Sunday's on the Phone to Monday (15 page)

-
Wanted, -
Carly thought.

The debate ended on a settlement before the school bell trembled:
when the Heart begins to beat.

L
ucy had water in her right lung, was drowning in an imperceptible and plaintive sort of way. Doctors at Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center, Children's Ward, told Claudio and Mathilde that their daughter had about nine months to live if she didn't get a transplant donor in time. The real trouble idled in her Heart.

In May, just six months before turning seventeen, Lucy felt her breath reducing even during untaxing activities like opening envelopes or washing her hair. Her feet and ankles amplified to bulgy proportions. She coughed all the time, and her belly engorged. She noticed her whirlybird pulse all the time, hovering.

Mathilde had taken her to the family pediatrician. Lucy loved going to the doctor. She never told anyone this. It was a purposeless and curious infatuation, she understood on a level one degree removed. Growing up, she'd often daydream about her most recent checkup and her doctor's voice, making her feel safe. She felt a similar feeling talking to technical support operators on the phone. She loved how present they were, how sincere they could sound. The
is there anything else I can take care of for you, Miss Simone?
and the
you have a good weekend. You take care now.
It could all mean something.

What mattered was the way the doctor made Lucy feel
comfortable. Lucy always had to wait at least an hour in the waiting room before seeing him, because he gave patients his time. She adored how he said the word
we
even though he referred to only her body. She liked how he opened her folder, which had every detail of her medical history, and looked over it without showing her. He made her feel passive, as though her health was entirely in the hands of professionals, not anything she'd ever have to be responsible for.

Her doctor gave his minimal yet intimate salutations:
Hi, Lucy. How are we doing today?

I think I have the flu.

After a series of EKGs and EEGs, Lucy learned that she had dilated cardiomyopathy. The doctor described her condition terribly:
I'm so sorry to say, but it can be a very serious condition where your Heart becomes weakened and enlarged. Eventually it won't be able to pump blood like it's supposed to.

How could this have happened?

Didn't your grandfather have a Heart attack?

Yeah. I never knew him.
Was he asking her to blame a putrid gene?

I also have a Heart condition,
Lucy's mother intercepted.
I was diagnosed with preventricular arrhythmia when I was in my midtwenties.
This was a fairly common ailment, particularly in women, with no fix nor real danger. The average human Heart beats about 100,000 times per day, and Mathilde's Heart beat about 110,000 times, and her doctors growing up had told her not to worry about it. Mathilde had chalked it up (at the time of her diagnosis) to being in love. A harmless, hummingbird kind of disease.

It was the era before Lucy's pediatrician cast Lucy away to some specialist in the Heart of Long Island. Lucy knew her problem required a cardiologist, but a part of her felt deceived. Her cardiologist was in her fifties, with hair so red that it seemed eggplant-colored when the light grabbed it. Lucy didn't want to trust a doctor with purple hair, but she had to.

Less than a month after the diagnosis, Lucy developed a
drowsy lung.
Only she ever called it that, christening it affectionately, like a pet or a joke. The cardiologist had listened to Lucy's breathing, then put the buds in Lucy's ears.
Hear those crackles in your lungs?
In fact, the sound of Lucy's breathing eclipsed her weak pulse.

So this means . . .

Your decreased Heart function has begun to affect other parts of your body.
She delivered the news in a purely expedient arpeggio—high, then low.

This was Lucy's left lung. She felt pity: a small, paper cut, hair-in-soup pain. She'd never before bothered to distinguish her lungs from each other. Lucy silently named her lungs while she listened to her doctor tell her what was wrong with her body. Blackbird was the right lung. Hermione was the left lung, the drowsy lung. And then, she named her Heart: Face.

That week she dreamed about Face more than about real faces. Face in her dreams resembled a Georgia O'Keeffe painting. Something swollen and slow. Yellow, with a melting-mashed texture, filled with quiet. Lucy reached out to touch her Heart. Tender, fleshy. A hive.

