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“Jesus.” Dad puts his head in his hands, and is so still that I wonder if he got too upset and the pacemaker blew.

“How did you get to be so cold, Sasha?” he asks.

“How are you just now figuring it out?” I shoot back.

“I knew,” he says quietly. “Your mom, she doesn’t want to see it, but I’ve always known. For your fourth birthday we took you to the zoo, and in the gift shop all the other kids were grabbing stuffed animals, hugging them, naming them right there on the spot. You picked out a set of dead bugs, suspended in glass cubes. It came with a magnifying class so you could study them.”

My pain meds are doing their job, floating my body away from the whir of my heart, my mind unmoored and fixated on odd things. The bell of a lily that faces me; the flower of resurrection. The baby’s breath nestled next to it. It’s all very nice except someone needs to invite an exterminator to that flower shop because there’s a stinkbug nestled deep inside the lily. Also, baby’s breath is poisonous.

What an odd name for poison.

Dad said something, and I should answer him. The thing about the bugs and the magnifying glass. I remember that toy, remember peering down at little body parts for hours, trying to figure out how they worked.

“So I can manipulate them,” I say, not realizing my thoughts are flowing outward now. “If I know how they work, I can make them do what I want.”

Dad sighs, rests his forehead against the window.

“You graduated to people though, didn’t you?” he asks. “When you found out about . . .” He doesn’t finish, doesn’t say her name, whoever the woman is that he’s cheating on mom with. “When you found out you didn’t get mad, didn’t run to tell your mom. You held on to it, used it against me.

“I don’t know how many surgeries it would take to make you a nice person,” he says, his voice a whisper that comes back from the glass, as cold as the surface they just hit. “How many hours of therapy. They can give you a new heart, but they can’t fix something that isn’t in there. What’s missing from you, Sasha?”

My tongue is a lead weight, so I can’t ask him if there were cameras in the surgery, or if someone in there ran their mouth. Everything I was afraid of has come to pass. They opened me up and found nothing inside.

“Dad,” I say, forcing my breath to come, my tongue to work, my trachea to vibrate. The drugs are strong, but my brain is stronger and I will speak. “Can we talk about this sometime when I’m not fucked-up?”

“And when will that be?”

I have to admit as I slide into unconsciousness that it’s a valid question.

twenty-six

“Last time we saw each other you were telling me about Brooke and Lilly,” Amanda says, scanning her notes. She’s wearing corduroys today, but they’re about an inch too short so when she sits down she looks like a little kid in time-out. Her hair is up in a messy bun that some girls can pull off. She is not one of those girls.

“And what did I say about them?” I ask.

I’ve decided to try a new tactic with Amanda, answering her questions with a question. She complies, flipping a few pages back in her notebook, which kind of makes me uneasy because I know I didn’t say that much during our session at the cardiac center.

“You had some concerns about the fact that they may have witnessed your fall.”

I snort at her choice of words, and she lets the pages fan back into place.

“I understand that Brooke came to see you at the cardiac center before your surgery. How did that make you feel?”

“Did my mom tell you that?”

“Yes. Were you glad to see Brooke?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“And what did you two talk about?”

“What do friends usually talk about?”

“So you consider her a friend?”

“Is there a reason that I shouldn’t?”

“Who else is your friend?”