The Heart Does Not Grow Back: A Novel (6 page)

I couldn’t come up with any reasons fantasy-Regina wanted, not even without the pressure of her being there, not even with all the time in the world to dream them up. So in my fantasy, we didn’t kiss, skipping straight to the hot sex as a clumsy virgin might imagine it, the ghost of her enjoying my first time more than any real Regina ever would, and me beating off to it, feeling like I was cheating on the girl who drove me to the hospital.

I fell asleep in my collar and rib belt and salty-wet underpants, dreaming of baseball fields and blood while Mom died a little bit more in the other room.

FIVE

Later that year, the baseball team lost in the conference championship game and Mack didn’t come to school for three days. Clint loved asking, “Where’s the great Mack Tucker? He still trying to get out of the fourth inning?” He said it in the hallways, the gymnasium, the parking lot. A few times he tried to get my attention in the hallway with his catcalls, but I would just turn away and bury my nose in my locker.

We might have won that game—and probably a few more during that 11–5 season—if Clint had been eligible to play. He was a damn good left-handed hitter, but he didn’t play thanks to my injuries, which were serious enough to compel Principal Turnbull to wipe out his season via suspension. The broken ribs were my first broken bones. Up to that point, I had the usual cuts and scrapes—a skinned knee here and there, a constellation of bruises from falling out of a tree that looked ripe for climbing—but never anything serious, nothing that tipped me off to the full breadth of my healing prowess. The doctor told me the ribs would heal in one to two months, with a dull ache that might last even longer than that. I felt one hundred percent in three days and chalked it up to good fortune.

After the suspension was handed down to Clint, the hallways and locker rooms weren’t easy. I endured Clint’s lingering glares and tried to keep my distance.

On the third day of Mack’s absence, Clint must have figured his chance to isolate me from Mack’s defense was an opportunity he couldn’t pass up. I stuffed a geometry book into my locker, closed the door, and a hand shoved me face-first into the metal. The ridges of the locker’s vent dug into my forehead. Before I hit the ground, I knew it was Clint. He must have been waiting behind me, coiled and ready to strike. I wonder how many students watched and waited without warning me so they could see a good old-fashioned ass whipping. The kicks came again, aiming for my just-recovered ribs. I balled up to protect myself, but one kick caught me in the temple, twisting my neck. My hard collar had been gone for weeks now and my neck felt perfect, but the kick pushed fresh numbness through me, flushing my nervous system with acidic heat, ending with an icy tingle in my toes.

The chatter of students was blunted in my ears. I could see sneakers gathered around me, shins covered with jeans as a circle of people formed to watch the beating.

I fought back, trying to time his kicks so that I could catch his leg and drop him, like I’d seen in the movies. Turns out kicks are much faster in real life—I opened up to welcome his leg and catch it, and his toe hit me right in the chest. I smelled the rubber of his shoe as the blow gonged through me. Looking straight up, I saw the haze of fluorescent lights, random faces, and Clint, his arms now held by Principal Turnbull and Mr. Gilbert, the agriculture teacher. They were about to drag him away when I saw the shadow of Clint’s rising foot and the black outline of his heel coming down like a falling eclipse, stomping into my face, crushing my nose and smashing the back of my head against the floor.

The darkness didn’t leave me until much later, when I woke in a hospital bed. Mack was asleep in the corner chair. The clock above him said it was seven at night. My nostrils were gritty with blood, and my head and neck were pounding, a percussion section with chaotic rhythm.

“Yo,” I whispered loudly. “Mack, hey.”

He bolted upright.

He got up and stretched. “We gotta call your mom. She wanted us—”

“What the fuck did you do?” I asked before he could finish. He looked worse off than me, both eyes blackened, a rash-bruise around his forearm. He walked toward the hospital bed with a limp, then smiled through blood-crusted lips.

“Pop tenderized me over the title game,” he said. He pulled up a chair next to the bed. “You should see that old fucker though. I got him back this time. Got him good.”

“Damn, man, I’m sorry.”

“I got him good,” he said again, then picked up the phone and started dialing. I heard the tones rattle as he pushed the buttons, and then he got a freaked-out look and hung up the phone, his eyes fixated on the doorway.

