movementsâlike sudden light on water.
The windowpanes vibrate as a helicopter takes off from the roof of the hospital. When my father lifts his head, his throat emergesâgray and sharpâfrom the nest of sheet Iâve spun around him.
âI want to meet her parents. Theyââ Though heâs moving his lips, I canât hear the rest of what heâs saying over the roar of the helicopter.
Last night, before Eleanor and I left here, Dr. Meyer took me aside. Heâs concerned my father is getting too enmeshed in the donorâs life. âOr death, rather,â he said.
âBut how can he not?â I asked. âYou wonât tell him hername, just a few details like her age and her profession⦠what she liked to do and how she died.â
âSometimes grief makes people really crazy,â Dr. Meyer said. âSometimes they are crazy anyway. And then itâs better for the recipient to stay anonymous.â
Still, my father continues to ask about her parents. I think they want to mourn their daughterânot adopt some man who is a generation ahead of her. I see her
lying on a metal table after her brain death has been established, still hooked up to machines that breathe for her, that keep fluids and blood salts in balance, until her heart is harvested for my father.
Harvested.
Thatâs what itâs called, according to Dr. Meyer. A
harvest of hearts. Of kidneys. And livers. Of eyes and toes and spleens and ears and
â
Stop it. A cannibalistic feast. Stopâ
âDr. Meyer told me youâre doing well,â I say quickly. The skin on my face feels dry and stretched from two hours in the car to Portland. I bend across my father. âReally well.â
He smells of mouthwash and, oddly, gladiolas, even though there are no gladiolas in his room. Just roses. Two bouquets of roses from Eleanor and me. But those I canât smell. Just those gladiolas.
Funeral flowers. A scent from the future?
No. Stop it nowâ
How to grieve when you dont know the language of grief?
My mother spoke the language of grief, carried it in her gaunt body where the almost-child had lived and died. That grief was all she had left. Her tears dried up entirely, and her eyes felt hot. When she put in drops to soothe them, her sight shimmered as though she were looking up from the bottom of a pond.
Ten years it took my motherâten years and two monthsâto become pregnant with me, as though her body were denying her passage of another child. Perhaps she could have shed her grief if she hadnât let my father claim me so entirely as his. Whenever I think of my parents during my early years, I feel Iâm seeing them through binoculars: my father enlarged, right up against my face; my mother reduced, fading from me while I watch her through the wrong end of the binoculars.
I donât even know the words for grief.
How to grieve when you dont know the language of grief?
âDr. Meyer ⦠he talked with her parents,â my father is saying. His features are jagged, small. He has no flesh left to waste. Not much between himself and death.
But he is recuperating, I tell myself. Heâs not dying. Soon heâll get out of the hospital, and heâll only return to have his knees and hips repaired to match his youthful heart, to hike faster and higher than I ever will, to beat me at tennis, at everything I have tried and will try.
âYouâll feel much better,â I say. âOnce you get out of here and back into your own house.â
âShe reads a lot, John. She â¦â
I can feel the fusion between the donor and my fatherâtheir only language the murmur of bloodâand for an instant I feel left out. Envious. She has taken the space of the almost-child, the daughter who will release me from his aspirations.
What does that make her relationship to me, then?
â⦠has at least a dozen novels on her night table, some