by Nicole Maggi
Grandma took a sip of her coffee, looking at me over the rim of her mug. “What’s wrong, sweetie? You don’t seem like yourself.”
“I’m not.” I stared down into the bowl, swirling the brown sugar into an endless spiral. “I have someone else’s heart inside me. I’m not me anymore.”
“Oh, Georgie.” Grandma put her cup down and came around the table. She cupped my cheek. “Of course you are.”
I leaned my face into her palm and looked up at her. “But what makes a person? Isn’t it their heart? If mine is gone, who am I now?”
Grandma pulled one of the other chairs next to mine and sat in front of me, our knees touching. “You are still the same person, Georgie. The heart is just an organ. It’s what you do with it that matters. Your thoughts and dreams and memories make you who you are.”
Memories. I took a deep breath. “But what if—I’m remembering things that aren’t my memories?”
Grandma pulled back a little, her hand dropping to her lap. “What do you mean, sweetheart?”
I chewed at my lip. “I forgot I was allergic to strawberries.”
“Your mom told me about that.” Grandma tilted her head and smiled. “You’d just had major surgery, sweetie. You were still groggy. That’s all it was.” She reached out and took my hand in hers. “I know you’re scared, Georgie. You just went through a trauma. But you survived and you are going to be just fine.”
She sounded like she was saying it to reassure herself more than me. I stared into her overbright eyes and tried to imagine what it must’ve been like, waiting by the phone to get updates from my mom while I was in the hospital. They were all so worried about me. I couldn’t tell her about this. I’d just have to figure it out on my own.
I squeezed her hand. “I’m so glad you’re here,” I whispered and picked up my spoon again. It took a few swallows of oatmeal to get the lump out of my throat.
Grandma pushed back from her chair and stood up. “I have something for you, actually.” She bustled out to the hall and came back a minute later with something wrapped in tissue paper. “I thought this might help you heal. Give you sweet dreams.”
“You didn’t have to get me anything.” I unwrapped the tissue paper to reveal a dream catcher. Spidery threads stretched across the hoop, and long, fluffy feathers hung down the sides. “It’s beautiful. Did you get it at that store we love in Santa Fe?”
Grandma blinked at me. “No, sweetie. It’s from your bedroom at my house. You always said you sleep better there than anywhere else, so I wanted to bring a bit of that room to you here.”
I traced the intricate web with a shaking forefinger. “It’s from my…bedroom?”
“Don’t you recognize it?”
No, I didn’t recognize it. Not only that, but I had no memory of my room or her house at all. I squeezed my eyes shut, fighting to pull up a picture, an image, even just a fragment of her New Mexico house. I knew it existed, I knew I’d been there, but I could not see it in my mind. It had disappeared.
I sucked in a hard breath and opened my eyes. “Of course I do,” I told her. “It was so sweet of you to bring it here to me.”
Grandma examined my face. “Are you okay, sweetheart?”
“Yes. I’m just…tired. I think I’ll go lie down.” I stood and cradled the dream catcher in my hands. “Maybe this will help me rest,” I added with a forced smile. “Thanks for the oatmeal.”
Once in my room, I closed the door and leaned against it, breathing hard. The dream catcher fell to the floor and sat there, mocking me with its gentle swoops and curves. How could I not remember my grandmother’s house? I’d been there dozens of times since I was a little girl. I could even remember riding horses through craggy valleys along desert trails. But the memory of the house was gone, like a puzzle missing that last important piece.
And in its place was the memory of a dank basement room where I had never been.
• • •
If she was going to hijack my memories, I had to know who she was. That thought permeated my brain as I sunk myself into my music all that day and the next, practicing the Poulenc Sonata—my audition piece—over and over. There was one phrase that I just couldn’t get in the Scherzo section, that my fingers just couldn’t grasp, and I attacked it like a war general, battering at it until Mom knocked on my door. “Georgie, we have to leave for your checkup.”
