by Emma Young
We both jump. Neither of us heard her. But the nurse is standing back by her desk.
“If you could come with me, I’ll take you to the family room. Mr. Johnson will join you there.”
“Excellent,” Elliot says, in a return to the voice.
She leads the way.
I follow, Elliot right beside me.
I try not to think.
I try not to feel.
39.
The family room is windowless. Blue chairs are arranged along the walls, which are decorated with framed prints of deserted beaches. There’s a low coffee table neatly piled with home decor and food magazines. A few plastic toys in a wicker basket. A vending machine stocked with bags of Hershey’s kisses, Snickers bars, and a whole assortment of sweets—including Nerds.
Elliot and I are alone. The LED lights are stark, shameless. I feel exposed. Because I am.
The door opens—
My heart rocks.
He’s in jeans and a plain navy sweatshirt. He has shaved. Cut his hair. But his cheekbones are the same, and his eyes are still haunted. And I know absolutely that Sylvia lives on in him, not me.
We stare at each other.
And stare.
The last time I saw him, he was in shadows, in the woods. In the revelation of light, I realize we have the same slightly upturned nose and narrow lips. His eyes are blue, his skin fair. Sylvia’s coloring—her dark eyes, olive skin, and brown-black hair—must have come from her mother.
My gaze is still fixed intently on his face. His seems ready to flinch, but doesn’t. The way he looks at me, it’s as though he’s afraid that if he moves, I will vanish, like—to borrow from the theme—a reflection threatened by wind over water.
The nurse says from behind him, “If you need anything, I’ll be at the front desk.”
It’s Elliot who closes the door. He says, “This is my sister, Rosa.”
“. . . Rosa.” Her father’s voice is deep, breaking.
He doesn’t move. I can tell he wants to touch me, but knows he can’t. He looks stunned. If I don’t move or speak, perhaps for him I am his daughter.
And I am not. So before we talk about anything, he has to know exactly who I am.
“I’m Rosa Marchant,” I tell him. “I’m eighteen. I got my first symptoms at seven. This is my brother, Elliot. I grew up in London. I’ve never been fishing. I’m not really talented at anything. I never risked my life to save someone else. I didn’t deserve this.” I spread my arms. “She didn’t deserve it. I’m sorry.”
I can feel Elliot’s gaze hard on my face. But this concerns Sylvia’s dad—and me.
Her father hunches over a little. He backs up, so he’s supported by the wall. Rubs a hand over his face. Tries to compose himself, I guess, to the extent that it’s possible. His arms drop and he looks at me with tears in his eyes.
“You’re eighteen,” he says, his voice low. “You got symptoms at seven. You deserved another chance. You look . . .”
“I know,” I whisper. “It must be so weird for you.”
“You came to the hospital,” Elliot puts in, accusingly.
Sylvia’s dad’s gaze flickers. “Yeah . . .” He shakes his head. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done it. A friend, she reached out to a nurse who was at the meeting when we signed. She was going to look after Sylvia. When we heard you’d moved into the rehab facility, my friend offered to wait in the park, in case you came out with the other patients. When she saw you . . .” He hesitates. “I shouldn’t have gone. I wasn’t going to. I only wanted to see you. Just for a minute. I didn’t even mean for you to see me.”
“It’s okay.”
“I don’t think it’s okay. And coming after you . . . If it were my daughter, I don’t know—I probably would have had me arrested. The doctors told me it was you who didn’t want to involve the police.”
He blinks suddenly at the lights, the walls, and the chairs, as though realizing for the first time that he’s physically inside a room rather than suspended somewhere, isolated in our conversation.
Then he rubs his face again. “The doctor told me you picked up my wallet from the park. He said you said I dropped it when I ran . . . So I guess the guy in the hoodie was you?” He glances at Elliot.
“Not me.”
He nods slowly. To me: “But you do want to meet us . . . ?”
