by Jill Wolfson
In memory of my bighearted dad,
Gilbert Wolfson
ONE
AMANDA STOOD BEFORE THE table of judges, waiting for her turn to compete on the uneven bars. Her hair was pulled into a bun, tight enough to give anyone a headache and moussed hard and flat to her scalp. Her leotard was black velvet with a splash of sequins from the waist up, like a glamorous coat of armor cut low in the back to emphasize her muscular shoulders.
At fourteen, Amanda was short for her age, but all legs and arm strength. Her body fat measured so low that she had gotten her period only once, a thin flow of blood before it stopped and showed no sign of making another appearance. Her longtime coach, an ex-college gymnast named Dave, was secretly pleased that his star performer had cheated puberty. It kept her hips narrow, her chest as flat as a nine-year-old’s. No cramps, no bloating, not the usual moaning of teenagers feeling too sick to work out. Amanda remained an arrow of a girl built for slicing through the air.
All around the gym that afternoon, a four-ring circus of flips, spins and jumps was taking place. On the balance beam, one competitor threw a double back flip and stumbled the landing, a big deduction of points. Another girl vaulted off the pommel horse, landing with a crisp arch of her back. In a floor routine, a girl in a bright red leotard performed three lightning-speed front handsprings in a row.
As always when awaiting her turn to compete, Amanda didn’t fidget. Her arms hung at her sides, like the palms were stitched to the thighs. By the lack of emotion on her face, she could have been waiting, bored, in a grocery store line. Other competitors couldn’t help but let on how nervous they were, their hands clammy and their faces turning either too red or too white from the strain of reining in their emotions. There was one girl on Amanda’s team who threw up before many competitions. Especially at an important one like this, the official state meet, the chance to compete in the Nationals riding on the outcome.
At this late point in the day, most of the observers – mothers and fathers, aunts, uncles and grandparents – had sore bottoms and shifted uncomfortably in the hard bleacher seats. The little brothers and sisters of the gymnasts, bored to tears by now, swatted each other with scorecards. Everyone was breathing in the sharp, greasy smell of the nachos sold by the Booster Club.
Amanda’s mother, Claire – brown-haired and green-eyed, her daughter definitely shared her coloring – sat four rows up on the stands, nervously biting her lower lip. Even though she was a gym-meet veteran of many years, her body still couldn’t bear the lull leading up to when Amanda’s hands first touched the bars. With a heavy sigh, Claire checked her watch. Seated next to her, another gym mom flashed a smile of empathy.
Almost directly behind Claire sat her ex-husband Robert, Amanda’s father. Usually these two made a point of sitting on opposite ends of the gym, so it was an uncomfortable coincidence that they found themselves so close together. Amanda knew, of course, that both her parents were there in the bleachers, but she didn’t wave, make eye contact or acknowledge them in any way. She didn’t want that kind of distraction. Just the thought of her parents being in the same room was enough to give her a stomachache. She hated the low-level tension when they were forced to be together, how they nodded at each other with pursed lips. It had been especially awful before her dad broke up with his girlfriend.
She dashed this image from her mind and brought herself back to the competition, wondering, Why are the judges taking so long? How long could it take to add up the previous score?
Some girls from another team (blue leotards with red and white stripes down the sides) finished their turns on the balance beam and drifted closer to the bars. They stood off to the side, waiting to get a better look at Amanda, the gymnast who was known for never flubbing a routine on the uneven bars, who never gave anyone else a chance to go home with a first-place medal. The girls stood shoulder to shoulder, sipping from water bottles and gossiping about Amanda’s leotard (“too showy”), her personality (“too Little Miss Perfect”). One of the girls whispered what the others were all thinking: “Can’t she miss, like, just once?”
And then, finally.
