Secrets of the Heart by RokofAges75
Story Notes:

Brian (I) by RokofAges75


Brian (I)


Brian Littrell had heard it said that a person’s heart is an ocean full of secrets. In fact, he had heard it said at least a hundred times, because he was pretty sure that line came from Titanic, and Titanic was his wife Becci’s favorite movie.

But there was nothing secret about his heart. Not anymore. It had been scoped, monitored, recorded, x-rayed, scanned, and catheterized until his cardiologist knew every beat, every murmur, and every thing that was wrong with it. There were no secrets. The test results told only grim truths: a congenital defect had worsened; Brian’s heart was failing; and if he didn’t get a transplant soon, he was going to die.

There was no time for secrets.

At first, he’d told only the necessary people: his wife, of course, and his family – Mom, Dad, his older brother. He and Becci had even tried to explain to Calhan, who was, after all, only a year old and much too young to comprehend how sick his daddy really was. But then the necessity had extended to others: his boss, his coworkers, and, eventually, the students at West Jessamine High School, where Brian had been employed as the choral director for a decade.

The last brought him full circle, for it was in front of his students that he had almost collapsed one day last winter, in the midst of rehearsing for the annual holiday concert. At the time, he’d made light of it, using his sense of humor to clown around his embarrassment. “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I always tell you, never lock your knees on the risers!” He’d earned a few chuckles, but hadn’t missed the nervous looks the kids exchanged for the rest of rehearsal. Not that he could blame them. The incident had alarmed him too, enough to send him to his doctor’s office. And that was where it had all started: the scoping, monitoring, testing process that explained why he was now here, at home in bed, sucking down oxygen from a tube when he should have been using his own supply to teach a bunch of teenagers how to sing.

Brian inhaled a little deeper and released the pure oxygen through a sigh, lifting the remote in his hand to change the channel on his TV. He didn’t understand the appeal these soap operas held for the average housewife. Every one he’d tried to watch seemed to have about fifty different characters, yet moved so slowly that a single conversation between two of them took the whole episode. In essence, nothing happened, and yet, over the course of a week, ridiculous things happened. It was all too melodramatic for him; who needed poorly-scripted drama when they were dying? That was real drama, and Brian had plenty of it. Yet there was nothing else on TV in the middle of the afternoon.

He gave up and turned off the set with a click. The picture on the screen faded to black, and a faint crackling dissipated into a heavy silence. Brian’s gaze moved to the window. In the summer, while he was out of school, he never watched TV during the day; he was always outside, playing with his family, or doing yard work, mowing the fresh grass, planting, watching things grow. But the greenness of summer was long gone now, and sometimes, Brian wondered if he’d ever see it again. Through this window, he’d watched the leaves turn to the vibrant, golden colors of autumn, then fall from their branches and curl upon the ground, dull brown with death. In another month, the trees would be bare, the grass frosted over until it, too, was dead and brown. The school choir would be rehearsing for the holiday concert, and for the first time in ten years, Brian would not be there to lead their rehearsals.

He’d been well enough to finish out the last school year, six months after his fatal diagnosis. But in the peak of summer, when the days were at their longest and the cool nights a pleasant relief, his decline had begun. By mid-August, he was on home oxygen therapy, and teaching music classes seemed out of the question. With reluctance, he’d requested and was granted medical leave, allowing someone else to take over his two choirs. He’d stayed away from school, wanting to send the message to his students that this new director was the director, and there should be no confusion over that. Yet he hoped to make the holiday concert, if he hadn’t gotten a new heart by December.

December would mark a year since his diagnosis, a whole year that he’d been slowly dying. He wondered how much longer the process could last. At what point would his weakened heart decide it couldn’t force another beat and simply stop? Would it be before Christmas? After the new year? Without a new heart, could he make it to his birthday in February? He’d be turning thirty-four. Almost middle-aged, by all accounts, but if you looked at the big picture, a thirty-four-year-old heart was still young. Hearts three times the age of his beat with more strength than his heart beat now.

In the silence, as he lay against his pillows, head turned toward the window, Brian could hear the beat in his ears. It was syncopated, uneven, and it raced with a tempo that was too fast for a person just lying static in bed. “Stay with us. You gotta feel the beat,” he’d urged his percussionists in the orchestra he’d conducted during his student teaching. Instruments weren’t his forte like vocal music was; he could tinker on the piano, strum chords on a guitar, and work the valves on a trumpet, but that was about it. If there was one thing Brian Littrell knew, though, it was rhythm. Rhythm was the backbone of music. Without the steady beat of the bass drum, the rest of the orchestra would collapse. That was what he’d told his bass drummer, Freddie Collins, after school one day, as they stayed late to practice quarter notes, drumming out an eight count that lasted until Freddie could keep the beat without Brian stomping it next to him. Now, it seemed, the drumming of Brian’s heart was worse than Freddie’s. It rushed ahead, then skipped a beat, as if to keep itself in check, and when Brian thought of the blood slogging through it, he felt light-headed.

