Dad has his arm around Mom, and pivots them both around at once. “What’s that, sweetie?”
“I’m…” My throat is tightening, trying to stop the words. But this has to happen, doesn’t it? The doorway out of limbo opens with the words that have been drowning in my crazed imagination. This is the hardest part, prying them out of my scarred, wasted, reborn body. I push, I push hard, and then, finally, the dam is shattered.
But instead of a river, only a trickling stream comes through.
“I should have let him drive.” I hear myself say the words, but they don’t feel like anything. And I remember Dad telling me that sometimes what you think you need isn’t what you need.
I thought it was all my fault, and I thought my guilt was keeping me from becoming myself again. Now I know I will never be myself, not the way I was before. I will carry this, the memory of the accident, the sound of the crash echoing in my ears. Maybe forever. It’s part of me. The after me.
I look at my parents, and they look like they were asleep for a long time and just woke up and are confused about where they are. They have heard me name the thing that I regret the most, that I will always regret more than anything else, and they tell me, “It’s okay, sweetheart,” but they don’t know everything else, and I don’t think I need to tell them. It’s the jumper all over again, a story I can’t quite explain, something they would wish I hadn’t seen. Something they can’t fix.
Bad things happen, and we are not the same when they are over.
But we go on.
They sit down and we talk for a while—Mom, Dad, and I—about what to do now. They don’t want to send me back to school, but I tell them (and I mean it) that school is the only place that makes me feel normal again. I need to go through those motions, do the normal things that normal kids do, even though the motions may not be smooth for a long time. Even though I will see Mel and remember our adventures like a movie I watched once. Even though Chase may not be there—and if he is, I don’t know what he’ll do with me if I don’t need a rescue team.
Maybe we can just get coffee.
That would be nice.
Eventually I convince my parents that I will be okay. And I almost convince myself, too.
Before they leave for their hotel, Dad pulls a cardboard box from inside his jacket. For a moment I think of Nate’s ashes, the box we took to the columbarium and surrendered to Eben Dolmeyer, but this box is white and a bit smaller, and I recognize the symbol on the outside of it. So I kind of know what it is. But I open it anyway.
It’s an MP3 player. Green, not blue like Matty was.
“I didn’t know if you’d want the same color as Nate had,” Dad says. “We can exchange it, if you want a different one.”
I shake my head. “No,” I tell him. “This is good.”
Mom says, “You were listening to his music a lot.” It isn’t a question.
I nod.
“Now you can listen to your own, too.”
—
And so I am. I’m listening to some new songs that I’ve downloaded and I’m stroking the smooth green metal when Dr. Blankenbaker comes in a few days later. She’s taller than I remember, and softer-looking. She’s smiling but her eyes are serious, and when she sits down in the blue chair that’s still warm from my mother’s body, I see that they’re the same color as mine. Carefully, I pull my earbuds out and set them in my lap. I can still hear the music threading out, tinny and distant.
“I just saw your parents in the hallway,” Dr. Blankenbaker says. “They look a lot better than when I first saw them.” Then she adds, “As do you.”
“I feel better,” I tell her. It’s good to say something that is both simple and true. I make a note to do that more often from now on.
But despite what I told my parents, that I’m ready to move on, there is still a story I need to tell. There is still so much I haven’t said out loud and it’s not enough to say it to myself, to fill this hospital room with words and let them echo off the walls into nothing. So Dr. Blankenbaker hears it all: Gerald and Jennifer and Dr. Fikri, Mel and Amy and Chase, what I did and what I said, what I’m sorry for. She raises her eyebrows higher and higher but she lets me finish before she speaks.
“There’s a lot we don’t know about grief, Tallie.” She looks inside the folder she’s holding, as if there’s a script in there that will tell her what to say next. Then she closes it and tosses it on the bed. “No one knows better than you do how it felt to lose Nate. Death is like a really confusing foreign film. Everyone in the theater has a different idea of what it means. And the subtitles are no help at all.”
“I guess it’s just one of the big mysteries,” I say.
She nods once. “It’s good to know there are still a few of those, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t think doctors like things they can’t explain. I thought you wanted to have answers for everything.”
“For every thing we can explain, there are a thousand that we can’t. I can’t tell you exactly how life begins, or why some people can tolerate pain that is unbearable to others, or whether death is an ending.”
“Or how the pearl grows in the mollusk?” I ask.
“Sure,” she says, a little uncertainly.
“And that doesn’t drive you crazy?”
She smiles. “If I had all the answers already,” she says, “I wouldn’t have any questions left. And questions are the whole point of what I do.”
“What’s your favorite question?”
She thinks for a moment, her eyes fixed on something invisible across the room. “Why.”
“Why is your favorite question, or why am I asking you?”
“Why is my favorite. Because it just keeps going, and it opens so many doors.”
