“Okay,” I say.
Amanda resituates herself on the chair and looks back at her notes. I’m expecting her to come at me with something impressive next, a bit of medical terminology or something self-affirming to show me that she knows what she’s doing. Instead she snaps her folder shut.
“So what’s going on with you?”
It throws me. I had my shoulders squared, ready for a verbal sparring match in the thirty minutes that are left in our session. Instead she asked me a simple question, and while my mind ponders the longer answer, my mouth pops out the simple one.
“I’m dying.”
Amanda nods, doing me the courtesy of not insisting along with the rest of the cardiac center that everything will be all right if we put a happy face on.
“A week ago I was alive, and now I’m dying,” I go on. “In a few days they’re putting a machine in me that will do what my heart won’t.”
“Yes,” Amanda says, flipping her folder again briefly. “An LVAD. It’s to assist your left ventricle with pumping.”
I feel a small smile, maybe a three on the pain scale of happiness. Amanda smiles back. “What’s funny?”
“I was thinking of my friend Brooke and how she accidentally googled pump king instead of pumpkin. Or maybe it wasn’t an accident. It’s hard to tell with her.”
“Brooke?” Amanda repeats. “She’s a friend of yours?”
“Yeah, she’s . . . yeah.” I think she is, anyway.
“Can you tell me about your sister?”
Amanda’s folder is shut, her eyes on mine. But I’m willing to bet she’s got every word of my conversation with Jones and Faber memorized.
“I don’t know.” I say. “Can I?”
“Yes.”
I study her, something most people can’t take for long. A liar is easy to spot, and lying is easy to do once you’ve learned how badly others do it. But Amanda isn’t a liar, and all the truth that’s in me comes out, heading for her like a magnet.
“I did jump out the window,” I say. “But it wasn’t me, it was my sister.”
Amanda opens her folder again, writing perfectly on the lines even though she keeps her eyes on me.
“My sister was upset about something and she felt that was the most logical reaction. She’s very emotionally driven. Her name is Shanna,” I tell Amanda, and spell it out for her. “I absorbed her in the womb and her heart took the place of mine.”
Amanda glances up at me, pen still. “What can you tell me about Shanna?”
I feel a small shudder deep inside, a life stretching back into wakefulness at the sound of her name. I hold Amanda’s eyes, waiting for her to contradict me as I speak.
“She likes sex and boys who will give it to her; she likes the smell of cigarettes and beer mixed with exhaust fumes. She likes to be shocking and say lewd things. She likes cold night air. She likes to have her way.”
“Is that the only thing you have in common?” Amanda asks, head still down. I stare at the uneven part in her hair, wondering if she knows it looks bad or just doesn’t care.
“Other than an entire body, yes,” I say.
“But only the heart is hers?” Amanda’s pen scratches away, the pad of paper shifting up and down on her knees.
“Yes, only the heart, but sometimes she uses our whole body for whatever she wants.”
“And she wants things like . . .” Amanda’s pen hovers, ready to record my sister’s dark leanings with cheap ink and a yellow legal pad. It feels good to see it there, an inanimate object about to take witness to my truths.
“A boy. Isaac.”
“Isaac,” Amanda repeats, tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth while she writes.
“He’s why she jumped,” I explain. “They got into a fight. I guess. Kind of. He wanted something more from me—her—than I was looking for with him. And then we—I—sent him a nasty text while he was waiting for me down in the driveway and he took off. So she kind of panicked and . . .”
“. . . and took the fastest route down,” Amanda says. Which actually makes my sister sound logical.
“Shanna’s bones come up out of my gums sometimes,” I tell her.
Amanda nods like that’s to be expected. “Tell me more about Shanna’s bones.”
“I used to think they were pieces of clarinet reed,” I tell her. “But then Shanna said it’s actually her bones working their way out of my system from when I absorbed her.”
“Shanna said this?”
I consider my answer for a long moment, wanting to get it right. “She didn’t say it. She wrote it down.”
“That’s how you two communicate?”
“That and when she throws us through storm windows to express dissatisfaction.”
Amanda raises an eyebrow to let me know I’ve violated the sarcasm rule. I have to admit she’s got the eyebrow raise down.
“Yes, that’s how we communicate,” I amend.
“And when did this begin?”
Like everything else it falls somewhere on the timeline of my life where the biggest demarcation is losing my virginity to Isaac Harver. “I think it was after,” I say.
“After?”
“No, sorry—just before.”
“Before what, Sasha?”
I feel a flush, my heart still capable of shoving all the blood up to my face. “I’d rather not say.”
“That’s fine,” she says agreeably. “But if you’re not open with me I’m not going to be a terribly effective therapist.”
I think I’m going to be very open to plenty of people next week when they put the LVAD inside me, so I leave that barrier in place. Amanda allows it, giving me the space of a quarter rest before continuing.
“Do you want to add anything more about Shanna right now?”
There’s a blip on the screen, my heart rate monitor disagreeing with this line of questioning. “No.”
“How about Brooke?”
“I miss her,” I say, apparently an embolism not being the only spontaneous thing that can happen.
“When is the last time you saw Brooke?”
I can fudge this one a little, since I last spoke to Brooke the other night over messaging, but I haven’t technically seen her since . . .
“The night of the accident.”
“So she knows about it?”
“She saw it happen,” I tell her, gratified by the surprise on Amanda’s face as the professional mask she was attempting to mold slips a little.
“She was there?”
“No, I was Skyping with Brooke and Lilly,” I explain. Amanda nods and leaves space for me to go on, but I don’t know what to say.
I’ve thought about it while I stared at the reflective roof in the back of the squad, the cracked ceiling above my bed at Stillwell, and now the artfully decoupaged tiles of the cardiac center. I don’t know how I had my laptop tilted, if my friends would have only seen me run off screen and heard the crash, or if they actually saw me unravel right before their eyes, leaving behind a chunk of my hair on the remnants of the broken window.
“Did something happen during this chat?” Amanda asks.
“Lilly said something I didn’t like, and Brooke agreed,” I say stiffly.
“And what was that?”
“A word I won’t repeat.”
“Was it directed at you?”
“Yes.”