CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
So our start time was slightly later than I had planned, but we still made it to our destination before dinner time. Odessa, Texas. Home of football. Football. And more football. Traveling to Odessa was the whole reason the road trip came about in the first place. Everything else had been fluff. Really nice Beck-filled fluff. It felt less momentous traveling without my urn, but I didn’t regret smashing it. It was a symbol of my oppression, and now that it was gone, I felt one step closer to being free.
“ So where do we head from here?” Beck asked, pulling into a convenience store parking lot so that we could plot out our journey. I pulled my wallet out of my purse and retrieved the slip of paper that Alyssa had given me at my doctor’s office. The piece of paper that could get my doctor, Alyssa, and the hospital, all in major trouble. I had to use it wisely.
Once the address was staring up at me with its black ink, I turned to look at Beck. He was wearing the baseball cap he’d worn that first time I’d met him. His face was easy and open; a small smile dotted the side of his mouth. His default setting was happy. That’s what I loved about Beck. He looked at life like it was a journey, like we were meant to enjoy every step of the way. Idling in a convenience store parking lot was a treat. Caroline didn’t get to idle anymore, so I was glad that Beck didn’t take it for granted.
“ This piece of paper has the address of a house that we’re here to visit.” I introduced the subject to him lightly, unsure of how he would take it.
He nodded his head, his hazel eyes falling in and out of the shadow of his hat’s brim. “Ooh..kay,” he answered, obviously hoping for more information.
“ We’re borderline breaking the law, but you know, it shouldn’t be a big deal. So just head to Main Street and then we’ll—”
“ Slow your roll. ‘Breaking the law’? How? Do you have a restraining order with these people or something?” he asked, slightly kidding.
“ What do you take me for?” I gawked at him as he put the Camper in drive.
“ A sexy, slightly-dysfunctional girl,” he answered with a smirk as he turned left out of the parking lot.
I smiled at the first part of his comment and chose to ignore the rest. “We’re going to see the kid’s parents, who y’know, donated my heart,” I answered under my breath, hoping the music would drown out my confession.
“ What?! We’re going to visit the family? Do they know we’re coming?”
I slashed my hand in the air to silence his worries. “Those are all minor details. I’m not going to spill the beans to them. I just want to talk to them. I feel like I have some right to know about the kid whose heart is now pumping oxygenated blood around my body.”
I plugged in the address from the paper into my phone and told Beck to turn left in half a mile.
“ So we’re going to do what exactly?”
“ Maybe scout it out a little bit first,” I answered, absolutely clueless as to how the plan would pull through in the end.
“ Aren’t there ways to go about contacting the family?” Beck asked gently.
“ Yes, Mr. Moral Compass. There are ways, but it takes forever and it’s not a guarantee that the family will establish communication.”
“ You make it sound like adoption,” Beck smiled, slowing to stop at a light.
I snorted and looked down at the tiny map on my phone. We were only minutes away from the house. Would they even be home?
We stayed silent the rest of the way until we pulled down a nice suburban street that looked straight out of a movie. There was a tire swing in some of the lawns and most of them had white picket fences.
“ Looks like it’ll be a nice family,” Beck offered as I inspected the numbers painted on each curb. 1039, 1041, 1043…1045.
“ Stop! It’s that one!” I pointed to a blue house with cream shutters and a bright red door. It was a bungalow style with ivy wrapped beautifully along the fence. There were two cars parked in the driveway: a Prius and some kind of SUV.
“ They care about the environment.”
Beck smirked and swung his head to look at me. “Because they have a Prius?”
I half-smiled, unable to peel my gaze away from the house. “I bet they recycle. I bet their son was the president of the Recycling Committee at his school.”
Beck’s smile fell. “He was in high school?”
Don’t do it Beck, I wanted to say. We can’t let emotions ruin the plan. “Yeah. A senior.”
Beck mashed his lips together until they formed a thin line and then turned back to the house. A second later, the back gate opened and a middle-aged man with a cool goatee trotted around to hop into the Prius.
