Chapter Five
Vienna

I can feel my brain snapping me out of my zombie state in the office. The colors in the room, the desk beneath my hands, Heather Hammel waiting patiently with swollen fingers locked over her belly. All of it is processed at once, and as I wipe at my mouth with a chewed-up Kleenex, I feel a small consolation in knowing the entirety of my vomit has at least made the trash can.

“Excuse me.” I grab the soiled basket and move around Heather, and for an instant, our bare arms touch before I tremble down the hallway to the bathroom.

“Hey sun—”

“You’re not dressed,” I say to Loretta who stands near the bathroom, still in her silk robe with a newspaper under her arm. My stomach lurches because she’s used too much air freshener, and thinking of why she’s used too much air freshener makes me feel faint. “We have a client in the office,” I manage.

“Oh, she couldn’t have seen me. I’ve been in here the last twenty minutes,” she whispers behind her hand.

“Listen, it doesn’t matter. Just...the lady in the office—a Ms. Hammel, I mean Mrs. Turnbull—did she call? Yesterday maybe when I was out?” There are only two possible reasons why Heather’s standing in my father’s office, and the spineless sixth grader in me prays it’s the one involving death.

“Oh yeah. Her mother passed away,” Loretta says. I’ve never met Heather’s mother, and even though my dealings with her have always been less than pleasant to say the least, it still makes me sad for her. 

“You okay?” Loretta nods at the fingers I’m twisting into the budding headache at my temple.

“Yeah, I’m fine. But I need her information. Please tell me you used the notebook?”

“Um, oh here.” Loretta says. She fishes in the pocket of her robe and hands me a note scribbled with purple ink. I pinch it with my thumb and forefinger and scan it quickly to see it only contains Heather’s name and the phrase “dead mother.”

“Loretta, really?”

“I got nervous, and Elbert was on the phone with that cow from A1 Storage, and I couldn’t concentrate. Apparently, wants to set up a booth for the open house, but I know she has the hots for him ever since he did her aunt’s funeral...”

“The notebook next time. Please.”

“All right, all right, the notebook. I’ll use it, and I’ll put on some clothes. Listen, I can pick you up some tampons today...”

“Not on my period.” I softly shoulder past her into the bathroom and close the door. The world spins, and I don’t know how I’m going to face Heather, how I’m going to get through a conversation without letting on to the fact that I’ve spent hours thinking about her. About what I’ve done. I slink against the papered wall, a forest of green vines snaking behind me. I prop my forehead on my knees and sit through the attack, the vertiginous panic crawling in and out of every orifice. I wish for cotton candy, the tire of a Ford Explorer. Of being young and innocent.  I swallow a rounded pocket of air and right myself against the hallway wall as I head back to my father’s office.

“She’s here, right?” Heather asks, sitting round as a marble in one of the guest chairs. 

“Loretta? I already talked to her and reminded her about our protocol. Again, my apologies.” I sit behind the desk again and dig beneath a thick layer of skin for my most professional tone, but my voice flattens, rusted and robotic.

“No. My mother.” I redden and try to ignore Heather staring through me to find an answer.

“Of course. Yes, yes she’s here,” I say, even though I’ve forgotten to confirm this with Loretta. But the county morgue tends to make late night deliveries, so while I was soaking my regrets in the claw foot tub in my bathroom last night, Mrs. Hammel was being heaved onto a cold slab of metal in our basement. “At this point we’ll just take care of the details,” I say and turn to the computer and open a pre-formatted program that keeps track of every service. It documents each funeral, each wake. It notes the specifics—the flowers, the coffin, the music. The details that will curl themselves in the bellies of all who attend, weighing heavily inside them.

“So, are you?” Heather asks, and from my peripheral, she’s the ghost version of herself.

“I’m sorry?” I cough wetly into my fist to fight off another surge of nausea. 

“Pregnant. Are you pregnant?” I turn toward her and process how awful she looks. A rumpled men’s button-down. Black yoga pants. Flip-flops. Heather’s hair is a shoulder length curtain with a bar of brunette bangs cutting frankly across her forehead. I take stock of the details to still my nervous stomach although I doubt there’s a way I could manage to make it any emptier. 

