Some of the Parts (26 page)

I
wake up in white.

“You're going to be fine,” the doctor says.

I try to speak but I can't. My tongue is thick in my mouth, glued in place.

“You need to rest. We gave you something to help you sleep,” the doctor tells me. “But you are going to be fine. You'll be back to normal before you know it.”

I want to scream, I want to say no, because I know now that there is no normal anymore, there is no back, there is no memory that can keep him. He's gone. Nate is gone. For real, this time. I want to tell the doctor this, tell him that I should have jumped, should have broken myself into pieces to give away.
My gifts.
The price to be with my brother.

But my body is a slab of wood. I cannot lift my head or my arms or anything else. I cannot speak or scream. I feel tears running down my face and I cannot wipe them away.

I still didn't get to tell him. I still didn't tell him how sorry I am.

“I know,” the doctor says. “I know.”

But he doesn't.

wednesday
10/15 and so on

M
om holds my hand. She traces the bones in my wrist with her thumb.

“We have a lot to talk about,” she says.

I touch her hand, too, feel her skin like paper. Like canvas for painting.

“We know everything now,” my father tells me. “I got a notice in the mail. A collection notice, for an unpaid ambulance bill. Four months overdue. And at first I thought that I must have just forgotten to pay it. But then—”

“We went through your room,” my mother blurts out. “I'm sorry, honey, but we had to do it. And we found—”

My father jumps in again. They're ping-ponging the conversation, like they used to do. Before. “Nate's mail. And some of his clothes. And things from his room.”

“I'm sorry,” I tell them.

They both shake their heads, mirror images. “You don't need to say that,” my father says. “What's done is done. We're just grateful you're…”

Alive.
The word hooks into the air between us.

I want them to be angry, I want them to ask me how I could do what I did, stand in a window and think about jumping. Ask what stopped me. Ask me anything.

My mother makes a little sound, like a choke meeting a gasp, and her hand tightens around mine.

“Are you okay?” my father asks.

That question.

“I don't know,” I say. “I thought I could make things different. I thought I could put Nate back together but—”

“Tallie,” my mother interrupts. “It doesn't matter now. You are going to get better, that's the important thing.”

“You said that already.”

“Well.” Dad shuffles uncomfortably. “We should probably let you get some rest.”

I didn't get to tell Nate, but I can tell them.

“Guys,” I say, so quietly that it's hardly even audible.

Dad has his arm around Mom, and pivots them both around at once. “What's that, sweetie?”

“I'm…” My throat is tightening, trying to stop the words. But this has to happen, doesn't it? The doorway out of limbo opens with the words that have been drowning in my crazed imagination. This is the hardest part, prying them out of my scarred, wasted, reborn body. I push, I push hard, and then, finally, the dam is shattered.

But instead of a river, only a trickling stream comes through.

“I should have let him drive.” I hear myself say the words, but they don't feel like anything. And I remember Dad telling me that sometimes what you think you need isn't what you need.

I thought it was all my fault, and I thought my guilt was keeping me from becoming myself again. Now I know I will never be myself, not the way I was before. I will carry this, the memory of the accident, the sound of the crash echoing in my ears. Maybe forever. It's part of me. The
after
me.

I look at my parents, and they look like they were asleep for a long time and just woke up and are confused about where they are. They have heard me name the thing that I regret the most, that I will always regret more than anything else, and they tell me, “It's okay, sweetheart,” but they don't know everything else, and I don't think I need to tell them. It's the jumper all over again, a story I can't quite explain, something they would wish I hadn't seen. Something they can't fix.

Bad things happen, and we are not the same when they are over.

But we go on.

They sit down and we talk for a while—Mom, Dad, and I—about what to do now. They don't want to send me back to school, but I tell them (and I mean it) that school is the only place that makes me feel normal again. I need to go through those motions, do the normal things that normal kids do, even though the motions may not be smooth for a long time. Even though I will see Mel and remember our adventures like a movie I watched once. Even though Chase may not be there—and if he is, I don't know what he'll do with me if I don't need a rescue team.

Maybe we can just get coffee.

That would be nice.

Eventually I convince my parents that I will be okay. And I almost convince myself, too.

