The Unremarkable Heart

The Unremarkable Heart

by Karin Slaughter

June Connor knew that she was going to die today.

The thought seemed like the sort of pathetic declaration that a ninth grader would use to begin a short story assignment – one that would immediately elicit a groan and failing grade from June – but it was true. Today was the day that she was going to die.

The doctors, who had been so wrong about so many things, were at least right about this: she would know when it was time. This morning when June woke, she was conscious not just of the pain, the smell of her spent body, the odor of sweat and various fluids that had saturated the bed during the night, but of the fact that it was time to go. The knowledge came to her as an accepted truth. The sun would rise. The earth would turn. She would die today.

June had at first been startled by the revelation, then lain in bed considering the implications. No more pain. No more sickness. No more headaches, seizures, fatigue, confusion, anger.

No more Richard.

No more guilt
.

Until now, the notion of her death had been abstract, an impending doom. Each day brought it closer, but closer was never too close. Always around the corner. Always the next week. Always some time in the future. And now it was here; a taxi at the foot of the driveway. Meter ticking. Waiting to whisk her away.

Her legs twitched as if she could walk again. She became antsy, keenly aware of her pending departure. Now, she was a businesswoman standing at an airport gate, ticket in hand, waiting to board the plane. Baggage packed. Luggage checked. Not a trip she wanted to make, but let’s just get it over with. Call my row. Let me onto the plane. Let me put back my seat, rest my eyes and wait for the captain to take over, the plane to lift, the trail of condensation against the blue sky the only clue that I have departed.

How long had it been since the first doctor, the first test, had predicted this day? Five and a half months, she calculated. Not so much time, but in the end, perhaps too much to bear. She was an educator, a high school principal with almost a thousand kids in her charge. She had work, responsibilities. She hadn’t the time or inclination for a drawn-out death.

June could still remember going back to work that day, flipping through her calendar – standardized testing the following month, then the master schedule, which no one understood but June. Then the winding down of the school year. Grades due. Contracts signed. Rooms cleaned. The school was to be painted this year. Tiles replaced in the cafeteria. New chairs for the band room. Lockers needed to be re-keyed.

‘All right,’ she had said, alone in her office, staring at the full days marked in the calendar. ‘All right.’

Maybe she could fit it in. Maybe if she could last four months, she could get it all done.

So June had not taken her dream vacation to Europe. She had not gone skydiving or climbed a mountain. She had continued to work at a job she had grown to despise, as if what she did made a difference. Suspending students. Lecturing teachers. Firing a slovenly gym coach she’d been collecting a file on for the last three years.

Clumps of hair fell onto her desk. Her teeth loosened. Her nose bled. One day, for no obvious reason, her arm broke. She was holding a cup of coffee and the heat from the liquid pooling on the carpet in front of her open-toed sandal was the first indication that something was wrong.

‘I’ve burned my foot,’ she had said, wondering at the dropped jaws of the secretaries in the front office.

What had forced her on? What had made her capable of putting on pantyhose and pantsuits every morning, driving to school, parking in her spot, doing that hated job, for four more months when no one on earth would have questioned her early retirement?

Willpower, she supposed. Sheer determination to finish her final year and collect her full pension, her benefits, after giving thirty years of her life to a system that barely tolerated her presence.

And pride. After all this time, she embraced the opportunity to show her suffering on the outside. She wanted them to see her face every day, to watch the slow decline, to note the subtle changes that marked her impending death. Her last pound of flesh. Her last attempt to show them that they were not the only ones who sustained damage. Jesus on the cross had made a less determined departure.

There was no best friend to tell. No family members left to whom she could confide her fears. June announced it in a school-wide email. Her hand was steady as she moused over to the icon showing a pencil hovering over a piece of yellow paper. Compose. Send to all. No salutation. No tears. No quibbling. She was fifty-eight years old, would not live to see fifty-nine, but a sentence of death was not a license to lose her dignity.

‘You should all know that I have inoperable stage four lung cancer.’

The first thing people asked was, Are you a smoker? Leave it to June to get the sort of disease that had a qualifier, where strangers judged you for bringing about your own illness. And even when June told them no, that she had never smoked, never tried a cigarette or even thought about it, there was a glassy look to their eyes. Disbelief. Pity. Of course she’d brought this on herself. Of course she was lying. Delusional. Stubborn. Crazy.

It was all so eerily similar to what had come before that by the end of the day, June found herself laughing so long and so hard that she’d coughed blood onto her blouse. And then the horrified looks had replaced the pity, and she was back in those dark days when her only comfort was the thought that the sun would rise and set, the years would go by, and eventually, she would die, her shame taken with her to the grave.

Irony
, June thought now. An incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs.

The lung cancer had quickly metastasized. First her liver, which gave her an alarming, yellowish pallor, then her bones, so brittle that she was reminded of angel hair pasta before you put it into a pot of boiling water. And now her brain, the last thing that she could truly call her own. All cancerous. All riddled with tumors, cells multiplying faster than the palliative radiation and chemotherapy could keep up with.

