Second Hand Heart (21 page)

On Calling Richard

I
called Richard three times in the three days before I left. I was hoping I could go get my worry stone back. To have with me on the road. And of course seeing him would have been nice.

Actually, seeing him would have been wonderful. But he was never home. All I got was the machine.

I think the third time I might have called just to listen to the outgoing message again.

It was Lorrie’s voice. He still hadn’t changed it. It gave me goose bumps and tingles to listen to her voice. Like she was some long-lost love of mine or something.

Not that I really know how it would feel to have one of those.

I wondered if he was out somewhere looking for me.

I left messages every time, and I thought maybe he would call me back before Victor and I hit the road. I was sure hoping he would.

He never did.

White Crows

I
stood in a fairly long line in front of the microphone, waiting to ask Dr. Matsuko a question. The mic had been set up at the front of the center aisle just seconds after she announced that the lecture portion of her talk was about to yield to Q&A.

My face burned, I felt a little dizzy, and I couldn’t stop clenching and unclenching my left hand. I had my right hand in my pocket, rubbing the worry stone. More or less as usual.

I missed most of the early questions due to my stage fright, and my inability to stop obsessing over whether or not I had felt this kind of fear before, standing up in front of classes all those years. I knew in the back of my mind I had felt some kind of fear in that professional forum, but could no longer recreate what kind it was.

I’m not sure whether or not I felt any of what I felt until after I lost Lorrie.

I also couldn’t help noticing that everyone in line ahead of me and behind me seemed to be college age. Students. The audience for this lecture appeared to be comprised of about eight-five or ninety per cent students. Based on my knowledge of university doings, I had to guess that some professor or other had offered extra credit for attending this lecture. I had made a point of sitting next to an older couple, because it made me feel like a fish out of water to be surrounded entirely by students.

I was just reminding myself to breathe when the young woman in front of me peeled away, and I found myself staring directly into the microphone. And the face of Dr. Matsuko.

She was a bit younger than I had thought, from this close angle. Not that she had looked older from my seat. More that I hadn’t been able to see her well, and had just assumed she was older. She was still a good bit older than me. Maybe late forties, I guessed. She was not what you might call pretty, but she was pleasant to look at. She appeared to be mostly, but perhaps not one hundred per cent, Asian. Very American-Asian. She spoke with not a trace of an accent, so I assumed she’d been born here.

Meanwhile I wasn’t asking a question, which was problematic. I could feel the audience shift slightly in its collective seat.

“Dr. Matsuko,” I blurted out suddenly, startling myself with the sudden amplification of my voice. I’d held my face too close to the microphone. I backed off an inch or two. “I noticed that in your book you made just a handful of references to cellular memory as it relates to transplant recipients. And that all such references were citations from other researchers. You never gave us your own opinion of the phenomenon of transplant recipients who seem to experience the memories of their donors. Would you be willing to do that now?”

To my surprise, she smiled broadly. And rather … humanly. As if genuinely amused and unguarded. As if she were a person and a woman as well as just a scientist and a researcher. Imagine that.

“Well, well,” she said, still smiling. “I’ve been waiting for this moment. Sooner or later someone was going to pin me down on that in public.”

“Sorry,” I said, once again too closely into the microphone.

“Don’t be,” she said. “I should have taken a bolder stance in my book. If I had it to write over again, I would. So here’s your answer: I’m a scientist. So I wanted to disbelieve it. I leaned hard toward disbelief. Which is my job, I think. If I’m not a skeptic, I can’t very well ask you to take me seriously when I say I believe something. Are you familiar with the theory of the white crow?”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry,” I said. At proper mic distance. “I’m not.”

Some of the stage lights had been trained on the audience, and I was aware of sweat dripping down my forehead. If I’d had a handkerchief, I wouldn’t have hesitated to wipe it away, even while under scrutiny. But I didn’t.

“It’s courtesy of the psychologist William James. He wrote, essentially, that if your goal is to upset the law that all crows are black, it’s enough to prove one single crow to be white. And I think it goes without saying that the transplant field has more than its share of white crows. Of course, the doctors pass it off as a response to the massive drug cocktails that are a part of the recipient’s life. But they can’t explain away something like the little girl who helped catch and convict her donor’s murderer by repeatedly dreaming the exact details of the crime. And there are others, but … just for the sake of conversation let’s call her our white crow. So then if another recipient comes to me and says his taste in food or music has changed, and then only later he asks about his donor, and sure enough, he has changed to the donor’s tastes … could this be a hoax or a coincidence? Yes. I suppose it could be. But I can’t tell this person, ‘No, that’s impossible. All crows are black.’ Because we’ve already established that there’s at least one white one. And there are so many reports of this … and I can only imagine how many more there would be if someone could lift the stigma and the disbelief these people face … I guess what I’m saying is that after a certain number of fairly credible reports, it becomes unscientific to believe too strongly in coincidence. Because the statistical likelihood of that many coincidences is simply unscientific. So, long answer to a perfectly simple question … I guess I’m stretching it out because I’m still not entirely comfortable with this … the answer is yes. I do, myself, believe that it’s possible for a transplant recipient to experience distinct donor memories as a result of cellular memory. At least for the first few months.”