So many whys. I think: Focus on the most important. “I want everything to be okay. I don’t want to live anymore thinking you’re out there and not knowing what you’re thinking and wondering if you’re wishing you’d never said yes.”
He swallows. “You know, I look at you and it’s a miracle. For you. I know: Sylvia is gone. There was nothing we could do to bring her back. But we could save someone else. Two lives. When she went out on the ice, she saved two lives. How many people get to do that?”
Tears spark at my eyes. I don’t even try to stop them.
“She’d have wanted this,” he says intently. “At first, truthfully, I wasn’t sure. It was my wife who persuaded me. Sylvia would’ve wanted it. And if we couldn’t bring her back, we could honor who she was.”
“You could have donated her organs,” I hear myself saying. “And still buried your daughter.”
He looks a little surprised. “Yeah, we could have donated her organs. We thought about that. The truth is . . .” He pauses. “I have a nephew. He’s seven now. The only reason he’s still here is because someone did something for him that no one else could. He was four when he got very sick. My sister—none of us could get all the money for the treatment he needed. She did some barbecues and yard sales to try to raise money. Someone, we still don’t know who, heard about it. One morning, she got a call from a lawyer, asking if she’d be willing to accept a donation. At first, she thought she was hallucinating it, from all the sleeping pills. When a doctor came to tell us about you, and they told us that surgery like this was your only hope, it was my wife who said, this is what we have to do. And we did bury her. We did bury Sylvia. I know rationally, consciously, that if you’re going to donate organs, an entire body is not different in kind. I thought, if we don’t save you, what are we saying? Let this girl die?”
He wipes his eyes with his hands, dries them on his jeans. “It was the doctors who said it was better to do this essentially anonymously. And we agreed. I know your parents thought it was better, too. Anyway, I read a lot and I thought a lot about how to think of you. I decided maybe I could think of you like her cousin. Now that I’ve met you, I think maybe I could see you that way. Not like you’re my family. Just that you’re like her in some ways, but not her. I mean, you look like her, but I don’t look at you now and think: That is Sylvia. You don’t move like her. Your voice is similar, but it’s not exactly the same. Your eyes: I look in them and, thank God, I see somebody else.”
He shakes his head, dismissing inner doubts, perhaps. Then he goes on: “After I got your message, I thought a lot about what to say to you. In the end, it comes down to this: It was a gift of life. I want what’s best for you. For all our sakes, I think maybe it’s better if we don’t see each other again. But you owe us nothing. I’d like you to know that.”
I think of the fact of my existence. The breaking of the mesmeric spell. My metamorphosis. My night with Joe. “I owe you everything.”
“No, because it was given freely and absolutely. You owe us nothing, and it’s very important to me you don’t think that you do.” He hesitates. “My wife had a second stroke. People say to me: what bad luck. First you lose your daughter. Then you lose your wife. And there’s nothing I can say to that. Because it’s true. Bad luck—that’s what it was. There was no meaning in any of it or any real silver lining for me. But at least we made something out of it for you.”
Silence. Except for the lights humming, the hidden electricity animating the room.
“Is there somewhere we can go and get coffee?” I ask him.
It’s abrupt, I know, after what he just said. But I feel
like ours is a relationship in which we’ve ditched the pawns and gone straight to the queens.
“Coffee?”
I nod. “If it’d be too weird . . .”
“No, it’s okay. Coffee? Yeah, there’s a café, sure.”
It’s totally dark, and uncomfortably close to bitterly cold, but we take our mugs out to the rear parking lot.
Elliot is watching us from inside, from a table by the window. I asked if he’d wait in the car, but he said no, how could he live with himself if Sylvia’s father had a breakdown and abducted me—this with her dad standing there with us, in the empty café.
“He doesn’t mean it,” I said to her dad.
“I absolutely do mean it,” Elliot said.
“Is it all closed?” I asked. “I can’t see anyone . . .”
“We can go around,” her dad said, too emotionally struck, I think, to get into anything unnecessary with Elliot, including any type of conversation. “I’ll get it. What kind?”
