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Heartbeat
Elizabeth Scott


We just look at each other, and I don’t care that he’s gorgeous and screwed up. I care that he really gets what’s going on. Sees it.Sees me.Since her mother's sudden death, Emma’s been, unable to really grieve, because in a way, her mum’s still there - kept ‘alive’ by machines for the sake of the baby growing inside her.And as Emma watches her old life fall apart around her, it sometimes feels like she’s the one who died instead. Like she needs someone to remind her how to breathe.Until she meets Caleb, a boy whose anger and loss could match her own – and who might have the power to make Emma finally feel like her heart’s started beating again. Praise for Elizabeth Scott‘The best love story I’ve read.’  –  Sarah Dessen on Something Maybe







Does life go on when your heart is broken?

Since her mother’s sudden death, Emma has existed in a fog of grief, unable to let go, unable to move forward—because her mother is, in a way, still there. She’s being kept alive on machines for the sake of the baby growing inside her.

Estranged from her stepfather and letting go of things that no longer seem important—grades, crushes, college plans—Emma has only her best friend to remind her to breathe. Until she meets a boy with a bad reputation who sparks something in her—Caleb Harrison, whose anger and loss might just match Emma’s own. Feeling her own heart beat again wakes Emma from the grief that has grayed her existence. Is there hope for life after death—and maybe, for love?


Heart Beat

Elizabeth Scott




www.miraink.co.uk (http://www.miraink.co.uk)


To Astrolabe, for over fifteen years

of being a bright and joyful light in my life. I miss you every day.


Contents

Chapter 1 (#uab0d3727-0734-5672-b979-6b7d3ca5fae1)

Chapter 2 (#u747d2110-53e1-5ce6-b307-bf0ab601e867)

Chapter 3 (#u8236bbce-41b6-5268-bb54-e46fa22a6f7e)

Chapter 4 (#u8a318f3e-3c7a-5ea7-9da0-2907d1703eb3)

Chapter 5 (#u75c1d8f7-c6c7-5aed-902e-388c2cb59456)

Chapter 6 (#uc5cfa086-408b-5181-8d5c-038ea3669ce2)

Chapter 7 (#ued6fdcea-f9d8-558b-840f-b0db3ee497c8)

Chapter 8 (#ubf4a52d1-750a-5807-8f1c-f32e5e2e49b5)

Chapter 9 (#u1d8d5b4b-b285-53f4-b84b-b8a3dfd2553e)

Chapter 10 (#u0af4e779-da10-5e56-ab87-68b052f0c18c)

Chapter 11 (#u9b77aca4-6a96-51d6-9d0a-02838d098e33)

Chapter 12 (#u5f7b292c-010c-5a14-850a-5ede15eea8a8)

Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

Questions for Discussion (#litres_trial_promo)

Q&A with Elizabeth Scott (#litres_trial_promo)

Teaser (#litres_trial_promo)

Excerpt (#litres_trial_promo)


1

I sit down with my mother. My smile is shaky as I tell her about my day.

“I think I did okay on my History test,” I say. “Oh, and Olivia wore her new pair of false eyelashes, the ones I told you about. She was batting them around so much that a teacher stopped and asked if she had something caught in her eyes.”

I laugh at the memory, and the sound is shaky too. “Olivia wasn’t super happy about that.”

There’s the slightest movement, but it’s not on Mom’s face. Her face never changes. But under the skin of Mom’s stomach...I don’t want to look but I can’t help it, because there my mother’s skin is moving.

Because the baby is moving.

I close my eyes.

When I open them, Mom’s stomach is stretched out and still.

“Emma, are you ready to go?” Dan says as he comes into the room, and I look up at him and nod.

“Did you two have a nice chat?” he says, bending over to kiss Mom.

I stare at him.

He must feel it because he straightens up, clearing his throat, and pats Mom’s stomach. “Look how big he’s getting. Lisa, he’s growing so much.”

Mom doesn’t say anything, not even to that.

She can’t.

She’s dead. Machines are keeping her alive. They breathe for her. They feed her. They regulate her whole body.

My mother is dead, but Dan is keeping her alive because of the baby.


2

Dan and I don’t talk on the ride home. As soon as I’m inside the house I head straight up to my room, and I lock the door.

