I’ve been complimented on odd things since coming out of surgery, how quickly I learn how to clean the exit cord on my own, how good my appetite is, how often I poop. I am like a baby, except one who menstruates, which is terribly inconvenient, though it does drive Dad out of the room at the mention of it, taking his pacemaker with him.
Mom asks if I need help, which creates an awkward moment when I ask exactly how she expects to help me putting a tampon in, and she follows Dad, telling me she’ll see if she can find more ice chips. I take care of everything in their absence, my IV tree and heart monitor following close behind, as I am once again part of a system and not whole on my own. My phone is charging and hidden under my pillow by the time they return, its cord anonymous among the many that create a web around me.
There is a line down my center, like a fish that has been gutted and then someone changed their mind, tried to fix everything with needle and thread. The stitches are very dark against my untouched skin, the wounded flesh an angry red. Now I understand why they would not let me see my face right away. Mom keeps redirecting my hands, my gaze, anything to keep me from touching and looking at where I once was open and am now closed again.
She asks me how I am feeling constantly, and I answer. I consider showing her my sister’s messages, scattered things that they are. But to do so would mean showing her the phone Brooke smuggled to me, or the laptop they think I only use for reading. I don’t tell her that we’re both still sulking a bit from the use of the word psychotic.
Because if that’s accurate then I’m crazy and she doesn’t exist.
Unacceptable.
For both of us.
My heart is still working in the morning. I know because I can hear it.
Mom is asleep in her chair, folded over to one side with her finger stuck in the pages of the DSM I slipped back into her bag during a visit to the cardiac center. I don’t know if she’s searching for more things that might be wrong with me or if she’s just one of those people who can’t not finish a book.
Dad is at the window, watching the sunrise. His eyes flick over to me when I move, and we stare at each other for a second.
“How are you feeling?”
“Like a machine,” I answer. “How are you feeling?”
“Like a human, but with a pacemaker,” he says.
I’m the first to look away.
“I thought it was my fault,” he says, his words directed at the window and the people pouring into the building to come and see their loved ones. The sick and the dying. The new ones who just came out of other people. Ones who haven’t done anything irrevocable yet that they can’t be forgiven for.
“It’s genetics.” I shrug.
He shakes his head. “I’d like to say that you’ll understand someday, Sasha. But I don’t know if you will.”
I press the button on my med line, the one that gives me a little more painkiller if I think I might need it. Dad’s talking, so I definitely think I might need it. He’s still looking out at the parking lot, like maybe someone out there is holding up cue cards.
“You’ve really done a number on your mom. You have no idea what it was like for her, losing that baby.”
“Shanna,” I correct him.
“And now you’re putting her through it again,” he plows on. “Twice over, because she could lose you too.”
I notice he doesn’t mention that he could lose me, maybe because that’s already been done.
“Technically you’re putting her through it,” I say. “If we’re operating under the assumption that my heart problems are from you.”
“Jesus.” Dad puts his head in his hands, and is so still that I wonder if he got too upset and the pacemaker blew.
“How did you get to be so cold, Sasha?” he asks.
“How are you just now figuring it out?” I shoot back.
“I knew,” he says quietly. “Your mom, she doesn’t want to see it, but I’ve always known. For your fourth birthday we took you to the zoo, and in the gift shop all the other kids were grabbing stuffed animals, hugging them, naming them right there on the spot. You picked out a set of dead bugs, suspended in glass cubes. It came with a magnifying class so you could study them.”
My pain meds are doing their job, floating my body away from the whir of my heart, my mind unmoored and fixated on odd things. The bell of a lily that faces me; the flower of resurrection. The baby’s breath nestled next to it. It’s all very nice except someone needs to invite an exterminator to that flower shop because there’s a stinkbug nestled deep inside the lily. Also, baby’s breath is poisonous.
What an odd name for poison.
Dad said something, and I should answer him. The thing about the bugs and the magnifying glass. I remember that toy, remember peering down at little body parts for hours, trying to figure out how they worked.
“So I can manipulate them,” I say, not realizing my thoughts are flowing outward now. “If I know how they work, I can make them do what I want.”
Dad sighs, rests his forehead against the window.
“You graduated to people though, didn’t you?” he asks. “When you found out about . . .” He doesn’t finish, doesn’t say her name, whoever the woman is that he’s cheating on mom with. “When you found out you didn’t get mad, didn’t run to tell your mom. You held on to it, used it against me.
“I don’t know how many surgeries it would take to make you a nice person,” he says, his voice a whisper that comes back from the glass, as cold as the surface they just hit. “How many hours of therapy. They can give you a new heart, but they can’t fix something that isn’t in there. What’s missing from you, Sasha?”
My tongue is a lead weight, so I can’t ask him if there were cameras in the surgery, or if someone in there ran their mouth. Everything I was afraid of has come to pass. They opened me up and found nothing inside.
“Dad,” I say, forcing my breath to come, my tongue to work, my trachea to vibrate. The drugs are strong, but my brain is stronger and I will speak. “Can we talk about this sometime when I’m not fucked-up?”
“And when will that be?”
I have to admit as I slide into unconsciousness that it’s a valid question.
twenty-six
“Last time we saw each other you were telling me about Brooke and Lilly,” Amanda says, scanning her notes. She’s wearing corduroys today, but they’re about an inch too short so when she sits down she looks like a little kid in time-out. Her hair is up in a messy bun that some girls can pull off. She is not one of those girls.
“And what did I say about them?” I ask.
I’ve decided to try a new tactic with Amanda, answering her questions with a question. She complies, flipping a few pages back in her notebook, which kind of makes me uneasy because I know I didn’t say that much during our session at the cardiac center.
“You had some concerns about the fact that they may have witnessed your fall.”
I snort at her choice of words, and she lets the pages fan back into place.
“I understand that Brooke came to see you at the cardiac center before your surgery. How did that make you feel?”
“Did my mom tell you that?”
“Yes. Were you glad to see Brooke?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“And what did you two talk about?”
“What do friends usually talk about?”
“So you consider her a friend?”