Heartbeat

  Olivia and I glance at each other. If Anthony is the ass end of the smart part of the school, Caleb Harrison is the ass end of the stupid part. He’s a total druggie and three years ago, when we were freshmen, he came to school so high he couldn’t even talk. I heard that stopped last year, but then, as soon as school got out, his parents sent him off to some “tough love camp,” which is rich-people code for boot-camp rehab.

  He came back seemingly off drugs but newly into stealing cars. He started by grabbing them at the mall and parking them in a different spot, but then he stole a teacher’s car.

  And then he graduated to a school bus. It was empty at the time, but still, I heard that got him a couple of weeks in juvie, or would have except for his parents, who intervened. I guess now he’s taken yet another step forward and by lunchtime, I know what Caleb stole.

  His father’s brand-new, limited-edition Porsche. And he didn’t just steal it. He drove it into the lake over by the park, drove right off the highway and into the water. The police found him sitting on the lake’s edge, watching the car sink. They were able to pull it out, but water apparently isn’t good for the inside of a Porsche.

  “You think he’ll go to jail this time?” Olivia asks as we sit picking at our lunches. I love that we have lunch together this semester, but it’s the first lunch block, and it’s hard to face food—especially cafeteria food—at 10:20 in the morning.

  “I guess it depends on his parents,” I say. “Last time they talked to the judge or whatever. They’ll probably just ship him off again. He must hate them, though.”

  “Yeah. To sit by the lake and watch the car sink like that—”

  “Exactly.”

  “Even when my parents are sucking their lives away with all their computer crap, I’d never do anything like mess with their stuff,” she says. “How can you hate someone who raised you, who loves you so—” She breaks off.

  “Dan didn’t raise me,” I say tightly. “And he doesn’t love me. Or Mom.”

  Olivia nods and I think about hate. I understand what can make someone do what Caleb did, although I don’t think a bored, rich druggie really gets hate. Not real hate.

  I do, though. If there were something I could do to Dan that would hurt him, I’d do it.

  4

  The rest of school is like school always is. I sit, I pretend to listen, avoid my AP History teacher’s attempt to try to talk to me after class and wait for the final bell to ring.

  I used to like school. I was the person—along with Anthony—who got A’s on everything and so wrecked any possible grading curve. I did extra credit assignments for fun. I went out and did research about authors we were going to read. I learned about minor historical figures we’d discussed in passing.

  Last summer, I audited a biology class at the community college to make sure everything I’d learned in Advanced Bio stayed in my head. I was going to do the same thing with chemistry this summer, and maybe something in literature too.

  I was a great student. The kind of student everyone hates, actually. I didn’t make friends in my classes, I had acquaintances that I blew away at everything, but I didn’t care. I wanted great grades, the best grades, and I had Olivia, who was in regular classes and who knew there was a list of the top one hundred colleges out there but had no idea which was number one. Or eight. Or forty.

  I knew what the number one school was, and I knew I couldn’t go there because one year of tuition cost an amount that was enough to support a family (or possibly two) for that year and they were stingy with scholarships, but I wanted a scholarship to one in the top ten. I wanted to be the best, not just for the scholarship I’d need to go to a great college, but because I could be.

  A lot of the time, I was. The best, I mean.

  At school, anyway. Personally, my social life was...well, it was pretty poor. A few kisses at a few parties. Anthony.

  Very poor, really.

  I didn’t mind. My dad—my real dad—was a history professor, and I wanted to be like him. Ever since I was little, that’s what I wanted. To be what my dad was. To see my mother’s face when I got my PhD in history.

  I don’t care about school at all now. I sit in class and if I get called on, I say, “I don’t know.” I don’t do my homework and the leeway I got at first is gone. I’m getting F’s on quizzes. On tests. I’m still ignored by my classmates, but now it’s because I’ve fallen so far behind I’ll never get back to where I was. I’m no threat anymore.

  I have a twenty-page paper on the New Deal that’s beyond late. I haven’t written a word of it.

  I’m not going to. I don’t care about school right now, and if I ever do again, I’ll never care about history. It’s nothing but studying things that have happened. That are gone.

  History is full of death, and I’ve had enough of that.

  5

  It took almost two years for my mother to get pregnant. Two years of planning, of Dan smiling and talking, hoping. Of Mom going to the fertility doctor’s office over and over again.

  Of me hearing her crying sometimes.

  “I’m sad,” she’d say when I asked, and I would watch her, so drained-looking, and wonder why she was doing it.

  But then Dan would show up, dry her tears, kiss her, and she’d smile and I’d know why. She wanted him to be happy. She loved him.

  So she tried. And tried.

  And tried.

  She was pregnant with me when she married my dad. She didn’t know it, but she was. She used to say I was such a quiet baby that she didn’t even know I was there until her clothes started getting tight.

  “Of course,” she’d say, “you made up for it with the colic, but still, you were worth it.” And then she’d kiss my forehead or my cheek. She used to talk about how easy it was, being pregnant with me, before she started trying for Dan.

