Second Hand Heart (36 page)

I love you, Myra.

Many thanks,

Your son-in-law (still),

Richard

The Art of Maturation

I
haven’t picked up this journal for months. I haven’t even thought about it. But I had to write this down. After everything else I took the trouble to put down in ink, I needed this last bit to complete the experience.

It’s almost like an epilogue. In its own way, it’s perfect.

It’s now February, near the end of the month, and I just heard from Vida again. There were two postcards in-between. But nothing for several months.

The whole thing went like this: Connie was visiting for the weekend, and I’d been struck by a brilliant flash of creativity involving scallops, garlic and angel-hair pasta. And then, like many absent-minded professor/mad scientist hybrids, at the last minute I had disastrously forgotten the parmesan cheese.

She was nice enough to run to the store and get some. When she let herself back in, she brought a stack of my mail.

“You never bring in your mail,” she said.

“That’s true,” I said. “I never do.”

“Good thing I’m here, then. You got a Valentine’s Day card from Vida.”

“Valentine’s Day was weeks ago.”

“Don’t know what to tell you about that, ace.”

I was up to my elbows in tomatoes. Peeling, seeding, and dicing. So I didn’t tend to it right away.

“What makes you think it’s a Valentine’s Day card?”

She held it up to face me, flap side out. “The fact that it says, ‘Happy Valentine’s Day’ on the back of the envelope.”

“Strong clue. Admittedly. Maybe it’s late because she’s traveling. Maybe it had to come a long way. Where’s it from?”

“Weimar, Germany.”

“Is that a joke?” I set about washing and drying my hands, to see for myself. “The postmark says Weimar, Germany?”

“No. The return address says Weimar, Germany. The postmark says Weimar, Deutschland. But I think they boil down to the same thing.”

I threw down the dish towel, retrieved my glasses from the counter, and sat down at the kitchen table with Vida’s card. I read the postmark, the return address. Examined the foreign stamps. Wondered what had led her so far from home.

When I opened it, I was taken aback by her artwork. It was a handmade card, with a drawing Vida had done on the front. A drawing of a heart. But not a valentine’s heart. A heart. An actual human heart, with red muscle and tissue, and red and blue veins and arteries branching in opposite directions.

I turned it around and showed it to Connie. “Startlingly realistic,” she said.

I opened it and read.

“Dear Richard,” it read. “I’m beginning to see that point about love you made when I first met you. Maybe it’s less like a valentine heart and more like a real one. Like maybe if you give somebody your heart, it’s this big gnarly muscle of a thing that’s not always too pretty to look at. You know? Enough philosophy. Hope you’re OK. Love, Vida.”

I read it twice. Lingered over it a bit. Then looked up at Connie.

“I’ll read it to you,” I said.

“Not if it’s too personal.”

“It isn’t, really. More just a reflection on love in general.”

I read Vida’s message out loud, and we sat with that for a beat or two.

“I thought you said she was childlike,” Connie said, tossing me the wedge of parmesan cheese.

“Kids grow up,” I said.

Author’s Note

A
n amazing opportunity presented itself to me in connection with the writing of this novel. A wonderful and very generous team of cardiac surgeons here on the Central Coast of California — Steve Freyaldenhoven, David Canvasser and Luke Faber — allowed me, with proper permissions from both patient and hospital, to observe a heart surgery in progress. In fact, I was in the operating room, suited in scrubs and shoe covers, masked, standing on a small step platform just behind the patient’s head, looking down into the open chest cavity. Witnessing the beating (and repair) of a living heart in a living human.

During some of the quieter moments of this procedure, I was able to exchange a few brief thoughts and hear more information from the surgeons. I found myself mentioning that I’d had a niece, Emily, whose heart had given out when she was only twenty-three. She’d been born with heart defects, nearly died on her first night in the world, and endured a catheterization and two open-heart surgeries across the span of her all-too-brief life. Then one day she went to sleep and did not wake up.

Dr. Freyaldenhoven asked me if that had been my reason for writing this book.

