Pacing from the door to the middle of the shop and back, I notice Ari out of the corner of my eye, hugging herself in the back of the shop, looking a bit frightened. I shouldn’t be blaming her. I should be blaming Ellie. All of these years I have refused to feel any resentment or anger toward Ellie, even if I felt it sometimes on the nights when Olive wouldn’t sleep and the days she was sick and I had no idea what to do to help her. I wanted to scream so loudly in hopes of Ellie hearing me so she knew how angry I was about having to raise our little girl alone. What did I know about raising a kid? Nothing. I was supposed to have a partner in this life. Olive was supposed to have a mother.
Olive was supposed to have a mother.
Olive was never meant to have a mother. She was only meant to have me.
“A car accident, even a fender-bender could have killed her,” Ari says through a whisper. “Then you would have been left with nothing.” I don’t want to listen to Ari and her thought-out words. I don’t want to hear the truth or any more lies. Now I know why Ari didn’t want to tell me and I can pretty much assume why Ellie didn’t tell me. I would have talked her out of it. I would have put her in a bubble and cared for her. She didn’t give me that option, though. “Instead, she left parts of her behind.” Ari places her hand on her heart, clutching at the material over her chest. “Olive has so many parts of Ellie.”
“You don’t even know her,” I remind Ari. I know it’s an asshole comment but it’s true. Unless she knows Olive, too, and just decided not to sharethatwith me either.
“You’re right, but it takes two people to create another human being; therefore she is, in fact, half Ellie.”
“Okay,” she says. With nothing left to argue about, Ari wraps her hand around mine and pulls it toward her body. Placing the palm of my hand flat against her chest, she holds it there firmly. I close my eyes and focus on the thumping rhythm. “It’s her.” Ari’s gentle voice vibrates through her chest.
I focus solely on the beat of Ellie’s heart, trying to remember a time where I listened to her heartbeat. There’s only one time that I can remember, though. The first heart doppler check we got at the beginning of her pregnancy. We thought the heartbeat was Olive’s but it was really Ellie’s. It had taken a minute before we heard a similar sound, just softer and more delicate. I didn’t consider how badly I would want to remember that sound. Does it sound the same in Ari’s chest? Does it work that way?
“When the doctor told me there was a heart waiting for me, I knew,” Ari says. “The doctors told me there was little to no chance of finding a heart donor with the same blood type. So I knew it was Ellie. Excitement, relief, and gratefulness never set in when I heard the words come from my doctor’s mouth. I had less than a month to live at that moment. I was deteriorating by the day and we were at the point of looking for hospices since it was becoming too difficult for my parents to care for me themselves.”
“You weren’t happy that you were getting a heart?” I ask, clarifying what she’s explaining.
She presses her lips together as an uneasy smile threatens to show through the evident pain. “Like I said, I knew it was Ellie. I knew she had died. I knew she was due to have Olive, and I knew the likelihood of her surviving labor and delivery.”
I want to tell her this isn’t fair, that she knew and I had my life ripped out from beneath me but I’m still focused on feeling her heart beating beneath my hand. I know why Ellie named Olive before she was born now. She knew it was over. “I don’t know whether to be angry or grateful for her actions, but I’m hurt. Incredibly hurt.”
“I can imagine,” she says, releasing my hand from hers. “But you can’t be angry with her. She didn’t want to die, but sometimes in life we don’t get to choose the path we want, sometimes we’re only left with shitty options and she chose the less shitty one in her mind.” How can I agree with that? “She didn’t deceive you to hurt you...she made the choices she did because she loved you so much. She wanted to leave something behind that belonged to both you and her. That something was someone...Olive.”
As much as I need space right now, my hand isn’t moving, so I close my eyes, trying to piece everything together. My head hurts. The thoughts coming and going are in a jumbled mess. How did things end up likethis?
“Why aren’t you teaching now? Your year off has come and gone. Why didn’t you go back?” I ask her, wondering why she would spend all of that time being mentored by Ellie and now not be doing what she wanted to do.
“In order to maintain my license the year following my surgery, I would have needed to get my MBA. I decided against it,” she says.
“Why, though?”
“For the same reason you shouldn’t consider getting involved with me, Hunter.” A struggling grin tugs at the corner of her lips and she cups her soft hand around my cheek. “I’m not good for you. I’m simply the soul carrier of Ellie’s heart. If our paths were to have crossed in different circumstances, we might feel different, but that’s not the case.”
This confuses me. I didn’t know who she was when we first met in the gardens and yet I was pulled to her—I was attracted to her and her expressive way of speaking since it sounded so much like the way Ellie spoke. “That’s not true,” I argue.
“I was at the gardens because I visit Ellie on a regular basis to thank her for her generous life-giving gift. That’s why we met. If it wasn’t for Ellie’s heart, we wouldn’t have met,” she says.
That’s a ridiculous statement, especially for someone who seems as intelligent as she is. “Unless you’re God, I’m not sure you can truly know that for sure.” She removes her hand from my face and stands up to walk toward the front door, forcing space between my hand and Ellie’s heart. She peers out through the glass. “What is the real reason you didn’t get your MBA, and what is the real reason why I would end up hurt by you?”
“The snow has stopped,” she says.
I stand up too and move up behind her, placing my hands on her shoulders. “Why?”
She turns around, her hair flying into my face as she faces me. “We all have our secrets, Hunter. Mine ismyreason for everything.”
Without an understanding as to why her words don’t drive me utterly mad, I take her face back into my hands and kiss her gently, focusing on the texture of her lips and the warmth her skin offers mine. Her arms wrap around my back, squeezing me gently but tightly. I slide my hand between us, pressing it up against her chest, feeling the heavy thuds of her heart as our lips remain connected. Needing a more intense reaction, I slip my tongue into her mouth, immediately noticing the effect on her heart, the increase of beats, the speed in which it’s racing.I still have an effect on this heart.
Ari pulls away breathlessly, looking at me with wonder in her eyes. “What did you feel?” she asks, dragging her tongue along her bottom lip before biting down on it.
“Your heart,” I tell her.
“And I feel her heart.” By the look of expression on her face, it wasn’t the right response. I don’t know what a right response would consist of though. Should I tell her she’s hot and an amazing kisser? Is that what women really want to hear? Because I’ve always seemed to think differently. “You’re in love with this heart, that’s all this is.”
“Ari, that’s ridiculous,” I argue, butmaybe she’s right...
She huffs a quiet chuckle and lightly presses her fingers against my mouth. “The flowers, the scents, the truths, this heart—it’s her, not me, Hunter. You don’t know me.”
