The Heart Does Not Grow Back: A Novel (20 page)

I still wouldn’t get the chance, it seemed—Melissa was gone, but the entire place looked like an archaeological dig for long lost toddlers. Toys were everywhere; every wall had pictures of a red-haired, gap-toothed little angel. She was a good smiler. The fridge was covered with pages ripped from coloring books. I could see the kitchen and bedroom from the open doorway. The house was probably smaller than my apartment, but reminded me of my palace in Verner.

She fiddled with her earring for an uncomfortably long time, faking a smile, finally saying, “Well, come on in.”

I looked at the pictures of Melissa and said, “She’s cute,” and I wasn’t even bullshitting to be nice.

“Thanks. She’s at my sister’s tonight. Believe it or not, I have to work at ten.”

“I believe it,” I said.

Her hair was still wet from the shower and I couldn’t tell if she had makeup on or not. That she would answer the door in such a vulnerable state was sort of touching.

It was already closing in on eight. “Do you think we’ll make it to this place and back in time?”

“No,” she said. “Wait—did you really want to go out to eat?”

Now she had me all screwed up. “Well, I wanted to talk. You wanted to go out to eat.”

“I thought by talking … I mean, you really want to eat dinner?”

“Oh, Hollie,” I said, the truth dawning on me. “It’s not like that.”

“Don’t get the wrong idea,” she said. “I don’t treat myself like currency. I’m not like that and I’ve never done anything like that.”

She sat down on the couch and said without looking at me, “I don’t have anything else to give you. I thought this might be what you wanted, and you sort of deserve it. My body, in a strange way, belongs to you.”

“Hell, my own body doesn’t even belong to me,” I said. “I’m glad you’re sitting down.”

I sat down next to her and she started to cry. I put my hand on her back and felt the dampness of her skin through the thin silk of her dress.

“My God, what you must think of me,” she said. “I just don’t know how to handle all this. I thought I was going to die and now I’m not and it’s because of you, and I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Three things you gotta know,” I said. “First, I’m a virgin. So as awkward as you just felt, how about
them
apples? Second, I think you’re one of the prettiest girls I’ve ever seen. And finally, that kidney I gave you? It grew back.”

That dried up her tears in quick fashion.

“What?”

“I can regenerate my organs and tissue,” I said. I held up my right hand. “Did you ever see the Verner shooting covered on television?”

“That one in the Midwest, at the high school party? I think I remember,” she said.

“The guy blew this hand off. It grew back.” I tugged my ear. “My ear grew back. My tonsils? Removed when I was a kid. They’re back. And that kidney I gave you—I have it back again. So if you think I own anything in your body, that’s just not true. It’s all yours. All I sacrificed was a little pain, and hell, they have drugs for that.”

“That’s about the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said. I took her shift in body language as a cue and took my hand off her back.

“You don’t believe me, which is fine,” I said. “The show is going to start airing and every week I’ll be giving things away. You may not believe it even then. You and a lot of other people will think it’s TV magic or some shit.”

“It’s not possible,” she said.

“That’s what I thought too,” I said. “Now that it’s all on the table, let’s just say fuck it. Let’s process it on our own terms, okay? I just want to hear you say fuck it and smile, and give me the number of your favorite local delivery-food source. Then I want you to go get some sweats on and let’s wolf that shit down so you can get a nap in before work.”

She smiled and said, “Fuck it, then.”

“Louder,” I said.

“Fuck it!” she cried, and laughed out loud.

We split a large pizza and drank Coke out of a two-liter bottle with almost no ice cubes, the best damn way to take it. You can really guzzle it down when it’s not too cold, just drink it so fast the bubbles hurt your nose. She talked about Melissa. I nodded and said “That’s nice” in all the right places, and just like that, my first-ever date was in the books.

On my way out, this tall, beautiful girl with her hair in a bun and a faded Raiders T-shirt kissed me on the cheek and said, “Thank you.”

And I didn’t think there was much to say to that, only things that could ruin the moment. I left and took the long way home, the way people do when there’s a moment worth savoring just a little while longer.

