I feel a knot growing in my throat and tears gathering in my eyes. Ron Johnson has actually come to give me something, rather than take something from me. He understands that when you lose someone, it’s as if they’ve been smashed into a thousand pieces and what you’re doing in the aftermath is gathering a few of those pieces to put some version of that person back together again. And not all of the pieces are yours. Some of them belong to other people. Part of Isabelle now belongs to Ron Johnson, too.
“Can I please see her room?” he asks.
I realize now that this is why he came here in the first place. He and Isabelle might have planned to spend time in her room when no one else was home. I want to scream at him, throw him out, send him away. But I don’t. I feel as though he deserves something in return for having given a small chunk of his Isabelle to me, a fragment of a moment that had been lost to me.
Grandma Régine is lurking in a corner. She is listening closely even though she’s pretending not to. I call out to her that I’m going to show Ron Johnson Isabelle’s room. She gives me a look that says she didn’t realize that Isabelle’s room has become a museum or a mausoleum, but she doesn’t stop me.
I get up and Ron Johnson follows me. I feel his eyes on the back of my neck. His stare feels so intense that it’s almost like a slight touch.
I turn around, and he smiles when he sees the STAY OUT sign on Isabelle’s door.
“You didn’t think she was hostile, did you?” I say as I open the door.
“Actually no,” he says.
“That was mostly for our parents,” I say.
“Should I take off my shoes?” he asks.
“It’s not Mecca,” I say as I turn on the light.
He walks in slowly, carefully, squinting behind his glasses as though he were tiptoeing into a dark cave. He methodically takes in the room, perhaps comparing what he’s seeing to what he’s imagined. He looks up at the seashell chandelier, then down at her bookcase headboard.
“May I?” he asks, once again sounding like an old man.
“Feel free,” I say.
He sits on the edge of her bed and reaches over to the bookcase. He flips through a few of Isabelle’s old magazines. Some yellowed subscription cards fall out, and he picks them up and puts them back as though they were precious artifacts from another age, which in a way they are.
He walks over to her daybed and runs his fingers over the railing. He picks up the mason jars full of buttons and holds them up, close to his glasses. He turns each of the jars around and examines the buttons as though he knows exactly what they meant to her, to us. Growing in size as we did. Changing in styles and colors with our ages. Getting plainer as we grew older: from cartoon characters’ faces to basic black, white, red, and grey.
He is looking at our buttons as though they are lit up, or are buzzing around inside those jars. He’s looking at our buttons like he knows everything about her, about us, like he’s family.
When he puts the jars down, his gaze wanders over to the music sheets on the wall. He reaches up and touches one of them, closes his eyes, and effortlessly traces the notes with his fingers, all while humming the wordless melody.
“Florence Beatrice Price, Symphony in E Minor,” he says. He looks as though he is reading something in braille.
Florence Beatrice Price was the first black woman to have one of her symphonies performed by a major orchestra in the United States. Isabelle’s orchestra teacher, Ms. Backer, promised Isabelle that the school orchestra would perform the Price symphony at next year’s spring concert, which would have been—should have been—Isabelle’s last one at the school.
Ron keeps humming the most repetitive and somber parts of the symphony. He is, I realize, a music person, too.
As soon as he stops humming, he opens his eyes and slides his finger over to Izzie’s wall calendar with the day of this year’s concert circled in red. His index finger follows the red circle around and around several times. I know the Price symphony is still playing in his head, because it is playing in mine, too. I’ve heard Isabelle blast it dozens of times. Some parts of it are muted, but it’s mostly upbeat.
Ron then walks over to the picture of him and Isabelle with the whales on the beach. Their smiles take up most of the frame. He does not look at the picture for long.
He covers his face with his hands and sobs.
I keep myself from crying by imagining how sweet Isabelle would have found all of this, how absolutely and positively over-the-top romantic. I could have teased her about it for years, but it would have made her day. It would have made her month. It would have made her life.
He wipes the tears with the back of his hand, looks up, and says, “I’m sorry.”
“No problem,” I say.
“I think I’m going to go now,” he says.
I offer him the picture of him and Isabelle, but he refuses it.
“I have one, too,” he says.
He walks out of the room ahead of me, and it is my turn to follow him.
Grandma Régine is waiting for us in the living room.
“Is everything all right?” she asks us both.
“Yes,” I say. But I am lying. Nothing will ever be all right again. I walk Ron Johnson to our front door. Another part of my heart splinters off, then shatters as I close the door behind him. I now know that he and my sister shared much more than one blissful day watching stranded whales at the beach. This is the only important secret she’s ever tried to keep from me.
“Will he become a nuisance?” Grandma Régine asks.
Somehow I don’t think so. Ron Johnson now knows that I fully understand what he meant to Isabelle. And he has said goodbye to both of us.
ONCE A YEAR, at Easter time, some members of Pastor Ben’s church can, if they like, take turns washing each other’s feet. It took me a while to build up enough courage to do it. Isabelle, though, loved it.
