I delete the name and watch the cursor blink, blink, blink, waiting for me.
I think about Phantom Amy, the false face she wears now. I want to tell her what I know about Nate, that he isn’t completely gone anymore, that he never was. We won’t ever be friends again like we were when we were little, but maybe if I give her this gift, she can forgive me. Maybe then I won’t have to carry the blame for taking him away from her.
FOR AMY, I type. Then I add 2.
I drag and drop song after song into the playlist, only the most beautiful songs, only the ones that make me want to dance or cry or smile with their first few words. If they can make me feel this way, I think, imagine what they can do for her.
When I’m done, I send the playlist to my phone and tell myself that I’ll figure out a way to get it to her. But just so I have him in my own way, too, I take a pen off my desk and I write his name on the inside of my wrist. The ballpoint tip tugs at my skin, makes the letters skip and stutter, so I trace it over again, and then one more time to be sure.
monday 9/29
When I wake up in the morning, I hover as long as I can in the half awareness that waking brings, a kind of mental haze that shields me from knowing that he is gone. It’s the best part of the day. But it doesn’t last long. And today is different, because the knowing is followed by something else, a knot in my gut that is made of a twisted rope of happy and sick.
I have the first two periods free on Mondays, so Mom doesn’t expect me to leave the house early. As soon as I see her car back out of the driveway, I start counting. I count to five hundred in case she forgot something and comes back.
I open my desk drawer just far enough to reach in and find the edge of the Life Choice envelope. Pull it out carefully, as if it might explode.
And maybe it will. Maybe this will blow what’s left of my family to high heaven.
I read the first letter again, the one from Gerald R., who is now walking around with my brother’s lungs in his body. No address or specific information, just those few details about his health, that name at the bottom. Just the shaky words of a deeply thankful person with a “new life.” Which is nice. For him.
The other letter is from Life Choice—in addition to the list of successful transplants, there are the paragraphs I couldn’t read the first time, which explain the rules. “Protocols,” they call them. They contacted the next of kin to verify willingness to receive this letter, which is what my parents were arguing about. They forwarded this letter and will forward others like it, but it’s all done anonymously until such time as both parties agree to personal communication. If personal communication is undertaken, both parties will be counseled on the risks and rewards of said communication, and asked to sign a waiver that says they won’t sue the pants off Life Choice if they don’t like each other after all (I’m paraphrasing, of course).
Please feel free to contact Life Choice with any questions or concerns, the letter tells me.
Don’t mind if I do.
The phone rings several times and a woman’s voice breaks in and says, “Life Choice, can you hold, please?” Tinny classical music fills my left ear before I can say yes or no. So much for choices.
“Life Choice, how may I direct your call?”
Suddenly I have no idea who or what to ask for. “Uh—uh,” I stammer, “I got a letter from someone?”
“Yes,” the woman says.
“And I was wondering if you can help me…find out who it’s from?”
“Yes,” the woman says.
“You can?”
“Well, that depends,” the woman says. Her voice is gentle but utterly neutral, like she’s an automated sympathy machine. “Are you the recipient or the donor?”
“I’m not—I mean, my brother is the donor. Was the donor.”
“Okay,” she says. “Are you the legal next of kin?”
I know that I’m not, but I decide to play innocent. “I’m not sure.”
She sighs. The limits of her sympathy programming are being tested. “Are you over eighteen? Are you the executor of your brother’s estate?”
Nate’s only worldly possessions were his clothes and his athletic gear, all of which is still in his room, and Matty. He had money from his summer jobs—his car fund—but it’s just sitting in the bank. After the funeral, I heard my uncle say that my parents should put it into a college fund for me, but then my aunt hit him on the arm and that was the end of the discussion.
So unless one of the books left in his room contains a secret treasure map or a coded message about a cache of stolen goods, there’s no “estate” to speak of.
“No. And no.”
“Then your parent or parents are likely the legal next of kin. Any communication on this matter has to involve them.”
Crap. This isn’t unexpected, but I was hoping for an easier road. I try another tack.
“I think, though, that this is really too painful for them right now. I don’t want to upset them any more than they already are, y’know? It’s just been so hard….” I let my voice break a little and snuffle like I might be crying.
The sympathy robot is very well programmed. Her voice gets softer, slower. “I understand,” she says. “Sometimes we work with a representative of the family, someone the family has chosen to handle things for them. But it still has to be a legal adult. How old are you now?”
“Sixteen,” I tell her.
“Well, if you can wait a couple of years, we’ll be able to do more.”
I can do a lot of things, I want to tell her, but waiting two years is not one of them. “Thank you,” I say instead. “I will consider that.”
“You’re welcome,” she says, and then, “Thank you for calling Life Choice.”
And she’s gone. Her words ring in my ears like an echo. Life choice, choice, choice. What choice do I have now? I can’t ask my parents. If they wanted me to know anything about this, they would have told me about donating his organs. But they didn’t. So they have their secrets and I have mine, and that’s how it’s going to stay.
