Change of Heart (18 page)

Sharlie woke up at two o'clock in the morning feeling as if something deadly, a poisonous smog, had lifted from her body and floated out her window into the cool night. She put her hands to her cheeks and thought she could make out the lines of her cheekbones. She was flooded with memories of the scene in old movies where a kindly old doctor emerges from the sickroom to tell an anxious family that “the crisis has passed—little Jimmy will be all right.” The compulsion to whoop with joy was tempered only by her awareness of the patients down the hall, whose tenuous grip on life might snap if they were to hear a great, victorious shout from Room 841. She reached for the phone instead.

It took a dozen rings before Brian's voice mumbled on the other end. She pictured his hair all pressed down against his forehead, making him look like a little boy. He had told her that he slept facedown, and imagining his head burrowed into his pillow, she marveled that he didn't suffocate in the night.

“What happens is this, Bri,” she said into the phone. “You can sleep on your face because when the sun goes down, you grow gills and breathe through your armpits. I don't know why I didn't figure it out before.”

“Ungh erm,” said Brian groggily.

Sharlie went on in her wide-awake voice. “You even talk like something that lives underwater.”

“Sharlie?” He was beginning to wake up.

She said, “Except that you do sleep in the daytime too, sometimes. Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with the sunset. Maybe it's your alpha waves that trigger the gill response. You think?”

“What time is it?” he murmured.

“I'm not going to tell you because you'll pull all my plugs. But you saved at least one life by picking up the phone.”

“Yours?”

“No, the lady in 831, who would have died of fright when she heard me scream at the top of my lungs that I FEEL FANTASTIC!” Instantly she was whispering again. “But I had to tell somebody.”

Brian asked, “Who's on the desk?”

“I don't know. Vinnie, I guess.”

“I'm coming over.”

“You can't…”

But the phone clicked, and Sharlie lay there with the receiver buzzing, cradled against her cheek.

She must have fallen asleep for a few minutes, because it seemed as if she'd just gotten off the phone and now there was somebody crawling under her sheet.

“Brian!” she whispered. “How did you ever get in here at this hour?”

He kissed her to keep her quiet. It had been a long time since they'd really kissed each other, and once they got started, her curiosity about hospital security began to feel irrelevant Brian ran his hands down her backbone and said, “You could use a pizza.”

She moaned. “Oh, pizza …”

“You'll have one for breakfast,” he said and kissed her again, murmuring something about oral gratification.

“They're going to catch us,” she protested, as he moved his hand along her side and down her hip.

“The shame of it. Think they'll make us get married?”

“Oh, my,” she said.

“Oh, your what?” he muttered, but he didn't let her answer.

Margaret and Walter held hands as they entered Sharlie's room. They stood beside her bed and waited for her to open her eyes, enjoying the sound of her easy breathing. Finally she looked up at them but then quickly turned her head aside to face the wall.

“What's the matter, Chuck?” Walter asked.

There was no response.

“Are you all right, darling?” Margaret pressed.

Silence. Margaret looked up at Walter in alarm and whispered, “We'd better call the nurse.”

Sharlie turned her head to glare at them. “Don't,” she said. “Just get out.”

Walter made a shocked, choking sound that was almost a laugh. But Margaret heard the fury in her daughter's voice and began to move away from the bed, pulling Walter by the hand. After they had left, Sharlie stared at the center of her door where the image of their bewildered faces lingered, until finally the rage in her eyes turned to fear, and she began to cry.

Sharlie sat in her wheelchair looking out Dr. Rosen's window. Today the view behind the soft red hair was blurred with rain. The tree limbs bowed under the heavy downpour, and Sharlie felt warm and safe in the cluttered room.

“Have the side effects of the medication disappeared?” Dr. Rosen was asking.

Sharlie nodded. The doctor watched the reflection from the window wash waves of shadows across her patient's face.

“Then how do you account for the episode?”

Sharlie sat withdrawn inside her clouded face.

“It's unusual for a postoperative reaction to occur at this late date,” Dr. Rosen pressed.

Sharlie nodded again but kept her face averted.

“What is it, Charlotte?”

Sharlie's eyes fastened on the doctor for a moment, their dark light disturbing the pale fragility of her face.

“If I told you, you'd lock me up,” she answered softly.

“I doubt it. Try me.”

Sharlie opened her mouth, attempting unsuccessfully to speak, then smiled, embarrassed. “I
know
it's ridiculous. But I can't persuade my head.”

