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For the first time that night, I understood real fear. In bed, I felt my heart pounding against my ribs and heard the blood whooshing through my head, and I was afraid to go to sleep. My mother had died in her sleep, her heart stopping without warning. So I stayed awake for hours listening to every echoey thump, like I could somehow keep my heart going if I just paid attention to it.
My father drove me to school the next morning. I caught up with my friends as they got off the bus and they were all talking about a boy my best friend, Sherry, liked and a party they all wanted to go to and how Sherry hoped the boy would kiss her there and how maybe there’d be beer and weed. I couldn’t find a way into their conversation and they forgot to slow down for me as we walked into the school. Sherry and I broke away from the rest of them as we headed for our science class, and we didn’t seem to have much to say to each other. I could hardly keep my eyes open, worn out from a nearly sleepless night. While my friends had been dreaming about boys and parties and getting drunk, I’d been doing my best to stay alive.
There was a new boy in our science class. We sat at two-person tables, and since the boy who usually sat next to me was absent, Miss Merrill stuck Travis Brown in his place. He looked more like he belonged in the sixth grade than the eighth. Short and skinny. When I handed him the stack of papers Miss Merrill wanted us to pass around, he didn’t look me in the eye. He had these really long eyelashes and thick hair that hung over his forehead. He looked like a girl and he seemed really sad. He was the kind of boy who’d be a target for some of the idiot bullies at my school.
“Robin,” Miss Merrill said from the front of the classroom, “after class, please share the assignments from the last few weeks with Travis so he can get caught up to the rest of us.”
“Okay,” I said, because I couldn’t really say I didn’t want to. From a few rows in front of me, Sherry turned to give me an I’m glad she asked you and not me kind of grin.
The last thing I wanted to do after class was hang out with this weird new kid, so I told him I’d email him the assignments that night. As I was walking out of class, though, Miss Merrill called me to her desk.
“I picked you to help Travis for a reason,” she said to me. “His father died recently. I thought you might be able to understand what he’s going through.”
“My mother died a long time ago,” I said. “It’s not really the same.”
“Isn’t it?” She raised her eyebrows.
“Not really,” I said again, but as I walked to my next class, Travis’s email address and phone number in my pocket, I knew she had a point. We were both half-orphans. You never got over that.
I emailed him the assignments that night, but when he didn’t understand something I’d typed, I impulsively decided to call him.
“Miss Merrill told me your father died,” I said, after explaining the assignment to him. “My mother died when I was four. So I think that’s why she picked me to help you.”
“Not really the same,” he said.
“That’s what I told her.”
“You’ve had your whole life to get used to it.”
“It’s still terrible,” I said. “I don’t remember her very well, but I still miss her. Miss having a mother.”
He was quiet. “My father was so cool,” he said after a minute.
“Do you have brothers and sisters?”
“No. You?”
“No.” I felt the loneliness suddenly. Mine. His. “It’s hard.”
“Yeah, it sucks. And then we had to move on top of it. We couldn’t afford our house in Hampstead anymore and my mother has friends at the church here, but I hate it. We’re renting this old dump. I hate your stupid school, too. The beach is the only good thing about living here. My father always took me to Topsail and we’d hang out on the beach.” It was like I’d plugged him in and suddenly all these words were spilling out of him.
“Where do you live?” I asked.
“Carolina Beach.”
“Oh.” I never hung out with the Carolina Beach kids at school. My father had always seemed to look down on them, an attitude I guessed I’d picked up without meaning to.
“What about you?” he asked. “Where do you live?”
“In a condo in Wilmington near UNC, where my father teaches.” We talked about our neighborhoods and I knew we were living totally different lives. Mine was clean and orderly and middle class and his sounded sort of thrown together in an emergency.
“At least you have friends here,” he said, “I’m starting all over.”
“I used to have friends,” I said. “Not so much anymore.” Wow, was that true? I felt like I was finally admitting it to myself. When was the last time Sherry called me instead of me calling her? When was the last time she texted me? My friends were moving on. Leaving me behind.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“They’re … I don’t know. They’re changing in a way I’m not. They don’t talk about anything important anymore.” I made it sound like I was leaving them. Not the other way around.
“Most girls are like that,” he said. “Airheads.”
“Major generalization.”
“Maybe.”
He told me about his old friends in Hampstead and how cool they were. I told him who was okay at my school and who he should watch out for and then we started talking about music we liked and before I knew it, it was ten o’clock and Daddy was knocking on my door telling me to go to bed.
