Chapter Six
Heather

It could be worse, Heather thought as the steering wheel rotated into her belly, but she knew she was wrong. She felt dissolved, mush-like, whereas before pregnancy had made her feel like a block of ice. Even though she hadn’t let on at Oaks, learning Vienna was pregnant had melted Heather, her cells loose like drops of water skimming down a sidewalk grate. 

It felt like losing her husband all over again.

Heather was thankful to leave the dark wooden cavity of the funeral home, and now, in the natural light of Thursday morning, she was kicking herself for inviting Vienna to Amber’s. She didn’t even know why she considered going because all she wanted to do was lock herself in her tiny laundry room and cry rhythmically with the washer. But Amber’s would be brimming with noise, and gossip, and thoughts that didn’t matter, and more than anything, Heather wanted to feel like nothing mattered. 

She thought Vienna could use a dose of that, too. 

She was starting to regret telling Amber about Wyland’s affair with Vienna. She knew she’d be in danger of becoming even more of a target for Amber’s feigned sympathy, but releasing her secret to someone whose opinions didn’t reach far beyond the dangers of formula feeding was, in a way, cathartic. 

“Mess with her a little,” Amber had said two weeks ago when Heather was having coffee in her friend’s massive kitchen. The way Amber had said it launched Heather back to the days when they would prank call Vienna, hoping to get her drunk mother on the phone.

Amber’s twins, Sierra and Sienna, had begun to whirl around each other, a red-headed cyclone disturbing the tumble-marbled peace. 

“Mommy, Mommy, Tootie Face ate my Oreos!”

“Stop calling me Tootie Face, Pig Butt!” 

“Organic,” Amber smiled at Heather because real Oreos were Satan’s treats and wouldn’t be touched with a ten-foot pole in the Fritch household. It didn’t seem to be working because unlike Amber who was a twig growing up, her daughters were plumper at their middles. Heather thought it a wonder they hadn’t eaten themselves into oblivion with a mother like theirs.

“Girls, go upstairs and play. Daddy buys you a thousand-dollar indoor tree house, and you don’t even touch it,” Amber said, the diamond in her ear shooting its ray at the Travertine beneath her feet. 

“Kids,” she said to her cup of coffee. Heather concentrated on the floor, on the absolute lines of crisscrossed grout and wondered if telling Amber was a mistake. 

“So, you set her up. Teach her a lesson. Listen to me. Women who think they can get away with that kind of thing need to be put in their places because they’ll only keep messing with the rest of us, and heaven knows men can’t put an end to it. We’d be doing womankind a favor. Seriously, girls. Upstairs. Now!” The twins tumbled out of the kitchen and onto the hardwood floor of the living room. Heather couldn’t concentrate. She felt itchy and hot underneath the knit maternity shirt she paid way too much for, and Wyland had reamed her about. But she couldn’t wear her uniform of yoga pants and flip flops around Amber, whose closet resembled a mini-Club Monaco factory. It was bad enough her life was a nightmare.  She didn’t have to dress the part, too. 

“What good would that do? I play with her head and then what? I’m still pregnant. He leaves, and I do this all on my own? Maybe if I talk to him...” Heather lost the words at the notion. She hadn’t said anything to Wyland. There was something in finding out the truth that had stricken her silent. Every time he came home at noon after a few months of not coming home for lunch at all, her throat scabbed over until the thought of confronting him felt like a punishment. 

“All I know is if Brent was banging some floozy housewife from down the street, I’d make sure even her kids would disown her.” Amber looked through her kitchen window to where the surgeon’s wife resided next door and forcibly swallowed a sip of coffee.

“I don’t know. The thing is, I don’t even feel this is so much about Vienna. It’s about him,” Heather said. Their marriage hadn’t been easy, that part was true. Heather shouldered the responsibility for that even if she did so privately. Her depression, her failure at graduating with a degree, graduating at all had broken and delivered its shrapnel as hard and fast as a grenade caught mid-air. She had always been less aware of Wyland’s needs because he had always been focused on hers. But that was forever ago, and forever’s hardened pill had soured in her mouth.

“All I know is Vienna is still in town and has turned into some sort of weirdo recluse.  Mom said she thought she saw her working at Aurelio’s once, but mom’s losing her marbles. Pathetic if she’s never left this place,” Amber said, grabbing a tea towel and blotting at a renegade drop of coffee on the counter. Heather refrained from reminding her that spending a summer searching for a potential husband in the city wasn’t exactly leaving either. 

“You’ve never seen her in town?”

