Things We Know by Heart

by Jessi Kirby

  “At the hospital? That nurse? She told you where I live? I . . . you . . .”

  Can’t be here.

  I stop myself, realizing that he’s no more guilty than I was for searching him out. I don’t know what to do with the way seeing him again makes my face go hot and my legs feel shaky. I cross my arms over my chest, suddenly too aware that I’m still in my pajamas. Look down, away from him, at the toenails I haven’t bothered to polish in forever.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, bending a little to catch my eyes. “I’m really sorry to just show up like this. It’s not—it’s not something I would normally do. I just . . .” He looks at me like he did in the café, and it lets loose a flutter that starts deep in my chest and spreads out over the rest of me in an instant.

  “Yesterday was . . . you were . . .” He frowns. Clears his throat and looks at the ground, my house, the sky. Finally, he looks at me. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I just . . .” He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “I just wanted to see you again.”

  Before I can respond, he takes his hand from behind his back. Holds it out to me. And I break, into a million invisible pieces.

  He looks from me to the sunflower in his hand and back again. “Um . . .”

  I can’t answer. I can’t even breathe. My eyes burn, and the ground feels unsteady beneath me. I look at him standing there on my doorstep, a single sunflower in his hand, and all I can see is a flash of Trent. It’s too much. All this is too much. I shake my head like I can make it go away.

  “I . . . no. I can’t. I’m sorry.” I take a step back, start to close the door, but his voice stops me.

  “Wait,” he says, looking confused. “I’m sorry. That was— I didn’t really think this through, I just . . . really liked meeting you yesterday, and I thought maybe . . .”

  His shoulders sag, and he looks lost in a way that makes me want him to finish his sentence.

  “What?” I whisper. I open the door a fraction more. “What did you think?”

  He doesn’t answer right away, and I don’t move from the doorway.

  “I don’t know what I thought,” he says finally. “I just wanted to know you better, that’s all.” The hand holding the sunflower drops to his side. “I should go.” He bends and lays the flower on the doorstep, at my feet. “It was good to meet you, Quinn. I’m glad you’re okay.”

  I don’t say anything.

  He nods like I did, then turns and walks slowly down the front steps, away. I look at the sunflower lying there on the doorstep. Colton walks across the driveway to his bus, and I know that if he leaves now, he won’t come back and that will be the end of it. That should be the end of it. Only, in this moment, I don’t want it to be.

  My heart pounds louder in my ears with each step he takes, but when he reaches for his door, the only sound I hear is my own voice.

  “Wait!”

  The word surprises us both.

  Colton freezes, and there’s a second before he turns around, when I worry I’ve made a terrible mistake. That I’ve crossed a line not only with him, but with Trent too. It’s not until he turns and looks at me with those soulful eyes that I realize I’m already standing on the other side of it.

  “Wait,” I say again, softer this time.

  I don’t have to say another word, which is good, because I’m still so shocked at myself I can’t. Colton crosses the yard and is back up the porch steps quickly, but cautiously, like he doesn’t want to frighten me off again. He stops in front of me, one step down, so we’re eye to eye. Waits for me to say something more.

  My mind races. What am I doing, what am I doing, what am I doing?

  “What about . . . what about your bus?” I stammer. “How do I . . . I need to take care of it, or pay for it, or . . . something?”

  He shakes his head, smiles. “No you don’t. It’s nothing.”

  “It’s not nothing, it’s . . .” I fumble for the right words, for any words, really. “I have to make it up to you somehow—for your bus.”

  What am I doing?

  He turns slowly back around so he’s facing me. “You don’t need to make anything up to me,” he says. “That’s not why I came here.” He shrugs and gives a little half smile. “I liked hanging out with you. So if anything, maybe just come say hi next time you’re back in Shelter Cove. How ’bout that? Sometime?”

  It’s an invitation, but he seems to know it offers me a graceful out, if that’s what I’m looking for, and the understanding of this small gesture touches me. I feel my eyes drift to his chest, and my own squeezes tight.

