She’s got tears in her eyes. “Because it could kill you. You’re alive, Lachlan.” She grabs my face, looks me in the eyes and whispers, her voice broken. “I lost you. You died. I was there—I watched you—I watched…I watched you die. But then we got the call to say that an organ donor had been identified, a perfect match for you. Because of that, you’re alive. Don’t waste it, Lachlan. Please…don’t waste it.”
“I don’t know how not to, Mom.” I feel the words tumble out, unbidden. “It’s all I know how to do.”
“Well, it’s time to learn.” She turns away, placing the sunglasses over her eyes, hiding her own emotions. We’re a lot alike, in that way. “You’re the only man in our entire family to survive the defect. You owe it to them, if nothing else. You owe it to Thomas—to your dad. To Grandpa Michael. You owe it to me.”
“To you? To YOU?” I’m shouting. “You took away my choice! I signed a DNR. I wanted to die. I didn’t want to be brought back. Or to be kept alive.”
“I wanted you to have a chance.” Again, her voice is a whisper, now barely audible. Her voice is smaller and quieter than it’s ever been, I think.
“It was my choice, Mom.”
“I couldn’t lose you, Lachlan! I only had thirteen years with your father. I deserved more. I thought I’d only have maybe thirty years with you. And then I did lose you. They barely brought you back, and then there was no guarantee we’d ever get a match.
“Do you have any idea what it was like for me, Lachlan? Sitting in that room for two months, watching you lie there, unconscious, kept alive by a machine, knowing I’d have to be the one to tell them to pull the plug? I knew you didn’t want to be kept alive like that. And I’d—I’d made a deal with myself. We’d wait for three months, maybe four, and if there wasn’t a donor in that time, I’d—I’d have to let you go. And I would have. But…can you even fathom what it was like? Knowing—thinking I’d have to watch you die a second time?”
She’s standing closer than I think she’s ever gotten to me. Inches away, so I can smell her perfume and see the makeup under her eyelids and on her eyelashes, and see the lipstick on her lips. “Don’t—don’t waste this, Lock. Please…please don’t. I know you’re mad at me. I get it. I deserve it, maybe. That’s fine. But don’t…don’t waste this.”
She leaves me then, going back into the house, shutting the door quietly behind her.
And I stay out on the deck, watching the sun go down, sobering up, and repeating her words over and over and over.
Don’t waste this.
Going nowhere with no one but me
Ardmore, Oklahoma
I slide the tip of the thermometer under the little girl’s tongue. “Okay, now just hold still for a few seconds for me. All right, good job, Eva. Now I need to look in your ears, okay?”
I go through the motions. Temp, ears, reflexes, nose, the works. Routine checkup. The next patient is the same. And the one after that. Then a young guy arrives with a sprained wrist and a concussion—he got tossed off a mule and landed the wrong way. All the usual stuff you’d expect to see as a physician’s assistant in a small rural town. The whole day goes that way. A summer cold. Some stitches in a forehead. Prescription refill. An annual physical.
As the PA, I take ninety percent of the patients. Dr. Amos Beardsley is going on eighty-five, and he really only sees the patients who’ve been with the practice for several generations, so I get the rest, the walk-ins, the checkups, the refills, the sutures and fractures and concussions and “is this rash normal” sort of questions.
It’s work.
It keeps me busy, and that’s all I need.
By the time the last walk-in has been seen, everyone else has cleaned up and shut down. Just as I prepare to close up for the day, a teenage girl arrives, too embarrassed and scared to ask her parents for contraceptives.
Finally, I grab my purse and head out to my vehicle. I’m tired, ready for bed. It’s seven o’clock, and I was at the office before seven this morning, and I didn’t have time for lunch. I’m still in my lab coat; still have my stethoscope draped over my neck.
I climb up into the cab of the truck and slam the door closed. I lower both windows to let the heat of the Oklahoma summer billow out. I’m already sweating, and I’ve only been in the truck for two seconds. It’s only going to get worse, too, because this old wreck doesn’t have AC.
