Heart Bones Read online

  Table of Contents

  Heart Bones

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright © 2020 by Colleen Hoover

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, locations, and incidents are products of the authors? imaginations. Any resemblance to actual persons, things, living or dead, locales, or events is entirely coincidental.

  HEART BONES

  Cover Design by Murphy Rae

  Interior Formatting by Alyssa Garcia, Uplifting Author Services

  Kelly Garcia, this book is for you, your husband, and your happily ever after.

  ONE

  Summer 2015

  There’s a picture of Mother Teresa that hangs on our living room wall where a television would go if we could afford the kind of television that hangs on the wall, or even a home with the kind of walls that could hold a television.

  The walls of a trailer house aren’t made of the same stuff walls in a normal house are made of. In a trailer house, the walls crumble beneath your fingernails like chalk if you so much as scratch at them.

  I once asked my mother, Janean, why she keeps a picture of Mother Teresa on our living room wall.

  “The bitch was a fraud,” she said.

  Her words. Not mine.

  I think when you’re the worst of people, finding the worst in others becomes a survival tactic of sorts. You focus heavily on the darkness in people in hopes of masking the true shade of your own darkness. That’s how my mother has spent her entire life. Always seeking the worst in people. Even her own daughter.

  Even Mother Teresa.

  Janean is lying on the couch in the same position she was in when I left for my shift at McDonald’s eight hours ago. She’s staring at the picture of Mother Teresa, but she’s not actually looking at it. It’s as if her eyeballs have stopped working.

  Stopped absorbing.

  Janean is an addict. I realized this around the age of nine, but back then, her addictions were limited to men, alcohol, and gambling.

  Over the years, her addictions became more noticeable and a lot deadlier. I think it was five years ago, right around when I turned fourteen, when I caught her shooting up meth for the first time. Once a person starts using meth regularly, their lifespan shortens drastically. I Googled it in the school library once. How long can a person live with meth addiction?

  Six to seven years is what the internet said.

  I’ve found her unresponsive several times over the years, but this feels different. This feels final.

  “Janean?” There’s a calmness to my voice that certainly shouldn’t be present right now. I feel like my voice should be shaky, or unavailable. I feel somewhat ashamed at my lack of reaction in this moment.

  I drop my purse at my feet as I stare intensely at her face from across the living room. It’s raining outside and I haven’t even closed the front door yet, so I’m still getting soaked. But shutting the door and sheltering my back from the rain is the least of my concerns right now as I stare at Janean as she stares at Mother Teresa.

  One of Janean’s arms is draped over her stomach and the other is dangling off the couch, her fingers resting gently against worn carpet. She’s a little swollen and it makes her look younger. Not younger than her age—she’s only thirty-nine—but younger than what her addictions have made her appear to be. Her cheeks are slightly less concave and the wrinkles that have formed around her mouth over the last few years look as if they’ve been smoothed out by Botox.

  “Janean?”

  Nothing.

  Her mouth is hanging slightly open, revealing yellow slivers of chipped and rotted teeth. It’s like she was in the middle of a sentence when the life slipped out of her.

  I’ve imagined this moment for a while now. Sometimes when you hate someone enough, you can’t help but lie awake in bed at night, wondering what life would be like if that person were dead.

  I imagined it differently. I imagined it would be much more dramatic.

  I stare at Janean for another moment, waiting to see if she’s just in some kind of trance. I take a few steps toward her and then pause when I see her arm. There’s a needle dangling from the skin just underneath the inside of her elbow.

  As soon as I see it, the reality of the moment slips over me like a slimy film and it makes me nauseous. I spin around and run out of the house. It feels like I’m about to be sick, so I lean over the rotten railing, careful not to put too much pressure on it so it doesn’t buckle beneath my grip.

  I’m relieved as soon as I get sick because I was beginning to worry about my lack of reaction to this life-altering moment. I may not be as hysterical as a daughter should be in this moment, but at least I feel something.

  I wipe my mouth on the sleeve of my McDonald’s work shirt. I sit down on the steps, despite the rain still pummeling down on me from the heartless night sky.

  My hair and my clothes are soaking wet. So is my face, but none of the liquid streaming down my cheeks is tears.

  It’s all raindrops.

  Wet eyes and a dry heart.

  I close my eyes and press my face into my hands, trying to decide if my detachment is because of my upbringing or if I was born broken.

  I wonder what kind of upbringing is worse for a human. The kind where you’re sheltered and loved to the point that you aren’t aware of how cruel the world can be until it’s too late to acquire the necessary coping skills, or the kind of household I grew up in. The ugliest version of a family, where coping is the only thing you learn.

