Heartbeat by Elizabeth Scott
“Who is he?” Dan says. “I’m not sure how to ask this, but—?”
“Then don’t, because even if there was something to tell, I wouldn’t want to say it to you.”
He looks at me, hurt all over his face, and I wish I could believe in it. In him.
But I don’t, and I go see Mom. I sit with her. I hold her hand.
It’s not enough today. I don’t just want to sit here with her hand lying still in mine. I wish I could curl up next to her. That I could lie with my head on her shoulder. But I can’t because she’s in a hospital bed and it’s filled with taped tubes and wires and IVs.
It’s filled with her stomach, with what’s in it, and when I look at her face I can’t see her, I just see the tubes going into her mouth and down her throat and up her nose and that’s all she is now. That’s what she is.
“Mom,” I whisper, and pull away, wrap my arms around myself. I can’t talk to her. I can’t tell stories about school, about anything. I can’t pretend that life is normal except for this. Not now. Not today. I can’t find her under what’s in front of me.
I can’t see anything of Mom. I just see a dead woman.
I pinch the bridge of my nose, hard, over and over until I know I won’t cry.
When Dan comes to get me he tries to put a hand on my shoulder. I move away from it, from him.
“Emma, please,” he says, his voice breaking, and I stare at him. He flinches and I know it’s from the hate in my eyes.
He turns to Mom and I walk out, leave the hospital and go wait by the car. I see an ambulance come in, sirens wailing, before Dan comes out and gets in the car. I wonder what will happen to the person inside. I hope they are all right.
I don’t see Caleb. I’m not exactly looking for him, but I am thinking about him. About what he said, about living with a dead person.
16
During the ride home, I think about Caleb.
I think about his sister, Minnie.
She died three years ago, when Caleb and I were both fourteen. She was seven, I think, or maybe only six. I know she was riding her bicycle and fell off.
That was it. That was how she died. That simply. There she was, on her bike, and then she was gone. Like getting up and going to get toast. Just a moment and then...gone.
I guess, now that I think about it, that’s when Caleb started doing drugs. He must have really loved his little sister. Maybe everything Caleb’s done is how he gets through it.
What would it be like, to live with that loss for three years? I can barely stand it, and it’s been less than a month. How could anything be left inside you at all?
“Emma,” Dan says, and I notice the car’s stopped, that we’re outside the house. I get out before he can say anything else, head up to my room and lock the door.
He knocks, but I pretend not to hear him. It gets easier every day. I go over to the window and open it.
I know eventually Olivia will come in.
17
She does, a while later, and frowns as soon as she sees me.
“What happened?”
“The usual.”
“Uh-huh. You saw Caleb, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Did he say something?”
I shrug.
“Emma!”
“Not really. Sort of.”
“Sort of? Like he sort of spoke? Or he sort of said something that upset you?”
“No, he didn’t—I just saw him again and he knew about Mom. He did see me with her yesterday.”
“Oh.” Even Olivia hasn’t seen that. “What did he say?”
“That it was screwed up.”
“Emma—”
I shake my head. “Do you remember his sister?”
“His—oh, yeah,” Olivia says. “Minnie. Fell off her bike and didn’t have her helmet on, right? My parents were all, ‘That’s why we made you wear a helmet, Olivia.’” She shakes her head. “Remember how awful it was? I wanted a pink one, like yours, and had that weird-shaped silver one.”
I nod, and she shakes her head. “Parents.” She blushes, looks at me. “Sorry.”
“Don’t. You can’t be weird on me. For real, not now, okay?”
“It was bad today, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I say and she hugs me and says, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” and I cry like I always seem to be doing. I cry and when I’m done my eyes hurt and I have a headache and nothing’s changed. You’d think I’d have learned that by now, that tears don’t change anything.
You’d think I’d have run out of them.
But I haven’t.
18
Mom did it. Well, she didn’t. Her body did it, because today is day thirty.
Thirty days of Mom being dead but kept alive and at the start of week sixteen it was okay, it was in the distance.
That distance is closed today.
I have missed school or a weekend or maybe both. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.
Olivia came by a few times, but aside from, “Emma, eat. EAT,” I can’t remember another thing she’s said. I’ve just felt empty inside, silent, and the one time Dan knocked on my door and said, “Emma?” I said, “Do you miss her at all?” and listened to the drone of his voice, words buzzing over me.
I know I can’t stay in my room forever. The thing about Mom dying is that the world didn’t stop. It didn’t even slow down. It’s flowers and cards and everyone understands but no one does because Mom wasn’t Mom to them. Without her it’s like I’m living inside a mirror. I see things, I do things, but they are just surfaces and nothing more.
I’m numb, so numb, because thirty days is here but when I’m in the shower staring at the water, I wonder if Caleb feels like that about Minnie. Is loss this constant pain, not mental, but actual pain? It’s like even my teeth hurt, but there’s a fog over it, one that makes the pain hurt and yet leaves me carved out too.
