Heartbeat

by Elizabeth Scott

  “It’s not your mother,” Dan says, seeing my face, my clenched fists, and I think of how Caleb must have felt when he came home from his summer away and saw his parents looking at him just like they had when his sister died. How empty he must have felt.

  How furious.

  “I know it’s not her. She’s dead.”

  Dan flinches. “I know she’s dead too,” and he saw what I didn’t. He saw Mom—my mother, God, my mother—he saw her life end. He saw her stop breathing. He was there when she left. He got to say goodbye like I haven’t.

  I was happy—just now, I was happy. I know I was. I can remember it, being happy just now with Caleb.

  How can it be gone so fast? How can life be so cold?

  How could it take Mom away from me?

  I want my mother. I had her for seventeen years, but I thought I had forever. I thought I was ready for anything, I had my whole life planned, but seventeen years is nothing when it’s gone in the time it takes someone to reach for a piece of toast.

  It’s nothing when the one person you were sure would be there, would always be there, is gone.

  I sink to the floor now, weightless, boneless. I wait to cry but the tears won’t come. They have always come before. I have cried more than I ever thought I could, oceans of tears since the day she died and I first saw her again.

  But I can’t cry now. I want to, but grief has wrapped itself around me so tight that there’s nothing left. Its thorns have closed around me, burrowed all the way inside. Grief has found the tiny thread of hope I held on to in spite of everything and snipped it, pinned it with a thorn to my still-beating heart.

  Dan isn’t going to talk to me about Mom. He is alive. I am alive.

  She isn’t.

  “Emma?” Dan says, and he is kneeling next to me now. I can feel him looking at me. I can hear him breathing, and here we are exactly where I thought we’d never be. I was going to finish school and leave.

  I wasn’t going to be left.

  “I hate you,” I say, and the words come out as flat and empty as I am, and Dan sits down across from me.

  “I know,” he says, and his voice is as flat as mine too. As empty. “But I meant what I said when you came in. I didn’t ask you what to do about your mother before, but I’ll ask you now. It’s—it’s the baby, Emma.”

  The baby.

  I stare at him.

  “It’s his heartbeat,” Dan says softly. “There are problems. It’s not strong enough, not all the time. The doctor says there’s a chance he can make it to forty-three days, to the twenty-five week mark, but if his heartbeat doesn’t stabilize he might die. And all the doctor says is that there’s a chance he’ll make it. That’s all he’ll say. That there’s a chance and—” He breaks off and then grabs my hands. His fingers are cold and shaking so hard I feel their tremors rattling across my palms, up my arms.

  “What do I do?” he says. “Do I let the doctors deliver him now, even though he’ll almost never make it, or do I wait and hope that he’ll make it to forty-three days? I already know he’ll never see his mother. I don’t—the thought Emma, of him never seeing me or you...” He squeezes my hands tight, and now my hands are cold too.

  So cold, and he says, “What should I do?”

  I look at him and he is looking back at me and he doesn’t know what to do, he is scared and lost and the baby could die, his heart could stop beating just like Mom’s did.

  One heartbeat, two heartbeats, three heartbeats, more, and you never know when you have used yours up.

  That’s the thing. You don’t know.

  How long will your heart beat for? How many heartbeats do you have?

  I look at Dan and see he is waiting for my answer. That he needs me. That he wants me to help him. To be with him.

  To be his family.

  But I don’t know what to say.

  49

  I don’t know what to say but I do. That’s the thing.

  I do.

  It has always been about Dan and what he wants. It has always been about the baby.

  He’s kept Mom’s body alive for the baby, kept her lying in a hospital bed, here but not here.

  Let her go, I told him when I finally knew, when it was too late, and that’s all I need to say now.

  Let her go.

  Let him go.

  Let it all go.

  I pull away from Dan and stand up.

  I just have to say it. I just have to say Let go. Let her go.

  Let them go.

  “Emma?” Dan says, “Emma, please talk to me,” but I’m not listening to him. I don’t want to even hear him.

  I step into the living room. I used to sit with Mom on the sofa. Right here, right where I am sitting down now. I should have sat with her more. Been with her more.

  I wish I had, but I didn’t. I only sat with her when I thought I could, when my “schedule” would allow it.

  “Emma,” Dan says again, pleading now, and I shake my head.

  I didn’t spend enough time with Mom. I thought I would see her get old and even worried about it once in a while, about what would happen to her, vague thready thoughts about how I would manage my life and take care of her and Dan when they were old.

  I worried about the future and I waited for it too. I wanted Mom to see me do all the things I’d planned.

  I thought it would matter if I was first in my class, if I got into a school that made people jealous, if I had a GPA that was so high no one else could reach it.

  I was going to talk about dedication when I was valedictorian, planned on standing on stage and talking about how I wanted to follow in my father’s footsteps, about how I knew I was making my mother proud.

  I’d planned all that and it’s too late to go back, too late to take back all those nights I worked for extra credit I never needed, the nights I spent preparing for tests I was already prepared for.

