Some of the Parts

by Hannah Barnaby

  Chase’s eyes narrow. “Do you think she has one of his organs? Is that why we’re here?”

  “Maybe.” My voice is loud again, and the police officer looks in our direction. More quietly I say, “Just give me a minute, please?”

  Chase sighs. “Okay.” His own phone is cradled in his hand, a key ready to open the escape hatch.

  I rub my temples. I need to keep the message short, to keep anything from sounding suspicious. And I’ll have to find a way to explain myself when the time comes. I also don’t want Chase to know that I’ve been deceiving these people, what with his whole-truth policy and everything, so I can’t give anything away to him either.

  I lean against the cool stone wall and keep my hands steady.

  have just arrived @ south station. are you available to talk? let me know when possible. with gratitude

  I leave out my mother’s name this time.

  “Done?” Chase asks. His voice is hard, and when I look at him, even through my sunglasses, I can see that his eyes are, too.

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “Now can we talk about what we’re really doing here?”

  “I will make you a deal,” I tell him. “You just follow my lead and do what I ask you to do, just while we’re here, and when we’re done, it’s your turn to be in charge. You can take me home, you can throw me in the harbor, you can do whatever you want. Okay?”

  “Why would I—”

  “Okay?”

  He takes a deep breath. “Okay.” Then he adds, “I’m giving you twenty-four hours.”

  I hear a fluttering sound above me. Two tiny brown birds are coasting and dipping through the air inside the station. I watch their unplanned ballet, shielding my eyes against the glare of the fluorescent bulbs.

  “Ceiling!” I call to them.

  “What?” Chase asks.

  “Should be plenty of time,” I say.

  —

  We both can admit, at least, to being really hungry, so we find a diner and order cheeseburgers and milk shakes. I keep my sunglasses on even though we’re inside, and the waitress looks at me strangely, but I know that she could never imagine why I’m here, could never write this story like I can, and I smile as she walks away.

  Chase doesn’t even bother to ask what’s funny. He just keeps glancing up from his plate with a worried expression.

  His phone does not ring, and neither does mine.

  I wonder how long it will be before my parents find my note, if they’ll see it right away or go about their business and assume that I’m with Mel somewhere. I haven’t heard from her since I left her standing in Ms. Pace’s room with her failed offering. But I am not anxious. I know she will do what I asked, now that she has revealed herself.

  I do not really want to hear from any of them, though, so I block their cell numbers and our home phone, just to be safe. I do this robotically. I feel like a spy.

  “I feel like a spy,” I whisper to Chase.

  He nods, poking at his food with his fork as if he is expecting it to start moving around.

  After we finish our burgers, we move on to coffee and pie. I am ravenous, like I have never eaten before. Like I will never eat again. I wonder how prisoners feel about their last meal, if they are ever satisfied with their choice, or if after they’ve eaten it, they immediately think of something that would have tasted better.

  “What would you want your last meal to be?” I ask Chase. The silence is making me itchy.

  He drums his fingers on the table. “That depends. Would I know it was my last meal? Or would this be, like, the last meal I eat before I am unexpectedly crushed by a bus?”

  “I think the term last meal implies that you know the end is coming.”

  He swirls a spoon in his coffee, leaving trails of cream. “Then I don’t think I’d be hungry.”

  This seems like a cop-out, and I tell him so.

  “Fine, then.” He drops the spoon on the table. The metal sings out, shrieking, and I feel my heart jump in my chest. “I would have grilled cheese with avocado and tomato. But the tomato would have to be perfectly ripe. None of that crap that’s forcibly ripened with ethylene.”

  He goes on about genetically modified wheat for a few minutes and then excuses himself. I watch him walk between the tables and disappear into the bathroom. It makes me anxious not to have him in sight, as if he might vaporize like Houdini was accused of doing. I look around for something to focus on and see the corner of Chase’s phone sticking out of his bag.

