by Jill Wolfson
“They’re the product of the deranged mind of a little kid. But that’s my point – interesting is more important than true. Who cares if people call you a liar when you’re dead?”
“Do you still write them?”
Milo muttered something. I asked, “What?” and he answered, “Yeah, I do. Only not so deranged. They have more truth in them now.” I begged him to read his latest one. I was completely obsessed with the idea of learning anything new and true about Milo.
“Come on. You can help me add some spice to my own life story, which, as you said, is terminally boring.”
“I did start a new one last night. So far, I only have the last line. Milo Nutley’s final wish is —” He paused. “I have an idea. Tell you what. Think about it for a while. Then, you tell me your final wish, and I’ll tell you mine. Deal?”
Dear Donor Family,
Maybe you might be interested in hearing about my final wishes because, as you might suspect, they can tell you a lot about a person. Such as what a person values and hopes to accomplish in life, and whether or not that person is selfishly obsessed only with their own happiness at the expense of everyone else, like most of the girls in a certain high school I’m familiar with.
Or whether the person wishes for things with a higher purpose, such as stopping all wars and curing cancer and making beautiful art and music in the name of world peace and saving the orphaned elephants of the world, of which there are far too many. I’m definitely the kind of person with final wishes of this higher sort.
But to be perfectly frank, I also think that anyone saying they want ONLY world peace, etc., etc., is probably self-delusional or hoping to win Miss Death Bed Congeniality or to get into heaven no questions asked. Well, the pageant judges might be fooled, but heaven won’t be. I bet that God (or any Godlike substitute of your choice) understands that it’s okay for some final wishes to be unlofty. As my mom always says, “Don’t shoot me! I’m only human.”
So, my list of final wishes – which I boiled down to ten so you won’t be bored out of your mind – includes both the good-for-the-world and the good-for-me kind.
The List:
1, 2, 3 and 4. All previously mentioned items – the end of war, cure for cancer, world peace, art/music and proper homes for elephants.
5. A high-paying job with good benefits for my mom that allows her to use her creative side and makes her stop complaining about her boss all the time.
6. A romance with someone obsessed with me in a sexual way that’s a little inappropriate for my age.
7. Lots and lots of fatty, good-tasting food.
8. No furry animals being gutted and skinned so rich ladies can wear fur coats.
9. Global warming reversed immediately.
10. A new liver for my friend Milo, and not just so he can be obsessed with me etc., etc. He really deserves a new liver so he can stop feeling bad about his last transplant and get on with his life.
Well, Donor Family, I hope you aren’t offended by any of my wishes and decide that the wrong person got your loved one’s heart and that you want it back immediately. I don’t think there’s anything I can do about that.
Sincerely yours,
Dani
“And finally, number nine: Global warming reversed immediately,” I read into the phone. I chickened out revealing number ten and shortened number six to: a romance.
“My turn?” Milo asked.
“Your turn.”
He cleared his throat. “Milo Nutley’s final wish. If he doesn’t get a second liver, Milo Nutley hopes that his heart is in good shape. He wishes that it goes to someone who needs it and deserves it, someone who will use every beat of it to live a great, long life.”
By the way, I never sent that particular letter to the donor family. I kept my first letter to them short, maybe a little boring according to Milo standards. I thanked them. I told them a little about myself. My last lines were: I know that your life will never be the same. Neither will mine. My doctor said that there couldn’t have been a more perfect heart for me.
TWENTY
MORE THAN A MONTH had passed since Amanda’s death. Her parents were doing as well as could be expected. That’s what everyone said. Claire could finally say “Amanda” aloud, without the name lodging in her throat. Robert had moved back into his own apartment, but he still had dinner with his ex-wife and son two or three times a week. That felt weird and tense at first. Gradually, though, they talked more and more about everyday things, like Tyler’s upcoming exams or the house that Robert’s agency just put on the market for sale. The parents had even taken the first step toward cleaning out Amanda’s room. Steeling themselves, they crossed the threshold and gathered up textbooks to return to her school.
So when Helen Curry from the transplant network asked if the family would like to receive letters from the organ recipients, Claire gave a hesitant yes. Up until then, she had known only the most basic details. That’s all she could handle. There was a local teenager who got her daughter’s heart. Something about a third-grader. Was it the liver or a kidney?
By the time the letters actually arrived, Claire had more or less put them out of her mind. They came on an ordinary Saturday, dropped into the mail slot by the ordinary mailman, the letters bundled in an ordinary tan envelope with an ordinary postal meter stamp and the Transplant Network as the return address. She ripped the envelope open and shook out the contents.
Three sealed white envelopes. To the Donor Family. To the Donor Family. To the Donor Family.
Until that moment, Claire had thought she was ready. She wasn’t. Her eyes settled on the letters with the growing fury of a housecat looking down from a window onto a trio of neighborhood toms that had made themselves at home in the backyard. This was wrong! They didn’t belong here! Claire actually hissed at the envelopes, the exhalation pressing hard against the backs of her teeth.
