The Heart Does Not Grow Back: A Novel (24 page)

I found a
Cheers
rerun, one of my favorites, the one where Sam and Henri have a contest to get phone numbers. I think Mack would have beaten them both, but maybe I was biased. When Sam walked out at the end, triumphant not in phone-number volume, but in having three lovely ladies on his arm, I dialed Hollie again and got the same result.

I looked in on Rae, who was slightly snoring. Her shoulders were naked and I knew she had taken her shirt off, probably even her bra, the quilt lying just over the top of her breasts, which were no doubt pooled underneath in that sexy way I’d only seen on Cinemax movies.

I watched more television and fell asleep. I woke up after midnight, and Rae was snoring louder now, lying on her side.

I went outside and it was like someone turned on the lights and volume of my existence. No city ever truly sleeps. This one never even got drowsy. I hailed a cab and had it drop me off at Hollie’s house.

Bugs harassed the naked, yellow bulb on her porch, looking like electrons, flying in smooth, practiced circles. All the lights were out. She and Melissa would be asleep, but I was here and just needed to ask her a question to see the answer in her face.

I knocked. I heard the rumble of footsteps in this simple house, the air bursting with the smell of night and dew, the sound of wind strumming trees.

Lights turned on, emitting a soft glow behind the drawn curtains. A man cracked the door, keeping the chain latched—a fit, good-looking man, with no shirt on, with abs, with stubble. His eyes were kinked up with sleep, and he rubbed at them, muttering, “Who the fuck are you? You know what time it is?” through a sticky mouth of not-quite-morning breath.

What could I really say to the guy? I found myself crushed to have him answer the door. A part of me exploded with self-hatred, with regret. It fought with the part of me that was relieved that another decision had been made for me. If Hollie had answered the door, if she let me in, if she forgave me for ignoring her, what would I do? Luckily, women like Hollie moved on. Maybe women like Rae did too—it just took them a hell of a lot longer.

“I need to speak to Hollie please,” I said.

He yelled for her and yielded without another word, either knowing who I was or just not caring. Hollie came to the door wrapped in a robe.

“Dale?”

“I have to ask you something.”

“Come by tomorrow, please, if you insist. This is just inappropriate.” She rubbed her eyes and the yellow light glinted off of a ring. On her left ring finger. An engagement ring.

“I know it’s inappropriate, but it won’t take long. Now, if I didn’t give you a kidney … listen carefully, okay? If I didn’t give you a kidney, and you met me without the whole
Samaritan
thing, would you have liked me just the same?”

Her eyes flickered behind me, past me, through me, anywhere but upon me.

“You’re a nice man,” she said. “I hope this isn’t a romantic question, because I’m—”

“Engaged. Sure. I get it. I didn’t call for months. I’m a prick. I’m an asshole. But if we met and just talked like this, small talk, normal talk, without the kidney backstory, would you smile at me? What kind of person do you think I am?”

“Generous,” she said. “Good night, Dale.”

“No. I said if I didn’t give you a kidney. You wouldn’t know if I was generous or not. What would you think of me?”

There. Pity. Of course she wouldn’t say anything. I couldn’t make her forget what she had gained from me, but I refused to admit I had given her anything, anything at all. But she must have wanted to humor me. Honor me with some truth. Or at least kill my urge to ever call her again.

“I wouldn’t have given you a second thought. Okay?” she said. “I’m not happy to say it. Don’t you remember when I almost fucked you out of guilt?”

“I remember when you kissed me,” I said.

“You might have remembered, but you didn’t care,” she said. “You never called.”

“Is he good to you?” I asked.

She closed the door behind her and stood with me on the porch. Me and porches and hospital rooms and random beatings—Jesus, some things I could just not escape.

“He’s fine,” she said. “He’s a good-looking man with a good job. I’ve given up on some scorching romance that changes my life. We’ll marry while the sex is still new to him, then I only have to work one job. Then he’ll either stay and take care of us, or get tired of me and move on, but I’ll be better off thanks to whatever settlement he leaves behind. Melissa will be better off. And I have to do it because of you.”

“Me?”

