Second Hand Heart

by Hyde, Catherine Ryan

  Then Esther said, “Are you sure you’re not doing it to see if the heart man will come looking for you?”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” I said. “Definitely that, too.”

  When

  Later, when the sun was almost down, and I was sitting watching it out the window, Esther said, “Exactly when do you plan to do this thing?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. Because, frankly, it’s one of those things that sounds better in the very moment it bursts out of your mouth. “Definitely not today.”

  “Well, of course not today,” she said. “Today is more or less over.”

  “Probably not tomorrow, either.”

  “I see,” she said.

  And I could tell she did see. In fact, she probably saw way too much.

  Manzanar

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said,” Esther told me at breakfast.

  She had served me tea with milk and sugar, and I was sipping it. Wondering if, out in the world, somebody hands you tea with milk and sugar in the morning.

  Probably not. “Which thing?”

  One of the shoulders of her housedress was falling down, and I could see her bra strap, which was held in place by a little pink safety pin.

  The flesh around her neck and shoulders was all soft-looking and “ample.” That’s what my mother always says about Esther. She’s an ample woman. I think it’s a polite way to say fat. I think when you have watched every friend and relative you ever had starve to death, or nearly to death, while nearly starving to death yourself, ample starts to seem like the way to go.

  “About our extra life, and how it’s our duty not to waste it.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry if I made you feel bad. I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.”

  “Well, not so very bad,” she said. “If it was too late, then I would feel very bad. But I’m not dead yet. So it’s not too late. It’s late. But it’s not completely so late that nothing can be done.”

  “So … what are you going to do, Esther?”

  “I would like to go somewhere.”

  “Can I come with you?”

  “I was hoping you would. I need that you would. I am too old a woman to be traveling alone.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “Not every place, like you. You are young enough for every place. I’m thinking I had better stick to only one.”

  “Do you know which one yet?”

  She absent-mindedly pulled up the shoulder of her droopy dress.

  “Yes,” she said. More than firmly. Regally. As if she’d been thinking about it for a long time. A lot longer than just since last night. “Yes, I have always known where I should like to go if I were ever to decide to go somewhere. I would like to go to Manzanar.” A silence. Then two pieces of toast popped up from the toaster, and she gave one to me and kept one for herself. I watched her slather on a great deal of butter, then wipe the knife carefully on her napkin before dipping it in the jam. “Do you know what it is, this Manzanar?”

  “I think so,” I said. Looking at the toast and thinking I didn’t feel very hungry. Not that my lack of hunger was exactly breaking news. “I think I saw a movie about it once. Isn’t it that place where we sent all the American Japanese people during the World War?”

  “That is correct,” she said.

  “It’s an interment camp.”

  “Let us hope not,” she said. “To inter someone is to bury them.”

  “Oh. I always get that wrong. So what’s the word, then?”

  “An internment camp.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Funny how that one letter changes everything.”

  “Not so much,” she said. “It doesn’t change all that much. I’m sure plenty were buried there. Besides, that’s the wrong word, too. It was really not an internment camp. That’s just the way you say something when you want it to sound better than it really is. It was really a concentration camp.”

  I stared at my toast a bit longer. I was more sure than ever that I didn’t want to eat it. But I bit the edge of it to appear cooperative.

  “But they didn’t kill people there.”

  “Not as far as we know, no. I didn’t say it was a death camp. I said it was a concentration camp. When you round up a people and make them live all on top of one another you are concentrating them.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I guess that’s true. Are you sure that’s where you want to go?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Very sure.”

  “I was just thinking that if you were only going to go just the one place, then you would want it to be someplace really wonderful.”

  “Are there still innocent Japanese people being held prisoner here in this camp?”

  I think she knew there weren’t. She said it like she knew. Like she just wanted to hear me say it out loud.

  “No. They let all those poor people out a long time ago.”

  “Then it will be wonderful,” she said.

  • • •

  Just one thing, though. Just one little problem. Esther doesn’t drive and neither do I. So it’s going to be a bit of a challenge. Figuring out how to get us both to Manzanar.

  Victor

  “I was thinking I would call Victor,” Esther said. “And see if he would drive us on our trip.”

  “Victor who drives you to your doctor’s appointments?”

  “Yes, but I think he won’t.”

  “Why won’t he?”

  “Because I can’t really afford to pay him what a trip like that is worth. It will take six or seven hours each way. We will have to stay over one night. The money I pay him per hour, I could not afford to pay him that much. But I can ask.”

  I got a little sulky, then. And stayed sulky most of the day. But I didn’t say why.

  But I’m going to write down why, now, because I think that’s what this book is for: if Victor said yes, then Esther wouldn’t need me to go. She would have Victor.

  I hate being left out.

  Though you would think I’d be used to it by now.

  More About Victor

  “Victor will take us,” Esther told me later that day.

  “Us?” I said.

  “You don’t want to go?”

  “I do want to. But you don’t need me to. You have Victor. So you’re not traveling alone.”