I never used to have a lock, but then, I used to have Mom. I used to think that Dan cared about what I thought. What I wanted. What Mom would have wanted. This way, all the talks he used to try to have, right after Mom first died, can’t happen. Or at least, he can talk, but I don’t have to see him and can put on music or headphones or even fingers in my ears to shut him out. Just like he shut me out.

I don’t have one of those wussy little turn-and-click locks. I have an actual lock, a bar with a padlock that I snap shut.

Closing out the world.

I put it in myself the day Dan told me what he was going to do to Mom. I walked out of the hospital, went to the hardware store and came home and put in the lock. My mother taught me how to do that. She believed women should know how to fix things. I’d seen her fix a broken toilet and watched her change the element in our hot water heater. She installed new locks on our doors when I was seven, after Olivia’s family got robbed.

I go over to my window and open it. On the roof, Olivia grins at me through her blond hair and then comes over and pushes herself inside.

“How did you know I was out there?”

“I saw your hair when we came in. Also, your car down the road. Thanks for not parking...here.”

“It makes things easier,” she says. “And clearly, I need a wig. Oooh, I could get a bunch. Red hair, blue hair—”

“That wouldn’t stand out at all.”

She sticks her tongue out at me. “I’d get other ones too. Brown hair, black hair. I could be a spy, don’t you think?”

“Spies have to use computers, Olivia.”

“No, they don’t. They go on missions. They have tech people do the computer stuff for them.”

“Someone’s been watching Covert Ops.”

“Like you don’t watch it too. You know you love it. You and your mom both think Sebastian is...” She trails off.

“Sebastian is cute,” I say, and try not to think about how Mom and I used to watch the show together. “But he’s also fictional, plus even spies on TV have to use earpieces and stuff—would you be willing to do that?”

“For Sebastian I would,” she says, grinning, and then flops on my bed. “But I really wish I could be an old-fashioned spy. Like back when they had to write coded messages in invisible ink and speak a dozen languages.”

“That sounds more like you,” I say, and sit down next to her. “I—I saw the baby move today.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Emma,” she says, squeezing my hand, “why do you even go to the hospital?”

“Because I can see her. Because I want at least one person to be there for Mom and not for the baby.”

“Dan—”

“Dan wants the baby. You know it, I know it. If Mom was alive...” I stare at my dresser, at the photo of Mom and me. It was taken in Vermont when we went skiing. Mom is smiling and has one arm around me, holding me tight. It was the last vacation we took together, just her and me. She was thirty-five. I was ten.

She met Dan two weeks after we got back from Vermont. I was nice to him when I met him because he actually asked where I wanted to go to dinner when Mom suggested the three of us go out. I thought he was kind.

I also thought he loved Mom.

“Hey,” Olivia says, and I look at her.

“She’d love you for being there,” she says. “She does love you for being there. I know it.”

I hug her, and Olivia hugs me back.

Dan knocks on my door. “Emma, you want some pizza? I made triple cheese.”

Of course he did. Dan doesn’t order food. He makes it. “The perfect man,” Mom used to say. “He can cook, he makes the bed and he remembers to put the toilet seat down.” Then she’d laugh and kiss him.

She loved him so much.

“I’m not hungry,” I say.

“I’ll leave it by the door,” he says with a sigh. “Olivia, do you want me to leave you a slice too?”

Olivia looks at me. I shrug.

“Okay,” Olivia says, and Dan says, “Thanks for coming today, Emma.” Like he does every day. Like I’m doing it for him. Like I’m somehow in this with him.

I unbolt the door after five minutes. When I first started locking myself in, Dan would hang around and try to talk to me when I came out. I used to like how hard he tried, but I sure don’t now. Not after what he’s done to Mom. Now I wait until I’m sure he’s gone.

Olivia eats most of the pizza and then says she has to get home to make sure her parents eat.

“Wish me luck,” she says. “Prying their handheld whatevers away from them for longer than thirty seconds makes them both go into withdrawal. See you tomorrow?”

“Yeah. You don’t have to go out on the roof to leave, you know.”

“I know,” she says. “But if I use the front door or try to go out any other way, I’ll see Dan. And I know he’ll ask me about you. He did the last time I left that way. I think he—well, I think he’s worried about you, you know?”

“Why? Because my mother is dead and he’s kept her body alive so he can try to save his precious son? Because I have to see her lying there—” I break off and open the window for Olivia.

