Some of the Parts (17 page)

The church is almost empty, except for a few small old ladies who appear to be as permanently fixed in their places as the pews or the pillars. They run their rosary beads through their fingers, their whispers echoing through the dusty air. I almost want to touch one to make sure they're real, but I'm afraid I'll find they are ghosts, that none of this is real. I lower myself into one of the pews at the side of the church, far away from where we sit every Sunday. The wood warms immediately underneath my body.

“Tallie?”

The hairs rise up on the back of my neck when I hear my name. It's Father Paul.

“It's very nice to see you, Father.” My voice, the words are mechanical. What my mother would say.

“And you, my child.” He is gripping the back of the pew in front of me, and the wiry black hairs on his knuckles look like hundreds of spider legs. “What brings you here this afternoon? Not our busiest day, you can see.”

I may not be exactly devoted to the church, but I can't quite bring myself to lie to a priest. Or look him in the eye. I raise my face and stare at a spot just to the side of his head, hoping the shadows will help hide my evasion. “Nothing in particular, Father. I just…I miss the windows.”

He smiles. I can see it in my peripheral vision. “You always did love the windows, didn't you?”

“I did.”

“We've been praying for you, Tallie, and for your parents.”

“Thank you, Father.”

“Perhaps coming here today could be a kind of first step for you? A step toward coming back to our flock?”

My hand hurts all of a sudden, and when I look down at my lap, I see that I've been digging my fingernails into my palm. Tiny red crescents are lined up like angry smiles.

Father Paul takes my silence as a chance to keep talking. “Sometimes, when something very difficult happens, we find ourselves resisting God and his work in our lives. It's important, Tallie, that you remain open to the message that God is sending you. He has great plans for you.”

Between the words he is saying, I can hear something else. Almost like when my father is tuning his ancient radio and the needle falls between stations and two different voices overlap in the static. Father Paul's words are doing that, separating, and the echoing whispers of the old women are smoothing the edges but I can hear something anyway. Both of my hands are clenched into fists now, the points of pain from my nails waking me up, tuning me in like the radio needle.

“It does us no good to be angry at God, Tallie,” Father Paul says. And beneath his words, I hear:

good Tallie

“We cannot wait for life to become what we expect.”

wait

“We will all find peace in our own time, but we must be patient and listen.”

find time

listen

“Tallie? Are you all right?” Father Paul's voice has changed. He sounds alarmed, and it is only then that I realize I have closed my eyes, squeezed them shut with the effort of listening to the words I am hearing.

I clear my throat. “Fine, Father. I have to go. Thank you.”

I don't even feel the stone floor under my shoes as I walk back outside.

Nine days is an eternity. I see it now. Anything can happen in nine days. But that could help me, or hurt me. Nine days is long enough for a breakthrough, for finding a whole new set of clues, but it's also plenty of time for my father to convince my mother to sell our house, pack our things, flee the scene of the crime, and start over.

Nine days can change everything.

Just look at how much happened in a few minutes in May.

And the words I heard in the in-between of Father Paul's advice—
good, wait, listen—
are the words I've been hearing all along from well-meaning adults like Principal Hunter and Ms. Doberskiff.
Be
good.
It will get better, just
wait. Listen
to us, we know what's best for you.

I'm done listening. I'm done being good.

I've been chanting
Get back to normal
all this time, like a litany, like a mantra. But maybe there's no going back. Maybe there's just pushing forward.

When I get home, the house is still empty. I go upstairs, into Nate's room, and I take a ballpoint pen from the cup on his desk. Pull up my sleeve and write on the inside of my arm, just above the crook of my elbow:
Nate.

tuesday
10/7

C
hase is absent again.

I manage to avoid both Principal Hunter and Ms. Doberskiff by hiding in the library for most of the day. I've convinced my teachers to give me independent assignments for the rest of the semester, playing the I'm-just-a-little-overwhelmed card. I think they were relieved to send me off on my own, given that the alternative was an in-class meltdown that would probably involve a lot of administrative paperwork. My self-imposed social separation meant that I was one of the last people to hear the news that Jackson's mother died over the weekend.

At first I felt relieved to have been replaced as the object of everyone's pitying glances. Then I realized that this could mean an expiration date on the preferential treatment I've been getting.

I'm not proud of either response.

I make a mental note to compile Jackson's favorite movie themes into a playlist for him, and then I check my mother's dummy email account. Gerald is waiting in the in-box.

It must be so difficult, the desire to know where every part of Nathaniel now resides. I wish I could do more. Perhaps we could arrange to meet? Perhaps seeing me in person—seeing the effect of his gifts—would put your heart at ease.

Those words—
his gifts
—bring a wave of heat across my neck. As if Nate took his organs out himself, wrapped them like Christmas presents, and gave them to other people.

I write back to Gerald quickly, a terse note.
It is too soon,
I tell him.
It would be too much right now. I need more time. I will write again when I am stronger.

I feel a little cruel, having encouraged him to write to me and used him for information, but also relieved because now I will not have to explain to him why I am not my mother.

I close the email and go back to the in-box. There's a new message from someone called SparkleCat76. At first I think it's spam because the subject line just says
Hello,
but I open it anyway and then I see that it's from someone named Jennifer. She's writing because Sandra Goldman told her that I'm looking for transplant patients in the Boston area.

Sandra is kind of pushy, IMO, but she kind of made me promise to write to you because she thinks I need to talk to someone other than her about myself. IDK, maybe she's just sick of me calling her. Anyway. I had my surgery at the end of May and I'm doing pretty well. I'm tired a lot. I had to quit my job at the record store, which sucks, but I'm all caught up on every season of Breaking Bad so I've got that going for me.
☺

I'm torn between excitement at potentially having a new lead and disappointment that whatever part of Nate may have ended up in this woman missed its chance to spend all day in a record store. He would have loved that. I skim the rest of her email for anything that might be a clue about whether that is the case, but there's nothing but inane clichés, references to second chances and gratitude.