  Watching my hand pull the phone out is like watching someone make a bad choice in a movie, my brain yelling, No! You’ll get caught! You’ll ruin everything! But my hand doesn’t stop. And just like every bad choice, this one carries a consequence.

  He texted Mel. He told her that he was worried about me, that I was acting weird. He asked what he should do.

  My feelings battle like competing voices. How could he do this? You can hardly blame him for trying to help you. I had things under control. You are falling apart in front of him.

  And then Chase is there and he sees that I am holding the phone, and he is saying something but I am having trouble listening because I’m there all over again, at the beginning of after, where everyone thinks they know what to do for me and everyone gets it wrong. I am not myself, I am a butterfly waiting to be pinned into a box and kept safe.

  Chase is still talking, I can hear his voice outside my ears. I feel like I’m going to be sick, and it’s bad enough that Chase has seen me cry but I’ll be damned if he’s going to see me throw up. I grip the table, lifting myself up and out of the booth, and the phone clatters to the floor and I try to say that I’ll be right back but I’m not even sure if it comes out right and then I’m running to the door, through the door, hearing the door close behind me as the frigid air outside slaps me on both cheeks and tells me to pull myself together.

  Chase is calling my name and I see him banging on the window when I look up and his face looks better but I can’t watch that happen again and I don’t even know if he’s real anymore.

  Run, Nate says in my head. Run or he is going to catch you.

  I don’t know where I’m going but I can see where we came from, so I head away from South Station, deeper into the city. I move quickly. I follow the cobblestone street like Hansel and Gretel followed their little white pebbles.

  I left my backpack in the diner.

  But I have my phone.

  Which is ringing.

  I see Chase’s name on the screen. No no no, I tell myself, and it becomes like a refrain I am singing as I walk swiftly through the streets, and there is no one who can catch me now.

  The trees are monsters slipping in and out of themselves, and I watch them.

  All the colors are moving, melting, slurring their words.

  The air presses against me.

  I am made of paper now. I can almost fly.

  The trees begin to whisper their sinister sounds, their whipping branches humming a dark tune.

  You belong to us, they tell me.

  We will swallow you in browning gold and hide you.

  “Yes,” I whisper.

  And I run.

  I run until I am out of breath and my throat is raw with cold, and then I hide myself in a doorway and try to think. I do not remember which way I came to get here. I also do not remember turning my phone off but I must have done it. I’m tempted to leave it off, to hide that way, too, but I need to know how to find Jennifer, so I turn it back on. I watch it come back to life and wait to feel something. But I am feelingless. Again.

  There are several missed calls from Chase. Seeing his name is mildly fascinating, and I almost want to call him back to see how he will explain his betrayal. But there is also one from a number I don’t recognize and the trees remind me that there is work to be done. I dial into my voice mail and delete each of Chase’s increasingly desperate-sounding messages, and I am scrolling through so quickly that I almost accidentally delete the one messag
e that isn’t his.

  It’s from earlier this afternoon.

  A woman’s voice.

  “Hi,” she says. “This is Jennifer Martin. I got your message and I’m, well, I’m actually home today, so, I don’t know, if you wanted to come by, I guess that’d be okay. Just, um, call me back? This is my home number.”

  She doesn’t sound very smart, I think. But beggars can’t be choosers.

  She answers on the second ring.

  “Hello?”

  Her voice is reedy, weak-sounding. I wonder if she is shy. If she was shy before her transplant or if having part of someone else’s—

  “Hello?” she says again.

  “Oh, s-s-sorry,” I stammer. “Hi. You called me. About getting together.”

  “Is this Sarah McGovern?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Sorry,” I say again, and I try to sound jovial but I am still feeling pretty much entirely flat, so it comes out forced. “I think there’s been a little mix-up. My name’s Tallie, um, Nathaniel? I’m writing an article for my school paper. Sarah McGovern suggested I talk to you. She didn’t tell you I’d be in touch?”