“People in the Applewood community usually don’t venture too far to rub elbows with the townies,” Amber winked then stopped mid-spasm. “Oh, no offense,” she added, and Heather gave her a blank smile, spinning her spoon around her cup of lemon water. She remembered wishing it were whiskey.

In the car, Heather righted the wheel and slowed at a stoplight. In the convertible next to her were two teenage girls, one applying lip-gloss, the other—the driver—texting on her phone. She thought about Vienna, the hell Heather had put her through during school. The hell Heather had lived herself. She felt sorry for Vienna knowing she had barred herself off from the rest of the world, and even though these feelings mingled with anger toward the woman who tried to steal her husband, Heather felt partly responsible for Vienna’s misery. She had seen no point in searching for her, gathering the bits and pieces of her life like crumbs down a crooked trail because she felt like Vienna had been violated enough. And truthfully, Heather feared what else she might find. 

That was, of course, until her mother had died. 

It was powerful how lonely Heather felt knowing Friday was only a day away, and it wouldn’t be spent in her mother’s kitchen, searching for something like love in her glazed-over eyes. Instead, she’d probably be glued to a computer screen, trying to find out more about Vienna Oaks, the reason why her husband no longer snatched at Heather’s wily heart or fingered the bumps of her brain.

When Wyland and Heather had first started dating in college, he’d stay over at the Reese dorm, the all-girls dorm Heather had hated until she felt the thrill of sneaking a boy in for the first time. Her roommate, Nora, was never there anyway. She was a stoner type, a long, dirty ponytail trailing the bony rod to her waist.  Heather once walked in on her toking up and praised the gods when Nora moved most of her stuff over to her boyfriend’s.

“Really? You and Vienna never...you know?” Heather asked. They had split a box of wine while Pearl Jam gutturally delivered its sound between the room’s four cinderblock walls. Heather remembered what Wyland had been wearing—a pair of jeans, a hole threatening one of the legs and a checkered long-sleeved buttoned-down. It was opened, his white t-shirt hiding a faint muscular ripple, even though his diet primarily consisted of pizza and Gatorade.

“No. I promise. I never did...that with Vienna.” He looked guilty. Maybe not because he had done it but because he had probably wanted to. They were lying on the floor, their faces inches from each other with their feet pointed at the opposite end of the dorm room. His eyes weren’t green or brown but a hybrid of the two. Heather forced herself to stare at them, trace the outline of his gold-etched irises with her mind’s eye. She wanted to believe him. “We kind of tried once,” he added.

Heather’s stomach would have fallen to the floor if it hadn’t been there already. Her dull wine buzz turned knife sharp, bringing everything to her attention: the soft roll of fat heaving over the waist of her jeans, the hairs on her left arm, dark and demanding, the thought of sex with Wyland, and how it always played shadowy, and wine-soaked, and the way he never seemed to mind.

“How?” Heather asked. 

“How? You know they did teach us ‘how’ in fifth grade...”

“No. How? You know what I mean.” Heather’s mind traveled to the Vienna she knew from elementary school, the one with the flat chest and orbs for eyes, her knobby knees and a wave of dark silk hanging to the middle of her back. She thought of the Vienna she had caught glimpses of in high school. Even after she had transferred to Saint Mary of Sorrows, Heather would sit in the new Corolla her father’s guilt had bought her all the way from Maryland, and she’d watch as Vienna and Wyland would leave school together, shoulder-to-shoulder. Vienna moved, curved but long, her sweater tight against the only parts that had grown larger than her eyes. 

Heather hadn’t mentioned this to Wyland in the three months they had been dating. She didn’t know how to tell him that the evil bubbled and popped so loudly in her veins, it snapped her apart and made her angrier. She couldn’t tell him that sitting there in the cold—in her dead-engined Corolla—she cerebrally blotted out Vienna’s existence and could only make out the golden curls springing at the sides of his face. 

“Um, in my room. I kissed her a little. My mom came home. We didn’t try it again.” His lips artfully shaped the words, made them pretty. She wanted to meet his mother, send her a gift, a lock of her hair. It was an irrational thought, but the wine softly buzzed again, and she allowed the truth—that providence had brought them together, had severed Vienna Oaks from their lives like a dead and useless limb.

There was honking behind her. The teenage girls were gone. She moved through the green light, gaining momentum, and eased the car onto Conch Street. She pulled around the square, passing Oberman’s Pharmacy, The Green Grocer. She glided by the photography studio where she had posed with a black piece of fabric against her breasts while Tracy Filmore snapped pictures of her naked belly, an extravagance paid with the money Heather’s father had curiously sent when she had sent word of her pregnancy. There in the mix of storefronts was Turnbull Realty. She could see Mark Hollywood through the window at his desk, waving his magician hands at a slightly overwhelmed young couple.

