Heart to Heart (4 page)

The sight of Elowyn hooked to all that technology was shocking, like a blast of icy water on my skin. I shuddered. Elowyn’s hand contracted and I jumped.

“Involuntary muscle reaction,” Terri said. “I called a nurse the first time I saw it. It means nothing.”

Tears filled my eyes.

“Just talk quietly. You’ll have between ten and fifteen minutes alone.”

She pulled over a chair and I sat close to the bed. Terri left and I leaned into Elowyn’s ear. “Hey, girlfriend. It’s me….” I wiped my eyes, decided to start again. “Remember when we first met? Hospital. Broken bones. You wore pink pj’s with little puppy paw prints.”

Only the hiss of the ventilator answered me.

I reminded her of school, of summers at the pool.

The beep of her heartbeat on a monitor sounded robotic.

“Wyatt’s sorry. Really sorry. He … he said it wasn’t what it looked like. Him and Jan.”

The hum of the hospital room’s AC filled the quiet. Elowyn didn’t move.

“Not that I forgive him. That’s up to you. So you have to wake up and deal with him.”

Nurses shuffled past, their soft-soled shoes giving an occasional squeak on the well-scrubbed floor.

“I slapped him around. Can you believe it? I really let him have it. He bled.”

Beneath her hooded eyelids, Elowyn’s pupils looked large, taking up all the space where her irises should be seen.

My voice trickled away. The machines were keeping her body alive, but where was she? Where was Elowyn?

The next day at school, people rushed me. They asked a hundred questions I couldn’t answer, or didn’t want to answer. I saw Wyatt in the halls, still wearing the Band-Aid Mom had stuck on him. We didn’t speak. Jan was a pariah. Everyone shunned her, and I heard later that she cried in a girls’ bathroom and went home early.

When Coach caught up with me, she asked questions too. “She’s bad off,” I told her, the words sticking in my throat.

“We still have a game Friday night,” Coach said.

I’d forgotten about facing Decatur. “Coach, I don’t think I can play.”

“The team needs you. I can’t lose my two best players at the same time.”

I wanted to scream,
My best friend’s in a coma! I can’t think about volleyball!
Instead I said, “I—I just don’t think I can keep my head in the game.”

“Is that what she’d want you to do? Bail on the team? The girls are shook up, and you’re the captain.”

That was unfair. Of course Elowyn wouldn’t want me to bail. I could almost hear her saying, “Don’t be a wuss. Suit up. Kick Decatur butts.”

Coach said, “If she wakes up between now and then, you’re free to hang with her. But if she doesn’t, I expect you to show up.”

It sounded cruel and hard-hearted, yet I knew I had to play. I had to play because Elowyn couldn’t. Because she might not play for the rest of the season.

Decatur stomped us. Coach begged, prodded, and pleaded with the squad, but our team fire was out. Especially mine. I kept playing the ball to Elowyn’s spot on the rotation, but she wasn’t there. She wasn’t there.

After the game Wyatt came up and asked me if I wanted a ride to the hospital. Mom had given me permission to stay past my usual curfew if I wanted to go see Elowyn. I understood Wyatt’s need to come—he just wanted to be close by, same as me.
We didn’t have much to say to each other during the drive, which suited me just fine.

Terri hugged us both when we stepped into the waiting room. She looked ready to drop; still, she was gracious. “It’s good to see you, Wyatt.”

He didn’t meet her eyes, and he looked as if he might cry. “I’m really sorry,” he said.

“We all are. Do you want to see her?”

Terri’s question surprised me because I didn’t think Wyatt deserved to see her.

“Yes.” Wyatt’s voice sounded hoarse.

“Maybe you can reach her. We can’t.”

Terri’s words made me feel as if I’d failed her and Matt and Elowyn. I reminded myself that Elowyn loved Wyatt. Love was supposed to be strong medicine. I told Wyatt, “You should talk to her.”