“Any,” I said.
He opened a hatch by the register and flicked a switch, illuminating a couple of white pendant lights. He went over to a machine, grabbed two mugs, pressed buttons, and returned with a couple of half-pints of liquid the same not-quite-black as the sky.
“Did you—” he started to say to Elliot, but I interrupted him.
“Elliot can help himself. He’s fine if we go outside and talk. He’ll be able to see us through the window.”
I watched Elliot closely the entire time I was speaking, willing him to obey like I was some kind of Jedi. And Elliot, as he did back in the gym a lifetime ago, allowed himself to be willed.
So now here we are, Sylvia’s father and I, in the cold, under the clouds.
The air was damp earlier, but the wind’s picked up. It seems to have swept away all the moisture. Even from my body. My mouth feels as dry as the air.
I sip the scalding coffee, which doesn’t help. I watch vapor rise from the surface and vanish. Where we’re standing, the glare from the parking lot lampposts is not strong. I can see him and he can see me, but this is much less overwhelming than being in the family room. He looks tired, I decide. But wired. I understand. Since he hasn’t had a chance to drink any of the coffee yet, this must be because of me.
Another sip. “I went to Lexington,” I tell him, and I see that this is news to him. Althea obviously hasn’t called him. “I had a wig. And glasses. And I had this list in my mind.”
“A wig?”
“Yeah. I had this list. Kind or unkind? Loves? Hates? Happy or unhappy? Hopes and dreams? I thought if I could get some answers, maybe it would help.”
“How?” he asks.
Isn’t it obvious? “Help me understand who I am. Because I have her body.”
He looks at me with an expression that says there’s something crucial I’m failing to understand. “Rosa—she’s gone.”
I nod. “I know. I just thought—”
“So if I talk to you about who she was, will that influence you?”
“It might influence my ability to make peace with her.”
“You are not at war.”
“No, I know, but . . .”
“But?”
I squeeze my eyes shut.
He says, “You know, I was the one who thought at first: Are they insane? They’re asking if our daughter’s body could be resurrected? Like, I don’t know . . . like a Buddhist reincarnation. Another girl, reincarnated in her. Because that’s what this is. A man-made miracle of rebirth.”
My eyes open. I stare at him. “Yeah.”
“And a part of me did think maybe this would be a way to keep her, to hold on to her just a little. That maybe whoever the girl was who got her body, maybe she’d take on something of Sylvia, and Sylvia wouldn’t be entirely gone.” He shakes his head. “Look, I don’t believe in souls. But I know it’s not unnatural to think like that. However, what you have is a collection of cells, of skin and bone and flesh and nerves, and at some point in time before now they happened to be in a constellation that made up my daughter’s body—her physical vehicle, not her.”
“You sound like Elliot,” I say quietly.
“Your brother? Then he talks a lot of sense. Look, I said before there was one thing I wanted to tell you. Actually, there’s also something I’d like to ask you. Not that I have the right to ask you anything.”
“You can ask me anything.”
Silence. I’m not sure if he’s reconsidering or composing himself. He swallows. Clears his throat. Waits until I meet his gaze, his eyes and mine interlocked.
Then he says, “We loved our daughter very much. I hope she knew it. Do whatever you want. Never think of us again, or even Sylvia. Do what you want with this body. But love yourself.”
I stare at him.
The world stops spinning.
And in that absence of motion, my remaining confusion stills and falls away. Suddenly, everything seems clear, though not in the way I think I expected it might. Do what you want.
Now tears spill out of me, but honestly, I think they’re mostly tears of relief.
Sylvia is gone.
Those episodes were side effects of my meds. Hallucinations.
This body is not her.
I have lost whatever I had of her.
And if she is totally gone, it really is up to me what I do. He takes a sip of coffee. “This really is bad,” he says. “You think it’s burned?”
He’s asking me about coffee. Sylvia’s dad. I welcome the normality of this. I really do. But I’m not quite ready to get away from the profound.
