43 pages • 1 hour read
When Crickets Cry: a Novel of the Heart
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Chapters 6-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary
Reese recalls when he and Emma met “on the playground in second grade” (39), after which he, Emma, and Charlie, all became fast friends. Intrigued by the human body even then, Reese dissected anything he could find: “I sliced the skin of an orange and then sewed it back together, careful not to spill the juice. When I had mastered oranges, I graduated to French bread, because the skin is delicate, brittle, and tears easily” (41).
Chapter 7 Summary
Reese remembers the first time both he and Emma’s family found out about her heart condition, after she had a “spell” that required admission to the hospital. Afterward, she had to take large pills daily, and Emma’s mother made Reese promise to remind her to take them.
Chapter 8 Summary
Back in the present, Reese experiences a recurring nightmare, which makes it difficult for him to sleep. In the nightmare, Reese holds a cracked pitcher of water while standing next to a dying man. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with the man, but he knows that when he pours the pitcher, the man seems to improve. “But the more I pour, the heavier the pitcher grows, and pretty soon, despite the feeling that I am using both my hands and all my strength, I am unable to hold it any longer” (45). In the nightmare, Reese falls, stops pouring, and the man begins dying again.
Chapter 9 Summary
Reese thinks back to his childhood and his serious and logic-driven nature, which made him well suited to becoming a surgeon: “Learning had always come easily for me, especially when it came to books” (47). Emma, by contrast, always thought with her heart. “What Emma knew filtered from her head down into her heart and informed who she was” (47).
Reese recalls asking Emma’s mother if they could just sew up the hole in Emma’s heart. When Emma’s mother said no, he resolved that one day, he would fix Emma’s heart.
Chapter 10 Summary
Reese drives past The Well, a bar owned by his friend Davis. Although Reese normally eats at The Well every Friday night, ordering the aptly named “Transplant” burger, he heads home instead, musing on the origins of Lake Burton, beneath which an entire ghost town lies. “Burton was once a prospering town, but they flooded it to generate hydroelectric power for the rest of the state” (51). Despite its bleak history, he notes that Lake Burton has become “the weekend vacation spot for the millionaires from Atlanta and their kids” (52).
Chapter 11 Summary
Reese remembers an evening when he and Emma sat on his second-story porch: He worked on a puzzle, and she drew until a storm blew through. Afterward, they heard a male cardinal screeching next to his wounded mate. Reese picked the female up and, knowing that cardinals mate for life, told the male cardinal, “Don’t worry, sir. I won’t hurt her. You can look inside my window if you want” (55).
Reese took the female cardinal inside, fixed her wing, and kept her in a cage near the window; while she healed, the male cardinal stayed near. Reese eventually released the female, and she flew back to her mate. “Those two stayed in that nest outside my window throughout high school. And every day they sang their love song to each other” (57).
Chapter 12 Summary
Back at Lake Burton, Reese thinks about his property, how he and Charlie “own opposite sides of a little finger off the eastern side of the lake: My view is of his house and vice versa” (58). Reese bought the property before Emma died, and she envisioned “three structures—a house, a dock, and a workshop” (58) on it. After her death, Reese and Charlie built the structures, according to Emma’s vision.
Chapters 6-12 Analysis
In these chapters, flashbacks reveal more about Reese’s past with Emma. From the moment they met, Emma and Reese were inseparable, and he felt protective of her. In Chapter 9, he thinks about their complementary natures: He is pragmatic, always looking for solutions, while Emma relied more heavily on her feelings. Like the male cardinal’s devotion to his mate, Reese’s devotion to Emma set the stage for his life’s work. His failure to keep the childhood promise he made to her mother—to fix Emma’s heart—adds dimension to his guilt and suffering.
The trauma of Emma’s dramatic death, the circumstances of which will be revealed in Chapter 34, elicits recurring nightmares, a response to Reese’s feelings of desperation, helplessness, and guilt. When he stops pouring water on the stranger in his dream, the stranger begins dying again, and the pitcher starts leaking again. His wish to save as many patients as possible, in a world where suffering is inevitable and the stream of patients unending, so exhausted him that he was too tired to help the most important patient of all: his wife.
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