I Fell in Love with Hope(95)

The night I decided to hate you, you didn’t even hurt me.

You came home from a business trip.

I was reading in my room. I’d taken to hiding my books and writing in boxes in the attic since you never went up there. That night, I heard your voice gradually get louder and louder through the walls. I peeked out of my door and I heard the sound of a lamp breaking against the wall, a dish against the tiles.

I didn’t want mom to get hurt, so I walked down the stairs thinking you’d stop if you knew I was there.

But you didn’t.

You took what was left of her sanity and you raped her right in front of me.

I didn’t care what the reason was. I didn’t even care if there was a reason. I wanted to kill you. I fantasized about getting a knife from the kitchen drawer and driving it into your back.

Mom didn’t even realize I saw it happen. She’d bitten through her arm to keep from making noise and tried to clean up before she caught sight of me.

Mom.

Oh, Neo, she said, smiling, pretending there weren’t tears streaming down her face.

It’s okay, honey, just go back to bed.

Your face is bleeding, I said.

Is it? She touched her cheek and hissed. I’m so clumsy these days, aren’t I?

Mom?

Yes?

Can you sleep in my room tonight?

She sniffled and nodded.

Yes, she said. Yes, of course, I can.

—

C couldn’t live without his heart.

I think I always knew that. Sorrow isn’t the first thing that hits when the surgeons emerge into the waiting room. It’s the realization that what I’ve been waiting for is here, like I’ve reached the end of a path I knew was a dead end.

You really are a strange, beautiful creature, he said.

That is the last thing he ever gave me.

Hikari and Neo hold hands, leaning on each other. I sit on Hikari’s side, my eyes closed, my consciousness traveling through the walls so that I can watch the surgery.

When C rejected the new heart, dread leaked into the room, submerging his doctors in difficult decisions.

They did everything they could. They always do.

C’s mother is the first to burst into tears when the surgeons give her the news. His father cries too, hugging his wife, C’s brothers, each falling into their own version of misery and frustration. Two of them stand, storming off. Another presses his hands to his face, shaking. The last surround their parents as if holding each other up will lessen the blow.

Hikari sits there in disbelief. She is crying, but it is noiseless. In her hand, the tangled earbuds C gave her for safekeeping sit. She looks down at them, not sure what to do. I gather her in my arms, kissing the side of her face laden with salt. She hides in the crook of my neck.

Neo is tearless.

He does not cry or fall to the floor. His hands are neatly folded in his lap, C’s phone loose in one, the promise he made crumpled in the other. Calmly, he stands up after the surgeons and their condolences have gone. He walks to C’s family, stopping at his mother.

“Madam,” he says.

C’s mother lifts her face from her hands, sobbing breaths stalled into quieter cries. Neo kneels in front of her.

“C’était là où il gardait toutes ses chansons préférées,” he says, handing her the phone. Then, in the softest voice he knows, “Je suis désolé pour votre perte.”

Neo leaves after a few minutes. He asks Hikari and me if he could be alone for a little while. He walks back to his room the way he would on any other day, greeted by a shut door.

He opens it to his father sitting at his desk with a letter folded over his lap.

Neo meets his gaze, apathetic, no change in his body. He regards his father like you regard a new, uninteresting piece of wall art and proceeds inside without much more care than that.

“You’ve been gone a while,” Neo says, shutting the door behind him. His father folds the letter neatly and clears his throat.

“Your mother convinced me to give you space,” he says.

Neo doesn’t fail to notice the state of his knuckles. He imagines what he must’ve done to his mother for them to retain such bloody coloring. He wonders if he is capable of killing her, if he already has. He laughs a little then, thinking of the odds that his mother and his heart died on the same day.

“Are we going to talk about this?” his father asks, holding up the pieces of paper.

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Neo says.

He traces his stacks of books, reaching under his bed to take out a single cardboard box and, one by one, putting them in it.

“You went and got some bravery after running off?” Neo’s father asks, although it isn’t aggressive or scornful. Pride flows through his tone, hooked on the corner of his mouth. He’s happy, Neo realizes. His son, rather than stay pitiful, weak, and afraid in the hospital, actually took his shot at escaping.

“I’m not brave,” Neo says, spines running down the cardboard and thumping to the bottom. “I never have been. I know you’re disappointed by that.” He stares his father in the face. “But at least I can acknowledge that I’m weak.”

Neo’s father sighs. It’s a sigh that preludes the violence Neo knows all too well. On instinct, Neo stands up, his breathing racking an unsteady rhythm. He backs away as his dad makes his way to him.