The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

by Megan Stielstra

  9

  My mother has given me many gifts. The best? A library card.

  She let me pick out anything, everything. I’d show her the books, and she’d read them, too, and we’d talk about them: what I learned, what confused me, what was new enough to sound strange. I didn’t know some kids didn’t have parents until The Great Gilly Hopkins. I didn’t know girls weren’t supposed to go hunting until Island of the Blue Dolphins. “Don’t be afraid to be afraid,” I’d tell myself like Meg Murry in A Wrinkle in Time. I remember crying my face off when Aslan died in Narnia, and the dogs in Where the Red Fern Grows, and Leslie in Bridge to Terabithia. “It’s okay if a story makes you sad,” my mom told me. “It’s okay if it makes you angry or afraid. Those feelings are real. Let’s live them.”

  After we checked out our books, we’d go next door to Wendy’s for Frostys. I wasn’t typically allowed stuff like that, junk food or fast food or pop, and those Frostys tasted dangerous. Forbidden. I didn’t do much that was forbidden, didn’t sneak around and get in trouble and test boundaries as kids so often do. For better or worse, I stayed in my head.

  The world outside seemed less shiny—dull and on mute.

  A lifetime later—after we’d moved away, when I was a teenager with a bra and St. Ives Blemish Control Peach Scrub and Girbaud jeans rolled three times and pegged so tight at the ankle it’s a wonder we still have feet and whatever book I was reading at the time, my favorite being Dune, a sci-fi novel by Frank Herbert about interstellar feudal society with a powerful order of women called the Bene Gesserit who trained their minds and bodies to the point of superhuman powers, which was so totally cool—my parents and I drove through Owosso and stopped at that same Wendy’s. I took out my retainer and wrapped it in a napkin. I remembered it two hours later, in the back of the car on the way to who knows where. Dad turned the car around and back to Owosso. Orthodontia is expensive and rarely covered by insurance. We spent hours in the alley behind the restaurant, searching through trash bins of discarded Wendy’s. We smelled like Wendy’s. We had Wendy’s in our hair. My mother tells me that we found the retainer eventually, but all I can remember is the fear of disappointing my parents. To protect myself against their iron silence, I repeated the Litany against Fear, used by the Bene Gesserit to focus their minds during great peril.

  I must not fear.

  Fear is the mind-killer.

  Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.

  I will face my fear.

  I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

  9

  New town, new house: fifty-some miles south to Chelsea, which, as of 2014, is officially a city but back then was most certainly a village. Home of Jiffy mix, the Purple Rose Theatre Company, and the greatest public library in the history of the universe. I loved that library. I loved Thompson’s Pizzeria. I loved the flag girls that danced in front of the marching band and the demolition derby at the Chelsea Community Fair and the fact that both my parents had jobs in the same place; Mom as the gifted education specialist, Dad as the middle school principal. On weekends, he’d have to work, and I’d run through the empty hallways and the empty classrooms and the empty gym.

  Our new house was a ten-or fifteen-minute drive from downtown on one of the many small lakes in the area. There were a handful of residential properties, but mostly it was state land, some cleared to rent for summer camps and retreats, some running wild with mossy, swamp-like forestland full of poison ivy. I learned where to walk and where not to walk. Outside, our house was nondescript, white with blue shutters and hidden in the trees; inside, it was like a log cabin, wood walls and floors and ceiling with an unfinished attic for my bedroom. My dad built me a window seat. My mom let me paint poems on the walls. There were built-in bookshelves and a closet for record albums, Beethoven and bluegrass. The garage was its own world: fishing poles and tools hung from pegboards, a second refrigerator packed with frozen meat and Ziploc bags of blueberries, canoes and toboggans in the rafters, stacks of lumber and a standing saw, rifles in locked cabinets, boots and camo and rubber overalls, box frames to house beehives in the summer, and mounted heads, mostly white-tailed deer. I named the biggest one Bilbo Baggins. Sometimes I’d sit out there and talk to him.