He followed Terri into the unit, and they came out about ten minutes later. Wyatt’s face was the color of chalk. He didn’t say a word. He walked down the corridor and punched the button for the elevator. It wasn’t until after he was gone that I realized my ride home was also gone. It was almost midnight and I’d have to call Mom to come pick me up.

Terri took my hand. “I’ll take you home. Matt wants me to sleep at the house tonight. He’ll return and stay with his Sugar Plum.”

When Matt stepped into the room, Terri fell into
his arms. I watched them hold each other for the longest time, and wondered what it would be like to have someone to lean on like they leaned on one another. I wondered if Mom ever missed my dad, then pushed the thought away. Why should she miss him? She’d given him a choice, and he’d chosen to leave us.

In the car, Terri was uncharacteristically silent. The heater turned me buttery warm, and within minutes I was falling asleep. The strain of the past few days, the exertion of tonight’s game, the sadness inside my soul made me want to sleep for a year.

In my driveway, Terri turned off the engine and touched my shoulder, rousing me out of my stupor. “They want to turn off the machines,” she said quietly.

“What?” I was suddenly wide awake. “But why?”

“Her doctors tell us she’s fallen farther down on her test scores. They say she has an irrevocable deep-brain trauma and for all intents and purposes, she’s experiencing brain death. Fixed and dilated pupils … doll’s eyes, they call it. No response to pain. No upper-brain activity on her CT scans. The only thing keeping her alive is the machines. She’ll never recover.” Terri stared out the windshield, recited the facts and statistics in a voice without inflection.

“Never?” I couldn’t process what she was telling me. Never was forever.

“Her body will begin to shut down with or without the machines.”

“Do you believe them?”

She turned her face toward me. “My little girl’s never coming home.”

The car was turning cold and I shivered as I tried to wrap my mind around Terri’s words.

She took a deep breath. “Did you know she’d checked the little box on the back of her driver’s license to be an organ donor?”

“I—I don’t think so.” I dragged out the words in an effort to remember something. “There was a man who came to our school. He wanted to impress on us about safe driving. You know, not drinking and driving. And he told us that his brother was killed by a drunk driver, but that he’d donated his brother’s organs to help others, so that his brother hadn’t died for nothing. He told us that organ donation was … like … you know, noble. Elowyn and I talked about it. I didn’t know she’d checked the box.”

“Well, she did. The transplant people talked to us yesterday. They said her organs would go to help a lot of people.”

“You’re going to give her organs away?” The idea made me feel sick. Not organ donation in principle—the man’s speech had been inspiring—but giving away Elowyn’s organs. How could they?

“It’s what she wanted done. She’ll look perfectly
fine after … afterward. She’ll look the same on the outside of her body. Her organs will save many lives and …” She didn’t finish the sentence.

I almost gagged on my tears, but I didn’t break down in front of Terri. “You’re sure? About … her brain?”

She nodded, sniffed hard. “We’re going to spend tomorrow with her. In a private room. If she’s still unresponsive at the end of the day, we’ll let them turn off the machines. A transplant team will be there….” She broke down and couldn’t continue.

Neither could I. I grabbed at the door handle, numb and blind with tears.

Before I could tumble out into the cold, Terri called, “Please come and say goodbye to her tomorrow.”

I made it inside the house before I sank to my knees sobbing. Mom was waiting up and she ran to me.

“What’s wrong, baby? What’s wrong?”

I managed to tell her the story in spurts. She listened, found me a tissue, made me stand up and walk into my room. She sat me on the bed and slipped off my shoes, laid me down, and covered me with my comforter, the one Elowyn and I had bought together after we painted my walls purple and my furniture white.

I cried into the soft material. At some point, Mom crawled into the bed with me and held me, whispering soothing words in my ear. She comforted me as if I were a small child afraid of the dark, until my body stopped shaking and I drifted into a dreamless black sleep.