  Before I was old enough to work for the food I buy, there were many nights I’d lie awake, unable to sleep because my stomach would be cramping from hunger. Janean told me once that the growl coming from my stomach was a ravenous cat that lived inside of me, and the cat would growl if I didn’t feed it enough food. Every time I got hungry after that, I’d imagine that cat in my belly searching for food that wasn’t there. I feared it would eat away at my insides if I didn’t feed it, so sometimes I’d eat things that weren’t food just to satisfy the hungry cat.

  She once left me alone for so long, I ate old banana peels and eggshells from the garbage. I even tried eating a few bites of stuffing from inside the couch cushion, but it was too hard to swallow. I spent most of my childhood scared to death that I was slowly being eaten from the inside by that starving cat.

  I don’t know that she was ever actually gone for more than o
ne day at a time, but when you’re a child, time feels stretched out when you’re alone.

  I remember she’d come stumbling through the front door and fall onto the couch and stay there for hours. I’d fall asleep curled up at the other end of the couch, too scared to leave her alone.

  But then in the mornings following her drunken return, I’d wake up to find her cooking breakfast in the kitchen. It wasn’t always traditional breakfast. Sometimes it would be peas, sometimes eggs, sometimes a can of chicken noodle soup.

  Around the age of six, I started to pay attention to how she worked the stove on those mornings, because I knew I’d need to know how to work it for the next time she disappeared.

  I wonder how many six-year-olds have to teach themselves how to work a stove because they believe if they don’t, they’ll be eaten alive by their internal ravenous cat.

  It’s the luck of the draw, I guess. Most kids get the kind of parents that’ll be missed after they die. The rest of us get the kind of parents who make better parents after they’re dead.

  The nicest thing my mother has ever done for me is die.

  Buzz told me to sit in his police car so I’d be out of the rain and out of the house while they retrieved her body. I watched numbly as they carried her out on a gurney, covered with a white sheet. They put her in the back of a coroner van. Didn’t even bother taking her in an ambulance. There was no point. Almost everyone under the age of fifty who dies in this town dies from addiction.

  Doesn’t even matter what kind—they’re all deadly in the end.

  I press my cheek against the car window and try to look up at the sky. There are no stars tonight. I can’t even see the moon. Every now and then, lightning will strike, revealing clumps of black clouds.

  Fitting.

  Buzz opens the back door and bends down. The rain has slowed to a mist now, so his face is wet, but it just makes him look like he’s dripping sweat.

  “Do you need a ride anywhere?” he asks.

  I shake my head.

  “Need to call anyone? You can use my cell.”

  I shake my head again. “I’ll be fine. Can I go back inside now?”

  I don’t know that I really want to go back inside the trailer where my mother took her last breath, but I don’t have a more appealing alternative at the moment.

  Buzz steps aside and opens an umbrella, even though the rain has slowed and I’m already soaking wet. He stays a step behind me, holding the umbrella over my head as I walk toward the house.

  I don’t know Buzz very well. I know his son, Dakota. I know Dakota in so many ways—all ways I wish I didn’t.

  I wonder if Buzz knows what kind of son he’s raised. Buzz seems like a decent guy. He’s never given me or my mother too much shit. Sometimes he stops his car on his patrol through the trailer park. He always asks how I’m doing, and I get the feeling when he asks this, he half expects me to beg him to get me out of here. But I don’t. People like me are extremely skilled at pretending we’re just fine. I always smile and tell him I’m great, and then he sighs like he’s relieved I didn’t give him a reason to call Child Protective Services.

  Once I’m back inside the living room, I can’t help but stare at the couch. It looks different now. Like somebody died on it.

  “You good for the night?” Buzz asks.

  I turn around and he’s standing right outside the door with the umbrella over his head. He’s looking at me like he’s trying to be sympathetic, but his mind is probably working out all the paperwork this has just caused him.

  “I’m good.”

  “You can go down to the funeral home tomorrow to plan the arrangements. They said any time after ten is good.”

  I nod, but he doesn’t leave. He just lingers for a moment, shuffling from one unsure foot to the other. He closes the umbrella just outside the door like he’s superstitious, then takes a step into the house. “You know,” he says, creasing his face so hard his bald head spills wrinkles over his forehead. “If you don’t show up at the funeral home, they can declare it an indigent burial. You won’t be able to have any type of service for her, but at least they can’t stick you with a bill.” He looks ashamed to have even suggested that. His eyes dart up to the Mother Teresa painting and then he looks down at his feet like she just scolded him.

  “Thanks.” I doubt anyone would show up if I held a service, anyway.

  It’s sad, but it’s true. My mother was lonely, if anything. Sure, she hung with her usual crowd at the bar she’s been frequenting for almost twenty years, but those people weren’t her friends. They’re all just other lonely people, seeking each other out so they can be lonely together.