  “No,” Jennifer says warily.

  “Sorry!” I say brightly. “Do you have some time to talk to me today?”

  “I’m really confused.” Jennifer pauses and I sink deeper into the shadow of the doorway while I wait for her, just in case Chase is walking around looking for me. Finally, she says, “You’re not Sarah McGovern?”

  “Nope,” I say. “But she told me all about you, and it sure would help me out to talk to you.” Then I add, “My editor thinks this story is going to be huge.” Now I definitely sound overeager. But she seems to accept it.

  “Okay. I guess. I live in Back Bay, on Dartmouth Street. Do you know where that is?”

  I don’t, really, but I want to save my questions for the important stuff. “No problem. I’ll be there in an hour.”

  And before she can object to anything, I hang up and start walking.

  It’s only about a mile to Dartmouth Street, and I am still full from what I ate at the diner before things fell apart with Chase. I can think those words to myself and they don’t even sound strange. Things fell apart with Chase.

  I am standing on the bridge in the Public Garden. I remember coming here with Mom and Dad and Nate when I was five, to ride the swan boats and see the statues of the ducklings, their heads polished bright by countless tiny hands. It was one of the memories I used to reach for when I did the rituals, the taste of the ice cream we bought from the truck at the corner outside the park, the feel of Nate’s hand at the back of my head, giving me rabbit ears while my mother took our picture on a bench.

  Now I look down, and next to my reflection I see a looser shape that darkens and then fades like a shadow on the water.

  I see you, I tell him. I know you’re here.

  I stagger over to the other side of the bridge and follow the footpath out of the park. Jennifer’s street is three blocks away. When I think I’ve gone far enough, I stop on a corner and try to focus my eyes on the street sign above me but the letters are swimming like alphabet soup. Stop it, I scold them, and just for a second, they fall into place. DARTMOUTH.

  I giggle. What a weird word.

  This is it.

  I step onto the street and realize that I don’t know what number Jennifer lives at. I fumble for my phone and turn it on to call her. But before I can dial, I hear a tiny voice coming out. Nate is in my phone, I think. And then I realize that it’s Chase.

  I put the phone to my ear.

  “Tallie? Hello? Tallie, are you there?”

  “I think so,” I say quietly.

  “Oh my god, are you okay? Where are you? I’m coming to get you.”

  “No, you’re not,” I tell him, and I hope that my saying it makes it true.

  “Tallie, listen, I called my father and…”

  “Okay.”

  “I didn’t know what else to do. I’m in massive trouble and I didn’t want to tell him anything, but you ran off—”

  I hang up on him. He probably thinks that I’m angry, and normally I would be, but right now I can only deal with one ghost at a time and also there’s a woman walking up to me. She walks slowly, uncertainly, as if she’s old, but her face is young and I’m reasonably sure she’s real and she says, “Tallie? I’m Jennifer.”

  Jennifer has an Elliott Smith poster in her living room. Well, her mother’s living room. She has lived with her mother since the surgery, she tells me, and she is hoping to go back to work at some point but she’s not really in any rush. She drops onto the couch as she says this, and though she doesn’t look heavy, the cushion sinks low as if it’s resigned to holding her. As if it’s been expecting her.

  Jennifer strikes me as someone who is not going to accomplish very much.

  She starts to tell me about the record store she used to work at, how the manager was always hitting on her. I think briefly of Cranky Andy, grateful that he spared me that kind of attention.

  “What about you?” Jennifer asks. “Got a boyfriend?”

  I think we probably do not have much time, because Chase is, well, chasing me and I am really not feeling very well. So I ignore her question and stick to my own. Since I left my backpack in the diner with Chase, I had to borrow a pen and a pad of paper from Jennifer. She is still willing to believe I am a high school reporter, despite my unpreparedness and the fact that I am twitchy and exhausted. She must be really desperate for social interaction.

  “How are you feeling?” I ask her.

  “Good, really good,” she says.