“Is that your father?” Travis asked.
“Yeah. He wants me to get off and go to bed.”
“It’s only ten.”
“I know.” I looked over at my bed, remembering how I’d stayed awake most of the night before, trying to keep my heart going. “I’m afraid to go to bed.” I bit my lip, wishing I could take back the words. I couldn’t believe I’d said that to someone I hardly knew.
“Why?”
“It’s just … It’s stupid,” I said. I didn’t talk much about my heart. I didn’t like people to think I was weak. The scrawny, girly image of him suddenly popped into my mind. Why was I talking to him at all? But the words wanted to come out in the worst way. “I have this … I have the same heart problem my mother had,” I said. “And yesterday I found out it’s even worse than my mother’s was, so last night I kept feeling it beating when I was in bed and it freaked me out and now I don’t want to go to bed.”
“Wow.” He was quiet for a few seconds. “You could call me,” he said finally.
“What do you mean?”
“Call me from your bed and we’ll talk about other stuff. It’ll keep your mind off your heart. And keep my mind off my father,” he added.
“That’s crazy.”
“You could,” he said.
“No, thanks,” I said. “And I have to get off. I still have to read a chapter for history and you have all those assignments to check out.”
“Like I’m really going to do that,” he said with a laugh. “See you tomorrow.”
I hung up the phone and got ready for bed, thinking about what a total dork I was for spending an hour on the phone with him. But once I was lying in bed, my heart started hammering against my rib cage and I felt like I couldn’t pull a full breath into my lungs and before I knew what I was doing, I reached for the phone and hit Redial.
He answered so fast, I knew he’d been waiting.
He became the person I looked forward to seeing at school. Not Sherry or my other long-time friends. As I was losing them, I was gaining Travis. He didn’t fit in well with the other boys. It wasn’t only his looks, although honestly, I was starting to think he was cute. He had really nice gray eyes beneath those insanely long eyelashes and although he didn’t smile often, when he did, he kind of tipped his head to the side in a way that made me smile back. He was too down over his father’s death to make much of an effort to fit in. He talked to me a lot about him, and I felt jealous that he’d gotten to know his father so well when I’d been cheated out of knowing my mother. His father sounded amazing. I loved my own father and I would have said we were close, but Travis’s father was almost like a best friend to him. A really, really good father.
We talked on the phone more than we emailed and it took me a while to realize the old computer he shared with his mother was always breaking down and they didn’t have the money to get it fixed. I didn’t know what it was like not to have enough money for something as necessary as a computer. We had three in our condo for just Daddy and me. Travis had to use the one at the library sometimes to get his work done—and he did get it done even though he always acted like he didn’t care about school. My father drove me to his house every once in a while so we could study together and afterward Travis and I would slowly walk the two blocks to the beach and he’d talk on and on about the tides and the surf and the marine life—all the things he’d learned from his father. My own father seemed to like Travis and called him “that nice little boy at the beach.” He was happy I was no longer hanging around my old friends, who were getting wilder by the minute. The nice little boy at the beach struck him as much safer.
By the time summer rolled around, I was hardly speaking to Sherry and everybody, and that was okay. We had nothing in common anymore and they always wanted to put distance between themselves and Travis, who seemed like such a loser to them. That summer, Travis and his mother spent the entire two months with his aunt in Maryland, and when he came back he looked completely different. It was such a shock. When I saw him the first day of school, I honestly didn’t recognize him. He’d had a growth spurt so huge it must have hurt. He was taller than me and he had muscles where he used to be all skin and knobby bones. He actually needed to shave! No one would ever think of him as girlish again. Especially not the girls, Sherry and my former friends included. They practically threw themselves at him, but he hadn’t forgotten how they treated him. And he hadn’t forgotten the one girl who treated him like he mattered: me.
I’d changed, too, over the summer. I suddenly understood my old friends’ fascination with guys and I saw Travis in a whole new way. We settled back into our friendship pretty easily, but there was something new and exciting cooking beneath the surface and we both knew it. We still spoke on the phone nearly every night, but our conversations were different, full of unexpected twists and turns.
“I met a girl in Maryland,” he told me one night, soon after school started.
I tried to act cool, though I felt ridiculously jealous. “What was she like?” I asked.
“Nice. Pretty. Sexy.”
I didn’t think I’d ever heard him use the word sexy before and it set all my nerve endings on fire. I was dying at the thought of him kissing her. Touching her body.
