Another Piece of My Heart Read online

  It was the fear that always hung over Andi. A headache was never just a headache, it was a brain tumor. A stomachache was pancreatic cancer, and so on. Except Andi never actually went to a doctor about it, instead using the Internet as her unofficial diagnostician. She would convince herself she had something terrible but would not go and see a doctor, and after a few days, she would have forgotten about it entirely.

  But these night sweats were bad. Usually whatever symptom it was she was worried about would go away, but this was happening more and more often.

  “Will you just go to the doctor?” Ethan had finally said. “If nothing else, it will just put your mind at ease.”

  And so she had.

  * * *

  Dr. Kurrish had peered over her glasses at Andi and asked a series of questions. Had her periods changed? Yes, Andi had admitted. They either came every two weeks, or sometimes not for six, and when they did, they were shockingly heavy.

  How were her moods? Dr. Kurrish had asked. Terrible, Andi had said, but that was largely due to a stepdaughter who hated her most of the time, who had started coming back drunk at fifteen (although she didn’t actually tell the doctor that part), and to a husband who refused to do anything other than tell his daughter he understood her pain.

  Any unusual changes in hair? Her hair had become thinner, she said and, with embarrassment, admitted she had taken to plucking out a few stray whiskers on her chin.

  “I think,” Dr. Kurrish had said, “you are going through perimenopause.”

  “Menopause!” Andi had exclaimed, louder than she intended. “But I’m only forty-one. I’m trying to have children. How am I going through menopause?”

  “Not menopause.” Dr. Kurrish smiled. “Perimenopause, the period leading up to menopause, and it can happen to women even in their thirties. It doesn’t mean you can’t get pregnant,” she said gently, although the expression on her face told a different story, “but it’s unlikely. Your ovulation is much more erratic, and it becomes harder…”

  She stopped at that point, as Andi started to sob.

  * * *

  She and Ethan talked about IVF, but the chances of its being successful, given her age and the added bonus of the perimenopause, were slim, and not worth the vast expense.

  They talked adoption, although vaguely. Ethan wasn’t a fan, and eventually he pointed out that they already had two children, that although Emily was difficult at times, Sophia loved and adored Andi, and perhaps … wouldn’t it be better … might she find a way to be happy with the family she had rather than the one she didn’t?

  She agreed to try to reconcile herself, still hoping that she would be one of the lucky ones, that despite the advancing menopause, it would still happen, but the hope was fading. She would wake up in the middle of the night, particularly those nights when she woke up cold and wet, feeling an empty hole in her heart.

  They hadn’t used protection ever, and still, every month brought disappointment. There were times she cried; couldn’t stop herself gazing longingly at the young mothers in town, with newborn babies cradled in slings around their necks. She felt a physical pang of loss.

  She loves the girls, Sophia particularly, but the longing for a child hasn’t gone, and these nights, as she moves quietly around the house, looking in on the girls, she feels it more strongly than ever.

  Andi moves quietly from Sophia’s room, stands for a while outside Emily’s. Emily is seventeen now. She drives. The tantrums have lessened, but there have been other problems.

  Last month she lost her car for a week, for coming home drunk. She wasn’t driving, was a passenger that night, but still, there had to be a consequence.

  “I hate you!” she’d screamed, this time at her father. “You can’t tell me what to do! I’m almost eighteen! I’m an adult, not a fucking child!”

  “Don’t swear at me,” Ethan said, sounding calm, although the muscle in his left cheek was twitching, always a giveaway. “And I am your father. While you are living in this house, you will follow the house rules.”

  “Fuck you!” she shouted, throwing the car keys at her father, who ducked, so they hit the door frame, leaving a small chip and a grey mark. Emily stormed out while Ethan just sank down on the sofa, looking dazed.

  “You can’t let her speak to you like that,” hissed Andi, standing at the bottom of the stairs with her arms crossed. “It’s disgusting. I’ve never heard of a child speaking to a parent like that.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” His voice rose in anger. “You’re always telling me how to deal with my child, but you have no idea what it’s like.”

