Our Chemical Hearts (23 page)

I didn't say anything. I inhaled deeply and turned my head and stared out the window as Grace gathered her wet shoes and got out of the car wearing nothing but her underwear and my jacket. “Good night,” she said, but I only nodded, because I couldn't speak.

Then Martin and Mary and her mom were hugging her and the cops were escorting her inside out of the cold, back into the house where she had to work off her debt to her dead boyfriend's parents, and I was left alone in the dark.

I wondered if she really believed she could make herself and the Sawyers feel better by letting her sorrow infect her, or if she just loved the pain. Loved the grief. I wondered if she let herself feel it in every one of her many billions of atoms because she truly, deeply thought she deserved it.

I messaged my mom to let her know Grace was safe but that I wouldn't be home for a while. Then I drove to the place I'd been avoiding for months now, the place that'd lodged in the back of my mind like a burr but that I hadn't realized I wanted to visit until tonight.

•   •   •

The cemetery wasn't as frightening as I thought it would be. There was no mist, no wolfish howls echoing from the distance, no swooping crows. I walked through the rows of graves quickly at first, jumping at every sound, but eventually I relaxed. I found Dom where I'd seen Grace kneeling a few months earlier. There were still flowers all over his grave, some older, their petals pulled away in the breeze, but fresh ones, too, garlands of them. She'd never stopped coming here. Even when she said she'd try, she never had.

The inscription on his gravestone was simple. The three lines read:

Dominic Henry Sawyer

Aged 17

“If love could have saved you, you would have lived forever.”

I traced the letters of his middle name. Henry. We shared so much, Dom and I. A name. A scent. A love. I tried to imagine us as friends, in another life, instead of me being jealous of his bones. But no. Probably not. The love Grace had described was the kind that transcended time and space. In any universe, in any life, it would always be them and I would always be the after. The lesser.

I'd seen a gravestone once where a pair of lovers had been buried in the same plot, fifty-four years apart. For fifty-four years the woman had lived on, alone and heartbroken, waiting for the day she got to join her beloved beneath the dirt.

Would Grace be buried here? In sixty or seventy years, would she come back to this spot and lie with her young, dead boyfriend? Even if she loved again, married, had children, would this be where her body would dissolve back into the universe? Could I handle that? If by some crazy miracle Grace and I did work out, if we went to college together and got married and traveled the world and had kids, would I be able to handle her getting buried with him at the end? How lonely would I be, alone in my grave, the love of my life intertwined with the bones of someone else?

Could I handle being jealous of a dead guy for the rest of my life? And even after my death?

I sat cross-legged on his grave in the dark and picked at the grass, trying to remember—now that I was there—what the hell I'd come to say.

“You absolute dick,” I said after a while. It kind of spewed out of me, filled with so much more anger and venom than I expected. “God, she loves you so much, and you went and left her here alone. Do you know how fucking broken she is? I mean, if you're there—if you can hear this—you need to get your ghost ass into gear and go all Patrick Swayze on her right now, because she's hurting like hell and there's nothin
g . . 
. there's nothin
g . . 
.”

I jammed my eyes closed and took a few deep breaths. It was too cold to cry.

“I can't help her, Dom. I want to help her but I can't because I'm not you. So if you're there—I mean it, for real, I don't care about any ghost code and the natural order of things and all that shit—if you're there, you need to show yourself right now. This is a corporeal realm emergency. Get your cowardly, haunted ass out of that headstone and tell me why the hell you left her.”

I waited for over an hour in the dark, until my eyes had adjusted to the deep blackness and my ribs were shivering. Ghost Dom never showed. Zombie Dom never rose from the dead.

“Well, screw you too,” I said as I stood up to leave. I walked home in the cold instead of driving, determined to prove to myself—just like Grace was—that feeling pain meant I was somehow, in some way, doing something right.

WHEN I WOKE
up in the morning, Grace was the first thing I thought about, this involuntary, gut-wrenching ache that spasmed from my brain into my chest. Grace, and the newspaper, and sucking at English and math because I couldn't make myself care, and how any colleges that might've taken me would see my first semester grades and stamp my application with a big OH HELL NO because I'd screwed everything up, let everything slip so far, and for what? For what?

Mom and Dad, unsurprisingly, chose that Saturday to start doing the concerned-parent routine they hadn't had to do since Sadie left for Yale. They came downstairs not long after sunrise and started lurking around the basement, assessing the damage I'd done to my life. They opened the curtains. Made me get out of bed and out of my pajamas. Put a bowl of cereal in front of me and refused to stop singing “Baby Got Back” until I agreed to eat it, which I did, because
God
.

