The Heart Does Not Grow Back: A Novel (9 page)

I used my new hand to yank the bandage off my ear—the ear had also returned, though it was still a bit pink.

“Mom,” I said, trying to say it loudly, but only a whisper came out. “Mom,” I repeated, getting her attention.

“Coming,” she said. She was lying down, something she did all the time now. We never said the C word. I kept insisting that she go to the doctor, and the subject inevitably got changed. I tried aggression. I tried to question her love for me, telling her if she didn’t have the simple will to live, she was betraying her only son.

“I do want to live,” she said. “Sometimes trying your hardest to stay alive isn’t living at all.”

She shuffled into the room, thin and gaunt. I held my hand up. She smiled. I couldn’t believe the look on her face, the complete opposite of my own astonishment. I thought we’d go to the doctor and get an explanation. Was anyone else out there like this, or was this affliction completely unique?

She took my hand. After a thorough inspection, she brought it up to her papery lips and kissed it. “This is God making up for what was taken,” she said. “This is God making things right.”

She died in the middle of my senior year. I didn’t need much in the way of credits to earn my graduation, and we both agreed I couldn’t go back. Still, she begged me to walk the stage and take my diploma, if she lived that long. “There’s ways to hide your hand,” she said. “We’ll think of something by the time May rolls around.”

So I stayed home, and despite her weakness, she went to school a few times a week to bring back classwork from fully understanding teachers so I could knock out the last of my requirements. We wanted to keep my secret until we understood what was happening to me.

She wanted to die at home, but I insisted on driving her to the hospital when the pain got bad enough. I was the only one at her side when she passed. Since Dad left, we were always a family of two, and any attempt to discuss extended family ended with her shaking her head and saying nothing.

Just before she took her last breath, she squeezed that same reborn hand, barely able to speak, her body drenched with tubes and masks and lights and cancer. Cancer was everywhere, in her bones, in her breasts, in her liver, in her lungs. I never pulled any plugs on her. I hoped that God would make up for what was taken, that He would make things right. But He didn’t, and she died in front of me, leaving another empty seat for my graduation.

*   *   *

After she died, I lived alone. I didn’t turn eighteen for a few more months, so I had to be careful. The utility bills kept coming in her name, and I kept paying them. No point changing the name since I wasn’t officially old enough to enter a contract. As long as the heat and lights stayed on, no problem. The house was paid for. I didn’t care that I wasn’t on the title. She had no life insurance and since the bank was local, it was easy enough to empty her checking account with a forged check.

Despite her wishes, I couldn’t bring myself to leave the house on graduation night, so I called Principal Turnbull and asked him to mail my diploma. Mack did the same. “I don’t need to walk across some stupid fuckin’ stage to get where I’m going,” he told me. He called, but rarely, and when he did, we didn’t tread any tragic ground. Nothing about my mother’s death, nothing about the shooting or our injuries. He came to her tiny funeral and hugged me but we barely talked. Now, only phone calls and just small talk, just because it was a habit to talk once in a while.

On my eighteenth birthday, I sat alone at my kitchen table, silent except for the tick of the clock. The fake oak didn’t smell like Pledge anymore. No more waxy feel that would make your fingers smell like lemons. Just me and the diploma, a piece of fancy-looking paper hidden behind a sheath of plastic, like it was old-people furniture.

I took the cleaver from the utensil drawer. The handle felt like an anchor, and the blade had a solid heft that made me confident it could split bone. Nothing had been made right or whole by my miraculous healing. A dead mother, for what, an index finger? Regina’s corpse for a useless piece of ear flesh? My friend’s golden shoulder, his pride, our dreams, for what? Being able to pick up a dirty sock? Having an opposable thumb to hold silverware? Everything was taken, and I was left with a power I didn’t want or even need. I didn’t need my hand or ear to heal. In due time, they’d have been capped with scars and the pain would vanish. The parts I needed to regenerate, the pain I needed to subside, were deeper and there forever, untouched by my abilities. Injuries that caused nightmares and bouts of unbridled crying, of looking out the window at a sunny day and being incapable of moving off the couch.

