Flying Leap. Judy Budnitz

a little thing really. Less than a pound. It’s just a muscle. You’ve got muscles all over the place. Can’t you spare one?” She looks earnestly into my face. “Can’t you spare a little bit of flesh?”

      “Your mother’s dying in there!” Nina blurts out. She heaves a shuddering sigh, then another. “Don’t you care?” she says, and then they are crying, both of them, drops sliding down the wrinkles in their faces.

      My mother’s dying in there. Dying? She looked all right just a little while ago, I remind myself. But I have to sit down. A coldness sinks and spreads through my gut. I want to call someone, talk to someone. I want a drink badly.

      Later we go visit my mother again. She looks worse, but perhaps it is the fluorescent lights draining color from her face. I stand again at the foot of her bed. I can see the veins and tendons on her neck. So delicate, so close to the surface, you could snip them with scissors.

      “Arnie,” she says softly, “you should go home and get some sleep. And shave. You look terrible. So tired. Go. I’ll be here tomorrow, I’m not going anywhere.”

      “You see?” Fran hisses at me. “Sick in the hospital with a bad heart, and all she can think about is you!”

      Nina strokes my mother’s head and tells her she’ll be fine. I look at my mother lying there and I try to think of her as organs, blood, cogs and springs and machinery. I remember a time when I was small and she hugged my head to her. My ear pressed into her stomach and I could hear the churning, gurgling workings within.

      “Go on, now. Get some sleep. I’ll be fine,” my mother says weakly, and closes her eyes. We shuffle out.

      Fran and Nina say they will stay awhile longer, in case anything happens. I leave, but promise to come back soon.

      I drive home in the dark. I go up to my apartment and turn on the lights. I take a shower and try to shave, but my body does not want to work properly. I stub my toes, jab my elbow, and poke a toothbrush in my eye. When I look down, my body looks strange and alien, hairier than I remembered, and larger. Looking in the mirror gives me a chill; as I shave I have the feeling the face in the mirror will start to do something different from what I am doing.

      I go into the kitchen and put a frying pan on the stove. I put in a dab of margarine and watch it slide around, leaving a sizzling trail. I think of eggs. Scrambled? No—fried, sunny-side up, half-raw and runny. I get two eggs out of the refrigerator. I crack one into the pan. There’s a blob of blood mixed in among the yellow.

      I dump everything in the sink and run the garbage disposal, trying not to look at it too closely.

      I want to call Mandy. Then I realize I don’t want to call her at all.

      Usually my mother calls in the evenings to tell me about TV programs and weather changes.

      I turn off the lights and sit in the dark. I look at the ceiling, at the smoke detector. It has a blue light that pulses and flickers with a regular beat like the blip on a cardiograph.

      Early the next morning, at the hospital, I tell the doctor, “I want to do it. Give her my heart.”

      He gives me a long, steady look, eyes huge behind the glasses. “I think you’ve made the right decision. I do,” he says. His eyes drop to my chest. “We can get started right away.”

      “But what about a transplant for me?” I say. “Don’t you need to arrange that first?”

      “Oh, we’ll take care of that when the time comes. I want to get your heart into your mother right away, before … before—”

      “Before I change my mind,” I say.

      He hardly hears; he’s already deep in his plans. His scalp is shiny with sweat.

      “Is it a complicated kind of operation?” I ask.

      “Not really,” he says. “Making the decision is the hardest part. The incision is easy.” He claps me on the back. “Have you told your mother yet? Well, go tell her, and then we’ll get your chest shaved and get started.”

      This is what I’ve realized: All along I thought I’d publish a book. Lots of books. Get recognition, earn lots of money, support my mother in style in her old age. Give her gorgeous grandchildren. I thought that was the way to pay her back everything I owe her.

      But now it looks like I have to pay my debts with my heart instead. Under these circumstances, I don’t have a choice. I’m almost glad; it seems easier this way. I’ll just give her a piece of muscle and then I’ll be free of her forever, all my debts paid. One quick operation will be so much easier than struggling for the rest of my life to do back to her all the things she thinks she’s done for me.

      It seems like a good bargain.

      When I tell my mother the news, she cries a little, and smiles, and says, “Oh, I didn’t expect it. Oh, not for a minute. I wouldn’t expect such a sacrifice from you, Arnie, I wouldn’t dare even to mention such a thing. It’s more than any mother could expect of her son. I’m so proud of you. I guess I did a good job raising you after all. You’ve turned into such a fine, good person. I worried that I may have made mistakes when I was bringing you up, but now I know I didn’t.”

      On and on she goes.

      And the aunts. They cry, and clutch my arms, not so tightly as before. They say they doubted me but they never will again. “What a good son,” they keep saying. Looking at them now, they seem smaller than they did before, shriveled.

      I call Mandy, and she dashes over to the hospital. She kisses all over my face with her cherry-flavored Chap Stick, and she hugs me and presses her ear against my chest. She tells me she knew I’d do the right thing. I’m feeling pretty good now; I light up a cigarette. She takes it away from me and mashes it beneath her heel. “That belongs to your mother now,” she says.

      They all give me flowers. I feel like a hero. I kiss my mother’s cheek.

      I hop on a stretcher. They wheel me out. They sedate me slightly, strip me, shave me.

      And then they put the mask on and knock me out good; it’s like I’m falling, falling down a deep well, and the circle of daylight above me grows smaller and smaller and smaller, until it is a tiny white bird swooping and fluttering against a vast night sky.

      How does it feel to have no heart? It feels light, hollow, rattly. Something huge is missing; it leaves an ache, like the ghost of a severed limb. I’m so light inside, but so heavy on the outside. Like gravity increased a hundredfold. Gravity holding me to the bed like the ropes and pegs of a thousand Lilliputians.

      I lie at the bottom of a pool. Up above I see the light on the surface. It wavers, ripples, breaks, and comes together again. I can see the people moving about, far above, in the light. I am down here in the dark, cradled in the algae. Curious fish nibble my eyelashes.

      After a while I see a smooth pink face above me. The doctor? “Arnie,” he says. “The operation went very well. Your mother is doing wonderfully. She loves the new heart.” His words begin far away and drift closer, growing louder and louder, until they plunk down next to me like pebbles.

      “Arnie,” he calls. The pool’s surface shivers. His face balloons, shrinks to a dot, then unfolds itself. “Arnie, about you—we’re having a little trouble. There’s a shortage of spare hearts in this country right now. We’re looking for some kind of replacement. But don’t worry, you’ll be fine.”

      Later I see Aunt Fran and Aunt Nina. They lean close; they’re huge. Their faces bleed and run together like wet watercolors. “Your mother’s doing so well!” they call. “She loves you. Oh, she’s so excited. She’ll be in to see you soon!”

      And later it’s my mother gliding in, her face pink, her hair curled. “Arnie … Arnie … you good boy …” she calls, and then they wheel her out.

      They leave me alone for a