Work Text:
The smell is what Ximena remembers the most, more than the sight of the swelling or the deep bruising that spread through every layer of skin. Jayce’s face was so swollen that he was hardly recognizable that night. His body was purple. The side of his skull had been crushed in the fall, but even more than the image of sunken bone, she remembers the sickly sweet smell of death, and the cloying, stifling way it filled the ICU room.
She is unable to visit hospitals because of it. Sometimes she catches a whiff on the bus, sitting next to an old man with eye bags so heavy he can hardly see past them. Sometimes she smells it when cooking dinner for one.
The smell is what she remembers the most, and then, it is the sound of the life support machine and its mechanical communication with the nurses and doctors—whirring, beeping.
She knew as soon as she received the call that he was never going to wake up again. The doctor told her that if Jayce did survive, he’d be paralyzed, deaf in at least one ear, and likely blind.
Spinal cord injury. Brain death. They were honest with her, but the words went in one ear and out the other. It couldn't be her son who they were talking about. It couldn't have been.
She held his hand and told him how much she loved him, hoping that somehow he could hear her. She apologized and promised that his sacrifice would save lives the way he had always wanted.
They took what tissue and organs were still intact, and after that, she never saw her son again. Her only remaining family returned in an urn of ashes, just like his father was.
Now, she is sick when she thinks of the stench of death, how Jayce’s body had begun to smell of rot even with his heart still warm and beating.
At night, she wonders if he felt regret. She'd done the math; it would have taken him three seconds to fall, enough time to feel afraid. To see her face in the back of his mind. To make a different decision when it was too late to do anything about it.
He didn't scream, that much she knows. There were no reports of any such thing from the neighbors. He stepped off the ledge, and he fell, and he died.
Grief overtakes her. Her hair falls out and grows back greyer. Her clothing doesn't fit her as well. Part of her died when Jayce did, and the other part died with her husband.
It brings her some comfort to imagine them together. To think about how much Jayce must be talking his father’s ear off, nearly fifteen years of information he has to get caught up on.
She smiles at the thought of her boys together again. These days, it’s the only thing that keeps her alive.
The grief never changes shape. It eats away at her body like a disease. She is tired, more than she ever thought she could be. Her eyelids carry the weight of the world, a stunning feat just to open them. Parting the curtains in the window is like parting the sea, and to make it to the kitchen for breakfast has her weary like a marathon runner crossing the finish line.
Several weeks after Jayce’s passing, Ximena receives a letter in the mail. The crisp, white envelope makes her fingers shake as she tries to open it. The logo of the donor organization is enough to make her tremble. The words inside the letter, in unremarkable Arial font, are her lifeline, the roots keeping her feet on the ground throughout the storm.
The letter says that Jayce’s heart and lungs have been successfully transplanted. The recipients are a 27-year-old man, a 38-year-old woman, and a 43-year-old woman.
That’s all it says. Three lives have been saved by the single sacrifice of her son.
Despite the damage he’d been in and his mangled body, his heart and lungs were strong. She is overcome with so much pride that it brings her to her knees as she cradles the paper to her chest.
Jayce’s heart, the one she’d felt beating his entire life, that she first saw on a small black and white screen, is out there somewhere fighting to keep someone alive. It's still beating the way it used to beat beneath her palm, beneath the cool metal stethoscope of a pediatrician, against her chest while she held him as he cried.
She is given no information about who or where, but is offered the chance for them to contact her if they wish to do so. It isn't a difficult decision, though she gives herself the time and grace to decide. Two days later, she responds to the letter, confirming that yes, she would like the organization to be her bridge back to her son.
If parts of him are out there, it is woven into her very DNA to find them.
She takes her time cleaning out his apartment. Six months have passed since his passing and she's only just making her way through his closet. It still smells like he does. Like he did before that night.
Some days, she spends up to ten hours meticulously going through his things. It’s a slow process, stopping to fold every shirt and flip through every notebook. She is physically tired, and her knees are bruised from kneeling on the hardwood floors.
The grief is still there, but she can move now, even with her sore back and achy knees.
