Sunday's on the Phone to Monday (31 page)

Segue into how you guys met. How did your first kiss happen?

Carly yanked her sleeves down. How
did
it happen, anyway? The body had made plans, that was how. What more could Carly say? How could she endeavor anything? They were just two girls, really. They couldn't be more than this. Carly wouldn't be more than this.

A few months ago, Natasha had read an article with the word
segue,
of which she thought she'd only seen in print. She'd heard people say it out loud,
segway,
under the impression that this was an entirely different word. She understood
segue,
as written word, had the same definition, but thought it a word she'd never heard, pronounced
seg-you
. Natasha understood that she had more intelligence certainly than most people her age, but she understood that there were bushels of things she didn't know. And when you don't know, it doesn't mean
you're wrong. But this means it's probably your responsibility to learn.

I don't think I like feeling so much about somebody else. It makes me feel needy and old.

Well, we're both kind of old souls,
said Natasha, with frugality. Girls their age, bouncy and directionless, were the kind of girls who had high school sweetHearts. Not Carly, not Natasha. Girls going through their kind of scrapes weren't supposed to waste their days being in love.

Carly brought over a pint of butter pecan ice cream that evening from Stephen's kitchen freezer to his living room. In her other hand, she held two spoons. She lay on top of him. It was like he was wearing her.

Why two?
asked Stephen. They were watching
Friends
on Nick at Nite.

I forgot,
said Carly.

That we're lovers?

Am I you?
asked Carly.

What?
asked Stephen.

Carly spent most afternoons-into-evenings at Stephen's house. His mother would come home from work and always say
oh!
like Carly's presence still surprised her. Still, she was a kind lady. Nobody mentioned it, but Carly started to notice more of her favorite snack constituents in the fridge, like pesto and Fuji apples.

It was Passover. Stephen was giving up bread with his family.
It's kind of fun. Like we're all in it together.
Carly learned how to make matzoh ball soup and matzoh brie and matzoh pizza. They talked like weak and visceral dieters about rye loaves and baguettes, cake and crepes.

- Auschwitz survivors were given only one piece of bread a week. -
She wondered, had she been a Holocaust victim, if she would've received a tattoo and been sent to work or else sent directly to
the gas chambers. How would Carly have been viewed? What would her worth have been? In many ways, though, Carly believed that being sent to death was not the worse outcome—at least there was a finite future. At least there was no more worrying about survival. At least she could've died with her own name.

S
lightly Lucy insinuated the word -
Alan -
to herself, handling the name beside her sisters.

A week later, Lucy ordered a framed map of the United States and put it up in her room.
Pretty,
said Natasha.

Just before bedtime, Lucy pressed her fingers to the map, dwelling on
Allentown,
Pennsylvania.
Alan,
her lips wreathed the name. Then Lucy concocted the words,
tis of thee.
It simmered in her throat.
Tisoftheetisoftheetisofthee.

Even if Lucy hadn't consulted the newspapers at the time of the transplant, Natasha realized, archives ghosted online.

They were eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with the radio on because they were tired of all of their records. A Jackson 5 song came on, “The Love You Save,” and Lucy mused,
I love the radio.
Natasha said there was something to be said about serendipity.

If we were PB & J, who would be who?
Natasha asked Lucy, even though she'd already come up with an answer herself long ago. They knew every answer to each other's questions. If Lucy was peanut butter (enduringly glorious), Carly was jelly (wobbly, saccharine), then Natasha was the seven-grain bread their mother made them eat to assist their digestion. Their dispositions called the shots: Natasha was responsible, and her sisters stuck to the ribs. And if they were colors, Natasha would be bone and
Lucy would be flamingo and Carly would be sea green. Then Natasha risked it, the issue backstroking out of her.
Do you ever think about where your Heart came from?

I know where it comes from,
said Lucy.
I looked it up.
She took a spoonful of indigo jam from the jar, then licked it like a lollipop.

You did?

I did.

Natasha nodded, tentative.
Fuck, well, so did I. Don't hate me.

You would, smarty-pants. But I love you,
said Lucy.
I love my secondhand Heart. And I love Alan.

The fact was, just one week after she'd come home from the hospital, Lucy had too furtively looked up the obituaries online, then searched for Alan Douglas Rachmones on Facebook.

Lucy loved Facebook, posting digital pictures and joining groups like
BRB . . . I'm not going anywhere, but this conversation is.
She'd declared herself in a faux-marriage with one of her platonic girlfriends from school and wrote her religious views as
are you there god? It's me . . . Lucille Margaret.
The morning of the surgery, Lucy had even told her sisters her Facebook password.
It's crunchyelevator7,
she told them.
Do whatever you want with it, if something happens.
She was saying,
- log into my life and make it last. -
Forbid.

Lucy had typed, her new-fangled pulse nudging through each finger vein,
Alan Rachmones.
And after she'd pressed enter, her fingers ran out of things to do. She'd been able to do nothing further but read his horrible Facebook page. How it existed, was public, and by that time had already become a shrine of sorts. The page was being maintained by his family as a grievers' forum. Anyone on Facebook could see how Alan had been rich in family and friends.
Miss you Alan . . . thinking of you every day. Kiss Bubbe and Milkshake for me. / I miss you Alan. I wish you could be here to celebrate everything in our lives. / Love you Bro . . . Thanks for sending me happy signs. You are the world's best angel.

Alan had just graduated college that summer, Lucy learned.
The profile picture of Alan smiled, wore a graduation cap. Ultimately her fingers broke paralysis, and she logged out of the family computer and erased the Internet history, having never in her life before absorbed so much information.

His mother was one of his Facebook friends. Barbara Rachmones. Lucy couldn't help herself. Over a matter of hours, opening and closing the same tabs, she gained an awful courage to find the mother's phone number and enter it into her phone. Then she called.