Olivia hugs me again and then leaves. After she does, I close my window and get into bed. It’s early, but I don’t care. In bed, I can look at my ceiling. It’s yellow and the color is swirled around so there are a million patterns and shapes to get lost in. Mom painted it last year even though the doctor didn’t want her “exerting” herself because she’d just had a blood clot taken out of her leg.

“Think about this instead of that boy,” she’d said when I came in and lay down on the bed to look at it.

“I can’t,” I’d said. “Anthony broke my heart.”

“I know,” she’d said, lying down next to me. “But one day he won’t matter.”

“He said I was lovely.” I’d looked up at the ceiling.

“They all say something like that,” she’d told me. “Trust the one who takes his time saying it.”

“Dan said he was falling in love with you on your second date.”

“Dan’s different,” she’d said. “He’s older, for one thing. And so am I. It’s...you won’t believe me, but one day Anthony will just be a memory and it won’t hurt when you see him at all, I promise.”

She was right. I wish I’d told her that. I could have. Anthony was nothing to me ages before she died.

I wish I could tell Mom something, anything, and have her really hear it.

“I miss you,” I whisper, and listen to Dan moving around downstairs. If I close my eyes, I can pretend I hear Mom, that this is just another night.

That she’s still here.


3

Dan drives me to school in the morning. He has done this since he and Mom got married, and I used to like it although I did start to ride with Olivia when she got her license.

That stopped when Mom died. I wanted Dan to remember I was around. I wanted him to remember Mom.

Like, Mom worried about my grades. Not that they weren’t good enough, but that I was working too hard. Dan told her that in order to grow up I had to be allowed to make my own choices.

Oh yes, Dan and his choices.

We drive to school in silence. At seventeen, I’m old enough to get my license, but the waiting list to get into any of the driver’s ed classes within half an hour of the house stretches out for months. I’d planned to put my name on a list last year but never got around to it.

Last year, before everything happened, Dan promised that over the summer he’d teach me how to drive and then I could just go get my license.

I don’t want him teaching me to drive now. What if something happens? What if I get hurt? If my body stops working, my brain stops functioning? Would he have machines keep me alive in case his son might one day need something? A lung, a kidney, bone marrow?

But I do ride in the car with him to school. I do it because it means he will have to pick me up afterward. That he will have to see me, that he will take me to see Mom. He works at home, so he can do that.

Or at least, he used to work at home. I don’t know if he still does, or if all the database consulting he did stopped when Mom did. Lately, he hasn’t mentioned any two-hour phone calls to talk someone through using a new feature he’s built.

But then, I haven’t asked. I don’t want to talk to him.

He was going to stay home with the baby, and Mom was going to go back to work. That was their plan. She was an assistant manager at BT&T bank. They sent flowers when she died. They didn’t send anything for the baby. Maybe they didn’t know what to do about it, but maybe they heard about what Dan’s doing and think he’s keeping a dead woman alive so he can get what he wants.

If they do, I love them for that. I mean, I know it’s a baby and it’s partly Mom, but I wish Dan had just once thought about what Mom would have wanted. It was so easy for him to choose to keep her here, dead, and it’s so hard for me to think about, much less see.

“I got a call from your AP History teacher about how you’re doing in class. Maybe we should talk about it,” Dan says as we stop, one car in the many that are waiting to snake into the high school. Mostly freshman and sophomores get out here. Juniors get rides with their friends who have licenses or, better yet, get their own and a car to go with it.

I could get a ride with Olivia, but I don’t.

“See you later,” I tell Dan and get out of the car. I won’t talk to him about school just like I won’t ride to school with Olivia anymore. If I did, then Dan would get to feel like things are normal and they’re not. They are so not. Not while Mom is still...

The tears hit me hard, hot pressure behind my eyes, in my throat, in my chest. It’s hard to breathe, to see, to think.

I look down at the ground and walk, blinking hard once they’ve started to spill down my face.

I cry without making a sound now. I have cried soundlessly, wordlessly, since I stood with Dan at the hospital and heard, “I’m sorry, but...”

Dan cried openmouthed then, sobbing, yelling his grief for everyone to see. I tried to hug him. I felt for him because I thought he loved her, because we were in the same place, because she was gone and he felt the gaping hole that had been born too, a Mom-shaped space in the universe.

He didn’t hug me back. He didn’t even seem to see me.

And then the doctor told him about the baby.

“Hey,” Olivia says, and I know it’s her because I would know her voice anywhere. We’ve been friends since first grade, and we’ve been through period trauma, boy crap, bad hair, her parents and their ways. And now Dan and his baby.

