Home Again

“No,” she said quietly, and he could see that all the humor had gone from her eyes. She looked at him now with a dawning sadness. “It’s your heart now, Angel.”

He felt a surge of bitterness. He thought of his heart, the donor’s heart, and he felt it beating in there, in his chest, beating and beating and beating. He wondered sickly if it would keep beating after his body died. He flashed on a sick image of himself in a coffin, his body stone-dead and paper-white, and that heart just thumping away. The thing had been inside him for three days now, and it felt more alien every second. “Yeah, tell that to the dead guy. He thought it was his.”

He lifted his head from the pillow, and it took an incredible, sickening amount of effort to do. “How could you let them do this to me, Mad?”

“We saved your life,” she said softly.

“Don’t look at me that way,” he hissed, hating her in that moment, hating everything and everyone from God on down. “You didn’t save my life, you prolonged my death. Look at me, for Christ’s sake. I look like a fucking pumpkin head on a stick body—or didn’t you notice that I’ve lost ten pounds and my head is the size of a watermelon? And what about the poor sucker who donated his heart to me? Donated.” He laughed acidly at the irony. “You make it sound like he gave a can of soup to the hungry. But it was his heart, damn it, his heart. You think he liked having your grimy hands inside his chest, hacking away, yanking out his heart like you yanked out mine?”

She sat very still, as if she were controlling her own anger with a great force of will. “You have a second chance at life. That’s what you should be focusing on right now.”

“What if I don’t want it?”

“How dare you? Someone died to give you this chance. If you throw it away, Angel DeMarco, I swear to God—” She shut up suddenly, as if she’d said too much. Breathing heavily, she wrenched her gaze from his face and stared at the wall.

Suddenly he felt tired, so tired. All the fight bled out of his body and collected in that damned canister at the foot of the bed. He reached up to push the hair from his eyes and felt the puffiness of his cheeks again. He was glad as hell he didn’t have a mirror. “Jesus, you’ve turned me into the Pillsbury Dough Boy.”

“It’s the prednisone. The swelling will go down.”

He looked at her. “I’m sorry, Mad.” He tried to think of something else to say. “I had a dream about Francis last night.”

She sank slowly back onto the seat. He noticed that her hands were shaking before she drew them into her lap. “Really?” she whispered. “What happened?”

“In the dream?” He tried to remember. “I dreamt I was cold. It was one of those dreams where you think you’re awake. I thought I woke up and found the blankets all bunched at my ankles. I reached down to pull them up, and when I had them drawn back up, I glanced at the observation doors, and there was Franco, just standing there, smiling.”

“What did he look like?”

“That was the weird part. He was soaking wet, like he’d been standing in a rainstorm. He touched the glass, as if he maybe wanted to go through but couldn’t. I heard his voice inside my head. ‘Heya, Angel,’ he said. Then he smiled—you know the one I mean, where his whole face crinkles and his eyes almost disappear into slits.” He shrugged. “Then he was gone.”

Madelaine’s eyes filled with tears.

“What is it, Mad?”

She stared at her own hands, clasped tightly in her lap. She looked incredibly fragile, pale. “Francis went to Portland last week.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Her head snapped up. “You do?”

“He came by here before he left.”

Madelaine gave him an odd look. “He didn’t tell me he saw you.” She paused, and he thought she was frowning beneath the mask.

“I’m sure he doesn’t tell you everything.”

She swallowed hard. “I didn’t want to tell you this quite yet because of your heart….” Her eyes filled with tears again. “Your precious heart.”

He got a cold, sick feeling in his gut. “What is it?”

“Francis was in a car accident outside of Portland.”

The chill moved, spread through him. “Yeah?”

She met his gaze, and he saw the answer in her eyes. “I’m sorry, Angel. He didn’t make it. He wasn’t wearing a seat belt.” She looked as if she wanted to say more, but she didn’t She just sat there, staring at him, slow tears spilling down her cheeks, collecting on the pale green of her mask.

No.

Francis couldn’t be dead, not Francis, with the laughing eyes and the awesome faith, who’d never hurt anyone in his life.