Second Hand Heart (34 page)

She was wearing shorts and sandals, and her legs looked so thin I thought they must be in constant peril of snapping like matchsticks. And yet they were berry-brown from the sun. I wondered how she did as well as she did out in the world. Better than me, sometimes. Or so it seemed.

“So this is your red rose,” she said, touching an outside petal. “Where did it come from?”

“Some woman I never met before. This older woman. She thought I looked sad, and she left this for me.”

“That’s really sweet,” she said. “So you got my message. I’m really glad you got my message.”

“What message?”

“I left a message on your machine. Sunday morning. Maybe nine or ten.”

“I was already gone.”

“Why did you come here if you didn’t get my message?”

“Now that is a very long and complicated story.”

“We don’t really need to tell any long stories right now. Do we?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

We watched the sunset without talking for a while. How long a while, I couldn’t really say.

I reached into my pocket for the worry stone. “I think I have something that belongs to you.”

I held out my open hand, the stone resting in my palm. I expected her to take it. Instead she took the whole hand, and held it, the worry stone pressed between her skin and mine.

We stayed that way for a time, watching the light change in the canyon.

“I’m sorry about Esther,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said. She didn’t ask me how I knew. After a while I noticed a very tall, skinny young guy with a big dog standing in the grass above the sun porch. Maybe it was my imagination, but I could have sworn he was staring daggers at us.

I indicated him with a flip of my head. “You know that guy?”

“Oh. Yeah. I do. I better go talk to him.”

She let go of my hand, dropping the worry stone. She got up and picked it up again, and went after him. The minute she did, he turned on his heel and stomped off. She ran to catch up, but was no match for his long legs. She really only got to the edge of the sun porch before she gave up. She looked wistfully after him for a moment.

Then she came back and sat with me again.

“I guess he doesn’t want to be talked to,” she said.

“Is he your boyfriend?”

“No.”

“So, I’m a little older. So help me understand. In modern language, when you’re young, does ‘he’s not my boyfriend’ mean that you’re having sex with him but there’s no real commitment? I know it’s really not any of my business. I was just curious to know.”

“Richard,” she said. The way you say a kid’s name when he’s being so silly it strains your patience. “I’m not having sex with anybody. I never had sex with anybody.”

“Never?”

“When would I have? How? With my mother watching?”

“She hasn’t been watching for weeks.”

“But there’s nobody I want to have sex with. I mean, you. Just you. Nobody else.”

I had no idea how to react to that. So we said nothing more for a long time. But I had a growing sense of blinders falling away from my eyes. Maybe there was only one way this could end. Maybe the path into it led only one direction, to only one conclusion, and I had been racing down that path for some time, only half oblivious. And maybe the fact that I had not consciously accepted what would happen next would in no way prevent it from happening.

So I stood up, and reached down for her hand, and she gave it to me. And I picked up the rose — not the cup or the water, just the rose — and handed it to her.

And then we went off and found my cabin.

I looked around for her non-boyfriend along the way, but fortunately he was nowhere around.

On Richard Trembling

R
ichard was so scared.

I swear to God if I didn’t know better I would think he was a virgin and I wasn’t. He actually shook.

It was incredibly sweet. Heartbreakingly sweet, actually. It made my heart hurt to see a big grown-up man be that vulnerable and that fragile and that right on the edge of breaking apart.

Especially this man.

I felt like I had to hold him with just the lightest touch possible. Like when you hold one of those really fine Christmas ornaments or that hand-blown crystal glass that’s so incredibly thin. Otherwise he might fly into a thousand pieces, and then not only would he be broken, but I’d cut myself trying to hold him in my hands.

And that’s all I’m going to say about that.

You don’t just go around writing down in a book a bunch of private things that somebody wouldn’t want you to say.

What To Be Sorry For, and What Not To Be

I
think I might have dozed briefly. When I woke, Vida’s back was pressed up against my chest, and the barest hint of light glowed through the window. Could have been the moon, or the first phase of morning. I really had no way to know.

In my sleep, I’d been allowing the contact with another human being to feel familiar. After all, I’d shared my bed with a woman every night for nine years. And when my eyes flickered open again, the feeling lingered for just a fraction of a second. And then the truth fell on me like the debris of a wall that’s been shattered from the outside.

It was her sharp shoulder blades, and the fact that I could feel every knob of her spine against my skin.

I started to cry. All at once. It was outside my jurisdiction. There was nothing I could do to pull it back or rein it in. I didn’t sob. It was just a matter of my eyes, and water. They let go like a faucet when you turn the handle from off to all the way on. Part of me knew I should have done this months ago. Another part of me didn’t want to do it even now, and would have stopped the process if I could. But it was too late for all that. It was too late.

I thought Vida was asleep until she said, “Why are you crying?”

“How did you even know I was?”

“I can hear the drops hitting the pillow.” She rolled over and handed me a tissue.

“I just miss her so much,” I said.