After she’s gone, I think about why. About how it was the question I hated most after the accident, because there was no answer at all for the longest time. And now I see that the answer I give today might not be the one that works tomorrow, or next year, or when I get married, or when I tell my son or daughter about their uncle Nate, who they can never meet.
But maybe it’s not about the answer, in the end. Maybe just being able to ask the question has to be enough sometimes. The question, the asking, my brain, my voice, my body. I am here. I am alive. I am lucky.
It sucks to be facing a life without my brother.
But it’s a life, just the same.
“Tallie?”
It’s a woman. She has inky dark hair and eyes and at first I think I am imagining her because her voice is so soft and gentle and hardly anyone who is real ever talks like that. She is wearing an enormous sweater that she has wrapped around herself. She is holding herself with her arms, like she is afraid she might fall apart.
I know that feeling.
Everyone else is gone now, my parents and the doctor and all the others who want to get a look at me, and I am empty as a bag from all that talking.
“Yes,” I tell her. “I’m Tallie.”
She steps into the room and comes almost to the side of the bed. I will not call it my room or my bed. These are not my things. At least, I know that much.
“I’m Ann,” she says. “Ann Shepard.”
“Hello,” I say.
She steps a little bit closer, wraps her sweater even more tightly. “I think,” she tells me, “that I may have your brother’s heart.”
I push myself up with my fists, sit straight.
Ann smiles, her mouth wobbling as it moves. She is very nervous. “Everyone is talking about you, all over the hospital. I’ve been participating in Dr. Fikri’s study but I wasn’t in the room when you— I was at another appointment down the hall, and when I heard about you, well—” She takes a deep breath. “I asked Dr. Fikri if she could find out.”
Your personal history. Questionable intentions.
“And she did?”
“We compared the dates of my surgery and your brother’s death. And they matched up. Your friend—Chase? He wanted to t
ell you right away. But we didn’t know for sure, until your parents got here. And then they had to talk to Life Choice and I had to talk to them, too—” She stops, out of breath. “I’m sorry, can I sit down?”
“Of course.”
She pulls the blue chair from the corner and sets it next to me. It’s a bright blue, a cartoonish blue. I wonder if Mom noticed.
“It doesn’t usually work out this way, but the Life Choice people decided that since we were all in the same place already, and everyone gave their consent—well, they confirmed it.”
And she actually places her hand over her heart, the heart that used to be Nate’s, when she says, “Thank you for sharing your brother with me. I’m so sorry you lost him, and I know it won’t fix anything, but I want you to know that I am taking good care of him.”
There’s an invisible rope around my throat. “Thank you,” I say.
Then I think of something.
“So,” I ask, “Chase didn’t know for sure that you had Nate’s heart until after I broke into the group meeting?”
She smiles. “None of us did, not for sure. But I spoke to Chase when he and his father first got here, when they came looking for you. They thought you might try to find us, the people from the group, and well—I don’t know. But they wanted to warn me.”
“Chase thought I was going to hurt you?”
She shakes her head. “No, he promised you wouldn’t do that. He did that thing, you know, that kids do?” And she traces her index finger across her chest, making an X with her finger.
“Cross my heart,” I say.
“That’s right. He did that, and then he told me that he thought you and I would have a lot to talk about. After you were okay again.”
“But he didn’t know…”
Anne shrugs, crosses her arms again. “Maybe he has special powers.”
Chase, I think. His name has become one of those words, the ones I will have to practice until they feel okay again. Until I know if he can forgive me for everything I did.
“Thank you,” I tell her. “I’m glad you came.”
“I’m glad you’re okay,” she says. “I should let you rest.”
“That’s what everyone says in hospitals.”
She smiles. “Yes. I remember.”
“Well,” I say, “I’m glad you’re okay, too.” I try not to look at her chest, try not to see the beating heart inside it. I look at her eyes instead. Dark, like Nate’s. But not Nate’s.
She stands carefully. “I wonder if…well…could I write to you sometime? I’d really like to know more about him. I’ve wondered, you know, what he was like. Maybe you could tell me some stories or—”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Oh.” Ann is as surprised as I am to hear the words come out of my mouth. But as soon as I say them, I know they are true.
“I just mean…” What do I mean? “I can’t try and explain him to you. He’s—he was…”
“He was a whole person,” she says. “It wouldn’t be fair to summarize him.”
“Right.”
And she is, but it’s more than that, too. I thought finding the rest of Nate would let me keep him somehow, but it wasn’t him I was looking for. It wasn’t a way to get him back.
It was a way to let him go.
She stands and turns to leave, and then she pivots back again. “It’s the strangest thing,” she says. “I never liked ice cream before, but lately I’ve been craving it. It’s all I can think about, getting a vanilla fudge dip cone. Isn’t that odd?”
She accepts my smile as an answer and a farewell. I watch her walk all the way down the hall, past all of the other doors that hold all of the other patients and visitors and doctors, and I think of the columbarium as I watch Nate’s heart walk back into the world.
