Heartbeat by Elizabeth Scott
“I can’t,” he says, and pulls his hand away. “I can’t.”
“Oh.”
“It’s not you,” he says. “I know how that sounds, but it’s not like that.” He looks frantic, frightened.
“So you want me to go?”
He looks at me but doesn’t nod. Doesn’t say yes. He just stands there.
“Caleb?” I say and his mouth works but nothing comes out. It’s like he can’t get the words out, like they are too hard, and then he rubs a hand down his face and I see there are tears in his eyes.
“They’ll make you hate me,” he says. “And if they make you hate me, I don’t know what—”
“They can’t make me hate you.”
“I hate myself when I’m with them,” he says, his voice breaking. “So how will you be able to not hate me?”
“Because I know you.”
He shakes his head, like it can’t be that simple, and says, “No, I—you don’t get it.”
I step on his foot. Hard. Mom used to do it to Dan when she wanted his attention and he was busy cooking or daydreaming about some database thing. It seemed to work for her.
“Ouch,” he says, and looks at me. Sees me looking at him.
I guess it works for me too.
“I know you,” I say again. “And you know me. So trust me.”
“Emma,” Caleb starts, and I lift my foot up again, lift it up very high. He sees that, and I watch the shadows in his eyes fall back a bit. See the tiniest bit of a smile, fast and fleeting but there, on his face.
“Do you trust me?” he says, low-voiced, and his hands are shaking.
I wonder if he has ever asked anyone else this, and I think he probably has. I think he asked the people who are supposed to love him and I think they said No. I think they saw he was breaking and didn’t care. I think they let him become broken.
And still he pulled the pieces of who he is together. He is who he is because of who he is and nothing more and that makes him so special.
“I trust you,” I say, and look at him. I let what is in my heart out, I let it into my eyes.
I see him look at me. I see him hear what I’ve said. I see him look into my eyes.
“Emma,” he says, and it’s too soon to say it, way too soon, but what’s in my heart is in his too and he touches my face, cupping the side of my jaw and my name is a prayer in his voice, four letters of joy.
And then we head downstairs. We walk through the garage, which is dark again but warm and filled with the sounds of engines cooling, and then he opens a door to the house.
We walk through it.
47
The house is just like I remember, perfect-looking.
Incredibly sad, a monument to Minnie. It’s as if even his parents don’t even live here, like this really is a giant, gilded tomb.
Caleb doesn’t say anything as we walk through the house but he’s holding my hand again and it’s shaking a little, damp against my skin.
If you’d told me that I’d be walking hand in hand with Caleb Harrison just a few months ago, I’d have laughed at you. Said, “Who?” probably, and then, “Oh, him. Yeah, sure. That’ll happen. And also, everyone will get a magic pony.”
But here I am, and there is nowhere else I want to be.
“Hi, Dad,” Caleb says, stopping abruptly at the doorway of a room, and I get a glimpse of it over his shoulder. It’s one of the ones he showed me, filled with untouched-looking furniture and a portrait of Minnie hanging on the wall with all the lights in the room shining on it.
His father says something. It might be “Hello,” but it might just be a grunt. He’s looking through a folder of papers with one hand, a glass more than half-full of amber liquid in another. I don’t need to wonder what it is. I can smell the alcohol from here.
“Caleb,” someone else says. I see his mother stepping out of a dim corner of the room, stepping away from a chair covered with files. He does have her hair, but where his is free, wild and curly and falling all over the place, hers is pulled back into a tight knot with exactly two strands allowed loose, curling over her ears and down along her face.
“Hi, Mom,” he says. “How was work?”
“Fine,” she says, and the way she’s looking at him is—it’s like he’s some sort of animal that she’s forced to see and doesn’t want to.
She hates him for living. I see that, and the force of that hate makes me want to cry.
I can’t even imagine how it makes Caleb feel.
“Do you need something?” she says, and she’s so polite, but it’s the kind of polite you are to someone you know you have to see but don’t want to. The kind that is all surface.
She blinks, glancing at me, and for a moment, I see who she really is under the icy layers, the hate. I see pain so deep it’s endless.
I see that she is broken too, and that she blames Caleb for it.
“No,” Caleb says, and his hand is really sweating in mine now, and he’s holding on tight, holding on as if I am keeping him standing upright. “I just heard you call when you came in. I’ll go now.”
His mother doesn’t say a word, just shrugs, and I watch her eyes fall on Minnie’s portrait as if they have to, as if it is the only thing she can see. I watch her face relax, soften.
I realize Caleb is no longer around. Not in her mind. She saw him just now, but she didn’t, not really. I bet she hasn’t seen him since the night Minnie died.
I knew grief could destroy you, but I didn’t know it could turn you into the walking dead. A shiver crawls up my spine because there is something in her blankness and hatred I understand. Something I see in myself.
