Second Hand Heart

by Hyde, Catherine Ryan

  He drove us to the parking lot at the lodge, and then he waited in the car while I got out and took that walk toward the rim for what I figured would probably be the last time. Not to sound morbid or anything. Maybe I could come back and see the canyon again someday. It’s just that I sort of have it in my head that I want to see new things. Not so much the same ones over and over.

  And, also, even though it’s nice that this place meant so much to Lorrie, I’m not Lorrie. I’m me.

  I halfway wondered while I was walking if Richard was still around here somewhere. Maybe he’d already checked out and gone home. Or maybe I would bump into him any minute. I found myself looking at all the cars, like I could tell whether his car was there or not, which is incredibly stupid, because I wouldn’t know Richard’s car if I saw it.

  I stepped into the gift shop, and there was nobody else there. Which seemed kind of nice. You always expect a crowd near the Grand Canyon, so the fact that I stepped into this little time warp of a lull in traffic seemed … well, like I said, nice. Actually it seemed even better than that. It seemed destined. Like I was parting time just by walking through it.

  OK. Sorry to sound weird.

  The lady behind the desk had gray hair and incredibly blue eyes and she smiled at me with all her front teeth, but not in a fakey way. In this really genuine way, like it made her feel great to see me.

  I always think it’s really nice to suddenly bump into someone who does that. But I don’t want to get too far off track.

  “Do you sell stamps?” I asked her.

  “I have a few in the drawer,” she said. “How many do you need?”

  “Just one.”

  “Oh. That’s no problem, then.”

  “Oh, shoot. I didn’t bring a pen.”

  I knew there was at least one in the glove compartment of Victor’s car, but it felt like a long round-trip walk. Why hadn’t I remembered to bring one with me? I felt a little spacey, like I’d just woken up. And I don’t even mean from that nap we had today. More like I’d been asleep the whole time, my whole life up until now. Like I’d just woken up in general. To everything.

  “I’ll let you use mine. If you just want to write a postcard right now.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I want. I want to write a postcard right now, and get it in the mail right away. Today. I want it to get home before I do.”

  “You can leave it with me, and I’ll put it with our outgoing mail.”

  She handed me the plastic ballpoint pen from behind her ear, where it had been behind her hair, and I hadn’t noticed it. I took it, and held it tight in my hand, thinking I was lucky that everything I needed was landing on me. It felt warm on one side, I guess where it had been tucked up against her scalp.

  I found a really nice postcard.

  They were all pictures of the canyon, of course. But it’s funny how you can take a hundred pictures of it and no two of them ever really look the same. I picked one with dramatic lighting. The sky was blackened by weather, with rays of light breaking through on a slant, making the rocks look redder and more volatile. Is that the word I’m searching for? Volatile? It looked almost dangerous. Which you wouldn’t think would make it an obvious choice for my mother. But I wanted her to know what an important adventure this had really been.

  I didn’t want her to think I put her through all this for nothing.

  Then I put it on the woman’s counter, so my writing would come out neat.

  “Dear Mom,” I wrote.

  It’s funny how this time I knew exactly what I wanted to say. Like the right words had been in there all along, and I just didn’t know it.

  “Ever notice how kids who get mostly freedom want care and attention, and kids who get a lot of care and attention mostly want freedom? I’m not making excuses for myself, but maybe that’s why I forgot to thank you for all the care and attention. I’m coming home now. Let’s start over.”

  And then I signed it, “All my love, Vida.”

  I stuck a stamp on it, and gave the lady back her pen, and the whole thing came to less than a dollar. I got a few cents change back from my dollar.

  And it’s interesting, in a way, because that dollar was exactly what I had left over from that nice lady’s fifty.

  We had almost a full tank of gas, and after that, some figuring to do. Or an adventure, depending on how you want to look at it. But I guessed we’d probably get where we were going. People pretty much always do. One way or another.

  Then I suddenly knew I wanted to add a PS, so I borrowed the pen back.

  “PS: Did you notice that I wrote something on this one right away? And mailed it? I’m making progress. Love, V.”

  I looked up at the lady when I gave her the card. “You’ll make sure this gets into the mail, right?”

  “I promise. It’s important, I take it.”

  “Yeah, it’s for my mom.”

  “Yeah. Moms are important. I should know. I am one.”

  “I owe my mom. I’ve been pretty hard on her.”

  “I’ll see to it that this gets on its way to her, then.”

  “Thanks.”

  Then I walked out into the sun, into the day, and looked up at the sky one last time. Like maybe there was something more for me to do. Something left over. Some sort of goodbye to say.

  But it didn’t feel that way. It felt like I was all done here.

  So I just walked back to Victor’s car and got in and said, “Let’s go home now, OK? I’m totally ready to go home.”

  So that’s what we did.

  CHAPTER 16: RICHARD

  From: Richard Bailey

  To: Myra Buckner

  Dear Myra,

  I’m home now. Back from the last of my fool’s errands. For better or for worse I do believe I’m done with all that, and looking more ahead.

