by Lucy Atkins
She hangs up and walks on through the alien streets, past gardeners with leaf-blowers, and flapping Hallowe’en shapes. She does not know what is going on, but she does know one thing: she needs to call a locksmith.
Chapter Twelve
It was Amaal’s job to transport the organ from donor to recipient. She had followed him in the brisk walk from the operating theatre, through the hospital corridors and out to the wet parking bay where the ambulance was waiting. The iced, preserved heart, which had until now pumped blood around the body of a fifty-nine-year-old mother of four, was to be driven at high speed across London and meticulously sewn into the chest of a twenty-year-old man who would die without it.
She is trying to organize the pictures she took of that portion of the heart’s journey. With the other subjects she had systematically narrowed the choice of images until she knew, instinctively, that she had the right one, but with this final shot she can’t make up her mind. She has printed out about twenty images now and they are spread on the kitchen table. She lifts up one of Amaal’s hand pushing the white box into the back of the ambulance. It’s good, but it doesn’t quite say enough. She pushes the other photographs this way and that, holding them up one by one, tossing them aside.
Her lower back is sore and she can feel a headache pressing behind her eyes. But she only has today and tomorrow to get this finalized. Joe is watching movies in the front room, delighted to have two days off school for the Thanksgiving holiday. David is coming to get him first thing in the morning and Greg has booked the two of them a hotel in a fishing town an hour or so up the Massachusetts coast for the rest of the Thanksgiving weekend. It will be their first nights away together in six months, and she has promised the editor that she will get this stage of the book finished – text and all – by tomorrow.
The sun is shining on the lawn, making the scattered leaves glow, deep reds and oranges. There are cars parked along the street: family gatherings, visitors, friends. Greg is at work – being married to a British woman has advantages – he can then have Christmas off without a scruple.
She grabs her cardigan and goes outside, turning her face to the sky, blinking at the watery sun, looking up at the bare November branches. She can see her own breath. She closes her eyes. When she opens them she sees a flicker of red across the road, behind the cars that are lined up outside the Schechters’ house. She focuses on the shadows, and feels a jolt of adrenalin: she knows the figure now, almost instinctively, but this is the first time she has seen her face. The woman is motionless, like a wild animal poised in the dimness. Dark-red hair straggles over her shoulders, half covering a skull-like face; she is scrawny, in a man’s overcoat that trails almost to the ground. She does not move. She just stares.
Tess feels her skin prickle and for a second they stand, eyes locked across the street. From inside one of the houses she hears the muffled roar of laughter. Somewhere further down the street a car door slams and people call out greetings.
She takes a slow step towards the fence and holds onto it. ‘Who are you?’ she calls. ‘What do you want?’ The woman looks desperate, frozen, too, as if she has been waiting here for a long time, as if she has nowhere else to go. ‘Can I help?’ Tess calls. ‘Do you need something?’
She turns to move towards the gate, but before she gets to it the woman gathers her coat around her body, opens her mouth and lets out a guttural hiss like a threatened cat. Tess stops, her heart thudding. Then the woman launches herself off, accelerating surprisingly fast, heavy black boots thumping on the tarmac. She reaches the end of the street and flies round the corner without looking back.
As she is walking back towards the house, her legs trembling slightly, Tess hears Helena and Josh’s garage door buzz. Her first instinct is to duck inside the porch – she can’t face the neighbours now – but before she can get there Josh’s head appears over the bushes.
‘Hey!’ he says. ‘Happy Thanksgiving, Tess! How are you?’
‘Did you see her?’ She goes towards him. ‘Did you see that woman – standing over there?’ She points at the spot by the cars. ‘Red hair, in an overcoat?’
Josh glances in the direction of the Schechters’ house. ‘Sorry – who? Where?’
‘There was a woman – she was standing over there watching my house. Did you see her just now? Did you just get back? You must have driven right past her.’
‘Red hair? You mean Muriel?’
