If by dying Minnie can save eight lives, what should I be striving to do by living? That’s a high bar to hit. Joey wants to show his kids they don’t need to follow his path. Eileen’s playing bridge. Becca just wants to start her life. Dennis wants to celebrate…everything. Gerry’s trying to spread goodness. I realize he’s not tagging me on his posts anymore. I pull up his feed. I’ve missed a few. I like the one about a moth called the lettered sphinx. Shaped like a stealth fighter, it reminds me of Batman. Or perhaps I’m reading too much into Gerry’s caption: Put out the signal. Friends will come. #goodday.
Would they come? I’ve noticed that I’m already closer to my organ family than any of my so-called friends. I wouldn’t mind some positive distraction.
At home the hall is quiet and filled with cool shadow.
“Hey, Mom,” I call. “I’m home.” No answer. Silence. Not even the sound of the television.
I check my email for the hundredth time since I left the PICU, hoping my appearance made an impact on Becca yet dreading what it might have been. Disappointment flushes through me as I see that my inbox is empty. A text from Dennis. So? Any luck today? I can’t WAIT to meet her! <3
“I’ll start dinner. Have to make a quick call. Pasta okay?” My shout echoes in the empty hall. Empty house.
No response. I hum a dozen notes to fill the quiet.
I kick my shoes into a corner and shuffle toward my room, already dialing Joey as I go. Light flickers through the kitchen and living room entry, and I relax. The television’s muted. Stockinged feet poke out from the end of the couch.
“Yeah,” Joey answers. I turn from my mom and go into the bedroom.
“Hey,” I say in a hushed tone as I shut the door. “Hi, Joey. It’s Emmitt.”
“Yeah, I know. Call display,” he says.
“Well, thanks for answering then.” Silence. “How are you doing?”
“Fine.”
I’m left listening to his breathing for a few seconds. It’s like a bad horror movie.
“I’ve got so much work to do tonight,” I say. I boot up my laptop so I can start searching out experiences for PICU patients. I wonder what experience Joey would choose.
He asks, “Have you ever wanted something so badly it made you sick?”
I pause with my fingers on the keyboard.
On a blue plastic molded chair, I once offered anything for my sister to wake up. I’ve never wished for help so powerfully in my life. “Yeah. Yeah, I have.”
“I feel that way about a drink.”
Oh.
“You feel that way now?” I ask.
“It hurts. I don’t think I can do this.”
He’s about to take a drink. But he hasn’t yet. I close the lid on my computer.
“Joey, is your sister there? Your kids?”
“Out for groceries.”
He’s an hour away from me. I don’t know what to do or say. I only have my promised questions. “Why do you want to live?”
Heavy breathing and then, “It’s funny, but sometimes I wonder if I did the right thing.”
“Answer the question.” Maybe he is. I hate how lifeless his voice sounds, frayed and ready to snap.
“Before trying to make the transplant list, I could drink. Now I can’t. I’m on all kinds of medications. Have all kinds of tests. I caught pneumonia. And I can’t drink. What was the point of the transplant?”
I struggle to control the rage. “How will a drink help, Joey?”
He sighs. “Everything slips away. Because the choice is made. There’s no more wrestling with it. Everything is easier.”
A cap spins off a bottle and skitters on a table or a desk. I don’t understand. I don’t know what to say next. I only have my questions. “Why were you worthy of my sister’s liver?”
A glass is poured.
“Was I worthy?”
No. “No.” I squeeze the tears from my eyes.
“Right then.” He draws a sharp breath.
The folds of my heart sister’s letter lie accordion-shaped on my desk. Careful not to foist your own ideals on others, right? “But…wait! That’s for you to decide, right? I mean, I don’t want my sister’s liver destroyed by booze. But it’s not hers anymore, is it?” And there it is. A hot flush rolls over me. “It’s yours now, and you have to decide what to do next.” Joey is silent. “I was wrong. Minnie isn’t your sponsor. I don’t decide if you drink or not. You picked up my call, Joey. You answered. You don’t want that drink. You want me to say something to stop you, but eventually you’ll have to decide for yourself.”