One evening, after she has just returned from cleaning and packing, the logo of the Organ Procurement Organization catches her off guard while she is looking through her mail. Her throat closes up. She takes the envelope to a special place to open it.
One of the recipients of Jayce’s donation has written her a letter.
Hello,
I’ve thought about writing this letter for quite a long time. I was told by the donor organization that you were open to communication— the family of my donor, that is —but I didn't know if hearing from me was something you'd truly want.
What can I possibly say to the family of a deceased 20-29 year old son? Or Brother? Father? I don't know. This is all I’ve been told, that the man whose heart I have died in his 20’s and that his family has allowed me to contact them if I'd like.
I will say what I'm allowed to say in this letter, and that is to first assure you that I will not let his sacrifice be anything less than the greatest mercy I have ever been given. The transplant was successful, his heart is healthy and beating.
I am 27 years old. My parents and I immigrated to this country from the Czech Republic when I was nine. I studied and work as a bioengineer, with my specialty being regenerative stem cell research. A bit ironic, I'll admit, that my life was meant to end very quickly. I was born with several conditions that made that clear from a young age. I was resistant, even, to the surgery that saved my life, because I had accepted this fact long ago and believed that dying young was my fate. Then, it came to the point that my heart was failing, and I realized the work I was doing needed to continue. I was put on the list, and here I am still breathing.
They say my new heart is so strong that my body needs to catch up with it. He must have had vigor, strength, and passion. It is a strange feeling not to know who he was, to not even have a name.
Because of this heart, I can stand again. I can walk without fainting. He gave me life, and I will do everything in my power not to let that be in vain.
If you would like to meet, please contact me. I want to know who he was. I want to know what he liked. I want to keep his memory alive, but most of all, I just want to know his name.
“Jayce,” Ximena says out loud for the first time in months. Even though it hurts, even though her lips taste of salt, even though her chest is tight and her voice wobbles. “His name is Jayce Talis.”
-P.S Was he fond of spicy food? I've had an odd craving for it ever since the surgery.
V.
Ximena finishes the letter with tears in her eyes. She hugs the paper to her chest, but doesn't sob. They come out of her so often these days. So freely, but not now.
Breathe, she reminds herself. Just breathe. They would want you to.
This man isn't her son, and it doesn't soothe the ache, not even a little, but a new feeling burgeons inside her. Hope grows like a bud, tender and young.
Support is needed for her to prepare a return letter of her own. Namely, the comfortable old chair next to the fireplace that her husband used to sit in. A steaming mug of chamomile tea Jayce gifted her on one of her birthdays. Pen and dark ink that has her cursive lettering like paint strokes on the paper.
She has to sit and breathe until her hands stop trembling. The ink bleeds into the paper where she presses the tip down, and she sees flashes behind her eyelids of broken blood vessels running purple beneath her son’s skin.
She has never been able to fight the feeling that she failed him.
She will not fail him again.
Dear V,
Your letter finds me kindly. My son made several donations and you are the only one to contact me. I admire your bravery, and your candidness is like a breath of fresh air for a grieving mother.
His name was Jayce. He was my son. This is the first time I've ever written those words in the past tense. I am his only surviving family, but make no mistake, he touched many lives.
Jayce was a researcher as you are, a scientist of a different kind. He was so full of passion and the brightest, most beautiful mind.
Among hearing his first cries and watching him take his last breaths, receiving this letter is one of the defining moments of my life. Please understand how grateful I am to know that his death was as beautiful as his life was. Jayce would be so proud to know that he’s helped you make a difference in this world.
My home is your home. You are welcome to visit at your convenience. Nothing would make me prouder than to tell you the story of my son. I will pass this information along to the organization so that this trip can be arranged.
I hope it is not too far.
P.S Yes, he did like his food with a little heat.
Ximena Talis
She folds the paper and seals it carefully into an envelope addressed to the organization that will then forward it to the anonymous 27-year-old male recipient of Jayce’s heart.
Sending the letter feels akin to sending Jayce off on his first day of school, all of his memories, all of what’s left on this earth, dependent on that one piece of paper finding its way home.
