Borrowed

by Lucia DiStefano

  “Okay, what’s your name?”

  “This isn’t funny. If you want me to go away, I will. But—”

  “Listen, sweetheart, I don’t know jack shit. If you can’t tell me your name, I’ll show you the fucking door.”

  He looks horrified. Or maybe that’s too strong a word. Maybe just devastated. “Daniel,” he finally says, his voice barely above a whisper.

  “Daniel. Thank you. I know this is weird for you. I’m only here because of a note in my pocket. And a key. And because my own family doesn’t recognize me. Worse, they swear I died.” I don’t know exactly at which point in my explanation the tears start, but by the time I reach died, they’ve overtaken me. I’m sobbing. I’m leaning against the messy, sickly-sweet-smelling counter.

  “Do you want to sit down?” he says softly, holding the back of a chair.

  I nod.

  I’m in the bathroom with the door shut and locked. My fingers are hooked in the neckline of my shirt. I’m ready to tug it down. Ready to confirm or reject all that Daniel told me.

  I complete the tug.

  I peer into the mirror. All I see under the bright pendant lights is Harper. Not the girl on the wall along the staircase. Harper. No scar.

  I’m flooded with so much relief I nearly have to sit down.

  So it’s a mistake. I can’t be her. Somehow, my scarless chest is a check mark in the things’ll-be-all-right column. Right?

  I whip my shirt off. I face the mirror again. Just me. A heart surgery scar wouldn’t be subtle, right? I reach for the shirt again and happen to catch something in my periphery. On me.

  Cold creeps into my fingers, cinches my neck like a scarf. There’s a ribbon of pink on my skin, on my sternum, traveling downward, nearly bisecting me. What the fuck? I claw at it. It’s there. It’s not ink. It’s part of my skin. It looks like … like … a scar. I stand in front of the mirror again. And when I look into the glass, the scar is gone. How? How is this possible? The lights are too hot. I’m clammy but overheating.

  Wait … there’s something else. Another kind of reversal. There’s something missing on me when I look at my body with my naked eyes, but when I look through the mirror, it’s there: the heart tattoo on my left hip.

  My head snaps back and forth between the mirrored me and the me I see unassisted, as if trying to catch some trickster in the act, and each time, it’s the same: my tattoo is all there in the mirror, is all gone when I turn and look down.

  I release my hair from its ponytail. I watch myself do it. My hands quake. In the mirror, my hair is dark. Walnut brown. Like always.

  But when I turn away from the mirror, and when I get a hank of it between my fingers, and when I draw it up to my line of sight … my hair is sandy-blond.

  How many not-possibles can one brain take in before shorting out? I collapse to the edge of the tub, a twist of pale hair in the palm of my hand, my forehead leaning against it. My heart keeps right on beating, my lungs keep right on sucking in air. What in God’s name is happening?

  I slip into my shirt to hide the nightmare I’m wearing on my flesh and go out to the kitchen to look for Daniel—so I can demand he explain it again as if this is all his fault—when the back door opens and two girls step inside. “There you are!” one says, the taller, prettier girl.

  “We’ve been texting you all day,” the shorter, less pretty (aka, not-so-pretty) one says.

  The pretty one’s gaze skitters to the mess on the counter. “Holy shit. Were you vandalized?”

  “Oh my God, what happened to your face?”

  “I can’t do this again.” I feel the stupid, useless tears threatening a comeback. They don’t fall, though. Maybe because I’m too woozy to spare them. Daniel walks into the kitchen.

  “Oh, hello,” the pretty girl says, I’m not sure to me or Daniel or the situation she believes she’s walked into. “We didn’t know you had … company.”

  “Aren’t you gonna introduce us?” the glasses-wearing girl asks me with a smirk.

  Both girls look at me expectantly.

  “Can’t,” I say, the room dimming. “I don’t know who the fuck you people are.”

  And then I fall to the floor.

  I wake up on the couch, a cool washcloth folded on my forehead. Daniel’s in the hideous recliner, the girls are on the sofa opposite it. The pretty girl is crying.

