(2006) When Crickets Cry (11 page)

"Oh, it's like anything," I dodged, thankful that she had blanketed me with the construction tab. "Once you learn how, it's not all that complicated. The right teacher, good tools, a little patience, and you could do it."

"I doubt it," Cindy said. "I can barely change a lightbulb without help from Annie."

"Well, sometimes a good team can make all the difference."

Cindy sat upright and began tightening her ponytail with several loops from a second pink rubber band. Her curious eyes had become assertive; the hallway talk had given her little information and raised as many questions as it answered. "Sounds like you know what you're talking about." She was digging again.

Annie's eyelids were falling down, giving me an easy exit. I whispered to Annie, "You get some sleep, and I'll come see you next week for dinner."

Annie unconsciously reached up and clasped the sandal now hanging on a chain and resting just above the tip of the scar on her chest. Her thumb gently rubbed the back as she nodded off to sleep.

Cindy looked embarrassed, like she had pushed too hard and too fast. She walked me to the door, fiddled with her hair, and said, "I think she likes the frog. Thanks."

I waved her off as if to say, Don't mention it.

Cindy handed me my heart-rate monitor and said, "Annie's doctor downloaded some really good information off here. He said you were right to put it on Annie. Said it helped him under stand the strength of her heart under strain and ... how long we have to find another one."

The sight of Annie plugged in to every outlet on the wall, beeping, flashing, and monitored by two to three nurses down the hall, brought back a lot. Everything was familiar. The smell of antibacterial soap, the temperature in the room cold enough to hang meat, the way the clear tape circled the IV and held the needle to Annie's arm, the constant monitoring of every aspect of life. I opened my mouth and spoke from my heart before my head had time to tell it to shut up.

"Does Annie like the water?" I asked.

Cindy looked confused. "Yeah, she can see it from her bedroom window, but she only gets in it to bathe."

"How about if I take you guys for a ride in a boat next week? Charlie, my partner, and I ought to have it finished by then, and I'll need to take a test run before the owner picks it up in time for next month's show."

Cindy smiled and looked back at Annie. "I think she'd like that. Just as long as it's not too rough and her doctor thinks she can handle it." She chewed on a cuticle and held one finger in the air. "You better let me get back to you on that." She nervously tucked the hair behind her ears again. "Transportation is . . . sometimes a problem." Her admission was painful.

"That sounds like a long story," I said, trying to ease her apparent embarrassment.

"It is, and it begins with the high cost of health care."

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of. I stepped through the door, beginning to feel uncomfortable as the reasoned voice in my head filtered down to my unreasonable heart.

"No worries. I'll pick you up." I scribbled on the back of a pizza coupon that had been taped to the door and said, "Here's my number. Check with her doctor and call me Tuesday morning to let me know if she's up to it."

Cindy nodded and shut the door behind me. Just as the door clicked shut, I spotted Annie's chart stuffed in the hanger on the wall outside her room. Without thinking, I slid it from the sleeve and began thumbing through its pages.

A nurse spotted me and yanked it out of my hand. "May I help you?"

Her hair stood a foot off her head in a tightly wound beehive, and she had plucked every last hair of her eyebrows. Her entire posture said, Don't mess with me!

I didn't.

"Uh ... no. Thanks. I was looking for ..."

"What?" she said, one hand propped on her hip.

"Pizza coupons," I said, trying my best to act stupid.

Without taking her eyes off mine, she reached in her multicolored shirt and pulled out a coupon for two large pizzas. "Now, what else can I do for you?"

She was probably an excellent nurse. I shook my head and waved the coupon. "Thanks."

She watched me as I walked out.

I unlocked the Suburban and sat for a moment while it warmed up. It was Friday night, time to head for The Well. I could already taste the Transplant.

ecause Dr. Hayes had been so bent on getting Charlie's and my blood, I went to the library and checked out every book I could find having anything to do with the human heart. If they wanted our blood, then there must have been some secret to it, so when I found a book that even mentioned the heart or blood, I read it. And that meant I read a lot of books.

One day as I sat in the library, surrounded by almost a dozen books, some pretty severe acne covering my face, Ms. Swayback, the librarian, tapped me on the shoulder and asked me, "Son, do you really intend to read all those books?"

"Yes ma'am."

"You mind if I ask you why?"

"I'm studying the heart."

She shook her head and put her hands on her hips. "Son, I wasn't born yesterday." She shook her head again and smiled a knowing smile. "Now, you mind telling me?"

"I'm gonna fix Emma. Figure out how to sew shut the hole in her heart."

"Oh, well, that sure explains it." She readjusted her hips, using them as shelves to prop her hands up. "Listen here, you little squirt, don't you get smart with me. And you better read every one of those books and then put them right back where you found them. I'm not wasting my time reshelving all those books just 'cause you're looking for the nudey pictures. I know your type."

I wasn't quite sure what she was talking about, but I said, "Yes ma'am," anyway. A week later, after I had actually read all those books, put them back exactly where I'd found them, and proved I wasn't going to be the trouble she thought, Ms. Swayback would help me find any book I wanted, even getting them on loan from libraries as far away as Florida.

