“Yeah,” she says, lifting her sweatshirt so I can see. “Mark of the last resort.”
“I get mine next week,” I tell her, and I swear I can see the same computation going on behind her dark brown eyes, a weighing of the free time she has left and if she wants to spend it with someone who won’t be around to remember anything she said or did.
“Dilated cardiomyopathy?” she asks, and I know we’re going through our second round of introductions, an exchange of diagnoses and not names.
“Yeah. Sickle cell?”
Her eyebrows shoot up. “Just because I’m black you think I’ve got sickle cell?”
“No, I . . . no,” I say, immediately backpedaling and trying to name any other heart condition I can think of, and coming up with none. “I’m . . . did I just really screw this up?”
“No, you’re just really white, that’s all.”
“Sorry,” I say. “It’s not like I’m racist or anything.”
“Not on purpose anyway,” she says, but her eyebrows have come back down so I think I might be forgiven.
“So . . .” I dig into the waistband of my pants to pull out the folded schedule of the day’s events. “Are any of these actually decent? I was thinking about the meditation one.”
Layla looks it over. “If we’re lucky, the watercolor lady might smoke a joint before she comes in and we can try to get a contact high off her hair. She thinks we like her a lot because we invade her personal space.”
“I think I’ll pass on getting high.”
“The Humane Society trips seem cool but I’m allergic, so I can’t go.” Her eyes shift to me, maybe hoping that if she’s out then I am too.
“What about the books thing?” I ask.
She shrugs. “It’s okay. Mostly a lot of people bring stuff that’s got to do with somebody dying and talk about how they can relate. I’d rather read about people falling into crazy love, something I don’t know the first thing about.”
She lets the sentence fade out, eyes still searching me. “You ever been in love?”
I let a little smile answer for me, no words necessary.
“So . . . the meditation?” I say.
Layla nods at me. “Meditation it is. You get breakfast yet?”
And suddenly I have a friend.
Meditation with Melody! turns out to be guided by a cassette tape player, not someone actually named Melody and certainly nothing resembling real music. Layla takes a mat next to mine, and we lie side by side, staring at the tiled ceiling. Another girl joins us, the one who Nadine had been attempting to teach chess. She takes a mat to the right and promptly goes to sleep. A nurse comes in and starts the tape, dimming the lights and clicking the door quietly shut behind her.
Something like a pan flute begins, tripping over a few bars to be joined by a soft male voice that encourages us to picture a safe, quiet place in our minds. Over by the wall, the girl who joined us lets out a long, protracted fart.
“Oh my Lord, Josephine,” Layla says, but the other girl doesn’t respond.
The voice from the cassette player urges us to concentrate on a calm memory, but my entire focus is on the fact that the pan flute in the background wasn’t tuned properly. It’s soon joined by the sound of running water.
“Great. Now I’ve got to pee,” Layla says, and I turn to look at her. “I don’t think I can meditate myself out of peeing.”
“You’re not into this at all, are you?” I ask her.
She sits up, her LVAD cord slipping out from under her shirt. “Nope, but you seemed interested so I thought I’d give it a shot.”
“I thought it would be better,” I admit. “Like with real music.”
“You into music?”
“It’s my whole life,” I tell her, my fingers going to the edge of the mat where some stuffing has poked through. “Used to be, anyway. I played the clarinet.”
“So what happened to your face?” Layla asks, waving away my startled look. “The other girls have a dessert bet going and if I can get the real info and an extra sugar cookie out of the deal, I’ll split the cookie with you.”
“My sister threw me out a window,” I tell her. “And you can keep the cookie.”
Layla lets out a whistle. One that starts high and ends low, like a bomb falling. “Damn girl. Is she your stepsister, half sister?”
I shake my head. “Twin.”
“No shit.” Layla crosses her arms, resting her head on them. “Is she in juvy now?”
I pick at the hole at the edge of my mat where the seams have come apart, digging my index finger inside as I wonder how much to tell her. “I don’t really like to talk about it.”
“Ohhhhhh . . . ,” Layla says, her voice making the same high pitch to low that her whistle had earlier. “She dead?”
“Why would you think that?” I ask.
“Honestly?” She cocks her head to the side like the question is more for herself than me. “Josephine read your visitor’s name badge the other day and we googled her. Didn’t take a genius to put together that a mental health worker coming to talk to a girl who was Humpty-Dumptied back together again means you’ve got issues. That’s still a doozy of an issue though, I’ll give you that.”
“My sister’s not dead,” I say, the warm pulse in my wrist agreeing.
Layla lowers herself back down to the mat, throws an arm across her eyes. “What’s her name?”
I pull my finger out of the mat and blow away some of the stuffing that snagged on my jagged nail. I lay back down next to Layla as the meditation tape switches over to the tide and seagulls, interrupted occasionally by Josephine’s snores. I swear I can feel the hollow bit in the mat under my shoulder blade where I pulled stuffing out.
“Shanna,” I tell her, thinking of darkness and sounds my throat can’t possibly have ever made, but my ears miss hearing.
“So you’ve definitely been in love before,” Layla says, and I start, wondering how she followed my thoughts.
I look over at her and she shrugs. “It’s all over you. Moony looks, vacant stares. You might be in a safe place right now, but I bet it’s not quiet.”
I laugh, causing Josephine to roll over in her sleep, arms covering her ears.
“Sure,” I admit. “I’m probably in love.”
“Nope. It’s you are or you aren’t,” Layla insists. “My mom always says you just know, and you can’t probably know something. You know it or you don’t.”
I think of all my lists of things I know, and things I don’t know. I don’t have a list for maybes, so Layla could have a point.
“Then how do you know?” I ask.
“According to books I have to tear the covers off of, or according to my own personal experience?” Layla asks. “Because I can tell you anything you want to know about the first. The second . . . guess I need a working heart first.”
“Why’s that?”
“Being near death scares them off.”