SIX : WITH A NEW HEART

GIANNA

The first thing I notice is the smell of sweet and clean lavender everywhere, filling the room like someone planted a garden in the walls while I was unconscious.

I don't know where it's coming from, I don't know where I am, and I don't know what day it is or how long I've been under or whether the baby is still alive inside me.

All I know is the strong scent of lavender, the sound of beeping and something hammering behind my ribs that I don't recognize. My hand moves to my chest before my brain catches up.

There's a bandage and a thick gauze surgical tape stretching from my collarbone to below my breast, and underneath it is a heartbeat.

Not the weak, wet flutter I was born with that gave out when I was nineteen, and not the mechanical click-whir of the LVAD that kept me alive for eight months like a wind-up toy running out of spring.

This one is real with muscle, valve and blood pushing through chambers with a force that feels almost angry, like the heart is furious about something I haven't figured out yet.

I press my palm flat against the bandage and feel it thump against my hand. It’s relentless and alive and within minutes, I feel the tears falling from my eyes.

It’s not the polite kind, or the kind I learned to do silently so Ryan wouldn't hear me through the walls and call me a pathetic loser or little girl. These tears are ugly, full-body sobs that shake my body and the hospital bed which make the monitors scream and bring a nurse running from the hallway.

I wave her off, or I try to at least. My arms feel like they belong to someone else, heavy and disconnected, and the crying turns into something closer to choking, I realize that I'm drowning in the sensation of being alive.

I completely forgot what it felt like. I forgot that a real heart doesn't just pump, it demands, it pounds and races and slows and surges and it's so loud inside my own skull that I can't hear anything else.

I press both hands to the bandage now, holding the heart like it might escape, and allow the sobs to come in waves. Each one pulls something out of me, a few memories. First, the night Ryan threw knives at my father's hands while I screamed.

Then, the morning I found my mother wandering barefoot on the highway median, the rain, the collapsing, the machine in my chest going quiet, the world going dark and the last thing I remember thinking before the nothing swallowed me: please let the baby live even if I don't.

I blink, turning to look at the nurse who’s presence I ignored until now. A satisfactory smile appears on her lips, and she pages someone. In minutes, the sound of footsteps echo through the hallway and the door opens.

"Well," Dr. Laurel says, standing in the doorway with a chart in one hand and a coffee in the other, "that's a hell of a way to say good morning."

I try to speak but what comes out is a wet, gasping mess of syllables that sounds nothing like English. Laurel crosses the room, sets the coffee down, she pulls a chair to my bedside, and sits. She doesn't touch me or try to calm me down.

She just waits, the way a woman waits who has watched enough people wake up from surgery to know that the crying isn't something you stop, It's something you survive.

It takes four minutes, I know because I'm watching the clock on the wall through blurred eyes, counting the seconds between sobs the way I used to count the seconds between my artificial heart's mechanical clicks. When the last sob shudders out of me, I wipe my face with the back of my hand and look at her.

"The baby," I mumble with a voice sounding like gravel dragged across glass.

"Is healthy," Laurel says. "With a strong heartbeat and good positioning. She handled the surgery like a champ."

She.

The baby is a she. I press my hand harder against the bandage on my chest and cry again, but softer this time, the kind of crying that doesn't need an audience just a witness and Laurel lets me have it.

"How long was I under?" I ask her.

"Three days since surgery. You've been in and out, mostly out. The anesthesia hit you hard but your body responded well. Your vitals are strong, your blood pressure normalized within the first twenty-four hours, which frankly surprised me given the state you arrived in." She pauses, her clinical mask slipping just enough for me to see the human underneath.

"You came in half-dead, Gianna. You were drenched and your clothes were wet, you were hypothermic, your LVAD was failing, and your blood pressure was in the basement. The fact that you're sitting up and talking to me right now is..." She stops herself and shakes it off. "The heart is performing beautifully. Way better than I expected, honestly. Your body is accepting it with almost no rejection markers. Like it was made for you."

I let the last sentence echo at the back of my head more than once. “Like it was made for you.”