Dr. Rosen waited, and Sharlie faltered, “I think, I mean, I
believe
that … that man is affecting what I do.”

“You mean the donor.”

Sharlie nodded.

“How?”

“By being inside.”

“No,” said Dr. Rosen. “How affecting what you do?”

“I get this swelling feeling like I'm all hot and bursting and I can't control it. It's not just my parents. I was dreadful to poor Dr. Diller.” Her face flamed with mortification. “My God, the man saved my life. He performed a miracle for me, and I humiliated him in front of all those people.”

“What about throwing the newspaper at Brian? Was that you or the donor?”

“Him,” Sharlie said firmly, then with a small, frightened smile. “I'm losing my grip, aren't I?” But her eyes weren't smiling, and Dr. Rosen recognized the terror in them. Sharlie didn't wait for an answer, just kept on talking now, the words pouring out and tumbling over one another like too many hatboxes when the closet door is finally opened.

“The rejection, I think I did that to myself. It seemed like I had to get rid of him or make some kind of compromise and accept him as part of me, and I couldn't do that, and my body knew, and even now I don't see how I can live with this. I mean, the man was a homicidal maniac, and how am I supposed to cope with that? Even when I didn't know for a fact I still had this creepy … communion. Oh, it sounds so ludicrous, I feel like a perfect asshole…” She looked up at Dr. Rosen in surprise. “I never used that word in my life. Excuse me.”

“How did it feel, saying it out loud?”

Sharlie gave her a shy smile, but instantly fear replaced it, darkening her face. “Where is this going to take me? That man was crazy.”

Dr. Rosen's voice was soft. “Charlotte, most transplant patients have strong emotional responses to their operations. Some, like you, experience a feeling of identification with their donors. The adjustment takes time. Give yourself a chance to heal. Don't fight it. You can damage yourself.”

Sharlie looked thoughtful. The rain had tapered off, and the shadow from the gardenia tree reached through the window to cast a dark web across the girl's face.

“Are you angry with your parents?” Dr. Rosen asked.

Sharlie's eyes were wet. “They've kept me alive. They've given up so much.”

“But are you angry with them?”

“How could I be?” Sharlie whispered.

“Do you still plan to get married?” Sharlie's face lifted a little, and the psychiatrist smiled. “Well, then?”

Sharlie smiled back. “Well, then…

The room seemed to be a kind of ballroom, an expanse of polished floor and a balcony along three walls suspended halfway to the lofty ceiling. Benches with red plush cushions were set in rows. Cologned, clean-shaven men sat beside women in flowered hats. At the front of the hall was a stage or altar, upon which, pushed to one side, stood a shiny black coffin. It was open, and she reclined inside it, head raised on a satin pillow so that she could watch the proceedings. Organ music played softly—Bach's “Sheep May Safely Graze”—and then it suddenly swelled, and all the guests rose, turning toward the entrance behind them. At first she didn't recognize the music, but then she realized it was the Wedding March, only distorted into a minor key and played very slowly.

Brain appeared in the doorway, and she sat up in the coffin, watching him approach her, straight and handsome, a young woman holding his arm and leaning against him. She was blond and suntanned and glowing, and instead of flowers, she carried a bouquet of diminutive tennis racquets.

When they reached the altar, Brian glanced at Sharlie, who gazed at him from her satin perch. His face was fond, as if to say, “I'm glad you're here to share my happiness, dear friend.” Sharlie smiled back at him, her throat constricted with longing. Then Brian turned to his bride and kissed her.

Sharlie awoke into the semidarkness of her room and spent the rest of the night watching her window change from black to gray and finally to the reassuring clear blue of daylight.

The prospect of a wedding sent the medical center into an upheaval unlike anything since Dr. Lewis's first successful transplant operation. Everyone wanted to get into the act, from the chief of surgery himself down to the people who cleaned garbage cans in the kitchen.

“It's like I'm royalty or something,” Sharlie complained unconvincingly to Mary MacDonald. They were in the solarium leafing through
Bride
magazine. Mary stopped at a photograph of an emaciated mannequin in a severe white gown.

“This one looks like she could use a transplant herself,” she muttered.

“Queen of Hearts,” Sharlie said dreamily.

“Come on, concentrate,” Mary said. “You're going to be walking down the aisle in your birthday suit at this rate.”