It would be so easy for me to make my entire life about Mom, about what happened to her. It would be so easy for my whole life to be hating Dan. Hating the baby.
Caleb feels my shudder because he glances at me and then starts to turn away, starts to walk us away from his parents.
“It’s polite to introduce your guests,” his father says, and his voice is falsely chipper, laced with something bitter.
“I—sorry,” Caleb says. “Mom, Dad, this is Emma.”
“Emma,” his father says, and drains the rest of his glass. “Very nice to meet you.”
He doesn’t look at me when he says it.
“Emma?” his mother says, turning away from the picture of Minnie, and her gaze is so needy and empty and angry and lonely it actually hurts to see it. “Wait, I know that name. You’re that girl, aren’t you? The one whose mother died.”
Caleb’s hand suddenly clamps down hard on mine and it’s not just his fingers that are shaking now. He’s shaking all over, trembling so hard I can feel it, and I get why just as she says, “There was something else too...a baby?”
“Yes,” I manage to get out, and Caleb’s father says, “Are you the girl whose father is keeping the body alive for the baby?”
“Stepfather, and yes,” I say again, and he looks at me as if he didn’t expect me to speak.
“I’m sorry,” Caleb’s mother says, and her voice is very stiff and very brittle, but I think she means it. “I know how painful loss can be.”
She looks at Caleb, and her gaze changes. So does her voice. “When did you meet my son?”
“We go to school together.”
His father looks at me now. “And you started talking after her mother died?”
“I—” I say, and then realize he isn’t talking to me. He’s talking to Caleb.
“Yes,” Caleb says, low-voiced. “We started talking then.”
“Of course you would. First the drugs, then the cars, but you will not hurt another girl. Do you understand me? You. Will. Not.”
He looks at me then.
“You need to leave,” Caleb’s father says, and
“Yes,” his mother says. “Go right now. You don’t—” She makes a low, keening noise. “You don’t want to get hurt, do you?”
They want me to go. No, more than that. They mean I should go and leave Caleb. They—
I think they think they are saving me in their own icy, twisted way.
They think he could hurt me.
That he would.
Caleb, staring at the floor, starts to let go of my hand but I won’t do it. I hold on.
I hold on and look at him until he feels my gaze. I look at him until he looks at me and then I say, “I’m happy to go, but I want Caleb to come with me. It’s dark out, you know, and I’d feel better if he could walk me home. I know I’m safe with him.”
His mother starts to say something but then stops and turns back to the picture of Minnie as if I’m no longer there at all.
His father doesn’t look away, though. He closes his folder and says, “Has he told you that he hit someone? That he stole a car and then ran someone down? That was at night. So I don’t know how safe you’d be with him. His own sister certainly wasn’t.”
I can’t believe this. I can’t believe them. How they talk to him. How they treat him.
How they don’t see who he is at all. I take a deep breath.
“I know he hit someone because he told me. And Minnie? I think she was safe with him. She knew she was supposed to wear a helmet when she rode her bike but somehow you can’t see that. Caleb did his best and all you do is blame him for it,” I say. “And me? I know I’m safe with Caleb.”
His father shakes his head and gets up. He walks out of the room, careful not to touch either Caleb or me. His mother stays where she is, but she is looking at me as if I’ve spoken a foreign language.
And for a second—just a second—I think she hears me.
But then she goes back to the dark corner. To her chair, where I realize she can look up and see only Minnie’s portrait.
Caleb doesn’t move. He just stands there and I turn to him, worried about what I’ll see.
He looks upset, but he also looks surprised, and when I start to walk away, ready to get out of this house, he follows, his hand still in mine.
“Emma,” he says as we approach the door and then he puts his arms around me, right there in that frozen house. He’s shaking, hard, and I realize that part of him still believed he killed Minnie, that even though he told himself it wasn’t true, that even when he tried to live as if it wasn’t, there was a part that screamed it was.
There are other things he’s done, things he will have to live with, and there is no perfect ever-after coming for him, but I swear I can actually feel some of the anger and grief he carries flowing away, flowing out of him.
It lasts for a second, maybe two, but that’s enough. I can tell because when he whispers, “Let’s get out of here,” I know it’s because he wants to and not because he has to.
Maybe that one word—wants—doesn’t seem like much of a difference.
But it is.
“You believe in me,” he says when we’re outside, out on the street and this dark is so much warmer than that house. “You trust me.” He touches my hair, my face, and then kisses me once, gently.
“Not enough,” he murmurs, and kisses me again, kisses me harder, and I smile, open my arms to him, myself to him, and we stand there in the darkness, in its embrace, its warmth and fall into each other.
It’s so much. It’s everything.
