The Heart Does Not Grow Back: A Novel (15 page)

He was just about to cut when he saw a bead of fat near the incision point. “This is not an issue unless it’s obstructing the incision angle or vision, and it wasn’t. Still, a jolt went through me that something might be wrong. But I went ahead anyway.”

That bead of fat could have saved both him and Angie—had he flicked it away, had he been completely thorough, he might have exposed the rest of the area. He might have seen that the duct that he was cutting to remove the bladder had a fork in it, that the real and safe incision point was above the fork and he was about to not only injure the main bile duct but clip it off completely.

He was telling me this story in Grayson, Illinois, because he did not see the fork. He cut off the main bile duct and with it, he extracted his wife, Minnesota, his reputation, and untold thousands of dollars from his life. In its place, he transplanted the guilt of knowing Angie would be worse after the surgery than she was going in.

Surgeons make this mistake in one out of every two hundred lap choles, one-half of one percent. But it is still a severe surgical mistake, one that lured him into the realm of lawyers and malpractice and seeing a sick and yellow girl tethered to a waiting list of over sixteen thousand people wanting new livers. And out of that list, who knows how many died waiting.

Angie’s image stood out for him among a host of Minnesota images—his wife packing, his now-empty office, the small-town talk making its rounds and coming back to him through the channels of his trusted friends. He was damaged. Marked. Broke. Malpractice insurance drying up, bank account draining, daughter getting ridiculed at school. There is no privacy act for bad doctors. There are no heroes on television explaining that doctors make mistakes, that they are not infallible. We expect our doctors to be perfect. No mistakes. No confusion. Crucify the bad ones, and by bad … one mistake is all it takes.

His story had left him, rising and vanishing into the night air like a coil of smoke, leaving quiet behind. The night was cooler but still humid. The last swig of my beer was warm, the can sweaty. He waited.

“She died waiting for a liver,” he said. “She was young, high on the list. But she was tough to match, and rejected her first transplant. Graft-host issues.”

His cards were on the table and the hand was pity. He explained a few connections he had, old friends who could transplant organs with the lights off, guys with research credentials. But at the end of the day, this would be Dr. Allen Venhaus’s discovery—the surgeon’s mistake made right again by work the world would never forget.

In short, I had him.

“I have a connection working the black market for my kidney,” I said. “I can call him and opt out. Tell him it’s game over. Get on your team. We work on helping people, then. But on my terms, and first, I need something.”

“I don’t have any money,” he said.

“Not money. Harold Stillson. He’s a patient of yours.”

Venhaus drew back and away from me, almost shrinking, the burden of medical privacy laws and ethical dilemmas swirling around us.

“I saw a lot of medication at his place. What’s wrong with him?”

“You know I can’t talk about this.”

“You made a mistake once,” I said. “Make another one and then we’ll wipe the slate clean.”

“Dear God, why?”

“Less to do with him and more to do with his wife. She’s an old friend.”

“This isn’t going to work,” he said. “Call your crooked funeral director. Winston. It’s not a big town, you know. I know that piece of slime is who you’re talking to. You’re two of a kind.”

I thanked him again for dinner and got silence in return. He stared off into the blackened woods, glued to his patio chair, and I went home. I wondered just how long Doc would sit there having a drink, thinking about that fork and where to cut, how many hours he had spent on that porch reliving that surgery.

Now he was thinking about my offer. All I had to do was wait. He’d convince himself it was his duty to do it, that it would be worth denting his honor one more time to deliver me to the world.

FOURTEEN

I got home after dark, my little piece of neighborhood morphing into a collection of porch lights and streetlights and shadows and the occasional bark of a dog.

As I approached my front steps, the back of my head took a blow that sounded like distant thunder, sending me face-first into the porch. Pain danced with dizziness, but before I could sort it all out, I was getting kicked with boots and struck with something—definitely not a toaster, but a club of some sort. Something hard and thick—enough to press skin and tissue into my bones, leaving tattoos of scorching hurt. The toes of boots found their way into my legs and sides, my ribs and neck.

Angled against the porch, one of those boots dropped like a piston, giving me an old-fashioned curb stomp, driving my mouth into the edge of the step, blowing out teeth and gums and lips. I felt jagged stalagmites of shattered tooth jutting from my jaw, the rest of the shards mixing with globs of blood and spit. “Clint?” I gurgled, knowing it wasn’t him, couldn’t be him, but his face is all that I saw in the dark.