“Actually, there’s something I think I have to do, and I want to tell you. You won’t like it, but you said . . .” I stop, and refocus. “It’s a big thing.”
A big thing. Ugly and utterly inappropriately everyday words for an atom bomb of an action. But I know it’s my actions now, not my words, that will matter.
Astonishingly, a trace of a smile breaks through the exhaustion on his face. “Bigger than the miracle of you standing here in a different body, drinking coffee with me?”
I think for a moment. “Not quite bigger than that,” I say.
40.
Unsurprisingly, Mum is mad when she hears about the trip to Hartford. She’s angry with me, with Elliot, with Dad.
“It’s all right,” I tell Mum. “Her dad and I agreed we wouldn’t see each other again.”
"You,” she says, eyeing Elliot as we stand together in my room. “If you weren’t going back to London tonight anyway, I’d be hustling you onto a plane.”
Elliot’s strength is special, I think. To me, he’s like a flame that cannot be blown out. It takes an awful lot for him even to flicker. Totally unruffled, he says to me, “Call if you need me, okay? Uni’s got kind of used to me asking for time off. I guess I should get around to telling them you’re not actually dying anymore, but the leeway it gives me is definitely helpful.”
Mum says, “Elliot!”
I only smile.
“Doesn’t that upset you?” Mum says to me. “Elliot, I know you meant it as some kind of joke, but there is a line.”
I shake my head.
“Perhaps I should ask Dr. Bailey to talk to you,” Mum says to Elliot.
“I’m sure Dr. Bailey’s far too busy writing up his notes about Rosa,” Elliot says. “After this is all made public, he won’t get out of bed for anyone less than Oprah.”
Dr. Bailey, by the way, has not tried to coax me back.
I’ve seen him twice. Once, in a corridor, he gave me a quick smile. The second time was in Les Baguettes. I pretended to be studying the fruit selection while out of the corner of my eye watching him select a croissant.
He turned to me. “Good choice. I only eat these so when I have a decent one someplace else, I can appreciate just how delicious it is.”
“I have had better croissants,” I told him, smiling a little.
“I’ve had better everything,” he said, turned away, stopped, looked back
. “That could be misconstrued.” He frowned. “I meant in food terms, right? I wouldn’t want there to be even the chance of a misunderstanding. You were a wonderful patient. I wish you everything you deserve out of life.”
I had to swallow to stop myself from crying. He wasn’t visibly affected. But then, he is more emotionally controlled than I am.
Things that I am . . .
The fact is—and I realize this might sound strange—I’ve been making a list. So far, I’ve noticed, a lot of the items are in the negative.
I am not regretful about going to Hartford to meet Sylvia’s father and to sit down by the bed of her unconscious—but not entirely unresponsive—mother, though my own mother seems to think I should be.
I do not want to live in Scotland. Nothing against Scotland as a place—I can totally understand why most people would love it—but it has no meaning for me.
I am not the kind of person who will be pushed into a decision.
I am the kind of person who can make important decisions and stick to them.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that conversation with Sylvia’s dad over the hospice coffee, and also about something Elliot said in our dark room: Don’t listen to Mum or Dr. Monzales. You have to make up your own mind about what you want.
When I think about what I want to do now, I jump to the second half of my second list—that one that went Mum and Dad and then Sylvia. There are two remaining items: Joe and then Me.
No matter how much I worry about and, yes, even dread the decision I’ve made—and what it’ll do to my family—I have to do what’s right for me. I guess loving yourself doesn’t always necessarily involve making the people you love happy, though it would be nice if the two were aligned.
This decision of mine is what brings me to now: walking out into a somber, gray afternoon in the park.
41.
The phone call I made to the Happy Haven Motel ranks very high on the list of memories that make me shrivel up inside.
Others on the list: making up stories about myself—pretending to be this girl who wasn’t sick. Telling Brandon I was a singer. Allowing him to write his number on my arm. Lying to Sylvia’s best friend.