Heart to Heart

by Lurlene McDaniel

  When I was thirteen, the call had come from Emory Hospital saying that the national donor service had a heart for me. The heart was being flown to Atlanta from another city in Georgia, and the transplant team was ready and waiting. We got to the hospital fast. I was prepped for the operating room, excited, ready for a new heart, a real life. I could run again! Jump. Go to a regular school. Then the big letdown when the heart had been declared unsuitable and I’d had to go home with my same old-same old.

  “You’re at the top of the list,” my doctor had said, trying to console me.

  I knew the transplant was based first on need, on blood and cell compatibility, and on body size—they couldn’t put a giant’s heart into a small kid. Being at the top of the list didn’t matter if the other things didn’t match. “What a way to be number one,” I said. “No effort on my part. Just luck.”

  Now, a year later, here I was again, all hopeful, longing for the transplant to happen, for it to be over with, for me to finally be well.

  Mom blew through a red light. “What if a cop stops our Batmobile?” I asked.

  “Then he can give us an escort,” she answered.

  At the hospital nurses were waiting for me with a wheelchair. They got me upstairs, put me on a gurney, and began to prep me. A hospital gown, a paper cap on my head, IVs in my arms, electrodes on my chest. Dr. Chastain appeared in the room. “How are we doing, Arabeth?”

  He’s a cardiologist and head of the transplant team. In the OR, there would be an army of people to assist him. “Is it a good heart?” I asked.

  “It is.”

  “Not like last time?”

  “This heart came from a teenage girl, like you. She died from a head trauma.”

  Not like me, I thought. She’d been normal. “What else?”

  He shrugged. Secrets are kept in the donor program. They won’t tell you much about a donor, claiming privileged information.

  “You remember what I’ve told you about the operation?” he said, changing the subject.

  “Yes.” How could I forget the gory details? I would be cut open like a fish, from my collarbone to my midsection. The transplant team would attach me to a heart-lung machine, cool my blood to protect my body and my brain, remove my old failing heart, and put in the new one. I would be clinically dead until the new heart was sewn in and restarted.

  “A six-hour cakewalk,” Dr. Chastain joked. “Got to get all those little vessels reattached. I’m pretty good with a needle and thread, if I do say so myself.”

  “Maybe you can make a prom dress for me someday,” I joked. I was getting sleepy from the drugs in my IV.

  Mom took my hand. “Stay strong.”

  “Who do you suppose she was?” I asked. “The girl. I wish I could meet her family … tell them thank you.”

  “We’re all grateful,” Mom said. She leaned over and kissed and hugged me, blinking back tears. “I’ll be waiting, baby. Me and Aunt Vivian and Uncle Theo. We love you. I love you.”

  “I love you too, Mom.”

  They wheeled me down the hall. I watched the overhead lights roll past. I’d been wrapped in warm blankets, but my hands were numb and my lips cold. This was it. No dress rehearsal. I thought again about the girl who’d died and her parents donating her heart to me, a stranger. Who was she?

  Machines and people filled the OR. My brain felt fuzzy. Dr. Chastain bent over me. “Ready to sleep, Arabeth?”

  I couldn’t form words, so I nodded.

  The anesthesiologist slipped a mask over my nose and mouth. The room blurred. My last thought was for my daddy. If only he could be with Mom while she waited.

  • • •

  An elephant was standing on my chest.

  “Wake up, Arabeth,” a voice kept saying. “It’s all over. You have a new heart.”

  I struggled to obey the voice and open my eyes. The pain was horrible, the weight on my chest almost unbearable. I forced my eyes open, saw a nurse, and next to her, Mom.

  “Hi, baby.” Mom stroked my cheek. “You made it through just fine.”

  I had a tube down my throat. I couldn’t speak.

  “Look,” she said. She carefully lifted my hand toward my line of vision. My nail beds were bright pink, not blue as they had been for years. Tears welled up. The new heart was pumping my blood to my fingertips, to every cell of my body. I was alive.

