Change of Heart (16 page)

Nurse Wynick helped Brian on with his mask and gown and paper slippers. He stepped quickly through the glass doors and stood by Sharlie's bedside, wondering if today would be the day she would wake up and talk to him. She opened her eyes and smiled.

“Hello, lovely man. That's you under all those sheets, isn't it? Did they make me bionic?”

Brian's eyes smiled, and he said, “Hi.” He couldn't seem to manage anything more.

“Give us a kiss,” Sharlie whispered.

Brian shook his head. “Not yet. I've got too many germs.”

“Oh, come on,” she urged. She reached out a hand for him, and he backed away.

“Sharlie, I'm not supposed to touch you.”

“Oh,” she said, disappointed. She held up her hands as if she were grasping a hose and pretended to spray him from head to foot. “You're disinfected. Hey, I'm injected, you're disinfected. Pretty good,” she giggled. Brian glanced at the window where Nurse Wynick watched them. She raised her eyebrows questioningly, but he smiled and turned away so he'd be left alone with Sharlie a little while longer.

“How're you feeling?” he asked her.

“Honey,” she said, grinning, “I am soo-per. Sooperb. And you know the best thing?” He waited, and she said, “All suspense, lambie-love? Really, listen, the
best
thing is …” She poked her toes out from under the sheets and said, “Taa-dah!”

Brian stared at her feet, then gave her a blank look.

“Pink toes! Can you believe it? Did you ever? I mean, who would have thunk it? No more blue feet, no more cold feet. Feel ‘em for yourself. They're roaster-toaster warm. Hot off the old ankle. Don't you just love ‘em?”

“Sharlie, you're bombed,” Brian said.

“Ho
ho
! Bombed, the man says. This Pearl Harbor Day?”

Brian started for the door, and Sharlie reached out to him. “Don't go away. Oh, please don't go away. I haven't told you the most important thing, the thing I came here to tell you, all the way from Seventy-fifth Street. All this way I tramped on my little pink toes, and you go away before I get to say my little speech, all polished and practice-perfect.”

Brian stood at the foot of her bed.

“Okay, lush, let's hear it.”

She waved her hands in an effort at fanfare, then pronounced ceremoniously, “You, Myron Borgan …” She started to giggle and tried again through the snickering. “I
mean,
you Byron Morgan … oh, dammit, dammit, it's no use …” She was laughing helplessly now, and Brian hurried outside.

He interrupted Nurse Wynick's conversation with the dietician. “She's drunk,” he said. “Absolutely looped.”

“Uh-oh,” Wynick said, and ran off down the hall. Brian called after her, “Hey, is she okay?” But there was no response. He went back to the observation window and saw that Sharlie was sound asleep again.

It was Tuesday morning, and Carlton Diller looked forward to making rounds. The notoriety over the Converse transplant had attracted several prominent surgeons from out of state, one of whom worked with Michael De Bakey in Texas. Diller was eager to exhibit his prize patient, so including the entourage of students, there were more than a dozen people peering at Sharlie through the observation window at nine thirty. Diller strode to the head of the bed to stand next to the microphone. Sharlie watched her audience solemnly.

“The patient is twenty-six years old, has suffered since birth from congenital valvular heart disease. Six weeks ago she experienced a pulmonary embolus secondary to a thrombosis from the tricuspid valve. Cor pulmonale developed rapidly. Enlargement and necrosis were severe, and the patient, upon arrival at the center, was near death.”

Sharlie stared at the disembodied heads in the window, the faces gawking at her with undisguised curiosity. She'd seen the same expressions last summer near Seventy-second Street where an old man had been run over by a taxi. He lay crushed and mangled while a mob of pedestrians gathered to watch him gasp out his last breath on the bloody pavement.

Diller leaned over to place his stethoscope against Sharlie's chest. As he reached to pull back her gown, she said in a low voice, “Don't touch me.”

Diller recoiled.

“What?” he said, stunned.

“I said, don't touch me.”

The faces at the window began to quiver like excited insects. One of the spectators spoke into the intercom beside the door. “She's still on immunosuppressives?”

