“No, I don’t think I’m going back,” I say.
“You have to eventually, you know.” Layla’s voice is quiet, barely louder than the combined noise of our mechanical hearts.
“Unless I die,” I tell her.
“Weird goal.”
“So what’s Brandy like?”
Layla rolls with my subject change. “She’s pretty cool. Didn’t get huffy about me asking about her foot. Oh, and she beat Nadine at chess first night here, and insisted on calling it chest instead. So she’s my new best friend. Sorry.”
“So she’s better at chest than Nadine?”
“Way. Better.” Layla holds her hands about three feet out from her top.
I laugh, the sound bouncing around inside me, scratching against the soft tissue still swollen around my sternum.
“I miss anything else?”
“Josephine’s parents said she sleeps too much and that she needed to come off the intravenous painkillers, so she was switched out to pills instead. She woke up long enough to be pissed off and say some words that I hope they didn’t hear down in the kids’ wing.”
“What’s she on?”
“They gave her Xanax for her fibromyalgia, and she said it was like using a cotton ball to soak up Niagara Falls, but Karen put her foot down and her parents started tossing the a-word around so she shut up.”
“They called their own daughter an”—I glance around and drop my voice—“asshole?”
It’s Layla’s turn to laugh, the sound much larger than her sickly frame. “Addict. But are you even serious right now? You can’t say asshole in a normal voice? Oh no, wait, let me guess.” She raises a hand to stop me. “You’re the good twin.”
I feel a finger of anger worming through me, burrowing down next to my LVAD.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Layla said, but she’s still laughing a little. “I’ve just never met someone so lily-white, and I don’t mean your skin.”
“Thanks,” I say, snuffing out the anger.
“And FYI Angela’s brother already has a good line on Xanax, so I wouldn’t bother trying to bum any off Josephine in the name of your illicit love affair. Besides, I doubt she’d give them to you anyway. Brandy told me she walked into Jo’s room to say hey one day while Jo had the bottle out and she basically hunched up over it and started growling like a dog with a T-bone.”
It’s a funny visual but raises a question.
“Brandy walked in? I thought she was missing a foot.”
“She’s got one of those fake things.”
“A prosthetic?”
“Yeah, pretty realistic too. First time she pulled her foot off in the lounge Nadine screamed so hard her oxygen nodes popped out.”
“Nice,” I say. “Sorry I missed that. Why would she take off her foot though?”
“She wanted me to paint the toenails.”
“Huh.” I think about that while Layla yawns and stretches out, wondering what it would be like to just take out the part of you that doesn’t fit.
twenty-seven
TODAY AT THE CARDIAC CENTER!
11:00 a.m.—Stitch in the Snow! Join a knitting class with Nurse Karen by the windows in the common room and celebrate the first snowfall of the year with a new scarf! (Note: This is an indoor program.) In case you were wondering.
2:00 p.m.—Scrap your Crap! Crafty Nurse Karen continues to share her skills in this scrapbooking class. Turn your pixels into pics and make something to remember.
Or, leave behind something for others to remember you by.
4:00 p.m.—Meditation with Melody! Relax before dinner with guided meditation.
Apparently Nurse Karen’s craftiness doesn’t extend to cassette tape players.
I put my schedule on the breakfast table next to Layla as she stirs her tea. “Want to meditate again?”
She pulls it toward her and glances at it before taking a sip of too-hot tea and having to spit most of it back out. “I will if you will.”
“Deal,” I say as we’re joined by the new girl.
“Hey,” she says, pulling out the chair across from me. “I’m Brandy.”
“Sasha,” I tell her, giving her a once-over. She’s pale and skinny but doesn’t have an IV tree following her around or any permanent machines attached to her like Layla and me. And Layla wasn’t lying about her having Nadine beat at chest.
“Want to do meditation with us later?” I ask her.
“What’s it like?” Brandy picks up a piece of her unbuttered toast and eyes it the same way she had been the window the first time I saw her, like maybe it has something important to share with her and her alone.
“Lame,” Layla warns her. “But Nadine doesn’t go, so I never miss it.”
“Sure.” Brandy reaches across the table and snags my schedule, turning it around so she can read it right side up. “Except it can’t be that lame. There’s an exclamation point in the title.”
“Makes it even lamer,” Layla says around a mouthful of apple.
“No, you’ve just got to say it emphatically,” Brandy says. “This is meditation with MELODY!”
She yells the last word, slamming her palm when she does. Over at another table, Nadine and Jo both jump and Nadine knocks her plain yogurt over.
“Footless freak,” Nadine mutters toward us as she goes to get some napkins.
Brandy ignores her, pulling out the pager that we’re all too familiar with and setting it on the table. She’s decorated hers with sugar-skull stickers.
“I hate carrying this thing around,” she says, spinning it with one finger. “It’s like waiting for a boy to call, but if he never does it will actually kill me.”
My hand goes to my hip, where my own pager is pressed against my skin. Like my LVAD, sometimes I forget it’s there, but for a different reason. I can still feel the flutter in my chest, but that along with the low hum of the motor have faded into the white noise of my daily life. I forget about the pager because it is eternally silent.
“Does Sasha know the game?” Brandy asks Layla.
“What game?” I ask, but Layla’s mouth is full of tea, and she points me over to Brandy.
“I came up with something to kill some time, so to speak,” Brandy says, tipping me a wink. “It’s a little twisted, but if you’re not into knitting or scrapbooking it does the trick.”
“Uh, it’s a lot twisted.” Layla tosses the rest of her apple across the cafeteria to land in the trash. “But if Karen comes in here with puppy dog eyes and tries to hand me knitting needles I might cave.”
We slip out through the common room, avoiding Karen’s glance from the windows, where she is surrounded by the preteens and a few of the littler ones. Layla’s room is warm, and I strip my sweatshirt off as soon as we’re inside, realizing the cardiac center is probably the only place I’ll ever be able to wear a tank top in public again without my scars and LVAD attracting stares.
Layla sprawls onto her bed and I follow, tucking my legs in so Brandy can fit too.
“If there’s not enough space I’ll take my foot off,” she offers. “Perks of the prosthesis.”
“So what’s the game?” I ask.
“All right.” Brandy hands Layla her tablet. “Layla said you’ve got a fussy side. So don’t get all puffed up on me.”