“Hey,” I say. I wipe my eyes and look at her. “How’s the car?”

Olivia makes a face at me but also wraps an arm around my shoulders, steering me toward our lockers. Her parents gave her a fully loaded convertible when she got her license, one with a built-in music player, phone, navigation system—you name it, the car had it. Could do it, and all at the touch of a button.

Olivia sold the car—through the one newspaper left in the area, which is basically just ads—and bought a used car. It’s so old all it has is a CD player and a radio. We bought CDs at yard sales for a while, but all we could get was old music, which we both hate, and the radio is just people telling you that what they think is what you should think, so we mostly just drive around in silence.

It used to bother me sometimes but now I like it. The inside of my head is so full now that silence is...I don’t know. There’s just something about knowing Olivia is there, and that we don’t have to talk. That she gets it. Gets me and what’s going on.

Her parents were unhappy about the car, though. Really unhappy, actually, but then there was a big crisis with one of their server farms at work and by the time they surfaced for air they hadn’t slept in four days. And when they said, “Olivia, that car was a gift,” she said, “Yes, it was. A gift, meaning something freely given, for the recipient to use as she wanted to, right?”

As we hit her locker, we pass Anthony, and he says, “Ladies,” bowing in my direction. A real bow too, like it’s the nineteenth century or something.

“Ass,” Olivia says.

“A donkey is actually not as stupid as people believe. However, you are entitled to your own beliefs about asses. And me.” He looks at me. “Hello, Emma.”

I sigh. “Hi, Anthony.”

“If you ever want to talk about your grades, do know that I’m here.”

I can’t believe I ever thought the way he talked was interesting. It’s just stupid, like he’s too good to speak like a normal person. “I know, Anthony.”

“I really would like to be of assistance to you. I believe in helping everyone. I’m talking to Zara Johns later. I think she feels threatened by the fact that I’ve been asked to help her organize the next school blood drive.” Translation: he’s butted in, and Zara’s furious.

“Either that or she just doesn’t like you. Emma, let’s go,” Olivia says, slamming her locker shut, and we head for mine.

“You okay?” she says, and I nod. Anthony doesn’t bother me at all anymore, just like Mom said would happen. I look at him and feel nothing. Well, some annoyance, but then, who wouldn’t after listening to him talk?

Of course, I didn’t always think that he was annoying. I open my locker, deciding not to go down the Anthony road, and hear the guy next to me say, “No way! I mean, everyone knows what’ll happen to Caleb if he steals another car.”

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—lay 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.

“What did you just say?” he says, and if it wasn’t for the snarl in his voice—plus the fact that he steals cars (and now apparently drives them into lakes as well)—he’d be cute.

More than cute, even.

But he does sound angry, and under his hair, blond curls falling all over his face, his eyes are narrowed and very pissed-off looking.

“Nothing,” I mutter, and he grunts and turns away. I stare at his back and only then start to wonder why he’s here.

And why does what I said matter to him? Does he really think I would be sitting here, in the waiting room outside the ICU, and somehow be thinking about him? I mean, really? Yes, everyone knows who he is, but it’s not like he’s the kind of guy I’d go for. And besides, what do I have to be afraid of from him anyway? From anyone?

“Hey,” I say. “Can I have a Women’s One?”

He turns back around. “What?”

“A Women’s One magazine,” I say, and he really does think I was sitting here thinking about him, because he’s glaring at me and plucking a magazine off the cart like it’s diseased.

“What’s your problem?” he says, tossing it to me. It lands on the floor by my feet. “If you have something you want to say to me—”

“Emma,” Dan says, coming into the room, “you can go in now.”

“Great,” I say and get up, step on the magazine and then push past Caleb Harrison like he isn’t there.


8

Mom is...she’s the same as she’s been since she was put in this room. She’s still, so still, and I sit and look at her closed eyes, at her slightly downturned mouth. At the tube going into it.

Her skin is strange-colored, almost waxy-looking, and her hand is warm but limp in mine.

“It wasn’t much of a day,” I tell her, and look around. The unit Mom’s in has huge open windows by every door—I don’t know why—but I can see people in other rooms. Most of them are sitting like I am, hunched by a bedside. A few are weeping. A few are just staring, lost-looking.

