Second Hand Heart

by Hyde, Catherine Ryan

  Love in return,

  Myra

  PS: Interesting coincidence. You were packing boxes and taping them up. I was cutting the tape on boxes and emptying them out. Well, one box, anyway. I went through the attic today and found a whole carton of photos of the girls as children. I’d guess more than half include Lorrie as a child. Of course they mean a great deal to me and I could never part with them in their entirety. But I would share them with you.

  From: Richard Bailey

  To: Myra Buckner

  Myra,

  Oh, yes, please. Please, anything you can spare me. As many as you can bring yourself to let go of, thank you. It would mean so much to me.

  You see, I’m slowing down on my wall. I went to a garage sale day before yesterday and bought a whole box of photo frames, all different sizes. Mostly 8×10, but a little of everything, really. A great assortment, and I picked it up for almost nothing. Classic garage-sale pricing. Which is a consideration, because of course I haven’t been working. As I carried them home, for that moment, I was almost happy. Relatively speaking.

  But then I got home and discovered that I only have a few photos left unframed. I’d been careful not to check. I wanted to think of my photo stash as infinite. Bottomless. Almost to the point of pretending that more photos could appear, as if by magic, at the bottom of a dark drawer or in an electronic image file.

  Almost. I’m not quite that bad. Silly, huh?

  I’ve been slowing down on adding photos to the wall. I’m down to about one a day. And I know this will sound insane, but I’m terrified of the day I have to stop. The day I see I have no more photos left to frame and hang.

  I feel like that crazy Sarah Winchester, who built her crazy Winchester Mystery House (uncomfortably close to where I live), to appease the ghosts of all the souls who died of bullets fired from Winchester rifles. Adding to it and adding to it and never wanting to finish it, for fear of what would happen if she ever stopped building.

  I don’t know what she thought would happen. I mean, not really I don’t. I should know as well as anybody, having been a guide there in grad school. (Did I ever tell you that, Myra?) I can still recite the entire memorized tour speech. But I can’t tell you what she actually thought would happen if she ever stopped. I only know I’d really appreciate more photos of Lorrie. What would I do without you, Myra?

  Many thanks and much love to you,

  Richard

  PS: Roger phoned today. From the university. He seems to want this leave of absence to have an end date already. As if I could simply look forward through my grief to the day it will ease to the point of allowing me to function again. And then I guess he wanted me to just read him off that date. The whole thing was so completely ridiculous but also totally overwhelming. My ending to the conversation was a step or two short of hanging up on him. I might need a new position when I’m ready to teach again. Or maybe he’ll be understanding. Right now I can’t find a place in me that cares.

  PPS: Thanks again for the photos. Whatever you can bring yourself to spare.

  Power Cords

  I was still in my pajamas and robe when I stumbled out to get the mail. In my bare feet. With my hair uncombed.

  This would be an easier confession if my mail were delivered in the morning. Let’s just pretend for the moment that it is.

  I opened the mailbox slowly. As if it might contain poison or explosives or, worse yet, something requiring action, like a bill.

  Inside I found a newsprint flyer of missing children. “Have you seen me?” I had not, but it stretched something in my chest. All that loss. Then I remembered that every one of those parents could at least hold hope of seeing their children again, and a measure of my empathy was lost. Or at least dulled. Ignoble but true.

  Under that was a catalogue, and a thick, large-format Priority Mail envelope that I knew was from Myra. It didn’t actually have her name on the return address, but I recognized her street name, and I don’t know anyone else in Portland.

  It made my heart beat too fast. Painfully so.

  I took it inside, and opened it, still standing in my living room. Pulled out the thick mass of snapshots.

  I couldn’t really fan them out and look at them, not without a surface. I tried, but only ended up spilling some. So I dropped to my knees. Literally dropped; there was pain involved. But then, there’s pain involved in everything.

  I spread them out in front of me.

  I didn’t even exactly look at them one after another. I just left them spilled there before me like some false idol, and I just stayed there on my knees and …

  And nothing.

  I just stayed there. On my knees. In front of them. How I would prefer to report that I sobbed like a baby. In truth I never do. How I would love to describe a feeling. But I think I have none left. Except emptiness. Just a blank slate of nothingness that seemed to swell in my chest, causing pressure. Such a large mass of nothingness needs room to operate.

  Lately I’ve been feeling as though Lorrie’s death jolted me in such a way as to pull my plug out of the wall. So now there is nothing. No power source.

  Or maybe she was the entity I was plugged into. Except I walked and talked before I met her.

  But maybe meeting her changed everything.

  I can’t tell you how much time went by before I was able to gather up the photos again. It felt like an hour, but it could have been a minute. I have no idea. If I can’t even name or isolate what’s going on in my own chest, how can you trust me with a thing like time?

  • • •

  In time, though I have no idea how much, I separated out four photos. Not for any special reason. In fact, I chose four that had been lying on the rug face down.

  The rest I carefully scooped up and slid back into their cardboard envelope, more or less unseen. At least, unexamined. Not singled out with my eyes and fully taken in.

