Under My Skin (12 page)

She gives me a half-smile. “We’ve been working together for months, now, Adam. I can tell when something is bothering you. It’s better if you go along with the process and comply with therapy.”

I gesture to the almost empty café. “If we’re doing real therapy, shouldn’t we meet in private, like in your office?” I can’t believe I suggested being alone with her, but her office is a few blocks away, far enough where we wouldn’t have time to walk there.

“Depends on the type. When reintegrating post-transplant patients with their new life, it’s often beneficial to do every day activities with them to gauge their response and tolerance. It’s sort of like systematic desensitization.”

“How am I doing?” I glance out the window at the hospital, less than half a block away, regretting my question.

“You’ve barely drunk your coffee and your leg is jittering so bad I can feel the floor shaking.”

I freeze. Bollocks, I hadn’t even noticed my leg jumping up and down.

“What’s making you anxious?”

I chew on my lip ring, studying the silver flecks in the fake granite tabletop while I mull over my options. I could tell her the truth—she freaks me out. Or I could play the game and offer some excuse about not adjusting to having a new heart. I lived with the defective one for so long. It’s like upgrading a crappy four-cylinder engine to a supercharged V8. A nice idea, except my chassis is still the same economy car model. With rust. And bald tires.

“Adam?”

I drag my gaze up to meet hers.

She lowers her eyebrows to a straight line. “Where do you go when you retreat in your mind?”

“You know what I think about this whole thing. I don’t have to repeat myself.”

“What whole thing?”

I sigh. “The transplant. Having a new heart.”

“What’s it like?”

“I … don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.”

I prop my elbows on the table and rest my forehead in my laced hands. A burst of cold air buffets me as a group of customers enters the café. Their chatter is bright, but it soon fades into the background. I focus on taking even breaths.

“Did you expect things to be different?” she asks.

“What do you mean?” My leg starts to jackhammer again. I drop my hands to the table.

She runs her finger along the rim of her coffee cup. “In a lot of ways, the surgery is the first step and the waiting before is, well, waiting.”

“Right. This is my second chance. One door has closed and another opened.” I leave off the yada-yada. I chug the rest of my coffee.

Her mouth tugs up in a half-smile. Wry. Challenging. “Which brings me back to the question. Did you expect things to be this way?”

I lean back in the chair and suppress a wince from stretching my chest. “What way are they?”

She narrows her eyes as if she’s deciding how much to yield. “You’ve got a new heart, but also new responsibility. There are more things to worry about, like infections, rejection of the donor heart, and the need to constantly be vigilant.”

“Vigilant?”

“If you get sick, your body can’t fight it off like healthy people.”

There it is. I’m not healthy. I’ve got a fresh start, I’m heart disease free, and I’m still weak. “What’s the point?” I mumble.

Shaw drags her chair closer until our knees almost touch. I fight the instinct to retreat. “Say that again? I didn’t hear you.”

I sigh. Once the words tumble out, I can’t reel them back in. She’ll hound me until I repeat them. “I’m wondering what the point of all of this is. I have a new heart, but now I have to take all these pills to prevent rejection and if I don’t, my body will attack it. It’s not a part of me. It’s foreign. But it’s also inside me, waiting to turn against me.”

“That’s the vigilant part I’m talking about.” She spreads her palm on the table. Delicate blue veins tangle between the tendons of her hand.

“My parents think I should be fixed, but I’m not. I couldn’t trust my old heart and I can’t trust this one.”

She retreats to the other side of the table. “Your father called me early this morning. He wonders why you’re not more grateful for the gift you’ve been given.”

I choke on a breath. It’s like a lance has impaled my chest. So far, Mum has been the one to communicate with Dr. Shaw and Dad’s taken a hand’s off approach. Now they’ve all ganged up on me. None of them care to listen. They think they know what’s going on, but they don’t and trying to explain things only makes it worse. I give up. Forfeit. Surrender.

“To tell you the truth, I have to wonder the same thing.” Steel glints in her eyes.

“I’m not talking about this anymore with you or anyone else.” I stand and walk away from her.

The light-hearted-hey-let’s-play-hospital-hooky outing is over.

Darby

Since I proved how well my lungs worked by screaming my head off, I was immediately moved to the pediatric wing. That was yesterday. Twenty four hours have passed since I woke up and my brother didn’t.