I didn’t want to accept the trade. I hated my new hand and what it represented. I gripped the cleaver. I spread my regenerated hand out on the table and chopped off my regrown fingers with a single strike. They flicked across the table as blood shot out of the mini stumps in gurgles of near-black blood. I watched with a certain affinity for the pain. I stretched the flesh of my ear taut with the thumb and pinky finger of my now-bleeding hand, and used the cleaver’s edge like the bow of a stringed instrument, drawing it back and forth against the tight cartilage until a sufficient piece was severed, comparable to my original loss. I threw the fingers and ear into the garbage disposal, switched it on, then used dishtowels and pressure to stop the bleeding of my hand. I left the blood-soaked dishtowel against the wound and wrapped it with a half roll of duct tape.

For three days, I didn’t leave the house, eating nothing but canned soup and cereal with expired milk. I didn’t bathe, I just slept and watched television and waited, hoping that in a couple days I could remove the makeshift dressings and show God I didn’t want his reparations.

Three days later, my fingers were back, my ear was whole, and the only reminder of those cuts that remained was a new set of white lines tracing the border between who I am and who I used to be.

NINE

I took the gun out, a familiar .38 purchased at our local Super Wal-Mart. At first, I kept it under the middle couch cushion and didn’t bring it out for weeks at a time. I’ve since warmed up to the prospect of holding it, watching the light die in the matte finish of the barrel. When you fondle a gun, it starts out cool and warms up, getting friendly in your hands. Hold one long enough and pretty soon, the urge to shoot something takes on a life of its own.

I sat on the couch and did nothing but watch TV, which is overloaded with channels on top of channels, reruns and commercials. The car-insurance lizard thinks he’s clever. Beer will make you smile and get laid. Trucks look cool covered in mud.

Doing absolutely nothing has its own inertia, making it tougher to walk out the door, and once outside, the fear of my computer kept me from wanting to come back. I had the Internet, but I feared my home page—a search engine, white and clean, a blank slate with a single box. Type something in and answers appear, unfolding down the page, just one click away. It’s like a cruel, modern genie that can tell you how to achieve any wish, but doesn’t do the hard work for you. I used my computer to read the news, check sports scores, whack off to the occasional porn video, hijack movies and music, but I avoided search engines if at all possible.

I could have set up a different home page, but even then, the search box would linger in the upper right of my browser, an oracle waiting for a visit. The Internet is like the face of God—overwhelming, incomprehensible, infinite. I lived in fear of that computer, of that search box in which I wanted to type “human regeneration,” an ominous rabbit hole I didn’t want to go down.

I sat on the couch with the gun resting on my thigh. One local network carried Carlton Franks on Sunday mornings as part of their religiously slanted programming block. Like any good preacher, he made loving God seem like heavy lifting, a lot of sweat in his pudgy, pink face. He always kept a handkerchief in his right hand to wipe away the sweat, the microphone trembling in his other hand. He would start each program sounding smooth and oiled, and end it sounding like he’d chewed razor blades all night.

I watched because he healed people through the television. Allegedly, anyway. He would call them by name, sweat matting his gray hair against the runny makeup on his forehead, holding his hand out. If he called your name, it was time to touch the television and get your healing. He was very specific. I would watch, waiting for him to say “Dale.” He never did. And he always healed cancer and migraines and paralysis. He never once healed someone’s ability to heal, so I was waiting for nothing. I just got his pixelated hand, blurry on my screen, healing a woman named Charlotte, her stomach tumor shriveling up as he belted out his passionate prayers.

For the longest time, I’d just hold the gun every day. I knew I couldn’t pull the trigger. Not yet. It wasn’t the fear, it was the knowledge that the gun held a clean, easy death. I hadn’t earned it yet. I wrapped the gun in an oiled cloth and tucked it back into the couch cushion, then took a shower. Shaved. Put on a decent pair of jeans and a shirt that wasn’t wrinkled too badly. By the time I got cleaned up and ready to start my day, it was well past noon.

