The Girl with More Than One Heart

by Geringer Bass, Laura;

  Be your own, it said.

  Was my Dad heart going to talk to me in riddles? Be your own. “I can’t!” I said.

  “You can’t what?” whispered Mom. “Briana, sit up, please!”

  “I can’t speak,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I can’t do the eulogy.”

  My mother nodded. “It’s okay if you don’t want to do it,” she said, but she looked disappointed. Grandpa Ben leaned over and patted my knee. He winked at me. I looked away. What would he say if he knew I had a Dad heart in my belly that talked to me?

  The rabbi began. “God, filled with mercy, may you illuminate like the brilliance of the skies the soul of our beloved, who has gone to his eternal place of rest. May you, who are the source of mercy, shelter him beneath your wings eternally and bind his soul among the living that he may rest in peace. Amen.”

  “Amen,” said my mother, bowing her head.

  My Dad heart was singing now. The words came out in the wrong order one by one like drops from a stuffed-up faucet. Black. Light. Night. Fly. It was an old Beatles song from The White Album, but it was all jumbled up. I had heard Dad sing it a million times.

  My father was not among the living. He couldn’t walk in the park or ride a bike or take me to a movie. He couldn’t sing “Blackbird.”

  He wouldn’t know if I did a eulogy or not.

  ESTRELLITA

  It was time for Mom to speak. She flushed, fingering her necklace, a string of beads. She looked short, shorter than usual. Mom talked about her first date with Dad. I waited for her to get to me. Me and Dad. No surprise, she got to Aaron first.

  “Aaron!” said Mom. “When Dad decided to teach you baseball, he had no idea what he was up against.” Aaron beamed angelically at Mom. There was scattered laughter. It was Dad who made jokes. Mom wasn’t funny.

  “Every Sunday for months your dad sang ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame’ and bought you a new bat and ball,” Mom continued. “‘Today, you’re a slugger,’ he’d say. ‘New bat. New ball. New hope.’ All those yellow bats are still around the house somewhere.”

  Take. Me. Out. Root. Root. Root, sang my Dad heart. It sounded like one of Dad’s old vinyl records, skipping . . .

  It’s baseball Sunday in Inwood Park. Dad is mine, not Aaron’s, but Mom says she can’t teach Aaron baseball. Why not? I ask.

  Dad is pitching. I’m the catcher. I paw the dirt with my sneaker, raising a puff of grit. I cough, half choking.

  Dad runs up to my brother and switches out his bat for another beginner’s bat just like it. He corrects Aaron’s grip and shows him the right stance. Bouncing on his toes, he backs up, raises one leg high, and holds the ball with both hands close to his mouth like he’s telling it a secret. He tosses it straight to Aaron.

  Aaron swings and misses.

  Strike one, I yell. I slam my fist into Dad’s old catcher’s mitt. My long hair is stuck to my sweaty neck. Dad holds his hand up for a time-out. He takes off his baseball cap and squats down, his hands on his knees, panting. Something is wrong. I walk toward Dad. He gets up, goes to the water fountain, wets his hair. He gives off a golden glow like marmalade.

  “Aaron!” said Mom, bringing me back. “Think of your father’s face as he pitched you those balls. It wasn’t about baseball. It was about how much he loved you.”

  I coughed, covering my mouth. I couldn’t stop. I was choking.

  Mom didn’t know where those Wiffle bats were but I did. They were still in the corner of my closet like a bunch of yellow flowers left over from a party that had been called off. Dad hadn’t bought them for me. Still, I couldn’t bear to throw a single one away.

  “And Briana!” said Mom. At last, she had gotten around to me. “Remember how your father loved his Estrellita.”

  I stopped coughing. My mouth felt dry, my tongue tasted like dust.

  Estrellita, called my Dad heart.

  “Don’t,” I whispered. Softly, it sang the Estrellita song. Little star. Can’t live. Without. Your love. Can’t live. Without.

  I heard the raspy sound of Mom crying. I plugged one ear with my finger.

  “What are you doing?” whispered Aaron. He imitated me, plugging his own ear.

  “Stop that!” whispered Grandpa Ben. He took Aaron’s finger out of his ear. “Your mother is talking. Listen.”