I sighed and put my oboe away. I was barely out of the hospital and yet I had to go back for a follow-up. All the way to the hospital I heard the Catch, drowning out the notes of the Poulenc. What else was Jane Doe going to take away? And what about the memories I didn’t yet know I’d forgotten? My heart started to pound. I could’ve forgotten a whole lifetime already and not even know it.
As Mom checked us in, I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and counted off the memories I’d lost. My allergy. Grandma’s house. Then I counted the ones I’d gained. Strawberries. A dank, dark basement bedroom. I’d lost two…and gained two. I froze in mid-shift, balanced on my right foot. I was losing a memory for each one I gained.
I set my foot down and stared at the Van Gogh print over the Admissions desk. The colors swirled. I dragged my mind back over the last several days. Yes, two whole complete memories had been placed into my brain and two had been taken out. A fair trade. Maybe the brain could only hold so much information, and when Jane Doe forced herself in, she forced something out.
In a daze, I followed Mom to the waiting chairs and sat down. I picked up a magazine and pretended to read an interview with a plastic surgeon to the stars. Had it happened the moment they removed my own heart from my body and put Jane Doe’s in? But what did the heart have to do with memory? Were memories contained in the human heart? If that was true, then what Grandma and Maureen had said was a lie. It wasn’t just an organ. It made me who I was, like my soul.
I pressed my fingers to my forehead. I wasn’t a philosopher, for crap’s sake. These were big questions; how was I supposed to know the answers? All I knew was that I now had two memories in my head that weren’t my own, and I wanted to know whose they were.
Mom nudged me. I looked up. The nurse was calling me into the office. I dropped the magazine on the empty chair next to me. As Mom stood, her phone buzzed. “Shoot… It’s my editor. Do you mind if I take this, honey? I’ll meet you in there.”
“Okay.” I followed the nurse into a small beige room with an oversized chair. I sat in the chair and she hooked me up to the same kind of heart monitor I’d been on in the hospital.
“Dr. Harrison will be in soon,” she said and whisked out the door.
The machine beeped, bringing me back to the moment when I’d first woken up in the hospital. Everything had felt different the instant I’d become conscious. I’d known that something was off. The machine’s beeps grew distant as I turned inward and listened hard to the Catch. Was Jane Doe trying to tell me something?
The door opened and Dr. Harrison bustled in, Mom on her heels. “Hi, Georgie. How are you feeling?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“Good, good.” She went straight to the machine and checked it without looking at me. Mom hovered over me, alternately sitting on the arm of the chair and pacing in front of it. I wished her editor would call her again.
Dr. Harrison marked something off on the machine’s printout and finally looked up. “So how is it being home? You taking it easy?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” She peered over my head at Mom. “I don’t want her to start with her tutor for at least a few more days. Absolutely no stress.” She perched herself on the arm of the chair and arranged her features into her “bedside manner” expression. “I know we spoke a little bit about rejection but I want to be sure you understand the symptoms.”
“Fever, chills, flu-like symptoms,” I recited.
She nodded approvingly. “That’s righ
t.” She switched the machine off and removed the pads from my chest.
As she turned to go, I reached out and touched the sleeve of her crisp white coat, just enough to make her pause. “Does it really have to be anonymous?” I said, so low that if the machine had still been on, she wouldn’t have been able to hear me. “Why can’t I know who she was?”
Her head turned so sharply I thought it would snap. She raised an eyebrow at me. “You shouldn’t even know that she’s a she.”
“Oh. No…” I shrank into the chair. That nurse, Maureen, had been so nice to me and I didn’t want to get her in trouble. “I just guessed. I mean, can you give a male heart to a female recipient?”
“Yes, you can.” Dr. Harrison folded her arms across her chest. “Your curiosity is only natural, Georgie. But donors have to be kept anonymous to respect their family’s privacy. It’s the law. After a length of time, you can contact the United Network for Organ Sharing, and it’s up to the family to release any information about the donor. Now,” she said with forced casualness, “I need to run some lab work. Just wait here and a nurse will be in to take some blood.”
