Zoë and the Big Beating Heart
i.
The velvet dark night embraced the three of them coldly, enveloping their big puffy coats and wool liners. The eldest and tallest one of them, Q (Quinten), walked his bike slowly, slightly behind the two girls. He looked down at the pavement as he walked, avoiding patches of ice, methodically stepping on every other piece of cobblestone. He did this everywhere he walked. Q ran his hands through his dark curly hair, scratching a little itch on the side of his patchy beard; his hot breath blew a little cloud in the cold air. The girls were busy staring at the winter sky, admiring every constellation they could find. They stumbled over each other's footsteps and laughed blaringly, shrieks piercing the dead Obdam night. Q watched over them as the stars watched over the Earth, somewhat distant but still, always their caretaker.
“Be careful,” he said as he watched Jeanne, the middle child of the peer group, almost slip on some ice in front of him. They had only known each other for a few weeks, but it was clear that the friendship was bound forever. She was here on exchange — she would be gone again within the month, back to Sion, her little hole-in-the-wall town in the Swiss countryside. She couldn't speak Dutch, and she knew extremely limited Flemish. They were confined to what broken English they both knew, Zoë (the polyglot), often serving as the mediator. It created funny situations at parties when the whole Heerhugowaard crowd attempted to explain some foreign concept to the girl; just two hours prior, the group's attempt to explain the het kwartje valt (the quarter falls) expression took a crowd of eight people and twenty minutes alone.
"Almost there," Q reminded the girls, just in case their location escaped their inebriated minds. The trio turned the corner to Hellemasträat, Zoë's street, and began taking slower, shorter strides, not wanting to say goodbye. They would see each other tomorrow, but it still wouldn't be the same; the sobriety would return, as would the morning sky. Q walked a little faster, catching up with them, putting his free arm around Jeanne's shoulders. She responded by squeezing his waist tightly, still holding Zoë's hand. The three stood outside Zoë's home now, speaking quietly so as to not wake up her mother (the walls were strangely thin). Q leaned his bike against the gate and shoved his right hand in his pocket. It was numb from the cold.
“We're meeting at the coffee shop tomorrow, right?” asked Jeanne.
“I'll see you both then,” Q nodded warmly, enveloping the two of them in a hug. They retreated into the house. He mounted his bike and pedaled away into the dark, cold night; the girls turned the lights and candles on, whispering both frantically and calmly, huddled together in Zoë's big bed.
ii.
In her dreams that night, Zoë felt warm.
She was taken back to the two weeks that past October (before her father was really ill) her parents had decided to spend in Granada, taken back to the morning the day they decided to visit the castles of Alhambra. They had eaten a luscious breakfast that day, a multiple-course meal at ten o'clock in the morning. Eggs, both sunny-side up and scrambled, bacon and ham and little steak patties, piles of fried and diced potatoes; tureens of multicoloured fruits — mango and watermelon, grains of pomegranate, custard apples and prickly pears decorated the table. She drank a tall glass of orange juice filled with pulp, her parents sipping mimosas and smoothies. Zoë, in her slumber, could almost smell the food wafting in the air. The breakfast was so heavy and so filling that Zoë could not see herself going to Alhambra anymore, telling her parents to leave her behind at the apartment to rest. Her mother wasn't happy with this.
Sonja, her father Dominic had said, calm down. Leave her alone.
Dominic loved his daughter more than he loved anything else in the world. It hurt him to see Sonja beat her, hitting her, yelling at her. He stopped her when he could, but sometimes she would hit him too. Dominic could never bring himself to hit her back; he wasn't like that. When he got sick, he lived at the hospital — it pained him to think of what his daughter could have been going through alone with his wife.
Suddenly Zoë was taken back to her father's funeral three months prior, sitting on the piano bench next to the chapel's altar, choking back tears as she sang her song, the one she wrote in French, his native language. It was the one she had written for him the day before his heart monitor flatlined, the one her mother wanted to sing for him on his deathbed but she could not bring herself to do it. She wrote it in honor of every time she finished something new and showed it to him first before anyone else. The breakfast table was empty. In her Obdam house, now, her mother would give her a slice of toast coated in a puddle of butter with a glass of store-bought orange juice, pulp-free.