“It hurts.”
I hold up the letter, scanning it for answers.
“But it doesn’t always hurt, right? The pain waxes and wanes? You’re scared. Scared. And drinking can take that feeling away.”
“Yeah.”
“How will a drink help you see how your kids turn out, Joey?”
“It won’t.”
“Why do you want to live?”
“To show my kids how to be strong.” His voice is a whisper.
“So strong.”
He breathes heavily into the receiver. “Do you think someone else died for me to live?” My grip tightens on the phone. He knows that’s true. He knows that. “I don’t mean your sister. I mean someone else waiting for a transplant.”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
I hear the glass slide onto the table. The cap slowly being screwed back on the bottle.
“Okay.”
“Same time tomorrow?”
“Yeah. Thanks, Emmitt.”
He hangs up. I don’t know if it’s enough. I stare at the phone screen for a moment before coming back to the depth of silence beyond my bedroom door. A truck rumbles past the house, rattling the chandelier in the dining room. I’ve let Joey go. I’ve let Minnie’s liver go. Her eyes catch butterflies. Her lungs run.
I open my bedroom door and turn on the kitchen light. My mom hasn’t moved from the couch. A bottle of pills is on the table. Tylenol. Was it there before?
“Mom?”
I poke her shoulder.
“Mom!” I shake her by the shoulders. Nothing.
I lean down, but I can hear only my own gulping breaths. Her chest rises and falls. I think. There. Her neck is cool under my fingertips. A wispy heartbeat.
I call my dad’s phone, but there’s no answer.
I text. Can’t wake Mom. I think she’s taken a bunch of Tylenol.
He responds. 9-1-1.
I dial.
TWENTY–FIVE
I’m so sick of hospitals. This one’s smaller. Older. Stuffy. I feel caged by unwashed privacy screens. My mother shares a room with another woman, her curtain perpetually drawn, her lungs perpetually trying to expel a lump of phlegm.
They don’t think it was a suicide attempt. My mom took a few too many Tylenols but not a bottle full too many. Physical pain related to depression is rare but not unheard of, and the emergency doc thinks we’ll be on our way home soon. She still needs to see a psychiatrist first. At least she has a bed and a room with only one other person.
My mom shifts but looks asleep. I don’t think she wants to bother opening her eyes. She hangs out in the only room she can stomach. Lightless, hopeless yet carefree, a room bordered by her eyelids.
A knock comes at the door. I look for my dad, but he’s not there. Another white coat.
“Hi, I’m Dr. Balder.” He straightens his coat and touches his stethoscope with thick fingers. I relax at their sight. They’re not surgical fingers.
I stand to leave.
“No, no.” He glances at a chart. “Please stay, Emmitt. I hope you can fill in some gaps for me.” His smile is warm. “Please.”
I sit back down, and Dr. Balder pulls a chair from the other side of the curtain to sit beside me.
“I won’t go over everything from the emergency room. I read through the notes. I’m sorry to hear about your sister.”
I nod.
“Your mother su
ffers from depression. Do you understand what that means?”
I start to nod again, because that’s what I’m supposed to do, but I stop. “I don’t understand the difference between depression and sadness.”
“It’s a good question. The biggest difference is that sadness is tractable. That means it can be managed. It’ll come in waves but will ease over time. It’s part of the process of mourning. Depression, on the other hand, is intractable. Without medical help, it may take your mother almost a year to fully resurface from her illness.”
My grief, when it comes, rolls raw and ragged over me and then is gone. I resurface after every wave. My mom stays down. I can’t imagine it omnipresent, sucking, disorienting. I touch my mom’s wrist. Her heartbeat is cool and flighty.
“But she wouldn’t be depressed if my sister hadn’t died.”
“Grief is a common trigger of depression.”
