Heartbreak for Hire

by Sonia Hartl

  “Maybe.” He rubbed his jaw. “Though I think knowing is what pushed me so hard in school. All of my classmates had bright futures on these distant horizons. They didn’t know what it would look like, but they knew it would be sunny. While I had demons chasing me. All those things I never wanted to be kept me running forward.”

  “Is that why you’re so determined to be the distinguished professor?”

  His lips thinned as he stared out at the lake, but he didn’t deny it. “I like teaching. I just don’t think about climbing the ranks of academia the same way you do about painting.”

  “What about this?” I swayed my hips as I gave the metal detector a sassy sweep across the earth. “Don’t you still want to be Indiana Jones?”

  “My grandfather would be disappointed I gave up that dream.” A faint smile touched his lips. “I’d gotten into trouble in middle school, poor grades, drugs. He took me out to the river behind his house, handed me a metal detector, and taught me how to understand people by the objects they leave behind.”

  “He sounds like a wonderful man.”

  “He was. He would’ve liked you too. He had a thing for pretty girls with smart mouths.” He gazed out over the water. “That afternoon changed everything for me. It made me want to study people and understand them, and it gave me something to care about, when up until that point I hadn’t cared about much, especially myself.”

  “So why not follow that passion?” I nudged him.

  He shook his head. “It’s a hobby. The total on my finds in the last month might come up to ten dollars. Can’t make a living doing that.”

  “What about teaching in a middle school? You could start a metal detecting club with kids who are looking for something. Like you were. It doesn’t have to be all prestige.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t get it.”

  “Try me.”

  “My father OD’d before I was born, and before my grandfather intervened, I was headed down the same path.” His voice became detached, as if he were talking about someone else, a stranger, or an anonymous story on the news, not his own life. “My grandfather pushed hard for me to go to college. That was always the pinnacle of success for him. No one else in my family had gone, and he wanted me to be the first. He wanted me to be someone people could respect.”

  “And people don’t respect middle school teachers?”

  “Not like university professors. My grandfather thought it was impressive just to learn from them, but if I became one of them…” He shook his head, as if he had to mentally trudge out of a deep and murky lake. As if he could no longer separate himself from the person he talked about. “I wanted to make him proud, but I also know I’ll always have something inside of me that’s trying to self-destruct. And the higher the standard I hold myself to—the more I have to lose—the less likely I’ll be to risk falling back into those self-destructive patterns and disappointing him.”

  “What if dedicating your life to climbing a slippery ladder you don’t even enjoy is how you’re self-destructing?”

  His expression went blank. He put his emotions on lockdown, but a storm raged in his cloudy eyes. He shook his head and walked to the edge of the water.

  I’d pushed him too far, and I wasn’t sorry about it. The more he opened up to me, the more I realized just how wrong he was for academic life. He wasn’t built for ass-kissing and backstabbing. He was worth so much more.

  And I was too. I was worth more than what I’d been doing for the last few years.

  I joined him on the damp sand and sat down next to him, trying not to think about how warm and solid he felt beside me as I rubbed my arms against the chilly lake air. “I know what it’s like. Trying to be the exact opposite of your parents.” I picked up a rock and tossed it into the water. “My mom wanted me to go into academics. I wasn’t lying that first night when I said I’d been raised in the library. She always pushed me to take an interest in behavioral science, and I ended up disappointing her.”

  I shrugged it off, but my entire life had been a roller coaster of trying and failing to live up to her standards. If I came home with an A, she’d ask me why it wasn’t an A+. When a paper I wrote in high school received state-level recognition, it was a shame it hadn’t gone national. Even when I went into psych, she was disappointed that I was third in our year, though that had been infinitely more tolerable to her than my changing my major to art.

  “I doubt you’ve disappointed her.” He leaned back on his hands. “She must be proud of your gallery plans.”

