Second Hand Heart

by Hyde, Catherine Ryan

  “So the memories will get lost, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Well, no. How can they, really? Once you remember that you remember something, you don’t forget it again. And then the memory rightly belongs to the new host, and is stored in every cell of the new host’s body, and then there’s just no telling what’s what. This is where our current science just falls flat on its face, I’m afraid. This is where a scientist with any humility at all will need to admit that God or nature or what-have-you has created something quite beyond our understanding in the human being. And even if we did understand it, this is something outside nature. God did not create a donor heart sewn into a new body. That’s our handiwork. And privy to all sorts of unintended consequences, I’m sure.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “I’m not speaking against organ donation.”

  “Never thought you were.”

  “It’s a modern miracle. Saves thousands of lives. I’m just saying that when modern scientific miracles meet natural miracles, some very interesting outcomes occur. And the only thing we can predict with any certainty is that they will be completely unpredictable. So, why is it such a problem for you to think that the effect might fade in time?”

  I looked up from my plate for the first time in a long time.

  “Because … when she was here … I treated her like she was faking, or crazy, or acting foolish, or otherwise just plain wrong. And now I don’t know where she is.”

  “Hmm. That would be a problem. Yes.”

  • • •

  Connie spent most of the rest of the meal explaining all the different ways in which sugar degrades human cells. So when the waiter arrived with a tray of sample desserts, and a line about whether or not he could tempt us, we both burst out laughing.

  “Just a check,” I said, masking my disappointment as best I could. I had watched that tray of desserts make its way over to a nearby table earlier in the meal, and could practically taste the chocolate cheesecake.

  Connie looked up at me, hands clasped on the table in front of her, in a kind of summing-up mode. A close to the hugely unexpected evening. I found myself knocked off-guard and off-center by her frank visual assessment of me.

  “I have a couple of articles I drew on for the book that seem relevant. You might find them interesting. I’ll send them to you if you like. Have you got a card?”

  “Oh. Do I? Let me see. I mean, of course I have cards, in general, but did I bring one? I usually keep two in my wallet. Unless I gave them out. It’s been so long since I’ve been in a normal flow with things like that. You know, even to check.”

  While I babbled, I dug my wallet out of my back pants pocket and admonished myself with an inner litany of, “Shut up, Richard,” and, “You’re talking too much again.”

  I opened the wallet and found two of my cards. I handed one across the table to Connie.

  She put on her reading glasses — they’d been hanging on a chain around her neck — and examined my card for a bizarre length of time. Longer than it should have taken her to read every word and number on it twice.

  “You live in San Jose?”

  “Yes.”

  “I just assumed you lived here in LA.”

  “No, thank you.”

  She laughed.

  “So where are you staying?”

  “At the Doubletree, just a few blocks from the university.”

  I did not mention that I had checked out, and had not planned to stay another night. I was hoping they still had a room available. If not, I supposed some hotel would.

  “Oh. Good. That’s just about three or four blocks from my hotel, I think. Maybe I can trouble you for a ride back. Save me calling a cab. I didn’t get a rental car because I hate to drive in strange cities. And what city could be stranger than LA? I ask you.”

  I smiled slightly, and found myself wondering if she ever berated herself for talking too much. Then her expression changed subtly. Became less lighthearted.

  “You didn’t drive down just for this, did you?”

  I felt uncomfortable, as if caught in a lie or a sin. “I did, actually. Yes.”

  “You know, there are other researchers whose body of work is more relevant to transplantation.”

  “They weren’t speaking anywhere in the west, though. And you were.”

  • • •

  On the drive back to the hotel, Connie asked, “What does your recipient remember?”

  “Just me. I think. She just remembers me. She swears the minute I walked into her hospital room she knew me. And loved me.”

  “Common,” she said. “If the heart is going to remember anything, we have to assume a dear loved one will be high on the list.”

  I drove in silence for a few blocks. I was amazed by how tired I was. I found myself working hard to be sure I didn’t slip, while still driving, into a mode too akin to sleep.

  Connie’s voice startled me. “Do you love her?”

  “Who?” A stupid question, I suppose, but she might have meant Lorrie.

  “Your recipient.”

  I was stunned, and completely thrown by the question. I had no idea why she would ask such a thing.

  “No. I don’t love Vida. How could I? She’s just a kid.”

  “Oh,” she said, her tone changing. “She’s a kid. That’s very different. Wait … how could she be a kid? How would the size be a match for transplantation?”

  “No. Not a kid kid. She’s something like nineteen. Or maybe she’s twenty by now.”

  “Ah. That kind of kid.”

  I tried hard to read her tone, but came up empty. “She’s … really, she’s a kid. She’s anorexic and completely scattered, and she’s lived outside the world for almost her whole life, and … well, believe me, if you met her, you’d see what I mean. She’s just a kid.”

  “So what you love is something more like the heart that beats in her chest.”

  “Yes. Something more like that.”

  “I could tell you loved something very strongly here. It comes through.”

