The Heart Does Not Grow Back Read online

  My right hand was nothing but splinters of shiny bone. I had road rash everywhere, blood slowly blooming through my shredded clothing.

  I stared into the sky, a dusty blue, the clouds half dissolved by the sun’s rising momentum. I could have stayed put and slept forever. But Mack was still in the ditch, in the mangled wreckage of the Lincoln, the victor of his skirmish with Passenger unknown. Assuming either of them had survived the crash in the first place. I found the strength to stand and ignored the frantic bystanders who were urging me to lie down and wait for help.

  * * *

  Unrelenting heat. No wind. The smell of gasoline and scorched rubber and the shavings of burned metal. Cars stopped. People were on their cell phones. Everyone telling me to sit, everyone a Samaritan.

  My movements were frenzied and out-of-body. I stumbled along on my shot leg and I could see how bad I looked in the twisted faces of others. The smell of blood was in my throat and nose. Droplets hit the pavement as I staggered toward the drainage ditch, turning black when they struck stone.

  Pain everywhere. Pain in my dragging leg, my sagging pieces of torn flesh. The back of my head, my right kneecap, my hand stump shorn down to the bone, white and slick, the only painless areas since the nerves had been scrubbed clean out.

  The Lincoln was tucked into the ditch on its side almost neatly, as if carefully placed. The windshield was gone. The guts of the car hissed and ticked. I spotted Mack on his stomach about twenty feet from the wreckage, facedown. Not one droplet of blood, not a scratch on him, but no movement. I didn’t see Passenger anywhere—most likely entombed in the remains of the car.

  Mack didn’t respond to my voice. “He’s hurt bad, mister,” a man said, crouched down beside us. If Mack had been thrown that far during the wreck, bad was an understatement. I knew I wasn’t supposed to move him, but I touched his shoulder. He flopped onto his back, still limp, and I saw the stain of blood on his midsection. The wound was too long and messy to be a gunshot. He was more likely gouged and torn from the shrapnel catching him as he was tossed from the rolling car. Again, the mutter of bystanders, warnings, advice, all of which I ignored, lifting his shirt up and seeing a puncture wound, his innards pushing through the injury, purplish and glossy, hanging from his belly. His eyes were open, the pupils black and round, eclipsing his eye sockets.

  I cradled his head and started sobbing, a cry that no bite could control, the kind of blazing sorrow that squeezes your lungs. It sucks away your breath, floods your head with snot and demolishes your will. I said his name and whispered, “Wake up, man. Get tough, you pussy,” but I couldn’t provoke him to say a word.

  The sound of approaching sirens blotted out the chatter. I leaned in close, meaning to tell him good-bye, and felt the humid warmth of his breath against my forearm.

  With that I started to scream “Help!” over and over and over until finally a uniformed EMT pried him away from me. They worked him, strapping him to a backboard, a pit-crew of EMTs testing and prodding and deliberating. I followed them as they shuttled him into the back of the ambulance. A thick-armed EMT held me back as they shut the doors.

  I relinquished myself to my own ambulance, thinking it would get me to Mack’s bedside faster. But the EMT who was now standing directly over me—Chris, by his name tag—looked at me and said, “Jesus Christ, this is Dale Sampson. The Samaritan.”

  According to Chris, Mack was going to White Memorial Medical Center. “Keck’s a mess today, thanks to you,” he said, chuckling.

  I thought of letting the ambulance take me to Mack, but if I did that, what would he have swung for the fences for? What would his sacrifice have meant? Miracles start with tragedy—a person dies and his family signs a piece of paper, and their loved one’s organs get harvested and sent out into the world like ashes in the wind. Meanwhile, somewhere a pager goes off and a dying man with a failing liver or kidney or heart says that he’s not getting his hopes up, not yet, and as he drives to the hospital he can’t help but get his hopes up.

  Mack’s injuries were the first domino. I would not let it fall without striking against something else.