With a quick sweep of her hand, she stuffed the letters into the big envelope and jammed it into the back of a file cabinet. She slammed the drawer closed with a hard, satisfying clank. All that day and next, Claire couldn’t walk through that room without feeling the presence of the letters, like she was slogging through a bog to get away from them.
A few nights later, she dreamed that she was wandering blindly and barefoot through a snowstorm. The flakes were large, white and square, stinging like paper cuts as they fell on her face, shoulders and feet.
“Tyler, wake up!”
It was 5:45 A.M.
“Mom, what? What’s going on?”
“Lighter fluid. Give it to me. And matches.”
“I don’t have lighter fluid!”
That was contraband material, family rules. So Tyler denied it fervently, even though he did have a practically full can of Zippo hidden in his bottom dresser drawer under the chaos of dirty socks and underwear. His mom repeated her request. This time, there was something about her tone – calm and impersonal, as if placing an order in a hardware store – that told him it was okay. Tyler went into his hidden stash and followed her down the stairs, through the kitchen and into the backyard. She didn’t offer an explanation, and he didn’t ask for any.
Outside, his mom sat cross-legged on the slab of concrete where Amanda had drawn hopscotch grids and Tyler had bounced balls for hours at a time. She patted the space next to her, and he took a seat. The ground felt cold through his sweats. The half moon, a clown’s too-wide grin, hung directly overhead.
“I hate these people,” she said. Her voice was strangely flat in contrast to the word hate.
“What people, Mom?”
“I know they didn’t do anything wrong, but I hate them.”
It unnerved Tyler to hear his mother talk this way, especially in the dark in that eerie calm and controlled voice. But even more, it thrilled him. This was so unlike her. His mother got along with everyone, and it usually drove Tyler nuts. If he ruled the earth, scores and scores of people – certain teachers and annoying neighbors, stuck-up classmates, nei
ghborhood brats, bad actors, politicians, public figures of all sorts – would be immediately banished to another planet in another dimension. And now, like him, his mother was also full of hate.
He watched as she shook out the contents of a brown envelope and tried to lean three white envelopes against each other in a tepee shape. When they kept collapsing, Tyler took over. Wadding up a piece of old newspaper from the recycle bin, he used it as a base and the tepee stood.
“Not big enough,” his mother said. “I want it big. I want it to go on for a while.”
Tyler surrounded the letters by a moat of balled-up newsprint. His mother went into the house and returned with some additions: a dental appointment reminder card for Amanda, her renewal forms for USA Gymnastics, some late-arriving sympathy cards. Tyler added more newspaper, a sheet of cardboard and some old cellophane wrapping.
“Perfect,” his mother said.
“Now?” he asked.
“Now.”
He squirted the pile with lighter fluid. The stream made an arc and caught glints of moonlight. He was well aware that his mother wasn’t scurrying around all nervous and parentlike to make sure things remained safe. Tyler had never before felt so trusted by her.
“Move back,” he ordered, and she did.
With one match, the edge of a piece of newspaper turned orange and then caught fire. There was a crack of cellophane. In another minute, the whole pile ignited. It burned steadily, not too quickly. Tyler liked everything about this fire, about any fire, really – the colors you never see anywhere else, the smells, the tickling on the inside of his nose, the sense of peace followed by the sudden pop that never failed to make him feel very alive.
His mother’s cheeks flushed slightly pink from the heat as she watched flecks of ash, like snow in reverse, drift skyward and out of sight.
TWENTY-ONE
TYLER DIDN’T STEAL IT.
In the moonlight, he had noticed that all three letters were addressed to him. To the Donor Family. He was family. A brother. It wasn’t stealing to take something that practically has your name on it. In his life, he had walked off with stuff that he had far less right to take than this. Money from his mother’s handbag, pens from Amanda’s room, batteries from Wal-Mart. He hadn’t felt guilty about those things. These letters actually belonged to him.
So when his mother wasn’t looking, he grabbed one of the envelopes and quickly slipped it into the pocket of his sweats. He felt its solid shape pressing on his thigh as the other two letters burned and turned to ash.
With the first hint of daylight in the sky, Tyler left his mother sweeping up the backyard and returned to his bedroom. He switched on his desk lamp and ripped open the letter. It had a Florida postmark.
Dear Donor Family,
As you notice, I’ve written this letter not on a computer, but on my old-fashioned typewriter. I don’t even own a computer. That should tell you I’m no spring chicken.
Someone who’s reached my advanced age should have the words for almost every situation. But I feel at such a loss for what I want to say to you. How do you thank someone for everything?
The hospital social worker, that dear heart, says that I shouldn’t try to be flowery, which is not my nature anyway. There are greeting cards for that kind of sentiment. She says I should tell you my story so that you can see your gift for yourself. So here it is, a bit long-winded but such as it is.
Twenty years ago, when I first moved to the Villages of Boca Raton in Florida, most everyone was around sixty-five years old, and you never saw such a group of spry retirees, just like in the ads, always swimming or playing tennis. My husband, Marty, a former dentist – may he rest in peace – loved nothing more than a good round of golf.
