Wishing Well

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Beep. Beep. Beep.

            Life becomes nothing more than a tempoed line on a screen. At least, that is what Mneme has realized. The beeping machine next to her bed mocked her, because that is all anybody else notices. To everyone else the machine is displaying the only living thing about her, her heart. To them she was a shell with a steady beat. No cognitive reasoning and no motor controls is what the doctor had said to another man in the hall, but obviously he was wrong.

            He'd also said that her memory was damaged. This was true, at least partially, because she couldn't remember why she was in a hospital with all these wires connected to her. She did remember this hospital though, especially this floor, but she didn't know why.

            Mneme remembered the white walls and tile floors that shone almost heavenly from the bright hall lights. From her room at the end of the hall she could see five other doors, which she supposed led into other patient rooms, on each side of the hallway. The sliding glass doors to each room were crystal clear and ensured that the patients within each room would never have a moment of privacy. Through the clear panes of her door she focused her gaze on the door diagonal from her own. For the past three days she had stared at the girl laying in that room, trying to remember who she was, or at least who she looked like.

***

            "Mom, can I go to school today?"

            Mneme looked up from the clothes she was putting away in the cheap particleboard dresser and turned to the girl on the bed. She was crouching low on the forest green bedspread with her short brown hair standing on end like a lion's mane. The girl had been cooped up in this room for several days while she recuperated from one of her never-ending hospital visits.  The white, empty walls of the small bedroom closed in on Mneme more every day, so she could only imagine how the girl was handling the claustrophobic space.

            "I don't think you should, you only just got discharged this weekend. How about you take it slow?"

The girl groaned, "I never get to do what I want. I always have to," she raised her hands and used air quotes, "'take it slow.'" Mneme knew she would say something like that: she always did, but she and the girl both knew that too much strain on her heart could cause her to be returned to the hospital for another week.

            "Mom," she continued when Mneme didn't respond, "I'm fine. I know my limits and plus I have my heart-rate watch on. Nothing is going to happen, I promise."

She was always like that. She always thought that just because she was the one who was sick she should be able to do as much as she could with the time given to her. Mneme knew that the girl was usually safe, but things happen and somehow she always ended up back in the hospital with wires and tubes attached to her like puppet strings.

            Ever since she was four years old and was diagnosed with a weak and failing heart, the girl had been in and out of the hospital at least once a month. For 11 years she has put herself and everyone else in her family through more traumatic experiences than anyone should ever have to go through.

Once, when she was six, she wanted to learn how to swim. One day she went swimming without her floaties on; she had said beforehand that she knew how to swim and that she didn't need them. While she was swimming her heart stopped for a couple of seconds, but it was long enough for her body to start sinking and for her to start drowning. The ride in the ambulance afterward was the most agonizing time in Mneme's life. Up until then she had held out hope that her little girl would someday be cured, or that she would have more time with her. The doctors had all said she had, at most, until her eighteenth birthday before she would need to have a heart transplant. They never said that keeping her alive until a transplant became available would be so difficult and heart wrenching.