The head judge put down her pen and raised her right arm, the signal to begin. Amanda straightened her already squared shoulders and returned the salute. She flashed the kind of smile where all her teeth showed. Then her mouth collapsed into a tight, determined line. She breathed in slowly and deeply, letting the air turn her belly as hard and round as an inverted wooden bowl. With the full muscle of both legs, Amanda ran, and then hit the springboard that carried her straight up, her hands gripping the highest of the two metal bars.
That was the point where her mind shut off and allowed her body – the muscles, tendons, bones, lungs, heart – to remember what they were trained to do.
Amanda swung forward. For a brief, breathtaking moment, she let go of the bar and hung suspended in midair before dropping and twisting just in time to grasp the lower bar. In the next swift, effortless move, she jumped back to the high bar, her body already pumping forward. The next skill required enormous strength and split-second timing. Up she went into a handstand, as if an invisible thread had pulled her into position and held her there, defying gravity.
Coach Dave clenched his fist, pumped it in the air. “Yesssss,” he said with five sharp S’s.
The girls in blue leotards with red and white stripes rolled their eyes at each other.
Next came the giants, the straight-arm swings around the bar. Amanda loved this move best of all. Hurling her body up and over, around and around, she was always on the verge of out of control, pushing up to the danger line, right up to it. It had to be that way. That was where the top scores waited, right at the upper limit of speed and power, right up to the very treacherous edge, where other girls got scared and backed off.
There, up to that point, right there, nothing less.
And then.
Afterward, after it was all over, one of Amanda’s teammates swore that this was when she heard a gasp. “Like someone seeing a ghost,” she said.
But the head judge, who was well trained to pick up on anything out of the ordinary – a toe not pointed, a back with a few degrees too much arch – testified she had noticed only the very slightest overrotation. “It was a beautiful routine. Until she … the girl … Amanda … until she just lost it.”
Afterward came all the theories, theory after theory that led nowhere definitive. Her mind must have wandered. Amanda’s mind never wandered! Maybe she had gotten scared. Scared? Amanda, scared? Or maybe fate was involved, one of those cruel twists. Maybe something inside her body had been programmed from birth to give out on this particular Sunday at this particular minute.
Things like that happen. In this world, such strange, strange things do happen.
Her body hurled forward, then dropped. No one could agree on what hit where first, only that there was a clink of bone hitting metal, then a sickening thud when Amanda landed facedown on the floor. The head judge jumped from her chair, hand pressed over her mouth. People in the stands stopped chewing their nachos.
As one unit, the girls in red, white and blue looked down at their feet. They didn’t say anything. Saying it aloud would give their collective thoughts too much weight, too much reality. Was it possible? Could they have caused it? When they had wished she would miss just once? Had their jealousy tapped into an evil that powerful, a force that destructive? One of the girls, struggling with a mix of guilt and horror, prayed to the air, “Get up. Get up.”
But Amanda lay there, looking like she was asleep except for the odd, unnatural angle of her neck. Light from the overhead fluorescents played on the sequins of her uniform. A man, the father of another competitor, rushed from his seat, s
houting, “I’m a doctor. Don’t move her!”
In the stands, five rows back, a man grasped the shoulder of the brown-haired, green-eyed woman in front of him. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. Claire’s right arm reached across her chest and covered her ex-husband’s shaking hand with her own.
TWO
WHEN DR DAVID SILVERMAN entered room 132, he noticed that the Schecters were in much the same positions as they had been for the past two days. Robert, the father, stood with his hands resting on the ledge of the windowsill, only vaguely aware of time, unconsciously marking its passage by cars coming and going in the hospital parking lot.
Next to him, slumped in a chair, the girl’s older brother, his dark hair disheveled, his legs stretched out before him, was plugged into an iPod and bent over a video game. Tuned in and tuned out. There were circles under his eyes so dark it looked like some kindergartner had painted them there. Dr Silverman tried to recall the boy’s name. Travis? Taylor? It was one of those T names that was so prevalent among this crop of teenage boys. Tyler. That was it.