She wasn't my only initial critic. My parents thought I had lost my mind, but when my science grade improved from a C- to a B+, they quit questioning me and even offered to let me stay late at the library when Ms. Swayback would drive me home.

People marvel at the genius of Mozart because he supposedly wrote "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" at the age of three and composed his first symphony at the age of twelve. And yes, of course he was a genius, but another way to look at it is that he just discovered early what it was God made him to do. That's all. For some reason, God gave him a little extra, or a little something different, and Mozart found out what that was and then got a head start on using it. Of course he was brilliant, but that's not the point. The point is he knew, and then he got to work.

I was no Mozart, and I had to work at it, but I never doubted what God made me to do. Not till much later.

The thought of Emma and her pitifully pumping heart got me out of bed in the mornings and kept me up late. Soon I was doing more work outside of school than in. I learned everything I could about how the heart and circulatory system worked: dark, sticky bluish-black oxygen-poor blood flowed into the heart, which immediately shot it back to the lungs where the carbon dioxide was taken out and fresh oxygen was poured in, turning it a bubbling, slippery purplish-red. Then, charged up and busting with pressure, it was returned to the heart, which again immediately shot oxygen-rich blood back to the body, which was starving to be fed.

And this occurred not once, but more than one hundred thousand times a day. I thought about this a long time. And when I understood this process, not only the physical anatomy of it, but the idea of it, what it did, the fact that when it worked, you lived, and when it stopped, you died, I shook my head and cried at the simplicity of it.

As early as 3000 BC, the Chinese had named the heart the Emperor of Organs. Since then, people have spent their whole lives looking for the Holy Grail, the fountain of youth, or the center of the universe. Why look so far away when it's right there in the middle of every human on the planet? The more I understood this, the closer I thought I was getting to fixing Emma.

I placed my hand on my chest, looked inside myself, and whispered, "Life is where the blood flows."

ne day a kid in my class brought his dad's Playboy to school and passed it around during recess. I took one look, and it struck me as completely wrong. It made me feel dirty, like I wanted to take a shower. Deep down, I knew that whoever had done that to those girls, taken all those pictures, must be a pretty sick person. My heart told me that.

I handed it back. That could be Emma, I thought.

Don't let me sound like some saint. Of course I wanted to see naked women, but beneath the part of me that was intrigued was another part, the part that knew better, the part that knew I was here to fix Emma. That part of me, where my soul lives, convulsed, vomited, and spewed disgust across the glossy centerfold.

Walking home that day, I was quiet. Even embarrassed. When Emma asked what was wrong, I told her. When we got to her steps and I had finished my story, she pulled me close and kissed me on the cheek-one heart speaking to another in a language that only the two of them speak.

Emma had the sickest heart of any human I'd ever met, but out of it flowed more love than from any other ten hearts put together.

SOON MY TEACHERS COULD NO LONGER ANSWER MY QUEStions, so I spent more and more time in the library soaking up everything to do with the human body. By the end of eleventh grade I had read several major textbooks for undergraduate premed students and even a few on Harvard's recommended list. I could quote them and see the diagrams in my head. But in all my study, I began to notice one problem: if I was going to science to find life and understand how to bring that back to a dying, diseased human heart, I had gone to the wrong place.

To science, the heart was just something to be dissected, labeled, and put on a shelf in pickle juice where a kid with glasses and a mouthful of braces could say, "Ooh" and "Ahh." The scientific approach was cold, unfeeling, and even the way they talked about it was sterile. As if the heart were nothing more than cells linked together by other cells.

Most books said it simply: The heart is a two-fist-sized organ divided in half by a muscular membrane called the septum. Each half has a thin-walled muscular collecting chamber called the atrium and a more muscular ejecting chamber called the ventricle that pumps blood through the lungs. Blood pours into and out of ventricles through valves, the tricuspid and pulmonary valves in the right ventricle and the mitral and aortic valves in the left. In the lungs, blood is reoxygenated, exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide, sent back to the heart through the pulmonary veins, and then fired through the body via arteries where the process is repeated more than one hundred thousand times each day, resulting in the movement of more than two thousand gallons of blood. Smoking, high blood pressure, birth defects, and elevated blood cholesterol can all damage the heart's ability to pump blood.

All the descriptions were so sterile. The books talked about it as if it were a sump pump stuck down in the muck and mire of somebody's backyard. Never in all my scientific reading did I encounter anything that talked about a broken heart. Never did I read anything about what the heart felt, how it felt, or why it felt. Feeling and knowing weren't important, only understanding. After all I had read, I was starving for someone to talk about the heart as if it were alive, not dead. Someone who wrote about the kind of heart I had found in Emma.

Emma knew this.

As I struggled with the library, diagrams, and Latin descriptions, she noticed the pained look on my face. We sat at a large table, separated by our stacks of books. Emma's physical activities were somewhat limited, so going to the library was something to which she looked forward and which we did almost daily. On my side of the table sat dozens of scientific books and manuals written by professors, PhDs and MDs, all known as experts in their fields. And on Emma's side sat dozens of old books, most written by men long since dead: names like Coleridge, Wordsworth, Milton, Keats, Tennyson, and Shakespeare.