Read Online Heartbeat by Elizabeth Scott - Free Book Online

sorry. I’m so sorry,” and I cry like I always seem to be doing. I cry and when I’m done my eyes hurt and I have a headache and nothing’s changed. You’d think I’d have learned that by now, that tears don’t change anything.
    You’d think I’d have run out of them.
    But I haven’t.

18
    Mom did it. Well, she didn’t. Her body did it, because today is day thirty.
    Thirty days of Mom being dead but kept alive and at the start of week sixteen it was okay, it was in the distance.
    That distance is closed today.
    I have missed school or a weekend or maybe both. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.
    Olivia came by a few times, but aside from, “Emma, eat. EAT,” I can’t remember another thing she’s said. I’ve just felt empty inside, silent, and the one time Dan knocked on my door and said, “Emma?” I said, “Do you miss her at all?” and listened to the drone of his voice, words buzzing over me.
    I know I can’t stay in my room forever. The thing about Mom dying is that the world didn’t stop. It didn’t even slow down. It’s flowers and cards and everyone understands but no one does because Mom wasn’t Mom to them. Without her it’s like I’m living inside a mirror. I see things, I do things, but they are just surfaces and nothing more.
    I’m numb, so numb, because thirty days is here but when I’m in the shower staring at the water, I wonder if Caleb feels like that about Minnie. Is loss this constant pain, not mental, but actual pain? It’s like even my teeth hurt, but there’s a fog over it, one that makes the pain hurt and yet leaves me carved out too.
    Is grief this forever wishing for what was even though I know I shouldn’t?
    I shake my head, water splashing everywhere.
    Mom loved to take baths. She actually took one the night before she died. I sat on the floor next to her tub, smelling the “calming” bath beads, oily bubbles, she’d put in. She’d put her hair up, stuck it in a half-knot that was already falling down and pushed the bubbles around as we sat there.
    “You don’t have to start on that paper now,” she said. “You can relax. Watch some TV. Hang out with your old pregnant mother.”
    “But—”
    “You don’t have to try so hard,” she said, reaching one hand out and touching mine, her skin hot and slick. “I love you no matter what.”
    “I know,” I said and she squeezed my hand.
    “So then let yourself breathe once in a while. Smell the roses. Go for it. Other inspiring things I can’t remember now and so on.” She grinned at me. “You do know what I mean, right?”
    “Dan’s going to come up and make you get out of the tub soon.”
    “You two.” She sighed. “Am I allowed to brush my hair?”
    “I don’t know. Dan’s got the pregnancy book. I’m going to read it after I get half of my New Deal paper done.”
    “Don’t work on it tonight, okay? Watch Covert Ops with me.”
    I didn’t. I worked on my homework and started pulling together ideas for my paper, blew a kiss at Mom when she stuck her head in and said, “Okay, I guess that’s a no on the TV. Don’t stay up too late.”
    “I won’t,” I said, half glancing at her as I read about FDR and his plans.
    Her hair was down and dry. The lamp in my room cast a shadow on her face.
    That was the last time I ever saw her.
    Thirty days ago today, and I turn off the shower and watch the water run down the drain, circling, circling until it’s gone.
    I get dressed, putting on clothes from the pile scattered around my bed. I realize, for the first time, that the rest of my room is boxed off to me. I could pick up the books piled on my desk. The earrings on my dresser I’d bought shopping with Mom the week before she took that last bath.
    But I can’t.
    I unlock my door, the reminder of putting in the lock—of Mom—almost bringing me to my knees and then I go downstairs.
    It’s early—I woke up before the sun rose and watched it come up, light tearing up the dark, and just thought