  Aaron threw me a look for getting him in trouble with Grandpa Ben.

  Weeping, Mom tugged at her beads. The string broke, and the beads bounced and rolled. The fat funeral ushers rushed forward, ducking their heads. Their bulging toad eyes looked for Mom’s beads. I waited for Mom to stop crying. I waited for her to say something else. About me and Dad.

  Mom clutched at her neck where the beads should have been. She shook her head. Tears streamed down her face. She thanked everyone for being there. She thanked the toads. The rabbi stepped forward for the closing prayer. I couldn’t believe it. Mom had summed up my life with Dad in one embarrassing word. Estrellita. It was private, Dad’s private name for me. How dare Mom say it in public in front of the pushmi-pullyu!

  “Beautiful” was another name Dad had called me. Couldn’t she have said that?

  BLUE

  That night, after everyone had gone home, Mom asked me to put Aaron to bed.

  “No, you,” said Aaron.

  Mom kissed him on the forehead. “Go with your sister, please, sweetheart,” she whispered.

  “My Dad heart is still there,” I said. “In my belly.”

  She sighed. “I told you, Briana, it’s just your pulse.”

  “It spoke to me. At the funeral.”

  A pearl button on Mom’s blouse had popped off. Her curly hair had gone frizzy. The color had left her face.

  “It sang ‘Blackbird.’ And ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame.’ And ‘Estrellita,’” I said. She squeezed my shoulder.

  “We’ll talk about it in the morning,” she said.

  I took Aaron’s hand. “G’night, Mom.”

  “Thank you, honey,” she said, turning away.

  I told Aaron to wait while I went to find a story to read to him. He propped his back against the wall and slid down to the floor. Resting his chin on his knees, his head drooped to the left. When he was tired or upset, he always drooped like that, as if his skull were heavier on that side. It made him look like a dandelion someone had stepped on but not quite crushed.

  Inside my room, I shut the door and leaned against it, my arms crossed over my chest. Through the door, I could hear Aaron humming to himself. It wasn’t a happy sound, but it wasn’t sad either. I breathed in blue.

  Everything in my room was blue—blue green, blue gray—like the sea: walls, rug, blinds, bedspread, sheets, pillows. Blue was my color.

  I scanned the tower of books on the window seat Dad had built for me. On the top were books I’d read more than once: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. To Kill a Mockingbird. The Member of the Wedding. On the bottom were books I had loved when I was Aaron’s age and a little older, the ones I knew I should give to him now that I was thirteen—The Tub People, Abel’s Island, My Father’s Dragon, The Moomins.

  I was too tired to look through them for something Aaron might like. I thought about asking him in to choose, but my room was off-limits, my safety zone.

  In the ratty wicker basket by my bed were my stuffed elephant and fuzzy lion and the other baby toys I’d saved: A plastic red clown with a pointy cap that squeaked when it rolled back and forth on a yellow ball. A wind-up dog with a rusty bell around its neck. And my favorite, a wool mitten puppet of a mama with a babushka carrying a baby with an identical babushka in her pocket.

  Standing there, surrounded by toys from Before Aaron, my Dad heart made a soothing sound like the rustle of leaves, like the wind in an endless stretch of sky, like the creak and sway of vines in my own hidden garden.

  Say goodbye.

  DUMPLINGS

  A few days after the funeral, Tina and Reena came over. The doorbell woke Mom from a nap. She napp
ed all the time now. Wearing her bathrobe and slippers, she let them in.

  “It’s so sweet of you both to come,” she said. I saw Tina take in Mom’s messy hair, her chipped nail polish. I saw her eyes rest on Mom’s blue slippers. A little white blob of stuffing had popped out of a hole on the left toe. I wished Mom had let me answer the door.

  In my room, Tina unwrapped some shrimp dumplings. I wasn’t hungry. To be polite, I took a few bites, half listening to the pushmi-pullyu plan Reena’s birthday party.

  The dumplings tasted rubbery. Like clams. Tina and Reena sounded like sparrows, cheeping. I couldn’t make out what they were saying. The cheeping got louder.

  My Dad heart pounded. Be your own, it said . . .

  I’m standing in Dad’s favorite Cape Cod clam joint. Before Aaron. There are no shady picnic tables left, so we pick one in the sun. Mom and Dad and me. We’re here for PJ’s famous chowder.

