“Yes,” Jonah said. “Chronic transplant rejection.”
My brain raced through everything I had ever heard about organ rejection, which wasn’t much. “I thought that was something that happened immediately.”
“Acute rejection sometimes happens right after surgery. They give you drugs for that to calm the immune system down, and usually they work.”
“But you take all those drugs.”
He nodded. “I do. But instead of an all-out protest, my immune system has been chipping away at the heart over time, rejecting it slowly, despite the meds.”
My arms crept across my middle, clutching handfuls of my shirt and hugging myself tight. “How do you know that’s what’s happening? You don’t look sick.”
“Heart transplant recipients have to have a biopsy every month to test for this sort of thing. At my third biopsy, eight months ago, they found evidence of atherosclerosis, and—”
“What’s that?” I said, my voice harsh and accusing, as if he were making words up.
“Hardening of the arteries,” he said. “The actual diagnosis is cardiac allograft vasculopathy. CAV. The immune system attacks the heart, leaves scar tissue. The scar tissue builds up and starts to wear down the heart until it eventually fails.”
I hated the ceiling then. All that brilliant color and joy and beauty. A party raging over the horror and unfairness strangling me. I looked at the plain buff floor, trying to breathe.
“How…?” Again, I had to swallow the hard lump lodged in my throat. “How long?”
“Four months, at this point. Maybe more. Maybe less.”
My own heart went into free-fall, and my skin went cold, head to toe as if I’d been doused in ice water. “Four months?”
Four months.
Sixteen weeks.
One hundred and twenty days.
Four months was nothing.
“Oh my God,” I whispered, the words squeezed out of my chest. I felt the tears wet on my face. Felt a drip slide under my jaw and start creeping down my neck. I was crying. I was breathing and pulsing and living.
And Jonah was dying.
He reached a hand as if he wanted to comfort me, but let it drop. “I’m so sorry,” he said.
A bark of laughter escaped me, echoing off the marble arches. “Why? Why are you apologizing to me? And why didn’t you tell me before?”
“If you could see your face right now, you’d know why.”
The tears were dripping off my chin then. I just stared at him, open-mouthed and tasting salt.
“Fuck,” he said, smashing a fist on the arm of the couch. “I fucking hate doing this to people. I hate what it does to you, and what it does to me. It makes it so goddamn real, when I’m trying to keep my head down and get by. Get through. Make it to October with a finished installation and…” He gestured to the ceiling above. “This. A legacy. I just want to leave a part of me behind that means something.”
“Your schedule…” I said, using a bit of my sleeve to wipe my face. “Now I get it. But I don’t get why you pushed all your friends away. To spare them? Don’t you think they’d rather decide for themselves? Don’t you think they’d want to be with you…?”
“I know they do,” he said. “I had to tell my mother what I just told you. I have to watch my family and friends count down the minutes whenever they’re with me. The pain in their eyes, the careful words, the hugs goodbye that last a little too long. I take it from Oscar and Dena and Tania, I take it from Theo and my parents… I take it from them because I have to. Anyone else… I can’t stand it. I have my circle and that’s it. I don’t want to tell people outside the circle. I don’t want them to have to find out. I don’t let anyone in…”
“And yet,” I said, gulping air, getting a hold of myself. “Here I am.”
“Here you are…” Jonah said, his eyes roaming my face. “Believe me, I didn’t want to let you in. But it was almost as if…”
“What?” I whispered.
“As if I didn’t have a choice,” Jonah said. “I tried to keep the circle closed and my walls up, keep to my routine…But you got in anyway.” He gently swiped a tear from my chin. “You feel it too, right?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“Kace…” He shook his head, raked his hands through his hair, wrestling with himself. “I don’t want to put you through…what’s going to happen. That’s why I acted like such an asshole earlier tonight. I saw it unfold to the end, and I … I can’t do it to you.”
We sat in silence. People came and went, passing our couch, oblivious to what was happening.
“How do they know it’s four months?” I said. “How can they be that specific?”
“They can tell. Although…”
“Although what?” I said, grasping at the word like a drowning woman for a hunk of life raft.
“I’m supposed to have a biopsy every month. So they can be even more specific. But I stopped going.”