“Yes.” The word is gone before I can wind it back in. I might have been wrong about the empty stomach thing.

“Well, then, join the club.” The corner of Heather's upper lip lifts, and I'm given a quick shot of her broad teeth. I’m numb through the seconds ticking with the grandfather clock in the corner. She doesn’t ask me whose it is, and I take it as a good sign until I realize why she doesn’t. She already knows. 

I force a toothless smile and turn back to the screen, typing Heather’s name into the allotted space. My fingers stretch and curl, clicking letters and forgetting the present. I think of our middle school bathroom with its moss green tile and sinks designated for the height impaired. I wrap my head around the image like a tongue engulfing a hard-edged candy.

“Amber, you’re next,” Heather had said in the bathroom of Burling Gates Middle School, the same day my mother died. It was the last day of school—lunchtime—so the sixth-grade girls met in clumps in the bathroom, coagulating and bound only by Heather’s plasmatic will. She forced and pumped through us, around us, until a hushed swishing sound played in our ears, and we all believed that this was what we wanted. To be Heather Hammel’s friend.

Amber tripped forward, her gingered ponytail twirling around her scrunchie like a helicopter. She had been the skinniest girl in class and one of Heather’s friends, a relationship I always imagined was crafted from Amber’s fear and Heather’s craving for it.

“Ow!” Amber said, then quickly covered her mouth. Heather made welts in Amber’s skin that turned white then red then faded completely. 

“Rosa, your turn,” Heather said, and my hand unconsciously gave my friend’s back a gentle push. Rosa was wide-eyed, seemingly stunned that this was a natural part of her day, and I wrongly assumed it was because she didn’t understand what it was worth to be friends with Heather Hammel.

“I think somebody should lay off the burritos,” Heather said, and the bathroom erupted, giggles pinging off the walls, the clackity-clack sound of dangly earrings irreverently shaking. Rosa didn’t answer. Her face looked faraway to me as if the bathroom didn’t exist and neither did the rest of us. She was usually quiet during fat check, but the way she kept her chin up, her gaze steadily above Heather’s head worried me.

Heather pinched with her fingertips, stopping to check Rosa’s eyes, but Rosa didn’t move. A new sort of panic pecked at my breastbone. I thought maybe I should get Mrs. Donovan, or I should just say something—anything—but I knew that neither was an option, considering my bravery didn’t extend far beyond stuffing my breakfast into the bus seat cushions on the days my mother said I looked bloated. 

“Fat!” Heather said, and Rachel scribbled the word next to Rosa’s name in the notebook with the kittens on the cover. Rosa trudged back into a crowd of girls who were too hormonally hostage to stand up for themselves, let alone her. I tried to get her attention, but Rosa wouldn’t look at me. 

“Vienna Sausage.” My throat closed, and the mossy tiles built a small, square wall around me. “You’re up, piggy,” Heather said. I took in a strong breath of air and sucked my stomach tight. I applauded myself for giving Troy my microwavable bacon that morning. 

“Huh, well that’s something.” Heather pinched along the sides of my biceps, my stomach, tense and straight as a slab beneath my shirt. I watched a soft, brown curl play in the smattering of acne bumps across her cheek. “You’d be a whole lot thinner if you dropped that last one hundred and thirty pounds of pure booze hound,” she punched, stealing my breath. I wanted to tell Heather she was wrong, that my mother had started going to AA meetings, was trying to be better for our family, but just that morning I had found Troy tossing the vomit towel into the hamper. And anyway, I knew Heather could smell a lie a mile away.

If I could have taken every good inch of my mother and sewn them together just to have something tangible for the nucleus inside the bathroom to see, to understand—or at the very least—to wrap myself in, I don’t think Heather’s comment would have broken me like it did. But there was nothing but the quiet tiles, and Rachel’s scratching pencil, and the unwelcome knowledge that the best parts of my mother could be fashioned into a pitiful handkerchief at best. 

“You’re a monster.” The voice snapped off the ceiling and my hair pulled tighter at the roots. I wasn’t sure how the words had come out of my mouth, but then I recognized they hadn’t.

