by Andrew Pyper
“It’s pretty unusual. Your turnaround. I’d say it’s a Top Ten for me. Just glad I decided to go in there and see what I could do.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
“Hey, you did the really hard work, Danny,” he said. “Dead for—what?—eight, nine minutes. You want to see your chart? ‘THE END.’ But then we get a heartbeat. I’ve seen sleepers in the morgue with better prospects than you and then—ba-bump, ba-bump! I’m telling you, something must have scared you silly over there. Because you sure came running back awful fast.”
Not that it was all good news. The surgeon told me I have a Class IV heart defect. They don’t go to Class V.
“It’s kind of a mess, I’m sorry to say,” he said, and I was surprised once again by how his bluntness was a consolation.
“What’s the problem? In a nutshell?”
“I’m a medical specialist. We don’t really do nutshells, but I’ll try. The left side of your heart has compromised aortic flow—the left side affecting your body and brain, as opposed to the right that affects your respiratory, so there’s that to be thankful for. Low cardiac output with high systemic vascular resistance resulting in severe systolic dysfunction. You want me to unpack any of that gobbledygook?”
“Maybe later. Can you can fix it?”
“You’re on all sorts of meds already. And once you get out of here, you’ll be taking more pills than Judy Garland.”
“What about surgery?”
“Been there, done that. Opened things up a bit on a blocked valve when you came in. Like blowing a spitball out of a straw. But there’s nothing more we can do. In a case like yours, there’s other spitballs floating around, and the straws around your heart are narrow. So, as far as conventional approaches go, no, there’s not much we can do. Wait, not true. There’s one more thing.”
“What?”
“A transplant.”
“Okay. So how—?”
“You’re already on the list.”
“That’s good. Right?”
“It’s not a short list.”
“Oh.”
“But if an appropriate donor appears, sure. If the procedure goes well. If your body accepts the new heart.”
“That’s a lot of ifs.”
“It’s an iffy business.”
“So I guess I’ve got to say my line now. What’re my chances, Doc?”
“If it were me? I’d put my affairs in order,” he said. “Say my ‘I love you’s. Because transplants are damn hard to come by. And if this happens again? You’re a lucky man to be here right now, Mr. Orchard. But you’re not coming back next time.”
ASIDE FROM THE PAIN THAT came from what felt like having had a grenade go off in my chest, I felt pretty good. I didn’t have what I’m told a good many other cardiac patients suffer from after an “event” like mine: the vertigo, the struggle for breath, the paralyzing exhaustion. Soon I was even going for little walks, the humiliating post-op parade of those pushing their IV poles down the hall, goose-pimpled legs on display. They would only let me out if I showed them I could shuffle around on my own, reliably make the journey between mattress and bathroom and back again. That was the ticket to freedom: to convince the nurses I was ready to live bedpan-free.
So I worked at being the best patient I could be. Because I had a reason to want out of there. Two reasons. Willa and Eddie being the difference between just wanting out, and wanting to go home.
But there was a question I needed to have answered first.
“I’m going to say this once,” I said to Willa one of the afternoons when she was on her own in my room. “I have to say it, and you have to really hear it. And when you answer—whenever you decide you can answer—I want it to be honest. Even if it hurts. Even if it feels like the worst thing you’ve ever said to another person, okay?”
“Jesus, Danny. That’s one hell of a windup. Why don’t we talk about whatever you want to talk about when—?”
“It can’t be later. I’ve got to say it now.”
She sat in one of the two uncomfortable chairs they had for visitors in my room. It gave a little shriek at the acceptance of her weight.
“I’m all ears,” she said. Stuck her fingers behind her ears and flipped them out. It made her look a lot like her son.
“You don’t have to do this. Once I get out of here. The whole recovery thing. The whole waiting it out until the end. You and Eddie have changed my life in a very short time and I can’t tell you how grateful I am. But it has been just that—a short time. So short there would be no blame—no blame from me, I promise you—if you decided it would be best to go back to Marcellus or wherever and not have to deal with me. Because we have to face it—I’m just a problem now.”
