Although the letter is addressed to my family, I feel as though she is speaking to me. Clearly she hasn’t received my latest letter and doesn’t realize we can move past this crazy shuttling of letters between us and the organization. Maybe they caught the code?
I’m smiling as I jog into my room, thinking about those books and how good stories are like good friends. I peel the packing tape off a box and start pulling out paperbacks. My tattered copy of Dune smells of dust, and its pages are as fragile as butterfly wings. I spot The Godfather in the stack and wonder why I was so quick to pack it away. I search out other favorites, sigh at the comfortable weight of The Count of Monte Cristo and then slot them back onto the bookshelf and close the box.
I leave Dune next to my bed, the letter tucked inside, before searching out the song she mentioned. I’ve never heard it before, but I recognize the heavy metal band that sings it and cue up Metallica’s entire album on my phone. My letter to my heart sister seems so uninspired now by comparison to hers, so I write her another one, one that tells her how I didn’t know Metallica well, but if we’re talking nineties music, she should check out the soundtrack to the movie Trainspotting or the indie horror flick The Faculty. And that we should definitely listen to my sister’s favorite song together at least once and read Pet Sematary—even though I’ve only ever seen the movie—and how Minnie related to Calvin in Calvin and Hobbes.
Writing about Minnie relaxes me. I feel my heart sister close. I wish my parents could have this. It would make it easier for them. It will.
I close the letter with the words I love you too. And I can’t really explain the instalove in my gut, except that she has my sister’s heart and my sister always had mine.
EIGHT
My sister created a diorama she called Rat Race: Mouse Wins. She always said that I inspired it, that when we were little she had watched from the sidelines of our grade-school track meet. It was the 1,500-meter race, and I had been this dumpy, short kid. I don’t remember a thing, but it left an impression on her, and the diorama immortalizes it.
In the scene are eight runners. Minnie used what she could for participants, and since this was during an unfortunate infestation of rats—those I remember entering at our sewer pipe, chewing through concrete—this diorama has seven rats and a mouse. You can guess who the mouse is supposed to represent. Anyway, all these rats are running flat out, tails straight back, while the mouse is standing up on its hind legs, skipping and looking around with this grin on its face, as if it’s not in a race at all but at a county fair, checking out the rides and cotton candy. She said it was a reminder that since the race never ends, the winner is obviously the mouse.
Rat Race is set up in her room, which no one has entered since her death. But I want the diorama for my desk. It feels a little like an inheritance.
A notification pops up on my phone. A message from my lung sister.
Hi, sorry for the late reply. While I’m grateful for my new lungs, I don’t want to meet. I don’t want to meet you. It would be looking backward, and I only want to move forward. You can come and cheer me on at this year’s Transplant Games though. I’ll be competing in four events. Please don’t contact me again.
She sounds like a rat. I look up the Transplant Games. They’re in Toronto this fall. I find it hard to believe that you can have new lungs swapped in and be racing in four or five months. Sounds like she received both of Minnie’s lungs, a double transplant. That means one less person around the campfire in my movie.
On the outline of Minnie, I shade in the lungs a purple color, the liver yellow—because that’s the way it’s headed at this point—and decide to hold off on a color for the heart. My lung sister’s comments keep running through my mind. My phone pings. Another Instagram post by Mothman. A monarch butterfly perched on a bloom of dozens of small purple flowers. Contrast is the color of life. #goodday
But it’s not the color of life for me. On my floor, Minnie’s outline is purple, brown and yellow. The hues are faded and bleed into each other. I try to summon an actual image of my sister and can’t, which sends a chill down my spine.
I slip my VR headset over my eyes and move into the center of my room, away from objects. Behind me two sensors track the headset. In front of me wires trail from my headset to the computer. It’s pretty easy to become disoriented when using the goggles, but there’s little left in my room to hit. I load an old file. Suddenly I’m in our garage, Minnie’s former workshop. As my sister manifests, I relax. Minnie’s then-dyed-silver hair glints beneath incandescent bulbs. She is skinning a skunk.
