Now what? I ask myself. My fake interview with Jennifer didn’t tell me anything. She may or may not have Nate’s liver. I almost hope she doesn’t, because knowing that part of him will be trapped in that apartment for all time makes me furious. Or it will, when I no longer feel like I’m wrapped in emotional insulation.
Just then the door flies open and Jennifer is standing there, pointing at me. “You’re his sister,” she spits.
“What?” The step I’m sitting on suddenly feels a lot less dependable, like the stairs have turned into an escalator.
“Some kid named Chase just emailed me,” she hisses. “He says you’re hunting down your brother’s organs.”
“I’m not ‘hunting’ anyone,” I say, and then I stop because I’ve just confirmed her suspicions and, in the same moment, realized how he did it. My laptop. It was in my backpack, in the diner.
He got into my email because I was stupid enough to choose a password he gave me. Rosabelle.
Jennifer crosses her arms and sighs dramatically. “I’m not happy that you lied to me.”
I don’t care about your happiness. Oh, I want so much to say it.
“How old are you, anyway? Do your parents know what you’re up to?”
“What do you care?”
She tilts her head. “Well, I don’t, really. But it seemed like the responsible thing to ask.”
I let myself stare at her then—her smug expression, her ratty cardigan, the shadowed circles under her eyes—and I hate her for being the one who lived. One of many who lived. Just like me.
“I have to go,” I tell her, and I follow the unsteady lines of the stairs.
She calls after me, “Wait! Tell me about your brother! Tell me the story!” All the way down she calls after me, her voice echoing through the stairwell, and I can still hear her as I walk outside.
I look at my phone. More missed calls from Chase. I delete the notifications and check the time.
It’s almost four o’clock.
It’s Monday.
I throw my arm in the air, like Mom does, and a white car with red writing on it comes whipping around the corner like a dog running to its owner.
“Brigham and Women’s,” I tell the driver.
I’m in a boat. The water is dark as night, rolling toward me, rippling like the skin of a predator ready to strike. The boat is so small and I am rocking, rocking, starting to tip, falling over—
I wake up screaming. “Nate!”
“Miss?” The cabdriver is peering at me over his shoulder, one elbow hooked over the back of the seat. “You okay?”
I don’t remember falling asleep, but I can see through the car window that we are here. Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
“Yes,” I gasp. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine,” he says gently. “Do I need to get somebody out here?”
I shake my head, take the last of my cash from the pocket of my jeans, and hold it out. My hands are trembling and he’s just staring at me now, so I thrust the money into the front seat and bolt out of the car.
Somewhere along the way, I dropped my sunglasses, maybe in Jennifer’s apartment or in the taxi, but it doesn’t matter anymore because the sun is crawling down the sides of the buildings and I am here and I will find him. I will find him.
I say it, again and again, make it the rhythm I walk to as I enter the hospital.
The swooshing automatic doors sound like an air lock opening on a spaceship and everything is so clean and shiny and white. Everyone is walking crisply and looking straight ahead and no one even sees me as I speed-walk from the door to the bank of elevators. There’s a list on the wall, but there are so many names and my whole body is humming with adrenaline, making it hard to focus. The letters are all so tiny and they are swirling like paint in one of those spinning toys that make dizzying artwork for kids. I wish this was one of those old-fashioned elevators with a man that rode up and down all day and I could tell him who I wanted to see and he’d take me to the right place.
I press my hand against the wall to feel something solid, to calm myself down.
Pull yourself together, I imagine Nate telling me. Don’t fall apart on me now.
That’s what he said after we saw the jumper.
We were driving down to Washington, D.C., for spring vacation, one of those educational family field trips. My parents filled the front seat with talk about monuments and museums and bickered about whether a visit to the FBI building was worthwhile. Nate and I stared out our respective windows, occasionally turning to look out the other side in case we were missing something good. I had the right, he had the left. We had just crossed over the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey when I noticed a man standing on the edge of the cliff next to the northbound lanes. I was about to say something like “Hey!” or “Look!” when the man jumped.
He did not look scared. He held his arms out like wings, and it almost seemed like the most natural thing in the world, for a man to leap from a high place like that.
But I knew it was not.
I looked to my brother’s window and he was already looking through mine.
“Did you see that?” I whispered.
He nodded. He held my hand.
“See what?” my mother chirped from the front seat. She did not turn around.
“Nothing,” my brother said. “It was nothing.”
And we kept our secret, through the nightmares we both had afterward, through our parents constantly trying to figure out what we weren’t telling them, because we didn’t want them to imagine what we had seen. I went to his room in the middle of the night, shaking, and he told me, again and again, Don’t fall apart on me now. We can’t tell them. It’s our secret, you and me. We saw it, really saw it, and nothing they could picture in their minds would have been even close to what we saw.
It was our moment, ours together. Ours alone.
“Help me,” I whisper to him now.
