The day that Kai and I first met was a Wednesday, of course. Partly sunny with a light offshore wind, the waves waist-high. I felt awkward in the wetsuit, unsure of what I was even supposed to wear underneath (Swimsuit? Nothing? I decided on swimsuit.). I was also starting to second-guess the surf-shop guy’s advice about the board I bought: maybe it was too large. As I sat on a log that had washed up on the beach and watched the waves, wondering what I had gotten myself into, a voice materialized behind me:
“Chloe?”
I turned toward it.
“Kai?”
Did the universes spinning around us give any indication, in that moment, that we were at the center of some kind of impossible cosmic crash?
If they did, we didn’t notice. I was thinking nice hair, maybe he was thinking cute freckles, or whatever you think when you lock eyes with someone for the first time and there’s something there, an attractive force you may not even be fully conscious of yet.
I remember him explaining the basics: board waxing, how to read the water to find the best path for the paddle out, how to spot riptides. First, we just practiced pop-ups for a while on the sand. I felt like an idiot doing this, especially once I started to sweat in my wetsuit. I didn’t want to sweat in front of this guy.
“How well can you swim?” he’d asked.
“I’m a great swimmer,” I lied.
We bodysurfed first, so I could get a feel for how to read and ride a wave.
Despite the water being so cold that it made me gasp at first, I found that I was a stronger swimmer than I had thought. I loved letting the waves sweep me to shore. Hearing the roar of the surf in my ears. For the first time since my transplant, I was having fun. Losing myself. I wasn’t thinking about hearts. Or summer school. Or hospitals. Or scars.
We made plans to meet again the next week.
As the summer progressed, Kai and I found each other every Wednesday on the same beach. Maybe, I think now, it was the only place we could meet. The only space in the cosmos where our realities had extraordinarily, miraculously intertwined. Sometimes he was there before me, waxing his board. Sometimes I would arrive early and sit in the cool sand, watching for him to walk out of the dunes. Every Wednesday, we paddled out together and floated on the surface of the water — sometimes so close we could almost touch, sometimes farther away, but always within sight of each other. A universe of two, of Chloe and Kai, took shape.
But it couldn’t last, could it? By crossing the boundaries that kept our realities apart, we were breaking the rules. Rebelling against the laws of physics. Even if we didn’t know it. I think back to that night when we’d texted in the moonlight, and how garbled the connection was when he’d tried to call. Maybe our texts found a way to cross universes when our voices couldn’t. Maybe I’ll never understand how it all happened.
Perhaps multiple universes can occupy the same physical space, but science insists that we should only be able to perceive one reality at a time. Otherwise, our existence would fall into chaos, wouldn’t it? There would be nothing certain to hang on to if every or turned into an and: right and left, up and down, live and die. How can you shape your own destiny if choices don’t have consequences? Because even in a multiverse where every probability is possible, in individual realities, some probabilities must cancel out others. And in this particular universe, if I live, Kai dies.
Ultimately, you can’t share the same heart.
Kai doesn’t have a grave that I can visit. There is no headstone inscribed with his date of birth and date of death. No place to lay flowers. After he died, his dad scattered his ashes in the waves.
A few weeks have passed since Tyler confirmed that he’d seen Kai and me, together, on the beach. Since I found out that the impossible was, somehow, possible. In that time, the copy of Sarah Harris’s death certificate arrived. I had completely forgotten I ordered it from the Alameda County records department. It didn’t tell me anything new, of course, but seeing the cause of death — lymphatic leukemia — written in black and white, and holding physical proof that she was not my donor, still shook me.
Jane and I are now official high school graduates. Once everything calmed down, my parents took us out to dinner, along with Jane’s mom, her stepdad, and the terror twins, who really aren’t so terrible. They’re squirmy and full of energy and exhausting, but they adore their big sister. I think she adores them too, even if she’s always threatening to lock them outside when they won’t leave us alone.
The two of us are on good behavior: instead of crashing parties and almost crashing motorcycles, we’ve been crashing in front of the TV at my house. My mom found me a therapist and, even though I can’t tell her everything, it’s helpful to be able to tell her some of it. Jane’s cooled it on the partying for now. I’m helping her work on a portfolio so that she can apply to art school.
I also accepted my admission invitation from UC Berkeley — after everything, it felt like the right choice — but I’m deferring for a year. I might spend some time traveling. Surf somewhere where the water is warm. Climb the Eiffel Tower. Ride the subway in Tokyo.
Kai’s heart, now mine, continues to beat.
Today, I get in my car, saying to myself that I just need motion. Speed. Wind rushing through open windows.
But I know where I’m going.
I head west, winding over golden hills and through valleys shadowed by tall, whispering trees. I turn off the Pacific Coast Highway at Bolinas. I drive under the canopy of eucalyptus trees along the lagoon, and make my way to the house that sits above the ocean.
I wonder if Kai’s dad is even still here. It looked like he was about to move when I had showed up several weeks ago.
But he answers the door. Well, Ruby answers it first by practically knocking it off its hinges and greeting me with her dog version of “You are my favorite person in the universe.”
