STILL WE ARE HERE by Adam Peterson

“I just don’t understand why we have to go through the whole rigmarole,” Andy said.

The table was covered in empty wine bottles. It was only the Murphys and us, and Andy’s wife Carol was drinking Sprite she brought with her. When Andy got boisterous Carol laid her possum-tail like fingers on top of his and the tension went out of the room. Andy turned his hand over and squeezed Carol’s before pulling it away and reaching out for his glass of merlot. Carol twisted her neck to study our wood-paneled dining room as Andy wiped the corners of his mouth with one of Laurette’s embroidered napkins. Their marriage lacked a common language, and sometimes Laurette and I could not understand why they stayed together at all.

“I’m just saying,” Andy said. “How much is this going to set you back?”

“Thousands,” Laurette said. “Maybe thirty. Even if it doesn’t work.”

I followed Carol’s lead and put my own hand on top of hers, but the tension didn’t stop, just built like blood against a tourniquet.

Andy blew up. “Thirty thousand!”

“That is a lot,” Carol added, looking bored. She was a medical technician and had a subordinate’s disdain for Laurette, a doctor, even though they didn’t work together. Carol had moony, half-closed eyes like a beagle and sometimes when she spoke she tilted her chin up so that it was hard to tell if they were open at all.

“Damn right it’s a lot,” Andy said. “And it might not work?”

“Thirty-two percent chance,” I answered. “We’ve budgeted to do it as many as four times. Maybe more.”

Andy gave a long exaggerated exhale and slapped his hands on the table hard enough that the half-eaten pot roast shook and the wine glasses jumped. Dinner had gone on for hours, but we still hadn’t gotten to the chocolate pudding and Cool Whip pie Carol brought. Everything had been perfect when they knocked. They may have had a nice meal, but Laurette and I had only waited for an opening. It was with a delicate and new-born confidence that we had broached the subject. Laurette and I could not have children. It was my fault. We needed sperm, but Laurette could not reconcile herself to an anonymous donor. We needed sperm. We needed Andy’s sperm.

There were certainly better candidates from a genetic perspective, but Andy was the only person we had the nerve to ask. We were more shy then, before the child. Besides, we didn’t care who the kid was or whether or not he got Andy’s hulking build and red hair.

“But I don’t understand why!”

“Well, you and Carol are our friends, Andy,” I said though it wasn’t really true.

“Not that, not that.” He waved the words away and unbuttoned the lone remaining button on his polo shirt. “Why all this cup and tube mumbo jumbo?”

“Andy!” Carol said.

Andy leaned toward me and gave me a look as if he could see to the depths of my soul and I could see to the depths of his so that we could talk like men once did, like our fathers might have or our fathers’ fathers. I didn’t think Andy was capable of seeing anyone like that, but he tried to take that plate-sized face of his and make it something wounded and soft when he said, “Look, Dennis, this is about doing what’s right for you and Laurette and what’s right isn’t thirty G’s worth of science. I don’t know what the matter is, but I think we could get this figured out without all that. I’ll give you blood or sperm or whatever I got, but I won’t give it to you in a cup, understand. I just won’t do it when it means some doctor’s going to be fleecing my neighbors. No offense, Laurette.”

We hadn’t considered this.

Andy put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. He had sweated through his baby blue polo, and there were navy circles at his armpits.

Without even looking at me, Laurette stared into her merlot and said it was fine with her.

No one said a word. It was better that way. Like no one decided it at all.

After only one try, Laurette was pregnant. For the following eight months the Murphys looked at the ground when we met them on the street or saw them leaving for church as we gardened on Sunday mornings. When Laurette started to show Andy would sometimes ask how she was feeling, but by the time the baby was born it was as if we had all forgotten how it had happened. Laurette never told me the details. I never asked. One afternoon I went to the mall and bought four new pairs of socks and had a strawberry malt in the food court. When I got home, Laurette was reading a book.

We took the baby’s name right off the incubator. Boy Thompson was the only name he would ever have.

Carol seemed strangely proud when she dropped off a pair of knitted blue booties after he was born, but Andy didn’t see Boy until months later when they came over for another awkward dinner, the last we ever had with them. Andy was nowhere to be seen in the baby’s features as he looked, even to his sharply down-turned nose, exactly like Laurette. If Andy was disappointed, he never said. Only once, when a six-year-old Boy was throwing rocks at birds in the backyard, did Andy show any attachment to the boy.