He’d survived the crash. Or his body had. But his brain had been damaged so badly he’d never come out of the coma. Mom and Dad had decided to stop life support. They gave up on him.

And here I sit, empty, sometimes quiet and numb and other times crying uncontrollably. Mom and Dad don’t know what to do with me. Nurses try to help me with games and treats and smiles. The doctor says my broken bone in my neck should heal and I’ll be able to start physical therapy soon, but she worries about willingness to go along with it.

I sit in middle of my bed, wrapped in three blankets, each pale pink. I rock back and forth, staring at the pastel safari animal decals plastered on the mint green walls. Baby giraffes, elephants, and gazelles jump across the painted grass under the lemon yellow ceiling. Their pale colors contrast with the plaid curtains that are bright red, green, and blue. The designer must’ve gotten confused. Are we in Kindergarten Scotland or Baby Zoo Africa?

I’m confused too. It doesn’t make sense why I lived while Daniel, the perfect son, brother, athlete, friend, and student, died.

Mom and Dad should forget about me, but they keep trying to fix me.

I don’t deserve it.

Mom went so far as to bring in my art supplies this morning. Says I should try painting to work through my grief. It can help me regain strength too. The canvases and supplies she brought lay abandoned in the corner, alone.

I have no desire to touch them. No desire to remember my old life.

Through it all, I keep breathing and my heart keeps beating while everything else inside me shrivels and dies.

Mom and Dad arrive after dinner. They hang their coats neatly in the locker-sized closet and drag two chairs to my bed.

Yay, broken family quality time.

Dad breaks the silence first. “Did you eat supper?”

I chew on a ragged fingernail.

Mom reaches for a can of Boost with a sigh. She pulls the tab and drops a straw into the hole. She holds the can under my nose. “Drink up. Strawberry is your favorite.”

I glare at her with my best leave-me-alone face.

“Open your mouth,” she says, like she’s talking to a toddler.

I suck on the straw until it’s all gone. I might as well chew on ash.

Mom sets the empty can on the table and sits next to me. She wraps her arm around my shoulder. “Darby, honey, please tell us what’s going on. I know you’re sad about Daniel. We all are. But we need to communicate in order to get through it. Sitting here, doing nothing, it’s not healthy.”

I pick at a scab on my hand. The pain distracts me from her comfort.

A tiny dot of blood pools in the groove. I wipe the droplet away with my thumb and then suck on it. The taste of bitter metal steeps on my tongue.

Dad unbuttons the top button of his shirt and tugs his tie loose. “Darbs, you need to snap out of this.”

I rip my fingers through my greasy hair.

Mom rests her forehead against my temple. Her tears stick to my skin. “We’ve already lost one child. Don’t make us lose another.”

So they’re holding onto me like a life raft, hoping I can stop the sinking Titanic that is our lives. They know I’m defective. They shouldn’t waste their time.

“Leave me alone,” I say. I want to add, “Forget about me. Pretend I’m dead. Move on.”

“That’s not going to happen.” Mom pulls me closer.

“We love you, Darbs.” Dad moves to the other side of my bed. He wraps his arms around both of us, sandwiching me in affection they’d ordinarily pour over Daniel.

Sweat breaks out across my forehead. My palms are clammy.

What they don’t say is they loved him more. The strawberry drink sloshes in my stomach. It’s sick that my brother has to die for my parents to pay me any attention. It’s worse that I want to sink into it. But I can’t. I don’t deserve it. I’m the booby prize when what they should have is the grand prize—their perfect son.

I choke out a sob. “Why didn’t I die?” The question comes out in a wail.

Dad hugs us tighter.

The pit of lava in my gut bubbles up.

“The accident was my fault.” I wait for their arms to retreat.

Mom stiffens.

“What do you mean?” Caution coils around Dad’s words.

I sniff. “We were arguing.”

“Oh, Darby.” Mom eases away from me—the beginning of her withdrawal from me. Good. This fits our normal script better. While it hurts, it also makes more sense.

I hug myself to hold in the bits of me that are crumbling off. “He’s dead because of me.”

Mom tucks a strand of my icky hair behind my ear. “It was an accident. The roads were icy. You had nothing to do with that.”