‘No, no, not Muriel, definitely not Muriel – she was older, thinner and kind of shabby, distraught-looking. She just ran away – literally just now, she ran off down there when I tried to talk to her.’
‘Sorry.’ He shakes his head. ‘I didn’t see her.’
‘Oh. OK. Don’t worry.’ She smooths her hair back, aware that she must look dishevelled and slightly mad herself.
‘Are you OK?’ he says. ‘Did she say something to upset you?’
‘No, no, she didn’t say anything. Honestly, I’m fine. Really.’
‘You look a little rattled.’
‘No, no, actually, I feel almost better for having seen her. I just came outside for some fresh air – I was working, I’ve kind of hit a wall – and there she was, just watching my house.’ She realizes then that she does not want to talk to Josh about this. ‘Look, it’s nothing, really. What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be eating turkey somewhere?’
‘Actually,’ Josh says, ‘Helena took the girls to her mother’s in Colorado and I decided to stay here. I have a lot of …’ His voice tails off and he shrugs. ‘You know.’
‘Oh,’ she says.
‘What about you? No Greg?’
‘He’s working. We both are.’
‘Is it your book you’ve stalled on?’
She nods. ‘I’m just trying to select the final pictures, but I can’t seem to see anything very clearly anymore.’
‘What exactly are you stuck on?’
She tries to focus on Josh’s face. ‘I have to decide on a picture to illustrate a particular phase of the donor heart’s journey.’
Josh shrugs again. ‘I could give you a second opinion, if that’d help?’
She realizes that perhaps Josh wants company – and it might be good to have a fresh pair of eyes. ‘Actually, that might be really useful – if you have time?’
As they pass through the hall she is aware of Joe’s shoes and a discarded hoodie that has fallen off the bannister, her own boots, piles of books, a half-packed weekend bag. She picks up the sweatshirt, kicks the shoes aside. ‘Sorry. It’s such a mess. We’re going up the coast tomorrow and I’m trying to get organized.’
Josh peers into the living room. ‘Hey, Joe.’
Joe looks up and mutters hi, but doesn’t move.
‘Wow,’ Josh gazes at the photographs spread across the table. ‘That’s a whole lot of hands.’
‘I have hundreds more. This is it narrowed down. I’m trying to select one for the picture of the transportation from the hospital where the donor was to the hospital where the recipient was waiting.’
‘I can see the problem.’
‘Yes, well, I need something that suggests urgency, motion, how extraordinary it is that this organ is outside the body, and how precious it is – and also, you know, the idea of a safe pair of hands. I have to find the one image to convey all that.’
She picks up the couple of shots she is leaning towards: one of Amaal’s hands pushing the cold-storage box into the ambulance, with the red letters ‘Human Organ for Transplant’ blurred but legible on the box, and one of his knuckles in close-up, folded around the handle, the coarse hairs on the base of his fingers, his dull gold wedding band, the blur of a moving background.
Josh holds out his hands for the two pictures. He looks at them, narrowing his eyes. He is clean-shaven, even-featured with a fine, straight nose, hair cropped around neat ears. He is good-looking, but somehow too ordinary for a woman like Helena. Perhaps that is the point: women like Helena might be drawn to powerful men like
Greg, but what they want, at home, is someone safer – less challenging, more devoted.
But why would Josh put up with Helena? Her looks, status and success cannot, surely, sustain a marriage. He must love her for deeper, less fathomable reasons. Then again, things between them must be bad if she has left him alone on Thanksgiving.
‘This one.’ He raises the one with the visible lettering. ‘Though I don’t know why.’
She leans over and takes it from him. ‘Not the close-up of his hand?’
Josh looks at the other picture. ‘Hmmm,’ he shrugs. ‘You know?’
‘Thanks.’ She glances over his shoulder through the criss-crossed window. The street is empty.
‘I’m no artist though, so don’t let my opinion sway you.’
‘No, that’s OK, thanks – it’s just useful seeing your reactions, it’s helpful.’
