The Book of Broken Hearts (23 page)

“We need to talk.” Mom swept the hair away from my face and frowned, her body sagging next to mine on the bed. Behind her, Mari stood in the doorway, eyes red and exhausted.

I’d been hiding out for the past two hours, paging through the black book, and I didn’t hear Mom come in from work. Mari probably ratted me out for refusing to accept her apologies, a stance that took epic willpower because her last round of
I’m so super sorry
involved peanut butter cookie dough. The warm sweetness of it still wafted through the hallway.

My stomach grumbled.
Traitor.

“Come in,
mi amor
,” Mom said to Mari. “Close the door.”

I shoved the book under my pillow as Mari collapsed into my desk chair, facing me and Mom on the bed. The slump of their shoulders was identical, the air around them heavy and sad.

I bolted up straight. “Did something happen with Papi?”

Mom shook her head. “Just some things . . . We need to get things out in the open.”

Vargas. She knows.

“Emilio’s just . . . he’s helping us. You know, to get the bike running,” I stammered. “He’s not—”

“It’s not about the bike.” Mari flashed a warning look, a silent signal meant for me alone:
Don’t say another word.
I exhaled with temporary relief.

What is this about?

“We need to start making some decisions about your father’s care,
mi querida
. Long term.”

“For when you’re back in Argentina?”

Mom bit her lower lip, tears welling in her eyes.

Mari scooted the desk chair close to the bed and rested her hand on my knee. “Papi could get really disoriented if we interrupt his routine now. The doctors agree it’s better for them to stay. Permanently.”

“The doctors just want our insurance money. We’re practically putting their kids through college.” I said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world, but even I heard the desperation in my words.

“It’s not that simple,” Mom said.

“What about Transitions?” I’d meant it as a challenge, but my voice was so small, it came out sounding like a good idea, like,
Hey! Have you guys thought of this awesome place, Transitions? I think Papi would capital-
L
Love it.

Mom didn’t flinch. Maybe she’d meant to tell me about it all along. Maybe she thought she already had. Obviously Mari was in the loop—she didn’t ask any questions.

“That’s one option for the table, yes,” Mom said.

“
On
the table,” I said.

“
Sí.
But there are other considerations. Things you and your sisters have to . . . more decisions.” Mom shook her head and mumbled something under her breath. I barely understood her through the accent. “The doctors . . . you explain, Mariposa.”

“I don’t know how much you know about the illness,” Mari said, “but early onset isn’t exactly the same as regular Alzheimer’s. There’s often a genetic component.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“They can test EOA patients to see if they have these gene mutations.” She clenched her fist, then opened it, traced her fingers over my knee. “Papi has them.”

“So . . . they can fix the genes? Like, alter them? Radiate them or something?” The questions tasted stupid on my tongue, but if there was a fraction of a chance . . .

“It’s just to help them look for the probable cause,” Mari said. “The doctors said that with the mutations, Papi likely has familial early onset Alzheimer’s. Inherited.”

My brain struggled to put the pieces together. “Papi’s parents had it, then?”

“One of them most likely did,” Mari said.

We didn’t know much about our paternal grandparents.
Papi’s mother left when he was in preschool, and his father died in his forties from lung cancer. Papi was already out of the house by then, and when they tried to locate his mother to tell her about her husband’s death, they found out she’d died early too. Something to do with alcohol. Liver failure maybe?

When I’d first heard the story as a kid, I thought they were so stupid, so selfish. Smoked and drank themselves to death, leaving my father and uncle before their time, depriving us of ever knowing our grandparents. But now, as I watched Mom fidget with my fleece blanket, felt Mari’s hand on my knee, I wondered if my grandparents somehow knew what their future held. If they’d gotten a glimpse and taken another way out before the demon could get a foothold, set up his evil lair.

I shivered at the thought. “What about Uncle Sebastian?”

“He’s getting tested,” Mom said.

Last I’d heard, they hadn’t told Papi’s brother about the diagnosis. He lived in Buenos Aires, and they spoke only every four or five months, if that. We weren’t close with my uncle, and neither was Papi. They hadn’t wanted to bother him with it before.

“
Querida
, you and your sisters . . . the way the disease works . . .” Mom pulled at a thread on my blanket. “I’m sorry. I feel like it’s our fault. Like I should’ve been able to . . . I didn’t understand how it worked.”

“We have a fifty-fifty chance of getting it, Juju,” Mari said, and then her face crumpled. Fear was back in her eyes, and in that moment my big tough sister looked small and weak,
shoulders hunched over her chest, sweater hanging on her frame like a shirt on a wire hanger. “There’s a test. They can tell us if we have the mutations too. If we do . . .”

Her words faded away, leaving a sharp black gash on my heart. Everything felt hot and sticky, breath rushing in and out in gulps. “Are you . . . and the . . . What did Papi say?”

“We agreed not to tell him,” Mom whispered. “Worrying about you . . . he’d blame himself. It would only make it harder on him.”

“We need to be prepared.” Mari’s eyelashes were dark with tears. “If we get early treatment, maybe . . .”

“Maybe what?” My hands shook. “We know about it sooner? So we can look forward to forgetting everything? No way. I’m not getting tested.”

“I get it,” Mari said. “You think I’m not scared shitless? But the benefits—”

“This is what Lourdes meant, right? On the call? She asked about a test, and then you guys got all quiet and weird and—”

“Not weird,” Mari said. “We’re trying to figure out the best way through this.”

“And?”

Any second now Mari would leap out of her chair, punch a pillow, come up with some way to beat the whole thing, and laugh about it later. And I’d go along with it.
Tell me what to do. Tell me how to fix this. . . .

