Heartbeat. Elizabeth Scott

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      6

      At the hospital, Dan always goes in and says hi to Mom first.

      Actually, he wanted “us” to go in and “say hello together,” but the first and only time he asked me that, the night after I’d lain in bed, thinking of my mother lying in the hospital kept alive for the baby—his baby—I said, “There isn’t an us. There’s you, and then there’s me.”

      “But we’re family.”

      “Were,” I said. “Go see what you’re here for. And then I’m going to see Mom.”

      “I’m here every bit as much for your mother as I am for the baby.”

      “I know. After all, if her body can’t be kept alive long enough, your baby won’t survive, will it?”

      “Emma, that’s not—”

      “It’s not? Then what is it?”

      “It’s what your mother would want.”

      I slapped him. Right there, in the hospital.

      Security was called, but Dan said nothing was wrong, that we were “just struggling with our loss” and that he’d sit with me outside for a while.

      He did walk outside with me, and he actually put a hand on my arm and said, “Emma, please. I don’t think you’re seeing—”

      “Don’t touch me,” I said. “Don’t try to sell me your story. Mom loved you, I know that. You can kick me out of the house, send me to live with Mom’s parents, maybe boarding school. Take your pick.”

      “I’d never do that. You’re my family. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know I love you like you were my own—”

      “Go see her,” I said, cutting him off and making sure I was out of his reach.

      “You should come too.”

      “I don’t want to see her with you.”

      “Emma—” he said and then sighed.

      So that’s how I got to see Mom on my own. Dan goes in first while I sit in the waiting room outside the ICU, and then he goes and drinks some of the hospital’s sludge coffee. I don’t think he likes it, but then I don’t care what Dan thinks or likes anymore.

      He’s in there now, doing his thing, and I’m staring at the ceiling. I did homework for the first few days, more out of numbness than anything else, and then I realized it was easier to just sit and look at the ceiling like I do at home. To think about how she’d painted it, to think about her, and not where I am.

      To not think about Mom tethered to a bed by machines and IVs and the lump in her belly.

      One of the volunteers comes in with the magazine cart. The thing is a joke because the hospital never has any new magazines. They just replace the old issues with slightly less old issues. But then I suppose most people in here aren’t really that concerned with what’s going on in the world.

      I know I’m not.

      The magazine cart squeaks as it comes over to the last table in the room, the one that’s at the far end of the bank of chairs where I like to sit. Not that there are a lot of people in the waiting room today. Or any day. The ICU is not a place where people come to stay for a long time. Not usually, anyway, but my mother is “special.”

      The tears come again and I blink, watch the ceiling waterfall into little pieces as my throat gets tight.

      I don’t want to see Mom like this, and I pinch the bridge of my nose hard. It makes my head hurt but stops the tears.

      Mom used to do it whenever she thought she might cry. She hated to cry, and I can remember how, on the day she married Dan, she sat there getting her hair done and pinching her nose over and over so she wouldn’t cry and mess up her makeup.

      I was part of the ceremony. Mom and I walked down the aisle together, and before Mom and Dan became husband and wife, Dan asked for my permission to be part of our family. He said, “I’m so happy to have found you and your mother and I promise I’ll always look out for you. I’ll always want what you do, I’ll always believe in you.”

      “Liar,” I mutter, and wipe my eyes.

      I look away from the ceiling and see Caleb Harrison staring at me.