I smile, remembering that the garage still smells a little of skunk and the baking powder she used to wash the pelt again and again. On the workbench are her tools—wire cutters for the armature that holds the shape of the creature, a bag of cotton balls to fill it out, pliers, scalpels, a box with different jaw sets and compartments for glass eyeballs (Minnie had a dream of one day being able to use tiger’s-eyes or star sapphires), needle and thread, and pins stuck in a pin cushion shaped like a strawberry.
There’s the steady snip, snip of scissors as she works. The armature strapped with cotton and wrapped in string gives a hint of her plans, wire front legs pointing up, snout dipping down, as if preparing for a high dive. On shelves lined with spools of different thread and wires of various gauges, mice inspect her progress with their beady eyes—one uses glasses, another peers through a tiny telescope that she fashioned using a jeweler’s loop. The camera has captured dust motes swirling, as if a touch of magic dances in the warmth as she brings her corpses to a form of life. In the corner, near her airbrush and paints, the skunk’s diving platform dries.
My dad stands as far away as possible from her, with his back pressed up against a cupboard filled with old paint cans.
“Dad, don’t be so crazy,” Minnie says, responding to some question he’s asked. “If I don’t do this, then the street cleaners just scoop the skunk off the road and throw it in the garbage. I’m not hurting anything. In some ways, we both do the same job. You take vegetables and make them look like meat. I take a hide and make it look alive again.”
“How’s that the same?” He shakes his head. “What if what you’re doing becomes a trend? People will hunt skunks, and for what? To put them…onstage. As trophies!”
“Onstage.” She laughs. “Do you really think taxidermy will ever be cool?”
He shrugs. “I didn’t think beards would be cool.” He scratches at his.
“Yeah, Dad, you’re so cool.” She rolls her eyes so that her eyelids flutter. “Left on the road, an animal would be run over and over and over again. Then thrown in the landfill beneath garbage. Let me explain it another way. A hunter celebrates the kill. If it’s not for food, then it’s a trophy. Proof of his or her superiority. I’m not into that. I celebrate the life of the animal. I mount it to honor it. You are celebrating the vegetable to try to cut down on the killing of animals. It’s the same dream.”
This is how I remember her always explaining taxidermy. She honored the animal by making its death meaningful. Was I honoring her now with my video, animating her organs? How do we honor our dead? Hundreds of people came to the funeral. There was singing and speeches and slideshows. And then it was over. Our house was empty, our freezer full, our lives hollow.
“You honor the animal by making it do ballet?” my dad asks.
“Hey, a sculptor must find the form within the rock. Sometimes a badger wants to be a ballerina. And a cauliflower a sheep.”
“A cauliflower sheep,” he muses. “That’s a pretty good idea!”
They burst into laughter, and, watching this in my room, I bite down on my hand to keep from crying. This was a lifetime ago.
“You should go on some of the taxidermy forums,” she adds. “You’ll see. These people really care about the animals.”
I go cold.
I rip off the headset and wipe away my tears. I stagger at the sudden return to the bedroom, but my mind is focus
ed on what my sister said. I’ve been looking in the wrong places for the organ recipients. I need to look for them on their forums.
Every disease, condition, disability and special-interest group has its own forum. To their members, these are identities, lifelines, surrogate families. I am part of a screenwriters’ forum and VR forums. A couple of people have offered me technical pointers on how to do what I want to do for Minnie’s video.
If I can find the right forum, maybe I can find a thread where someone has mentioned receiving an organ from my sister.
Within a few minutes I’m a member of a diabetes forum, and I’ve learned a lot about kidney failure. After navigating through several kidney-disease subforums, I land on one that discusses transplants. I scan for a congratulations thread and find it easily.
Place your good news here! reads the thread title.
A member who goes by the profile name Insulin Junkie has posted about receiving a new kidney only days after my sister died. She thanks members of the Mississauga Hospital Transplant Team—that’s pretty close. It’s a good one, she brags, a teenage organ. Will last my lifetime!
I have her.
Now I only need her address. Asking directly hasn’t worked well so far, and I’m reluctant to do it here, but the woman has offered to speak to anyone about the experience.
