Brown and de Luca Collection, Volume 1 Read online

  Hell, I’d even yelled at Myrtle today.

  I looked at the folder in my hand. O.R.G., for “Organ Recipient Group,” a support group for transplant patients. Great. Amy knew perfectly well that I’m not exactly known to get good grades in “works and plays well with others.” I thought about tossing the brochure aside, but for some reason I didn’t. I took it with me when I headed out the back door with Myrtle on her completely unwarranted leash—like she was gonna what? Sprint away from me? We took our evening walk around the perimeter of my piece of paradise, and I let myself bask in it for a while, then reined myself in when I started sliding too far into the mind-set I preached to the masses, and instead opened the leaflet and started reading.

  We’re a group of people who’ve been given something precious and welcome the chance to talk about what that means to us. Non-recipients can’t come close to understanding all the things that come with such a generous gift. What does it mean for us long term? How do we feel about our donors? Are we obligated to donate our own organs when we pass? Should we feel guilty if that’s not what we want to do? There are no right or wrong answers to any of these questions, nor to the thousands of others that can sometimes haunt us. But here we can discuss them openly. Nothing said in this safe space is judged, and nothing is repeated. We meet Wednesday nights at 7:00 p.m. at the Legion Hall, out back under the oak tree when weather permits, inside the meeting room in back otherwise. Service animals welcome.

  Wednesday. Tonight. “Huh.”

  I realized I’d stopped walking, and glanced down at Myrt. She was lying down, her head on her front paws, eyes closed, snoring softly. Hell, I’d only been standing still for like forty seconds. “What are you, Myrt? Narcoleptic?”

  She snarfed at me without even opening her eyes.

  “Aw, come on, Myrtle, you need to walk. Let’s get going.” I bent over her, put my hands underneath her “armpits” and lifted.

  She behaved like a sopping wet blanket. Okay, make that ten sopping wet blankets.

  Sighing, I straightened, looked at the brochure, looked at the dog again. “Want to go for a walk into town?”

  Her head rose, and she opened her eyes and looked up at me, though I knew she couldn’t see me.

  “Walk into town?” I repeated, and she tipped her head way to the side, one floppy ear perking up a little. “Come on, let’s go for a walk into town!”

  Myrtle sprang upright. Well, okay, “sprang” is probably a bit of an overstatement, but she got the hell up, and we headed back to the house for my purse. Myrt knew that “walk into town” meant a treat. It had become my way of bribing her into exercise. If we made it as far as the McDonald’s on the corner, she would get a Chicken McNugget or two. Myrtle loved her some Chicken McNuggets, and the Legion Hall was a stone’s throw from their golden arches.

  An hour later we were there.

  The meeting was inside, probably because it was pretty dark already by seven at this time of the year. There were chairs around a long, banquet-style table, about half of them occupied by men and woman of various ages, shapes and sizes, a big coffee urn with towers of cups, and packets of powdered creamer, sugar and every sugar substitute known to man all in the same oversize salad bowl, and plastic spoons scattered loose on a white plastic tablecloth.

  I walked in with Myrtle. A man saw us and came right over. Probably forty, blond hair with a few gray strands, good-looking in a GQ sort of way, with a sexy smile, my eyes said. He extended a hand and I took it, looking down as I did so I could read him without my eyes mucking things up.

  Younger than he looks, thirty-five, maybe less. Grip not as strong as it should be. Looking for love. “Welcome,” he said. “David Gray. Heart.”

  “Wow, that’s the big time, David. I just got a layer of corneal tissue myself.”

  “There are no small transplants, Ms….?”

  “Rachel,” I said. “And this is Myrt.”

  He looked down at Myrtle and smiled, because it’s impossible to look at Myrtle and not smile. She’s just got that kind of face. So ugly she’s cute, you know?

  “She’s a service dog?”

  “Well, she was.” It was a bald-faced lie, but how would he know? He didn’t have my skills for detecting a lie in a word or gesture, did he? Of course not. “She’s retired now that I got my eyesight back. Not a moment too soon, either, since she lost her own recently.”