Is grief this forever wishing for what was even though I know I shouldn’t?
I shake my head, water splashing everywhere.
Mom loved to take baths. She actually took one the night before she died. I sat on the floor next to her tub, smelling the “calming” bath beads, oily bubbles, she’d put in. She’d put her hair up, stuck it in a half-knot that was already falling down and pushed the bubbles around as we sat there.
“You don’t have to start on that paper now,” she said. “You can relax. Watch some TV. Hang out with your old pregnant mother.”
“But—”
“You don’t have to try so hard,” she said, reaching one hand out and touching mine, her skin hot and slick. “I love you no matter what.”
“I know,” I said and she squeezed my hand.
“So then let yourself breathe once in a while. Smell the roses. Go for it. Other inspiring things I can’t remember now and so on.” She grinned at me. “You do know what I mean, right?”
“Dan’s going to come up and make you get out of the tub soon.”
“You two.” She sighed. “Am I allowed to brush my hair?”
“I don’t know. Dan’s got the pregnancy book. I’m going to read it after I get half of my New Deal paper done.”
“Don’t work on it tonight, okay? Watch Covert Ops with me.”
I didn’t. I worked on my homework and started pulling together ideas for my paper, blew a kiss at Mom when she stuck her head in and said, “Okay, I guess that’s a no on the TV. Don’t stay up too late.”
“I won’t,” I said, half glancing at her as I read about FDR and his plans.
Her hair was down and dry. The lamp in my room cast a shadow on her face.
That was the last time I ever saw her.
Thirty days ago today, and I t
I get dressed, putting on clothes from the pile scattered around my bed. I realize, for the first time, that the rest of my room is boxed off to me. I could pick up the books piled on my desk. The earrings on my dresser I’d bought shopping with Mom the week before she took that last bath.
But I can’t.
I unlock my door, the reminder of putting in the lock—of Mom—almost bringing me to my knees and then I go downstairs.
It’s early—I woke up before the sun rose and watched it come up, light tearing up the dark, and just thought thirty thirty thirty thirty. Thirty days. Mom’s gone but still here and that’s how it will be for another—
I can’t. I just can’t think it. I walk into the kitchen and Dan is there, looking like he hasn’t slept. He’s reading a book and I see it’s the pregnancy book, the one he was reading the night before Mom died. The one I was going to read.
He sees me and puts the book down, pages up so I can’t see the cover, the serene portrait of a woman holding her belly. A woman, alive.
“Do you want some breakfast?” he says. “I could make something.”
“It’s thirty days today,” I say and he nods, his eyes filling with tears. I wish I could take all of my own back now. I don’t want to be anything like Dan.
“I thought that might be you—well, why you were in your room,” he says. “I asked one of the doctors at the hospital about it. She says she’d like to meet you. Talk to you. She thought it was interesting that you didn’t come with me to see your mother during this period.”
Interesting? Really? All because I sat in my room and thought about her. The real her, not the one I have to see.
Not that one who breaks me over and over again.
“I’d like a waffle,” I say, and Dan looks at me, surprised, and then smiles, huge, bright, and gets up, moving around the kitchen. He gets out bowls and boxes, eggs and spoons, and plugs in the waffle iron I bought for him two Christmases ago.
“Here,” he says a few minutes later and I look up from the table—where did Mom touch it before she fell? I’ve never asked. Was it here? Over there? Did she not touch it at all, just walk straight to the toaster? Was Dan looking when she fell?
When did he know what he would do? After the ambulance came? After the doctor said she was gone?
Or did he know all along? Deep in his heart, had he made his choice the moment two years of drugs and testing and waiting brought Mom home to tell him what he so longed to hear?
He puts a waffle on the table. I hold on to the chair in front of me. I smell flour and eggs and milk and chocolate, which Dan always puts in waffles for me.
Mom would say, “Dan, you shouldn’t spoil her,” and Dan would say, “Chocolate isn’t spoiling. Love isn’t spoiling.”
“You went shopping.”
He nods. “We didn’t have much to eat.”
No, we didn’t. Food goes bad. It spoils.
I swallow.
“I’m not hungry.”
“But you said—Emma, I can hear your stomach!”
Dan is standing with his hands pressed together like he’s praying and in the silence of the kitchen I hear a slight gurgle, a churning. It is my stomach, awake and moving.
Inside my dead mother there is a baby. It needs to eat. I suppose it has a stomach. I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it.
Thirty thirty thirty thirty.
“I’m going to the car,” I say.
“You have to stop this,” Dan says. “She wouldn’t want you to punish yourself like this. It’s not your fault that she died.”
“I know it’s not my fault. Are you going to take me to school?”
“Emma, I lost her too. We both lost her. I miss—”
I leave then. I walk outside, past the car and down the driveway. I cannot be here. I cannot see him, not now. I can’t say anything else and I’m afraid that if I do he will find a way to make it so I can’t see her. That he will—he could do anything to me because he’s my guardian now. He could even have me committed.
I feel sick.
Mom wanted him to be my guardian. I wanted him to be my guardian too.
We both thought he was good at taking care of things.
And then she died.
I hear the car, hear Dan. “Emma, get in.”
I look at the car. “Are you going to send me away?”
“What?” There’s silence for a moment and then he sighs, a battered sound, and then I hear the horn beep over and over, the sound muffled, start-stop-start-stop.
I look over and see he is hitting it. Dan is smacking his hands into the horn, face red, wet with tears.
He stops. “I would never send you away,” he says. “You’re my family.”
Thirty thirty thirty thirty.
I don’t believe him, but I want to be here. I have to be here. Mom doesn’t need me like I want her to, but I am all she has.
I get in the car.
“Emma, please know I wanted your mother and you, I wanted our family. That hasn’t changed a bit. I wish that we were all—”
“Yes,” I say so he won’t say anything more. He does, he’s wishing and wishing, but I don’t listen.
I don’t believe in wishes anymore.
19
Caleb isn’t in school. I notice before first period and again at lunch. I don’t say anything to Olivia, who saw Roger at the mall on Saturday and tells me all about it. I listen to her story of a fast-beating heart and flushed face and hesitant conversation like I am an old woman.
Heartbeat. That’s what’s keeping Mom here. I try to not think about it, but I can’t because she doesn’t have one.
Heartbeat. It’s just a word. A word.
It’s more than that.
“Hey,” Olivia says, waving a hand in front of my face. “You’re just sitting there nodding,” she says. “This is really huge for me. He said it was great to see me. Not good, not fun. Great.” She starts to say something else but then stops and says, “What’s going on?”
“It’s been thirty days since she died,” I mutter.
“Thirty...oh,” Olivia says. “So then—”
“Yeah,” I say. “The doctors said if she made it through thirty days, the odds were stronger that she’d make it long enough for them to—so that eventually they can go in and get the baby out.” I wipe my stupid welling eyes. “I’m sorry. I know everything with Roger is huge, I do. Tell me again.”
She shakes her head. “It sounded stupid when I was saying it. Who cares if he said it was great to see me?”
“Great is better than good. Or fun.”
“I could walk by his locker after lunch and see if he says anything.” Olivia plays with a button on her shirt. “Should I? No, wait, I can’t do that. What if he doesn’t say anything?”
I look at her, the one person who I know loves me, and think about Mom in the bath that last night.
“I think you should go for it.”
“Really?”
I nod.
We go and he’s there and he says, “Hey, Olivia,” and she says, “Hey,” back and squeezes my hand so hard it hurts after we’ve walked away, but it’s a good hurt. Her smile makes me smile and it gets me through the rest of the day and to the hospital, up to the floor where Mom lies.
To Caleb and his cart passing us in the hall on the way to her, to me sitting in a chair in the waiting room.
I realize I am waiting—hoping—to see him as I stand up and walk out into the hall. He’s at the door as I get there, and we both stop and look at each other.
“I was waiting for you,” I say, and immediately wish I could take it back. It’s true, but I shouldn’t h
“Oh,” he says, and looks at the cart. “I—uh—” His hair falls in his face and whatever it was before, those moments where I looked at him and thought he knows, they seem far away now. He’s just a guy standing there, made awkward by a strange girl with a round face that doesn’t have the curves and grace of his.
“Not like that,” I say, because it isn’t like that, or even if it was (just a little—okay, a lot), I know it can’t be. I know what goes together and it is not me and someone who steals cars and gets high. It’s not me and someone who looks like him. It’s not me and anyone like him.
“Not like what?”
“Like whatever is normal for you.”
“Nothing is ever normal in any hospital,” he says.
“You’ve been to more than one?”
“Five. Three for Minnie, two for me. Stomach pump and a dislocated shoulder, and every single hospital had the same color walls and the same awful lights. Not normal at all.”
Thirty, I think, and swallow.
“You weren’t in school,” I say, to stop what I’m thinking. “Are you okay?”
He looks at me and then pushes his hair back with one hand. His eyes are wide and very green, even under the hospital lights. He looks so surprised.
“Emma?” Dan says, and it’s time for me to go, to see Mom. I leave without looking back because I’m embarrassed and just...I don’t know. I shouldn’t have said anything to Caleb.
“Hi, Mom,” I say when I’m sitting next to her. I don’t say thirty. I don’t say anything about that at all.
“Today was okay,” I say instead, and tell her about Olivia and Roger. I look at her still face. I know there is nothing to see, that who she was is gone but she’s here. She’s still here, right here.
Except she isn’t.
I should know this by now, but grief is slippery, a tangle of thorns that dig in so deep you don’t know where they stop and you start. You don’t know where you are.
I think of Caleb and how he looked when I asked where he was. So surprised, like no one would ever wonder where he was. How he was.