Panting breath, club shots, kicks. The feel of bones giving way, of skin splitting, my head thrumming, my adrenal glands opening up like a boat throttle.

I tried to roll and flail, to no effect—it just revealed fresh places to get hit. I tried to curl up, fetal-like, but kicks and strikes cockroached their way into my softest areas. The goal might not have been to kill me, but it was a side effect my attacker wasn’t worried about.

The violence stopped all at once—that serene calm that is made more still by the chaos of the storm that came before it.

“Tell them you fell,” he said. I couldn’t see him smiling, but I could hear the way it shaped his words.

I started crawling into the yard. I didn’t have a destination, I was just moving to move, to feel like I was getting away. I had no idea if Harold was still lording over my fallen body, ready for more. The grass was wet with dew, slipping through my fingers. I got to the sidewalk by the closest streetlight, then I turned onto my side and reached for the cell phone in my pocket. The pain in my forearm crackled with each move of my fingers—a broken arm for sure.

Black fluid seeped from an oblong crack in the screen, the bubonic plague of a fractured display. Then a boot dropped, crushing the phone and most of my hand against the rough surface of the concrete, my fingers twisted and snapping like bubble wrap as he twisted his foot.

I figured the best thing to do at that point was just play dead. I went limp and closed my eyes. I scanned my body for pain, finding it everywhere, my brain throwing its hands up and saying, “Fuck picking a spot; you’re totaled.”

Observant, I heard fading footsteps. The clop of running boots. Would he tell Rae about this? Maybe I would die here, on this sidewalk, a noble death dealt out because I couldn’t stand her having a black eye.

So I closed my eyes and waited for something or nothing to descend upon me.

*   *   *

The fog of sleep lifted. Maybe I was emerging into an afterlife. The secrets of the universe would be mine.

Cold steel surrounded me—smooth tile, jars on the countertops, no clutter. Each heartbeat was a beacon that lit up spots of pain inside of me.

Maybe it was heaven. Maybe God was a doctor, and we would die and wake up in His care, and He would fix us up and then we would get our “Welcome to Heaven” party, complete with a smoked pig and barely dressed girls and Jesus making water into wine and beer and Hawaiian punch.

But this wasn’t heaven, it was just an all-purpose medical room, and a vaguely familiar one at that.

A big piss burned in my abdomen. I wanted to move, but I was swollen and sluggish, my blood feeling as thick as used motor oil.

“Hey,” I said, a whisper at first, my throat full of rust and croak. With subsequent tries I gained some throat traction. Louder, but not loud. I banged on the side rails of the cot. Another futile “Hey.”

I wanted to swing my legs over to get up, but then I noticed I had a piss tube stuffed into my johnson. This helped me scream a little louder.

Doc Venhaus came through the door and shushed me. He wore street clothes—jeans, sneakers, a polo shirt.

“Don’t rush yourself,” he said, standing bedside, his mere doctorly presence enough to drive my head back into the pillow. “You’ve got a broken leg, among other broken things. If breathing hurts, it’s from rib breakage—and you have been lucky enough to have your lungs intact after breaking your ribs. Again.”

“You definitely did your research on me.”

“Of course.” He did doctor things, checked things, wrote things down. He was monitoring me, but from the feel of my injuries, I belonged in a hospital. This wasn’t an altruistic act that Doc Venhaus was doing; he found me and decided to bring me to his office because he wanted me all to himself.

“Damn lucky I came along when I did,” he said. “Healing’s one thing, but I don’t know if you have nine lives yet.”

I had never thought about the possibility, but it would have been just my luck to be immortal and suicidal at the same time.

“So did they do the toes, or did you?” he said.

I pointed to my own chest.

“That’s why they’re ahead of the curve then.”

He pulled the blanket back and raised my foot to show me. They were whole, completely regenerated, except for the pinkish color and the fact that the nails hadn’t grown completely in yet, making them look queer, like a face without a nose or eyes.

“When did you find me? What day is it?”

“You’ve been out for about thirty-six hours.”

