She, Myself, and I

by Emma Young

  I clear my throat. “Stupid?”

  “No.”

  “Miserable.” “No.”

  “That’s how I would feel.”

  “And that is where you’d be wrong.”

  He sits up. “If your goal is to get to the top of that mountain, you welcome the cold and the hunger and the pain in your legs. Because if you’re feeling it, it means you’re getting closer to your goal.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Rosa, this wasn’t ever going to be easy.” He gets up. Pads on thick carpet over to the windows but doesn’t part the curtains. “You think you don’t know who you are because you have someone else’s body and now you know something about her. Maybe you don’t know who you are. But it has nothing to do with your body.”

  “I slept with Joe.”

  He turns back to me. “Okay. Good.”

  "Not good. Because he thinks I’m like this.” I spread my arms wide.

  “What did that psychologist talk to you about?”

  “Elliot, this is not me.”

  “Did you listen to him?”

  “Who? Dr. Bailey?”

  “Rosa—Jesus—you don’t know who you are? I can tell you who you are. I can give you a list. You like Top Gear.”

  I fall back on the bed.

  “You don’t think that’s something? You like Top Gear because you love Dad. Because you love me, you listen to my captions without ever telling me they’re crap—”

  “I’m sure I did—”

  “You’re the girl who colored in that banner with daisies stuck all over it that said ‘Happy Ninth Birthday Elliot’ and when I said there should be a comma before Elliot, you cried. I felt bad about that for weeks. Years. I still feel bad about it. You’re the girl who used to dance really badly in the kitchen.”

  "Badly?”

  “Who slipped cans of tuna into the shopping trolley so you could feed that feral ginger fleabag and you didn’t think Mum knew, and Mum didn’t tell you because she wanted you to have happy secrets.”

  I press my hands to my eyes.

  “You’re my sister, Rosa. You’re my sister. You’re the girl who is alive because she chose to go through one of the hardest things any person has ever done, because she wanted to live so much, and I was so fucking glad she did, because I can’t imagine our lives without you.”

  “Elliot—”

  “You’re the girl who, despite knowing how upset and scared and fucking mad we’d be, disappeared with some guy.”

  “But I wasn’t thinking about you. And that was bad—”

  “No, it was bad for us—but in a way it was good for you. Because you’re not just my sister. You’re not just Mum’s daughter to save. If you don’t make your own decisions, you’ll never know who you are. And who you are has nothing to do with what you look like. It has nothing to do with the girl who gave you her body.”

  He comes back over to me. It’s so dark, but even so, I make out a seriousness in his eyes that I’ve never seen before.

  “You slept with that boy. You did. What he needs to know about you is Top Gear and banners and tuna, not what your arse looks like in skinny jeans or what a girl who’s gone was like. If you’d asked me, I’d have tried to talk you out of coming here, because it couldn’t ever have told you anything worth knowing. But you came. And it didn’t go exactly right. And not everything will go exactly right. For you or anyone else, including me. So it turns out Aula’s got this other boyfriend. A Swedish human rights lawyer. But those decisions I made to do with her weren’t wrong.”

  “How did you—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he says.

  “It does matter.”

  “Yeah, but not right now.”

  “I should have told Joe the truth.”

  “Maybe,” he says.

  “Really?”

  “Maybe. Don’t listen to Mum or Dr. Monzales. You have to make up your own mind about what you want.”

  “I’m sorry about Aula.”

  “In the end, I’m not that sorry. Which tells me something about me.”

  “. . . You didn’t love her.”

  “That maybe I’m clinically narcissistic. I actually think: her loss.”

  I smile.

  I sense him smile back.

  “I think it’s her loss, too,” I tell him.

  He takes my hand. “You’re not Sylvia Johnson—you know that, right?”

  “Tuna. Top Gear, banners . . . It doesn’t add up to much. Was I really that bad at dancing?”

  “You’re eighteen years old, Rosa. And you’ve not exactly had it easy. And tuna, Top Gear, and banners—they’re just off the top of my head. I can write you an essay if you like.”

