Pieces of Me (18 page)

“You went, right?”

“Of course I went.” Anger flared and made her voice vibrate.

“Sorry!” He held his hands out in surrender, grabbed the blanket, and turned over.

The only questions her parents asked were about the bills. The pills. Money.

“I’m an ass. I’m sorry.” Misty touched his back.

“Are you okay?”

“I promise. I’ll be fine. Just a big test coming up.”

“Okay. I have a piano recital on Thursday after school. Can you come hear me?”

“Sure. Of course.” If something happened to her, who would go hear George play his music?

Grief colored the entire world
like an overlay of drudge. Vivian stared at the mound of dirt set off in the distance that no one was supposed to notice. The small, strikingly purple casket (Pantone 18-3025) disappeared into the earth as people moved away. She’d watched Sally’s parents sob against each other, and the surviving siblings huddle together.

I gazed around.
Is this where my body is too? Will we walk by my gravestone? Do I have one?

Leif didn’t let go of Vivian’s hand, and I wanted someone to hold mine too. Vivian’s mother never came to funerals with her. It was too hard.

As if it weren’t a big deal, Leif skipped school and drove them to the church and then to the cemetery. For Vivian it felt like a huge deal that he came with her (Pantone 3278).

But Vivian was out of tears. When she died, what would mark her time on earth? A hole in the ground? A stone with her name on it? Anything permanent?

Your paintings will outlive us all
.

I can’t say it ever occurred to me to wonder.
What’s my legacy?
I never even thought about the leaving, so thinking about what might linger wasn’t part of the equation. But I got it. I understood why she was fixated.

Leif spoke quietly. “I liked what the minister said about death being a heavenly birthday.”

Vivian’s mind filled with a lively party scene. A whole world of purple and pink, balloons, cake, and presents. Sally was more vibrant and beautiful and wholly healthy, enjoying the reunion with friends.

Is that what heaven is? A party? Then why am I not there?

Vivian tipped her head to look up at Leif. “Do you believe in heaven?”

“I’d like to.”

“Me too.” Vivian had buried her friends for as far back as she remembered. First they were the older kids who knew the ins and the outs of the hospital. Who brought luggage to turn their rooms at the hospital into a home away from home. Who told her how to get through a test, or which nurse might sneak in ice cream after visiting hours, and who to avoid letting put IVs in at all costs. Sally was too young to know any of those friends.

But then, they were kids Vivian’s own age, maybe younger, but frequent fliers she met for the blood tests, and the PFTS, and the biopsies. Or met in the hospital during antibiotic treatments, the friends she Skyped with and texted, when they were too sick to hang out. Friends who also spent a great deal of time thinking about heaven’s existence.

And then somehow Vivian became the elder, the oldest kid in the ward who knew all the tricks and all the nurses. That was when she’d met Sally.

“I’m going to die,” Vivian declared.

“We all are.” Leif shrugged her off.

“Yeah, but you’ll be a grandfather first.”

Leif tried to make her smile. “You’ll be a cougar.”

“No. I will die young too.” The sincerity in Vivian’s voice sliced at Leif.

“You can’t know that. What are you talking about? You’re so wrong.” Leif couldn’t keep his voice low. His reaction carried on the wind over the mounds, between the crosses.

Vivian snorted. “I’m wrong?”

“Yeah, you are, I Googled CF. There’s an eighty-two-year-old.”

“So?”

“So that’s old. Freakishly old.”

“It’s not that old for a normal person.”

Leif huffed and licked his lips. “You’re more normal than most people I know.”

She refused to lighten up. “Don’t be funny. I’m serious. CF colors everything.”

“What color?”

“The color of snot when you have a bad cold. Pantone 15-0543.”

He grimaced. “Yuck, I can actually picture that. But why that color?”

“My entire childhood was spent dealing with the stuff of slime monsters. Trying to get it out of my lungs, hawking up loogies and hanging upside down to drip it out.” She paused. “People don’t live more than five or six years with new lungs.”

“So? You’ll be the first lung transplant to live sixty years more.
You’ll set a new standard.” Leif nodded his head as if decreeing the future.

Vivian knew this was unlikely; she wanted to hope, but it felt so impossible. She knelt and tossed in a handful of dirt onto the shiny purple of Sally’s casket. The sound of the particles hitting the lid was so final. So permanent. “Maybe I got some old person’s lungs. You think to Google that?”

“You didn’t.”

“No, probably not.”

Leif grabbed her hand and wound his fingers through hers, fiercely, as if trying to hang on to her forever.

They climbed back into the car and Leif drove toward Vivian’s. The radio played a mix of pop tunes and make-out music. I usually avoided cars, but I sensed a serious conversation on the horizon. Probably because I knew what they both thought in each moment.
Will come in handy when I figure out how to work it
.

“Do you think about your donor?” Leif finally broke the silence.

“All the time.”

“Do you want to know who he, or she, was?”

“I can write them a letter and if the family wants to meet me too, then we can, eventually. There are rules.”

“Okay, so write them a letter.”

“I think I might already know.”

I held very still while Leif pulled into the driveway and shut off the ignition.

“What? How?” Leif nudged her chin up until they made eye contact.

“There’s a girl who went to our school who died the night
after I was admitted to the hospital. I actually bumped into her right before my body collapsed.”

“That girl who donated her hair to the cheerleaders?” Leif nodded in recognition.

“Yeah, Jessica Chai.”

Hearing my name brought pause. There, after standing at another girl’s graveside, Vivian and Leif talked about me. They said my name.

“You think?”