  I’d been told that making it through the first twenty-four hours was a good sign for a good recovery. I flew through the first twenty-four hours and the next and the next. I felt so good, I sat on the side of my bed on day two, took a short walk with a nurse’s help later the same day. I could breathe freely. I had energy. I asked, “Is this what it feels like to be healthy?”

  Mom laughed. “Oh, honey, you look wonderful!”

  “Your skin’s pink as a baby’s butt,” Aunt Viv said.

  I’d been put into a clean room, and anyone coming in to see me had to wear a mask and a sterile gown. Germs were my mortal enemy, at least until my drug regime stabilized my immune system. Of course there was always a chance of rejection, a possibility that my body would rebel and refuse to accept the new organ, so along with antibiotics, I was pumped full of antirejection drugs. “You’ll have to take them all your life,” Dr. Chastain told me.

  “And puff up like a toad,” I said. The drugs would show up in my face, filling it out until I looked like a moon pie.

  “The effects will wear off,” he said. “And they’ll keep you from rejecting.”

  I would do anything to protect my new heart, even look grotesque.

  Aunt Viv said she and Mom were going to give my bedroom at home a makeover. “What do you want?” she asked. “Any special colors? Style?”

  My head filled with images of the colors yellow and deep blue and fields of pretty purple lavender plants waving in the breeze. “Yellow and blue and lavender,” I said before I knew it. “You know, like in France.”

  “France?” Mom puckered her brow. “Where did that come from? It’ll be different from the rest of the house. Are you sure?”

  Mom owned a bed-and-breakfast in historic Roswell, a suburb of Atlanta, where we lived. Our house was decorated in a rustic style with antiques and painted furniture, pine hardwood floors, and slouchy flowered sofas and chairs. We had four guest rooms upstairs, a large dining room for our guests, and a kitchen where Mom created Southern-style meals—not just breakfast, but lunch and dinner too. Our patio was surrounded by gardens. Mom and I lived in a newly constructed section at the back of the house consisting of two bedrooms upstairs and a small private family room on the main floor. She’d carried the country look through the whole house.

  I thought about it. “I’m sure. I mean, as long you asked me to pick a style.”

  Mom and Aunt Viv looked at each other. Mom said, “Well, if that’s what my girl wants, she shall have it. France it is.”

  Even I was puzzled by my choice. If any part of the world interested me, it was England—a place I’d read so much about in the works of Jane Austen. And yet, the impression of France was so strong in my mind, I couldn’t have said anything else. Crazy.

  I went home on a sunny April day wearing a mask for my own protection and with strict orders to remain out of public places for six weeks. “No shopping,” Dr. Chastain told me. I had a long list of instructions and a plastic container filled with prescription pills. At the house Mom wrote appointments for follow-up visits in red on a giant wall calendar.

  I felt good, and didn’t want to be housebound. But I didn’t want to get sick either.

  When I opened the door to my bedroom, I could hardly believe my eyes. My bedroom had been transformed.

  “Do you like it?” Mom asked.

  “It’s French country. We copied the colors and style from a decorating book,” Aunt Viv explained.

  “It’s beautiful!” I said. The walls were yellow, the furniture pale blue and white. A pattern of sunflowers covered the bedspread and pillow shams. There were blue accent pil
lows with yellow trim, a framed poster of a water garden over the bed, and a bright red lamp on a new bedside table. The scent of lavender filled the air.

  “So did we nail it?” Aunt Viv asked.

  The skin on my arms and the back of my neck prickled. Something about the room felt familiar, but how could it? I knew nothing about France. I’d never so much as written a research report on the country. I’d never seen French country decor in my life, yet I felt at home in the bedroom. “It’s perfect,” I said. “Totally perfect.”

  · 9 ·

  Arabeth

  I’ve divided my life into two parts: the awful years and the truly awful years. I was an army brat, so we moved a lot. Mom was always packing and unpacking—new faces, new schools, new house. When I was six my heart started going down the tubes. It was a genetic thing and nothing that I couldn’t live with at first. I played hard, stopped when I got winded. Simple. But that was the start of my awful years.