“You think you can treat us all like dirt because you feel like dirt. How dare you say that about Vienna and how dare you talk about someone else’s mom when my mom says yours is a crazy hermit!” Rosa was no longer vacant. Her eyes had gained purpose and focused solely on Heather who looked like she had just stepped on a scale. “You should just leave us alone,” Rosa said, and it seemed the cleft in her reliable heart whittled each word. I waited for everyone to cheer, to pat Rosa on the back and tell her, “Thank you,” but no one moved because nobody knew what happened when Heather didn’t have a leg to stand on.

Heather’s throat rolled with a hard swallow, and I waited for it, the screaming, hitting. But she merely emitted disappointment like she had lost her favorite earrings and didn’t know where to look first. She shouldered through us, our knots forced to release, and we were all singular again, backs against the cold wall, watching as the only thing that connected us sulked away.

The mossy tiles break and settle into a fine green powder when Heather asks, “So who’s your doctor?” I’ve avoided seeing a doctor after the incident at Dr. Walker’s and feel my old familiar hate for Heather a bit too much to be having this conversation. I look down and spot a slight watery stain on my dress from the vomit. My tears are traders, and one is gutsy enough to slide down my cheek.

“I’m sorry. It’s none of my business, really.” Heather reaches into the burlap shoulder bag she had dropped onto the desk when she came in. She hands me a tissue, and I see the swelling hasn’t stopped at her fingers. Her arm is ballooned, puffy. Her girth suffocates her as she relaxes back into her chair with a grunt.

“It’s okay. It’s just a difficult situation,” I say. I hide behind the tissue, not looking Heather in the eye. 

“Whose is it?” Heather finally asks, and I feel the relief but don’t rely on it. Deep down, I’m sure Heather knows about me and Wyland because when I look at her, I still see the girl who knew more than the rest of us growing up—the girl with all the power. So, I lie and pray it’s the one time she won’t catch it.

“This guy named Lucas. Mailman. Moved to Kansas City a while ago.” The lie begins to weave itself until I’m wearing a colorful sweater. Lucas liked horror movies but couldn’t stand anything about the supernatural. He shortened his words, gave everything a nickname, which drove me batty. His parents divorced, then remarried, then divorced again. His brother died.  I watch each white thread saturate in color, and I fashion each fiber until it consumes me and feels more like reality than the soft piping of “Tears in Heaven” pumping off the ceiling.

“Why did he leave?” Heather says. If she thinks I’m lying, her hard-set mouth doesn’t betray the fact. 

“The pregnancy. He said he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t be like his parents. He was afraid I’d force him into marriage, and we’d be living this lie until it was time for us to die. It’s scary thinking of it that way.” I’m watching Wyland’s face in my mind as I say it. The last day of what we had was brittle and grew an even weaker spine after we had sex in an empty house he was showing. The carpet was beneath me, devoid of color like a boiled egg. His mouth, his teeth and tongue, all of it saying, “We can’t do this anymore,” so we didn’t. He followed it up with an email, telling me it was nice to “reconnect like old times.” I haven’t heard from him since, and all I’m left with is the aftermath, the receipt from a couple of weeks forgetting who I am and hoping I’d never have to remember again. 

“Now what?  What are you going to do?” she asks me. I look out the office’s window, but all I see is Heather’s reflection.

“Pray,” I say. I swallow and begin prying all the necessary information from Heather, even though my thudding chest muddles with my thoughts. Flowers: gardenias. Coffin: wooden with brass fixtures. Music: Ave Maria. Heather’s answers are butterflies she pinches mid-air. There is no calculation or predetermined focus in her planning, and I can tell she doesn’t know her mother the same way I never knew mine. Heather decides on a date and her lips strain in anticipation as if I’m a game show host, and she’s waiting for me to reveal the correct answer. 

“Sunday, June 5^th then. The funeral will be at one, the burial immediately after. Will you be needing pallbearers?” I catch a familiar look I see often, a client silently considering if they might be a member or two short for the pall bearing when in reality, they might be the only family member, the only friend in attendance. 

“There won’t be many people there,” she finally confesses. Heather looks pained, but I don’t press on. 