As Heather lumbered to the doorway, shifting her weight until she heard the tinkling bell above her head, she could hear Mark’s enthusiastic spiel on the upside of short sales. 

“Sure, a short sale can be scary. But so can open heart surgery unless you’ve got the best surgeon in the biz.” His thumbs snapped at his chest, and his lips revealed a stark-white grin.  Mark mimed a wave at her—not looking up from his two, pint-sized clients—and continued with something about “releasing a previous mortgage.”

She walked to the back and found Wyland on the phone. He held up two fingers.

“Yes. Yes, I know. Okay, I’ll be sure to do that. Talk to you soon.” She waited as he placed the phone back in its cradle for him to mention who he was talking to. He didn’t.

“So, what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I’m back. From the home? The funeral home.”

“Oh, right. How did it go?” There were papers stapled together on his desk, and it seemed like he was talking to them, stroking the top page of one with his distracted finger. For a second, she lost herself in that motion, calling to mind his habit of guiding his fingers through her hair when they watched TV or when he came up behind her, her swollen knuckles battling soapy dishes. His hands in her hair in the nighttime when a nightmare paralyzed her, awoken from a dream where she hovered unwillingly above her body. 

His hands.

“Which one did you choose?” he added, his eyes meeting hers so quickly that she forgot he hadn’t been looking at her in the first place.

Heather breathed deeply. She was nervous, and she knew she wasn’t supposed to be the nervous one. But she wanted to watch his face when she told him, especially after he had spent the evening before trying to convince her to go with Bauer and Sons because Mark said his grandmother’s funeral was done “tastefully” there. She hadn’t told him she had already gone by Oaks and spoken to Loretta. There she had sat in the recliner as Wyland danced around and waved his arms, talking about how some dead stranger’s funeral was a soul moving sight. He should have spent it consoling me, not convincing me, she thought.

“Oaks.  Met with Vienna,” she said in a rush of breath. Wyland looked as if she’d taken his stapled papers and threatened to slice his neck open with them.

“You didn’t have to do that. Drag the past into this,” he said, crinkling the sharp sides of the stack. “Haven’t seen her in forever.” He managed to wedge it in at the end, but his eyes were still on the paper.

“I’m not dragging the past into anything. I researched the home. I like it. Vienna is good at what she does.” He looked up at her, confused. It was another moment, one of many she’d had standing naked with him in the shower or watching his mouth move when reciting lines from Top Gun, and she’d take him in his purest form. He’d become the boy she fell in love with again, and she’d pray with all the fragments of her soul that they could just exist and be happy with existing. 

“I invited her to dinner tonight with the girls,” she said. Wyland pinched his lips white, and all noise left her, even Mark’s boisterous account of the perks of living in a home some poor dolt couldn’t afford to keep. She watched her husband run a hand through his hair and open his lips to speak, his father’s voice booming through him.

“Wyland, I need to see you for a second in the office. Oh, Heather. You have my deepest condolences.” Owen Turnbull floated to her, and his arms took her before she had a chance to bring him into focus. He smelled peppery, a delicious fragrance that would have reminded her of a grandfather if she had known one. Owen pulled away from her and held her awkwardly from the elbows, waiting to pull her strings and make her dance.

“You hanging in there, kid?”

“Yeah. Yes. Just stopped by to give Wyland the details about the funeral. Sunday at 1:00.  They’ll put the announcement in the paper. They do all that.” She said it clumsily and could feel her body heat up as Wyland and his father stared at her. She wondered if Owen could feel the warmth emanating from her elbows.

“Well, I’ll certainly be ordering the flowers from all of us here at Turnbull Realty. Margaret sends her best as well.” Heather bit her tongue, having thought the Turnbulls would show up for the funeral, but she knew she should consider herself lucky that at least Wyland would be getting off work, and she wouldn’t have to deal with Margaret’s overly sweet sympathy. She could already see the dreary clump of people at her mother’s funeral, a living and breathing embodiment of Caroline’s tenuous life. Owen offered his full-face smile, and Heather knew that was her cue. 

“I’ll see you at home. This afternoon?” she asked and watched Wyland smile and nod. His dimples caught her, fish on a hook, and the thought of losing everything kept snagging at her clothes. “I love you,” she said because she meant it and couldn’t help questioning if he still did, too.

“Love you,” he said, and it trailed behind him like toilet paper stuck to his shoe as he followed his father into his office. She wondered what Vienna had seen in him, needed in him.  Heather was afraid it was the same things that kept her unreasonably grounded in a man who had a hard time looking at her.

