Authors: Karen Harter
“I don’t want to know this,” I said, still chuckling. “Anyway, he’s got to be rich. He has a yacht, you know. He told me he
cruises up to the San Juans every chance he gets.”
“Yeah. And the whole thing is furnished with yard sale treasures.”
“No way.”
“Way. Trust me. I’ve been on it. He invited the transplant team out for a dinner cruise last summer. He poured cheap wine
and took us on the tour. Chairs, wall hangings, dishes—you name it. All from garage sales. You’d think he was displaying trophies
from his last safari. I came out of the bathroom and he wanted to know how many squares I used.”
Christopher grew quiet momentarily as he checked my pulse. He scrawled something on the page attached to his clipboard and
then motioned for me to lie back on the padded table. I had already disrobed and slipped into a cotton gown spotted with faded
green alligators. I knew the drill. Christopher began preparing for the echocardiogram and I automatically untied the front.
I had been chilled all morning. A fresh crop of goose bumps emerged from the flesh of my arms. We spoke lightly of this world
within a world that we shared, while we both pretended that I was not a half-naked woman and that he was only a nurse and
not a man.
“The doctor will be right in.” He winked as he left the room.
I STARED at the faces from
People
magazine smiling their dazzling white smiles. Actors and actresses promenaded across the pages in tuxedos and glittering
gowns with plunging necklines and seams split to the upper thighs. They bored me. I strained to listen to the hushed voices
outside the door to no avail.
The trip to Seattle had tired me. I lay back on the tissue-covered examination table and closed my eyes. As usual my palm
rested on my heart. Squish. Squish. Squish-squish. I tried to remember how it used to sound—that bold thumping in my chest
when I had run up the hill from the creek all the way to the barn to hide from the James Gang after I pushed Jared James’s
face in the mud. How it had pounded like a bass drum when a sow bear ambled toward me as I fished. Even after she grunted
to her cubs and detoured across the stream on a mossy deadfall, the healthy throbbing of my heart reverberated in my ears.
Now the muscle that controlled my destiny was a weak, lethargic jellyfish. I hated it. I had trusted it to beat as faithfully
as the spinning of the earth, the rising and setting of the sun. It had betrayed me.
And yet I felt I had this coming. It was God’s judgment on me for all the rotten things I had done. I betrayed my husband.
I was an adulteress and a liar and, worst of all, I murdered my own baby. She was unplanned and inconvenient. Her timing was
off, so I killed her. I delivered her up to the butchers in the plush clinic with a smiling receptionist and mauve upholstery
and sanitary white walls. I paid them three hundred and twenty dollars to do the deed and dispose of her mutilated body. I
often argued with myself. The abortion was the only reasonable thing I could have done at the time. Plenty of other women
had committed the same act and didn’t seem to be tormented by it. Yet I felt somehow more accountable for my sins. It was
the curse of being the Judge’s daughter. Of having his words rise up into my head no matter how far from him I wandered, and
knowing that if he was right, and that every word in the Bible was inspired by God and absolutely true, I was in a whole heap
of trouble for eons to come.
I don’t know when I first realized that I could never measure up to the Judge’s standard. I had tried to be good like Lindsey.
My sister brought home schoolwork with smiley faces and gold stars. My papers said things like:
Messy. Incomplete. Didn’t follow instructions.
At parent-teacher conferences Lindsey got rave reviews. Her homework was always finished and turned in on crisp unwrinkled
paper with no mud streaks or jam stains. She never talked out of turn or had dirt under her fingernails. Not once did she
get into a fight on the playground. Mrs. McCrite just couldn’t see how we could be sisters. She said we were as different
as night and day. I knew which one she meant was night because Lindsey was everyone’s Little Miss Sunshine.
Of course, once I found out the truth about my origins, it all began to make sense. I was the offspring of some brash, wild-haired
woman who sold me to the Dodd family because she didn’t want me. That’s why I was so different. My mother and my sister both
had soft shiny hair the color of a hay field in July. Mine was as brown as a cedar trunk.
Even now, I had to admit, it hurt. TJ, like Lindsey, did not bump into a wall when he approached the Judge. In his innocence,
my son would rush into those consecrated arms with no thought as to whether they would open to receive him. In the evenings
he often climbed onto his grandpa’s lap. The Judge would rest his chin on TJ’s tousled head and read aloud, sometimes petting
him, massaging his neck as if he were a Lab puppy. But between the Judge and me there was a Plexiglas wall. I could see him
but never touch him. And strangely, even now as an adult, I longed to feel worthy of my father’s love.
