Some of the Parts

by Hannah Barnaby

  I pull my school-issued laptop out of my backpack and set it on the desk, setting Gerald’s letter and my notebook aside. I fish Matty out of my sweatshirt pocket and start up the Amy playlist. Mine, not Nate’s. I broke my own rule and added it to the time capsule, and it may be sacrilege to say so, but I think mine is better. I really want to send it to her but I know I have to wait for the right time, so for now I listen to it myself. A lot.

  I log in to the school network and watch the little white arrow hover over the W icon before it flies instead to the lowercase e and opens an Internet window. As if the computer is a Ouija board and I’m not controlling the keystrokes, I watch as the URL for the organ donor website appears in the address bar and the list of support groups pops up on the screen.

  There are a few in Boston, some specific to the kind of transplant people have had, others more generic-sounding. Each one gives a street address and an email address for a contact person. The one at the top of the list is a woman named Sandra Goldman. My little white arrow floats around her name, wanting to click on her email and say something.

  Don’t lie, someone says, and it takes a second or two for me to realize that it was Matty, a lyric snaking through the earbuds. But I take the advice and close the browser.

  Then I pull out my phone and, hiding it from Ms. Huff in case she’s checking on my progress, send a text to Chase:

  in library. can we talk?

  He replies:

  later

  I stare at the word, willing it to say more.

  By the time Chase gets to the library, I have gathered an offering. I hand him a thin stack of pages.

  “What are these?” he asks.

  “For the binder,” I say. “Sorry they’re just printouts.”

  I couldn’t risk looking through recent obituaries, of course, and I still don’t know what the criteria are for inclusion in the binder. But it was a simple thing to visit the website for the Molton Historical Society and gather some of the more interesting death records from past generations. After a while it stopped feeling morbid and started to feel…good. Like I was honoring these deaths, ever so briefly, by connecting them back to the lives that came first. Some of the records even had pictures of the deceased before they had earned that designation, so I printed those, too. Something about the stern black-and-white faces reminded me of Chase’s house, of the gallery hanging in the hallway. These are definitely people who aren’t getting remembered on a regular basis.

  Chase accepts my payment with a mix of suspicion and delight, and quickly tucks the pages into his bag.

  “Thanks,” he says. “Anything else?”

  Don’t lie, I hear again, in my own voice this time.

  And then just, Don’t.

  I push the word away, and begin to answer the questions that hang in the air between us. What surprises me most is how relieved I feel to tell him everything, even though it truly does sound like some insane fairy tale. Once upon a time there was a girl whose brother died and her parents donated his organs so she went on a quest to find his missing parts and…Well, even I don’t know what comes next. I can only tell Chase what’s already happened.

  Chase is masterfully cool about it, not asking any questions, just letting me speak until I’m finished. Only then does he clear his throat and, tapping his fingers on the desk, say, “That is…Wow.”

  I try to discern the notes in his voice, like separating the layers in a song. Do I hear sympathy? Fear?

  “I don’t think I can help you,” he says.

  I expected maybe he’d be angry that I used him to get to his father. But not this. Not indifference.

  My shock must show. “No,” he says quickly, “it’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just, well, even my dad probably doesn’t know where your brother’s…where everything went. He was pretty high up in the food chain at Brigham and Women’s, but then he left to come here. And I’m pretty sure all of the organ donation stuff is, like, fully confidential.”

  “He did say he would send me his contact in Boston, didn’t he?”

  “My dad says a lot of things. He usually doesn’t follow through unless it involves making money or getting his name in a medical journal. So you probably shouldn’t wait around for him to get back to you.”

  “What if you can get back to me on his behalf?” I ask, trying to sound playful despite the anxiety radiating across my body.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. Find out who he’s talking about? Get me a phone number?”

  The rhythm of his fingers on the desk pauses, then picks up again. “I like a secret mission as much as the next guy,” he assures me. “But what you’re asking—it feels like lies on top of lies. I don’t exactly like my dad, but I still love him. Pretty much. And you know how I feel about honesty.”

  “Fine. You’re not obligated to help me.” I stand up. “I should go.”

  Chase sighs. Sets his fingers into his hair and pulls his own head back, raising his eyes to mine. I want to step closer, see what I look like reflected in them, but I hold my position. Wait.

  “Don’t do that. I didn’t say I wouldn’t help. I’m just thinking it through out loud. It’s my process.”

  “Is that part of your process, too?” I point at his fingers, rapidly tapping again.

  “Apparently.” He stills his hand. “Okay,” he says. “Let me see what I can find without getting anyone in trouble. Especially us.”

  “How?”

  “By searching my dad’s email account for contacts at Brigham and Women’s.”

  “You know his password?”

  “It’s the date he was appointed chief of surgery. It took me about ten seconds to figure it out.”

  “So, you’ve done this before.”

  “I don’t make a habit of it, if that’s what you’re implying.”

  “Of course not,” I say. “You pretty much love him after all.”

  The bell rings.

  “I gotta go,” Chase says. “I’ll be in touch.”