Out on the sidewalk, the sun abused Heather’s eyes. She figured it was a fit punishment for not screaming “She’s pregnant, you idiot!” and running out of Turnbull Realty like a madwoman. And she began to laugh a little because she knew that’s what her husband and his father would have thought of her—that she was the crazy one, even though Wyland had managed to knock up two women simultaneously, not to mention ruining them. Heather could see her mother’s anguish over her father running off and finding Ronnie and how Heather used to roll her eyes and pray her mother would grow a pair. It was amusing how the tables jerked when they turned, leaving Heather with her own pair shriveled and out of commission.

In the car, she turned on the radio. “Here Comes the Sun” flooded the interior, and Heather drowned in memories of her father, outside humming the tune while raking leaves into piles, inside with his head in his hand, cerebrally vanquishing a string of dirty clothes snaking its way into the living room. 

All these years and she hadn’t seen her father’s face, not since he had left. There was the car and her schooling he paid for when Heather decided she wanted to study math in college and needed a high school education that required holing up in her room with her books, away from her mother’s kitten-like whimpering. There was the newspaper article when he had started the grooming business, a three-inch clipping featuring his partner, a Veronica Stanheimer, who looked tan, and healthy, and able to cook a meal without lacing it with bug bits. Heather’s mother had highlighted Veronica’s name over and over until the yellow ink soaked and marred the clipping, searing a hole into the heart of it. That wet-edged hole had made Heather angry, and to retaliate she told her mother her father had called, had said he and Ronnie were getting married, and would Caroline be so kind as to send her wedding gift to their new address? She had watched her mother buckle, bleed out a rotten pool of tears from the landing upstairs. That was the last thing her father had ever sent other than the alimony and child support checks. She found it funny, the way his void became larger than the body that used to fill it.

“Quit calling him ‘Dad’, Heather,” her mother would scream, but it came out hoarse. She looked like a lunatic at that point, her hair heavy and long, clusters of it dividing and rising above her head. Her nails were yellowed and shot out from her toes like tiny razors. When she’d grit her teeth, there would be bits of what she mistook for food around her gums. The normalcy of it stabbed Heather’s temple relentlessly.

“What do you want me to call him? The guy that knocked you up?” It was high school, Heather’s first year. She was scared and hated the uniform. She hated that nobody knew her except Amber who had already secured a position on the cheerleading squad before school even started. Instead of being feared, Heather was merely forgotten. Unknown. 

“I am your mother,” Caroline said. Maybe genetically but the lump of flesh on their dirty floral couch was something entirely different. Caroline sat in her threadbare sheath—her “house dress” as she called it—but the fabric was soiled from the burned cooking oil clinging to the air. Gone were the years of poorly made bundt cakes, flour in the hair, and pearls around the neck.  The cardboard cutout of Beatrice had long been neglected, and now her main task was to collect the cobwebs that would otherwise hang from the ceiling.

“And he’s my father,” Heather said. She rocked on the dirty floor beneath her feet and winced at the unnatural crunch beneath her shoes. 

“You keep chasing him like this, wishing him back into our lives then you’ll be doing it until the day you die. And don’t think that need will ever go away,” Caroline said. She roughed up her nose with the blunt palm of her hand, and when she was finished, there it sat, an inflamed welt on her face. “Even if he kicks the bucket tomorrow, you’ll still be craving him. You’ll be willing to replace him with anyone.” Her mother went to retrieve a feather from her teeth. She was picking at bits of a baby bird she had found unconscious in the backyard and had roasted in a pan with garlic cloves and half-moon slices of onion. She had left the feathers on the wings so that the dead bird was an aberration, its span blackened and ash-flecked, taunting Heather with its wrongness. 

“No. Not true,” she had whispered. Heather ran upstairs and slammed the door. She welcomed the clean lines of her room, the space to walk one foot in front of the other unhindered. Heather had looked out her second-story window into the tangled heap of their side yard, believing her mother had cursed her, knowing full well that it was her own belief that kept her cursed. 

The car groaned into the driveway, and Heather parked, facing the chipped white planks of her and Wyland’s tiny two-bedroom house. It was only 9:15 a.m. She watched the afternoon stretch before her eyes, and she could hardly stomach it. She grabbed her phone from the dark insides of her bag and scrolled through. She thought about calling Vienna and canceling because what would Amber and Rachel say if they found out Vienna was pregnant and realized whose husband had done the damage? Vienna wasn’t showing yet, but Heather imagined her friends’ lips locking in disbelieving rings, their eyes ballooning like a set of suburban kewpie dolls if they even caught whiff of a pregnancy. 

“Forget them,” Heather whispered, placing her phone back in her bag, determined to believe in nothing.