Second Hand Heart

by Hyde, Catherine Ryan

  “How soon can you look at it?”

  “Maybe near to the end of the day. Maybe morning. Depending on when I can get done with this water pump for this nice young lady.”

  I caught Eddie’s eye. Like asking him what he was doing. What he was saying. But he just looked away again. I looked up to see Victor drive up in Eddie’s truck.

  “Oh, look,” Eddie said. “You’re in luck. Here comes my assistant. If you like, I’ll have him drive the two of you to a nearby motel where you can cool down some and get a hold of your nerves. And I could call you. Keep you posted.”

  “That would be good,” the guy said. “Yeah. That would be nice.”

  “Hey, Victor,” Eddie called as Victor got out of the truck. “Don’t even unload those parts yet. I got another little job for you to do.”

  Victor came into the shade of the shop and Eddie pulled him aside and slipped him some money. I wasn’t close enough to see how much it was.

  But I heard Eddie say, “Take these people somewhere they can get a room, and then let me know where they land.”

  Victor looked at the money and said, “What’s this for?”

  And Eddie said, “Well, your repair is all paid. So I’m paying you to do this extra job for me.” Victor tried to argue, but Eddie said, “Don’t argue with me. The longer you stand here arguing the hotter these two are gonna get, and they’re hot enough under the collar as it stands.”

  So then Victor loaded them both in the small front seat of Eddie’s little pickup truck, and off they went down the road, disappearing in the wavy lines of heat over the tarmac. And Eddie went back to doing our water pump.

  “Why didn’t you put paying customers first, Eddie?”

  “Your repair is paid.”

  “Yeah, but they’re paying with real money.”

  “Besides,” Eddie said. “I like to do things one at a time.”

  The Desert at Night

  Night is my favorite time here. It gets all the way down under 100. Eventually. Not until way after dark, though. Sometimes I take Jax for a little short walk when it’s almost dark, and he runs around and lifts his leg on everything. Usually Victor comes along, but tonight he was doing one more job for Eddie.

  Eddie had just knocked off work. He finished the water pump and then started getting into the engine of the cherried-out truck so he could tell that poor couple what was what. So then, when he knocked off later than usual, he paid Victor twenty dollars plus gas to drive into Barstow and bring back a pizza from Eddie’s favorite pizza place. I was thinking that would have to be a pretty good pizza. It’s a long way to drive for an ordinary one.

  Anyway, Victor got to drive there in his very own running car, which made him happy. And since his car didn’t have air conditioning, we didn’t have to worry that Eddie’s pizza would get cold on the long drive home.

  Jax and I went for a little walk by ourselves. The moon was up, nearly full, and there was something that was just almost barely like a breeze. It made me glad we decided to stay one more night. I love the desert at night and I hate it in the day, so it would be a shame to spend more days than nights.

  I think we’d have been on the road already except for Eddie’s pizza, so I liked the pizza idea.

  The giant thermometer said 104.

  Underneath the giant thermometer, not too far away, there’s a big rock. And on the rock there’s always this cast-iron skillet with two eggs in it. Somebody around here must put two eggs in it every morning, so people can watch them fry in the sun during the day. They’re plenty crispy by this time of night, believe me.

  Jax wasn’t on a leash, so he sniffed his way over there and ate the eggs. I guess that was OK, because they have to put fresh ones out in the morning anyway. I think if Jax hadn’t eaten them the coyotes would come down and get them in the night.

  Then I wondered if they were fresh enough, but it was too late. But they didn’t make him sick, anyway. He was OK.

  So, back to the coyotes. Coyotes are very hungry. So hungry that we have to keep Jax in the tent with us at night. Even though he’s big. Bigger than a coyote. But Eddie says if there are enough coyotes, a whole pack, they’ll go after a big dog. Depends on how hungry they are.

  But I don’t want to get off track.