I look away, look back at Mom. “I turned in my paper on the New Deal,” I say. “And we’ve started a new book in English that I like a lot. Oh, and I got an A on my Algebra II quiz.” I talk and talk, spinning a story of a day filled with academic success. Filled with lies.

Part of it is because I am looking at her and I want her to think everything is okay even though I know she can’t hear me.

Part of it is because part of me thinks that maybe she can, that despite everything the doctor said she will somehow open her eyes and say, “Emma, I know something’s wrong. I can hear it in your voice. Start talking, okay?”

Yes.

Yes, I want to talk about it so much; I love you and I miss you and I wish you were here but not like this, I don’t want you here like this and I know I’m seventeen but I don’t want you to be gone. I want you to open your eyes and tell me everything is going to be okay. I want you to squeeze my hand and tell me something, anything. I want to hear your voice, not the machines that beep all around us.

“Mom,” I whisper, and kiss her hand, pressing my cheek to it, eyes closed as I imagine.

I feel movement, a slight shift in her but I know it’s not her.

It’s the baby.

“Why did you do it, Mom?” I ask. “Why did you try so hard for this when it was so hard on you? When the risks were so many? When you cried so much? When you ended up—when now you’re here?”

I hear Dan’s voice as he comes back into the ward. He always says hello to everyone, like he’s so friendly. Like he’s actually thinking about anything other than himself.

I open my eyes and see a magazine cart in front of the door.

And I see Caleb Harrison staring at me again.

“Hey there,” Dan says to him as he comes to the room. “I saw you earlier, right?”

Caleb nods, looking at him and then my mother. I see him stare at her stomach.

Dan walks into the room. “Lisa, Emma and I are both here now, and I thought we’d all talk for a little while before we have to go.” He pats Mom’s stomach. “I was thinking today we could talk about names.”

“No,” I say, and Dan looks at me.

Caleb, still standing in the doorway, looks at me too, and Dan glances at me, then at him, and says, “We don’t need anything to read now, thanks.”

Caleb shrugs and moves off, the cart squeaking as he goes.

“You know him?” Dan says.

“No, but it’s not every day you see a girl sitting with her dead mother, is it? People would stare at that, don’t you think?”

“Emma, honey, your voice—”

“She can’t hear me.”

“The baby can, though, and I don’t want—”

I stand up so fast that I’m dizzy for a second. I don’t want to hear more. I can’t hear more.

“I don’t feel good,” I say. “Can we go?”

“I really was hoping we could talk about names. I’d like for you and I to...” He sighs. “Your little brother is in there, Emma. He’s in there and he’s fighting to stay alive.”

I walk out of the room then. I stop at the nurses’ station and ask to use the phone. I hear Dan come out when he realizes I’m not coming back. I hang up the phone.

“Emma,” he says, but I pretend I can’t hear him and walk out. He follows me, of course.

“You’re hurting your mother,” he says when we’re waiting for the elevator. “She wanted this baby. She’d want you to be part of this. She’d be so sad to see how you’re acting.”

I stay silent. I stay silent all the way to the car, all the way to the house. I don’t think of it as home anymore.

“You say what she wants. What she thinks, what she feels,” I say when we get there. “She can’t do anything now, and it’s all because of you and what you want. So don’t tell me how she feels, because she can’t feel. She’s dead. She died trying to have your baby, and if you want to think about feelings and Mom, how do you think she feels about that? How do you think being dead makes her feel?”

“Emma,” Dan says, and then “Emma!” but I’m out of the car and heading down the driveway, heading toward the car I know is waiting there.

The lights turn on as I reach it, and I open the passenger door and get in.

“Thank you,” I say, and Olivia nods, squeezing my hand before we drive off.


9

The phone at Olivia’s house is blinking when we get in but she ignores it, sits me down in her parents’ gleaming steel kitchen and puts a peanut butter sandwich in front of me.

“Just don’t let me see you destroy it,” she says, putting a bag of corn chips next to me, and then goes over to the phone.

I hear her talking while I’m opening the sandwich and putting corn chips on top of the peanut butter.

“No, she called me from the hospital, and I said I’d come get her. I—look, Dan, I think she just needs some decompression time. You know?”

I love Olivia. Not just for talking to Dan for me, but for a million little things. Like, she was okay that my mom loved peanut butter and corn chip sandwiches even before I was. I thought the idea was disgusting until I found myself wandering around the house three nights after she reached for toast and then broke. I was thinking about her, the things she did, like how she always had to put her wallet in her purse before she’d put anything else in or how much she hated peas.