EIGHTEEN

I got home relatively early and the television lulled me to sleep. Later, the sound of a giggling girl woke me up. I was getting better at sleeping through Mack’s late-night entrances, no matter how loud his conquest for the evening was. But the muted giggling, a hidden-secret giggle, eased me out of slumber. I knew this sound. Tickling and foreplay, soon to be replaced by grunts and heavy breaths that always sound strange if you’re not the one having sex.

I tried to sleep. The heavy crash of flesh kept me awake, a smacking sound louder than the laugh track of the
Cheers
rerun on TV. Thankfully for my sanity, Mack’s weakness was his endurance. The noise wouldn’t last much longer, and it didn’t, and I fell asleep to the image of a strange and slender arm draped over his chest, wondering if that was as comforting as television made it out to be, or as annoying as it seemed in my imagination.

I never heard the girl leave, and woke up to Mack cooking his “I’m guilty of keeping you awake all night with my adulterous banging” waffles with microwaved sausage links, and we ate, squinty-eyed, standing at the countertop, washing them down with Gatorade straight from the bottle.

“You tell that one you were married?”

He smiled, his mouth full, and held up his hand, wiggling his platinum wedding band with his thumb.

“This motherfucker is money. It’s like a filter that wards off all the relationship-wanting chicks. If they see this thing and give you the time of day, you know it’s fuck, suck, and duck the fuck out. I mean, look at this; is this heaven? She didn’t even stay for breakfast.”

Another huge bite. Loose syrup dripped onto the countertop. “I feel used, I tell you,” he said. “Used! Like the rubber on the nightstand.”

“I’m eating.”

“Hey, you know why she didn’t stay for breakfast? She was sick and tired of putting sausage in her mouth.” He punctuated this by taking a bite out of a sausage link.

As far as I could tell, Mack hadn’t seen his “wife” in months. Everything was fake about
Dedications,
except for the marriage, which was legally binding in the state of California. He might have even filed for divorce, but kept the ring for “ho-filtering,” as he put it. He never spoke much about it. Could the relationship have actually damaged him? I wondered. Impossible. The pain must have been reserved for something entirely unrelated.

“You dial Rae last night? Do that stupid shit where you jerk the phone off, wishing you had the balls to call her?”

“No. I called Hollie.”

He shook his head. “Hollie? Christ, dude, you need to get
laid.
You get that? You get sucked into these busted-up chicks. You insist on drinking swill from someone else’s bottle, dude. Plenty of fresh beers in the cooler, ones that don’t have Harold Stillson’s cigarette butt floating at the bottom.”

“I’m not getting zapped.”

He picked up the phone. “What’s Rae’s number? I’ll call the goofy bitch. Seriously.”

“Not happening.”

“Then, here.” He slid the phone to me. I stopped it with my palm before it went into the sink. “Call her. Tell her to fuck or walk.”

“That doesn’t make sense. She’s already walked.”

“You’re one frustrating motherfucker. She’s already walked? That’s what I’ve been telling you for months. I’m telling you to call her finally because then, maybe, you can finally get to moving on. Personally, I’d tell her to walk off a short fucking pier with a hundred-pound bag of meth tied to her ankle.”

He grabbed a balled-up T-shirt from the top of the couch, put it on, and picked up his wallet. “You’ve got your privacy for a few minutes. I’m going to get condoms and toilet paper.” He stopped at the door. “This show will never work if you’re a mope-ass on TV. I’m shocked they picked it up, the way you were when the cameras were on. You’re saving a life and it looks like your fuckin’ dog died. Move on. For both of us. I wouldn’t be giving you so much shit about it if I didn’t care.”

He left, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t connect with a sort of twisted sense I understood. Months had passed. No word. The time had come to at least dial that last digit. If I didn’t, in some weird way, I felt like I was cheating on my promise to Rae if I kept talking to Hollie.

So I dialed, my finger hovering over that final “8,” the tip sticky from syrup, the smell of maple and grease in the air. The apartment was shadows and coolness, the shades drawn, the light falling on the floor in creases. I pressed the number. I listened for the ring without bringing the phone to my ear, contemplating hanging up before anyone could answer, but a voice said “Hello” on the second ring. I brought the phone close, tight against the cove of my ear.

“Hello?” the voice said again. A woman, not Rae.

“Hi, I’m looking for Raeanna Stillson.”