  We turned for home, and … That’s funny, huh? I just called Eddie’s gas station home. We have definitely been here too long. And then Jax and I saw that Victor was back with the pizza, and Jax ran to say hello.

  I was tired. So I just walked.

  • • •

  We sat in the back, on our sleeping bags in the dirt, because inside the tent we wouldn’t feel that tiny breeze.

  Victor got out some trail mix that we were going to have for dinner.

  But then all of a sudden Eddie was standing over us, holding the pizza, and we looked up.

  “So, who’s hungry?” he said.

  And Victor said, “Eddie. You can’t pay me twenty dollars to go get a pizza that you’re going to turn around and share with us.”

  Eddie sat down cross-legged in the dirt without even using his hands. Just sort of folded up and sat.

  “Why can’t I? Seems to me I can do what I want. So long as nobody gets hurt.”

  He put the box between us on the ground and opened the lid. Victor had to hold Jax back.

  “He can have a piece,” Eddie said. “It’s a big pizza.” He was right. It was a big pizza.

  We started into the pizza, and it was that really good kind of pizza where you lift up a slice and the cheese drips all down, and it takes some time to gather it all up again. I was really hungry for the first time in as long as I can remember.

  “How’s that truck?” I asked. And Eddie frowned.

  “Bad. He cracked his block.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “The engine block. That’s the whole enchilada. Normally you crack your block on an old car, you just throw the car away. That’s what most people would do, anyway, unless it’s a valuable car. But this truck. You should see the engine. All chrome. I mean, the valve covers and the air cleaner and stuff are all chrome. It’s so clean you could eat your lunch off it. Not a drop of oil leak. It’s this guy’s baby, I can tell. I hate to call him up and tell him. I figured I’d give him one good night’s sleep before I break the news.”

  “How long will it take to fix it?”

  “Oh, more than a week. If he even has me fix it. Job this big, sometimes people don’t. Sometimes they call their brother or their cousin or their buddy to drive out here with a tow bar. Help ’em get the damn thing home. So we’ll see. So where are you guys headed in the morning?”

  I was glad he asked, because we hadn’t decided. We’d been talking about it for a while but then Victor had to go on his pizza run before we figured it out.

  Victor said, “We’re trying to decide whether to start at Zion or the Grand Canyon. We were looking at the map to see which is closer. I’m thinking Zion, because then we don’t have to backtrack to Barstow to pick up Route 40. And because we figured it would be cooler.”

  “Cooler?” Eddie laughed. “You figured Zion to be cooler? How’d you do your figuring?”

  “Well, it’s so much farther north.”

  “It’s also a lot lower in elevation. And a lot hotter. Distance wise, it’s more or less a draw. But the Grand Canyon South Rim is around seven thousand feet in elevation, and the North Rim is over eight. High eights in places. So that’s your better bet for cool. Plus when you get to about Williams, you have a choice of the Grand Canyon or Sedona. Bout the same amount of drive from there. You could flip a coin.”

  Victor and I looked at each other. Jax had finished his slice and was waiting and drooling, hoping for another one.

  “Cool?” I asked Victor.

  “Cool,” he said.

  So that’s how we decided that in the morning we would backtrack to Route 40 and head due east.

  Then Eddie looked right at me and said, “How do you
remember this place, anyway?”

  I tried to look at his face, into his eyes, but it was almost completely dark by then. I could see the tall thermometer behind him, and it was lighted up at 102. I didn’t answer at first.

  “Was it someplace you went to when you were a kid?”

  “No,” I said. “I never got to go anywhere when I was a kid. I was always too sick.”

  He didn’t ask any more questions, but I could tell he was waiting. Victor was waiting, too. You see, I never really told Victor how I remembered the place I was looking for, either. I just said it was one of those things that was hard to explain.

  “My new heart remembers it,” I said.

  “Your new heart …” Eddie kind of trailed off. I could tell he wanted to know if I meant that literally. But maybe it was too personal a question.