My weekends evaporated with nothing accomplished. During the weekdays, I worked for the US Army Corps of Engineers, a fancy government agency, but my job title and duties were far less fancy—I was a GS-1 on the mowing crew. The other two guys drove commercial mowers; I slung a string trimmer all day. In the mornings I would get dropped off at one end of a bridge rail and over the course of ten hours, I’d try to get a couple of trimmed miles behind me. Then I’d get picked up by a white Corps truck—rangers who barely talked as I drank up the cold air spewing from the air-conditioner vents. In the winters, I did nothing. You could ration out seasonal GS-1 pay for a long time if you didn’t have much in the way of a social life or hobbies and you had a paid-off house. I got myself a little car, a computer, and a prepaid cell phone that barely worked in Verner, but the house? I hated the house now. Mom was in the walls like smoke damage, every inch of it swollen with memories of her. I wanted to get out but I couldn’t afford it.

Mack left Verner as soon as he could. I think it was because the town was steeped in memories of what he used to be, could have been. He carried on with his dream to party at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, only not on a baseball scholarship. Not anymore. I didn’t know if he was using charge cards or student loans, but Mack always had a way of making things work for at least a while. I had the grades for school, but college didn’t appeal to me. Work didn’t appeal to me. Nothing appealed to me. I got right to work wasting my days.

Before Mack left for good, we gave the announcement a moment of silence. We needed to digest the deepening distance between us, then we quickly shifted to talking about sports and weather and anything other than how truly and deeply frightening the future could look without fame, or baseball, or money, or success, or even so much as a plan.

Sometimes, when it was dark and no one could see me, I’d take a good long walk. The darkness was important. Seeing people meant those pitying looks, or worse, people asking how I was doing. I found myself hiding my hand in public, lest someone know the details of the shooting closely enough to be suspicious of my regenerated extremities. I’d see a faint dome of light to the north—Grayson, Illinois. Their population sign had four digits instead of three, they had a Wal-Mart with a floral section I’d visited once before, stoplights, cell towers, gas stations, and a selection of fast-food restaurants. Compared to Verner, Grayson might as well have been on the fucking moon, but the towns were still connected by country side roads. They cut through soybean and cornfields pocked in the dark by farmhouse lights. The kinds of roads that bubble in the summer sun, then soften at night. When it’s cold, black ice nibbles the surface. Thick puddles gather where the road meets dirt, usually from truck tires denting it in, skirting the side while two passing trucks graze shoulder to shoulder, spewing gravel into the culverts and ditches that stretch out into the distance. Roads have a pulse, like railroad tracks. I could put my hand in the middle of the narrow road in front of my house and feel the fading heartbeat a hundred miles away as the blood bloomed from her skull.

Sometimes I’d walk and the questions would come—What did I do today? What difference did I make? How is the world different? Why would it miss me? Visions of
Matlock
reruns, endless commercials, empty bags of cookies, empty beer cans I acquired with sheer, illegal persistence, and half-read magazines flashed through my mind. Another wasted day.

I went home and ate an entire frozen pizza for dinner, the only non-cereal meal option in the house. When you’re broke you only keep the bare essentials around—a stack of cheap pizzas, cereal, milk. A case of light beer that cost you twice as much as the sticker price because you needed to pay a stranger to buy it for you.

Rope. Razor blades. Some foam insulation, perfect for a car-exhaust suicide. When running the car in the garage, precious noxious fumes can escape through gaps in the garage door. Wouldn’t want to hurt the environment. A toaster, still in the box—the preferred cliché for electrocuting yourself in the bathtub. I wonder who thought that one up—there’s really no reason in the world for a toaster to be in the bathroom. Any small appliance could do the job. A toaster was random. Poetic, even.