Kai’s father appears from the kitchen and hands me a glass of water. He seems uncomfortable. Anxious. It’s clear that he’s unsure about what to do. Call my parents? Drive me home? Dial 9-1-1? I sit up and try to pull myself together. I take a sip of the water, then set it on the coffee table. Stuffing my shaking hands into my jacket pockets, I focus on breathing normally.
“I’m okay,” I say, anticipating his question. “It’s just kind of emotional to meet you. To see the photos of . . . your son.”
I don’t believe in ghosts.
I note that there are moving boxes stacked near the right side of the room, some still open, some sealed with packing tape. And, near the door, several surfboards are propped against the wall. Seeing the orange one with black trim sends the world tilting again. It’s his. The one he carried with him every time I met him at the beach.
It’s Kai’s.
Dead is dead is dead is dead.
I need to get out of here. Now.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Kai’s father asks. “I mean . . . should we call someone? I’m concerned about you being all right to drive home.”
More drama for my parents. Another trip to the hospital. “Calling someone” is the last thing I need.
“I’m fine. Really,” I say. “I should go.” I stand up and try to look like I’m in control, when all I want to do is fall apart.
The next ten minutes are a blur. His name is Michael, he tells me. Michael Yamada. He gives me his number and asks for mine. He makes me promise to text as soon as I walk in my front door. I tell him again that I am fine.
I’m not fine, of course. But I can’t tell him the whole story. I can’t tell him why. He would never believe me. No one would believe me.
I don’t believe me.
I drive home in a daze, thinking about every impossible thing I just learned. Michael is Kai’s father. The same man I remember from the night of my transplant. The man I spotted on Divisadero Street. Ruby is Kai’s dog. The one I remember chasing balls in the sand. The one I remember diving into lavender on a hill above the ocean. Sarah Harris was Kai’s mother. She is the woman who dies in my dreams, the woman who lived at the address that Jane and I visited in Berkeley. Kai had her smile. And I know all this because, as unlikely as it might seem, some of his memories must have merged with mine.
This I can almost accept. This I can almost wrap my head around. This I have been already half believing for months. Every cell in your body contains your complete genetic code. Your DNA. The blueprint for what makes you you. Maybe habits, personality traits, even memories really can live on through a transplanted organ. It would explain why I remember Kai’s parents, why I inspire such a ridiculously joyful reaction in his dog, why I know the way to the places he has lived. Why I relive his death almost every single night. It doesn’t seem completely out of the realm of possibility that I have inherited some of Kai’s life along with his heart.
It’s the rest of the story that I can’t accept. That I can’t believe. If Kai is my donor, then how can I explain this entire summer? The surf lessons. All those times we met on the beach. How can I explain the living, breathing, flesh-and-blood Kai whose skin I touched, whose lips I kissed?
It’s not possible for someone to be alive and dead at the same time. Not possible at all.
Which means that ever since I met him, I have either been out of my mind, or everything I thought I knew — about life and death, about objective reality, about the nature of time and space and the agreed-upon, scientifically accepted laws of the physical universe — is completely, totally, and incredibly wrong.
I am never going to get out of bed again.
My bed is the only place that makes sense. The only place that is safe. If I try to get out, if I even try to dip a toe over the edge I will fall, fall, fall into a deep, bottomless black hole. Into nothing. Into oblivion. I will keep falling forever. But if I stay here, if I never leave, maybe things that make no sense at all will stop happening.
My mom has come into my room three times.
Four times.
Five.
Chloe, are you all right?
Chloe, what is wrong?
Chloe, answer me, damnit!
She called my dad at work. And the last time she was in here, she threatened to call 9-1-1. I knew that would mean having to go to the hospital. Having to get out of this bed. So I opened my eyes and told her the truth. That my heart was fine. My head was not. I wanted to be alone. I wanted to sleep. I would do whatever she wanted later if she just left me alone and let me sleep.
The blinds are twisted tight. I burrow under my blankets. I try to think as little as possible. So that I see nothing. Hear nothing. Feel nothing.
But my mind has other ideas. It won’t stop. Can’t stop. Waves. Tunnels. Heartbeats. Kai.
He was real.
He was not a ghost.
I don’t believe in ghosts.
I hear my mom moving around in the house, feel the light vibration of her footsteps. She’s on the phone, speaking in a voice so low and muffled that I can’t make out the words. I don’t need to. She is most certainly talking about me. Stressing out about me. Worrying. Unable to do her work.
I dig around in my nightstand drawer for the bottle of anti-anxiety pills that the doctor had prescribed when I came home from the hospital a few weeks ago — after whatever the fuck it was that happened with my heart. And with Kai.
His heart.
Our heart.
There are fifteen pills. Briefly, impulsively, I wonder what would happen if I swallowed them all. Would I fall asleep and never wake up? That seems kind of relaxing. I’m so exhausted. . . .
But even after everything that has happened, everything that’s making me question my own sanity, I don’t actually want to die. I just want to sleep. To give my thoughts a rest. So I swallow two of the pills and lie there, looking up at the ceiling until my eyelids get heavy, so heavy that I can’t possibly hold them up for even a millisecond longer, and then I am floating in a deep and dreamless sleep.