  Do you think that’s weird? Remember, I was an only child. My parents both worked. There weren’t any kids my age around and I was still too young to bike downtown alone. It was easier in the summer. I had the lake, with a raft in the middle on floaters. As you swam toward it, seaweed reached up from the bottom and tickled you, which felt fine at first but later, at somebody’s slumber party, we watched a grown-up horror movie where a woman went swimming at night and the seaweed came alive, winding round her legs and arms and pulling her screaming into the black. I didn’t swim to the raft after that.

  Ever.

  Still.

  I take the goddamn rowboat.

  9

  I walked into class, looked around at the new, strange kids in their rows of desks, looked up at the teacher, said, “Mr. Bullock?”—and puked. I puked everywhere. Over everything. This is not an attempt at dramatic effect, an intentional use of exaggeration to make a better story. No, there was puke on the blackboard, on the bulletin boards decorated with construction paper. Puke got on kids. It got on their desks and they jumped and screamed. Mr. Bullock walked me down the hall to my mother, who worked at my same elementary school. She helped me clean up and get back to class, but it was too late. I was ruined. For weeks, no one would sit next to me. When I raised my hand, they’d duck and cover. When I opened my mouth to speak, they’d make puke sounds like Chunk in The Goonies.

  But it was nothing compared to the multiple sclerosis read-a-thon.

  For one week, once a year, we all wore stickers that said kick ms, and for one week, once a year, I got the shit kicked out of me. When I tell that story, people laugh. Probably because of how I tell it—humor as weapon, humor as shield. But here’s the truth: gingerly pulling down my pants so the elastic from my underpants wouldn’t snap against the blue-black welts across my hips; sitting sideways in an elementary-kid-size desk ’cause straight down on my butt hurt too bad; walking through the hall and staring straight ahead, ignore it, keep going, pass over me and through me. But this is true, too: I was lucky. For me, it would be over in a week. It was so surface, so stupid—my initials, for god sakes. But for other children, this happens every day because of the way they look or talk or dress, where they live or where they’re from or who their parents are or any of a number of reasons why we’re all so impossibly cruel.

  10

  My dad asked me not to tell anyone about this, but he’s retired now, hasn’t worked in a school for a decade, hasn’t worked at that school for two decades, and it’s been three decades since it happened so the statute of limitations is up.

  One night, he used his master key and took me swimming at the Charles S. Cameron Pool.

  It’s big: a six-lane, twenty-five-yard competitive pool with a separate shallow end for swim lessons. Underwater lights illuminated the blue floor of the pool, but we kept the main lights off in case the janitors were still in the building. At the time, there were three diving boards: two standard size and, between them, the high dive. You’ve seen this moment in the movies: The girl stands at the base of the ladder, nervously tugging at the butt of her Speedo. She looks up, up, up at the terrifying height, trying not to let on how scared she is. This fear will follow her for the rest of her life: airplanes, mountains, roller coasters, the Skydeck at Sears Tower. At the top, she clings to the poles at the side of the board and scoots forward till they’re gone, just her and the darkness and the low-lit water a million miles below. The board trembles beneath her feet. All she hears is heartbeat. All that’s there is fear—breath, body, bones.

  “Jump, kid,” said my dad.

  I’m forty years old and I can still hear his voice, bouncing on the water like an echo chamber.

  “Jump.”

 
Here Is My Heart

  Write your name here. Address, here. Here—check every box on this long list of disorders and diseases and conditions that are a part of your medical history, your parents’ medical history, your grandparents’ medical history, and down the DNA. So much terrifying possibility. So much what if in our blood, our bones.

  I checked two. Melanoma and—

  “Heart disease?” my new doctor asked. I liked her immediately: her silver hair, her enviable shoes. Later, I’d love her intelligence and, later still, her respect for my intelligence even when—especially when—I acted bonkers. She removed the weird, spotty growths from my arm and told me they weren’t cancer. She diagnosed my thyroid disorder and fought it like a dragon. She helped me understand my own body and demanded that I treat it with kindness, even when—especially when—I was stressed or exhausted or scared. It’s so easy to forget ourselves, to prioritize our own hearts second or tenth or not at all. Do you see yourself in that sentence? Are you, right this very moment, treating yourself less than? Cut that shit out, my doctor would say, except she’d say it in professional, even elegant doctorspeak. And to her, I listen. Her, I trust. Every woman should have such an advocate and the fact that our patient/doctor relationship is a privilege as opposed to a right makes me want to set the walls on fire. Look up—see the wall in front of you? Imagine it in flames.