She woke up. It was almost four o’clock. Jeanne was still sound asleep. She went downstairs, fluffy socks muting her footsteps, silently trodding down the spiral staircase. She approached the kitchen and pre-heated the oven, sitting at the breakfast bar, staring mindlessly outside of the window. It was cold outside. In the suburbs of Amsterdam, it was quiet, so quiet Zoë could hear a party happening miles away, the gears of a bike turning on the avenue outside, the flick of a lighter. She watched the chicken coop in her backyard; the three little birds were silent, probably asleep by now. Her eyes skimmed the picture frames hung on the wall, lingering on the ones of her and her father, his smile larger than life, larger than him. A photo of her, sitting on the edge of his hospital bed. He was smiling, but he looked so frail, so breakable....Zoë remembered not wanting to talk to the corpse after his soul had gone. She thought it was silly. She thought her family was weak.
The oven dinged loudly, snapping her out of her little dream. Zoë placed two slices of bread in the middle of the oven tray and waited a few minutes, sitting on the ground facing the oven, staring directly into its light. Once she deemed it ready, she took her warm, soft bread upstairs, eating it silently, thinking back to the morning in Andalusia, one of the many mornings where she felt her father close to her.
Secretly, Zoë longed for her father to come back and defend her again.
iii.
Sonja wanted to go out that morning. She had been cooped up inside all week, laying in bed, watching films and eating, sometimes taking a pause to read some of her book. This had been her routine for the past three months since December, since she had to stop making daily trips to the hospital, occasionally sleeping on the couch in her husband's room. Every once in a while, she felt the urge to either take Zoë on a nice, long drive into Amsterdam or go somewhere with one of her other children, even alone sometimes; today, she was going to call her eldest daughter, 28-year-old Amara, to go to a fair and then out to dinner in Alkmaar, which was a few towns over.
She got out of bed early, sometimes around 8 o'clock. There were breadcrumbs on the counter. Sonja knew her daughter had been midnight snacking again, but didn't bother waking her up to scold her — it had been difficult to do so since Jeanne had been here, and besides, there hadn't been any real motivation to get angry ever since December. That's not to say that Zoë hasn't acted up, but it seemed pointless now to put up a fight.
Sonja hummed that David Bowie song, the one she had heard on the radio a few months ago, not retaining the name, as she combed a mascara wand through her lashes and dabbed red lipstick on her lips. She changed into a warm pullover and jeans and slipped on a pair of boots before texting Zoë to tell her she would be out until two o'clock in the afternoon. Sonja was planning on being out until much later than that, but decided to withhold the truth as a preventative measure for potential parties; at this point, however, Zoë had caught on to her mother's strategy.
—
Once she had left, Q came over bearing gifts: three little stamps, decorated with flecks of paint, dosed high. Dressed in all black, he whistled a cheerful tune as he biked from Heerhugowaard to Obdam, towards his closest friend's house, gray skies shining above him.
It was nine o'clock in the morning by then — they had to start early. Zoë knew her mom would be out for the whole day and immediately texted Q, the seasoned traveler, changing their plans from a quick coffee date to a light two-hundred microgram trip. He locked his bike on Zoë's back-door gate and knocked three times; Zoë let him in almost instantly.
Jeanne, dressed in an electric blue sweater and black jeans, sat on the breakfast bar, barefoot. Zoë was eager, fiddling with the hem of her sundress. Q was excited too, ready to introduce his best friends into his psychedelic world; none of them said anything. The room was quiet, save for the sound of the rain dripping onto Zoë’s front porch. It was a somewhat odd situation. Their silence made it awkward.
“...Should we just get started?” asked Q hesitantly, reaching into his back pocket for his wallet, where he kept the tabs neatly folded into a receipt. The girls nodded and giggled nervously like overly enthusiastic schoolgirls, reaching their hands out for their share. Q gave them each a little tab, and placing them under their tongues, the three waited.
—
"This has to be the best moment of my life," muttered Jeanne quietly, tears welling in her eyes. The trio was sitting on the carpeted floor at the entrance of Zoë's room, huddled in soft duvets they had taken from each bed in the house. It must have been two o’clock in the afternoon by then, and no sign of Sonja; no texts, no calls, no car in the driveway. Zoë knew the three were safe. The lights were off, and three scented candles were lit; it was bright outside, but Zoë closed her sheer red-coloured curtains to give the room a soft pink tint, as if inside a big, beating heart (or so, Jeanne had said).
“I feel love, right now,” said Q, choking back sobs. The two girls nodded again, more contemplatively, and let their tears stream down their faces, ruining Zoë's foundation and Jeanne's mascara.
Jeanne had never known friendship like this. In this moment, staring at her friend's faces, swirls of rainbow color dotting their skin, she felt as if they were all one person, triplet souls. In Sion, she had friends, but nothing like this; she felt as if Q and Zoë understood her in a way nobody else would. They were so stunning to her, both with perfectly symmetrical faces and big brown eyes. Jeanne found them the most beautiful people in the world. She looked out into the hallway and saw butterflies calling out to her, flying up and down the hallway, disappearing into the wall and reappearing from the other. She announced to her friends that she would be back quickly, and taking a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from her bag, she walked down the stairs and out the front door. She tied her long, blonde hair back before leaving.