His name is Viktor. He lives several layovers away, and as such, it takes them two months to plan for his visit. They communicate through the organization until they are allowed to communicate directly, and then, it is thirty minutes before she's expecting a knock on the door and she’s nearly as nervous as Jayce used to be, wearing a hole in the rug.
Viktor’s flight gets delayed due to bad weather.
She keeps dinner warm on the stove.
The doorbell rings, and she straightens her skirt.
It is difficult to keep herself from thinking: Jayce has finally come home.
When she opens the door, she isn't expecting to see someone so slight standing before her, shivering in the cold weather. He’s wrapped in a wool scarf up to his red-tipped nose. His skin is nearly as white as the snow is.
She does not see Jayce.
He is not Jayce, but he is the first person to show up on her doorstep in a very long time. Not since her neighbors stood on the porch with canned condolences and sympathy casseroles.
For a long while, the two of them are silent. Viktor lowers his scarf, and his breath creates a cloud of fog in the cold. She thinks of Jayce’s lungs having been separated from one another, albeit unwillingly, now breathing in time with two others.
“Mrs. Talis?” Viktor asks.
“Yes, yes, I’m sorry.” Her hand slips on the doorknob; she wants to hide her face behind the oak and cry, but it isn’t Viktor's fault. Such a young man already has so much to carry.
Viktor’s face softens, and it's then that she takes proper notice of his weight leaning on a cane. He shifts awkwardly.
“Let me help you get this inside—”
Her hand brushes his as she reaches for the handle of his suitcase, and that’s all it takes for her to lose composure. He is warm, soft. She hasn't touched anyone in months. There were so many hugs when Jayce passed. Shoulders to cry on, and then it just stopped all at once.
Viktor doesn't pull away from her. When she looks up, it's empathy that greets her on his face.
“It would be alright,” he says quietly, “if you wanted to.”
Gently, she touches his hand. Properly, she touches his hand. She grips his thin wrist and feels his pulse quicken beneath her fingertips.
Thump thump. Thump thump. Like a rabbit.
She all but throws her arms around him and breaks down.
His body is not like Jayce’s. Too sharp and slight. Not quite as tall.
“I’m here now,” he says. “May his memory be a blessing.”
She inhales his scent and commits it to memory. It is undoubtedly the scent of a living man: sweat, coffee, the sterile cleanliness of an airport terminal.
Viktor shivers.
“Come, please. Come and get warm,” Ximena tells him.
Inside, he lets the scarf slip from his shoulders, and she can finally see the remainder of his face. Thin lips forming a tight smile, slightly crooked, sloping down one side of his face.
His back is turned to the portrait of Jayce and his father. The two of them hover over his shoulder, Jayce smiling in the way he did when he was still learning how to do it properly.
She takes Viktor’s coat and scarf and hangs them up on the wooden coat rack near the door. Then she takes his bag.
“I have dinner prepared, if you’d like to sit.” Her throat feels closed up, nervous like she used to be as a young girl. Viktor is someone otherworldly to her, an angel standing in her foyer on top of a colorful handwoven rug. His boots are still wet with snow and salt.
“Actually, it's been a long day of travel. It would be nice to rest.”
“Oh, of course,” she says, noting the way he favors his left leg. “Jayce’s room is this way, I hope you don't mind.”
“Not at all,” he answers, though his footsteps slow, just a little, as he follows her down the hall.
“Here it is.”
She opens the door, and Jayce’s childhood bedroom looks the same as it had when she last saw it. He took much of what he owned when he moved into his apartment, but it is still lived-in, with scuffs on the wall from reorganizing over the years. A mirror opposite the window. Shelves lined with the books she didn't donate and some of his old toys and magic tricks.
Viktor swallows visibly, his throat bobs. “Thank you,” he says, ghostlike. “It is very comfortable.”
“There are towels in the closet just across the hall if you’d like to shower. Please help yourself to anything in the kitchen if you are hungry. I’ll put dinner away; you are welcome to reheat it.”
He continues to pull off his gloves, politely offering another thanks.
She smiles, and he clears his throat, sitting on the edge of Jayce’s bed, resting his bare hand on his crutch in front of him.