“You, Dale. I told you—I didn’t want to live. I truly didn’t. Now I have to live like this. Mel has to live like this. I have to endure business decisions instead of real relationships so I can drop at least one shift and be with her, try to wring some sort of value out of the time I’ve got left. Time you forced on me. God was going to take me away and replace me with a fresh slate for her, and then there was you. You, Dale.”

I bit the inside of my lip to stop it from quivering. “You don’t have to put yourself through that. You can wait for the right man. If you need some money to wait, some money to be happy, just—”

“Fuck you, Dale,” she said. “I don’t want your money. Not a dime of it. I already have a scar that makes me think of you. I don’t want to think about you anymore.”

“I just wanted to help,” I said.

“Saving people doesn’t necessarily mean saving their lives,” she said. “Good-bye, Dale. Oh, and what we just talked about was fuck-it talk, okay? That’s the last we speak of it. I owed you the truth. I owed you that much.”

I nodded and she went inside. The old Dale might have taken everything she said at face value, but I was finally sure about how much she cared about me, about how much it hurt her that I disappeared. She didn’t believe in love anymore. She didn’t believe she deserved it. Here I was, the world’s most inexplicable marvel, saving lives at every turn with impossible abilities, and I’m the one that made her stop believing in miracles.

I stood on the porch until she turned the lights out, leaving me in the dark.

*   *   *

I smelled coffee in my hallway and knew it was coming from my apartment. When I keyed myself in, the lights were on and Rae was standing in the kitchenette, spooning sugar into her mug.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she said. She took the coffee to the living room and sat on the couch.

“I was just out … visiting with someone,” I said.

She smirked. “We’re not married. I don’t care if you went out for whatever it is you went out for. It’s not my business.”

I sat down near her, but not next to her, leaving a vacant cushion between us.

“You going to sleep?” she asked.

“I don’t sleep much. I certainly can’t sleep with you in my apartment,” I said.

“I think that’s a compliment?”

“Yeah, it’s pretty-girl-at-my-place nervousness, not murdering-thief-in-my-midst fear or anything.”

She drank coffee and picked a channel. We watched syndicated comedies I never got into, like
Seinfeld
and
Home Improvement
. She laughed out loud so much I figured it was on purpose, a way to break the tension, the silence. She had something to ask and I could do nothing but wait.

After a couple of episodes had passed, she said, “What’s the sunrise look like around here?”

“Looks like someone slowly turning the contrast up on a television,” I said.

“You ever go to the beach around here and watch it?”

“We’re on the West Coast, Rae. The sun rises over the city, not the ocean.”

“Yeah. Right.”

I realized she might have been poking me into a little date of sorts. Hell, I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything anymore.

“What’s the hardest part?” she asked. “About all the surgeries?”

I knew that answer immediately. I never tried to form it into words, but I tried for her.

“I’m not sure if you knew this. Do you remember when my ribs got broken by Clint?”

“Yeah,” she said, looking disappointed for some reason.

“Regina drove me to the hospital and stayed with me for a while. After Clint stomped the shit out of me, I woke up in a hospital room and she came to see me. She brought a balloon. Now with every surgery, every time I wake up, I keep finding myself hoping she will be there, and all over again, the reality of her death sets in. It’s like when you wake up after a good dream and it takes a few moments before it fades away and reality wrecks it, and you have this little moment of disappointment. For me, the disappointment stays a little longer. Usually until I get another dose of painkillers.”

Rae stared into the rim of her coffee cup.

“God, Dale, I can’t fucking take it anymore.”

“What?”

“In the hospital room? That was me.”

It was like my blood suddenly couldn’t find the places it needed to be. My breath got short.

“But Regina gave me her number.”

“Because I was too shy. She said she’d get you to call, that she would help hook us up.”

“And after that—”

“It was all me. Always me. At the baseball diamond when Clint hurt you. Driving you to the hospital. Giving you the balloon. You just kept wanting me to be Regina and I couldn’t say anything. I was shy and scared and didn’t want to see you be disappointed that I wasn’t Regina. The way you looked at me and talked to me when you thought I was her, I kind of loved it. No one ever talked to me that way.”

“The party. The note. ‘R.’ That was you?”

“I’d finally got up the courage to tell you the truth. I left the note in your locker. I wanted to tell you at that party, that it was me.