  Without looking up from my notes, I ask, “And your surgery was when?”

  “I told Sarah that already. End of May.”

  “But the exact date was…?”

  “Why do you need to know that?”

  I glance at her. I am having trouble not staring at her, searching for some sign of Nate, but I force myself to look away. “For my timeline,” I tell her. “I need to be precise. Journalistic accuracy.”

  “Oh,” she says. “The twenty-sixth.”

  That lines up nicely, doesn’t it? Within twenty-four hours of the accident.

  “And what kind of transplant was it?” I ask. And then I brace myself because though I think I know already that she doesn’t have his heart, maybe I misunderstood her before, and maybe she does, and the idea of this woman having it…

  “Liver,” she replies.

  Relief and disappointment tumble all over me.

  “Do you know whose…I mean, do you ever think about the person whose liver you got?” I ask her.

  She nods. “Of course I do,” she says. “Like, I wonder exactly how he died, like, if he was a bad driver or if his accident was somebody else’s fault.”

  Something swells up in me then, but I push it down, reach for another thought. I wonder why Jennifer needed a liver transplant in the first place. She’s not that old. Maybe she drank too much in college.

  “Does it matter?” I ask.

  Jennifer shrugs. “I guess not. But it would sort of be better if it was something tragic, y’know? Like, it would be a better story.”

  I could answer all of her questions. I could satisfy her curiosity, give her all the gory details, the sound of the car hitting the tree, the feeling of being pulled from the car, of seeing my brother taken away. Except I don’t actually remember those things, and even if I did, I wouldn’t give them to her.

  I cough, dislodge the words I really want to say. “Okay, next question: If the donor’s family wanted to meet you, would you be open to it?”

  She looks confused. “Why would they want to meet me?”

  “Well,” I say, “part of their, um, loved one has become a part of you.”

  “So?”

  “You don’t think that’s important?”

  She takes a long sip from her can of diet soda. Is she supposed to be drinking that? “Of
course I think it’s important. I’m alive, aren’t I? But I don’t see what his family would get out of seeing me. I mean, it’s not like I got the face of their loved one. I got the liver. You can’t see the liver.”

  “That’s true,” I tell her. “But it might help the family cope with their loss to see how the donor’s contribution has changed your life. It has, hasn’t it?”

  She stares at me. “Of course it has. I’m not dead.”

  I feel my optimism draining away, emptying all of the moisture from my body. Specifically, my mouth. “Can I have a glass of water?”

  “Sure.” Jennifer stands up and walks into the kitchen. I seize her absence to push my sleeve up, trace Nate’s faded name with Jennifer’s pen, watch the ink feather into the tiny channels on my skin. When she comes back from the kitchen and hands me the water, I quickly pull my sleeve back down and say, “I see you have an Elliott Smith poster.”

  Jennifer looks over her shoulder as if she’d forgotten the poster was there. “Oh, yeah,” she says. “I love him.”

  “It was so sad when he died,” I say.

  “I know,” she says. “He was really cute.” Then she adds, “But no one ever knowing exactly what happened? That’s pretty hardcore.”

  I ask her what her favorite song was.

  “Oh, you know,” says Jennifer, “the one about the little house and the mayor named Fear? I can’t remember what it was called. I used to listen to it all the time.”

  “Memory Lane,” I think. It’s on Matty. But I won’t answer that for her either.

  “Okay, well, I guess that’ll do it,” I tell her. After an awkward handshake, I remind her I have her email address in case I want to follow up, even though I would rather eat glass than have another conversation with this girl. Virtual or otherwise. Also, she looks extremely relieved that I am leaving her apartment. Her mother’s apartment.

  She closes the door behind me but I don’t leave. I sit on the top step in the stairwell and look at all the other steps below me, all the dependable straight lines and perfect right angles.

  Nate loved that song and he can’t listen to it anymore. She can listen to it whenever she wants but she can’t even remember what it’s called.