It was still drizzling out, but the droplets felt nice to Jeanne. They almost warmed up the chill of Dutch winter. She flicked her lighter on and lit a Gladstone, inhaling the nicotine and blowing out a cloud of smoke. Jeanne plugged in her earphones and switched to the classical radio on her phone, listening to her soft piano melodies as she observed her surroundings, seeing unknown colors in places they shouldn't be. The sky looked so beautiful, more beautiful than any blue sky she had ever seen; the clouds overtook her, shifting colors and dancing in front of her eyes, vibrating to the soft rhythm of her music. The Chopin was in a minor key, but to Jeanne, it sounded like the happiest music in the world.. The sky looked like a Mandelbrot fractal, intricate patterns, shapes, and colors fluctuating and changing; it just looked so geometric, so exact, so mathematical, and Jeanne felt awestruck. She smiled. Passing a little garden, she stopped to smell the flowers, camellias, roses, tulips, lavender bushes dancing in the winter breeze. They smelled like Q. She smiled again, and she kept smiling, all the way home.
The world is so much more beautiful than we think it to be.
iv.
Sonja came home later that night, around eleven o'clock, and found a pair of cigarette butts on the porch. She picked up the white pieces of paper-wrapper cellulose, fuming, and her heart dropped. How could this be happening? How could my own daughter be smoking cigarettes when both her father and I have told her countless times not to? How could she not listen to me? How could she betray me? Sonja had always wanted to protect her daughter from illness and dirty, unclean things, but here she was, essentially volunteering to kill herself slowly and painfully.
Jeanne had unknowingly left the cigarette butts there, not really paying attention to the consequences of her actions.
“Zoë, come downstairs,” Sonja called out calmly.
Zoë, not yet sober, crawled out of bed silently, careful not to wake Jeanne and Q sleeping next to her. She made her way down the stairs quietly, making eye contact with her mother and smiling. She was good at feigning sobriety. She had done it at least a hundred times. She saw that her mother looked mad, but the one strategy she used was always to pretend everything was okay, or that it was going to be okay. It was only when she reached the first floor and saw the two cigarette butts sitting on the dining table that she realized she had made a terrible mistake.
“Do you care to explain?” asked Sonja. Zoë felt a lump in her throat. Her breathing grew rapid and shallow. Her cheeks turned red and she felt her face turning hotter and hotter; she felt her pulse pounding in her wrists and in her temples. She knew she was giving herself away, but it was over. She knew they were Jeanne's, but that would hold her as accountable as it would her friend. There was nothing that could be done.
“I'm sorry,” she whispered.
“You're sorry?” said Sonja, voice growing louder.
“I'm sorry.” There was nothing else to be said.
“Why would you betray me like this?” her mother wasn't yelling, like she usually did. She was speaking quietly, sternly.
“I'm sorry,” responded Zoë again, staring at her feet.
“Look at me when you're speaking to me,” Sonja snapped, “and you're not sorry. Explain yourself.”
“I smoke sometimes,” Zoë said, practically inaudible.
“Sometimes?”
“Sometimes.”
Sonja was ready to give her daughter a piece of her mind, before she was interrupted.
“It's not like it's uncommon, any Dutch kid my age smokes! You don't see their parents making a big fuss out of it,” whined Zoë. As soon as she said it, she regretted it. Her mother quieted, swallowed a sob, and spoke.
"Don't you think the reason I care so much about this is because I don't want you to get lung cancer?" Sonja uttered — almost whispering — quietly, chillingly. Zoë froze. “You never visit your father at the graveyard anymore. You never come with me to the hospital to see the nurses. You never have dinner with your siblings anymore. You didn't even hold him or talk to him in the hospital when he was gone! I told you to sing to him in his last moments and you couldn't even do that. You're not a part of the family anymore, and you know it,” pronounced Sonja, stern voice clear as day, well-enunciated, deep as a trench.
“I'm sorry,” Zoë yelled in response, “I'm sorry it hurts too much to go to his grave. You think I don't even care that he died, but I would so much rather have gone down with him than have had to stay here with you.”
No response.
The silence was daunting. It lay in their skin like a poison, seeping into their blood and paralyzing their brains.
Sonja retreated into her room, took her makeup off, and went to sleep.
v.
