Two Hearts

by David Connor

  "Touch him," Vaughn said. "In any manner you wish."

  Frank spun around. He glared.

  "Quickly… Move. Do something. Start with a kiss, perhaps."

  "A kiss?" Frank shook his head wildly. "This is not some child's bedtime tale, Vaughn." His daydream from a moment ago worked now for his argument. "Your son is not Arora fallen by some wicked queen's poisoned fruit, and I am not his noble savior come on a princely steed to magically awaken him."

  Vaughn huffed. "The way you speak... Come out of character, will you please, and just be yourself."

  "The scenario is unreal. Why should I be genuine?" He almost couldn't help it. Nerves often triggered Frank's affected speech.

  "The storm will pass quickly!" Marion suddenly shouted. "Summer is over. The leaves will change." She tugged at Frank's sleeve as Vaughn had before. "Do something, Franklin."

  Vaughn pulled her back. "Be careful, my sweet love."

  "Frequent storms will not come again for months," she pleaded. "This must be done quickly."

  "Please, Frank. Lay your hands on him," Vaughn begged just as vehemently, with his eyes, with clasped hands. "You must."

  Frank tensed. His body tingled from his heels to the top of his head. A crack of thunder followed another blue flash, not a second in between. The storm was right above them now, and so he moved toward the bed, because he wanted to do it. For Vaughn, he had to try. "I don't even know…"

  "I'm going to shut off the machines."

  Frank's breath caught. "Vaughn. No."

  "He must," Marion said.

  "Lay your hands over his heart. Try that," Vaughn instructed.

  Frank's own heart was fluttering. He couldn't seem to breathe, and sweat ran down his back from the upstairs heat and tension. His hands began to shake. "Vaughn. My God!"

  But Vaughn was at the ventilator. He flipped the switch as Marion opened two large windows. The unexpected noise as they slid up and the volume of the storm made more apparent alarmed Frank even more.

  "Wait!" he shouted.

  "There is no time."

  "Hurry, our Franklin," Marion said.

  Our Franklin. Frank took a moment to process the strangeness of Marion calling him that. Was it simply an extension of Vaughn's feelings, or had she been secretly lurking as well, following him, getting to know him, mothering him in hiding from afar?

  Another blue strobe illuminated the room and brought back the matter at hand. The lights flickered just as Vaughn shut off the last machine. The gushing sound made by the breathing apparatus ceased, and Liam's chest, with one last heave, no longer moved up and down.

  "Now what?" Marion stood still, but her eyes danced around, back and forth between Frank and her boy lying lifeless before them.

  "Please, son," Vaughn said.

  Frank closed his eyes. He raised his hands, holding them high before resting one and then both upon Liam's still chest. He pressed down hard, making the skin beneath them turn bright red. Frank concentrated all his energy—his supposed gift—toward making Liam breathe again. "Come on, Liam. We can do this."

  But nothing happened—nothing more.

  "It's not working," Frank fretted.

  "Keep trying," Vaughn instructed. "Wait for more lightning."

  Frank pumped on Liam's chest, like he hadn't needed to do with the huntsman in the woods. It was a different situation, much different. In that case, the electricity that ran through Frank's body had most likely acted as a defibrillator. But Liam had been dead for quite some time—brain dead. Not decomposing nor living, he'd just existed, like a thing, not a being, because of technology and mechanics. Could electrical current reanimate a brain? "This all seems futile."

  "Remove your clothes and lay atop him," Vaughn suggested.

  "That's absurd!" Frank bellowed, loud enough to wake the dead, as the silly old axiom went. But that didn't work either, though Frank had hoped it might.

  "More flesh, more contact," Vaughn told him. "It is not mere folly. It makes actual scientific sense."

  Nothing made sense, but there was no time to argue. Frank refused to get naked, but he did remove his shirt and pants. Then he took a deep breath, a calming inhale and exhale, before placing his entire body atop naked Liam Hellier's. "Unscrew the light bulbs from all of the lamps, Mrs. Hellier, but do not turn them off or unplug them. Be careful!" He turned to stop her before she reached for one, suddenly terrified of the imminent danger to her hands. "They'll be hot. Use a cloth."

