“No, I mean, it doesn’t just work that way, regardless of how selfless this offer is. I can’t even wrap my head around the absurdity.”
“What do you mean? We’ll draft up paperwork, and it’ll be a done deal.” How is this so easy for her to talk about?
“I know the rules and laws of donations and transplants and a living person can’t offer to donate an organ.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she says.
“I agree, but that’s the law and I don’t know a doctor who would put their job on the line to break that law.”
“You told me your doctor is a sleaze, right?” she asks.
I did tell her this. Dr. Drake has propositioned me and has made things very uncomfortable. I have set him straight and debated on reporting him to the hospital but I’m not dumb enough to ignore the fact that he is the best heart surgeon in New England and I would be a complete moron for getting him fired. “Yeah, and?”
“Let me at him,” she says with a sinful glow to her face.
“What are you going to do?” I ask nervously.
“Do you trust me?” she asks.
“I did up until this very moment,” I say through soft, uneasy laughter.
“Look,” she says, stopping in place, turning to me and grabbing my shoulders firmly. “I’m most likely not going to make it through birth and I have a perfectly healthy heart. We have the same blood type, which is just weird, and I feel like this is the way it’s supposed to be, Ari. Take my heart if you make it longer than I do?” The thought of taking her heart means she will no longer be here but that’s a part I can’t control. “Say okay!”
I sniffle, trying to hold back my tears, but they come anyway. “Okay,” I mutter.
“I told you we were soulmates,” she says.
“I thought it was because we were both dying and needed each other for support, not because one of us would outlive the other and then live on with the other’s heart.”
“But now, we’re true soulmates,” she says. “You’ll have a part of my soul with you long after I’m gone. What are friends for, Ari?”
“If I make it that long, I promise you I will always take care of your heart as if it were my own.”
“I know you will, and you will make it.”
“The doctor said I probably don’t have more than a year,” I tell her.
“When did that happen? Why didn’t you tell me?” Ellie scolds me.
“Yesterday at my appointment. I was going to tell you but I’ve been digesting.”
“Well, I have six months to go. That’s half of a year. Hold on, okay?”
“I’ll try, but I’d rather you make it through childbirth and be this baby’s mom,” I tell her, reaching out and placing my hand on her stomach.
“We don’t have choices, Ari. We can only make plans.”
CHAPTER ONE
December 26th
Five Years Ago
Miracles don’t happen. Especially not two days after a “miracle-less” Christmas. So, what is this? Is this real? I stare at the pager on my nightstand, watching as it vibrates against the old wood. My breath hitches in my throat and I’m not sure I can find a way to make my lungs start working again as I slowly pull my weakened arm out from my under me, while also silently praying this isn’t a mistake. Do mistakes like this happen? I suppose they could, but would God be so cruel? My trembling hand closes around the pager and I bring it in front of my face, waiting for my eyes to focus well enough to read the blurry number staring back at me.
Oh my God. Oh my—
“Mom!” I shout through a hoarse voice. “Mom!”
She nearly trips herself running into my bedroom before dropping down at the edge of my bed. “What is it? Are you okay? Does something hurt?” She pulls open my nightstand drawer, fishing out a handful of pill bottles. She inspects each one as quickly as she can, probably looking for the right bottle that will relieve the pain she thinks I’m in right now. She’s been through this drill so many times before. I watch her for a minute, observing how the pain and fear she has worn on her face for the past seven years has taken a toll. She’s aged so much in the short period of time it’s been since I received news of the impending, untimely death I will face.
There are bags under her bottom lashes and red veins line the whites of her eyes. Her once steady hands constantly shake and tremble now. She used to spend time on her hair and makeup, but now she barely looks in the mirror. I can understand that. I have avoided the mirror too. No one wants to watch herself turn into a person they weren’t meant to be—a person becoming a muted shadow of who they once were.