  I called Roger, and he was very understanding about my previous behavior, and had not yet fired me. So hopefully before too long I’ll be giving work another try.

  I guess you know there’s a summing-up here. I suppose you feel it coming.

  You’ve given me a lot of advice over these months, most of which was welcome, some of which was not, and there is obviously a note left hanging about rightness. Sometimes I felt you were right, other times that you were perhaps too cautious, which is certainly your prerogative.

  There’s a temptation for me to look back now, having gone down some ill-advised roads, and say you were right all along, and that I should have listened to you. But that’s not a hundred per cent of the truth.

  Here is the truth, as best I can express it.

  You were half-right. You said it would bring me nothing but pain, and you were half right. It brought me pain. But it didn’t bring me nothing but.

  Still glad for your support, no matter who was right and who was wrong. Mostly we’re all walking around being both, I think, at almost all times.

  I love you, Myra.

  Many thanks,

  Your son-in-law (still),

  Richard

  The Art of Maturation

  I haven’t picked up this journal for months. I haven’t even thought about it. But I had to write this down. After everything else I took the trouble to put down in ink, I needed this last bit to complete the experience.

  It’s almost like an epilogue. In its own way, it’s perfect.

  It’s now February, near the end of the month, and I just heard from Vida again. There were two postcards in-between. But nothing for several months.

  The whole thing went like this: Connie was visiting for the weekend, and I’d been struck by a brilliant flash of creativity involving scallops, garlic and angel-hair pasta. And then, like many absent-minded professor/mad scientist hybrids, at the last minute I had disastrously forgotten the parmesan cheese.

  She was nice enough to run to the store and get some. When she let herself back in, she brought a stack of my mail.

  “You never bring in your mail,” she said.

  “T
hat’s true,” I said. “I never do.”

  “Good thing I’m here, then. You got a Valentine’s Day card from Vida.”

  “Valentine’s Day was weeks ago.”

  “Don’t know what to tell you about that, ace.”

  I was up to my elbows in tomatoes. Peeling, seeding, and dicing. So I didn’t tend to it right away.

  “What makes you think it’s a Valentine’s Day card?”

  She held it up to face me, flap side out. “The fact that it says, ‘Happy Valentine’s Day’ on the back of the envelope.”

  “Strong clue. Admittedly. Maybe it’s late because she’s traveling. Maybe it had to come a long way. Where’s it from?”

  “Weimar, Germany.”

  “Is that a joke?” I set about washing and drying my hands, to see for myself. “The postmark says Weimar, Germany?”

  “No. The return address says Weimar, Germany. The postmark says Weimar, Deutschland. But I think they boil down to the same thing.”

  I threw down the dish towel, retrieved my glasses from the counter, and sat down at the kitchen table with Vida’s card. I read the postmark, the return address. Examined the foreign stamps. Wondered what had led her so far from home.

  When I opened it, I was taken aback by her artwork. It was a handmade card, with a drawing Vida had done on the front. A drawing of a heart. But not a valentine’s heart. A heart. An actual human heart, with red muscle and tissue, and red and blue veins and arteries branching in opposite directions.

  I turned it around and showed it to Connie. “Startlingly realistic,” she said.

  I opened it and read.

  “Dear Richard,” it read. “I’m beginning to see that point about love you made when I first met you. Maybe it’s less like a valentine heart and more like a real one. Like maybe if you give somebody your heart, it’s this big gnarly muscle of a thing that’s not always too pretty to look at. You know? Enough philosophy. Hope you’re OK. Love, Vida.”

  I read it twice. Lingered over it a bit. Then looked up at Connie.

  “I’ll read it to you,” I said.

  “Not if it’s too personal.”

  “It isn’t, really. More just a reflection on love in general.”

  I read Vida’s message out loud, and we sat with that for a beat or two.

  “I thought you said she was childlike,” Connie said, tossing me the wedge of parmesan cheese.

  “Kids grow up,” I said.

  Author’s Note

  An amazing opportunity presented itself to me in connection with the writing of this novel. A wonderful and very generous team of cardiac surgeons here on the Central Coast of California — Steve Freyaldenhoven, David Canvasser and Luke Faber — allowed me, with proper permissions from both patient and hospital, to observe a heart surgery in progress. In fact, I was in the operating room, suited in scrubs and shoe covers, masked, standing on a small step platform just behind the patient’s head, looking down into the open chest cavity. Witnessing the beating (and repair) of a living heart in a living human.

  During some of the quieter moments of this procedure, I was able to exchange a few brief thoughts and hear more information from the surgeons. I found myself mentioning that I’d had a niece, Emily, whose heart had given out when she was only twenty-three. She’d been born with heart defects, nearly died on her first night in the world, and endured a catheterization and two open-heart surgeries across the span of her all-too-brief life. Then one day she went to sleep and did not wake up.

  Dr. Freyaldenhoven asked me if that had been my reason for writing this book.

  I told him I wasn’t sure, but that I was about to write an author’s note for the novel in question, and so would have to figure that out soon enough.

  Here’s what I came up with, bearing in mind that imagination is always a hard entity to track with any accuracy.

