“You don’t know. Just like I forgot Dad’s birthday, and I ran away, and I pick battles with you, and I make more mistakes in a day than most people do in a lifetime. And maybe that’s selfishness to you. Maybe my depression makes me selfish. But what is it that makes you selfish? All you do is pray for me, and preach to me, and tell me how wrong I am for letting myself hurt. You’ve never tried to understand me. Why don’t you want to understand me?”
I wiped a tear that I didn’t even know had fallen until I tasted salt on my lips. She looked at me briefly, so briefly she didn’t see me at all. She didn’t want to.
“It’s not that I don’t want to understand you,” she said, still focused on the wall. She might as well have been talking to it. “I’m just afraid that if I did, I would want to fix you. And, apart from an act of God, I don’t know how to fix you.”
“I don’t want you to fix me,” I whispered. “I don’t want you to see me as broken.”
“Well, I do. I can’t help it. I can’t help it when I hear you crying in your room when you think I’ve gone to bed, or see you staring at walls for hours on end, or catch you running around with a boy who is going to do nothing but break an already broken heart.” Her eyes fogged over, as if she wanted to cry but didn’t know what she was crying for. “That boy will destroy you. By then you’ll be so broken, I’m afraid you’ll be unmendable.”
“He makes me feel,” I justified, to the benefit of no one but myself. “He makes me feel like I’m more than just a sack of blood and bones with a stomach full of antidepressants. That sounds ridiculous, I know. But I don’t fear anything with him. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. You won’t understand.”
“I’ll tell you what I understand,” she said. “I understand he may treat you well, and pay you attention, and give you all of these feelings. And he may mean every bit of it. For now. But what happens when that little girl has her baby, and he is suddenly responsible for taking care of another person’s life? What happens then?” She watched me with pity I didn’t want. I didn’t want to need it. “You’ll never get the best of him, sweetheart. He’s going to leave you like the one before. And I don’t say that to knock you down. I say that because you’ve already lost people you’ve loved. I don’t want to stand by and watch it happen again.”
She doesn’t know Snake, I tried to remind myself. But it wasn’t comforting. I didn’t know if it was her sincerity that propelled my doubt, or the unchangeable reality that hearts are fragile machines, made to be broken. I might have already known that Snake would break my heart if I let him. If I gave him a heart to break. He would never be permanent. Like ninth grade year. Like best friends. Like nerdy boys from math class. Like circus people.
Snake Eliot was incurably human. And like all humans, he was wind and fire. A gust of life. A wake of destruction. And I would soon be a broken heart. An unmendable machine.
“I want to see Dad,” I said. I couldn’t think about the inevitable. I couldn’t let myself dwell on what I knew I was going to have to do to preserve the tiny pieces of me that remained intact. That kind of hurt could wait.
“I told you, he’s asleep.”
“I’ll be quiet. Just let me see him, okay?”
She rubbed her exhausted eyes. I knew she didn’t have the willpower to tell me no. And the careful way she slid away from the door, the way she looked at me with something reminiscent of my dad’s compassion, told me that she didn’t want to.
When I walked into his room, the lights were dimmed. He was hooked to stacks of metal by small tubes and needles. His eyes were closed tightly, and his square glasses weren’t on his face. He looked even more helpless and fragile than he usually did. I stared at him, probably in the pimple way that I didn’t like. But I couldn’t help staring, and wanting to help, and feeling guilty because I was selfish. I was so astoundingly selfish.
There was a cushioned chair stationed by his bed. I sat in it, close enough to see the pastiness of his skin, the purple hue of veins drawn beneath it, the lifelessness of sucky hearts. I wouldn’t touch him.
“Happy birthday, Dad,” I whispered, so quietly I wasn’t sure I made a sound.
I tried to arrange some grandiose speech to appease my conscience, something about remorse and lost time and wishful thinking. But, like all the pages ripped from my journal, words weren’t good enough. They didn’t express enough. Give enough. Mean enough. My mind wasn’t bound by words, but doses of memories. And sunlight. And odd smiles that didn’t seem to fit. And a wolf above the fireplace. And regret.
“You told me once that nothing ever dies,” I whispered; his eyes were still firmly shut. “But you lied. Things die every day. Poor children in Africa and people in car wrecks and cancer kids and old people and animals. And yeah, they have spirits. And yeah, the impression never leaves. But people do die, Dad. We die because we’re decay. We’re the wolf above the mantel. We are and then we aren’t, and that’s the truth of it. That’s our nature. We can’t stay any longer than time can have us.” I wanted to reach for his hand, but I was afraid he would wake up and hear me. Some things were better left unsaid.
One of his devices beeped loudly, lines rising in V-shapes and falling again. I stared at the heart lines, waiting for a doctor to hurry in and rush him away. But seconds later, the sound subsided, the lines mellowing. He never opened his eyes. He never moved.
I contemplated touching his hand, and that time found the courage. I wrapped my fingers around his. They were colder than the metal of the bed. I traced my fingertip along an icy blue vein, but he didn’t seem to feel my touch. A sleep that deep must have been nice to someone with a heart like his, a necessary relief from overbeating.
“I wish the world had a pull cord, and whenever it spun too fast, you could yank it and stop everything dead in its tracks.” I studied the vein. It was thick, protruding from the skin. Blood pulsated under my thumb. “Wouldn’t that be nice? To convince yourself that the universe and time and life are willing to pause for you? Maybe I would be happy then. I think I wouldn’t have wasted so much time not appreciating the temporariness of you.” I thought I saw his eyelids flutter, but it was probably more wishful thinking.
“Time is in a race with itself. And we’re the gunshot that sends it running. By the time it comes back around, we’ve already made all of our mistakes. And people like me have already hurt ourselves and taken our pills to the bottom of the bottle and hated everyone and everything along the way. And people like you are left with the pain we cause. But we don’t mean to cause you pain; we just want to cure our own.”
His hands didn’t grow warmer with touch. My fingers were sweating against him, yet he felt as cool as he had when I first laid my hand on his. I stood from the chair, bending toward his face. I would have thought he was gone already had it not been for his breath, slow puffs against my cheek.