First of all, I don’t have pretty feet. Isabelle’s feet were not that pretty, either, but at least she’d wear socks around the house to both hide and protect them. My thick soles were only part of the reason I’d avoided the Easter foot-washing service. The other reason is that I think it’s yucky.
Foot washing, Pastor Ben explains on Easter Sunday morning, is common in many ancient cultures, where it’s considered courteous to wash the feet of one’s visitors. Usually the visitor has traveled long and dusty distances in sandals and is in need of a good scrub. I remind myself of this as my parents and Aunt Leslie and Grandpa Marcus and Grandma Régine keep bugging me to enter one of the smaller rooms, a plain white one, where the foot washing is to take place. When I walk in, Tina is sitting on a stool behind a white plastic washbasin.
“Did you pick me on purpose?” I ask.
“My grandpa’s the minister. I get first dibs on all the best feet.” Her laughter echoes through the room.
Tina is an old pro at foot washing. She motions for me to sit on the chair facing her. I push off my flat, roomy shoes and let my feet sway above the water.
“Are you mad at me or something?” she asks.
“Are we supposed to talk while doing this?” I ask.
We are not supposed to talk. We are actually supposed to be praying, asking God to reveal to us our most humble selves, our deepest sense of service to others.
Tina guides my feet into the basin, cups the warm water by the handfuls, and pours it over my toes. Pulling my feet deeper into the basin, she gently massages my arches.
“Jean Michel says you’re not calling him, either,” she says.
“Does he, now?”
“My mom says when you hit your head as hard as you did, you get a lot of mood swings, so I’m going to forgive you now.”
“Bite me,” I say.
“I would if your feet weren’t so gross,” she says.
“I miss Isabelle, too,” she adds, after pouring a few more handfuls of water on my toes. “I loved her, too.”
Once, when Tina was hanging out with us
at the house, she was doing what she calls “twin testing” and asked Isabelle and me to write down what our last meal would be, if we were on death row. Our imagined maximum security prison was on a strict budget, so we could only pick three things.
Isabelle asked Tina to jot down the menu for her last supper and it turns out that the three of us mostly had the same things: a really big burger, some curly sweet potato fries, and each of us a different kind of milk shake. I’d tried not to choose something Isabelle would go for, so I’d opted for Tina’s favorite meal. Isabelle must have mind-read my choice. Isabelle’s one extra thing was Grandma Régine’s vanilla coconut cake, which she said she’d ask Tina and me to sneak past the guards for her.
“Double bite me,” I tell Tina for making me remember this, too.
We switch places and now it’s my turn at her feet, which, unlike mine, are well manicured. I give her feet a real scrubbing, but do not put them between my teeth and bite them, pinch her, draw blood, or bring her to tears, which is what I want to do.
Foot washing is supposed to be a shared experience of surrender, as Pastor Ben liked to say. I just hadn’t expected it to be a make-up session with my friend.
“It might have been easier to do this for a leper,” Tina says once we’re done.
We hug.
“Are we okay now?” she asks.
“We’re okay now,” I say.
“When are you coming back to school?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. Both my parents agree with Aunt Leslie that I’m not yet ready to go back.
Tina and I sit together on a side pew and watch as Dad and Mom try to wash each other’s feet. Mom’s bandages have been getting smaller and smaller, and underneath her elaborate hats her hair is starting to grow again. Her ribs are hurting less, too. She’s not grimacing as much when she moves, and she’s able to bend down and get up for the foot washing.
Dad now has his wounded arm in a sling, but is still wearing his leg cast, so Mom only washes one of his feet. When it’s Dad’s turn, Mom has to sit on a higher stool and one of the deacons has to hold the basin, which shows you how much effort they’re both putting into this. Dad strokes Mom’s feet in the water and tickles her toes with his good hand and they smile to each other as he does it.
If only Isabelle could see this, I think.
“I’m astonished,” she’d say.
ASIDE FROM THE crash articles online, Gloria Carlton is nowhere to be found. Before she leaves town to go pack her things, Aunt Leslie finds thirty or so Carltons in the Miami-Dade area. She calls them all. None of the Carltons she gets to speak to her—by blocking her phone number and pretending to be a high school principal—have a daughter named Gloria.
Since Ron Johnson dropped by unannounced, Mom agrees to let Tina and Jean Michel come over one day after school.
Jean Michel and Tina spend the afternoon on their laptops, combing the Internet for clues to Gloria Carlton’s past. Though I still get light-sensitivity headaches, I’m now able to look at screens with my cat eyes without feeling like my eyeballs are being stabbed with needles. Still, Jean Michel keeps reminding me to be careful, as though I’ve just left the hospital.
Jean Michel and I don’t act the same way around each other anymore. He’s less flirtatious with me now, a lot more cautious. Maybe he’s responding to the ways I have changed, the way I can’t even imagine being playful, or even being fully myself, with him or anybody else.
Things haven’t been the same with Tina, either. How can they be? With Isabelle gone, I have no right to do the same things Tina does, to go on with my life just like it was before. But I need their help and I’m glad they agreed to help me.
I get tired really fast, so we don’t get too far with the search. They promise to work on it at home and come back with some answers for me the next day.
