The Heart Does Not Grow Back: A Novel (21 page)

“Easy now, you’re driving,” I said.

The rest of the conversation was relaxed and full of laughter. The only time we returned to anything resembling heavy conversation was at the end of the night, on the sidewalk, as I tried to hail a taxi.

“Can I come see you?” she asked. “In the hospital?”

I wanted Hollie with me, of course, but I didn’t want her cast as Regina in my head. It was too much.

“I don’t want you to see me like that,” I said.
It didn’t work out so well for the last girl,
I almost said, but didn’t.

“You’re going to be ‘like that’ for quite a while, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “But it doesn’t mean I won’t call you or that I won’t be excited as hell to see you when the taping is done.”

A cab finally pulled up to the curb.

“So it may be a while,” I said. I started to say something else, but she interrupted me with a kiss—a real one, her lips alive on mine, her mouth aggressive and warm, tasting like wine and, somehow, honey. I felt the wedge of her slender hips pushing against her black cotton dress and I was too scared to pull her any closer. I just enjoyed the feel of a woman in my arms, kissing me.

When the kiss was over, I was too stunned and amazed to say anything. “Can’t have you forgetting about me while you’re working,” she said. I watched the sway of her body as she walked away. When she looked back, I thought of Regina leaving me at the hospital. I should have been overwhelmed by the joy and excitement of the kiss but instead, waves of dread lapped at me until the cabbie finally honked.

I got in the cab. I was the Samaritan. I could make people complete, save them, and be no worse for wear. Tissue returned. Bones mended. Organs rebuilt themselves. But for all my powers, a single kiss could crush and bewilder me. One look from Rae could move the rudder on my life’s entire course. A note in a locker, a phone number hand-scrawled on a piece of paper, a “Get Well Soon” balloon, blood on a truck’s dome light—my memories, like my flesh, could never be destroyed. If they never formed scar tissue, I would always be myself. I would never be the person who could benefit from the electricity of that kiss—the man Hollie deserved.

*   *   *

I meant to call her. I truly did. But after the surgery took my hands and feet, I woke up and Mack visited. He didn’t say much. I kept expecting Regina to walk into the room and check on me. I kept imagining that my missing right hand was due to gunshots and not the careful blade of a surgeon.

He sat there and read sports news on his new smartphone and kept asking if I felt any healing coming on yet. I didn’t. My eyes kept flicking toward the phone on my nightstand.

“Jesus, you call Rae yet, or what?” he said.

“I actually did,” I said. “She’s not at that number anymore.”

“Thank the fucking gods,” he said without looking up from his phone. “Look at this shit. Like, seven NFL coaches got fired. You’re still a Bears fan, right? Who you got for their next coach?”

I used to love watching football. I think ignoring it was part of the self-flagellation I’d made a habit of since my hand grew back.

“Ditka,” I said jokingly. “Mack, I think I’m into Hollie. Quite a bit.”

He still didn’t look up.

“I know. We sort of had this talk. My concern is that you’re both having a little pity party. She’s going to fuck you because you saved her life; you’re going to fuck her to forget about Rae. I give it two months.”

“Thanks,” I said.

He was wrong. It didn’t even really start. It didn’t last a moment after that conversation.

*   *   *

After the operation, once my hands grew back, I looked at Hollie’s number a few times but I couldn’t call. Phones and I got along just about as well as me and luck, or me and women. Regina’s spirit was so heavy as I cycled through those hospital rooms—from pre-op to post-op to recovery, I could almost hear Regina telling me to not inhale the helium in the balloon. And when I saw Regina’s face, I saw Rae’s. That was the worst part—that my adolescent love was controlling my adult desires. I needed Regina, even if the relationship made zero sense and was destructive and dysfunctional. My desire for her was suspended, and Rae woke it up. I couldn’t control it. Only Rae could fulfill it now. I wasn’t strong enough to let it rot and finally move on.

If it weren’t for that desire, happiness might have been a phone call away. I knew Hollie liked me, and not in a pity-party sort of way. I knew she was waiting. Finally, after a month went by, she called. I let it go to voice mail and she didn’t leave a message. She did it again a few days later and that was it.