Dr. Sovold’s entrance startled me. He swung into the room, plopping onto a wheeled stool and sliding toward me in one motion.
His lanky legs straddled the stool awkwardly. He wore a plaid shirt today instead of the traditional white coat.
“Good morning, Samantha. I hope I didn’t wake you. You looked like Sleeping Beauty lying there.”
I raised myself up on one elbow and studied him. “You look like a long tall Texan on a Shetland pony.”
“I always wanted to be a cowboy.” He grinned. “But I found out I was allergic to horses and became a cardiologist instead.”
He stood and began to slide the cold wand over my chest and beneath my armpits, taking longer than usual, studying the pulsing
image on the screen in silence and finally wiping the slippery gel from my skin. “Okay.” He sighed. “Wrap yourself up.”
I sat up, relieved that it was over. “I’m starved. My sister and I are going to this great little Thai place on the way back.”
“Well, Samantha—” He shook his head. “I don’t think so. Not today.” He hesitated.
“Why don’t you just aim your six-gun and shoot?”
He smiled apologetically like he had been caught on the carpet with manure on his boots. “Okay.” He pushed back his stool
and crossed his gangly arms. They were white and freckled. The skin of his face was the color of an uncooked chicken, slightly
dimpled, a few stray whiskers protruding like unplucked feathers. His brows drew together slightly. “Your tests show no improvement.
In fact, we’re seeing increased weakness in the walls of the left ventricle. You’ve probably been feeling it.” I nodded. “Your
heart’s cavity has enlarged and stretched and it’s really working overtime trying to pump blood around your body. It’s tired.
You’re tired.”
I couldn’t argue with that. I stared back at him, waiting.
He raised his chin with authority. “I want to check you into the hospital. You need the rest. You need to be waited on hand
and foot at the Hard Knocks Hotel. Let someone else do your laundry, bring you lunch. All you have to do is paint your own
toenails. Read some good books. Maybe even write one. This would be a good time for that.”
“But it’s Christmastime.”
His eyes softened. “I know. But I think this is necessary, Samantha. It’s time.”
I had planned to call Donnie that night when I got home. I missed him so badly, and now that I had decided to live he might
change his mind about not seeing me anymore. “I can rest at home. I have my mother and my sister—”
“I need to have you close to me right now. Once every few weeks is not enough anymore. I need to check on you every day. You
can’t make the three-hour drive into the city every day. That’s no way to rest. If”—he corrected himself—“
when
a compatible donor heart becomes available to you, you’ve got to be strong enough to go through surgery.”
“I have to go home first. My son . . . and all my things . . .”
“Your parents will bring them. They’ll bring your boy too. I’ve already talked to them.”
So it had been decided. The river that was my life had veered off course again.
My father had promised that everything would be all right. He often spoke of the future and I was always in it. He said I
should check into Cub Scouts for TJ when he reaches second grade. He brought books home for me on career choices and pamphlets
from Northwest Community College in Darlington. When he saw me writing in my journal, he would nod approvingly. “Working on
that bestseller?” my father would ask. “I can’t wait to read it.” And I found myself wanting to write it. Imagining my father
proudly pulling my book from the rack in the grocery store checkout line and flashing the boldly printed name on the cover.
“My daughter wrote this.”
I remembered Irma’s lilting German voice when it hardened. “You’ve got to be willing to fight, Samantha.” I closed my eyes
and saw myself in the dream. Strong. Alive. Fearless. I would fight this battle. But apparently I would fight it lying down.
That evening, alone in my hospital room, I dialed Donnie’s number. He would be glad to hear that I was fighting for my life
now. I was not the pathetic weakling he had toasted at my premature funeral. How had I been so blind? I had given up on life
because of Tim. Because the man I betrayed would not forgive me, though in reality it had been over between us five years
ago. That truth had finally sunk to the bottom of my soul, landing with a thud. I still had my son to live for. And what about
Donnie? I was free to love him now. He had said he loved me. What kind of love did he mean?
