Heart Sister Read online

  Copyright © Michael F. Stewart 2020

  Published in Canada and the United States in 2020 by Orca Book Publishers.

  orcabook.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Heart sister / Michael F. Stewart.

  Names: Stewart, Michael F., author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200184601 | Canadiana (ebook) 2020018461X |

  ISBN 9781459824874 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459824881 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459824898 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PS8637.T49467 H43 2020 | DDC jC813/.6—dc23

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020930594

  Summary: After his twin sister's death, a teenage filmmaker tries to track down the recipients of her organs in hopes that it will help his parents move on from the loss of their daughter.

  Orca Book Publishers is committed to reducing the consumption of nonrenewable resources in the making of our books. We make every effort to use materials that support a sustainable future.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Edited by Tanya Trafford

  Cover images by Katie Carey

  Cover design by Rachel Page

  Typeset by Ella Collier

  Author photo by Natasha Stewart

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  23 22 21 20 • 1 2 3 4

  Orca Book Publishers is proud of the hard work our authors do and of the important stories they create. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it or did not check it out from a library provider, then the author has not received royalties for this book. The ebook you are reading is licensed for single use only and may not be copied, printed, resold or given away. If you are interested in using this book in a classroom setting, we have digital subscriptions with multi user, simultaneous access to our books, or classroom licenses available for purchase. For more information, please contact [email protected].

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  For my brother’s heart sister and her family.

  Dear Heart Family,

  Inside me beats your daughter’s heart. I am not allowed to tell you very much about myself. I would if I could. What I can tell you is that I am your heart daughter. If she had a sibling, then “Hiya, Heart bro or sis,” *waves* I am your heart sister. I will do everything I can to hold her close.

  It makes me so sad to know I only live because of another’s death. But I’m not just alive because of her—I am born. I have never really lived, not yet, and your daughter’s heart is giving me a chance to begin.

  Ever since I was a baby, I was protected because of my bad heart. Protected from exercise. Protected from even crying too hard. I came home early. Never learned to ride a bike or to swim. What if I fell off? What if I went too far? My only adventures came in books. And I didn’t dare to dream.

  Now? Now I have a heart that can keep up with my dreams. I dream of climbing mountains. I dream of crossing oceans. Your daughter and me, we’ll adventure together.

  I promise to be amazing, just like I know your daughter must have been. I want so much to know all about her.

  Please write.

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY–ONE

  TWENTY–TWO

  TWENTY–THREE

  TWENTY–FOUR

  TWENTY–FIVE

  TWENTY–SIX

  TWENTY–SEVEN

  TWENTY–EIGHT

  TWENTY–NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY–ONE

  THIRTY–TWO

  THIRTY–THREE

  THIRTY–FOUR

  THIRTY–FIVE

  THIRTY–SIX

  THIRTY–SEVEN

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ONE

  Six weeks following my sister’s death, I find her heart’s location.

  There’s an envelope on my mother’s dresser from the National Transplant Organization. Inside is a letter written in flowing script and pink ink.

  “When did this come?” I ask my mom, wandering back through the kitchen with the letter and the reading glasses I’d gone searching for. I hesitate. Is she ready for this? She’s been on bereavement leave since the accident, but I don’t think her lying around all day is normal. Tissues litter a coffee table cluttered with cups of unfinished tea. Blinds let slip a thin ladder of light across the far wall. Plants droop at the windowsill.

  I turn the lights on, awakening the room.

  My mom waves me off from where she’s stretched out on the couch, staring at a daytime game show and patting our dog, Sirius, with slow strokes, his marble eyes unblinking. I’m expecting more from her, but I don’t know why.

  “This is a letter from the person who received Minnie’s heart!”

  “For one thousand dollars…what pyramid retains a limestone cap?” the television host interjects.

  “Have you even read it?” I ask.

  She winces, drawing her knees to her chest and curling into a fetal position. Quick, sharp breaths whistle out from her and then the spasm ends. She unfolds. I shut the lights back off.

  My sister would have known what to say. She finished half of my sentences. She’d have known what to do. I find myself looking around for her, even though I know she’s gone.

  My mom nods but ignores the letter, just as she ignores the glasses she asked me to find that I set on the sofa arm.

  I gotta get her off the couch.

  “Mom, you can’t just…” I jerk a thumb at the television. She clutches the remote to her chest.

  The post date on the envelope says the letter was sent two weeks ago. It occurs to me that there might be more. I jog to the front door and open it to a cool-for-August day. Across the street a neighbor nods uncertainly at me as he sweeps his porch. The tightly packed, identical townhouses seem to lean away from ours. They are all somehow more colorful than ours with its bruised siding.

  A dead squirrel lies twisted in the middle of the street, and I think I’ve got to tell Minnie about it. But then I remember. Again.