  Like the fictional Richard, I saw an item on the news one day, years ago, suggesting that some transplant recipients seem to experience an odd sense of connection with their donors. A sudden craving for the donor’s favorite food seemed to be the most common occurrence. Nothing too amazing on the surface of that, until you learn that the recipients didn’t know their donors’ favorite foods until after they began craving them.

  I remember thinking it was curious, and probably one hundred per cent unexplainable.

  But it came to mind again when I began to learn more about quantum theory, a subject which never ceases to fascinate and amaze me. It’s almost impossible to imagine that our bodies, which seem so solid and so “there,” are, like all matter, made up almost entirely of empty space. It’s also hard to unlock from the old and well-worn idea that our brains are the only conscious organ in our bodies, and that we are our brains and nothing more than our brains. But the more I read and learn, the more fascinated I become with the idea that every cell in our body is living, breathing, and — in some unfathomable (at least to me) way — aware of itself and of the whole.

  Considering all that, what is a heart when removed from its body? Is it merely a pump, like a spare part you take from a car and put into another car? Most people would say so, and yet it seems to me that their gut emotion betrays their logical thinking. For example, I read about a survey on the subject in which a vast majority of people said they believed that a transplanted heart would carry no traces of the memories or attributes of its donor. Yet, curiously, the majority of those same people said they would not want to receive the heart of a murderer in a transplant.

  So maybe it depends on whether one consults one’s head or heart in the matter.

  Whatever you believe on the subject of cellular memory, and I do not quarrel with whatever you choose to believe, there lies the indisputable truth that the modern miracle of organ transplantation is rich with emotional context. A life is saved because another life is cut short. There is celebration in one family even as there is mourning in another. Often the two families find each other and come together to share the experience, to bond through these complex emotions.

  It seemed to me that if I couldn’t find a story waiting in that emotional storehouse, it was time to turn in my novelist’s hat.

  Behind and beyond the fascinations listed above, I was able to weave the layers of this story into a set of circumstances all too familiar to me: a child born with a weak and troubled heart. I knew that pain from close experience.

  Maybe I wanted to create a fictional young heart patient and write her a happier ending than my niece Emily was able to have. Hard to say.

  But, having said all of that, I do want to thank all the medical professionals who make such happy endings possible in the real world, every day.

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost, I want to thank a wonderful local team of cardiac and cardiothoracic surgeons, Drs Stephen Freyaldenhoven, David Canvasser and Luke Faber, for their generous contributions to this work, which included not only reviewing the manuscript for medical accuracy, but allowing me to observe an actual “open heart” surgery first-hand. Such opportunities do not come along every day in the life of an author, and I’m deeply grateful.

  Many thanks also to John Zinke MD, and Nancy Vincent Zinke RN, BSN, for reviewing the early manuscript and referring me to the surgeons mentioned above.

  I also want to note that the aforementioned details of cardiac surgery are quite removed from the fictional scientific opinions of my researcher character, Connie Matsuko. I have read and studied extensively the writings of the neuroscientist Candace Pert and the psycho-neuroimmunologist Paul Pearsall, and their research was helpful to me while creating the purely fictional Connie Matsuko and her views. I do want to be clear, however, that Connie Matsuko is neither Candace Pert nor Paul Pearsall, and that I created her myself through my own interpretations of such studies. Those who argue with her theories on cellular memory should definitely see them as coming from me and no one else.

  Finally, I want to thank my friend Lee Zamloch for allowing me to borrow a small b
ut rich detail of her life, taken from a story she once told me of waiting with her daughter for a donor heart that never came. It’s these small truths that bring fiction to life. I’m sorry you had to live it, but appreciate your generosity in allowing it to be used.

  “An excellent read.”

  –New Books Review

  “Original and wonderful.”

  –The Sun

  “Catherine Ryan Hyde at her utter best.”

  –ChickLit Reviews

  The U.K. bestseller is now available in the U.S. for the first time!

  Former Broadway dancer and current agoraphobic Billy Shine has not set foot outside his apartment in almost a decade. He has glimpsed his neighbors—beautiful manicurist Rayleen, lonely old Ms. Hinman, bigoted and angry Mr. Lafferty, kind-hearted Felipe, and 9-year-old Grace and her former addict mother Eileen.

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  By the bestselling author of WHEN I FOUND YOU, SECOND HAND HEART, and PAY IT FORWARD, DON’T LET ME GO is the heart-breaking, funny, and life-affirming story of a building full of loners and misfits who come together to help a little girl survive—and thrive—against all odds.

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  About the Author

  Catherine Ryan Hyde is the author of 20 published and forthcoming books. Her newer novels include When I Found You, Second Hand Heart, Don’t Let Me Go, and When You Were Older. New Kindle editions of her earlier titles Funerals for Horses, Earthquake Weather and Other Stories, Electric God, and Walter’s Purple Heart are now available. Her newest ebook title is The Long Steep Path: Everyday Inspiration from the Author of PAY IT FORWARD, her first book-length creative nonfiction. Forthcoming frontlist titles are Walk Me Home and Where We Belong.