  “I would like.”

  “Okay . . .”

  He squeezes my hand.

  “But Joe . . .” I pause. “If I looked like I used to, maybe he’d never have even talked to me.”

  “Then it would have been his loss.”

  I want to believe him.

  "You like pretty girls. Look at Aula. And Catherine Smith. And I could go on. Since when have you ever gone out with a girl who wasn’t objectively attractive? So it matters to you. It’s part of who they are.”

  “And look at me . . . ,” he says. “I don’t think any girl has gone for me because I look like Bradley Cooper, because I’m well aware that I do not.”

  “You’re a boy. It’s different.”

  “No, it isn’t. And out of the girls I’ve gone out with, which breakup cut me up?”

  “. . . I don’t know. None of them.”

  “One. Rebecca Stapleton. Remember her?”

  "Rebecca?”

  “See.” A pause. Then he says, “You’re not Sylvia, but it’s okay for her body to influence how you think and behave. Like it’s okay for mine to influence you—and Joe’s, and Mum’s, and everybody else’s. Have you heard of this thing called emotion contagion?”

  I lean back against the pillow. “No.”

  “So, I read about it. It’s how you catch other people’s emotions just by being around them. There’s this ancient pathway in the brain. If someone’s happy or afraid, they send out signals in the tone of their voice and the way they’re sitting and the expression on their face, and your subconscious brain picks all this up without you even knowing, and it influences how you feel. You can catch fear from someone else. You can catch happiness. Some people naturally do this more than others. But the point is, you’re never just yourself in isolation. No one is. We’re all intertwined with the people we’re around.”

  I find myself thinking of what Joe said about “taking” his mother’s life.

  Her life is intertwined with his. Mine is intertwined with Sylvia’s, but it’s also meshed with Elliot’s and Mum’s and Dad’s and Joe’s. I guess there are other ways of intersecting identities than with a skull saw and nanoknife. It might even be normal.

  Then Elliot says, “But even if I influence you and you influence me, there’s still a fundamental me. And a fundamental you. You don’t have to deny her existence; just know you’re not her. And now your job is to do stuff. It’s only when you do stuff that you get a good idea of who you are. So.”

  I look at Elliot—or what I can see of him. “The Confucius of Lexington,” I say. “How did you get to be so wise?”

  I expect him to come back with a jokey answer. I’ve left the way open, after all.

  He says, “That mountain analogy isn’t mine. It’s basically Nietzsche’s. The rest . . . I thought for years I’d watch my little sister die. A cliché, but turns out it’s true—it’s the kind of thing that makes you think about life.” Again, he squeezes my hand. “You should have asked me, Rosa. I’d have brought you here, if that’s what you were determined to do.”

  35.

  Choices . . .

  It seems almost crazy that I have them.

  For so long, I might not have been trapped entirely by my illness, but I was heavily encumbered. And I was constraine
d by Mum and Dad. What they wanted for me, and what they wished I would do. Then came the operation and the requirements of post-surgery rehab. After that, I was pushed by what I thought was a need to find out about the girl whose body became mine.

  All these forces, acting on me . . .

  Now, if I want to be, I’m free.

  Which makes me think: plane to Barbados. No, Southeast Asia. I’d love to see Angkor Wat. And Thailand. I think: backpacking. Diving lessons. Beaches. Hammocks. But first, a trip on my own, or with Elliot, into Boston for cocktails and clam chowder. Elliot even offered to hand over the credit card he said Dad gave him when he left the hospital to meet me. I could go anywhere.

  But what do I really want?

  What do I really want?

  If freedom—as Elliot insists—is the ability to make choices, I have some substantial choices to make. And though part of me wants to run away, a bigger part wants to make things right. (Mental note: Even wanting to make things right is a clue to who I am.)

  I stand in front of an antique mahogany-framed mirror, below the chandelier in the grand room of this hotel in Lexington, and I look at myself in a new light.

  Elliot is right: Just like him, and Mum and Dad, Sylvia will always be part of me—but not the deciding part.