  The mailbox is stuffed with several envelopes and a couple of community newspapers. I gather it all up and head back into the house. I dump the pile on the dark burl of the dining room table and sort through it. I spot another envelope with the same transplant-organization logo.

  Now, guessing what could be inside, I wonder if I should open it. Who wrote it? Who else has my twin sister inside them? What if I hate them? It feels a little like I’m picking at the scabs of Minnie’s death. But wouldn’t knowing more about the people Minnie has saved help my mom find a way to feel that her daughter lives on? I need to be strong for her. Maybe I can decide if it’s something she should see.

  I slip a fingernail along the edge and carefully pry open the seal.

  Hi!

  Thanks for the corneas. The
transplanters won’t let me say anything personal. Nothing that will allow you to draw any connections to me. I am a man who couldn’t see. And now I can. Thanks. It means a bunch.

  See you. Off to catch butterflies.

  A small child has scrawled a butterfly and a crayon-lettered note in the corner.

  Grandpa helps me ride my bike.

  The note is signed with an eyeball beside the butterfly.

  I look at the envelope again. The return address is the transplant organization’s. Someone there functions as a go-between. But I grin at the note, because they missed something.

  To me, this writer is asking to be found. He highlighted the rules and then gave me a personal clue. I’d give anything to have another minute with my sister. Even just a small part of her.

  “Mom, check this out,” I say, waggling the note. “It’s from the guy who received Minnie’s eyes.” I stand in the doorway to the living room and wait for her response. The game-show host drones on. The refrigerator compressor rattles to life. It sounds an awful lot like a hospital room.

  If my mother hears me, she gives no sign. Like she has every day since Minnie’s death, she just lies there, cradling the remote control and patting Sirius. Patches of his fur have been loved away.

  She’s worse in the mornings. By the afternoon she usually gets up to brush her teeth, at least. But I’ve noticed she’s been getting off the couch later and later. And she seems very confused at times. Once I caught her just standing in the bathroom, holding a vase, clearly not sure how she or the vase got there.

  Maybe she just needs proper nutrition. “Mom, do you want something to eat?”

  Nothing. I swallow my irritation.

  Sometimes I’ll make her toast and eggs, or even a complete meal like spaghetti. And there’s all the freezer food. That’s one good thing about a funeral. But it can be a bit like Russian roulette. You never really know what you’ll find in there, especially when your dad is the vegetarian “butcher.” People line up at his store, Slaughterhouse-Chive, every morning to buy vegetables that look exactly like meat, and so I guess a lot of people think everything they make for us has to be vegetarian.

  I send my dad a text. I know he’s working on a big order for a wedding—including one hundred vegan lamb-like chops. The hundreds of brief text bubbles on my screen are the only real evidence of our current relationship. Minnie’s corneas went to a guy who loves butterflies, I text. He wrote us.

  A minute later I get a reply. I miss your sister’s eyes.

  They were green.

  He doesn’t use her name. Ever.

  I’m going to write back.

  Maybe if my mom could hear how all the people who received Minnie’s organs are doing, it would help her snap out of this fog. I want my mom’s hugs back.

  My dad replies with a turkey emoji. That probably means he’s crafting a tofurkey.

  I guess I will need to go through this organ-donation group. I’ll start with my heart sister and try the direct approach first to see if this anonymity stuff is one-way. I sit down at the table and grab a sheet of paper.

  Dear Heart Sister,

  My name is Emmitt Highland, and I was happy to learn that you are the proud new owner of my twin sister’s heart. Her name was Minnie. She was sixteen years old. She played the guitar but secretly preferred the ukulele, and she loved movies—maybe even as much as I do. You know, I’m having trouble separating out what of her was me, and what of me was her. You know? When you’ve spent every waking moment together, you sometimes wonder where one of you begins and the other ends. You wonder who you are.

  Her friends were my friends. We spoke another language that no one understood. And no one ever will again.

  But there was one thing my sister loved to do that we didn’t share. Roadkill taxidermy. Yes, I’m totally serious. She made these incredibly detailed dioramas from trapped mice or squished squirrels she found on the walk home from school. She set them up like scenes in a movie, so they looked like humans playing video games or bungee jumping. Maybe you would like to come see them one day?

  Please write us soon. Sorry for the slow reply. My mom’s pretty sick—in story terms, you could call it her darkest hour. She isn’t thinking too clearly. Maybe I can come meet you?

  Sincerely,

  Emmitt

  I struggle with whether to sign it Heart Brother. I’m not sure I’m ready for that yet. Not with how everything around the organ donation went down.

  I head to my bedroom to grab an envelope. On my desk is a diorama my sister created for me, one of her first. Not her best work. The suturing on the bodies is obvious, and there are signs she might not have cleaned the hides quite well enough, but it always makes me smile. A mouse shouts from a director’s chair as other mice scurry about the set, one with a tiny mic boom, while two actor squirrels perform a fight scene. One squirrel is kicking the head of the other, who is falling forever to the ground. Minnie knew I want to be a film director.