  “You told them?” I ask him.

  He nods.

  The one wearing glasses elbows her friend and hisses, “Alma, that’s not what she needs right now.”

  “So sue me!” Alma snaps, still crying. “I’m not a robot. She doesn’t even know us!”

  “She’s just forgotten.”

  “Julie,” Daniel says to four-eyes, “maybe you should tell Lin—um … her your theory.”

  “I wasn’t going to say this before,” Julie says to me, heaving a big breath, “when you were … uh … doing things that Linnea wouldn’t, but now I guess there’s no point not to.”

  I prop myself up on an elbow. The washcloth—monogrammed with a curly capital S—slides off my head and into my lap. “Spit it out.”

  “Cellular memory,” Julie says. With gravitas.

  “If that’s supposed to mean something, it doesn’t.”

  “Though it’s controversial,” she says without irony, as if she’s chatting it up for documentary cameras, “there’s quite a bit of anecdotal evidence. I mean, I’ve never heard of it being so dramatic, so complete, you know. Like a total eclipse of the original persona. Usually it’s partial. A thing here or there. A preference. A bunch of memories. An allergy.”

  “But what is it?”

  She pushes her glasses up high on the bridge of her nose. “The heart donor’s personality overrides the patient’s.”

  Daniel makes a sound in his throat. Stands up. Paces in front of the hideous recliner.

  “Okay.” I clear my throat. “If no one else is going to say it, I will. That’s fucking absurd.”

  “How do you explain that you look like Linnea to us, you’re in her house, and yet you think you’re somebody else?”

  Personalities aren’t planes. You can’t just hijack them. “Where are you getting this?”

  “My brother’s in med school. He’s talked about it before.”

  “We should call her mom,” Alma says.

  “Her mom would freak,” Daniel says.

  Julie eyes him suspiciously. “You’ve known Linnea for like fifteen minutes, how do you know that?”

  “She begged me not to call after she got stung by bees,” he says.

  I fall back against the cushions and throw the washcloth over my eyes.

  “So let’s ask your brother what to do,” Alma says to Julie.

  “This isn’t the kind of thing you do something about,” Julie says. “There aren’t smelling salts for it.”

  “What good is knowing about it then?” Alma balls up a tissue and tosses it onto the coffee table.

  “What she probably doesn’t need,” Daniel says, “is the two of you fighting about it.”

  “Fighting?” Alma says. “Who’s fighting?”

  Julie says, “Yeah. This is called concern. Maybe you should stay out of it.”

  I get up, start to head away from them. Daniel reaches out to grab my arm and questions me with his eyes.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Need to pee. The girl y’all are talking about pees occasionally, right?” Julie shoots me a look and goes on lecturing about bogus science. Nobody notices when I slip out the back.

  19

  MAXINE

  I lose count of how many times I have to circle the parking lot and loop through the underground garage before I find a cramped space next to a cement post. Mom’s car is bigger than mine, and I’ve misjudged the park—the door scrapes nastily when I open it. A woman in blue scrubs walks by and says, “Eesh.” There was a time when getting Mom’s car fixed before she noticed would be my problem of the year.

  Once the girl who swore she wa
s Harper—the piano-playing psycho who’d slept in Harper’s bed and groped Ezra—had taken off, he nailed the window with the broken latch shut. I had to talk him down from calling the cops and reporting my car stolen.

  “Let’s give her time to bring it back,” I said, not knowing exactly why, except maybe when someone calls you the nickname no one else ever used, not even your mother, you default to leniency. He asked me if I had any idea who she was or why she would play this cruel trick on us on the cruelest day of the year.

  “No idea,” I half-lied.

  My shadowy, flickery idea was too crazy to say out loud, and anyway, he doesn’t know about Harper’s heart (only Shelby does). I wasn’t about to choose today to tell him.

  Once Ezra reluctantly left for campus, I called Shelby and asked her to take the boys for a few days. That was harder than it sounds. I can’t shake the feeling that asking for help equals failing. Plus I feel more like myself with the boys around. Still, I don’t want them to be at the house if the girl comes back and tries to claim her room. Or them.