  While I’m thinking this, something else in the reflection catches my eye.

  On the spindle-legged desk, by a black Bakelite phone, are a pad and a pen.

  This time, I know for sure what my list should say. I take the pad and pen back to the bed. Propped up on my elbows on the quilted bedspread, I write:

  1. Mum and Dad

  2. Sylvia

  3. Joe

  4. Me

  36.

  1. Mum and Dad.

  The taxi pulls onto the road that leads to the front of the hospital, to the main entrance, with its polished concrete columns. It’s a cloudless day. The sun through the windshield is hot.

  I blink, searching for Mum and Dad in the people milling about. I see paramedics in their jumpsuits; patients hunched over and being helped. Then there they are: Mum in her white hospital coat, Dad in brown cords and a gray sweater.

  They run toward us even before the wheels have stopped. There’s a tragicomic moment when I try to open my door from the inside at the same time as Mum tries from the outside, which causes the mechanism to jam. She’s still tugging on the handle while Dad runs around to the other side. Elliot jumps out. Then Dad’s half in the car, grasping my hands, saying, “Rosa, my God, Rosa.”

  He pulls me from the cab and into his arms. Then Mum’s there, too, and the three of us hug on the sidewalk. Mum’s clean-skin scent and the smell of coffee and Dad’s sweater triggers a memory of being seven, on my way to see a neurologist for the first time, not feeling afraid but kind of excited because I had both Dad and Mum in the car.

  Holding me tight, Mum says, “We need to talk, but Dr. Monzales is waiting in the scanning suite.” Her hand drops to mine, and Dad backs off slightly so we can walk toward the doors. Elliot is with us now, beside Dad.

  I say in a tone that I think is gentle, “No.”

  I guess I must have been emphatic, because Mum stops in her tracks.

  “I mean, I will,” I tell her. “But the scans can wait a little.”

  “Wait for what?” Mum says, eyes wide.

  “For me to feel ready. It’ll be soon—I promise.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Her voice is suddenly brittle.

  “I know,” I tell her. “But that’s okay.”

  She and Dad exchange a glance.

  He looks so slight, standing there in the sunshine in his baggy sweater, the wool almost the same hue as his beard. Surely he’s not old enough to be quite this gray. There’s so much I wish I could change, and not just for me. All I can do now is try to make the future right.

  “I just wish you’d told us where you were going,” Dad says. “You could have said, I need to go after the donor—”

  “Yeah,” I say, “I’m sorry.”

  “Not now,” Mum says to Dad.

  “No, now. Because I want her to know that’s all I wish. But Rosa, there was no reason for you to go there.”

  Here’s a gap, I think, that I can expand myself into.

  I take a literal step back, so I’m still close to them but not quite so enmeshed. All around us, people are moving through their own lives. A woman’s yelling. A kid with undone laces and an Elmo helium balloon is crying. I block all of that out. I have to focus on what is mine.

  “I had to do it,” I tell them. “But it’s okay. It’s part of my mountain.”

  Mum’s expression says she’d like to rush me to the scanning suite right now.

  “Ask Elliot,” I say. “He can explain.”

  Mum turns to him. He nods deeply.

  “I hope you haven’t been listening too much to Elliot,” she says to me.

  “Not too much,” I reassure her. “Exactly enough.”

  Once we’re inside and up in my room—which feels like some place I used to know—we talk it all over; namely, how I even knew to go to Lexington.

  Elliot has told them what I told him. He did it on the phone before we left Lexington. Mum’s voice was so loud that I could hear her talking about the police. So I took the phone and said, “Please, just wait. Just till I’m back.”

  Now I drop my bag and jacket and sit down on my bed. Dad comes to sit beside me. Mum takes the chair at the desk. Elliot’s standing by the window. I look from him to Mum to Dad to him.

  I ask them what they told the police after I left the hospital.

  “What do you think?” Mum says. “That a highly vulnerable patient was missing! We had no idea where you’d gone. No idea. Rosa. Can you imagine what that was like?”