  “Awww.” He crouched and scratched her head. Myrtle turned around and presented her butt instead. She loved to be scratched right above her stub of a tail. He obliged but only for a few seconds, then he straightened again.

  “Come on in, Rachel. Sit down. Coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  He waved me to a chair, then, on his way to the coffeepot, said, “This is Rachel. Corneas.”

  “Hi, Rachel,” the others said en masse. Like cult members. Or an AA meeting. Ugh.

  I lifted a hand and wiggled my fingers in reply. Yeah, awkward. I was already regretting my decision to attend and plotting a suitable retaliation for Amy when “David, Heart” returned with my coffee. He took the chair right next to mine. Myrtle collapsed on my feet and began to snore. A woman giggled, drawing my eye. Pretty, blonde, too thin.

  “Emily,” she said. “Liver.”

  I was getting the format here. Name, organ. It was like a secret code for a secret club.

  “Terry,” said an oversize guy with leather chaps to match the jacket on the back of his chair, and tattoos that made sleeves unnecessary. Or totally necessary, depending on your taste. “Bone.”

  “Bone? How the hell does that work?” I glanced fast at David Heart. “I’m sorry, am I allowed to ask?”

  “Terry?” David said.

  Terry grinned. He had gold caps on both incisors, and that really creeped me out. Then he patted the top of his crew cut. “Ditched my bike. They had to patch my skull back together with bone grafts.”

  “Holy shit.”

  He grinned at David. “I like her.” He said it in a way that made me expect “Can we keep her?” to follow. But it didn’t.

  I then met Carolyn Skin Graft, Ken and Matthew Kidney (not really a couple), and Blake Lung, who didn’t look as if he was going to be coming back for too many more meetings. Everyone had coffee, and Emily walked around with a plastic tray of bakery cookies that looked to die for.

  As she did, the door opened to admit a newcomer. Tall, very slender, and the only one in the group wearing a suit.

  “Hey, Dr. V. We have a newbie,” Emily said as the man hung up his coat. He had thinning, but longish blond-and-silver hair, which he wore straight down, combed behind his ears, with a girlie little flip at the ends. Kind of like Custer, sans the pointy beard.

  He met my eyes while I was inspecting him and held out a hand. “Welcome. I’m Dr. Vosberg.”

  “Rachel…um…” I didn’t want to give the whole thing away, just in case. Though I had glimpsed recognition in the eyes of a couple of them already. Then I realized I didn’t have to. “Corneas.”

  “Ahh. And how are you enjoying sighted life?”

  “Great so far.”

  He frowned. As if he knew it was a half-truth. Huh.

  Finally Dr. V sat down and said, “Who wants to start?”

  “How about our new girl?” Terry Skullbones asked, grinning at me.

  I shook my head. “Yeah, no. Can I just sort of hang out and listen? It’s my first time.”

  “I’ll start,” said Ken Kidney. “I met my donor family last weekend.”

  Everyone smiled, like this was a great achievement among this crowd.

  “How did it go?” Carolyn asked.

  “It…it was weird. It was like they expected something from me. And they were watching me so close, like…too close. You know?”

  Dr. Vosberg nodded. �
�They were looking for your donor in you. They always do. They want to see some sign that their son is still alive inside you.”

  “Yeah.” Ken nodded real slow. “Yeah, that’s exactly what it felt like.”

  Yeah, it was, I thought, remembering the way Mason Brown had looked into my eyes during our meeting.

  “They hugged me like they knew me, you know? Invited me to freaking Thanksgiving.”

  I closed my eyes. That poor guy.

  “What did you say?” Emily asked.

  “I said I’d let ’em know, but I don’t want to go. And now I feel obligated.”

  “You don’t need to feel that way,” said Dr. Custer. Okay, Vosberg, but really. Custer. “You’re not obligated.”