“You left-handed?” Andy asked as he leaned against the chain-link fence that separated our yards. I was on the porch with a lemonade and a book about the building of the Colossus.

Boy replied by throwing another rock with his left hand. I had been about to stop him, but Andy seemed to enjoy watching Boy throw.

“Me too,” Andy said. “Can’t ever find a good pair of scissors.”

When Andy left, I took Boy into the house and spanked him.

A year later, Andy and Carol moved from Brockton to Tallahassee. We send a card every Christmas to the address they gave us in Tallahassee, but we’ve never heard from them.

       Three months after Boy turned 16, I found a heart on the sidewalk in front of our house. The heart was waiting for me when I went to claim the morning’s paper after Boy had gone to school and Laurette had long been gone to the hospital. I looked up and down our street before touching it, sure that someone would appear to offer an explanation and take the heart away. When no one appeared, I touched the heart with the tip of my slipper like it was a bomb. The heart only rolled onto its other side.

I went into the house and came back with a blue kitchen towel. I wrapped the heart in the towel and carried the bundle inside.

At the kitchen table I unwrapped the towel and studied the disquietingly still heart. It seemed poised on the edge of beating, as if at any second it would come to life. With its neatly clipped arteries and veins, it did not look like Valentine’s chocolates or the heart in I ™ NY T-shirts. The familiar shape might have been there somewhere, but the muscled network of tubes turned the heart into something ugly and intimidating. This could not be the center of us.

There was no blood.

Or at least none that could be seen. The heart did not even leave a mark on the blue towel. From a drawer in the kitchen I took out a pair of yellow gloves that I used to do the dishes and held the heart in my hands. Hardly an expert, the heart appeared healthy. A few fibrous blood vessels glowed a red brighter than the red of the muscle. It was surprisingly light, about as much as a Bible or one of the turtles Boy kept in his aquarium. The heart was not a fragile thing, and when I poked it with a yellow-gloved finger it had little give. It smelled like nothing.

I was unsure of what to do with it, so I called from the phone in the kitchen. As they paged her I listened to smooth jazz while holding, occasionally ducking underneath the hanging copper pots to ensure the heart had disappeared or, though it was impossible, started to beat. But there it was, dead, on the blue towel in the middle of the table.

“What is it, Dennis?” Laurette answered.

“I found a heart,” I said. “On the sidewalk in front of the house.”

“You found a heart?”

“On the sidewalk.”

“A heart?”

“A heart.”

There was a long pause where I could hear another doctor paged and a man ask a receptionist for a patient’s room number. Laurette often took long pauses to think things over. When I had asked her to marry me, she took two weeks during which she did not say a word to me. We were only 17. Her parents liked me, and I suppose eventually Laurette did too. Boy was less sure.

“I’m sure it’s just a joke, Dennis,” Laurette said. “It’s probably a cow’s heart. I mean, Jesus Christ.”

She hung up.

Concerned but unsure of what to do, I wrapped the heart in the towel and placed it in the refrigerator, careful to keep it away from a bag of spring mix on the same shelf. Then I left.

At a coffee shop, I read the Brockton Enterprise. The cover story was about a 15-year-old girl who disappeared after telling her parents she was going to get ice cream. It had been a week. There was a picture of the girl, Savannah Gordon, in a red soccer uniform with her foot resting on top of the ball. She barely smiled. I wondered if that was the most representative picture they could have found of poor, missing Savannah. I read the article while sipping my triple Americano and repeatedly interrupted myself to watch people pass my table. The other customers were mostly bored retirees who would walk the mall for recreation and meet for coffee afterwards. I didn’t work either, so I saw them almost every day. Some even said hello.

“Terrible, isn’t it?” a woman in a matching sweatsuit said and pointed at Savannah Gordon’s picture.

“Horrible,” I said. “I’m sure she’ll turn up soon.”

“Terrible,” the woman said.

The police seemed to think it was likely Savannah had run away with some unknown boyfriend. She excelled at math. She had recently quit the soccer team. There wasn’t much else in the article so I switched to the lifestyle section. Before leaving the coffee shop I took the pen knife I carried with me and carefully sliced out a recipe for artichoke dip.

At home, I unwrapped the blue towel just enough to see a dull red piece of the heart before wrapping it back up and closing the refrigerator.

Boy came home first. From the kitchen I heard the front door slam and the shuffling of socked feet down the hallway and then another, more defiant, door slam. I put down the toaster I was cleaning and followed close behind. I was unsure of what to say about the heart, but I had decided I needed to feel him out.

