They Gave My Heart to My Sister and Forgot My Last Birthday novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Birthday
On Deirdre's twenty-sixth birthday her father tells the fourth floor the new heart goes to Maeve; she walks out into the rain, where Donovan Mulcahy opens his car door.
My father told the whole fourth floor that the new heart was going to Maeve.
He said it at the nurses' station, with a doctor on one side of him and my mother on the other.
I was standing in my doorway in a hospital gown, holding my IV pole, because I had heard the word "heart" in the hall and come to listen.
I had turned twenty-six that morning.
Nobody had said so.
"A donor heart came in at dawn," the doctor said. "The blood type fits both of your daughters. The committee made its decision an hour ago."
He was looking at the floor tiles.
"Maeve," my father said. "Get her ready."
Two nurses at the station stopped typing.
A man in the hallway lowered his phone, and the woman beside him took her hand off her husband's arm.
I walked toward them with the pole rattling beside me.
"I've been on the list longer," I said. "My numbers are worse. Ask him."
The doctor said nothing.
"The committee looked at the whole picture, Deirdre," my father said. "Maeve has earned it."
"Earned it how?"
"By being a daughter who doesn't make accusations."
That was what this was about, and everyone standing there knew it.
Three months ago the alarm sheet for the safe in my father's study had been sold to the Mulcahys, and two nights later the safe was empty.
I had seen Maeve photograph that sheet with her phone.
I told my father, and he called me jealous and a liar and took me off the family books that same week.
"She sold your alarm code," I said now, in front of the whole floor. "I told you in July."
"And I told you I was done hearing it," my father said.
My mother put her hand on my arm.
Her voice was soft, the way it always was when she wanted me to stop talking.
"Not now, Deirdre. It's Maeve's day."
"It's my birthday."
She blinked.
"Is it?" she said. "Oh, honey. Today?"
She turned to my father. "Desmond, did you know it was today?"
My father looked at his watch.
Behind me a wheelchair rolled over the tile, and a nurse brought Maeve down the hall with her oxygen tube and her hospital socks.
She had on the lemon socks I'd given her at Christmas, and her eyes were red.
She took my hand in both of hers, and hers were cold.
"Deirdre, I'm so sorry," Maeve whispered. "I didn't ask for this. I'll talk to Dad. I'll chain myself to his desk until he finds you another heart."
It was such a Maeve thing to say that I almost laughed.
"I know you'll try," I said.
Her phone was in her other hand, held low against her hip.
I squeezed her cold fingers and let them go.
At the end of the counter a nurse was holding a plain white envelope.
"This was left for room 412 an hour ago," she said. "A tall man in a black coat. He said it was for the birthday girl."
My name was written on it in blue ink.
My father crossed the floor in three steps and took it out of her hand.
"I'll hold it for you," he said. "You shouldn't be reading things from strangers in your condition."
He slid it into the inside pocket of his coat.
I looked at his pocket.
I looked at my mother, who was fixing Maeve's blanket, and at Maeve, who was looking at nothing.
I looked at the blue wool bracelet on my left wrist, the one Katie had knitted me in the basement support group before she stopped coming.
Katie would have said something.
She would have said it loudly.
I had been the good daughter for twenty-six years.
I had kept the books and swallowed the Sundays and said sorry for things I hadn't done.
It had bought me a gown, a drip bag and a father who checked his watch.
So I stepped out.
I peeled the tape off my arm, left the pole at the station and unplugged the pump from the wall.
I hooked its small battery bag over my shoulder, with the line still running into the vein above my elbow.
"Deirdre, you can't," the doctor said. "Without the drip you have days."
"Then write down that I left against medical advice," I said. "And write down who signed the committee's order."
My father didn't raise his voice, and the whole floor heard him anyway.
"If you walk through that door, don't come back."
"I'll remember you said that."
It took me forty steps to reach the elevator.
My knees shook the whole way, and nobody followed me, and I wanted that to hurt less than it did.
The lobby doors opened onto rain.
I stood under the awning with the bag cutting into my shoulder, breathing in short, shallow pulls.
I had two hundred and eleven dollars on my phone, a card my father could cancel in one call and nowhere to go.
A black car pulled up to the curb.
The back door opened from the inside.
The man who leaned out wore a black coat, and the ink on his left hand ran up under his cuff.
I knew his face from the newspaper clipping my father had pinned to the wall of his study, with a dart stuck through it.
Donovan Mulcahy, the rat.
"Deirdre Kilbride," he said. "Get in. Your father just took something of mine, and you're about to need a doctor."
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