The next few months were a haze of drugs and blood, of Mack hovering over everything, of Tracy’s stern advice and relentless energy.

My meals were shit glopped on trays from hospital cafeterias. I thought of Regina, of Rae, of Hollie, of what my life would be like if only I had the guts to be happy. One after the other, I was smothered with affection from recipients, compressed in hugs, drenched in tears, showered with proclamations of my generosity, feeling like shit the entire time, always in pain, always wondering, wondering, wondering. I had no doubt they were thankful, but on those days, I was usually weak from recovery, feeling constrained while wearing normal clothes like jeans instead of blue, assless hospital gowns, thinking all the time of Hollie fake-smiling during her double shift, putting on a show at a table to assure a solid tip. I thought of Rae and wondered if her eyes were black, considering where her heart finally settled. Maybe she’d left him for good, but needed a fresh start without me. Maybe she was still there, dodging punches.

Then, just as I told Hollie I would, I gave away my pancreas to a guy who was also named Dale, only this one had guts and balls. He had a limp from shrapnel that was unrelated to his latest act of heroism, the one that did, in fact, lead to the Medal of Honor. He was one of the few living recipients of the award, and Tracy was psyched. Nothing like free publicity, I guess. He mentioned me in all the press related to the medal, like if he deserved one, I deserved ten of them. He was wrong—he only had one leg to give. He was capable of sacrifice. I was not. In any case, I didn’t get to know the guy that well during shooting. I didn’t like to get emotionally involved with recipients after Hollie, and it showed on television—the only part of the show that focus groups keyed in on as a negative.

I was inaccessible, but that was by design. Capt. Lyle Hayes was the Commissioned Corps officer who shadowed our medical team. The corps, as Doc had told me, was under the umbrella of the United States Public Health Service, but Hayes made it clear he represented interests in the CDC and the Department of Defense. The rules were simple: any footage with his likeness in it couldn’t appear in any public forum. My exposure was limited to the show, filtered, controlled, and edited, and he personally approved all footage that appeared on television. Typically, Tracy would be fighting like a pit bull to get me on the
Today
show or a sit-down with Oprah, but she didn’t fight the blackout. “You? In an unfiltered interview? It’d kill the show.” She didn’t elaborate, but I could tell she was taking an order from Hayes and shaping it into her own decision. Our communications mostly consisted of him glaring at me, pissed that he had to be out of uniform so much on my detail. He was a post-op fixture, though, hovering over me, clinging to his charts, riddling me with a barrage of questions, his pencil smoking as he spoke.

I gave away four organs—five if you include bone marrow—to Kimmy Higgins, a nine-year-old who had a myofibroblastic tumor that encircled her entire blood supply. She got the platinum maintenance plan—liver, two kidneys, pancreas, marrow—all at once. She lived, and somehow, so did I. It was simpler than it sounds—I just let machines do the work for me until I regenerated enough to wake up. Sometimes I’d spend time in comas—black and dreamless, just days and sometimes weeks flicking by as if I’d just blinked them away.

Dr. Reynolds stayed on as the leader of my medical team, but he never did come to grips with my ability. He seemed constantly amazed. “If this didn’t kill you, nothing’s going to kill you,” he said before almost every surgery.

I did a double-lung transplant next—two Dale lungs, two different recipients. A double feature. Tracy kept saying it smelled like a season finale. My last surgery of the taping schedule was pretty basic. I gave a college athlete a liver and some bone marrow. He had severe aplastic anemia, and had endured a year of chemotherapy, infections, blood transfusions, a bout with pneumonia, and was almost always in the hospital. Greg Moseley was the guy’s name, just a few years younger than me. We had a long talk off-camera about hospital stays. For once, a “contestant” I had something in common with.

“You’re in the hospital, just thinking about everyone who’s not in the hospital, wanting to be with them,” he told me.

He made me feel silly and humbled and I almost called Hollie, but I didn’t. I couldn’t.

When they discharged me from that last surgery, I’d have months to go before my next one, and that was only if season two became a reality. We needed ratings. Everyone was left to prepare for and get nervous about the premiere, but I was me again, free to do whatever I wanted, so after that last checkup and surgery, I sat outside the hospital on the bench and cried. Even though most of my body was different, I was still the same goddamned Dale.