“It makes sense. She’s the right age and time frame and cause of death. But I don’t know for sure. I guess I like to think it was her because our lives crossed. Maybe only accidentally, maybe just that once, but she saw me and I saw her. Is that weird?”

“No weirder than the reality of having someone else’s parts inside you.”

“Your leg was rebuilt with donated materials, right?”

“Yes, though at the time they didn’t tell me exactly what that meant.”

Cadaver tissue, anyone? My tissue
.

“Would you have refused? If you’d known?”

“No, but … I don’t think so.… Look, I don’t know anything about being a patient like you. I know that. But I do know about how life changes in an instant.”

“Your injury?”

Leif nodded, his lips twisting in part frown, part grin. “It wasn’t an accident. There’s a guy in jail for it.”

“What? You never told me—”

He interrupted. “Is it terrible that I want to thank him?”

Confusion snaked through Vivian’s words. “Thank him?”

Huh? Thank him?

“Yeah, it’s almost like he did me a favor.”

“How?”

“I didn’t have choices. I didn’t know who I was. What I wanted. I didn’t know you.” Leif touched her leg.

Leif heard the rumors almost immediately after he woke in the hospital. A few of his teammates visited him, and then more came during his rehabilitation. They egged him on to seek vengeance when he was better. His injury was bought and paid for by a rival quarterback’s family. The rationale? Leif received too many scout visits; scouts couldn’t be in two places at once and weren’t going to West Sealth’s games in favor of Leif’s. Their son was ignored because Leif garnered so much attention. Take Leif out, get noticed more.
Sick
.

“But how?”

“They paid off a lineman.”

“How could anyone do that?”

“The kid’s family was broke, I guess. They thought it wouldn’t be that big a deal for me to get a little surgery, be out for the rest of the season. They seemed to think it was kind to not do it first game in September.” His chin dipped with sadness.

“A little surgery? What? Four operations?”

Leif shrugged. “I was on autopilot. You are too.”

“What are you talking about?” Vivian mustered taller in the seat.

“You’re expecting a certain outcome.”

“I am?”

“What college are you going to?”

She rolled her eyes. “I don’t know.”

“What’s your wedding look like?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where are you buying a house and when are you starting a family?”

“I don’t know!” Vivian’s voice got louder and louder.

He smacked the steering wheel to prove his point. “See! You refuse to think about it. Most people think about it.”

“I can’t think about it.”

“You don’t want to. There’s a difference.”

“Why think about things that will never happen?”

“They won’t if you don’t want them, and work toward them, and put energy into making them happen,” Leif vehemently argued, but it sounded like a lecture.

“My life isn’t a football game, Coach.”

“That’s not what I’m saying. You’re misunderstanding.”

“No, actually I think I understand perfectly. You want me to have a winning attitude about this disease, but what you don’t get is that the CF wins. Every freakin’ time. CF, not me. Not Sally. Not Brian, or Crystal, or Wallace. Get it? They are
dead
. With transplants, or without transplants, it doesn’t matter. None of them were eighty-two when they died.” Vivian’s eyes brimmed with unshed pain.
What does she call the color filling her whole body? Fear? Sadness? Depression? Failure?

“Vivi—” Leif paled as she flinched away from his outstretched hand.

“Thanks, Coach, great talk.” Vivian slammed the car door behind her, then the house door.

He knocked but she refused to answer.

She found more tears.

So did I.

Misty left the library early
so she could get to school before the busses arrived. She wanted to see for herself if her hunch was correct.

Yep, I’m your donor. Why aren’t you taking better care of my piece?

The idea that a stranger had saddled her with this existence was one thing. But to think that she’d seen me alive was too much to bear.

She passed the bathroom where she usually ate lunch and where she had hidden out during that fourth period last October.

At the end of the hallway, she stopped. Her feet stuck to the floor as if all of this year’s old chewing gum was cheek to cheek between here and there.

She muttered. I felt her try to summon courage. The last drops of bravery squeezed from my liver and she moved forward.

Toward the trophy case. One foot in front of the other.

What happens to me next school year? When school is out for the summer, will they take all this down?

My photo stared back at us with as much personality as the paper it was printed on. Who was that girl? I no longer recognized
her. No longer bound by my hair, or my body, or my thoughts of tomorrow. Tangled up in other people’s breaths, and dreams, and pains. Next to my photo was the tacky, plastic, gold trophy the Skirts won for the hair drive.

Rage wanted to wash over me but Misty was drowning in a sea of depression, without purpose or direction. Misty’s emptiness trumped anything the Skirts did to me.

Misty laid her hand against the glass, hoping to feel warmth, or welcome, or recognition. But all she felt was the hard, smooth glass. It told her no one cared. It lied.

I care! Sam cares! Your brother cares!

I was afraid that even if she physically heard me, even if I manifested and shouted in her face, she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, hear me in her heart.

What did that say about me? What did people think about my death?

Do I have the strength to face it all?

Her fear almost shoved my own away. But maybe, just maybe, if I turned toward the case and read the words written about me, she too would gain strength to face her life. I wanted lungs to sigh, and eyelids to force wide, and a brain to tell to read. But I was no longer there, no longer a piece of this world.

But when Misty began to read, her lips moving silently, I read too.

Who wrote this? I don’t know this Jessica Frances Chai. She’s a stranger. Mother couldn’t let me be. I had a lemonade stand once when I was five, but I lasted only a couple of hours because selling required talking to neighbors and strangers. That freaked me out. The only money I made was a buck from my father. I never donated to the food bank. Carlton does the UNICEF thing, not me. Ever. Change the world? How? Seriously, my mother wrote this with her bridge club and tennis partners in mind. Did anyone really know me? Ever?