Revenge14 min read
"Save her first," he said — and I lost everything
ButterPicks13 views
"Save her first," he said.
I heard those words while the lights above me blurred into a single white pain. I heard them while my world went soft and hollow and the room smelled of metal and cold. I heard him choose.
"Of course," he told the surgeon. "Save Jaliyah."
I lay on the table and I closed my eyes.
They took my kidney. They took my blood. They took my baby's life.
Weeks later they took my sight too.
My name is Annie Xu. I am twenty-one when the city calls me a liar, a thief, a fake. I am twenty-one when I lose pieces of myself to keep another woman breathing. I am twenty-two when I walk into a classroom and teach first graders about spring with a belly that grows and a job that pays two thousand dollars.
"You're late, Annie," Mrs. Park in the office says the first morning I come to that school. She looks at my stomach and then at the cheap coat I wrapped around me.
"I can run the reading circle," I say. "I can read the poem, 'Spring is here.'"
"Good," she says. "We need you."
I squeeze the chalk, read the lines, listen to tiny voices recite. I am tired. My legs swell. I breathe for two people and I save every small cent. I want a safe moment for the child inside me — a quiet room, a nurse who will not look away.
That quiet lasts ten days.
On the tenth day a group in black suits bursts through my classroom door.
"Who are you?" I shout.
A man in white steps out. His shoes flash. The light hits his face and I cannot move.
"Gavin," he says when my head clears. "Gavin Garza."
He looks exactly like the boy who once told me he would marry me to repay a saved life. He looks exactly like the man I loved for twelve years. He looks like a god and a judge all at once.
"Don't come near me," I whisper.
He looks past me at my belly. "This is why you ran."
"You can't..." I try. "You can't take him. Two months. One month. Please."
He doesn't look like a man who begs. He smells of winter cologne and of hospital corridors I will come to know too well. "Bring her," he says.
"Wait," I hear a small voice say behind me. "Gavin, wait."
It is Jaliyah Courtney. She comes forward on legs wrapped in bandage and silk. Her smile is very calm.
"Annie," she says with a soft bow. "I'm so sorry for what you've lost. I never wanted—"
"Don't lie," I spit. "You helped build this."
She flinches like I punched her. She is fragile, but she is never fragile enough to stop her hands from opening other people's doors.
They put me on a stretcher and we travel through hospital halls that smell like bleach and cheap coffee. I see Gavin once, over the edge of a window, and I think my chest will break open. I think of my child and how I wanted his tiny hands and how I wanted to teach him "Spring is here" in a class full of sticky fingers.
"This will be quick," a nurse says. "We need the kidney now."
"Please," I try to say. My throat is raw. My voice is a thin rope.
"She's five months," someone says. "Her baby won't survive."
"Then save Jaliyah," Gavin orders.
I feel the cold blade. I feel the child's life cut out. I hear nothing but my own blood rush. I feel the jar drop to the floor. A nurse screams.
Later, when I come back to life, I will crawl on my knees to the trash bin and feel for pieces of salt and glass. I will cradle a small, wet, red thing in my palms and call it by every name I know.
"This is garbage," the head nurse says when she pulls it from me. "Put it away."
"No," I shout. "That's my baby."
"Quiet, woman," someone snaps.
They take it. They throw it into a bin. I hold nothing but a question: Why?
"Because you are expendable," Gavin says once, when I am stable enough to lie and breathe and painkillers fog my head. He comes close, puts his hand near my face like a stranger. "Because Jaliyah has been missing and she is the real daughter. Because her life matters."
I have no fight left. I have no claim left that sounds true to them.
They tell the city I am cruel. The papers write I was "cold to donate," "refused to help." My step-parents on television beg and cry and call me a monster. The city calls my name and spits at it.
"Why didn't you help?" a reporter hisses when I stand in a hospital hallway, blind but listening. "You could have saved her."
"Because they told me to," I say. "Because I was forced."