“Goodnight.” She closes the door with Viktor inside.
Despite his early retirement, her heart is full with the comfort of no longer sleeping in an empty home. The light beneath Jayce’s door makes her stomach fill with nervous butterflies each time she passes by in the night. She hums to herself as she puts dinner into neatly organized containers, an old lullaby.
When she passes the bedroom for the last time, she hears a distinct sound coming from behind it: the wet sniffle of someone crying. By the time Viktor is choking back sobs, she has half a mind to knock on the door, to throw it open and comfort the strange man she's only just met moments ago. But she does not. She returns to her room feeling shaken in ways she could not have expected. Just when she thought she was ready, that she could handle it all because the worst had already happened, something new and confounding has her praying for strength to overcome.
He is undoubtedly one of the bravest young people she has ever met. Jayce would be proud to know who received his heart.
She resigns to tell Viktor this in the morning, and turns off the light.
At dawn, Viktor looks as though he hasn't slept a wink.
Ximena already has breakfast prepared. Coffee with milk and slices of homemade bread, slathered with butter and pressed.
Viktor comes shuffling out of the room, his socked feet sliding against the hardwood floors, his shirt rumpled and bedhead astray. He sits at the table and rubs at his dark circles.
“Good morning,” she says.
“Good morning,” he says, then eats like he's starving. He looks like he wants to lick the remaining crumbs off the plate when he's done.
After pouring him more coffee, Ximena retrieves a thick, dust-covered photo album from one of the shelves in the living room and sets it down on the table beside him. “When you are ready,” she begins.
The two of them silently sip the warm beverages, and she finds that he, too, prefers to drink it heavy with milk. He makes polite conversation about the Cuban bread recipe, and then when he’s ready, sets his mug down.
Ximena flips open the book, and there are Jayce’s baby photos on the first page. He was a big baby, a small boy, and a large man. “Nearly nine pounds,” she says fondly. “But he didn't grow until he was older. He would pout if you called him a late bloomer.”
Viktor stares at the photos intently, taking in each one. Jayce was swaddled in a blanket when they took him home, so new and pink he hardly opened his eyes. Then, when he was old enough to sit up on his own, he sat in her lap when they had their first family picnic in the park. The quilt beneath them was one her mother made.
Jayce was smiling, a mouth full of wet gums and no teeth.
“July 7th,” she says suddenly. “His birthday.”
“December 29th,” Viktor responds.
“Oh, a Christmas baby. Your mother must have been so happy.”
“We are Jewish.”
Ximena blushes. “I'm sorry for assuming.”
“It's alright, you could say that I am ‘Hanukkah baby’, perhaps.”
“Happy birthday, then.”
Ximena continues to flip through the pages, sharing stories for almost every one of the photos. She is careful to go slow, and to check in with Viktor, to read his face and the tension in his shoulders in case it’s too much, lest she put his heart—Jayce’s heart—through more than it can handle.
She is nearing the photos from Jayce’s tenth birthday when Viktor speaks up, “May I see what he looked like most recently?”
“The last photo?” Ximena asks.
Viktor nods.
She goes to retrieve her phone where it's sitting beside her bed. She doesn't use it much now that the only person she ever texted is gone. “He sent me this a couple of days before he passed.”
She opens her messages with Jayce. She doesn't have to scroll to see it. She had been worried when she stopped hearing from him, and asked him to tell her that he was okay. He responded with the photo. In it, he is tired but smiling, sitting in his apartment in one of the shirts he usually sleeps in, hair still loose and yet to be smoothed into place with gel or mousse.
I love you, have a good night
That was two days before he took his own life.
Viktor’s eyebrows raise with intrigue as he looks at the photo. “Mrs. Talis, you are remarkably humble for having birthed one of the most handsome men to ever walk this planet.”
She laughs. “It wasn’t easy. He did not want to come.”
Viktor huffs, a bit like a laugh, until it splits into a harsh cough.
“Does it hurt?” she asks, overcome with the instinct to comfort him.