NINETEEN

We watched the season premiere of
The Samaritan
at Tracy’s house, our first opportunity to relax after months of taping.

Two projection screens were set up in her living room—a cold space, the furniture white and hard, the walls mostly glass. Her entire house looked carefully staged, torn straight from a trendy catalog, an uninviting place with furniture that could be traded in for a car and curious decor with no functionality: glitter-spackled balls in a basket, wiry-looking tree things, candleholders that held candles with black wicks but no melted wax, so she must have lit the wicks to make them look like they were used often even though they weren’t. Everything in there was either fragile or attracted fingerprints, giving the entire place a repellant, don’t-touch vibe.

Mack drank a lot of beer at the party and when people asked him about his involvement with the show, he happily told them “associate producer.” Everyone seemed appropriately impressed. I figured Mack Tucker wasn’t the first guy in L.A. getting by on a useless job title. He was nervous—the next step was to have a hit on our hands. After enduring multiple surgeries over the past few months, I really didn’t care if the first episode was a train wreck. I was almost hoping for a ratings stink bomb that would land me on the safe padding of the Hollywood blacklist. At least then, the decision would be made for me. If it was a hit, if they asked me for more, I couldn’t say no. The show employed people. Mack was happy. Rae was out there, watching.

People I didn’t know were getting introduced to me by Tracy. I would shake their hands and smile in all the right places and thank them for the congratulations and forget them the minute they walked away.

“Nervous?” Mack asked.

“I wish this thing would start already. I’m sick of these smiling pricks.”

“Hey, I’m smiling.”

“Yeah, but that’s because you’re the one who’s nervous.”

“Touché,” he said, and finished his beer.

The show began with a voiceover, the Big Voice Guy opening the show with the words “In a cruel world, where being on a donor list means hoping to live while waiting to die…” Which was punctuated by images of crying families. Hugging families. Sick-looking people. To viewers, they were just montage images meant to set the mood. But they would meet these people. I had met them. I knew their names. I had saved them. Big Voice Guy continued, “These families are praying for a miracle. Dale Sampson is that miracle—blessed with an incredible and unexplained ability to regenerate his organs and limbs, his mission is to use his gifts to save as many lives as he can.”

Then me, walking the streets of Los Angeles, looking nobly at random things in the distance. In every shot, the streets were wet because dry streets don’t photograph well. Our crew had guys with hoses spraying them down. I can’t watch a movie anymore without spotting the wet streets, even if it’s a night scene in a film set in a dry climate.

It took me ten takes to look noble in that shot. I kept asking what I was looking at. Turns out it didn’t matter.

Then the montage flashed to me off the streets and in a hospital gown, getting toted away. Hugging families in slow motion. Mack pushing me in a wheelchair, smiling down at me. Dr. Reynolds casually putting his arm around me. You see, he’s more than just a doctor, he’s my
friend.
The magic of television. I hated him. I wanted Venhaus instead, but Hayes shot that down. He assured me the good doctor was living his normal life in Grayson with no repercussions, and I believed him—they wouldn’t want to piss me off. Not when I was cooperating so splendidly.

I was smiling directly at the camera to close the montage, and this shot had taken nineteen takes to get right.

All the while, Big Voice Guy summed up the hook of the show for our viewers at home. “The stories are real. The surgeries are daunting. But Dale will risk it all in order to be …
The Samaritan
.”

At this point everyone at the party cheered. Corks popped, Champagne frothing onto the floor from multiple bottles. Tracy handed me a glass.

“They’re ruining your carpet,” I said.

“If my hunch is right, I can afford new carpet.” She winked. “And you’ll be hosting the next party.”

“Fuck yeah,” Mack said, and took the Champagne flute, knocking it back with one flick of the wrist.

“I can’t drink,” I said, smiling. “I’m on a pretty strong cocktail of meds, and a little short of breath.”

“Still recovering from the last one?” she asked.

I nodded.

“What was that one, the—”

“Double lung transplant,” I finished. Two recipients, one Dale Sampson, one surgery. Two lungs would mean certain death, right? The ventilator kept me alive. They planned on showing the time-lapse footage of my new, pink lungs blossoming into existence. Oh, the intrigue.