Second Hand Heart (3 page)

T
he heart is going to be on its way to us soon. Right now it’s still in this poor donor, who’s being kept alive on machines. But still, I think I might only have around an hour and a half, maybe two hours if I’m lucky, before they come prep me for surgery. They like to get a good head start on that, and once the heart is out and on its way to us, believe me, nobody wastes any time.

And there’s all this stuff I want to write down before that happens, because I won’t be writing for a few days, if not longer, and there’ll be all the painkillers, and all the pain, and I’ll be in the intensive-care unit for three or four days at least, and there’s really no privacy at all in the ICU, and besides, maybe afterwards it’ll feel like everything’s different. Maybe everything I was thinking before the surgery will seem really far away, if I even remember what it was. I probably won’t, though. I’ll probably have forgotten all the things I wanted to write by then.

The stuff I’m going to write is mostly not about the heart, and it’ll seem like I’m getting off track, but I still need to write it. I’m going to get down as much as I can as fast as I can, and if my writing is messy, it’ll just have to be messy.

That’s just the way things are sometimes. First the days go by so slowly in the hospital, and every minute seems like an hour. Then they find you a heart, and everything happens all at once. Everything happens really fast.

More on My Friend Esther, So the Next Thing I Write Will Make More Sense

W
hen I was five (nearly six), Esther moved in upstairs. She was an old lady even then. “Then” was about fourteen years ago now. That’s how long I’ve known her. About fourteen years. When you’re nineteen, that’s a long time to have known somebody.

My mother sent me up the outdoor stairs all by myself (looking back, I’m guessing she watched me out the window the whole way), with a little basket of muffins and a note to welcome Esther to the neighborhood.

I always liked it when I got to go anywhere by myself, which I think is part of why the whole Esther thing worked so well, right from the beginning. Because, you know, I’m thinking about it now, and I can’t think of any other times when I got to walk out of the house on my own two feet without my mother right there with me. When I was well enough to go to school, she’d walk me there and pick me up. When I wasn’t well enough, we were together all day long because she had to help me with my schoolwork. At least, until I was a whole bunch older, and by then I was so sick that I really couldn’t go out much anyway.

So, at that point in my life, walking up the stairs was pretty much my far-flung frontier, and it was completely thrilling, not to mention making me feel very self-sufficient and proud.

I had to stop twice on the one flight of stairs. To breathe. Just for a minute, though.

I knocked on Esther’s door, but she didn’t answer, which seemed weird, because we’d noticed she didn’t go out much. She had groceries delivered twice a week. Sometimes, later, she’d have a doctor’s appointment or something, but just in those first couple of weeks we really hadn’t seen her go out.

To this day I don’t know if she was home or not. I always had a feeling that probably she was, only maybe she didn’t answer the door for just anybody. That’s only a gut feeling, though. I never asked her, so I can’t say for sure.

After a while I gave up and left the basket in front of her door, and about two days later we got a little note from her saying thank you, but not too much more.

My mom was right on the borderline of thinking she was weird, or that there was something wrong with her, but I could tell she still wanted to give Esther the benefit of the doubt, at least for a while longer.

So then about a week or so later it was my birthday, the day I turned six. My cousins Max and Eva were there, making a lot of noise and being difficult, and two friends from the first grade, Pauline and Janna. And my mom, of course, and my grandmother and Aunt Betty, who was Max and Eva’s mom. That was it. For us, that was a big party.

We were having hot dogs and pork and beans and birthday cake, and I know my mom wanted to try one more time with Esther, so she made her up a little plate.

“I’ll take it up to her!” I said — screamed, actually, very desperate — because I was terribly hurt when I saw my mom was halfway out the door with the food.

Didn’t she know the thrill of freedom I got from walking up those stairs all by myself? How could she take an important moment like that away from me, when I had so few? I felt hugely misunderstood in that moment.

“No, that’s OK, honey,” she said. “It’s your party. You stay and enjoy your party.”

But the thing is, I wasn’t enjoying my party. Not at all. The kids were too loud, they were all hyped up on sugar, and they wanted to play.

I didn’t mind playing if it was something like a board game or dressing up dolls. And I liked card games a lot, Go Fish and Old Maid especially. But they wanted to play in that running/wrestling sort of way. And I not only couldn’t do that, I hated to be reminded that everybody else could.

So I was just desperate to get out of there.

I pleaded with her. I actually got down on my knees and held on to her legs so she couldn’t go. I was wearing a short skirt, and the rug made little indentations in my knees. They were red, and they stayed indented that way for a long time, because I remember looking down and seeing the red indentations while I was waiting for Esther to answer the door.

So, I guess I’ve let on that my mom gave in. Eventually. It took some heavy kneeling and begging, but she let me be the one who got to go.

This time I sort of knew, almost by the feel of the thing, that maybe Esther didn’t answer the door for just everybody. So I talked to her through the door.

I said, “Mrs. Schimberg? It’s only me. Vida. From downstairs. You know. The girl who left you those muffins.”

Esther is one of those elderly women who makes a big groaning, complaining noise when she pulls herself up from a sit, and I could hear that noise come right through the door.

After a minute the door opened, and she looked down at me. Not really smiling. Not making me feel bad, like I shouldn’t be there, but not really smiling, either.

And she said, “Yes, little girl? What can I do for you?”

I’d never heard a heavy accent like hers before, at least not that I could remember, and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.

I looked down at the tray of food I was holding, so she would look there, too.