  It’s too late to take them back and to just sit with her on this sofa. Be with her.

  She’s gone, and I sat beside her a few nights before she died, desperate to get to my homework, but she’d had a bad day at work, lots of phone calls that left her upset and tense, and she just wanted me to watch TV with her for a while, said, “Come on, sit and rest for a minute. If I can do it, you can do it. Right?”

  I remember it so clearly. I didn’t want to, mumbled and muttered about homework but sat down, and she’d sighed and put her feet up on the coffee table.

  They were swollen.

  I’d forgotten that until now.

  I remember that I could see the marks her shoes had left, and said, “Mom, you need new shoes.”

  “No, it’s just the baby,” she’d said. “It’s what happens.”

  “Your feet must hurt,” I’d said, and stopped thinking about homework and focused on her.

  I wish I’d done that more now.

  “A little,” she’d said, wiggling her toes, and flipped through the channels. She’d stopped on a sitcom we’d both seen a million times before, four friends living in “the big city” and trying to “make their way in the world.” They would, of course. That’s the beauty of TV. Everything works out in the end.

  Mom had flipped through the channels during a commercial and now I lean into the sofa, lean into where she was sitting, and remember her doing that.

  I remember it all because I was really and truly there with her then.

  I noticed.

  I saw her holding the remote. I saw images flickering by one after another. An infomercial, a bad movie, an okay movie, an ad, another comedy, more ads.

  She stopped on an ad for a restaurant.

  I remember thinking that was weird because it was a restaurant ad and who hadn’t seen one? We’d just seen ten alone
, but the ad she watched—

  There was a family sitting in a booth, smiling as the waitress dropped off their enormous platters of food.

  “Are you hungry?” I’d said, thinking of how Mom had eaten all of her dinner and then gone back to the fridge to make a sandwich, Dan trying to help and her saying, “I’m pregnant, Dan. I can handle bread. Look, here I am holding one slice! And now another! Next thing you know, I’ll be able to pick up mustard all by myself! Amazing, isn’t it?”

  “No,” Mom had said to me as I asked her about the ad she’d stopped on, and her voice was quiet, so quiet. “I’m not hungry.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  I looked at her because I wasn’t sure—she was eating a lot and still had a bit of mustard on her chin—and she was staring at the TV.

  She was staring at the ad, at the food on the table, at the waitress smiling.

  At the family. The mother, the father, the daughter and the baby in the high chair reaching for the “grown-up” food and making everyone laugh.

  Special Deal! flashed across the screen and Mom sighed and put a hand on her belly. On the tiny rise that was there.

  “We’ll do that,” she whispered. “We’ll do that.”

  “Not there,” I said. “Dan hates that place.”

  She smiled and said, “He does, doesn’t he? But we’ll all go somewhere nice and it’ll be just like that ad.”

  I hurt. I actually hurt all over, and I see what I missed and I can’t stop it even though I want to.

  I remember how she touched her stomach again, stroking over the tiny bump. She whispered, “Do you hear that, baby? We’ll do it. We will. You just hang in there for me. You stay with me.”

  “Where’s he going to go?” I said, and then “Can we go back to the show?” and she said, “Sure,” and we did, we went back to the sitcom and that was it.

  Except it wasn’t.

  I thought I knew what she wanted, but I didn’t.

  She wanted that picture the ad showed; she wanted that family—the mother, the father, the daughter, the baby. She wanted all of us together, and when I saw her touching her stomach I thought she was hungry and then, later—after—scared.

  And she was scared, but not like I thought. Not for herself.

  She didn’t want to be kept still. She didn’t want bed rest.

  But she did it.

  She did it because she wanted the baby to be here. She wanted the baby to be here and all those times I heard her crying when she wasn’t pregnant or when she miscarried were because she was in pain.

  But also because she wasn’t pregnant.

  She wanted what she saw in that ad that night I thought I was being with her. She wanted something so simple. She wanted all of us to be together. She wanted me and Dan and the baby and her together forever and ever.

  She gave up so much to get pregnant and the thing is—

  The thing is she wanted it. She wanted him, the baby swimming inside her. I thought she was scared and she was, but not of him.

  She was scared for him.

  She agreed to bed rest, terrified of it, for him.

  She wasn’t afraid of dying.

  She was afraid he would.

  I see her now, really see her, and all the moments I thought Mom was scared for herself, all those moments where she touched her stomach and I saw fear in her eyes I thought I knew what it was for. I thought she knew what was coming and didn’t know how to escape it.

  I was wrong.

  She touched her stomach because she wanted to know the baby was there. Because she wanted to feel him. Because she wanted him to stay with her. She didn’t talk about names because she was afraid to pick one, afraid she’d lose him like all the other babies she’d almost had, and those hadn’t swum inside her for nearly as long, those hadn’t lived long enough for names to even be an issue. She’d wanted him to make it. To be with her and me and Dan.

  She’d wanted him to live.

  Mom, I think, Mom, but I am just a girl on a sofa, a girl whose mother woke up one morning and died because that’s how life is.