When I opened the door to his room he was dropping rainbow-colored flakes of food into his turtle aquarium. Laurette had forbidden him to lock his door and encouraged me to pop in unannounced. For her part, Laurette made a point to walk on the tips of her toes to Boy’s door and open it suddenly. Mostly he was just on his computer. Once he was looking at pornography. This confirmed the wisdom of the inspections to Laurette.

“They’re getting big,” I said.

“They don’t grow anymore,” Boy said. “They haven’t grown for, like, two years.”

Boy sounded like Laurette. Boy looked like Laurette. He was tall, much taller than me but only an inch more than his mother. He had small, circular glasses and before she started wearing contacts, Laurette had worn a pair just like them. But Boy couldn’t have known that. Boy and Laurette were studies in contrast with pale skin but black hair and dark circles around their eyes. Sometimes it was like living in a black and white movie. Often times, it was also a silent movie.

“How was school?”

“Fine, Mr. Thompson,” he said. For Boy this was sarcasm, but he never could accent the words right so it sounded enthusiastic and sincere. “Just another day.”

“Do anything on your way home?”

“Yeah, walk.”

Boy again said it all wrong so that it sounded like he loved walking.

“Something strange happened,” I said. This got Boy’s attention away from the turtles. “Nothing to worry about. Just something strange.”

“What?”

I hesitated. “Does the word ‘heart’ mean anything to you?”

Boy paused.

“Love?” he said and this time he wasn’t trying to be sarcastic. Even though he was slumped-shouldered from the weight of his teenage languor, he was still a strange, sensitive boy.

“Like an actual heart,” I said. “One that used to beat.”

“A human heart?” he said.

“Maybe,” I allowed. “But it could be any kind of heart.”

“A turtle’s?”

“No. A mammal’s heart.”

Boy closed his eyes and rubbed his hands together while he thought about it. In the aquarium, the turtles extended their necks to eat. I didn’t know how many Boy had anymore, but it seemed like too many. The walls of Boy’s room were covered in pictures of turtles he had drawn. The earliest was a disfigured crayon sketch done on his eighth birthday – the day I bought him his first painted turtle.

“No,” he finally said. “I don’t know what it means.”

“Would it mean anything to your friends?”

Boy sat at his computer and did not say another word. I let myself out.

To be safe, I moved the heart from the fridge to my toolbox in the garage. I wasn’t particularly handy, but the garage was my only room in the house where I could count on privacy. Boy was not the sort to take shop, and Laurette would rather not know about the mechanics of the world. It was my job – my only job – to keep malfunctions to a minimum.

For dinner I fried steaks and made artichoke dip. Laurette wasn’t back and Boy ate in his room, so I was alone at the table. Afterward, I fed Laurette’s steak to the dog that lived in what had been the Murphy’s yard. Laurette wouldn’t eat reheated food. Midnight was a very happy dog.

Laurette didn’t come home that night at all. This was okay.

She used to call when she had to stay late at the hospital, but she had decided to stop two years before. I knew where she was, Laurette said.

Before going to bed I checked on the heart. The fluorescent lighting in the garage made the organ purple and ugly. When I closed my eyes in the center of the bed I placed my right hand over my own heart and felt it beat. I tried to see it. The purple mass of it sputtering and hiccupping like a puppy. A little frightened, I tried to forget hearts, but instead I thought of Savannah Gordon’s pounding as she ran down the soccer field. Unlike the heart in the toolbox, Savannah’s looked like a Valentine’s Day heart. Bright red and perfect, I watched it beat until I fell asleep.

In the morning, Boy thunked down the hallway and into the kitchen. As he poured himself a cup of coffee he asked me about our conversation the day before.

“It was nothing,” I said. “I’ve just, you know, been thinking about hearts.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Mammal hearts?”

I shrugged.

At the coffee shop, I read another article about Savannah Gordon. Her parents, Fritz and Louise, were offering a reward. A forensics team had been brought in to scour her room for evidence. There was to be a vigil in their front yard. The old woman I spoke to the day before saw me reading the paper, and we shared a solemn nod, confirming that we both understood sadness.

When Laurette came home that afternoon I was on the back porch with a glass of lemonade and a stack of that week’s magazines. I subscribed to a great deal of magazines but not enough that I hadn’t read them all by Wednesday. It was a Wednesday, and I was nearly done.