  “After I got my new heart, I remember some things that I think it saw before it knew me. But that I never saw.”

  “I heard of that!” Eddie said. Excited now. “I saw something about that on the news! People who used to be vegetarians, and then all of a sudden they get a transplant and start craving bacon, and then they find out their donor loved bacon. Wow! That’s really interesting. I wonder how that would feel. Is it something you can even explain?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “I mean, it just feels like remembering. It just feels like any other kind of remembering. The only difference is that you know you never saw the place you’re remembering. You know you couldn’t have.”

  “Wow!” he said. “More things in heaven and earth, huh?”

  And then we wolfed down the rest of the pizza without saying anything.

  “Well,” he said. And got to his feet the same way he got down, only in reverse. No hands. He just unfolded and then he was up, holding the empty pizza box. “I’ll let you kids get some sleep. If I don’t see you in the morning, have a safe trip. Godspeed. And all that.”

  He started to walk away, but then I got up and ran the few steps after him. I had to use my hands to get up, though.

  I grabbed him from behind and gave him a hug. My arms didn’t even go all the way around his big belly.

  I said, “I’ll try to come back through and say hi sometime.”

  And he said, “I hope your new heart finds what it’s looking for.”

  And then I let him go, and he did.

  Flipping a Coin in Williams

  When we got to Williams, Arizona, we had to sleep in the car. Turns out in the summer, this close to the Grand Canyon, things are a little busy. It’s kind of hard to get a camping spot on short notice. Especially since it turned out it was a Saturday night. We didn’t know that. What day it was. Victor and I lost track of that a long time ago. Until we tried to get a camping spot. And then we found out it was Saturday night and we’d have to sleep in the car.

  Now, sleeping in the car was not the easiest thing in the world to figure out.

  Fortunately it was a big car. A big old Oldsmobile, with a solid bench seat up front, thank goodness.

  But still.

  The only way we could figure to fit Jax into the picture was to let him sleep on the back seat with me, all the way against one of the doors, and then I would have to curl up in a tiny little ball and use him for a pillow.

  We tried it for a little while when it first got nearly dark. But it was hard to go to sleep that way.

  So I said, “Victor? Are you asleep?”

  He said, “Nope.”

  I said, “I think I’m going to have to be really tired to sleep in the car.”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “You want to take Jax for a little walk?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  So we got out. And we put on Jax’s leash, because Williams was busy with cars. And we walked down a few streets in the nearly dark.

  It was a little before nine, and we walked by a place that gave visitor information. It was just closing.

  “Hey,” I said. “Stay here with Jax, OK?”

  And I went inside and asked the lady, who seemed sort of nice but tired, if she had some information about the Grand Canyon and Sedona. She laughed in a way that was like snorting. I guess that’s mostly what she had.

  Anyway, she quick piled up a few brochures, and a little newspaper-type-thing for the Grand Canyon park, and then handed them all over to me and we walked out together. And she put out the closed sign on the way out, and locked the door behind us.

  I said to Victor, “I thought this might help us decide.”

  He said, “I thought we were going to just flip a coin.”

  “Well, we can if you want.”

  So we stood under a street light, and Victor took out a quarter.

  “Heads, Grand Canyon,” he said. “Tails, Sedona. OK?”

  “OK.”

  I watched it flip up into the air and fall end over end, and I knew I wanted heads.

  “Tails,” Victor said. “Sedona.”

  “OK.”

  I guess I wanted Grand Canyon more, but I promised I’d do what the coin said, and, anyway, we could always go to the Grand Canyon later on.

  • • •

  I woke up in the night, and I was stiff, but there was no way to really stretch. I don’t know what time it was, because I never wear a watch. But the streets were empty. Not a person or a sound.

  We were parked too close to a street light, and I blinked into it, and it was hard to keep my eyes open because it was too bright.

  Jax stirred and tried to stretch, but he really couldn’t, so then he gave up right away and went back to sleep.