‘These are all terrific pictures.’ His eyes flicker over the images on the table. ‘It’s a cool idea for a book – the heart’s journey.’
‘Well, it’s about organ donation in general, not just hearts.’
‘Oh, sure, total body recycling …’
She laughs. ‘I haven’t heard it called that before.’
He smiles back and jangles his keys in his pocket, looking around. ‘It’s kind of nice in here, lighter than it looks from the outside. We’ve lived in the street three years now and I’ve never set foot inside this house before.’
‘I thought you’d been here for longer than that?’
‘Oh, no,’ he says. ‘We were in Scituate before this. My wife likes to uproot us every few years. She gets bored.’
Tess looks down at the images on the table, all the hands – open, closed, grasping, letting go.
‘She says she knew Greg at Harvard.’ She tries to keep her voice light and casual. ‘Isn’t that funny?’
‘At Harvard?’ He frowns. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Oh.’ She begins to gather the images up one by one.
He shakes his head. ‘No.’ Blotches of red have spread across his cheeks. ‘She didn’t know him then.’
‘Yes, well, Greg doesn’t remember her, so maybe she made a mistake.’
‘Listen, Tess …’ He shifts, and looks out of the window. ‘You should probably know that my wife is … she’s, well, she has …’
‘What?’
‘She gets obsessions.’
‘She does?’
‘And right now, well, she has kind of a thing for your husband.’
‘A thing?’ The word seems so juvenile, so high-schoolish, that for a moment she wants to laugh. But this is clearly anything but trivial to Josh, who is rigid, his cheeks blazing, his shoulders high.
‘This isn’t the first time.’
‘The first time what?’
‘Never mind.’ He sounds suddenly formal. ‘I shouldn’t have said anything. I just didn’t want you to, you know, you and Greg seem happy and … well, you know …’
‘Wait, no – I don’t think I quite understand what you’re saying.’
‘Listen.’ He pushes his shoulders back. ‘Please – it’s really not a problem for you guys.’ He lays his hand, flat, on the table. ‘It’s an issue for me and my wife. And now I should probably get home, I have a stack of papers to grade and this is my chance for some uninterrupted time.’
‘But—’
‘Look.’ He attempts to smile, but his mouth is too stiff. He begins to walk round the table towards the hall. ‘Helena and I are having some marital issues right now, but we’re working it out. Don’t give this another thought, OK? I shouldn’t have said anything, I don’t know why I did.’
‘Wait.’ She skips round to stand between him and the door. ‘Please. I just want to be clear: Greg and Helena don’t have any history, do they?’
He sidesteps her and reaches for the door handle. ‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’
He blinks at her. ‘Aren’t you?’
She steps back to let him out and as she shuts the door she catches the image of her own face, miniature, warped and huge-eyed, in the shining new lock.
*
She stands in the hall for a moment, listening to the chirp of cartoon characters on Joe’s TV. Then she knows what to do.
The basement air is freezing and she is shivering when she gets down to the laundry room. She stands with her back to the machine, hugging her arms tightly around her body. Inside her, the baby is kicking so hard that she can feel tiny thuds at the base of her neck. Greg’s boxes are lined up just above eye level.
She has to stand on tiptoe to ease the first one off the shelf, but it is not too heavy. She kicks laundry out of the way and puts the box on the floor. She hesitates, then squats, making room for her belly, and rips off the masking tape. The cardboard is soggy. She’ll tell Greg that she decided to repack his things into damp-proof plastic crates. She will go and buy some of those before he gets home.
The box contains black ring binders. She pulls one out. On the cover is a logo – a crimson shield with three books on it and ‘Veritas’ inked across them, with ‘Harvard’ underneath. She pulls out a few other files. All have the same Harvard University logo. She opens one and finds notes in Greg’s measured handwriting: ‘The Trigeminal Nerve.’ She turns a few pages: ‘Difference between Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria.’ The pages are dense with complicated terminology, diagrams and mnemonics. She puts the files back, shuts the box and pushes it aside.