I’d love to discuss the whole process. Would you mind? I post.
Her response is immediate. Of course! When did you go on the list?
She naturally assumes that I’m prepping for an operation too, and I let the assumption slide. If she knew the truth, she might not want to talk to me, but that doesn’t mean she shouldn’t.
Instead I write, The place you had your transplant is pretty close to me. Could we meet in person?
Her next message isn’t on the forum—it’s through the in-forum email.
We make a date for tomorrow.
On Minnie’s outline I lightly trace a kidney in green for “go.”
My phone buzzes.
A text. Can I come over?
I don’t recognize the number. Who are you?
Kidney friend.
I look back to the laptop screen, stunned and confused, but then glance at the outline of Minnie. Of course. She has two kidneys. Someone found me! Yes, please.
I’m at your door.
I grin. Now this is a good day. I race to the door and throw it open.
NINE
On the steps is an Asian-looking guy a little older than me. He wears a thin yellow tie over an Iron Man T-shirt and black, ripped jeans. His arms are in the air as if he’s cheering at a concert.
“I’m Dennis,” he says. “I’m alive!”
I blink and say, “Hi, Dennis. I’m Emmitt.” He looks over my shoulder and down the hall. “Come on in?” I ask.
“I will!” He lowers his arms and leaps past me into the house. “I’m so sorry about your sister. So sorry.” He’s clearly trying to tamp down his joy as best he can. “But I’m so happy to meet you.”
“You sure seem happy.”
Dennis swallows, eyes widening. “But I’m sorry too.”
“I got it,” I say.
He breaks back into a grin. “When you are almost dead and then suddenly not dead, so sick you cannot move and then can dance, when there is nothing in front of you and then…” His hand sweeps the world behind him. “Everything.”
A peculiar kind of happiness-sadness wells in my chest. Pride in my sister for having done this.
“It makes everything taste better, smell better, sound better. Better than I ever remembered before I got sick.” His lips twist in a wry smile. “Especially out of the hospital, huh?” He doesn’t wait for an answer, barreling on. “I want to know everything about your sister. Everything. Where do we start?”
I suddenly feel as though he’s on the wrong side of the threshold. That I’ve let something dangerous into the house.
He must read it in my face. “Oh, dude, I’m sorry. I talk too much. It’s just…” His hands drift back toward the ceiling. “I’m alive.”
“Come on in,” I say again, a bit more welcoming now. We move farther down the hall, and after I place a finger to my lips, we creep past the living room where the television flickers. A soap-opera rerun.
“That your mom? Her mom?” Dennis asks with a note of reverence, like we’re in the White House and have caught a glimpse of the president’s family.
I nod, and Dennis takes off his ballcap and then steps toward her. I tap him on the shoulder and shake my head. “Not now,” I say. “She’s not feeling well.”
He cranes his neck and replies, “She’s sooo beautiful.”
Into my mind flashes my mother the day after last tax season, greeting me at the door, gripping my hands hard and pulling me into a wild, spinning dance. It’s an accountant’s happiest day of the year. Her face is a crazy, grinning blur. Beautiful.
It hurts. Dennis is who I’d hoped for. Someone so filled with gratitude it explodes from him, but now that he’s here, I feel it’s too much too soon. Too much for my mom.
I tug Dennis toward my bedroom.
“That’s weird.” Dennis points down at Outline Minnie. “What’s that for?”
“I’m checking off the organ recipients I find. You’re one of the kidneys.”
“The one on the right,” he says with certainty. “And the pancreas too. Still weird.”
“Sure. Now that I’ve found you, I can color you in. What color do you want?”
“Orange, of course!” He laughs wildly, catches himself and whispers, “I wonder who my kidney twin is! I’d love to meet them. There should be a transplant twin day, where we all get together and show our scars and tell stories of what we’ve done since.”
“Maybe, yeah.” Dennis is a bit odd. “How’d you find me anyway?” I ask.