It’s late, after midnight, when my stomach rumbles and his does too and we go and get burgers, eat them in the parking lot after walking through the drive-through and laughing at the looks we get, and we are still kissing. In between bites of burger and sips of soda we are kissing like we can’t stop.
He pulls away, breathing hard, and says, “This is crazy.”
“Yes.”
“But right.”
“Yes,” I say again and we grin at each other. He looks at me, right at me, in that way he has, like he sees all the way inside me and what he sees is beautiful, and I close my eyes because I don’t want this moment to end. I like being happy.
It’s nice, and I don’t think I ever enjoyed it like I should have.
I didn’t know happiness could be lost, but it can be.
“Emma, are you—?” He pauses. “You should go home, right? Talk to Dan about everything again.”
“It’s not my home,” I say, and it hasn’t been, not since Mom died, but I want it to be. I want that house to be my home again, I want it to be more than a place where I sleep, where memories coil around me and dig their way under my skin, leaving space for grief’s thorns to burrow deeper still.
I want things to be right again and I thought they could be today and then I realized they couldn’t and I still—
I still have to go back.
I still have to see Dan. And I do have to talk to him again. Not for him. Not even for Mom. But for me.
“You’re right. I do need to talk to Dan.”
It feels strange to say that. I don’t know when I last said that and meant it.
It feels strange but not false. It feels true, and that’s because it is. Because life has come and changed things. Changed Dan, changed me, and maybe grief is all we will share. Maybe it’s all we will ever share now and will break the family we were into nothing.
But I should know. I need to know.
So Caleb walks me back to the house. Home. That word still feels false when I think it. Feels false when I look at where I live. At where I once took everything inside for granted.
I kiss Caleb before I walk up the driveway, but I don’t say goodbye. I’ve had enough of that word forever. I don’t want to have to say it again. Not for a very, very long time.
“Emma,” he says, and I look back at him. Watch him walk toward me, and he is the trifecta, like Olivia said. He is beautiful, but the thing that truly makes him so is on the inside.
Is his heart, and I touch his chest, feel it beat against my hand.
It beats fast but sure. Solid. I like that.
“See you tomorrow. Well, today,” he says, and then he kisses me again. His heart beats faster when our lips meet.
“Hi,” he says when we separate, and smiles at me. He understands what it’s like to not want to say goodbye too.
And this—all of this, everything that’s happened between us—it feels like something. It is something.
It’s a beginning.
“Hi,” I whisper back and then turn away and walk to the house. I look back once, because I know it’s important to do that now. To see the people that are in your heart.
He’s there, and he waves. I wave back and then go forward.
The kitchen light is on and I see Dan standing by the stove like he’s waiting for me.
Maybe he needs to do this too, to figure out if what we were can be somehow saved or if we have to let it all go.
I walk into the house. I walk into the kitchen.
“Dan,” I say, and he looks at me.
He looks at me and I know something is wrong. Horribly wrong.
“There’s been—” he says and his voice is thick with tears. “There’s a problem, and this time I want to talk to you about it. I want to know what you think we should do.”
48
I almost say, Mom?
In spite of everything, I almost say it. I almost ask What’s happened to her? even though nothing can happen to her now.
Over a month of her being gone and I still see her.
Every day, I see her.
I’ve hated Dan for making his choice without asking me, for holding Mom’s body here for the baby.
But what I hate him for most of all is t
I tell myself she’s dead.
I have told myself that all along, but part of me doesn’t believe it.
I didn’t see her die. I didn’t see her fall to the ground. I didn’t see her leave.
I never even saw her body. Not until after Dan had made his choice. Not until after machines made her heart beat again, made her lungs breathe again, made her body here again.
Not until after I could sit with her. Hold her hand. Rest my head on her shoulder.
Be with her.
I know all that’s left is her body, but there’s so much power in that, in seeing the face and hands and hair of my mother. I know that there’s a place machines can’t reach, that there is no way to hold on to who a person is when they die, no way to capture what makes them who they are and keep it with you.
You can hold on to their body, but not them. Who they are slips away. Flies free.
But it’s hard to remember that when you see someone you love. When you can touch them, talk to them, hold their hand.
I have hated Dan for choosing the baby, for keeping Mom’s body alive.
I have hated him for making me hope when I know there isn’t any.
I hate him for what he’s done to Mom, but I hate him just as much for what he’s done to me.
So I almost say, Mom? and as the word bubbles scorching up my throat I feel my hands knot into fists because it isn’t her, it can’t be her, he can’t be talking about her, and yet here I am almost asking. Hoping.
This is what it all comes back to. To what happened, and how I never got a chance to say goodbye. I never got a chance to say anything.
Dan made his choice. He picked the baby without any thought, without even asking me what I thought. It was like I didn’t exist in that moment and now Mom’s body beats and breathes for it. Her body exists and I can see it. I can see her. I have seen her.
But it isn’t her at all.