Then there was the mother, seated next to her daughter and hovering like mothers do. Any closer and Claire’s chair would have been on the bed. Amanda lay elevated on a pillow, a gray hospital blanket tucked around her, her head in a white turban towel as if she had just stepped out of the shower.
Even with IV lines snaking into her arms, Amanda looked perfect. Achingly perfect, her mother thought. Only the slight bruise on her cheek from when she fell. Other than that, not a scratch anywhere. Her lips pink and full. Her eyes half open, the whites clear. Her skin soft and rosy, not even one of those rare zits that would send her huffing into the bathroom.
The nurses had arranged Amanda’s arms over the outside of the blanket, so that Claire could stroke the light, downy hair. Despite the antiseptic surroundings, Amanda even smelled exactly like herself. One sniff of her daughter’s neck or hair would always give Claire a sense of well-being, a feeling that all was basically right in the world.
Perfect, she said to herself, and then more adjectives floated into her mind: tough, funny, beautiful, too hard on herself, proud, loving, smart, determined.
Alive.
Claire started at the sound of new footsteps in the room. When she looked up at Dr Silverman, she smiled meekly and expectantly. Since the girl’s accident and the emergency surgery, Dr Silverman had come into this room many times to check her vital signs and to leave the family with the same message of hope mixed with caution. A large subdural hematoma, a blood clot. A lot of swelling. “Like a twisted ankle in the confined space of her skull,” he had explained. “It’s a time game. We have to wait and see.”
But when the doctor entered the room this time, the father sensed something new and grave in the way he didn’t meet anyone’s eyes. He felt the avoidance like electricity traveling up his spine. “You know something. Something new,” Robert said. It was not a question.
In response, Dr Silverman dropped his head, chin to chest, only half a nod. “The most recent tests.” He paused. “We’ve been measuring the blood flow to her brain.” Another pause. “There is none.”
“None,” Robert repeated flatly.
The doctor offered synonyms, as if that would make his message more clear. “Zero. Negative. None.”
Claire’s eyes frantically tracked the doctor’s face for something that would tell her that she was misunderstanding. How could these few syllables of negation – zero, negative, none – apply to her daughter? As Dr Silverman forced himself to meet her look, he felt his professional detachment slipping. He wanted to tell this family … what? What could he say? Four years of medical school, two residencies at top teaching hospitals and hundreds of surgeries performed had prepared him for probing around the brain, the most delicate part of a human being. But they didn’t give him words for this horrible moment. Dr Silverman’s recourse was to retreat emotionally, to gather the threads of his own fears, sadness and anger, and tuck them away. He became all doctor again.
“Terrible business,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’ve declared her brain-dead.”
“No.” Claire said the word simply, as if correcting one of the students in her sixth-grade class who had just given the wrong answer to a math problem.
“I’m sorry,” the doctor repeated. “Truly.”
One by one, the mother’s features began shifting. Eyes narrowed, nostrils flared, lips sucked in on themselves. For the first time since the accident, she screamed.
All this time, Tyler had been sitting off by himself. He didn’t know what he was feeling. He clicked off the iPod and removed the earphones. He watched as his mother’s sister, his aunt Jen, rushed into the room from the waiting area, followed by a nurse carrying a clipboard. Soon all three women were hugging and crying. The doctor placed his hand on Robert’s shoulder. Tyler heard his father groan a deep, animal sound.
Now the hospital social worker entered the room, looked around and immediately made a beeline for Tyler. The last thing he wanted right then was a stranger with a box of Kleenex. Desperate to avoid her, he scanned the room for an empty corner, found it and ducked away.
Strange to find himself here in this corner. Until a few minutes ago, this was the spot where his mother had maintained her vigil over Amanda. Now Tyler’s eyes swept along the length of gray blanket that covered his sister’s toes, feet, legs and torso. At the first glimpse of skin, real skin, Amanda’s neck, his eyes snapped closed as if against a dust storm. With tight fists, he rubbed the lids and for a minute lost himself in the tricks of his optic nerve: the fantastic explosions of brightness, the wiggling little shapes like transparent worms under an overturned rock.