“I saw your post but didn’t want to just send back a message. I had to trace you using a fifth-grade class photo an old friend of yours posted. I called your elementary school to get your address, but of course they’re closed for the summer, so I had to pretend to be a friend of yours from camp—Camp Kawabi? You went there a few years back. They gave it to me after hearing you’d lost your sister. They send condolences, FYI. Even though it was an old address, it wasn’t too hard to follow your last move—holy crap, is that a virtual-reality rig?” He picks up the headset and looks at me pleadingly. “Can I?”
“I tell you what,” I say. His eyes shine. “I’ll let you use it if you’ll let me film you. With any luck, you’ll eventually be able to meet Minnie and all of your other organ…twins.”
“Yes! Hook me up.”
Carefully, like he’s setting down a breakable vase, he eases the headset back onto my desk. “Whoa! Are those real?”
He’s poking at the diorama. Somebody needs to tie this guy down. “Yup.”
“That’s gross.”
“Pretty much.”
“But neat.”
Maybe it’s because he’s a great excuse, or maybe it’s because his energy is contagious and I’ve been wanting to do this for weeks, I don’t know, but I say, “My sister used to make them. Do you want to see more?”
His expression says he does. I pad back down the hallway, listening for the TV. I motion for Dennis to follow and cross to my sister’s room. The door’s closed but not locked.
I step inside. Beneath the dust of closure lies the musk of animal fur, talcum powder and potpourri.
“It’s like a dollhouse,” Dennis says.
Closing the door behind me, I put my finger to my lips again. Dennis nods. It’s more than a dollhouse. The walls are filled with shelves, each subdivided into rooms and cut with holes between to allow for stairs, ladders and ropes that drop into dungeons. It’s a world—or many worlds. On the top shelf a skunk dives from a cloud perch down into a blue lake with mice in rowboats, one on a Jet Ski, another kitesurfing. Beneath that lake water cascades in a fall of blue streamers into an underground cavern where a cat with seven mice
heads lurks. In another scene squirrels shop at a supermarket called Walnuts, their baskets full of them. And in another a ladder leads to a sewer with red-eyed rats.
“I love her,” Dennis says.
“My mom built the shelves,” I reply. “At least initially, and then Minnie…”
Minnie took over. She filled the room. Filled every room.
“Sooo much detail.” Dennis inspects the burrows of rabbits on a farm. “Oh my god.” He pokes at a toy combine that has cleared a strip of dried grass made to look like wheat. “Is that…?”
“Yup, that’s Chip,” I say and can’t help but smile. “That was Minnie’s first-ever chipmunk.”
Contorted in the tines of the combine’s blades lies a mangled chipmunk.
“Whoa. Dark, man.”
I laugh. “She had a boyfriend who dumped her, and on the way home she found this little guy in the gutter.”
“Oh, and was the ex-boyfriend’s name—?”
“You got it.”
“Chip.”
We both burst out laughing.
The door crashes wide open, rattling the tiered shelves of arrangements. In the doorway stands my mom. Her hair hangs in clumps, partway to dreadlocks. This is the most movement I’ve seen from her in weeks. “What are you doing in here?” she yells.
I dash in front of Dennis as if to shield him. “Mom, Dennis here wanted to know about Minnie. He got one of her kidneys and her pancreas.”
“I heard laughing. How can you laugh?” Her fingers on the doorjamb whiten. “Get out! Get out!”
She drops to her knees, blocking our exit. Dennis glances to me for help and then to the windows. I take him by the elbow, and we shuffle past her tensely, as if she might tackle us. But my mom’s shaking and sobbing.
“Sorry,” Dennis says as he tiptoes by her. “I’m sorry.”
My mom replies, “I can’t do it. I can’t.”
I let Dennis out the front door without another word. We’ll do the film another time.
When I return my mom’s already back on the couch, still crying. I want to apologize, explain that we got carried away. That we weren’t laughing at Minnie. Her bedroom door is shut now. In my room I try to quell the panic by listing my tasks. I call my liver brother. Then I text Dennis an apology and ask that he listen to Metallica at 9:00 p.m. We still need to do the video, I add, to which he replies, Okay, but maybe not at your house, okay?
Heart Sister Page 5