I hear a strange sound, and when I look down, I see that I have crunched the letters up into a ball in my fist. I set my phone down and use both hands to smooth the paper out again. Of course, you can never get a crumpled piece of paper back the way it was. It’s just one of those things that can’t be undone.
I decide to cut school and stay home for the rest of the day. If the school calls, I’ll tell them I was traumatized by the kissing booth at the carnival on Friday. Ms. Doberskiff will back me up.
There’s plenty to keep me busy. Checking up on Dad, reading Mom’s journal (in which she has recently confessed to a habit of shoplifting lipsticks in her younger days), thinking about how to find the rest of Nate’s parts. I conduct Internet searches for everything I can think of, and elaborate schemes keep forming in my head—hacking pharmaceutical databases to see who is taking suppression drugs so their bodies won’t reject their new organs, visiting random hospitals and striking up conversations with possible transplant patients, putting up a Facebook page to lure the recipients into contacting me. But as soon as these plans start to take shape in my head, I realize how absurd they are.
I take a nap, I wake up, I heat soup in the microwave and burn my fingers on the edge of the bowl. I wonder what Chase and Mel are doing. I listen to Matty for a while, but every song is familiar and I realize that I have listened to all of them. I’ve used them all up and I can’t add anything new because that would be my own choice, not Nate’s. It would ruin the time capsule.
The house starts to feel like it’s contracting, shrinking to fit me like I’m Alice in Wonderland.
I’m tired of waiting, and I’m losing what little equilibrium I have. So I decide to ride my bike into town.
I ride past St. Anne’s, past gas stations and convenience stores, past the garage where Dad took the cars for oil changes and bought us packs of gum that we chewed all at once. I remember the way Nate made his eyes as big as moo
ns as he folded each piece into his mouth. Blowing bubbles bigger than our faces and jabbing them into each other. The time mine got stuck to his and exploded, the hours we spent picking gum out of his hair and his eyebrows.
“Argh!” he kept yelling. “How did you do that?”
And me, trying not to giggle, desperate not to make him angry with me.
I try to see Nate in these places, try to make him appear, but I see only stone and gravel and the hard, unsympathetic surfaces of the roads and sidewalks. I used to be brave enough to ride with my eyes closed but now I am careful, so I have to watch everything as it slides away behind me.
Then everything is moving, not just front to back but sideways, too. My hands grip the bike’s hard plastic handlebars, molded to receive my fingers but slipping underneath them. My helmet grips my head but it’s too much—it’s too tight and I can’t breathe and I’m dizzy—so I stop.
I let the bike fall away from me as I fumble with the clip under my chin, releasing myself from the helmet’s care. The sound of the bike clattering against a tree echoes like a distress call that I can only hope no one has heard. I do not want to be rescued. I just want to do the things I did before: ride a bike, wear a helmet, listen to music. I want there to be less meaning in everything. I want it all to signify nothing.
I don’t want to know what I know.
I can think of nothing more simple than walking, so that is what I do. But even that betrays me, because before I realize where I’m going, I find myself standing across the street from the Sip’N’Dip, staring at the only other person there: Amy.
She doesn’t see me right away. She is holding an ice cream cone and crying. She is not eating it, just letting it melt down her hand and her arm, and crying. She is sitting on one of the splintery picnic tables, sitting on the table itself instead of the bench, sitting with her legs tucked into each other. Crisscross applesauce, I think, or maybe I whisper it. Or maybe I even say it out loud, because she looks up at me in the same instant that I see that her cone is a vanilla fudge dip.
She looks up at me, and her face is not soft and sweet like ice cream. Her face is contorted with sadness and something that looks like anger. She throws the cone on the ground and takes a step toward me.
I run.
I run all the way home, past my bike and helmet, past the garage, the church, past all of the other houses that hold people who know me. People who don’t know me anymore. I run until I think my head will explode and I almost hope that it will and I stand in the front hall waiting for it to happen, but it doesn’t. I ruined her, I think. I broke her. There’s no way a playlist will make up for that, not even accompanied by the news that Nate isn’t wholly gone. And then finally, through some miraculous alchemy of exhaustion and panic, I know what to do.
I’ve been forging my mother’s signature for years. I even signed off on Nate’s teachers’ notes, and stuff from school he didn’t want my parents to see, because I had perfected Mom’s handwriting better than he ever could. I liked that he needed me for something.
It didn’t start out as anything intentional. Mostly, I just wanted to see how well I could copy her signature, and then one day she was too busy to sign a permission slip for my field trip to the apple orchard, so I signed it myself and got away with it. It made me feel grown-up to do it, to write her name in her fancy script with the lowercase c in our last name swooping up into the capital G. I have kept my own signature simple, for contrast. My writing is small and deliberate, tightly packed on the page. Mom’s is airy and attention-seeking. At least, it used to be.
Still out of breath, I climb the stairs and lurch to my room. I sit at my desk, flip to a clean page in my notebook. I’m out of practice, so I start carefully.
Dear Sir, I write. I am so pleased and grateful to hear from you.
I try to channel Mom when I do this so I don’t hesitate as I’m writing. I have to really pretend I’m her to keep the flow going. It would be easier to type, of course, but Gerald’s letter was handwritten and I want to return the favor, establish a personal connection.
