A shiver runs through the center of my chest as I steer the bike toward the Gilman Street exit. Left on Hopkins, right on Sacramento, and then left again at Frances. Even though I’m anxious about who or what I might find there — will it be the man from the hospital? — I have to follow through. I have to know.
Especially now.
Frances Street is a bit nicer than the busier streets nearby. It’s lined with mature trees and small but charming Craftsman-style houses. I spot it right away: nicely kept and painted robin’s-egg blue. As we pull up, I recognize the gravel drive, the purple hydrangeas, and white porch swing. In my mind’s eye, I see an olive tree in the backyard, and a silver-gray dog — the silver-gray dog — lying on a redbrick patio, next to a neglected garden bed. My head is humming.
I stop the bike and sit for a minute, staring at the house.
“Is this the right address?” Jane asks as she climbs off.
“Yeah,” I say, even before I see the number hanging above the doorbell. I pull off my helmet. But once I’m standing on the sidewalk, I feel frozen in place, not sure what to do next. “Jane,” I whisper. “I recognize this place.”
She looks at me with a curious expression. “You mean, like, you’ve been here before?”
“No,” I say. “I haven’t. And I’ve never ridden a motorcycle before today either.”
She nods slowly, looking a little unnerved. “Well, that’s interesting.”
For once, she doesn’t have much else to say.
I look at the house and then back at Jane. I’m afraid to knock on that front door. But I try to push back the fear and summon up my scientific side. The side that knows you have to collect data to learn anything. And that’s why I’m here, isn’t it? To get answers. About my donor. About my heart. About whatever the fuck is happening to me right now.
“I think I need to do this by myself,” I tell her.
“Sure,” Jane says. “I get it. I’ll be here if you need me, especially since I can’t go anywhere else without causing a major traffic incident.”
I hesitate for a few more seconds.
“You can do it,” she assures me.
“Okay, then.” I hand her my helmet. “Here goes.”
A guy with a baby attached to his chest opens the door as I walk up the steps.
Not the man from the hospital. The one with the tattoo.
“Hi,” he says. “Can I help you?” I’m not sure if he’d heard me coming up the walk or if they were already on their way out. The baby wears a sun hat and peers at me with big brown eyes.
A young dad. A baby.
I freeze again.
Oh, god.
Ten minutes ago, as I was racing across the bridge, I was so sure of myself. Sure that this is what I needed to do. And now, face-to-face with this man and this child, I start to wonder what the hell I was thinking. What if the heart belonged to his girlfriend or his wife? What if this man standing in front of me had lost his wife? What if this adorable baby chewing its drool-covered fist is now motherless? The two of them look like they’re ready to go on a walk. It’s a beautiful day. And here I am, about to drop a bomb on their front porch.
I recall Dr. Ahmadi’s words again: Your donor’s family has made it clear that they do not wish to be contacted.
My mind is reeling. What was I going to say, anyway? Now that I am standing here, I realize that I should have practiced. I should have come up with a plausible cover story. I don’t even have a name to ask about. I decide that rather than simply being selective about the details, I’m just going to lie if I have to. Lie about how I got the address. Lie about why I’m here and what I’m looking for.
I smile at the baby and try to calm myself down. “I’m so sorry to bother you, but I’m looking for the family of someone who may have lived here back in December. Someone who . . .” My voice trails off. But while I’m thinking of what else to say, I get yet another strong, almost certain feeling: these two are not my donor’s family. The house is so familiar, but this man and his child are not.
“Hmm,” he shakes his head. “You’re looking for someone who lived here in December? We moved in in February this year. I think it was vacant before then. Are you sure you’ve got the right address?”
I don’t know whether to be disappointed that he’s probably not going to be able to tell me anything useful or relieved that he’s not grieving my heart donor. But this house . . . I know this house.
Prove it, I tell myself. Gather data. Collect evidence.
“Is there an olive tree and redbrick patio in your backyard?” I ask, and then hold my breath, not sure if I’m hoping to be right or wrong.
