My Heart and Other Black Holes

  A small smile creeps across my face. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Have a good day.” The phone clicks off.

  I shove my phone back into my pocket and push my car seat down so I can lie flat on my back. The sun is peeking out from behind the clouds and it splashes against my face. I need to talk to Mom about Dad.

  I imagine visiting him. I wonder if he’ll be in white scrubs. Or worse, in chains. I squint and try to picture his face, but all I can see is the man I remember. The man who would never have beaten a boy to death with a baseball bat. Maybe we all have darkness inside of us and some of us are better at dealing with it than others.

  What my dad did was wrong, awful, inexcusable, but maybe there’s still hope for him. Maybe if he can get the help he needs, they’ll be able to resurrect the man who taught me about Bach’s toccata and slept in the chair in my room when I was afraid of the dark.

  And if there’s still hope for my dad, there has to still be hope for me. Maybe it’s true that he and I have the same black slug inside of us, but it’s up to me to conquer it. I owe that to my dad. I owe that to myself.

  I adjust the car seat back to its normal position and put the key in the ignition. I need to talk to Mom. As I pull out of the school parking lot, I make a promise to myself: I will be stronger than my sadness.

  I will do my best to become the girl from Roman’s drawing. The girl with the bright eyes. The girl with hope.

  MONDAY, APRIL 1

  6 days left

  When I get home, Mom is at the sink peeling potatoes. I make my way to the cupboard and sort through the junk, trying to find a chocolate-chip granola bar.

  “Aysel,” she says, giving me a tiny wave.

  I turn to face her, holding the empty box of granola bars. “Mike always takes the last one and he never throws the box away. It’s annoying.”

  Mom smiles weakly. Her light brown hair is pulled back into a loose braid. When her hair is like that, exposing her wide forehead and angled cheekbones, she looks more like Georgia than normal. She puts down the potato peeler and dries her hands. “Can we talk?”

  Looks like she’s not going to answer me about the granola bars. I set the box down on the kitchen table. “Sure.”

  “TMC called today. Mr. Palmer was wondering where you were. You missed a shift on Saturday and you were supposed to work today, too?” She sounds so uncertain, like she’s afraid to reprimand me.

  She’s right, though. I have been blowing off work. I guess I figured that if I was going to die, it wasn’t so important to hold on to my job. Money is worthless to a dead person. But the thing is, even if I don’t jump from Crestville Pointe, I’m pretty sure I never want to work at TMC again.

  “I’m quitting my job,” I say.

  “What?” she says in a calm and measured voice.

  “You can yell at me,” I say. “I’m not him, you know? I may be like him, but I don’t have to turn out the same way.” I feel a heaviness building behind my eyes. I do my best to blink away the tears.

  My mom recoils like I’ve just slapped her. She brings her hand to her cheek. “Oh, Aysel. Oh, sweetie.” She reaches out for me.

  I let her hug me, but I don’t hug back. I collapse against her and feel her stiffen as she holds my body’s weight.

  She takes my hand and leads me to her bedroom. I haven’t been in this room since I moved in. It’s the master bedroom of the house, but that isn’t saying much. It’s not that much bigger than the room Georgia and I share. I notice a few of Steve’s dirty shirts on the floor in the corner, but besides that, it looks like Mom works hard to keep this space clean. It’s her one sanctuary away from the messy storm that is the rest of the house.

  We take a seat on her bed. My palms press against the floral comforter. I stare down at it. The threads are fraying, making the roses look like they’re fuzzy and bleeding. I pick at one of the loose strands.

  She pulls away from me so she can look me in the eye. “Aysel,” she says, “you’re nothing like him.”

  I can feel my heart pounding and it feels so heavy and big and I wonder if it’s the only thing the black slug has left me. Like the rest of my insides are empty, and all that’s left is my lonely, beating heart. “But I am like him.”

  She touches my hand lightly. “What do you mean?”

  My breathing is shaky and I take a few gulps to try to steady myself. “I’m sad, Mom. I’m sad all the time. And I think he was, too.”