Under their watchful eyes, I vacuumed the carpets, washed
my clothes, tidied my bookshelves, and transported all my schoolwork upstairs to the kitchen table so they could continue to supervise me while I caught up on the last couple of weeks of Hotchkiss's demonic math problems and the English essay I felt too empty to bullshit my way through. At eleven o'clock, Mom made me go for a jog with her. At lunchtime, Dad made me eat again. Sadie had the day off and came over at around two o'clock, by which point my request for a nap had been granted and I was lying spread-eagle on my bed.

“Hey, Henry, have you see
n . . 
. Are you listening to Taylor Swift?” said Suds from the foot of the stairs.

“Yes, Sadie. This is the second straight hour I've been listening to Taylor Swift. She's the only one who understands me.”

“Oh God.”

“Who hurt you, Taylor?!” I yelled, gesturing at the ceiling. “How can one person endure so much heartbreak?!”

“Good lord. Scooch. It's time for a chat.”

“Sud
s . . 
. I really don't want to talk about it. I'm not good at sharing.”

“I'm your sister, douche canoe. You don't talk to your friends, you don't talk to your parents. Are you gonna keep all this bottled up inside until it manifests as mental illness?”

“That's pretty much the plan.”

“How long have you been lying in that bed for, anyway? You're going to get deep vein thrombosis.”

“Leave, Sadie. Leave me to my heartache and my DVT.”

Sadie ignored my protests and flopped down on my bed
on top of my rib cage, winding me in the process. Then she poked my cheek over and over again in the same spot, saying, “Speak, speak, speak,” until I eventually spoke and said, “Ugh, fine, you wretched woman. It'
s . . 
. Grace, and
I . . 
. I don't know what's going on.”

“I gathered that from the Taylor Swift marathon.” Sadie waited for me to continue. “Care to elaborate?”

“I'm jus
t . . 
. so confused by it all. And I think I've done some kind of permanent damage to my respiratory system. My chest is tight, like, all the time.”

“That's probably the ribs I cracked when I jumped you.”

“Is love supposed to feel like this?”

“No, it's not, kid. I don't know about the whole ‘love lifts us up where we belong' crap, but it isn't supposed to screw you up either.”

“I know. I mean, look at Mom and Dad.”

“Mom and Dad are a fairy tale. They don't exist.”

“You loved Chris, though.”

Sadie took a deep breath. “Yeah. I did. And I mean sometimes I used to wake up in the morning and he'd be lying there with his slack jaw drooling on the pillow and I'd think,
What the hell was I thinking when I procreated with him?
He wasn't perfect. He wasn't even perfect for
me
. It was hard, all the time. But I did love him. And it was worth it. While it lasted.”

“So you never thought he was your soul mate?”

“Oh, honey. Are we still believing in soul mates?”

“You
don't
believe in soul mates? How can you look at
Mom and Dad and not believe that two people are made for each other?”

“Jesus, they've really screwed up your perspective on the world, haven't they? They thought being deceptive would protect you, but all it's done is spoon-feed you a fantasy. They're practically cult leaders. They've brainwashed you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Henr
y . . 
. sweethear
t . . 
.”

“Why are you being such a weirdo?”

“Oh boy.” Sadie closed her eyes and bit her bottom lip. “Before you were born, Mom left Dad for, like, three months,” she said quickly, her eyes still jammed shut.

I blinked a handful of times. Sadie opened her eyes slowly, one at a time.

“Mom made me promise not to tell you until after you'd graduated college. They wanted you to have a ‘stable childhood.' But I can't let you walk around for the next half decade looking for something that doesn't exist. I mean, why do you think I had my twelfth birthday party in a trailer park playground?”

“I never really closely studied the photographs of your twelfth birthday party.”

“They've poisoned you with this ‘love is patient, love is kind' bullshit since you were a kid. But love is scientific, man. I mean, it's really just a chemical reaction in the brain. Sometimes that reaction lasts a lifetime, repeating itself over and over again. And sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it goes
supernova and then starts to fade. We're all just chemical hearts. Does that make love any less brilliant? I don't think so. That's why I don't get why people always say ‘fifty percent of marriages end in divorce' as a justification to not get married. Just because a love ends doesn't mean it wasn't real. Mom and Dad were fighting all the time. I know you've never seen them have so much as a disagreement, but they were really going for each other. Then one night, Mom woke me up and helped me pack a bag and that was it. I didn't get to see my bedroom again until we moved back in three months later.”

“Do you know why she left?”

“Because she'd fallen out of love with him. The chemical reaction receded. That's why. That's all. Love is never perfect, Henry.”

“Why'd they get back together?”

“Mom found out she was pregnant.”

“She came back because of
me
?”