"She wanted to die," the man from the paper writes. "She was greedy."
They parade Jaliyah in bandages and tears. They make her into an angel; they make me into the villain.
Later, with tape over my eyes and with a signature they told me to sign, I write my name on a paper they call a divorce agreement. They promise me a house, a million dollars. The assistant, Gage Mayer, reads it aloud to me slowly.
"One million cash," he says. "A villa."
"I don't want your money," I say. "I want nothing from a house built on my shame. I will walk away with nothing."
He blinks. Gavin looks like he wants to laugh and also want to throw up.
"You're real," Gavin says loud enough for the nurses to hear. "You were never a greedy liar. You were never fake. You were... you were my wife."
"Then why did you pick her?" I ask. "Why did you pick her first at the table? Which organ was more important to you—your lover's life or my body?"
He does not answer. He looks at the paper and then rips it into pieces with hands that are not quite steady. He tosses them and walks out of the room. The nurse slaps a bandage on my palm and drags me back to my bed.
They use my blood, my organ, my eyes. They make me into a vessel.
Three days after I leave the hospital, I disappear.
I don't mean to go missing. I run because there is no safe place left when your own husband and the woman he loves can sign away your parts like a shopping list. I run to the one place that will not ask for my past, the one place where my belly can be a small sun under my coat.
"Annie, we need a teacher for the first grade," the head teacher says when I knock on the school office. "Can you?"
"Yes," I say. "Please."
The kids bring color back to my chest for five minutes at a time. They bring it back for a half hour when they sing. They bring it back for a full day when one small boy says, "Teacher Annie, when will you have the baby?" and presses his hand to my shirt like it is a secret kingdom.
The weeks drift and then crash. Two thousand dollars saved. A lullaby learned. A list of names to call if I go into labor alone.
The day they find me again, I am teaching "Spring is here" with a cracked voice and music box shoes. A woman opened the classroom door and there he stands, the man I loved and feared. The black suit cuts the light.
"I told you I'd find you," he says.
"Don't come near me," I say.
He reaches for my chin and his fingers pinch like a man trying to test his own memory. "This boy is five months?"
"Yes," I say. "He is not yours."
He looks like he wants to laugh and then kill me. He lifts his hand and my jaw trembles.
"Bring her," he says. "Bring her now."
They drag my arm. They bring me back to the hospital. They strap me down.
I think of the small jar I found the first time I woke up. I think of the blood on the white floor. I think of the trash bin and how the lid clanged down like a judge's gavel.
"She tried to take me," Jaliyah says in the hall. "She lied. She wanted my life."
"You wanted my husband's life," I spit.
They take me in. The doctors talk about blood types and donors like they are talking about weather. Dr. Kenneth Belov stands over me with a face like paper.
"You are not stable," he says. "If we take your kidney, you may not survive. If we keep both, she may die."
"Then let her die," I say. "I cannot be butchered to make her queen."
Gavin's jaw clamps. "We cannot."
I do not cry then. I cry later in the bathroom when the glass is cold under my shoulder and when the child in my belly is not mine to hold. The cut on my belly is empty and I am empty.
They take the baby jars away like garbage. They stitch me and tell me not to move. They say the word "donor" like they are proud.
That night, a nurse who used to hum while she worked comes to my room and sits by the bed. She is young. Her name is Kendra Bush.
"You shouldn't have to forgive," she whispers. "No one should."
"I saved you," I say. "I saved her instead of myself."
"No," Kendra says. "You saved someone because someone wrote 'Save her first' in a voice that has no heart. You didn't save them. You survived."
She holds my hand. The hand she holds is thin like paper and cold. The life left in that hand is very small.
Weeks pass. Jaliyah recovers. She laughs in public. She sips cola while the cameras love her expression. She visits me once. Her eyes are bright and new.
"Annie," she says, when she sits, "I am sorry."
"Why do you still stand there?" I ask. "Why are you not ashamed?"