  “Oh, sweetie,” she says in a heavy voice. I finally look up at her and see that her eyes are misty and bloodshot. “You should have told me. Why didn’t you come to me sooner?”

  I hang my head, pressing my chin to my chest. “I was scared—” My voice breaks and I taste the salty tears building in my throat. “I was terrified you’d send me away. Or worse, that I’d cause more problems for you. You don’t deserve more problems.”

  Mom pulls me close to her again. We rock back and forth in silence. She lets go of me and wipes her face. “I don’t know how to explain this, Aysel, but I think I’ve never tried to talk with you about all of this because I was terrified of saying the wrong thing.” She pauses for a moment and her lips twitch like she’s about to say something, but she doesn’t.

  “Mom?”

  She sighs. “I guess I still don’t know what I want to say. Or what I should say. You know, when you were younger, I used to see you standing by yourself under the tree in the front yard of the elementary school wearing that blue windbreaker jacket your dad had bought you. The one with little yellow ducks all over it. Remember?”

  I do remember. She continues, “I would be there to pick up Georgia and I knew that your father was coming to get you, but I could never shake the feeling that there was something I should do for you. You looked so lonely, even then. I wanted to get out of the car and hug you, talk to you, but I never did. And then when everything with your father happened, I let my fear overwhelm me even more. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I should’ve been stronger for you.”

  She reaches for my hands, but I move away from her grasp. Tears dribble down my cheek and I blot them with the sleeve of my shirt. I clear my throat. “I want to visit Dad.”

  She doesn’t say anything. She stares at the floor.

  “Mom, I really want to see him. I think it would help me.”

  “He’s not in prison anymore,” she says slowly, reaching for my hand. This time I let her grab it. She gives it a squeeze. “They moved him to a psychiatric hospital.”

  “I know.”

  She jerks her head up. “What?”

  “I tried to visit him at McGreavy and they told me he’d been moved. And I need you to go with me to be allowed to visit him at Saint Anne’s.”

  She brings her hand to her lips and makes a fist, lightly biting on her knuckles.

  “So will you take me?” I press.

  She takes a deep breath and slowly reaches over and runs her hand through the back of my hair, the way I’ve seen her do to Georgia and thought she’d never do to me again. “I’m not sure that’s the best idea, but I’ll look into it and see what we can arrange.”

  “Promise?”

  She grabs my hands. “Promise. But I’m also going to need you to do something for me.”

  “What?”

  Our hands are locked together in a tight grip and she gives them a squeeze. “Talk to me about your sadness, Aysel. Do you need to see someone?”

  I look away from her. “I don’t know.”

  For as long as I can remember, I’ve been terrified of telling anyone about my sadness because I thought for sure they’d see it as proof that I had inherited my father’s insanity. But now, I realize that I’ll never be able to change what my dad did or the fact I wasn’t there that afternoon to try to stop him. Every day, I will wake up and he’ll still be responsible for the death of Timothy Jackson.

  And maybe the black slug will always live inside of me. Maybe I’ll always have bad days where the heaviness seems unbear
able. But as cheesy as it sounds, maybe the good days will make it worth getting through the bad ones.

  For too long, I’ve made my past my future, afraid to imagine anything else. And I acted like that—static—afraid of my own kinetic energy. Maybe it’s time to start imagining, maybe it’s time to be in motion. Maybe it’s time for me to fight back against the sadness inside of me.

  I wonder if it’s possible to make Roman understand that. Make him see that my change of heart isn’t about flaking out; it’s about fighting back. I’m going to have to find the courage to finally be honest with him.

  “Can I think about it?” I finally say.

  “Sure,” she says. “But even if you don’t talk to a professional right away, you have to promise to keep talking to me. You can’t keep all of this hidden inside of you, Aysel. Not anymore.”

  “I know,” I say, and lean into her again. I breathe in her floral perfume and it reminds me of when I was younger, before the heaviness inside me became so overwhelming, so unbearable. I wonder if that’s how darkness wins, by convincing us to trap it inside ourselves, instead of emptying it out.

