by Elle Tyler
“I just saw her... I just fuckin’ saw her this morning. We talked all morning on the swing. We ate breakfast. I just saw her.”
He stared at me unsure, but said, “She’s not here. She’s being air-lifted...”
“What happened?” I demanded.
“She bled into her brain,” he said quietly. “It was too late by the time we got her here.”
“You just said she wasn’t here! Stop lying to me!”
“You didn’t let me finish. They’re air-lifting her to Presbyterian. There’s a patient on higher priority who needs her kidney.”
“On whose fuckin’ order?”
“Who do you think?” he replied.
“What do I think?” I yelled. “I think you don’t understand the point of being her Power of Attorney! I think I’m her husband and I am about to fuckin’ fail her by allowing the very thing I promised would not happen to fuckin’ happen!”
“He’s giving her kidney to Truscott’s mother, Wanda,” he said. “She’s needed one for many years. It’s his peace offering, Callum. Let Brighton have this one moment of purpose. Real purpose. Scout will get her heart, but she’s going to New York first. They’ll bring the heart back here and then perform his surgery.” He grabbed my arm, as if he knew where I was headed when I turned away. “There’s no hope for her. She’s gone, son.”
I jerked from his grasp. “Don’t ever say that.”
“You need to understand.”
“I understand perfectly well, but don’t ever say that about Everly.”
I raced to the roof, my chest pounding as I pushed the doors open and caught the force of wind from the chopper in my face. And then I saw a moment of mercy.
“Nick!” I yelled, waving my hand until he saw me. “Nicholas!”
He climbed from the helicopter and put his hands on my shoulders. All it took was a look.
“Get in.”
One of the crew members was kicked to the curb, and I took his place.
And there she was.
My limp little doll.
My topolina.
My farfalla.
My peach.
My Everly Anne.
She was there, but her silence was deafening. Only the sound remained of a machine pumping air into lungs, rhythm into a distant heart. I searched my ribs for the tether. It coiled firm and true, breathing with the rise and fall of her chest, reaching for her cold hand that would never again gain the warmth of mine.
“Everly Anne.” Her name didn’t even sound the same, as if my mind had already begun to travel away from it.
Suddenly, her vitals flat-lined, and the other medic rushed to help her, but I pushed him back.
“She’s DNR.”
“You don’t even work on this crew,” he yelled back.
I grabbed his jacket and shoved him hard. Nick turned in his seat and struggled to reach me through the skinny space.
“I said she’s DNR. Let her go.”
He twisted out of my grasp, and I held my hand protectively over her chest. Nick watched with alarm.
“Callum,” he said, “she’s gonna die. Just resuscitate her now and apologize later. You’ll never forgive yourself if you let her die right now.”
“There’s no honor in that. I promised. I promised I’d let her go.”
“She’s your wife,” he begged.
“You think I don’t know that?” I snapped. “Just fuckin’ go.” He didn’t waver. “I said GO, Nick.”
As the sound of the helicopter took over, I found the too quiet in holding her hand. I pressed her fingers to my cheek and forced bravery into my words.
“Everly Anne.” I could see her on that first day of class.
Her humming, “Mmm,” as she sipped lemonade in Central Park, asking me on the dim steps of Belvedere Castle, “Do you like how short my dress is today?”
I could smell the sun in her hair on the Fourth of July and recall the sparkle of wonderment in her eyes as we watched fireworks, holding hands.
Her perched nude on that rock in the pool as we hid behind the waterfall.
The soft claim of her lips against mine.
Her holding Andy the day he was born.
Her smile.
Her laughter.
I vowed to attach the sound of her name to every memory I owned, not what I called her, not what she was titled at birth, but just the way it felt to hear her name as a belonging force in this stupid, overly-complex world. I loved her name. I loved the naturalness of her laughter. Why did anything need to be more complex than that?
I hovered over her and didn’t see the truth. She was as elegant as Sleeping Beauty resting peacefully in her bed. Perhaps it was fate’s way of charming me in my darkest hour.
I rested my lips to the bare skin of her shoulder hidden beneath the hospital gown.
“How it begins is how it goes.” I sealed our goodbye much the way we’d started—with a binding kiss amidst an impossible truth. “It began with your eyes cast down and mine looking right at you,” I whispered. “I watched you rule out hundreds of questions and accept only mine. I poured my stories into your eager heart, and you sparked faith inside the stubbornness of mine. Our beginning was written in the stars—how could it not be? You, this constant revelry following me into the darkness of desolate nights. My farfalla. My topolina. My peach. You sweet, beautiful little thing.” I kissed her cheek. I remembered it warm and vital, flushed and smiling. “And so this is the song I’ll sing, this our dance, Everly Anne—your footprints are stamped across my life, cleansing and purifying me, molding and reminding me. A love I can’t deny. A love I can’t ever rebuild or recapture. And for all the suffering I will reap for loving you, I will never be sorry. I’d rather feel the burn of your loss than to never have experienced the bliss of your laughter. You may have lifted my burden of giving away your heart, but I will never tell it goodbye. How could I? It beats your song so fervently inside of my chest. It beats so full of spirit inside of our son.” I kissed her eyelids, her philtrum. I held her hand to my cheek as a reminder of how true softness felt. I combed her long blonde hair through my fingers until it burned scars across my spirit.