She and her sisters loved to share dreams. Carly had a chronic dream of being pregnant and going into labor, but never felt any pain.
How strange,
she'd say,
I don't feel pregnant.
The doctor would always ask her how she knew she was in labor, and she'd say because it said so on the calendar.

Lucy swore before this that she never had a recurring dream that she remembered, all of them seeming to flurry in from and out of left field. Her dreams were visionary on one day, apocalyptic on another, obvious on the third. Lucy dreamed about her nose getting bitten off, volcanoes, Jean Valjean. She dreamed about turning into Super Mario and turning into a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and her sisters turning into middle-aged intellectual men with clean hands and big noses. She dreamed about loafers and owls and rotary phones.

Dreaming that week, Lucy had the body of a whale, and beached herself at dusk. Whales who beach themselves die slowly. They don't know any other way to die. Air settled down on her as the weight of her lay. Crowds came by. They called an ambulance, but what did they expect, for the ambulance to lift the many tons of her and take her to a hospital with nothing to offer whales? The ambulance slipped in anyhow, for ornamental rationale, and parked.

The cordon of humans designed an enormous garbage bag for her. A mournful welling brewed in Lucy, harmonizing with the whine of the ambulance. This was the way it happened.

She felt Face twinge as she woke up. Releasing a symphony sigh, Lucy rolled over and called out to her mother.

How's it feel?
asked Mathilde.

Like it's dragging. Like an ellipsis.

You're a poet, you know that? Who else compares a Heartbeat to a piece of punctuation?

Of course I know it. I'm a poet!
Lucy smiled, hijacking her mother's tone.

Mathilde's cell phone rang. She retrieved it from her pocket.

Hello?

Who is this?
asked a jumpy voice. Jane. Mathilde mouthed
somebody from work
to her daughter, then walked upstairs and shut her bedroom door to talk to her secret sister-in-law.

Mathilde put on one of her voices. She was the type of person who designated certain voices for certain people. This didn't make her bad, she rationalized, but wily.
So wonderful to hear from you. How are things?

Things are unkind. Unkind, and dangerous.

I'm so sorry to hear that. Would talking to Claudio make you feel better?

Nothing can make me better. I have a fever and I yawn a lot and I cry and I have infections and a blubbery belly and I'm pale and I throw up and the book I'm writing is too quiet.

Mathilde looked at the phone in her hand, feeling wistfully feeble, the way a father would after walking his daughter down the aisle.

You're writing a book?

Yes, and I'd love for you to star, when it turns into a movie. Use those acting chops. Claud brags about you.

He says nice things about you too, Jane.
He didn't, because worrying about a person wasn't the same as saying nice things about a person.

That night, Mathilde told Claudio that his sister thought she was writing a book. Claudio rubbed his eyes and asked his wife to repeat what she'd said. He looked puzzled, like he'd forgotten he had a sister.

She says she's writing again? I'll try to look for something next Tuesday.
Tuesdays were the days Claudio visited Jane.
But I sincerely doubt it.

She always talked about writing when I first met her. Remember that poem? Something about the body, I remember. More spooky than sexy, though.

She used to write all the time. Little things. Poems, thoughts. Not cute stuff,
admitted Claudio.
Dark stuff. But that's Jane. That's just Jane.

T
he next morning, Mathilde traveled to work. Her co-commuters typed on their cell phones and listened to their music through earbuds. Technology was linear, with little room for nostalgia or circularity. Nobody grieved beepers or VHS players. Life went on for everybody, including her.

Mathilde worked at Thirty-fifth and Eighth, which was unspectacular, not her New York. The New York, New York, Mathilde was wild about was the timeless kind where the Woolworth Building and the Chrysler Building poked out through the sky like elbows. Where men with coats soft as sheep walked across Grand Central Station, holding open the door. Where they still had a Gimbels. Mathilde's Manhattan had no crime, only rent-controlled apartments and a soft smell of pistachio. Her lifelong Manhattan love affair (even though she'd grown up there, even with her family's money) was a fantasy thin as tissue paper.

