My Heart Insists It’s Time to Move On
The fluttering tone of my Facetime rings through when I get home. The apartment is dark, and Jewel is at work, so I’ve got the place to myself. “Pick up. Pick up,” I chant at the screen, even though I know it isn’t going to change whether Abby is available to talk or not. I just want to process this with her. She knew how bad my crush was on Seth during our senior year, so of everyone in my life, she’s the perfect one to talk to about this. The glowing light from the phone helps me pick my way through the dark apartment to my room, where I flip on the light.
It connects, beeping, and suddenly Abby is smiling at me on the other side of it. “Hannah!”
“How warm is it?” I ask and sit on my bed to remove my boots, comforted by the sight of my friend, the one who has known me through the most difficult points of my life and is still present.
“Super cold,” she grins. “Only got up to 75 degrees today.”
I scoot back on my bed until I’m leaning against the headboard. “I’m so jealous. It snowed here today.”
Abby laughs and adjusts herself wherever she’s sitting twenty-five hundred miles away. “What’s up?”
“I had to call. Guess who I ran into today. Literally ran into.” I’m a little nervous to share seeing Seth with her; I know how important he is to her, even if they haven’t kept in touch.
Her eyebrows shift over her dark eyes with a question, then her image pixelates, freezing. “Who?” The question warbles with the connection.
“Abby? Can you hear me?”
The image reconnects to the sound. “Yes. I can. Who?”
“Seth.”
“Peters?” The circumference of her eyes widens. “Really?”
“He transferred. To Western.”
“I haven’t seen him since the summer after graduation.”
“Me either. Until today.”
“Wow.” She looks away, and her smile fades with the weight of the complicated history they share.
Junior year had been tumultuous. She and Seth had been childhood friends flirting with more, but Abby’s heart leaned toward Gabe, Seth’s one-time best friend and long-time rival. It was an awful bunch of wrinkles that eventually got ironed out, but not without some painful struggle. They seemed to find their way through senior year. Then Seth moved away, Gabe and Abby broke up, and lines of communication were severed between them.
“I need to hear this story.”
I fill her in about our chance encounter at the library, our pizza meet-up, and his recent texts. “He asked me to go to a basketball game with him.”
A smile grows on Abby’s face. “What?”
“Don’t be weird,” I tell her and look down at my comforter; my cheeks are hot. “We’re friends.”
“Okay.”
But when I look back at her face, she’s grinning, though, the closed-mouth grin that I tells me she’s trying to temper the look. “So, is this a mutually agreed upon meeting or is he picking you up?”
“I’m meeting him after work. Dinner after.”
“Intriguing.” She wiggles her eyebrows. “Why are you freaking out?”
“After I agreed to go, he texted, ‘it’s a date.’” I make air quotes for her with one hand. “Now I’m stressing because I don’t know if that’s what he meant.”
She squeals with excitement and bounces on the screen. “Of course you’re stressing out. That’s what you do—overthink and stress. I think you should just go and have a good time. Don’t overthink.”
“As friends.”
“As whatever the night decides.” She smiles. “Hannah, you’re always putting rules on yourself…” She pauses and readjusts again, dropping out of the screen for a moment. “Look, you had a mad crush on him, and you have the chance to see if what you felt then is something now. Why would you waste the opportunity by putting rules on it?”
My face heats. She knows me. And Mason had said essentially the same thing.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t attracted to Seth, that I wasn’t curious to see if what I’d felt then translated to now. I’d always been attracted to Seth, but then I was Hannah from high school, and now I’m older Hannah, who can’t seem to get past my screw-ups. “I don’t know if I have the emotional capacity to just see where the feels take me,” I tell her.
“Is this about Sebastian?” she asks, her smile gone and the frown pulling at the corners of her eyes.
I try to say no, but the word doesn’t flow from my mouth like it should. It catches there and grabs hold, making me think about her question, forcing me to be honest. “Yes, but not because of Sebastian, but because of me.”
“What? You? He was the dick in the scenario.”
“Not in that way–” I say. “In the way I was with him.” I look away from the screen. Abby’s incredulous look—her eyebrows raised with her angry set mouth—is keeping me from thinking clearly. I see the lamp from my room reflected in the dark window next to my bed. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, how throughout us being together, I felt like I didn’t deserve him.”
Abby makes a disgusted sound. “That pisses me off, Hannah.”
“If that sound was any indication–”
“It was always the other way around–”
“You’re partial.”