“Hey.” A breathless Donnie finally answered the phone. “Sorry, I know I’m late, but I just got in from the barn. I have to
get cleaned up, and I’ll be there in about a half hour. You’re probably wearing one of your great dresses, right?”
I was confused and didn’t speak.
“Rachel?”
My hand clenched the receiver like it was a climber’s last lifeline and then slowly lowered it back to its cradle.
F
OR THE FIRST COUPLE of days I had no roommate. My mother sprawled across the vacant hospital bed with
The Seattle Times
spread out in front of her, her ankles crossing and uncrossing in the air. When TJ came he snuggled into bed with me, but
only for a few minutes at a time. There was so much to see and do. My nurse, Christopher, brought empty syringes, teaching
him how to suck water from my drinking glass and then depress the plunger, squirting streams across my toes and on innocent
pedestrians on the sidewalk below my window. He took TJ on a wheelchair ride. It seemed they were gone a long time. When they
returned TJ colored pictures of the doe and two fawns that crossed our field every morning going to the river, leaving a trail
of wandering dotted lines across the snow. “This is for my friend,” he said. “He doesn’t have no hair.” My son seemed saddened
by this. When Christopher wheeled him away again later that afternoon to deliver his pictures, I was glad to see him go. I
had no right to keep all that healing sunshine to myself.
On day three I got Lulu. She moved into the empty bed next to mine with much ado. Two potted geraniums tottered precariously
on her lap as the nurse wheeled her in, because, she said, she couldn’t trust anyone but herself to keep them alive. “My neighbor
Clara, God bless her, is the Charles Manson of horticulture. She’d have this drowned to death by Tuesday.” Her real name,
she said, was Luella, but all her friends just called her Lulu, which was exactly what she was. A real one. She wore a pink
satin bed jacket like Doris Day, open in the front, revealing three-fourths of two weathered and weary breasts. She looked
down at them and sighed. “The old gray mare just ain’t what she used to be.” Then she brightened. “But I still have my own
teeth.” She looked exactly like an old horse when she drew up her lips to show me. “The originals. Not bad for an old broad,
eh?”
“Hey, if you’ve got them, flaunt them. That’s what I always say.” That was a lie. I never said that before in my life. I did
think it before, though. That was when I was talking myself into doing the topless-dancing thing because my roommate Mindy
promised it would be so lucrative. It was not a good career move for me. Not that I wasn’t built for it. That was the one
thing I had over my sister, Lindsey. She would have paid big money to be able to bounce when she jogged. So I got one asset
from the woman who gave birth to me. I lasted in that job for about a week before coldcocking a trucker passing through Reno
with a trailer full of pork sides.
“So what are you in for?” Lulu promptly removed her swirly strawberry blond hair, placing it on a white foam head on her bedside
table and giving it a little fluff before turning back to me. “Don’t tell me it’s the C word.”
I was still a little distracted by the hair thing. Her own thin gray down was cut close to the head, causing her to resemble
a seagull hatchling. “Huh? Oh, you mean cancer? No, it’s not that. My heart. I have dilated cardiomyopathy.”
Lulu’s lips formed a pout. Actually, she had no lips to speak of, but lipstick outlined the opening where she put her food.
“Oh.” She shook her head sympathetically. “You poor little thing. And you’re so young. I thought maybe it was lung cancer,
the way you been coughing and all. I’ve got the heart thing going on too. Come to think of it, I guess we all do in this ward.
I’m here to get a heart transplant.” I watched her profile as she gazed at the black TV screen. Then she turned to me with
a smile. “I’ve done a lot of livin’. Had two good husbands. A one-legged one that could dance till sunup and a two-legged
one that wouldn’t dance if he stepped in a nest of fire ants. He was a shy one.” She let her head fall back on her pillow.
“Old Elmer didn’t know how good-lookin’ he was. How ’bout you? You got a husband?”
Lulu made me smile. “I used to. He was a good one. Had two legs.”
She nodded. “Never should have let that one get away.”
It had been a long boring day. Lindsey had called during breakfast while I pushed canned peaches around in a bowl. No one
would be able to come today. I said I understood. It was almost a three-hour drive from the river, after all. By lunchtime
I was bored out of my gourd. Still, I had felt invaded when Lulu was wheeled in and hauled into the bed next to mine. I could
stand the suspense for only so long. “So how did he dance? The one with one leg.”