“All right, we can provide those. Now, may I ask how you’d like to pay?” The worst part of the job. Heather slaps a few things around in her bag until she retrieves a free-floating credit card and pushes it across the desk. It has his name on it.

“I married him. It’s not awkward to talk about it, right? I mean, you’ve been calling me Mrs. Turnbull for the last half hour anyhow.” It’s only been fifteen minutes, but time doubles in the office. She’s probably surprised I haven’t mummified before her eyes. I nod at her, giving her a pinched smile that I try to pass off as “Well, imagine that!” but it comes off as if I’m chewing through a lemon.

“Wow, that’s wonderful,” I say with strained lips. I quickly type in the numbers, my thumb rubbing the raised letters of his name. Heather sighs at me and adjusts her weight.

“He’s a jerk. You were right for losing touch with him.” Her voice echoes and condenses in my head. It had always bothered me, how Heather and Wyland found each other during college in Chicago. I was the one who had spent my high school years tempering Wyland’s anger with his father, while I’m sure Heather was up to her usual game, making everyone’s life a living nightmare at the all girls’ school across town. I couldn’t take knowing Heather was the sort of woman my best friend had found hope in, so I had stopped calling and emailing Wyland while he was away at college with my grade school enemy. It wasn’t until he contacted me six months ago that I could forgive him only to realize where the act of forgiving would get me three months later. 

“I wasn’t wondering.” I struggle the words loose and give Heather the copy of her receipt.  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I add. Heather blinks at me for a second until she realizes she’s being dismissed. As she grabs her bag, her chair nursing its cratered dent, she turns and says something I’m not expecting.

“Do you remember Amber and Rachel? From school?” I twist my lips as if I’m trying to place them.

“Yeah. I think.”

“Well, I get together with them. Thursday nights. They have kids so they know about this kind of stuff. And they’re different now.” The way she says it hints it’s not true, but I nod anyway. “Amber’s doing this girls night in thing. You should come with us.” I look at my hands, an all too familiar fear walling around me like cold, green tiles.

“This is a hard thing, for everyone I guess,” Heather says, pausing. “Pregnancy,” she adds, and a quiet chill passes through me. “So, you have my cell. Call me before seven if you want to come. I can give you directions.”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, I know, it’s weird. But think about it.” She smiles, and her face is a swollen moon hanging above me. Her bag is stained brown at the bottom with what I pray is coffee, and her bangs hang dejectedly from her forehead. For the first time, I don’t rationalize her as Heather Hammel. I just see her as another woman, sweeping the dust, changing the bulbs.

Heather shuffles out, her burlap bag smacking at the girth trailing her. I sit back down and save Heather’s page to the “Services” file on the desktop. With a wayward pulse, I try to determine if any of what just happened was based in reality. The air is changed, the smell of men’s cologne from Heather’s button down-playing with my first trimester senses. Wyland. The budding in my belly multiplies.

#

DAD WOULDN’T LOOK AT me. Even when one of the pens on the guest book table ran out of ink, and I could tell he was visibly pained by it, he didn’t ask me to get a new one. He nodded at Loretta instead who—puzzled at his miming—fanned out the memorial cards in a “pick a card, any card” gesture at the guests gathered for Adil Sharma’s funeral. 

“I give up,” he whispers at me now in the break room as all the mourners sit sandwiched in their seats except for a lone straggler burping a baby in the hallway. The wet, stale scent of spit up flirts with the stale scent of baked ziti from the oven. I take a breath through my mouth just to be on the safe side.

“She’s just off her game today.”

“Not Loretta. I mean, you’re right, she’s being a pain in my arthritic backside, but I love her.” He grabs the mug Loretta bought him, emphasizing his point, and pours a cup of coffee. He artfully covers the masked writing on it with the flat of his hand, the faint “G” curving a sharp slice through the gap in his fingers. “I’m talking about you. I don’t know what you’re going through, Vienna, but now is not the time. It’s summer, and you know how summer goes. Hiking, boating, motorcycling—a slew of possible accidents. Which means a full home.” I look at him as he blows on a stream of heat curling up from the mug, trying to remember the last time anyone confused Burling Gates with Club Med, but I allow him the worried knot between his eyebrows.