I was wandering, remembering, and I was alone. Dan was sleeping peacefully, no doubt dreaming of his baby.

I thought about those sandwiches.

I made one the way she always did, first pressing the slices of bread and peanut butter together, and then taking them apart to put the chips on before smooshing it back together, and it was good. As I ate it, for a moment I swear I could almost see her. Picture her smiling at me.

“Sure, she’ll call later,” Olivia says. “Okay. Bye.”

She comes back to the table, one arm extended. I hand her the chips and smile as she heads toward the pantry, eyes averted from my sandwich.

“It’s not that bad. I’ve seen those gel things your parents eat.”

“True,” she says, coming back to the table and sitting down.

“You can see the sandwich now since you’re sitting here, you know.”

“Yeah, I know. What happened?”

I tell her.

“Oh,” she says when I’m done. “Names, huh? He must really think the baby’s going to make it.”

“I guess. All it has to do is lie there and suck everything out of Mom that’s pumped in until it can survive long enough to live in an incubator.”

“Emma,” Olivia says, picking up my plate and walking over to the shiny steel sink. “You know the baby’s not a bug or anything. It’s your brother.”

“Half. And it’s—Mom is dead and it’s not and I try not to see it but sometimes it moves and Mom’s—she’s just lying there, you know? Her body is only there for the baby and Dan chose that. He said he loved her, that he’d do anything for her. What kind of love is that, Olivia? Would you want someone to keep your dead body breathing with tubes and machines because they wanted something from you?”

I’m yelling by the end and Olivia has come back to the table and puts her arms around me.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t—my parents—our family’s not like it was for you and your mom. And the baby, it’ll never even know her. That’s so strange and awful.”

“When Dan finally gets around to thinking about that, he’ll probably just say it’s proof that science can work miracles and it’s how Mom would have wanted it.” By the time I’m done talking, I’m shaking so hard my teeth are chattering.

“I want to fix it for you, you know?” Olivia says. “You’re so angry, Emma. And I don’t know if it’s with Dan or your mom.”

“Dan. Definitely Dan.”

“And the baby.”

“I—look, I do get that it didn’t choose for Mom to die. But she did, you know? And the doctors say the embolism didn’t happen because she was pregnant but it’s just...” I swallow. “There was that clot and everything else—she was so scared, you know, so scared, and now I see her every day and try not to wonder if she’ll wake up even though I know she can’t. That she won’t.”

“Maybe you should talk to someone.”

“Dan said that too,” I say. “What’s a shrink going to tell me that I don’t already know? My mother’s dead and I miss her. I’m angry at Dan for keeping her body alive so the baby he wants so badly can maybe survive. Mom would hate being trapped like she is and I can’t—won’t—forgive him for it. I can’t forgive the baby either, and maybe that makes me awful, but I don’t care.”

“You really are angry. Like, I’m worried about you angry.”

I shrug and stare at the table again. Olivia knows me and she’s right. I am angry. I am so angry I feel like it’s all I am.

“At least I’m angry for a reason. At least I’m not running around stealing cars for fun like Caleb Harrison. I saw him at the hospital today. Twice, actually.”

“Wow, so it is true,” Olivia says.

“What?”

“I heard his parents got him some emergency hearing and he got assigned community service for the thing with his dad’s car,” she says. “You know, picking up trash and stuff. But I guess he’s at the hospital instead. What did he say?”

“Nothing,” I say, thinking of his, What’s your problem? and his stares. The second one was the worst. The way he was just looking at me and Mom, and how he must have seen me lying there, resting my head on her hand.

“Nothing? You sure?”

“How do you know what happened to him, anyway? It’s not like you’d have found out by going anywhere near a computer, so that means you talked to someone and that means...”

“Yes, I saw Roger,” she says, and blushes. “But it’s not what you think. I was getting gas and when I went to pay for it, he was inside getting a soda and we talked for a minute.”

“Uh-huh. So you were getting gas.”

“Yep.”

“Even though you got it two days ago and you’ve only driven to school and back since.”

“All right, fine,” she says, mock-slapping my arm. “I saw his car in the parking lot and I might have wanted to see him, and I did but it was no big deal. Okay?”

“How long did you talk to him?”

“Awhile.”

