Alive

by Chandler Baker

  Transplant NTE

  CROSS, STELLA M.

  *Final Report*

  Document type:

  Transplant NTE

  Document status:

  Auth (Verified)

  Document title:

  Post–Heart Transplant Note

  Performed by:

  Belkin, Robert H.

  Verified by:

  Belkin, Robert H.

  *Final Report*

  Post–Heart Transplant Note

  Patient:

  Stella Cross

  Age:

  17 years

  Sex:

  Female

  Associated diagnosis:

  Acute cardiomyopathy

  Author:

  Belkin, Robert H.

  Basic Information

  Reason for visit: Biopsy, echocardiography, electrocardiography

  Transplant diagnosis: measurable deterioration of the function of the myocardium; dilated

  Transplant type: Deceased donor heart transplant

  Transplant info: Last biopsy: N/A

  Cardio allograft, needle biopsy:

  —30% obsolescence

  —Acute tubular injury

  —Diffuse inerstitial fibrosis

  —Negative immunoperoxidase staining

  —Vasculitis identified

  History of Present Illness

  The patient voices concerns over nausea, migraine pain, and dizziness.

  “You look terrible,” Brynn says as I squeeze past her along the bleachers. I find a spot in the basketball gymnasium between her and Lydia, a few rows down from the top, just high enough to be dizzying.

  A recorded violin plays through the loudspeakers. Students shuffle to their seats, voices held lower than usual. I shed my jacket and fold it in my lap.

  “Please, be more honest.” I say in a voice no louder than a croak. “Don’t spare my feelings.”

  She levels her chin. “Serious question: Have you seen yourself in the mirror? Follow-up: Are you doing all right? Because—”

  “Yes, I know.” I let out a tired one-note laugh and even that hurts. “I’ve seen myself. And I have no idea, it’s pretty touch-and-go at this point.”

  “I’m sorry about Levi,” Lydia says quietly.

  I give her a grim smile that I have no intention of making reach my eyes.

  “It’ll get easier,” I say, unconvincingly.

  She squeezes my hand. “Yeah, it will.”

  A normal girl would eat a pint of rocky road, watch The Notebook, and spend an entire weekend wallowing in her PJs, but I’m finally coming to terms with the fact that I’m not a normal girl. In the past seventy-two hours, I’ve deteriorated significantly. Brynn and Lydia pass worried looks between each other and quickly shuffle apart to make more room for me.

  My doctors would call it something fancy, like “regression of pulmonary arteriovenous malformations.” I would call it something simpler. Withdrawal.

  From Levi.

  My legs are brittle and quiver even when I’m sitting. Plus, it hurts too much to eat, so I’ve given that up, too. When I left the house, there were rings underneath my eyes—yellowish-blue, the color of three-day-old bruises.

  “Don’t you have, like, a million doctors you could talk to?” asks Brynn. Considering she generally refuses to acknowledge the fact that I’m sick, this is a huge step for her.

  “I’m fine,” I insist. But this isn’t true. Last night I’d dreamed of Tess. Or at least I thought it was Tess. There was a girl and she had a hole in her chest, hollowed out like somebody had taken a serrated cookie cutter to it.

  The edges were toothed and flayed, shiny with thick, gelatinous blood. Sticky, if you touched it with your fingers. When I looked over, I could see all the way down, like I was staring into a pit of molten lava. It gurgled when she tried to breathe.

  I woke up from my dream drenched in sweat, and I could have sworn I saw a figure in the window, staring in. Dark hair, hooded eyes. But when I sat up, it was gone and I wasn’t sure anymore whether I’d been fully awake or not. Either way, I hadn’t been able to get back to sleep.

  By then, the pain was raging. If I asked to skip school I knew Mom would make me visit Dr. Belkin and I didn’t want that. I could make it through this. I could be normal.

  “At least you’re better off than her.” Lydia nods to the gym floor down below. At the center, an easel holds a blown-up picture of Tess Collars. Flowers and teddy bears litter the mascot emblem.

