Heart to Heart
Authors: Lurlene McDaniel
You’ll want to read these inspiring titles by
Lurlene McDaniel
Angels in Pink
Kathleen’s Story • Raina’s Story • Holly’s Story
One Last Wish Novels
Mourning Song • A Time to Die
Mother, Help Me Live
• Someone Dies, Someone Lives
Sixteen and Dying • Let Him Live
The Legacy: Making Wishes Come True • Please Don’t Die
She Died Too Young • All the Days of Her Life
A Season for Goodbye • Reach for Tomorrow
Omnibus Editions
Always and Forever • The Angels Trilogy
As Long As We Both Shall Live • Journey of Hope
One Last Wish: Three Novels
The End of Forever
Other Fiction
Breathless • Prey • Hit and Run Briana’s Gift • Letting Go of Lisa
The Time Capsule • Garden of Angels
A Rose for Melinda • Telling Christina Goodbye
How Do I Love Thee: Three Stories
Till Death Do Us Part
Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep • To Live Again
Angel of Mercy • Angel of Hope
Starry, Starry Night: Three Holiday Stories
The Girl Death Left Behind
Angels Watching Over Me
Lifted Up by Angels • Until Angels Close My Eyes
I’ll Be Seeing You • Saving Jessica
Don’t Die, My Love • Too Young to Die
Goodbye Doesn’t Mean Forever
Somewhere Between Life and Death • Time to Let Go
When Happily Ever After Ends
Baby Alicia Is Dying
From every ending comes a new beginning….
This book is dedicated to Lois and to Kaitlyn,
whose heart lives on
.
The last enemy to be destroyed is death
.
1 C
ORINTHIANS
15:26 (NIV)
a note from the author
The name Elowyn is unusual, but I’ve loved it from the first time I heard it. The name belongs to the daughter of a friend of mine, and I was told that my friend and her husband “made it up” after reading Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. No matter. In fact, it is a real name in the Cornish tradition and means “strong elm”—as in elm tree. Origins of names are quite varied. It’s fascinating to learn why you were given your name and then to investigate its roots. You might want to do a Web search for
your
name and see what you find out.
This story is fictional, but the phenomenon of “cellular memory” has been recorded by organ transplant recipients on numerous occasions, especially in cases of heart transplants. It is the idea that all human cells can store memories of the body and these memories can be passed along through an organ transplant. Medical science has proven that only the brain can store a memory, and most scientists believe that cellular memory is only speculative. And yet reports persist from many transplant recipients about how they assumed certain personality traits, likes, and dislikes after their transplants. I found this intriguing and used the idea in this novel.
Kassey
Elowyn Eden and I became best friends.
We met the summer before were were going into seventh grade, when we were hospital roommates in the orthopedic wing, waiting for the same surgeon to fix broken bones. I’d busted up my arm playing volleyball (my favorite sport), and Elowyn had done a number on her left leg skating. She asked me, “Are you scared?”
“About the operation? Not a bit,” I said, then dropped my water pitcher because my hands were shaking so much I couldn’t pour water into a cup. The pitcher splatted on the floor, and after we watched the water spread everywhere, Elowyn raised an imaginary microphone and said, “Cleanup on aisle four.”
We started laughing and couldn’t stop. Hours later, we’d talked ourselves hoarse, only stopping long enough to eat dinner. Elowyn and her parents had just moved from South Carolina to Alpharetta, a suburb of Atlanta and my hometown since Mom and Dad split when I was three. Turned out Elowyn lived in a gated garden-home community five blocks over from our house. “So tell me what I’m facing at my new school,” she demanded.
We were going to be in the same middle school, so I gave her an earful about who was who and what was what of the kids I knew would be our classmates. She took notes on a hospital napkin. That was so Elowyn—she made lists and took notes like nobody I’d ever met. By the time we left the hospital, we were each wearing a cast signed with the other’s name and phone number. She called first, and because I was more mobile than she was, Mom took me to her house a few days later.
Her room was awesome! Her mother—“Call me Terri,
not
Mrs. Eden,” she insisted with a smile—was an artsy-craftsy type, and the whole house looked like something out of a decorating magazine, with lots of bright walls and piles of pretty pillows. Elowyn’s room had hand-painted vines and fields of flowers growing up the walls. The room was blue and yellow, the flowers pale purple. My house was beige; my room seemed dreary. I’d hung posters, but the space was quite bland.