“Brian would like that”

Sharlie stood and cinched her hospital gown at the waist, pirouetting. “Maybe I'll wear this…”

“My ass you'll wear that,” Mary grumbled.

“One would think you weren't enjoying this, Mary. Maybe I ought to elope.”

“Just you try it, my girl,” Mary said menacingly, and Sharlie grinned at her.

Vinnie arrived with a tray of medications for Sharlie. “Is it true we're all going to come?” The young nurse was seven months pregnant and moved awkwardly.

“They're going to work out a rotating schedule,” Sharlie said, swallowing a blue capsule, “so everybody can stay for part of the ceremony. We're making it
extra
long.”

“It's so wonderful,” Vinnie chattered as she poured out another cup of water for Sharlie. “I bet they do your life story on television or something. I mean, it's so fantastic. I bet the guy's mother is really happy. It makes up a little for what he did…”

Mary's head snapped up from the magazine, and she gave Vinnie a ferocious look.

“I'm sorry. I forgot … I didn't mean—”

Mary broke in, “Give Miss Converse her medication and get out please.”

Vinnie seemed to be paralyzed, so Mary grabbed the pills and yelled,
“Move,
girl.”

Sharlie swallowed automatically, her eyes wide. Vinnie rushed out She tripped at the doorway, nearly spilling her tray. Mary and Sharlie sat absolutely still, like overgrown children playing statue. Neither looked at the other until finally Mary breathed a heavy sigh.

“I don't suppose we can forget that”

“Yes, let's,” Sharlie said.

She still clutched her hospital gown at the waist, and now she released it, leaving soggy clumps of wrinkles where her hands had bunched the material. She sat down on the edge of the couch, and Mary began to clear away the piles of magazines that lay open on the coffee table. “I won't have you going all morbid on me,” Mary said. “Not just before your wedding day. You just remember that what you got from that poor tortured creature was a hunk of muscle and nothing more.”

She lifted Sharlie by the arm, and they walked to her room in silence. Then she helped her into bed. “You thank heaven for the gift of a healthy new heart and forget the package it came in.”

She pulled the curtain, and the room turned soft gray. She stood in the doorway a moment, looking at Sharlie's face as she stared wide-eyed at the ceiling.

“You hear me?” Mary called. “Sharlie?”

Sharlie said, “Yes. Don't worry. I'll be all right.” But she didn't move her eyes a fraction and never noticed when Mary finally shook her head and left, closing the door quietly behind her.

They now allowed Sharlie to stroll on the grounds, provided she wore a gauze mask and always kept someone with her. Occasionally she would spot another masked face and that made her feel less self-conscious.

This afternoon she had tired quickly, so Brian spread his jacket on the grass, and they sat while he told her about yesterday's trip to Los Angeles. Ordinarily Barbara would have refused the case, since it was destined for trial in California. But it involved a film producer's unauthorized use of material written by a young woman screenwriter, and with Brian in Santa Bel, Barbara was delighted to leap headfirst into the action. Brian was secretly grateful for the chance to get back to work and away from the oppressive atmosphere of the medical center.

“I stopped by at a supermarket in Beverly Hills,” he was saying, “and there was this old lady by the cornflakes. She must have been eighty-five, with a shiny gold jump suit thing—skintight—and Plexiglas sandals, and she had all this blue-white varnished hair that looked stiff enough to hang coats from and these huge hairy false eyelashes. And, I'm not kidding, she was shuffling down the aisle between the cereal and the lettuce with a
walker.”

Sharlie giggled and leaned against him. “Can we go there for our honeymoon? I'll sew sequins all over my mask.”

“How long are you going to have to wear that thing?” he asked.

“Don't know,” she answered. “I think I'll hang on to it and maintain the mystery in our marriage, you know? The masked wife. You'll always wonder what's underneath—whether I've lost all my teeth, maybe I've grown a moustache …”

“No, really,” he said. She reached up to unhook the mask, and he put his hand over hers to stop her.

“Brian,” she said softly, “I'm never going to be very much like your everyday blushing bride.”

“Thank God,” he said. But his eyes looked past her to the hospital gate.

“Hey,” she said, poking him lightly to get him to look at her. “We've got options. We can live together and see how it goes. We can
not
live together. We can get married later. We can meet every Saturday night at a singles bar…” She was thankful for the gauze, which she hoped would muffle the trembling in her voice. He looked into the eyes that read his thoughts. Then he cupped his hands around her face.