I could afford a new truck, of course—I make decent money. But this was Ollie’s truck. He fixed it up himself, back in high school. When I first moved down here, after the accident, I visited Marcus, Ollie’s younger brother. We didn’t click, Marcus and I. He was country, and I’m…not. We just don’t see the world the same way, and I think the grief of losing Ollie was too much for both of us.
But Marcus was sympathetic to my grief, and realized my need to have something to connect me to Ollie. So he gave me this truck. I paid to have it looked over, anything broken got fixed. I spent more on it than it’s worth, probably, and it still breaks down all the time. The AC went at the beginning of the summer, and I just haven’t gotten around to getting it fixed. It’s not a big deal, though, since I work six days a week, sunup to sundown, and thus I’m rarely in it during the real heat of the day.
I’ll drive this old heap until it quits on me, because I can smell Ollie in it. See him in it. I’ve got his picture wedged into a gap in the dashboard, a candid photo I took in Africa. He’s blood-spattered, in the middle of stripping off his gloves. He’s exhausted; you can see it in the bags under his eyes. But he’s happy. I’d just told him I loved him, out of the blue. He’d needed to hear it, and I knew it, so I shouted it out across the tent: “Hey, Pep! I love you!” And he’d looked up, grinned, and I’d snapped the shot. I got him grinning, a moment of happiness amid all the hell.
I turn the engine over and it coughs, rattles, and then catches with a rumble. The radio is on—it’s always on—and the cab is filled with country music, Ollie’s favorite. It’s a traditional station, the same station where he’d had it tuned. Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Randy Travis, Alan Jackson, maybe some older Tim McGraw and that crowd. Nothing new. It’s the soundtrack of this town of Ardmore—slides on steel strings and songs about love lost and taillights in the dust.
I hate it.
But the old radio has never been changed. Not once, not ever, and I’ll never change it.
We used to sit in that old Nissan pickup at the MSF compound, and Ollie would pull out his trusty iPod, filled to max capacity with every country song he could think of, tuck the left ear bud in my ear, the right in his, and we’d listen to country music and catch a breath or two between incoming two-tons full of bloody refugees.
I’ll always hate country music.
But I listen to it anyway.
Home is a good twenty minutes away on the outskirts of town. Outskirts may be pushing it. It’s a tiny one-room shotgun shack at the end of a long dirt road, sitting on a half-acre pocket in the midst of hundreds of acres of grass and hay in every direction. No neighbors but the Jensens half a mile down, who own all those acres, and the dozen or so horses grazing on them. It’s a lonely little place, dead silent at night except for the hooting of the occasional owl, and the crickets, and the humming of the light fixed to the power line pole at the edge of my property. It’s not much, but it’s mine.
I’ve got a couch, a TV, a few overflowing bookshelves, a bed, and a dresser; that’s all that’d fit anyway. It’s all I need, all I’ll ever want.
I toss my lab coat and purse on the couch, strip out of my scrubs, toss them in the hamper. Throw my sports bra and panties after them, step in the shower and rinse off the day. I towel off, brush my hair and slip on an old T-shirt of Ollie’s. It used to smell like him, but the smell has faded now even though I don’t wash it much; I’m trying to preserve the last shreds of his scent on it.
Pep, my cat and only friend, waits until I’m sitting on the couch with a book before saying hello. He’s a little black
and white tom, so of course I named him Pep. I adopted him as my first official act after moving down here, because you can leave a cat in a house alone all day, and I needed something.
And god, does Pep come through for me. He’s a snuggly little fella; I like to sit cross-legged on the couch, and he likes to curl up like a comma in the space between my legs. Purrs like a little engine for as long as I stroke his back and the little strip of fur between his ears. He sleeps on the pillow next to mine at night, and takes my warm spot after I get up in the morning.
I read until my eyes blur, until my head spins. And then I climb into bed, set Pep on his pillow, and go to sleep.
