Jori
She was running. Cold air, heavy with rain, rattled around in her lungs. Little clouds of breath puffed from her open mouth as she panted. Her heart was pounding, as fast and as hard as her feet upon the wet pavement. Dead leaves squished beneath them as she ran through the darkness. The icy wind whipped through her hair and the fallen leaves, pelting her face with stinging raindrops. They mixed with the tears leaving sticky trails down her cheeks.
She tried to keep her head down, but she kept looking back over her shoulder, expecting to find AJ following her. The street was dark and deserted, but suddenly, in the midst of the darkness, there was light. At first, it was just a pinprick in the distance, like the glimmer of sunlight at the end of a tunnel. But it grew nearer and seemed to split itself in two, twin halos of light that expanded outward, filling her vision. The headlights were bright, almost blinding.
She forced herself to look away, but she could still hear the growl of an engine gaining on her, the roar of tires splashing through puddles. When she chanced another glance over her shoulder, the truck was coming right for her. Startled, she spun around and tried to jump out of the way, but her foot sunk into a pothole she hadn’t seen. She tripped, turning her ankle as she stumbled out into the street. As she straightened up, she was bathed in brilliant light. She stopped, frozen, but the headlights kept coming, so close they threatened to swallow her up.
At first, she couldn’t see anything, but as the light surrounded her, she could make out the familiar silhouette of her grandfather’s pick-up truck. She saw a flash of color and recognized her own paint job – rainbow swirls, spray-painted over the rusted white exterior, giving the illusion of tie-dye.
Her pain turned to fear.
She was going to die.
The thought crossed her mind a split second before she felt a crushing blow. Her body was thrown violently onto the hood of the truck. As her head collided with the windshield, she caught one last glimpse of her fiancee’s face behind the wheel.
Then it was cast back into the shadows, as the light faded to impenetrable dark.
AJ
Outside the hospital, the light of dawn had lifted away the dark of night. Inside a windowless waiting room, AJ was oblivious to the change. He had drifted to sleep and now dozed under the same fluorescent lights that had burned brightly all night.
It was only when he felt a hand touch his shoulder and a voice whisper his name that he jolted upright, mumbling, “What time is it?”
“Just after seven,” said Dr. Edison, the ER resident who had been treating Jori. “Mr. McLean, I need to talk to you about Jori. Are you with me?”
“Yeah… yeah,” said AJ, rubbing his eyes. They felt sticky with sleep, but those may have been tears crusted in the corners. He blinked a few times to clear them and then looked at the doctor. “How is she?”
“I mentioned earlier that we were concerned about a head injury. We’ve been running tests all night, Mr. McLean. Unfortunately, they show that Jori has no brain activity. Her heart and lungs are still functioning because she’s on life support, but she is brain dead.”
AJ continued to stare at the grim-faced doctor, his words sinking in slowly. “She’s dead.”
“Yes. The trauma to her brain was too severe. As soon as we take her off life support, her other organs will shut down.”
“So she’s still… alive? For now?”
The doctor hesitated, then nodded. “Clinically, yes, but only because she’s on a ventilator that’s forcing her to breathe. I’m very sorry, Mr. McLean, but there is no chance of her recovering from this.”
AJ swallowed hard. “So, what, are you just waiting for my permission to turn off the life support or something?”
“Yes.” The doctor then cleared his throat, suggesting he had more to say. “I also wanted to ask you about organ donation.”
AJ felt his lip curl in disgust. “Organ donation,” he repeated.
“Yes. Do you know if Jori wanted to be an organ donor? She was brought in without identification, but she may have signed the back of her driver’s license?”
AJ could only picture the front of Jori’s license. Most people look terrible in their DMV photographs, but Jori looked beautiful. Her red hair was radiant, hanging straight and long over her shoulders. Her blue eyes stood out vividly against the backdrop. He couldn’t remember ever having wanted to turn that picture around to see the back side, and so he shook his head. “Sorry, I don’t know.”
“That’s alright. You know Jori. Think about the kind of person she was. Would she have wanted to save other people’s lives, if she could?”
AJ could sense the powers of persuasion at work, but he didn’t need to be pandered to. “Yeah, she’d probably want to do it,” he said. “Go ahead. Take her organs.”