  I don’t want it to win.

  WEDNESDAY, APRIL 3

  4 days left

  In English, we’ve moved on from talking about depressed American poets to our unit on Paradise Lost. I guess we’re just hopping across the pond, shifting our focus from depressed American poets to depressed English ones.

  Mrs. Marks is in love with John Milton. She keeps clutching the book to her chest, like it’s a baby and one of us is going to rip it from her hands and run away with it. Apparently she had to fight for years to be allowed to teach it, and she still acts like any second the superintendent is going to come in and shut the whole thing down.

  She’s pacing around the classroom. That’s her thing. She has us sit in a horseshoe and she spends the whole class doing laps around us. “As you know by now, I’m a sucker for a great quote. A clever turn of phrase.”

  A few people in the class snicker at her use of “sucker.” I rub my eyes, trying my best to stay awake. The classroom is hot and stuffy, and I can hardly ever pay attention to Mrs. Marks even when the classroom is a normal temperature. I check the clock. Thirteen more minutes until the bell rings and I get to go to physics.

  “And, as much as I love me some John Berryman and Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg, I’m partial to English poetry,” she says to the sound of more groans. The American poetry unit wasn’t that popular. Surprise, surprise. “And John Milton might have the distinct honor of having penned my favorite quote of all time.”

  She stops doing laps and walks to the whiteboard. She grabs a blue marker and scrawls: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” She reads the quote aloud and then says, “Can anyone tell me what Milton meant by that?”

  The class goes completely silent. No groans. I reread the quote and the words echo in my head. For the first time all year, I flip open my English notebook in the middle of class. It’s mostly empty, except for where I wrote down the homework assignments. On the top of a blank page, I copy down the quote.

  “Aysel?” Mrs. Marks says.

  I can’t believe she’s calling on me. She never calls on me. I thought we had some kind of unspoken agreement.

  I shrug and quietly say, “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, come on.” She taps the end of her marker against the whiteboard. “I see you’re writing something down. You must have some thoughts about it. Give it your best guess.”

  I take a deep breath and read the quote for the third time. The quote makes my brain feel like someone’s plugged it into the wall and given it a spark of energy. “It reminds me of Einstein.”

  After I say that, the class goes back to snickering and groaning.

  “Silence,” Mrs. Marks hushes everyone. “Go on, Aysel.”

  I know it’s in my best interest to stop talking. A week ago, I would have done just that. But now, I feel like there’s something in me that can’t stay quiet anymore. “What I was trying to say is that it reminds me of Einstein’s theory of relativity. But obviously Milton isn’t talking about the speed of light, he’s talking about how the human mind views life.”

  Mrs. Marks is nodding encouragingly, so I continue. “But really, Milton and Einstein were kind of saying the same thing. That everything is subjective in the human mind. Our emotions, our opinions, they’re all relative. It all depends on perspective.”

  “Excellent, Aysel,” she says. “You should participate more.”

  And to my surprise, there are no whispers. No hushed insults. The room is quiet, and Mrs. Marks goes back to yammering on and on about Paradise Lost. She assigns us our pages to read for homework and then the bell rings. As I’m leaving her classroom, Mrs. Marks gives me a small thumbs-up. I nod at her, smiling with my eyes. I hurry down the hallway so I can get to physics before everyone else arrives. I’m practically out of breath by the time I reach Mr. Scott’s classroom.

  “Whoa, Aysel,” he says, holding his hands up above his head. “No need to run.”

  “Sorry,” I pant. I catch my breath. “I just wanted to ask if I could still apply for that summer program.”

  His lips spread into a huge grin. “Yeah. The deadline isn’t until May first. There’s still time for you to put together your application.” He walks over to his desk and opens one of the drawers. He pulls out another copy of the brochure and hands it to me. “Just in case you lost the other one.” He winks at me.

  I think about telling him that I still have the other one he gave me. That the glossy pictures are smudged now because I’ve spent so much time flipping through the brochure. Trying to imagine myself as one of those smiling kids, wearing goggles too big for my face, peering into a microscope or building a bridge out of toothpicks.

