Read Online Second Hand Heart by Catherine Ryan Hyde - Free Book Online Page B

reach the rails, so they dangled like the feet of a kindergartner. She tugged at her dress and shifted her weight often, tipping her hand on the fact that she couldn’t focus off that discomfort.
    “Thank you for agreeing to see me,” she said.
    “It’s all right.”
    “I know from what you said in your email that it must be hard to get out and do much of anything.”
    “Yes,” I said. “It is.”
    “Well … So thank you for meeting me here.”
    But I had already absolved her once, and it seemed too tiring to do it again. People should consolidate their requests of me. Not use up any more of my resources than necessary. I looked out the window again.
    “Do you have children, Mr. Bailey?”
    “Richard,” I said.
    Another example. It was the third time I’d asked her to call me Richard.
    “Richard.”
    “No. I don’t.”
    “Your wife didn’t want children?”
    “She worked with them. She taught the fourth grade. So she loved kids.”
    “She must have.” An interjection. An interruption, really.
    “But sometimes we wondered if the reason she loved them so much was because she got to spend just the right amount of time with them. If you know what I mean. She got to know them, and enjoy them, but she also got to send them home. I’m not saying she was dead set against it. We discussed the idea. I guess it was one of those things we thought we still had time to decide.”
    Abigail looked down into her tea and allowed a silence. A sort of forced — or at least mandatory — reverence.
    Then she said, “This next thing I’m going to say might be hard to understand if you never had a child. Or even if you had children, really, but if you never had a critically ill child. Which most people never do. So this might be hard to understand. But ever since the first night Vida was born, I’ve been told to prepare myself to lose her. But when you’re a mother, there’s just this part of you that can’t accept that. Even when you know there’s nothing you can do. You just can’t let it be that way. You can’t. So you put every ounce of energy you have into keeping your child alive, and then after a while you start to feel that it really is you keeping her alive. You know. With the sheer force of your will.”
    “So, what you’re saying is, you slip into the trap of magical thinking.”
    “I guess that’s as a good way to put it as any.”
    I felt the tug of home, and tried to ignore it. But I think it spurred me to honesty.
    “I’m not at all clear on what you’re trying to tell me.”
    “I feel guilty.”
    “About what?”
    “I feel like I was wishing for somebody to die in time to save Vida. Some nameless, faceless person. Only she wasn’t. She was your wife and you loved her.”
    I breathed deeply. It didn’t really feel fair that I had been called here to save Abigail, rather than the other way around. I thought carefully, spoke carefully. Slowly, too, I noticed. As if I must be precise.
    “Lorrie died because the road was slick and she skidded off it. And because the place she skidded off happened to be on the saddle of a hill, at the edge of a sharp drop. Not because of anything you wished. No offense, Abigail, but you’re not that powerful.”
    I waited to see if she would look offended. Instead she looked hopeful.
    “So what you’re saying is that I shouldn’t feel guilty.”
    “I can’t tell you how to feel. But I can tell you there’s nothing real there to feel guilty about.”
    She pulled in a deep breath and smiled. I knew then that she had gotten what she’d come for.
    “So that’s why you wanted to see me,” I said.
    “Part of it. I wanted to ask you a question, too.”
    I steeled myself. Prayed this would not be tiring. “OK.”
    “Why did you decide to donate?”
    “Wouldn’t anybody?”
    “Oh, my goodness, no! Oh, you have no idea, Mr. Bailey. Richard. You have no idea how many people bury perfectly good organs when someone in their family dies. Sometimes even