  "What is your plan?" She hadn't moved, the risk of burning herself nil.

  "Not a plan. More a hunch. A hope," Frank said. "Vaughn, plug the machines back in. If this works, they will not interfere."

  "Are you certain?" Vaughn asked.

  "Of absolutely nothing," Frank confessed.

  "Do not allow any harm to come to him," Marion said, a bit frantic as she tended to her given task.

  "Franklin will be fine, schatz."

  Frank doubted she was worried about him.

  "Do not concern yourself with more than what dear Franklin asks." Suddenly, Vaughn was the one more insistent. "What should she do next?"

  "Bring the lamps closer to the bed. Be careful not to touch inside the sockets." Frank lay there giving orders made on mere whims. The machines were buzzing, and once the lamps were lined up beside him and Liam, "Bring me something metal," he demanded. "Quickly. Long and metal."

  "Vaughn!"

  "Do as he asks, Marion!"

  "It is too dangerous."

  "Quickly, woman!" Vaughn shouted.

  She looked around and came up with a coat hanger. "Will this do?"

  "Yes. Two or three… if you have them. Hand them here." Frank reached for the first one. "No! My God! Damn it!" He rarely cursed. "Lay it on the bed. Toss them from a distance. The whole frame is metal. Do not get too close."

  Marion did as told. Frank picked up the first hanger, untwisting the hook end hurriedly, because he sensed lightning coming. He knew it was going to strike close to the house. In perfect proximity.

  "It's now or never," he said, hoping the logic of what he was about to try would work with the unknown quantitative properties of his powers. "Twenty seconds from now or never," he amended. Using every notion that came to him from reading the medical textbooks in the mortuary, plus some ideas borrowed from Mary Shelley herself, Frank connected the three hangers together, making one long piece that would reach the lamp socket furthest away. He inserted the other end into Liam's nostril.

  "Yes. Yes!" Vaughn said excitedly. He must have figured out what Frank was thinking. "Keep going until you feel resistance."

  Marion turned away. She grabbed Vaughn's elbow and muttered incoherently. It may have been a prayer, or possibly simply utterances of disgust.

  "The easiest route to the brain is through the nose," Frank said.

  Marion made a noise close to gagging.

  "Ten..." Frank began counting down.

  "Get out of the room, my sweet."

  "Why?" Marion asked her husband.

  "Go downstairs!"

  "Franklin…" Marion would not let go, so Vaughn pried her fingers off of him.

  "Vaughn, you too," Frank insisted. "Do it! Hurry. Five…."

  Marion grappled for any part of her husband. She chattered away, angrily, frantically, to God, perhaps. It was still difficult to tell.

  "Good luck."

  "I'll need it, Vaughn," Frank said.

  And then they were gone. Frank heard them bound down the stairs quite quickly considering their age, Marion blathering the entire way.

  "Three… two…" He counted to himself, now without an audience. The end of the hanger not up Liam's nose had been bent into three curves that he'd turned down like the tines of a very thin garden rake. Pressing himself into Liam's nude body, all parts in alignment, Frank managed to ignore what he felt as he directed the three bends close to the lamps. "One."

  He stuck them in the sockets with precise synchronization to accompany the power of the clo
ud to ground lightning flash. When he did so, his entire body tensed at once, while Liam Hellier's jerked violently. Frank made a sound—a gurgle, a groan of pain and panic. The Helliers' son may have as well. Frank was too shaken to tell for absolute certainty. Like that day in the woods back in the summer of 1964, some of his senses were not working to their best, making Frank not fully aware of anything but excruciating pain. This time, he felt that, in the bed and moments later when he flew across the room and crashed into the wall.

  He slid to the floor then, almost nude, unable to stop himself, even had the notion come to try. His heart beat irregularly, and he could not catch his breath. Frank found himself wishing he was not so fully conscious just as the tingle throughout his entire nervous system began to subside into nothingness. With the scent of burning flesh overtaking him, he thought it odd the sense of smell was the last one to leave him.