  I think she caught on that I was feeling a little sulky. I don’t hide stuff like that very well. I think it’s part of that whole never-lying thing.

  “First of all,” she said, “you are always invited if you want to go. Second of all, I think I need you to go. I think you are the reason Victor will do it.”

  “How could I be the reason?”

  “You tell me,” Esther said. “I only know that at first he didn’t think he could. He was worried that his car would break down on such a long trip. And he didn’t want to take that much time away from his band.”

  “Victor has a band?” I asked. Knowing I was only helping us get off track. But then, that’s me. Isn’t it?

  “Apparently so. But then I mentioned that you would be coming along, and then right away he said he would trade cars with his mother and charge me only for the gas.”

  “Hmm,” I said.

  I’ve only met Victor once or twice, on the stairs. On his way up to get Esther for the doctor’s, or whatever. He seemed kind of odd to me. I didn’t pay very much attention.

  “Well. Then I guess I have to go.”

  It was all I could do not to smile a little. Because I really did want to go.

  Esther Mentioning My Mother

  Right around the time I said goodnight and told her I was going to bed (to couch, actually, as I think I’ve made it clear that Esther doesn’t have a second bed), Esther said, “I wrote a note to mail to your mother.”

  “Why would you do that, Esther?”

  “Because she is your mother. It’s a very sacred trust, that motherhood. Not that I know for myself, because I have no children. But I had a mother. So to that
extent I know. No matter how she handled that trust she was given, she still needs to know you are OK. So I told her you are OK. I told her I had heard from you. Which is true. I heard from you. Correct?”

  “Where did you say I was?”

  “I told her you had sent me a postcard from Independence, California. I thought that was very close to the truth. Because you will be in Independence, California so soon.”

  “Oh,” I said. Or if not “Oh,” then something very much like it.

  “We will leave the day after tomorrow,” she said.

  “Why not tomorrow?”

  “I thought it would be better to go on Wednesday because your mother will not be home. I know you don’t want to run into her on the stairs. And I don’t wish that she would know you have been staying here. Good God, I would never hear the end of it. So, Wednesday morning. That’s the day she goes to her missing-child support group.”

  A silence, while I counted the number of ways in which that last sentence was strange, surprising and pretty much all wrong.

  “My mother goes to a missing-child support group?”

  “So she says.”

  “Shouldn’t that pretty much be for mothers whose missing children are … you know … children?”

  “One would think, yes,” Esther said.

  “Do you think she lies and tells them I’m younger than I am? Or do you think she gets some kind of special exception because I’ve had to live like a child all these years?”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t know,” Esther said.

  I’m sure I wouldn’t know. That’s what she said. It sounds like the kind of thing a person says when they’re feeling a bit peeved. And I think she was. But not with me, I don’t think. I was sensing that second-guessing my mother was not her favorite hobby.

  I don’t like it much myself, but for me it’s been more of a career.

  “What if she goes running out to Independence to find me?”

  “If I mail it on the day we leave, then by the time she gets the note in the mail, we will be on our way back.”

  “Oh. OK.”

  “It seemed the only humane thing to do. To tell her you are OK.”

  I guess I wondered for a minute if I was being inhumane to my mother. Probably, huh? But it made my head hurt to think about it. So after a while I stopped.

  Even More About Victor

  Victor has a dog. He’s part German shepherd and part collie. Not Border collie like everybody has these days, but the real old-fashioned Lassie kind of collie. You can tell by the shape of his face, which is very narrow and long. But he looks something like a German shepherd, too.

  His name is Jax.

  Victor forgot to tell Esther that Jax was coming along.

  I guess he figured it went without saying. If you’re going away overnight, you have to take your dog. You can’t just leave him home alone all that time. I guess he thought, Why would anybody mind?

  Now from Esther’s point of view: people who have been in concentration camps tend to have issues with dogs. Maybe if they were Yorkies or chihuahuas, that might not be so bad. But a German shepherd can trigger issues.

  We were actually standing in front of Victor’s car before we got the news — in a purely visual way, that is — that Esther was going to have to share the trip with Jax. I mean, there he was, in the back seat. So it was pretty obvious.

  As if I might have been foolish enough to think things couldn’t get much worse, Victor held the back door of his car (well, OK, his mother’s car) open for Esther. You know. Thinking she was going to get in the back. With Jax.

  I guess when Victor drives Esther around, she sits in the back. And Jax sits at home.

  I can’t quite describe the look on Esther’s face. Victor missed it, because by then he was loading our overnight bags into the trunk.

  Esther hissed at me to quick get in the back, and I did. Jax kissed my ear.

  Then Victor came back around from the trunk and said, “Oh, no, I was going to have Vida sit up front with me.”

  “Then I hope the dog will fit in the trunk,” Esther said.

  Everybody just looked at everybody else for a long time. Even Jax was checking out all the faces. I think he caught a whiff of the unrest. Dogs are good at that.