Hello?
the mother answered, and Lucy said nothing, but her Heart called out, accelerating, rattling. She pressed end and felt relief. -
It's your mother, not mine, -
Lucy thought, pointing between her breasts, addressing her torso, feeling small and spooky. She felt like she'd just risked everything, but this did not stop her from jotting everything else she learned about this once-mother, this retired mother (Alan had no siblings, at least none on the Internet), on a pad of paper. Her address, her e-mail—both work and leisure.

What to do with this information, other than hide it? Lucy wasn't sure, but she felt slightly better having it in her possession. She was the type of person for whom the ultra informative approach surpassed all other worths. If god had offered Lucy a piece of paper with her date of death on it, Lucy would take the paper. It didn't mean she was necessarily stronger, or better, or unhappier—she just had a kind of personality. Knowledge comforted Lucy no matter how embarrassing or maddening it could be.

The night he stopped being a secret, and every night that week, Lucy dreamed of Alan. One night she had even gotten into bed two hours early to dream earlier, for (what she twinged to believe) their harmonized sabbatical: hers from her conscious life, his from his death. She had made a mistake in telling her sister. It was obvious now.

Guess who I dreamed I made out with last night.

Uncle Jesse from
Full House.

No. It was strange.

Someone like Mr. Johnstone?
Mr. Johnstone was the creepy technology teacher everyone joked about being a pedophile.

Alan. We kissed in the dream.
Lucy, erring on the side of honest.

Oh my god, Lucy! This poor boy!
Natasha's mouth sweated, keeping her own secret. She could never tell Lucy of her own dream. Alan wasn't hers to dream about. Also, appearing in more than one person's dream somehow made Alan seem more alive.

Shut up. And fuck you.
This came as a fright for Natasha, given how rare swearing was of Lucy. Lucy's treatment of language was delicate and not because she had anything in common with banal vanillas like Perry Como or Disney Channel child stars before their discovery of Hollywood nightlife.
Why curse when you can use more articulate and powerful words?
she frequently said, saving her curses for the times she had nothing else to say. The times she said these words, she meant them. Their father was the same way—he treated words with reverence and a varied palate, a connoisseur.

All Lucy knew of her dreams was how they led her thighbones in an achy trance. How every morning she woke up with her blanket off her body, arms enswathing the bed. Whenever Lucy used to have a crush on a boy, she'd daydream for hours about what they had in common, like membership in a band or an aptitude for math or their ethnicity. She almost felt the same way about Alan, loving him distantly and urgently, like a celebrity or venerated idol.

- Nobody understands, so screw everyone, -
Lucy thought. Nobody understood how it felt to graze the After. Lucy's journey had been (was?) a lengthy dredge. Alan's had been walloping and hopefully with little pain. Alan didn't come back. Lucy did. Alan saved her sorry body. His lovely, uncertain Heart beat inside her, and she couldn't imagine anybody else meaning more to her.

In her favorite dream, Lucy and Alan roomed together in
a city where all the lost children, children who died too early, went. A nirvana run by lost children, neither living nor dying. The city was an island, and Alan floated up on a canoe, offering her a seat.

Where are we going?

Leaving,
said Alan.
I want to go back.

Back?

I miss my mom too much.
Alan sniffed. He twirled his oars, dipped them in and out of the shivering sea. She fingered his spine, sure to stroke zithers of cartilage, a tundra-framework of cold porcelain. But nothing remained except bedrolls of air through her fingers.

That shattered in the accident,
he told her.
How could this thing have been so important?
he asked.

What thing?

You know,
he said.
My body.

Lucy hugged Alan, breathing jaggedly, for only when she and Alan made love did she have a Heart. They could be one unstoppable body, sharing Kitten. They had to be one body: sex was as necessary as it was carnal as it was ritual. Face was the lukewarm moon in this city, and even here it had trouble working. Face, who was supposed to heat up the whole night and nourish the planet with its crinkling light. The city as dark as a shearwater wing, except for Kitten, who heated Lucy and Alan in halves.

Lucy couldn't tell anybody what it felt like to be in love. She had nobody living to love. There was LJ, but he was with Leora, and even his love felt conditional. He romanticized her circumstance, which was even sadder than not having anyone in love with her at all. As for Sloane, well—he was too playful, seemed like he had no faculty for sadness. Lucy felt guilty about her feelings for him. And speaking of guilt, there was Stephen, who Lucy coveted in her confidential way.

There were so many boys, too many boys, none of them fit to adore. Lucy loved the only boy she believed she could. In the
conscious world, they couldn't share his Heart, and he'd given it to her.
- Well, -
Lucy thought,
- maybe
give
wasn't the right word, -
since his Heart had been taken and forced into her, the living deciding someone needed it more than he.

Lucy researched sexual fetishes the next day, learning about frotteurism, sexual sadism, sexual masochism, telephone scatalogica, necrophilia. She studied partialism, zoophilia, coprophilia, klismaphilia, emetophilia, erotic asphyxiation. She went to websites looking up pyrophilia, mammaphilia, narratophilia, olfactophilia, salirophilia, somnophilia, sthenolagnia, teratophilia. Why were people erotically charged by such different things? It was just probably association. Getting turned on in a blue room just once sometimes led to being turned on, for the rest of your life, by blue rooms. The mind could be astonishing or sinister.

Somewhere in the midst of her investigation, Lucy read about the idea of
safe words
, sometimes a term that people used during sex
. A safe word is a code word or a series of code words that is sometimes used to unambiguously communicate physical or emotional state, typically when approaching, or crossing, a physical, emotional, or moral boundary,
she read. Saying a word or term out of context like
platypus
or
umbrella
brought the two consenting adults back to reality if one or both went a step too far.