The Mighty Heart of Sunny St. James

by Ashley Herring Blake

“Sunny,” Kate says. “This is Lena. She’s… she’s—”

  “My mermaid,” I say out loud.

  Lena lifts her dark eyebrows and smiles. “I’ve always wanted to be a mermaid.”

  “Well, yeah. Who wouldn’t?” I say.

  Lena smiles at that, but I don’t smile back.

  “Are you okay?” Kate asks me, glancing at my monitor.

  Okay seems like a silly word right now, so I don’t answer.

  “Lena called me about a month ago,” Kate says. “It had been a long time since I’d heard from her. Years. The last number I had for her was disconnected every time I tried.”

  “When did you try calling her?” I ask.

  Kate winces. “A few times, after you got sick.”

  The mermaid… or whoever… doesn’t say anything to that. She doesn’t even look down. She just stares right at me, totally still like a statue. I don’t think she’s even breathing.

  “She wanted to see you,” Kate went on, “but you were so sick, baby. I couldn’t do that to you. Or her. I just couldn’t risk the stress on you and…”

  Dave gets up and puts his hand on Kate’s shoulder. Tears run down her face, and I know I should hug her or something, but all I can hear is a month ago and called and Lena.

  “I was trying to figure out how to handle it all when we found out you got a heart,” Kate says. “I called Lena when you went into surgery. I knew I had to.”

  “I didn’t know you were sick.” Lena takes another step into the room. Her voice sounds so… real. “I never knew. I’m so sorry, Sunshine.”

  Oh, Sunshine, I’m so sorry.

  My dead-dream floats back to me. Lena, reaching out to touch my freckles, our matching jet-black hair. Matching eyes. Matching eyebrows. Matching mouths with the bottom lip just a little bigger than the top.

  “I can go, Sunny,” Lena says. “If you’re uncomfortable at all, I can leave right now.”

  I stare at her, still trying to piece together if this is all really happening. Whenever I think of Lena, looking at her picture night after night, she’s always just this story that never had an ending. A question mark instead of a period.

  Lena and Kate used to be best friends. I know they grew up together in Mexico Beach, Florida. Kate brought me to Juniper Island after Lena gave me up.

  I was in first grade when I started wondering why I was never allowed to call Kate Mom. I had foggy pictures in my head of a black-haired lady who used to sing a lot, but I could never really figure out if she was real or just some dream I had once. But I knew she wasn’t Kate and I knew Kate wasn’t my mom. Margot had a mom. All my friends had moms, but I didn’t. I just had a Kate, with her white-blond hair and blue eyes that looked nothing like mine.

  One day I came home and asked Kate if I could call her Mom. I remember she set down the knife she was using to spread peanut butter over apple slices.

  “No, Sunny, you can’t,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m not your mom.”

  “You are, though. You make me take baths and you bought me my favorite unicorn pajamas.”

  She smiled at me, but her chin wobbled like she was trying not to cry. “That’s true.”

  I scrunched up my brows, because nothing she was saying made sense. Moms took care of kids. Moms bought awesome and amazing pajamas. “Do I have one?”

  “A mom? Of course you do. And a dad.”

  “But he died.”

  She ran her hand over my hair and nodded.

  “But my mom didn’t?” I asked.

  “No, sweetie. She didn’t. She was very sad, though, and she didn’t know how to get through it. She didn’t handle everything very well.”

  “What everything?”

  “Being sad. And trying to do the best job she could with you.”

  “She didn’t do a good job?”

  Kate sighed and handed me my plate of apples. Then she grabbed an old book off her bookshelf and we went onto the porch. She pulled me into her lap on the swing. It creaked as we swayed in the salty air, and the ocean whispered a soothing hush-hush just over the rocks, like a lullaby.

  Kate opened the book and took out a picture of a pregnant lady with long dark hair and bright, light brown eyes. My mouth fell open as my fingers closed around the glossy photo.

  “She looks like me,” I said.

  “She does. That’s your mom and that’s you inside her stomach. Her name is Lena and she loves you so much.”