Then, I wake up in the morning, and do it all over again.
Same as I’ve done every day since I came down here.
I had to go somewhere, and Ollie’s hometown seemed as good a place as any, especially since his parents didn’t live here anymore. They were up in northern California somewhere, and I couldn’t stand to be near them. Ollie sounded like his father and looked like his mother, and both of them tore my heart to shreds.
Being in Ardmore was another way of holding on to him, of being alone with him. Another way of keeping him as close as I could. Feeling him. Seeing him. He’d gotten milkshakes at the diner, bought his first pair of Tony Lomas at the outfitter a few blocks down. Took his first girlfriend to the movies at the theater across from the town square. He’s all over this town, and that’s equal parts comforting and cutting.
I don’t cry myself to sleep at night.
I stopped doing that months ago.
I don’t whisper his name when I’m lonely, because I’m lonely all the time.
I don’t get the shakes anymore, because I don’t do anything more dangerous or traumatic than stitching up the occasional boo-boo. I quit MSF, of course. I couldn’t go back, not after losing Ollie. I couldn’t face any of them. I couldn’t face Africa again, not without him.
I can’t face life without Ollie.
I don’t know how.
I know what I’m doing is unhealthy. I’m not moving on. I’m not healing. I’ve grieved, but I just can’t seem to stop grieving. I can’t stop needing him. I can’t breathe without him, and he’s gone, so I can’t breathe.
So here I am, in Ardmore, Oklahoma.
Alone.
The only thing I know how to be.
At least I’ve got Pep.
Wandering the city streets
Trinidad, California
“I’m sorry, but I can’t share that information with you.” The voice on the other end is quiet but firm, and the call ends with a click.
“Goddammit!” I toss the phone across the room where it lands on the bed.
I’ve been trying like hell to find out whose heart I’ve got in my chest. I don’t know why, but I’ve got to know.
I’ve got to know.
And no one will tell me.
So as much as I hate to do it, there’s only one person left to call. So I call him.
“Hello?”
“Howdy, Larry.”
“Lachlan. To what do I owe this pleasure?” Larry Carter, family attorney, and well-paid bulldog.
“I need a favor, Larry.”
“Well I can’t make any promises, but tell me what you need and I’ll see what I can do. Usual rates apply, of course.”
“No shit.” I hesitate, blow out a breath. “I need to know who my organ donor was.”
“I—what?” This is the first time I’ve ever heard Larry caught off-guard. As the go-to attorney for several ultra-wealthy clients, he’s used to all sorts of requests.
“The heart in my chest. I need to know who the donor was. No one will tell me, and if anyone can get the information it’s you.”
“I’ll see what I can do. It can’t be that hard to get that kind of information. I’ll get back to you.”
“Thanks.”
“Sure thing.” A pause. “How have you been—?”
“I’m fine, Larry. Just find out who the donor was, yeah?”
“Yes, sir. Shouldn’t take long.”
“Good.” I hang up, and go out on the deck.
I’m drinking Perrier. I’m drinking a lot of Perrier these days. I gave Gregor all my Lagavulin, and Mom watched me do it. She searched the house herself, made sure I was really giving it all away. I’m not sure what to think about this, because I never thought of myself as an alcoholic. I didn’t drink all day every day, and rarely to wild excess.
Okay…maybe that’s a lie.
I did drink a lot, now that I think about it.
Most days.
By noon, most days.
To blackout, some days.
I never saw a reason to quit, though, you know? I was gonna die anyway, so what did it matter if it was liver failure or heart failure? Something was going to give out, and it was gonna be my heart. So might as well drink up while I could.
But now that it matters, now that I’m aware of the importance of not drinking, it’s really, really fucking hard to quit. I want a drink every single goddamn moment of every single goddamn day. I’m a fucking mess. I don’t smoke, never have. Don’t drink, now, because I can’t. I might be able to handle a drink or two. Maybe. But what if I can’t? What if I’m a real-deal alkie, like I take a drink and somehow I’m wasted, with no in between? The what if, that’s the fucking worst.