When I awake, my mom is sitting on the edge of my bed.
“Hey, sweetie,” she says. “You feeling better?”
“A little,” I say.
“Good.”
She climbs in bed just like she did at the hospital and puts her head on my extra pillow. We both lie like that for a bit, staring at the ceiling.
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”
I don’t know what’s going on. But I hate that I’m making my parents worry. Again. Maybe I can share at least a half-truth.
“I went to see my heart donor’s father.”
I can tell that she’s surprised by this and not sure how to respond. She doesn’t even know that I had reached out to Dr. Ahmadi about contacting my donor’s family in the first place, all those months ago.
“I see,” she says. “That must have been . . . Was it hard? I wish you’d told us, Chloe. Dad or I would have gone with you. You didn’t have to do it all alone.”
“I know. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. Anyway, it was hard. Really, really hard. And not at all what I expected.” Even this small confession makes me feel a little better. A little less like I’m about to explode from keeping everything bottled up.
My mom is quiet for a while, and I wonder what she’s thinking.
“I’ll never forget the first time I saw your heart,” she says finally. “We were doing an ultrasound a few weeks after I had a positive pregnancy test, and I was holding my breath. I don’t know if you know this, but we had a number of false alarms before we had you. Your dad and I had been trying for a long time.”
I didn’t know this.
“So this was pretty exciting stuff — getting to see you for the first time. But it wasn’t exactly what I expected. Ultrasounds are really fuzzy, and all we could see is what looked like a little bean beating there on the screen.” My mom smiles at the memory. “I laughed out loud, thinking how weird it was that this — I
don’t know what because you didn’t even look like anything resembling a baby yet — that this tiny beating pinto bean was my future child. That’s how we got your nickname, you know.”
“Little Bean” is what my parents used to call me, until one night at dinner when I told them that I was too old for them to call me that anymore. “It’s embarrassing,” I’d said.
My dad had protested: “Aw, c’mon, Little Bean, it’s a great nickname!”
But my mom got it. “You might have to remind me when I forget, but I’ll try,” she’d said. I didn’t have to remind her. She understood that just about everything embarrassed me when I was twelve. My dad, not so much.
She looks at me and pushes a coil of hair away from my forehead.
“When we found out about your heart defect and how sick you were last year, it seemed, somehow, like I had failed you. Was it my fault? I wondered. Like maybe I had eaten too much canned tuna when I was pregnant or was too forgetful about the prenatal vitamins. I couldn’t stop thinking about the half glass of Chardonnay I drank in my third trimester on your dad’s birthday.”
“Mom, what? That’s crazy.”
“I know it sounds ridiculous now, but that’s what I thought.”
Her eyes get that look like she’s about to cry.
“We were so relieved after the transplant — we are so relieved that you are still here with us — that I haven’t thought as much as I should about how strange it must be for you. How strange it must be that some other mother once waited to see the heart that’s now beating inside your chest. That your life is now connected to this person who you’ve never met, will never meet, but must wonder about all the time. Every day.”
Never met. Will never meet. I wish I could tell her the whole story. I want to tell her. But I know that if I try to talk to her about Kai, about everything that’s been going on since my transplant, it will only make her worry even more. About my head and my heart. So instead I just listen.
“I know you are trying to find your way back after this,” she continues. “And I know this whole experience has changed you. How could it not? It’s changed me too. I’m still finding my way back too. So is Dad. But things are going to be all right because we all have each other. Okay?”
“Okay,” I say.
But I feel a but coming on.
“We are going to find somebody for you to talk to, and I need you to agree to go.”
This is not a terrible idea. “I will,” I promise.
“And we also need to talk about the surfing.”
“Don’t make me quit,” I beg. Don’t make me quit. Don’t make me quit.
“It’s dangerous,” she says. “We have to run it by Dr. Ahmadi. Does this boy you are taking lessons from know about your heart?”
And just like that, the momentary release of telling my mom about meeting Michael Yamada is overtaken by my inability to make sense of anything else.
Very good question, Mom, I think. Probably not. Because he’s dead and his heart is my heart, which is not possible and why I am likely having a mental breakdown and haven’t been in the mood to get out of bed.
I hear the doorbell ring.
“We’ll talk more about this later,” my mom says, slipping out from under my covers. The bell rings again, longer this time. The ringer, whoever it is, must be holding it down.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she says as she heads to the door, “but I borrowed your phone to track down your friend Jane. It seemed like you’ve been missing her lately.”
Although I’m kind of embarrassed that my mom has called Jane, I’m also glad that Jane has actually showed up.
I get out of bed to find a sweatshirt. My feet sink into the shaggy purple rug. I do not fall into oblivion.
“Your mom is a total pain in the ass,” Jane says as she sweeps into my room. She flops onto my bed, acting like she hasn’t been ignoring me for weeks now. “She called me like six times. My parents can’t even remember my friends’ names.”
Maybe that’s true of her dad, but Jane’s mom, who I met over the summer, does, in fact, know my name.
I pull my sweatshirt on and sit at my desk.
