The first day of one life, and the last day of another.
A birthday, and a dying day.
Who I am, and who Havi is to Connor.
“January eighth,” he says, blinking hard. “January eighth, but, but…that’s the day I got my new hear—”
“I heard the crash from my room.” My voice is quiet and lifeless, and the rest of me feels the same. The numbness in my hands and face slowly spreads to the rest of my body, and things I’ve used all my energy, all my power, to hold at bay slam into me. I want to lie down. I want to curl up, call my mom, and askher to come and get me. I don’t want to have this conversation, and I don’t want this to be the version of reality I live in.
I look up at Connor and see concern and confusion etched into the lines around his eyes, and I’m reminded, yet again, that he doesn’t deserve this. He doesn’t deserve to be lied to. He deserves to know what happened. He deserves to know everything, and even though telling him will mean that after all this time, I finally have to face it myself, I need to tell him. “I never moved that fast in my life. I got here as fast as I could.”
I close my eyes, and the sight of Havi, ghostly pale and sleeping on the side of the street, assaults me. His eyes closed, peaceful. His hand stretched out, the rose tattoo no longer as vivid or bright as it was when he got it. Faded and comfortable under his skin.
No.
Not sleeping.
For a long time, when this scene burst into my consciousness, I told myself he was sleeping. But he wasn’t. Not really. He looked like he was, but there was an inky red halo around his head. “The paramedics got here fast.” Fast, slow, a lifetime, I don’t know which. “I rode with him to the hospital, and they did all the things to him. You know, all the things you see on TV.”
I scrape my fingers through my hair, digging my nails into my scalp as I travel back to that night. I see it all. I hear everything. I feel it all as if it’s still happening.
Machines beeping and the deafening screech of a siren. An urgency in the paramedic who was working on him that gradually faded. A team of medical professionals waiting for Havi when we got to the hospital, masks, coats, and gloves. Someone saying, “DOA?”
They said it like it was a question, which made sense as there was no way Havi could be dead.
“When we got to the hospital, someone put me in a small room with beige chairs and told me to wait there.” They had metal arms, the chairs, and they were fixed to the wall with steel bolts. “I waited there until Havi’s mom and his sisters arrived, um, and then this upright man came and said lots of things to us. Things like,I’m sorry, and…he’s gone.”
Things that made no sense at all.
Everyone was crying. Everyone except me. Havi’s mom was making this terrible sound. An awful, gut-wrenching sound. It was a sound I’d never heard before, but one I recognized instantly. A mother mourning. It made me shake hard. So hard that I was cut off from my emotions.
My tears were there, but they couldn’t find their way to the surface.
I’m shaking like that again now. So hard that it’s more than a shiver. More than a tremor. It’s as though something has got into my marrow and is attempting to shake the life out of my body.
“Someone said the wordsdonation after brain death.” I sound calm, almost unfeeling, though my entire ribcage is constricting and the pain is making it hard to keep talking. “And I started feeling really, really…not like myself.”
Connor has one hand clamped over his mouth and the other is on his chest. The other is clutching his heart.
“It’s not that I don’t support organ donation, Con. I’m registered as a donor myself, and it’s not that it isn’t what Havi wanted either. We’d spoken about it. Iknowit’s what he wanted. It’s… It’s that the version of me that heard those words was…” My voice trails off, and a thin, wispy sob floats down the street toward the house Havi and I used to call home. “That version of me wasn’t okay. I couldn’t believe it. Icouldn’tbelieve what was happening.” I was in the grip of a shock unlike anything I’ve ever felt. A shock unlike anything I knew existed. Unlike anythingI thought people could survive. “I felt sick, so I went to the restroom while Havi’s mom was signing paperwork, and I threw up, and when I was done, I didn’t want to go back to the beige chair room. I…”
My ribs crack and the wispy sob becomes something different. Something broken. Something that’s still there in that hospital. Something that still exists in that moment, living it over and over on repeat.
“I wanted Havi,” I sob. “I wanted to check up on him… I knew he’d be scared and…I was his safe person, so I had to get to him. I”—I wipe my face with both hands, and more saltwater rains out of me—“I got to these brown double doors, and I tried to go through them, but someone said I wasn’t allowed to go in there, and I…I didn’t know where to be, but I couldn’t leave Havi on his own, so…” I wipe my face again, eyes and nose, this time on the sleeve of my jacket. “There was this big yellow bin near the brown doors, and I found some space between the wall and the bin and sat there.”
The wall behind me was cold, and so was the floor. Everything was hard, and the lights were too bright. The yellow bin dug into my shoulder.
I don’t know how long I was there for. Hours. Days.
Time stopped meaning anything when Havi fell asleep on the curb.
“At some point, the elevator doors opened, and these two nurses came out. They were walking fast.”
They weren’t just walking fast. They were talking fast too. There was a frisson of electricity buzzing around them. Excitement. Optimism. A schism of hope that was so foreign to me then that it drew my attention.
Now, knowing Connor like I do, I understand it. I get it. Of course the people who were taking care of him loved him. Of course they wanted him to live. At the time, it was the hope thatbroke me. The fact that the worst day of my life meant something different to them.
“They went up to this official, navy pants, navy shoes woman—” And one of them said the words that completely and utterly derailed me. “And one of them said, ‘Is it true there’s a heart for Connor Lockwood?’”