And she tucked her head in close to my chest and held me as tight as she could, and then the tears fell on her instead.

“I think I did a really bad thing,” I said after a while.

“What did you do?”

“I should have told you. When I brought you here. Before … Before. I should have told you that I don’t see this as being … well, you know. Ongoing.”

She took a deep breath, and blew it out in an audible sigh. Like an oddly contented baby before sleep.

“You didn’t have to tell me that. I already knew.”

“You did? How did you know? I didn’t even know.”

“Because I know who this is really about. And I know I’m not her.”

I cried some more, and she let me, and held me. And handed me another tissue.

“I’m sorry I’m not her.”

“I don’t think you need to be sorry for that,” I said.

“OK,” she said. “But I am.”

To my surprise, she got out of bed and began to dress.

By now there was enough more light coming through the window to signal morning, or what would be morning soon enough.

“I have to go back and talk to Victor,” she said. “See if he’s OK.”

“Are you going to go back home with him?”

“Yeah. I think I should.”

By now she was dressed, and I was afraid she’d slip out before I could stop her, so I held out my hand, and she came close and took it, even though I could tell she didn’t know why.

“Could you sit just a second?” I asked. She did, silently. Waiting.

“This might sound odd, but I’m going to say it anyway. I’m going to try something. I’m going to try to give you the heart again, but maybe better than I did the first time. I kept acting like it was half-mine, which isn’t fair. So this time I’m giving it to you the right way, and I’m going to go put my life back together if I can, and I’m going to stay out of yours.”

She smiled at me as though she were the only grown-up in the room, and I were a child. She brushed a bit of stray hair back off my forehead.

“You know,” she said, “it’s funny. It’s just now starting to feel like my heart to me, too. I never told anybody this. They’d think I was crazy. But I think the reason I didn’t reject the new heart as much as most patients do is because I let it still be Lorrie’s heart. Sounds like it would be the other way around, but I think most people feel like they have to fight something in their body that isn’t theirs. But I just accepted that it wasn’t mine, and we got along OK.”

“It’ll be more yours as time goes by.”

“Think so?”

“Yeah. I do.”

She kissed me on the forehead, and got up to leave. I didn’t feel any pull of sentimentality coming from her. I didn’t feel like it was hard for her to go. She just seemed done. It stung me a little. No, actually it stung me a lot.

“You might want to go see your mother. I think she might be in therapy.”

“Seriously? My mother? In therapy?”

“She said she’d think about it, and she sounded serious.”

“You think she’s in therapy to figure out how to fix me?”

“No. I think to figure out how to let go.”

“Wow. Now there’s a concept.”

She made it almost to the door, then turned back suddenly.

“Oh. The rose. I almost forgot the rose.” She fetched it from the bathroom, where she had set the base of its stem in a sink partly full of water. “You did mean for me to take this, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

She opened the door and then stood a moment, allowing me to feel the cool breeze of morning and see it glow behind her head.

“We’ll still talk, or see each other or something, right?”

“Right. We will.”

“OK, good.”

Then she raced over again, opened my hand and folded something into it. I felt the warm, familiar weight of the worry stone in my palm, and a quick press of her lips on my cheek.

“Here,” she said. “I think you need this worse than I do.”

Then she let herself out.

I checked out of the lodge just minutes later. I couldn’t get away fast enough.

There wasn’t much of anyone around at that hour. The clerk behind the desk was a young woman I had not met before. She looked at me with some slight surprise, and only then did I realize that anyone could see I’d been crying. It was too late to fix that, so I didn’t try.

She informed me that my credit card had already been charged, but that the unused nights would be credited back to me. But that it might take as long as three weeks.

I told her I didn’t care how long it took.

I walked halfway to the front doors before I remembered, then walked back to the desk.

“I almost forgot. I have reservations for October. I need to cancel them now.”

She pulled it up on the computer while she said, “Right. Of course. Because you were here now.”

“No. That’s not why. Actually. It’s because … It was supposed to be for my wedding anniversary. But my wife passed away.”

She looked up at me suddenly. I could see her putting two and two together about what she had already observed in me.

“Oh, no. I’m so sorry. That’s terrible.”

“Yes,” I said. “It is. It’s terrible. And do you know what else I just found out about it? I just found out it’s the goddamn truth, whether I like it or not. And that I can’t do a damned thing to change it. Nearly three months later, and I’m just now getting that I have to accept it. How sick is that?”

“It’s not sick,” she said. “We’re made that way.”

“Think so?”

“Yeah. I do. We take things on a little at a time because all at once they’d kill us. Anyway, I’ll cancel this.”

“No. You know what? Never mind. I changed my mind. Just leave it. Maybe in October I’ll come back here all by myself.”

She looked at my face for another minute. I had no idea what she was thinking.

“We only need twenty-four hours’ notice if you change your mind.”

“I don’t think I will,” I said.

Then I drove home.

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