“ Duck!” I said as soon as he came into sight. I lifted the latch on the outside of my seat and flew the seat backwards until I was lying as horizontally as possible. Beck groaned but followed my instructions until we were both mostly out of view.
“ This is ridiculous. He totally saw us.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, unwilling to give up. “No, he’s leaving. Let’s go talk to the wife while he’s gone.”
Before he could offer a rebuttal, I moved to hop out of the passenger side door. Except my shoe got caught on the door because I wasn’t used to rolling out of a vehicle. I face planted into the grass with the second half of my body still lying on the floor of the Camper.
To his credit, Beck asked if I was okay before completely losing it to hysterical laughter. “You’d make a terrible spy.”
“ Oh please! We would have been caught if I didn’t tell you to duck,” I fought back while I picked grass out of my mouth. We hurried across the street. I feared we didn’t have much time. Maybe the husband was running to the corner store for ice or something.
I tried to inspect my surroundings while we waited for someone to answer the doorbell. The lawn was recently mowed and there were children’s toys strewn around the front yard. I was inspecting a bright red wagon when the front door started to open.
“ Can I help you?” A sweet voice asked. I turned to see a woman with light brown hair piled into a messy bun on top of her head. She was wearing a simple pair of khakis and a button down cotton shirt.
“ Oh, hi,” Beck began, and I cut him off.
“ Hi. Um, I know this is awkward, but our Camper broke down and neither of our cell phones are dead. I mean charged. Neither of them are charged from our camping trip last night. Is there anyway we could use your phone?” It was possibly the worst lie I could think of, but I was hoping that she wouldn’t read too much into it. Did we look like criminals? I should have made Beck take his hat off. Did he look like a drug dealer? Usually not, but now that I was looking at him out of the corner of my eye, he did have the build to be in a gang.
The woman’s face morphed from confusion to pity. “Oh, wow. Yes, come in. I’ll grab a phone.”
Overwhelming guilt smacked me all at once. I wanted to yell at her for being so trusting. Beck said I was slightly-dysfunctional; this poor woman shouldn’t have let us in. She kept leading us back toward a living room and then turned to face us. “Are you two from around here?” she asked politely, apparently wanting to make small-talk before finding the phone.
I didn’t trust Beck’s manipulation skills. I was the one with a mission. “We are, but we moved here recently,” I paused trying to hold my tongue back, but it was no use. It was now or never. “We knew Colby though.”
The woman’s hand flew to her mouth. “Oh no, I’m so sorry. Please have a seat, let me get you a drink and the phone.” She flew out of the room and Beck grabbed my arm. “Abby, what are you doing ? That wasn’t subtle at all,” he hissed quietly.
I shook out my hands, feeling like I’d just held up a bank and now I was stuck with hostages that I didn’t know what to do with. “Okay. Okay. I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do,” I whispered, trying to calm my breathing.
“ Here you go, you two,” she said as she reentered the room with two glasses of lemonade and the phone. Lemonade. God damnit woman, don’t serve us sugary drinks when we’re manipulating you!
Beck bolted over to help her with the drinks and then he took the phone. “I’ll go… call a tow truck,” he fumbled, and the woman gave him an awkward glance.
The second he was out of earshot, she sat down and patted the couch cushion next to her. “Were you a friend of Colby’s from school?” she asked gently. I tried to morph her features to see what she would look like as a teenage boy, but I failed miserably. I couldn’t picture what Colby could have looked like at all.
“ Um, yes,” I lied, and then took a giant gulp of lemonade. “I mean, I knew of him, but we weren’t really friends,” I added once I had swallowed. I didn’t want to lie to his mom anymore than I had to.
“ Do you have any pictures of him?” I asked.
The expression that passed across her features was impossible to discern. “Oh, um, no, we don’t.”
Strange.
I nodded and tried to think of another question that wouldn’t reveal the fact that I actually didn’t know her son in any way.
“ Could you tell me about him? If it’s not too painful?” I had no clue where my question landed on the spectrum of red flags, but she furrowed her brows and set her lemonade down on the counter.
“ I thought you said you went to school with him,” she answered, not meeting my gaze.