“If I’d said something earlier,” she continued, “if you knew that Regina didn’t care about you but I did, who knows how things could have been different. I should have been at the party. We were going to make things right that night, Regina and me. I was going to walk out of Ted’s party with you holding my hand and she was going to crack the façade of Mack Tucker and leave Clint for good. God, Clint—he never would have pursued her as hard as he did if he hadn’t known how desperately
you
wanted her. She was nothing more than a way for him to fuck with you, fuck with Mack.”

The twins were no different from Mack and me at that age, plotting a perfect outcome, the path to a utopian future. The next day, the next year always feels like it’s going to be perfect, so we fuck up the present waiting for it to rearrange itself, but of course it doesn’t.

“If I never let you believe it was Regina, if I didn’t beg her to let me tell you on my own time…”

“How?” I asked. “She fucked around with Mack. That’s why he went off. You had nothing to do with that.”

“He went after her because
you
liked her. If I’d just told you sooner, maybe he would have shifted his focus to me, and who knows how that might have turned out.”

“It might have ended up with you in that truck,” I said.

She stopped short of telling me that she would have taken that outcome, but I could tell that’s what she was thinking.

“You don’t stop guys like Clint,” I said. “Something else would have pressurized his crazy ass and the pop would have been just as loud and deadly.”

“I just keep going over it in my head,” she said. “I gave you the note. I was ready to tell you the truth. Regina was relieved. She kept telling me it wasn’t right, keeping you mixed up. That night, God, Regina tried so hard—I mean she physically tried to pull me out of my bedroom and get me to that party. I just couldn’t do it. I was scared.”

She feared the big reveal, when someone you care about might look you in the face and tell you they don’t give a rat’s ass about you. I knew the power of that moment. So did my mother—it’s easy to convince yourself you’re not dying of cancer when you avoid the doctor, but you can’t dodge the truth forever. We can only postpone it, sometimes for so long that the truth doesn’t even matter anymore.

“You had nothing to be afraid of,” I said. “I would have loved you.”

Memories of Regina were dying in my mind. I had to recast her in my brain as Rae, and it felt strange, but the girl I’d fallen for all those years ago was suddenly alive, on my couch, drinking my coffee.

I took a breath so I could move again, and closed the gap between us, sliding onto the middle cushion. I put my hand on her forearm, and she took the cue and put down the coffee, and held my hand in both of hers.

“It’s not your fault,” I said. “Not her, not Harold, not any of it.”

“I know. I just can’t make myself believe it.”

“Believe it. It’s not your fault.”

“Say it again,” she said, her hands clammy.

She leaned in and kissed me, hard. I kissed her back and it all seemed to happen while I was on the cusp of passing out, her sweatshirt hitting the floor and her breasts in my hands, the way she commanded me, pushing my head and my hands into soft places. She seemed to know I was a virgin, to sense it, and it should have been beautiful but I was done before we got started, so to speak. I tried to apologize, but she shushed me and waited, taking me into her hands and waiting for me to get hard again, smiling, getting on top of me. Sweat started to blossom on the small of her back as she worked, and this wasn’t exactly what I thought it would be, this love thing, and that’s what this was. She pushed away the coffee table and got on all fours and helped me inside of her. “I love it like this,” she said. “This is ours,” she said, and I knew it was a way that Harold had never done it, a way he hated, and I knew it was love because Mack had always said love is a feeling you wish was forever, you never want it to end, and feels best from behind.

I stared at her back, her hair, the way she turned to try to see me. She reached, touching my hip with her hand, urging me along and I looked at the television because it was on, and who can look away from a television? It’s like trying to stare at a word without reading it.

But the people on TV were pixels, not flesh, not real. Rae was real, and we fucked away a million pounds of guilt and regret and frustration and fear that night.

*   *   *

We slept on the living-room floor and woke each other up with kisses, followed by wordless, greedy sex. We ate more pancakes in our underwear, then had sex again. Later that day, we ordered takeout and fucked until the delivery guy knocked on the door—I paid for it while wrapped in a blanket and put the sack of Chinese on the coffee table, where it got cold as we finished our latest session. We were sweaty and hungry, eating from white boxes while staring at each other, wanting each other. I ate so fast I almost vomited while she was on top of me.