“It’s good to see you too, Jane.”
“Oh, stop being so dramatic,” she says. “If I didn’t want to come, I wouldn’t have. What’s going on? Your mom said you are acting super weird and won’t come out of your room. I think she’s worried that you may be on drugs.” She squints at me. “Are you?”
“You mean aside from the pile of pills I have to take every day for basically the rest of my life? No.”
“Well, on the bright side, swallowing a few pills for the ‘rest of your life’ means that you’ll have one.”
“Jane,” I tell her. “Everything is messed up. I’m messed up.”
She sighs. “Everybody is messed up, Chloe. I don’t know why you think you’re so special.”
“Not ordinary messed up. Like seriously, maybe neurologically, messed up.” I take a deep breath. I have to tell somebody. I want to tell somebody. “I don’t think I have a firm grip on reality at the moment. I’m scared.”
“What are you talking about? What happened yesterday? Your mom said you seemed fine before she left in the morning and that you weren’t fine when she came home.”
So I tell her everything. About visiting Michael Yamada in Bolinas. About learning that his son’s heart is the one beating inside my chest. About finding out that Sarah Harris was my donor’s mom. About confirming that my donor died in a motorcycle crash. And about Michael showing me the photos of Kai.
Jane jolts up in my bed. “Wait a second, what? That can’t be possible. That’s not possible.”
“This is what I’m telling you!” I say. “I have been taking surf lessons from someone who doesn’t exist. From my dead heart donor. Or not taking surf lessons. Maybe I’m hallucinating, a schizophrenic, I don’t know what.”
Jane stares at me.
“Please don’t look at me like that,” I tell her. Now I’m thinking that I shouldn’t be saying anything about this to anyone, even Jane.
“No,” Jane says. “No. It’s a different guy. Maybe they look a little alike or something.”
“Jane, no, it was him. I know it was him.”
She’s quiet for a second, thinking, and then, “Can you ask his dad for a photo? Do you think he’d send you one?”
“I already have one. I asked him for it yesterday.”
After I’d confirmed with Michael that I got home safe, I had to ask him for proof. To be sure, again, that I hadn’t dreamed the whole thing up. Would you mind sending me a photo of your son? I asked.
He texted me back right away. Maybe it was his way of confirming I wasn’t a figment of his imagination either.
“Send it to me,” Jane says.
“Why?” I ask. “You never met him, right? Nobody I know has met him! You even thought I had made him up, remember?”
To me, the scariest thing possible is to have something wrong with your mind. With your ability to tell fact from fiction. Real from unreal.
“Chloe, just do it.” She leans over, picks up my phone from my nightstand and hands it to me. “You say nobody you know has met him, but what about Tyler? I can send it to him and ask if he knows him.”
Tyler. From the party in San Francisco. The one who called me out for taking his wave. Jane is now talking to me like an adult talks to a child, in a slow, careful voice. “Let’s just ask him. I’m telling you, they probably just look alike and you’re only thinking it’s the same guy because you are going through some shit right now. Which is totally understandable, all things considered. Okay?”
I want this to be true, so I unlock my phone and find the text from Michael Yamada. In the photo he sent, Kai is at a restaurant, next to his mom, looking a little embarrassed to have to pose behind a cupcake with a birthday candle on top, but smiling anyway. Their dimples match. Looking at it again, at his smile, at the tattoo peeking out below the sleeve of his T-shirt
, I’m more certain than ever that the Kai I met at the beach every Wednesday and the Kai in this photo are one and the same, but I move aside to show Jane anyway.
She stares at the photo for a minute. “You’re sure you’re not just getting faces mixed up in your head? I mean, maybe there really is something going on with your brain. Cognitively speaking. Like, I once heard about this thing called face blindness?”
“Maybe . . .” I answer weakly. I know she’s trying to help, but all of her attempts to apply logic to the situation are making me feel worse. Even though, if the tables were turned, this is exactly what I would do too. Jane and I are more alike than she thinks.
“Jane, I’m sorry about everything. About almost killing us on the bike, and I should have been looking out for you at that party, and all this time you’ve been dealing with all my . . . shit. I’m just . . . I’m sorry.”
Jane’s face softens.
“Thank you for saying that. Now send me that picture.”
I do as she says, and then she types out a message to Tyler: Do you know this guy?
A few minutes — to me, an eternity — later, her phone chirps. She holds up her screen so we both can see.
I don’t know him . . .
My stomach lurches. So it’s true that I can’t tell real from unreal. Fact from fiction. What is wrong with me?
But then something else appears on Jane’s screen.
Tyler is sending another text.
I’ve seen him, though. Serious shredder.
Where? Jane types.
At the Point. With your friend . . .
Chloe?
Yep. Chloe.
Jane’s face freezes, while my heart, Kai’s heart, our heart, begins to race. The blood vessels in my temples pulse so hard that I can barely put together a complete thought.
Now Jane is calling Tyler. She puts him on speaker.
“Hey, Jane . . .”
“Hey. So you’ve definitely seen the guy in that photo? Recently? You’re sure it’s him?”
Everything I Thought I Knew Page 19