“Fuck yeah, I’m partial.” She takes a deep breath. “So?”
“I’ve been missing something in myself, and what worries me is dragging that into a relationship with someone else. And if that person was Seth–” I pause, then shake my head. “He just walked back into my life. If I complicate it with all these feelings–”
“So there are feelings?” She smiles.
“Of course there are feelings. The moment I saw him, it was like all those unresolved what-ifs rushed back in to plague me. What if I follow that trail and–”
“Wait. Wait. You’re sounding like Hannah from senior year. I hear what you’re saying. And…” she says, drawing out the word, “what if those fears keep you from what you need? What if you take the risk and it’s exactly what you need to figure out what it is you’re missing?”
“I hate that.”
“What? Getting what you need?”
“No! That you’re right.”
She grins, and her eyebrows arch up higher. “Well…”
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
“Already did.” She laughs and mimics her head expanding with one of her hands, stops, then sobers. “I just want my dearest friend to be happy. And I don’t want you to miss a possible opportunity of figuring out what you need to be happy because you’re afraid.”
“I’ll think about it. It could just have been an expression–”
She dips her chin. “Hannah? I specifically remember you telling me one time, many, many years ago that Seth asking for a date didn’t read as ‘just friends.’” She gives me the sly, I-just-ruined-every-argument-against-this grin.
I change the subject instead. “Are you coming home for spring break?” I ask her, hoping I might get to see her.
“Nicely done.” She laughs. “I’m not sure. I’m thinking of staying here. Maybe you could come to Hawaiʻi. Chill with me.”
“As amazing as that would be, I’m not sure I’ve got the funds.”
“What funds? Once you’re here, there’s nothing to worry about. I’ve got you. If you can just get a flight.”
“Maybe.”
“Don’t maybe me. I need more from you.”
“I’ll look into it.” But I’m thinking about those possibilities she’s mentioned. Possibilities that might include Seth.
She smiles, and there’s a noise off the screen, which makes her glance beyond the camera, then back at me. “I think my roommate is locked out. She’s always forgetting her house keys.” She moves. “You must call me after the game. I want to hear about this non-date date with Seth.” She winks.
I laugh as we say goodbye and disconnect.
After a shower, I set up in my room and work on a paper for my philosophy of education class, but I’m struggling to keep Seth in the part of my brain where he belongs. I reimagine his arms around me, then recall them around me that night on the beach. I see his mouth in my mind’s eye, talking, smiling, eating his pizza, then remember kissing him. The strong rhythm of my heart and the way my extremities tingle remind me of that, and how I’m lying to myself by thinking I don’t want that again. Chills race across my skin and considering it makes me ache with want, a foreign feeling that needs a translator.
My eyes cross with exhaustion as I lose focus on the paper I’m writing, so I give up the fight. I flip off the light at my desk and crawl into my bed. Just as I’m about to fall asleep, my phone pings. My seventeen-year-old sister’s name is in the notification. I swipe the screen open.
Ruth: Nanna, are you coming home this weekend?
Me: Hi Rue. Yes, I’ll be home.
Ruth: Okay. Bring me some of those gummies from the school store? Pretty pleeeeaaaassssseeee.
Me: I got you.
I put the phone on my nightstand and roll over toward the wall, conflicted about going home. It isn’t going home that I don’t want. It isn’t seeing my mom and my sister, but rather the gaping hole left by my father. I close my eyes, willing the awful memories away, only the memories have nowhere else to go and haunt me instead, reminding me how badly I’d messed up.
I’d been at a party with my roommate freshman year, the first party back after the holiday season, a new term, and a good time to let loose because we weren’t slammed with papers or tests yet. I’d gotten drunk, probably a little too drunk, but I’d needed the liquid bravery to do what I intended, which was to let go of my virginity with a guy named Hunter I’d flirted with in writing class the previous term. I trusted him. We had fun together. I didn’t carry any preconceived notions that the experience was going to be anything more than what it was, and though I’d been told my whole life not to have sex until I was married, I didn’t figure I was going to hell because I wanted to make an empowered choice for myself.
We’d stumbled back to his dorm room, had mediocre sex, then fell asleep together. I’d woken up in his bed, hungover, but we’d walked over to the cafeteria together, chatted over breakfast, and joked about the walk of shame. When I made it back to my dorm room, I hunted up my dead phone which I’d accidentally left behind, and plugged it in to charge while I took a hot shower. When I checked my phone, the screen was stacked with missed notifications and messages from my family.
