Heartbeat

by Elizabeth Scott

  I spy a family.

  I miss Mom so much.

  “I’m going to hang out with Emma,” Olivia says. “She can spend the night, right?”

  “Sure,” Olivia’s dad says. “Is it okay with Dan?”

  I nod.

  “Do you need anything?” Olivia’s mom says, and I shake my head because what I need isn’t something anyone can give me. She looks at Olivia, kisses the top of her head, and then leaves, turning to the beeping gadget in her hand. Her dad grabs a package of crackers and wanders out, eating them one-handed as he starts to look at the cube again.

  Some people think Olivia’s hatred of technology is an act, like she’s pretending or whatever. But she really does hate it. It’s not so much because of her parents—although I think that’s part of it—as it’s what she doesn’t want her life to be. She thinks it’s sad that people would rather talk without ever seeing each other.

  “I just think life should be lived, you know?” she’s said to me more than once. “And how can all the talking with a keyboard ever be like actually talking to someone? It can’t. People need each other.”

  “I don’t know,” I always said. “I think it just makes life bigger. People are closer, actually.”

  “I’d rather have an actual talk with my mom instead of having her send me messages,” she’d say. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Sometimes,” I’d say, and she’d say, “Okay, fine,” but I get what she’s saying now. Mom and I talked like everyone else does, in person and over the phone and in all the ways you can, but now that she’s gone, I miss talking to her for real. Hearing her.

  I could call her cell phone and hear her voice mail, but it wouldn’t be her. I could send her an email and get back the “I’ll be in soon!” message she put up before she left work, but it wouldn’t be her either. I would just hear and see electronic ghosts, and I already have a live one to face every day.

  I call Dan from Olivia’s room.

  “Hi,” I say when he answers. “I’m spending the night at Olivia’s. I’ll come home in the morning to get a ride to school.”

  “I don’t know,” Dan says. “What about your homework? You left your bag in the car. Plus we still haven’t talked about what happened—”

  “There’s nothing to say. You want a name. You pick it out.”

  “Emma, your mother would be so sad to hear you talk like this.”

  “She can’t be sad though, can she?” I say. “She’s dead. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  And then I hang up.

  He doesn’t call back. I know he won’t. I know that despite everything he says, he knows what he’s done. That he saw Mom die and made his choice.

  He saw her die, and he still went ahead and decided that the baby was worth more than Mom and how scared she’d been about the pregnancy. About dying.

  And he didn’t even ask me what I thought. Not about Mom. Not about the baby.

  Not once.

  He just decided the baby was worth everything.

  10

  I wake up in the middle of the night and I can’t fall back to sleep because I remember the day Mom came home with the official news that she was pregnant. Dan was with her and he was smiling so hard I thought his face must hurt. I’d never seen anyone so happy.

  Mom didn’t look like Dan did, and when he ran up to the nursery to get the sketches he’d been doing, she sat down at the kitchen table.

  “Hey,” I said. “So what’s it like to be knocked up?”

  “Scary,” she said, and then bit her lip. “I just...I’m not young like I was with you, Emma. It was easy then. I never thought about what could happen. How I might lose you.”

  “Where am I going?”

  “You know what I mean,” she said. “Being pregnant is risky. And it’s really risky for me.”

  “Yeah, but you’re disgustingly healthy. That clot didn’t even slow you down even though you were supposed to rest. It’s like when Dan and I got the flu. What did you get? Nothing. Not even a cough.”

  “You two were the worst,” she said. “Couldn’t even have a fever at the same time, but what can I say? I love you.”

  “What’s that?” Dan said, coming into the room.

  “The flu,” Mom said. “Remember?”

  “How could I forget?” Dan said. “Emma and I suffered, and you never even coughed.”

  “That’s what I said!” I said and Dan grinned at me. I looked over at Mom. She was staring at the kitchen table, but she wasn’t looking at it. It was like she was looking at something far away.

  “Mom?”

  “Hey,” she said, blinking and looking at me. “I spy a family.”

  “Yeah, you do. Three, soon to be four.” I grinned at her.

  She blinked again. “I think I’d better go sit down. I don’t want to take any chances.”

  “Oh honey,” Dan said. “You’re already sitting down.”

  “I mean somewhere...I just...” Mom trailed off.

  “Everything’s going to be fine,” Dan said.

  “Promise?” Mom said, and her voice was shaking a little.

  “Promise,” Dan said and kissed her.

  I smiled and said, “You guys,” like I always had, like I thought I always would and the thing is, Mom was scared.

  She was scared and I didn’t see it. Not like I should have. I just thought it was the idea of the baby or the fact that she was over forty or maybe even giving birth itself, which sure didn’t sound like fun to me.

  But now I think Mom knew. I think that somehow, she knew that something was going to happen to us. That something was going to break our family.

  I grit my teeth and close my eyes. I don’t want to think about this anymore.