Then I remember that she thinks I'm a reporter. So she's going to get some questions.

I thank her for writing and express my deepest sympathies for everything she's gone through. I tell her that I'd like my article to help people understand her experience, both physical and emotional. She didn't say which organ she had replaced and I wonder if it's rude to ask—too personal, according to some spectrum of medical inquiries—but I figure I can find out later, if she's even one of Nate's recipients. I ask her what she knows about her donor, if anything, and whether she thinks about that person. Hidden behind my mother's name and the story I've made up about who she is, I tell myself that these questions are necessary.

And I pray that the answers are what I need.

I ride my bike home from school. My parents aren't there, and I wonder if Hunter has notified them yet of my insubordination. If he called yesterday, or today, they have opted not to say anything. At least, not right away. Maybe they are sitting on the information like a cat with a mouse, waiting to see what the mouse does next.

With Matty threading songs into my head, I get myself an apple from the bowl on the kitchen table and rub it against my jeans until it's shiny, reflecting light I didn't see before. I hold it in front of me all the way up the stairs like a beacon and drop my backpack on my bed. I'm about to bite into the apple when I hear a noise behind the music. At first I think it's part of the song, but when I take out one of the earbuds, it's still there, separate from all the other sounds. Short taps like staccato beats, mixed with quick little scrapes. It's coming from my closet. Still holding the apple, I open the door. The tapping stops, then starts again. It sounds like it's coming from the other side of the wall. From Nate's room. It's probably an animal, a squirrel or something, that climbed in through the attic. But it sounds so familiar, almost like—

Morse code.

Nate and I used to ask for our rooms to be connected. We wanted my dad to cut a hole through our shared wall so we could crawl back and forth and visit each other, but we always got one of those noncommittal parentisms like “Oh, that would be fun, wouldn't it?”

Eventually we stopped asking and tried to send each other messages in Morse code instead. Nate got a book from the library with a chart of the Morse version of the alphabet, and he eventually taught me how it worked, how the taps were measured. A dot is the quickest, one short beat, and a dash equals three dots. A one-dot pause between the parts of a single letter, a three-dot pause between letters, and a seven-dot pause between words. On a telegraph, someone could hold the signal longer for the dashes, but we had to figure out another way. Nate came up with scrapes for dashes, mixed with taps for the dots. I could never think quickly enough to understand his messages as he tapped and scraped but I got better at recognizing the patterns, and by the time I was ten or eleven, if I listened closely enough, I could write the “words” down and then look up the translation. Which was usually a lot less exciting than what I expected.
THE CROW FLIES AT MIDNIGHT. SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT. MEAT LOAF FOR DINNER.

I step into the hallway and listen for signs of life from downstairs, but it seems that I am still alone in the house. Or at least that my parents aren't here. Nate's door swings wide without noise or resistance, just like any other door. I have been in his room plenty of times since the accident, but only when my parents were sleeping or gone. A few rules were established after it happened, rules we never discussed but that were somehow understood between us, and staying out of his room was one of them.

The first time I snuck in, I thought maybe the door would be stuck like the sword in the stone, locked under some mystical spell. I was almost disappointed when it was so easily opened.

Now I close it behind me, just in case my parents come home.

Everything in Nate's room looks the way it did before, like a museum exhibit preserved behind glass. When I took things after the accident, I was careful not to move his stuff around too much so Mom and Dad wouldn't know anything was missing. Not that they ever spend any time in here. The room smells stale. I flip the latch on the window and slide it open a few inches. Dust bunnies emerge from the corners and dance across the floor, animated by the breeze. My mother would be appalled. I gather them up with my fingers, and when I bend down to tuck them into the little trash can next to Nate's desk, something catches my eye.

There's a kind of pocket stapled to the back of the desk. Nate must have swiped one of Mom's fabric swatches and her staple gun to attach it. I reach inside and pull out a book.

I recognize the red cover. I turn it sideways and see a white tag at the base of the spine. Little black numbers.

It's the codebook from the library.

He was so sure that we'd learn Morse code, that we'd be able to communicate with it someday, and he never got impatient when I couldn't figure it out. But we hadn't talked about it in a long time, so I thought he'd given up.

I sit down on Nate's bed and open the book's cover. There are notes written in his careful capital letters, a list of words he used a lot and their Morse translations:
and, with, music, everyone.
My name is at the top. I close my eyes against the sight of it and flip to the back of the book instead, then let the pages flip forward past my thumb until I feel them skip. I open my eyes and see a folded piece of paper tucked into the middle of the book.

Nate
is written on it in rounded print, the letters of his name huddled close together.

I've seen this print before, on notes passed to me in classes every year of middle school. On birthday cards and silly drawings and lists of boys' names at sleepovers.

I open the note fold by fold, my breath catching on the edges.

Dear Nate,

I don't know how to tell you this in person. I mean, I've tried, but I just feel bad and I can't get all the words out. So I'm really sorry to be doing it this way, but I think we need to break up. I really do like you. You're a great guy. But I can't lie about my feelings anymore.

I'm sorry,

Amy

My head is spinning. I lie down, without even thinking about it. I lie down and put my head on his pillow and even with the fresh air coming through the window it all smells as dusty and stale as a tomb. Everything whirs through my mind like a lightning-fast slide show: the playlist he made for her, the kiss I wasn't supposed to see, this note, Amy crying at the Sip'N'Dip, going to Principal Hunter, yelling at the carnival. All this time, I've been trying to help her, trying to make up for what I took away from her.

And she'd already thrown it in the garbage.