And then, like the Ouija board, like magic, I feel a push against my hand—not the one that’s holding me up but the one that’s dangling at my side—and it lifts to the squirming list of names and guides my fingers slowly up, over, up a little more. There. FIKRI, SAMIRA, MD. 8TH FLOOR.
I think I hear my name just as the elevator doors close, but I am hearing so many other things, too. Nate’s voice, my own echoing thoughts, and something else, something like doubt tapping out its own warning. I still have Matty in my pocket. I tuck his earbuds into my ears and turn the music on, keeping it low. Just loud enough to cut the noise.
I watch the numbers light up one by one.
6
7
8
I can hear the doors when they open, and then I hear voices. New voices. Familiar voices.
Chase and Dr. Abbott are here, waiting for me.
I fold into the corner of the elevator car and let the doors close again.
The elevator is already sinking to the lobby when I think of the directory. Other floors, other offices. And the elevator isn’t the only way to get to them.
The doors open, then close, and I press 9. All of this rising and falling is hellish for me, but at least the inside of the elevator is not too brightly lit, and the metal walls feel like ice against my body, lovely and cold. I watch the numbers until the doors open again.
Just around the corner from the elevator is the door to the stairwell. I test the door from the inside before I let it close behind me, to see if it will lock. It doesn’t, so I trust that the other doors are the same way. One door wouldn’t be different from the others, would it? Mr. Cunningham says that conformity is much more likely than chaos in the natural world, and I’m not sure if stairwells count as part of the natural world but they were designed by people, so…
…I wonder if I’ll ever see Mr. Cunningham again. I wonder if he and Ms. Pace will get married. I wonder if I would have been invited to the wedding, if they would have asked Mel to design a little taxidermied bride and groom out of field m
ice, if she would have asked me to help her pick the flowers for the mouse bride’s bouquet….
I see then that I have sat down on the steps and I’m not sure how long I have been here. I stop the music and tuck Matty away, so I can think.
Get up, I tell myself. You’re so close.
But doubt drowns my thoughts. Doubt, and terror that my mission will fail, that I’ll have to keep carrying all the words I have wanted to say, the message I have for what’s left of my brother in the world. I pull my sleeve up, to see his name, but the letters are smeared across my arm. Just another mess I’ve made.
“It’s all my fault,” I whisper, practicing, trying to get it right. “I shouldn’t have been driving. I didn’t know how yet, I told you I knew how and you believed me, and I…I killed you, Nate.” I am sobbing, the stairwell amplifying my misery. I am crying for him, for myself, for our family of four that will always be three. For all the stories that will never be told. Nate going to college, falling in love with someone who loves him back, getting married. Being there when I get married. The possibilities that will never become anything more. The promises that will never be kept.
Cross my heart, he said.
His heart. His heart is here. Get up.
“Okay,” I say. And I launch myself like an uncertain rocket, I reach the door and pull the handle.
Mr. Cunningham is right. Conformity reigns. I come out on the eighth floor, around the corner from the elevator, just like on the ninth. I can still hear them talking, even over the sound of my own ragged breath.
“We need to call her parents,” Dr. Abbott is saying.
“I already did,” Chase replies quietly.
“Well, it wasn’t your place to do that, son.”
“What difference does it make who called them?” Chase snaps. “The outcome is the same. They have been called. They are on their way.”
Dr. Abbott clears his throat. “What makes you so sure she’s coming here?”
“I just know.”
Then a woman’s voice, slightly accented, takes a turn. “My group is waiting for me. I cannot make them wait forever.”
“You go, Samira,” Dr. Abbott tells her. “Chase and I will wait here in case Tallie shows up. And in the meantime”—he clears his throat again—“we can have a long talk about boundaries and expectations.”
“Terrific,” Chase mutters.
“Very well,” Dr. Fikri says. “I’ll come back when my meeting is finished.” I hear the click-clack of her shoes coming toward me. Moving quickly, I manage to roll myself along the wall and through the stairwell door just before she turns the corner. Through the tiny window, I catch a glimpse of her passing by.
Follow her. This is it.
I ease the door open, hold it with my foot, and slip my body through one piece at a time.
Dr. Fikri click-clacks to a door down the hall. I watch that door after it closes and I inch my way toward it, leaning against the wall, such a strong, steady wall, and my hands are sweating, slick with ambition, ready to fight, but the edges of my sight are getting black and fuzzy and I know I am sinkable, but not now, please, not now….
I turn the handle.
I am in the room.
They are all in a circle in plastic chairs.
Their faces are swimming and indistinct and I can’t be sure….
Is that Jackson? Margaret? Bethany?
It’s the wrong room.
Isn’t it?
A woman stands up.
“You must be Tallie,” she says calmly.
Calmly to calm me.
I giggle.
“Are you here to talk about your brother?”
All their faces, staring, expectant.
“I’m here,” I rasp, “for his heart.”
“Pardon me?” a man says nervously.
“One of you,” I tell him, “has my brother’s heart. And he needs it back. For promises.”
“Tallie.” Dr. Fikri steps out of the circle. “You look unwell. Will you let me help you, please?”