  “If she loves me so much, where is she?” I ask.

  “She couldn’t take care of you anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “She’s sick.”

  “Like with a cold?”

  “Not that kind of sick,” Kate said. “She’s an alcoholic.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She drinks alcohol too much and it’s not good for her. It makes her do things she shouldn’t.”

  “Like leaving me at the grocery store?” In that tiny moment, my six-year-old brain flashed to a dingy tile floor and a blue-vested cashier asking me where my parents were while I wailed.

  “Oh, Sunny girl,” Kate said, kissing my hair.

  “So she gave me to you?” I asked.

  “Sort of. Yeah.”

  “She left me?”

  “She’ll be back for you. She loves you. She’s getting help and she’ll be back.”

  Kate pressed her face into my black hair, her arms so tight around me it almost hurt. We sat there in the swing for a long time, watching the ocean swirl while I stared at the picture of Lena. She was so pretty. I wanted to know her, but I wanted Kate too. I ran my fingers over my mom’s face and thought about what would happen to Kate when my mom came back.

  Well, I never had to find out. I waited, year after year, for my mom to get better and come back, but she never did. I stare at that picture every single night so I’d know her the second I saw her, but it never mattered. So I made up my own ending to the story. Like I said, I’ve always had a killer imagination, even before my heart flaked out on me, and about a year after Kate gave me the picture, I decided that Lena was a mermaid. That she had to leave me because we were too different and she was too mysterious and exotic for a human girl.

  I never asked Kate about my mom again. I knew she wasn’t actually a mermaid, but I didn’t want to know who she really was either. Because whatever the answers were, they all ended up being about the same thing—my mom left me when I was four and I didn’t hear from her for eight whole years.

  And now, here she is. After all that nothing. After the heart she gave me shriveled up and got yanked out and replaced with a new one. Suddenly, my question-mark mom is a big old exclamation point.

  My brain gets that it’s her. My brain gets that she was sick too.

  But my heart doesn’t.

  At least, not this one.

  Because she could’ve called. She could’ve written. She could’ve visited, even if she had to leave again. And she never did.

  I want to ask her why. I want to know. And I don’t want to know. It’s weird, wanting something so bad for so long and not wanting it at the same time. It makes me feel dizzy, makes my breath come too fast and shaky.

  I scrunch down in my bed and roll over so my back is to my mermaid, to everyone. It hurts, the incision on my chest fiery and sharp, but I don’t care. My fingers itch for a pen and paper, because, wow, do I have some thoughts that I need to get out of my head, thoughts that would probably make a great whiny song if I could get the words to rhyme the right way. My brain fills up with all sorts of words like remember and lost and left and I grab on to all of them, holding super-tight so I don’t start crying right in front of everyone. No way I want to do that.

  No one says anything. Eventually, Kate kisses me on the forehead and gets up from the bed. Dave follows her, because Dave always follows her, and then she starts whispering to my mermaid.

  I stick my fingers in my ears and push until it hurts, until all I can h
ear is my brand-new heart pushing blood around my body, just like a heart should.

  You’re nothing like I remember.

  Maybe that’s because

  I don’t remember much.

  It’s all blurry,

  like we lived underwater

  before you left,

  and you’ve just now come up for air.

  How did it feel,

  when I turned my back today?

  Did your heart get stuck in your throat?

  Mine beat strong, mine beat sure.

  It doesn’t know you anyway.

  CHAPTER

  6

  “Sunny, will you please hold still?” Kate says as she rubs a glob of SPF 4,000 onto my back. Okay, fine, it’s SPF 70, but it’s so thick, it might as well be a bulletproof vest.

  Hold still, she says. Like I could possibly sit still on a day like today.

  “You need to finish your Ensure,” Kate says, nodding to the half-empty can of chocolate yuck nestled in the sand.

  “I’d rather never touch the ocean again,” I say.

  “I doubt that. I’m not letting you dip a toe in that water until you drink your nutrition shake.”

  “How about a toenail?”

