hands

David often had trouble discerning who he loved more, who he'd loved first--if he'd even loved in the first place.  After all, they were both projects.  Sick little projects.  Two people he'd tried to fix because he didn't know how to fix himself.  It sounded pathetic and vindictive--it was pathetic and vindictive.  

In the end, it all came back to Melanie.  Melanie with the angel's face and the heart to match it.  Melanie whose definition of love involved many a psychiatric term in conjunction with a set of brain parts.  Melanie whose heart needed a transplant.  Whose hands were trained to heal like his were; whose smile made everything alright--for the patients and mostly, for him.  Melanie who, like him, had been taught not to believe in miracles--only the correct response at the correct time.  Except he'd tucked those truths away.  Kept them in a small corner of his brain to retrieve only when someone's life was at stake and they were needed.  

But, then again, perhaps, in the very end, Jenny was the final knot.  After all, she was the one who'd spun her own wives' tales and knocked on wood for good luck before surgeries--the one who, despite the contamination of medicine, believed in true love.

So who was he building this art studio for?  Jenny or Melanie?  Jenny.  She'd been the one who'd dreamt of it.  But Melanie was the whole reason he'd met Jenny in the first place.  He'd failed to fix her, so he found Jenny--Jenny with the same marble skin and pastel eyes, the same occupation, the same pensive smile--and tried to fix her instead.  No.  It was Jenny--he was sure of it.  Jenny believed in his heart, and, once upon a time, she'd believed in hers, too.  He loved Jenny more than he could Melanie, because she'd believed it when he'd told her the words.  But.  But it wasn't Jenny he'd drunk hospital bleach for, was it?  That was Melanie's death.  That was the one that mattered.  The one that truly changed everything.

Jenny was no one.  Faceless.  It was selfish, forgetting her the way he was trying to, but he wasn't sure he could take caring for anyone else at the moment.  It wasn't Jenny he was painting.  It was Melanie; Melanie all along.  Why else was there an empty hole where her heart should be?

Instead of dipping his brush in deep sanguine and filling the space, David put his hand over it.  The memories.  He'd stripped them bare with extra night shifts and coffee in the place of meals, pills in place of sleep.  But the emotions were still there.  And when he would shut his eyes and let himself get close enough to Melanie, he'd find himself laying a hand on her chest; he'd feel the beating of her heart, and remember the day it stopped.          


They used to joke about it.  Whether she'd be a different person after the transplant.  "How can this Katherine Armstrong have a better heart than yours?" he'd joke.  But only in private, because no one knew about them; the fact that they'd fallen for each other--that they knew each other at all; the fact that he was operating on her.  Only because she'd wanted him to.  Melanie was finally coming around.  She was beginning to believe in this love thing--she'd said it herself:  "I trust you the most with my heart".  He'd believed her.  He'd let himself believe her.  He hasn't stopped hating himself since.  

It was all supposed to be okay.  She worked at the hospital by the bay, and he worked at the hospital in the eastern part of the city.  They saw each other only after work, meeting in the middle.  They went to places where no one knew them, because they liked it that way.  

He'd perform the heart transplant, and wouldn't be caught.  She'd be able to breathe without worrying, and so would he.    

She wasn't supposed to be any different from the others.  He'd helped give dozens of people new hearts.  Melanie wasn't supposed to be different.

He'd kissed her before he begun.  A gentle kiss.  A "see you later".  Not a goodbye.  

No.  It was all wrong.  It wasn't supposed to be goodbye.  Oxidation wasn't supposed to drop thirty percent before he could plug an IV into her wrist.  Pulse wasn't supposed to suddenly stop after pumping 150--it was textbook, somewhere he knew, but he had no heart for the characteristics and numbers life had to fit into.  The bottom line was, a person wasn't meant to die after fighting so hard to live.  

"Not you, Melanie.  You're not supposed to die."

She'd given him her life to hold.  And his hands shook.  As Melanie was losing air and he was scrambling to retrieve the facts he'd so furtively tucked away, David's hands shook.

And, as mountains unraveled into flat planes, David's whole body shook.  Shook with anger and fear and grief and his whole world collapsing on top of his shoulders.


Someone had come and told him to stop.  Someone had led him away.  Rescued him.  Suddenly, he was in the bathroom, scrubbing his damaged hands raw and breaking his lip with his teeth.  When he was done, all those little university facts and rules began to come back to him.  He remembered his professor saying something at the end of the year, before graduation:


"A hospital is different from a lab.  In a hospital, there isn't just life at stake--there are people at stake.  You'll hear some terrible things said, and see some terrible things done.  Sometimes, you're gonna be the one doing those terrible things.  Telling someone their life is over.  Telling a mother her child is dead.  And that sound, that sound of people crying--of people being broken apart--it's the most dreadful sound in the world.  So get used to it.  As fast as you can."


He thought he'd gotten used to it.  But, as his own cry erupted from his swollen throat, David realized that he hadn't learned anything at all.






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