No, not having any outlet is the worst.
I don’t actually do anything. I’m not skilled at anything except sailing, drinking, and fucking. And the problem is, if I set out to do the first, I’ll end up doing the second. And right now, as odd as it feels to realize this, I’m not in any place to be doing the third.
I’m lonely as hell, of course. I’ve never been alone before—I don’t know how. But here I am, alone, all day, every day.
I run a lot. Up the beach a few miles and back. Swim in the frigid water. I read a lot of books—I’m catching up on the classics I never read by not going to college.
I don’t have a talent.
I don’t have a trade.
I don’t have a skill.
I don’t have…anything worthwhile.
I am no one.
Goddamn you, Astrid, for putting the thought in my head: You are wrong about one thing, Lock: the only true measure of a person is what they do with their life.
Now I can’t forget that shit, and I can’t stop realizing, time and again, over and over, that it’s the truth, and the truth in this case inculpates me.
What have I done with my life? Not a goddamn thing.
What am I worth? Not a goddamn thing.
I mean, financially I’m worth a lot. Mom wrangled back the shares I sold all those years ago, and recently signed them back to me. So now I’m worth a fuck-ton of money again.
Super cool.
But…what do I do with it?
Funny how life works. Live like I’m dying, because I am, and enjoy every moment, knowing it’s coming to an end all too soon. But now that I have a future in front of me I hate myself, I hate every moment of my life. Legit, I have zero self-esteem.
No direction.
No plan.
No reason for existing.
Before, I had a reason: live like I’m dying, as that old Tim McGraw song goes.
Now—alive and not dying, I have no reason.
* * *
“Lachlan, Larry here.” There’s a rustling of paper on the other end of the line. “I have some information for you.”
“Great. Let’s hear it.”
“The donor was a man named Oliver James. A doctor, specifically a surgeon who worked for Doctors Without Borders. Died in a car accident on the PCH. He was thirty-six. Married, no children. His parents are listed as his next of kin, and they’re actually in your area. Down in Kneeland, or thereabouts.”
He gives me an address, and tells me to give him a call if I need anything else. I don’t know what I’ll find. I don’t even know what I’m looking for. I just know I can’t stay here
anymore. I need…I don’t even know. But if I can find something out about this Oliver James, whose heart beats in my chest, maybe I’ll…
Maybe I’ll what? I don’t even know.
I don’t question the need to leave, though. I toss a backpack and some camping gear into the back of my truck and head down to Kneeland.
* * *
Damn…this is backwoods. Real backwoods. Not much here but ranches, farms, and old houses on rolling hills tucked back into quiet old-growth forests.
Even after I find the correct county road, it takes me another thirty minutes of driving before I spot the mailbox with the right house number. I pull into a long, winding, dusty driveway, which in turn leads me way, way back into the wooded hills. Rolling fields behind, hundred-foot-tall trees towering ahead, swaying in a gentle breeze. I’ve got the windows open so I can smell the air, taste the fine grit of the dirt road, and hear the crunch of my tires.
The house itself is a tiny little place, ramshackle, probably a good hundred years old, maybe more. Smoke curls up from the chimney, even in the summer. Little screened-in porch, an old white Silverado with a rusted rear bumper parked at an angle on the grass near the front door. Pole barn out back, off to the right, and a stable with an attached split-rail corral on the left. A couple of splotchy horses graze quietly along one corner, the kind that are white with big brown or red spots. Paints, maybe? I don’t know much about horses.
I park behind the Silverado and hop out. Of course, in these parts you can hear visitors coming from a mile away and by the time they pull up you’re waiting for them at the front door.
He’s old. Seventies, eighties maybe. Tall, straight, strong-looking, the kind of man who’d once cut a hell of a figure and still does, even now. White hair combed straight back, piercing, deep-set brown eyes. Hand on a knobby, gnarled walking stick.
Yours: A Standalone Contemporary Romance Page 7
