The Anatomical Shape of a Heart(18)

It was extraordinary.

A small tag hung from a string tied to the leg. It read: CUSTOM MADE FOR YOU. HAND-CARVED AND DESIGNED IN-HOUSE. TELEGRAPH WOOD STUDIO. BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.

“Whatcha got?” Heath hung over the back of the sofa. “Whoa. Who sent this?”

“I have no idea. But get this—” I told him all about Mom’s weird phone call that night as he inspected the mannequin. “It was sent by a local messenger, but look at the tag. It was made in Berkeley.”

“Oh, Bex.”

“What?” When Heath didn’t answer right away, I panicked. “What? Tell me!”

“Dad just moved to Berkeley a couple of months ago.”

That couldn’t be right. “He’s somewhere in LA—Santa Monica.”

“What did the address label say?”

My heart thumped as I showed him the crumpled paper. “No return address. Just Beatrix Van Asch. This is what the bike messenger note on the door was all about.”

Heath sighed, sat on the sofa arm, and slid down into the cushion next to me. “I saw an envelope in the kitchen trash when I was I tying it up. It had Dad’s name and Berkeley on the return address, so I dug through the garbage—”

“Gross.”

“—until I found a card. One of those ‘We’ve Moved!’ deals. Dad was informing Mom that he and Suzi had moved to Berkeley.”

“Are you kidding? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“If Mom didn’t tell us, I figured she didn’t want us to know. And big deal. So he’s closer now, who cares?”

“And sending me extravagant gifts? Is this to make up for not paying child support? What the hell?”

“I don’t know, Bex. But the bike messenger note on the door was left on your birthday, so I guess he remembered. Damn sure didn’t remember mine.”

We both sat there staring at the mannequin for a long moment before I shoved it back into the box. “If that was the person Mom was talking to on the phone, she said she’d throw away anything he sent.”

“All I know is, if you’re planning to keep it, you better hide it.”

“Don’t tell her,” I warned. “I mean it. Do not tell Mom.”

He mimed zipping his lips.

I unzipped them and gave him a quick thank-you peck. Part of me wanted to tell him about Jack, but if I really was the only one who knew Jack’s secret, it felt like a betrayal to share it—even with Heath. So instead, I said, “Guess who just won a golden ticket to Wonka’s Cadaver Dissection Lab?”

If you make the decision to will your body to the university, you get two funerals: one when you die, and then a second after you’ve been dissected and used for research, when you’re cremated and given a small ceremony by the students. This is what Simon Gan told me after he handed me a clip-on visitor’s pass and provided a brief tour of the need-to-know areas of the anatomy lab and classrooms, which were clustered on the top floors of the same campus building where I’d originally met with Dr. Sheridan.

Lean and handsome, Simon had a quiet, smart-guy vibe. He was a local grad student from the Inner Richmond district, which is basically the real Chinatown—not the Grant Avenue Chinatown for tourists. He was kinder to me than he had to be, which took off some of the nervous edge. I wanted to ask him if he knew why Dr. Sheridan had changed her mind, but he was in a rush to get me settled and move on to his own work, so I just listened.

The actual lab with the bodies—the Operating Room, as Simon affectionately referred to it—was on the top floor, and it looked like a long, airy medical bay on a spaceship. Everything was white and gray, with vibrant submarine-yellow doors. Cameras snaked from the ceiling alongside bright lights on long, curved necks, and big LCD screens hung next to wipe boards and rolling medical monitors. Six life-size teaching skeletons—just like my own Lester, only these weren’t missing their arms—stood sentry along the walls.

But the stars of the show were the bodies, which reclined on rolling gray metal tables, all of them covered by white plastic sheets. Just vague shapes. The effect was so sterile and cool there might’ve been anything under there—bricks, clothes, CPR dummies. But the faint odor of formaldehyde told me otherwise. Some of the bodies remained in the lab for an entire year—kind of crazy. But there was a state-of-the-art ventilation system, and the unpreserved bodies were kept in a refrigerated room nearby.

Simon briefly introduced me to his study group, who, like him, were all wearing blue hospital scrubs. I felt like a sore thumb in jeans and my glow-in-the-dark Mütter Museum T-shirt—the museum in Philadelphia that has all the preserved anatomical specimens, medical anomalies, and antique medical equipment—but Simon didn’t seem to notice.

“We’ll be working at the north end of the room,” he said as he walked me to the other end of the lab. “So I thought maybe you could draw on the south end.” He stopped in front of a white sheet in the last row of tables and pointed to one of several metal stands, the kind used to hold sheet music. “You can adjust this and use it for drawing on, if you need to. And here’s a stool. The mirror can be angled, if you need to get a magnified view from above.”

“Great.”

“We’re protective of our bodies—we get assigned one to study for months at a time. The one I picked out for you is assigned to my roommate, and I got his permission for you to use her. I opened everything up for you, and I’ll take care of it when you leave.” I had no idea what that meant, but I nodded. “With this in mind, I just ask you to be respectful and not touch or move anything on or near the body.”