“I don't know. Maybe. Probably. They love each other unconditionally and they're best friends, but they're not
in love
anymore. They haven't been for a long time. So you can't go around thinking that every person you fall for is ‘The One.' People don't
have
soul mates. People
make
their soul mates.”

“I know that. I
do
know that. It's jus
t . . 
. I can't imagine ever wanting to put that much effort into another human being again. So much time and energy. So much of myself. How do you start over with someone new?”

“How does a novelist start a new book when the last one is
finished? How does an injured athlete start training again from the beginning?”

“God. Why does anyone do this more than once?”

“Fall in love?”

I nodded.

Sadie chuckled. “Biologically speaking? For the continuation of the human race. Logically speaking? Because the journey is beautiful in the beginning. And no one can see the bend in the train tracks until it's already too late to stop. And when you board the train—”

“Really chugging along with this train metaphor, huh?”

“Shh, it's too late to get off the tracks now. When you board the train, you hope that this will be the one that doesn't crash. Even though it might be, even though it probably
will
be, it's worth getting on anyway, just to find out.”

“Why can't I stay at the station?”

“You could. But then you'd never get anywhere.”

“Oh wow. That's deep.”

“I should have been a philosopher.”

“I want her back, Sadie.”

“I know you want her back, kid. And I know that people saying things like ‘there are plenty more fish in the sea' is only going to make you hurt more. And I could tell you all about the science of what your brain is going through right now. How it's processing a pain as intense as hitting a nerve in your tooth, but it can't find a source for that pain, so you kind of feel it everywhere. I could tell you that when you fall for someone,
the bits of your brain that light up are the same as when you're hungry or thirsty. And I could tell you that when the person you love leaves you, you starve for them, you crave them, you have withdrawals from them, like an addict would from a drug. And I know this all sounds very poetic, or exaggerated, or dramatic, but it's not. Heartbreak is a science, like love. So trust me when I say this: you're wounded right now, but you'll heal.”

“Damn, Suds. You're bringing out the big guns today.”

Sadie tilted her head back and fluttered her eyelids. “You're making me cry, you rascal. Listen to me, spouting all this good advice. Have you ever really been happy with her? Because from the outside, this has looked like a struggle from day one. The dead boyfriend, the disappearing. Is there a full month or week or day that you can look back on where you're like, ‘Yep, that's it for me. That's what I want my life to be like. Take me back to those good old days.' Do you have that with her?”

I shut my eyes and thought. I tried to remember a period of more than a few hours that I'd been truly happy with Grace. I remembered anxiety, stress, pain, sadness, the acid from my stomach eating away at my lungs. I remembered loving her, desperately. There was the night we walked home together from the movies, hand in hand, when I'd been sure I was going to marry her. There was the Thanksgiving fair, only the second time I'd seen her wear clothes that didn't belong to Dom. Brief, bright flashes of happiness, no more than lightning strikes in the dark.

I opened my eyes. “Oh, shit,” I said quietly.

“That's what I thought.”

“I don't know if I can accept that it was all a waste of time, though. That all this pain was for nothing. That what we had was never real.”

Sadie flicked my temple. “Aren't you listening, doofus? Love doesn't need to last a lifetime for it to be real. You can't judge the quality of a love by the length of time it lasts. Everything dies, love included. Sometimes it dies with a person, sometimes it dies on its own. The greatest love story ever told doesn't have to be about two people who spent their whole lives together. It might be about a love that lasted two weeks or two months or two years, but burned brighter and hotter and more brilliantly than any other love before or after. Don't mourn a failed love; there's no such thing. All love is equal in the brain.”

“Doesn't stop it from hurting.”

Sadie smudged a tear from the corner of my eye and ran her fingers through my hair. “I know, kid. Sometimes shit just doesn't work out, you know? Plus, how can she be your soul mate? Didn't you tell me she'd never read Harry Potter? Do you really want to spend the rest of your life with someone like that? I mean, for God's sake, think of your children. What kind of environment would they be growing up in with such a mother?”

I laughed then and Sadie laughed and I closed my eyes and hugged her.

She stayed curled up with me, stroking my hair, the way we'd always done for as long as I could remember.

As I stared at the ceiling with Sadie humming Taylor Swift songs into my skin, I thought of Grace and felt the root canal pain Sadie had talked about ping through my entire body. We had a heavy love, Grace and I, the type of love that would drown you if you waded into it too deep. It was a love that tied little sinkers to your heart one at a time, until the organ was so heavy, it ripped right out of your chest.

“Sud
s . . 
. I know it's been a long time since you've been a juvenile delinquent, but do you still remember how to break into the English department at school?”

Sadie grinned her wicked grin. “Old habits die hard.”