  We pulled up in front of her hotel. Not a moment too soon.

  She turned and took me in, assessed me as she had at the end of dinner, and I felt no less alarmed. Perhaps more so, in light of the strange turn the conversation had taken.

  “Well,” she said. “It’s been very nice meeting you, Richard Bailey.”

  She thrust her right hand forward, and I shook it. “I really appreciate your time, Dr— Connie.”

  “Close one,” she said.

  Then she opened my car door and stepped out into the dark street.

  I winced and jumped as she slammed the door behind her, and I watched as she made her way to the hotel doorway. I watched in that sort of gentlemanly way. Waiting to be sure she got in all right. Despite the fact that a door man appeared, ready to play that exact same role.

  Or maybe I was just too stunned to drive away immediately.

  Or maybe I was waiting to see if she would look back.

  She didn’t look back.

  What Doesn’t Upset Us

  I thought I would fall asleep the moment my head hit the pillow.

  I was fortunate enough to get a room in the hotel where I’d stayed the night before. Why that one was better than any other, I don’t know. Only that I drove to it first thing, and hated to think of driving any farther.

  I could not have been more wrong about the sleeping.

  I lay awake for hours in the glow of the overly aggressive lighted clock radio, exhausted to the point of pain, but nowhere near sleep.

  At about three thirty in the morning I got up, dressed, and wandered down to the hotel business center to check my email.

  Truth be told, I had checked it quite often, obsessively in fact, up until leaving for LA. Hoping for some word from Vida. And I had thought of it many times since leaving home. And I couldn’t sit on that urge any longer.

  With my room key, I let myself into the dim and de
serted business center off the lobby. There I sat in front of one of the two computers, racking my brain for my webmail password. I don’t use webmail often. I got it on the third try. I tried first Lorrie’s birthday. Then our wedding anniversary. The day I met her — which was the same month and day as our wedding anniversary, but two years earlier — proved to be the charm.

  There was no email from Vida. I found, instead, about thirty pieces of spam and three messages from Myra.

  I’ll paraphrase.

  To sum it up, she had emailed me shortly after I’d pulled out of my driveway for this trip, to inquire about my welfare. When I hadn’t responded, as it was my habit to respond within half a day at most, she’d gotten downright panicky. In the last message, she asked me to please call her as soon as possible, and said that if she didn’t hear from me by tomorrow, she would have no choice but to begin the long drive down.

  I looked at my watch again. Silly, as I knew it was well after three. I certainly couldn’t call her now.

  I trudged back upstairs, prepared to lie awake for the rest of the night and then some.

  I lay down on my hotel bed, still dressed, and closed my eyes.

  When I opened them again, it was after noon.

  • • •

  In my hurry to check out of the hotel, at which checkout time was the standard twelve noon, I forgot about calling Myra.

  I remembered just as I got on the freeway.

  I had not thought to bring an earpiece with me for my cell phone, and my car was a slightly older model and did not have Bluetooth or any type of hands-free feature. And handheld cellular use while driving had been declared illegal in California. But this was important. And I knew I had to call.

  She picked up on the first ring.

  “Richard,” she said. “My God. You’re all right.”

  I wondered what had been going on in her head, but didn’t want to ask.

  “You won’t believe this,” I said. “But I managed to get myself up and out of the house. I’ve gone on a little trip. Sorry if I scared you. I never really thought about that. It just never occurred to me that it would.”

  “That’s wonderful,” she said. “A trip. You must be getting your head up some.”

  “Some,” I said, thinking it to be fractionally the truth. Some doesn’t have to be much.

  “Where are you?”

  “Just driving out of LA.”

  “Oh. But you hate LA.”

  “Yes, but there was an event here I wanted to attend.”

  “Concert?”

  “No. Not a concert.” I didn’t want to say. But I knew, in that instinctive, non-verbal way we all have, that she could tell I didn’t want to say. And that the more I didn’t want to say, the more she wanted to know. “A lecture.”

  “On …”

  “Cellular memory.” A long silence.

  I dropped the phone into my lap as a highway patrol car, which I’d spotted in my left-hand mirror, drew level and then passed me. When I was sure he’d gone, I picked it up again.

  “I’m sorry, Myra. If you said something just then, I missed it.”

  “I hadn’t said anything.”

  “Oh. OK. Good.”

  The final word of my response could have been taken a couple of different ways. In fact, I wasn’t even sure which way I’d intended it.

  “I’ll feel a lot better when you get through this phase, Richard. I think it will bring you nothing but pain. But I guess I’ve made that clear already.”

  “Yes,” I said. “You have. I wish you could have heard this lecture. This researcher, Connie Matsuko, she’s really old-school science. Or anyway, she was. She was as skeptical as you about all of this. But it’s won her over to a great degree.”

  “Richard—”

  I did not let her have her say. I was feeling emboldened. I was not going to be pushed or cowed.

  “She brought up that case of the little girl who helped catch and convict her donor’s murderer. The girl remembered every minute detail of the crime in dreams.”