“No, not anymore.” He clears his throat with another cough. “It took me three months to recover after I had the surgery here. Then I moved back home.” He senses her worry. “There is no sign of rejection or necrosis. The doctors say it is one of the most seamless transplants they've done. As if our bodies were already one.”
This is good for her to hear. That Jayce's heart is keeping Viktor healthy.
“If you'd like to see the scar…” He reaches for one of the buttons on his shirt, but she stops him.
“Someday.” She thinks of Jayce's scars all too often. The stitches in his face. The wounds that never got a chance to heal.
They tried. His body tried and fought until the very end.
As they sit together at the table, Viktor sitting where Jayce used to sit, across from her, she has time to study the young man for the first time since he walked through her door cold and tired from traveling. He's rested now, even if not well, and she can see the sleep collected in his eyelashes, the steady and precise way that he moves. He is fine-boned, slight, but not at all weak. After seeing Jayce’s last photo, he’s keen on seeing more, curious about his school photos, the way his smile changed, but never quite looked natural. Not unless they were candid photos that Ximena took when he wasn't looking.
“All of the newest ones are here,” she says, again directing Viktor to her phone where some of the last photos they ever took together are kept in a backup folder. There is one of Jayce with his arm around her, one of them cheek to cheek.
“I see the resemblance,” Viktor muses.
“He looks much more like his father.”
“How did your husband pass? If you don't mind me asking.” They have already moved past the funeral photos.
“It was an accident,” she answers. “He was killed working with heavy machinery. At the time, Jayce tried so hard to be strong. He was so young and determined to be the man of the house. I don't know where he even heard this, or who taught him that. He was just a boy, that's all I ever needed him to be. I regret how he had to see me.”
As Viktor scrolls through the photos, Ximena can’t see which ones he’s looking at, but she can watch Viktor’s microexpressions change from across the table. “You showed him how to be human.”
She wrings her hands together, twisting her wedding ring. “Yes, I suppose I did.”
She only makes it to the second day before she can no longer resist asking. “So, Viktor, do you have a special someone in your life?”
He twirls a lock of hair around his finger and looks down to the right. “No, no, there is no one.”
“Oh come now, but you are so dashing!”
“Please, Mrs. Talis—” He begins to cough harshly, something that gets her to back off rather quickly.
“Oh! Oh, I'm so sorry, here—”
He waves her off, catching his breath and gripping the edge of the table for stability. Ximena holds onto the cloth she had offered him.
“Who took care of you when you were recovering?”
“The nurses,” he says. “My parents are no longer alive.”
“I wish I knew.” She would have been there, she would have pushed his wheelchair, and made his meals. She would have visited the hospital and brought him flowers, and sat by his bed when the procedure was over.
He shakes his head. “You needed someone to take care of you.”
“I suppose we are alike.” She squeezes the hand towel, fidgeting like Jayce did when he felt guilty. “Jayce was like that, too. Always giving, always helping. He needed to do something about everything, to be a hero.”
The tears well up in her eyes, but don't fall. Jayce would have hated watching her grieve. He'd have felt so helpless. I'm sorry, she thinks, vowing to do better now. To live her life the way that Viktor is.
Viktor touches her hand, stilling her heart. “What are you going to show me today?”
She knows exactly what's in store for them. “One of his favorite places. If he were here, I'm sure he would have wanted to show you.”
Jayce’s favorite place was a playground built to look like a miniature castle.
It's down by the river, and there is a large cement dragon for the children to climb on, or to battle. Jayce normally chose the latter, swearing to slay it with his magic and save the make-believe village from the evil emperor’s reign of terror.
Viktor smiles when he sees it, and the children who are out playing.
“When he was a little boy, he had so much energy he couldn't sit still. He liked to run, climb, and twirl.”
“Twirl?”
“Yes, spin. Until he got dizzy.”
Viktor looks on. There are children ahead of them running and squealing. Ximena watches them fondly.
“You never had other children?” Viktor asks as they take their seat on a bench.
“We didn't need them,” she says. Jayce was her world. “And you, someday?”
He dodges the question again, much like he had the previous one. “I don't think so.”
She knows when a man has something to hide. His silence is no attempt to be humble; rather, he is wary.