  “Okay,” I say finally. “I will—sometime.”

  A slow smile spreads over his face. “Sometime, then. You know where to find me, right?”

  I nod, and we stand there like that with the sun beating down and the heat of the day already rising all around us. After a moment he turns to go, and this time I don’t stop him. I watch as he walks to his bus and gets in. He waves, then backs down the driveway, and I stand there on the porch. A breeze rolls softly over my skin, bringing with it the scent of the jasmine and a delicate rush of something else. Hope, maybe. Or possibility. I wait until he turns onto the road and disappears to look down again at the sunflower. This time it looks different somehow—less like a painful reminder and more like a sign, maybe that Trent would understand.

  This is what I tell myself as I bend to pick it up. And when I think, Yes, I know where to find him.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Approximately 3,000 people in the United States are on the waiting list for a heart transplant on any given day. About 2,000 donor hearts are available each year. Patients who are eligible for a heart transplant are added to a waiting list for a donor heart. This waiting list is part of a national allocation system for donor organs. The Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) runs this program. OPTN has policies in place to make sure donor hearts are given out fairly. These policies are based on urgency of need, available organs, and the location of the patient who is receiving the heart (the recipient).”

  —National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute

  COLTON’S WORDS FLOAT around me in my room as I sit in front of my computer, staring at the very first blog post I read about him. They echo, just like another set of words did, before I knew where to find him: male, 19, California.

  Trent’s family had only been given the most basic information about the recipients of his organs, and those three things were all that they knew about the recipient of his heart. That’s all I knew when I wrote to him. And later, that’s what I held on to when he didn’t write me back. When I wanted to know where to find him, because I needed to know more about him.

  A series of words, separated by commas, typed into a search box: male, 19, CA. I added heart transplant and got 4.7 million results in 0.88 seconds. Results I could sort by date and relevancy, narrow even further by geographic location, and still came up with endless links to follow, pieces that might or might not even have belonged to the same puzzle. I followed them all night after night, turning the pieces in the pale glow of my computer, until I found the ones that seemed to fit.

  There are twelve transplant centers in California, but there was only one that had performed a heart transplant on the day Trent died. I’d found it in a blog post, written by a girl who was incredibly scared but who was trying to remain hopeful about her younger brother, who had been in the ICU there. He’d already been put on an artificial heart, but he was growing weaker every day as he waited for a new one.

  I’d look at the picture on his sister’s blog post, of Colton and his tired smile, flashing a thumbs-up for the camera as his parents and sister surrounded him that day, teary eyed and smiling. His sister wrote that, in this photo, they’d just heard the news that a suitable heart had been found and that, according to all the tests, it was a perfect match. This must have been about the same time when, miles away, Trent’s heart was being removed from his chest as our families held ea
ch other in the waiting room, shedding tears of a wholly different kind.

  The minute a heart is harvested from a donor, the clock starts, and doctors are in a race against time to get it to its recipient. The heart is sealed in a plastic bag filled with sterile solution, then surrounded by ice for transport, most often by helicopter. Trent’s had been. And as it was flown to the transplant center, Colton was prepped for surgery. His family prayed, and they asked their friends to do the same, and what was life or death for them went on as a standard procedure for the doctors performing it. Just a few hours after Trent’s heart had been removed from his chest, it was sewn into Colton’s. Blood vessels were reconnected, and when the heart was infused with Colton’s blood, it started to beat again on its own. Just as my world went completely still.

  I scroll down, over words I’ve read so many times I could recite them from memory, to the next picture of Colton, taken just after he woke up from the surgery. He’s lying on his back in the hospital bed, the ends of a stethoscope in his ears, the flat circle of it pressed to his chest by someone else’s hand. Listening to his new heart beat.

