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. I imagine this was 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’d 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.
It had been hard for me to look at that picture the first time I’d seen it, so many months after Trent’s death—hard not to feel the sharp pang of loss all over again. But it was impossible not to be moved by what I saw captured in that photo, and the raw emotion on Colton Thomas’s face. It made me want to know him. And after months without any reply to my letter, it was through his sister’s words and pictures that I started to.
I’d gone through all of Shelby’s posts, and with them, constructed parallel time lines. On the day we buried Trent, Colton had the first biopsy of his new heart and showed no signs of rejection. Nine days later he’d been strong enough to walk out of the hospital and return home with his family, and I was too weak to attend the last day of my junior year without Trent. I’d spent the summer, and then my senior year, suspended in a haze of grief. Colton had spent that time getting stronger, impressing doctors with his progress. Healing. I didn’t know it at the time, but months after Trent’s death, when I’d written my anonymous letter to the anonymous male, 19, from California, he was doing everything in his power to move forward and move on. And then yesterday I decided I needed to see him to do the same.
Now I don’t know what comes next.
I scroll back up to the most recent post on Shelby’s blog, written weeks ago, on day 365. The anniversary of Trent’s death, and of Colton’s second chance at life. The beginning point of our parallel time lines. I brought them together yesterday, though that should be the end of it. There shouldn’t be any ”sometime.” But then I think of him standing there on the porch smiling at me, with the sun shining down on us like an invitation, and regardless of what it should be, it doesn’t feel like the end.
A knock on the door interrupts the thought before it can go any further. I recognize the quick, staccato raps, and I know it’s Gran. I also know she’ll only knock once more before she uses her key to let herself in and starts up the stairs to see why I haven’t answered. She’s surprisingly fast for an eighty-year-old, so I snap my laptop shut, finger-comb my hair, and get up from my desk just as I hear the second knock. I cross the room quickly, but the sight of Colton’s flower on my dresser stops me for a moment. It lies right beneath the picture of me and Trent, and the now-crumbling flower he gave me that first day.
My eyes go straight to him, and his smile freezes me there. I tense reflexively, wait for the familiar tightness in my chest to come. But it doesn’t. I glance down at the flower again. “Was this you?” I whisper.
Though I know it’s not possible, I almost expect an answer this time. But just like all the other times, the only thing I hear in the silence around me is the beating of my own heart. An undeniable reminder of a once-unfathomable truth: that I am still here even though he’s not.
“Well, look at you,” Gran says, taking off her Jackie O sunglasses when I get to the top of the stairs.
“Look at you,” I answer with a smile.
She holds out her arms and does a little spin. “Everyone always does, doll.”
They have good reason to, especially today. Gran’s dressed in her red and purple “full regalia,” as she and her Red Hat Society ladies call it. Her feisty group of “women of a certain age” proudly wear clashing combinations as a symbol of the fact that they’re old enough not to care. The glitzier the better. And Gran was born glitzy. Today she has chosen purple leggings with a matching flowing top, a red feather boa, and her signature wide-brimmed red hat with a tall plume of purple feathers that continue to float and bob in the air above her even after she stops moving.
When I get to the bottom of the stairs, she spreads out her arms and envelops me in a hug of feathers and her familiar Gran scent of Estée Lauder, Pond’s cold cream, and peppermint Lifesavers. I breathe it in and hug her right back before she pulls away and takes a good, long look at me.