Before they leave for their hotel, Dad pulls a cardboard box from inside his jacket. For a moment I think of Nate's ashes, the box we took to the columbarium and surrendered to Eben Dolmeyer, but this box is white and a bit smaller, and I recognize the symbol on the outside of it. So I kind of know what it is. But I open it anyway.

It's an MP3 player. Green, not blue like Matty was.

“I didn't know if you'd want the same color as Nate had,” Dad says. “We can exchange it, if you want a different one.”

I shake my head. “No,” I tell him. “This is good.”

Mom says, “You were listening to his music a lot.” It isn't a question.

I nod.

“Now you can listen to your own, too.”

And so I am. I'm listening to some new songs that I've downloaded and I'm stroking the smooth green metal when Dr. Blankenbaker comes in a few days later. She's taller than I remember, and softer-looking. She's smiling but her eyes are serious, and when she sits down in the blue chair that's still warm from my mother's body, I see that they're the same color as mine. Carefully, I pull my earbuds out and set them in my lap. I can still hear the music threading out, tinny and distant.

“I just saw your parents in the hallway,” Dr. Blankenbaker says. “They look a lot better than when I first saw them.” Then she adds, “As do you.”

“I feel better,” I tell her. It's good to say something that is both simple and true. I make a note to do that more often from now on.

But despite what I told my parents, that I'm ready to move on, there is still a story I need to tell. There is still so much I haven't said out loud and it's not enough to say it to myself, to fill this hospital room with words and let them echo off the walls into nothing. So Dr. Blankenbaker hears it all: Gerald and Jennifer and Dr. Fikri, Mel and Amy and Chase, what I did and what I said, what I'm sorry for. She raises her eyebrows higher and higher but she lets me finish before she speaks.

“There's a lot we don't know about grief, Tallie.” She looks inside the folder she's holding, as if there's a script in there that will tell her what to say next. Then she closes it and tosses it on the bed. “No one knows better than you do how it felt to lose Nate. Death is like a really confusing foreign film. Everyone in the theater has a different idea of what it means. And the subtitles are no help at all.”

“I guess it's just one of the big mysteries,” I say.

She nods once. “It's good to know there are still a few of those, isn't it?”

“I didn't think doctors like things they can't explain. I thought you wanted to have answers for everything.”

“For every thing we can explain, there are a thousand that we can't. I can't tell you exactly how life begins, or why some people can tolerate pain that is unbearable to others, or whether death is an ending.”

“Or how the pearl grows in the mollusk?” I ask.

“Sure,” she says, a little uncertainly.

“And that doesn't drive you crazy?”

She smiles. “If I had all the answers already,” she says, “I wouldn't have any questions left. And questions are the whole point of what I do.”

“What's your favorite question?”

She thinks for a moment, her eyes fixed on something invisible across the room.
“Why.”

“
Why
is your favorite question, or why am I asking you?”

“
Why
is my favorite. Because it just keeps going, and it opens so many doors.”

After she's gone, I think about
why.
About how it was the question I hated most after the accident, because there was no answer at all for the longest time. And now I see that the answer I give today might not be the one that works tomorrow, or next year, or when I get married, or when I tell my son or daughter about their uncle Nate, who they can never meet.

But maybe it's not about the answer, in the end. Maybe just being able to ask the question has to be enough sometimes. The question, the asking, my brain, my voice, my body. I am here. I am alive. I am lucky.

It sucks to be facing a life without my brother.

But it's a life, just the same.

“T
allie?”

It's a woman. She has inky dark hair and eyes and at first I think I am imagining her because her voice is so soft and gentle and hardly anyone who is real ever talks like that. She is wearing an enormous sweater that she has wrapped around herself. She is holding herself with her arms, like she is afraid she might fall apart.

I know that feeling.

Everyone else is gone now, my parents and the doctor and all the others who want to get a look at me, and I am empty as a bag from all that talking.

“Yes,” I tell her. “I'm Tallie.”

She steps into the room and comes almost to the side of the bed. I will not call it my room or my bed. These are not my things. At least, I know that much.

“I'm Ann,” she says. “Ann Shepard.”

“Hello,” I say.