“Look, I've never gotten married before. Can't I have a few standard prenuptial jitters?”

“Are you sure that's what they are?” She unhooked her mask deliberately. “My germs are going to have to learn to live with your germs.” He kissed her, and her body relaxed against him. Then he slipped the mask back on and pulled her to her feet. As they walked back toward the hospital entrance, he told her about the shopping-bag lady he'd seen who drove around Los Angeles in a beat-up Dodge crammed to the rusted roof with tiny pieces of paper and old scraps of rags, how, in California, even the crazies need wheels. Sharlie listened to him happily and told herself she didn't care what happened to her as long as she had just a few days married to him.

Diller stood next to Sharlie's bed, listening to her heart with his stethoscope. He watched her warily, as if at any moment she might turn mad and stab him with her letter opener. Sharlie saw his eyes linger on the tapered instrument and smiled. It was sterling silver and elegantly monogrammed with the initials
CCM
, a wedding gift from Barbara Kaye. Sharlie hoped she'd get a chance to use it soon on something other than envelopes marked “Occupant,” since the only letters she'd ever gotten were from Margaret, sent from down the street, or postcards from Walter's trips, to cheer her up when she'd been in Saint Joe's too long.

Dr. Diller slid the silver disk under her left breast and dropped his head, concentrating on the thumps from inside her chest. Despite Sharlie's regret for embarrassing him, she was amused by the surgeon's cautious respect. Since her public outburst, he no longer brushed off her hesitant inquiries, and it was now easier to ask questions.

“What do you think? Is there going to be a wedding?”

Diller stood away from the bed and offered her a cool smile. “As far as I'm concerned, yes,” he said. “I've told you the conditions.”

“Will you come?”

Diller was a literal man who carefully memorized other people's jokes and used them in speeches at benefits. He had little patience with humor, but had learned through experience that Sharlie was not always entirely serious. He searched her pale face now and saw only entreaty there.

“Please come,” she repeated.

She held out her hand to him, and finally he took it. For a moment Diller looked at the pretty girl on the bed and felt his life touched by hers. He gripped her hand tightly, and then suddenly she was Walter Converse's daughter again, valuable as a potential sponsor for his research program. Sharlie watched the detachment move into his face and change his eyes to ice again, but she remembered the brief thaw and was pleased.

After he'd left, it occurred to her that she had never seen Diller really smile. He could manage a tense curvature of the lips, but the stiff arc did nothing to light up his eyes or lift the other muscles of his face. She remembered the drawings she used to make as a child—round faces with great sad eyes and a straight line for the mouth. Margaret would take a look and say, “That's very nice, dear,” in her automatic voice, but Walter invariably burst out, “Christ! Can't you put a smile on the thing? Looks like a goddamn mortician.” After a while she began to put the curved mouth on her faces before Walter got to them. A few months ago she'd dug one of the childhood scribbles out of her mother's desk drawer, and the face seemed horrible to her—terrified eyes, anxious eyebrows, and the hideous crescent grin. So much like Diller—a cartoon face in which only the mouth changed positions, a mechanical twitch.

That's why he's so intimidating, she thought suddenly. That solemn expression always made her wonder what offense she'd committed: Had she forgotten her green pills? Sneak a nibble from somebody's banana cream pie?

Maybe if Sharlie did what he did all day, she wouldn't be able to smile either. Hands stuffed down into some poor slob's chest, holding the future quite literally in his fingers. She would make it her particular goal to see if she could persuade the stiff old thing to smile. Maybe at the wedding, if they pumped him full of champagne and surrounded him with a dozen adoring nurses.

Smiling was an admission of one's humanity, an acknowledgment of being touched by someone else, a response to the world. Diller made smiling seem like a weakness, other people's grinning faces contemptible and childish. There's nothing funny about science, he was saying with that sober expression, or about disease or the origin of the universe. Life is serious, this medical center is serious, and A. Carlton Diller is serious. Untouchable, inaccessible man—that's why she was always trying to entertain him, to charm him.

Well, what the hell, she smiled all too much anyway. How pleasing to just relax her facial muscles and frown to her heart's content. Excuse, please. To
his
heart's content. How much had her donor, poor Martin Udstrom, smiled in his lifetime, after all? Probably only in the midst of committing some heinous sadistic act.

She decided to try it out on the next person who walked into the room. Not one twitch of a smile, and she'd discover if she could suddenly become a figure of vast authority like Diller.