  “I didn’t even tell her I’d made the offer. Although now I’m glad I didn’t. She hates my paintings—or at least, hates the idea of them. She’s never actually seen them.”

  “She’s never been to your apartment?” He gave me an incredulous look.

  “No. We only see each other for weekly lunches, and even then we meet at her office.” She did that on purpose. She seemed to hope I’d skip over to the admissions building one day and reenroll. “That’s just the way things are between us.… Are you familiar with Harlow’s monkey experiment?”

  At least all those psych classes had been good for something. They’d helped me see how screwed up my relationship with my mom was. They’d also explained why I constantly sought validation from people like Aiden, Eliza, and Eve.

  The problems I had with my mom hit home the hardest when I learned about Harry Harlow in one of my social cognition classes. He’d set up two surrogate monkey mothers, one made of wire mesh that was cold and uncomfortable to the touch but provided food and other basic physiological needs. The other was a terry-cloth towel mother who aesthetically gave love and comfort, but no food. He found that baby monkeys would cling to the terry-cloth mom, even though she didn’t supply nourishment.

  “Are you saying you were raised by the wire-mesh monkey?” he asked.

  “Essentially.” I pulled my knees up to my chest. “We used to tolerate each other, but when I dropped out, we started a fight that hasn’t really ended.”

  “If you don’t mind me asking, why did you drop out?” His hand brushed mine, sending little tingles up my arm. “Weren’t you pretty close to having your master’s?”

  “I had an ugly breakup that kind of sent me spiraling.” It was strange, mentioning that time in my life to someone who hadn’t known me when I’d gone through the worst of it. Margo liked to remind me, and often, that I was damaged, but Mark didn’t see me that way. And I didn’t see myself that way either. Not anymore.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Why do you want to know?” My shoulders hunched instinctively.

  I really didn’t want to rehash all my shitty Aiden memories. Like the time he’d made me drive myself to the hospital when I was having a stress-induced panic attack, because he had to study for midterms. Or that time he didn’t talk to me for a week because I bought him regular M&M’s instead of the peanut ones.

  Not only did I feel foolish for giving Aiden so much of my time, but there would be no turning back once I shared that ugly side of me. Not many people stuck by me once they got a look at my baggage. Not even my own mother.

  “I want to know the parts of you I haven’t seen yet. And I don’t mean that in a naked kind of way. Well, mostly not.” Mark grinned at me, and I got a glimpse of the wild boy just under the surface of all that college professor polish.

  “Cute.” I rolled my eyes. “Aiden, my ex, wasn’t very nice.”

  Mark’s expression darkened. “What do you mean?”

  “He was smart, top of the class in psych.” Last I’d heard, he’d opened his own practice and was doing quite well, despite that black magic spell I’d paid to have put on him during a moment of weakness. “But he also had an ego. He was the type of guy who had to make himself feel more important by stepping on other people, and I was his favorite target.”

  Mark shook his head. “You eventually broke it off with him though?”

  Here’s where all my ugly lived. “Only after he cheated. I l
et it go on for three years before that, just taking the insults. About me or my mannerisms, the way I wore my hair, the way I dressed, my art, my grades, the way I chewed my food. Nothing was off-limits. Every day, for three years, he’d strip away little pieces of my self-worth—and still I wanted him to love me. I begged for it.”

  “That’s not your fault. None of that was. Him cutting you down, it’s only because he was a small and insecure man. He knew he didn’t deserve you.”

  He laid his hand on top of mine and squeezed it. It felt nice.

  Maybe, just for a little while, I could leave everything that had happened between us behind in the city. I could take the comfort offered and just let it be without overthinking it.

  “Anyway, that’s why I dropped out of school,” I said. “My relationship wrecked me, but the longer I stayed away, the more I realized I didn’t want that life. I’d only been trying to win approval from my mom.… Then Margo approached me at the restaurant where I’d just given my apartment key to Aiden. I didn’t start working for her right away. A few other things happened in the process.” Like all of my friends ditching me because watching me fall apart made them uncomfortable.