  I gather my things as if I, too, have to get to class. As if I am not going to walk out the front door of the school and take the long way home, as if I have any energy left to talk to Mel or Amy or walk the halls full of people who don’t know the story I just told Chase. They think they know what happened to me. They think the accident was the end of something.

  They could never understand, as I do now, that it was only the beginning.

  friday 10/3

  I don’t really decide to skip school. It’s just what happens. I text Mel to sign me in on the clipboard in the school office—Molton has an automated system that calls your parents if you’re missing from homeroom, but the secretaries cross-check it against the list in the office, so your parents won’t get a call if your name is there. It matters more that it’s on the clipboard than who put it there.

  She texts back:

  y?

  I respond:

  mental health day

  Then, to placate her:

  making list of covers for scud

  After my parents leave for work like they’re supposed to, I ride my bike to Common Grounds and order an overly complicated coffee and two kinds of muffins, all of which I consume very slowly while watching Cranky Andy and Martha bicker about how much to charge for the new T-shirts they’re selling. Then I ride to the Elbow Room and, sitting on the couch where I saw Chase at the séance, flip slowly through a huge book that contains full-color diagrams of the human body, trying to imagine the lines that would be drawn on people as if they were pigs about to be butchered. Some of the diagrams indicate things other than organs, things that can’t be seen, like chakras and auras and vestigial energy fields, and I wonder what happens to those when organs are traded from one person to another. Does the heart have its own aura? Does the liver? The lungs? Do the energies get mixed up like paint colors, muddying the recipient’s aura until it looks like the water that’s left in the cup after you rinse your brushes out?
>
  I stop at the Sip’N’Dip for an ice cream cone (mocha almond fudge). I sit where Amy sat. I eat my ice cream before it melts, and I do not cry at all.

  Finally, I go home, plant myself on the curb, and wait for the mail.

  If our mailman, Jim, is at all curious about why I have been waiting for him lately, he does not say. Instead, he stops his boxy little truck and bypasses my outstretched hand to put the mail into the box. He will not alter his methods simply because I happen to be standing there.

  I can respect that.

  He grudgingly says, “Good day,” and putters away.

  I wait until he’s a few houses down the street and then I pull the stack of envelopes out of the mailbox. One particular corner, vanilla-hued with dark blue print, catches my eye. I slide it carefully from the pile, like I’m choosing a magician’s playing card.

  Yes.

  The return of Gerald?

  No one is home, but I open and close the front door quietly anyway, then sprint up the stairs without taking off my shoes or hanging my house keys on the hooks over the hall table. Only when I hit the top step do I realize that I have gotten there without thinking of Nate, the sound of him coming into the house and my mother’s reprimand. I tap Gerald’s letter on Nate’s bedroom door for luck—or to mark the moment—and close my own behind me.

  My heart is pounding and I’m a little sweaty. I wipe my hands on my jeans before I open the envelope, ease the letter out, unfold it. Dark ink on the page, spiking and dipping like heartbeats on an EKG.

  Dear Mrs. McGovern, it says. My full name is Gerald Rackham. I wanted you to know that right away.

  A tiny twinge of guilt taps at my gut. I ignore it, as I ignore the headache forming like a thunderstorm between my temples.

  Read.

  I am so grateful for your letter. My illness and my long recovery have left me feeling quite isolated, and it is a great relief to correspond with someone whose suffering is, perhaps, like my own. I do not mean to imply that our experiences are equal. But I know loss, Mrs. McGovern. I have been quite close to death and I have returned from its precipice with a new sense of vitality and purpose.

  The irony, I think, is that Dad would probably love this guy.

  I wonder if you might agree to continue our correspondence electronically. I have requested that the good people at Life Choice enclose with this letter the necessary forms for your consent, which I have already signed. My email address is profrackham@altamail.com.

  But somebody missed something, because there are no consent forms in the envelopes, and the email address, which I’m guessing was supposed to be blacked out, is completely visible.

  The universe has smiled upon me.

  I stroke my river scar as my computer wakes up.

  It takes less than a minute to set up a new email address in my mother’s name. To combat the guilt about taking forgery to a new level, I give her a username I think she would love but would never give herself: Mama2Nate. Plus, it will tug at Gerald’s heartstrings when he sees it, maybe sway him in my favor when I ask for his help.

  That part is quick, but then I stop, frozen in place.

  What do I say?

  Think, I tell myself. This is the puzzle. Nate’s treasure hunts always seemed impossible at first, with their coded messages. If the house had no walls and you were a crow, one began, how would you fly and where would you go?

  But once I figured out the key—as the crow flies means “in a straight line”—it was surprisingly simple.

  Chances are slim that Gerald knows where the other recipients are, but he might have some information about support groups, or be able to set me up on a message board somewhere. I gather from my online research that these people spend quite a bit of time finding each other and comparing experiences. Although it doesn’t sound like Gerald is at the top of his game, technology-wise. He talked about being isolated and I could practically hear him stumbling over the word email in his letter.

  Still, he’s my only direct link to Nate. And there’s got to be a way to find the others. I have to trust that something, someone, will show me how. I take a deep breath, put my mother’s sadness over me like a cloak, and start typing.

  Dear Gerald,

  I am so touched by your kind words, and I do feel that we are truly connected now.

