Second Hand Heart (13 page)

A little snorting laugh escaped me, followed by the sting of immediate regret. I apologized in a mumbly voice.

“What’s funny?”

“The idea that you’ve never been in love before. I thought you always told the truth.”

“I do always tell the truth. Why would you think that isn’t the truth?”

“Because Abigail told me,” I said. As if from a distance, I heard my voice harden and come up in volume. I wondered why there was emotion behind the words, and what kind of emotion it might be. “Abigail told me the truth. She told me that every couple of months you meet a guy and decide it’s love at first sight.”

In the silence that followed I thought, There. I did it. I punctured that weak balloon of fiction. It was messy and painful, but it needed to be done. I thought all this with my eyes trained down to the worry stone, which I had begun to absent-mindedly finger.

When I looked up, Vida’s face was white. Shockingly white. Drained of all color. I found it hard to look away.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“Look, I’m sorry. But it’s better to get the truth out on the table.”

“Why would she lie?” she asked, her mouth remaining open long after the words had fallen out.

It struck me hard in my unusually vulnerable gut that she was probably not faking it. At least, my gut said she was not. It said you just can’t fake that level of shock. Maybe Vida really did always tell the truth. Maybe Abigail was a liar.

“Where was I supposed to have met all these guys? I was too sick to even go out of the house. Why did you even believe that, Richard? How could you believe that? It doesn’t even make sense.”

I opened my mouth but no words came out.

She was right, of course. I should have at least doubted Abigail’s version of events. I guess, in the absence of first-hand experience, I still had a sort of “default” image of Vida living a normal life before I met her.

Why hadn’t I at least considered the possibility that the picture Abigail had painted wasn’t even possible? I guess when a tiny pink-cheeked pixie like Abigail opens her mouth to speak, I somehow expect truth to spew forth.

I thought I had plenty of time to answer. I glanced down at the stone again, and when I looked up, Vida was off her chair and halfway to the door.

“Vida!” I called out, and everyone in the coffee house turned around. As if everybody’s name was Vida. I hadn’t meant to shout. “Where are you going?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I hope you’ll excuse me. I have to go kill my mother.”

The door made a whooshing sound as it closed behind her.

I sat nursing a deep disappointment. I’d allowed myself just so much time to indulge my strange and ambivalent experience with Vida’s company, and it stung to have it prematurely yanked away.

I turned my attention to the printouts, planning to gather and neatly stack them to take home.

That’s when I realized that our worry stone was still firmly gripped in my right hand.

•  •  •

I waited until Myra had gone to bed in my bedroom. I’d given her my bed for the duration of her visit. And, let me tell you, it took everything I had not to call it “Lorrie’s and my bed.” There was only one bed in the house. So I was sleeping on the couch.

I took out my glasses, and the stack of printouts I’d brought home from the coffee house. They had been hiding in a scandalously old stack of unreturned student papers.

Vida is right. I’m a liar and a coward.

But I’m not a complete coward, I guess. Because I began to read them.

The first, the one whose headline I had already read, turned out to be a surprisingly scholarly article from some type of medical website. I tried to divine what type, based on the link text in the navigation bar, but it didn’t help. In any case, very little was anecdotal. It outlined a new theory that suggests that the mind-body connection is so complex that memories are stored not solely in the brain, but in virtually every cell of the body. A prominent psycho-neuroimmunologist suggested that every living cell of a living system has the capacity to remember, creating pathways that extend to the skin and to internal organs …

I stopped reading briefly to attempt a breath. Something akin to a hiccup seemed to have emptied my lungs.

“Richard?” Myra said. And I jumped the proverbial mile. She couldn’t have missed seeing it, either. She stood in the bedroom doorway, her shoulder against the jamb. “I’m sorry, did I startle you?”

I shook my head in place of words, because if I’d tried to speak she would have learned more about my reaction. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t calm my heart. And I had no idea why her sudden presence should have jolted me so deeply.

“I thought I might start for home tomorrow,” she said. “If you think you’ll be all right here by yourself.”

“I think I will,” I said, trying to disguise my breathlessness. “I think you should be allowed to get back to your life.”

She tilted her head at me oddly. I wasn’t sure how many observations she was making at the same time. “Are you all right, Richard?”

“Yes. Fine. Silly, I guess, but it did startle me. I don’t know why. Just a voice when you don’t expect one. You know.”

She regarded me for a while longer, while I wondered if she would change her mind about my ability to cope without her.

“Well, goodnight,” she said.

“Goodnight, Myra. Thank you for coming. It meant a lot.”

When she’d closed the bedroom door again, I slid the printouts back into their hiding place amongst the student papers.

•  •  •

I stood in my own driveway, watching Myra drive away. Waving in that phony way we’re taught to do when we’re barely old enough to toddle. With one hand. Rubbing the worry stone hidden in my pocket with the other. Waiting to feel that pull of loss I’d felt when I’d watched Vida retreat down the same street. But Myra’s leaving pulled nothing out of my gut and strung it painfully down the asphalt.

Then I went inside and closed the door. My plan was to finish reading Vida’s printouts. I think I used to have a better track record with plans, but maybe I’m remembering wrong.

Not even a full sixty seconds later I heard the knock. Of course I assumed it was Myra. The timing dictated that it would be. She’d forgotten something. A belonging she’d suddenly realized she’d left sitting on my bathroom sink. Something she’d meant to say. Though, looking back, she could have phoned in any final thoughts, I suppose.

Speaking of looking back, the knock itself told me it was not Myra. The very essence of what it conveyed was all wrong. Not a Myra knock at all. This knock was panicky, insistent. But I shuttled that instinctive information aside.