“So what’s this about hearts?” Laurette said when she slid back the glass door and came out on the porch. She was wearing the same black suit and skirt I vaguely remembered her having left the house in the morning before. “Boy says you’re bothering him about hearts.”

I wiped the condensation from the lemonade glass onto my khaki shorts and smiled at her. It was a beautiful day, but Laurette looked harried. She did not, apparently, remember that I had called her at the hospital.

“I found a heart,” I said. “I’m sure it’s nothing. Probably a dog’s heart.”

“Where?”

“In the toolbox.”

“Where did you find it, Dennis?” she asked.

I sighed and closed my issue of Popular Mechanics.

“On the front sidewalk. I thought maybe it was a prank some of Boy’s friends were playing.”

“Boy doesn’t have friends,” Laurette said. “He has a mother.”

She followed me to the garage and watched closely as I unwrapped the blue towel around the heart. Suddenly I realized putting the heart in the toolbox was preposterous, but Laurette didn’t say anything. She took it from me and, holding it close to her blue eyes, rotated the heart and even sniffed it before handing it back.

“It’s a human heart,” she said. “No question.”

“Whose?” I asked, knowing it was a stupid question. Laurette did not answer stupid questions.

“Where’s Boy?” she asked.

“School.”

“We’re going.”

I followed Laurette out to the BMW with the towel in my hands. When Laurette saw it she asked me to take it back to the house, but when I insisted she only asked that I not put it in the glove compartment.

“Why?” I asked.

“In case we get pulled over, Dennis,” she said. “You’ll have to open it to get the registration.”

This made sense so I put the heart in the center console. Laurette gave directions as I drove the BMW through Brockton. Boy’s school was a private, non-religious school on the far side of the city. In the mornings, the school’s van drove him the twenty minutes to the campus gate, and I had not even seen the school since Boy’s freshman year parent-teacher conferences. The teachers had told us he was quiet but not shy, smart but not compassionate. It was the usual report, and as we drove home that year Laurette said I could stop going in the future.

“Do you want to wait in the car?” Laurette asked when we parked inside the gates of the prep school.

“I found it,” I said, “and I’m going inside.”

It was a polished, beaming school like any other. The hallways were long and empty except for banners with the name Savannah Gordon written in magic marker and glitter. Boy had never mentioned a disappearing classmate, and it hadn’t occurred to me that she was only one year younger than Boy or that the name of the school on her soccer jersey was Hyde Prep, my son’s school. The banners announced search parties or pleaded for those with information on the disappearance of Savannah Gordon to call an anonymous hotline.

“Do you know anything about this?” Laurette asked.

“She disappeared,” I said. “She played soccer. For a time. That’s about it.”

There was a police officer stationed in front of the door to the main office. I gave him a polite nod but Laurette walked straight in with her chin up as he held the door open.

“We need to see Boy Thompson,” I said before Laurette could. The receptionist glared at me so I added weakly, “Our son.”

The receptionist whispered the name into the intercom and from inside the office we could hear it echo through the hallways. Boy Thompson. Boy Thompson to the office. Boy Thompson. Laurette asked the receptionist if we could meet with him in private, so the receptionist led us back past the principal’s office where she stuck us in a small room with a tape player and a set of headphones.

“This is where we conduct the hearing tests,” she said.

Laurette crossed her arms and tapped her foot against the ocean of industrial carpet until the door opened and Boy slunk in.

“Is this about hearts?” he asked.

“Yes,” Laurette said. “This is about your father’s heart.”

Boy and Laurette both looked up at me as if they had planned this inquisition for me and not for Boy. Laurette’s hand was on his shoulder as they waited for me to explain myself.

“It’s not my heart,” I said. “I just found it.”

“We know, Dennis,” Laurette said. She sat down in the chair across from Boy.

“Boy,” she said. “Do you know anything about the heart?”

Boy was a dark child. He was a serious child. Even in the small room in front of his mother who I think he loved more than I ever could, Boy had a calm control of the situation and a steady pulse.

“No,” Boy said. “Of course not.”

Laurette exhaled and kissed him on the forehead. “That settles it. Dennis, get rid of the heart.”

“Should I take it to the police?”

“Of course not,” Laurette said. She met my eyes and then lowered them. I could have protested or acquiesced only to take it immediately to the officer outside the door, but we both knew I wouldn’t. Boy stood up from the desk, his questioning over. He hugged his mother again and made for the door. As far as Laurette was concerned, our emergency, such as it was, was over and the life we had chosen as teenagers, reaffirmed over dinner, and consummated on only one night, would continue unfettered.