You can imagine how difficult this time has been for me and my family. Especially my daughter, who lost her brother so suddenly and tragically. It is so gratifying to know that my son’s death was, in this way, not the end of his life. We wish you all the best.
I want to ask for more, ask who he is and where I can find him, if we can email each other instead of writing these letters. But I know that my mother would show more restraint. And I can’t sound desperate, or like a kid in any way. So I write a couple of paragraphs, just a few sentences each, about what a kind, talented boy Nate was, beloved in our community, an inspiration to his friends and neighbors. As if I’m writing a college recommendation, except it’s in the past tense. Then I add one last thing.
I do hope you’ll write again.
I take an envelope and a stamp from the desk in the kitchen, and write the Life Choice address on the outside.
There is a mailbox up the street, not far from where my abandoned bike rests in the shade. The door creaks when I open it, as all doors on all mailboxes seem to do, and then I drop the letter into the darkness before I lose my nerve. It feels like making a wish, throwing a penny into the well. I stand there, hands pressed to my chest, feeling my heart beat. I wonder if the heart recipient does this, too. I wonder if he thinks about Nate, where that heart came from, or if he tries not to.
Cross my heart.
A bird lands on the tree above me then. Its black feathers swallow the sunlight.
Confirmation.
I nod to the bird, and retrieve my bicycle and my helmet. I put them back in the garage so they are safe.
Then I listen to Matty’s playlists until dinner.
tuesday 9/30
There is a note from my mother in the kitchen the next morning, telling me that she will pick me up after school. Doctor’s appointment. I panic, briefly, but then I check the calendar and see t to dr balder written in my mother’s newly careful lettering, kept so neatly in the box that this day was given.
I had considered staying home again, but this clinches it. I have to go to school. Plus, if I don’t show up for school two days in a row, Mel might come looking for me (if only out of curiosity), and I’m not sure if I want to tell her about this new plot twist. On the one hand, matters of organ donation are right up her alley. The removal of the essential parts, the surgical precision, the reanimation of something. Mel would find it poetic. I just don’t know if I’m ready for this to be a metaphor.
We haven’t been friends long enough for me to say that we don’t keep secrets from each other. For all I know, Mel has warehouses full of secrets. So keeping one from her doesn’t feel wrong. It doesn’t feel like anything other than a necessity.
For some reason, though, as soon as I see Chase slouching in what has become his usual waiting-for-Tallie place, I have this compulsion to tell him everything. I fight it, of course.
“Hey, sicko,” he says.
I am perplexed by this greeting, until I realize he must think I was home with an actual illness, a legitimate reason. He thinks I’m a girl who follows the rules. And he’s not wrong. The threat of Red Circle Day has been keeping me in line for a while now.
My mission is to act normal. “Hey,” I reply. “What’d I miss?”
“Nothing of import,” he says, matching my pace as I walk down the hall. “Those girls from the kissing booth are in my history class, and they got chewed out by Ms. Appleton for calling World War II ‘totally scud.’ She went on this whole rampage about trying to force the evolution of language and disrespecting veterans. It was pretty intense.”
“Poor Ms. Appleton,” I say.
“She’s usually so quiet.”
“I know. She really hasn’t been the same since—” I stop myself from saying the accident. This is going to be a day of stopping myself from saying things, I guess.
“I heard Absalom is having another event at the Elbow Room this weekend
,” Chase tells me. “Wanna go?”
“I don’t think he would be very happy to see us. And I don’t think he has any actual psychic abilities.”
Chase snorts. “Of course he doesn’t. You’d have better luck with half a Ouija board than with that guy. If you were trying to contact someone, I mean.”
“Which I’m not.” His lost brother might be fully on the other side, but mine isn’t. At least, that’s my hope.
A look passes across his face like an eclipse, and he says, “I always wanted to try when I was a kid, see if I could actually get through to Houdini. His wife tried for years, y’know? He told her to before he died. He told her he’d come back.”
We’re at my locker now, so I have the numbers to focus on to keep myself from looking at Chase when I ask, “Did he?”
“Nope. She tried for ten years. She had séances every year on Halloween because that was the anniversary of his death, and after ten years she announced that he wasn’t coming back, and that proved it was impossible. Because if anyone could escape from the other side, it would be Houdini.”
“But how did she know he didn’t? What if she just missed something?”
“They had worked out a coded message. It never came through. People are still trying, though. Every Halloween since 1927. If he’s out there, he’s probably wishing they’d just give up.”
What if that’s what Nate wants, too? What if he wants us to just move on and I’m doing the wrong thing? I push the thought away and look at Chase.
“Do you really think it’s impossible for someone to come back?”
He shrugs. “I doubt anything’s impossible. Maybe Houdini was just being stubborn. He never believed in séances when he was alive, so coming back would have been kind of hypocritical anyway.”
“Well, they’re together now, right?”
Chase shakes his head. “His wife’s family wouldn’t put her in a Jewish cemetery, so they’re not buried together.”
Some of the Parts Page 9