“I'm gay,” he says plainly.
When Jayce was seven years old, his father had just finished tucking him in when he returned to Ximena in their bed and said, “I think our son is gay.”
Of course, he meant nothing hateful by it, but she asked him, “Why do you think that, mi amor?”
“I have a feeling. You can just tell.”
“Is this because he plays with my dresses?”
“No. It’s because he's always been different.
“Jayce is special.”
He liked to look through the fashion magazines Ximena got in the mail, at the pretty dresses and high heels. Even when he got older, he would look through them, but he was never as interested in the women as he was in what they were wearing.
She said nothing when she found a magazine of men in various states of undress under his bed.
When she tells Viktor this story, he laughs.
“My mother took quite some time to figure it out,” he says. “Though I wasn't quite forthcoming about anyone I was interested in.”
Beyond the playground, a group of older boys is kicking a ball around the field.
Jayce wasn't good at sports. He would get distracted on the field by a butterfly or a flower, and he couldn't hit a baseball hard enough because he didn’t like to hit things in general. The afternoon that he quit the Little League Baseball, Jayce was in the backseat of her car, rubbing his eyes because his team lost again and he thought it was his fault.
“I don't want to play anymore,” he said sadly.
“Why, mijo?”
“I made them lose.”
“You were trying your best.”
Seeing him crying in the rearview mirror was enough for her to never go back.
He was sensitive to those kinds of things. The way people looked at him and what they would say when he wasn't around. She tells Viktor this story, and he seems to understand what it means for a man to have a reputation and why it would have meant so much, even then.
Viktor makes it to the fourth day before he asks his own question, and it’s one that Ximena has been dreading.
“It was suicide, wasn’t it?”
She looks up in surprise. The two of them are sitting side by side, Viktor helping her prepare lunch, carefully peeling potatoes. “How did you know?”
“I had a feeling.”
It’s hard not to feel judged when people find out. How could you let this happen? Didn’t you know he was struggling? You could have stopped him.
She smiles despite it, and can feel her sadness resurfacing from its deep and precious burrow inside her body. Viktor does not sound judgmental; he sounds experienced. “Would you like to read the letter?” She hasn't shown anyone; there was no one to read it. No one who would have wanted to. Jayce intended it for her because he knew that she would be strong enough to read it. She would need to hear those words again and again. She would need them.
Viktor’s skin grows increasingly pale as he considers the possibilities, all of the terrible and beautiful things that Jayce could have written. “Yes, but I don't know if I’m ready.”
“You may, when you wish to.”
She knows what he's thinking. How could he ever be ready for something like that?
Truthfully, Jayce’s letter is only two words long:
I'm sorry.
In the last conversation she had with him, he sounded relieved. He said, “I feel like everything’s finally going to be okay. I just… I know you’re worried about me, but you don’t need to be.”
“Where do you believe his soul is now?” Viktor asks suddenly.
She touches his chest, laying her hand over Jayce’s heart and feeling it beat. “Here,” she says. “With you.”
Ximena thinks about what she did do as often as she thinks about what she didn't. Jayce was very attached as a baby. He would cry if he didn’t sleep with her at night.
She trimmed his fingernails and brushed his silky hair, and slathered his first single tooth when it came in with baby toothpaste. Shaved his bald little head so that his hair would grow back thicker. He had cried so hard she nearly vowed never to cut it again.
She remembers lying in bed with him as he cooed, reaching out for her strands of hair— all black then —as gently as a baby could reach. He was so gentle, always. So soft spoken as a little boy. Even his cries were never as loud as the other children's, but they could have been. Jayce could have taken up as much space and as much silence as he wanted. “Who made you feel like you didn’t deserve to?” she asks the otherwise empty room. The open spot on her bed where he would have lain, small fingers reaching out for her before she took them in her own hands.
On the sixth day together, Ximena brings out the old tapes. Viktor has seen photos, but he hasn’t heard Jayce’s voice. She leaves him to his own devices, allowing him to look through the dates on the cassettes and decide which ones he wants to view and in what order. They are ordered from oldest to newest; the oldest are on tapes, but the most recent recordings have been digitized.