“Did you do it?”
He laughed, sounding a little embarrassed. “Almost, but no.”
I felt relieved. “Are you still … I mean, do you want …”
He laughed again, and this time I knew he was laughing at me. “Spit it out,” he said.
I shut my eyes. My heart was beating so hard I could feel it pounding through my back into my mattress. “Are you going to see her again?” I asked. “It’s not like Maryland’s on the other side of the country.”
“No, I’m not. It wouldn’t be fair to her.”
“Why not?”
“Because the whole time I was hanging with her I wanted to be with you.”
Yes. I couldn’t believe how much I’d wanted to hear him say that! “I love you,” I said. I blinked my eyes open and stared at my dark ceiling, biting my lip. Waiting.
“Since when?” he asked. Not exactly the response I’d wanted. But I thought back.
“Since that first night we talked on the phone. Remember? How you said talking would keep me from thinking about my heart and you from thinking about—”
“I love you, too,” he interrupted, and suddenly everything was different.
I missed tons of school that fall because I was weak and kept getting sick. My father was afraid every time I left the house for “the germ factory,” which is what he’d started calling my school. Travis was driving by then, this little old Honda of his mother’s, and he’d pick up assignments and books for me and bring them to our condo after school. My father didn’t like it. At first, I thought it was because the books and papers were coming from the germ factory, but then I realized he didn’t like Travis and me being alone together. Daddy’d had no problem with Travis when he looked like a harmless, skinny little kid. Now, though, he looked like a man, and suddenly Daddy wasn’t crazy about him. When Travis finally asked me to a movie, my father said I couldn’t go. Daddy and I were sitting in our den. I was doing my math homework on the sofa while he answered email and he didn’t even bother to look at me when he told me no.
“Dad,” I said, looking up from my work, “we’re just friends. It’s no big deal.”
He took off his reading glasses and set them on the desk. Whenever the glasses came off, I knew we were in for a long conversation about what I could and couldn’t do. It had been that way for years. “Honey,” he said, “one of these days you’re going to have a new heart and you’ll be able to live a full and active life, but until then, staying healthy and taking it easy are your top priorities, and—”
“Sitting in a movie with my best friend isn’t going to tax my heart,” I argued. I rarely fought back. I’d been taught not to argue by both my father and my doctor. They’d taught me to avoid conflict and stress for the sake of my failing heart. I was supposed to breathe slowly and repeat the words peace and calm in my head over and over again until the urge to fight passed. But some things were worth fighting about and this was one of them.
“You may consider him your best friend,” Daddy said, “but I know how boys think and that’s not the way he’s thinking about you.”
“Yes, it is.” The lie felt so natural to me. I wasn’t going to let my father screw this up.
“Boys and girls can’t stay friends when they become men and women,” my father said. “Hormones come into play and it’s impossible. Travis is the wrong boy for you to get involved with, anyway.”
“First of all, we’re not ‘involved,’” I said, although when my father said that word, all I could think about was holding Travis’s hand in the movie and kissing him afterward. “Second, there’s nobody who cares about me more than he does. Besides you,” I added quickly.
“I was a boy and even the nicest boy has one thing on his mind.” My father swiveled his chair to face me. “But even if … all that wasn’t a concern, I still wouldn’t want you with Travis. It’s time to cool down that friendship, honey. He could drag you down.”
“Are you talking about money? It’s not like we’re rich and he’s poor.”
“We’re not rich, but we’re very comfortable,” he said. “Travis … isn’t. I doubt he ever will be. It’s not his fault. I know he hasn’t had the advantages you’ve had, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s not the sort of person I want my daughter to end up with. So there’s no point in giving him any encouragement. And that’s that.”
“That’s so unfair!” My cheeks burned. I felt the heat in them as I slammed my math book onto the coffee table. My father was instantly on his feet, holding his hands out in a calming motion.
“Settle down,” he said. “Settle down. You know better than to argue—”
“You’re always telling me to treat people equally and all that and then you say that just because he has less money than we do, I can’t go out with him. He’s smart, Daddy. He wants to be a biologist someday.”
“Listen, honey.” He sat down next to me on the sofa and put an arm around my shoulders. “I don’t want you going out with anyone right now, okay? You don’t understand how serious your condition is.”
“You’re upsetting my heart more than Travis ever would,” I said.
“Then stop arguing with me.” His voice was so annoyingly calm. “You have to trust that I know what’s best for you right now. If you want, I can have Dr. McIntyre talk to you about this. He’ll agree with me. Until you can get a new heart, you need to—”
“To stay locked up in my room without friends or ever doing anything fun.”