“Yeah, there is.” He looks surprised that I know this. Not as surprised as I am.
No, more than surprised. Stunned. Completely freaked out.
There might not be a word in existence that describes how I’m feeling right now.
“I’m sure I have the right address,” I say.
“Well, we just rent here. My wife started a fellowship at Berkeley in the spring. Don’t know who was living here before us. Sorry.”
I catch the scent of an overgrown rosemary shrub near the porch and a feeling of déjà vu overwhelms me so strongly that I can hardly breathe.
I remember.
I remember brushing my hand across the rosemary as I climbed the porch steps, stirring up its piney scent. I remember wheeling a motorcycle from the small garage in the back. Pulling a vinyl record from a collection stacked inside the dining room’s built-in shelves. I remember the silver-gray dog sprawled on its back on the sofa. And I remember the woman — the one I think about, the one I dream about, the one whose image materializes in my brain like the ghost of someone I used to know — I remember her sitting at the kitchen table, coffee cup next to her and a book in her hand. Only this time, she’s not wearing a cap and her light-gold hair is tucked behind her ears.
There are also things that I know. I know that the porch swing creaks when you push it back too far, that you need a lighter to start the white Wedgewood stove in the kitchen, and that the backyard patio is cracked in one spot, but cool and quiet and the perfect place to kick back and look up at the sky through olive branches when you need to clear your head and think. I know.
I feel unsteady, unmoored, as though I might fall.
“Are you okay? You look a little pale,” says the man. “Sorry I can’t help.”
The baby squirms in the carrier, impatient for movement, new sights and sounds.
“I’m fine,” I say, suddenly having the urge to flee. You shouldn’t be here, I think. This is not your home. These are not your memories. This is too weird, too disorienting, too impossible. “Thanks anyway.”
But as I head back down the familiar stepping-stone path that led me to the front door, the man calls me back.
“Hang on a sec.”
The clock on the stove doesn’t work.
He pulls his phone out of his back pocket and looks up a number.
The spare key is hidden under a clay pot in the backyard.
“Our landlord. He may know where the people who lived here before us went. Feel free to give him a call.” He pulls up the number on his phone and holds it up so I can copy it down in mine.
“Thanks,” I say.
“No problem. I hope you find your friend.”
My friend. How funny that sounds. How strange. What do you call the person who gave you a heart?
I don’t know how many seconds, or even minutes, go by before I can recover. It’s Jane’s voice that brings me back to the present.
“Well?” She’s leaning on the bike, looking to anyone passing by like a person who knows exactly what she’s doing. Before we became friends, I would have thought so too. But the more I get to know Jane, the more I realize that her bravado is sometimes just a mask, one she wears so that she feels strong and invincible, even when she’s not. Not always, but sometimes. And it’s not just her. I put on my science-nerd mask when I’m thrown b
y something that I can’t explain. Emma puts on her “perfect daughter” one when she’s too afraid to say what she really thinks. It’s hard to live without them when you’re still trying to figure out who you really are.
I stop on the sidewalk in front of her.
“The people who live here now didn’t live here in December,” I say, still trying to collect my thoughts. “The old tenants moved out. I got the landlord’s number.”
“And you’re going to call, right?” she asks. “Today?”
“Yes,” I promise.
“Cool.” She hands me the helmet she’s been holding. “All right, Daughter of Anarchy, take me home. Or to a biker bar.”
I wait until later, when I’m home alone, to call. The landlord answers after four rings. This time, I do have a cover story. I tell him I’d sold an armoire to a person who lived in his rental house back in the fall and that I recently had found the key for it. I tell him that I lost the buyer’s phone number.
“Sarah Harris?” he asks.
“Yes, that’s right,” I say, trying to keep my voice calm and normal, even as the heart in my chest starts to thump. “Sarah. Do you happen to know how I can reach her?”
