Second Hand Heart by Catherine Ryan Hyde Read Free Book Online

reach me, I could have. In fact, anonymity would have been the default setting for this donor arrangement. The donor program encourages her to write to me. But they don’t give away my address. I invited further contact. Then, the moment said contact accepted my invitation, I backed up and began to feel imposed upon.
    And yet, there I was in the hospital, ready for the drama to begin.
    Why? Hard to say. I’m halfway guessing.
    I suppose we wanted to think of it as one of those happy human interest stories on the evening news. Life springs from death, and even the deepest tragedy can open up to reveal a miracle in its wake. And here is the gratified young woman, lying in a hospital bed, breathing. Living! Living proof.
    What a tribute to the deceased woman and her grieving family!
    As I stood in that stark hospital hallway, I believe it was dawning on me that there would be more to it than that. It would be real.
    Maybe this is why it was so important for me to find Abigail. She was my partner in denial, and I needed her. Perhaps, with her help, I could still find my way back.
    I even asked at the nurse’s station on Vida’s floor, but as far as they knew she had gone home for a nap.
    I had two choices. Come back later. As if one drive to the hospital hadn’t used up a week’s worth of my scant supply of energy already. Or let myself into the girl’s room alone, without introduction.
    I suppose there was a third choice of forgetting the whole questionable idea. Accepting that I had hit a logistical and emotional red light, perhaps for a reason.
    But I dismissed that idea, having passed a point of no return within myself on this Vida issue.
    I decided that seeing her alone at first was preferable anyway. With no one taking notice, able to observe that I’d come with an agenda, some indistinct expectation for gain. Especially if that expectation turned out to be misguided. Especially if I was about to fall on my ass.
    I steeled myself outside her door for so long that two nurses came by and gave me questioning glances. One with raised eyebrows. As if I must need something. And I did. But nothing they would likely have on hand.
    I walked through the door.
    I expected her to be asleep, but she sat half-propped-up, her dark eyes wide open and staring at me. There was some startling element to them, something wild and intense. I’d expected at least to see her groggy and half-conscious. Just a handful of days after such a traumatic surgery, wasn’t she still on some kind of heavy painkiller? If so, what must her eyes look like naturally?
    I couldn’t imagine she was nineteen, though I knew from her mother’s letter that she was. She seemed high-school age, underweight and frail. Perhaps borderline anorexic, with dirty-blonde hair which might actually have been dirty, or just looked it. She had dark circles under her eyes, a body strangely slack and at rest, only her eyes fully alive. Only her right thumb was in motion, rubbing an obsessive, repetitive pattern over a small oval object.
    Above the neckline of her hospital gown I could see the top of the scar, shockingly unbandaged and still stapled. It caught and tingled in my stomach and made me feel squeamish, as though I should sit down.
    “You’re the guy,” she said. “Huh?”
    I never bothered to ask how she knew. I figured I must be wearing it on my face, entering her room with an expression that only one person in her world could possibly fit.
    “Yes,” I said. “I am the guy.”
    I walked over closer, and sat down on a hard plastic chair. I remember a vague sense of disappointment. I’m not sure what I thought I might see. Whatever it was, I didn’t see it. Just a stranger, a girl I’d never met before.
    She turned her head to follow me with the stare. Her assessment of me made me uncomfortable, a role reversal I hadn’t meant to allow. I found myself wondering what her stare did while I was elsewhere. It was all part of that disconnectedness, that sense