The next one contains more Harvard Medical School ring binders, as well as two box files with ‘GMC’ written on them in marker pen – presumably Greg’s UK certification paperwork. There are photocopies of documents: Greg’s social security number, his birth certificate, his undergraduate degree certificate from the University of Pittsburgh, his Harvard medical degree certificate, visa forms in small type with UK government logos on them, grainy passport photos in which he looks thinner-faced with cropped hair, but otherwise little altered.
She wonders what they would have made of each other back then. He was a ruthlessly ambitious medic working hundred-hour weeks and she was a photographer, working in an independent bookshop, shaken and hollow after her father’s death. They would have been completely incompatible and yet, perhaps, even then, a mechanism deep inside them would have slotted together. She shoves the files back and stands up, reaching on tiptoe for the third box.
It contains more medical student notes in Greg’s handwriting. She sits back on her heels. A sheet of paper has fallen out and she picks it off the floor. It is a typed poem, ‘Fair Harvard’. She skims through its pompous stanzas:
… from the age that is past,
To the age that is waiting …
…
For the good and the great, in their beautiful prime …
She folds it and tucks it back into the file.
She sits for a moment longer on the cold, concrete floor. She doesn’t really want to think too much about Helena and Greg in their beautiful prime. She is not sure what she thought she’d find in these boxes – evidence? Pictures of Helena? Love letters? Something to demonstrate that Greg has lied about knowing her? She tucks the files back in their box. She has no idea why her instinct is to doubt him when it is clearly Helena who is making things up.
But now she has started she might as well see what’s in the last box. It is light, as if it contains nothing but air. She rips through the seals and finds a child-sized baseball glove inside. She lifts it out, feeling the cracked, stiff leather, turning it over: a little relic of his small-town Pennsylvania childhood.
She cradles it, gently, and a heavy sadness folds itself around her. She has no right to be in this painful place, sifting through memories that he can only handle by containment. He has never invited her to witness this.
As she goes to put it back in the box she sees something pale and cottony folded up on the bottom. She shakes it out. It is a pair of baseball pantaloons, about Joe’s size, and below these a blue-and-white nylon
baseball shirt with ‘Robesville Sluggers’ and a number sixteen on the back.
She tries to picture a ten-year-old Greg playing Little League like the boys she has seen in the local park. There are no photos of him as a child because everything was destroyed in the fire. It is a miracle that these few objects survived. She lifts them up to her face. They smell of musty corners, tree bark, mouse pelt – but not smoke or ash. She feels shabby: she really should not be pawing through these things, uninvited.
But no wonder he has carried this box of memories all the way across the Atlantic and back. These things are precious. They shouldn’t be left down here in the damp. That, at least, can be a justification for what she has done. She folds the baseball pants and shirt back up and as she is laying them back in the box she notices something shiny in one corner. She picks it out. It is a medal, on a striped ribbon, lightweight and tinny, with ‘Robesville Sluggers, Junior League Champions’ engraved on it. Again, she wonders how it survived the fire.
They had only known each other a month or two when he told her what happened to his parents. His voice was controlled, but afterwards he went out and ran for more than an hour. When he came back, sweating and loose-limbed, he stood in the kitchen with a glass of water and said, ‘I told you because you need to know, but I don’t want to talk about it again. I am a different person now. It doesn’t help me to remember; it never does.’ He tipped back his head and gulped the water without stopping to breathe, his eyes fixed on the ceiling.
Sixteen is a terrible age to lose both parents. She was sixteen when her mother died, but at least she still had her father, and he had always been the one who cared for her so, in a sense, when her mother died, very little changed. There was even – something it took her many years to admit – a faint sense of relief because life became infinitely simpler. Her father had continued to be her rock until his death nine years later. So, really, she can’t compare her loss at sixteen to what Greg went through.