  When Shelby and I went to camp to pick them up, before I could surprise them with the news about a spring break slumber party at my friend’s, they surprised me.

  “Harper came back!” they said in stereo.

  “She looks totally different,” Race said breathlessly, “but it was her.”

  “I didn’t get to see her!” Will whined.

  “But she’s gonna come back,” Race said. “She promised.”

  Want a guaranteed way to turn a horrible day to hellish? Try explaining to your little brothers that their dead sister did not resurrect after all. That your family isn’t whole once more. That things won’t go right back to the way they were before the cops showed up at your front door.

  And to think I felt bad for her when Ezra clocked her. Now I wish my knuckles were the ones that had collided with her face.

  It takes a special kind of fortitude to not let the smell of a hospital drag you down, and I don’t have it today. In a fraction of the time it took me to find a parking space, I find out that the nurse I’m here to see moved to Tulsa last month. The nurse who convinced me forging some papers in order to save a life was courageous. The nurse I sought out six months ago when I thought the whole thing had been for nothing and she told me just the opposite, that my decision had saved a girl’s life. “But don’t ask me who she is, okay?” she added when I was about to ask exactly that. “That wouldn’t be good for anyone, Maxine.”

  The smell of cleaning solution and fear comes at me sharper as my devastation sinks in. “Is there something I can help you with?” the messenger nurse asks, head cocked, one hand on the receiver of a ringing phone. Her name tag says Tina, caring since 1997.

  “Cansomeonewithahearttransplant”—I gulp a big breath and then let all the rest of the words go on the exhale—“starttothinkthey’rethedonor?”

  She puts on a pair of glasses. The better to see me with. “Someone you know?”

  “Um … school assignment.” An orderly chauffeuring a weepy patient in a wheelchair passes by at a glacial pace.

  Tina waits for them to move past before speaking. “Young lady, a heart transplant is one of the most major surgeries there is, so someone who’s worried about complications should consult their doctor.”

  “It’s not me.” I’m five again, caught chocolate-handed after Harper discovered her birthday cake had been ransacked. “Really.”

  “Well, speaking hypothetically, which is the most I can do because we don’t dispense medical advice to people who aren’t patients, it’s highly unlikely.”

  “Oh. Okay.” I understand slamming doors when I hear them. I turn away.

  She lifts a hand to keep me there. “Have you met Florabelle?”

  “Who?”

  “In the gift shop. She sometimes talks to people about transplants. Unofficially, mind you.” She looks at me down the bridge of her nose, over the top of her glasses. “Not about anything you should be talking to your doctor about.”

  “It’s not for me,” I insist. I’m about to lower my shirt enough that she’ll see I don’t have a scar, but the phone rings. Tina, caring since 1997, snatches it up and waves goodbye to me.

  As much time as I’ve spent in this hospital, I’ve never been in the gift shop before.

  There’s a whole wall of stuffed animals in an array of sizes and species, some wearing sweaters saying Get Well Beary Soon! and I Love You Beary Much!, some clutching heart-shaped boxes of candy swaddled in cellophane, some gripping mini-Bibles despite wearing irreverent expressions. There’s a corner of prefilled restless Mylar balloons converging on the air vent in the ceiling, incrementally shifting and jostling each other like passengers in an overstuffed elevator. And there are two walls of flowers arranged like a bleachered stadium crowd, filling the air with a riot of scent instead of sound.

  A middle-aged black woman I guess to be Florabelle (judging by the flowers adorning her head, a cross between a headband and a tiara) is signing for a UPS delivery. The driver laughs at something she says. “I’ll remember that,” he says, all teeth. “See you tomorrow.”

  “Have a peaceful day,” she tells him.

  I feel itchy. Who says that? Peaceful? This isn’t where I want to be, not today. I start to back out.

  Florabelle lassoes me with her voice. “You look like you need help.”

  I blurt, “You know something about heart transplants?”

