Page 37 of Steal My Breath Away

CHAPTER 18Haley

EIGHT YEARS AGO

Dad died two years after Ace came into our lives. He was in the kitchen at home doing what he loved to do when his heart finally gave out. His doctor had been warning him for years about his weight and blood pressure and had put him on a strict diet. But Dad loved food. It was his life. And there was no way he would let a dish leave the kitchen if he hadn’t tasted it first.

I was the one who found him. I came home from school excited for snack time. Dad had promised me a new type of grilled cheese with three different cheeses and artisan bread, and I was looking forward to being his taste tester and telling him all about my day.

Even when I saw him lying on the kitchen floor, it never occurred to me that he could be gone. Dad was a big man with a loud, hearty voice, and he could fill up a room with his presence alone. At first, I thought he was doing something funny, like hiding or pretending to look for spiders on the ceiling, but then I noticed the silence. No music. No laughter. Not even the huff of Dad’s breath—he’d been huffing a lot going up and down the stairs to the cellar. Mom said it was too much exercise, but Dad didn’t listen.

“Dad?” Part of me already knew it was bad the second my knees hit the floor. Part of me had already started building the black box I would need to keep the overwhelming feelings contained. Little girls aren’t supposed to handle big emotions or try to lift their daddies off the floor. “Dad? Wake up. It’s not funny.”

I couldn’t move him, so I wrapped my arms around him and gave him a hug, waiting for him to jump up and tickle me until my stomach hurt from laughing. “Dad? Wake up. Please wake up. I have to tell you what happened at school.” I pressed my ear to his chest and heard the faintest thud of his heart, lighter than butterfly wings.

That’s when Ace found me.

Ace called for an ambulance and then he called Mom. After they took Dad away, he took me to the hospital where we met Mom and Matt in the waiting room. Dad was in surgery by then, and all we could do was hope and pray.

Matt couldn’t handle the wait. He prowled around the room, flipping switches, rifling through magazines, and thumping on the vending machine when it didn’t deliver his soda.

“What the fuck is wrong with this place?” He kicked the machine. “If they can’t even fix a soda machine, how can they fix a heart?”

Ace went over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. I couldn’t hear what he said, but it seemed to calm Matt down. Ace shook the machine gently from side to side and the soda slid free and dropped into the well.

“Thanks,” I whispered when he returned to the seat beside me. “Matt loses it when he’s scared.”

“I’m not scared,” Matt shouted. “It’s going to be fine. They can do all sorts of things with hearts. I read it on my phone. Stents, bypasses, quadruple bypasses, pacemakers… They’ll fix his heart and then he’ll come home.”

I wasn’t so sure. Dad had been in surgery a long time. Mom had gone to get an update and still hadn’t come back, and every so often a nurse would come out and look at us with a sorrowful expression on her face.

As if he knew what I was thinking, Ace wrapped my hand in his and gave it a squeeze.

“You don’t have to stay,” Matt said to Ace. “We’ve got that big math test tomorrow and I know you need to study.”

I tightened my grip on Ace’s hand. With Matt about to lose it and Mom gone to find a doctor, he was the only thing keeping me steady.

Ace looked down at me and his eyes softened. “I’m not going anywhere. Fuck the test.”

“Fuck the fucking test.” Matt laughed, a hollow, bitter sound. “Wonder what Dad will say tomorrow when I tell him we said ‘Fuck the test.’”

I saw Ace’s throat move as he swallowed, and I knew that he was thinking the same as me. He’d seen Dad on the floor. Dad wasn’t going to be there tomorrow. He would never know about the test or the swearing or the dents in the vending machine. He wouldn’t take Matt aside for a “talking-to” and then send him out to rake the lawn.

I closed my eyes and leaned against Ace’s shoulder. He was so calm, so still, so utterly in control. I tried to absorb his strength, but even with his hand wrapped tight around mine, and his warmth seeping into my body, I couldn’t breathe when the news finally came. It was too big. Too overwhelming. Dad was my person, and my person was gone.

I don’t remember much about what happened in the days afterward. All I knew was that Ace was always there, helping Mom with the funeral and celebration of life, holding my hand or sitting with me on the back steps, talking to Matt and playing games with him until late into the night. I never thought about who was there for him.

Everyone thought Matt would be the problem after Dad died, but as it turned out, it was me. I became completely untethered, vaping in the restrooms between classes, skipping lessons, hanging out with older kids after school. My marks went from straight As down to Ds and the principal arranged a meeting with Mom because she was worried I was going to fail.

“Have you considered counseling?” she asked Mom as I scrolled through my phone in her pristine modern office and tried to look bored.

“She won’t go.”

“How about her friends? Could she talk to them?” The principal seemed to have forgotten I was sitting right there.

Mom told her Paige had done everything she could to pull me out of my whirlpool of destruction. Mostly, she was concerned that I was staying out late every night with the wrong kind of kids. She didn’t seem to understand that I didn’t want to come home and see the empty kitchen and the hear the echo of my dad’s “baby girl” ringing in the house.

“She was close to Matt’s friend Ace, too,” Mom said. “But Ace hasn’t come around since the week after the funeral. Dave was like a father to him. He took the death very hard.”

“I had his grandmother in here the other day,” the principal said. “He hasn’t been coming to school either. It’s so sad. He’d already been through so much in his life, and he was doing so well.”

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