Heart's Desire (39 page)

READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

Hallie believes that she’s fallen in love with Auggie after a brief meeting. Is there such a thing as love at first sight?

Do you have a set of criteria for “the right one,” characteristics that you know you really like in a person, or do you just go by how you feel when you meet someone and then spend a bit of time together?

Brandt points out that most species are not monogamous. Into which category do you think humans fall? Are we meant to mate for life, be serially monogamous, or just date various people? Or does it depend on the individuals and the relationship?

At the beginning of the book Hallie observes that many couples seem to divorce when their kids leave for college. Do you think that people wanting to get divorced should try and stay together until their children are at least teenagers?

Can your significant other also be your best friend? Is it necessary to have a good friend with whom you’re not engaged in a physical relationship in order to talk about certain things?

Hallie’s mother believes that Louise has taken up with a bad crowd of friends and that this is to blame for her recent wayward behavior. Is it fair to judge people by the company they choose to keep, or should you be able to view them strictly as individuals? Would you worry if you had a teenage daughter hanging around with older guys who drove fast cars?

Hallie and Brandt have known each other a long time, and it appears that they might start a relationship. Has there ever been a person you really like and have known for a long time, but never considered for a relationship? What makes for “chemistry” between two people, where they both want more than friendship?

Hallie is having what she deems to be a good experience at college, but it sounds as if only a fraction of her time is devoted to actual learning. What percentage of high school and/or college would you say is about academics and what percentage is about other things such as learning how to be a friend, have a relationship, and basically be a human being?

Craig and Hallie agreed not to be exclusive while attending colleges so far away from each other. Based on your experiences, can long-distance relationships work?

Brandt and Louise choose abstinence when it comes to premarital sex. Is this the best option for all young people, or does it depend on the teenager? Should parents, teachers, and counselors be trying to steer teens toward abstinence, or should they provide all the information and let them decide what’s right? If you had a teenage son or daughter what route would you want him or her to take?

What are the pros and cons of marrying the only person with whom you ever plan on having a serious physical relationship?

Every once in a while we’re surprised to hear someone we thought was heterosexual announce a lifestyle change. In the book, Gil briefly considers being with a woman after a long same-sex relationship. Do you know people who have questioned their sexual preferences, and if so, do you think the urge to do so came on suddenly or had been on their minds for a while, only they may have been worried about sharing the information?

Ottavio wants to marry and Olivia doesn’t. Whose side are you on? Would you mind if one of your children, parents, or grandparents was living with a significant other?

Is it true that you always remember your first kiss and/or the first time you enter into a serious physical relationship? Do people make too big a deal about first times or are they really special?

Hallie’s parents have a lot of kids to keep track of. If you’re a teenager, do your parents know much about your
real
life? How might they answer if you were to ask them? If you’re older and you think back, did your parents know much about what was really going on when you were sixteen or seventeen? And if you have teenagers now, do you think you know much about their relationships?

Occasionally Hallie is forthcoming about her fears and concerns but usually lets them bubble inside for a long time. On the other hand, Bernard is happy to unburden himself to basically anyone willing to listen. Do you tend to discuss your problems with others or keep them to yourself? Is either way healthier, is there a happy medium, or does it depend on the person?

As you get older, has your view on love changed at all? Are you more hopeful or more cynical about romance than you were a few years ago?

Do you think people usually break up because they feel that one of them has changed, or because they find they didn’t really know the other person as well as they thought? Or is there another cause you see happening a lot, such as meeting someone else?

Can the brain be saying one thing about a person while the heart is saying another? Why do you think we sometimes make bad choices for partners? And is this a learning curve so that as you get older your selection process improves? If a friend told you that he or she loved someone who didn’t love that person back, what would be your advice?

Bernard goes through a very bad time after splitting up with Gil. Have you ever had a bad breakup? What helped you through it? Did you learn anything that ended up being useful later on?

What do you think is the most important element in a successful relationship?