  There was an icy silence.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Andi asked slowly. Her voice was cold.

  “Nothing.” He shook his head, burying his face in his hands. “I didn’t mean anything. I just mean I don’t know what else to do.”

  “You did the right thing,” Andi said eventually, breathing through her anger, for she knew what he meant: she wasn’t a mother. She couldn’t understand. “You took the car away for a week. Now you have to stick to it.”

  Ethan nodded. “I know.”

  “Really,” Andi warned. “When she comes to you tomorrow, crying and saying how sorry she is and she’ll never do it again, you can’t do what you did last time, you can’t give her the car back.”

  Ethan looks up at her sharply. “Last time? I’ve never done this before.”

  “No, but last time she was drunk you told her she couldn’t go to Michaela’s party, and when she apologized, you said she could.”

  Ethan sighed. “I’m trying,” he said eventually. “I’m just doing the best I can.”

  The latest transgression resulted in a curfew being imposed. Midnight. This is for two weeks. Starting three days ago.

  * * *

  Some of the time, when Andi wakes up drenched, she changes and goes straight back to sleep. Tonight is not one of those nights. Back in bed she tosses and turns before sighing deeply and reaching over to click on the bedside light.

  Next to her, Ethan moans slightly and rolls over to face away from the light, but he doesn’t wake up. Damn. Her book is downstairs.

  Reluctantly—sleep is no longer an option, and what else will she do—she climbs out of bed again, padding out of the bedroom to go downstairs.

  The woven wool carpet is warm and comfortable, and she braces herself for the cool wood floors of the hallway, making yet another mental note to buy some slippers.

  At the far end of the hallway, Andi notices a light coming from Emily’s bedroom. Strange. Surely she should have been asleep by now. Perhaps she has fallen asleep with the light on. Andi moves down the hallway and gently pushes open the door, shaking her head in dismay as she surveys the chaos.

  Crumpled clothes are strewn all over the floor. A pyramid of makeup, with a fine dusting of face powder covering the carpet, lies by the mirror. The comforter on the bed is scrunched up, and it is hard to tell whether there is anyone in it until Andi, gingerly stepping over odd shoes, bowls half-filled with days-old encrusted food, draws closer.

  The bed is empty. Emily is nowhere to be seen.

  Two

  As if on cue, downstairs, the sliding door to the yard creaks open, and there are slow, uneven footsteps. Emily. Home.

  Andi freezes. With her own children, she knows she would go straight down and confront, but this is not her own child, and she isn’t sure that, at four thirty in the morning, she is ready to take on the tantrum that will undoubtedly ensue.

  If she does go down, Emily will beg her not to tell her father, but how can Andi not tell him? He has to know. This is not okay, and she cannot withhold it from him, not least because she is worried for Emily, terrified that her life is spinning out of control, and the only person who may be able to stop it is her father.

  Through the balusters, Andi sees Emily weave through the hallway, a smile on her face. Andi tiptoes back to her bedroom, pulling the door until there is just a crack, an
d watches as Emily trips up the stairs, recognizing the smell as soon as Emily drifts past the door.

  This time, she is stoned.

  Again.

  * * *

  This isn’t within Andi’s frame of reference. She wasn’t a kid who did such things. Perhaps if she had been, she wouldn’t be so discombobulated by Emily’s increasing preference for alcohol, or drugs, when she goes out. The only kids Andi knew in high school who were potheads dropped out, then went on to … nothing.

  Other than Gary Marks, who became an Internet bazillionaire.

  But Emily is still a child. She is seventeen, young for her grade, and has decided not to go to college this year, but to take a year off instead, a year in which to mature.

  Thus far, she hasn’t applied anywhere; the more time that passes, the more Andi realizes that Emily’s throwing her life away is a very clear, and terrifying, possibility, increasingly becoming a probability.

  Emily is clever. And funny. She is the sort of girl whom everyone thought would always be at the head of the class, but the teenage years derailed her, and the rebellions seem to be more than the classic teenage kind.

