Kai is still on the beach. I imagine him finding me here, slumped over in the sand, face white, gasping for breath. I picture the look of surprise on his face when he says, “Chloe, are you okay?”
No. That is not going to happen. I am fine. Fine.
And just as quickly as the sensation arrived, it’s gone. My heart rate returns to normal. The warm, perfect day envelops me in its beauty just as it had moments before. I hear the soft rush of the surf, watch a tern dip into the grasses between the dunes.
I pick up my board, loosen the collar of my wetsuit, and continue along the path to the parking lot.
It was nothing. Nothing at all.
The next day at school, I find Jane in the library, working — for a change — on her trig homework.
“Let’s do it,” I tell her.
“Do what?” she asks.
“Look up the medical records. Let’s do it after school today.”
Gather data. Collect evidence.
I’m going to get to the bottom of this . . . this whatever that’s going on between my head and my heart, once and for all.
You’d be surprised at how easy it is to hack into a hospital’s medical records system. No special computer skills or coding genius are required. Consider all the doctors, nurses, and other staff who have access. And of that group, more than a few are lazy with their passwords — making them too easy to guess or writing them down somewhere so they don’t forget. All you need to do is find one of those people. Just one.
Jane’s mom.
Who is currently wending her way home from work in the northbound rush hour while Jane’s stepdad, Paul, is with her brothers — the “terror twins,” as she calls them — at their swim lesson. It takes us about five minutes to locate the password, which, as Jane suspected, was written in a small notebook that we found in the top drawer of her mom’s desk.
“Social security number?” Jane is seated in front of an iMac, hands poised above the keyboard. We start with my records. Although my mom has copies of just about every biopsy, scan, EKG, and test result connected to my own case, I’m thinking the hospital’s file on me might be linked to the record of my donor, or at least contain some identifying information. An address. A birth date. A name.
I tell her my social security number and she types it in.
“What was the date of your transplant again?” Jane asks.
“December eighteenth. Last year.”
She types. Points. Clicks.
“Here it is.” She reads a note from my record. “Patient, Chloe Russell, notified of available donor on December eighteenth at eight p.m. Admitted to the transplant center at nine twenty-five p.m.”
That night. I remember it like a movie of someone else’s life, one that I can replay scene for scene, but instead of being the main character, I’m only watching her.
I was so sick by then, I didn’t even look like me. I had lost weight — too much for my small frame — and, aside from the dark circles under my eyes, my skin was so pale it was almost translucent. I looked like a vampire. Not the sexy kind. The skinny, scary, horror-movie kind. I see my parents helping me into the car and my dad throwing my bag — packed weeks before, when I was moved to the top of the recipient list — into the back. There’s even a soundtrack. My dad had made a heart-themed playlist when we got the news that I was next in line on the list, which he put on to lighten the mood once we were on our way: Janis Joplin, “Piece of My Heart”; Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty, “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around”; Bonnie Tyler, “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” It helped, a little. Dad’s dated musical tastes at least gave us something to talk about, aside from the fact that we were all terrified. Hopeful and wired and excited too, but mainly terrified. I knew this was my last chance at staying alive. If the transplant didn’t succeed, there would be no returns or exchanges on hearts. And, although they would never say it, I know my parents were thinking the same: should anything go wrong, and there were multiple things that could go wrong, this might be the last ride we would take together as a family.
“There better not be any Celine Dion on here,” my mom said as we pulled onto the freeway.
“Of course not,” my dad answered. “What kind of a monster do you think I am?”
I was pretty short of breath, even with the portable oxygen tank, but managed to add, “I guarantee you there’s some Elton John, though.”
By the time we reached the Golden Gate Bridge, a heavy fog had settled and we could barely see the taillights of the car ahead of us. Elton John and Kiki Dee’s duet “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” (of course) was playing then, but we had stopped making jokes. My dad got quiet and concentrated on driving as swiftly as possible in the fog. My mom sat with me in the back and held my hand tight, going over the check-in details as if we were simply on our way to the airport for a family trip. I think she hoped that as long as we followed the instructions and stuck to the plan, it would all come out okay.
Jane starts paging through links and tabs, opening windows that display EKG readouts and X-ray images.
“Whoa, is that your heart?”
She points to an image of a chest X-ray, the contrast dye casting the arteries and veins of the heart in an eerie neon glow. I stare at the X-ray. Is it my former heart? Or the donor’s heart? It’s hard to tell without comparing them, side by side.
I do know that mine was abnormally enlarged, the myocardium having grown thick and scarred from the damage caused by ARVD. But I don’t remember having any imaging done on the night of my transplant. The doctors already knew the condition of my heart by then:
F-.
“I think it’s the X-ray they did on my donor,” I say to Jane.
This is the first time I’ve actually seen a picture of it.
Hello, heart.
I’m mesmerized by the image, so much so that I can almost see it beating right there on the screen in front of us, in time with the real-life twin in my chest.
“That. Is. So. Cool,” Jane says. “It looks like your tattoo.”
“Well, technically, my tattoo looks like the heart.”
