Heartbeat

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.”