  The friends Emily had when Andi first met them have long since disappeared. Samantha, and Becky, and Charlotte are still the golden popular girls, the girls Emily once whispered with and went to dance class with. The same girls Emily now hates.

  Emily’s crowd is now what Andi would call goth, but what she thinks might today be called emo. They dye their hair jet-black, and have piercings. Emily came home with a pierced nose last month. It could have been worse, Andi thought. It could have been a pierced eyebrow, or lip, or, like so many of Emily’s male friends, giant holes in their earlobes that they stretch every few weeks by inserting bigger discs in their ears.

  She tried to ask them about it. Just last week, Andi came home to find Emily in the kitchen making scrambled eggs for two boys, sitting at the kitchen counter. They looked like twins, in their grey drainpipe jeans, raggedy sleeves hanging over their fingers, their hair, the requisite blue-black, covering their eyelinered eyes almost down to their pierced and sulky mouths.

  “Hi!” Andi said brightly, putting the grocery bag on the counter. “I’m Andi. Emily’s stepmom.”

  “My father’s wife,” Emily muttered, belligerently, from the stove. Andi didn’t respond, putting her hand out to shake hands with the boys.

  The first looked down at the hand as if he’d never seen one before, then warily took it and sort of held it limply before dropping it quickly. “Hey,” he said.

  “Hi,” said the other. “I’m G-man.”

  There was something familiar about him. “G-man?” Andi peered at him.

  “Yeah,” he grunted, looking down.

  “George!” she exclaimed suddenly. “George Mitchell?”

  He shrugged.

  “Oh, my goodness! You’ve … changed. I haven’t seen you for years. How are your parents?”

  “Dunno.” He shrugged again as a hot red blush filled his cheeks. Oh, God, she thought, wondering if Beth Mitchell was going through the same hell as she was, wondering what had happened to her sweet, clean-cut son. She hadn’t seen Beth in at least a year, not since she had run into her at a Bikram Yoga workshop (which Andi hadn’t been able to complete, thanks to almost passing out from the heat halfway through).

  “Is your mom still teaching at Red Dragon?”

  George grunted something that sounded like a yes.

  “Well, tell her I said hi,” Andi said, peering at the black bone hoops in his ears, which had stretched the original piercing hole to half an inch, half an inch through which Andi could clearly see the French doors at the other end of the room. “So Geor … G-man.” She frowned, unable to tear her gaze away. “Can I ask you a question? What is it about the holes in the ears? I know I’m old, but I just don’t get it.”

  All three teenagers looked at one another in horror as George shrugged, and mumbled in embarrassment, “It’s just what everyone does.”

  And what will you do when you are my age? Andi thought. What will you do about the inch-wide holes in your ears? What do you think your children will think, and how in the hell do you correct it? Can a plastic surgeon sew your ear back together?

  A vision appeared, of thousands of middle-aged people, all walking around with giant holes in their ears, giant earlobes dangling, swinging as they walked, getting caught on things and ripping.

  “Do you, like, need anything in here?” Emily turned to her in exasperation. “Because we were having a private conversation.”

  The urge to laugh was suppressed. A conversation? These kids can barely talk.

  “You want to put my groceries away?” Andi kept her voice light.

  Emily paused, then: “Okay.”

  “Great. Thanks. I’ll get out of your way. Don’t forget to wash the dishes when you’re done.” She quickly walked out before Emily could say something else, but Emily called out just as Andi reached the hall.

  “Hey, Andi?”

  Andi turned, rare for Emily even to call her by name, and watched Emily leave the boys in the kitchen and come out to the hallway by herself, her hand extended.

  “Do you know what this is?” Emily dropped her voice as she pointed out a rash on her fingers.

  Andi peered closely. “I think it’s just from dry skin,” she said, “or maybe an allergy. Do you want some cortisone cream?”

  Emily nodded. “You’re sure I don’t need a doctor?”

  “I’m pretty sure, sweetie. Let’s try the cream and, if it’s not better tomorrow, we’ll go to the dermatologist. How’s that?”