  My stomach turns like a screw.

  The microphone screeches. Our guidance counselor, a thin man named Dr. Yang, calls for us to quiet down. Lydia and Brynn straighten beside me. I relax, thankful for the privacy that comes with the new distraction.

  I hug my jacket to my chest, trying to stanch the aching with pressure, but no luck. I settle in for the long, tedious business of memorializing Tess while suffering the sensation of my torso being rammed through with a saw-toothed blade.

  As soon as Dr. Yang begins, saying words like a positive force, encouraging, and big-hearted, I know this whole eulogy will be a work of fiction. Tess wasn’t that nice and she definitely wasn’t encouraging. And if I were him, I might have stayed away from the mention of hearts altogether.

  I look around, though, and the audience is nodding. Pairs of girls lean together, hugging, and we’re only a few sentences in. I’ve thought about my own eulogy often. Wondering what, if anything, anyone would have to say. I flinch at the idea that it would have been anything like Tess’s, bland and dishonest.

  Among a sea of peers, I feel a single shiver sneak its way up the back of my neck. Goose bumps pop up on my arms, puckered at the hairs. My throat tightens, fingers tense on my legs.

  It’s the same sense that woke me from my dream last night. The feeling of being watched.

  As casually as I can, I glance around the cavernous room. Everyone is listening attentively to Dr. Yang. Sniffles, quiet coughing and rustling clothes fill the surrounding air. But the tingling intensifies.

  I keep my breath steady. Slowly, I turn my head to one side. I search the bleachers. Nothing out of the ordinary. My knees start to jiggle. I want to shake off the sensation, but it sticks to me. Gradually, deliberately, I pivot the other direction.

  Just two rows up and catty-corner, Levi is fixing me with an unwavering stare. I nearly jump. When I catch his eye, he doesn’t smile or try to look away. He watches me, motionless.

  My heart pounds. I realize in that moment that I’m scared of him. Terrified. How did I let it go on so long?

  A single droplet lands with a plop on my lap. Breaking our eye contact, I look up to the ceiling, searching for a spot that’s leaky. Another drop lands.

  It’s then that I see the two bloodstains on my pant legs. Three more fall with a satisfying pitter-patter. I rub at one of the spots. It smells like a penny.

  One drips onto the back of my hand. Another on my cheek. My breathing grows shaky. Blood rains down on me. I whip my head back to Levi and he’s still staring, this time with a smirk and I realize, with a start, that somehow he knows.

  Meanwhile, Dr. Yang is telling us something about how Tess wouldn’t want us to feel sad forever. In fact, what she would want is for us to go on with our school year and live life to the fullest. Or at least that’s what Yang’s takeaway must be. I can hardly hear, my ears are so full with a metallic buzz, and I sit very still, letting the scarlet soak my khaki pants.

  At the end of the memorial, Lydia insists I have to go to the nurse’s office. Dazed and catatonic, I allow her to gingerly hold my hand so that she can help me pick my way over the bleachers. She keeps up a steady stream of chatter, which should be the first sign that something about me appears seriously off. But it hardly registers, because I’m not listening.

  When I look down, what I see is a bloody mess, clothes coated in crimson, but nobody else seems to notice. People pass me by without a second glance.

  I trail Lydia until we reach the nurse’s. Sh
e wants to stay, but I tell her I’m fine. The nurse will send me home with a note anyway, which she does.

  Only, when I get home, I realize I’m not alone. A black Tahoe idles a short distance down the street and an icy ripple of fear follows me like a ghost into the house.

  I bang through the front door.

  “Stella?” Mom calls from the kitchen.

  “I’m home,” I shout. I palm my forehead and try to take deep, normal breaths. What’s happening to me?

  Mom appears in yoga pants and an apron. “Quiet, Elsie’s down for her nap.” Of course. I’m on the verge of losing my mind, but let’s all make sure I do it quietly, because my little sister’s very busy napping. “What are you doing here?” Her eyes grow wider as if she’s only now registering the fact that it’s the middle of the day and I’m home. “Stella, what’s wrong? Do I need to start the car? I’ll call your father.”