Zoë had sat in the living room by herself, eating, for a few hours. She came back into her sister's room, wiping away tears. It was almost five o’clock in the morning. She knew the trains from the Obdam station were still running. Zoë wanted to go to the beach. It was going to be freezing, but she wanted to see the ocean. Still whispering quietly about Zandvoort and about sand, she shook Q awake, who nudged Jeanne. Quinten knew that whatever this little episode was about, it meant a lot to her. They sat up, rubbing their eyes.
“We’re going to Zandvoort,” Zoë announced, “I want to go to the beach.”
“Now?” asked Jeanne, mid-yawn.
Zoë affirmed, and the pair shrugged their shoulders and stood up, slipping on their jeans and their coats. Zoë didn't care about sneaking out anymore. There was nothing she could do that would make her mother angrier than she already was. They walked downstairs and mounted their bikes, heading towards the station. It was a strangely warm night, wind working in their favor. They reached the station and locked their bikes on one of the bike racks, tapping their metrocards on the entrance to track six. The station was almost completely empty. They waited in silence, shivering on the platform with ten minutes to spare before the train left. They stared up at the night sky, still seeing little bits of color and pieces of light where there was none.
"I fought with Sonja again," Zoë said, almost whispering, staring into the tracks.
"Oh?" Q appeared curious and Jeanne was listening.
"She thinks I'm betraying her for smoking cigarettes," she continued, not making eye contact. She wanted to reach for her pack in her back pocket but decided against it.
"Oh," Q answered. Jeanne looked up and placed her hand on the side of Zoë's neck.
The train ride was brief. It was only an hour, but it felt like five minutes, both due to the drugs and the anticipation. Once they got off, the beach was right there, and the coastline was completely barren, beach empty. It was nearing seven A.M., and the sun was due to rise soon. Morning lights were already illuminating the beach.
“It's pretty,” said Jeanne. The understatement of the century.
The coastline lay softly under the early morning light, gentle waves rolling in on the sand. The trio walked in the sand, towards the water, breeze gently caressing their faces. The sea air tangled their hair, dew sticking to their faces. They stopped right in front of the water and looked up at the massive, never-ending sky. Mellow blues and pinks blurred together in a silver mist to create a vivid, powerful scene. Even when Zoë was drowning in grief and melancholy, the sky was always there to comfort her.
“It is pretty,” she said. Q nodded and wrapped his arms around her tightly.
Zoë closed her eyes and breathed in deeply.
"I get what Sonja means," Q whispered to her. Normally, Zoë would have gotten mad at him for siding with her mother, but not this time. She watched Jeanne drop a cigarette into the sand and crush it with her foot. The waves would wash it away, but it would always be there, either floating in the water or polluting a turtle's digestive system. It would never disappear.
"So do I," Zoë said. She meant it. She understood.
vi.
“Hi.
I made a new friend. Her name is Jeanne, she's from Switzerland. She came to our school on exchange and mom agreed to house her because she misses having a third person in the house. I missed having a third person in the house too. Jeanne came and left a few months later. I became so close to her, so close I'm sure she's going to be my friend forever. Her presence helped me, but I still miss you. I miss you more than I ever imagined I would. I thought I was ready for you to go, you having been on-and-off sick for a few years, but I wasn't ready. Not even close, not even a sliver ready.
“I smoked for a while. I smoked half a pack of cigarettes a day, I drank a lot, I did so many drugs, I have to repeat the school year. I miss you. You broke me, but not as much as you broke her. Now that you're gone, so is she, and I can tell. She doesn't even yell or hit me anymore. Your death struck her so much harder than it struck any one of us. I always knew you would be gone soon, but she was always in denial, always optimistic about every chemo session. I used to think there was nothing in her mind, and that there was nothing in her body, either, and all she was for was hitting me and yearning for you. I wished I was with you instead, briefly, but I realized that she wishes she was with you too. I smoked because I wanted to go, go away in the same way that you did. She knew that. She would binge-eat for the same reason.
"I know there's more to her now. I understand that she misses you and I understand why she never wanted to say goodbye. I promise I'm not writing because Mom wants me to talk to you more. She's not going to read this. I would never let her. But I understand what she means now. I know she beat me and I'm not ready to forgive her, but I understand why. I'm going to be nicer to her, I swear. I can see you looking down at me from the clouds, shaking your head in every time I light a new cigarette, or every time I get irrationally mad at her, like she does to me. Our relationship still needs mending, but I'm willing to do it. I promise I'm willing to do it for you… .
— Zoë”
Zoë placed the envelope, along with a bouquet of lilies, at the bottom of the headstone. She gave her mom a little side-hug. The pair walked past the other gravestones and out of the graveyard, into the car and back home in silence.
Cover Photo by Max Pixel. Edited by Madison Case.