  Emily smiled, and her face lit up. “Thanks, Andi,” she said, disappearing back into the kitchen, leaving Andi stilled by her sweetness, her turning to Andi as a mother, wishing she could hold on to these moments rather than have this constant pendulum, hate to love, to hate again.

  At times like this, Andi feels a surge of all-consuming love for Emily, but more often it is a surge of dislike. Andi refuses to use the word “hate,” at least out loud. But when Emily is screaming, and Ethan is paralyzed with fear, and Andi is railed against over and over, with no one standing up for her, this is what she thinks.

  I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.

  And during those times, when Ethan refuses to get involved, when he sits on the bed, looking miserable, looking from one woman in his life to the other, one of who is screaming, the other who is trying to get a word in but can’t because she is constantly shouted down, this is what she thinks:

  I hate you, too.

  She doesn’t. Of course she doesn’t. But just as Emily blames her father for choosing Andi over her, it is hard, sometimes, when Andi is tired, and drained, and despairing at having to deal with the constant drama, for her not to feel that Ethan, in disappearing for hours to try to heal Emily’s pain, has also abandoned her.

  And when Andi is hurt, or abandoned, her natural inclination is, has always been, to run away; to make the hurt disappear by disappearing herself.

  Emily is all she and Ethan ever fight about. All they have ever fought about. And five years on, in her deepest, darkest moments, Andi wonders for how much longer she can do this.

  Whether it is worth it.

  * * *

  Emily weaves down the hall as Andi watches from behind the safety of the bedroom door; then Emily walks into Sophia’s room. Oh, God. Please don’t wake her up.

  Andi hears Sophia’s voice, sleep-filled, as the light is switched on, and now Andi has to intervene. She has no choice.

  She walks firmly down the hallway, her heart already pounding with anxiety, and walks in to find Sophia sitting up groggily in bed, with Emily sitting on top of her.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Andi says, her voice loud with anger. “Sophia was fast asleep. Get into your own room.”

  “Oh, chill,” Emily says. “I just wanted to give my baby sister a kiss good night.”

  “Leave her alone. She was fast asleep,”
Andi says. “And wait until your father hears about you breaking curfew again.”

  Emily gets up and pushes past Andi in the doorway, pausing to lean her face in close to Andi’s.

  “Big fucking deal when my father finds out. What’s he going to do? Take my car away again, then give it back when I cry? I don’t care. The only thing he can do to hurt me is stay with you. Bitch.” And she walks into her bedroom, slamming the door and leaving Andi shaking in the corridor.

  * * *

  “Are you okay?” Sophia, still fuzzy with sleep, appears next to Andi. She nestles in close, leaning her head on Andi’s shoulder and taking her hand.

  Andi closes her eyes for a few seconds. She is the adult. She is the one in charge. She is the one who should be looking after the children. Instead, a thirteen-year-old is comforting her. This is not the way it should be, and she has to pull herself together, if nothing else than for Sophia’s sake.

  “I’m fine.” Andi smiles down at Sophia. “Don’t worry so much. And get back to bed, young lady. You need your sleep.”

  “You know she doesn’t mean it.” Sophia frowns. “She means it at the time, but … not really. It’s like a habit.”

  “Bed!” Andi points to the bed. Her world is topsy-turvy. A thirteen-year-old is asking her if she is okay. It should be the other way around.

  “Okay, okay. Are you going to bed now, too?”

  “Sophia”—Andi waits for Sophia to climb into bed, then pulls the covers up and tucks her in, Sophia scooching over to the side so Andi can sit down—“I will probably go back to bed, or I may read for a bit because I am not sleepy.” She smiles down at Sophia as she smooths the hair back off her forehead, continuing to stroke her hair as Sophia opens her mouth in a huge yawn.

  “Want me to stay with you for a bit?” Andi asks as Sophia nods with a sleepy smile.

  Within minutes, Sophia gives the nod: Andi can go; she is almost asleep.

  Oh, if only Emily were as easy as this.

  * * *

  “What’s going on?” Ethan is standing in their bedroom doorway as Andi pulls Sophia’s door closed and walks down the hallway toward him, his hair tousled with sleep. “What’s all the noise?”