Please turn the page for an exciting preview
of Laura Pedersen’s next novel,
the sequel to
Heart’s Desire
.

Full House

BY THE SECOND WEEK OF JANUARY EVERYONE IS FINALLY FINISHED dropping and adding classes, changing majors, joining ski club, and breaking off relationships that had been allowed to drift through the holidays. It was easier to coast the extra few weeks to avoid changing plans, returning long-ago-purchased gifts, and general all-around misery. It’s a brand-new year. A fresh start. And when you’re eighteen, the possibilities seem endless.

The biggest fraternity on campus holds a keg party Saturday night and welcomes all comers as long as they can produce a fake ID along with twenty bucks to be paid in cash at the door. Since my roommate Suzy has this huge crush on the treasurer, she convinces Robin and me to be her accomplices in searching for ways to drive the manhunt in a forward direction.

The frat house is a box-shaped building with dark brown vinyl siding that looks as if it could be the back part of a church where the priests live, were it not for the large Greek letters carved out of wood and pounded in between the second and third floors. Also, it’s practically new. Craig had explained to me that the tradition of the dilapidated
Animal House
–style fraternity house had ended a decade ago when insurance companies started discontinuing policies to buildings that no longer measured up to all the fire codes. So even though the furniture on the inside might have springs popping out of the cushions, or be nonexistent, the structure itself has to be sound.

We pay our cover charge on the front steps, and a guy wearing a multicolored jester’s hat uses a stamp to emblazon the backs of our hands with big purple beavers. In the strobe-lit entrance hall Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” is blaring from speakers that seem to be everywhere. Meantime the jacked-up bass causes the wooden floor to thump so hard it feels as if there’s a heartbeat in each foot. The couches are pushed back to the walls and the ceiling of the large living room is hung with dozens of strings of chili pepper lights that cast a crazy quilt of patterns onto the walls and guests.

The next hour consists of a shouted exchange with this junior in the art department named Josh whom I had a crush on the entire first semester of my freshman year, while he didn’t even know I was alive. Only the problem is that now, after so much fantasizing about our nonexistent relationship, as well as several beers, I’m experiencing difficulty separating the real conversation we’re finally engaged in right now from all the imaginary ones I had with him last fall. For instance, Josh looks surprised when I talk about having nine brothers and sisters, whereas I’m thinking we covered that
months
ago. Furthermore, I’m desperately trying to act interested in everything that Josh is telling me about where he’s from and what he’s studying even though I already know all this from asking around and looking up his campus profile on the Internet. I may be majoring in graphic arts, but like most college women I minor in stalking.

Finally
he asks me to dance. Only I can’t help but wonder if it’s his way of ending the conversation and working toward making an exit, alone. Nonetheless, Josh and I move toward the area in front of the fireplace where throngs of intoxicated students dance to Jason Mraz’s “I’ll Do Anything.” I’m probably reading too much into the situation, as usual, but it’s as if every line in the song has a double, or even triple, meaning. And when Josh pulls me close I realize that if he puts his arms around me we’re headed for more than just dancing.

“Hall-ie . . .”
I hear my name echoing somewhere within the swirl of music, shouts, laughter, and a gauzy but pleasant alcoholic haze.

It can’t be. It
cannot
be the voice that boomerangs through the garden at the Stocktons’ and calls me into dinner at the end of the day.

Sure enough, Bernard is
pardonnez-moi
-ing his way through the gyrating, closely packed crowd, carefully ducking and maneuvering so as not to disturb any of the headgear with beer cans attached to the top and plastic tubes running into the mouths of thirsty partygoers.

It must be two o’clock in the morning and the party is by now in full swing, with at least a hundred people wildly dancing to “I Melt with You.”

Oh no—could there have been another breakup with Gil? Tell me it isn’t so! Or worse, maybe something terrible has happened to Olivia and Ottavio on their trip to Italy. A plane crash?