“No, you don’t really know,” I say. The baby coos, and I catch glimpses of its dark feathered hair, its flesh-colored nails as the mother rocks her hips side to side. She doesn’t look much older than me, and even from the back she seems to have surrendered to exhaustion. A smudge of something white stains her black pants. A lone, long curl falls out of its ponytail. 

“Then tell me. Enlighten me. I know you’ve suddenly grown some sort of familial bone and need to reconnect with your brother. I know you, Vienna. You think you’re locked up all alone in that tower of yours, but you’re not shackled. I pay you well, you could get an apartment.  Start dating. Do whatever it is you need to do, but don’t tell me that I haven’t given you an opportunity here. Don’t tell me you can’t do this anymore.” He lifts his cup, and a slight wave of coffee flows over the lip. He curses softly and grabs for the towel looped through the oven handle. As his hand smacks against the glass door, light is shed on what we’re really talking about. He’s worried I’ll leave him.

“At least I know you can’t go anywhere,” he used to say to me after Mom died, and Troy started spending too much time out at night. One of those evenings when the living room was dark except for the glow of the TV, my father wrapped us both in a blanket, and I could feel his face against my hair. He said, “I love you” and started crying, and even as my hair dampened and matted at the back of my neck, I knew he wasn’t talking to me. Even now, I wonder if it’s me potentially leaving or the new void he’d have to contend with that’s prompted this little speech.

“I’m not leaving. And I won’t talk to Troy anymore.” I say it because it’s habit. Because if I don’t, his disappointment will eat through any shred of resolve I have left, so I do the damage for him. I listen to the muffled boom of a voice delivering the eulogy, the creaks of chairs and crinkles of programs. I imbibe the noise of waiting and boredom so I don’t have to focus on the type of woman I’ve become. Tall as a weed and just as easily plucked. 

“Good.  You need to stay focused, Vienna, and your brother is the very definition of unfocused.” An older gentleman with a little girl walks into the room, and Dad dumps his coffee in the sink, rinses the mug. His hairy knuckles work the soap and water, and for a minute I’m hypnotized. He places the mug in the back of the cabinet and shuts the door with measured force. 

“I know you don’t understand why I did what I did with Troy, but you’ll understand one day when a few of my grandkids are running around here, and you have no control over anything.  Their happiness, their pain. That right there isn’t easy,” he says beneath his breath, nodding at the gentleman handing a juice box to the girl. She squeals and squeezes the box too hard, sending a stream of watery liquid down the man’s suit jacket. The truth is right there before me, my loneliness underscored as the man wipes at this suit with a dry hand. I can’t take care of myself.  I won’t be able to take care of a child. 

“Dad, I need to tell you some—” I start but don’t finish.  The music courses through the speakers again and my father makes his way to the front of the home to open the front doors.  Our driver, Earl, is outside, the hearse’s engine already grunting on idle. The smell of gasoline wafts through the foyer as the pallbearers raise Adil like a king on his throne, and the guests amble directly behind. Mrs. Sharma’s wailing sets the rhythm to their every step. The pounding hurts the walls of my skull. 

I make my way to the morgue and close the heavy door behind me. I see Rosa and the panic takes me.

“I have to—I can’t do this. I can’t Rosa, I can’t.” Rosa turns in time to keep me from falling to the floor. I’m lightheaded because despite the promise I’ve made to her, I merely pecked at my lunch. I made a big show of tuna on toast, a side of strawberries and even a few chips from Loretta’s stash for good measure, but I broke it all into lumpy pieces and ended up throwing the majority away. And now I’ve surrendered to the gnawing threat of hunger and even worse, truth.

“Okay, we’ll go. We’ll go to the clinic. I’ll do anything you need,” Rosa hums into my hair. I breathe in a lungful of patchouli from Rosa’s shirt. The air pickles my skin with cold, and I like the feeling, the fluorescent light beaming off the white linoleum floor into my eyes. It’s uncomfortable, and honest, and lets me know that my intuition is absolutely right. I can’t handle a baby.