He remembered how Dr. Robert had explained it to him: “Your heart is, of course, a pump,” the cardiologist had begun. “Newly oxygenated blood enters the left side of your heart from your lungs and is pumped to the rest of your body. It comes back to the heart on the right side, which sends it back to the lungs. But your heart has a defect, a large hole between the left and right ventricle. This means that every time your heart beats, some of the oxygenated blood in the left ventricle sloshes over into the right ventricle and is pumped straight back into your lungs, even though it already has oxygen. Therefore, your heart is having to work harder to get enough blood to your other tissues, and over time, this has enlarged and weakened it. The left ventricle has started to fail; it doesn’t have the strength to keep pumping blood as well as it once did, and now you have a back-up of blood that it can’t bail out. The murmur I hear when I listen to your heart is the blood leaking into the other ventricle.”

He thought he could hear it now, the muffled whooshing that accompanied each sickly beat. It was like the ticking of a time bomb, one which had no visible clock. He couldn’t count down, because he didn’t know what number he was starting from, yet he knew that each passing second, each rush of blood in his ears, brought him closer to death. Just as the bomb would explode, his heart would eventually stop, and there was no guarantee of being able to reset the clock. Listening to the death march of his heart made him feel woozy, and as a clammy sweat broke out on his forehead, he lifted his head from the pillow and took a deep drag of oxygen from the thin tubes in his nostrils. He felt weak, drained, yet he couldn’t let himself lie down again. He felt like the madman in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” – hearing the heart beat was going to drive him insane.

So he sat up again, adjusting his pillows behind his back, and resignedly turned the TV back on, grateful for the noise. Martha Stewart was on now, which meant Dr. Phil was next, and then Ellen DeGeneres, at which point Becci would come home from work and flip to Oprah to see if her show was more interesting that day. It usually was, by Becci’s standards – she liked the serious topics, while Brian preferred the much funnier Ellen.

Two more hours, and Becci would be home, having picked up Calhan on the way. Brian couldn’t wait to see his wife and son. These dying days were so long, yet the weeks seemed so short. To think, Becci had already been in school two months. Two months, and still no heart. They’d both hoped it would come over the summer, while they were both off work, so she wouldn’t have to take time off from her teaching job. But although Brian had moved up on the transplant list with the summer’s decline, no heart had come, and Becci had started the year with a new batch of fourth-graders like usual. Her school knew the situation and was prepared to hire a long-term sub after the transplant, when she would be needed at home to help care for Brian. But first, there had to be a heart. And there was no timing when the right person might die.

Brian’s eyes strayed again from the TV, this time to the small, black pager that lay amid the prescription bottles on his nightstand. When it happened, the pager would go off, and Brian and Becci would make the drive into Lexington to see if there was a match. So far, the pager had been only silent and still. Brian tried not to get his hopes up over the first time it might vibrate. Over the summer, when he’d still felt well enough to sit up at the computer, he’d scanned enough transplant support forums to know that there were often false alarms. Indeed, sometimes in the plural. He might rush to the hospital only to find that the donor heart was not viable after all. Antibodies might keep it from being a perfect match. He might have a fever or the sniffles; even the slightest sign of an infection would be enough to postpone the transplant and give the heart to someone else. But there had been no heart at all, and the pager remained as static as the day Dr. Robert had handed it to him.

No heart…

Dr. Robert…

Dr. Phil…


The scattered thoughts blended into one, as Brian dozed off to the drone of the television, his head lolling to one shoulder. He awoke with the sound of the front door closing, and his chin snapped up from his chest as he looked around, suddenly alert. Ellen was dancing across the TV screen; it was four o’clock. Becci was home.

She swept into the room, balancing Calhan on one hip. In one smooth movement, she bent to kiss Brian, plopping the toddler down on the bed. As his wife straightened up, the faint scent of her lotion lingering in the air, and as his son crawled into his lap and clumsily patted his face, Brian smiled. This was the best part of his long, melancholy days: when his family came home, and the three of them could spend time together. Each moment was more precious than ever, under threat of the ticking time bomb with no exact number.

“How was your day?” he asked Becci, as she began to move about the room, changing from her school clothes into her sweats.

She paused in front of the large dresser to unfasten her jewelry. “Long,” she sighed, flashing him a tired smile in the mirror. He smiled back at her reflection. She was pretty in an old-fashioned way, not stunning by today’s standards, but sweet-faced, with a fair complexion that flushed easily, expressive gray eyes, and dark brown hair styled in a short bob. In the ten years he’d known her, she had never treated her hair; it was always soft, always silky. She was forever running her fingers through it, as she did now, tucking back a lock that had fallen into her eyes as she lowered her head over her wooden jewelry box. “The kids have been keyed up all week,” she added, carefully stowing her earrings and necklace in their proper compartments. “I wish Halloween would come and go already… and the week after, too. Nothing like twenty-five ten-year-olds who are all sugared up on the candy they ate for breakfast and brought in their cold lunches.”

Brian chuckled, shifting Calhan in his lap. “Aw, c’mon. You love Halloween.”