“Boy,” I said. “Do you know Savannah Gordon?”

“I did.”

I dropped Laurette off at the hospital and promised again to dispose of the heart before she came home. For her part, she promised to come home. Boy rode back with me, Laurette having talked the receptionist into excusing him for the rest of the day. As Boy bounced in the passenger seat, the heart safely stored in the center console, I tried to imagine Boy having held the heart in his unsteady hands. I tried to imagine him crying.

But Boy was not unsteady. And Boy did not cry.

“I need to get rid of the heart,” I told him.

“What’re you going to do?” he asked.

“Bury it, I suppose.”

He turned off the radio and concentrated. “Where?”

I didn’t know. We drove to a park first. There, school children in shorts climbed a jungle gym and inattentive young parents sipped from white-lidded coffee cups. “No good,” I told Boy. So we drove toward the baseball diamond where Boy had, for only one practice, played little league. If Boy recognized the field, he didn’t say. A group of teenagers loitered on the bleachers. One, hanging by his arms from the highest bench with a cigarette dangling in his lips, glared as we drove by without stopping.

“What about a golf course?” Boy suggested.

“They would probably notice,” I said.

“Let’s throw it in a pond.”

“We need to be respectful.”

“You should just toss it somewhere,” Boy said. “You don’t even have to. I’ll do it.”

“What if it was your heart? Would you like that?” I asked. I thought he’d say that he wouldn’t care because he’d be dead, but instead he became reverently quiet.

All around us there was the hard armor of cement covering the Earth. Even when there was an opportunity – an unoccupied sand volleyball court behind a bar, a fenced-off lot where a new Walgreens would soon be built – it felt ghastly to imagine leaving it there alone and insignificant.

And then we were there. I had memorized the address from a poster at the school, but I hadn’t meant to drive there, not really. The Gordon’s home was attractive but modest with rose bushes still blooming in a large flower bed along the façade. It was peaceful, without recognition of its tragedy except the pink ribbon tied around a maple tree in the yard.

“Whose place is this?” Boy asked when I parked the car.

“Savannah Gordon’s,” I said.

“You think it’s her heart?” Boy asked. He pushed his glasses back up his nose.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Stay here. I want to make sure they’re not home.”

Boy blinked at the house a few times as I stepped from the car. I wasn’t sure what I would say if he refused to play his part in this but he only said, “This should be fun.” But he said it all wrong again so it sounded like he was really looking forward to seeing what happened.

I skulked through the rose bushes to peak through the window into an austere and motionless sitting room where prim bouquets conquered a coffee table and had begun to take over the mantle above a fire place as well. If Savannah were my child, I would be worried that she wouldn’t even recognize the smell of her own home. She might open the door and smell honeysuckle when she expected vanilla and disappear all over again.

The house was empty and the street was still. Boy looked worried as I ran back, as if the Gordon’s were going to soon be storming out of their house, but I only came back for the heart.

“Wait,” Boy said. “Can I see it first?”

I was worried about being seen and Laurette wouldn’t have wanted me to, but I thought he should know about things like this. I opened the center console and, for the first time, picked it up with my bare hands. The heart was cold but not slimy. It was as if I was holding the entirety of someone. My own heart beat so loud, so fast that my hands shook and the organ shook in them. It looked so much like a valentine then that I understood how man could have mistranslated their most precious part into something crude and misshapen. Boy studied the heart but didn’t reach for it. I gestured for him to take it, but he raised his hands like a hold-up victim, the heart the gun. “I don’t think I can,” he said. “But I want to see you bury it.”

The maple tree was old enough that pieces of bark were missing where steps had once been nailed for children to climb. Did Savannah have siblings? I couldn’t remember any from the articles, but I began to imagine she did and that this was the tree where they played on long summer days until the world turned back on them and school came again. I used to have such a tree.

Boy followed me out of the car and into the yard where I dug a small hole and buried the heart underneath the maple tree. Boy touched the pink ribbon. We didn’t speak. We didn’t pray.

I touched the pink ribbon, too.

A week later as I drank my coffee on an overcast morning, I read that Savannah Gordon had returned home. They had found the girl, thin but unharmed, standing in the yard as if she had always been waiting for them to look for her there in the most obvious place of all.

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Adam Peterson is the author of the short story collection My Untimely Death (Subito Press, 2008).