  In my mother’s voice, I ask questions about his family, tell him a few things about ours (omitting the tendency toward forgery and deception). I ask if he has found “a community of people like yourself.”

  At the end, I wish him well.

  Our brief correspondence has already meant so much to me, I tell him. I am eager to hear more about your journey.

  —

  My brother’s ashes live in an urn, which is inside a box. The box is in my father’s closet. My father’s closet is perfectly organized, shirts neatly folded in stacks on wire shelves, shoes lined up like soldiers on racks below. Sometimes, when my parents are not home, I walk quietly into their room and open my father’s closet doors, because seeing everything so arranged is like looking at a museum exhibit. It is not the messy, thrown-about stuff of actual life. It calms me down. Everything has a place of its own. Everything is always the same.

  Which is why I noticed the box as soon as it took up residence there. It was sitting on the very top shelf, angled ever so slightly like it had been set up there quickly. Like my father couldn’t wait to stop touching it.

  I always knew that my brother had been cremated. There was a casket at the funeral, closed tight, keeping its secrets. I sat in the church, between my parents, and stared at the casket. I tried to picture Nate inside and couldn’t. Then I tried to picture myself inside and got so freaked out that I had to count panes in the stained-glass windows until I could breathe again.

  After the service, we all walked outside and watched the casket slide into the back of the black car from the funeral home. No one said anything. But I remember that now and think, They knew then. They knew that all these parts of him were missing already and they watched him go away and they didn’t say a word.

  In a weird way, I admire my parents for having secrets.

  It makes them a lot more interesting.

  The funeral car, I guess, took what was left of Nate and delivered him back to the funeral home, where he was burned to ashes, and those ashes were put in the box, and the box was given to my parents. It’s just a cardboard box, smaller than a shoebox but bigger than a book. When I first saw it, I thought how odd it was that a whole person could be reduced to that size.

  Now I know better.

  And when I come downstairs after emailing Gerald, the box is not in my father’s closet anymore. It is on the kitchen table. And my parents are sitting with it, their hands folded, looking at it with a kind of stunned sadness. I heard them come in, I knew they were here. But this tableau is not what I expected.

  “What’s that?” I ask, feigning ignorance. It feels cruel, but necessary.

  “It’s…,” my mother starts, and then turns her hands over as if she has suddenly forgotten the answer.

  “Tallie,” my father says gently. It’s so weird to hear my name in his voice that I almost want to interrupt, tell him to forget it, stop talking. I don’t need to know. “We think it’s time to inter your brother’s ashes.” He taps the box with one careful finger.

  “Now?” I ask.

  “Tomorrow,” Mom whispers. “Tomorrow morning?”

  Her hands are still turned on the table, palms up and vulnerable. She has soft hands, my mother. I used to pet them when I was little, stroke them with my fingers like they were feathered birds. Those are the hands that would have held Gerald’s letter and trembled as she read it. Those are the hands that would have written her reply.

  Except I did it first.

  I speak to those hands when I say, “Okay.” Then I go up to my room and listen to Matty for a while. I scroll through the list of artists, looking for one that will stir something up. A memory, an idea. Somethi
ng I can do. Nate’s yearbook and his shirt are bundled in my closet, laid to rest, but Matty still has stories to tell me. I pick Elliott Smith.

  Wish I could call you today, just to hear a voice.

  I got a long way to go, I’m getting further away.

  I concentrate on the words, the individual syllables, not what they mean. I focus on the sounds. I do not think about the box downstairs, or the fact that we are about to put what little we have left of Nate into a wall somewhere. I push my eyes closed and then open them the tiniest bit, so everything I see is blurred and kind of jumpy, like a really old movie.

  “Nate,” I whisper. My eyes are starting to water. I don’t know if it’s from squinting or crying. I press my river scar against my face, wipe my eyes. My hand feels warm. I press harder, so there is no border between what my hand feels like and what my face feels like. Parts of Nate are still warm like this. Other people’s bodies are sustaining them, but they are his. They are made of him, and I want so much to find them, and when Elliott Smith sings Wish I knew what you were doing and why you want to do it this way, there is no mistaking my tears for anything else.

  saturday 10/4

  Everything in here is cold. I guess marble is supposed to impress people, make them think they’re preserving their loved ones in a rich, reliable medium. But it’s just so slick and unrelenting.

  Nate was a summer guy. He loved heat and sun and being outside. He was the first kid at the town pool on summer mornings and the last one to leave, always begging my mother for five more minutes even as the sun-reddened lifeguards were glaring at her and pointing to the clock.

  But I will not say this, of course, because it would upset my parents. And anyway, I know as well as they do that only a percentage of Nate is inside the urn that my mother is clutching like it’s a grenade that will explode if she lets it drop. And maybe if we can just get this over with, she will stop crying in the middle of the night and when she’s in the bathroom and all the other times she thinks I’m not listening. Maybe she can go back to work full-time and lose herself in fabrics and couch-sized paintings and knickknacks. She will remember that there are other people in the world and she will remember that she likes at least a few of those people, and there will be brunches and cocktail parties and orchestra concerts, and life, for once, really will go on.