The Anatomical Shape of a Heart (15 page)

“But a few of my nursing credits will transfer,” Heath said excitedly. “I'm too late for fall, but I might be able to get in this winter. January, hopefully, if I don't get turned down for financial aid.”

It took all of ten seconds for Mom to raise two victory fists in the air, and then she was hugging Noah like he really were a saint. Maybe he was.

So why wasn't I over the moon about all this? I was happy for Heath, sure. But it was only a couple of weeks ago that he was out partying. And it was only a couple of months ago that the two of them were on “a break.” And it was only
six
months ago that Heath was ditching a community-college nursing program. Again.

But despite his long list of screwups, he was still my brother, and I guess I was sad he'd be breaking up Team Adams and leaving Mom and me behind.

“You can have Laundry Lair,” Heath said after dinner, leaning across the counter toward me while Jack and I rinsed off plates and filed them into the dishwasher. Now I knew why Heath had cleaned off the brimstone wall; he'd already been planning on moving out.

“I dunno,” I said. “On one hand, more privacy. On the other, it smells like car exhaust and mold down there.” I didn't mention it was half the size of the dining room—a sticking point between us since we'd moved in here.

Heath smirked at me. “And once you get your stuff down there, it'll smell like formaldehyde and pencil lead.”

“Where
is
your room?” Jack asked me.

“Not exactly the mayor's mansion here,” Heath said. “Rooms are where you can find space to fit a bed.”

I threw a kitchen towel at my brother. “You can handle the glasses.” They never got clean in the dishwasher, so we had to do them by hand. I left Heath to it and walked Jack to my X-ray doors, explaining the whole dining-room-origin story, while, at the other end of the living room Mom and Noah conspired over coffee to plan my brother's future. I left one door cracked so it wouldn't look like I was luring Jack into my web to have my wicked way with him.

“This is amazing,” Jack said, peering through the mission china cabinet at my strange assortment of anatomy tchotchkes. “It's … so you.”

“Go on and say it. It's weird, I know.”

“It's very weird. And I love weird, so you're in luck. Whoa—is this vintage?”

I showed him my Visible Woman (which he went bananas over) and introduced him to Lester the Skeleton (which creeped him out). I almost pulled out the artist mannequin that my dad had sent—the wood-carving shop in Berkeley
still
hadn't answered my email—but I was too worried Mom might stroll in and ask about it. And while I was busy freaking over the fact that
Jack was in my room
, he flipped through a couple of sketchbooks—random drawings I hadn't posted online. Some were from art class at school. He stopped on a still life and chuckled.

“What?” I said, sitting next to him.
On my bed.
Some primitive part of my brain was already running through potential seduction fantasies, like accidentally spilling something on his shirt so that he was forced to take it off, and then I'd have to rub down his bare chest with my bedspread.

The primitive part of my brain wasn't particularly bright.

Still Life with Fruit,
Jack said in a faux-cultured voice. “I can practically feel the resentment in your hatching. Definitely not your favorite subject matter.”

“You're not wrong. Guess you had me pegged from the get-go. Keep flipping through that and you might find some angry logo design, too.”

“Where's”—he lowered his voice—“Minnie? Can I see her?”

“I'm not finished or anything,” I said, suddenly self-conscious.

“When's the deadline for the art contest?”

“I've already signed up, but I have to turn in my piece three days before the exhibition. Which means I have to finish by July twentieth. I can show you what I've done so far. I haven't quite decided how I'm going to put it all together, but if you want…”

“I want. Believe me,
I want
.”

Wait—what did he want? Not Minnie, that's for sure. Dark eyelashes blinked at me as his knee rested against mine, and suddenly it was that first night on the bus all over again, staring at each other with flames shooting between us. I quickly decided my fantasy with the spill on the shirt was far too tame—I needed to spill something down the front of his jeans.

“What are you thinking?” he murmured.

“I'm thinking about your 4-H belt buckle,” I murmured back.

Well. That shocked him. Guess my future
bon vivant
college self had officially chosen Jack over the ex-swimmer college professor.