I stood, stunned by her last sentence.

She gently indicated with her body language that she was done. She shifted her gaze up the aisle to the person behind me and pointed slightly. As if to say, “Next.”

But I didn’t move. I couldn’t move.

A moment later the young man behind me reached around me and pulled the mic off the stand and back to his lips.

“Dr. Matsuko …” he said.

And I peeled away back to my seat.

I had read as many as seven books on the subject of cellular memory. I had read Dr. Matsuko’s book twice. Nowhere in any of them had anyone suggested that donor memories in a transplant recipient could be a temporary phenomenon.

If Dr. Matsuko was right, I had only just so much time to share this bizarre bond with Vida. And I had no idea where she was.

•  •  •

I expected Dr. Matsuko to exit from the stage when it was over. Duck behind a curtain and disappear. I was wrong.

I stood in front of my seat, my thighs leaned on the seat-back in front of me, and watched her gather her notes and tuck them into a soft-sided, natural-colored leather briefcase. I watched a student, a young man, approach her, and wait for her to finish gathering. I waited for her to brush him off. Act busy, and brush by him and out of the auditorium.

She didn’t. She stopped and talked to him.

I’d been sitting close to the back wall, a testament to my inability to appear front and center in my own life, so by the time I made my way through the crowd to the podium, there were at least a dozen people waiting to talk to her. A dozen twenty-year-old students and me.

I stood, looking away. I wanted to pretend to be looking at something else, but what? I settled for scanning the room as if trying to locate a lost companion. Why, I’m not sure. Maybe for the same reason that people who are dining alone will attempt to fix their attention on some imaginary interest or concern.

It took a good ten minutes before I realized that this was going to take a long time. I rubbed the worry stone hidden in my pocket and waited.

I glanced at my watch. It was nearly nine. For some irrational reason I had thought I’d drive home after the lecture. Pure insanity, as it was nearly an eight-hour drive. I’m not sure what I was thinking, other than having been away from home for a day and a half already. Which was perhaps a thousand times longer than I’d been out in the world since Lorrie’s funeral.

I gave up locating my imaginary companion, and instead just half-leaned, half-sat on a table on the stage, my arms crossed, looking down and pretending to be lost in thought. Distantly hearing the chatter of the doctor and whoever remained of the students, but not really focusing on words.

I have no idea how much time elapsed.

I know only that at some point my charade of deep thought turned over on me, and I became lost in genuine thought, almost without noticing. Crazy though it sounds, even to me, I was weighing the possibility of contacting a valid psychic — if indeed such a thing exists — regarding Vida’s whereabouts.

It took me a moment to register the silence.

Then I heard Dr. Matsuko’s voice slice through it. She said, “Are you the recipient?”

I looked up. Surprised. I glanced around to see if she could be addressing someone besides me. But everyone else had finished engaging the doctor and wandered away.

“No. I’m not. I’m the donor.”

She stood before me, briefcase dangling from both hands in front of her. Smiling in a way that felt surprisingly familiar. I don’t mean to suggest that there was anything familiar about her to me. There wasn’t. More that she was treating me with a familiar air. Not like the total stranger I so obviously was.

She raised one eyebrow. “Living donor? Kidney? Partial liver?”

“Oh. No. I guess I don’t mean I was the donor. I mean, I donated my wife’s organs. After her death.”

“Recent?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you. So am I.”

“Don’t tell me. Let me guess. You’re confused because I suggested it might be temporary. I could see the way it hit you.”

“I haven’t read that in anybody else’s research.”

“Well, they’re not sure. And, actually, neither am I. There’s not much hard evidence to go on. It gets down to that wacky, unpredictable world of quantum mechanics as it relates to the increasingly holographic view of human anatomy. And just between you and me …”

It took me a second to realize she was pausing so I could supply my name.

“Richard.”

“Between you and me, Richard, if anybody tells you he or she fully understands the subject on anything other than a gut, instinctive level … hell, even that … he’s either a liar, or his brain needs to be studied. Except, look what I just did. I passed it off as relating to his brain. Which is the old-school science. The old way is to believe all knowledge and understanding comes from the brain. Even after all my research into how every cell in the human body carries the memory and experience of the whole. But those old habits die hard. For so many years we thought our brain was the determinant. That the heart could only beat if the brain told it to. But we know for a fact that the heart will beat valiantly for a time after disconnection from its brain. Literal disconnection. In fact, the new school is that, if anything, it’s the heart that runs the show. You know. Puts the ‘us’ in us. Please don’t repeat what I said to an actual MD. Not to say they’re old school, though God knows some of them are. More like it’s not even the same school. Medicine doesn’t think the heart runs the show. Just the oddballs like me.”

She stopped and looked at my face. I think it had turned white. I thought I could feel the blood draining out of it.

“Oh,” she said. “Right. Sorry. You donated your wife’s heart. Didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I should think before I talk.”