  She places one palm on her chest, raises the other in my direction. “‘There is a window from one heart to another,’” she says through a smile that makes her look younger than she did a minute ago.

  “Uh …”

  Florabelle smiles more broadly. “That’s Rumi.”

  “Oh, that’s pretty.”

  She gestures for me to come closer and her bracelets jangle. “My daughter had a heart transplant many years ago.” She smiles at me, waiting. I guess the tiara doesn’t allow her to read minds.

  “I … um … nurse Tina said I should see you. I’m wondering if someone who gets a heart transplant can start to have memories that belonged to the … you know, the person whose heart it was.” I swerve around the word donor like it’s roadkill.

  “You look tired,” she says.

  I have that complicated feeling in my chest, the one where you’re surprised someone zeroes in on something you thought you were hiding. I slump against the front counter, trusting it to hold me up.

  “Tired,” she repeats, “but healthy. You’re not the patient. Am I right?”

  The flower lady gets what the nurse didn’t. Life is like that sometimes. I nod.

  Florabelle moves to a tall stool behind the register and rearranges her long batik skirt so she can sit. “The heart holds secrets. Scientists think who we are comes from the brain, but I think there’s more to it.”

  “Can you forget who you were, though?”

  She blinks fast. “Come again?”

  I feel sheepish as I say it. “As in, you think you’re the person who the heart used to belong to, instead of the person you’ve always been.”

  Knitting her brow, she adjusts her crown of petals. She looks thoughtful, but confused. “I don’t think identity is a straight path to a known destination.”

  “What about memories? Can those stay with the heart? Even … even after … ?”

  Florabelle grabs scissors on the counter in front of her, gets busy snipping the stems of a bunch of red carnations. I hate carnations. Funeral flowers.

  “You came in here for answers,” she says. “But I’m afraid all I have are questions of my own.”

  “That’s okay.”

  She shakes her head. “You don’t have to pretend. It’s someone you love?”

  “Yes. She is … she was … my sister. She’s gone now. But someone else thinks …” My throat closes over the rest of the words. They pile up like pebbles in a tube.

  “Everybody’s different,” Florabelle says, “but my daughter used to hate can
taloupe. After the surgery she loved it, couldn’t get enough of it. So which was truer, that she hated it or that she loved it? And does the difference matter?”

  A dull throb knocks at my temples. I wonder if it’s from lack of caffeine or the strain of trying to track Florabelle.

  “Closer to what you’re getting at,” she says, “one time after the operation my girl got the strongest feeling of déjà vu when we were driving past the LBJ library, and I knew for a fact she’d never gone there. We had to go in. And she stood in the lobby, right beside that big ole black limousine, and she remembered being there when she was just a pipsqueak wanting to put handprints all over the shiny paint. Was it the same kind of déjà vu we all get from time to time, or was it her heart talking to her?”

  “‘Was’?” I say. “Does that mean it stopped happening to her at some point?”

  “She died.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  Florabelle speaks softly, but her affect doesn’t change. She’s careful, not somber. “Not everyone can make room for a new heart. And not every heart can be content in a new home. One in four patients die. My sweet Pamela made it ten months. But she knew she wouldn’t be long for this world. I was the one in denial.”

  I don’t know what to say. I sweep the cut stems into the palm of my hand, let them fall into the small trash can near my feet.

  “I’m Florabelle,” she says.

  I nod.

  “What’s your name?” she prompts.

  “Max,” I rasp.

  She smiles. “That’s a good strong name.”

  There’s that complicated feeling again, spreading through my chest like spilled paint.

  “I’m standing way out here on the shore, Max.” Her voice is round and soft. “And you’re the one in the water, but maybe, just maybe, your work is to accept that your sister is gone? That her life was precious, but that now it’s your life you need to be in?”

  I can’t stop the tears from welling; I open wide without blinking to try to keep them from spilling.

  She reaches under the counter, draws out a deep purple flower with petals like soft butterfly wings. “Iris,” she says, presenting me the single stem. “A symbol of hope.”