Diller nodded. Sharlie glared.

“Any evidence of postoperative psychosis?” asked the clinical voice.

“Oh, lots,” Sharlie said into the microphone. “The patient is adjusting most lousily to having her heart cut out.”

Diller arranged his face into an expression of sympathy and tried to put his hand on Sharlie's shoulder. She shuddered and slapped at it as if it were a poisonous snake. Diller said, “Heh, heh,” with his mouth twisted into a grotesque smile.

Sharlie looked at her fascinated observers and choked out, “Go away.”

The faces remained until Diller turned to wave them off. They disappeared reluctantly, and he put his hand over the microphone to hiss at her through tight lips, “Quite a show, Sharon. I assume you're proud of yourself.”

“I'm not your prize freak, Doctor …
Dalton,”
she retorted.

“You don't have a speck of gratitude, do you?” he said contemptuously.

Sharlie felt the waves of rage rising until they towered inside like thunderheads.

“I'm a person, a
person.
Look what you did to me!” she wailed.

Before Diller could reach the call button, Nurse Wynick appeared with a hypodermic. Diller held Sharlie's flailing arms while the nurse plunged the needle in, and all the time Sharlie was howling, “Don't touch me, don't touch me, don't touch me!”

Sharlie lay quietly in her bed reflecting on conflicting sensations of freedom and insecurity. She had been unhooked from her last wire today. She knew she was doing well because her father had left for New York yesterday morning, and in the afternoon they transferred her into a real room with a window to the sunshine instead of the oversized incubator she'd been inhabiting. Her head felt quite clear despite some giddiness, which she attributed to the elation of functioning free of machinery. She put her hands to her cheeks. They were puffy, and she gathered from the way people looked at her that she had changed. So far, she hadn't mustered the courage to confront herself in the mirror, even though Dr. Lewis warned her that the heavy dosage of cortisone would eventually make her face swell. But there could never have been enough preparation for the dismay in Brian's eyes as he sat by her bed and gave her his brave smile.

She'd lost ten pounds since her arrival in Santa Bel, and barely required X rays to discern the skeleton under the thin layer of flesh. She sighed as her eyes skimmed over the surface of her blanket, filling her mind with the image of a pitiful scrawny body topped by a pouting cantaloupe head. Pumpkin head. She imagined herself climbing out of bed at night, slipping into her wheelchair, the mechanized horse, to careen through the hospital like a dreadful ghost from Sleepy Hollow in search of some poor Ichabod Crane in a room down the hall.

When she was six years old, she'd contracted a severe case of the mumps. They couldn't figure out where she'd picked it up, since she was isolated from other children. Nevertheless, one morning she had awakened with her glands ballooning out from under her ears. Margaret had held up a mirror, and her reflection made her laugh. She wore her hair short in what was known as the Buster Brown style. The texture was so fine even then that there was nothing much she could do with it except cut it in a straight line and keep it shiny clean. But with her hair perched on her bulging glands, it was as if her hairdresser had used a far too shallow bowl to guide his scissors. Margaret reminded her that one could get mumps on only one side; at least she was symmetrical.

Sharlie lifted her hands to her cheeks again and thought perhaps they'd shrunk just a little since yesterday. She imagined Dr. Rosen sitting all night by her bedside chanting paragraphs from psychiatric textbooks to reduce the size of her swollen head. Perhaps she should give some consideration to the other end of her anatomy in hopes of cheering herself. Her feet—now there was a miracle for you.

Hands finally unhampered by IV tubes, she pulled back the covers and gazed. Remarkable what a little healthy circulation could do for one's digits. Her toes glowed and twinkled, robust testimony to the magical fingers of Lewis and Diller. First thing out of the hospital, she'd buy a pair of sandals so that whenever she felt the urge, she could take a quick reassuring peek. She had worried about lying in bed with Brian, imagining his body tense beside hers in anticipation of the icy implantation of her foot on his leg. She had warned him that sleeping together would require her wearing socks to bed out of compassion for his central nervous system.