Dr. Edison looked surprised that he had agreed so quickly. “I’ll send our transplant coordinator in to see you. She’ll have some paperwork for you to sign. Thank you for gift, Mr. McLean, and again, I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“Wait,” said AJ, as the doctor stood up. “You said Jori was still on life support. Can I see her first, before…?” He trailed off, hoping the doctor would understand.
Dr. Edison nodded. “Of course. Come with me.”
He led AJ to a small room where the fluorescent lighting had been dimmed. A nurse stood next to the bed in the center of the room, writing something on a clipboard. Dr. Edison cleared his throat again, and she looked up. “Mind giving Mr. McLean a few minutes alone with his fiancée?”
“Of course not.” The nurse took the clipboard and hurried out, giving AJ a sympathetic sort of smile as she passed by.
“Take all the time you need,” said the doctor, gesturing toward the bed, which was surrounded by monitors and machines. “I know it’s a lot to take in. When you’re ready, we’ll take Jori to surgery to harvest her organs, and afterwards, she’ll be left looking the same – you won’t even be able to tell.”
AJ nodded and said nothing. He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to think about telling Jori’s family or planning her funeral. He didn’t want to think about the future at all. Instead, he focused on the present, on that moment, on saying goodbye to the woman he had loved. The woman he had killed.
“I’m sorry, Jori,” he whispered, once the doctor had gone, occupying the spot where the nurse had stood. He looked down at Jori’s body on the bed. He couldn’t hold her the way he had held Lucy. She was trapped inside a tangle of tubes and wires, snaking out from her mouth, her arms, and the neck of her hospital gown. But like Lucy, she looked different in death. Her face was discolored with bruises and distorted by swelling. And although her chest rose and fell steadily with the hiss of ventilator forcing air into her lungs, she was otherwise lifeless and still. The spark inside her that had made her the flame-haired firecracker he’d fallen in love with that day at the tattoo parlor had been extinguished.
He moved to the foot of the bed, where there was not so much equipment, and lifted the covers to expose her right leg. He wrapped his hand around her right ankle, running his thumb over the black outline of a dove he had tattooed there. “I hope you’re at peace now,” he said and bent down to kiss the dove. “I can’t forgive you for what you did… but I’ll never stop loving you.”
He gave her foot a squeeze and then released it, forcing himself to turn and walk away. He hesitated once in the doorway, where he could still hear the hiss of the ventilator and the blip of the monitor that measured each beat of Jori’s heart. But he didn’t allow himself to look back. The body on the bed wasn’t his Jori anymore, and the organs inside it, being kept alive by the machines, belonged to someone else.
Brian
Brian was in bed when Jori Wilder was declared brain dead. Becci had just left for work, dropping Calhan off at his mother’s house on her way. Facing another long day alone, Brian drifted back to sleep.
The call came two hours later.
He heard it through the fog of sleep, but by the time he had fought through the tangle of tubing that wound its way from the oxygen tank at his bedside to the canula in his nose and picked up the phone, there was nothing but a dial tone on the other end of the line.
That was when the pager went off.
He called the hospital back and talked to the transplant nurse. Then he called Becci at school.
“Guess what, Becs. The pager. It went off.”
She rushed home to pick him up, and they raced to the hospital.
As his donor was being prepped for surgery, Brian was put through a battery of tests to make sure he was a match. He knew that others had been called, too, so it came as a surprise when the cardiologist himself swept into the room and announced, “It’s a go, Mr. Littrell. The donor heart looks good. It’s being flown down from Ohio on a helicopter as we speak, and you’ve checked out as the perfect candidate to receive it.”
“Really?” Brian asked, unable to contain his astonishment. His own sick heart, seeming to sense that its beats were numbered, started hammering hard.
The rhythm on his heart monitor made Dr. Robert frown. “Really,” he said, “and not a moment too soon.”
Brian nodded in agreement, taking a deep drag of oxygen. “So what happens now?”
