has been smiling on us all this time, Evan,” my father is saying. Did I mention he was in here with me? He is. He’s helping me get into my clothes. I’m strong enough to dress myself, but I’m letting him feel useful.
My mother’s here too, though she’s outside the room, to give me privacy while I get dressed, and probably also because she feels guilty about letting Reverend Tadd crap all over the last few minutes I had with my sister.
They’re releasing me from the hospital today. Over the past several years, Julia and I have spent a combined total of over five hundred days here. During those five hundred days, I’ve imagined this final day many times. In my favorite version, we walk out the front doors, and shortly afterward, the hospital is leveled by an earthquake, and then ripped apart by a tornado, and then set on fire by roving bands of zombies. After that, if “fortune keeps smiling on us,” packs of wild dogs will urinate all over the rubble as a warning never to rebuild.
“It’s nice to see you smiling, Evan,” my dad says, when my head emerges from the sweater he’s pulling into place over my Frankenstein torso.
I decide to let him in on the daydream. “I was thinking that after we walk out of the hospital’s front doors—”
“You know we’re going to wheel you out in a wheelchair, right? No walking just yet. But soon!” he tells me cheerfully.
“Oh, right,” I say. He is so literal.
Every doctor and nurse on this floor is lining the hallway as I’m wheeled toward the elevator by my parents. Even some of the more mobile patients are standing in their doorways to watch us, the medical pioneers. My father waves and smiles at all of them. My mother is soundlessly mouthing thank you, as though she were always one hundred percent behind this whole cannibalize-your-sister’s-organs scenario.
I’m dying to hear what Julia would say about this sad parade to the elevator. Would she tell me to feign a stroke? Or clutch my heart?
“That’s right, smile,” my father says quietly. “Let them see how grateful you are.”
Am I grateful? I haven’t heard her voice for two weeks.
In the main lobby, and the world outside is visible through the huge glass doors. My mother’s gone off to pull the car around, and when we see her driving into the pickup area, my dad says, “Here we go,” and pushes me out through the doors.
“Oh!” I cry out, because the strangest thing happens the moment I cross the threshold: the super-heart stops. There’s a heartbeat, and then there is nothing, stretching out from one instant to the next and the next and the next. I cannot breathe, I cannot move. My super-heart has walked off the job without giving notice.
My father’s smile falters, and then, in a panic, he shakes me. “Evan? Evan! Is it your heart?”
There’s a thunk! in my chest as the heart starts up again. Then, thump-thump, thump-thump, it’s going—as if nothing at all went wrong. If anything, I feel a new surge of vitality.
“Evan?” he says again, frantically.
I wave him away. “My heart … is fine,” I tell him.
“Are you sure?” He looks back through the doors, ready to flag someone down.
I nod, give him an emphatic thumbs-up. My mother has pulled the car up right in front of us, so I push myself to my feet, and before he can even catch up to me, I’ve opened the back door of the minivan and climbed inside. In moments, we’re all in the car and my mother is driving away.
I watch the hospital growing smaller as we get to the end of the street. When at last I can see only a sliver of the hospital’s upper floor above neighboring buildings and it’s about to disappear from sight entirely, I think, Cue the earthquake!
Julia should laugh at that, but she doesn’t. I’m sitting in the back of the minivan alone, looking past my parents at the road ahead. Traffic and life are out there, ready to take me in.
It’s not until we are stopped at a long traffic light that I hear it. Very quietly, a voice asks, Do you want to kill all the other patients? The voice sounds not so much upset as curious, and it’s as soft as the murmur of an insect or a mouse.
I’m so startled, so unsure of what I’ve heard, that I can only bring myself to whisper an answer. “I don’t mind if they’re all evacuated first,” I breathe. “But the building has to go.”
There’s silence in response and I sit there, holding my breath. I’ve imagined the voice; it’s nothing but my hopeful ears playing tricks on me. The quiet stretches on as we travel through the city. My ears strain for anything besides the noise of the traffic, and they are disappointed.
But when we’ve gone a very long way and the hospital is nothing more than an anonymous mass far behind us, I hear this:
I agree. The hospital building has to go. The voice is growing as it speaks. It’s not a mouse’s voice anymore, it’s a kitten’s. So …, it says, growing into a child’s voice, what were the results of the operation?
“Just the usual,” I whisper, for fear of scaring her away. “You know, new heart, liver, pancreas, blah, blah, blah.”
No new brain? she asks. Her voice has become her real voice.
I shake my head.
So they screwed up the one thing you actually needed?
I nod. And smile.
Did you hear about that kid who was taken into the operating room, but then he had a change of heart?
“He didn’t know if he was going to liver die,” I whisper.
Aorta laugh at that.
“Like me—I’m in stitches.”
I don’t mean to cry, but tears spring to my eyes and a bunch of them are pushed out by a sudden burst of laughter that is incredibly painful to all of my recently sutured parts, which doesn’t make it any less magical.
“You were so quiet,” I whisper.
That was on account of being dead, she tells me. By the way, I heard you call it “your heart.” That was a little cold.
“I didn’t mean it,” I say, squirting out another set of unstoppable tears. “I meant our heart.”
I’ve said this last part loudly, and my father and mother both turn back to look at me.
“Our heart!” I say again to her.
“That’s right, Evan. Our heart,” my father says.
Is he serious? Julia asks. Are they going to take credit for everything forever?
“Probably,” I answer.
Julia sighs. Eventually she says, I guess it doesn’t matter what they think. What do we care?
There.