As she walked to Penn Station she noticed a full moon suspended above the Peep World and Sbarro buildings. A woman on the sidewalk sliced mangoes and sold them in sealed Ziploc bags. The moon and the stone fruit shone the same yellow. She thought,
the moon is my night-light,
pining irresistibly for it to shroud her, imbue her with safety. This moon, with the same
face she recognized from her childhood, peered primly over a dynamic world. Mathilde remembered reading
Goodnight Moon
to baby Lucy, who'd smelled like Johnson & Johnson shampoo and milk of magnesia. With her hair swirly like pinwheels in the wind and a snoozy, sublime dream-flush on her neck. The comeliest, most tuneful, baby.

She took the Long Island Rail Road home. Familiar cadences in the recorded voice sounded.
This is the off-peak train to Babylon. This train will be making stops at Jamaica, Rockville Centre, Baldwin, Freeport, Merrick, Bellmore, Wantagh, Seaford, Massapequa, Massapequa Park, Amityville, Copiague, Lindenhurst, and Babylon.
Mathilde mouthed the stops; hers was the last. She loved trains, especially at night. Riding them felt smooth and sleepy.

From eight-thirty in the morning to seven at night, Mathilde collected headshots and arranged castings for thespians who quoted Stanislavski and Bertolt Brecht more than they spoke their original thoughts. Spending most of her day interacting with strangers, who called themselves actors, was why she usually didn't get lonely on business days.

She didn't recollect much on her youth and thought she'd wasted too much time as a girl dwelling in sadness. What had been the point? After actualizing a family, she learned how much better life could be when it was simpler. Crying gratified but also taxed amounts of her energy and time. Her sorrow detached her from everyone she knew, and she never wanted her daughters to cry. She quit completely and abruptly. There'd be no more submission to this puerile habit. She couldn't keep pandering to herself, needed to stop encouraging what had been her own essence. It was for her own good.

- I have a husband and three daughters. I have a lovely brother. We can sleep when we're tired, and eat when we're hungry. We can be warm or cold whenever we'd like to be. There's no reason to ever
be sad. -
Mathilde would never have believed her own wiring could change until the day she decided to change it. And the Mathilde who was a mother wasn't needy, didn't hunt for tragedy. It seemed as though tragedy would detect her, during the portion of her life she'd decided to be hopeful.

T
he name
Lucille Margaret Simone
was placed on the National Heart Transplant List. Lucy would move up on the list if somebody before her received a Heart from a dead donor or died of Heart failure. Somebody was always dying no matter what. This was good news.

There were ifs involved.
If
somebody in the United States was to die young, perhaps from an accident, and
if
(s)he'd been declared brain-dead with his/her body still on life support, and
if
his/her Heart remained intact, and
if
(s)he had agreed to volunteer his/her organs to be donated, and
if
the Heart was a swell match of similar tissue, then the Heart would be shipped to Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center, Children's Ward.

The cardiologist gave Lucy a beeper, which would beep when a match was found. It could go off at any time, like a bomb or deranged person. Lucy would need to go to the hospital and wait while the doctors prepared her body to receive the new Heart from the person who died. Lucy would be put into a deep sleep with anesthesia, and the surgeon would cut through her breastbone. Lucy's blood would be circulated through a Heart-lung bypass machine to keep her blood full of oxygen during the surgery.

Lucy's old Heart would be removed. Her new Heart would be stitched into place. The Heart-lung machine would be
disconnected. Blood would flow through her new Heart. Tubes would be inserted to drain air, fluid, and blood out of her chest for many days. This would allow both of her lungs to fully re-expand. For the rest of her life, Lucy would need to take anti-rejection medications in order to ensure that her body would not disallow this new piece of her.

Your body is smart,
the cardiologist told Lucy.
The immune system detects something new and wants to get rid of it.