The first one he chooses is labeled in messy handwriting. Jayce had written it himself: my MAGIC show ! and covered the tape with star-shaped stickers.
The first few seconds of the tape are static, and Viktor moves to sit on the sofa beside Ximena as he waits patiently for it to play. Soon, the screen brightens, the camera is centered on Jayce, no older than eight or nine, with a blanket tied around his neck like a cape. He faces away from the camera, before turning around and revealing the magic wand he's holding in his right hand.
As he prepares for whatever he has in store for his audience, music begins to play, the shrill roar of an electric guitar like an engine revving. The energy builds, louder and louder, and he strums his wand like a guitar, as if conjuring the make-believe forces to assist him with his show. Once the lyrics begin, he breaks off from his center position, running through the cues he has clearly practiced as he performs various tricks for an audience of one.
Ximena was filming; her delighted laughter can be heard intermittently in the background, as well as her surprise when a bouquet of fake flowers burst from the end of the wand.
It’s as impressive as it is adorable. She feels her eyes grow wet while she watches the mini Jayce on the screen, wishing she could reach through it and pull him into her arms again.
A lower voice breaks through the music, “Is that Motley Crüe?”
“He found your old albums,” she says softly, still off-screen.
The next video is of Jayce, fifteen, playing a real electric guitar. His fingers dance across the strings, intently focused as he hits every note of the song. He had learned how to play since the other video was taken. In fact, he insisted on it and took to music much more easily than he took to sports. In the video, he sits on the edge of his bed. When the song is over, he looks up and smiles, then wordlessly gets up to stop the recording.
It's over too soon.
“He often listened to that loud music while he worked,” Ximena comments.
“What kind of work did he do?”
“He was an inventor.” How proud he would be to hear her say that.
“So, we are both men of science,” Viktor says brightly.
“Yes, you are.”
When dinner time comes, she cooks for him. Asks about his parents, what they were like. Viktor explains what it was like for them as immigrants, and how painful it was to lose them. At the end of their meal, he offers to clean the dishes, and she catches him humming the song Jayce had played on his guitar.
Having Viktor around feels more natural than she could have ever imagined. The sound of his precise footsteps becomes as familiar as rain against the windowpanes in the springtime. The presence of his cane leaned against the sofa or the table as common as the trees in the yard. She enjoys having him, and his company is more than welcome. She begins to dread how it will feel to say goodbye to him, to be alone again in a home without a family to keep it occupied.
Early in the second week of Viktor’s stay, she finds him flipping through one of Jayce’s notebooks. When he's finished, he leaves it open on the table and quickly steps outside, out into the garden. She takes a look at it afterwards. Jayce had written inside, but that isn’t what catches her eye. What is noticeable is the spare piece of paper bookmarking the two pages of notes. It’s an old and wrinkled paper, lined with Jayce’s elementary handwriting, when his lowercase r’s looked like n’s and the dots of his i’s were either too low or too high, but never just right.
It’s a letter, she quickly realizes. Jayce often wrote them and hid them in places for people to find. This one was never 'sent'.
dear future friend,
my name’s jayce. we haven't met yet but someday we’ll be best friends. today was a hard day. I felt lonely so I thought I'd write you a letter!
I can't wait to meet and play together! do you like magic? what's your favorite color? I can teach you how to do a hat trick and show you my train!! I built a track for it in my room. it’s super long!
anyway, my mom says I have to go to bed now but soon we’ll be friends and yeah it will be so fun!
well okay Bye until we meet!
love, jayce
She finds Viktor outside, even though it is brisk. Fresh snow coats the ground in a soft layer. He looks up at the sky and sighs, “Who were his friends?”
“He never had many,” she admits. “He was close with a girl, Caitlyn. She was a student he used to work with. It hurt her greatly when he passed.”
“Anyone else?”
“Well, no.” She recalls all who had attended his memorial service. Academic colleagues and mentors. “He was so focused on his work.”
Viktor looks dissatisfied. He’s grappling with something unspoken, something he’s holding himself back from.
“He’d have liked you,” she adds.