  Even that crowd has dwindled thanks to the addiction that’s ravaged this town. And the type of people she did hang out with aren’t the type to show up for a funeral. Most of them probably have outstanding warrants, and they avoid any kind of organized events in the off-chance it’s a ploy by the police to do a warrant round-up.

  “Do you need to call your father?” he asks.

  I stare at him a moment, knowing that’s what I’ll end up doing, but wondering how long I can put it off.

  “Beyah,” he says, pronouncing my name with a long e.

  “It’s pronounced Bay-uh.” I don’t know why I correct him. He’s said it wrong since I’ve known him, and I’ve never cared enough to correct him before this moment.

  “Beyah,” he corrects. “I know this isn’t my place, but…you need out of this town. You know what happens to people like—” He stops talking, as if what he was about to say would insult me.

  I finish the sentence for him. “To people like me?”

  He looks even more ashamed now, even though I know he just means people like me in a broad sense. People with mothers like mine. Poor people with no way out of this town. People who end up working fast food until they’re numb inside, and the fry cook offers them a hit of something that makes the rest of the shift feel like they’re at a disco, and before they know it, they can’t survive a single second of their miserable day without hit after hit, chasing that feeling faster than they chase the safety of their own child, until they’re shooting it straight into their veins and staring at Mother Teresa while they accidentally die, when all they ever really wanted was an escape from the ugliness.

  Buzz looks uncomfortable standing inside this house. I wish he’d just leave. I feel sorrier for him than I do myself, and I’m the one who just found my mother dead on the couch.

  “I don’t know your father at all, but I know he’s been paying the rent on this trailer since you were born. That right there tells me he’s a better option than staying in this town. If you have an out, you need to take it. This life you’ve been living here—it’s not good enough for you.”

  That might be the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. And it’s coming from Dakota’s dad, of all people.

  He stares at me a moment, like he wants to say something else. Or maybe he wants me to respond. Either way, the room stays silent until he nods and then leaves. Finally.

  After he shuts the front door, I turn and stare at the couch. I stare so long, I feel like I’m in a daze. It’s weird how your whole life can completely change in the hours between waking up and going to bed.

  As much as I hate to admit it, Buzz is right. I can’t stay here. I never planned to, but I at least thought I had the summer left to prepare for my exit.

  I’ve been working my ass off to get out of this town, and as soon as August hits, I’ll be on a bus to Pennsylvania.

  I received a volleyball scholarship to Penn State. In August, I’ll be out of this life, and it won’t be because of anything my mother did for me, or because my father bailed me out of here. It’ll be because of me.

  I want that victory.

  I want to be the reason I turn out the way I’m going to turn out.

  I refuse to allow Janean to receive any credit for any good things that might happen in my future. I never told her about the volleyball s
cholarship I received. I didn’t tell anyone. I swore my coach to secrecy and wouldn’t even allow a write-up in the paper, or a photo-op for the yearbook.

  I never told my father about the scholarship, either. I’m not even sure he knows I play volleyball. My coaches made sure I had everything I needed as far as supplies, equipment, and a uniform. I was good enough that they weren’t going to allow my financial situation to prevent me from being part of the team.

  I haven’t had to ask my parents for a single thing related to volleyball.

  It feels strange even referring to them as parents. They gave me life, but that’s about the only thing I’ve ever received from them.

  I am the product of a one-night stand. My father lived in Washington and was in Kentucky on business when he met Janean. I was three months old before he even knew he’d gotten Janean pregnant. He found out he was a dad when she served him with child support papers.

  He came to see me once a year until I was four; then he started flying me to Washington to visit him, instead.

  He knows nothing about my life in Kentucky. He knows nothing about my mother’s addictions. He knows nothing about me, other than what I present to him, and that’s very little.

  I’m extremely secretive about every aspect of my life. Secrets are my only form of currency.

  I haven’t told my father about my scholarship for the same reason I never told my mother. I don’t want him to take pride in having a daughter who accomplished something. He doesn’t deserve to feel prideful of a child he puts a fraction of his effort into. He thinks a monthly check and intermittent phone calls to my work are enough to cover up the fact that he barely knows me.

  He’s a two weeks out of the year Dad.

  Because we’re so far apart on the map, it’s convenient for him to excuse his absence in my life. I’ve stayed with him fourteen days out of every summer since I was four, but in the last three years, I haven’t seen him at all.

  Once I turned sixteen and joined the varsity team, volleyball became an even bigger part of my daily routine, so I stopped flying out to see him. I’ve been making excuses for three years now as to why I can’t make our visits.