  I still can’t really see myself that way, but I can imagine the possibility of it. Scratch that. I can feel the potential of it, deep down in my gut.

  But I don’t tell Mr. Scott any of that. I take the second brochure from him and smile. “Thanks.”

  I’m walking to my desk when he says, “Oh hey, Aysel?”

  “Yeah?” I turn around.

  “How’s your project coming along? I’m excited to see what you and Tyler came up with.”

  I think back to the trip to the zoo. It seems like years ago. “We’ll be ready by the tenth.”

  Mr. Scott smiles. “Good, I’m looking forward to it.”

  THURSDAY, APRIL 4

  3 days left

  I drive to Roman’s house. I texted him to let him know I was coming. He didn’t answer, but sometimes he’s slow to respond.

  I picture him in his room. Flopped down, belly-up, staring at Captain Nemo, absently sketching, his pencil making light marks across the paper. I wonder if he and Captain Nemo sit in silence all day or if Roman talks to him. I wonder if Roman ever talks to him about me. I wish I could get Captain Nemo to divulge all of Roman’s secrets.

  I grip the steering wheel and remind myself that I don’t need anyone to tell me Roman’s secrets. That I’m going to make him talk to me. Because I’m going to be honest about everything. I take my eyes off the road for a second and glance at the passenger seat, where I tossed a book I bought called Exploring North Carolina’s Beaches. I figure I’ll start by selling him on the road trip to the ocean and hope the rest will come naturally.

  Roman still hasn’t answered my text by the time I pull into his driveway. I sit in the car for a couple of moments, staring at the familiar butterscotch-colored mailbox. I text him again and when he still doesn’t respond, I try calling. No answer.

  I jump forward in the driver’s seat when I hear the front door of his house open but relax once I see it’s his mom. I step out of the car and wave at her.

  “Aysel,” she says as she walks toward me. She’s wearing a pink sweater and her daisy-print clogs. “What are you doing here?” Her chestnut-colored hair is pulled up into a topknot. It ma
kes her look younger than usual.

  I give her an apologetic smile. “Oh, I was in the neighborhood and wanted to see if Roman was home. Last week, we’d talked about hanging out today.”

  Mrs. Franklin frowns, drawing her eyebrows together. “Roman isn’t home.”

  “Really?” I try not to sound completely shocked. I thought he never left the house, unless it was with me.

  “Yeah. He told me he was going to your house.”

  I feel my jaw go slack. “What?”

  She wraps her arms around herself like she’s suddenly very cold. “Yeah, he asked for permission to borrow my car to go to your house. I’m not sure if you know, but Roman hasn’t been allowed to drive for some time. But it seems like he’s been getting so much better, hanging out with you, and so I thought . . .” She trails off.

  A horrible thought hits me with the force of a tsunami. I feel like I’m drowning as I manage to sputter, “Can I go upstairs?”

  She pauses, staring at me, a confused expression on her face. But then her eyes bulge and she runs toward the house. I follow her.

  She speeds through the kitchen, pushing a chair out of the way. It collides with the kitchen counter, causing a teacup to fall from the edge and shatter. I hop over the shards and I’m right behind Mrs. Franklin as she darts up the steps.

  We race upstairs and my heart lifts when I see the door to Roman’s room is open. Maybe he’s inside. Maybe he’s just wearing headphones, listening to his terrible music, zoning out and forgetting the world.

  Mrs. Franklin stops in the doorway. She raises her hand to her heart and lets out a deep wheezing breath. My feet feel like they are two anchors, weighing me down, but I force them to move and I enter his room.

  The hairs on my arms stand at attention and I get a sudden, sinking feeling as I take in the empty room. I turn to look at Mrs. Franklin and her face is neutral, almost relieved. I scan the room, searching for any sign of him.

  The bed is unmade, the beige comforter crumpled in a messy pile at the end. There’s a dent in the pillow. I walk over to it and press my hand against it.