  Before trying to get pregnant took over her life.

  My dad named me. His parents, who’d died when he was fourteen, left him in the care of his aunt Emma because one set of his grandparents was dead and the others were both well on their way to drinking themselves there. Emma loved history, just like my father, and took out a second mortgage on her house to send him to graduate school. She got sick with a cold the day before he got his doctorate and died of a massive internal infection a week after she saw him get it.

  Dan’s parents are dead, which is the only thing he and my dad have in common, besides the whole being married to Mom part. My mother’s parents are both alive, but they live in Arizona and I’ve only met them twice. Both times were awful. They basically spent the entire visit telling my mother that she was such a disappointment and she needed to “turn herself into someone better.” The second time, Mom told them that maybe they needed to fix themselves and then we left. They didn’t try to get in touch with her again and when she died, they called and left a message.

  I think that’s why Mom was such a great mom. In spite of her parents, or maybe because of them, she taught herself how to love.

  And she did.

  She loved so much, and she loved with everything, with her soul. I wanted to be like that.

  I don’t anymore.

  Mom did a lot of stuff for Dan, but what she did to get that baby...some of it sounded pretty gruesome. Painful, even. I once heard her tell Dan, “I don’t think I can do it. I just...my body is like this thing now.”

  “We’ll talk to the doctor,” Dan said. “He did warn us that with that blood clot you had, things could be even riskier. And I know being on the drugs is hard. So if you’re this unhappy...”

  “No, no,” Mom said, but of course she’d say that. She loved Dan. She knew how much he wanted a baby. She knew that because she was over forty when they started trying, her best chances of having a baby—“The dream baby,” she used to say with a smile—l
ay with drugs and testing and all kinds of stuff. And risk. So much risk.

  Dan began setting up a nursery in the guest bedroom about thirty seconds after the clinic called to say it looked like she was pregnant, and I can remember Mom saying, “Dan, it hasn’t even been a day yet. I don’t want you to hope too much.”

  “Don’t be afraid,” Dan had said. “I know it’s true.” He grinned at me as I stood in the corner of the already-changing guest room. “You’re going to have a brother or a sister, Emma!”

  “But if it hasn’t even been a day—” I said, and then broke off as Mom looked at me, her face full of love and pleading.

  “You need help with what you’re doing?” I said to him, and helped Dan box up the extra linens in the closet, sat with him while he drew up plans for what would go where and Mom sat, listening to him and smiling a little.

  She was pregnant for real then, finally. But it was a hard pregnancy from the start. She was sick all the time, so much that she lost weight. Dan made her favorite meals to try to get her to eat but it didn’t help much.

  And then, in the second month, she had some spotting and had to go the hospital. Dan rushed there from the house so fast he forgot to call the school and tell them to find me and tell me what was going on.

  I still remember coming home and finding Mom in bed.

  “What happened?” I said. “Is something wrong with the baby?”

  “No, everything’s fine,” Mom said. “I just—I was bleeding some before and—” She broke off, her voice cracking, her eyes filling with tears.

  “Lisa, honey, don’t cry. You’re okay. You’re going to be fine,” Dan said, and Mom nodded but she didn’t look like she believed him. She looked scared.

  I waited until Dan left and sat down next to her. “Mom, are you okay about the baby? Dan talks about it all the time, but you don’t and I’m wondering if—”

  She squeezed my hand and said, “Emma, honey, I know what I want. I just...it was hard to get here. But now I am. I beat all the odds—over forty, all the drugs, the warnings about the clot—ugh, I already went over it. And over it.”

  She touched her stomach and I kissed her cheek and lay beside her.

  “I could get used to this,” I said a while later, stretching out with one foot to try to pull the TV remote up toward me.

  “Not me,” she said. “I’d like to be able to get up and move around. I feel trapped just lying here. I mean, if I could paint your ceiling after the clot came out, why can’t I walk downstairs?”

  “I heard that,” Dan called from the hallway. “No rest, no chocolate cake.”

  “Meanie,” Mom said, grinning, but she was tapping her toes against the bed, like she heard a song and was following the beat. Like she wanted to move to it.

  She was able to get out of bed after a week, and everything after that went okay. She still got sick, but not as much, and she started to finally gain some weight.

  And then, on a Wednesday morning, after I’d already left for school with Olivia, she went to grab a piece of toast in the kitchen and fell down.

  That was it.

  That’s how she died.

  She was getting breakfast, something she did every day, something normal, and her body just...stopped.

  Dan ran right over to her and performed CPR until the ambulance came. She wouldn’t—couldn’t—open her eyes. Couldn’t feel anything when she was touched. Couldn’t talk.

  She’d had a massive stroke caused by an embolism in her brain, the kind that—

  The kind that you don’t come back from.

  Mom was gone when she hit that floor. CPR kept her lungs going for a while, and then surgery and tubes and machines to try to figure out what was going on took over. And then the doctor came out and said, “I’m sorry, but she’s gone.”

  “Gone?” Dan said. “But she was breathing! I was with her. She was breathing!”