  She turns me around and stares her wicked stare, her eyebrows reaching for her blond hairline. I huff loudly and give in, bending over to snatch my Ensure from the sand. Kate winces. She’s been doing that a lot lately. Anytime I, you know, move.

  It’s been two weeks since Dr. Ahmed said my heart was ticking along all right and sent me home from the hospital, which means I’ve had a new heart for six whole weeks. Even though I’m still going strong, Kate watches me like I’m a bomb about to explode. Then again, maybe I am. Sometimes I get real quiet and still and push my hand to my heart. I listen to it work, feel it pump blood under my palm. It’s like any minute, I expect it to just… stop.

  I guess Kate feels the same because sometimes, she sleeps in my room in a sleeping bag on the floor, like I’m a newborn baby who might suffocate in my blankets. On top of all that, I have to take a mountain of pills every day, go back to the hospital three times a week for checkups, and do all this physical therapy so I can lift stuff and walk around like a normal person.

  But today. Oh, beautiful, amazing, cloudy-but-I-don’t-even-care today. Today is the day I’ve been waiting for ever since Dr. Ahmed spoke the words dilated cardiomyopathy.

  Oh, yes.

  Today I am going into the ocean.

  And looking for a boy to kiss, but one thing at a time. I have a three-step plan for my New Life and I can’t really do them out of order.

  Step One: Do awesome amazing things I could never do before. Okay, no, getting in the ocean doesn’t seem all that amazing and awesome and, okay, yes, I’ve done it before. But not for a couple of years, I haven’t. Not to actually swim and have fun without huffing and puffing. Not without Kate risking her own heart attack.

  Step Two: Find a new best friend. I may have missed out on the past two years of kid-hood, but I know that I do not want to enter the halls of middle school without a best friend.

  Step Three: Find a boy and kiss him. Because kisses. Also handholding and maybe cuddling while watching movies. I’d really like to hug someone who’s not a parent figure and thirty-four years old. I used to think about kissing girls too, but not anymore. No way. Boys only from here on out. Plus, I like boys, so it might as well be a boy.

  I’ve still been trying to write my own kissing song to go with my New Life plan, but every time my head gets all crowded with song-ish thoughts, I end up writing about something else.

  Like Lena. I try not to, but your long-lost mom showing up after eight years is hard to forget, and writing stuff helps me get the words out of my head. None of the songs rhyme, but I like the way they sound when I read them back to myself.

  Now, my new heart is so excited about my New Life, it thrum-thrums in my chest. I press a hand to my sternum and give it a little high five. Then I say a thank-you to whoever gave me their heart. I don’t know their name and I never will. Some donors want to stay anonymous and mine does. Or, their family does. All I could do was send them a letter that had to go through the United Network of Organ Sharing. I sent it right when I got home from the hospital and, thinking back on it, it seems so silly. Thank you is such a silly thing to say for a heart, isn’t it?

  So I wrote them a song instead. A nonrhyming song, but still. I’m alive because they’re dead. That’s not something I can ever forget. I wonder what their name was and what their favorite color was and if they liked soccer or if they liked to read.

  Look, it’s the sea, I whisper to them in my head. Isn’t it beautiful?

  The beach is pretty scarce for a Friday in the middle of June, but that’s mostly because it’s super-early in the morning and it’s cloudy. Still, the pastel beach houses that line the coast are already filling up with vacationers, so any second now, this beach will probably be crawling with people.

  I look around for Former Best Friend, my heart pumping out a big old beat of relief when I don’t see her. I don’t need Margot ruining Step Two. She’s really good at ruining best friend things. And kissing things, for that matter.

  Kate finishes slathering me with a second skin and I take my last chalky sip of Ensure.

  “Okay,” she says, capping the sunscreen and tossing it in her enormous beach bag. “I think we’re all set.”

  I give her some side-eye as I carefully, oh so carefully, get my towel out of my bag and ball it up in my arms. “We?”

  She takes off her tank top to reveal her black one-piece. “It’s your first time back in the water and Dr. Ahmed said—”

  “That I’m fine.”

