Heartbeat. Elizabeth Scott

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      2

      Dan and I don’t talk on the ride home. As soon as I’m inside the house I head straight up to my room, and I lock the door.

      I never used to have a lock, but then, I used to have Mom. I used to think that Dan cared about what I thought. What I wanted. What Mom would have wanted. This way, all the talks he used to try to have, right after Mom first died, can’t happen. Or at least, he can talk, but I don’t have to see him and can put on music or headphones or even fingers in my ears to shut him out. Just like he shut me out.

      I don’t have one of those wussy little turn-and-click locks. I have an actual lock, a bar with a padlock that I snap shut.

      Closing out the world.

      I put it in myself the day Dan told me what he was going to do to Mom. I walked out of the hospital, went to the hardware store and came home and put in the lock. My mother taught me how to do that. She believed women should know how to fix things. I’d seen her fix a broken toilet and watched her change the element in our hot water heater. She installed new locks on our doors when I was seven, after Olivia’s family got robbed.

      I go over to my window and open it. On the roof, Olivia grins at me through her blond hair and then comes over and pushes herself inside.

      “How did you know I was out there?”

      “I saw your hair when we came in. Also, your car down the road. Thanks for not parking...here.”

      “It makes things easier,” she says. “And clearly, I need a wig. Oooh, I could get a bunch. Red hair, blue hair—”

      “That wouldn’t stand out at all.”

      She sticks her tongue out at me. “I’d get other ones too. Brown hair, black hair. I could be a spy, don’t you think?”

      “Spies have to use computers, Olivia.”

      “No, they don’t. They go on missions. They have tech people do the computer stuff for them.”

      “Someone’s been watching Covert Ops.”

      “Like you don’t watch it too. You know you love it. You and your mom both think Sebastian is...” She trails off.

      “Sebastian is cute,” I say, and try not to think about how Mom and I used to watch the show together. “But he’s also fictional, plus even spies on TV have to use earpieces and stuff—would you be willing to do that?”

      “For Sebastian I would,” she says, grinning, and then flops on my bed. “But I really wish I could be an old-fashioned spy. Like back when they had to write coded messages in invisible ink and speak a dozen languages.”

      “That sounds more like you,” I say, and sit down next to her. “I—I saw the baby move today.”

      “Really?”

      “Yeah.”

      “Emma,” she says, squeezing my hand, “why do you even go to the hospital?”

      “Because I can see her. Because I want at least one person to be there for Mom and not for the baby.”

      “Dan—”

      “Dan wants the baby. You know it, I know it. If Mom was alive...” I stare at my dresser, at the photo of Mom and me. It was taken in Vermont when we went skiing. Mom is smiling and has one arm around me, holding me tight. It was the last vacation we took together, just her and me. She was thirty-five. I was ten.

      She met Dan two weeks after we got back from Vermont. I was nice to him when I met him because he actually asked where I wanted to go to dinner when Mom suggested the three of us go out. I thought he was kind.

      I also thought he loved Mom.

      “Hey,” Olivia says, and I look at her.

      “She’d love you for being there,” she says. “She does love you for being there. I know it.”

      I hug her, and Olivia hugs me back.

      Dan knocks on my door. “Emma, you want some pizza? I made triple cheese.”

      Of course he did. Dan doesn’t order food. He makes it. “The perfect man,” Mom used to say. “He can cook, he makes the bed and he remembers to put the toilet seat down.” Then she’d laugh and kiss him.

      She loved him so much.

      “I’m not hungry,” I say.

      “I’ll leave it by the door,” he says with a sigh. “Olivia, do you want me to leave you a slice too?”

      Olivia looks СКАЧАТЬ