Mom places one of the pill bottles aside and tucks the others back into the drawer. Unscrewing the cap, she taps a couple of tablets into her hand and settles in closer. This is where she sits for hours every day, watching me die. I’ve wondered what it might be like for her to watch me disintegrate, and I’m curious if she has ever secretly wished for a time when she wouldn’t have to sit here and wait for “the day” as we call it. Though, there may be hope that I don’t have to wonder that now.
“Look.” I uncurl my fingers from around the pager and turn it around so she can see it.
Her hand cups around her mouth, and her eyes fill with tears. I watch her read and re-read the number on the page before she looks down at me. Mom opens her mouth to say something, but no words come out. Instead, sobs break from her throat as she takes my hand in hers and places it against her soft cheek. Maybe I’m still in shock, but I feel happier for her than I am for myself. The burden I have been at twenty five years old is one no parent should have to endure.
“A donor,” she utters to herself. “There’s a donor for you. You’re getting your heart. Ari, you’re getting your heart!” Tears are now rushing down her cheeks, and her mouth falls agape. “Sweetheart, you’re going to live. You’re going to be okay.” She falls into me, embracing me with all of her strength as she pulls me against her like I were no stronger than a rag doll, which is pretty much the appearance I have owned for the past year. “Our prayers have been answered. Finally, our prayers have been answered.” With realization seeping into every fragment of my body, I want to wonder where the heart came from, but I don’t think I have to wonder at all.
Placing me back down into my pillow, she springs off of my bed and tears a suitcase out of the closet and throws it down onto the foot-bench at the end of my bed. The zipper screams as she tears the case open and she places her hands on the rim, looking inside blankly. After a quick pause, she spins around toward my bureau and pulls out an armful of clothes. She’s filling the suitcase as if we were going on some exotic vacation…a dying wish I’ve often had.
Within minutes, my room is more or less packed up into the one large suitcase. “I’m going to go call Dr. Drake,“ Mom says, sounding encouraged for the first time in months…maybe even years.
My excitement over the news comes and goes quickly as I lose myself in the thought of where this heart is coming from. Dr. Drake has told me many times that I’m far down on the transplant list due to my blood type being AB negative. He told me that unless I had a personal connection with an expectant donor, I would likely never receive a heart in time to survive. And things don’t quite work that way.
“Ari, are you ready?” Mom comes in with bags in hand and coat on, all ready to go. While her undying excitement is calming, or should be calming, I also know the risks involved with this surgery. I know the statistical chances of coming out on the other side. I know the possible side effects and everything else that goes along with it. Of course, I feel like I’ve just been given a second chance to live, but I’ve worked hard to keep myself and my thoughts grounded.
Mom helps me up from the bed and places a coat around my shoulders. Normally, I close my eyes when I walk past the mirror on my wall, but today I look. I glance at the alien I have become. With a tube up my nose strung along the back sides of my ears, puffy eyelids, sunken chee
ks, skin paler than snow, and the whites of my eyes taking on a pink hue, I look horrifying. I look like I’m dying.
It takes us several minutes to make it out of the house and up to the car while Mom holds me up as if I were an elderly woman who should be wheelchair bound. “I’m scared,” I tell her, as I slip into the passenger seat.
She places her hand down on my knee and looks at me with a smile filled with hope—a type of smile I haven’t seen her make in years. “I know in my heart that you are going to make it through this. You must believe me.”
“I do believe you, Mom.” She needs the hope more than I do right now. It’s the least I can do for her, but being honest with myself, I can’t imagine a life without waiting for this stupid pager to buzz. I can’t imagine going to bed at night, knowing I’ll wake up in the morning or leaving my house to run an errand, knowing I’ll return. With my heart failure at the stage it’s at, Dr. Drake made it clear that a heart attack could come out of nowhere. I even got the whole, “Live each day as if it were your last,” recommendation from him. I went more than five years living on the hope Dr. Drake continued to give us, but as things progressed, the hope he once had would have been a lie if he continued to fill my head with it.