  It was hard for me to look at that picture the first time I saw it, so many months after Trent’s death—hard not to feel the sharp pang of loss all over again. But it was impossible not to be moved by what I saw captured in that photo, and the raw emotion on Colton Thomas’s face. It made me want to know him. And after months without any reply to my letter, it was through his sister’s words and pictures that I started to.

  I went through all of Shelby’s posts and, with them, constructed parallel time lines. On the day we buried Trent, Colton had the first biopsy of his new heart and showed no signs of rejection. Nine days later, he was strong enough to walk out of the hospital and return home with his family, and I was too weak to attend the last day of my junior year without Trent. I spent the summer, and then my senior year, suspended in a haze of grief. Colton spent that time getting stronger, impressing doctors with his progress. Healing. I didn’t know it at the time, but months after Trent’s death, when I wrote my anonymous letter to the anonymous male, 19, from California, he was doing everything in his power to move forward and move on. And then yesterday I decided I needed to see him to do the same.

  Now I don’t know what comes next.

  I scroll back up to the most recent post on Shelby’s blog, written weeks ago, on day 365. The anniversary of Trent’s death, and of Colton’s second chance at life. The beginning point of our parallel time lines. I brought them together yesterday, though that should be the end of it. There shouldn’t be any “sometime.” But then I think of him standing there on the porch smiling at me, with the sun shining down on us like an invitation, and regardless of what it should be, it doesn’t feel like the end.

  A knock on the door interrupts the thought before it can go any further. I recognize the quick, staccato raps, and I know it’s Gran. I also know she’ll only knock once more before she uses her key to let herself in and starts up the stairs to see why I haven’t answered. She’s surprisingly fast for an eighty-year-old, so I snap my laptop shut, finger-comb my hair, and get up from my desk just as I hear the second knock. I cross the room quickly, but the sight of Colton’s flower on my dresser stops me for a moment. It lies right beneath the picture of me and Trent, and the now-crumbling flower he gave me that first day.

  My eyes go straight to him, and his smile freezes me there. I tense reflexively, wait for the familiar tightness in my chest to come. But it doesn’t. I glance down at the new flower again. “Was this you?” I whisper.

  Though I know it’s not possible, I almost expect an answer this time. But just like all the other times, the only thing I hear in the silence around me is the beating of my own heart. An undeniable reminder of a once-unfathomable truth: that I am still here even though he’s not.

  “Well, look at you,” Gran says, taking off her Jackie O sunglasses when I get to the top of the stairs.

  “Look at you,” I answer with a smile.

  She holds out her arms and does a little spin. “Everyone always does, doll.”

  They have good reason to, especially today. Gran’s dressed in her red and purple “full regalia,” as she and her Red Hat Society ladies call it. Her feisty group of “women of a certain age” proudly wear clashing combinations as a symbol of the fact that they’re old enough not to care. The glitzier the better. And Gran was born glitzy. Today she has chosen purple leggings with a matching flowing top, a red feather boa, and her signature wide-brimmed red hat with a tall plume of purple feathers that continue to float and bob in the air above her even after she stops moving.

  When I get to the bottom of the stairs, she spreads out her arms and envelops me in a hug of feathers and her familiar Gran scent of Estée Lauder, Pond’s cold cream, and peppermint Lifesavers. I breathe it in and hug her right back before she pulls away and takes a good, long look at me.

  “How are you?” she asks, turning my chin from side to side. “Something is different here. . . .”

  My hand goes to the three stitches in my lip, and she waves her hand dismissively. “No, not that. That just makes your lip seem full and pouty.” She angles my chin once more, turning it to one side and then the other, and I hold my breath. Gran has a way of looking at you that feels like she’s actually looking into you, and today it makes me nervous about what she might see.

  “I dunno,” she says finally, dropping her hand. I exhale. “You look good today. Good enough you should’ve made it to brunch with me and the girls.”

  I smile at this. “The girls” who make up her chapter of the Red Hat Society are all seventy plus, but you really would never know it. They’re a rowdy bunch. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I was pretty tired after yesterday.”