“A year?” I imagine fibers of the couch growing over her, a plaid lichen. That’s how I’d film depression. Mundane yet terrifying. I picture an underworld fungus racing miles in every direction but showing only a single mushroom above.
“Nine months to a year, if left untreated.”
My mom will lose her job. She’ll lose her health. I look toward the psychiatrist. “And you can make her better?”
“I sure hope so, Emmitt. With your help.”
Now the tightness in my gut reminds me of Joey needing his drink.
“But Emmitt, and this is important—”
I shift to the edge of my seat.
“—caring for someone is not the same as saving them. Do you understand?”
“Emmitt.” My dad is standing at the door. I don’t know how long he’s been there, but only now do I catch the smell of tobacco smoke clinging to his clothes.
He flushes under my glare.
“Where were you, Dad?”
His fingers are tight on the door frame. “Been in the parking lot.”
He couldn’t come inside. The last time he entered a hospital, he lost his daughter. The fight that had surged in me breaks against the wall of his sudden vulnerability.
“I’m Dr. Balder.” The doctor shakes my dad’s hand, forcing him to remove his grip from the wall. My dad is still wearing his butcher’s apron, which is crisscrossed with splatters of red, green and yellow. I imagine he was slaughtering peppers when he received my text. He rushed over but then froze in the parking lot. The pain waxes and wanes. It’ll be better.
“Can we go home?” he asks. He twists his body to the hall, already on his way.
Dr. Balder says, “I can keep Allison here for observation, or you can take her home with her prescription, and I can follow her on an outpatient basis.”
My dad enters and holds my mom’s hand, her skin translucent with blue veins. His movements are jerky and nervous. I rise too. “We think she probably took seven or eight pills. We administered acetylcysteine, which is an antidote to this sort of overdose. It’s likely that no permanent damage was caused to the liver. But she can have no more drugs of any kind, including alcohol, until tomorrow morning.”
I glance up at the doctor. “My mom might have damaged her liver?”
“If your mom had taken any more pills, or you had waited longer to call the ambulance, then yes.”
“By damaged you mean, like, need a transplant?”
“Possibly.” I sense the blood draining from my face, the narrowing of my field of vision. “Sit, Emmitt.” Dr. Balder takes me by the elbow and pulls me back into the chair. “She’s going to be fine. Most people don’t realize how dangerous acetaminophen is to the liver. How little it can take to scar it.”
This time the cold that flows through me is that of realization. That there’s no difference between my mother and Joey. Joey who destroyed his liver due to an addiction. My mother who nearly destroyed hers due to a depression. Both have illnesses. We were just lucky.
Dr. Balder speaks with my father and hands him a prescription to fill. Nurses remove the IV and monitors. Finally the room clears.
My dad and I help my mom out of bed and over to a wheelchair. It’s not that she’s catatonic, but she’s like a puppet, and for now we need to hold the strings. For a moment I understand her. All I want is for someone to take over for me, to guide my strings, to keep me upright.
It’s a long walk out of the hospital. And a very quiet ride home.
TWENTY–SIX
I go straight to bed when we get home. For the first few hours, I wake at the slightest noise, worried that my mom might be up and searching for pills to swallow. The refrigerator compressor starts. The water heater clicks on, followed by the whoosh of ignition. The furnace shuts off. Then the sounds begin to seem sinister. Padded footsteps. Creaking boards. A clink of silverware—do people still steal silverware? At 2:00 a.m. my feet slide onto the floor, and I creep over to my computer and bathe in its artificial light. I search out VR scenes from the wish list, head bobbing until I succumb to fatigue at 4:00 a.m., head nestled in the crook of my arm on the desk.
I wake to my phone rattling beside me.
The ringer’s off, but it buzzes. Again and again.
I pick up the phone.
“I’m at your door.” It’s Dennis.
I look at the clock. Ten a.m.
I need to be leaving soon if I’m planning to do my rounds at the hospital. I spot an email from Martha. The subject: You guys are so cute. I pocket the phone before reading on, preferring to read Becca’s emails with a level of intimacy that has been broken by my visitor.