“Danny. Listen—”
“What I’m saying is you’re free. Any promise you’ve made—any suggestion of commitment—it’s clear. We’re good.”
Willa pursed her lips. Raised her eyebrows. Made an are-you-finished? face.
“Are you finished?” she said.
“I think so.”
“Okay. I understand what you’re saying. But what you don’t understand is me.”
Willa got up from her chair. Lay on her side next to me on the bed so that she could whisper what she said next into my ear.
“I don’t run from things, Danny. And I don’t say things because they sound good at the time. I say them because I believe them.”
“I love you.”
“Like that, for example.”
“No. I really love you.”
“Ditto. So that’s all you need to know from me on this offer of yours. You had to say it, you’ve got your answer. And you can never open that door again—not unless you’re the one who walks out of it. Got it?”
She kissed me. And though I must have smelled considerably less than sexy, though I couldn’t get my lips to work right, it was a real kiss, not just a gentle deal-sealer. And when it was over and she started to roll away I pulled her back for another.
OTHER THAN LYLE KIRK, PRESIDENT of the Boston Afterlifers, who came by with a six-pack of Rolling Rock (“Not sure they let you have this in here, but you only go round once—or twice, or maybe three times—right?”), my only visitors were Willa and Eddie. If it wasn’t for them, I would’ve been alone in there with the nurses and doctors who came and went, taking blood and asking how I was doing in a way that made it clear the answer wouldn’t make a difference one way or another.
The cardiac surgeon was the only other visitor I actually looked forward to seeing. I got the sense that he didn’t have to check on me as often as he did. He seemed to take a special interest in those near the edge, like me. Life and death. The inarguable line in the sand. It’s probably what brought him to the job in the first place.
“Danny Orchard,” he announced as he came into my room once. “Why didn’t you tell me you’re famous?”
“I’m not. Not really. D-list at best.”
“Modesty! Some of the nurses have told me you’ve been on TV, and they take TV very seriously. They’ve even brought your book to work but they’re too shy to ask you to sign them. So I volunteered on their behalf.”
He produced three copies of The After from his satchel. Placed them on the bed beside me and slapped a ballpoint pen on top.
“Would you mind?” he said.
I asked for the nurses’ names and set to inscribing the title pages. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the doctor watching me with an amused stare. It’s an expression I’d grown used to over the years. The curiosity that came with being next to someone who may have a handle on Life’s Big Mystery.
When I finished he continued standing there, nodding down at the books I’d returned to him.
“I’m a man of science. Never seen a spirit in my life, holy or otherwise,” he said. “But I went to Catholic school growing up. I’m no stranger to what I’m supposed to believe happens to us after we go. And in my line of work, I’m often the last one to see them before they d
o. But I’ve got to say you’re a first time for me. You’ve come back twice.”
“Three times now, actually.”
“See! I’d think you were a nutcase if I saw you on TV saying that.”
“I probably would, too.”
“What I mean is that I know you, and take you as more or less sane. Which makes me want to ask: On this most recent occasion, do you have any memory of what you saw over there?”
“Yes.”
“And how was it? Heaven, I mean. Have they done any renovations to the place since you were there last?”
That’s not where I went this time. This time it was someone trying to pull me the other way.
“It looks a lot like Detroit,” I said.
ONE AFTERNOON, AFTER WAKING FROM a narcotic snooze, I opened my eyes to find someone in my room. One of the candy striper volunteers I’d noticed walking the halls, pushing carts stacked with newspapers and magazines and stuffed animals. Did they make them hang out there as a condition of some suspended sentence, counting the hours they had to put in handing out three-month-old Peoples and Times instead of a stretch in juvie detention? Or were they just good kids trying to help?