  "Three, two, one…" He counted silently now, knowing what was imminent. Then Frank's world went black and his body fell lifeless, as prone as Liam Hellier's before the attempt to bring him back to life.

  Chapter Four

  Vaughn hung his head as the casket-lowering device clicked at each stop, automatically dropping the fancy wood-veneered coffin deeper and deeper into its grave. Frank had witnessed on several occasions how much it broke Vaughn's heart to bury someone without loved ones in attendance. The poor departed soul about to be interred had no one but the mortuary employees standing around him, and Vaughn was beside himself.

  "My dear Franklin," he said. "I did not want your life to end like this. I always wished you would find someone to be with well until the golden years of life. It was very much Marion's hope as well. I think you know how she adored you now. Though your interactions were rare, she did come to love you through my anecdotes and simply because her heart knows good. She always cherished the notion of a son… a second son… you." Vaughn lit a cigarette. "The death of the elderly is expected. When young people pass, I cannot help but think of it as a tragic waste."

  "No one is looking for them?"

  "No. Neither one."

  Bodies unclaimed from the county morgue often ended up at Helliers' mortuary. The two Vaughn was burying were teen runaways, authorities had deduced. No one had answered the notice in the newspapers calling for relatives to retrieve them. "Perhaps they were running from neglect. I can finish up," Vaughn offered. "Go back to the mortuary, now. You haven't visited with Liam since he awoke."

  "Awoke?" Frank asked. "That's what we're calling it?"

  "Your mood, Franklin, has been quite foul of late."

  "I died, Vaughn. I died and there were no bright lights, fluffy clouds, or relatives in flowing robes playing harps. There was nothing. Nothing but blankness, like a dreamless sleep."

  "Some would call that peace."

  "Others would call it nothing."

  "Perhaps you didn't die. You might have just passed out."

  "You restarted my heart. That's what you said."

  "There's every chance it was nothing so extreme."

  "I guess. After reanimating a virtual corpse and all… Maybe getting to heaven takes a while." Frank picked up a shovel. "Maybe there's a line, like at a crowded movie theatre. Or maybe God knew I wouldn't be staying."

  "You are being facetious."

  "I'm still trying to believe in something I'm uncertain I ever believed in to start. I want to." Frank truly did, for Renny and Melissa, for his father and the cat that wandered off and presumably died alone in the woods way, way back. "It seems now that dead is dead," Frank declared. "And I was. Does not the fact that you were able to touch me without being thrown across the room—during a storm, no less—automatically prove my side of things?"

  "It may."

  "And yet, upon awakening, I am back to where I started. A couple of dead flies prove it. I wonder how long I would have to stay dead for it to go away for good."

  "Franklin, did you ever consider that maybe the lesson you were shown was that any happiness one can expect must be found here on Earth? Liam would like to see you."

  "Why? Because you told him he should?" Frank began to fill the first grave. "I can't help out with him. I can't shave him. I can't hold him up while he relearns to walk. I can't even feed him. Silver is an electrical conductor, you know. It's only because copper is less expensive that they use that for wiring. I hold his fork for him; he takes a bite… bizzzz!" Frank tilted his head to one side, closed his eyes, and stuck out his tongue.

  "You can talk with him. Tell him stories."

  "My stories are long and dull, Vaughn. Even the laziest of blue jays flies off from his tree in the woods halfway through one."

  "You and Liam could be a perfect romantic match."

  "What is with your interference in this part of my life?"

  "In Europe, one's parents often choose a mate for their offspring. It is not such a farfetched notion. Is it so wrong for me to wish you a companion? Is it unthinkable I might want the same for my son? You certainly seem in no hurry to find one for yourself."

  "You know such a thing is impossible. The reason I was able to rouse your son from his deathbed, that's the same reason he and I can never be lovers."

  "Franklin, go. And speak to Liam like a man in his twenty-fourth year in this decade—the nineteen seventies. If you wish to be an actor, take the stage. As it is, you are hiding behind a curtain sewn from peculiarity. Purposely, I dare say."

  Frank pouted. "That is quite the metaphor you sew yourself, Vaughn. Who are you pretending to be? Or does insanity sprout on your family tree as well?"