  I stare at Olivia’s dark ceiling and remember Caleb Harrison looking at me. Asking me what my problem was, and then staring at me and Mom and her stomach and then Dan and me.

  I think about what I saw in his eyes before I looked away.

  Anger.

  And, weirdly, understanding.

  11

  I get back to the house in the morning and find Dan sitting in the kitchen, hunched over a stack of papers. He’s still there when I come back from showering and getting dressed.

  “I need a ride,” I say, looking at the muffins he’s made, which are cooling on the counter. Chocolate chip, my favorite.

  I ignore my stomach’s rumbling.

  Dan looks at me.

  “Do you want a muffin?”

  “No. I need a ride, like I said.”

  “I’d still pick you up after school even if you’d gone with Olivia,” he says. “I know how much you want to see—”

  “I’ll be in the car,” I say, cutting him off. Having Dan take me to school sucks, but I want him to remember that I’m still here because after what happened to Mom, what’s to stop him from deciding I’d be better off somewhere else? Maybe he really would ship me off to some boarding school or worse, Mom’s parents. Not that I know they’d take me, which makes it even crappier.

  Dan comes out in a few minutes, shuffle-walking like he’s an old man.

  “I need to tell you something,” he says when we’re on the road. “It’s about your mother’s hospital bills.”

  That stops my worry fast, fast, fast. “Let me guess. Someone else is paying them.”

  He blinks. “How did you know?”

  “I saw the stack. How else could you?”

  “I—well, I’ve been working, or trying to, but I’ll never earn enough to pay for the house and everything plus your mother’s care.”

  I look away from him, stare out the window. “Her care?”

  “Yes,” he says, and I rest my head against the glass because he sounds
like he means it, he really does. He really thinks that what he’s done is caring. “Luckily, some people have set up a fund. It’s for the baby and your mother.”

  Something in his voice makes my stomach hurt, like it’s being twisted around and then shoved up toward my throat. “And what do they want in return?”

  “There’s a court case in Florida. A woman just passed away. She was pregnant and her husband wants to try to save the baby, but her parents—”

  “Let me guess, her husband wants you to talk to them,” I say, cutting him off. “Or are you going to talk in court about what you’ve done?” I turn to stare at him, and Dan’s cheeks blaze bright red.

  “It’s not that simple,” he says slowly. “He wants the baby, and her parents—”

  “Fine. You should go down there and cry and say how sorry you are about Mom, how much you loved her, and how you’re only trying to keep your little boy alive. Throw in something about how you know Mom would be so proud of you, covering your pain to focus on the baby.”

  “I am in pain,” he says, his voice cracking. “I loved her, and I’ll love her forever. I understand that you don’t want to hear this, but your mother wanted this baby, and I know she’d—”

  “She’s dead! You can’t ask her what she thinks or how she feels and you never, ever did. You remember her being pregnant and happy. You don’t remember how scared she was. You don’t remember how things really were.”

  “I do, and—”

  “She knew,” I say. “She knew something was going to happen. You don’t remember how she looked when she had to go on bed rest. You don’t remember how she’d just sit in her chair at night and hold her stomach like she knew it was going to break her. But you know what? I do. And I get to see what broke her every day. I get to see it and you want it and you’ll get it and I hope...”

  I trail off because Dan has pulled over, stopped on the side of the road, and is staring at me, white-faced.

  “You hope what?”

  “I hope she forgives you,” I say, but that’s not what I was going to say and we both know it.

  Dan blows out a breath and pulls back onto the road. His hands are shaking on the steering wheel. He doesn’t say another word until we’re at school.

  “Your mother would be ashamed of you,” he says quietly. “Be angry at me, Emma, but don’t ever be angry at your bro—”

  I get out of the car and slam the door shut on him. His words.

  He’s right, though. Mom would be shocked by what I almost said. By what I was thinking.

  Mom was terrified of the pregnancy, but she loved Dan. She wanted to make him happy, and I know she would be sad to see how things are between us now. That she would tell me not to blame anyone, that things happen and choices are made.

  She would tell me hate only destroys.

  I know this because she did.

  “Hate almost killed me after your father died,” she told me once, when I was nine and decided I wanted to know everything about him. “I was so angry, Emma. Angry at your father for driving in the rain. Angry at him for not somehow knowing that there was going to be an accident. About a month afterward, I was sitting alone, just staring at nothing, and I was hit with this wave of...” She trailed off.

  “I went to his books—I’d boxed them all up because I couldn’t bear to see them,” she said after a moment. “I opened a box and got one out. I sat down with it and just started ripping the pages out. If he’d seen me, he’d have been so horrified. But he couldn’t. And I thought ‘Good, that’s what you get for leaving me.’ I missed him so much, I loved him so much, and yet I hated him for being gone.”

  “You hated him?”

  She nodded.

  “Were you...were you sorry that you...?”