“These Carltons,” Tina says, mimicking a James Bond–type British accent, “are definitely trying not to be found.”
When they come back the next afternoon, Jean Michel gets on his laptop to plug in some new tools that he and Tina have researched.
I notice as he logs on that his screen saver is Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas.
How does he know, I wonder, that this is exactly how I’ve been feeling? Split in half sometimes, and at other times walking, living, breathing for two. Two hearts are beating in my one chest, but it feels like no heart at all.
Mr. Rhys would call this a moment of sentimental appropriation. Just like the grief class he tried to have for me.
“I think we got it,” Jean Michel says, typing the Fridas away. “It took us most of the night—”
“Working remotely,” Tina clarifies.
“And our lunch periods today.” Jean Michel completes his thought.
“I can’t wait for you to see this.” Tina lets out a joyful shriek.
This is her big reveal.
Their excitement for me, more than being pleased with themselves, tells me that they really want me to have some answers, to be a little bit at peace.
Tina lets Jean Michel do all the typing, but it seems like they’re onto something together. Using their newly acquired software and apps, they found out something non-crash-related about a girl from Miami named Gloria Carlton.
Jean Michel then shows me a portrait of Gloria Carlton on our school photographer’s website. He morphs that picture with a screenshot of the picture Officer Sanchez showed me, the one from the newspaper. Tina imports that blended picture into a bunch of school databases. Hundreds of wrong faces pop up quickly until the screen slows down, then freezes, and we get our highest read, 85 percent recognition, on a matching image for our girl.
The new picture is maybe a year old. Gloria Carlton is standing at the entrance of a school near downtown Miami called Midtown Academy. She’s wearing a school uniform, khaki pants, and a white blouse. Underneath that picture is the name Janice Hill.
“I swear we could work for the FBI,” Tina tells Jean Michel.
No wonder this took them most of the night, and their lunch hour, too.
It’s all moving faster than my bruised brain and racing heart can keep up with, though. Is it possible that they found something about Gloria Carlton that the police hadn’t?
“We should give this information to the police,” I say.
“They can’t figure out that we hacked into the Board of Ed records,” Tina says.
I have never seen this side of Tina before. It’s a cooler, bolder, more dangerous version of Tina.
“I found her birth records,” she tells me.
She’s sweating now, every pore on her face bursting wet.
The links to the birth records show that Janice Hill was born in Gainesville, Florida. She’s actually sixteen and not fourteen.
“Maybe she and her family are in the witness protection program,” Tina says, “and now she’s just blown it. She’ll have to get a different identity.”
Jean Michel chortles. Their eyes linger on each other’s. I feel like a third wheel.
I ask Tina to send what they’ve found out to my mom’s and dad’s email addresses. My head is throbbing again from all the screen gazing, so I ask them to leave so I can lie down, close my eyes, and process all this for a while.
Still, I can’t stop thinking about their discovery. How come Officer Butler and Officer Sanchez hadn’t figured out that Gloria Carlton was an alias?
GRANDMA RÉGINE AND Grandpa Marcus are out for their early evening walk. My parents are fighting.
They shut the bedroom door, but I can still hear everything they’re saying. I guess foot washing can’t save every relationship.
One of them must have opened the door, then slammed it shut, then opened it again. Mom is screaming so loud that I’m worried someone might hear her from the street and call the police.
I stumble out of my room and into the hallway. Both Mom and Dad are standing there, looking breathless, with their backs pressed against the wall.
Dad is l
eaning on his crutches while holding a letter and envelope. He looks up and sees me standing there, then goes back to mouthing the words from the letter to himself. Then he hands the letter to me.
“She’s not supposed to be reading.” Mom grabs the letter back from me.
“She just sent us an email,” Dad says.
“That was my friend,” I say.
“We sent it to the officers,” Mom says.
“What’s this letter?” I ask.
“It’s a thank-you letter for organ donations,” Dad says.
“And they’re thanking us for your corneas and your heart.”
My corneas? My heart?
“We’d already signed the papers when we thought it was you,” Dad says.
Every word coming out of both their mouths is spat out with anger. Their anger is not really directed at each other, though, but at the entire situation, at yet another reminder that Isabelle is gone. But it sure seems like they hate each other.
I need to back up. They donated Isabelle’s heart and eyes and did not even mention it to me. So I’m wrong about the time Isabelle died. Maybe she actually died, really died, when her organs were put into those other people.
Still, I can’t help but like the idea that parts of Isabelle are still out there somewhere. She did not just smolder into ashes. Her heart is beating in someone else’s chest. Her corneas are looking at things. They’re seeing flowers, clouds, stars.
“Izzie’s heart is inside somebody else,” Mom says, rocking herself.
Dad tries to reach over and put his arms around her, but she pulls away, almost letting him fall. He balances himself quickly, grabbing the crutches and pushing back against the wall.
“Izzie’s heart is inside somebody else,” Mom keeps saying.
“You signed the papers,” Dad says. “We both signed all the papers. You said Iz would have wanted it that way.”
“I know,” Mom said. “M konnen.”
Isabelle’s heart is in somebody else’s body.