I was like a dead girl walking. Mom and I were on the surgical floor at the hospital, heading toward the private room where Elowyn lay still and hooked to machines. She was being kept alive to keep her organs usable. I knew that behind the huge double doors at the end of the hall a transplant team was waiting.

After talking to Mom for most of the morning, I was resigned to what was happening. I understood that parts of Elowyn’s body would go to save others. I knew that with my head. But my heart had a hard time accepting the reality.

“Is that the way you’d want to live?” Mom had asked me. “Hooked to machines?”

“Would you turn me off?” I asked her.

“What would you want me to do?”

I saw nothing but brick walls. “I guess I’d want to donate,” I answered. “It seems best. If I’m dead.”

She brushed my cheek. “Like the Wicked Witch of the West in the
Wizard of Oz?
Really, most sincerely dead?”

I gave her a weak smile.

Terri and Matt were in the room with Elowyn, on either side of her bed, each of them holding one of her hands and weeping. The vent tube was taped to her face and the machine hissed softly, doing the job she could no longer do on her own. “Come in,” Terri said. Her eyes were swollen and red. “Tell her goodbye.”

Mom and I came closer. I stared at Elowyn’s face. Some of the swelling had gone down and the skin around her eyes was turning from red to purple. “She looks asleep,” I said. I wanted to touch her while her skin was warm and alive.

“Go ahead,” Terri said, as if reading my mind.

I stroked Elowyn’s cheek, hoping she’d flinch, wishing she’d sit up and say, “Cut that out!”

My throat filled with a million things to say, but my voice couldn’t make its way out. I took a step back. Terri pulled me into her arms, held on so tight I could hardly breathe. I felt her trembling. “You were like a sister to her,” she whispered in my ear.

I was blinded by tears.

“It’s time to go.” Mom put her arm around my waist and helped me to the open door. We made our way back down the hall, leaving Elowyn’s parents alone with their daughter and her machines and the waiting transplant team.

Her name was Elowyn Eden.

She was my best friend.

She died when she was sixteen years old.

The call came early on a Sunday. I heard the phone ringing from upstairs, where I lay in my room in bed sucking oxygen from a big green tank parked beside me, my companion almost twenty-four hours a day. I heard Mom pounding up the stairs and then she threw open my bedroom door. Breathlessly, she said, “They have a heart.”

I bolted upright. My heart fluttered from the exertion and the adrenaline rush.

Mom hurried to my closet, opened the door, and took out a suitcase, packed for months waiting for this call to come. “Don’t move. I’ll toss this in the car and then help you downstairs.”

After dropping off the suitcase, she returned, helped me to stand, and switched my oxygen to a
portable unit I could carry in my hand. I took a long look around my room, wondering when I’d see it again. Or if. In the car I said, “I hope this isn’t another false alarm.”

When I was thirteen, the call had come from Emory Hospital saying that the national donor service had a heart for me. The heart was being flown to Atlanta from another city in Georgia, and the transplant team was ready and waiting. We got to the hospital fast. I was prepped for the operating room, excited, ready for a new heart, a real life. I could run again! Jump. Go to a regular school. Then the big letdown when the heart had been declared unsuitable and I’d had to go home with my same old-same old.

“You’re at the top of the list,” my doctor had said, trying to console me.

I knew the transplant was based first on need, on blood and cell compatibility, and on body size—they couldn’t put a giant’s heart into a small kid. Being at the top of the list didn’t matter if the other things didn’t match. “What a way to be number one,” I said. “No effort on my part. Just luck.”

Now, a year later, here I was again, all hopeful, longing for the transplant to happen, for it to be over with, for me to finally be well.

Mom blew through a red light. “What if a cop stops our Batmobile?” I asked.

“Then he can give us an escort,” she answered.

At the hospital nurses were waiting for me with a wheelchair. They got me upstairs, put me on a gurney, and began to prep me. A hospital gown, a paper cap on my head, IVs in my arms, electrodes on my chest. Dr. Chastain appeared in the room. “How are we doing, Arabeth?”