I reach over to the rail that runs along the side of my hospital bed, identical to the one that held me after the accident. So much has changed and yet here I am, and it’s as if I’ve been taken back to when everything spun sideways, that day that I lost my brother and lost myself, too. The rail is cool when I wrap my hand around it, it is solid and real, and it rings like a bell as I tap and scrape my finger to the rhythm of the one word I always knew best.
Scrape tap. Tap scrape. Scrape. Tap.
Nate.
six months later
Be back soon. I write the note and then crumple it up and throw it away.
“Be back soon,” I call to my parents. Then I walk to the doorway, to make sure they heard. They are in the dining room, paint chips and fabric swatches spread across the table like a collage, debating which shade of navy blue is perfectly, absolutely right for below the chair rail. My father is putting up a fight in name only—we all know that this is my mother’s domain, the choosing of colors, the application of new skins on the furniture, the arranging of it all.
He just likes to add his voice to the symphony. Another instrument in the daily soundtrack we’ve all gotten used to hearing again.
They look up at the same time, like expectant puppies. “Going out?” my mother asks. Her face is softer than the one I woke to at the hospital, the hollows of her cheeks filled in again, so she looks more like she did in the family pictures that have started reappearing around the house.
“Just for a drive,” I say. “Maybe ice cream.”
The words they do not say—please and be careful, among others—hover between us. There are still things we leave to the air, things we don’t talk about. I’ll never tell them about the jumper, or how close I came to following him, but some of our secrets have come back into the light of day. We are not the same, but we are okay.
The emails my mother gets from people who have read her story on message boards and organ donor forums. The meetings my father goes to. The password protection he added to his computer, and the lock on Mom’s nightstand drawer. All the reminders of the sins I committed, and the apologies that I have yet to make.
Just because I learned a lesson or two doesn’t mean their secrets are safe.
My car awaits me, an ancient Volvo station wagon that’s too heavy to drive fast and too yellow for other cars to miss. Mel dubbed it the Mustard Missile when she saw it, when I hauled it out to the barn—uninvited—to see how her latest tableau was coming along. She let me as far as the front door and balked, said she was too superstitious to show anybody and promised me the first look as soon as she was ready. I think we both knew that was my last trip to the barn, but she did me the favor of that promise, gave me the gift of an un-goodbye.
I’ll see her in school, probably.
And Amy. She and Jason Rice have been hanging out, I hear. She could do better, but I won’t offer that opinion, even if she asks. And maybe someday I won’t have to think about our friendship in the past tense.
I’ll see Jackson and Margaret and the others, even though Bridges has all but disbanded—everyone just got tired, I guess, of talking about themselves. There are much more interesting topics. Ms. Doberskiff has bounced back nicely, though, and recently announced that she is going back to school for a degree in abnormal psychology. Maybe even she got bored with our average problems, our stories of sadness and helpless frustration.
Everyone has to move on.
The world is not the same.
I drive to Chase’s house, honk the horn to announce myself, and cue up my MP3 player to the beginning of the playlist I made last night. The Mustard Missile’s only modern feature is the stereo that Dad had installed, to celebrate me getting my driver’s license. The license lives in my wallet, back to front with Nate’s. Same little red heart in the bottom right corner.
His gifts.
I put a check mark in that little box on the RMV form. I did that. Not because I thought it was the right thing to do, but because Nate got me to the ceiling once and I know now he was a far better person than I am. He was good, and he was real. So I will copy what he did, mimic his goodness, until I figure out what mine will look like.
He got me to the ceiling.
I’ll take him everywhere else.
The Abbotts’ front door opens, and Chase comes out, blinking at the insane brightness of the sun. The sky is cloudless blue, endless and wide like an ocean above us, and he gets in the car and I think about how I will kiss him later today, so that every kiss we’ve already had will pale in comparison. I make that silent promise, and I reach one finger to the impatient stereo, and I press play.
And we drive.
Stories are born in the hearts of their writers, but they can’t become books without a whole lot of help. My boundless thanks to:
My family—especially my children, who remind me always why stories matter.
My editor, Melanie Cecka Nolan, who saw what this story could be far beneath what it was.
My agent, Linda Pratt, who found me exactly when I needed her.
My Monday-morning ladies: Jennifer Elvgren, Kathryn Erskine, Kathy May, Rosie McCormick, Anne Marie Pace, Fran Cannon Slayton, and Julie Swanson.
The Super-Secret, All-Powerful YA Binders.
The VCFA community.
And last, but most certainly not least: teachers, librarians, and independent booksellers everywhere, who work with passion and unwavering dedication to inspire readers of all ages. You open doors, you reveal worlds, you save lives. Thank you.
If you would like to learn more about organ donation, please visit organdonor.gov.
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Some of the Parts Page 23