The line goes silent for a second, and then he says, “I’m sorry, but you can’t reach her. She didn’t move. She died.”
I pause, feeling like my entire circulatory system is pulsing in response.
She died.
“When?” I ask.
“December.”
Oh. I almost feel like I’m about to laugh. Or do something similarly inappropriate, because I’m thrown, even though I shouldn’t be. Sarah Harris is probably not going to be able to tell me more about my heart donor because in all likelihood she was my heart donor. I don’t know why I wasn’t expecting this as a possibility. I just assumed the tenant I was looking for would be a parent or a partner or spouse. Not the one. But of course this makes sense. The Frances Street house is, after all, the address that was in the file. My donor’s address. Maybe she lived alone.
“Did she . . . I mean, is there anyone I should follow up with about this key?”
The landlord is quiet again.
“Not that I know of. Not now. A friend of hers moved everything out. The whole thing . . . very tragic.”
“Do you happen to have her —?”
But he interrupts me before I can finish. “I’m sorry. I don’t feel very good sharing personal information about a tenant. You understand. I wouldn’t worry about the key. The armoire is gone.”
And before I can ask any more questions, he hangs up.
After the call, I can’t turn off my spinning brain.
Sarah Harris.
Of course. She’s the woman in my head. The one I remember. It’s her. It has to be her. I remember her dying. I remember her living too. Smiling. Crying. Laughing. Sitting at the kitchen table. Standing on a beach. Driving in a car with the window down, hair flying. Lying in a hospital bed. How could I not have realized? The answer was right there in my head all along, waiting for me to connect the dots, waiting for me to solve for x to figure it out. These memories are Sarah Harris’s memories. This heart was Sarah Harris’s heart.
I call Jane and tell her that we have to go back to the records, because now I have a name.
“From the landlord?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “Sarah Harris. She was the previous tenant. And Jane . . . she’s gone. She died.”
“You think she’s your heart donor?”
“Yeah,” I say. “She must be, right? But I guess the only way to know for sure is to go back to the records. Now that we have her name, we can look her up.”
“Ah, goddamnit,” Jane says. “I can’t tomorrow. I’m at my dad’s this weekend. And my mom is going to be around the house early in the week. We need her computer to get into the hospital’s network. Maybe Thursday night? I’m supposed to be watching the twins, but as long as I let them on the Xbox, they won’t bother us.”
“Okay,” I say, but I’m ready to jump out of my skin. Thursday is six days away, and even though I feel that Sarah Harris must be my donor, my head still needs confirmation — proof — of what I’m feeling in my heart.
What makes us who we are? Do we actually have souls that exist apart from our flesh, blood, and bones? Or are our personalities determined by the cells that surge through our bodies and the codes embedded in our DNA? Where do our thoughts and memories fit in?
I think of all the bits and pieces of my existence that I have stored up over seventeen years. The things I’ve learned. The names and faces of the people I love. The feel of sand sifting through my fingers. The smell of the warm, freshly laundered sheets my mom used to dump over my head when I was little. My dad cooking pancakes and bacon on Saturday mornings. Running. Laughing so hard while sitting at Emma’s kitchen table that milk exploded out of my nose. The first time I saw snow. Where does all that go when we die? All of my memories, all the things I believe and know, all the colors that I’ve seen, all the voices and music and words that I’ve heard, the textures that I have touched, will they still exist somewhere out there in the cosmos? Will they continue to drift through time and space? Like waves?
I pull off the shirt I just put on five minutes ago and toss it on the floor. As I root through my closet for another, I decide that I hate every single item of clothing I own. I want something different. Something that will make me feel less . . . annoyed. Less unsettled. Less like this person caught in some weird limbo-land where nothing about me feels quite right. A new wardrobe. Maybe that will do the trick. I could get a cool haircut like Jane, put on a fabulous new outfit, and maybe everything will be better, like on one of those makeover shows on TV.
What would Sarah Harris wear? I say to the me who looks back from the closet door mirror.
