I shake my head, unable to hold his eyes. Because I’m a good girl and I lied to him. Lied to him about ignoring his texts. Lied to him that my heart was his. Lied to get him here, right now.
There are two warm spots on my cheeks, a small trickle of tears that will freeze before they hit the ground. I raise my head. The least I can do is look at him.
“She’s always been here, Isaac. And she loves you so much. The way she feels . . . it’s . . . I can’t even begin to tell you. Her heart swells. I always thought that was a stupid thing they just said in romance novels, but it’s real. It’s real and she feels it.”
I take his hand, now hanging limply at his side, and place it on my chest, right near the scar that peeks out of my tank top.
“She’s so in love with you,” I say, holding his gaze.
“Right,” he says, his voice colder than the air around us. “She is. Not you.”
He tries to reclaim his hand, but I keep it pressed against my skin. “It’s a compliment, Isaac,” I try to explain.
He jerks away as I hear the first raised voice from the cardiac center. Words can’t be made out, but I recognize the hint of controlled panic.
“A compliment?” Isaac repeats. “I’m supposed to be happy that you can’t admit that you care about me?”
“No,” I shake my head, half-frozen tears flying from my face, my lips going numb. “It’s not like that. You don’t understand.”
“You’re right, I don’t!” Isaac is yelling now, his voice echoing back off the birch trees, my arms, the building behind us.
“Shhhh . . .” I urge him, lifting my finger to my lips, the knife I’d pulled from my waistband coming with it.
“What the fuck is this?” Isaac yells, backing up a few steps, his hands in the air.
“SHHHHH!!!!!” I hiss at him, the sound sliced by the blade, the heat from my lips fogging the metal. “They can’t find me. Not yet.”
“Who can’t find you? Sasha— What—?”
“She loves you,” I repeat, pulling the knife away from my face. “Shanna loves you so much and all she wants is to be with you. I can’t take that away from her, not when I owe her so much already.”
I slip the straps of my tank top down off my shoulders, my chest bare and naked in the moonlight. His eyes follow, even here, even now.
“Sasha . . .”
“I need you to listen to me,” I say, raising my voice so he can hear me over what’s now a group of people calling my name inside the cardiac center. “Are you listening?”
“Yes,” he says, swallowing hard, eyes flickering over my shoulder.
“She’s going to come to you now,” I tell him. “Once she’s with you I’ll be okay. I’ll be good again.”
“Sasha . . . what are you even saying?” Isaac takes a couple of tentative steps toward me, his eyes on the knife and not my face.
“I’m saying what comes next will be disturbing, but I’m going to be okay.”
I’m close to numb, but the knife still hurts going in, the tip of the blade barely registering when it cuts through deadened scar tissue, then flaring into a bright streak of pain as it goes deeper, past skin, through nerves to the hard surface of my sternum. It makes a noise when it scrapes across bone as I follow the path of the scar, calmly lifting my breast as I curve underneath it.
“Jesus Christ, what the—help! Somebody! Anybody!”
Isaac is screaming, immobile, torn between running away and stopping me. Blood is pouring from me, running down my torso, soaking my shirt, eating through the snow at my feet and creating steam all around me as my body heat leaves in a cloud, my life evaporating in the night air.
But I am not done yet, and I am determined, I am Sasha Stone. This is mind over matter and my mind is the strongest thing in me and I will not falter, will not hesitate to exorcise my sister from me and reclaim my life, even as I give her what she wants. What she needs.
“Isaac,” I say, staggering a little in the snow, tasting blood on my teeth. “Isaac, come here.”
And he does, his hands on my shoulders again, now slicked with blood as the weight of my breast pulls the opening I’ve cut in my chest wider. I reach in, numb fingers warmed by my own body cavity. I find the LVAD, the metal now cold from the night air rushing into me. I clutch it, feeling Shanna, pounding, pulsing, unsure.
And I pull.
She doesn’t want to come out, doesn’t want to be torn out of the womb of my body. And I understand her fear, understand how hard it is to come face-to-face with someone and show them all your ugliness. Because I’ve been there, with the scar on my face and wires in my chest, and still I persevered. So I’m taking her out now, tearing out my own ugliness so that I can be new again.
Veins come with it, the connections to my body unwilling to be severed, the cord of my LVAD stretching tight against my stomach as they’re pulled out through the hole in my chest. It’s still working, spraying blood in a fine mist over my face and his as I cut the cord, cut the veins, cut through everything that holds us together as one.
I give Shanna to Isaac, and she quivers in his hands, happy to be home.
“That’s for you,” I manage to say, before I fall forward into my own frozen blood.
thirty-eight
And then I died.
For a little while anyway. The numbers are a bit gray, but I think the EMTs in the squad on site to transport me probably have the most accurate data. Typically such things are judged by when the heart stopped beating, but since mine has been replaced with a new one, my time of death is a little fuzzy.
I didn’t get the whole heart, to be honest. I didn’t even get a decent chunk, I guess. What I actually gave to Isaac was a handful of soft tissue and gristle, the cord from the LVAD and a few bone chips from my sternum. But it did the trick, scared him so badly that he didn’t notice that I put the knife in his other hand before I passed out. He ended up in jail for a few days before I cleared his name, but no sane girl would carve herself up like that. So he had to wait there until my new heart was where it belonged. Somewhere they couldn’t take it back out of without serious ethical issues and lawsuits.
My new heart likes me, and I like it. It’s found a home, burrowed down into the gaping hole I left for others to fix, taking to the reattached arteries as if they were reunited instead of patched together. I could feel it, strong and capable, as soon as I gained consciousness in recovery. It pulsed inside me, flushing all the bad things Shanna brought along with her from my system.
I thumb across my phone, reversing the camera and taking a picture of my chest to send to Brooke, the only person who is returning my texts. I’ll never be able to wear a tank or a revealing dress again. What’s left of my chest looks like offal from a butcher shop, the bits that end up in the alley Dumpster for the rats. My left breast hangs lower than the other, since I decimated too many pectoral muscles in the attack on my sister.
I slip the phone back under the pillow out of habit, not for secrecy. Mom and Dad were pissed to discover it in my bag, under Layla’s favorite coverless paperback and the hospital-issued underwear. But I got to keep it, because as Dad said, “What more can she do?”