“In a few minutes, you’ll be transported to pre-op and prepped for surgery. The heart should be here in an hour or so, and I’d like you to be on the table when it arrives. But rest assured, we won’t remove your old heart until the new one’s in the room.” Dr. Robert smiled, and Brian forced himself to smile back. His poor heart was pounding so hard, he almost felt sorry for it. But it would be a relief to wake up with a strong new heart inside of him, one that would allow him to go on with his life.
That was what he kept telling himself as a pair of nurses prepped him for surgery and wheeled him toward the operating room. When you wake up, it’ll all be over.
“I love you,” Becci whispered, her warm breath caressing his ear as she bent down to hug him goodbye.
“Love you too,” he murmured back. “See ya in a few hours.”
“See you soon,” she echoed as she straightened up again. He could see that her eyes were full of tears again, and her chin was quivering with the effort not to let them fall. She had been his constant companion and caretaker for the duration of the long wait, and it all came down to this moment. Struck by his love for her, he flashed her a wide grin, which she returned, tearfully.
It was that last image of her that he held in his mind as the two nurses wheeled him away. In the operating room, when the anesthesiologist placed an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose and instructed him to breathe deeply and count back from ten, Brian closed his eyes against the brightness of the lights overhead and pictured his wife’s bright smile instead, as he counted himself into darkness.
But in the midst of the darkness, there was light.
At first, it was just a pinprick in the distance, like the glimmer of sunlight at the end of a tunnel. But it grew nearer, the round halo of light expanding outward, filling his vision. It was bright, almost blinding. It fought the darkness, chasing it away, and at first, he was grateful. But the light kept coming, so close it threatened to swallow him up. He couldn’t see anything, and as the light surrounded him, his feeling of comfort turned to fear.
He was going to die.
The thought crossed his mind a split second before he felt a crushing blow, and the light faded to impenetrable dark.
In the operating room, Dr. Robert pulled the defibrillator paddles away from the new heart in Brian’s chest and smiled, as he watched its weak, random twitches strengthen into vigorous, pulsing beats.
Just six months later, in a trauma room one floor below, a different team of doctors looked down into the cracked chest of their patient and frowned, as they watched the weak, random twitches of his ravaged heart slow to a stop. “The knife’s out; let’s defibrillate,” said one. “Charge the internal paddles to twenty.”
“Too late - asystole,” said another. “Starting internal massage.”
Looking down on his own body from some unearthly vantage point above, Brian watched the doctor take the donor heart in her hands and squeeze it, forcing it to contract. He could see the blood pouring from the hole in the heart, but he felt no pain or fear, no revulsion or sadness, just an odd sort of detachment.
“Look at this – his left ventricle’s shredded. We’re not gonna be able to repair this.”
“Even if we could, we wouldn’t get him back – he’s been down too long.”
One of the doctors sighed. “What a way to go.”
The other shook his head. “What a waste.”
Brian looked up, and where there should have been ceiling, there was only light – an endless, open sky of white light, more brilliant than the sun. It filled his vision, but it didn’t hurt his eyes; in fact, he no longer needed to blink. He was drawn to the light, like a moth to a flame, and felt himself drifting toward it. As the light surrounded him, the scene below him disappeared in darkness.
Becci
Becci had spent too much time sitting in waiting rooms.
She would never forget the six-hour wait she’d endured while Brian underwent his heart transplant. But the long, nervous wait had been worth the relief she’d felt when Dr. Robert had come to tell her, “Brian sailed through the transplant with flying colors. The new heart’s in and functioning fine. He has a long road to recovery ahead of him, but he’s looking better already, and after a few days, I’m sure he’ll be feeling better, too.”
Worse yet was the wait in the emergency room, as the doctors and nurses scrambled to save her husband from succumbing to the stab wound in his heart. The wait wasn’t nearly as long, though it felt that way, and when it was over, there was no relief.
“Mrs. Littrell?”
Becci looked up at the woman in scrubs who had addressed her. Her scrubs were spotlessly clean, but Becci noticed a spatter of red on her shoes, which made her suspect the doctor had changed clothes before coming to talk to her. The realization gave her a sinking feeling in her stomach. “Yes?” she asked, her voice an octave higher than usual as she stood up shakily.
The doctor extended her hand, and Becci noticed that her nails were scrubbed clean as well. “I’m Dr. Maxwell, the trauma surgeon. I operated on your husband.”