"Whose is it?" I ask.

The question comes out before I can shape it into something more delicate or appropriate. “Whose heart is beating inside me? Whose organ is keeping me alive Laurel? Whose chest was cut open and emptied so mine could be filled?” I end, rumbling the upper part of my chest.

I catch the sudden change in Laurel's face. It’s not much since she's too practiced for that. I catch the tightening around her eyes, the way she squeezes her lip and looks away for a minute before returning her gaze to me, her breath held half a second longer than it should be.

She sets her coffee down and folds her hands on the chart in her lap.

"Her name was Peculiar Cooper," she says.

The name means nothing to me. It sits in the air between us like a word in a language I don't speak. Peculiar. What kind of name is Peculiar?

“Was?”

“Yes. Was, she passed four days ago," Laurel continues. "Brain cancer. Stage four glioblastoma, diagnosed eighteen months prior. She was… she was a remarkable woman."

I can hear something move through Laurel's voice that I can't quite place. Grief, guilt, or both twisted together so tight you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. "She was generous, warm, and stubborn in the best possible way. She was really the kind of woman who argued with her doctors and won." Then she pauses. "She was also the mother of Sean Cooper."

I stare at her.

"Sean Cooper," Laurel repeats, watching my face. "As in Cooper Industries, as in the man Forbes calls the God of War and Wealth, as in the wealthiest man in New York."

“I’m.. I’m sorry but the name doesn’t ring a bell,” I say.

Laurel opens her mouth, but shuts it, waving her hand.

I look around. The lavender, the private room, the hospital suite that looks more like a boutique hotel than a cardiac recovery ward, the mahogany side table, the real sheets, the window with a view of Central Park instead of a parking lot all begins to click into place like a lock turning.

"There are conditions," Laurel says carefully dragging my attention back to her. She's choosing her words the way a surgeon chooses instruments, one wrong move and something bleeds. "There’re legal conditions attached to the donation. His lawyers drew up paperwork and you signed.."

"I what?"

"You signed consent forms when you were admitted. I know you were barely conscious, but the forms were presented as standard surgical consent." She holds my gaze. "But they weren't standard, there’re some additional terms."

The heart of Late Mrs Peculiar, this dead woman's heart beating inside my chest begins hammering and the monitor spikes immediately. I watch the numbers climb: seventy-two, eighty, eighty-nine and Laurel watches it too, her hand drifting instinctively toward the call button, but the numbers level slowly and she pulls back.

I inhale deeply and hold her gaze. "What terms?"

"Sean wants to.. explain them himself. He's coming tonight."

"No! You tell me right now."

"Gianna, you just woke up from a major transplant surgery. You need to rest, you need fluids, you need to let your body…"

"I need to know what I signed." My voice is harder than I intended, but I don't soften it. I've been soft my whole life. Soft with Ryan when he told me what to wear, soft with his family when they laughed at my paintings, soft with myself when I made excuses for the way his hand gripped my arm hard enough to bruise. Softness almost killed me. "Tell me," I press.

Laurel looks at me for a long time. I can see her weighing it as the doctor in her versus the woman who sat beside me through three hospitalizations, two cardiac emergencies, and one marriage that looked like a love story from the outside and a crime scene from within.

"He'll be here at seven," she says finally. "I'll be right outside the door. And Gianna, whatever he says, whatever the terms are..you are my patient first. Not his, mine. Remember that."

She squeezes my hand once and walks out slowly before I can utter another word. The door clicks shut. The lavender fills the silence like a perfume I didn't ask to wear.

I stare at the ceiling and press my palm against the heart that doesn't belong to me. It's still pounding hard and fast like it knows something I don't, as if it's trying to warn me about something that's already on its way.

He's coming tonight. Sean Cooper, the God of War and Wealth, the son of the woman whose heart is keeping me alive and whatever I signed while I was bleeding out on a hospital gurney, whatever deal I made with a dead woman's son while my brain was swimming in anesthesia and my body was fighting for two lives, I signed it in my own blood.

And blood doesn't wash off easy.