This is what I wanted to ask the teenaged girl who stood with her back to me, flipping through the newspapers on her cart. I was trying to think of a polite way to put the question to her when she spoke first.
Special delivery for Mr. Orchard.
Everything stopped. Her back, the sway of long hair over her pink smock, the comings-and-goings in the hallway outside the door, all of it stilled.
Wasn’t easy to find this, I can tell you. But we aim to please.
The girl turned. Mimicked the look of horror on my own face with widened eyes, her mouth stretched into a black oval.
No.
This wasn’t a word, wasn’t a failed scream. It was the hopeless denial I’ve felt every time she’s come to me. The wish for her to go away that’s never once been granted.
She frisbeed the newspaper onto my lap.
I recognized it instantly, though I hadn’t laid eyes on it in years. The Detroit Free Press of July 10, 1989. The paper that was tossed onto the front porch of our house in Royal Oak the morning after the fire that took Ash’s life and mine. The headline on the bottom corner of the front page pored over by my father, the paper laid on the kitchen table but never opened. TRAGIC FIRE CLAIMS ONE LIFE, ALMOST TWO: TWIN BROTHER AND SISTER IN BLAZE, QUESTIONS REMAIN.
I looked up and she was standing there. Looming over me at the edge of the bed.
Ash reached up and put her hand around my IV bag. Weighed it, swung it back and forth on its hook. Then her fingers tightened. The bag collapsing, forcing the fluid down the tube and into my arm. I felt it swell, followed by a shooting pain up my arm. My shoulder blades, my neck, my chest on fire.
She let go.
The bag expanded, sucking up the contents of the tube. This time, it brought blood along with the saline. Curdling the clear liquid, from pink to crimson to something darker still.
She squeezed it again.
And with it, the pain found a home inside me. My heart. Crushed as though held between the teeth of a vise.
My eyes squeezed shut. A red road map against the backs of my lids, the capillaries enlarged and throbbing.
From somewhere very close, Ash’s smell. Her lips—the skin flaked with dryness, the touch cold—brushed my ear.
I miss you, Danny Boy.
I threw a blind fist out at where she stood but it met nothing but the IV pole, knocking it back. Opened my eyes.
The saline clear. The pain in my chest gone as though it was never there at all.
No Ash.
No Detroit Free Press on the bed.
But the smell still there. The lingering trace of perfume that sent me stumbling to the bathroom to vomit onto the floor after missing the sink.
I miss you.
14
* * *
After almost three weeks, and given there was little more they could do for me until a heart came through the doors in an ice bucket, they finally let me go home. The surgeon I liked was the last one to sign off. He brought his own fresh copy of The After. I signed it “For Helping My Achy Breaky.”
“Cute,” he said, snapping the covers closed. A finality to it that made it clear he would never open them again.
“I wish I could do more to thank you,” I said. “You play golf? Red Sox tickets?”
“Gave up my membership at Brae Burn when I realized all the drivers I kept throwing into the creek were going to bankrupt me. And I’ve already got first-base-line season tickets at Fenway. But trust me. Your insurance has covered me just fine.”
“Well, then. Until we meet again.”
“Hmm?”
“The transplant?”
“Right.”
“If something becomes available—”
“Absolutely. We’ve got fingers crossed, I can tell you that.”
He gave me a look that said he believed in miracles as much as the next guy.
“I know everybody’s been all over you about not exerting yourself,” he went on after he asked if he could drink the untouched cup of orange juice on my breakfast tray. “But you really have to take it easy. Hang in there so we can keep spinning the wheel at our end. Not too much excitement, okay?”
“So you’re saying I should go easy on the hot-tub sex and half marathons?”
“I’d definitely drop the half marathon. That doesn’t even sound fun. But I’m sure as hell not going to be the one to advise a fellow against the other activity if he’s given the invitation.”