"Because shame is for people who have nothing left to bargain with," she says. "I have favor. I have my place."
She reaches and touches my shoulder. I jerk like a live wire.
"Leave me," I say.
That night, I find a small jar in the nurse's closet. Inside is a scrap of paper. It is folded and smudged and it reads, in a child's small writing: "For my mom." The letter is not mine.
I keep a diary. I write in it in a room that is borrowed, with a light that hums low. My writing is uneven. I write things that I hope will not sting the reader but that I cannot stop writing.
"Ten years ago you told me you'd marry me," I write on a page. "You told me you'd protect me. You said I was brave when you saved me from the cold place. You told me to stay. Now I understand that saving is a trade, and trades take everything you have."
I plan then. I am not a schemer. I am a teacher. I am a woman who has been used and is now empty and wants to give the last thing she can — proof.
"If I go now," I write, "I will leave them a map. I will leave Gavin a thread. I will put the truth inside files and a USB and a diary and if he can read, he will see."
I do not know whether he will ever find the things I leave. I do not know if he will care. I do not know if my death will change anything. But I write anyway.
I walk back to the bin. I find the jar with my baby's parts missing. I ask the night nurse for a needle and I hide into a closet and I record — I record my voice, my pain, the names of doctors who took things from me, the times when Jaliyah laughed while I waited for painkillers.
"Dr. Belov took the organ," I whisper into the phone. "He said, 'We had no choice.' Gage Mayer signed the papers. Kendra stole a look and cried. Gavin was there when they decided."
I set the phone down. I sign records, I hide passports, I mail a copy of my diary to the only address I can trust — to a woman who once gave me bread at the shelter. I leave the evidence in the place where a man who loves me will find it.
I wait for him not to come.
I do not run the day I decide to go back. I go to the hospital. I go to the place I am told will be calm. I knock on a door. I take the blade hidden in my sleeve and hold it as if it is a sharp coin.
"Please," I say into the dark. "Please let this end."
It is a trap. Jaliyah is there, pretending to be fragile. The hospital corridors are full of men in uniforms and cameras and the click of shoes like someone counting heartbeats. Gavin's face appears like a ghost through the glass.
"Don't hurt her," he shouts from outside.
"Annie," Jaliyah says. Her voice is a child crying.
"Open the door," I whisper. "Open the door, Jaliyah."
She pushes the chair toward me and the room smells like perfume and false salt. I move slowly. I want him to see me hurt her. I want him to understand what losing a child feels like. I am wrong.
The moment I lunge, the metal echoes. A shot — one loud, final crack — and then the world moves into slow, watery tubes. The white pain comes again, but now it is sharp and final. I feel the warm trickle across my temple and the room snaps like a single glass.
"Don't," I hear Gavin scream. "No!"
They pull me back. Jaliyah is screaming. The uniforms dive in. The cameras flash. The shot is enough. My body slips out of me like a bad coat. I see the opening of the window and I climb. I see the city below.
I jump.
They say the fall is quick. They say there is no thinking, just the wind and a belly that is empty. I do not know whose voice those are. I know only that the world keeps moving and that my life ends against the hot dark.
I do not watch what comes next. I cannot. I wrote the pages that followed in a fevered hurry the week before. I recorded voices and left them in a place where they would be found. I left Kendra a sealed envelope because I trusted her heart.
I think of my mother. I think of the little kids at school who drew me pictures of babies and planets. I think of the jar and the trash and the small things life let me keep.
I do not get to watch Gavin when he finds the files. I do not get to feel his hand on the diary. I do not get to see him go mad with grief the way the papers portray. I can only leave words and hope.
But sometimes hope becomes action.
Kendra found my envelope on a night when the hospital was thin with people. She cried and then she called someone she trusted. "You buried her pieces in the trash," she told the detective she met. "This is wrong."
The detective plays the recording in a room full of white tiles and the case opens like a door.