  “Megan?” she said, and I pulled myself away from her shoes. “There’s a history of heart disease in your family?”

  “Yes,” I said. “My dad.”

  She asked questions and I did my best. “In his forties, he had chest pains shoveling the driveway in Michigan and got—are they called stents?—he got stents, and then in his fifties he had the same pain playing racquetball and they had to medevac—”

  “Medevac?”

  “This was in Alaska—he lives on an island now. It’s called Kodiak. Yes, there are bears. They sent him to the mainland for surgery and afterward he went right back up the mountain—”

  “The mountain?”

  “He’s always on mountains, hiking insane heights with drop-offs like this”—I made a ninety-degree angle with my hands—“and carrying moose around in backpacks that are like what, a thousand pounds? And sure, fine, he’s in great shape; he eats tons of wild salmon and can bench press you and me put together but still, he’s almost seventy, and a week ago he was hunting and had those pains, again, and they sent him to the mainland, again, and—”

  The more I explained, the angrier I got.

  Anger is easier than fear.

  Afterward, I called my dad’s cell phone. We talk often, a couple times a week. He tells me about the weather or the ocean or whatever book he’s reading, Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life or Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, but that day I wanted to hear how he was doing. He just had heart surgery. I pictured him on the couch, dog at his feet, benched for who knows how long, and bored out of his mind. Maybe I could entertain him, tell him stories, make the time pass quicker. Healing sucks.

  He picked up on the first ring.

  “Hi! How are—” I started, but I didn’t make it to the you.

  “Can I call you back?” he said in an exaggerated whisper. And then, in the same matter-of-fact way you or I might say I’m at the store or sitting down to dinner, he said, excited, “I’m tracking a moose!”

  * * *

  The first time I dissected a heart was a miserable failure. Me, in my kitchen in Chicago with a knife and a fist of raw meat, and then, a minute later, a long, veiny slab, veal-colored and flat like skirt steak, watery purple seeped into the cutting board.

  I remembered the frogs I dissected in high school, the smell and the death and the tiny, fragile jawbone; deer carcasses hung upside down and bleeding in our garage in Michigan; Christopher, my then boyfriend/now husband, gutting rabbits on the porch to impress my father, the blood and the mess and the pressure of becoming a family; laying on the table in my paper robe and hearing my son’s heartbeat: He’s alive he’s alive he’s alive.

  So much joy. So much fear. How can a heart take it?

  I stared at my work, messy wet chunks of meat. After a while my dog stuck his nose in the back of my knee. I looked down and he wagged his tail so hard his shoulders shook.

  “Fine,” I told him. “You win,” and I set the cutting board on the floor.

  * * *

  Every fall, my dad flies through Chicago to hunt birds in Michigan—him, my uncle Chuck, and two English setters to point the way. I love these trips because we get to see him and I hate these trips because we don’t get to see him enough: morning flying in, evening flying out, and a few days between hunts. Poor Dad. Poor Chuck. I’ve yelled at them both.

  Maybe I used the wrong words. Let me try again.

  I love you. I miss you. Stay another day. Stay two days, a week. Your grandson is getting older. I’m getting older. You’re getting older. I have so many questions, so many things still to learn, so many things to say like: Please, Dad, please, I’m afraid of the mountain. And: Please, Dad, please, how is your heart?

  After the most recent surgery, he sat in my dining room and we talked genetics. Did my grandparents have heart problems? Would I? What about my son, Caleb, then six years old and looking at a picture book, some kid-friendly anatomy thing. “Grandpa,” he said, pointing. “Is that what a heart looks like?”