  “Take me to the UCLA Medical Center,” I said. “I’m already late. And take Mack, too. I don’t care if he’s a mess. I can save him.”

  “Holy shit. Keck Hospital was a smoke screen?” Chris said.

  I nodded.

  “You’re in no shape for surgery, kid. I think we’ll take you both to White Memorial. It’s close.”

  “You’re killing Mack if you don’t take us both to UCLA. Him and another guy, whose chest is probably getting cracked open while we chitchat.”

  “I’m not so sure your superpower, or whatever it is, can help your friend. Needing an organ is one thing, massive internal bleeding is a catastrophic injury, a whole other ball game. Try prayers instead. As for the transplant, a chest can be closed. They can reschedule.”

  “Why do you think I’m out here? You’re hardly the only one who wants me to reschedule and reconsider. If you don’t get me into UCLA, that man dies.”

  “If I take you there,” he said, “you die.”

  “If you don’t,” I said, “I will fail the one person I cannot fail, and I’ll have to be the Samaritan forever.”

  Chris understood trauma. He had seen the inside of people laid bare, the hysterics of family members wailing over a loved one’s ruined form. Here was a man without a white coat, a man in the trenches who wanted to save lives instead of being published in medical journals.

  He turned to the driver. “UCLA Medical Center.” He radioed the other ambulance and despite their objections, they followed suit. He was careful not to expose us, and didn’t use my name. “If I had a right hand,” I said, “I’d shake yours right now.”

  He held out his left hand, and I shook it.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  En route to the hospital, I was stable and the pain had dulled to a slow throb, the lasers of hurt activating with each beat of my heart.

  “You’ve lost some blood,” Chris said. “I would normally say operating is out of the question, but if you’re really going out in a blaze of glory I guess it makes no difference if you’re a cadaver or not.” I felt the hum of the drive with the occasional bump, the feel of turns, Chris’s hand supportive on my shoulder.

  “One request before we roll you in,” Chris said. “Sign this?” He gave me a medical chart. My chart. I signed it, “To Chris and my rescuers … You are the Good Samaritans.” I signed it Dale Sampson, the print barely legible, my dominant hand having been blown to bits. I stamped a thumbprint of blood underneath it.

  “Turn your head to the side and keep your eyes closed.” He placed some gauze on my face, disguising me. “Whatever you did to cover your ass, it worked. This joint is even less busy than usual.”

  “I still appreciate the discretion,” I said, as he pressed another piece on my forehead. “Tell Dr. Banks I’m here.” Banks was Venhaus’s ace in the hole, a top-tier cardio specialist who had also been one of Venhaus’s med school friends.

  “You got it,” he said. I rolled into the hospital, just another guy fucked up from yet another car accident. Nothing to see here. I never stopped moving, the squeak of the wheels drowning out Chris’s words as we moved through the hospital. Eventually, I felt the gurney come to a stop and heard Chris’s voice in the distance shouting, “Good luck, Mr. Carlson!”

  Movement again, then a familiar voice. “I got you,” Doc Venhaus said. “Just be still.”

  “Mack,” I said, turning to face Venhaus, the bloody gauze falling away. “You gotta save him first. Take everything out of me, I don’t give a shit.”

  “You have many gifts, but stabilizing a trauma victim isn’t one of them. I can check in on him, but from what that EMT told me, you can’t help your friend,” Doc said. “He’s in the hands of God and doctors, Dale.”

  “Bullshit. He’s got fucked-up organs, so give him some organs.”

  “It’s not as simple as just swapping organs w
ith him, Dale. In fact, I’m calling the surgery off altogether,” he said.

  “Fuck that,” I said.

  “This isn’t what you planned or wanted—scars from the road rash and your right hand gone for good. It would not be right to operate on you in this condition. And did someone shoot you?”

  “It’s too late to back out,” I said. “I just can’t now. Try your best, but if I die, fuck it.”

  “Why are you in such a hurry to die?” Venhaus said.