Michael shakes his head. “Not one to call ahead, are you?” But this time, he doesn’t seem upset that I’m here.
“I was close by and I thought I’d just . . . I’m sorry. I probably should have texted you first.”
“It’s okay.” He opens the door.
“Are you leaving?” I ask as I step through the threshold. Inside, it’s even emptier than it was. Most of the boxes are gone. All that remains: the old sofa, piled with blankets and a pillow, and Kai’s board leaning against the wall like a ghost. The air smells of fresh paint.
“Yeah,” he says. “The house is going on the market next week.”
He doesn’t offer any more information than that, but perhaps he doesn’t want to live in a place that holds too many memories and too much sadness.
We both stand there for a moment, unsure of what to say. He is a quiet guy. Like Kai.
“I was just wondering,” I ask. “Those photos you showed me. Of . . . Kai?” I almost can’t speak his name. “Could you send me a few more?”
“Sure.” He nods. “Of course.”
Being in the same room with him now, several weeks removed from the shock of finding out his connection to Kai, I can’t stop studying his face. In some ways they look alike, and in some ways they don’t. While Kai and his mom shared a smile, and those dimples, he and his dad have the same jawline, same skin tone, and the same build — lean and surf-sculpted. Especially, I notice similarities in the way they move. I’ll bet anything that they looked most alike when they were in the water. When they launched their boards off the wall of a wave, defying gravity.
And as soon as that thought enters my mind, an idea — maybe mine, maybe Kai’s, maybe ours — bubbles up.
I nod toward the ocean, just like Kai would when he was signaling me to get a move on when the waves looked good.
“Want to go out?” I ask.
“Surfing?” Michael looks surprised. “You surf?”
“Yes,” I say.
He shakes his head and laughs in disbelief.
“You have your board?” he asks.
“It’s in my car. Y
ou just need to talk to my mom first, if you don’t mind.”
Dr. Ahmadi has cleared me for surfing as long as I go out with a partner who is experienced and knows to get help if I report any suspicious symptoms, like palpitations or shortness of breath. I also have to keep a portable defibrillator in my backpack. My mom has additional conditions: I need to call her with my exact GPS location before I paddle out, as well as the name and number of my surfing companion; and I need to confirm afterward that I have returned, safe, to the shore. It’s totally embarrassing but better than being forced to quit.
I was right about them looking most alike out here. Every move Michael makes is a mirror of Kai. It’s uncanny. The way he paddles cleanly through the water. The way he pops up in a single, graceful movement. The way he pivots the board — Kai’s board — as he moves across the face of a wave, keeping the ride going as long as he can, longer than seems possible, until he kicks out with ease and turns back toward the horizon to catch another.
I hold my own too, and afterward he tells me: “Someone taught you well.”
“Yes,” I say. “Someone did.”
As we walk back up the path to the house, Michael stops at the top of the bluff, the ocean continuing its ceaseless cycle of motion below us.
“He called me six times that night,” he says, looking out.
“The night he died?”
He’s quiet for a while, and then: “Yes. Six times. And I didn’t pick up. I knew Sarah was dying. I had gone to see her a few weeks before and it was . . . I thought I was prepared, but I wasn’t. She was so tiny, so frail. I didn’t want to believe it was her. Despite every shitty thing I did, every promise I didn’t keep, I still loved her.
“She asked me to look out for him.” That expression again. A grimace, as if he is in physical pain. “So when he called that night, I knew. I knew I should go to the hospital. I knew I should be there. It was way too much for him to shoulder alone. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t see her like that again. I didn’t know what to say to her, or to him. I froze.”
He grips Kai’s board, planted lengthwise at his feet, as if it’s the only thing keeping him upright. “And when I finally did pick up the phone, it was the police. You don’t know how much I have prayed that I could rewind and go back to make things right.”
Maybe not in this universe, I think. But perhaps in another, there are other chances for him, other choices. I can feel him wanting to bang his head against the hard wall of regret he must be staring at, tall enough to block out the sky and sun.
He looks at me. “This is why I didn’t want to meet you when you reached out. Because I wished — still wish — that that night had ended differently. If I had shown up when Kai needed me, he’d still be here. But then, maybe, you wouldn’t. I didn’t think I could face someone who would remind me of everything I had done wrong, someone who lives only because he died. You know what I mean?”
I nod, tears burning in my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I say, “for not respecting your wishes. For showing up here —”
“No, don’t be. I’m glad I got to meet you.” He pauses, then says, “I know this may sound strange, but I kind of feel his presence in you.”
It doesn’t sound strange at all. Not one little bit.
“I feel it too,” I say. If I could tell him how much, I would, but it’s all too weird, too unbelievable.
The shrubs to the side of the trail rustle and shake as Ruby bursts out, tail wagging. As we walk back to the house, I finally get up the nerve to ask: “Did you visit my room that night? The night I got his heart?”
He looks at me with a curious expression and then shakes his head. “No. I didn’t know where his heart was going after they . . . after they took it. Why do you ask?”
I can’t tell him exactly why I’m asking. That it confirms that he wasn’t crying in my room. He was crying over Kai. Yet somehow, I remember it.