Rosa searches through her bag and retrieves a dwindling package of tissues. “Here,” she says, patting under my eyes and wiping my cheeks. She goes for a tube of concealer and a blush compact from her kit. The look on my face stops her in her tracks. “They’re dead.  Not contagious,” she says. She sighs and rolls her eyes. “I cleaned the brushes, Vienna.” I give in and let her work her magic because I like the feeling of Rosa mothering me. She sits me down in her wheeled chair, and I look around at the place I always try not to look at too closely.

There are books on an empty stainless-steel table pushed against the wall. Of all places, the morgue has always been Rosa’s reading room of choice. She’ll stay an extra hour or two after the deceased is prepped and ready to go, and she’ll sit in her chair with a novel on her lap. It’s the quiet that keeps her content and the formaldehyde that has fried her brain enough to think this is in any way relaxing.

The embalming machine sits on a shelf above a body—Mr. Eckhart’s mother—whose information I had the misfortune of finding on another of Loretta’s straggler post-it notes in the office. It pumps pink embalming fluid through a curlicue tube, and I remember thinking how it looked like a vat of bubblegum when my grandfather used to let me assist him during summers in high school. That was back when the morgue felt safe, and I’d listen to his stories about the people on the table, often people he knew personally. I liked that about my grandfather, that his job wasn’t just a job but a payment of respect. 

Mrs. Eckhart is sheeted and fixed with a toe tag. That’s another thing that always gets me about this place. Sure, there are dead bodies and chemicals to keep their bodies from deteriorating, and that, in and of itself, is scary to most people. But the most uncomfortable thing about the fluorescent lit morgue is seeing a life dwindled down to a slim five inches of paper.

“I don’t know how to tell him,” I say. I scrunch my nose when the bristles of Rosa’s makeup brush begin to tickle.

“Your father?” she asks me.

“No.” 

“Well, I’d let you know what I think, but I don’t know who ‘he’ is,” Rosa says. Her lips shrivel into one another, and I know she’s lying.

“Yes, you do. You knew when you caught me kicking his car.”

I sneeze into the tissue when her brush stops. Her eyes are unavoidable. 

“I told you it was a bad idea.” Rosa clicks her tongue hard and begins to swipe at my cheeks again, this time pulling at my skin. “You know I hated her as much as the next girl, but it was years ago, Vienna, and it’s not right anyway. That’s her husband, and she doesn’t deserve this.” The guilt metastasizes. There’s no swallowing it down. 

I close an eye when Rosa smooths my brow with her thumb. “You had to know it was him. Wyland,” I say. His name hasn’t been on my tongue for a while now, not since the night when reality blurred, and I let myself down. Saying it feels like jinxing myself.

“Of course, I knew. But you had to tell me, Vienna. You had to own up to it. And now that you have, you have to fix it. Does Heather know?” Rosa stops messing with my makeup and searches my face.

“No.  I don’t think so. She was here today, actually. Her mother died.” I see the shock in Rosa’s eyebrows, in the way they begin to arc high on her head.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” she laughs in disbelief. Rosa’s lips reveal pink gums and smoker’s teeth, a habit she kicked the year before, but she still perches her eye shadow brush between her fingers like a long cigarette holder.

“No, I’m not.” This doesn’t feel like it used to when our legs would lock like pretzels and Rosa was my priest. There’s no healing in telling her any of this. There’s not even the simple satisfaction that it’s all out of my head and into the open. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything and having to own this fact hurts. It makes me think we’re changing, I’m changing. And not for the better.

I look at the long, thin fingers of my right hand cupped in my lap. My flesh is nearly nonexistent, a gelled membrane stretched over each and every knobby bone and inked vein. I poke at it and watch the colors turn. When Wyland would hold it, he’d press his thumb lightly over my skin and press his lips into it. He told me I was perfect the way I was—thin and long—and it made me happy to hear his theory that everyone else was jealous, proving their envy with every offer of a turkey sandwich. I think of the heavy weight in Heather’s belly, her hips that can’t stop growing. How Wyland’s love for me wasn’t love but a reaction. 

“She invited me to dinner,” I whisper. 