I threw the door wide and found myself looking over the head of the diminutive Abigail. My face fell, and I knew she saw it.

She did not look pleased. “Where is she?” she demanded.

“I don’t have her.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Well, believe what you want. But I don’t.”

“I’m coming in to look.”

She barged past me and headed straight for my bedroom. I caught her by the back of her shirt. She was wearing a pink long-sleeved tee-shirt, and I watched the material stretch as she pulled forward on her Vida-finding crusade. As if nothing could stop her. But in time she snapped back again and stood, still facing the bedroom, still stretching her shirt by pulling, looking oddly like a marionette at the end of my string.

“Actually … you’re not,” I said. “Not unless I invite you to. This is my house, Abigail. In purely human terms, it’s quite rude to barge in here and inspect it as if it belongs to you. In more of a law-enforcement sense, it’s a type of illegal entry.”

She stopped pulling. “So you are hiding her,” she said.

I sighed.

“OK. Look. Abigail. I will escort you to every room of my house so you can see for yourself that your daughter is not here. I just wanted to make the point that you ask someone’s permission before you inspect his house.”

I let go of the tee-shirt.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Still facing away. “I’m very worried about my daughter. May I see with my own eyes that she’s not here? Because I really don’t know where else she would go.”

“Well, it’s a small house,” I said. “So this won’t take long.”

I took her into the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen. Even the garage.

She seemed to deflate further in every successive room. In the garage, I think she more or less gave up the ghost of her crusade. And with it, her abundance of energy.

“How long has she been gone?” I asked, belatedly feeling sorry for Abigail.

“Since yesterday.”

Still we just stood there, staring at my car. As if expecting it to do something. I noticed with some shame that it hadn’t been washed in months. But I felt unmotivated to do anything about that.

“What about her friend Esther?”

I watched her eyebrows raise slightly. Almost stealthily. As if she would have preferred to hide that reaction from me.

“She talks to you quite a bit, then, does she?”

I sighed again. I had taken to doing that a lot. Especially around Abigail. I didn’t answer. I felt sharply aware of the lie she had told me, and more sure than ever that she was the liar, not Vida. It was something I could almost feel in receptors on my skin. Not the lies, exactly, but the desperation to control the uncontrollable. Which is both the motive and the opportunity for manipulating the truth.

I don’t like to give information to liars. I guess I’m not unique in that.

“I tried Esther’s,” she said. “She was very rude to me.”

“Similar to the way I was rude when you barged through my door?”

She looked briefly over (and of course up) at my face, then quickly away again.

“If you see her, or hear from her, please call me immediately.”

“Only if that’s OK with Vida.”

I felt a tangled mass of her energy return. My God. I’d had no idea of the fireball hiding underneath the skin of this tiny, seemingly mild-mannered woman.

“You’re conspiring to keep her away from me?”

“She’s a grown woman.”

“Ha!” A snort pushed the word out into my garage. Aimed it at the window of my filthy car. “That shows how little you know about Vida! Turning Vida out into this world is like turning a puppy loose on the freeway.”

“Maybe so,” I said, thinking it Abigail’s fault that Vida wasn’t better prepared. “But, legally, she’s over eighteen and can do what she wants.”

“That’s exactly what Esther said. And what Vida’s doctor said, too.” She reported these opinions in a tone that made it clear she felt she’d been repeatedly given bad advice. There was a kind of spitting in her reportage.

I wanted to say, “Oh. That kind of rude. The kind where people tell you the truth.” I wanted to quote my friend Fred who used to say, “If three men call you a jackass, buy a saddle.” I didn’t say either of those things. What I said, at least from Abigail’s point of view, was likely a great deal worse.

“I think you need to accept the idea that if you lie about your daughter … make her out to be some kind of tramp … especially to someone she cares a great deal about … it’s going to infuriate her and drive her away.” No immediate response. I stood nearly shoulder to shoulder with her for a beat or two, trying to read her energy by feel. But she’d managed to draw some kind of curtain around her reaction, and I felt only blankness coming through.

Then she turned on her heel and stomped off.

I didn’t follow. Just noticed the puckering of the stretched-out back of her tee-shirt as she stormed away. Just stood there in my own garage, listening for the slam of the front door. When I heard it, I pressed the button to power open my garage door, then went inside the house to fetch my keys. I pulled the car out into the driveway and set up with a bucket and hose to give it a good wash.

While I worked, it dawned on me, as if for the first time.

Vida was gone. I had no idea where she was, if she was OK, or if she was ever coming back.

And she had taken the heart with her.

So Much to Learn

T
his morning I cleaned out my bank account.

Believe me, it wasn’t much. But it was all I had. And then, suddenly, after all those years of saving it up, I had it all in my hand. All $576.22 of it.

It mostly amounts to birthday money I’ve been given over the years. I think I had this idea that I’d save it up and spend it all in one place. Not waste it. But do something kind of … lavish with it. And it would be fabulous. Of course, I was picturing this truly impressive wad of cash.

I think I forgot to allow for inflation.

I stood out in the street and hailed a cab. While I was waiting, I breathed. I mean, even more so than usual. More deliberately than normal. It was morning, and I could already feel the summer in the air. And I could smell the bay. I wasn’t in the part of San Francisco that’s the most wonderful part. Not my favorite part, that great downtown part of the city where you can just look down steep hills and see the bay stretched out in front of you.

But with a little luck I was about to be.

A cab stopped, and the driver got out and put my suitcase in the trunk, and while he was doing that I got in.