  “Did you ever have reservations about working for Margo?”

  Yes. But I’d bought Margo’s bullshit about what H4H was supposed to represent. It made me feel good to take control of my interactions with men, even if they were staged, even if they hurt real people. For all the Aiden purging I thought I’d done, he had still managed to exert control over my life. I didn’t owe him a damned thing, but I couldn’t begin to explain why I’d insisted on a payback he’d never see or feel.

  “I used to think I was helping women and helping myself by bringing down other people’s Aidens. But it’s not about him anymore.” It hadn’t been for a while, if I was being honest with myself. “I stayed to save for my gallery, but I lost that, so now I don’t know what’s next for me. I guess I’m stuck at H4H.”

  “Why are you stuck? You had a setback on your gallery, it happens. It’s not like you’d really invested anything. You can find another building.”

  I pulled my hand out from under his. The quiet, comforting moment between us was over. How dare he wave off losing my gallery like it wasn’t a big deal? It wasn’t just the rejection on top of more rejection, or feeling that I never got anything right, or trying to find another place in a neighborhood that wasn’t exactly brimming with storefronts in my price range. It was bigger than all of that. For a moment, I’d believed I could be more than a Heartbreaker.

  But who cared about my problems, right? My gallery was just a silly little pipe dream, so it didn’t really matter where I opened it. I was never going to have an impressive university career, and in his eyes, everything else was insignificant. That’s the way it was with all academics. I didn’t know why I’d thought for a second that he’d understand.

  “It’s so easy for you to blow off my loss when you don’t take any risks.” I jumped to my feet and paced in front of the lake. He’d touched a nerve, and much like my personal mascot, Winnie, I spit and hissed when I got backed into a corner. “You don’t know what it feels like when you put your heart on the line and fail, because you don’t put anything on the line. You take the safe and dependable route so you can feel like you’ve accomplished something without having to feel anything at all.”

  He stood and strode over to me. “You tried one serious relationship and haven’t dated since it ended. You’ve had one job since you left college that makes you feel like shit. You made an offer on one gallery, and when you lost it, you’re ready to just throw in the towel. So, remind me again, what risks do you take?”

  “At least I tried. Which is more than I can say for you.” I turned and made my way to the passenger door of the van and crossed my arms, making it more than obvious it was time to go.

  “You’re a trier, all right. That’s why you run every time things get hard.”

  This was why I didn’t open myself up. Things had been perfectly fine before I pulled out all my broken toys and asked if he wanted to play. “Fuck you, Mark.”

  He rested his arm above his head on the van. “If you want to say fuck you and run again because you’re uncomfortable with the truth, because things aren’t always easy, fine, but I’m done chasing after you. Whatever this thing is between us, it’s over.”

  I lifted my chin. “Can’t end what never began.”

  A spark of hurt leaped into his eyes, and I turned my head. I didn’t want to deal with any of this. All I wanted was to bury my head under my covers, like I’d planned to do before he showed up with his pity muffin.

  Better to walk away now and save myself a whole lot of heartache down the road.

  CHAPTER 23

  On Friday morning, I decided to stay home to prep for my weekend assignment. It was supposed to be Mark’s last night of training with me. I didn’t know if he would be there, but I’d rather have chewed off my own arm than text him to ask. We hadn’t talked since our fight at the lake, and he hadn’t shown up for the minor assignment I worked on Wednesday night. If he was going into the office, it was on the days I was working from home.

  I spent most of the week replaying the fight in my mind, but I wasn’t going to cave and call him. I wasn’t that person anymore. The only reasonable course of action was to let it eat away at me instead.

  His assessment of me had been so wrong. Maybe I didn’t take a lot of risks, but it was hard to justify continually putting myself out there when I always ended up on the losing side. Case in point: letting him in had been a risk, and that had turned out to be a huge mistake. And if the last few days had felt a little colder and a little emptier, well, that wasn’t because of the absence of Mark. That was just my life.