  The waitress winks at me. She knows I hate clams. My soup comes. I pick the clams out one by one. I line them up on my soggy napkin. It takes a long time.

  A row of sparrows perched on the roadside fence by our table bob their beaky heads, eyeing the little corpses by my bowl. My stomach does a flip-flop.

  I think I’m going to throw up, I say.

  We should go to some other place for lunch from now on, says Mom, looking disgusted. She’s right. No one who hates clams should have to sit through lunch at PJ’s.

  Never! I say.

  Dad beams at me. He loves PJ’s.

  “Maybe we should ask Neil to be the DJ at my party,” Reena was saying.

  Neil was short and skinny. At Halloween every year he dressed as a ghost with cutout holes in the sheet for his geeky black-framed glasses. He was legally blind without them. Last year he had surprised everyone by changing his costume and masquerading as an Apple motherboard. At lunch, Neil ate alone, listening to music on his iPhone. Sometimes he sat with Daisy and her artist friends. Peter thought he was going to be one of those new tech billionaires in a few years, like that guy who invented Tumblr and sold it to Yahoo.

  “Is it worth it?” asked Tina. “Do we really need a DJ?”

  “I know what you mean,” said Reena. She giggled. “He’s so . . .”

  “So . . .” Tina laughed.

  A week ago, I would have laughed, too. Tina, Reena, and Briana, always laughing. I frowned.

  “I like Neil,” I heard myself say. “He’d make an awesome DJ.”

  Reena stared at me. “Neil? You like Neil?” she said. “You think he’s awesome?”

  “He knows his music,” said Tina. “I’ll say that for him. But . . .” She rolled her eyes.

  “Are you coming back to school soon?” Reena asked.

  “Estrellita?” prodded Tina.

  I turned red. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Did your father really call you that?” asked Tina. “I never heard him say it.”

  “It was private,” I said.

  “Has Peter called you?” asked Tina. “Is that private, too?”

  I stood up. My Dad heart beat loudly.

  Be your own, it repeated.

  Tina reached for her cell phone, scrolling to check for messages.

  “Briana?” Mom called from the kitchen. “May I offer your friends some cookies?”

  “No thanks, Mom,” I shouted. “They’re just leaving.”

  Tina looked up, surprised. She looked at Reena and nodded.

  “Well, see you,” they said together, dumping the homework and a shopping bag stuffed with condolence cards onto my desk. They hurried from my room.

  I looked through the cards. Sorry for your loss. Miss you. Sending love. Come back soon . . .

  A printed program from Dad’s funeral fell out of the stack. What was it doing there? On the front was the photo Mom had picked, the one that looked like Dad never smiled. On the back was a small sketch in ink. It was a copy of the photo, except Dad was smiling! It wasn’t exactly like Dad’s smile, but it was pretty good. It was signed xoxo Daisy.

  CRAZY

  Peter came over the next day. After the Estrellita eulogy, at the end of the service when everyone was milling around, he had said, “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  He had called every day after that.

  We sat around the kitchen table. Aaron was watching cartoons in the living room. Mom was taking a nap in her room.

  “Hey, how’re you doing?” said Peter.

  I nodded toward my mother’s closed door. “Do you think my mom’s crazy?” I asked.

  “Depends what you mean by crazy,” he said. “My mom’s crazy, but she doesn’t hear voices or anything.”

  “I do,” I said. “I hear a voice.”

  “Ha ha,” he said, searching my face.

  I could have said, “No joke, I hear my dad’s voice.” I let it go. I wasn’t ready to tell Peter about my Dad heart. I had told Mom, and she thought it was my pulse. Peter would probably think so, too. Or he’d think I was crazy.

  “Tina was over yesterday. She thought my mom was nuts. I could tell.”

  “Tina,” said Peter. “Who cares what she thinks?”

  “I know,” I said, “but you should have seen the look on Tina’s face when Mom answered the door in her slippers.”

  “What’s wrong with her slippers?”

  “That’s not the point. She was in bed in the middle of the afternoon. Like now.”

  Peter stood up and paced around the room. “How come your mom doesn’t work anymore?” he asked.