She steps a little bit closer, wraps her sweater even more tightly. “I think,” she tells me, “that I may have your brother's heart.”

I push myself up with my fists, sit straight.

Ann smiles, her mouth wobbling as it moves. She is very nervous. “Everyone is talking about you, all over the hospital. I've been participating in Dr. Fikri's study but I wasn't in the room when you— I was at another appointment down the hall, and when I heard about you, well—” She takes a deep breath. “I asked Dr. Fikri if she could find out.”

Your personal history. Questionable intentions.

“And she did?”

“We compared the dates of my surgery and your brother's death. And they matched up. Your friend—Chase? He wanted to tell you right away. But we didn't know for sure, until your parents got here. And then they had to talk to Life Choice and I had to talk to them, too—” She stops, out of breath. “I'm sorry, can I sit down?”

“Of course.”

She pulls the blue chair from the corner and sets it next to me. It's a bright blue, a cartoonish blue. I wonder if Mom noticed.

“It doesn't usually work out this way, but the Life Choice people decided that since we were all in the same place already, and everyone gave their consent—well, they confirmed it.”

And she actually places her hand over her heart, the heart that used to be Nate's, when she says, “Thank you for sharing your brother with me. I'm so sorry you lost him, and I know it won't fix anything, but I want you to know that I am taking good care of him.”

There's an invisible rope around my throat. “Thank you,” I say.

Then I think of something.

“So,” I ask, “Chase didn't know for sure that you had Nate's heart until after I broke into the group meeting?”

She smiles. “None of us did, not for sure. But I spoke to Chase when he and his father first got here, when they came looking for you. They thought you might try to find us, the people from the group, and well—I don't know. But they wanted to warn me.”

“Chase thought I was going to hurt you?”

She shakes her head. “No, he promised you wouldn't do that. He did that thing, you know, that kids do?” And she traces her index finger across her chest, making an
X
with her finger.

“Cross my heart,” I say.

“That's right. He did that, and then he told me that he thought you and I would have a lot to talk about. After you were okay again.”

“But he didn't know…”

Anne shrugs, crosses her arms again. “Maybe he has special powers.”

Chase,
I think. His name has become one of those words, the ones I will have to practice until they feel okay again. Until I know if he can forgive me for everything I did.

“Thank you,” I tell her. “I'm glad you came.”

“I'm glad you're okay,” she says. “I should let you rest.”

“That's what everyone says in hospitals.”

She smiles. “Yes. I remember.”

“Well,” I say, “I'm glad you're okay, too.” I try not to look at her chest, try not to see the beating heart inside it. I look at her eyes instead. Dark, like Nate's. But not Nate's.

She stands carefully. “I wonder if…well…could I write to you sometime? I'd really like to know more about him. I've wondered, you know, what he was like. Maybe you could tell me some stories or—”

“I don't think that's a good idea.”

“Oh.” Ann is as surprised as I am to hear the words come out of my mouth. But as soon as I say them, I know they are true.

“I just mean…”
What do I mean?
“I can't try and explain him to you. He's—he was…”

“He was a whole person,” she says. “It wouldn't be fair to summarize him.”

“Right.”

And she is, but it's more than that, too. I thought finding the rest of Nate would let me keep him somehow, but it wasn't him I was looking for. It wasn't a way to get him back.

It was a way to let him go.

She stands and turns to leave, and then she pivots back again. “It's the strangest thing,” she says. “I never liked ice cream before, but lately I've been craving it. It's all I can think about, getting a vanilla fudge dip cone. Isn't that odd?”

She accepts my smile as an answer and a farewell. I watch her walk all the way down the hall, past all of the other doors that hold all of the other patients and visitors and doctors, and I think of the columbarium as I watch Nate's heart walk back into the world.

I reach over to the rail that runs along the side of my hospital bed, identical to the one that held me after the accident. So much has changed and yet here I am, and it's as if I've been taken back to when everything spun sideways, that day that I lost my brother and lost myself, too. The rail is cool when I wrap my hand around it, it is solid and real, and it rings like a bell as I tap and scrape my finger to the rhythm of the one word I always knew best.

Scrape tap. Tap scrape. Scrape. Tap.

Nate.