Becci gripped her hand weakly. “How is he?”
“Let’s sit down,” said Dr. Maxwell, still holding Becci’s hand. She sank into the seat next to Becci’s, and Becci reluctantly dropped back down beside her. “The stab wound in Brian’s chest was very severe. The knife went into the left ventricle of his heart. As blood leaked into the sac surrounding his heart, it put too much pressure on his heart and stopped it from beating. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to repair the damage in time. I’m very sorry to have to tell you this, Mrs. Littrell, but your husband has died.”
In that instant, Becci felt as if someone had plunged a knife through her own heart, tearing a hole that could never be patched. But somehow, her heart kept beating. Somehow, life went on.
Six months later, she found herself standing in a much different waiting room, with butterflies fluttering in her stomach.
“Rebecca Littrell?”
She stepped forward to meet the officer who had called her name. He checked the visitor’s badge she’d received in exchange for filling out a form.
“Follow me.”
He led her out of the reception area and through a security checkpoint that reminded her of an airport. She only wished she were flying somewhere, anywhere but here.
Once she had cleared the metal detector, she followed the officer into a large room divided in half by a wall of thick, plexiglass windows. There were counters and a row of stools on either side of the glass. Narrow dividers extended from the wall, forming small booths, and every booth had a phone installed on both sides. Becci noticed that everything was firmly fixed to either the wall or floor. To her, it was like seeing the set from a movie; she had never visited a prison before.
“You sit here,” said the corrections officer, escorting her to a stool at the end of the row. “They’re about to bring him in. When you’re ready to talk, just pick up the phone.”
Becci nodded. “Thanks,” she replied faintly, reconsidering her decision to come. How could she face this man? What would she say? It seemed foolish, but she was desperate for answers. He was the only one left who might understand, who might be able to make her understand, too.
She had only seen AJ McLean on her TV screen, never in real life, but she recognized him when she saw him being led into the room by another officer. His tattoos were covered by the long sleeves of his prison jumpsuit, and his thinning hair was buzzed short, but his eyes looked the same as they did in photographs. Dark. Haunted. They narrowed when they spotted her, and she realized that although she recognized him, he had no way of knowing her.
Once he was seated across from her, he picked up the phone on his side of the glass, and she picked up hers. “Who are you?” he asked as a greeting, but his tone of voice wasn’t challenging, merely curious.
She swallowed hard and attempted a smile. It was strange speaking to someone on the phone and facing them at the same time. “My name is Becci Littrell. I’m Brian Littrell’s widow.” She paused, unsure if he would recognize the name, then added, “You know, the man who got-?”
“Who got my girlfriend’s heart,” he finished. “I remember. He came to see me once.” AJ frowned. “You said ‘widow.’ He’s dead?”
Becci felt the now familiar stabbing sensation in her heart, but she forced herself to nod. “He died in May. The police think it was suicide… that he stabbed himself in the heart.” Jori’s heart, she thought. She could tell by the look in AJ’s eyes that he was thinking the same thing.
“Holy shit, are you serious? Why would he do something like that?”
Becci met his eyes. “That’s what I want to know.”
AJ appeared so taken aback, he literally leaned back on his stool. “You think I know? You think I had something to do with it? I’ve been incarcerated since April.”
“I don’t know what to think.” Becci shook her head, staring down at the counter in front of her. “All I know is that something changed in him after his transplant. He was never quite the same after that. He started having nightmares… it was like he was haunted by Jori. That’s why he went to see you that day.” She looked back up at AJ. “He was looking for answers. I guess I’m just looking for the same thing.”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I don’t have any answers.”
Becci nodded and lowered her head, so he wouldn’t see the tears that had sprung to her eyes. She had spent six months seeking an explanation, trying to understand what could have driven her husband to take his own life. Now her last hope had proven futile.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” AJ added, and Becci glanced up. He was looking at her through the glass with sympathy. “It’s hard to understand why shit happens to good people. Maybe we aren’t meant to understand. In the end, I guess some things just defy explanation.”
But Becci Littrell would spend the rest of her life waiting… waiting for an explanation that would never come.