  “So she can take care of Aaron,” I said. “She says he’s a full-time job. He’s my job now though.”

  “Your mom’s stuck,” said Peter, still pacing. I tried not to think what would happen to me and to Aaron if Mom stayed stuck.

  “Not exactly,” I said uneasily. “She’ll have to go to work again soon like your mom, but she hardly ever goes out anymore. She just sleeps.”

  Peter stopped pacing and stood there with his big hands on the back of my chair. I liked his hands there. For a second, I imagined them moving forward to my shoulders. They stayed where they were.

  “It sucks to be stuck,” he said.

  Find her, said my Dad heart . . .

  I’m on the beach in Cape Cod. Before Aaron. Mom jumps the waves in a white bathing cap. A ray of sunshine finds her head, making it shine. I watch from a safe spot onshore. I’m wearing a bathing cap, too, with droopy pink petals. Dad is up to his knees in the water, splashing, and clowning around. Brrr, he says, clutching his shoulders. There are no clouds in the sky. Flocks of sandpipers cast black shadows on the sand. I want to run into the surf, but I hold back. Mom faces a gigantic wave. It lifts her high, higher. She rises to the top, then scissor pirouettes and gives me a sharp salute. Holding her other arm above her head, she flashes a dazzling smile. The swell brings her closer. It breaks. She ducks her head under and pops up again, laughing. Through bright spray, she stands and reaches both hands out to me. I can’t take my eyes off her. Neither can Dad. She’s full of pearly light like one of her own green-eye miracles. Come! she calls.

  Peter was right. Mom was stuck. She wasn’t the green-eye-miracle Mom anymore.

  “My dad always said it’s not a bad thing to be stuck being human with a human brain to figure things out,” I said.

  “Your dad was cool,” said Peter, taking his hands off my chair.

  Peter’s father left when Peter was in third grade. No goodbyes. Peter sometimes said it would have been better if his father had died.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe my mom’s not crazy. Maybe she’s not stuck. Maybe she’s just figuring things out.”

  FOR NOW

  It had been more than a month since the funeral, and Mom didn’t act like she was figuring things out. All she wanted to do was sleep. She cooked and did laundry, but I had to take Aaron to school and to the playground after school. I had to give him a bath every night and get him ready for bed.

  “You’re thirteen, Briana,” Mom said.
“You can help out around here.”

  “Can’t Aunt Joanna come?” I asked. “Does it have to be me?”

  Aunt Joanna wasn’t really my aunt. She was one of Mom’s best friends. She phoned every few days, but Mom didn’t always pick up. Other friends called, too, but Mom wasn’t returning calls.

  “Yes,” she said. “It has to be you. For now,” she added. She wouldn’t tell me when now would end.

  That night, I chose the pajamas Grandpa Ben had given Aaron with the pattern of milky white clouds and cows floating through the sky. Aaron loved cows. His window-sill was crowded with them, little plastic ones.

  “I miss Dad,” he said, pushing his arms through the sleeves.

  “I do, too, Aaron. I miss him all the time.”

  “I don’t miss him all the time,” he said. “I miss him a lot.”

  I helped him with his pajama pants, one leg, then the other. He stared at his feet. “I want him to come home,” he said.

  “He would if he could.”

  “Maybe,” he said, wiggling his toes.

  “I know he would.”

  “You don’t know,” said Aaron. “You can’t ask him.”

  “I can,” I said. I don’t know why I said it.

  “You cannot!” He peered up at me, uncertain.

  “I have this extra heart,” I said. “My Dad heart. It talks to me. It sort of sounds like Dad.” I put my hands on my belly. “Dad,” I said. “Would you come home if you could?”

  I bent my head and pretended to listen. My Dad heart was silent. “It said yes,” I said after a moment.

  Aaron frowned. “Your Dad heart talks to you? Like Jiminy Cricket?” he said.

  I patted his pillow and turned down his fluffy blanket. Aaron reached out and put his hand on my belly. He thumped on it. “Dad’s in here?” he asked.

  “Not Dad,” I said. “My Dad heart.” I almost told him about how sometimes my Dad heart sang songs and brought me back to Before Aaron, but how could I talk to Aaron about Before Aaron? When it was just me and Dad. Me and Mom. When we were a happy family.