  There is a method to my madness. Which, of course, does not make it anything less than madness. It just keeps it methodical, which is better than nothing.

  When you look at a photo too many times, or for too long, or both, you lose it. It becomes memorized. Whatever impact of emotion it used to produce in you will be dulled to the point of nonexistence. After that you can stare at it for hours trying to recreate its original effect, but it will only dig you deeper into the hole.

  Also, the experience of receiving new photos, photos of Lorrie I had never once seen before, was such a monumental one that I couldn’t bear to see it end. I wanted to recreate it, over and over. Every week for months. Three or four photos at a time.

  Or maybe I’d even have to whittle it down further than that. To two at a time, or even one. But I chose not to think about that in this otherwise satisfying moment. I would enjoy my generous helping of four without worry.

  I turned them over in my hands.

  The first was a photo of Lorrie at about the age of five or six. She was captured with her two sisters, and a litter of fairly new kittens. I studied the perfectly matched color of the sisters’ hair. The three children looked so much alike that only their size seemed to distinguish them, and I studied the dark-honey color of their hair, bobbed into matching short haircuts. Lorrie’s hand reached out to touch the back of a fuzzily striped kitten.

  I pulled up the next one.

  Lorrie at age two or three, all by herself in the photo, wearing a patterned dress that came only about halfway down her amazingly skinny little thighs. Smiling shyly, her eyes cast down. Behind her, the door of what appeared to be a fort or a castle. A vacation shot of some sort.

  The third. Lorrie at age thirteen, or maybe fifteen, or maybe somewhere in-between, standing beside her parents, wearing some sort of chiffon dress which didn’t suit her in the slightest. And she seemed to know it, too. She was obviously dressed for some special occasion, and it must have made her feel like a fish out of water, and it showed. Again, her eyes were cast down, refusing to meet the camera.

  I hesitated brie
fly before turning over the fourth. Wondering if it would show her looking directly into the camera. Brimming with confidence.

  I turned it over.

  Lorrie with her two sisters, apparently on their way out the door for a Halloween party, or to go trick-or-treating. Lorrie’s sisters were dressed as a ghost and a witch. Lorrie was the only sibling who chose a non-macabre costume. A pirate. Lorrie was a pirate. I could picture that for her. I could see her as a pirate, confident, swaggering. Ready to win the day. But in the photo, her eyes (well, her eye — one was covered with a black eyepatch) gazed at the floor.

  Lorrie had been a shy girl? She’d had trouble with her confidence?

  The first true hit to my gut in a long time. I mean, one I could actually feel. She’d been so sure of herself when I met her, a pathetically short nine years ago. That’s one of the things that drew me to her. That comfortable sense that she knew which way to go, almost always, almost instinctively, even if I didn’t.

  If she’d been a shy young girl, I should have known that. Why didn’t I know that? Why didn’t I ask?

  Why hadn’t I met her sooner?

  I went back to bed and took a long nap in preparation for framing the four photos and hanging them on my wall.

  • • •

  I sat with my back pressed uncomfortably against the uncomfortable back of an uncomfortable chair, gazing out the window as a way of avoiding Abigail’s face. The tables were the type that sat high enough over the coffee-house floor that one could use them while standing. Which made the chairs oddly high, with rails to rest your feet. But Abigail’s feet did not reach the rails, so they dangled like the feet of a kindergartner. She tugged at her dress and shifted her weight often, tipping her hand on the fact that she couldn’t focus off that discomfort.

  “Thank you for agreeing to see me,” she said.

  “It’s all right.”

  “I know from what you said in your email that it must be hard to get out and do much of anything.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is.”

  “Well … So thank you for meeting me here.”

  But I had already absolved her once, and it seemed too tiring to do it again. People should consolidate their requests of me. Not use up any more of my resources than necessary. I looked out the window again.

  “Do you have children, Mr. Bailey?”

  “Richard,” I said.

  Another example. It was the third time I’d asked her to call me Richard.

  “Richard.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “Your wife didn’t want children?”

  “She worked with them. She taught the fourth grade. So she loved kids.”

  “She must have.” An interjection. An interruption, really.

  “But sometimes we wondered if the reason she loved them so much was because she got to spend just the right amount of time with them. If you know what I mean. She got to know them, and enjoy them, but she also got to send them home. I’m not saying she was dead set against it. We discussed the idea. I guess it was one of those things we thought we still had time to decide.”

  Abigail looked down into her tea and allowed a silence. A sort of forced — or at least mandatory — reverence.

  Then she said, “This next thing I’m going to say might be hard to understand if you never had a child. Or even if you had children, really, but if you never had a critically ill child. Which most people never do. So this might be hard to understand. But ever since the first night Vida was born, I’ve been told to prepare myself to lose her. But when you’re a mother, there’s just this part of you that can’t accept that. Even when you know there’s nothing you can do. You just can’t let it be that way. You can’t. So you put every ounce of energy you have into keeping your child alive, and then after a while you start to feel that it really is you keeping her alive. You know. With the sheer force of your will.”

  “So, what you’re saying is, you slip into the trap of magical thinking.”

  “I guess that’s as a good way to put it as any.”