Time. It crept in as I slept and stole the hours away.
Time. It ran out.
Time. It was time.
I had to leave.
She had to stay.
She had to go.
I had to stay.
One last time.
“Sleep well, topolina,” I whispered. “I’ll always be waiting for you.”
***
I waited for the door to open. I could not leave her behind. Just as I had sat on the floor of the hospital in fourth year, waiting, I sat and waited for her that night, too. Nearly an hour after I arrived, the door opened. A coroner named Richard Gainey jumped slightly at the surprise of me sitting outside the doors.
And he somehow knew my purpose right away. I didn’t go to Brighton that night, but I felt his presence linger in the eyes of Gainey, as if he had been warned.
“I’m sorry for your loss, sir.”
I nodded to the file in his hand. “Is that her report?”
“Yes, sir. I just finished.”
“Give it to me.”
“Sir, you really don’t want to read... I mean... why?”
“Give me the damn thing.” I held out my hand but made no move to read it when it was handed over. “I’ll turn it in for you. Go.”
“I can’t let you do that. It’ll cost me my job.”
“I’m a doctor. It will be fine.”
“Sir, no. Please go home and get some rest. You look... exhausted.”
“Rich.” I drew myself up and took three measured steps toward him. He was a short, stocky man in his upper-fifties. I loomed over him. “You need to get the fuck out of here. Trust me.”
“Why are you here, sir? There are so many other ways to...”
“To what? To mourn? Is that what you’re going to say?”
“Yes, sir. And t
his is not the place to do that. Only death lives behind those doors, and it is not pretty.”
I handed him back the file but did not let go when he tugged.
“You have scissors?” I asked.
“Yes, sir...?”
“I need you to do something—since you’re so damn adamant about this not being a good idea.”
“What do I need scissors for, sir?”
“I need a lock of her hair.”
He backed up. “Sir…”
“Fine, I’ll do it myself.” I turned toward the doors, but he grasped my arm.
“I’ll... Oh God...! I’ll do it! Damn it. Damn it. Damn it.” He huffed, but I stuck my arm out in front of him.
“Don’t touch her with the anger you’d like to inflict on me. When you touch her hair, you touch her as if she’s an angel bearing the grace of a God who will freely smite you for thinking anything less than something kind. Do you understand, Rich?”
He nodded and pushed through the doors. After a moment, I was handed a lock of golden hair, and shoved it deep down inside my pocket. I then traded him a picture from my wallet and told him to tuck it in her hands, folded over her chest.
TWO HEART BEATS
37.
MY SANITY RELIED on him going right to sleep.
Beside me, I felt him wriggle under the covers, stirred with the feeling that something was amiss in his innocent, tiny world. I came home to find Marta with him, and it suddenly made sense. My father had been waiting for her to arrive as he cooked. The rest of the story was a fabrication for my benefit. So his quiet stirring beside me was only an extra punch of guilt to my gut. He deserved to know. He deserved to be comforted and not just kept quiet. But I wasn’t ready to speak those finalizing words and bring them to light.
“Pop?”
I was grateful for the darkness of the room. It helped me hide the face of a coward.
“Just sleep, okay?”
But he was only a kid and needed to know. “Is mom sick again?”
I covered my face and prayed he was none the wiser. “No, she’s fine now.”
“Then why isn’t she here with us at home?”
“She’s home,” I said, the anger already escaping through my tone. “But not our home.”
“Will she come home tomorrow?”
“Andy. Sleep. Now.”
He stilled, and when I reached my hand to feel where he was, I only found a small scared boy curled into his pillow, unsure of why his father was angry. I pulled him to my chest and said I was sorry. He just picked at the cotton fibers of my shirt and resisted sleep.
“It’s a soft goodbye, right?”
My ears perked. “What’s a soft goodbye?”
“What Grandpop says happened to Grandma Julep. When someone you love goes away but you still feel them in your bones.”
I held him tighter to me. “Grandpop is a smart man, so if he told you that, it’s true.”
“But how can it be true? How can someone live in your bones?”
“It’s a figure of speech. He just means you still feel their love even if they’re gone.” I put my hand on his chest. “You know how mom said you were her second heartbeat? Well, it’s kind of like that. I can still feel her because I have you.”
“Were you one of mom’s heartbeats?” he asked.
“I feel confident in saying yes, but she only officially gave you that title.”
“Can I have the earphones?” He meant stethoscope. “I wanna see if you have a special beat. Maybe I can feel mom that way.”
I found my medical bag and lent him the scope, showed him how to find the sound in my chest. There must have been something too wondrous and soothing still locked beneath my ribcage despite the hollowness I felt, because, for next three months, that is exactly how he fell asleep.
***
He was searching around our house like a mouse sniffing for cheese.
I watched him as I sipped coffee from the kitchen table, and at first it seemed like a perfectly normal thing for a kid to do, but the more he snooped under couches and inside of closets, the more I felt compelled to investigate.