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you!” Bernard cups his hands around his mouth to form a makeshift bullhorn. “Come on—we have to go!”

“What?” I can hardly hear over the music. On top of that Bernard doesn’t so much as say hello to the young man attached to my midsection, when normally he is so well mannered.

“Your father had a heart attack!” he shouts in the general direction of my left ear. “We have to go
now
!”

Josh steps back, and now that I’m a solitary human form again Bernard uses the opportunity to grab me by the arm and pull me toward the door. It takes a moment to get through a crowd of rowdy (translate: drunk) women just arriving and claiming to have paid earlier. The heavyset doorman, who happens to be a linebacker on the football team, is effectively blocking their entrance and shouting, “Show me your beavers!”

Bernard looks questioningly at me. “Hand stamp,” I explain. But it’s too loud to hear anything, and so I put mine up to his face and he nods that he now understands.

Once we’re outside Bernard continues to yell as if still competing with the music. “Gil is waiting in the car with the girls. It must be a mile from here—there isn’t any place to park on campus. In fact, I’ve been to so many different parties tonight I don’t even know where I am anymore.” Bernard stops and looks searchingly up and down the street.

“What did you park in front of?” I holler back, though it’s quiet now but for a few shouts coming from a late-night snowball fight across the quad.

“There was some sort of sculpture out front—it looked like a giant toadstool.”

“That’s the science building,” I say. “It’s supposed to be a molecule or an amoeba or something along those lines.”

I hurry Bernard in the correct direction and the cold air clears my head slightly. “Is it serious?” I ask Bernard.

“I’m not sure. Louise phoned.” Only now we’ve been jogging for a few minutes and it’s not so easy to catch our breath. “You-can-call-her-from-the-car.”

I easily locate the maroon Volvo that Bernard recently traded for his antique silver Alfa Romeo waiting across from the science building with its engine running, the exhaust puffing a cloud of gray smoke into the cold winter air.

The girls are asleep in their car seats in the back and I quickly climb between them while Bernard dives into the passenger side. The moment I pull the door closed Gil shoves a cell phone in my ear and then puts the car into gear so that we jump away from the curb.

Louise is frantic on the other end of the line. “Hallie? Is that you?”

“Yeah,” I exhale heavily.

“
Thank God
they found you!
Please
go to the hospital right away and tell me what’s going on. I’m stuck here with the kids. And every time the phone rings I practically faint. Relatives are calling. There are people I’ve never even heard of—an Uncle Ernie called from somewhere in the West Indies.”

“That’s Dad’s uncle,” I explain. “Our great-uncle. Only I thought he lived on a houseboat near San Diego.”

“I’m so worried, Hallie.” Louise sounds as if she’s starting to cry, and that it’s not for the first time over the past few hours. “I don’t know what happened. I woke up and the paramedics were flying down the stairs with Dad on a stretcher and Mom threw a coat over her nightgown and yelled at me to watch the kids. Reggie’s been screaming bloody murder. I finally gave him a bottle of regular milk. It’ll probably kill him. But at least he shut up. Tell Bernard and Gil that I’m sorry to have woken them up and everything, but I didn’t know what else to do.”

“No, it’s fine.” I’m suddenly feeling incredibly sober.

“I finally got hold of Eric about an hour ago,” reports Louise. “He’s taking a bus from Indiana that leaves late tonight and arrives in the morning.”

“I’ll go to the hospital, find out what’s going on, and then call you right back.” I click off the phone and let my head tip over backward.

“Don’t worry,” says Gil. “The new hospital has a terrific cardiac unit—state of the art.”

“How old is your dad?” asks Bernard.

“Both my parents are thirty-nine,” I say. It’s easy to remember because I just have to add nineteen to whatever Eric’s age is at any given time.

“Oh, that’s
young,
” says Bernard. “He’ll be fine. They can do quadruple bypasses and even replace valves and aortas with pig parts. And if your heart can’t be fixed then they just throw it away and paste in a whole new one.”