She'd read somewhere that a man achieved mystical sexual heights if ice were applied to his genitals at the moment of his climax. Opportunity lost—they could have used her feet.

She covered her toes and picked up the inventory, deciding to skip everything between ankles and navel, since those areas seemed basically unaffected. She couldn't recommend heart transplantation for sex therapy patients, at least not today. The idea of body contact sent tremors of agonized protest along her scar tissue. She hadn't yet braved looking at it, but with her fingers gently traced the track running from her neck to the middle of her abdomen. Which brought her stocktaking to the
piéce de résistance
—the heart of things, so to speak.

If, out of fear of alarming her, they had told her she'd undergone a gall bladder operation instead of a heart transplant, she'd known the truth despite their denials. She could almost hear the steady, efficient hum of valves meshing, the rhythmic click of an effortless pulse.

But the sense of loss astonished her. What had they done with her poor old, incompetent, derelict, flabby, wheezing heart? Certainly they snipped off a piece to examine under their microscopes and marvel over. But the rest? Did they chop it up and flush it down the toilet? Did they stuff it into a bottle of formaldehyde to repose on a dusty shelf with fellow rejects—lackluster livers, somnambulant spleens, careworn kidneys? If she'd had the foresight, she would have requested that they feed it to the handsome Bengal tiger Brian had reported seeing at the Santa Bel zoo. Surgical consent forms should include the patient's instructions for the destruction of offending organs.

The fact was, she missed it—pathetic, unserviceable thing—and wondered how Cyrano de Bergerac would react to a nose job. Certainly he'd rue the loss of his grotesque protrusion even as he admired his sleek new profile in the mirror.

Disposal seemed abhorrent, almost sacrilegious. Poor heart, house of all her most intimate yearnings. She wouldn't ask.

That decision made, at least temporarily, the ultimate dreaded topic flashed through her mind in bright-red capital letters: DONOR.

Fear invaded her stomach and sat there like an indigestible lump. She thought of Diller and her angry outburst. She had never before lost control of herself like that. But it wasn't only the surgeon. There had been moments these last few weeks when she'd felt the madness rising in her throat with the staff, with her parents, even with Brian. She would clench her teeth against it, trying to wait it out, feeling as if she were engaged in a battle against an unfamiliar and violent enemy, who had taken up residence inside her.

They wouldn't tell her that morning, when they'd pieced together their final vital tests and rushed her, drugged and protesting, down to OR. In the elevator it suddenly seemed so crucial that she receive the heart of someone simpatico. Through her tranquilized fog, she'd begged to be taken back upstairs. She'd rip up the consent form she'd signed under the pleading eyes of Brian and her parents the night before.

Please,
she'd joked.
Let it be someone who played the harpsichord. I've always wanted to play the harpsichord.
They mustn't give her a mortician. Or a child abuser. Or a schizophrenic—these things were chemical. A dream is a wish one's heart makes—so give her a heart that makes nice wishes. A gentle, sensitive, intelligent heart. She'd grasped the hand of the nurse as the elevator doors opened and they rolled her bed out of the door. “Please,” she'd cried, “Don't let it be inharmonious. The rest of me …”

Then her bed became a silver and white ship that sailed upon a white sea. Her tongue grew fatter and fatter, and her brain turned to flannel, and there'd been no more protesting until she woke up in the ICU to finish her sentence: “… won't like it.”

Today the operation sat in her mind like a dark, snaking question mark, and somewhere within its coils lurked the secret of her future. She felt sick and frightened. When Brian came later, she'd try out her courage again and perhaps ask him what she so desperately wanted-yet-didn't-want to know.

Perfect gambit for a new quiz show, she thought. They'll call it
Name Your Donor.
The master of ceremonies will introduce the recipient, offering a brief medical history, perhaps even including a film clip of his or her transplant operation. Then a curtain will rise, revealing four marble slabs upon which repose four dead bodies, each with an identical scar (three of them provided by skillful network makeup artists). Each “donor” is accompanied by his next of kin, who answers the recipient's questions: “How did Number Three pass away? … Number Two, when was brain death established? … Number Four, what legal process is necessary to permit donation of organs for transplantation?”

