Footprints

by Shelby Hearon

Overview

Shelby Hearon's 14th novel opens at a reception for the loved ones of deceased heart donors where, for the first time, Nan and Douglas Mayhall come face to face with the aging preacher who is the recipient of their twenty-two year old daughter's heart. Their very different reactions to this disturbing encounter sets them off on separate paths.

Something is eroding under the surface of their marriage. Hoping for some peace of mind, Nan goes to Sanibel Island to step back and reassess her life. But it takes another real scare to allow her to slip out of her own footprints for a moment, to see that a world exists outside her pain.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307800473
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/02/2011
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	191
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Shelby Hearon was born in Marion, Kentucky, lived for many years in Texas and New York, and now makes her home in Burlington, Vermont. She is the author of sixteen novels, including Footprints, Life Estates, and Owning Jolene, which won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award. She has received an Ingram Merrill grant as well as fellowships for fiction from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and she has twice won the Texas Institute of Letters fiction award. She is the mother of a grown daughter and son.

Read an Excerpt

Someone in this crowd is wearing our daughter s heart. I imagined Douglas thinking those words. We were holding hands, wife and husband, here at this outdoor picnic arranged to honor donor and recipient families. Earlier, there had been a ballgame between the medical staff and the organ staff, with recipients part of each team to show that they were good as new. There d been a fine Texas barbeque (the first we d had in years), pork loin, chicken legs, lean beef, to show that recipients could eat with hearty appetites. Soon there would be awards, speeches, the lighting of the torch.

Our marriage was breaking to bits against the shoals of this group of coastal folks who meant nothing but kindness. How could a marriage be buffeted to bits as if against a coral reef even while we bent toward one another, clasping warm palms together (the heat also a stranger to us), weighted by the anchor of twenty-five years?

To say that there was a difference in our point of view was to say the obvious, to say nothing really. For me, it wasn t a matter of the death of our daughter Bethany, or the decision to give some of what could be salvaged from what remained of her when she was gone. That I would deal with as I was able. It was Douglas's joy, his hope, his belief that it was his daughter's heart which was beating in someone's chest. That she still was, that twenty-two-year-old girl, woman, our lovely strong-legged runner. Had it been someone else, someone not Douglas, the man I thought I knew through and through, skin to flesh to very bone, my Douglas, I could possibly have taken it as metaphor, as a way of seeing a baton being passed. The baton itself is not the runner, yet it is part of the race.

...I held on to him, in reflex, as if not to let him swim away into the clusters of nervous, near-delirious family units, those who had given and those who had taken away. Chests opened from throat to navel on both sides, body parts traded much the way children in their treehouse press cut wrists together, mingling blood, swearing lifetime connection.

Don't find him or her, I begged in the silence of my own mind. Don't. Fail to make contact. Let our recipient have decided to go away, to go fishing on Padre Island, to go see a film, now that she's able to be up and about, so many movies missed, or to go bowling, now that he can lift his big black ball again...

Douglas, wandering the crowd, suddenly bounded forward, like a puppy sniffing a trail. Someone had beckoned to him, an elderly-looking black man dressed in a black suit, white shirt, a bright red tie with a red heart smack in the middle of it. A red hanky waving from the chest pocket. I didn't follow but stood, watching as my husband bent down -- the man with the red handkerchief was small, frail -- tears coursing down his face. My Douglas, weeping as he had not at news of the wreck....

...Douglas sat rubbing his streaming eyes. The preacher wiped streaks from his cheeks, then slapped a hand on Douglas's back. Douglas fumbled in both pockets, found his handkerchief. He turned and met my eyes, then turned away.

Grief cut a canyon there was no crossing.

Editorial Reviews

Hearon is a comforting writer, not a cozy one, because there's too much down-and-dirty reality in her books. But in reading Hearon's impressive list of novels (the latest was "Life Estates", 1994), one realizes that in her fiction, although children may die, marriages crumble, and the world go awry, the characters will come through as stronger and better people. And all this without overt preachiness! In her most recent novel, the sudden death of their 22-year-old daughter, Bethany, forces Nan and Douglas Mayhall to confront their differing approaches to life, chasms that have been smoothed over during their long marriage. Douglas takes comfort in knowing that Bethany's transplanted heart is keeping someone else alive. He takes a young lover and talks about having more children. Nan, on the other hand, feels that watching an actual transplant operation will help her deal with her grief. She believes that by getting back to the study of paleontology (which she gave up for marriage and children), she will be able to put Bethany's death in perspective. Hearon's compassionate novel conveys how marriages work--and don't work--in times of crisis and the various ways people deal with sorrow and loss.

Nancy Pearl

The author of Life Estates (1994), among other portraits of women struggling through a Sargasso of ego-entanglements, here tracks a marriage splintering in an agony of deep grief after the death of a beloved daughter.

"A lot of wishes and feelings lay buried in a person, then something like this tragedy comes along and uncovers them." So declares Douglas, sorrowful husband of Nan, who narrates here. The accidental death of their 22-year-old daughter Bethany, and then the gift of her heart to prolong the life of a frail Texas preacher, does indeed blast apart the secure "compromises" of the 25-year-old marriage, releasing fevered resentments, other griefs, old rage. Nan, who cut short her academic career in paleontology, chaffs against her husband's (deserved, she knows) success as a "brain scientist." She thrashes against the confines of her marriage, her untended desires, her increasingly strange life—symbolized for her by Syracuse, the wintry city in upstate New York where she now lives, as opposed to the warm breadth of her native Texas. Nan will absorb herself in fossil hunting, while Douglas drifts toward an affair (does he resurrect a desire to have more babies? a "replacement" for Bethany?), and becomes obsessed with the man who has his daughter's heart as if "she still was." Healing will take place as Douglas confronts an old savage grief and recovers a closeness to their son. And Nan, turning back from her escape into science, confronts her grief when she watches a transplant operation and witnesses a miracle.

A stimulating read, crammed with thorny themes and scientific marvels: fossil "footprints" billions of years old; the fluttering of a living heart; underwater creatures rich and strange. Hearon skimps on character—Douglas and Nan are at times reduced by the novel's weighty concerns to lecturing, hectoring shells—but even so this is a bright, involving work, if more somber than Hearon's others.

Kirkus Reviews