Page 14 of The Heartbreak Hotel
I look down at her, and she turns onto her back to look up at me. “Waste all what?”
“All that time.” Her lower lip trembles. “I spent a year with them, you know? I thought we were building toward something. But now I’m just back to square one and I—god, sorry, I sound like such an ass right now. You were with Nate way longer.” She smashes a hand over her face. “Fuck, sorry, Lou.”
I swallow. I was with Nate long enough to have trouble remembering how things felt before him. Long enough that a year felt like a blink. But Nate was also gone so often—more than half the time—that I’m used to being without him. That I don’t miss him, if I’m being honest with myself. I just miss knowing that I had someone out there, planning to come home to me.
“It’s okay,” I tell her. I pry her hand off her face, and we meet each other’s eyes in the firelit living room. This is how it’s always been, with Mei and me—with everyone and me. I’m more comfortable taking care than being taken care of. “You didn’t waste it, Mei. Think about everything you’ve learned about yourself over the last year. What you want in a partner, and maybe some things you don’t. And how big of a love you’re capable of givingto someone else.” I try to hear the words as I say them. “You get to keep all of those things. How much better you know yourself now. That’s yours forever, and it’s so valuable.”
For the first time, Mei offers me a weak smile. “You’re really good at this, Lou. It’s like you could be a therapist or something.”
I roll my eyes, and she sits up. Pulls the bowl of Sour Patch Kids into her lap. “I’m serious.”
“Thank you.”
She picks an orange gummy out of the bowl—my favorite—and hands it to me. “Can I stay here forever?”
“Of course you can.”
“Even when you start renting out the rooms? Can I get a friends and family discount?”
“I’ll charge everyone else more so you can stay here forever for free.”
She smiles again. Smashes two red gummies together and eats them. “Or at least until my heart’s not broken.”
“At least until then,” I agree. “We the brokenhearted have to stick together.”
“So true,” Mei says, leaning her head onto my shoulder. She melts back into the couch. “We the brokenhearted.”
As we watch the movie, the words ring between us:We the brokenhearted. We the vulnerable. The left-behind.
I picture my house full of people like us, leaning on each other. Eating candy and watching kids’ movies and doing the soft, quiet things that make us feel a little less raw. Talking about all the small, awful memories of the people we won’t know anymore. Saying them out loud so they don’t have to live, trapped, inside of us.
“Mei,” I say quietly. She looks up at me. “What if I did that, with the rentals?”
“Did what with the rentals?”
I swallow against the swell of it, rising in me. “Offered them to brokenhearted people. Like a retreat, to recover.”
She sits up again. “Like heartbreak rehab.”
I nod. “Like—get away to the mountains and recover from your heartbreak with hiking and a therapist to talk to and good food.” I correct myself. “Almost therapist.”
“Decent food,” Mei amends.
“Right.” The truth is I’ve felt more like myself this evening than I have since the breakup. Having someone to care for—putting my energy into someone else’s pain—lessens my own. I’ve always been like that.Bleeding heart, Goldie calls me.
Maybe this is exactly what I need. Not only the thing I’m best at, but the thing that makes me feel best. Being useful, creating peace, giving people someone to sit beside in their hurt. It would be like therapylite: channeling all the reasons I wanted to be a counselor in the first place, but doing it in a way that’ll fill my time—and patch my heart—until I can retake my licensing exam and start my career in earnest. Using this house I love so much to help people heal, the way it’s healed me over all these years.
I look at Mei. “Do you think—I mean. Is it a good idea?”
“Lou.” Mei takes my hands. Her wad of tissues is stuffed between our palms. “It’s agreatidea.”
The first heart I everwatched break was my mother’s. My father was never in the picture—Goldie’s, neither—but I grew upmarking time by Mom’s heartbreak. In kindergarten it was Ross, a contractor whose big boots sit by the front door in all my earliest memories. In second grade, Matthias with his blue pickup truck, the sticker shaped like a German shepherd on its mud-splattered back window. In third grade, Darren—not around long enough to be buried with a talisman in my memory. It wasn’t the men who stuck with us, making a pattern of our family. It was their going: the sudden absence of them, and the fallout we repeated like clockwork.
It was worst when we were staying with them—when it wasn’t just a breakup but an eviction, too. We didn’t always live with Mom’s boyfriends, but it certainly made things easier for her. Rent was our boogeyman, creeping out from the baseboards with cold fingers. We moved more than any of my friends—usually living in someone’s spare room, the three of us snuggled like sardines in a queen bed, or on a month-to-month lease Mom could break when she needed to. Her boyfriends’ places tended to be small and spare, but we didn’t pay rent there.
If we weren’t living with him, the break was cleaner and less complex. I tracked her phases through a breakup like checking days off a calendar; she always followed the same process. The sharp-toothed, uncontrollable anger—the cursing, the redness of her face. Then the sorrow—the way she became small, folding into a meek and miserable version of herself. This was the part Goldie hated most, but the easiest for me. She’d start sleeping on the couch, away from us—so her crying wouldn’t wake us, maybe, or so that she could play something on TV all night and knock out the loop of her own thoughts. I’d wake up, finding her gone, and shuffle out to join her on the couch. It’s almost sweet, in my memory: the picture of my mother liftingthe throw blanket in the glow of the television, making space for my body against the curved shell of her own.
Then came her defiance. She’d get preachy, two weeks into a breakup—teaching my sister and me that men couldn’t be trusted, shouldn’t be sought after, didn’t deserve love. Then she’d meet someone new, and she’d forget it all until the next time.