  I felt the tug of home, and tried to ignore it. But I think it spurred me to honesty.

  “I’m not at all clear on what you’re trying to tell me.”

  “I feel guilty.”

  “About what?”

  “I feel like I was wishing for somebody to die in time to save Vida. Some nameless, faceless person. Only she wasn’t. She was your wife and you loved her.”

  I breathed deeply. It didn’t really feel fair that I had been called here to save Abigail, rather than the other way around. I thought carefully, spoke carefully. Slowly, too, I noticed. As if I must be precise.

  “Lorrie died because the road was slick and she skidded off it. And because the place she skidded off happened to be on the saddle of a hill, at the edge of a sharp drop. Not because of anything you wished. No offense, Abigail, but you’re not that powerful.”

  I waited to see if she would look offended. Instead she looked hopeful.

  “So what you’re saying is that I shouldn’t feel guilty.”

  “I can’t tell you how to feel. But I can tell you there’s nothing real there to feel guilty about.”

  She pulled in a deep breath and smiled. I knew then that she had gotten what she’d come for.

  “So that’s why you wanted to see me,” I said.

  “Part of it. I wanted to ask you a question, too.”

  I steeled myself. Prayed this would not be tiring. “OK.”

  “Why did you decide to donate?”

  “Wouldn’t anybody?”

  “Oh, my goodness, no! Oh, you have no idea, Mr. Bailey. Richard. You have no idea how many people bury perfectly good organs when someone in their family dies. Sometimes even against the wishes of the person. When you have a child lying in a hospital bed, with only maybe a few days to live, it’s unbelievably frustrating. I can’t even tell you how frustrating it is. It kept me up for days at a time, because I’d get so angry I couldn’t sleep.”

  “I guess it’s a form of not being able to let go,” I said.

  “Why did you decide to donate?”

  I sipped my coffee. Made a show of buying time to think. Truthfully, I’d never had to put it into words before.

  “I guess so the whole thing wouldn’t be so damned futile.”

  Abigail nodded and said nothing.

  “No, wait,” I said. “I know. I just got it now. I know why I donated. I wanted people to never forget her. As many as possible. This way I knew you would never forget her, and neither would Vida. And anybody who loved Vida. And the woman in Tiburon who got her corneas, she’ll never forget Lorrie, and neither will her family and everybody who loves her. And I could go on with the other organs, but … I wanted as big a group of people as possible to think about Lorrie on an ongoing basis. Not just get over it and forget.”

  Abigail squirmed in her tall chair.

  “I’ll certainly never forget her,” she said.

  “Is that a bad reason?”

  “There is no bad reason. Whatever gets people to donate is great.”

  Then we fell into an awkward silence. Abigail was finished with her tea, and I was just about to make noises about moving on.

  “Vida would really love to see you again,” she said. “I don’t know how you feel about another visit.”

  “I don’t know how I feel about another visit, either.”

  “She may come home as soon as tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Maybe I’ll visit in the morning. On one condition. If you’ll be there the whole time.”

  She tried to look into my face for answers, but I refused to give any away. You don’t want to know, I was thinking.

  “Sometimes I find her challenging,” I said. To my surprise, Abigail burst out laughing.

  “Most people do,” she said.

  “Oh. OK. She just has an energy that’s … sort of …”

  “She’s very intense.”

  “Yes. I guess that’s it. Intense.”
<
br />   “I’ll be there the whole time.”

  I agreed that I would make an effort to visit. I definitely didn’t promise.

  From: Richard Bailey

  To: Myra Buckner

  Dear Myra,

  Was Lorrie a shy child? Why is she looking down at the floor in so many of these photos? She was so confident when I knew her. So calm. And steady. So the opposite of me. I was all over the map and she always brought me home safely.

  I think that’s part of what I loved so much about her. I think I felt welcome to relax in her presence, because she had everything so under control.

  That’s a bit of a role reversal, I guess. But I don’t really care. I’m not hung up on gender stereotypes.

  Speaking of role reversals, here’s another one.

  I never told this to anybody before. Not for any special reason. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just not one of those things you talk about. It’s one of those things you just do.

  Lorrie was a very heavy sleeper, and she always slept straight through the night. I woke up at regular intervals, but even if I got up to go to the bathroom or get a glass of water or milk, it never woke her.

  So sometimes I used to lie with my head on her chest and listen to her heart beating. She always slept on her back, and the weight of my head never seemed to cause problems for her. So I would just listen.

  I’m not even really sure why. There was just something comforting about it.

  Now that I think about it, I don’t even think Lorrie knew I used to do that.

  Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is … What am I saying?

  I guess I’m saying I had a long-standing personal relationship with Lorrie’s heart.

  Does that help explain any of this? I hope so.

  Something has to.

  Much love,

  Richard

  PS: I was rereading our old emails today. And I realized I’d ducked a question. I didn’t do it on purpose, I don’t think. Oh, hell, of course I did. I just didn’t do it consciously. You asked me why I wasn’t off gazing into the eyes of that old woman in Tiburon. But then you told me about the photos, and that pulled me all off track. But I guess I wanted it to.