  I was contemplating pulling off the freeway to discuss this, but traffic had slowed to a crawl going over the Hollywood Hills, so I sat, stopping and barely starting in heavy traffic, near the Skirball Center and the Getty Museum.

  “Maybe the little girl was psychic,” Myra said.

  “Now that’s interesting. Why would you believe in ESP and not cellular memory? Aren’t they just about the same degree off to the left?”

  But in the silence that followed, I knew why. She believed that which it did not deeply upset her to believe. Like all of us, I guess.

  “It’s just that ESP is so well proven. Some people are psychic. We know that. Why, just yesterday or the day before there was an article in the Portland paper about a psychic who consulted with the local police and helped them solve three cold cases. Now, if the police believe in her, who am I to question? Besides, she was right. We’ve always known, as long as I’ve been alive at least, that humans are only using a small percentage of the potential of our brains. So I guess this must be one of the parts most of us don’t use. That’s not so hard to understand.”

  Ah, yes. The brain. The determinant of everything. I pictured Connie laughing. Quite literally saw it, vividly, in my head.

  “Look, Myra. The connection is breaking up, and I’m not supposed to be talking without hands-free. So I’m going to let you go now. I’m sorry I scared you. I’m fine. Really.”

  “Thanks for calling, Richard,” she said. Hesitantly. Making it clear, by her tone, that there was much more she wanted to say.

  “Goodbye, Myra,” I said, and clicked off the phone before she had a chance to say more.

  • • •

  I arrived home well after eight.

  I checked my email immediately. But, other than spam, there was nothing new.

  Then I opened my web browser, and did a search for The Oregonian, the Portland newspaper. Once on their site, I searched the word “psychic” along with the phrase “cold cases.”

  It came up immediately. The article Myra had referred to. The woman’s name was Isabelle Duncan, and she had received this “gift” (she made it clear later in the article that she did not consider it a gift and, in fact, did not want it) fairly late in life, after dying during a surgery and being brought back by the doctors two and a half minutes later. She approached the police after reading a human-interest story about a cold murder case, written on the tenth anniversary of the victim’s death. She didn’t particularly care to mix in, but she knew who did it, and when, and why, and where the murder weapon was hidden, and felt it her civic and human duty to say. The Portland police were skeptical, of course, but they followed the lead to an easy arrest and conviction. Every one of her details checked out. The police were so impressed that they convinced her to reluctantly take on two other cold cases, which were quickly solved.

  I read the article twice.

  I found the link to the reporter’s email address, and sent him the following painfully simple inquiry:

  Is there any way that one can get in touch with this Isabelle Duncan? Thank you.

  Richard Bailey

  • • •

  Then I went to bed.

  I noticed that the message light was flashing on the answering machine, but I was sure I would only discover that Myra had left panicky messages. Or, failing that, I was sure it would prove to be something I wouldn’t want to deal with, and which would only keep me awake. So I let that go for the time being.

  Postcard from Independence

  It was after eleven the following morning when I put on my bathrobe and wandered out to collect my three days’ worth of mail.

  I carried it all in, weeded out the junk and catalogues, and dropped them in the recycle bin.

  There was a notice from the phone company that might well have been final, and a second notice on the gas bill. With a deep sigh, I knew I would need to pull myself together to pay bills. Which meant I would have to confront and a
bsorb the truth about my rapidly dwindling bank balance. I supposed I could always take another credit card advance.

  I briefly put them aside.

  Under them was a postcard. A photo of a snowy Mount Whitney. I turned it over. My heart literally missed a beat to see that it was from Vida.

  I read it three times. Held it in my hands. As if it could tell me something.

  Then I remembered my phone messages, and played them.

  Two panicky messages from Myra. Three calm ones from Vida. She was home, and hoping to get her worry stone back.

  I picked up the phone, and called her house. Abigail picked up on the first ring.

  “Vida?” Not even hello. Just, “Vida?”

  “No. It’s not, Abigail. It’s me. Richard Bailey. I was hoping to talk to Vida. I was returning her call. Calls. But, from your greeting, I’m guessing she isn’t there.”

  “She’s gone again. She was home three days, and now she’s gone again. Do you have any idea where she is? Tell me the truth.”

  “If I did, Abigail, don’t you think I would have called there instead of here?”

  “Oh.”

  “I know she was recently in the Eastern Sierras. She sent me a postcard of Mount Whitney. Postmarked Independence.”

  “Yes. That’s on record. That’s pretty well established. Did yours have any writing on it?”

  “Of course it did. What would be the point of a postcard with no writing on it?”

  “I’ve been wondering that myself lately. If she turns up, I’ll let you know.”

  “Thank you.”

  But six long days went by. And nobody let me know anything.

  • • •

  Six days later, at ten minutes to nine in the evening, the phone jangled me out of sleep.

  I grabbed it up, hoping it would be Vida, or, failing that, Abigail, with news.

  “Richard?” A woman’s voice.