  In her more recent pieces, Minnie started combining different animals to create new creatures. Bird wings on chipmunks, mice heads on the body of a cat. Like a morbid Snow White, Minnie attracted dead animals. People brought her all kinds of deceased things—chipmunks, rabbits, a skunk once…even their own pets to be taxidermized. That’s how my mom still has our dog to pat. Sirius died a year ago.

  I stroke the nape of the director’s fur, imagining him shouting orders. Action! Cut! I have this crazy idea. An idea that just might shove my mom off the couch. Might force my dad to whisper Minnie’s name. Might fill this gaping hole in my chest.

  TWO

  It’s not a crazy idea. It’s brilliant.

  If Minnie honored animals by making them whole again, then maybe I can piece my sister back together too. In a way. In my way. I just need to find out where all her organs went and then place them in a diorama—a living diorama of my creation.

  I visualize the scene. My mom and dad listening to and laughing with all the pieces of Minnie, other people who each somehow have internalized her, making them more powerful, more artistic, more compassionate. They hug. We all hug, and it’s like Minnie never left us.

  Sunlight filters through the gauzy curtains of a bedroom now largely alien to me. The posters have been taken down, exposing chipped, burgundy-painted walls. Dusty pine shelves are nearly empty of books. The desk surface has been mostly decluttered except for broken pencils, a model of the flux capacitor from Back to the Future and the lonely diorama. Only a few items hang in the closet. My Empire Strikes Back duvet still covers my single bed, but I’m waiting for a new one. The stacked boxes around me are full of childhood stuff, things I want to leave behind, stuff that reminds me of Minnie more than it reminds me of myself. I’m sixteen now. Old enough to put away teddy bears, action figures and participation awards. The transformation started soon after Minnie’s accident. The bare walls reflect my loss. But the boxes, whether full of me or of Minnie, I’m not sure I’m ready to give away just yet.

  I push the boxes up against the walls and toss stray laundry items onto my bed, clearing a Minnie-sized space on the floor. I grab a roll of my dad’s butcher paper from the closet and unroll it. I usually use it to brainstorm storyboards for movies, but today I need it to tell a different story. I always start with paper.

  Laid out over the floor, waxen side down, the paper crinkles beneath my kneecaps. Three felt-tip markers—red, green and black—are on the nightstand. I have been using them to list the contents of the boxes. The acrid solvent smell of the uncapped black marker in my grip fills the room.

  I draw Minnie’s outline from memory. I haven’t been able to look at a photo of her since the hospital. Even the picture of us cliff jumping together is face down on my shelf. But somehow her presence still fills my head as I begin. So often she would hang over my shoulder, bugging, suggesting, guiding.

  The marker sweeps down, drawing her high forehead, a side-on profile of her face, cheeks, lips, everything plump, and a snub nose. My
eyes fill with tears, but I keep drawing. I sit back to inspect the profile so far. It’s not her.

  It is a caricature of Minnie. Her ski-jump nose is too pointy, her lips bulbous. My stomach roils. I need to get this right. I flip the paper and face the blank page head-on—like the accident? I shudder and then press the palms of my hands against my temples to will the images away.

  The marker nib squeaks as I continue, outlining her bobbed hair, the rounded shoulders that shook when she laughed. Arms out like she’s ready for a hug. I’m hit with another wave of pain as I realize my sketch is starting to remind me of the chalk outlines in those old noir movie crime scenes. Why is this so hard? There’s a quaver in the wrist I’ve drawn. A tear drips from the end of my nose and beads on the paper. It’s not lost on me that I’m using butcher paper to map out the organs I need to collect. I’d be nauseated if I wasn’t sure that Minnie would love it.

  I sketch her hand. Gentle, firm, probing, never clammy—at least, not until they were…fuh…I keep drawing.

  Her torso was solid. She always said she loved how strong her body was. She never worried about her size. I mean, as far as I know, and she’s my best friend. Knew. Was. Was my best friend.

  Our friendship made others jealous. We always knew what the other was thinking. We’d play games, telling people we could read each other’s minds. Then we’d prove it by guessing what the other was thinking. When our victims accused us of having planned it all in advance, we’d challenge them to give us categories—numbers, vegetables, animals, names. We’d always guess correctly, having played this game so often with each other. We shared what few friends we had—even her taxidermy group. But no one found their way into our inner circle of two. Still, though, sometimes I feel we all orbited her. I was just the moon, the closest thing in her sky.

  When I start to draw her feet, I pause. If not flip-flops in summer or red patent-leather shoes at school, she wore bunny slippers. Actual former pet bunnies she named Left and Right the day she picked them from the Humane Society. They lived another two years before fulfilling their destinies. I could just do her barefoot—but her toenails were always a kaleidoscope of color, and the black marker can’t do them justice. I sketch in long, droopy bunny ears.