  “Yes. Fine to swim around a little, not race yourself to the sandbar and back.”

  “I’m not going to—”

  But Kate does her staring thing and I shut up. She knows me too well. The sandbar is a good two hundred yards from the shore and I’m itching to move, move, move.

  “Kate, come on. Let me go by myself. I want to do this alone.”

  “Why?”

  I shake my head and gaze out at the water. Honestly, I don’t really know. I usually love swimming with whoever, anyone, the more the merrier. But it’s my first time back out there. In a lot of ways, the ocean feels like my first friend and I never have to worry that we’ll grow apart. It’s always there, ready whenever I am. I just want a minute to get to know the water again.

  There’s a reason why it’s Step One of my New Life.

  “Sunny—”

  But whatever Kate was going to say is cut off by her phone’s blaring ringtone. This time, it’s blasting “Yellow Submarine” by the Beatles.

  “Ugh, David Alexander,” Kate mutters, digging into her bag for her phone. She only uses Dave’s full first and middle name when she’s really annoyed. I can’t help but laugh. Every time Dave sees Kate—which is all the time, either at our house or at the bookstore—he steals her phone and changes her ringtone. She’s tried putting a passcode on it, but he usually figures it out. It’s pretty funny.

  Kate finds her phone and grapples for the side button to silence the song. She huffs again, but there’s a little smile on her face. Yup. Totally in love with Dave.

  She looks at the phone and that smile drops like a shell in the sand.

  I know what that means.

  “It’s her, isn’t it?” I ask.

  Kate sighs and rubs her forehead. She doesn’t even have to nod for me to know the answer is yes. Lena’s been calling a lot over the past few weeks and every time, Kate’s smile falls on the floor, she sighs and rubs her forehead, and then she disappears into her room or wherever so she can talk to Lena in private. Kate never asks if I want to talk to her. She knows I’d just say no. And I would. I would totally say no.

  My excitement about my New Life plan fizzles and pops like a soda going flat.

  “What does she want?” I ask, and Kate’s eyes widen on me. I’m still p
retty ticked at Kate for not telling me that Lena had called her while I was sick. Not that I would’ve talked to her even if I’d known, but still. It’s the principle of the thing. If someone’s mom comes calling, you tell them, right? So, this is the first time I’ve even acknowledged the fact that Lena calls, that she’s back, that she… exists. My heart jumps all over the place. I press a hand to my chest, trying to get it to calm down.

  “She wants to see you,” Kate says. “Talk to you.”

  I nod, but I have no clue what to do with that. Lena is most definitely not part of my New Life plan.

  “You don’t have to, sweetie,” Kate says.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “But…” Kate takes a big breath and presses her mouth flat, her eyes closed like she’s trying to calm herself down.

  “But what?”

  She opens her eyes and tugs on the end of my hair, a tiny sad smile on her lips. “But you can if you want. Whatever you want to do is okay with me. I’ll support you.”

  “I don’t want to.” It comes out automatically, a habit. My heart is a closed hand against my ribs, knocking super-soft.

  Kate nods. “I get it. You’re angry and you should be. I just don’t want you to regret anything. She’s still your mom.”

  I shake my head and chew on my lip to keep it from wobbling. “No, she’s not. You are.”

  Kate cups my cheeks then. “Sunshine.”

  “Kathryn.”

  She smiles a little at that, then opens her mouth to say something else, probably about how things with Lena are complicated and when you’re an adult, you’ll understand. Blah, blah, blah.

  But she never has a chance, because her phone belts out another round of “We all live in a yellow submarine!” and cuts off whatever she was going to say.

  She sighs, but this time, I can tell she’s going to answer it.

  “All right,” she says as her thumb hovers over the screen. “Go ahead, okay? I’ll watch from here.”

  “Really?”

  She nods. “I trust you. Don’t overdo it, all right?”

  She tucks a flyaway strand of hair behind my ear and then plops down into the sand, her phone clutched between her hands. She looks dazed and a little upset, but hey, she’s letting me go swimming by myself and I’m not about to waste one second of this glorious freedom.