What they don’t show in the ads is what they wouldn’t dare show because it would send potential residents running in terror. Nobody living here is young for their age anymore. After two decades, we’re all falling apart a section at a time, arteries clogging, kidneys shutting down, feet as cold as dead fish. All the little things that used to go away don’t anymore. If only we knew then about the importance of calcium, we wouldn’t have so many bodies twisted like question marks sitting around the pool.
Once, sometimes twice a week, an ambulance, sirens screaming, comes tearing through the Villages. For me, that sound unleashes questions: Did the poor soul have any inkling her time was up? What did she tell her loved ones about what finally, ultimately, at the end was important in her life?
I’m not by nature a morbid person, and I’ve never been particularly religious. But I don’t think you have to be in order to have these kinds of questions. And I know I’m not alone in having them. When the sirens start, it gets very still. People in the clubhouse stop making their crafts. The swimmers hook their arms on the side of the pool. Even the noisy Florida birds stop their chirping, as if they’re considering whether or not they’re making good use of their time on this earth.
Up until recently, I’ve been one of the lucky ones. Knock on wood. But when you turn eighty-four like I just did, you’re asking for it. Sometimes late at night, I would wonder, So, Miriam, old gal, what will it be? Breast cancer? Heart attack?
The big problem turned out to be my eyes. Who would have figured? They were once hazel beauties. I had not given them a thought in years, except to note with a certain sadness how wrinkled they’d become, heavy-lidded like a toad’s. But then the clouding started. It got worse and worse, until I was looking at the world through wax paper.
What kind of life would I have if I could no longer read, play canasta, look out at the ocean, or see the smile of my first great-grandchild, who’s on her way into the world?
One of my eyes couldn’t be saved. The doctor hoped that a cornea transplant on the other would give me some sight. I prayed that the doctor was right.
He was.
Many evenings now, I sit on my deck and watch the sky for hours through my good right eye. I’m mesmerized, sometimes moved to tears by its clarity. I swear, there are two hundred different shades of dark. I never realized that before. And the stars!
If my husband the pessimist were still around, he would say something about how the stars are all the terrible questions, desperate pleas to God, longings, fears and disappointments that had ever been expressed by human beings.
I would drape my arm around him and say, “Marty, you know I’m no Pollyanna. But maybe those stars are all the prayers that have been answered, mine included.”
Donor Family, that’s what I want to say to you. You are my answered prayer. You are the star that keeps the light shining.
Thank you, thank you and thank you again.
Yours truly, Miriam P.
TWENTY-TWO
TYLER FLIPPED THE LETTER over hoping for a postscript, some last-minute thought that the woman needed to get down on paper or the insight might be lost forever.
He didn’t want the letter to end. There was a sense that as long as the paper remained in his hands, Miriam P. would still be communicating with him, despite the gap of three thousand miles and more than sixty years of age. He pictured her, an old woman looking to the stars.
She had never before been mesmerized – that was her word – by the stars and shades of the night sky. Did this passion rise spontaneously as the doctor placed the cornea on her eye like a crystal dome over the face of a watch? What did it mean? Where did it come from? Was there anything, even at the very edges of her vision, that seemed to belong to someone else?
Ever since reading The Real complete honest truth about Tyler and me.doc, he had avoided his sister’s laptop. He feared it in the way he had feared the dark as a little kid. Who knew what would jump out of the computer if he switched it on again? What words or sounds or images would appear out of the dark, unsummoned and unwelcomed, with the touch of a key? Only now, Tyler felt compelled to turn it on. He Googled the word cornea and read randomly.
The thin, transparent membrane consists of five layers.
It be
nds light.
Despite its seeming lack of substance, the cornea consists of organized proteins and cells.
With no blood vessels to nourish it, the cornea feeds on tears.
The cornea that once fed on his sister’s tears now sat on the eye of this woman who stared at the Florida sky every night.
Could one person’s vision be transferred to another? Donor’s tears to recipient’s sight?
Tyler searched his memory and came up with fleeting images that connected his sister to the sky and to the stars – Amanda staring out the window, Amanda lying on her back on the lawn – but nothing conclusive. He searched her documents for the word star. The screen filled.
One file contained Amanda’s team photo, the Tumbling All-Stars. He clicked it closed. In Staranswers.doc, he found a homework assignment from Amanda’s earth science class.
Page 97, answers to 1 & 2.
1. The star nearest to our solar system is the triple star Proxima Centauri, which is trillions of miles from earth.
2. The number of stars visible to the naked eye from earth has been estimated to total 8,000. Some of those stars are a million light-years away.
Only one remaining entry looked promising, a long document labeled Random Star Thoughts. References to stars jumped out.
Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I like looking out my window, especially when it’s a clear night like now. Some of these stars are a million light-years away, which means the light I’m seeing was created when I was negative 999,986 years old. That gives me the chills.
When I look at the night sky, I always hear that deep voice at the beginning of Star Trek reruns. “Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise, her five-year mission…”
There’s a lot to know about space. But given how fast science is moving and all that, one day we’re probably going to know everything we need to know about it. So what about right here, all the black holes on this planet? There’s so much that nobody can explain. Like, why does everyone run around thinking everything they do is so important? We’re all going to die, so what does it matter if you get an A on a test or come in first or fiftieth place on the balance beam at some gym meet?