Finally the recipient is allowed to wander among the corpses, examining the scars for professionalism and originality, and is then given fifteen seconds to make the final judgment as to the identity of the real donor. During this moment the suspense mounts, with the frenzied studio audience shouting suggestions. Then the thinking-music stops, and the recipient announces his decision.

If he's correct, he wins an insurance policy that will cover his medical expenses for the remainder of his life. The donor's family gets a check for three thousand dollars and taxi fare to the nearest funeral home. However, if the recipient is persuaded to choose a fake donor, the dead person's next of kin wins the cost of a funeral complete with horse-drawn hearse, marching band from New Orleans, and burial at Forest Lawn.

Sharlie thought it was too bad Bela Lugosi wasn't around anymore. Maybe they could get Vincent Price as emcee.

She glanced at the clock above her head, crestfallen that the game-show idea had provided only five minutes' worth of diversion. She wondered what she could possibly think about that wasn't going to send her anxiety level shooting sky-high, past the meters on her monitor—no more distinguishable clicks, just the blur of frantic heartbeats in one alarming buzz.

When Brian suddenly appeared, she nearly leaped out of her bed. He laughed at her startled expression. “Don't you recognize me without my Klan attire?”

“I recognize you,” she said quietly. “That's more than I can say for me.”

Brian looked quickly at the door, and said in mock horror, “Good God! They sent me to the wrong room.” He started to get up, and she tugged at his hand.

“Hey, don't leave me, whoever I am.”

He stared at her for a second. “Dr. Rosen's coming to see you tomorrow,” he said finally. Sharlie's eyes veered away. “The mood swings are not entirely chemical, you know,” he said softly.

“I was awful to Dr. Diller,” Sharlie said.

“He'll survive.” She kept her eyes averted from him. “Sharlie, why can't I look at you?”

“I'm ugly.”

“That's no excuse.” He hooked a finger under her chin and turned her face to his.

“Amazing you managed to find anything to hang on to,” she muttered.

“Is that all this is? The temporary cherub look? I think you're pretty cute.”

She was silent.

“Come on,” he said. “What is it really?”

Her eyes widened with fear. “I want to know who it was.
Don't tell me!”
The last words came out an urgent plea.

He ran his finger along her shoulder and down one arm. “You don't ever have to know about it. It's not important. Just rejoice in those rosy pink toes and forget about where they came from, okay?”

She was quiet a moment. “I can't,” she said finally. “I've got somebody else's heart in here. I should at least write a thank-you note to the next of kin, don't you think? It's a pretty extravagant present, somebody's dear-one's insides.”

“Hey, listen, Sharlie, most of the time the patient doesn't even know who the donor is. Like adoption—”

She interrupted him. “But this time everybody knows who it was. Except for me. There's something special about this one.”

“Not particularly,” he said blandly.

“Brian, some nurse was in here and started talking about all the reporters in the waiting room and got all clutched when I started asking questions.”

“I think you should speak to Dr. Rosen about it.”

“It was somebody famous, wasn't it?”

“No, not really.”

“Was it a man or a woman?”

“Look, do you really want me to tell you?”

“No. Yes.”

Brian waited.

“Just tell me how come everybody knows all about it this time.”

“Talk to Dr. Rosen about it, and if she says it's okay, I'll tell you all about it. Or she will.”

Sharlie's eyes were enormous. He looked at her and shook his head. “It's a hunk of flesh, a pump, an organ like a liver or a kidney. All that matters is that it's a healthy one, even if the donor was Adolf Hitler.”

Sharlie's eyes dropped. “That bad, huh?”

“You just talk with Dr. Rosen.”

“Chicken,” she said.

“Look, do you want to know or don't you want to know?” he asked, exasperated.

She swallowed hard and then murmured, “Don't.”

He nodded and started talking about a phone call he'd had from Barbara Kaye this morning mercilessly relating the recent woes of Mrs. Salvello. Brian repeated it all to Sharlie, with some embellishment, until she began to laugh again.