  I always wanted a dog, but my mom thought I would get some kind of deadly germ from one. Which is stupid, because other people are like this hotbed of diseases, but there’s very little a person can get from a dog. One of my doctors even told her that, but she got it in her head that it would be dangerous, and I couldn’t knock it loose again.

  I think I know what happened to my mother. I think she opened up this mechanism for keeping me OK, and just couldn’t figure out how to shut it off. Like when you open a computer program, but then it hangs up and stops responding, and you can’t get out of it again.

  It’s very hard on the user. But in this case I’m not sure if that’s her or me.

  Both, I guess.

  But she is still my mother. Esther was right about that. So I’ve made up my mind I will send her a nice postcard from Independence. That way at least she won’t have to feel bad, thinking I sent a postcard to Esther but not to her.

  And I definitely want to send a postcard to Richard, too, because I think about him all the time and I want him to know.

  Wow. I really got a long way off the track there, didn’t I?

  Long story short. Esther sat up front. And Victor was not happy about it. I guess he was really looking forward to chatting with me the whole way. He tried to, anyway. At first. But I had to keep asking him to repeat what he said, because of the road noise and all. So after a while he just gave up and brooded.

  Every time I looked up I could see him looking at me in the rear-view mirror. I could see the back of his long black hair, which seemed kind of stringy and limp, and maybe even too black to be real. I was looking at it, thinking he must dye it black to look more punk. He was definitely the Goth type. I figured that out by his nose and eyebrow rings and his very heavy black lace-up boots, and the fact that he wore a black trench coat even in extra-hot weather. Making black the hair color of choice, I’m sure. But then I’d catch his eyes in the mirror, and they were black, too, or at least dark enough brown to pass, so then I decided maybe that was his natural color.

  He was so tall that his head literally pressed up against the headliner and lifted it up higher, which looked pretty uncomfortable. I wondered if his own car was better for a tall person. Probably so.

  Esther kept looking over her shoulder to convince herself that Jax was still lying down, and not just about to touch her or sniff her or something. She’d made me swear I would keep him away from her, and I’d made a solemn vow, but I guess that wasn’t enough to make her feel safe.

  It was shaping up to be a pretty interesting trip.

  About Real Mountains

  Moving cars put me to sleep. Always have, since I was a little kid. And I guess in that one way, I never outgrew being a little kid. Actually, according to my mother there are other ways, but most of them involve how I sleep. I sleep like a kid, I guess, which maybe is why she feels so free to treat me like one. But that doesn’t really seem fair to me, because I’m only asleep one-third of the time, and besides, she mostly treats me like a kid when I’m awake. I mean, so far as I know.

  Then again, if she treated me like a kid when I was asleep, I wouldn’t know.

  I think I’m getting off track again. What I’m trying to say is, I fell asleep.

  When I woke up, Jax was sleeping with his head in my lap, and I was sleeping all bent over sideways, with my head on his back. I straightened up and stretched, and I had a dog hair in my eye, and I really think I tweaked some muscles in my side, because they were acting up and sore for pretty much the whole trip, but I think I’d better be careful not to get too far off track again.

  When I looked out the window, I saw the mountains.

  I knew that Manzanar was really close to the mountains, and that
those mountains are called the Eastern Sierra Nevadas. What I didn’t know is that they would have snow on top of them in the summer. I didn’t think anything would have snow in the summer.

  I also didn’t know how beautiful they would be, and how they would be unlike any other mountains I had ever seen.

  We have mountains in the Bay Area. At least, I always thought we did. Now I think they’re just hills. The ones I know have grass and brush on them; they’re not sheer gray rock reaching up for ever with folds and seams full of snow. It was like looking at the Swiss Alps or something. Although I guess it goes without saying that I never saw the Swiss Alps. But this is kind of the way I imagined them, or maybe I saw a picture of them in a book or on the Internet. Or maybe I imagined them and saw a picture of them, both.

  I sucked in my breath, and I guess it was so loud you could hear it in the front seat, because Victor looked at me in the mirror. I could see his black eyes and the little earring in his pierced eyebrow, and some fresh red marks and old scars from his having bad skin. His eyes looked like they were wanting something, hoping real hard, and I wondered what he thought he was going to get from me.

  “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” he said, in his deep voice.

  And then Esther, who I guess did not hear me suck in my breath and had not known I was awake, whipped her head around to make sure that Jax wasn’t awake, too. He was, actually, but his head was still down on my lap. I was petting it.

  “Yeah,” I said. I’m not at my most articulate right after I just woke up.

  “Did Esther tell you I hiked Mount Whitney?”

  And I said, “Excuse me? What did you say?” Because, you know, the road noise and all.

  “Did Esther tell you I hiked Mount Whitney?” Louder this time.

  Esther never told me anything about Victor. Why would she? I didn’t even know him. He was just a guy I saw on the stairs if Esther had a doctor’s appointment. But I didn’t say that. It would have been mean.

  “No, I didn’t know. Is that near here?”