  By the time I was ten, my heart was working way too hard and I had to slow down, stay inside in the summer heat, take naps like a two-year-old. Dad was promoted to sergeant and stationed in Texas, where I was close to a great kids’ hospital and a doctor who watched over me. I heard my doctor use the word transplant a couple of times, and it made Mom cry and Dad look sad. That bothered me because I didn’t want them to be unhappy.

  Dad called me his princess and built me a playhouse in the backyard that was big enough for two to have tea parties and pretend to be real princesses. It was painted lime green with cheery pink trim, had a door that opened and closed, two windows and a table and three chairs inside. Every kid on the base living in army housing wanted to be my friend. Especially Monica. She came every day, and we shared everything in our heart of hearts with each other. In the playhouse we could be anyone we wanted. She wanted to be a movie star. I wanted to be a gymnast. The house was magic.

  The truly awful years began when I was almost twelve and Dad got shipped off to Afghanistan for a two-year tour of duty. Then it was just me and Mom waiting for his letters, e-mails, phone calls. He sent me gifts: a few dolls—“This is what the local girls play with,” he said—a beautiful kite, and for Christmas that year a camel saddle. I didn’t have a camel to ride, so Mom put a hobbyhorse in my room and I threw the saddle on it. Weird-looking, but I loved it because it was from my daddy.

  I started sixth grade with him still half a world away. My heart was getting weaker, but I dragged myself to school because being at home all day was just too lonely. Mom worked half days in the commissary and volunteered to help new army wives adjust to the army way of life. My social life wobbled. It was hard for me to keep up, hard to go places like the skating rink and the bowling alley. I was tired all the time and short of breath. I hung on to Monica, my only friend, but one day she came up to me in the hall and said, “I don’t want to be your friend anymore.”

  I couldn’t believe it. “Why?”

  “I have new friends,” she said.

  Behind her, I saw a group of the popular girls, the ones who controlled the social order at the school. They were pretty, and catty, and Monica and I used to poke fun at them behind their backs. Now she was telling me she was one of them. I almost burst into tears. “But you’re my best friend,” I said.

  “Things change,” she said with a peek over her shoulder to see the others watching her.

  Her initiation, I thought. This was what she had to do to join them—humiliate me and walk off into the sunset. It worked. I felt horrible. My heart squeezed and not from its internal flaws.

  Stupidly I said, “But my playhouse …”

  She smirked. “That’s baby stuff. You play in your dollhouse. I’m doing other things.”

  She walked back to the group and they swished off down the hall. I went to the principal’s office and asked to go home. I wasn’t feeling good, I told the assistant principal. She called my mother and when I got in the car, the floodgates opened. I told Mom everything. “That’s so mean,” Mom said. “Do you want me to call Monica’s mother?”

  Horrified, I said, “No! Never!” I was twelve. I had my pride.

  Pride was cold comfort when I sat alone in the cafeteria, or watched Monica and her new friends walk in a group down the halls. Worst of all, I never figured out why those girls blackballed me. Or why Monica went along with them.

  Just before school ended that year, Monica’s dad was transferred. For Monica, being transferred meant starting over on another base, in another state, in another school; it meant starting at the bottom of a new social order and making new friends. Maybe she’d pick nicer ones next time. I saw her crying alone on a bus bench on the last day of school, her little group of girlfriends nowhere around. I tried to feel sorry for her, but I couldn’t. She never called to tell me goodbye. I shut myself in my playhouse and cried.

  My heart was getting worse, and I settled in for the long hot Texas summer. I was already dreading starting seventh grade and going back to school, but I was also relieved because I wouldn’t have to see Monica, the traitor, every day.

  The day of the Great Awful came one late afternoon in July. I was sitting on our sofa writing a letter to Dad. He told both me and Mom that he liked letters best. Letters made him feel closer to us than e-mails, even though letters took longer to get to him. He also liked the care packages we sent—boxes of things he couldn’t get in Afghanistan, like peanut butter, sports magazines, good soap, and especially Mom’s chocolate chip cookies.