“Andy,” I called.
His head was tucked under his bedframe. “Yeah, Pop?”
I sat on the edge of the mattress. “Have you lost something?”
He pulled away from the bed and faced away from me.
“You look like you lost something,” I pressed.
“I’m just playin’,” he said quietly, still turned away.
“Hey, what’s wrong?”
Small feet shuffled against the wood floor. I couldn’t hear his mumbled words so I kneeled beside him. “She... sometimes... She hid in the closet... or under my bed.”
“Who?”
He tried—Heaven help him, he tried—but as “Mamma” slipped from his lips, tears streaked from his eyes.
“Andy.” I sighed and then pulled him into a tight hug. “You can talk to me. It’s okay to be sad and miss your mom.”
“I’m not sad!” he cried, trying to twist out of my arms. “I’m mad! I wanna punch something’s face off!”
“That’s okay, too. You can hit a pillow or scream or stomp your feet. Whatever you’re feeling is perfectly okay.”
But then my son fell into my arms and cried his tender heart out. “I want her back. Pop, I want her to come back right now!”
“I know... I want her to come back, too.”
“Grandma Marta lies to me all the time and says we can see her again in heaven, but I pray to God and He never sends her back. It’s all lies! God isn’t real!”
I soothed his back with my hands and then lifted him to sit on the bed, cradled in my arms. “Andy, if there was a way to bring your mom back, I would. I promise you I would do it in an instant, because there’s no one other than you who I have ever loved as much as Everly. But what Grandma Marta told you about seeing her, that’s the truth. She just didn’t tell you the whole story.”
“It’s not!”
I held him steady and shushed him in my arms. “It is true. Tomorrow... Tomorrow I will show you it’s true. I promise.”
He cried softly for a moment before he sniffled and whispered, “With both pinkies?”
I held him tighter. “What other kind of promise is there.”
***
I handed Andy a key to a newly renovated-drawer in my desk. Inside sat a jar filled with numbers that made his eyes light up in a way I hadn’t seen since his last birthday.
“What is it?” he asked curiously.
“It’s everything I loved about your mother.”
Andy rolled the jar in his hands until his face scrunched. “They all fit into this little jar?”
I smiled at him. “You are so much like her, it’s uncanny, Andy.” I sat him on my desk and explained, “Do you remember when I took you camping last summer and we looked up at the stars before we went to bed?”
“At Orion! Yeah!”
“Well, this jar is kind of like those stars. When you’re far away from them, they seem so small, like you could reach up and collect them all in your hand. But when you look closer, you see that they’re connected to something even more spectacular. Your mom was like that. She had so many good things that I loved, each one was beautiful on its own, but then I looked at them all together, and I realized how special she was. She was like those constellations, and I had to share her magic and beauty with the whole world so everyone could see.”
He lifted the jar. “So other people have jars with Mom in them, too?”
I smiled. “Yes. Everyone who knew her has a reason why they loved her. And when you put them all together, it makes all the little reasons form into a giant.”
He frowned a bit. “I don’t have a jar.”
“Yes, you do.” I poked his chest. “It’s right there.”
Andy stared down to his hands. “Can I open your jar?”
“Anytime you want.”
And that time was right at that moment. He spilled scr
aps of paper across my desk and rummaged his hands through each one, flipping them over and searching for reasons.
“It’s all numbers,” he wondered aloud. “No words, just numbers, Pop.”
“It was how I said I love you. Someday you’ll have a girlfriend and do silly things to make them happy, too.”
“But why?”
“Because girls like to feel special.”
“Numbers made Mom feel special?”
“I think it made her feel like I was always listening to her.”
He admired the litter of paper on my desk one last time before he asked, “Can I write numbers, too?”
“You can love your mom any way you wish. You can get a box and fill it up with memories or start a journal and write down what you’d like to tell her. Whatever it is, I know if anyone can fill it up with reasons to love her, it would be you.”
His face brightened but then squinted. “How will she know?”
“I’ll take them to her,” I replied.
“I wanna go! I wanna go too!”
“Okay,” I agreed, “but you’ll have to use your imagination. Seeing Mom is a special thing, and you need special eyes.”
Andy smiled up at me. “And two heartbeats,” he added.
I touched my boy’s head. “And of course... two heartbeats.”
A SCOUTS HONOR
38.
I BRACE FOR TWO THINGS as I found room number 708 at Atlanta Memorial: the quiet and the loud.
As I looked down to Andy, I found enough bravery to twist the handle and step into a room I hadn’t seen in nearly two months. Scout stared up at the television until I said hello.
“Dr. Trovatto,” he said, surprised. “Hey.”
I gripped Andy’s hand for strength. “How are you, Scout?” The question was asked innocently enough, but we both knew what stood between us. Guilt plagued his face, as if he wasn’t sure how to answer. If he was great—I was doomed. If he was terrible—still doomed, but twice as much and without good reason.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said finally. His eyes flicked to Andy. “Hey, little man.”
Andy was one-hundred-percent Everly’s son. He puffed up his chest and chided, “Who you callin’ little? You look like a vampire. White as a ghost.”