Jane rolls her eyes. “Whatever, nerd.” She and I stare at the X-ray for a few more seconds before she clicks the image away and starts scrolling again. She scrolls and reads. Reads and scrolls. Until she whacks my arm, hard.
“Chloe! Here!”
Jane looks at me and grins like she just found the answer key for the trig final.
“I think this is a file on your donor.” She clicks on a tab and starts scanning the information on the screen. But, as I slide my chair closer, her triumphant hacker face fades. “Wait . . . what? Goddamnit!”
“What? What?” I’m trying to read what she’s reading, but her head is blocking my view. I gently nudge her aside so I can see.
“The name, birth date, and social are blacked out. Why would they do that?”
I know why.
“It’s to keep the identity confidential,” I say, reminding her of what I’d told her when I arrived at her house about an hour ago and almost chickened out about doing this. About my conversation with Dr. Ahmadi, when he confirmed that my donor’s family did not want to be contacted.
“Shit. I can’t look up your donor’s full medical record without a name or number.”
I guess this hacking thing is going to be a little trickier than we’d anticipated after all.
We continue reading through the file, just in case there’s anything useful. And, even though all the identifying information about my donor is blocked out, there are some other details.
Blood type, for example. My donor’s was O positive, the same as my own.
This I already knew.
There are also EKG readings, echocardiogram results, enzyme tests, and even size measurements — all done on the night of the transplant to confirm that the organ I was about to receive was healthy and undamaged by whatever it was that had proved fatal to my donor’s brain. Then, a single entry, near the bottom of the page. Cause of
death: head trauma.
A loud, sickening crack.
“What do you think happened?” Jane asks.
I shrug, even though I’m pretty sure I know the answer.
Blood washes over my eyes.
“Probably an accident of some kind.”
On a motorcycle. In a tunnel. The one I relive every night.
“That’s really sad.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It is.”
One second you are here, and the next . . . there’s nothing. It’s the “nothing” part that’s the worst.
Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this. It feels weird. Wrong.
Just as I am about to tell Jane that we should stop, she yells “HA!” and practically pushes me off my chair.
“Chloe! Look! Sloppy record keeping. They forgot to delete the address.”
“What address?” I ask as I squint at the line she’s pointing at.
52 Frances Street, Berkeley, California.
A home address. My donor’s home address.
Jane grabs a Post-it pad and copies it down. She yanks the note off the pad and offers it to me.
I stare at it for a second. Do I really want to do this? Looking up information without anyone knowing about it is one thing, but showing up at someone’s door?
“I don’t know,” I tell Jane. “What am I supposed to do with this? Ring their doorbell and say what? I have your daughter’s, or your wife’s, or your husband’s heart? I think I may have inherited their memories? I tried to contact you but you didn’t want to meet me so I hacked into UCSF’s medical records system to track down your address like a creepy stalker?”
Jane sighs.
“Obviously you aren’t going to do that, Chloe. Have you considered, perhaps, not telling them who you are? At least not right away.”
“Lying.”
“Selectively leaving out some details.”
This too seems wrong. But something is compelling me to do it anyway.
“All right,” I finally say to Jane. “A selective introduction. What are you doing tomorrow?”
School. We both have school.
“I think I’m coming down with a cold,” I say. “That’s contagious.”
Jane needs little incentive to ditch.
She spins around in her mom’s desk chair and yells, “Achoo!”
I am digging in a patch of earth with my bare hands. The ground is thick with roots. I tear and pull at them as my nails break and bleed. I’m frantic to find something. Something I need.
The soil is warm. Moist. It smells of copper. Of compost. Dead leaves. I keep digging until my hands touch something rubbery, about the size of a baseball. I pull at it, hard, until it releases, trailing a dirt-encrusted and tangled knot of roots.
Only they aren’t roots. They’re blood vessels.
I’m wiping soil away from a human heart. And somehow I know, am sure, that it’s my heart. The one that I was born with. The one that was taken from me. I hold it in my bleeding hands and I realize that it’s moving. Pulsing. Alive.
Something wet and wriggling clings to my wrist.
A maggot.
It’s stuck to my skin. Another squirms between my fingers. And then hundreds of them are falling from my heart, falling in clumps on top of each other in a writhing pile on the ground. I drop the heart, shake my hands in panic, scream —
I’m still screaming when my mom shakes me awake.
“Chloe! It’s a dream. It’s just a dream.”
I stare at her, still imagining that I feel maggots crawling all over my hands. Crawling all over my heart.
“What, honey? What were you dreaming of?”
“I can’t remember,” I lie.
“You’re as white as a ghost,” my mom says. “Are you feeling all right?”
“I’m fine,” I say.
“Are you short of breath?”
“No.”
“Dizzy?”
“No.”
“Chest pain?”
“Mom, no.”
What have I done to her? I honestly think she might have PTSD from my heart transplant.
“Maybe I should stay home.”
No, no, no. Jane and I are ditching today. She cannot stay home.
“Mom. It was just a dream. I’m fine. Really.”
I make a goofy face to show her that it’s all good.
My mom hesitates for a few more seconds.
