Read Online Heartbeat by Elizabeth Scott - Free Book Online Page B

never send you away,” he says. “You’re my family.”
    Thirty thirty thirty thirty.
    I don’t believe him, but I want to be here. I have to be here. Mom doesn’t need me like I want her to, but I am all she has.
    I get in the car.
    “Emma, please know I wanted your mother and you, I wanted our family. That hasn’t changed a bit. I wish that we were all—”
    “Yes,” I say so he won’t say anything more. He does, he’s wishing and wishing, but I don’t listen.
    I don’t believe in wishes anymore.

19
    Caleb isn’t in school. I notice before first period and again at lunch. I don’t say anything to Olivia, who saw Roger at the mall on Saturday and tells me all about it. I listen to her story of a fast-beating heart and flushed face and hesitant conversation like I am an old woman.
    Heartbeat. That’s what’s keeping Mom here. I try to not think about it, but I can’t because she doesn’t have one.
    Heartbeat. It’s just a word. A word.
    It’s more than that.
    “Hey,” Olivia says, waving a hand in front of my face. “You’re just sitting there nodding,” she says. “This is really huge for me. He said it was great to see me. Not good, not fun. Great.” She starts to say something else but then stops and says, “What’s going on?”
    “It’s been thirty days since she died,” I mutter.
    “Thirty...oh,” Olivia says. “So then—”
    “Yeah,” I say. “The doctors said if she made it through thirty days, the odds were stronger that she’d make it long enough for them to—so that eventually they can go in and get the baby out.” I wipe my stupid welling eyes. “I’m sorry. I know everything with Roger is huge, I do. Tell me again.”
    She shakes her head. “It sounded stupid when I was saying it. Who cares if he said it was great to see me?”
    “Great is better than good. Or fun.”
    “I could walk by his locker after lunch and see if he says anything.” Olivia plays with a button on her shirt. “Should I? No, wait, I can’t do that. What if he doesn’t say anything?”
    I look at her, the one person who I know loves me, and think about Mom in the bath that last night.
    “I think you should go for it.”
    “Really?”
    I nod.
    We go and he’s there and he says, “Hey, Olivia,” and she says, “Hey,” back and squeezes my hand so hard it hurts after we’ve walked away, but it’s a good hurt. Her smile makes me smile and it gets me through the rest of the day and to the hospital, up to the floor where Mom lies.
    To Caleb and his cart passing us in the hall on the way to her, to me sitting in a chair in the waiting room.
    I realize I am waiting—hoping—to see him as I stand up and walk out into the hall. He’s at the door as I get there, and we both stop and look at each other.
    “I was waiting for you,” I say, and immediately wish I could take it back. It’s true, but I shouldn’t have just said it like that. Or at all.
    “Oh,” he says, and looks at the cart. “I—uh—” His hair falls in his face and whatever it was before, those moments where I looked at him and thought he knows, they seem far away now. He’s just a guy standing there, made awkward by a strange girl with a round face that doesn’t have the curves and grace of his.
    “Not like that,” I say, because it isn’t like that, or even if it was (just a little—okay, a lot), I know it can’t be. I know what goes together and it is not me and someone who steals cars and gets high. It’s not me and someone who looks like him. It’s not me and anyone like him.
    “Not like what?”
    “Like whatever is normal for you.”
    “Nothing is ever normal in any hospital,” he says.
    “You’ve been to more than one?”
    “Five. Three for Minnie, two for me. Stomach pump and a dislocated shoulder, and every single hospital had the same color walls and the same awful lights. Not normal at all.”
    Thirty, I think, and swallow.
    “You weren’t in school,” I say, to stop what I’m thinking.