“I was thinking about how hot your bra looks beneath that see-through toga shirt, so I guess we're even.” He leaned closer and whispered, “Show me Minnie before I embarrass myself in front of Nurse Katherine the Great.”

Guh. Okay, now he'd shocked me. But God as my witness, I would see that belt buckle again in the near future or die trying.

I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans and blew out a long breath as I stepped across the room to my drafting table. The sketchbook was stashed among a couple of others between the table and the wall. Not that Mom would instantly know I'd been at the lab if she saw the sketches. I copied a lot of “internals,” as I liked to call the inner-organ diagrams, from old textbooks.

Jack hovered near my right arm, watching me flip open the sketchbook. If anything could put a damper on rampant sexual frustration, it was looking at cadaver drawings. I skipped over my preliminary sketches and went for the one I'd been working on the last two sessions: a view of Minnie's full torso, including the dissected arm. It was pretty disturbing and, frankly, I'd been having a hard time looking at my sketches after I left the lab. This one was extra-bad because I'd included her face and hair. But I really felt I needed to because it humanized her—made her less of a “thing” and more of a real person.

Maybe a little too real …

“Think I'm going to pass out,” Jack mumbled from my side in a funny voice.

I started to apologize, but the words never left my mouth. His legs folded, and he dropped as though like someone had shot him. He was pranking me, surely. That's what I thought for all of one second.

He wasn't getting up.

16

I fell on my knees by his side and touched his face. He wasn't dead. He groaned and tried to lift his head off the floor, but his eyes weren't opening.

“Mom!” I yelled, but she was already racing into my room with Noah and Heath.

“What happened?”

“He was looking at one of my drawings and said he was passing out, and he just collapsed.”

Mom went into nurse mode. “Honey, can you hear me? Jack?”

“M'okay,” he slurred. His eyes fluttered open.

Her hands moved in quick succession over his neck, forehead, wrist. “Listen to my voice. Are you diabetic?”

“No.” He tried to shift his legs.

She quickly repositioned them. “Are you on any meds?”

“No.” He swallowed thickly and opened his eyes. “God, I'm dizzy.”

“Bex, hand me the pillows off your bed.”

When I brought them to her, she was unbuckling his 4-H belt buckle. I nearly flipped until I realized what was going on: restrictive clothing. She loosened it, wiggling open the top button of his jeans before checking his neck again. He was wearing that black T-shirt, which wasn't tight. “Under his feet. They need to be higher than his heart,” she instructed. “Has this happened before, Jack? Have you fainted before?”

“Fuck,” he said. Then, “I didn't mean to say that, sorry.”

“Don't be. I'm sure Buddha will forgive you.”

He tried to laugh. “I can't believe … I've never…”

Mom went through a series of questions. Could he breathe okay? Did his chest hurt? Numbness? She took his pulse again and inspected his head.

“I'm okay, really,” he said, pushing himself up.

“Oh, no you don't,” Mom answered, pushing him back down. “Heath, go fetch a glass of water and find that stash of Easter candy in the pantry. Noah, you help him.” After the boys trotted off to the kitchen, she said, “Okay, so tell me what was happening. No judgment here, and I mean that.”

“Did you…” His hands felt around his open belt buckle.

“Nurse Katherine's a perv,” I said.

“Bex,” my mother scolded.

“Look, the whole thing's my fault,” I told her. “I was showing him gruesome sketches.”

“No, no. I haven't had a lot of sleep lately,” he argued, buckling himself back up. “I'm probably just run-down. Either that, or I've got a Victorian woman living inside me. Jesus, this is embarrassing.”

“Sweetie, nothing embarrasses me,” Mom said. “The things I've seen and done in the ER this week alone would make Vin Diesel faint. I just want to make sure you're okay.”

And he was, or he seemed to be—enough that he finally fought off Mom's ministrations and stood with no problem. He made self-deprecating remarks in front of Heath and Noah, And after it was determined that Jack was back to normal, he said he had to get home and promised Mom twenty times he could drive himself.

