Free Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult

child and see, instead, the one that peeked up at you from the folds of a baby blanket. You can watch your eleven-year-old daughter painting her nails with glitter polish and remember how she used to reach for you when she wanted to cross the street. You can hear the doctor say that the real danger is adolescence, because you don’t know how the heart will respond to growth spurts—and you can pretend that’s ages away.
    “Best two out of three,” Claire said, and from the folds of her hospital johnny she raised her fist again.
    I lifted my hand, too.
Rock, paper, scissors, shoot
.
    “Paper.” Claire grinned. “I win.”
    “You totally do not,” I said. “Hello? Scissors?”
    “What I forgot to tell you is that it’s raining, and the scissors got rusty, and so you slip the paper underneath them and carry them away.”
    I laughed. Claire shifted slightly, careful not to dislodge all the tubes and the wires. “Who’ll feed Dudley?” she asked.
    Dudley was our dog—a thirteen-year-old springer spaniel who, along with me, was one of the only pieces of continuity between Claire and her late sister. Claire maynever have met Elizabeth, but they had both grown up draping faux pearls around Dudley’s neck, dressing him up like the sibling they never had. “Don’t worry about Dudley,” I said. “I’ll call Mrs. Morrissey if I have to.”
    Claire nodded and glanced at the clock. “I thought they’d be back already.”
    “I know, baby.”
    “What do you think’s taking so long?”
    There were a hundred answers to that, but the one that floated to the top of my mind was that in some other hospital, two counties away, another mother had to say good-bye to her child so that I would have a chance to keep mine.
    The technical name for Claire’s illness was pediatric dilated cardiomyopathy. It affected twelve million kids a year, and it meant that her heart cavity was enlarged and stretched, that her heart couldn’t pump blood out efficiently. You couldn’t fix it or reverse it; if you were lucky you could live with it. If you weren’t, you died of congestive heart failure. In kids, 79 percent of the cases came from an unknown origin. There was a camp that attributed its onset to myocarditis and other viral infections during infancy; and another that claimed it was inherited through a parent who was a carrier of the defective gene. I had always assumed the latter was the case with Claire. After all, surely a child who grew out of grief would be born with a heavy heart.
    At first, I didn’t know she had it. She got tired more easily than other infants, but I was still moving in slow motion myself and did not notice. It wasn’t until she was five, hospitalized with a flu she could not shake, that she was diagnosed. Dr. Wu said that Claire had a slight arrhyth miathat might improve and might not; he put her on Captopril, Lasix, Lanoxin. He said that we’d have to wait and see.
    On the first day of fifth grade, Claire told me it felt like she had swallowed a hummingbird. I assumed it was nerves about starting classes, but hours later—when she stood up to solve a math problem at the chalkboard—she passed out cold. Progressive arrhythmias made the heart beat like a bag of worms—it wouldn’t eject any blood. Those basketball players who seemed so healthy and then dropped dead on the court? That was ventricular fibrillation, and it was happening to Claire. She had surgery to implant an AICD—an automatic implantable cardioverter-defibrillator, or, in simpler terms, a tiny, internal ER resting right on her heart, which would fix future arrhythmias by administering an electric shock. She was put on the list for a transplant.
    The transplant game was a tricky one—once you received a heart, the clock started ticking, and it wasn’t the happy ending everyone thought it was. You didn’t want to wait so long for a transplant that the rest of the bodily systems began to shut down. But even a transplant wasn’t a