The doctor, an impossibly young man with a smattering of acne on his chin, had said, ‘The metastasis are quite pronounced.’

‘Metastases,’ June had corrected, thinking she could not even have the luxury of dying without having to correct the English of someone who should clearly know better.

‘Five months.’ He’d scribbled something in her chart before he closed it. ‘Six if you’re lucky.’

Oh, how lucky June was to have this extra time.

The tumors in her brain weren’t impinging on anything useful. Not yet, at least, so it would seem not ever. This morning, she imagined them as similar to the shape of a lima bean, with tiny, round bottoms that fit puzzle-like into curving gray matter. Her speech was often slurred, but the gift of brain cancer was that oftentimes she could not hear her own voice. Memory was an issue, though maybe not. She could be paranoid. That was a common side-effect to the myriad of medications she ingested.

Short term memory loss. Palsy. Dry mouth. Leaky bowels.

Her breathing was borderline suffocation, the shallow gulps bringing a wheezing death rattle from her chest. She could no longer sit up unaided. Her skin was cold, the constant temperature of a refrigerator’s vegetable crisper and, in keeping with the metaphor, the texture, once smooth and even, was now entirely wilted.

In the early days of her diagnosis, she’d had so many questions about her impending death, but could find no one to answer them. There were plenty of tracts in the doctor’s office on keeping a good attitude, eating macrobiotic diets and making your way back to Jesus, but June could find nothing that spoke frankly on the actual act of death itself. There must have been information online, but if June wanted to read endless paragraphs of poor-me navel-gazing, she could walk down to the reading lab and start grading creative writing assignments. Besides, she could not overcome her long-held belief that the internet was designed to render human beings functionally retarded.

Years ago, when June had gallbladder, she had talked to other patients about what to expect. How long was the recovery? Was it worth it? Did it take care of the problem?

There was no one to talk with this time. You could not ask someone, What was it like when you died?

‘It’s different for everyone,’ a nurse had said, and June, still full of enough life to feel the injustice of her situation, had said, ‘That’s bullshit.’

Bullshit, she had said. Bullshit to a perfect stranger.

Five years ago, the air conditioner at the house had finally given up the ghost, and the repairman, a former student of June’s who seemed disproportionately fascinated with the minutiae of his job, had described in great detail where the fatal flaw had occurred. Condensation had rusted the coil. The Freon had leaked, depriving the system of coolant. The hose to the outside unit had frozen. Inside the house, the temperature had continued to rise rather than fall, the poor thermostat not understanding why cooling was not being accomplished. Meanwhile, the fan had continued on, whirring and whirring until the motor burned out.

Cause and effect.

And yet, while June could easily find a semi-literate HVAC repairman to explain to her the process through which her air conditioner had died on the hottest day of the summer, there was no medical expert who could reveal to June the minutiae of death.

Finally, on one of the last days that she could leave the house unaided, June had discovered a book in the dusty back shelves of a used-book store. June had almost overlooked it, thinking that she had found some new age tripe written by a pajama-clad cultist. The cover was white with the outline of a triangle inside a solid circle. The title was an idiotic word-play she could do without –
How Do You Die?
– but she found comfort inside the pages, which was more than any living being could offer her.

‘The following text will serve as a guide to the physical act of dying,’ Dr Ezekiel Bonner wrote. ‘Though every human being is different, the body only dies in one way.’

‘Well,’ June had mumbled to herself. There, finally, was the truth.

None of us are special. None of us are unique. We may think we are individuals, but in the end, we are really nothing at all.

June had taken the book home, prepared a pot of tea, and read the book with a pen in her hand so that she could make notations in the margins. At points, she had laughed aloud at the descriptions offered by Dr Bonner, because the physical act of the body shutting down was not unlike that of her dying air conditioner. No oxygen, no blood flow, the heart burning out. The brain was the last to go, which pleased June, until she realized that there would be a period of time in which her body was dead but her brain was still alive. She would be conscious, able to understand what was going on around her, yet unable to do or say anything about it.

This gave her night terrors like she’d never had before. Not believing in the afterlife had finally gotten its own back.

How long would that moment of brain clarity last? Minutes? Seconds? Milliseconds? What would it feel like to be suspended between life and death? Was it a tight wire that she would have to walk, hands out, feet stepping lightly across a thin wire? Or was it a chasm into which she would fall?

June had never been one to surrender to self-pity, at least not for any length of time. She considered instead the day ahead of her. She had always loved making lists, checking off each chore with a growing sense of accomplishment. Richard would come soon. She could already hear him downstairs making coffee. His slippers would shuffle on the stairs. Boards would squeak in the hallway. The hinges would groan as the door was pushed open. Tentatively, he would poke his head into the room, the curiosity in his eyes magnified by the thick lenses of his glasses.