The Heart That Doesn't Stop

Dara pressed two fingers against her wrist, right there in the soft spot below her thumb, and waited.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

There it was. Her heartbeat, tapping against her fingertips like a tiny drummer living inside her arm.

"Sixty-eight, sixty-nine, seventy," she whispered, watching the second hand on the kitchen clock sweep back to the top. She wrote the number down in her notebook with the purple cover: 70 beats in one minute.

Dara loved numbers. She loved how they stacked up and multiplied and turned into something big. So she sat at the kitchen table with her cereal getting soggy and her pencil getting busy, and she started to do the math.

"If my heart beats seventy times in one minute," she said to herself, "then in one hour, that's…"

She wrote it out carefully.

70 × 60 = 4,200.

"Four thousand two hundred times an hour!" She put down her pencil and blinked. She pressed her wrist again. The little thump-thump-thump felt so small, so quiet. But four thousand two hundred times? Every single hour?

Her dad walked into the kitchen, still yawning, his hair sticking up like a confused porcupine.

"Dad," Dara said. "Did you know my heart beats four thousand two hundred times every hour?"

Her dad poured his coffee. "Mmhmm," he said, which was his morning sound that meant I am not awake yet but I love you.

Dara kept going. "So in one whole day, that's…"

She scrunched up her face. 4,200 times 24. That was a big one. She worked it out in the margin of her notebook, carrying the numbers carefully.

4,200 × 24 = 100,800.

Dara stared at the number. She underlined it twice.

"One hundred thousand, eight hundred beats. In ONE day." She looked down at her chest. "You've been busy," she told her heart.

Her dad sat down across from her and took a long sip of coffee. His eyes were starting to look more like a human's and less like a sleepy owl's. "What are you working on, Dar?"

"I'm figuring out how many times my heart has beaten. In my whole life." She tapped her pencil on the table. "I'm seven. So that's seven times three hundred and sixty-five days…"

"Two thousand, five hundred and fifty-five days," her dad said, suddenly looking very awake. "Give or take."

Dara wrote that down. Then she multiplied.

100,800 × 2,555.

This one took a while. She had to use the back of the page. She had to start over once when she lost track of a zero. Her dad watched her work without saying anything, just holding his coffee with both hands like it was something precious.

Finally, she got it.

257,544,000.

Dara's mouth fell open.

"Two hundred and fifty-seven MILLION," she breathed. "Dad. My heart has beaten two hundred and fifty-seven million times. And I didn't even tell it to. Not once!"

Her dad set his coffee down. He had a look on his face that Dara didn't have a number for — soft and wide and something.

"Not once," he agreed.

Dara pressed her wrist again. Thump. Thump. Thump. Still going. Two hundred and fifty-seven million and counting.

She thought about that. She thought about all the things she'd been doing while her heart was beating those millions of beats. She'd been sleeping. She'd been learning to walk and falling down and getting back up. She'd been starting school and not liking it and then liking it. She'd been reading books and riding her bike with the green streamers and arguing with her little brother, Koa, about whose turn it was to pick the movie.

Through all of that — every nap, every scraped knee, every birthday cake — her heart had just kept going. Thump. Thump. Thump. Not stopping to rest. Not waiting to be asked.

"Dad," she said slowly. "It was beating before I was even born, right?"

Her dad nodded. "It started before you were born. When you were very, very small. Smaller than a blueberry."

"Smaller than a BLUEBERRY?"

"Smaller than a blueberry. And your heart started beating. And it hasn't stopped since."

Dara looked at her notebook full of numbers. She looked at the big one at the bottom, the 257,544,000. And then she thought about something that made her put her pencil down.

"It was beating when I didn't even know I was me yet," she said quietly.

Her dad didn't say anything for a moment. He just reached across the table and put his hand over hers.

Dara sat with that feeling for a minute. Then she pushed back her chair.

"I need to find Koa," she said.

She found her little brother in the living room, building a tower out of blocks. He was four. The tower was leaning dangerously.

"Koa. Give me your wrist."

"No."

"Please. It's important. It's science."

Koa held out his wrist suspiciously, like she might be tricking him. Dara pressed her fingers to the soft spot and watched the clock.

Thump-thump-thump-thump. Koa's heart was faster than hers! She counted quickly.

"Ninety!" she said. "Your heart beats ninety times a minute!"

"Is that good?" Koa asked.

"That's a LOT," Dara said. "That's —" she did the math in her head — "a hundred and twenty-nine thousand, six hundred times a day."

Koa looked impressed, even though Dara was pretty sure he didn't know what a hundred and twenty-nine thousand meant. "Cool," he said. Then his tower fell over, and he went back to building.

Dara checked the dog next. She found Biscuit asleep on his bed in the corner, his paws twitching in a dream. She put her hand gently on his chest.

His heart was going so fast she could barely count. It was like a tiny hummingbird in there, a little motor running and running.

"You too, Biscuit," she whispered.

She went out to the backyard. She stood very still in the morning air, which was cool and smelled like wet grass. A bird was sitting on the fence — a small brown one, ordinary, nothing fancy. It tilted its head at her.

Dara couldn't feel its heartbeat from here, but she knew it was there. Beating away. Fast, probably. Faster than Biscuit's, even. A tiny, blazing drumbeat inside that puff of feathers.

She looked around. The neighbor's cat was walking along the top of the wall. A squirrel was racing up the big oak tree. Somewhere down the street, she could hear kids laughing.

All of them, she thought. Every single one. Hearts beating away right now, this very second, without anyone even thinking about it.

Millions and millions and millions of beats, happening all at once.

She went back inside. Her dad was washing his coffee cup. Her notebook was still open on the table.

"Dad?"

"Yeah, Dar?"

"I want to add more to the number." She sat back down and picked up her pencil. "I want to figure out how many more beats I'll have. Like, if I live to be a hundred."

Her dad dried his hands and came to sit beside her. "That's a lot of math."

"I know," Dara said. And she smiled, because she could already feel the numbers lining up in her head, getting ready to be something enormous.

She started to write. But first, she stopped. She put her hand flat against her chest and felt it — that steady, faithful thump, the one that had started when she was smaller than a blueberry and hadn't missed a single beat since.

"Thank you," she said quietly.

Then she picked up her pencil, and she got to work.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Two hundred and fifty-seven million, five hundred and forty-four thousand… and counting.