  “I’m not,” I said. “I haven’t been for a while now, actually. I love a girl and I love my friend, but I never acted, Doc, and I can’t say I could have stopped the massacre or my friend getting his shoulder blown off, but I sure as shit let her get away. Hell, I let myself get away. I have this power and what did I do? Nothing, not really. Sure, I let people take from me, a lung here, a kidney there—”

  “You’re giving now,” Doc said.

  “And I’m not going to stop,” I said. “If I live through this, that is.”

  “The odds are not in favor of that outcome,” Doc said. “Not anymore.”

  I reached out and took Doc’s hand. He squeezed back. “You promised, Doc.” I said. “This is what I want.”

  He got me to an operating room, but he was there as my friend now, not a doctor. There were plenty of doctors scurrying around us. All of them old, sporting neat, white beards and glasses. I was pleased to see these old men of a noble trade whose days of ambition were long behind them, men who respected Venhaus and the secrets that needed to be kept that day.

  I handed my arm over for an IV and Doc never took his hand off my shoulder. He waited, along with me, for a countdown backward from ten.

  No mention of Rae, which was disappointing, if only because I’d wanted to finally measure myself as a man in her eyes—maybe glimpse her looking down on me with gratitude—even love. Or maybe she’d have just seen me as a manipulative asshole anyway, parlaying her need for my heart into a chance to shackle her with memories of me forever.

  * * *

  Harold agreed to take a huge gamble and allow his surgery to begin before I even arrived at the hospital. Doc Venhaus had taken every precaution to keep the location a secret, but with Harold’s deteriorating condition, Doc had the surgical team begin Harold’s surgery early. Once he was on bypass and his heart was out, if we were discovered it would be far more difficult to shut it down and let a man die since the surgery would already be under way.

  I was home, a surgical room with cold lights, icy steel, and unbreakable silence. Doc was only going to observe the surgery—this was outside his realm of expertise, yet he had screened and organized the surgical team that would be plucking out my heart and planting it in Harold. He stood over me as final preparations were made.

  “How much longer?” I asked.

  “Very soon,” he said.

  I waited. He added nothing.

  “Do you think she’s coming to see me? To say good-bye?” I said, finally.

  “Surgery is imminent, Dale. I have serious doubts about your ability to withstand an operation this serious without complications, so please don’t make me feel guilty by voicing your regrets at the last possible second.”

  “Fair enough,” I said, and stared at the ceiling, waiting for the mask to fall on my face.

  Doctors bustled around me as I stared at the lights.

  “Any last words?” Venhaus said. “Not to scare you, Dale, but I’d put your chances at thirty percent, and that’s generous. We’ll try our best, and even if we’re successful and you live, you’re not really living, so to speak. People will ask what your last words were. So say what you will for posterity’s sake.”

  “I guess whatever I choose will be a Jeopardy! question a hundred years from now. Might be as close to immortality as I’m ever going to get.” I thought about Rae. Where would I be if I had never seen her that day in Wal-Mart? If she had moved to any city but Grayson?

  “Fuck it,” I said. “No last words. Just nothing.”

  Doc stood beside me. He put his hand on my forearm and I saw pain in his eyes. He was a doctor, practiced at exuding confidence and authority, but the guise fell away when he touched me, his face shaded with doubt and fear.

  Doc was the one left most exposed by our little ruse, because at some point soon, he would have to answer to Hayes, whom he had double-crossed to make this happen. Venhaus was brought onto the show under the condition of being Hayes’s inside man, and we’d taken advantage of that. Venhaus had whispered in Hayes’s ear that I was arranging a secret surgery. He revealed the location—Keck Hospital. Then, early in the morning, he leaked the Keck location to the press, all the while setting us up at the UCLA Medical Center. I have no idea how he pulled that off with no leaks, but when it comes to miracles, sometimes you just don’t ask. Sometimes you just want to believe in the magic.

  “She’s here,” Doc said. “She wanted to see you to say good-bye, but only once you were anesthetized,” he said.