For the last six months, I’ve been lying on my bed with nearly no energy to hardly lift a spoon, waiting each day for the last day to arrive. I’ve considered horrible ideas to relieve myself of the inhumane waiting game, but I’m not brave enough to follow through with any of them. I’ve even found online support groups for people like me—people who are waiting to die. Some of those people assist others in suicide. Others preach that prayers will be the answer and we will all eventually be healed. Let’s be real, though, if that were the case, fewer people would die every day. Right?
Life feels like it’s speeding by me in a blur as we amble in through the hospital entrance. With Mom’s hands clenched tightly around my arm, she ushers me to the reception desk to find where we need to go. Usually, we go to the same floor, but maybe we’re going somewhere different today.
While Mom is in the middle of a conversation with the receptionist, my focus is pulled to a man crying in the corner. The wall looks to be holding him up as he holds a phone up to his ear, clutching it as if it were holding him up. The hospital has never been a happy place for me. It’s always been the place I go to find out how much faster I’m running toward my death. However, I’ve seen people walking out with smiles on their faces, and moms holding their new babies, so I know this can be a happy place. I just haven’t experienced it. It looks like this guy might agree with me on that.
“She’s gone,” he cries into the phone through a guttural cry. I imagine this is what Mom and Dad would look and sound like on my last day—left with nothing but memories. “She died.” He places his hand over his face, squeezing his fingers around his temples. “An unforeseen complication—and I’m a dad. And I don’t know how I can do this alone. I don’t think I can. I can’t do this without her. I can’t even believe the words coming out of my mouth right now. She was just here two hours ago, full of life and excitement about our future as a family, and now she’s not. How can she be dead? How?” His voice is growing in volume and anger takes over for the pain he must be feeling as he drops the phone to the ground. In the instant his gaze lifts, finding mine staring back at him from across the corridor, I quickly realize that I recognize him. I don’t want to recognize him. He doesn’t know who I am but I have seen him in hundreds of photos Ellie has showed off to me—my soulmate who selflessly offered me her heart while it was still beating in her chest.
Now I have my confirmation. Ellie’s heart is the heart waiting for me. She died. Ellie and her husband were supposed to have their baby soon. She even called me just last week to see how I was doing. She told me to hang in there just a little longer. I knew why, and I told her to stop talking like that. This was never what I wanted for her, or her poor husband, Hunter.
“All set, sweetie,” Mom says, taking my arm. She guides us toward the elevators, but my gaze is still locked on the man who I only know through Ellie’s descriptions and pictures, the happy man who will now forever live with a broken heart.
I’ve spent so many days and years feeling sorry for myself, feeling alone in this world like I’m the only one bad things happen to, but now I see I was wrong. I wonder if I’d rather be at the receiving end of life shattering news or if it’s better to be the cause of the earth shattering news. I guess my pain would end if that day were to happen, but Mom and Dad’s pain would live on. I haven’t envied the two people who love me more than I love myself, and I don’t envy that man.
“Where do you think the heart came from?” I ask Mom as we step into the elevator, wondering how much she knows. I never told her of the pact Ellie and I made, or the conversation we both had with Dr. Drake—the conversation that was highly improper and against all codes and regulations. My life was at stake, though, and Ellie’s heart was possibly up for the taking. The part that sealed the deal was the ironic realization of our blood types matching. It was like we found each other for this one reason.
“Does it really matter, sweetie? That’s not something you should be worrying about right now.”
It does matter.
When we arrive on the sixth floor, the nurses all stand from behind the counter and begin a slow clap. My cheeks burn with discomfort. Nothing feels right about this celebration. One of the nurse’s pages Dr. Drake and places the phone down with an ear-to-ear grin. “Congratulations, Ari,” she says.
I know people congratulate for life accomplishments but is it a life accomplishment; to take a person’s heart after they just died and replace it my failure of a heart? I failed at life. I don’t deserve a “Congratulations.”
