My Stolen Heart

Usually when people say their heart’s been stolen, they mean it figuratively. I don’t.

My name is Angelina Williamson. I’m fifteen years old and living in a little town called Oconomowoc, which is just outside of Milwaukee. I was born with a congenital heart defect and sometimes it seems like my whole life’s been spent traveling from hospital to hospital. I know all the best hospitals in southeastern Wisconsin and I even traveled once to Minnesota to go to the Mayo Clinic. This is not an exciting lifestyle, in case you’re curious.

Then yesterday, the doctors called my parents and said that a heart donor had been found!

I was so excited! I mean, I knew that I’d have to go to the hospital again and have a huge operation and then be on drugs for pretty much forever so that my body didn’t reject my new heart, but still! I’d be able to run around like normal people. I could learn to swim in summer, and for now, I could go sledding and throw all the snowballs I wanted. I could play with my little brother and Dad wouldn’t yell at Timmy for hurting me or tiring me out. Mom would let me baby-sit for the neighbors’ kids (and I’d get to go shopping with all that money!). I’d get a boyfriend and he’d be cute and wouldn’t be scared of breaking me or something. Everything would be great.

But then, earlier today, when I was sitting in the hospital in one of those annoying, itty-bitty, butt-less gowns, the doctors came in and told us: “Your heart’s been stolen, Miss Williamson.”

WHAT? I mean, really, how do you steal a heart? That’s what I wanted to know. I was sure it was just a bad joke. A really bad joke. So bad that I started to get seriously ticked off. I mean, you just don’t say something like that to a girl with a lousy heart!

But they weren’t kidding.

“How could that happen?” my dad asked. He sounded about as shocked as I was. Mom didn’t look much better.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Williamson,” answered the doctor. “Angelina’s heart was on the way from Tennessee in a helicopter. But the bad weather here forced the chopper down in Chicago – the whole Milwaukee airport’s been closed. The heart was placed in a car and rushed from Chicago as fast as it could be. We’d have rather used an ambulance, but there were none at the airport and with the snowstorm, getting one there from a local hospital might have taken another hour. The airport limo service was faster. They came speeding up here, making good time, when they hit a major accident on I-94, because of the icy roads.”

Yeah, okay, I thought. Wisconsin weather sucks in January; nothing new there. So where’s my heart? Is it just delayed, maybe?

“They turned onto a small farm road to bypass the accident. That should have gotten them around the accident and up here in plenty of time, but they weren’t the only ones to think of it, apparently. As they drove over a small hill, the driver and nurses saw a pickup truck turned sideways on the road. The driver couldn’t brake in time on the ice, but he was able to avoid hitting the truck by sliding to the side and into a cornfield.”

“Oh my God,” my mom whispered. “Is everyone alright?”

The doctor nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Fortunately no one was injured.”

“What about the truck?” Dad demanded. “And where’s my little girl’s new heart?”

That’s what I wanted to know, too.

The doctor looked down at the ground and played with his stethoscope for a second before answering my dad. Finally he said, “The truck was put there by a gang of car thieves. They—”

“No!” my mom screamed, suddenly seeing where this was going. “No! Please, they must have known my Angel’s heart was in there! The nurses – why didn’t they say anything? Why didn’t someone stop them?”

Dad put his arm around Mom, like he always does to calm her down when she goes bonkers about something, but this time it was clear that he was just as upset as she was. It’s just that he’s quieter than Mom when he’s worried, so it’s not so obvious. I guess I’m more like him in that way. I mean, when the doctor told us that the car my heart had been in was stolen, I was scared and worried and mad, too, because I knew what it meant. I’m not stupid! But I couldn’t think of anything intelligent to say at all – and it was my heart! How crazy is that?

“The nurses tried to tell the thieves about your heart, but no one was listening to them,” the doctor continued. “They and the driver were thrown in a nearby barn with duct tape over their mouths and around their hands and feet. Theirs wasn’t the only car that had been stolen by these people. It was almost an hour before the thieves left and the people in the barn got free and found someone else to help them. By the time the police got there, the crooks were long gone.”

“But... they’ll find them, right?” I asked. “I mean, the cops’ll chase down these bastards and get my heart back, won’t they?”

“Language, Angelina!” But my mom’s snap didn’t have the force in it that it usually did.

The doctor sighed. He started talking slowly and in very short sentences. I’ve noticed that doctors do that sometimes when they think you don’t understand. Teachers to it, too, but not as much – and trust me, I’ve been in enough schools and hospitals to make the comparison. He said, “I’m sure the cops will catch them. But it might be too late. If the thieves have left the cooler with your heart in it open, it won’t matter whether or not they get caught. Your heart will be ruined.”

I nodded. I know, I should have been screaming or crying or something, but I just couldn’t. It was too crazy. The whole thing just felt impossible.

Mom and Dad talked to the doctor for a long time then, but I really didn’t care anymore. My heart was sitting out there in some crook’s garage or something and getting old. Hearts do that, you know – they’re like raw meat. I left some chicken out on the counter overnight once when I was supposed to have put it in the fridge. The next morning, Mom saw it sitting there and gave me the old “Are-you-an-adult-or-a-little-kid” speech, because the chicken was bad and now she had to find something else to cook for dinner. Hearts are like that. Just like a piece of raw chicken, they’re not much good once they’ve been left out in the open for a while. Even if the cops ever find my heart, I probably won’t be able to use it.

It’s been eight hours now since the doctor told us what had happened – and it was a couple hours before that that the car stealing actually took place. I’m still sitting in the hospital now, just in case, but they at least let me put my regular clothes on and write in my writing notebook and stuff. The doctors haven’t actually said anything, but I don’t think they really think my heart will be found in time. It’s just something in their eyes and the way they’re all super polite with me that tells me that.

I told Mom to go back home with Timmy – he was driving us all crazy again. He’s never been very good at sitting in hospitals. I can’t blame him. I guess it’s good that I’m the one with the lousy heart and he’s got a good one – he’d probably go crazy if he had to sit still as much as I do. At least I like to read.

I know that tomorrow or the next day, whenever everything sinks in and I learn that my heart’s gone for sure, I’ll probably be really upset and angry about it all. But right now I’m pretty much just numb. It’s like when you take a huge test and you think that for sure you’ve failed it, but then you get back the results the next day and you see that you ended up with a B after all. You know you should be jumping for joy, but all you can do right away is sigh in relief because you didn’t fail. That’s sort of how I feel now, except in a backwards way, I guess. I can’t be really furious just yet. That’s why I wanted to write this today, because tomorrow I’m sure I’ll be too ticked off to get the facts straight.

You know what I keep wondering now, though? Now that I’ve had a little time to think about it? I’m wondering what happened in that car wreck on I-94 – the one that made the nurses with my heart get off the highway in the first place. I hope that nobody there died, I really do. But if they did, well, I just hope that they checked the little box on the back of their drivers license that makes them an organ donor. Because I think I’d feel better knowing that, even if I don’t get a new heart today, someone else will.