My heart in my throat, I’d listened to one message after another of Rue or my mom, “Hannah. Call. Right away.” “Hannah? Where are you?” “Hannah. It’s Dad.”
I’d immediately dialed Rue, who picked up, her voice raw and hoarse. “Hannah? Where are you?”
“I didn’t have my phone.” Guilt for being without it, for being at a party getting drunk, for having sex with Hunter hit like a succession of punches. I’d been having sex with Hunter while my family was trying to find me. “What’s wrong?”
Recalling that moment has a surreal quality to it, as if I disconnected from my body to survive it. I think I thought she was calling to tell me Dad had a terrible bout of food poisoning, or maybe broke something because he’d taken a fall trying to take down the Christmas lights by himself. My dad—Gregory Hammish Fleming, III—was invincible, after all. While my mind was making up plausible stories, my heart was in my throat. It knew this was something else. My sister’s tearful voice, and the insistence of the message were clues to something so much bigger. I denied the intuition. Dad was fine.
“They took him to the hospital last night.” Her voice broke.
I’d swallowed and shook my head. “Okay. And?”
“He just collapsed.” She was sobbing. It was difficult to understand her, the words mired in the swamp of her sobs.
My hand had covered my mouth and tears sprang to my eyes. “Is he okay? I’ll come home now.” I’d twirled in the spot where I stood, unsure and unsteady, nothing making sense. My dad collapsed.
Ruth had continued her tearful replay, “The firemen and the ambulance people. They were working on him.”
“Oh my god,” I’d said, even though I knew not to use the Lord’s name like a swear word. I hadn’t meant it like that, but out it came. “I’ll go straight to the hospital.” I’d fallen to my knees and looked for an unused duffle under my bed. I hadn’t been thinking; I didn’t have a duffle under my bed. “Or did they rush him to a different hospital?”
“Nanna.”
I’d frozen at Ruth’s lament in my nickname. My throat constricted while my insides tightened into slick glass.
Her tearful explanation continued. “He didn’t make it, Nanna. Daddy. He’s gone.”
Still folded over on my knees, I’d look at the blue-gray carpet, at the loops and the variations of color. “Gone where? Did they transfer him to Salem?” The words had slid out of me through my slick-glass body, nothing able to hang on and find purchase.
“No. Nanna. Daddy died.”
I’d cut the call, trying to find the breath that wouldn’t hold, sliding around the slippery surface of my insides. I’d panted the word “no,” over and over while staring at the loops of the blue carpet, wondering why someone had chosen this shade of blue. A terrible color. Dingy. No. No. No. No. Depressing. Then I’d unrolled from the ball onto my back, looked up at that ceiling so high above me and wailed.
Caroline, my freshman roommate, found me sometime later, tear-soaked and numb. I could barely string together words, but she’d helped me pack and drove me home. I’d walked into the house that used to feel like a refuge and found the arms of my sister as if there was a magnetic pull of familial grief guiding my way, like birds flying south for the winter. By the time I’d walked up the stairwell to my mom, she’d been buried in her bed.
The vast emptiness of his loss was visceral, a gaping nothing that seemed to suck everything familiar, and happy, and known, and comfortable into that void.
I’d walked into the bathroom and was sick.
Now, I roll on my bed to stare at the ceiling again, wondering where my tired went.
This weekend marks two years. I’d messed up that night, forgotten the truth of who I was supposed to be, the good girl who could always be counted on to do the right thing. I hadn’t been there for my dad and if I had, maybe I could have said goodbye. I would have been there for my mom and my sister, at least. Instead, I’d been selfish, and it had reaped an awful, heavy, guilt-ridden fruit.
Mom has said repeatedly that I can’t blame myself. That even if they could have gotten ahold of me, I wouldn’t have made it home in time. But she doesn’t know where I’d been, what I’d been doing. I deserve this shame.
Not blaming myself had been a part of her argument to get me to go back to school. To appease her, I agreed just after the first-year anniversary of my dad’s death. Then I’d met Sebastian a few weeks later, unbound and broken. Hating myself. In many ways, Sebastian had saved me. Made me feel whole when the gaping hole left by the loss of my dad was so large. He’d made me feel protected. He’d made me feel safe. I know there were things wrong with my relationship with Sebastian, but it wasn’t all him.
