The List

It didn't matter that it was a heart.

It could have been a lung, or a liver. Anything, that without for some period of time, she could no longer survive and would slowly, or perhaps quickly die. But a heart made sense, was life itself and no-one could doubt its necessity. Some people can live without a liver can't they? For a while, and there's folks out there with only one lung.

Annie's mother needs a new heart. It's serious and Annie has been worried. Every day on her way to her mother's room in the hospital she walks down the stark corridors, dragging her feet on the tired linoleum and making syncopated squeaks with the toes of her sneakers. She glances through flapping doors into forbidden worlds of things that have gone wrong and the worried faces of those trying to put those things right again. Even where the babies are, there's always something to worry about.

Annie knows her mother won't see Thanksgiving. The doctors say this, but they offer hope in the form of a transplant from a suitable donor and Annie's mother is number fifteen on the list. Getting there seems an awfully long way off. Some distance point way beyond the time she has left to live Annie thinks.

In the room her mother is oddly free of foreign devices, tape and wires. As if, if she wished, she could sit up, swing her legs across the bed, slip to the floor and walk straight out of the hospital and hail a cab in the street to take her home.

But she is pale, and breathes with difficultly. Annie imagines her mother's tired and failing heart, wheezing and spluttering in her chest with every beat like an idling badly tuned lawnmower. She speaks to Annie quietly, with effort, and tells her stories of when she was younger, what a good girl she was and how she nearly didn't make it into the world because the cord got wrapped around her neck starving her of oxygen until a quick thinking nurse grabbed some scissors and cut it from around her neck and tossed it aside like a dangerous snake. Of how in the first few weeks she wouldn't feed, and this made Annie's mother feel helpless and worried. That her baby may die because then so young so new, it didn't know that it had to eat to survive and some reflex that should be there wasn't there. And unlike now with their immutable connection, their mother daughter bond, baby Annie couldn't understand her mother's desperate pleas.

Annie stroked the back of her mother's hand, taking care to not touch the green plastic butterfly where the intravenous cannula had been inserted. She ran a finger around the transparent edge of the plaster holding it in place and wished it didn't pinch her mother's skin so. Annie speaks to her mother and tells her all the things they will do when she is well.

They will fix things in the house and visit places they used to before this room became so unhappily familiar. Annie's mother's new heart will let her swim again, at Choke Canyon and in the gentle waves at Rockport beach. But it's so hard to imagine it now with her like this, shrunk and on hold, slighter than she really is. They imagine from whom her new heart will come, and they pray for someone young, and strong and please god Annie says, immortal.

Annie couldn't wait for fifteen other people on the list to be saved. Fifteen perfect arcs to occur before her mother can be promised a mere chance of life. Annie knew she must reduce the list but hadn't worked out the details of how. Not the chemistry or butchery or whatever it would take to see the heart, their heart cupped in a surgeon's hands ready to reanimate her dying mother. The task was daunting and irrevocable and it would take courage.

Annie's mother lived for another twelve years after the transplant. She ran eight marathons in that time and swam in the ocean every week in Rockport. She hadn't particularly wanted to blaze these trails preferring to perhaps tend her garden, read and take gentle day trips to the lakes. But she felt that she owed it to Annie to achieve something that would be extraordinary even for someone of her age who hadn't undergone such a life changing surgery. To know that Annie would be proud and had not acted in vain she couldn't rest, just exist to live an ordinary life.

She visited Annie almost every week, taking the three bus journey to the facility. They treated her differently to the other visitors. Subtle things, sometimes just a look but it wasn't a judgement, more of an acknowledgement of the terrible circumstances and of what she must be feeling for her daughter.

Annie killed nine of the people on the list before she was finally caught and incarcerated in the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville. Her mother was there when they gave Annie the lethal injection, saw her daughter's life taken because her own had been saved.

The press were there from every continent. The story was a sensation around the world, with its tragic Shakespearean plot exciting the public and eliciting much debate.

Someone made a movie about it. It did so-so at the box office.

By Darren Seeley