Tyler was sixteen years old, certainly no baby, and he knew, of course, about the inevitability of death, how everything eventually dies. Batteries and rosebushes and pet dogs and goldfish. Newly hatched birds fall out of nests. When he was a little kid, he had poked at that kind of death with a stick. Human beings, too. They die every day, every hour. Grandmothers and retired neighbors, that kid in the senior class last year hit by a drunk driver. People die on battlefields in foreign countries. They get blown up in airplanes and die just like old stars do, pieces of them thrown across the sky.
Yes, people die.
He steeled himself, blinked and looked.
A face. A mouth. A nose. His sister’s face. Death. Here it was.
He forced himself to hold his gaze steady and take in the details. The curve of her eyebrow, the light down on her upper lip. What was that on the outside corner of her right eye? A mole no bigger than a full stop on a page, nothing Tyler would have noticed before.
Only suddenly he realized that he had noticed it, not in any deliberate way but in the way he had unconsciously absorbed everything about his sister. Everything. Every day. The way she walked with her feet slightly turned out, how her nostrils flared when she was trying not to laugh. This mole, this tiny dot, was part of the landscape of her face. It wouldn’t have been his sister without it.
He heard someone in the room say her name. Amanda. Then from someone else, his own name, Tyler.
He hesitated, then reached out and ran his index finger across her skin. It was still warm. The mole was too flat and small to even feel, but the knowledge that it was there, that he could still touch it, made goose bumps rise on his arms.
The air closed in; the room tilted.
People die.
Even someone whose voice you can hear when she’s not there, can die.
Whose towel you can tell by the smell of her sweat.
Whose socks you have stolen out of her drawer.
Whose sandwiches you have shared.
People die.
Sisters die.
His sister was dead.
He took a stumbling step backward, as if a wave had knocked him loose from the only patch of firm ground beneath his feet. Tyler felt as if he were being pulled out to a vast, cold and dark ocean from which he might never return. He tried to hold o
n. He tried to resist but couldn’t.
THREE
WITH HER HANDS FOLDED before her, Helen Curry entered room 132 and immediately felt the oppressive air. Several hours had passed since the family had received the horrible news, and the parents had been left alone with their daughter. Thank God the older brother had been whisked out of the room by an aunt.
Helen’s arrival went unnoticed, or at least unacknowledged. She watched as the father tilted his head in his ex-wife’s direction and they pressed together like dolls with magnets in their foreheads. She couldn’t help but wonder what Amanda would have made of this reunion, of her own part in it. A child of divorce, Amanda surely had the fantasy that one day some miracle would erase the distance between her parents and bring them together.
But not this distortion of a miracle.
All Helen’s instincts and training told her that she shouldn’t even be in the room. Privacy was the very least of what these people deserved. But she knew that if she left and didn’t say what she needed to say, didn’t ask the question that needed to be asked, it would quickly become too late.
“May I?” she said – and, as one, the parents turned in her direction. She didn’t wait for an answer but pulled two chairs closer to the hospital bed, taking a seat in one and gesturing for Robert to take the other. His legs stretched out before him, the left ankle locking gently around Claire’s right foot, as if ankle-on-ankle was the only thing holding them to earth.
“This must be so unreal for you,” Helen began. “So much information at once. Is there anything I can do to clarify things?”
Robert shook his head.
Claire’s face had a dazed look, the confusion of a visitor from another planet. “And you are?”
“I’m the coordinator. From the transplant network.” As Helen responded, Claire stared at her moving mouth as if she herself were deaf, her ears accessories, useless things for earrings to dangle from.
Helen could tell that the word transplant had not quite registered, so she repeated the explanation. “I’m Helen, from the transplant network. I need to ask you something. Something hard. There’s no easy way to do this. So I’m just going to come out and ask. Have you thought about organ donation?”