I grin at her. She stares at me for a moment and then grins back. “I know! We talked! Do you think he likes me? I really want him to like me.”

“What’s not to like?”

“The fact that most people think I’m a freak because I don’t use computers or any of that stuff.”

“Olivia, we go to school with people who steal buses. And their father’s car. Oh, and that guy who always wears the same brown shirt. You’re not a freak.”

“Well, not compared to Caleb Harrison. Or Dennis and his shirt thing,” she says. “But neither of them have social lives and I’d like one.”

“You have one. You talk to people in your classes. You dragged me to parties after the horrorfest that was Anthony. You went out with Pete last year. If you ever started using technology, you’d rule the school in a week.”

“Nice try,” she says, and grins at me. “Roger said I have nice hair, but what does that mean? It just lies there.”

“Olivia, you do have nice hair.”

“It’s flat.”

“You’d like Caleb’s hair,” I say, and she blinks at me.

“What?”

“I just—it’s wavy and stuff. Like how you’re always saying you want yours to be.”

“I thought you didn’t talk to him.”

“I didn’t.”

“But you noticed his hair.”

“We were in the same room, Olivia. He was about two feet away from me. It was hard not to see him.”

“He’s cute,” she says, and now I stare at her.

“No, not I think he’s cute cute,” she says. “Scary druggies don’t do it for me. But a lot of girls think he’s hot.”

“Not the ones in my classes!”

“No, you all think guys like Anthony are hot. Caleb’s got that whole quiet loner thing going, plus he has the cheekbone/eye/hair trifecta.”

When I stare at her she says, “Awesome face, great eyes, amazing hair. A trifecta. What are you learning in your classes?”

“Not that.”

“Oh, right. How’s the New Deal paper coming anyway?”

“It’s not.”

She looks at me and then says, “For real?”

I shrug.

“I know you haven’t been buried in books like usual but I thought you wanted to go to one of those top ten schools. I thought you and Anthony were neck and neck to see who could have the best ranking and SAT score and all that stuff.”

“Yeah, we were.”

Olivia frowns and starts to say something else, but her parents come in. They are both blond, like she is, but that’s pretty much where any similarity stops. They work in IT support and their life—their world, in fact—is computers. I have never seen one of them without something that isn’t electronic in one hand. It reminds me of how Olivia and I started the whole hanging out on my roof thing.

A few years ago, they gave her some sort of “does everything and can organize everything” gadget for her birthday and she came over, climbed up the trellis on the side of our house onto our roof, knocked on my window (and scared the crap out of me), and when I came out onto the roof, she cried and we talked. And then I threw her gift off the roof.

Mom calmed Olivia’s parents down, then calmed Olivia down, and then gave her a birthday gift from “me and Emma” and put foot rungs on the trellis so she could get up onto the roof easier. Since then, it was something we did once in a while for fun, but since Mom died, it’s the only way she comes to see me.

Her mother closes the door while typing out a message on some impossibly tiny thing, never looking up. Her father, who entered first, is using a strange-looking square, holding it in one hand and touching it with a plastic stylus, frowning as images flicker in and out.

“This cube isn’t maximizing its storage capability or its potential speed,” he says. “It feels like more of a design idea than an actual product.”

Olivia rolls her eyes at me, gets up and gets two energy drinks out of the fridge. “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad.”

“How are you?” her dad says as her mother smoothes a hand over Olivia’s shoulder. “You have a good day?”

“Yeah,” Olivia says, and her Mom’s device starts to beep.

“Have you eaten?” her mother says, and Olivia rolls her eyes again.

“Yes. You?”

Her mother nods, and Olivia looks at her dad, who flushes. “I’m going to,” he says. “But the cube came in and I wanted to see it. I’ll eat later.”

“Something without caffeine or the word Energy! in it?”

Her dad grins at her. “Yes. And hey, we have a little more work to do, but then we’re going to watch a movie.”

“By yourselves?” Olivia says. “Without anything electronic in hand? Will you be all right?”

“You,” Olivia’s mother says, and kisses her cheek. “Want to join us?” She looks at me. “How about you, Emma? You in for a movie?”

I shake my head. Olivia’s parents drive her crazy and they aren’t around that much but they’re here, truly here, even if it’s not the way Olivia wishes they were, and I’m like a kid with her face pressed against the window, all the things I want and can’t have right in front of me.

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 essay and who was stressing out and how badly it would screw their grades.




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