Heart to Heart Read Online Free PDF

come and say goodbye to her tomorrow.”
    I made it inside the house before I sank to my knees sobbing. Mom was waiting up and she ran to me.
    “What’s wrong, baby? What’s wrong?”
    I managed to tell her the story in spurts. She listened, found me a tissue, made me stand up and walk into my room. She sat me on the bed and slipped off my shoes, laid me down, and covered me with my comforter, the one Elowyn and I had bought together after we painted my walls purple and my furniture white.
    I cried into the soft material. At some point, Mom crawled into the bed with me and held me, whispering soothing words in my ear. She comforted me as if I were a small child afraid of the dark, until my body stopped shaking and I drifted into a dreamless black sleep.

• 7 •
Kassey
    I was like a dead girl walking. Mom and I were on the surgical floor at the hospital, heading toward the private room where Elowyn lay still and hooked to machines. She was being kept alive to keep her organs usable. I knew that behind the huge double doors at the end of the hall a transplant team was waiting.
    After talking to Mom for most of the morning, I was resigned to what was happening. I understood that parts of Elowyn’s body would go to save others. I knew that with my head. But my heart had a hard time accepting the reality.
    “Is that the way you’d want to live?” Mom had asked me. “Hooked to machines?”
    “Would you turn me off?” I asked her.
    “What would you want me to do?”
    I saw nothing but brick walls. “I guess I’d want to donate,” I answered. “It seems best. If I’m dead.”
    She brushed my cheek. “Like the Wicked Witch of the West in the
Wizard of Oz?
Really, most sincerely dead?”
    I gave her a weak smile.
    Terri and Matt were in the room with Elowyn, on either side of her bed, each of them holding one of her hands and weeping. The vent tube was taped to her face and the machine hissed softly, doing the job she could no longer do on her own. “Come in,” Terri said. Her eyes were swollen and red. “Tell her goodbye.”
    Mom and I came closer. I stared at Elowyn’s face. Some of the swelling had gone down and the skin around her eyes was turning from red to purple. “She looks asleep,” I said. I wanted to touch her while her skin was warm and alive.
    “Go ahead,” Terri said, as if reading my mind.
    I stroked Elowyn’s cheek, hoping she’d flinch, wishing she’d sit up and say, “Cut that out!”
    My throat filled with a million things to say, but my voice couldn’t make its way out. I took a step back. Terri pulled me into her arms, held on so tight I could hardly breathe. I felt her trembling. “You were like a sister to her,” she whispered in my ear.
    I was blinded by tears.
    “It’s time to go.” Mom put her arm around my waist and helped me to the open door. We made our way back down the hall, leaving Elowyn’s parents alone with their daughter and her machines and the waiting transplant team.
    Her name was Elowyn Eden.
    She was my best friend.
    She died when she was sixteen years old.

part two

• 8 •
Arabeth
    The call came early on a Sunday. I heard the phone ringing from upstairs, where I lay in my room in bed sucking oxygen from a big green tank parked beside me, my companion almost twenty-four hours a day. I heard Mom pounding up the stairs and then she threw open my bedroom door. Breathlessly, she said, “They have a heart.”
    I bolted upright. My heart fluttered from the exertion and the adrenaline rush.
    Mom hurried to my closet, opened the door, and took out a suitcase, packed for months waiting for this call to come. “Don’t move. I’ll toss this in the car and then help you downstairs.”
    After dropping off the suitcase, she returned, helped me to stand, and switched my oxygen to aportable unit I could carry in my hand. I took a long look around my room, wondering when I’d see it again. Or if. In the car I said, “I hope this isn’t another false