Silent tears slip from my eyes, and I roll back to my side and try to alleviate the grief and regret with sleep, slipping into that darkness to find peace.
A noise down the hall jolts me awake.
The darkness is stark and whole.
I reach for the light next to my bed and twist the knob on. It clicks and cuts the darkness. “Jewel?” I call out from my bed.
There isn’t an answer from the hallway.
I check the time on my phone and know she should be home. She hasn’t texted that she’s staying at Joy’s. After waiting a moment, I get up and walk to my bedroom door, open it, and peek out into the dark hallway. “Jewel?”
A loud crash makes me jump.
My heart thuds in my ears like bass drums.
“What the fuck was that?” Jewel asks from her bedroom doorway at the other end of the hallway.
“I don’t know,” I whisper.
“We better check,” she says and disappears into her room. I hear the low sound of her words to Joy. When she reappears, she’s shrugging into a hoodie and walks down the hallway toward me.
I follow her, knowing that I might be backup, even if I’m useless.
“What was it?”
I look over my shoulder at Joy, Jewel’s girlfriend, standing in the hallway. She rubs her eyes and yawns.
I shrug.
By now, Jewel is at the door. She flips on the light, peeks out the peephole, walks to the window in the living room and looks out. “No one’s there,” she says, looking through the window again, rocking back and forth for a full view.
“No one? I wonder what that noise was.” I take a relieved breath and look over my shoulder at Joy, shaking my head. When I look back at Jewel, she’s looking through the peephole again.
“I’m going back to bed.” Joy disappears back into Jewel’s room.
“Should we open the door?”
“Now why the fuck would we do that?” Jewel asks me, incredulous that I’ve even suggested it.
I nod. “You’re right.”
We retreat to our own rooms. Once I’m back in bed, it takes me too long to fall asleep. When I finally do, it’s restless, and I toss and turn to dreams of a shadowy creature banging on the door, snarling at the windows, trying to get in.
The following morning, after moving through a sleepy haze, Jewel opens the door, saying something to Joy about her coat collar and reaching to help her fix it.
“What’s that?” I ask, stepping toward the door.
A scrape of paper is taped to its surface. Chills race across my skin, and a tremor rocks my muscles.
Jewel plucks the note from the door and looks at it, then turns and holds it out. “It’s for you.”
“What?”
“It’s got your name on it.”
I take it and retreat with it to the kitchen counter.
She meets me at the end of the bar. “Who’s it from?”
I recognize the handwriting: all caps, only it’s messier than usual. “Sebastian.”
“Are you telling me, he was the one making all that racket last night?” Joy rolls her eyes. “Figures. Such a selfish jerk.”
Jewel makes a frustrated noise that whooshes through her nose and mouth, then rubs a hand over her face. “That fucker. Leave it to him to scare the shit out of us.”
Now that I know that last night’s sound was Sebastian, the tension in my muscles ease. “I’m sure he didn’t mean to scare us.”
“Maybe not, Hannah, but you’re too nice about it, regardless.” She pats my arm. “We’re going to go.” She looks at Joy. “Ready?”
“You’re deserve better than that, Hannah,” Joy says as she follows Jewel out of the apartment.
“See you later,” I call after them as they disappear, then look back at the note Sebastian has left, confused. He’s called, he’s texted, and now he’s come to my place in the middle of the night to leave a note.
Maybe he thought it would make me remember how attentive he could be, but irritation takes a grater to my insides. I consider throwing out the note without reading it, but curiosity wins out, so I pull it across the countertop and remove it from the envelope to read:
I read the letter again, and a third time, trying to make sense of what I’m seeing. I can tell his handwriting isn’t confined to his normal neat and controlled print. It’s slanted, the letters uneven, and I have the sense he wrote it drunk. Sebastian drunk-noted me. The thought makes me snicker. Then I smile, but not because I’m moved by the gesture, but rather because of the wonderful way it makes me feel… nothing.
That, in and of itself, is progress.
I wonder if I would have felt that way if Seth hadn’t somehow miraculously walked into my world yesterday. I recall how difficult listening to Sebastian yesterday morning had been. I’d known it was over but hadn’t put that into practice yet. Perhaps Seth’s reappearance is a fortuitous gift from God to reinforce my need to walk away from whatever had been with Sebastian rather than allowing it back into my life. Of course, I feel bad for Sebastian’s hurt, but I also know that nine weeks ago he was the one who asked for this.
I fold the letter, return it to the envelope, and throw it away before leaving for class.