Second Hand Heart by Catherine Ryan Hyde Page B

need to explain myself to you.”
    “But you promised you’d come.”
    “Next time I’ll know better.”
    “It isn’t fair. And if you say life isn’t fair, I’ll scream.”
    “I wasn’t going to say that.”
    “Then what were you going to say?”
    “I was going to say, ‘Goodnight, Vida.’”
    “You know I’ll just call you again.”
    “Yes,” I said. “I do know that.”
    From:
Richard Bailey
To:
Myra Buckner
    Dear Myra,
    I think I should have listened to you. I think you were right.
    Love,
    Richard
    PS:
I don’t really think, though, that it’s so much about that question I asked you at the funeral. I don’t think I’ve completely lost it and started believing that all the love Lorrie amassed in her lifetime, particularly for me, still resides there in the heart. I think it’s a simpler trap than that. Vida has a piece of Lorrie. An actual part of the woman I love. Inside. Alive. Beating. Carried with her. Wouldn’t that make a difference to anybody?
    I hope so. I’d like to believe that, even though I’ve completely lost it, I’m not completely losing it.
    By the way. What I just said about my connection to the heart is true. So far as I know. At least, there is definitely a level at which it is true. Except to the extent that it isn’t true. Except in light of that peculiar phenomenon in which something can be true and not true at the same time.
    Good God. Listen to me. I’ve become an attorney for conflicting realities. Or maybe that’s redundant. Maybe that’s the only kind of attorney there is.
    God help us all.
    PPS:
I boxed up Lorrie’s clothes today. That’s all. I hope you weren’t expecting more from me. Just put them in boxes. Taped up their tops. I didn’t move them out of the house or anything. I may never do that.
    Let’s be reasonable.
    From:
Myra Buckner
To:
Richard Bailey
    Dear Richard,
    Please know it gives me no joy or satisfaction to have been right in this case.
    It all makes sense, what you explained. Even the part of it that’s true.
    But I’m still troubled by one question: What about the old woman who received Lorrie’s corneas? Why arent you off somewhere gazing into her eyes?
    Love in return,
    Myra
    PS:
Interesting coincidence. You were packing boxes and taping them up. I was cutting the tape on boxes and emptying them out. Well, one box, anyway. I went through the attic today and found a whole carton of photos of the girls as children. I’d guess more than half include Lorrie as a child. Of course they mean a great deal to me and I could never part with them in their entirety. But I would share them with you.
    From:
Richard Bailey
To:
Myra Buckner
    Myra,
    Oh, yes, please. Please, anything you can spare me. As many as you can bring yourself to let go of, thank you. It would mean so much to me.
    You see, I’m slowing down on my wall. I went to a garage sale day before yesterday and bought a whole box of photo frames, all different sizes. Mostly 8×10, but a little of everything, really. A great assortment, and I picked it up for almost nothing. Classic garage-sale pricing. Which is a consideration, because of course I haven’t been working. As I carried them home, for that moment, I was almost happy. Relatively speaking.
    But then I got home and discovered that I only have a few photos left unframed. I’d been careful not to check. I wanted to think of my photo stash as infinite. Bottomless. Almost to the point of pretending that more photos could appear, as if by magic, at the bottom of a dark drawer or in an electronic image file.
    Almost. I’m not quite that bad. Silly, huh?
    I’ve been slowing down on adding photos to the wall. I’m down to about one a day. And I know this will sound insane, but I’m terrified of the day I have to stop. The day I see I have no more photos left to frame and hang.
    I feel like that crazy Sarah Winchester, who built her crazy Winchester Mystery House (uncomfortably close to where I live), to appease the ghosts of all