  Dad bent over the page. “Well, real hearts are more purple than red,” he explained. “There are veins and tubes and blood—” I watched the two of them, heads together. You can tell they’re related: same looks, same laugh, same fearlessness. I like thinking of the beauty we pass down, as opposed to the danger. “Tell you what,” Dad told him. “When I get back to Alaska, I’ll send you a box of deer hearts and you and your mom can dissect them.”

  A month or so later, Grandpa’s box arrived by FedEx. It contained three frozen hearts, a few rounds of caribou steak and thirty pounds of halibut that according to my father is the world’s best eating fish. I stuffed the freezer, leaving a heart out to thaw, and went outside to ride scooters with my kid. “By the time we come inside,” I told him, “the heart will have melted and we can cut it up!”

  He looked at me from underneath his helmet and said, “Why do we want to do that?” which, frankly, is an excellent question, one rarely considered by this little boy specifically and, I wager, by children in general. Usually they jump right into that strange neon puddle. They run headfirst into that electrical fence. They grab that scorpion. They eat that thing. They stick their fingers in that other thing. And who the hell cares why?

  I’ll tell you who.

  Your mother.

  But with the arrival of the deer hearts, our roles had switched. The child now requires a logical explanation before he’ll go anywhere near the creepy, drippy things, and I find myself both unable to stay away and unable to articulate why.

  * * *

  The next time I dissected a heart, I came prepared. I studied anatomical diagrams. I read websites on coronary artery disease that terrified me and articles on cardiology that were way over my head. I watched YouTube channels on dissection, videos of open heart surgery, and Cristina Yang performing her first solo valve replacement because oh my god I love that show.

  Left atrium, chordae tendineae, ventricle.

  Interventricular septum, tricuspid valve, papillary muscles.

  I remembered the frogs I dissected in high school, skin flaps peeled back and pinned to the dissection tray; salmon yanked out of the Pacific, smearing blood from their hooked mouths and flopping like crazy till you whack them with a baseball bat; my friend Jeff writing about killing a fish as a child, how it influenced his understanding of queerness and masculinity; my son catching his first big fish on a river in Alaska, so excited, so proud, and his uncle Tim telling him he had to kill it, me standing there thinking of Jeff, thinking of the memories we carry; flash forward twenty years and my boy’s grown up and still traumatized from killing this fish ri
ght here/right now; flash back to the present when he tells Uncle Tim no thank you and we go in search of skipping stones and talk about death: plants and fish and humans, scales and guts and bone.

  I set the cutting board on the floor and called my dad.

  “How’s the writing?” he said.

  “Ugh,” I said.

  “That good? What are you working on?”

  My dad is one hundred percent supportive of my work. One notable and admittedly deserved exception: a published story where I spelled Dall sheep d-o-l-l and he went off, something about a Tom Wolfe novel where the main character goes quail hunting with buckshot. Buckshot! Can you believe it? Does he want to eat the bird or explode the bird? I mean if you can’t even bother to research. I tell this story every semester to my writing students: Dall and doll, Wolfe and quail. We talk about movies set in Chicago that get our streets wrong. We talk about our responsibility to the places and people we write about. We talk about the pressure of telling stories about the people we love. “Are you scared to write about your dad?” they ask. And I answer, “Hell yeah I am!”

  “I’m writing about you,” I told him.

  “Oh,” he said.

  I talked about the deer hearts, a metaphor for fear. Body, bones, blood. “You can read it first,” I said. “In case you—”

  “Oh, kid,” he said. “Write whatever you want.”

  A tidal wave of gratitude.

  “So long as it’s the truth.”

  * * *

  When Marilyn, my stepmother, called to tell me that Dad had been airlifted from the urgent care center in Glennallen to the hospital in Anchorage, I said, “Fuck,” but with four or five u’s so more like: fuuuuck. I have a mouth like a sailor, but I try really hard not to curse around Mare because I know she doesn’t like it and I love her very much. She gave me three brothers (we got drunk by the fire pit and decided we didn’t like step), three sisters (we got drunk in the banya and decided we didn’t like in-law), a brilliant niece (Hi, Olive!), a brilliant nephew (Hi, Nico!), and here we are, a family.