"That recording," Gage says when they bring him in. He is sweating. "That's not real. They doctored it."
"We have your hands on the video from the OR," the police tell him. "We have times. We have signatures. We have a chain of custody."
Gavin goes to the hospital the next day, because some thread in him will not wait for the rest of the world. He collapses over my grave even though I do not stand there. He pulls papers from my diary and he reads them out loud in front of people until his voice breaks.
"She was telling the truth," he says in a recording that the press will replay until the city tastes my name like metal. "She wrote everything. She left it for me."
I had left him the diary, yes. I had left him the small USB with videos. I had known him well enough to know that he would read and the man reading would not be the man who let me go. Grief changes men; rage makes them sharp. He wanted justice and then he wanted more.
"What did you want me to do?" he asks in the tape that will later be played in court. "Kill them? Break them? I just wanted— I wanted to stop them. For you. For our child."
Gage Mayer sits in the dock with his palms white. He never imagined a man like Gavin would come after him with the cold precision of a man with nothing left to lose.
"If you had asked me," Kendra testifies at the hearing, voice raw, "I would have told you sooner. But I was scared. They were powerful."
"Who ordered the file?" the prosecutor asks.
"It was Jaliyah," Kendra says. "She paid people. She signed checks. Dr. Belov took the notes. She promised a 'quick fix.' She bribed staff."
Jaliyah screams in court when they read the transcripts of her calls to the doctor. She squirms when they roll the surgery footage across the screen and the man in the mask points to the jar and says, "Dispose."
"That's not me," she yells. "I— I didn't—"
The crowd around the glass leans in when the judge reads the charges. Corruption. Illegal organ trade. Manslaughter. Bribery. The city watches like a winter audience as the thin power of the family is stripped and put on a table. Witnesses talk about payments, vans, secret rooms.
Gavin sits quietly. He looks like a man who has no appetite for praise. He wants only names. He wants them in black and white. He wants to see the ledger that shows how many organs moved and to whom. He wants to open the drawer that holds the record of my child's jar.
They arrest the owners of the clinic. They take Dr. Kenneth Belov into custody. They charge three nurses. They charge a group of men who handled bodies. They freeze accounts. They publish names. The Wen family — the ones who accepted Jaliyah back — find their bank accounts frozen. The company that used its power to move organs now sits under a court order. The hospital board is stripped overnight.
"Is this what you wanted, Annie?" Gavin whispers at my grave later. He folds the diary and tucks it in his jacket. He lays the small jar of colored paper that the children gave me over the tombstone. The paper is a child’s drawing of "Spring is here."
He kneels. He whispers words I cannot hear because I am not there, only because I left them for him to find.
"He was so small," he says on tape, later, voice breaking. "He would have been a quiet boy. He deserved more."
The papers call it justice. The law calls it punishment. The public calls it theater.
Jaliyah goes to prison. Her face is pale in the mug shot. She cannot drink cola. The machine of the city strips her of the things that made the world easy. She loses any claim to sympathy. She cannot explain why she did it. She cannot explain why she thought she was owed.
Gage serves time. Dr. Belov loses his license. The nurses who helped take my parts lose theirs too, and their names are printed on websites meant to shame.
"Is anyone satisfied?" I ask in the pages I leave behind. "Does a ledger at the end of a year return your child?"
Gavin stands and answers the question for me in interviews I planned for with the diaries and a trusted lawyer, for those were some things I could write even as I bled. "He says he is not satisfied," a reporter will later say, "and he spends his nights in the small classroom where Annie taught as if he is a student waiting for her to come back."
He does not become a different man. He becomes the man carrying me like a stone in his chest. He fights. He sues and he wins. He drags the news into the places that had laughed. He makes municipal changes. He opens a fund in my name for the kids I had taught. He pays for training on organ ethics in hospitals. He makes the city feel a different kind of shame.
None of that brings me back.
But it holds them accountable.