But I couldn’t wait for that; I was losing my memories now. Besides, if she was a Jane Doe, then she didn’t have any family. UNOS wouldn’t have any information to release. I squirmed in the chair, trying not to let my desperation show on my face.
The door opened and the front-desk nurse peeked her head in. “I’m sorry, but I have a question about your insurance, Mrs. Kendrick.”
Mom sighed and went out into the hall, muttering, “They never get it right,” under her breath. Dr. Harrison followed her out, leaving me alone again. I squirmed against the chair. I understood why they had to keep organ donors anonymous. But my case was different. I mean, I was remembering things from her life, for crap’s sake. Didn’t that entitle me to some information?
Several minutes later, the nurse still hadn’t come to take my blood, and Mom was still MIA. I slid off the chair and poked my head into the hall. “Hello?” No answer. Voices murmured from a couple of doors down. I tiptoed to the open door and was about to reach around to knock when the conversation inside stopped me.
“…said nothing to her. It must’ve been one of the other nurses.”
“Well, I’d like to find out who. That’s a serious lapse.” It was Dr. Harrison’s voice.
“It doesn’t seem like she knows any more than the gender of the donor. That’s not so bad.”
A loud sigh. “I suppose not. As long as she doesn’t find out more. Do not tell her anything if she asks.”
“Of course I won’t. Can you imagine if she knew?”
Knew what? I inched as close to the door as I dared. Say it, say it, say it…
“Well, I would think that she’d still feel lucky to be alive. It doesn’t matter how the donor died.”
“Still…suicide… It’s so sad.”
I stumbled back, thankful for the carpeted hallway to hide my footsteps. My ears buzzed. Somehow I made it back to my chair and collapsed into it a moment before the door swung open and a nurse entered, carrying a tray with a needle and four vials.
“Hi, Georgie,” she said, and I recognized the same voice that had just uttered the word “suicide.” I stared dumbly as she inserted the needle into my arm. My blood flowed into the vials, one after another, its dark red stain proof that I was alive. Suicide. I had life because Jane Doe had taken hers.
From the research I had done, I knew that a transplanted heart had to be the same size as the recipient’s. That meant that my donor had been my age, or close to. She had been young. And she had been so hopeless as to take her own life. Tears leaked out of the corner of my eyes. I blinked fast to keep them from falling on my face.
“Almost done,” the nurse said cheerily as she swapped the third vial for the fourth. I wanted to slap her. When she was done, she taped a piece of gauze to the needle-prick site and folded my arm up. “Just sit still for a minute before you leave.”
“Okay.” It came out a little strangled. I kept my head turned from her as she left. As soon as the door closed, I wrestled my phone from my jeans pocket and brought up Google. I typed in “Boston suicide teenage Jane Doe” and waited for the page to load.
How could no one know who she was? What kind of life had she led that no one had come forward to identify her? Where were her parents? A pang thrummed inside me. Were there really people on this planet that no one cared about?
The page finished loading a number of random, unrelated pages. But at the top, there was a link to a Boston police precinct website, dated the week before I’d gone into the hospital. I tapped it. A short paragraph popped up.
Police are investigating an apparent suicide attempt by an eighteen-year-old female on the night of January 17. Authorities say she jumped off a fifth-story balcony at 826 Emiline Way and lay for several hours before being discovered by a man walking his dog early the next morning. The girl is in critical condition at Massachusetts General Hospital and not expected to live. Police have been unable to identify her. Anyone with any information is asked to call the BPD Hotline at 617-481-5162.
I pressed my palms against the chair to keep my hands from shaking. That had to be her. Same time frame, same hospital. They must have tried to identify her for several days before declaring her brain-dead. I went into the hospital on January 22. My heart failed a day later, and I was bumped to the top of the UNOS list. How lucky that there was a perfectly matching heart just down the hall from me.