  I had somehow knocked down all the brochures. Or Jax had. Before I went to sleep, they were on that shelf under the back window, but now they were fallen down all around me. I’d been sleeping with my cheek on one. It was wedged between my face and Jax’s side. I guess I was sweating a little, because I had to peel it off my cheek. It was sort of stuck there.

  I looked at it in the light from outside. It was puckered from my sweat. It was a brochure about hiking in the Grand Canyon. I was looking at the back cover.

  On the bottom, in big red letters, guess what it said? “Warning: Do not attempt to hike to the river and back in one day.”

  “Victor,” I said. “Victor. Wake up.”

  “What?” he said. I think he said it while he was still asleep.

  “I know where we’re going now.”

  “Sedona.”

  “No. Grand Canyon.”

  “You said Sedona.”

  “You don’t get it. I mean, I know now. Where the place is. It’s the Grand Canyon that I remember. That’s what I’m looking for. That’s the place.”

  “You mean we don’t have to go all those other places?”

  “Right.”

  “Good.”

  We were quiet for a minute, and then I said, “OK, I guess you can go back to sleep now.”

  But he never answered. So I guess he already had.

  On My Having a Dream

  This is important. This is a big thing.

  I finally got back to sleep. It took hours, because I was all excited. I thought I never would get back to sleep, but then hours later, when it was almost getting light outside, I did.

  I had a dream.

  I dreamed I was standing up above this big stone patio that looks out over the Grand Canyon.

  It was right on the edge of the canyon rim, and had this low stone wall so people wouldn’t fall right in, and flat stone making up the patio itself, and a bunch of big chairs with arms. Some were big enough for one person and some were big enough for two. Doubles. The chairs were almost all lined up looking toward the edge, facing the low wall. Facing out. So that people could sit there and stare into the Grand Canyon for as long as they wanted.

  I stood there in my dream and memorized everything, like I knew even in the dream that I would need it all. That I would need every single detail again.

  And then I looked at all the people, and one of them was Richard
. But he was younger. A lot younger, like maybe in his twenties. But it was definitely him. There was no doubt about that.

  He looked really tired and discouraged.

  I started to walk over. To say something to him. And just then Jax tried to scratch his ear with a back paw and it woke me up.

  I tried to get back to sleep to finish the dream, but I never could.

  CHAPTER 6: RICHARD

  The Grand Canyon

  It was a Sunday morning. It was early.

  I’d been very deeply asleep. Or very lightly asleep. Does it seem odd that I wouldn’t know the difference? Yeah. To me, too. But there’s this certain type of dream state that feels different from most. Different how, I can’t quite say. It just feels … OK, I’m tired of saying different. But any new words I might use to describe it won’t seem to flow.

  Sometimes this kind of dreaming happens to me at the bottom of a REM cycle, but other times I have oddly vivid dreams when I’m drifting in that no-man’s-land of neither awake nor asleep. So there’s my confusion about that in a nutshell.

  I guess I mentioned that I didn’t used to be a person who went on and on about things.

  In my dream, I was reliving the story I’d told Connie. The story of the Grand Canyon, and meeting Lorrie for the first time. Oddly, I seemed to be dreaming not so much of that time itself, but the telling of it. Maybe just because those details were fresh in my mind, freshly unearthed. But I found myself lingering in each section of that experience — the river, the hike, the camp, the lodge — in just about the same time frame and detail as I had in the telling.

  Until I got to the part where Connie cut me off.

  In the telling of this tale to Connie, after Lorrie sat down and mentioned that she’d seen me on the trail, my dinner conversation had made a sudden forced turn and ended abruptly.

  Oddly enough, at this exact same moment in the dream, I woke up.

  I lay in bed, the sun just barely glowing through the curtain, letting the moment continue inside me. Enjoying not being pulled off track.

  “So, could you just fall over and die?” Lorrie had asked.