What am I doing?
He turns slowly back around so he’s facing me. “You don’t need to make anything up to me,” he says. “That’s not why I came here.” He shrugs and gives a little half smile. “I liked hanging out with you. So if anything, maybe just come say hi next time you’re back in Shelter Cove. How ’bout that? Sometime?”
It’s an invitation, but he seems to know it offers me a graceful out, if that’s what I’m looking for, and the understanding of this small gesture touches me. I feel my eyes drift to his chest, and my own squeezes tight.
“Okay,” I say finally. “I will—sometime.”
A slow smile spreads over his face. “Sometime, then. You know where to find me, right?”
I nod, and we stand there like that with the sun beating down and the heat of the day already rising all around us. After a moment he turns to go, and this time I don’t stop him. I watch as he walks to his bus and gets in. He waves, then backs down the driveway, and I stand there on the porch. A breeze rolls softly over my skin, bringing with it the scent of the jasmine and a delicate rush of something else. Hope, maybe. Or possibility. I wait until he turns onto the road and disappears to look down again at the sunflower. This time it looks different somehow—less like a painful reminder and more like a sign, maybe that Trent would understand.
This is what I tell myself as I bend to pick it up. And when I think, Yes, I know where to find him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Approximately 3,000 people in the United States are on the waiting list for a heart transplant on any given day. About 2,000 donor hearts are available each year. Patients who are eligible for a heart transplant are added to a waiting list for a donor heart. This waiting list is part of a national allocation system for donor organs. The Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) runs this program. OPTN has policies in place to make sure donor hearts are given out fairly. These policies are based on urgency of need, available organs, and the location of the patient who is receiving the heart (the recipient).”
—National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute
COLTON’S WORDS FLOAT around me in my room as I sit in front of my computer, staring at the very first blog post I read about him. They echo, just like another set of words did, before I knew where to find him: male, 19, California.
Trent’s family had only been given the most basic information about the recipients of his organs, and those three things were all that they knew about the recipient of his heart. That’s all I knew when I wrote to him. And later, that’s what I held on to when he didn’t write me back. When I wanted to know where to find him, because I needed to know more about him.
A series of words, separated by commas, typed into a search box: male, 19, CA. I added heart transplant and got 4.7 million results in 0.88 seconds. Results I could sort by date and relevancy, narrow even further by geographic location, and still came up with endless links to follow, pieces that might or might not even have belonged to the same puzzle. I followed them all night after night, turning the pieces in the pale glow of my computer, until I found the ones that seemed to fit.
There are twelve transplant centers in California, but there was only one that had performed a heart transplant on the day Trent died. I’d found it in a blog post, written by a girl who was incredibly scared but who was trying to remain hopeful about her younger brother, who had been in the ICU there. He’d already been put on an artificial heart, but he was growing weaker every day as he waited for a new one.
I’d look at the picture on his sister’s blog post, of Colton and his tired smile, flashing a thumbs-up for the camera as his parents and sister surrounded him that day, teary eyed and smiling. His sister wrote that, in this photo, they’d just heard the news that a suitable heart had been found and that, according to all the tests, it was a perfect match. This must have been about the same time when, miles away, Trent’s heart was being removed from his chest as our families held each other in the waiting room, shedding tears of a wholly different kind.
The minute a heart is harvested from a donor, the clock starts, and doctors are in a race against time to get it to its recipient. The heart is sealed in a plastic bag filled with sterile solution, then surrounded by ice for transport, most often by helicopter. Trent’s had been. And as it was flown to the transplant center, Colton was prepped for surgery. His family prayed, and they asked their friends to do the same, and what was life or death for them went on as a standard procedure for the doctors performing it. Just a few hours after Trent’s heart had been removed from his chest, it was sewn into Colton’s. Blood vessels were reconnected, and when the heart was infused with Colton’s blood, it started to beat again on its own. Just as my world went completely still.
I scroll down, over words I’ve read so many times I could recite them from memory, to the next picture of Colton, taken just after he woke up from the surgery. He’s lying on his back in the hospital bed, the ends of a stethoscope in his ears, the flat circle of it pressed to his chest by someone else’s hand. Listening to his new heart beat.