Still, I didn’t get it. If she committed suicide—if she had wanted to die—why was she still holding on to life? My life? Why were her memories still present? Shouldn’t she—and her memories—be off floating in some afterlife-y fourth dimension or something?
Mom popped her head in the room, a harassed look on her face. “I think I finally got that straightened out,” she said. “Ready to go?”
“Yeah.” I slid off the vinyl chair and followed her out of the office, out of the hospital, down to the parking garage, and into the car. Night was falling as we emerged onto the street, the lights of the Boston skyline twinkling against the dusky gray sky. Was Jane Doe haunting me? I pressed my hand to my chest. Was I possessed?
Beneath my palm, my heartbeat alternated with the Catch. Somehow that didn’t seem right. I didn’t think I was possessed. But Jane Doe was in there, her memories imprinted on her heart that now beat in my chest. And maybe the Catch was an echo of her, a reminder that this lost girl who had killed herself, all alone, had existed.
I curled my hand into a fist against my heart. All I wanted was to get on with my life. Play my oboe, go to school, and be normal again. But it seemed like Jane Doe had other plans for me.
And if that was the case, then I needed to know who the hell she was. Because no one but me controlled my life. No one.
Chapter Five
How did one find a lost girl? I wasn’t even sure she wanted to be found. I was working purely on guesswork in a territory I had never known existed. But I had to do something before I lost another memory. And I did have one solid piece of information.
I had an address.
826 Emiline Way. As soon as we got home, I went up to my room, closed the door, and sat on my bed. I pulled up the police website on my phone again and tapped the blue-highlighted address. Google Maps launched and clocked 826 Emiline Way at five miles away. So close.
But in a city like Boston, with its twisty streets, you could never just go from Point A to Point B. You had to go to Points C, D, and E first. I would have to take two buses and then the T to travel the five miles from my house to 826 Emiline Way. I couldn’t drive; that wasn’t allowed until my chest was fully healed. Two buses and a T ride wasn’t a hop, skip, and a jump. It was like a long and winding hike over two valleys and a river. I couldn’t climb the stairs without my chest hurting, so I wasn’t sure I could travel that far without se
rious pain.
Not to mention I’d have to come up with a really good excuse for why I was leaving the house at all. Also, there was no way my parents would ever let me go to Mattapan without an armed escort. There was a reason its local nickname was Murderpan.
My brain clicked and whirred all through dinner and the Hearts tournament that Colt insisted on playing afterward. I lost spectacularly, finally calling it a night after Colt had shot the moon for the third time.
“I’ve got nothing more to teach you,” I said, slamming my cards down. “The pupil has become the master.”
Colt punched the air with his fist. I laughed and headed upstairs, my smile disappearing the moment I was out of sight of the kitchen. I closed my bedroom door and leaned on it for a moment, taking shallow breaths until the ache in my sternum eased.
I could ask one of my friends to drive me to 826 Emiline Way, I thought as I changed into my pajamas. But if I told them why, they’d think I was crazy. This was so far out of the realm of things I could trust them with. As I pulled my shirt off, I caught sight of my bare chest in the mirror, the ugly red scar bisecting my body. That scar was like a wall between me and everything that made me who I was. The instant they’d removed my old heart, they’d disconnected me from my life.
I tugged my tank top over my head, the scar just peeking out from the neckline. Maybe my friends could still be useful, even if I didn’t tell them what was going on. As I crawled into bed, I began to formulate a plan to get me across those five miles to 826 Emiline Way.
• • •
“You’re sure Ella can drive you home?” Mom asked as she steered the car to the curb in front of the Roslindale Community Center.
“Yes.” I unbuckled my seat belt and leaned over to kiss her cheek. “Don’t be such a worrywart.”
“Fat chance.” She peered over my shoulder at the building. “Are you sure about this? You should be at home resting—”
“Going out of my mind is more like it,” I said. “I’m just going to sit and listen. Nothing strenuous.”