Читать книгу Heartbeat - Elizabeth Scott - Страница 16

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.