Page 50 of The Love of Our Lives
A long silence passes between us, mother and daughter standing in the shadows without speaking.
‘You’re a fool,’ she says finally. ‘A wasteful fool, throwing away everything we’ve ever given you. Don’t come crying to me when none of this works out.’
‘I won’t,’ I say, more forcefully now.
And then as swiftly as Emily’s mum came into the flat, she turns on her smart black heels and heads back into the hallway. At the last second, she turns, and I’m not sure but I think I see the glisten of something in her eye; a slight drop of a barrier she’s had up the whole time.
And in this moment, I finally understand it all. That somehow, despite all of our surface-level differences, Emily and I were the same. Neither of us were living the lives we actually wanted.
But more than that, I wasn’t actually living at all.
Emily’s mum opens the door, stares back at me with eyes full of pain and regret.
‘I love you, Mum,’ I find myself saying, even as those strange sensations start to drift away again, ‘but I have to do this.’
She looks like she’s about to say she loves me too when she stops herself.
‘Goodbye, my Stella,’ she says, ‘my star,’ she adds softly, before walking out.
The door closes behind her, and my whole body stiffens.
My Stella.
And everything I thought I’d just figured out is covered by a tsunami.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
In the very early years, Dad used to get confused between Cat and me. With our matching red heads and pale skin, you could catch us at a certain angle and find that we looked near identical at times – the way we walked, the way we talked, the way we laughed even. That’s when he started calling us Big and Small. Cat wasn’t that much bigger than me really, but I always felt it still fit somehow because when you were around her, the world just felt brighter and lighter and full of possibility. She would be the first one to try a new flavour, a new activity, the only one to get up and dance in the kitchen at breakfast just because she felt like it. The names helped him to keep track somehow but it was also just his way of being affectionate, I think, of creating that specific link between him and each of us. And as I sit here staring at the screen, it finally dawns on me that Emily’s parents had a name for her too, and everything I thought I knew, everything I’ve fallen for in this life, comes crumbling down. The running in the rain and stomping up hills in the wind, trying new foods and sharing cocktails with friends, meeting the man of my dreams and following where my passion leads me for the first time in my life. All a set design being pulled apart on stage.
Placing my head in my hands, I let out a shuddering sob.
Stella.
Starin Italian.
Which means I’m living in my heart donor’s life and seven months from now, this body that I’m in – this life I’ve been living – will all be gone.
And I’ll be right back where I started.
The cruelty of it threatens to overwhelm me. There I was thinking the universe was finally helping me out, giving me a second chance at it all, when all it was doing was showing me what I can’t have: health, fun, love.
I walk over to my handbag on the sofa and pull out my wallet. Taking some scissors from a side table, I cut straight through the leather and finally tear out the mystery card, which wouldn’t budge. And now here it is in my hands – her donor card, fresh and shiny, her absolute confirmation to the world that, in the case of her death, she wanted to donate her organs. Because Emily was just like that, always giving, always thinking of others first and she wasn’t going to leave it to anyone else to decide it for her.
‘No,’ I cry, a ragged sob coming out of me.
How is this even possible though? I rush to the computer again, start typing in words like heart transplant and phenomenon, and reports from all over the world come up about organ transplant receivers claiming that they’ve inherited memory and experiences – even the emotions of their deceased donors. The reasons for it are varied, from the ‘little brain in the heart’ theory, where the heart has an intrinsic nervous system that might be responsible for memory transfer, all the way to psychometric theory, where psychics claim that the donor heart is an object imbued with the psychic energy of the person it came from; much as a bracelet or other object could carry the memory.
So, what if some way, somehow, one of these theories has manifested fully after my transplant? What if it’s been stretched to its limit and I’ve gone back into those memories, but it’s real, it’s happening, and it’s me instead of her. I’m actually over-writing her last year.
Slumping to my knees, I put my head in my hands.
Oh god, what am I going to do?
How can I possibly tell Adam the truth? How can I even face him? How can I go back over there and face any of them, all the while knowing what’s going to happen?
Because now I understand the real truth of it all: this life wasn’t going free, Emily didn’t want rid of it, she died unexpectedly – that’s what the letter said. Not ‘she took her own life’, or didn’t want to be here, or anything like that. She’d made a new life for herself, and now, for some reason I still can’t even fathom, I’m reliving the last year of it.
Before she dies.