WITHIN THE HOUR WILLA AND Eddie were walking with me out the doors to the car, the sun hurting my eyes. Eddie was next to me the whole way, holding my elbow. I would have told him I was okay, it wasn’t my legs that were in lousy shape but my heart, but his need to help was greater than my desire to make a show of a hopeful exit, and I leaned on him a little.
It’s a short drive between the hospital and our place off Porter Square. Willa took a roundabout route that afforded a glimpse of the Charles, Harvard’s spires, the rush hour traffic along Mass Ave. The faces of other passengers hinting of other stories-in-progress: the pissed-off, the anxious, the fulfilled, the bored. On the sidewalks everyone holding either a giant coffee or a cell phone, as though a law had been declared against public displays of empty-handedness. Everyday sights that struck me as original, heartbreaking, and funny at the same time. Too much life to digest all at once.
“What’s wrong, honey?” Willa asked when she glanced over to see me drying my cheeks with a shirt sleeve.
“Nothing’s wrong. I just remembered how good it could be.”
“How good what could be?”
I gestured out through the windshield. Kept my hand moving to point a thumb at Eddie in the backseat, then brought it up to graze Willa’s neck.
“This,” I said.
15
* * *
It was Willa’s idea to get married.
She asked me. I asked if she thought it was a good idea. She told me to shut up and give her an answer. I said yes.
This was on a Monday, less than a week after I was released from the hospital.
On Tuesday, we booked a church for the coming Friday. After that there wasn’t much to arrange for outside of a quick-turnaround dry clean on my tux and a reservation at our favorite restaurant in the Square for dinner after the service. You keep the numbers small and slip in a “Truth is, I’ve only got a couple months to live” here and there, and you can put a wedding together in a couple days, no problem.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t have doubts about the whole thing. Just because my ticker didn’t have many miles left on it didn’t mean I deserved a woman like Willa, a woman who had already lost one husband and was now looking at her second leaving the stage, all well before she turned forty. She told me, in her forceful way, that she wasn’t doing this because of the shape I was in but because she wanted to.
Because she loved me. She told me the same thing she said when she slid on top of me in our bed and I asked if she thought Eddie was asleep, if he might hear us.
“Just do what feels good,” she said. “Can you do that?”
As it turns out, I could. Even after a lifetime of training myself otherwise, a lifetime of Ash showing up to remind me that anything of the kind—a woman’s love, the yielding to pleasure, the making of promises—was against the rules, I could feel good with the best of them.
And I was feeling pretty damn good standing at the altar of Marsh Chapel on the BU campus with Eddie, my best man, next to me, and the two of us turned at the organist’s playing of “All Things Bright and Beautiful” to see Willa start up the aisle. She was breathtaking. Literally. So lovely in her silk suit and hair tied up in a ribbon of flowers that I forgot to inhale for the first half of her journey toward me, and I eventually gasped, my heart tom-tomming, the bow tie tightened around my neck.
Don’t die here. Not now. Let me put the ring on, let me raise a toast to the bride, and then I’m yours. But not now.
It sounded like a prayer, but even as I thought the words I realized I didn’t address them to God. I was begging Ash for mercy I’d never known her to show.
There were maybe a dozen guests sitting in the church, including the minister and ourselves. The remaining attendees were friends and family of Willa’s. Other than Lyle Kirk nobody on my side because I didn’t have a friend to invite. My public speaking agent? My publicist? The guy who does my taxes? Though it probably shouldn’t have, it stunned me to realize I hadn’t talked to anyone in years who I didn’t pay to talk to me.
Except Ash. Not that she’d require an invitation anyway.
Which is why I was relieved that, when I scanned the pews, I didn’t see her sitting at the back, or balancing atop the organ pipes, or peeking through a crack in the chapel doors as I half expected her to be.
Willa made her way up the altar steps, blowing all my worry away. She wasn’t a tall woman, my wife-to-be. Yet she was so much stronger than me. You could see it as she took my catcher’s mitt of a hand in hers and leaned her head against my side, a lending of power that made me stand straight.