  “Oh, no,” Mom said. “Never. You were the best thing that ever happened to me. But even knowing that, I would look at you when you were little and know he’d never see all the things you were able to do. I knew that he’d want to be there. But he wasn’t and I hated that and I hated him for it too, and the hate was so...it was like a pit, Emma. I couldn’t ever see the bottom of it and I finally realized if I didn’t stop, it would take over my whole life.”

  “You really hated him?”

  Mom looked at me. “When someone you love...when they die, you want it undone. You’d do anything to have them back, and it’s easy to believe that if only this had happened or that had happened, everything would be fine. And that’s what makes you angry. What makes you hate. You don’t want to believe that sometimes bad things happen just because they do.”

  “Mom, I’m sorry,” I whisper now as I step into school, and I hope she hears me. That she forgives me. That she can help me find a way to untangle the knot of hate in my heart, because it’s there.

  It’s there, and I feel it.

  It’s there, and I can’t make it go away. I understand what she meant now about the edge and how hate can take over everything. I see it. I feel it.

  But I don’t know how to stop it.

  And the one person who could, the one person who’d be able to pull me back, is gone.

  12

  I’m in a pretty bad mood when Olivia finds me, and she takes one look at my face and wordlessly hands me a rubber band. Olivia’s mom is a worrier who had a pretty messed-up childhood, and she always wears a rubber band around one wrist so that when she feels a burst of worry or a bad memory coming on, she can snap it against her skin and remind herself that she’s here.

  I put the rubber band on and give it a good yank. It stings—a lot—but I don’t feel better. I already know I’m here. I already know what’s on my mind.

  Anger.

  I’m starting to get scared at how angry I am, though. At how, when I try to find a way out, even for a second, I can’t.

  I snap the rubber band again as Olivia opens her locker. Still nothing. I do it again, and again, and then the band breaks, falls off my wrist and to the floor.

  I stare at it. Someone steps right on it, and then it’s gone, trampled off down the hall.

  I look at my wrist. There’s a red welt on it.

  My mother has marks on her skin from the tubes and needles. She has to be turned and moved so her skin won’t get sores.

  “Okay, that clearly didn’t work,” Olivia says, grabbing my arm as she closes her locker door. “Come on, we gotta get you to your locker before classes start.”

  “I left my books in Dan’s car,” I say, and look around as Olivia says something about finding a notebook for me to take to class.

  I see people walking by. Fast, slow, laughing, frowning. So normal. I hate that too.

  And then I see Caleb Harrison standing by a locker, staring at me. I see him look at my wrist, at my face, and I can’t see anyone walking by anymore.

  He saw me yesterday. He saw me with Mom yesterday.

  He knows something’s wrong with me.

  “Here,” Olivia says, sticking a notebook into my hands just as the bell rings. “See you later.”

  I nod. What happened to Mom isn’t a secret, but the whole baby thing never really got much attention. I thought it would—I thought it would pull in the nighttime reporters, the ones who are seen on TV everywhere—but it didn’t. There were a couple of things locally, sandwiched in between stories about allegations surrounding the governor, but that was it.

  “Death...and life,” they always said, like my mother and what happened to her could be boiled down into three words and a pause.

  Some people in my classes said they were sorry or asked how I felt, but that was right after it happened, and when I didn’t break down and scream, when I kept coming to school, things went back to how they’d always been. Who was applying where, who needed what SAT score, who was going to hire someone to help them write their entrance e
ssay and who was stressing out and how badly it would screw their grades.

  On the news, there were murders and robberies and local sports heroes and possible rain showers.

  That was it.

  Mom got five days. Five days in the local news. Five days when people talked about her. When they noticed she was gone, when they asked questions, but those days passed. It was enough time for them but not for me, and it still isn’t. The thirty-day mark since she died looms in front of me because if she makes it till then, if she stays dead but her body is still alive, chances are her body will hold out long enough for the baby to—I can’t think about this, not now. I don’t want to think about it at all. I don’t want to think about anything.

  Except, as I head to class I wonder why Caleb Harrison was staring at me.

  What he sees that no one else seems to.

  13

  “You haven’t turned in your New Deal paper,” Anthony says to me in second period, just before the teacher starts talking.

  I shrug. A month ago, Anthony would have been telling me his paper was longer or had more sources. Six months ago, he would have said the same thing and I would have said, “And we’ll see who gets the better grade, won’t we?” and he would have responded, “Emma, your competitive streak worries me,” and I’d have said, “I know it does,” and think we were flirting.

  That’s really what I thought. I thought Anthony—so determined to get into the right school, to be king of everything—was the guy. The boyfriend who could be mine if only I could get him to notice me.

  I was wrong, but I didn’t know that until after I’d made the disastrous mistake of hooking up with him.

  It was four months ago, I think. I used to know it to the day, even to the hour, but I don’t now.

  We’d been working on a project for Advanced Chemistry together, doing an experiment on chemical compounds and reactions at night, just me and him with our chemistry teacher down the hall in his office snoring so loudly we could hear him.