Jerk It by Lani Lynn Vale

CHAPTER 20

I hope life isn’t a joke, because I don’t get it.

-Mavis to Fran

MAVIS

“I have to go,” Guilia whispered. “I’m going to…”

She was going to leave, because she couldn’t bear watching her son die.

I couldn’t blame her.

I didn’t want to watch him die, either.

I swallowed really hard. “Would you take Vlad to my sister’s? He…”

He didn’t need to see this. Didn’t need to witness the breakdown that was coming.

Something in which I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, would absolutely break me.

And I would stay broken.

I would learn to work around that brokenness, but I would never heal.

I would always have that large part of my heart just…gone.

“Yes,” Guilia croaked. “I’ll…yes. I’ll drop him off. I’ll be back.”

We both knew she wouldn’t be back.

She would come back eventually, yes. But not in time.

Not in time to watch everything that happened next.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

Then Guilia was gone, and I was left sitting by Murphy’s bedside, listening to his labored breathing, and wondering if each breath would be his last.

I was supposed to call the home health nurse.

She was supposed to be here when I thought he was close, just to offer extra support for me if I needed it.

But…I didn’t want her here.

I wanted to spend the last bit of time with him.

I wanted…

I got up, tears rolling down my cheeks that I hadn’t realized I’d been crying and scooted into the bed beside Murphy.

He didn’t move or react in any way to my closeness. Not like he once would have.

Hell, even when he was most ‘mad’ at me in the very beginning, had I gotten close to him, he would’ve pulled me in closer. He would’ve hugged me tight. He would’ve yelled at me while his arms were firmly around my smaller body.

“When I met you,” I spoke, not sure if he could hear or not because he appeared to be sleeping, but he’d been a good fake sleeper for a while now, trying to hold back the alarm that it would cause his mother and me. “You were the prettiest thing I’d ever met. You had all that golden skin and black hair. I wanted your hair so bad.” I smiled softly, and the salt of my tears dipped into my mouth. I licked my lips clean and kept speaking. “Then you came and spoke to me, and I felt like my whole entire world just opened up, allowing you inside. You might not know this but…I had a really shitty childhood. I hated my grandmother with the fire of a thousand suns. And the day that she kicked y’all out, I never spoke to her again in a cordial tone.”

I spoke with him for what felt like hours.

I was so lost in thought, my voice raw from speaking, that at first I didn’t hear the ringing of my phone.

I stood up from my curl against Murphy’s body—he was still breathing—and went to the phone.

I frowned when I saw the unfamiliar phone number.

Placing it to my ear, I said, “Hello?”

“This is Dr. Battle. Get Murphy here now. We have a heart.”

I cried out in surprise and said, “I’m getting him there!”

“You have an hour. We’ve been trying to call you for a while,” he grumbled, sounding pissed.

I hung up, not replying.

Then I looked at the man that was on the bed, dead weight, with nobody around to help me get him in the car.

I already knew that it was going to be bad, but I’d be damned if I didn’t get him there.

• • •

I made it with a half an hour to spare.

I was sweating, my head hurt from the strain of getting the man in my van, and I was fairly sure I’d torn something in my shoulder.

But I got him there.

I rolled up to the entrance doors of the ER and found the transplant team already there waiting.

They looked pissed.

Little did they know that there was no one there but little old me, and they were lucky that I did CrossFit. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to get him there at all.

Functional fitness at its finest.

They had him out of the car ridiculously easily, and then he was being wheeled into the hospital with nary a word to me.

Which I was okay with.

The moment that he was gone, I sat down in the middle of the breezeway in front of the ER doors and stared.

I stared, and stared, and stared until a security officer came out and asked me to move my van.

I got up on noodle-like legs, opened my car door with my good hand, and sat inside almost on auto pilot.

I closed my door, put the van that’d been running for who knew how long into drive and drove right out of the parking lot.

I turned around only when I realized what I was doing and went to find a spot in the back of the lot.

There I sat in silence, and the dark, while my husband had a heart transplant, and waited for the call.

And the entire time I was sitting there, I wasn’t once aware that I was twirling the wedding ring Murphy had given me around my finger.

Not even when my finger was bleeding and raw.

• • •

MURPHY

I felt like I was looking out of a looking glass.

When my eyes opened, I wasn’t confused for once.

I was completely comprehending of everything that was being said around me.

“Clear!”

I felt my entire body jolt.

The shock went from my fingers all the way to my toes.

“No pulse,” I heard.

That’s when something changed.

I went from being on the inside, to the outside.

At least, that was what it felt like.

I stared at the frantically working hospital workers as they poured around my body.

There was blood everywhere.

There were people in the room looking on in shock.

The man that had his hands inside my chest, manually pumping my heart, wore a look of complete and utter desperation.

“One more time.”

Paddles came out of nowhere, the man at the doctor’s side handing them to the doctor.

He pulled his hands out of my chest, his fingers coated slick with vibrant scarlet, and placed those paddles against my heart.

The shock hit me again, and this time, I gasped and came to for a second time, back inside the body.

Before I could comprehend what was going on, I heard, “We have no pulse!”

Then…nothing.

At least, not until I stared out at the water.

There was so much of it.

And I was walking on it.

I looked down at my bare feet and saw that, though I had a ripple where my feet were pressing against it, I was still suspended as if it was solid.

And the sense of profound peace stole over me.

I was…home.

I looked over the grassy hills and sunshine for miles and was surprised to see that I wasn’t alone.

“Jasper?”

Jasper looked up, a grin on his face. “I never thought it’d be so peaceful.”

Peaceful was an understatement.

Gorgeous.

Breathtaking.

So beautiful that it hurt to look at it.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I guess the same thing as you.”

• • •

MAVIS

I got the call to come to the waiting room on the third floor six hours and fifteen minutes later.

At receiving that call, and the lack of ‘he made it,’ I texted my sister and asked her to meet me at the hospital before turning my phone off and heading for the place where I was told to wait.

I’d just arrived at the location specified when I saw it.

The doctor came out of the room at the end of the hall, and I stared at him, trying to gauge whether he was there to deliver me bad news.

He looked…blank.

As in, he was trying very, very hard to hide his emotions.

I knew that I wasn’t going to like what he had to say.

“There was a lot of damage,” he said, face weary and broken.