“ Right. Yeah. I’m sorry.” She wasn’t going to make this easy and I couldn’t blame her.
“ He was on the basketball team, did you know that?” she smiled as if recalling a memory. “He was the star of the team and all of the girls loved him, as I’m sure you know.” She winked.
I smiled and nodded reassuringly as if all of that was old news. So he was an athlete.
“ He was a giver. Everyone said he had the biggest heart.”
I choked on my lemonade, spewing clear liquid across her coffee table.
“ Oh dear, are you okay?” She leaned over and patted my back before I jumped to my feet.
I wiped the remaining lemonade from my mouth with the back of my hand.
“ I’m so sorry. Let me grab some napkins.” I darted into the kitchen only then realizing how awkward it was to be running around her house without her approval. I had no clue where she kept the napkins and my head was still spinning from her ‘heart’ comment. What are the odds that she would use that phrase? It was destiny. I was supposed to meet her.
“ Ma’am,” I began, twisting on my feet and starting to run back into the living room. I grabbed a towel from the counter as an afterthought. “Colby was my donor. He gave me his heart. Your son saved my life.”
The woman was leaning over the table, moving papers out of the way of my lemonade spill. When I said my spiel, her gaze lifted to mine and she looked as if she’d seen a ghost. “Oh, sweetie. I’m not Colby’s mom. His family moved out of Odessa shortly after his death.”
What?
My shoulders slumped in defeat and I dropped her towel onto the coffee table. What did she mean they moved? Why hadn’t they updated their address with the hospital yet?
“ What? Do you know where they are?” My hand flew to my mouth. Crap. This was just a random stranger. I was lying, spilling lemonade, and now crying in front of a total stranger.
“ I don’t have any idea. They didn’t tell anyone. I was just a neighbor of theirs. We moved into this place so we could have more space for our family.” Her family that did not include Colby. What the hell.
The front door opened. “Alright, Abby, the tow truck driver is on his way, but I think I figured out our problem. It looks like the alternator was short circuiting with the cable that leads to the ignition. I just swapped it out with…a spare we had in the back,” Beck rambled awkwardly. He really was a terrible actor. I don’t think any of those sentences actually made sense.
“ Colby’s family doesn’t live here. This isn’t his mom,” I muttered, feeling the tears starting to build behind my eyes. I could hardly look up toward him. Beck grimaced, eyeing the woman apologetically before walking over to me. He wrapped me in his arms and I stuffed my face in the crook of his arm.
“ I’m so sorry, Abby,” he whispered into my ear.
“ It doesn’t matter,” I tried to cover up my sadness, but it felt like the treasure at the end of my hunt had been stolen by thieves without me even realizing. I’d needed this light at the end of the tunnel. I’d dragged Beck across the state for absolutely no reason. What a colossal waste of time.
Then I thought of something. “So you didn’t really know Colby?” I asked the woman, pulling away from Beck. I needed to know if her story about him having a big heart was true or if it was just hearsay.
The woman frowned and shook her head, unable to meet my eyes.
I nodded and then reached down to wipe the lemonade off the table with the towel. It was the least I could do after barging into her house and feeding her lies.
“ Oh, you know what! We have a neighborhood newsletter that comes out every few months. I keep them all in a little folder so I can stay up to date with community stuff,” she shook her head clear of her tangent, “Colby was in a few of them. Let me grab them for you.”
She hustled into the kitchen and I could hear her shuffling through papers. I studied the towel that had soaked up all of the excess lemonade before looking back toward Beck. He was watching me with worried eyes and I gave him a crooked smile to let him know I wasn’t going to breakdown on the spot. I’d wait until we were alone.
“ Did you really call a tow truck?” I asked.
He wiped a hand down his face. “No, and I felt terrible lying about it.”
“ Here you go!” the woman sang as she reentered the room with a folder held safely in both hands. “These are the ones I think you should have,” she said, offering them to me. I didn’t even hesitate; I took them from her and lunged forward to give her a massive hug. I felt guilty for lying to her, but now she’d given me another chance at completing my goal. I needed to know about Colby. About the boy who gave me his big heart.