  “I won’t say anything,” I said. “I’ll keep my eyes closed. I’ll stay completely still.”

  He nodded. Another surgeon whispered something in his ear, but Doc shook his head and said, “No, it will be fine. It doesn’t hurt anything.”

  “Hold this tube in your mouth,” he said.

  I pretended to be put-under, my eyes closed, my breathing slow, the tube tasting like a chewed-up plastic straw in my now-dry mouth. I waited.

  I sensed her beside me. Even with the air heavy and antiseptic, I recognized the fragrance of flowery soap, remembering a time when the soapy smell mixed with the acrid and beautiful scent of sex. Not being able to open my eyes and see her was agony, but I endured and kept them gently shut. She sobbed for a few long moments, trying to bite herself back from completely losing it. I could hear Doc comforting her. Her touch was surprising and electric, popping off a jolt of tension in the muscles of my hand and arm. I wondered if that tipped her off to my consciousness, but I continued to play dead. She curled her fingers into mine and kissed the back of my hand, pressing it against her cheek and holding it there. Then, she opened my hand and kissed the center, her tears gathering in the seams of my palm.

  She moved my open hand to her belly: tight, round, and swollen. The real person who drove her to pen the letter.

  Nothing like finally staring down the truth until it’s far too late. The possibility of ending up with Rae and settling into some normal, domestic life had once lingered deep inside of me. Once I felt her child thudding against the walls of her stomach, she was truly gone for good. Harold’s child, a child she would lie for. A kid she’d fuck someone all day for. She knew Harold was scum but loved the baby so fiercely that she’d do whatever it took to give her child a father—even if it meant grinding the last happy parts of me into dust. I wondered if Harold knew about that part, if he gave her permission to seduce me into compliance. She could have told me she was pregnant and taken her chances, but what mother takes chances? She knew I loved her and wasn’t about to lose that edge.

  I felt her kiss upon my forehead as she placed the dry, hard remains of a flower into my hand—a withered rose that was once placed on a windowsill all those years ago, flat from being kept in some book somewhere, now completing its journey of rejection.

  “I just want you to know, Harold has been good to me a long time now. I want you to know that I’m sorry. I can’t say I love you, Dale, but I can say that I could have. I might have. If things were different for all of us.”

  My eyes remained calm and closed, my jaw loose around the tube. I was out of my body now, visiting all those little crossroads where I might have ended up with her, but there were too many what-ifs to count. I was sick of counting them. My grip remained limp. I never felt so still. I felt like a pond on a windless morning. Another Dale might have spoken up or cried or begged for an explanation. She took my hand off of her womb.

  “Good-bye, Dale.”

  Perhaps it was my pulse that gave me away—the final s
cream of my Dale Sampson factory-installed heart, but she knew.

  “I’m glad he was awake,” she said to Doc as she neared the door. “Now that it’s over, I’m glad.” And with that she was gone.

  * * *

  “We’re going to count down from ten,” the anesthetist said. “You won’t make it to one.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I’ve got experience at this. Tolerance. I can make it to one.” I smiled.

  Doc took my hand. “So, about those last words, then?”

  Goddammit—I couldn’t think of anything funny or clever. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath and pictured a crowd of strangers outside with chants and signs, some with words of support and some of hate; and thought of Mack, and the burning house; and wondered when my life would flash before my eyes. But it already had, and it wasn’t that I was given nothing to miss, it was that I had not created anything to miss.

  “Give everything,” I said, keeping my eyes closed.

  “Well done, Dale,” Doc said, patting my forearm. “Now, don’t you go chattering and messing that one up, just in case we can’t pull this off.”

  He was the last I heard of that world—him and the beep of machinery as the hissing mask descended upon me, driving the light away, and I counted down in my head and did not make it to one.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  They gathered up the press in one of the hospital’s conference rooms. Reporters huddled in a throbbing mass of mobile technology and bad fashion sense, with smartphones poked out to record whatever would be said at the haphazardly set-up lectern.