“I distracted him.”

“What were you fighting about?” Dad retreats to the window and rests his butt against the sill. He rolls up his sleeves. Time to get to work on solving the puzzle of Darby.

I suck on my bottom lip, hesitating. It’s too embarrassing to tell. My brother’s dead because of a couple pictures and a lame revenge plot. Maybe putting it out there will be the final blow. Mom and Dad will have to leave once they find out what I did.

Mom stands. “Did you get in trouble at the game?”

“No, I wasn’t
in trouble
.”

She returns to the chair, taking her warmth with her. As foreign as it is, I miss it. “Then what happened?”

“It was stupid.” Bile rises to my throat.

Dad lowers his chin. His face is all wrinkled forehead, squinted eyes, and thin lips, cancelling out his “we love you” line from a minute ago. Love shouldn’t have conditions, but it does for me. “That makes no sense, Darby. Why pick a fight when the weather was so bad? Couldn’t it have waited until you got home?”

This is what I’m used to. Anger. Confusion at my stupidity.

“Phillip, go easy on her,” Mom says.

“She just said she caused the accident, Annette!” He shoves off the windowsill. His eyes are sharp and piercing. “Why is it that you’re always in the mix when bad things happen?”

“
Phillip
.” Mom scrunches her face like she’s going to be sick.

I stare up at him, shaking. “You wish I died instead, don’t you?”

“Jesus, Darby.” Dad runs his hand through his thick black hair—care of Just For Men hair dye—and paces the small area between my bed and the window.

“We don’t wish you died,” Mom says. She slides to the edge of her seat, but doesn’t reach out to touch me. Maybe it’s finally dawning on her that life will be smoother without Darby to mess it up.

“Yes, you do.”

“Listen to me, honey. Accidents happen.” Mom’s not letting go.

I can’t understand why.

Dad pauses, tipping his head back to stare at the ceiling.

“Daniel’s death was not the end for him. His heart went to someone right here, in this hospital. He gave the gift of life to so many others.” Mom expression brightens with hope. Soon she’ll start talking about how he’s looking down on us from Heaven.

Dad covers his mouth with a hand. His face goes red. He sucks in a shaky breath. I doubt he feels the same way.

“I have to hold onto that and you should too,” Mom adds.

I toss the blankets aside and stand. My greasy hair covers my face in chunks. I feel crazy. I probably look crazy. “You let the doctors cut him up in pieces and give parts of him away? Is this hospital running a chop shop?”

Mom recoils. Horror snaps through her eyes, widening them with disgust. “How could you say something like that?”

“He wasn’t dead. You had to pull the plug.” Someone else has Daniel’s heart. It beats in his or her chest, strong, alive.
Stolen
. And my brother is lying dead in a coffin.

Mom slumps into the chair. Her whole body shakes.

Dad circles to my side of the bed. “He was brain dead, Darby.”

“He was alive!”

“He wasn’t, honey. His body was, but his mind was gone.
He
was gone. H-he’s in Heaven now.” Mom’s voice shakes like she’s grasping onto what she’s saying with her fingernails. Problem is, her hold is slipping. The rock under her hands is sand, and there’s nothing to steady her.

A chill shudders down my spine. I don’t believe in life after death. Once your heart stops beating, that’s it. Game over. And I certainly don’t buy the whole silver lining bullshit. I mean, she’s happy that Daniel’s organs were donated? Doesn’t change the fact that he’s dead.

He’d dead. He’s dead!
He’s dead!

I yank on my c-collar, gasping for breath. I pull until the Velcro tabs loose.

Mom launches from her chair. She clamps her hands over mine. “Phillip, help.”

Dad pries my left hand away from the collar while Mom does the same with my right. “Darby, stop.”

“Get off me!” My screech pierces my ears, but I don’t care. I twist and bend, but Dad manages to pin my wrist behind my back. He wraps his other arm around me while Mom calls for help.

It’s too much. I break down into sobs.

About six nurses and aids rush in, ready for action.

Nissa, a petite woman with a bubble gum pink stripe in her hair takes the lead. “What happened?”

Mom quickly explains while the group yanks on rubber gloves. It’s about to get down and dirty.

“You have to leave the collar on, Darby.” Nissa speaks in a calm voice.