  Gran gives a quick nod. “Well. I’m glad you’re up and about. We’ve got work to do. Brownies. Twenty-five dozen of ’em for our booth at the fair.”

  “Wow.”

  “Wow is right. Now come help me with the groceries.”

  We unload the car, Gran dons her red apron as I preheat the oven, and then the two of us get down to the business of baking. It’s one of my favorite ways to spend time with Gran. She directs and I follow, and we fall into a rhythm of cracking eggs, and measuring, and stirring, sometimes talking the whole time, sometimes quiet, in our own thoughts. Today we stay quiet for a little while, but I know it won’t last. She waits until I pour my first batch of batter into the greased pan to start with the questions.

  “So,” she says, not so casually, “your mother says you had your little fender bender over at the coast yesterday? That you went driving over there without telling anyone?”

  I busy myself with the spatula, scraping all the batter from the bowl, feeling bad about taking off and worrying my parents, not to mention getting into an accident.

  “Were you on the prowl?” she asks with a mischievous grin.

  “What?” I laugh. Her question surprises me, even though nothing about her should surprise me anymore. “On the prowl?”

  “Isn’t that what you girls call it now?” she asks as she lifts her mixing bowl with hands that tremble just a touch more than they used to. “Like a cougar?”

  I hold a baking pan steady beneath it, and she pours the batter. “No. That’s . . .” I laugh, wishing Ryan were here to hear that one. “That’s a totally different thing, Gran. And I don’t think anybody calls it that.”

  “Well. Whatever you want to call it. That’s why I went to the beach when I was your age. Soon as I slipped on that bathing suit, all the boys came around.” She opens the oven, slides in our two pans, and closes it. “That’s how I caught your grandfather, you know.” I smile at the thought of a young Gran, on the prowl for boys at the beach. “That’s why he married me so fast. He saw me in that bathing suit and couldn’t wait to see me out of it, if you know what I mean, and when we—”

  “HOW LONG FOR THOSE TO COOK?” I interrupt.

  Gran winks at me. “Forty-three minutes exact
ly.” She starts measuring out cocoa powder for another batch, and I reach for the flour.

  “I wasn’t on the prowl,” I say, avoiding her eyes. “I just went to get away. Do something for a change.” Vague as it is, I know she’ll support this reasoning.

  “Well, that’s good,” she says. “Sometimes you’ve got to go off on your own. Get out. Have a day to yourself at the beach.” She says it like she’s proud of me, like it’s a sign that I’m showing progress, or moving on, and I feel a little twinge of guilt that makes me keep talking.

  “I didn’t really make it to the beach—I crashed the car when I got there, so I didn’t . . .”

  Gran turns to me. “Well, it’s the fact that you went at all, Quinn. It’s a start.” She carries both of our bowls to the sink and turns on the faucet. “You should go back. I tell you what—if I looked like you, I sure as hell wouldn’t be spending my summer sitting in the house alone; I’d be out on the prowl.” She winks again. “Or at least on the beach, in a bikini underneath that glorious sun.”

  She doesn’t say anything else, and neither do I, and this is one of the things I love about Gran. She knows when to say just enough. And today it’s just enough to get me thinking, and my thoughts drift back to Colton and his words: “You know where to find me.”

  I do, and I can’t stop thinking about that fact.

  “Maybe I will,” I say after a little while. “Go back there sometime.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “There are many things in life that will catch your eye, but only a few will catch your heart. Pursue those.”

  —Michael Nolan

  BROWNIES ARE HOW I justify making the drive to Shelter Cove the next morning. I ran into his bus, and then he took me to the hospital and was concerned enough to check up on me. Sweet enough to bring me a flower. Wise enough not to push too hard. The least I can do is bring him a plate of brownies. I know from a post his sister wrote that he has a sweet tooth and that brownies were the first thing he wanted when he was allowed to start eating again, and Gran’s are the best. He at least deserves that. And then I’ll go to the beach.