  "Liam does not respond to my voice or to Marion's." Vaughn ignored both questions and the preceding comment. "I am not even certain he understands us when we speak."

  "Maybe I'll come by." Frank never came out the victor when he argued with Vaughn. "We'll see. What I still don't understand," he said, "is why, if Mrs. Hellier thought so fondly of me, we had never met. Is it because of my face?"

  "Did you see her flinch, dear Franklin? Do you think she even noticed that?"

  "Then what?"

  "You ask too many questions." Vaughn swiped his brow. "You exhaust me at times. Maybe I talk like I talk because of you. Perhaps after so many years together, I succumbed to your atypical speaking like a virus." Vaughn perked up slightly, just for a moment. That comeback, in sports terms, was a homerun. And so, Frank relented—for the time being, at least. "Please. I want you and Liam to get to know one another," Vaughn said. "It is important that you both have someone in your lives when the time comes that Marion and I can no longer be."

  Frank looked at Vaughn. He seemed to have aged ten years overnight. "We'll see," he repeated.

  Arriving back at the mortuary alone, as Vaughn stayed in town to visit the bank, Frank still debated whether or not he would go upstairs and knock. He didn't have to. Liam and Marion Hellier were out in the side yard, Liam up on his feet! It was quite miraculous, Frank thought, after only two weeks. Naturally, Liam was unsteady, leaning forward like a tot taking his first few steps ever. Marion had placed herself against his hip, and his arm was thrown across her shoulders. Together, they walked several feet.

  "Wow!" Frank exclaimed, truly impressed. But then—Crash!—Marion let go, and Liam fell, face-first, into the grass with an oomph. Frank flinched.

  "Come on, Liam. Get up. Try again." Marion was strident, not encouraging. It looked as if she was quite the taskmaster. "Up!" She clapped her hands together, which sounded like a gunshot. "We have another hour. Up!" Liam just lay there. He didn't seem to be hurt at all, just tired, maybe disheartened. "Vaughn said two hours per day, Liam. Then we can be finished."

  Liam still didn't move.

  "You must get up," Marion insisted, nudging at Liam with the toe of her shoe. "Move! Now!"

  Frank stepped from the shadows, out from behind a large yew. "I don't know," he said. "That looks pretty comfortable to me. Hi, Liam."

  Liam turned to look, only at the neck. He still made no move to stand.


  "Mind if I join you?" Frank got down on the ground, first to his knees, then flat out on his belly. "This is nice," he said. "Cool. Comfortable. Smells good too. What is that, caterpillar pee?"

  There may have been a chuckle. Perhaps Liam could understand words.

  "I say we stay here all day," Frank said. "All fall. All winter. Vaughn can rake around us and shovel us off when it snows. Marion will be doing her fall planting soon, though." Frank lowered his voice to what one could call a stage whisper. He was close enough to be heard, yet far enough away to be safe. Against supposed type, rather than speaking like a man from generations past, Frank decided to sound far younger—the word "childish" sprang to mind. "Your mother might try to plant flower bulbs in our butts. In spring we'll poop daffodils. Wouldn't that be… far out?"

  If only Vaughn could hear him now. Liam definitely understood Frank's silliness too. He laughed in all the right spots. No matter how old a man got, Frank figured, there was still a little boy in him who liked silly words like "poop", "pee", and "butt". Vaughn had probably been fibbing a bit. He had to know Liam had full comprehension when it came to human speech. That too was astounding, Frank thought, unless Liam was just reacting to tone and Frank's expressions, like an infant or a canine might.

  Frank deflated just a bit. Still, he went on. "We could lie here," he said, "and risk it. Or we could get up and try walking again."

  Liam struggled to his knees.

  "Good going. Now rest there another minute. I have an idea. Marion, can you bring me one of Vaughn's old belts? Biggest one you can find."

  "All of Vaughn's belts are big." There should have been a smile. There wasn't. Marion looked rather stressed.

  "Please."

  She turned in a huff, but took off, leaving Frank and Liam sitting in the grass. "You're doing good," Frank told him. "Well… Doing well, I guess. That's the proper English, right?"