Heartbeat by Elizabeth Scott

here. I want to know how to fix things. Caleb has survived loss. He lives with grief all around him, in him. He must know how he did it. How he does it.
    He lets go of my hand. “I’m not—Emma, I drove my dad’s car into the lake. I don’t want to be in this house, I don’t want this to be how things are. But I want a lot of things that can’t happen, that won’t happen, and that’s what I know.”
    It’s not what I want him to say, but it’s the truth. I hear it in his voice. I know it in my heart.
    Under the idea that we can all make our fates, that we have choices, is the reminder that sometimes we don’t. That sometimes life is bigger than our plans. Bigger than us.
    “Okay,” I say.
    “Okay?” he says and I smile because he isn’t okay and I’m not okay, but what he’s saying is okay. Is right. Sometimes you want things that can’t happen. That won’t happen. And it’s just how things are.
    “There need to be more words,” I say. “Like a way to get that okay isn’t possible, but it is okay.”
    “I don’t think there can be a word for that. Do you...do you maybe want something to eat?”
    I look around the hall, back toward the rooms we’ve just been in. This quiet, strange, sad monument to a girl that exists only in her parents’ mind. “Here?”
    “No. Well, sort of.”
    “Sort of?”
    “Not in here,” he says and looks back into the house too. “I don’t—I’ve never brought anyone here before. You can see why, I guess.”
    “Yeah,” I say, because I do, and we walk outside.

27
    We eat lunch in his room.
    His room isn’t in the house.
    It’s above the garage, a small white room with a window that has no curtains. There are no rugs on the floor. No soft chairs. There is a bed, a small TV, a bathroom and, tucked into the corner, a tiny kitchen.
    “The nannies used to live here,” he says, going over to a small fridge. “And then my mom took a lot of pills after Minnie died. I started taking them too and then I found out if I took them and drank...” He looks over at me. “You know about this.”
    “I heard things.”
    “Right,” he says, pulling out a pizza box and shutting the fridge. “So there were pills and other stuff, and one night I lit my room on fire.”
    “On fire?” I hadn’t heard about that.
    He nods. “My mom was up—she doesn’t sleep much—and she put it out. She, uh—when I woke up she was just staring at me. I started to say I was sorry and stuff and she just kept staring at me.”
    “She didn’t say anything?”
    He looks at the pizza box. “Not until I stopped talking. Then she said, ‘Haven’t you done enough?’ I moved over here after that.”
    “Is that why you stopped...you know.”
    “What, getting high? You can say it. You can’t get high just from saying the word.” He blows out a breath. “Sorry. I...um...it’s not why I stopped. The first car I stole, I—I hit someone. A guy. He had this little backpack with him. He was going to see his kid, who was at her first sleepover and had forgotten some stuff. I got out of the car and he was just lying there and that backpack was lying there and I thought he was dead. That I’d done what...”
    He trails off and shifts so his hair falls forward, covering his face.
    “The guy didn’t die,” he says after a moment. “I didn’t believe it, even though he sat up after a second and started screaming at me about his leg and what I’d done. I can still see him right before he sat up and started yelling, you know? Minnie...” He shakes his head. “That’s when I stopped. Why I stopped.”
    “You hit someone with a car?” I say, and I know he just said it, but I didn’t—I knew he’d done stuff, but I didn’t know he’d done something like that.
    I knew he understood grief. I didn’t know that it had spilled out of him and into the world.
    I didn’t know he had hurt people other than himself.
    He nods. “And I—well, you know I kept stealing cars after that. My