  I hurt all over even more now, like someone has shattered my insides, like I’ve been torn apart and put back together but I’m missing something.

  Her.

  And him. My brother.

  I know that, and I know what I need to do. What Mom would want me to.

  A family is more than one person.

  “Dan,” I say, and wait till he turns toward me.

  50

  I’m at the hospital. I’m just...I’m just standing in a corner of a hall on one of the floors.

  It’s small. Quiet. It’s where I want to be. Where I need to be.

  It’s been forty-three days since Mom died, and I’m finally going to do it.

  I’m finally going to say goodbye.

  “I’m sorry,” I say as I sit down and take her hand, which is cool and almost papery. I can’t bring myself to look at the rest of her. I want to remember the way she was before all this happened. “I’m so sorry I didn’t see that you wanted the baby so badly. That you weren’t scared about yourself at all. I wish I’d spent more time with you. I wish—” My voice cracks. I lace my fingers through hers, tears welling as I have to move her fingers to make it happen. “I wish you were here but you aren’t. I miss you, Mom. I miss you and I know I always will but...” I bite my lip hard and make myself keep talking. “But today everything changes. And even though you aren’t here, I know you’re happy. That you’ll be happy with what’s going to happen. With how things are going to be.”

  I let my fingers fall away from hers, catch her hand and put it gently by her side. “I love you. I miss you.” I start to cry. I can’t tell her goodbye. She’s still with me. She’ll be with me forever. I love her that much and she loved me that much too.

  I sit there with her for a little while longer, until I’m not crying. Until I can look at her stomach.

  She’s twenty-five weeks pregnant now.

  Forty-three days, and the baby’s heart is still beating.

  In fact, he’ll be born today. Dan and I picked out his name together.

  Liam.

  And now, the operation to bring him here has started. Dan wasn’t sure how long it would last. The doctors—there are more of them now, more of them here for this moment—aren’t even sure.

  Liam won’t come into the world like most babies do. Mom’s body will be there, but she won’t, and when he comes out she’ll be—that will be it. He’ll have to be taken to ICU right away.

  I blow out a breath as I think of what will happen.

  The machines that have kept Mom’s heart pumping, her lungs breathing, will be turned off. Her body will be empty. Silent.

  Liam will never hear her breathe on her own. Never touch her for real. Left unsaid is what might happen to him. Left unsaid is that no one has been able to say if he will ever draw his first breath.

  Left unsaid is that he might slip away like Mom did. That he could be here. And then be gone.

  “We don’t know what will happen,” the doctor who will head the operation told Dan and me last night. “We think things look good, but—”

  I stopped listening then. I held Dan’s hand.

  He held mine back and when we got home we looked at the photos of Mom we’ve been collecting. They are for Liam. They are for us.

  I am still in the corner where I stood before I said goodbye to Mom when Caleb rubs my arm gently. He’s been with me since I got to the hospital, walked with me to this corner and stood, waiting, for me to come back. He came to be with me.

  Olivia came over this morning. She brought doughnuts but no one ate them. We just sat there, around the table, talking about Mom. Dan told us how
she used to call him at home from work and ask him what he was making for dinner, sighing and saying, “If I’d known getting married would mean dinner every night, I would have done it years ago.”

  Olivia told us about how she’d managed to get her parents to agree to stay home and meet Roger, who had not only told his ex to stop calling him but, when she came up to him at a party when he was with Olivia and acted like she wasn’t there, said, “This is my girlfriend, Olivia,” which was pretty much perfect boy behavior and Olivia figured after that, her parents would be easy.

  “I told them they needed to talk to him without any gadgets the whole time. I figure I’ve got two minutes, tops, but still, I want them to meet him.” As soon as she said it, she added, “But if you need me—”

  “I do,” I said. “I’ll need you when I get home and tomorrow and for the rest of my life. I also know I need you to be happy. And besides, it’s not like I’m not going to tell you everything anyway.”

  “Promise?”

  I gave her a look and she grinned, but still hugged me before we left and whispered, “Emma, I’m here if you need anything. You know that, right? You can even call my mom or dad if it’s an emergency.”

  That was big stuff and I hugged her because she was awesome and I knew she meant everything and because Olivia has been here through it all and she has always been my friend. Mom would call her “a keeper.”

  Mom’s right. But like I always knew—she usually was.

  Olivia and I are fine, and she is going to have her parents meet Roger, just like she’s finally starting to be okay about me and Caleb.

  “I know you,” she said to me last week, “and you’re happy when you’re with him. Really happy and it’s been a while. So I’m happy. I just...I mean, you, Miss I-Have-To-Be-Perfect and a car thief. I never would have guessed.”

  “Me either,” I said, and it was true. The me I was before never would have guessed. Never would have seen.

  But I—the me I am now—I do see. And I am happy with Caleb.

  Caleb.

  When I told him what I’d said to Dan, that I wanted to go ahead and do the very thing I’d been fighting against, that I wanted to keep Mom’s body beating and breathing so that Liam might live, he didn’t say anything. He just held me and I cried.