The Museum of Heartbreak - Meg Leder Page 0,77

minutes she drew back, sniffing loudly. “You don’t have to go to school today, on one condition: Get out of bed and come bird-watching with me and your dad. We’re going out to Dead Horse Bay.”

“Don’t you have to work?”

She shrugged. “You’re not the only one who plays hooky. Downstairs in a half hour, okay?”

She kissed my forehead and left.

I lay there for a few minutes longer, miserable and sad, lonely and heartbroken, then pushed myself out of bed and to the shower.

• • •

After the ninety-minute subway plus bus ride, and then forty hushed minutes of my parents waiting to spot the kestrel at her nest while I fiddled with my dinosaur charm, sliding it back and forth on its chain, all my listlessness was mostly gone. My bones were restless.

“I’m going to go read on the beach,” I whispered, holding up the copy of Emma I had shoved in my bag.

They nodded, shooting me relieved smiles (I was seriously cramping their bird-watching game), and I walked away, the tall grasses shushing around me, turning into reeds by the water.

I had heard about Dead Horse Bay before—the marshy area that had housed horse processing plants in ye olden times and had then been used as a landfill. It was now a weird stretch of beach where old bottles and leather shoe soles and the occasional creepy horse bone washed up at low tide. Ellen loved to wander there, bringing back old glass bottles for art projects, and Eph told me how he’d scavenge with her, the stretch of beach reminding him of something postapocalyptic—all the leftovers of lives long gone.

Yet despite everything I knew in advance, when I climbed the crest to the water, my mind blanked: no sadness, no anger, just the clean space of awe.

The beach was covered with bottles, a mosaic of glass where the tide had washed out—mostly browns and greens, the occasional cobalt blue and milky white. Mixed in were horseshoe-crab shells, indistinguishable pieces of leather, smooth driftwood, odd metal and plastic bits.

I began walking where the water met the shore. Even though the place didn’t feel toxic—only dirty—I was grateful for the thick soles of my Doc Martens as I navigated the shards poking up from the sand, covered in deep ocean muck.

I wondered what the beach would look like when the sun was shining. That day was gray and cold, with a winter-ready sky, and everything in front of me felt as lonely as I did, all these broken pieces.

I stopped and examined a small round cylinder, the glass creamy white once I rinsed it off, the word POND’S on the side, and I realized it had once been filled with cold cream. I thought about the woman who might have used it, what her hands looked like, if she’d put it on at night before she went to bed, if she’d ever cried herself to sleep.

Using a stick, I dug a deep green bottle out of the sand. It was filled with dark black filth, barnacles growing around the edge, but it was the same shape and size as a soda bottle, and I pictured a girl my age drinking from it, the tickling of the fizz on the edge of the nose, summer blazing around her.

I shuddered as I walked over a miniature plastic baby missing its arms—way creepier than the Santa that Eph had given me—but I thought of The Velveteen Rabbit and wondered what had happened to the child who’d surely loved it when it was new.

I settled on the edge of an abandoned, spray-painted old rowboat. It sat under an old, dead tree, but people had tied bottles and pieces of glass from the branches, and the brokenness chimed above me as I rested my chin on my knees.

Nudging the sand around me with my boot, I uncovered a small shard of pottery dotted with blue flowers. I wiped it on the edge of my jeans, marveled at the detail of the leaves, the brightness of the petals.

Maybe it had been a sugar dish or a serving plate, a vase or a statue.

It was hardly bearable then, all these objects loved and discarded, the history left behind.

I wished I could go back to the time before I ever knew things could be broken.

I would find Eph there, take his hand, not let go.

We would close our eyes, hold on to everything fleeting and bright and shining, listen to the dinosaurs around us.

But instead I had this:

A broken