  Dad squeezes my shoulder. “Why don’t you tell us what happened? From the start.”

  And I do—I tell them everything. About the park, the woman with the leaflets, Joe.

  “None of this was his fault,” I say, as firmly as I can. “I told him I was fine to leave the hospital. He doesn’t know anything about the surgery. I asked him to help.”

  I expect Mum to ask more about Joe. But she’s looking at Dad. “I knew they wouldn’t be able to stay away.” She says, “They wanted anonymity, too. There’s an agreement.”

  He says, “And would that really stop you? If Rosa’s body was out there? If it was the other way around?”

  “Rosa’s body is not her,” Mum says, one eye on me.

  “Good thing,” I say, “seeing as my body’s been incinerated.”

  Evidently, this worries her. “Maybe Dr. Bailey—”

  But I interrupt her: “Mum, I don’t think I want to see Dr. Bailey again.”

  “I’m not sure you can avoid it,” she says, not unkindly.

  “I’m not sure anyone can make me do it,” I say. “I’ll see someone—but not him. I’ll find someone.”

  Dad frowns. Mum pales. Elliot, who’s out of her sight line, gives me a fist pump, which a stranger might assume to be ironic, but I know is not.

  I go over to Mum. I crouch in front of her and I take her hands. They’re thin. Stiff. She might have made mistakes, but I can’t question the engine of her actions: a motivation to do what she truly believed was best for me. The worried expression in her eyes cuts to my heart.

  “Mum, I’m okay.”

  She interlocks her fingers with mine, grips me tight.

  “Everything you planned for—it worked,” I tell her.

  “Let’s see,” Dad says, making me look around at him. “You disobeyed your parents’ wishes. You frightened the hell out of us. You went off in a car with some guy and didn’t tell us where you were going . . . We wanted you to have a chance at being a typical teenager.” He looks at Mum. “We’ve got everything we wanted.”

  His eyes have filled with tears. My own tears roll down my cheeks as I look up at Mum. She squeezes my hands tight.

  “Some teenagers like staying at hom
e,” she says, her voice trembling, “and, I don’t know, sewing and—”

  “Collecting stamps?” Elliot interrupts. “Knitting little dolls?”

  “Maybe some do!” Mum says.

  “I could learn to knit,” I tell her, and I mean it.

  “Dad really could do with at least a few sweaters that date from the current millennium,” Elliot puts in.

  Mum opens her mouth to protest, I guess, but Elliot stops her by saying, “Didn’t someone say something about pizza?”

  “I don’t think so,” Mum says stiffly.

  “Then it’s a very good thing I am,” he says. “Rosa? You hungry?”

  I nod.

  Dad says, “I think pizza is an excellent idea.”

  Elliot smiles.

  Dad pulls his car keys from his pocket. “You know what is a very good thing? That you asked to be on the insurance, Elliot. It’ll be quicker if you go for it. I’ll have a margherita. Thank you.”

  Over pizzas that Elliot brings back from Figs, I tell them what I did in Lexington (or most of it), and the little that I discovered about Sylvia.

  “Crispy calamari,” Elliot says, and hands Mum a box. “The calzone for you, Rosa. Margherita for you, Dad. Spicy chicken sausage for me.”

  There’s a grin on my face that’s spreading from deep in my chest. Ever since I can remember, Elliot has made a point of ordering the most unusual topping, whatever the menu, whatever the topping. Some things change. Some don’t.

  Mum and Dad reveal that they knew a little more about Sylvia than they’d let on to me. Which is no real surprise. I mean, they didn’t know that Sylvia sang at O’Neill’s, or that she wasn’t a great dancer, or that she hated s’mores, or that there are two dogs in Lexington who go crazy at the sight and smell of her.

  They did know Sylvia was a student at a high school in Massachusetts and she’d fallen through ice. And they had met Sylvia’s parents.

  The meeting happened at the hospital, Mum said. They exchanged only first names and the kinds of personal details that could not allow each set of parents to identify the other.