At the end of the long court, the prosecutor adds a line that I had begged him to add in the letter I left inside the diary: "Public apology and full confession." The judge orders Jaliyah to read her confession aloud in court before sentencing.
"I was wrong," she says finally, voice raw like laundry. "I was hungry. I was jealous. I wanted him. I am sorry."
She does not look sorry for breaking my body. She looks sorry that she was caught.
Gavin listens. He is thin. He sits with letters in his hand — mine, the kids', the little jar drawings. He rises when she finishes.
"What would you like me to say?" he asks her, quietly.
"You confess," the prosecutor says.
He looks at Jaliyah. He looks at the family that raised her yet sold her. He looks at the faces of people who were bought and corrupted. Then he steps forward.
"You said save her first," he begins, and he looks like a man making a verdict. "You used my power to force her to serve you. You made her cheap. You took a baby. You left a woman to die in the trash."
Gavin does not deliver a speech. He does not shout for blood. He only sets the diary on the bench and walks out.
Months later, I hear he goes to the little school where I taught. He paints the stairwell. He sits in the back of a classroom when the kids draw planets. He tucks paper cranes into jars of charity. He reads the diary out loud on the days when the small bell rings and the children recite "Spring is here."
"Annie," he whispers into the wind one rainy morning at my grave. "I am sorry I listened. I am sorry I did not see. I am sorry I used my hand this way."
He leaves a paper boat folded with a child's crayon inside. It is my last drawing. It will sit on the stone for a long time.
They say revenge tastes like rust. They say regret is a slow thing.
I have no taste for either now. I have only pages and the memory of the hands of the small boy who asked when my baby would come. I have only the sound of the music box playing at recess.
If you read this and want to own an ending, know this:
"Annie, why did you leave me files?" Gavin asks on the last tape he plays to the reporters.
"Because some things need proof," I had written before I left. "Because the truth is a knife that can cut a net."
He folded the diary close and promised to keep the baby rights fund, promised to rename the small room at the school for me, promised to stop hospitals from trading bodies in the night. He promised the children a teacher's place even if I could not fill it.
We cannot be redeemed by a promise. We cannot bring back parts. But they can be made to explain, in public, what they chose to do.
"Do you forgive me?" he recorded, one night, when the city had quieted.
The tape plays and then ends and the world moves on. The last line I ever wrote in my diary reads:
"If you want to punish them, make their names bite the air."
He did. The city bit.
I had nothing to lose. I gave everything I had: my blood, my sight, my child, my words.
The last thing I kept was the truth.
If you stand at my grave, in spring, you will find a small paper drawing stuck into the soil. It is of hands and little stars. My handwriting is childish and blunt.
"Keep our children safe," it says. "Teach the truth."
He reads it and cries. I did not watch him cry, but I wrote the note for him to find. That is the closest I came to making a choice for him.
"Spring will come," he whispers.
I used to teach them: "Spring is here. Everything wakes up."
Now I keep a small hope that waking can turn into fixing. The rest we leave to the living.
This is my letter. This is my proof. This is the old jar of a small thing I called my son. I left my diary by the bench I knew he would sit on. I left my recordings where a woman with a true heart would find them.
"Tell them it's not enough," I write on the last page. "But tell them at least they can't lie forever."
If you want an ending, here it is: Gavin took the proof. He made the city look. The guilty went to prison. The doctors lost their hands. The family lost its money. Jaliyah reads in a cell about a teacher whose students still sing 'Spring is here.' The song keeps going.
I can only hope they hear the tune and understand that the life we destroy belongs to someone. I can hope that a man who once signed a paper and chose another woman will remember the weight of a child's small hand and the price that comes with the choice.
He left a paper boat on my grave the last time he visited.
I like to think he will never let a child answer a question alone again.
If you hold this diary, read the first line I wrote when he said, "Save her first."
"Save her first," he said.
I turned my face to the light and closed my eyes.
The End
— Thank you for reading —