“It’s supposed to be the French countryside,” Elowyn said. “France is my favorite place in the world. So romantic. I’m going to Paris on my honeymoon.”
“Are you getting married anytime soon?” I joked.
“Someday … and he’ll be so handsome. Maybe I’ll meet a French exchange student and marry him.”
I hadn’t thought about getting married to anybody, much less someone from a particular country. I walked to the wall and touched the painted flowers. They looked so real. “What kind of flowers?”
“Lavender. Can’t you just see whole fields of it? And I love the way it smells. It’s my favorite perfume.” She spritzed the air with a bottle from her dresser, and the scent was wonderful.
Elowyn seemed so grown-up to me. I didn’t have a special fragrance except for the strawberry-scented shampoo I used. I kept looking around her perfect bedroom. “Your mom’s talented.”
“That’s true. She’s one of a kind, but it’s my daddy who understands me best.”
Elowyn’s dad was a lawyer, a Southern man who said goofy things like “Don’t get off the porch if you can’t run with the big dogs” and “Wake up and smell the coffee.” I didn’t get the point of most of his sayings, but one thing I did get: Elowyn had him
wrapped around her little finger. He called her Sugar Plum. I admit, the one thing I ever envied about Elowyn was her relationship with her dad, because I’d grown up with mine long gone.
My mom was a claims adjuster for a huge insurance company and worked long hours, so we were both happy when I fell in with Elowyn and had someplace to hang. I’d grown up with Mom working and me going to day care. No biggie. When I turned twelve, I got to come straight home from school and stay by myself doing homework and watching TV. I liked being around Elowyn and her family—so much like the families I saw on old television shows. Terri always met us at the door, and was always working on some project—gourmet cooking, painting watercolor landscapes. Elowyn and I traded books we loved, and after our casts came off, we parked ourselves at the community pool, turning our bodies buttery tan and swimming to rebuild our shriveled limbs.
In seventh grade, I lured her into volleyball, and between us we played a wicked game. Elowyn was left-handed, so few people on opposing teams could return her hook ball. I was a power server. The coaches loved us.
We took up another habit the summer between seventh and eighth grades.
“How’d you like to come on our family vacation?” she asked me.
“Vacation?”
“A trip.”
“I know what a vacation is.” Mom and I rarely took vacations. If we traveled it was to see Grandma and Grandpa in Michigan. Talk about a long drive! Otherwise, we just stayed home, because Mom was tired and because vacations cost money we didn’t have.
Elowyn sat with a bounce on her bed. “Do you know what it’s like to be trapped for a week with my family doing tourist stuff somewhere I don’t want to go to in the first place?”
“No idea,” I said, but thinking,
Lucky you!
“B-o-r-i-n-g
. Anyway, I got this idea that if I took a friend with me, I’d have a lot more fun than just hanging with Mom and Dad.”
“You have fun parents.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh sure. We run around, but we never go anyplace cool.”
I didn’t get it.
“So,” she went on, “I asked Mom if I could bring you along.”
“You want me to come?”
“You’re my best friend.”
“And you’re mine.”
“Then it makes sense, don’t you think? We’ll have a ball doing things together, and Mom and Dad will have each other and they won’t feel like they have to keep me entertained. It’ll be a blast!”
“I—I don’t know if Mom will let me….”
She held up her hand. “My mom will handle it.”
And Terri did handle it. In August, I went with Elowyn and her parents to Destin, Florida, to a beach house they rented overlooking the ocean on sugary white sand. Elowyn’s parents played golf and we lounged on the beach flirting with cute guys. Between eighth and ninth grades, I went with them to a resort in Hilton Head, South Carolina, where Elowyn and I caught the interest of two guys who said they were in college. We sneaked out of our room adjoining her parents’ and met the guys by the pool in the moonlight. My guy, Todd, kissed me until my head spun and my blood ran hot. It was all new to me. Then he decided to put his hand inside my top. I jerked away. “Don’t!”
“Why not?” His voice was not nice.
Shivers of excitement shot through me, but I pulled away. “I—I said no, so it’s no.”
“What are you? Some lousy tease?” His face, so handsome and romantic in the light of the moon, turned snarly.
I shoved hard and he went backward into the pool. “Let’s go!” I cried to Elowyn, and she broke free
of an embrace from her guy and ran with me for the pool gate and the patio door to our room, which we’d left unlocked. The guys called us some names but they didn’t follow.