“What?” I asked.

He just pointed, and there was Regina with a balloon that said
GET WELL SOON.

“I can come back if you have a visitor,” she said.

“I was just going on a hospital Jell-O run,” Mack said, hobbling away. “You want anything?”

“No, thanks,” she said.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” he said, giving her a cold look. She returned it, and won the staring contest when he finally left the room.

“Hey,” I said.

She tied the balloon to the rail of my bed.

“How you doing?”

“Better now,” I said. She pulled up a chair and sat next to me.

“I’m that much of a morale boost, huh?” she said. “Well, I can’t stay long.”

“Just showing up means a lot,” I said.

She looked sad, started to say something, then stopped.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Clint’s a fucking nut job,” I said, a thought I wouldn’t have parted with if the painkillers hadn’t tamped down my nerves.

“I know,” she said.

“Why are you with him? Why stay?”

She took a long time to answer, clearly indecisive. I took that as a small win, but looking back, there was so much more to see. I was still blindfolded, letting pretty girls bounce me off of playground equipment. “At least we have that much in common,” she said finally.

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Asking that question. All the time. Trying to make sense of it.”

“He’s not holding you hostage,” I said, knowing immediately I might have overstepped a boundary. Stupid drugs.

She shook her head, leaned in, and kissed me on the cheek. “Now, don’t you go and suck the helium out of that balloon.”

She left, and Mack actually came back with Jell-O. My mother arrived after her shift was over. She slept in a chair next to my bed, both of us hoping a night of sleep would bring about a much-needed slice of healing. I slipped in and out of sleep every couple of hours, and in those black hours that are neither night nor morning, I felt my mother holding my hand, her palm clammy. She was smoothing my hair with her other hand, just being next to me. I could feel the edges of her knuckles, the thin glide of her fingers, and I heard the unsteady breath of her crying. I kept my eyes shut and tried not to cry because I knew her sorrow was not for me alone. I should have known then it was cancer. I’d never observed cancer personally, but it claimed so many fictional characters in TV shows and movies, the symptoms should have been evident. Her hand was skeletal, the flesh and tissue fed to the furnace of malignant cells torching her entire body.

*   *   *

The initial prognosis of a broken nose seemed like a reach to me. I never had a problem breathing after the injury. The scrape on my head was gone almost overnight. My ribs had no lingering soreness and my neck felt fantastic, as if Clint kicked something back into place instead of out of whack. I felt prime and complete, all cylinders firing. I had no choice but to call it more luck, maybe good genes. What else could I have done? Was I supposed to rebreak my bones to test the process? Some people were fast healers. I didn’t think anything of it, I was just thankful to be ahead of the healing curve. The heat-death of spring held the promise of summer, when I wouldn’t be forced into the clumsy glove of hallways and classrooms. And because Clint’s latest assault had resulted in expulsion, the rest of the school year flew by, smooth and conflict-free.

On the last day of school, rumor spread of a party at Ted Painter’s house. I hadn’t officially been invited, but Mack insisted that I go. I refused, the thought of awkward mingling outweighing Mack’s obvious disappointment. This wasn’t my first party refusal, but this one pissed him off something terrible.

“Sometimes I’m afraid you’re going to be you forever,” Mack said, and didn’t talk to me the rest of the day.

A piece of loose-leaf paper was in my locker. Someone had folded it up and stuffed it through the vent. The note was on its side, halfway open, with ruffled bits frilling the edge like lace.

I’ve been thinking about things. I hope you will be at the party. We should talk. I need to tell you something.
Signed with a single letter:
R.

Thanks to the loose curriculum of the final day of class, Mack was in the weight room instead of biology when I got the note. I trotted down to see him and he greeted me with a grunt, grinding out a few bench-press reps.

“What now?” he said. “You decide to quit school or something? Become a nun?”

“I’m going tonight,” I said. “I need a ride.” I tossed him the note. He unfolded it, read it, then flicked it away.

“I’ll give you a ride, but don’t be all focused on one chick. She’s bad karma, man, don’t you get it?”

“It’s getting me into the scene,” I said, picking the note up from the concrete floor. “I figured you’d be happy.”