  I tried to hug him, and then the doctor drew him aside. I found out later he told Dan that Mom was brain-dead, that without medical intervention she wouldn’t be breathing, that her heart wouldn’t be beating. That the baby was still alive and Dan could have everything turned off now—and let Mom go—or keep her hooked up to machines until the baby was old enough to maybe live on its own.

  Mom never knew what happened to her. That’s what I have to hold on to. That at least it was fast. That whatever pain there was didn’t last long. That she reached for a piece of toast and left forever.

  Except she’s still here—alive but not alive—and I wonder if part of her is trapped in her broken body. A prisoner of the baby swimming around inside her.

  I think of how scared she was and wonder if this was what she saw coming. If she knew that no matter what happened to her, Dan would pick the baby—that Dan would choose his baby over her. Over the family we’d had. Did she know that he would look me in the eye and say, “Your mother would want this,” even after I’d lain next to her in bed and heard how restless and scared not being able to move made her?

  How having to lie still made her feel trapped.

  Sometimes I hope she’s gone, that she’s in heaven looking down at all of this, but I’ve felt the weight of her hand in mine every day since she died. I’ve watched her fade, become smaller despite all the nutrients piped into her, the baby taking all it can.

  She isn’t gone. Not like she should be.

  My mother’s name was Lisa Davis Harold, and she was strong and beautiful. She was a person, she had her own thoughts, and I remember that. I remember how she was. Who she was.

  I remember her.

  I’m the only one who does.

  6

  At the hospital, Dan always goes in and says hi to Mom first.

  Actually, he wanted “us” to go in and “say hello together,” but the first and only time he asked me that, the night after I’d lain in bed, thinking of my mother lying in the hospital kept alive for the baby—his baby—I said, “There isn’t an us. There’s you, and then there’s me.”

  “But we’re family.”

  “Were,” I said. “Go see what you’re here for. And then I’m going to see Mom.”

  “I’m here every bit as much for your mother as I am for the baby.”

  “I know. After all, if her body can’t be kept alive long enough, your baby won’t survive, will it?”

  “Emma, that’s not—”

  “It’s not? Then what is it?”

  “It’s what your mother would want.”

  I slapped him. Right there, in the hospital.

  Security was called, but Dan said nothing was wrong, that we were “just struggling with our loss” and that he’d sit with me outside for a while.

  He did walk outside with me, and he actually put a hand on my arm and said, “Emma, please. I don’t think you’re seeing—”

  “Don’t touch me,” I said. “Don’t try to sell me your story. Mom loved you, I know that. You can kick me out of the house, send me to live with Mom’s parents, maybe boarding school. Take your pick.”

  “I’d never do that. You’re my family. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know I love you like you were my own—”

  “Go see her,” I said, cutting him off and making sure I was out of his reach.

  “You should come too.”

  “I don’t want to see her with you.”

  “Emma—” he said and then sighed.

  So that’s how I got to see Mom on my own. Dan goes in first while I sit in the waiting room outside the ICU, and then he goes and drinks some of the hospital’s sludge coffee. I don’t think he likes it, but then I don’t care what Dan thinks or likes anymore.

  He’s in there now, doing his thing, and I’m staring at the ceiling. I did homework for the first few days, more out of numbness than anything
else, and then I realized it was easier to just sit and look at the ceiling like I do at home. To think about how she’d painted it, to think about her, and not where I am.

  To not think about Mom tethered to a bed by machines and IVs and the lump in her belly.

  One of the volunteers comes in with the magazine cart. The thing is a joke because the hospital never has any new magazines. They just replace the old issues with slightly less old issues. But then I suppose most people in here aren’t really that concerned with what’s going on in the world.

  I know I’m not.

  The magazine cart squeaks as it comes over to the last table in the room, the one that’s at the far end of the bank of chairs where I like to sit. Not that there are a lot of people in the waiting room today. Or any day. The ICU is not a place where people come to stay for a long time. Not usually, anyway, but my mother is “special.”

  The tears come again and I blink, watch the ceiling waterfall into little pieces as my throat gets tight.

  I don’t want to see Mom like this, and I pinch the bridge of my nose hard. It makes my head hurt but stops the tears.

  Mom used to do it whenever she thought she might cry. She hated to cry, and I can remember how, on the day she married Dan, she sat there getting her hair done and pinching her nose over and over so she wouldn’t cry and mess up her makeup.

  I was part of the ceremony. Mom and I walked down the aisle together, and before Mom and Dan became husband and wife, Dan asked for my permission to be part of our family. He said, “I’m so happy to have found you and your mother and I promise I’ll always look out for you. I’ll always want what you do, I’ll always believe in you.”

  “Liar,” I mutter, and wipe my eyes.

  I look away from the ceiling and see Caleb Harrison staring at me.

  7

  It’s definitely him. We aren’t in any of the same classes but he’s in the lunch block Olivia and I share and I’ve seen him getting food, shoving his perfectly wavy blond hair off his face as he waits to pay.