“I loved Halloween as a kid. I love Halloween with my kid. I do not love Halloween with a bunch of other people’s kids who I’m expected to teach,” she explained in her matter-of-fact way, a smirk tugging at the corners of her mouth. She pulled her sweater up and over her head.

He watched her undress, admiring the curves of her body as she turned her back toward him. She was not a slender woman, but she had a classic, hourglass figure that he found attractive. It was wider on bottom ever since she’d had Calhan, and though she complained about wanting to lose the rest of her baby weight, he didn’t see her ever going back to the same body she’d had when he’d married her. But then, her breasts were larger now too, and so it all evened out. She unhooked her bra, sighing with relief as its loosened straps slid down her shoulders, and he saw the red marks on her back where it had dug into her white skin. Shoving the bra into her top dresser drawer, she took out a sweatshirt and pulled it on to cover herself.

“Much better,” she said with a smile as she crawled onto the bed beside him. She snuggled into him wearily, resting her head on his shoulder. “Your mom said Cal’s discovered a new game: catch the kitty!”

Brian laughed. “More like ‘chase the kitty,’ I bet. I can’t imagine Missy would actually let him catch her.”

Becci laughed too. “No, but not for a lack of trying. Grandma said you ran all over the house trying to grab her tail, didn’t you?” Her voice lifted as she spoke to Calhan, chucking him playfully under the chin. He giggled, squirming away, and Brian smiled, watching him.

His son was him in miniature; everyone was shocked by how alike they looked. Same blue eyes, which crinkled at the corners when they smiled. Same long noses that scrunched up as they laughed. Same wispy curls, though Calhan’s were blonder. Brian imagined they would darken with age, as his own hair had. At his parents’ house, where Calhan went for daycare while Becci worked, there were plenty of pictures of Brian as a child, and his relatives constantly marveled over comparing the two.

“Uh-oh… better watch out. I don’t think Missy likes having her tail pulled,” Brian warned Calhan, grimacing as he imagined how his mother’s elderly cat would hiss and spit if the baby did manage to get hold of her switching tail. But he wasn’t really concerned. He knew his mom wouldn’t let the “game” go that far; she was as protective a grandmother as she was a mother, and she doted on her grandson.

“Maybe we should get a cat of our own, so we can show him how to treat one,” Becci said off-handedly.

“Or a dog. A small dog,” he added, smiling. They’d never been able to agree on the best pet; Becci was a cat person through and through, while Brian preferred dogs. Maybe they’d wait until Cal was old enough to have a say and let him cast the deciding vote.

“Ha. Never mind the pet. What do you want for dinner?” she asked, swatting his thigh as she straightened up, swinging her legs over the edge of the mattress to get up again.

“Whatever you feel like fixing. Want some help?”

“I’d love some company, if you feel like it,” she returned his offer with a smile.

“Definitely. I need a change of scenery,” he replied, sitting up straighter himself. Becci nodded. She scooped up Calhan and set him down on the floor, then extended her arm to Brian. He took it, holding on to the oxygen tube with his free hand to keep the line from tangling as he got up. He moved slowly, fighting the light-headedness that accompanied even the slightest exertion. She was ever patient, standing by until he was ready, steadying him when he finally gathered the strength to stand. She picked up the small oxygen tank that sat next to the bed and carried it with her as they walked up the hallway at the pace of a couple of ninety-year-olds.

It had humiliated him, at first, to have to depend on her like this. He was the athletic one of the two; he’d always been in shape, active, full of energy. He’d coached girls’ basketball at the high school for eight seasons before Calhan was born. He’d never imagined that a mere two years later, just walking to his own kitchen and back would seem as tiring as running ten suicides. He hated the sedentary life he’d been forced to adopt, but there was no way around it. He no longer had the stamina to be up and about very often; fatigue and vertigo were his constant companions. And Becci, who had taken on the role of caretaker to a husband as well as a baby without complaint. When he got his new heart, he vowed to make it up to her.

He was breathing hard by the time he sank down onto the kitchen chair Becci pulled out for him, and once again, he felt the erratic thrumming of his heart in his ears, as the rush of blood brought color back into his face. He sat back to visit with Becci as she made dinner, keeping an eye on Cal, who pushed a toy car around his feet. A few months ago, Brian would have been on the floor with him, making the cars crash with lively sound effects that made his son shriek with laughter. But now, he could only watch.

When he got his new heart, he would make it up to Cal too.

When… it was all a question of when. And the question became more crucial with each passing day. A long wait for a heart, which had once seemed feasible, no longer seemed so. Brian was getting weaker and sicker every day, and although he’d been bumped to the top of the waiting list, there was still the matter of waiting. How much longer would he have to wait? Another day? Another week? Another month? Or just until the time bomb in his chest ticked down to its very last second? Waiting game over. Final score: zero.

A cold sweat that had nothing to do with exertion broke out on his skin, and he felt the blood drain from his face again. He sucked in deep lungfuls of oxygen to slow the numbered beats of his palpitating heart. Then he closed his eyes, and there, sitting alone at the kitchen table, he prayed. He prayed swiftly and silently the same plea he knew Becci, too, made to God each night when they went to bed: that the answer to the question of when would be soon.

***


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