“I’ll be straight-up God-damned happy when you can go out for the baseball team or go to a party because you want to, not because you’re trying to impress some moody whore whose boyfriend stomped your ass twice.”

“She can’t stay with him. She just can’t.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “She’s a fucking ho.”

“Don’t say that,” I said.

“She is, man. She cheated on him.”

“You didn’t tell me you heard that.”

“That’s because it was with me.”

He dropped back onto the bench and started repping out his next set. I could only wait for him to finish before speaking again.

“Did you have sex with her?”

He slapped at his own back, hugging himself with ballistic stretches. I wanted to kill him, but knew any move down here, alone, would end up with me getting another no-expenses paid trip to the hospital.

“No. She sucked my dick.”

“What?”

“You don’t want to know, dude, seriously. She’s bad news, that’s all you need to know.”

“Why did you do it?”

“It was like”—he snapped his fingers—“and she was blowing me in Justin Wilson’s bedroom. And in case you’re wondering, she was sober as a priest. Clint was drunk off Natty Light, hugging the cat’s litter box in the laundry room.”

“But you knew how much I liked her.”

“Shit, it could have been you, if you ever went to parties. Yet another Dale no-show, so I figured it would prove she’s a fucking slut so you could get on with things. The next thing you know I’m done and I felt bad about it, so I figured I’d just not tell you and let you grow out of it, you know, out of respect for your feelings. But that ain’t happenin’, so I’m telling you here and now, she’s a whore. And dude, even if you could get past it, she’s not even a good whore. She used too much tooth and spit my load into a pair of penny loafers.”

He dropped into another set and started pumping away. By the time he was done, I was gone, intent on getting to the party myself, hoping that the delicate, handwritten loops on my note could trump the harshness of Mack’s revelation.

SIX

The party was at a farmhouse flanked by a silo and barn with a lengthy vein of gravel for a driveway. The attendance looked to be epic, with dozens of cars lined up along the blacktop country road, half hanging in ditches overgrown with wild grass.

The porch light was on, and some students I recognized sat on the rails with red plastic cups in their hands. All eyes were on me as I shuffled up the steps.

“Good old Silent Sampson,” Billy Stannely said, a thick and zitty kid, a year younger than me. He leaned by the door, his glassy, drunk eyes glimmering in the ugly light. “Can’t believe you’re here. Cups are five bucks, or did you bring chocolate milk?”

I ignored him and went inside.

The house was lit with dusty bulbs stuffed in chandeliers. The place was old, with high ceilings and hardwood floors already splattered with beer, tacky against my shoes. Plastic cups were in most hands, people broken off into splinter groups, talking and drinking.

In the kitchen, Dirk Gaston, a senior and the basketball team’s star point guard, was pumping the keg, flirting with the girls in line. Mack once told me pumping the keg was “the first step to pumping a chick’s ass,” so it didn’t surprise me to see Dirk, another high school lady killer, manning the post. Ted sat on his kitchen counter with a big sleeve of cups stacked next to him.

I took a deep breath and wandered into the spotlight of the kitchen, a five-dollar bill, my only money, folded in my hand.

“Hey, Ted, can I get a cup?” It was early, but he already looked half-drunk.

“Fuckin’ Dale Sampson? Now it’s a party,” he said, popping a cup off the stack. “They’re usually five bucks, but for this special appearance, it’ll be … five bucks.”

I handed over the bill and took the cup. Dirk stood at the keg, staring at me. I was two inches taller than him, yet he was looking down at me, one hand on the black knob of the pump, the other holding a frothy brew that he sipped from.

“Is beer extra?” I joked.

He busted into a smile. “I thought for sure you’d just wander around with an empty cup.” He pumped the keg. I grabbed the nozzle and performed a terrible, novice pour—mostly foam.

“Jesus, Sampson, you pour beer like a bitch. First failing grade ever.”

I scurried into the social areas of the house, trying to lose myself in the noise of the growing crowd. Blending wasn’t working. Anywhere I went to stand, I was alone. I felt like I wasn’t standing right, or didn’t look casual enough, or wasn’t drinking my beer the right way. Sweat built up on my chest and in my armpits as if the white heat of a spotlight was following me. Without Mack around, I couldn’t get over the dark tingle of exposure.