“If you don't make it back safe, your dad will sue me,” Mom argued.

“I can drive his car, and Heath can follow on my Harley,” Noah suggested.

Jack shook his head. “I appreciate your good intentions, but I'm trying to impress a girl and not look like a total putz, so I'm leaving now. Thank you for dinner. It was excellent, and I mean that.”

“It was probably food poisoning that did it,” Heath joked. “Jack's just the canary in the coal mine. The rest of us will be on the floor before the night's over.”

Mom smacked him in the arm as we all headed outside, and because Heath was staying over at Noah's, they were leaving, too. So I had to walk Jack back to Ghost under my family's watchful eyes.

“I know you're tired of answering this, but are you really okay?” I asked. “I'm so sorry about Minnie.”

“Not your fault. Seriously, I'm just tired.”

Some tiny voice in my head whispered that he wasn't exactly telling the truth, but I decided not to hammer him on it. “Despite the bad ending, I'm glad you came.”

“I'm glad you hunted me down at the Zen Center.”

“It was only fair. You hunted me down at Alto Market.” I crossed my arms and shivered in the night air as he unlocked his car door.

“What are you doing for the Fourth?” Jack asked. “You scheduled to work?”

“I don't think so. It's already here?”

“Day after tomorrow. My dad will be showing his face at Pier Thirty-Nine for fireworks over the Bay, which, as you know, might be a moving patriotic display or a muddled cloud of pink fog, depending on the weather.”

“We used to hunt a spot to watch them, but it's not worth the hassle.”

“Then, how about a movie at my place? Andy and a few other people are coming. It's been an Independence Day tradition over the last couple of summers, since I always have the house to myself.”

“Sounds fun.”

“Okay, well, since Nurse Katherine is watching us, I'm going to leave now with half my male pride intact.”

“We should advertise: Lose your machismo at the Adams family home. We're like the opposite of that skeevy roll-on underarm testosterone treatment.”

“Even having lost my machismo, I can promise it's not enough to keep me away,” he said as he slipped into Ghost and rolled down a window. “Good night, Bex.”

“Good night, Jack.”

I watched him drive off and waved at Heath, who looked ridiculous on the back of Noah's motorcycle. Then I headed back up to Mom. It took her all of one minute to end up in my room, perched on my bed where Jack had sat earlier.

“Okay, what
really
happened?” she said.

“I don't know. Like I said already, I was showing him my art—”

“Dammit, Bex. Normal people don't want to look at that stuff. It's grisly.”

“I know.”

“You used to be so creative. Why don't you paint anymore?”

“I like doing this, and it's practical. I'm thinking about my future, which is what you've always drilled into me. And it's not that different from what you do at work—or what you're all jumping up and down about Heath going back to school to learn. My art could help save lives one day.”

She grabbed my shoulders and forced me to look at her. “Heath and I aren't blessed with a gift. If I had your talent, I wouldn't be stressed out, working graveyard and missing out on my kids' lives.”

“But—”

“Art shouldn't be practical. It should be emotional and expressive. There are other ways to save people's lives than drawing teaching diagrams for med students. You could do something bigger. Something that makes people happy—and that makes
you
happy.”

I pushed free from her grip. “I'm not unhappy. I've told you that a thousand times. Why don't you believe me?”

“Because you're the most stubborn person I know.”

“Tenacious,” I corrected. “It's a gift.”

She sighed dramatically. We both looked anywhere but at each other until she finally said, “People don't faint for no reason. Could be an indication of something more serious going on with Jack's heath, or could've been emotionally triggered. Anything he's stressed about at home?”

Besides his mom's seizure and having the mayor of San Francisco for a father? Gee, I didn't know. “He's definitely going through some serious stuff right now with his mom.” I couldn't tell her any details about Jack's mother—not even the little I knew—because what if Mom said something at work? It might spread all over the ER and get back to the Vincents or someone in the press. I already spilled Jack's vandalizing secret to Heath, which was bad enough.