“Sometimes I feel like I knew you even before we met,” I tell him, explaining as much as I can. “Is that weird?”
He gazes out at the ocean and then back at me.
“I’ve heard of weirder things.”
After I pack up my gear, I return to say goodbye to Michael. With his buzzed scalp and the neck tattoo, he’s not a cuddly kind of guy like my own dad. But I hug him anyway.
“Thank you,” I say again, catching him in a somewhat awkward embrace. He holds on tightly for a few seconds. Long enough to catch just a few beats of Kai’s heart.
“Take care of it,” he says, his voice caught on the words. “Don’t waste a minute of the rest of your life.”
“I won’t,” I promise.
It’s a promise I intend to keep.
As I turn to leave, Ruby does her thing, weaving in and out of my legs and licking my hand. Then she rolls over in front of the door, offering her white belly, yet again, for a scratch. I wonder if maybe she’s offering even more than that. This dog that chases balls and digs in the sand in my dreams.
In my memory.
In his memory.
It’s worth asking.
“Are you taking the dog?”
Kai’s dad looks at Ruby and shrugs. “I travel too much to have a dog but I can’t just leave her,” he says. “Not a lot of takers for a full-grown pit bull. Especially one with a scar.”
I’ve got nothing against scars.
I rub her belly and turn to Michael. “Well, you only need one taker.”
Ruby sits in the passenger seat and sticks her head out the window on our way back to my house, her ears flapping like flags in the wind. Before I left Bolinas, I texted my parents to let them know I was on my way home, and bringing a surprise.
I no longer die in my dreams every night. There’s no tunnel. No tree. No tires squealing on the pavement. Because now I know what happened. He died. I lived. In this universe, my universe, our orbits have moved out of alignment.
But every so often, I still catch a memory that I know is Kai’s. A story. A scent. A song. An excellent ride at some spot that I’ve never been to but plan to visit someday. I see it through his eyes. Feel it through his heart. Instead of being spooked, I now look forward to these flashes. I reach out for one of his life’s moments and hold it as long as I can.
It’s nothing I can control. Just like I can’t control the waves. Some days they cooperate. Some days they don’t. But that’s okay. Control is overrated, I guess. This is something I never understood before: Living, really living, demands that you give up on the belief that you’re always in the driver’s seat. You can do everything right, weigh every decision, mitigate every risk, and still nearly drop dead of a heart attack a few weeks after your seventeenth birthday. Or crash your motorcycle in a tunnel. Or get cancer. Or be sitting directly in the path of a flaming asteroid when it falls out of the sky. We are nothing but specks of dust that have settled, ever so briefly, on the vast expanse of everything. All it takes is a single cosmic breath to blow our way and we’re gone.
But still.
And yet.
We get up every day. We go to school. We eat. We drink. We surf. We fall in love. If we are lucky, we grasp every moment we’ve got with both hands. And who’s to say that the life here on this tiny planet, in this one of trillions of solar systems, in this galaxy among billions and billions of galaxies, in this universe that is one of multiple other universes that could go on and on and on into infinity — who’s to say that this is our only shot? Maybe we do get to do it again.
And again.
All at once.
Over and over.
On and on.
Fate. Chance. Luck.
A roll of the dice.
Four: I don’t get sick.
Six: I get a new heart.
Ten: Kai makes it out of that tunnel alive.
Is there a reality that allows us to meet under different circumstances? Where I don’t get sick and he doesn’t die, but somehow our paths cross anyway? Maybe. Perhaps there is a universe where, right now, right this very s
econd, we are standing in front of a stage, listening to that band he wanted to see. Kai is behind me, his arms are around my waist, his chin resting on the top of my head. So close that I can feel the beating of his heart. And he can feel the beating of mine.
I’ve always thought it kind of sucked that the best weather comes to the Bay Area when you have to be in school. Summer, in the city and along the coasts at least, is often foggy and cool. And most winter breaks, it rains. But the fall is always glorious, with each day more brilliant and sun-kissed than the next. Days that, when I was stuck in school, would taunt me through an open window. But on this perfect, seventy-degree, clear-blue-skies-as-far-as-the-eye-can-see day, I don’t have to be in school. I don’t have to be anywhere in particular.
So of course I’m going to check out the surf.
I pull into the parking lot at a new spot: Ocean Beach. It’s mid-October, almost one year to the day that I collapsed during track. One year since everything I thought I was sure about got shaken up, spun around, and put back in a different place.
I’m still going to college, but for now I am taking a break.
I have new friends, but I haven’t forgotten the old.
I have adopted a silver-gray pit bull terrier with a scar above her eye.
I am back to asking “Why?” all the time.
But I’m working on accepting that there isn’t always an answer for everything, no matter how hard I try to find it.
I have given up motorcycles.
But not surfing.
The water is sapphire-blue, glittering in the late-morning light. Ruby sniffs the sea air through the open car window and can hardly contain herself. She’s ready to burst out the back door.
“Your dog is drooling on my neck,” Jane complains.
“She only drools on people she really likes,” I say.
“Well, she must like everybody then,” Jane says. “Because she doesn’t seem very discriminating, if you ask me.”
Everything I Thought I Knew Page 21