“Oh wow, she does know,” Rosa says, packing up her stuff. I watch her stack the books she’s reading, her curled-edged favorite, HERmoine, placed on top. 

I shrug, not really knowing if that’s the truth or not, or at least praying it isn’t. “She wanted me to join her and her friends tonight. You remember Amber and Rachel?” I tell her about talking with Heather, my awkward vomiting, how Heather thinks Wyland’s a royal jerk.

“Well, at least she’s not completely brain dead,” Rosa says, strapping her purse to her shoulder. She clicks the metal clasps of her makeup kit shut, and the sound echoes off the floor.

“No, not completely, I guess.” I concentrate on what I’m going to say next, hoping it will make sense. “So, she thinks they might be supportive, about the pregnancy thing. Guess she could tell I’m not head over heels on the whole idea of baking a baby for nine months.” I pray Rosa at least cracks a smile, but she doesn’t. She just studies me, weighed down with books, and her bags, and more than her fair share of reason.

“You think it’s smart to go with her?  I mean she’s obviously grieving over her mother. She probably has no idea what she’s doing right now.”

“I didn’t say I was going to go,” I mumble, the redundant thud in my chest saying otherwise. 

“I know you. You want to go. You want to prove to all of them that you’re better than them. That you’ve changed. And you want to pay Heather back for all those years of torment. But I think it’s safe to say that you’ve already beaten her at her own game.”

“That’s not fair.  And that’s not even it.”

“Then what is it?” Rosa says. I concentrate on the neat edges of Rosa’s lips, nude gloss shaped against her dark skin. I wedge my tongue between my teeth so I don’t tell Rosa the sick thought that’s been whispering its assault at my ear all morning. That I want to be Heather Hammel’s friend. 

“Listen, Vienna, I love you, you know that, but I don’t think you have a clue what you’re doing.”

“Yes, I do.” I shred the tissue in my hands and watch the pieces fall to the floor like snow. 

“No, you don’t. Heather’s going to hurt you. She’s done it before, and you know she’ll do it again.”

“It’s different this time.” 

“Why? Because you slept with her husband, and now you’re pregnant?”  Rosa smacks hard, and I feel like my body’s bruising beneath my skin. 

“It’s not like I’m a kid,” I say, and I know it’s the wrong answer. Her face reflects the time when her world had spun grotesquely on its axis, and she learned at thirteen she was going to have my brother’s baby.

“Now you’re the one not being fair,” she whispers. This is the point where the apology should seep out of me and drown my ankles. But then the anger comes, and I know the change is real and vicious, and the past sidles up next to my cheek like a cold glass window.

“And it’s not like I’m a skank who slept with my best friend’s brother.” My heart stops. “And it’s not like I planned to kill his baby.”

Rosa doesn’t wait for my apology. She walks out, this time with her heels on. They pummel the ground, and the quick color of beige flashes at me as I chase her to the foyer. The doors tear open, and I watch her dwindle down to a speck of herself through the window as she crouches into her Volkswagen and screeches away. 

I’ve torn out the only person who’s anchored neatly in my corner like a rusty hinge, and I won’t give myself a moment to fully realize it. 

Instead, I quell some of the bite in my stomach and the nervousness in my hands by shutting down the computers and cleaning the toilets. I can feel my father’s voice flittering through the home, tactfully teaching Loretta the merits of dressing for work. I go upstairs—his background noise at my heels—and start to get ready for whatever the night decides to throw my way.

I grab my cellphone to call Heather, and I see it. Gram’s number. It’s something I’ve needed to see for so long that I’m confused as I try to make the numbers work in my mind. I decide not to call my grandmother back, the sprite-like version of Dad resting angrily on my shoulder. If he’s upset I met with Troy then I reason talking to Gram wouldn’t make him much happier. I do my best to refrain from assessing why it is my father’s happiness is always elbowing my own right out of the ring.

I look down at the cloudy smudge of ink on my palm that I transcribed earlier in the office. I start to dial. I’m lost at the thought of talking to Heather Hammel, my tongue fattening and consuming the void inside my mouth.

“Hi,” I say when Heather picks up, and suddenly it’s sixth grade all over again. But Rosa’s not here to hang up the phone.