  “No.” I pinch my forehead. In normal life, I’d have any number of perfectly non-alarming excuses. I have a cold. I have the flu. I have food poisoning. But if I say any of these, it’ll be an instant red flag. The symptoms are a match for basically every sign of transplant rejection. Doesn’t high school come with enough rejection that I shouldn’t need to worry about my immune system rejecting my organs, too? “It’s nothing. Just…cramps,” I say, pulling out the oldest trick in the book. “I was feeling exhausted, so I figured I should come home anyway.”

  Mom relaxes. “Smart, Stella,” she says, becoming once again businesslike. “You’re finally learning to take care of your body first.” Tess’s murder had really freaked out the Duwamish parents. Mine were no exception. I felt the heightened worry. The need to check in, text every hour. For my parents, any change in the status quo was an excuse to go into military-operation helicopter parenting.

  “That’s me. A model patient.” I wander over to the dining room and separate the slats on the blind over the front window.

  “Still raining out there?” she asks.

  The street outside is slick, damp in a way you can smell just by looking at it. It’s still out there—the black Tahoe, its windshield wipers shuddering menacingly across the glass. Fumes snort up from its mouthy muffler and swirl between the drops of rain, where they blend and disappear.

  I drop the blind with a snap. “Yeah, it’s a real nightmare.”

  I can’t get to my room quickly enough. Mom, usually eagle-eyed when it comes to my symptoms, completely misses the amped-up, paranoid energy that makes my hands shake and leads me to crack all my knuckles to the point that it sounds like rapid machine-gun fire.

  I close the door behind me and lock it. Retrieving my computer, I start it up and nervously chew the inside of my lip until there’s a painful sore bitten into the gum. Who, I wonder, is Levi Zin? I should have a better answer for this. Immediate. Apparent. None comes.

  I had known that he wasn’t on any social media, and at the time, it felt like an edgy choice—avant-garde, even. Akin to liking a band before it was popular. But now, this single fact has taken on a more onerous hue. Who is this person that I’ve been spending all my time with? The fact that I don’t know is unsettling. I think of the way his fingers crushed into my wrist, threatening to snap it.

  Sure, my parents’ generation loves to poke fun about our reliance on all sorts of Internet outlets, but in some respects these collections of profiles serve as an anchor, a way to keep personalities from becoming too slippery.

  While my browser loads I try to summon a list of people who have no virtual footprint, but the only ones I can think of are members of the Mob and of the CIA, both groups that seem far too “establishment” for my Levi.

  My heart contracts. My Levi? He’s not my anything anymore.

  When the search window pops up, my fingers—brittle as hollow bones—tap furiously at the keys. First, I check all the major social media outlets for good measure. I find one locked account, but without a picture or any other information, it’s impossible to tell if this is the same Levi Zin.

  Next, I cast a wider net, punching his name into the search engines for the Internet at large. This turns up a flood of useless information. I scroll through it, skimming the underlined headers, hoping for a stray word to catch my eye.

  It’d help to have an inkling of what I’m looking for. A title in all caps: YOUR EX-BOYFRIEND, LEVI, IS A CREEP? Not likely.

  When I’m starting to realize the task has taken on a distinctly needle-in-a-haystack feel, I narrow the search words to “Levi Zin” “Seattle.” In the moment it takes for the computer to process, I have a moment of clarity—that may not even be his real name—but in the next…

  Bull’s-eye.

  “‘Boating excursion turns tragic for local teen,’” I read aloud. Breathless, I double-click the link. The header leads me to the Web site for the Seattle Times. This alone feels almost too official for my wild-goose chase. The article’s dated only a few months back. I bite the corner of my thumb as my eyes scan the page.

  Boating Excursion Turns Tragic for Local Teen

  By: Edward Bulletin

  The U.S. Coast Guard has closed the Stacy Street Dock on the Duwamish Waterway where a pleasure boat ran into a power line Saturday afternoon killing one local teenager.