  Unable to concentrate, I dumped all my notes on the accountant assignment on my couch and went straight into my studio. What I really needed to do was paint. Something new into which I could channel all my conflicting emotions. A blank canvas had always allowed me to say the things I’d never been able to put into words.

  Leaving the café scene on the easel, I put a blank canvas on the floor and mixed together stormy grays and twilight blues with cracks of electric yellow. The scene came to me so clearly—a lone house with chipped paint on a barren field. The front yard held a single tree, leafless, with crooked limbs reaching toward a violent sky.

  I worked for four hours straight. Paint streaked my face and clumped in my hair, and my hand ached from how tight I’d been clutching my brush. The result didn’t satisfy me though. I still had a million conflicting feelings about my fight with Mark, all of them ramming against each other. I wanted to both call him and block his number, apologize and make him grovel, fight until it was all out of my system and give him the silent treatment while I stewed in my resentment.

  Most of all, I wanted him to understand that I had invested in my gallery. Maybe not in money, but in hope, and between the two, hope was a lot harder to come by. The fact that he couldn’t see that meant he’d never really seen me.

  My phone buzzed, and I pushed my hair out of my face, dragging a streak of midnight-blue paint across my forehead. It was an e-mail from the background check company I used for higher-profile targets. Whenever I did a basic search on someone, the company would then dig up even more personal information, such as dating history, photos uploaded to the cloud, and large monetary transactions. I’d get an alert about a week later, the main reason why some of my bigger assignments took more time to execute.

  This alert was for the esteemed curator Dr. Richard Vaden. I’d almost forgotten I’d looked him up. Curiosity more than anything made me open the e-mail, and I nearly dropped my phone when I read what it contained. Nearly ten years ago, he had sent a wire transfer for $200,000 to Dr. Carolyn Saunders.

  I closed my e-mail and immediately called my mom. It went to voice mail. “Call me as soon as you get this message. I have some questions about Richard Vaden.”

  Fifteen minutes late
r, I called back. This time she sent me straight to voice mail. She was avoiding me. Forget about texting. The only thing I could do to get hold of her was show up unannounced. She hated that, which only made me want to do it more.

  In the courtyard, I ran into Dr. Faber. I wanted to confront my mom before she left her office for the day, but it would have been rude not to stop and say hello. “Almost time,” I said. “Are you ready to leave all this behind?”

  “I think so. I’d like to travel.” His wrinkled eyes took on a distant look. “I’d also like to find a nice girlfriend. My career hasn’t given me a lot of time to do that, but I think now is a good time to find someone to build a life with.”

  Sure. Seventy seemed about the right age to settle down and start a family. I gave him a pat on the arm. “She’ll be a lucky lady. Have you heard any news on your replacement?”

  “As a matter of fact, it was just decided this afternoon.” He rubbed his chin. “Can’t remember the name. They’ll be getting a call though.”

  I didn’t push him for more information. Mark would find out soon enough, and I wasn’t sure which outcome to keep my fingers crossed for. I didn’t want him to continue at H4H, but even if he left, it wouldn’t solve my growing issues with working for Margo. On the other hand, while I was still pissed at him, he deserved better than this academic life. He was worth so much more than the weight of his past.

  I headed down the psychology hall to my mom’s office. Outside the door of another professor, a student was camped out like he was waiting for a discount TV on Black Friday, a paper clutched in his hands. I recognized the bloodshot eyes and nervous tic. I didn’t miss the days of arguing for a higher grade one bit. Despite my mom’s best efforts, I’d never been cut out for school. The struggle to maintain my GPA, the pressure during exams, the politics of impressing my professors—it had all started to feel like a game I could never win.

  Without knocking, I flung open the door to my mother’s office. A young student who couldn’t have been more than nineteen jumped to her feet, spilling the contents of her backpack on the floor. Her bottom lip trembled.