The Anatomical Shape of a Heart(11)

In fact, even after I’d looked at everything else, I went back to that heart diagram for one last look, admiring every detail, including the tiny handwritten labels: AORTA, LEFT VENTRICLE, TRACHEA. It was so completely perfect. And I couldn’t help but think he’d drawn it from a dissected heart. If Dr. Sheridan would just let me spend some time the anatomy lab, I might be the next Max Brödel. I mean, anything’s possible, right?

But even though I was currently in muscle-and-sinew heaven, it didn’t mean that my family was. Mom kept trying to steer me into one of the permanent collections to see Rembrandt and Rubens: “They’re famous, Bex. And so beautiful.” Eventually Heath griped and groaned and yawned us into the museum’s overpriced cafe for lunch. It was pretty much the same kind of food we had in the deli at Alto Market, so none of it was all that appealing to me. But we ordered, then snagged seats on the patio outside. And because I was a total loser, I checked Body-O-Rama’s comments one more time, only to be disappointed anew.

My mom was checking her phone, too. I so wanted to ask her about that weird late-night phone call she’d gotten the other day, but I was worried I’d end up incriminating myself. I’m a terrible liar.

“You’re eating that, Bex,” she said, nudging my shoe beneath the table as she futzed with the fanning dark hair around her temples. She had a pixie cut, which was pretty much just a shorter version of Heath’s haircut—only where his was all blown up, hers was blown down. She was tiny, like me, and the elfish thing looked good on her. But as long as I lived with the two of them, I could never cut my hair short, or we’d all look like some freaky family gang, ready to lure strangers into our house with Kool-Aid. Hence the braids.

I made a face at Mom. “The bread’s stale.”

“It was twenty dollars. It can’t be stale.”

Heath slung his arm over the back of my chair. “Sure it can. Noah says half the starred restaurants in town recycle bread from other tables.”

“Saint Noah is never wrong,” I pointed out. Noah was my brother’s latest boyfriend, a twenty-five-year-old engineer who had a million-dollar condo in the Castro. He’s stable and smart, and even though Heath had yet to bring him home and introduce us, we’d heard so much about him that we were kind of in love with him, too—especially my mom. I think she was hoping he’d be a positive influence on my not-so-stable brother, who had already burned through two community colleges, dropping out once due to boredom and a second time after he got busted at an inopportune moment with an English professor twice his age.

“By the way,” Mom said, rearranging her knife on her plate, “you never told me when Noah would be free to come over for family dinner.”

“I forgot to ask, sorry. He’s been working, and…”

And Heath had been sneaking out to drink and see metal shows every other night. I didn’t say this—sibling loyalty is a two-way street—but my mom has some weird sixth sense about these sorts of things, which is probably why I have no confidence when it comes to lying to her. Nurse Katherine the Great always knows.

She shot him a dark look across the table. “I swear, Heath, if you screw this up with Noah—”

“I’m not going to screw it up.”

“Again,” I amended under my breath.

“We were on a break,” Heath said.

“Because you were fooling around with that cook.”

“Chef,” he corrected. “And he was fooling around with me. I didn’t start it.”

“Tell me again, why is Noah with you?”

“Because I’m overflowing with personality and I ooze charm.”

I snorted. “You’re overflowing and oozing something, all right.”

“Please, God,” Mom pretend-prayed to the sky. “All I ask is that you swap these children for kittens, and I’ll never sin again.”

Heath made prayer hands and closed his eyes. “Dear Prince of Darkness, please make sure the kittens piss all over her bed so she’ll regret it and beg for us to come back.”

I elbowed him in the ribs until he laughed, and then I asked Mom for money. “I’m going back inside for ten-dollar strawberry shortcake,” I explained as I accepted her debit card. “You two keep steering us toward the apocalypse while I’m gone.”

They continued to joke and laugh as I strolled around tables and a hundred pecking birds, who must’ve thought this place was some kind of avian Shangri-La, what with all the fancy crumbs being tossed their way by museum patrons. I couldn’t blame them. It was really pretty out here, especially beyond the patio; afternoon sun cleared out the fog over Golden Gate Bridge’s famous orangey-vermillion arches stretching across the blue bay. For once, it actually seemed like summer. Though I did feel a little sorry for the tourists who were prancing around in shorts. Come nightfall, they’d be regretting they didn’t book their trip in September or October, when it was sunnier.

As I opened the cafe door, a riot of sound drew my attention toward the museum hallway. People were jumping up from their seats, craning their necks to see something. I sidled past one of the museum volunteers and wove between patrons crowding the exit of the Flesh and Bone exhibit.

A couple of guards cleared a space around a spotlighted area in the middle of the room. That’s when I saw it, scrawled in slanting metallic gold on the gray exhibit wall beneath Max Brödel’s heart diagram: