Our Chemical Hearts

by Krystal Sutherland

  The fishpond.

  I sat bolt upright then, because I was such. A. Fucking. Idiot. “I know where she is,” I said out loud. Dead or alive, I knew she would be there.

  There was no time, no reason to wake my parents—I shrugged on a jacket, snatched the keys off the dining room table, and sprinted out to the car. I drove into the city. Climbed the cast-iron fence. Sprained my goddamn ankle rolling off the hedge. Hobbled down to the abandoned train station. Picked the lock to get inside. Ran down the spiral staircase that twisted into the basement.

  And there she was, in the dark, waist deep in the still water. Alive. Gloriously, miraculously alive. My insides melted away in relief until I was a shell spun from glass. My legs almost gave way beneath me.

  “Grace!” I yelled as I half sprinted, half slid down the stairs. “Grace!”

  Grace turned to face me. Although there was no light except from the moon, I could see trails of tears falling down her face. Her palms were resting flat against the surface of the water and she was breathing these short, sharp breaths that sent plumes of white in front of her lips. I slowed for a moment, sure that I was dreaming, because she looked like something out of a myth. There was a wreath of pale flowers woven into her hair, and she was dressed in white, all in white, like a wedding dress.

  Here was Ophelia, in the flesh.

  I ran into the water until I couldn’t run any more, then I waded out to where she was and took off my coat and draped it around her shoulders, because she was shaking.

  “C’mon, we have to get you out of the water,” I said, but she didn’t move, wouldn’t move. Grace looked at me, tears in her eyes. And then the world imploded. It was like she split open, finally, and let the pain pour out. She was crying, bawling, these huge, violent sobs rolling over and over her, almost too much for her body to handle. She collapsed against me, her full weight in my arms, and I swear I could feel her grief radiating outward. I breathed it in with each breath until the pressure of it leaked out of her.

  “Why’d he have to die, Henry?” she said over and over again through her sobs. “Why’d he have to die? Why couldn’t it have been me?”

  “I’m so sorry.” I crushed her against me and held her tight because I didn’t know what else to say or do. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  And it went on and on like this until my teeth were chattering and I couldn’t really feel my legs.

  Then, just like that, Grace stopped crying, as though she’d had a certain amount of tears in her inventory and they’d been exhausted. She pulled herself out of my arms and waded back toward the stairs without looking at me, my coat trailing in the water behind her. When she reached the first rung, she climbed and sat, shuddering, with her feet still in the icy water. I followed her, of course, because I’d have followed her anywhere. That night, if she’d walked the other way, into the cold depths of the basement, I’d have followed her there too.

  I sat next to her, cross-legged, and tried not to show how cold I was, because I wanted to be with her, just us, alone, before I had to take her back. I leaned over and fished my phone out of my coat’s breast pocket and called Martin. He answered after one ring.

  “Please, God, tell me she’s alive,” he said.

  “I found her. She’s fine. I’m bringing her home.”

  “Oh, thank God, thank God, thank God. Bring her back to us.”

  “I will. We’ll see you soon. She’s fine. She’s safe. Can you please let my parents know she’s safe and I’m okay and I’ll be home soon?”

  “Yes, of course. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

  I hung up.

  “Everyone was pretty worried about you,” I said quietly.

  “You know I was on suicide watch the first month after he died? Everyone assumed I’d try and off myself once he was gone. Like, I couldn’t even mourn in peace without people banging on the bathroom door to make sure I hadn’t slit my wrists. Dom would never think that of me. Dom was the only one who knew me.”

  I couldn’t look at her. A few hours ago, I’d been sure Grace was dead. That she’d killed herself. I was one of them. The people who didn’t know her soul. Not like him.

  “I wasn’t depressed. I’m still not depressed. I’m fucking angry.

  “I want to tell you about him,” she said through softly chattering teeth.

  “Grace . . . you don’t have to.” I couldn’t say what I really wanted to say. Please don’t. Dear God, please don’t tell me about him. Haven’t you broken me enough?

  “I know. But I’ve been unfair to you. You deserve to know the truth.”

  “The truth?”

  “I met him when I was nine years old. God, there are so many things from your childhood that melt away into a haze, but the day I met him . . . It was early fall, so it was cool, but everything was still green. My dad was already dead and my mom hadn’t been home for three days and there was no food left in the house. I called my uncle and he picked me up but he wasn’t much better with kids than his sister, so he dumped me with this woman he worked with. Mary. I remember on the car ride over there that he told me she had a son around my age, but I hated boys. They were always mean to me at school, when I went. These weird, foreign creatures, you know?

  “Anyway, when we got there, Dom was jumping on a trampoline in the backyard. I remember thinking that he was the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen, which was strange, because I’d never thought of boys that way before. I was this incredibly shy kid, but he wasn’t. He jumped straight off the trampoline when he saw me and asked me to come and play Mario Kart with him. I’d never played before—I’d never even seen a gaming console before—so he had to teach me, but he was super patient and he let me win. It was one of the best days of my childhood. We played video games and then, once the sun had set, we held hands while we watched cartoons on a laptop in his tree house. I loved him. I loved his family. I hadn’t known, before them, that people like that even existed. I’d decided, by the end of the night, that I was going to marry him.”

  I laughed softly despite myself and so did Grace.

  “Kids, right?” she said, wiping a tear from her eye. “Except he fell in love with me, too, and instead of fading as we got older, it only got more real. Dom was the first boy I held hands with. The first boy I kissed. My first and only everything, until you.”

  “I didn’t . . . think about that.”

  “I can’t put into words what it is to love someone like that. Or lose someone like that. Which is part of the reason why I don’t write anymore. Because words fail. A lot of people say they don’t know what they’ve got until it’s gone, but I knew. I knew. I knew every day that we were together that what we had was extraordinary. And I was so afraid, every day, that I would lose him, lose them all. I used to worry so much about his safety, worry that they’d finally get sick of dealing with my messed-up family, but they never did. And I used to question how two people could be so lucky. How could the universe justify bringing us together when we were only nine? How could it ever be fair that what everyone was looking for was handed to us on a silver platter when we were too young to even know that we wanted it?

  “I guess, now, I know. All the love that’s meant to last a lifetime I spent in the space of eight years. We were supposed to grow up together. Go to college together. Travel the world together. When he died, it felt like my future died with him. Dom wasn’t perfect. I mean, I know that. He was meticulous about some things and sloppy about others. He picked his fingernails when he was nervous or watching sports, and it used to drive me crazy. Katherine Heigl was his favorite actress and he made me watch all her movies. He liked Carl Sagan way too much. But my God, Henry, his soul was so extraordinary. The things he would have done with his life . . . You would’ve liked him a lot. You would’ve been friends.”

  In that moment, I felt the terrible weight of the unfairness of it all. Grace Town did not believe
in souls for the rest of humanity, but for Dom, she was willing to make an exception.

  “I was in the hospital when they held his funeral,” she continued. “They waited for as long as they could, but I was too sick and they had to, you know? So they asked me to write something. Something that someone could read out, like a eulogy, because everyone knew I was a writer and they always told me how beautiful my words were. But I didn’t do it. I made out like I was in too much pain and I didn’t do it and I haven’t written anything since. I don’t think I’ll be able to write anything again until I make myself write it.”

  “Why didn’t you write it?”

  “It was my fault. I’ve never told anyone that before, but it was. It was my fault that we crashed and it’s my fault that he died.”

  “It was nobody’s fault. It was an accident.”

  “That’s why I haven’t told anyone. Because I know you’ll all say the same thing. Survivor’s guilt and all that. But I was teasing him. Distracting him. He told me to stop but I didn’t, and the next thing I knew, we were in the wrong lane. You know the whole cliché of your life flashing before your eyes the split second before you die?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s bullshit. I saw the car coming and I felt him swerve and I knew in that fraction of a heartbeat that we were both going to die. And the only thought my brain had time to generate was, Well, this is shit. Literally. My last thought could potentially have been a curse word. I didn’t think about my life or my family or my friends or even about him. It makes me wonder what he was thinking, you know? Maybe the same thing.”

  “He was probably thinking about you.”

  “He didn’t die right away. When it was in the news, all the articles said he’d died instantly, on impact, but he didn’t. It took a minute. We were there in the car, upside down, both of us bleeding, and he was trying to talk. It wasn’t like in the movies. He didn’t die whispering ‘I love you’ or anything like that. He was in pain and he was panicking and he was trying to breathe, but he couldn’t. And there was nothing I could do. Nothing I could do except watch him go.

  “You know what I did on the day of his funeral? I watched Cosmos, the Neil deGrasse Tyson one, in its entirety. Thirteen hours of it. He’d been trying to get me to watch it for months, and I’d kept calling him a nerd for being so into space. It was the only way I knew how to mourn him. To be awed by the universe and remember that even though his consciousness was gone, every single molecule of him was still here.” She took my face in her hands and pressed her damp forehead to mine. “I wish you could see the world the way I see the world. See that death is the reward for having lived.”

  “Please don’t talk like that. You scare me when you talk like that.”

  “I don’t mean it in any suicidal sense,” she said, and she was whispering even quieter now, like she was telling me a terrible secret. “You know how you sometimes have the most exhausting day and you can’t wait to get home and fall into bed and sleep for hours? I feel that way about life. There are people out there who read books about vampires and they crave immortality, but sometimes I’m so thankful that at the end of it all, we get to sleep forever. No more pain. No more exhaustion. Death is the reward for having lived.”

  “We need to get you home,” I said, and this time she did not protest. Instead, Grace reached behind her to where a small metal box was sitting on the steps. Inside it was an assortment of things from Dom’s shrine: the anchor necklace she’d worn the first day I saw her, the Strokes keychain, the Ramones shirt she hadn’t been able to wash. She stood and took my hand and led me back into the pond, her limp barely discernable in the water, where we held hands, our breaths bright white and blooming in the cold, as she released him piece by piece into the depths. The last thing to go was the box itself: DOM GRADE 10 had been scratched into the side. We watched it sink amid a flurry of silver bodies to come to rest on the debris-strewn floor at our feet.

  I wondered, as I watched her, if this was what redemption looked like. If this was something like absolution of sin, and now that she’d forgiven herself—if she had forgiven herself—if she could move on. But Grace caught me looking at her and said, as though she could read my mind: “Stories with happy endings are just stories that haven’t finished yet.”

  Then she waded through the water and ascended the stairs wearing my jacket and her white dress, the latter of which clung, damp and sheer, to all the curves of her body. She walked out of the train station and up the hill and climbed the hedge and fence barefoot, and when we got to my car, she stripped to her underwear in the street and threw her dress in the gutter.

  “I was going to marry him in that,” she said flatly, staring at the sopping pile of wet lace. “I’d already said yes.” Then, trembling, she got into the car and put on her seat belt and drew her knees to her chest, alive but empty, her hair wreathed in flowers like a walking grave.

  • • •

  We didn’t speak on the drive back to her place. I cranked the heat so Grace could warm up, but even though her skin was rashed with goose bumps, she sat perfectly still, a statue of a fallen angel.

  All the lights in the house were on when we arrived. Martin and his wife Mary and Grace’s mom and two cops were standing on the front lawn. They moved toward the car as I slowed, but Grace shook her head and held up her hand to stop them and they slowed and waited and watched.

  Grace turned to me. “I killed their son, and as a reward, they’re paying my medical bills and letting me live in their house. That’s part of the reason why I can’t be with you. I can’t . . . spit in their faces like that. I can’t watch their son die next to me and then let myself fall in love with someone else a few months later. You understand?” I did understand, sort of, but sort of understanding didn’t make it any easier. Would Dom’s parents really not want her to move on? Would they really want her to be in so much pain as some sort of sick repayment for what she thought she’d done?

  I’d asked her that first night at the abandoned train station what sins she needed absolved, and here was the truth, finally. “You think you deserve to be sad. You think you’re working off some kind of cosmic debt by torturing yourself. You think this is your redemption.”

  “I feel less guilty and less shit about myself when I’m sad than when I’m happy. It’s the least I can do for Dom and his parents. Don’t you get that? It’s the only justice I can offer.”

  “So you’ve handed yourself down a prison sentence. For how long? A year? Two years? The rest of your life? How much pain do you have to put yourself through before you’ve repaid your debt?”

  “At least a little bit more.”

  “Jesus. It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t kill him. It was an accident.”

  Grace took off her seat belt then and tucked her hair behind her ears and leaned over and kissed me, her almost-bare breasts pressed against my chest. I held her jaw in my hand and she worked her fingers into my hair, and for a few moments, the world was better, even if it was so fucking broken. But then she pulled away, the way she always did, and looked at me like she was trying to tell me something she couldn’t find the words to say.

  “Why did you kiss me?” I said to her quietly, because I really, truly didn’t understand. “That first night. Why did you kiss me if you knew you’d never be able to let him go?”

  “You don’t want to know,” whispered Grace. “You don’t want to know that.”

  “I do. I have to.”

  “Because I was drunk and you were there and I missed him.” Grace shook her head. “God, how can you still look at me like that after everything I’ve put you through?” she whispered.

  “Because I’m in love with you.” There seemed to be no point in hiding it anymore. No shame in saying the words first. It was true. I didn’t know the exact point when I’d moved from wanting her to loving her, but I had.

  “You don’t know wha
t love is, Henry,” she said, in the same tone you’d use to tell someone they’re an idiot. “You don’t even know who I am. You have a teenage crush. That’s all.”

  I didn’t say anything. I inhaled deeply and turned my head and stared out the window as Grace gathered her wet shoes and got out of the car wearing nothing but her underwear and my jacket. “Good night,” she said, but I only nodded, because I couldn’t speak.

  Then Martin and Mary and her mom were hugging her and the cops were escorting her inside out of the cold, back into the house where she had to work off her debt to her dead boyfriend’s parents, and I was left alone in the dark.

  I wondered if she really believed she could make herself and the Sawyers feel better by letting her sorrow infect her, or if she just loved the pain. Loved the grief. I wondered if she let herself feel it in every one of her many billions of atoms because she truly, deeply thought she deserved it.

  I messaged my mom to let her know Grace was safe but that I wouldn’t be home for a while. Then I drove to the place I’d been avoiding for months now, the place that’d lodged in the back of my mind like a burr but that I hadn’t realized I wanted to visit until tonight.

  • • •

  The cemetery wasn’t as frightening as I thought it would be. There was no mist, no wolfish howls echoing from the distance, no swooping crows. I walked through the rows of graves quickly at first, jumping at every sound, but eventually I relaxed. I found Dom where I’d seen Grace kneeling a few months earlier. There were still flowers all over his grave, some older, their petals pulled away in the breeze, but fresh ones, too, garlands of them. She’d never stopped coming here. Even when she said she’d try, she never had.

  The inscription on his gravestone was simple. The three lines read:

  Dominic Henry Sawyer

  Aged 17

  “If love could have saved you, you would have lived forever.”