After Jennie's girlfriend,Jisoo, dies in an accident during their junior year, she reaches out to the recipients of the donated organs in hopes of picking up the fragments of her now-unrecognizable life. But whoever received Jisoo's heart has chosen...
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"The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways."
— Blaise Pascal.
There isn't a place to turn around on this road, even if I wanted to. Just a steep drop down a hillside of moss-covered oak trees that rise up out of the tall, summer-gold grass. The road goes on for miles like that, winding its way all the way to the coast, where she's been all eighteen years of her life. Thirty-six miles away.
When the trees finally give way to the wide blue expanse of ocean and sky at the edge of her town, my hands are shaking so badly that I have to pull into the Scenic Overlook on the shoulder of the highway. A thin swath of fog clings to the cliff's edge, melting beneath the morning sunlight that spreads over the water beyond. I turn off the car but don't get out. Instead, I roll down the windows and breathe. Slow, deep breaths in an attempt to calm my conscience.
I've been here, to Shelter Cove, lots of times before. Driven past this spot and headed into the little beach town on countless spring and summer days, but today feels different. There's none of the giddy anticipations that used to bubble between me and my sister, Jean, in the backseat as we drove over with Mom and Dad, our trunk packed full of beach towels and boogie boards, cooler bursting with all the junk food we were never allowed to eat at home. There is no thrill of freedom came when Jisoo first got her license and we'd drive over in her car for the day, feeling grown-up and romantic. Today there's just a grim sort of determination and the tense feeling that comes along with it.
I look out over the water, and a startling thought occurs to me. I wonder if any of those times I'd been here, I ever saw Roseanne Park. If Jisoo and I ever walked past her on the street, eyes catching for half a second before moving on without another thought, the way strangers do. Completely unaware that one day there would be this link between us. Before everything. Before Jisoo's accident, writing letters, and meeting the others, and before I spent so many nights hoping to hear back from Roseanne Park and wondering why I never did.
It's a small town. Small enough that we could've seen each other at some point on one of my trips over. But then again, maybe not. She probably didn't spend her summers the way the rest of us did. I've studied the careful timeline her sister kept on her blog, which is what eventually led me to her. Though she didn't start it until Roseanne was put on the transplant list, I know that she was fourteen when her heart began the excruciatingly slow process of failing her. She made the transplant list by the time she was seventeen. And she would've died had she not gotten the call in the eleventh hour of her eighteenth year. The last day of Jisoo's.
I push away the thought and the heavy feeling that comes along with it. Take another deep breath and remind myself how careful I need to be with this. I've broken too many rules already, written and unwritten, protocols meant to protect both the donor families and the recipients from knowing too much. Or expecting too much.