  “God, why do the families always act like we’re supposed to channel their dead relative for them?” That was Matthew, the other Kidney in the room.

  Emily was eating a cookie, but she raised her hand, even though no one else had, and tried to rush it down with a swig of coffee so she could talk. “It’s because…wait.” Another swig. Rinse, swoop the tongue around. There you go, girl, get those crumbs. “It’s because a part of their loved one lives on in us.”

  “It’s a piece of meat,” Terry Skullbones said. “It’s like taking the battery out of a Harley and putting it into a Yamaha. How much sense would it make to start expecting the Yamaha to look or sound or ride like the Harley? It’s the same thing.”

  “People aren’t machines, Terry.” Emily shifted in her chair, bit her lip and sent a slightly sheepish look at Dr. Custer.

  She has a crush on him.

  “I mean, I can totally see your point,” she went on, correcting her transplant group etiquette, I guessed. “I see it differently, though. I think we do get a little bit of the personality—the soul, if you want to call it that—with the organ.”

  “That,” I said, leaning forward in my chair, “is fascinating. Did you feel that after you got your liver, Emily?”

  “Yeah.” She made the word swing upward at the end, like a question, all uncertain, and looked around the room, expecting to be judged, and her eyes lingered longest on the shrink, who nodded encouragement at her. “Did any of the rest of you?” she asked.

  Everyone looked at each other, waiting for someone else to go first. I said, “Not me. Not yet, anyway.” And that set off the murmur of denials. Em was on her own in roomful of liars. Oh, yeah. I felt it. They were all afraid to admit it. This was a revelation.

  “Tell me more, Em,” Terry Skullbones said. “What kind of stuff are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know.” Head down, shoulders slumping. “I probably just imagined it.”

  I felt bad for her, and for lying, because what good would it do? So I said, “There is this thing with the hot sauce, now that I think about it.”

  I could feel the ears perking, even though human ears can’t perk.

  “Yeah, I never liked the stuff before, and since the graft, I put it on everything. Gotta admit, I wondered if maybe my donor was a hot-sauce nut.”

  The minute I said it, I knew I was right. Mason Brown’s brother, my donor, had been a hot-sauce nut. I didn’t even need to confirm it. I knew. And that gave me the creeps as I wondered if he’d also been prone to having visions of murder victims or nightmares about bashing brains in with heavy hammers.

  “With me it’s The Beach Boys,” Em said. “I only listened to country music before, but a few weeks ago I heard this Beach Boys song, and started singing along before I even knew what I was doing. I knew the words. That knocked me for a loop, because I know I don’t know that song.”

  “Which song?” Terry asked.

  Terry, I decided, was kinda dumb.

  “What difference does that make?” Em asked.

  Terry shrugged. “I make up rhymes.”

  Silence. All eyes on Terry now. He shrugged. “It’s stupid, I know. Little two-line rhymes inside my head for damn near every occasion. It’s freaking weird.”

  “You can say that again,” I blurted. “Shit. Sorry. I just…I can see why that would freak you out a little.”

  “I think Em was right,” David said. “This might be our imaginations. When you’re looking for evidence of something, you tend to find it.”

  That could have come right out of one of my books.

  “How’s everyone doing with the antirejection meds?” he went on.

  Smooth. Nice change of subject. He was very uncomfy with the woo-woo talk, I decided. His heart donor must’ve been a skeptic. I almost wished I’d said that out loud, then decided this wasn’t the place for my warped brand of humor.

  There was a drawn-out pause, during which my gracious bulldog let out a fart that sounded like a Bronx raspberry. Emily clapped a hand over her mouth, her eyebrows arching high. Terry slapped his leather-clad tree-trunk thigh and laughed out loud. And then the smell spread and the people nearest me started waving their hands in front of their faces.

  “Damn. I am so sorry.” I got up, and shoved Myrt until she got up, heaving a giant sigh at the inconvenience. “Look, I won’t bring her next time. I’m really sorry.”