“You’re not the first one,” she said, and chuckled a little. “This must be their old number.”

I hung up without another word. She was gone and it hurt like I didn’t expect it to hurt. And I knew
The Samaritan
would happen then. I finally wanted it. I wanted to be on television and look into the glittering eye of a camera and know she’s out there, and I was here, saving people, and one day I would look into that camera and say her name for millions to hear and she would feel the mistake she had made become hard and sharp inside of her, and she would call, and I would think about not picking up—not picking up would be such an option for that future me, I was sure of it—but I would wait for three rings at least and then pick up and go from there.

*   *   *

“Your hands?” Hollie said. “That’s insane.”

“Feet, too,” I said. We were finally seated at a real restaurant, some white-tablecloth joint called Providence. You can always tell a restaurant is fancy when the price-to-portion ratio is something completely asinine. I got a piece of salmon the size of a deck of cards with some sauces randomly smeared on the plate, artistically presented next to a haphazard alignment of fruits.

“Quadruple amputee. Old guy got a blood infection. Sepsis? Something like that. Should be good stuff for TV; he sure knew how to talk to the cameras. Stuff about finally touching his grandkids’ faces.”

“That’s what I was to the show-running people?” she said. “Stuff?”

“Sadly, yeah. But not to me. I promise, not to me.”

“I know, Dale,” she said. “But the joke’s on them. I held the good stuff back.”

She was eating some chicken contraption with a glass of red wine, and took a long drink.

“You can tell me,” I said. “But not if you don’t want to. I understand the value of keeping things to yourself.”

“No, I can tell you. You’re the kind of guy you can just tell things to. But after I tell you, let’s just say fuck it and eat, okay?”

“Fuck it, indeed,” I said. “Shoot.”

“I tried to kill myself,” she said. “Pills. Melissa, God bless her—she dialed 911. I have no idea how your people didn’t find out about it, but even if they did, they wouldn’t know that I prayed every day I wouldn’t get a call about a donor. I wanted to die in the worst way because I
love
that little girl. I’m worth over a half million dollars dead. Young and dead, anyway. Even when I was so broke I had to skip meals, I paid my premiums. I knew it was the only way to protect her. And we drive by this place in actual Los Angeles, a beautiful place on Raymond Avenue, brick with a green roof, green steps. Perfect landscaping. It’s close to everything, including a good school. It’s not a dream home but any home is a dream for me.”

“How much?” I asked.

“That, I shouldn’t say,” she said. “It seems like I’m trying to play a future celebrity for a handout.”

“I’m just curious,” I said.

“Something like four-hundred thousand,” she said, and punctuated it with another gulp of wine.

“She’d have a mostly empty house and maybe some money left over for college,” I said. She nodded. “But no mother. And that money for college? It’ll evaporate, Hollie. Life does that to money. She’ll be so young, some handler will drain it off for property taxes and repairs and utilities.”

“My sister wouldn’t—”

“She wouldn’t care as much as you,” I said. “But you’re here now. Right?”

“I’m here now. And I’m calling fuck it,” she said. “So, if you do that amputee guy and your hands and feet grow back, what next?”

“The one after that should be easier. I’m going to give a pancreas to a diabetic war hero. They say this guy might win the Medal of Honor. His battalion was pinned down for an entire day, one of his comrades dying just out of reach. He was stuck behind the husk of an old truck, his ammo low, radioing every few minutes for permission to extract the injured soldier. He kept getting negatives, and he kept refusing opportunities to pull back to safer ground. When he was down to his last clip, the tide finally started to turn, and he radioed again for permission, getting an exasperated “affirmative.” He didn’t hesitate, and the injured soldier lived. But alas, our hero got diagnosed as diabetic, got discharged, and already had a kidney transplant. He ended up with serious complications and needs a pancreas.”

“A pancreas sounds easier than hands and feet,” she said, and giggled a little. “Sorry, I don’t mean to laugh, but you treat it like a long day at work.”

“That’s sort of what it is,” I said, and took a sip of water. The waiters had actual fucking assistants, one of whom immediately refilled it.

Hollie watched, fascinated. “How hard you think it is to drink this water to the bottom?” she said. “Do I have to chug it?”