“Why aren’t you smiling right now?” Mom asks as we take two seats in the small waiting area. “I told you, you have nothing to worry about.”
Is it worry I’m feeling? Is it fear? Maybe I’m scared I’ll wake up and be a different person, a person with Ellie’s heart.
Lost in thought, I didn’t notice Dr. Drake approaching or taking Mom from her seat to have a private conversation with her on the other side of the room. I shouldn’t have to have a legal guardian at twenty-five and technically, she’s only my health proxy, but since I was diagnosed at eighteen, I never got the chance to test the waters of adulthood without a chaperone attached to my hip.
“We’re going to prepare you for surgery now, Ariella,” Dr. Drake says, walking toward me with the same smile Mom’s sporting. They look like pod people looking through a glass window at a test monkey who just learned to use a phone.
My mind is racing while I follow Dr. Drake and Mom down the hallway, feeling like a small child looking up at the high ceilings and the foreign inspirational words written across the hanging pieces of art. Everything around me feels blurry, especially with a conversation floating above my head, one I can’t comprehend the words to. Something doesn’t feel right.
A person should never steal another person’s heart. We’re taught this at a young age. Hearts are weak and can be broken easily—in some case, too easily. I’ve never wanted to rip someone’s heart out or cause anyone pain, but today, I’m literally the cause of someone’s heart being torn out, and that has to cause someone, if not many people, pain.
“Dr. Drake,” I speak up as we enter into a private room. “Whose heart is being donated?” I need the confirmation.
“Someone who no longer needed the heart, Ariella,” he says softly, avoiding contact with my eyes. “We need to get moving.”
“Who?” I ask again, this time tugging at the sleeve of his white coat. I need to hear her name even though I saw her husband, Hunter, downstairs. “Who didn’t need their heart anymore? You made it very clear that unless someone were to donate their heart to me, I would likely never receive a donation. Was I just lucky?”
Dr. Drake looks over at Mom and gives her a slight nod. He isn’t confirming
because this is considered malpractice. A living person cannot promise another living person their heart. Yet, we made it happen. “We have to do this now,” he says sternly.
Everyone moves around me, helping me change into a gown, stabbing me with needles, and hooking the IV up, all while sharing looks with one another but not speaking. Mom kisses me on the cheek and wraps her arms around me tightly, shaking and breathing heavily. “I’ll see you real soon, sweetie,” she hardly gets out as she’s pulled away from me by a couple of nurses.
I watch Mom’s face crumple as the tears she had been holding onto behind her bravery, pour down her cheeks. Walking backward, not taking her eyes off of the scene I’m a part of, her hands reach for me like a child who is reaching for her mom and the look in her eyes says she may never see me again. I’ve already come to terms with the risk of this surgery—how it’s a gamble whether I die today, in a month, or if I’m lucky, ten to twenty years from now. Mom, on the other hand, hasn’t come to terms with anything. She’s always full of hope and optimism.
“It may be a little late, but this is certainly your Christmas miracle,” a nurse says as she places the gas mask over my nose, leaving me with a gentle smile before the world fades into a blur of darkness.
CHAPTER TWO
CURRENT DAY
I flip the lights on and close my eyes, inhaling the wafting breeze of roses, jasmines, sweet alyssum, stargazers, and gardenias. The aroma only lasts for a few brief moments before each unique scent melts into the back of my mind like they do every day. As I place my keys down on the counter, the back doorbell buzzes. Gosh, this is early for a delivery, I think to myself while peering at my watch.
Opening the back door to accept the delivery, Dax walks in and places a box down beside my feet. “Sorry, Ari, I’ve got a packed schedule today.” He runs back out to his truck and returns with a smaller box and hands it to me. “Just these two today.”
“Great, thank you!” I carry the box in my hands out front and place it on the counter then turn back for the second box, but Dax is in front of me…right in front of me. Like, two inches in front of me. “Hi,” he says.
Christmas in the City II Page 13