  I had her almost to the door when David Heart hurried over and reached past me to open it. I sent him a grateful look, and he sent me back a cow-eyed one. “I’m glad to hear you’ll be coming back.”

  Shit, he’d almost just made me decide against it.

  Then again, he wasn’t bad-looking. Why was I automatically assuming a date would be a bad thing?

  Based on past experience.

  Yeah, but I was blind then. I can see now.

  And that’s gonna help, how?

  “I’ll see you next Wednesday, Rachel.”

  I smiled sweetly while my inner bitch called me ten kinds of idiot. “See you then…David.”

  Then I retreated, taking my stinky dog with me.

  I didn’t dream that night. Slept like a log, in fact. Maybe knowing that other people were having odd experiences like mine had validated my own enough to make me believe I wasn’t slowly losing my sanity.

  * * *

  Two days later I hit a mailbox and wound up in the ditch. I was driving my T-Bird with the top down, despite it being only sixty-five degrees. It was sunny, and I liked having the top down. I had a mission, and I was on my way to complete it. I’d been calling Mason Brown at his desk every day for the week since we’d met by the dam, looking for my brother, and he’d alternated between dodging my calls altogether, and taking them and giving me bullshit answers. I could tell by a slight hitch in the back of his breath in between his words that he was holding something back. And that pissed me off. I’d called this morning, too, only to be told he was coming in later in the day, so I asked for his partner, Rosie, who was all too happy to spill the beans that Mason was moving out of his apartment today. I pulled out my smartphone and did a little online research—I was getting good at it and had learned a few useless tidbits about his dead brother already—and I scored an address on Washington Avenue. Figured that was the place he was moving from, and that I’d best get there, because it might be a lot harder to track him down at a new place.

  I got lost three times before I found the street, then creepy-crawled along it reading house numbers from a distance.

  I didn’t spot it, though. I hit it instead.

  I don’t know what the hell happened. It was like my eyes stopped seeing what was in front of me and decided to play a movie clip instead. I was blind, but not blind blind. I was seeing, just not seeing what was really there, you know? Instead I was seeing an ordinary scene taking place on a different street. A scarecrow shaped guy in skinny jeans—God, I hate skinny jeans on men. Of all the sights I’ve seen since getting my vision back, that one’s in my bottom ten. Anyway, it was just that. Tall, skinny guy, brown ponytail, teal T-shirt with Legalize
Love emblazoned across the front in white, jeans so tight I didn’t know how he pulled them over his big feet, walking down a sidewalk, past a shop window with a neon coffee cup complete with three wiggly strips that were supposed to be steam coming off the top.

  And then I felt the bump and the slow tilt as my passenger side front wheel dropped into a ditch.

  The flickering film reel was gone. I was back. Footsteps were jogging toward me across the blacktopped drive, and I blinked myself back into focus. Mason Brown had stopped and was standing at the edge of his driveway, looking from my gorgeous ride to his mailbox’s new angle, and shaking his head.

  I shook my head clear, still not sure what the hell had just happened. I’d taken a mini-vacation to la-la land. But why? And oh, shit, what about my car? My gorgeous yellow car!

  “Rachel?”

  “Hi,” I said. “Guess I found your place.”

  “Found it? You assaulted it.”

  I shrugged. “How bad is the car?”

  “Better than the mailbox, I’d guess.”

  “Don’t be a drama queen, it’s still standing.” And it was, though leaning severely to the left. “How do I get my car out of your ditch?”

  “Do you even have a license?”

  “Brand-spanking-new one. Got it a few weeks ago.”

  Hands on his hips, he heaved a big sigh. His chest expanded with it, and my libido followed suit, but I told it to settle down. I was on a mission here, remember?

  “I can pull you out. Hang tight a minute.” He started to turn away, then stopped. “Are you okay?”

  “Nice of you to ask.” Eventually. “Yeah, I’m fine. Except these damn corneas you gave me seem to be malfunctioning. Was there a warranty or anything?”