Viktor is exactly the sort Jayce would have confided to her about. Making friends was something that confused him. There were people who took notice of him, wanted him for various self-serving reasons, but approaching those he didn't already have a connection with was difficult for him, especially when he was young.
She knows it bothered him, even if he never spoke of it once he was older.
Eventually, shivering in the cold, Viktor settles on whatever equation he had been solving in his mind. He finds peace enough to relax his shoulders. To look at her again.
“I don't know why he did it,” Ximena says, hugging herself to keep warm. “I will never know his last thoughts. But I think if he had someone, he'd have felt less alone. I think he was afraid, and he felt he had failed.”
“He thought he had no other choice.”
The tears fall as she blinks, whisked away by the cold wind. “Yes.”
Viktor approaches her. The two of them embrace one another. Viktor cold, Ximena colder. Then, when he pulls away, he announces that he’s going for a walk. He retrieves his coat, gloves, and scarf, and she does not see him again until the sun has set and it's gotten dark.
Two weeks is all the time they have together.
Viktor surprises her with tickets to the ballet she hasn’t seen since she was a little girl. They sit close enough to see into the orchestra pit. Violins, cellos, and flutists are playing. “How did you know I would like that?” she asks afterward, still bright and excited in a way she didn’t know she could be anymore.
“I saw the music box on the shelf,” he says shyly. “The one with the dancing ballerina.”
For dinner, when she asks, “Is it too spicy?” he looks up at her with his mouth full, shaking his head.
He shows her articles about flatworms generating new bodies from their parts.
He promises to spend Jayce's birthday with her every year.
Thanks to Viktor, she can talk about Jayce without crying. She can breathe more easily. She thanks him profusely for meeting her. Thank you, she says. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Their last night together, Ximena tells Viktor about the time she saw her son the most afraid he had ever been.
They were driving home in a snowstorm when the car slid and rolled off the road into a ditch. She thinks about how afraid his little face had been, the copious tears, how he clung to her for weeks afterwards. It makes her feel sick thinking that in his last moments, he might have felt the same.
“You don't know that,” Viktor tells her. “Maybe he felt free. Maybe he was overcome with relief. I've been on the edge of death, and to call it peaceful would not be an exaggeration.”
“You think he had peace?”
“I don't feel any pain in his heart. Please believe me.”
“I do,” she says, finally. “He’s not alone anymore. He has you.”
And his father. All parts of Jayce will forever be held.
It is her who has yet to see them, but she will, someday, and when her time comes they will welcome her with open arms.
“Have a safe flight back home.”
Viktor squeezes her hand.
Ximena has nightmares that she is just beyond the locked door of a room while Jayce is inside hanging from a rope, slowly suffocating. The door is locked, she shouts and shoves and tries to get it open but fails every time.
There were signs.
There were signs.
Then, Viktor tells her how he dreams of hazel eyes and soft hands. His research wins awards. It saves lives.
He sends her flowers on her birthday and calls to ask her about her week, and she thinks that she has found a new reason to wake up from those nightmares and to see the world with her own eyes, even when it hurts.
They talk about mundane things, the new mattress she ordered to replace the old one she’s had for twenty years, the dark roast coffee he ordered that morning, celebrity gossip. If she’s lucky, she will hear Jayce in the soft whisper of his laugh, in his enthusiasm about a new project, or his frusteration towards someone who has done the wrong thing.
Viktor is not a replacement, he is a miracle all on his own.
He cries the first time that she tells him she loves him.
“Jayce, look at the camera.”
He stands at the top of a colorful plastic playground, peering over the edge. It isn’t very high off the ground, but for a child two feet tall, it seems like the top of the world.
“Come on down the slide, mijo,” Ximena says gently.
He didn't speak much when he was that small; it took longer for him to start talking than other children did. But he was so expressive. She sees every thought he’s having in the furrow of his little brows.
Carefully, Jayce sits on the surface and then scoots his butt until his legs are dangling over the slide. Inch by inch, he scoots forward until he begins to fall. Midway down, his fear turns to joy, his smile lights up. He is giggling by the time he reaches the bottom, and Ximena is there to catch him.