I told him I wasn’t sure, but that I was about to write an author’s note for the novel in question, and so would have to figure that out soon enough.

Here’s what I came up with, bearing in mind that imagination is always a hard entity to track with any accuracy.

Like the fictional Richard, I saw an item on the news one day, years ago, suggesting that some transplant recipients seem to experience an odd sense of connection with their donors. A sudden craving for the donor’s favorite food seemed to be the most common occurrence. Nothing too amazing on the surface of that, until you learn that the recipients didn’t know their donors’ favorite foods until after they began craving them.

I remember thinking it was curious, and probably one hundred per cent unexplainable.

But it came to mind again when I began to learn more about quantum theory, a subject which never ceases to fascinate and amaze me. It’s almost impossible to imagine that our bodies, which seem so solid and so “there,” are, like all matter, made up almost entirely of empty space. It’s also hard to unlock from the old and well-worn idea that our brains are the only conscious organ in our bodies, and that we are our brains and nothing more than our brains. But the more I read and learn, the more fascinated I become with the idea that every cell in our body is living, breathing, and — in some unfathomable (at least to me) way — aware of itself and of the whole.

Considering all that, what is a heart when removed from its body? Is it merely a pump, like a spare part you take from a car and put into another car? Most people would say so, and yet it seems to me that their gut emotion betrays their logical thinking. For example, I read about a survey on the subject in which a vast majority of people said they believed that a transplanted heart would carry no traces of the memories or attributes of its donor. Yet, curiously, the majority of those same people said they would not want to receive the heart of a murderer in a transplant.

So maybe it depends on whether one consults one’s head or heart in the matter.

Whatever you believe on the subject of cellular memory, and I do not quarrel with whatever you choose to believe, there lies the indisputable truth that the modern miracle of organ transplantation is rich with emotional context. A life is saved because another life is cut short. There is celebration in one family even as there is mourning in another. Often the two families find each other and come together to share the experience, to bond through these complex emotions.

It seemed to me that if I couldn’t find a story waiting in that emotional storehouse, it was time to turn in my novelist’s hat.

Behind and beyond the fascinations listed above, I was able to weave the layers of this story into a set of circumstances all too familiar to me: a child born with a weak and troubled heart. I knew that pain from close experience.

Maybe I wanted to create a fictional young heart patient and write her a happier ending than my niece Emily was able to have. Hard to say.

But, having said all of that, I do want to thank all the medical professionals who make such happy endings possible in the real world, every day.

Acknowledgments

F
irst and foremost, I want to thank a wonderful local team of cardiac and cardiothoracic surgeons, Drs Stephen Freyaldenhoven, David Canvasser and Luke Faber, for their generous contributions to this work, which included not only reviewing the manuscript for medical accuracy, but allowing me to observe an actual “open heart” surgery first-hand. Such opportunities do not come along every day in the life of an author, and I’m deeply grateful.

Many thanks also to John Zinke MD, and Nancy Vincent Zinke RN, BSN, for reviewing the early manuscript and referring me to the surgeons mentioned above.

I also want to note that the aforementioned details of cardiac surgery are quite removed from the fictional scientific opinions of my researcher character, Connie Matsuko. I have read and studied extensively the writings of the neuroscientist Candace Pert and the psycho-neuroimmunologist Paul Pearsall, and their research was helpful to me while creating the purely fictional Connie Matsuko and her views. I do want to be clear, however, that Connie Matsuko is neither Candace Pert nor Paul Pearsall, and that I created her myself through my own interpretations of such studies. Those who argue with her theories on cellular memory should definitely see them as coming from me and no one else.

Finally, I want to thank my friend Lee Zamloch for allowing me to borrow a small but rich detail of her life, taken from a story she once told me of waiting with her daughter for a donor heart that never came. It’s these small truths that bring fiction to life. I’m sorry you had to live it, but appreciate your generosity in allowing it to be used.

“An excellent read.”
–New Books Review

“Original and wonderful.”
–The Sun

“Catherine Ryan Hyde at her utter best.”
–ChickLit Reviews

The U.K. bestseller is now available in the U.S. for the first time!

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