“We’re having a birthday party downstairs, and my mother said to bring you this.”

“Whose birthday is it?” she asked. I said it was mine.

“Well. Happy birthday to you, young lady. Would you like to come in?”

I was very happy and excited about that, because I’d never been to visit anybody all by myself, and I’d never known anybody that my mother didn’t also know, except the kids from school, but they all knew each other, so that’s not quite the same.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and I started to walk in.

But she stopped me gently with one hand on my shoulder.

“What I’m about to say may sound very strange to you,” she said. “But I need to say it, and I hope you will do your best to understand it. You are welcome inside, and you may please bring that nice piece of cake. But the hot dog, which I’m guessing is a pork hot dog, and the beans, which I can see are pork and beans, will have to stay outside.”

It did sound a little strange, but I put the cake on the napkin and left the rest outside on her little stoop.

When I got inside, I was surprised by how bare everything was. My mother was really big on things. Filling up our living space with all kinds of things. Esther didn’t seem too wrapped up in things. Back then I thought it was because she’d just moved in. But that never changed. I just had to change my theories on why.

The window was open, and there were two pigeons and lots of little black birds on the windowsill, eating crumbs she’d put out for them. I liked the way the breeze came in, and the way you could hear the city sounds. My mother never left windows open. It’s like she was scared of air.

Esther explained to me what it meant to keep kosher. I didn’t completely understand. But I did get the connection between that and why the pork had to stay out on the stoop. I tried to follow it as best I could. I understood everything except why, but I figured it would be rude to ask too many questions about a thing like that. Especially questions that have a “why” in them, because that might make it sound like you’re judging.

“Do you have room for one more piece of cake?” she asked.

“I can always eat cake,” I said. That was back when I used to eat.

“Then you eat that piece, the one in your hand. And we can let your mother think that I at least enjoyed the cake, even if I couldn’t have the franks and the beans.”

So I sat with her, feeling more grown-up than I ever had, eating my third piece of cake in one day.

I looked on her counter and saw that most of the muffins we’d given her were still there, getting all old and stale, and then I looked at the windowsill again and I knew that’s what the birds were eating. I could see the yellow with black dots of the lemon-with-poppy-seeds one.

I guess I knew, somewhere inside me, that my mom would be hurt and offended if she saw what had happened to the muffins, but I thought feeding birds was actually a pretty nice thing to do with them. Maybe they weren’t kosher, either. I still wasn’t sure how you would tell, outside of pork, which is the easy part.

After we’d talked a little, just about the usual stuff like how old I was and where I went to school (which in my case was complicated because of how sometimes I wasn’t well enough and had to go to school at home), she said something nice to me.

She said, “You are a pleasant child to have for a visitor. Normally I am not so fond of being around children, but you are welcome to visit me anytime you please. Most children are very noisy, and they never stop moving. They make me feel too weary. You don’t tire me out. You hold still, like you were a grown-up, and you seem very quiet and contained.”

I guess I could accidentally be changing a couple of words in the remembering, since this all happened so long ago, but for days afterwards I kept replaying those words again and again in my head, which is why I think I’m still getting them pretty right.

I told her it was because I had a bad heart. I told her the doctors said I might only live to be a teenager, and maybe not even that long. Maybe only that long if I was lucky.

She sat back in her chair, and sighed. Then she said, “Sometimes people will tell you things, but then those things turn out to be wrong. No matter how much they think they know.”

“That’s what my mom says.”

“I’ve cheated death once already, for the privilege to grow old. And because I’m old, I now cheat death every day that I wake up and breathe air.”

“How did you cheat death?”

“Well, that’s a long, involved story,” she said, “and maybe one best left to another day. Maybe your guests will like to have you back at the party now. After all, it is in your honor.”

I was disappointed, but I just said, “OK, but I want to come back and visit you again.”

And she said, “Any time at all.”

I felt very honored, because I knew nobody else came and visited her — at least no one had up till then — and that made me feel special.

When I got outside, the beans were gone and there was an orange cat eating the hot dog. He (or she) had dragged it away from Esther’s door and was chewing on it and looking very defensively over his shoulder, and then when he saw me, he carried it away. That only left the bun, so I broke it up in pieces and sat down on the stairs, and then birds came close to me, because I guess it was worth it to them, for the bread.

I looked up at the window and saw Esther looking out, and she waved to me. That’s how I knew I had a new friend, one I’d made all on my own.

So after that I went up and sat and talked with her nearly every day. Even on the days when I wasn’t feeling my very best.

I could tell that my mom was a little concerned about the whole deal. Not like she thought there was anything bad about my visiting Esther. More like she could see I had a whole new area of my life, and it was a place she didn’t get to share. I remember she asked a lot of questions about what sort of things we discussed on our visits. And she made me a little mad once, because she went up and talked to Esther behind my back.

I only found out because later Esther said, “Your mother came up to see me. To express some concern about whether or not a six-year-old needs to be hearing stories about a concentration camp. I assured her I was not relating horrors that would give you bad dreams at night. Even so, I think she feels that all should be made to sound pleasant and happy to you. As if life is quite benign.”

I didn’t know the word benign when I was six, but I didn’t want to waste time asking.

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her that I sincerely felt someone needed to discuss the topics of living and dying with you, so that you would feel free to discuss these things as well. I said I believed that was why you sought out my company. Because we talk about subjects that you are not allowed to discuss in your home.”