“Okaaay,” she says, with the worry line between her eyebrows fully deployed. “Call if you need me. I’ve got meetings, but just in San Francisco, so I’m not far.”
“Will do,” I answer, mentally willing her to get a move on.
Jane texts, Here! when she arrives; I find her outside on a black motorcycle, holding an extra helmet and looking like a badass.
“Birthday present from my dad,” she says. “My mom is pissed, which was probably his main objective. The twins are so jealous.”
“It’s your birthday?” I ask.
“Last week,” Jane responds.
I wonder why she didn’t mention it. And I have to admit, I’m kind of floored by the extravagance of her present. My parents usually just take me out to dinner.
“Your dad must not worry much,” I say, glad that my own dad is away at a conference and my mom is already en route to San Francisco. They would definitely not be cool with me riding a motorcycle, even if I was only going around the block, let alone across the San Francisco Bay.
Jane shrugs.
“Maybe we should take my car,” I say. One week doesn’t seem like a whole lot of time for her to practice her motorcycling skills.
Jane shakes her head. “Are you serious? There’s no way we’re taking your Honda when I’ve got this.” She tosses the extra helmet at me.
It is a beautiful bike. I’m already imagining what it will be like to streak across the bay on it, wind rushing, but . . .
I wave my phone at her. “How are you going to hear me navigating?”
She points to the bike. “It’s got GPS.”
“Oh.” I hadn’t realized motorcycles came with GPS, but this one — sleek and modern with a pristine matte-black finish — looks pretty high-tech. Like something a character in a dystopian sci-fi movie might ride. I pull up the address on my phone, which I had transferred from the Post-it. It takes her a little while to figure out how to get everything set up on the GPS, which makes me wonder for a few seconds how many times she’s actually ridden this bike.
In the meantime, I strap my helmet on. It smells of new plastic and foam padding.
“Got it!” Jane looks up from the GPS screen. “Ready?”
I climb on the bike and circle my arms around Jane’s leather-clad waist.
“Ready.”
She starts it up.
“Happy belated birthday!” I yell over the growl of the engine as the bike lurches away from the driveway, wobbling as we pick up speed.
It’s soon clear that “motorcycle operation” is an activity that Jane is unprepared to maneuver through with her usual, oversize confidence. At the fourth intersection, a car behind us blares its horn as the light turns green and she stalls out for the third time. I decide to intervene. “Oh my god, Jane, pull over! Pull over!” I yell as loud as I can in the direction of her ear. She swerves abruptly toward the sidewalk, bumping the curb hard.
“What?” Jane lifts up her face shield. Her brow and cheeks are slick with sweat.
“You’re going to drop us.” She looks at me blankly. “You know, tip the bike over? Did anyone teach you how to ride this?”
Jane looks embarrassed, which would make this the first time I’ve seen Jane embarrassed about anything. “It’s not as easy as it looks.”
A peculiar feeling comes over me, like some impulse, buried way back in my consciousness, is trying to break through.
“Let me try.” I hop off and order her to slide back, which she does. It’s funny how well people listen when you seem completely sure of yourself.
“You d
idn’t tell me you knew how to ride,” Jane says.
I don’t. But what’s weird is that the gears, the foot pedals, and many of the instruments on the bike feel familiar. “You didn’t tell me you don’t,” I reply.
I climb back on, in front this time, grab hold of the handlebars, roll the bike away from the curb, and hammer the accelerator with my right hand. We take off into traffic, speed through a yellow light near the shopping center where I got my ears pierced when I was eight, and curve up the entrance ramp to the freeway. I hear Jane let out a whoop behind me. My entire body is tingling.
Holy shit.
The feeling that I have done this before is so powerful, so certain. But I know I haven’t. I’ve never even sat on a motorcycle, forget having ridden one.
This can’t be possible. It can’t.
Memory is a function of the brain. The heart is an organ that pumps blood. You can’t acquire neurological processes through a heart. Not. Possible.
And yet here I am, weaving a Ducati in and out of traffic like I’ve done it hundreds of times.
As we sweep across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, the speedometer ticks to fifty . . . sixty . . . sixty-five . . . seventy. A roaring wall of wind pastes my too-light jacket against the front of my chest and rattles the face shield of my helmet. But despite my nightly death-by-motorcycle dreams, I am curiously not afraid. I want to go faster.
Faster.
Faster.
Faster.
The rippling surface of the water streaks by beneath us, the Bay Bridge in sight to the right, the Berkeley Hills in view up ahead. We are almost across the bridge when images start to flash across my brain: A street sign. An Indian restaurant. A bookstore called the Cat’s Corner.
A realization dawns on me: I already know the way. I don’t have to look at the GPS. I haven’t been looking at the GPS. I know. Exit 12 off of 580 at Gilman, turn left on Hopkins, right on Sacramento, and then left again at Frances, just past the restaurant and the bookstore.
Why — no, how do I know this? Feel this? Or maybe it’s not me that knows. Could it be the heart? Like a distress beacon, finding its way home?
Everything I Thought I Knew Page 10