“You need to be careful. That’s all I was going to say.”
I knew it was time to back down. I could feel my heart hurting, though it was more like a heartache than anything to do with my condition. I would find a way to see Travis. I would just have to hide what I was doing from my father. I’d never done anything behind his back before, but he wasn’t leaving me much of a choice.
So, I did go to the movies with Travis. I told him we needed to keep it from my father because he was worried about my health and didn’t want me to date. I didn’t tell him Daddy didn’t want me going out with him. I’d never hurt him that way. Travis was sweet and sensitive, which was why I’d loved him back when he was a scrawny little boy and why I was falling into something deeper with him now. He wasn’t like the other guys I knew who were all about drinking and hooking up with girls. The guys my old girlfriends hung out with and drooled over and talked about day and night.
It was amazing to sit next to Travis in the theater, holding his hand, feeling electricity between us where there used to be just the warmth of friendship. In his car, he kissed me and made me feel a little crazy with the way he ran his hands down my body over my clothes, and I thought: I could die tomorrow, so there’s no way I’m going to deprive myself of this today. I decided right then that I was going to squeeze every drop of living into my life that I could.
Every single drop.
7 Erin
I’D BEEN LIVING IN MY BRIER CREEK APARTMENT for nearly a week when I discovered a coffee shop tucked into the far corner of the shopping center’s vast parking lot. The tan stucco building looked very old, as though it had been there for decades and the shopping center had grown up around it, but I knew that couldn’t be the case. It was simply designed to look old to give it some personality. The shop’s name was painted on a board that hung above the wood-and-glass front doors and I couldn’t read it until I was nearly on top of it. JumpStart. I walked inside and was transported from the bustling parking lot with its zillions of cars and the illusion of squeaky-clean newness into a warm space that felt almost like a living room. The furniture was organized into intimate little groupings set apart from one another by bookcases and a fireplace—not burning, since it was still very warm outside. Then there was the long counter with a menu made up of pastries and salads and coffees and teas. Music played softly in the background. It was something jazzy, which I didn’t usually like, but I didn’t really care about music one way or another anymore. Music, books, politics, art, sex—what did any of it matter? It was all so insignificant to me now.
Half the chairs and tables and leather sofas were occupied, mostly by people my age typing on their computers or doing paperwork. Three young women shared a table and they were laughing at something on a computer screen. A man was talking about real estate with an older couple. I heard the words town house and too many stairs. Another couple was in the midst of an intense conversation, an open bible on the table between them. I knew the moment I walked inside that I’d be spending a lot of time there. I felt anonymous and I liked the feeling.
I spotted a leather chair that I wanted to claim for my own. Although it was part of a grouping—three chairs and one sofa—no one was sitting in that little circle. I liked knowing I would have that space to myself, at least for a while.
I ordered a decaf latte and a bagel I knew I would only nibble. I’d lost twenty pounds in the five months since Carolyn’s death and I had to force myself to eat. I couldn’t taste anything and food seemed to stick in my throat. The barista, a dark-haired guy whose nametag read Nando, smiled at me, showing off a deep dimple in a handsome face. I did my best to smile back without much success. I noticed a tattoo of a unicorn on his forearm as he handed me my bagel.
I settled into the brown leather chair, pulled out my iPad and did a quick check of my email. Michael wrote that he missed me and asked how I was doing.
Okay, I typed. In a coffee shop right now. It’s nice. Hope you’re okay, too. We’d had a similar exchange every morning since I left and I guessed that would be the nature of our communication for a while. Polite and bland. Empty words. The sort you might write to an acquaintance you checked in with once a year instead of a man you’d shared your life with for so long. A man you’d made love to and laughed with and cried with.
We used to email each other all the time during the day. The days I worked in the pharmacy, I’d check in to talk about dinner or household things or simply to tell him I loved him. The days I was home, I’d describe what Carolyn and I were up to and he’d write back saying he was sad that he wasn’t with us. He meant it, too. My friends had envied that, how close he and Carolyn were. How capable Michael was of taking care of her. If my friends had to leave their kids with their husbands for some reason, they worried the guys wouldn’t be able to manage. I never worried about that with Michael. He’d take Carolyn to the park or just make up a game to play with her on the spot. I’d admired that about him. He was so creative and fun and Carolyn always looked forward to “Daddy Time.”