I trudge to the door and open it a crack to reveal Dennis. He steps up, toes on the doorsill.
“Hi, Dennis,” I say, holding the door half-open.
“Is she beautiful?” he asks, teetering.
“I’ve barely spoken to her.”
“You’ve met her? You have! It worked? I knew it would work.” He loses his balance and catches himself on the doorjamb.
“If you mean having to dress up as a clown and still be stared down by every nurse and doctor, then yeah, it’s working well.”
“Awesome. You have a picture? Can you text it to me? I’d love to meet her.”
He talks like a machine gun.
“Listen,” I say. “I really appreciate your help and everything, but my mom was just in the hospital and—”
“Oh.” He steps down so that his face isn’t in the door. He blanches. “Oh. I get it.”
Guilt curdles in my guts. I know this has nothing to do with my mom. I know that.
“I guess she’s not my heart sister, right? I’m more of an organ cousin, right? Once removed and all.”
“It’s not like that.” It is, I realize.
Silence extends between us.
“Dennis, it’s not like I don’t appreciate your help, but you following me around all the time…it’s a bit much.”
Dennis folds his hands in front of him and stares at them as he says, “Six weeks ago my life changed forever. I’m still sorting out what to do with it. But you are too.” When I don’t respond, he adds, “You know where to reach me.”
I shut the door and lean against it. Do I have any right to keep my heart sister to myself? I peek through the peephole. Dennis stands with his back to the house but doesn’t leave. I yank out my phone and read Becca’s email.
Email! We can email each other! I didn’t realize my heart brother was a genius! OMG, now I can write you essays! Heart sister fan fiction. Oh, that’s SUCH a good idea. I’m a genius. Let’s collaborate on heart sister fanfic. What would she like it to be about? How would it start?
How can I let Dennis into the middle of this? I read on.
Speaking of fan fiction. Have you ever done fan art of your sister? Do any taxidermy? I mean, your sister loved it so much. I would think it would bring you closer. I could never. Needles. Blood. They’re all problems for me. Most transplant patients get pretty blasé about people sticking things in them. Not me. I spend half my time panicking. Well, not about need
les so much as big honking skewers in my neck—those I take issue with.
Okay, funny story—a clown came in today. Yes, you read that correctly—a clown. Not like Stephen King’s It type of clown. This was the real deal. Although he was a bit distracted and not all that funny, but cute, you know?
I can work with cute.
Not that I’m at all interested, because he’s a clown, and a weird one at that.
Must be less weird.
He comes in to show me his virtual-reality stuff. I’m really not into that. I have enough reality and prefer books for my entertainment. Don’t you think there are enough ways not to talk directly with people in this world? I mean, they’re talking about creating artificial-intelligence therapists. Can you imagine confiding in a robot for therapy? We’d need therapy for therapy, right?
You asked about awesome days. Well…I’ve never had an awesome day. That may sound selfish, given that the day I received a new heart was pretty awesome, but I wasn’t pumping a fist after it, I was fighting for my life. An awesome day for me would be climbing to the top of the escarpment in my town without keeling over and looking back over the bay.
Here’s your question of the day: what’s the best thing that’s ever happened to you? Mine (excluding the obvious heart upgrade!) will sound silly. But here it is. One time I was allowed to go for a sleepover. I was eight. They had a trampoline. My parents knew this, but they let me go because the parents had said that they’d watch and make sure nothing happened. But the parents went out on a date and left a babysitter, and we told her that we were allowed to bounce. I wasn’t. It was glorious. I bounced until I couldn’t breathe and my heart pounded. It hurt, and I loved it. Maybe that’s fist-pump-worthy.
Love, YHS
She rambles less in her handwritten notes. I grin at the email. I feel as though I’ve gone way beyond sharing with Dennis. This feels so personal. I’m not too deflated by her lack of interest in virtual reality. I see it as a challenge. My dad is shuffling around in the kitchen, so I stay where I am and email Becca back, thumbs a blur on my phone.
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