Page 74 of The Heartbreak Hotel
“Come here,” he says, guiding me to the couch. He picks up the extra blankets from the floor and tucks them around me until I’m cocooned like a bug, my teeth chattering and my phone still clenched in my hand. Henry sits next to me and holds hisarm out. I tip into him without thinking, pressing my head into his shoulder. He’s so, so warm.
“What happened?” he asks, one hand sweeping up and down my arm. It’s quick and firm—the way you’d chafe your hands together in the cold, the way you’d rub a newborn puppy to help it breathe. The movement grounds me, reminds me of my body. I take a long breath and hold it.
“It was my mom,” I say, trying to still the shaking. I can’t quite tell if it’s from the cold or the panic. “She’s going to get evicted.”
Henry’s hand doesn’t stop moving. Outside, the sun crests the mountains, and his living room fills with yellow light; it all feels quiet and soft and I have the strange thought that I’m home sick from school.
“Why?” he asks. I hear Goldie:Because she hasn’t been paying her rent, obviously.
But I only say, “I need to send her some money by tomorrow.”
Henry’s quiet. When he shifts away from me, it’s to turn on the couch so we can look at each other. I miss his hand on my arm immediately. “How much?”
I rub a fist between my eyes, working out the beginnings of a headache. “More than I have.”
Henry reaches for my fist and uncurls my fingers to thread them through his own. My hands are stinging and pink. “Louisa, has she done this before? Asked you for money?”
Only every year since I left home, I think. “A few times.”
“And do you feel like you—” He hesitates, eyes scanning back and forth over mine. “Do you feel like you need to give it to her?”
I can hear the questions he’s really asking:Is this your job? Isthis a fair sacrifice for her to ask you to make? How much of yourself will you give to her?
But Henry doesn’t know the depth of it. The weak place inside of me that my mother presses on every time. The boundary I’ve never been able to build between us.
“Yes,” I say, unable to look at him. I want to be alone, suddenly—I want to hide. I don’t want him to see this, the way I can’t stop with her.
“Okay,” Henry says. I pull my hand from his and twist my fingers back into a frigid fist. “How can I help?”
Twenty-Nine
The house is empty whenI get home. No Nan at the kitchen table, no guests closing doors or turning on showers or padding down the hallway upstairs. I waited until I was a block from Henry’s house—out of his sight line on the off chance he was watching me drive away—to start crying. I drove around the lake with my eyes blurred, traffic lights turning to watercolor. I asked Goldie to match my thousand dollars and didn’t tell her where the rest of the money was coming from; when she asked if two grand was enough to fix the problem, I lied and told her yes. Goldie hates sending our mother money, butevictionwas an emergency enough for her to follow my lead for once.
It eats through me bite by bite. As I unlock my front door, as I breathe in the house—oiled wood, books, home—as I drop my keys in the dish by the stairs. Henry sending me a wire before I could even finish asking. A cut of the Comeback Inn profits; the money that was supposed to be replacing my rent. The bottomless, sickening shame of it.
You don’t have to help her, I’d said. And he’d looked at me asthough he could see right through to my torn, red interior. Told me,You know I’m not doing this for her.
But it kept swirling in me, churning like an unsteady sea. That Goldie was right—You do this. That she expects it of me. That my mother does. That I give more than I get, and it lands me back here every time. With Nate, who took advantage of me the minute I stopped paying attention; in a house designed to heal everyone but me; in a new relationship with a man who can give me his money but not his memories.
My mind turns it over, again and again, wearing the image smooth: the two of us on Henry’s living room floor, me asking about Molly and Henry covering my body with his to quiet me. I’m awful at being shut out. I need to be needed; the longing hurts in a deep, primal place. Henry eventoldme, that night at Ophelia’s—he warned me that he was bad at this and I’m still here, letting myself be devastated by it. I hear Goldie’s voice every time I close my eyes:You do this.
I pull my favorite throw blanket off the back of the couch and bury myself under it, sinking into the cushions and pressing my face into a throw pillow. I have two days alone in the house before Nan comes back. Another day after that before my next round of guests starts to trickle in.
I started the Comeback Inn to care for people—because the part of me that knows how to nurture others has always felt like the best and truest part. But as I breathe into the cross-stitched pillow cover, as my eyes burn with tears, I wonder if that’s all I’ll ever get to be, all I’m capable of. If the power I thought I held by being needed is just a weakness; if I’ve sought out sadness in others so I don’t have to confront my own. If Henry’s heartbreak is what drew me to him, too.
If I’m only ever a caretaker.
If there’s something broken and sick inside of me.
Mei calls later that afternoon,when the sun’s started to sink through the kitchen windows and I’m still on the couch, HGTV playing softly from the other side of the living room. I have a string of texts from Goldie—I sent my 1k, and thenShe texted me that it’s taken care of, and thenThank you for handling.There’s one from my mother, too:Thank you my sweet girl xx
“How was your Thanksgiving with Hot Henry?” Mei says when I pick up. I gave her the full story after our night at Ophelia’s, and I’m so grateful to the Louisa of last month for getting into it so that I don’t have to muster the entire tale now.
“I mean,” I say, propping myself onto a ramp of throw pillows. “Hot.”
Mei exhales on a squeal. “Do tell.”
“Well, we—” I hesitate. On TV, a woman in denim overalls whales a sledgehammer through her drywall. “You know.”