  I saw the jeep pull up through the window and I sat straighter. The base commander and his aide headed for our door. The brass on the commander’s hat glinted in the sunlight. My heart skipped beats. “Mom!” I yelled. She was in the kitchen starting dinner.

  She came out quickly, wiping her hands on a towel. “What’s wrong?”

  “Commander’s here.”

  We both froze. The doorbell rang.

  Bad news from the army is delivered in person. “Go away,” I whispered.

  They didn’t. They came in and told me and Mom that my daddy, Sergeant Gordon H. Thompson, had been killed by a roadside bomb on the streets of Kabul in Afghanistan.

  I remember crying more than I’ve ever cried before or since. I remember other army wives coming over and bringing food and holding Mom while she cried. I remember going to Dad’s funeral: soldiers in dress uniforms, the crack of rifles, a casket draped with an American flag, the perfect precision folding of the flag and the commander presenting it to Mom.

  On the walk back to the car that would take us home, I fainted. I woke in Mom’s arms. She held me on the grass, squeezing me and whispering, “Don’t you die on me, Arabeth. Don’t you dare!”

  We packed and left the army base, went to Atlanta to Aunt Vivian’s. We lived with her and Uncle Theo and my three cousins for a few months. Cindy, my seven-year-old cousin, was put out of her room so I could take it over until Mom figured out what we were going to do. “I don’t like you,” Cindy told me.

  “No problem,” I told her. “Nobody likes me.”

  With the money from the army, and her savings and Dad’s pension, Mom bought the bed-and-breakfast in Roswell. I went into the homebound program for school. When the first heart transplant fell through, I withdrew into a really dark place inside myself. I turned fourteen facing the facts of my life. I had no dad, no friends, a malfunctioning heart, no future, and no hope.

  And then one morning, the phone rang and I was offered a stranger’s heart.

  · 10 ·

  Kassey

  If funerals were supposed to bring closure, Elowyn’s funeral didn’t work for me. I cried nonstop for days, until Mom forced me to see a grief counselor. The woman told me nothing I didn’t already know—the car wreck had been a senseless accident, it was okay to grieve but I couldn’t let it control me, life went on … blah-blah-blah. She even suggested that I take an antidepressant “for a few months.” I didn’t want pills. I didn’t want a counselor. I wanted my friend back.

  I wasn’t e
xactly shining on the volleyball court either. I still liked the game, but my teammates got on my nerves. None of them could play like Elowyn, anticipating my moves like she could read my mind. Coach called me into her office just before the playoffs. “Lighten up, Kassey. Don’t be so aggressive. The girls are complaining.”

  “Well, they should work harder.” Whiners, I thought.

  “We made the playoffs. I’m proud of our team. It doesn’t help morale when the captain is always shouting and criticizing every mistake. We can win this whole thing if we work together.”

  “Aren’t you the one who used to tell us that mistakes don’t win games?”

  Coach blew air through her lips. “I know you’re hurting, but you can’t take it out on the others.”

  I had a zinger comeback but I bit my tongue because Coach won’t tolerate back talk. “Yes, all right. I’ll watch it.”

  We won the first game and the team wanted to go out for ice cream, but I didn’t feel like celebrating. I looked up in the gym stands for Mom, who comes to all my games. As the bleachers cleared and kids streamed past me calling out “Good game,” I caught sight of her in the top row, her back to the wall. Terri was sitting next to her. My heart stumbled. I hadn’t seen her since the funeral and didn’t expect to see her at this game.

  Mom waved, and I watched her and Terri thread their way down the rows toward me. “Nice game,” Mom said, giving me a hug.

  “Terrific,” Terri said.

  “Thanks.” I couldn’t meet Terri’s eyes.

  She reached out and took my hand. “I—I couldn’t stay away. I know how much Ellie loved volleyball and how hard she played the game.”

  “It’s not the same … without …” I didn’t finish because a lump had swelled my throat shut.

  “We miss her too,” Terri said. “More than I can say. Matt wanted to come tonight, but he couldn’t face it.”