I felt around my mouth—tips of new teeth were already ascending. My split lip was sealed up into one piece of flesh instead of the two curtains I remember from the beating.

“I’d like to take you into X-ray again in the morning. Seems there’s no need to cast your leg at all—I have observed the bone mending perfectly on its own.”

He’d arrived at my house to continue our discussion. “I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I needed you to know I couldn’t betray the trust of a patient. Not even for you. I owed you that answer in person.”

Sadly, he was still a few minutes too late to save me from the latest entry in the Dale-Beating Hall of Fame.

“Did you call the cops?” I asked.

“No one knows you’re here.”

“You should have taken me to a hospital. Right?”

“If you were normal, yes. But hospitals have access to things like medical records. One look at a chart that says you should have half a hand and only one ear, and you’d soon have every doctor in America poking around inside of you for answers.”

“As opposed to just one. Am I on painkillers right now?”

“No. I didn’t want to interfere with your natural process.”

“Well, don’t be stingy. It may heal fast, but it hurts like fuck. How about your best painkiller cocktail? And when I wake up, I’d like some soup. Vegetable beef.”

Doc juiced me up until it felt like a pat of butter was melting on my brain. I dozed off, wanting to sleep through my healing until it was over, like it were some boring car ride that I wanted to end as soon as possible. Healing might come with positive connotations, all these images of light and warmth and hope, but in reality, healing hurts like a motherfucker.

*   *   *

Two days later, Doc let me go home. My broken leg was nothing but an annoying limp. My teeth were back, whole and slick and white as a glass of milk, untouched by years of food and abuse. My split lip was a true laceration, the flesh parted by blunt force, but the wound had already fused back together. Splints held my fingers straight as they mended clean, which didn’t take long.

The pain of broken bones vanishes until you try to move them, so my healing became a game of keeping the broken parts still. Bruises melted away from my skin, draining away the pools of tenderness that lurked underneath. Lumps on my head receded. The abrasions probably hurt the worst—they were deep rashes on the back of my hand, on my arms and legs, on my right cheek. The skin was scrubbed away by concrete and boot soles, removing the epidermis and exposing the nerve endings, where even a cool breeze across an undressed wound felt like the sizzle of a grease fire. Even the subtle pulse from my beating heart pounded the rashes like a drum. I felt my cheek get hard and crusted-over. When those scabs fell away, leaving patches of gloriously restored pink behind, I knew I could take off the bandages from my arms and legs. I think the pain was worse because I was so engaged in it, monitoring myself for the healing I knew would come, but it’s hard to describe because pain is like a bad dream—your recollection of it never matches the actual experience.

My cell phone got smashed in the brawl, so I called from my home phone to order a new one and asked the clerk how to check my voice mails from a landline.

Shockingly, I had three of them. The first was Frank Winston, who wanted to talk to me about “that thing,” like I were some drug-running gangster. He left a callback number. I saved the message.

The second was Mack. He sounded downtrodden. “It’s me,” he said. “I just figured since the shit has simmered down for a while now, we should talk it out. Hug it out. Punch it out. Whatever. Call me.” The message was a day old. I wondered if he thought I was blowing him off on purpose.

The third one was Rae. She just said, “I hope you’re okay” after a long breath, and hung up.

FIFTEEN

I went straight to Raeanna’s house in broad daylight. Fuck Harold, I thought. If he was worth a shit he’d be at work anyway. Still, I parked down the street and walked most of the way, the limp from my broken leg slowing me down. I was healed-up, but not all the way. I had patches of pink all over and all the bruised places were still a subtle shade of yellow. My broken bones had mended, but I still had a day or two before they stopped hurting. I was limping on a broken femur after just a couple days of recovery, though, so I couldn’t complain.

Rae wore sweatpants and an old fleece top, her hair flickering in the cool wind as she watered the mums lined up in front of her porch. She saw me limping down the sidewalk, and she choked off the water hose. I caught a look of relief in her eyes, maybe even happiness, but it vanished quickly, gone in thick, molten drops, showing me fear and panic with such stark clarity that a tingle of my own fear gave my lungs a hard squeeze. She went from fear to anger, the seasons of emotion changing in her face. She walked up to me, her lips clenched, and slapped me across the face, waking up the heat in the healed abrasions.