Are her memories the ones that won’t stop living in my head? The tunnel. The hospital. The dog. Did she ride a motorcycle? Did she know the man who visited my room after my transplant? How old was she? I Googled her last night but didn’t come up with much. All the Facebook and Instagram profiles I found for “Sarah Harris” were for people who are currently active. So, unless she’s posting updates from the afterworld, they’re not hers. I also tried a number of different spelling combinations, all of which yielded similar results. It’s like she was a ghost, even when she was alive.
There is one more thing I can do on Monday: request a death certificate. Provided I’m spelling her name right, the Alameda County records department should have one on file, which would confirm the specific date and cause of her death. But, according to the county website, this will take at least a week.
In the meantime, I have five more days until I can get back into the medical records system with Jane. Five long days, which makes me wish that I could surf this weekend. I wish I could paddle out into the ocean and forget about my donor’s heart, my donor’s life, my donor’s death. For a little while, at least. But my parents are around all weekend, and they still have no idea that I’ve been spending so much of my time this summer getting pummeled by ocean waves. And after the tattoo and forgetting to take my pills the night I stayed in the city with Jane, I don’t think now is a good time to tell them. I have a movie date with Emma, anyway. This Saturday is her last in town before she drives across the country to move in to her dorm at Brown. We will go to dinner at the restaurant that’s been our favorite since we were twelve — the one with a menu the size of a book. It’s the place where we always used to celebrate our birthdays. Now it’s just where we go, even if the food doesn’t seem quite as fancy as it once did.
I pick Emma up in my car. She jumps quickly into the passenger seat and seems more relaxed than she did the last time I saw her, at her graduation party. Maybe it’s because she’s about to put a few thousand miles between her and her mom.
“I can’t believe it,” she says, letting out a sigh of relief. “There’s actually nothing left for me to do.”
“Oh, come on,” I say as I pu
ll away from the curb. “Surely there’s something you’ve forgotten to pick up at The Container Store.”
“Oh my God, Mia won’t stop talking about her drawer organizers.”
“Well, life is hardly worth living without well-organized drawers. You don’t want to waste any time searching for clean underwear.”
She laughs. “God help Alexis.”
“Are you excited for your trip?” I ask. “Where are you and Lily going to stop?”
Emma is going to spend a few weeks driving cross-country with Lily Kim, who is also going to a school on the East Coast, before freshman orientation starts.
“I don’t even know yet!” says Emma. “We’re just going to wing it.”
“Whoa,” I say. “I figured your mom would have required your daily itinerary.”
“Ha ha,” says Emma. “Well, I reminded her that adventurous travel is the perfect opportunity to build ‘grit,’ a trait essential to entrepreneurship.”
“Good one,” I tell her.
“Believe it or not, I’ve never seen the Grand Canyon,” says Emma. “Or maybe we’ll go to New Orleans.”
“The perfect spot for the Vampire Princess!”
“Oh my God, that reminds me: my mom almost threw her out last week. She’s into this purging our clutter kick right now, even though, well, you’ve seen my house. There’s really no clutter. Can you believe it?”
“Yes.” I laugh.
She grins. “I managed to rescue her from the curb, thankfully. She’s in the trunk of my car.”
“Excellent,” I say. “Very bad luck to leave her behind.”
“She’ll be our mascot for the road trip,” Emma says.
I feel a twinge of jealousy when Emma says this. Our means Emma and Lily. Not Emma and me. But hopefully the princess carries a little piece of our friendship with her.
The rest of the night is pretty mellow. We haven’t seen much of each other this summer and don’t have a lot to talk about. We both seem grateful for the movie so we don’t have to.
I still feel really sad though. We’ve imagined going away to college for what seems like forever, and now it’s really happening. For Emma. It’s weird to think of her and all the kids that I’ve spent the last eight, ten, even twelve years of my life with heading off in separate directions. While I remain, the only one standing still.
Everything I Thought I Knew Page 11