With all of the sound left in me, I roar, “I’m fine!”
But it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t believe me.
“Just tell me,” I plead. “Just tell me who has it, I need to talk to him.”
Now the other chair-sitters start shifting in their seats, but I am between them and the door and they can’t get out. They can’t get out without giving me what I want.
“Tallie,” Dr. Fikri starts, but I yell, “Stop saying my name! I don’t want to hear you say my name!” Then, because yelling makes the blackness close in, I whisper, “I just want his heart. I need it. I just need it.”
“I have it,” says a voice from behind me.
I spin. Wobble. Catch myself again.
Chase.
“I have it,” he tells me.
“No,” I say. “You shouldn’t be here. I lied to you. I ruined everything.”
He reaches for me with grasping fingers that I shrink to avoid.
“But I did, too,” he says. “So we’re even. And I’m not lying now. I know where Nate’s heart is.”
I want to believe him, so badly.
Chase nods, like he can hear me. “I know where it is,” he says again. “It’s in another room, though. Do you want to come get it?”
I step toward him. The energy between us is a pack of animals, scratching and sharp.
“It’s okay,” Chase says. “I’ll show you.”
And I am almost there, to him, when Dr. Abbott appears in the doorway. “Okay, now,” he says to no one in particular. “I think we’ve had just about enough of this.”
Run.
I leap, and they’re not ready for it. Instinctively they both step out of the way before they remember that they’re supposed to catch me.
And then they’re all just yelling.
But their voices can’t catch me.
Run.
I am so fast.
I run to the bathroom. Lock the door behind me.
It’s cool in there, every glacial surface, but I am sweating and I can’t breathe.
I open the window, lean into the air. I look down.
Remember the jumper.
Is it far enough? Can I get to him this way?
I pull Matty out of my pocket. His metal is warm, the cord of his earbuds wrapped around him like a blanket. I press him to my lips, and then I throw him out the window. I count the seconds—four of them—until I hear him hit the ground.
It doesn’t tell me anything, that sound.
There is pounding at the door.
But I hold my body to the window. My hands grab the frame on either side.
Jump.
I want to, I want it to be over, but my hands won’t let go.
“Please,” I hear myself whisper, sobbing. Pleading with myself, whatever part of myself demands to go on living even though I don’t deserve it. “I killed him,” I tell my hands. “Please, let go.”
But they will not obey.
Come with me, Nate says. And then his voice is drowned out by the roaring of my own, screaming, “I can’t!”
The door bursts open and someone, someone strong, is pulling my hands. Someone is holding me. Before I can even turn my head to look, the world closes in and I think, I failed, and it all goes black again.
I wake up in white.
“You’re going to be fine,” the doctor says.
I try to speak but I can’t. My tongue is thick in my mouth, glued in place.
“You need to rest. We gave you something to help you sleep,” the doctor tells me. “But you are going to be fine. You’ll be back to normal before you know it.”
I want to scream, I want to say no, because I know now that there is no normal anymore, there is no back, there is no memory that can keep him. He’s gone. Nate is gone. For real, this time. I want to tell the doctor this, tell him that I should have jumped, should have broken myself into pieces to give away. My gifts. The price to be with my brother.
But my body is a slab of wood. I cannot lift my head or my arms or anything else. I cannot speak or scream. I feel tears running down my face and I cannot wipe them away.
I still didn’t get to tell him. I still didn’t tell him how sorry I am.
“I know,” the doctor says. “I know.”
But he doesn’t.
wednesday 10/15 and so on
Mom holds my hand. She traces the bones in my wrist with her thumb.
“We have a lot to talk about,” she says.
I touch her hand, too, feel her skin like paper. Like canvas for painting.
“We know everything now,” my father tells me. “I got a notice in the mail. A collection notice, for an unpaid ambulance bill. Four months overdue. And at first I thought that I must have just forgotten to pay it. But then—”
“We went through your room,” my mother blurts out. “I’m sorry, honey, but we had to do it. And we found—”
My father jumps in again. They’re ping-ponging the conversation, like they used to do. Before. “Nate’s mail. And some of his clothes. And things from his room.”
“I’m sorry,” I tell them.
They both shake their heads, mirror images. “You don’t need to say that,” my father says. “What’s done is done. We’re just grateful you’re…”
Alive. The word hooks into the air between us.
I want them to be angry, I want them to ask me how I could do what I did, stand in a window and think about jumping. Ask what stopped me. Ask me anything.
My mother makes a little sound, like a choke meeting a gasp, and her hand tightens around mine.
“Are you okay?” my father asks.
That question.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I thought I could make things different. I thought I could put Nate back together but—”
“Tallie,” my mother interrupts. “It doesn’t matter now. You are going to get better, that’s the important thing.”
“You said that already.”
“Well.” Dad shuffles uncomfortably. “We should probably let you get some rest.”
I didn’t get to tell Nate, but I can tell them.
“Guys,” I say, so quietly that it’s hardly even audible.
Some of the Parts Page 22