“Celi and Lourdes are coordinating flights in a few weeks,” she said. “They want to be here so we can all get tested together.
We can talk to the counselors first. It’s better if we’re together. We can . . . It’s just better.” She sank deeper into the desk chair. My knee went cold in the absence of her touch.

There was nothing left to say, and after a few moments of uncomfortable silence, Mom kissed my forehead and they retreated to their separate bedrooms, leaving me alone with the big white elephant in the room sucking up all the air.

I slipped the
Book of Broken Hearts
from beneath my pillow and flipped through the pages again. There were the Vargas boys, and all the other breakups my sisters had endured, decades of collective heartache immortalized. Other stuff too—Duffer, the dog they’d had before I was born, buried behind the barn. A boy from Lourdes’s class who’d committed suicide. Mari’s best friend who moved to France their senior year. Other friends who’d graduated early or cut ties after some stupid girl fight.

My parents were barely mentioned though, not even in the background of the diary-style entries. It truly was a time capsule of the Hernandez Sisterhood; it was as if my parents never existed. Important back then was falling in love, passing a test, getting into college. It was unfulfilled crushes and secret dreams, first drinks, first kisses, the best way to the river in the dark, the sneaking out that had sparked some of the very entanglements that later ended in tears. They didn’t have to consider my parents in their possibilities of broken hearts. It never occurred to them that there might come a day when Papi wouldn’t remember them, a day when they’d long for a
way back through the tangle of memories, back to all the little things, back before they’d ever thought about saying the long good-bye.

The long good-bye.
That’s what they called Alzheimer’s on the message boards, the websites I’d scoured in the weeks after his diagnosis looking for a loophole, a way out for us. Maybe not today or tomorrow or even next month, but one day, they said, one day we’d wake up, and Papi wouldn’t know what day it was. He’d forget my name maybe, forget we had a dog, or maybe instead of Pancake he’d call him Waffles or Window or Shoelace. And every day it would start again, us scrutinizing the lines in his face, the arch of his brows, wondering if today was familiar or new.

Maybe it
was
the long good-bye, the longest one ever. But it was worse than that, too. Because in that good-bye were a hundred hellos, every day brand-new, as if we were meeting for the very first time.

The demon would ensure that. There wasn’t a cure. Only the destruction. The aftermath.

And now, a 50 percent chance it would live on in us.

The sun wove pink-orange webs in the dawn sky, and Pancake yawned and smacked his jowls at my feet, like,
Please can we go back to sleep now, puh-lease?

He’d stayed with me all night, and as he gazed longingly at my bed in the morning light, I wanted so badly to crawl under the blanket with him, to curl up and pretend everything Mari and Mom had told me was just another nightmare, some worse-than-worst-case scenario invented by my subconscious.

But every time I closed my eyes, the number flashed before them. The big five-oh. Fifty percent.

Half
.

Half a chance at living a normal life, growing up and falling in love and getting married and having kids, or maybe not getting married, maybe just collecting a few broken hearts for the book, but either way living to tell the tale.

Half a chance at death. A slow and painful fading away. The long good-bye.

I looked at my feet sticking out of the blanket, toes glowing in the sun that streamed through the window. My nails were painted bright green and blue, and they looked like the little mint candies that came with the check at restaurants. I wriggled them, curled and uncurled them, felt every one, and in that moment it was all decided.

No
. I wouldn’t go out with a long good-bye, turn into some pale and tattered paper moon. If Papi’s demon was my legacy, I’d fight that bastard all the way, breath for breath, memory for memory, fire with fire.

I sat up fast, put my feet on the floor.
Starting now, Juju.

Tonight was the
Alice in Wonderland
preview. I plucked the tickets Zoe’d given me from my bulletin board and rubbed my thumbs along the edges.

If things had gone according to plan, I would’ve tried out for Alice. I would’ve spent the past few weeks rehearsing with Zoe and the other cast members, practicing lines with Christina at Witch’s Brew, reading monologues to Pancake as I wolfed down breakfast before dashing to the theater.

Instead, the demon reared its ugly head, sank its venomous fangs into our lives. And I’d spent most of those weeks in the barn learning how to rebuild a Harley, all my fragile hope pinned on that machine.

On Emilio Vargas.

On my father.

I would’ve made a perfect Alice, tumbling ass over teakettle down the rabbit hole, drugged and dreaming and wondering what—if anything—was real.

Real.
Here was real. I still knew my name and I could still paint my toes and wriggle them in the sun and hug my dog, and no matter what some genetic test might say about the end of days, that’s what I had.

I grabbed my phone and scrolled to Emilio’s number, pressed the device to my ear.
Please pick up . . .

“I knew you couldn’t resist seeing me again,” Emilio said. He’d accepted my apology easily, no grudge attached, and now he was standing by his bike in my driveway, all dimples and clean-soap smell, and for once I didn’t argue. He was right—I couldn’t resist.

“I’ll drive,” he said.

I looked down at my denim skirt and the pink wedges Mari had lent me. I was pretty sure she still felt bad about how we’d left things yesterday—the fight, and then all the bad news—because all she said as I was blow-drying my hair in the bathroom was that the shoes would look really cute on me and to tell Zoe to break a leg tonight.

No warnings about Emilio, no cautions against the perils of love. Just a pair of pink shoes and a smile. And after that, a headband, because I’d lost my silk flower clip at the Bowl that night, which totally sucked because it was my favorite and it would’ve gone perfect with Mari’s pink shoes and Emilio liked it.

“I’m not getting on a bike in this,” I said now. “I’ll drive.”

“I meant—” Emilio plucked the keys from my hand and jangled them in front of my face. “You promised me another lesson.”