Page 10 of The Heartbreak Hotel

Eight

Mei is significantly taller than me, but she’s pretzeled herself into the smallest possible surface area on my couch—head propped on a pillow in my lap, wad of tissues pressed to her nose that she whimpers into like a wounded animal at regular intervals.

I lit every candle I could find in the house.

Put Treasure Planet —Mei’s comfort movie—on the TV with the volume nearly muted.

Set out a bowl of Sour Patch Kids, which have so far gone untouched. I run my fingers over Mei’s hair.

“It’s just such a shame ,” she says for the thirteenth time.

She’s in shock, still, repeating herself to get used to the ideas.

A fire crackles in the fireplace; no matter the heat of the day, nighttime’s always cool.

“Like, you love someone but then they physically need to move their human body away from you and that’s why you break up?

In this day and age? Technology has failed us, right? Why can’t we teleport?”

“I know,” I say quietly. “When you’re feeling better, we’ll figure out teleportation.”

She lets out a wet laugh that turns into a sob halfway through. “Fuck, and their family ? I love Andy’s family. Andy’s mom ?”

“Andy does have a great mom,” I say. “And you do, too. And so many other people who love you and will make sure your life still feels full.”

“But who will I text when I see a meme about Mexican hairless dogs?”

I hesitate. “Um, me. I would love to laugh with you about Mexican hairless dogs.”

“But they were Andy’s favorite ,” Mei says weakly, her voice dissolving into the tissues.

I know what she’s doing: remembering. Even with the distance Nate and I had let grow between us, there’s a version of me—younger, buried—that feels it like a fresh cut every time.

Nate’s voice when he was halfway to sleep.

The Jack Skellington suit he wore every Halloween.

The way he’d text me a photo anytime he saw someone walking a dog that looked like them.

“What’s your favorite?” I ask, and Mei whines, “Who cares , Lou?”

“I care,” I say. When I lean forward to pick up a Sour Patch Kid, she groans at the movement. I hold it to her mouth and she opens up like a baby bird. We sit in silence, candles flickering around us, as she chews.

“I guess those fluffy black ones,” she says finally. “With the white-and-brown faces? That save people from avalanches?”

I think of Henry, the rigid set of his jaw in my kitchen. “Bernese mountain dogs?”

“Yeah,” she says miserably. “Bernese mountain dogs.”

I pat her head. “Good choice. Much cuter than Mexican hairless, if you ask me.”

“Yeah,” she says again. For a while, she just breathes—steady, in and out. On-screen, the crew of 2D pirates crash-lands on an unfamiliar planet. The movie’s a stark contrast to the room around it, which is all wood paneling and carved finials and antiques I’ve spent the last four years collecting.

When Mei speaks again, she sounds clearer. More serious. Like after getting her jokes out of the way, we’ve finally arrived at the tender core of her hurt. “But it’s like, did I waste all that?”

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 giving to 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 therapy lite : 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 a great idea.”

The first heart I ever watched break was my mother’s.

My father was never in the picture—Goldie’s, neither—but I grew up marking 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 lifting the 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.

I was seven, Goldie sixteen, when one of Mom’s boyfriends got her into therapy.

It was Matthias—his muddy blue pickup a stark contrast to the softness hidden beneath.

It was unclear to me, a child, exactly what was going on; I only knew that our mother was suddenly at the doctor with novel regularity.

It scared me. It was only after I’d woken Goldie up in the middle of the night for the third time in a week, panicked that our mother was sick and dying, that she told me Mom had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.

Finally , Goldie had said, but I didn’t understand what a personality disorder was—or how someone like my own mother, who I’d learned everything from, could have one.

To me, Mom’s temper was part of being human.

Her impulsivity was what made her fun. The messes she got us into—forgetting to pay rent, or spending all of it on things we wanted but didn’t need—seemed like honest mistakes.

It wasn’t until Matthias—until counseling—that I came to understand some of the things that I thought made my mother who she was weren’t personality traits but symptoms.

When Matthias left, less than a year later, so did the incrementally more even-keeled version of our mom.

I understood, later, that he was paying for her psychotherapy and that, without him, we couldn’t afford it.

Mom wasn’t in treatment long enough to experience lasting healing or change.

She went back a few times—the first after an unexpected holiday bonus at work when I was in sixth grade; again after an aunt died sophomore year and left her some money.

She wanted help. I believed that, more than Goldie did.

But she could never get it for long enough to stick, and when her sporadic attempts “didn’t work,” she eventually stopped trying.

Mom’s boyfriends—coming, going, leaving her brokenhearted—remained inextricable, for me.

The way she dove in heart-first every time horrified Goldie.

She’s sick , she’d tell me, after we listened to Mom rave about someone she’d only just met.

But it didn’t feel that way to me. Maybe because I was younger; maybe because I didn’t want to believe that our mother’s unyielding desire to find love—after all the times she’d been burned—could be anything but a virtue.

Maybe because it was me, every time, picking up the bloodied pieces. Me, who she needed; me, who was useful. Me, sliding in beside her on the couch in the most vulnerable hours of the morning, our breaths syncing up in the darkness.