  The coast guard sent out a radio message at 2:30 p.m. closing a section of the river and warning of the hazard, but Levi Zin, Daniel James, and Stefan Ashbury of Crown Hill did not have a marine radio onboard.

  Zin, 17, was killed when the friends’ small boat ran into a transmission line the Seattle Port Authority was lifting out of the water for repairs.

  Two SPA boats were allegedly patrolling the area and tried to signal to Zin, James, and Ashbury to slow down.

  Zin was airlifted to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, where he was removed from short-term life support and declared dead from blunt-force trauma to the head and neck. Toxicology reports revealed a high level of alcohol in the teenager’s system, and it is likely that Zin was driving the boat at the time of the accident. The two other boys sustained minor injuries.

  My mouth goes dry. It takes me three full read-throughs to digest the contents of the article and even then I feel full paragraphs—letters and punctuation—stewing half-chewed in the pit of my stomach.

  This, I remind myself, could be any Levi Zin. Not one in particular. But even as I practice self-soothing by repeating these thoughts, I know that they have a ring of falseness. It’s not as if Levi Zin is a particularly common name. The probability shrinks more when narrowed to the number of Levi Zins in Seattle. Not impossible, but the chances are minimal that there’s no connection at all.

  I pull out a tattered notebook from my school bag and jot down the names Daniel James and Stefan Ashbury. These feel important, like a trail of bread crumbs. No photograph accompanies the article. I also copy the name of the hospital, Harborview Medical Center. Because of my transplant, I’m familiar with most of the surgical facilities around Seattle, and this one I recognize as the hospital where Henry’s father works.

  My work takes on a more purposeful air, but I’m still not able to ignore the consistent throbbing in my chest. One thing’s clear: the boy who entered Duwamish High isn’t the one who died. The boy at my high school must have assumed the identity of the deceased Levi, but why would anyone do that?

  As I see it, there are two options: witness protection—or worse. And since the witness-protection program provides people with new identities—not old, stolen ones—this leaves me with only one real possibility.

  And it’s much, much worse.

  When I wake, my room is dark with shadows tinted sepia by a yellowing moon. It’s the middle of the night, hours before my alarm clock will go off. Everything is still but for the pounding of my heart. Right away, I’m as alert as if I’d had two cups of coffee.

  My sixth sense buzzes in my ears. I lie stock-still. Afraid to move. The sensation of another human presence nearby settles over me and I remember being very small and too scared to
check inside my closet at night.

  I slide the covers off my chin and peer down my nose at the window on the other side of the room. But no one’s there. My pulse skips. Slowly, I push myself up, back to the pillows, and draw my knees to my chest. The space outside is empty, but the acrid scent of fresh cigarette smoke seeps through the cracks in the sill.

  Without looking away, I fumble for my phone on the nightstand and slide it into my lap.

  Henry, I type into the keypad, I need to come over tomorrow.

  There’s no response until morning, and all I can do is sleep with one eye open.

  “Hi, Dr. Jones,” I say, stepping over the threshold into Henry’s home. Henry’s father, dressed in baby-blue hospital scrubs, is a grown-up replica of Henry. His boyish, curly hair gives him a vaguely hyperactive appearance, and it’s occurred to me more than once that I rarely see adult men with curls you could loop your finger through. His demeanor is unfailingly earnest and sincere. He has a way of making me feel as if he cares deeply about the answers I give to any offhand question.

  “How are you?” he asks, ushering me in with a hand placed gently between my shoulder blades.

  “I’m…” I contemplate this for a moment, since answering Dr. Jones always seems to warrant a bit of reflection. “I’m okay.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “‘Okay’?”

  “Well…” I push nervously at the spot over my heart where it aches.

  “Have you had any complications?” When I’d first been diagnosed, I’d wanted Dr. Jones to perform my surgery. Especially after I’d met cold, hard Dr. Belkin. I didn’t know at the time that not just any surgeon could perform a transplant. Dr. Jones covers more general emergency-room trauma.