Chapter Seven
Vienna

My room glows pink, even in the evenings when the light on the third floor is dim, and I’ve shut the door at the top of the stairs, cutting me off from the rest of the home. It used to be my grandmother and grandfather’s room, a suite crafted out of vacant attic space. Dad gave it to me when we first moved in because he couldn’t stand sleeping in a place designed for his parents. I don’t blame him.

After my shower—the plucking and pulling, dressing my warm body like Rosa does the cold ones—I’m as pink as my room. I stand in front of the floor length mirror near the stone fireplace and take my time figuring out what bright and pretty thing I should wear to help me forget how I’ve ravaged the workings of my best friend’s heart.

I choose a navy-blue cocktail dress that hits mid-thigh and is cinched at the waist with a black belt. I sometimes wonder if someone snuck their way up the stairs during a wake and came face-to-face with my closet, if they’d assume I travel, that I go out a lot. That I have someone in my life that likes me in my dresses as much as I do. Or if they’d peg me for a recluse who’s taken to online shopping.

I wrestle into my bra, a pair of panties, and slip the dress over my head. I don’t look like me—like a vulnerable little girl or an anti-social monster—and I suppose that’s the best defense against a line of women I’m hopeless against.

When Heather had first asked if I wanted to go to Amber’s, I wavered a little. Rosa is right—I really do just want to show up the girls who made my life miserable, but now that Heather has given directions over the phone to Amber’s home in Applewood, that’s no longer an option.  They’re married to rich men, take their kids to a rich school, and drive around in their expensive cars to pick up cleaning products for their maids to use. Considering I have dealt with my fair share of cleaning products, I probably have more in common with their maids than with them.

I know there’s no real reason for me to go, and there’s no reason for Heather to have asked me, which makes me nervous. A couple of hours ago, just thinking about being in the same room as my past snapped an anxious switch, so I went ahead and took a pill. Again, Rosa is right, but I try to not think about her. She’s angry at me. She deserves to be angry at me. But she’s always questioned my reasoning and has never trusted me to make my own decisions.

It would be nice for once to feel like I have something in common with someone. Maybe I can find that in Heather. Maybe this time, she’s not being malicious. Maybe she’s just trying to help.

Before I can spend too much time deciphering Heather’s motives or the loneliness that’s propelling me into a dumpster fire of an evening, I grab my bag, my heels, and I spritz myself with a bottle of perfume my father bought me last Christmas. He said it smelled like the viewing room when it’s brimming with flowers and that the scent reminded him of me. I just pretend he said, “It smells like Spring, so it reminds me of you.” 

As I’m leaving, he’s at the foot of the stairs already in his pajamas and the robe I bought him for his birthday in February. It’s the same shade as my dress and gives him a royal feel. King of a funeral home.

“Going out?” he asks. I nod, and I consider telling him what I intended to earlier at Adil Sharma’s funeral. That I’m pregnant, I’m lost, I need him. But the moment’s passed, and the only thing I can imagine happening if I utter the truth is my father short circuiting like a robot doused with water.

“Yeah, Loretta gave me her keys earlier.”

“Car still in the shop?”

“That or they’ve lost it, and they’re too embarrassed to tell me.” I smile but he doesn’t.

“So, where you heading?”

“Got in touch with some old friends for a dinner party.” It’s weird saying it because it’s the sort of thing I always say when I go out at night to see a movie in Blythesville, or head to the Manor Market, or drive around in circles, putting miles on Loretta’s Prius it doesn’t need. I always wonder what he thinks when I lie to him, attempting to make him think my life is a little more exciting than it is. I wonder if he feels as sorry for me as I feel for myself.

“Okay, be careful.” He acts like he’s going to say something else, and the thump-thump at my throat swallows my tongue as I imagine Rosa has called him to quit. But he just nods, and I nod back, and with that I’m released into a firefly night. I watch them zip around me in the dark, sending light to the points of my shoes, the silver studs in my ears. My trail is lit as I head to the Prius, and it’s a beautiful send off to a night that will most likely ruin me.

#

I TURN INTO AMBER’S driveway and park behind the blue Corolla, the one Heather drove in high school. I almost said that, too, “The one you drove in high school?” when she told me to look out for her car because I couldn’t believe it. She still drives the same car Wyland and I would spy following us around when the bell rang, and we’d be out in the open, navigating life with our hands twisted in our pockets. 

I remember Wyland calling it “The Blue Phantom.”

Amber’s home is the type you have to breathe in. The place is so large, I can feel it in my lungs, and even though I expected to pull up to a nice house, I wasn’t aware how nice. I didn’t know pediatricians made this much, but considering it’s Applewood, anything’s possible. Our CPA lives in Applewood, and even though the community’s only ten minutes away—stationed smack dab between Burling Gates and Blythesville—I’ve never seen the guy in person. If I lived in a place like this, I can’t imagine I’d leave much either.

Heather gave me a few details about Amber over the phone. It was after a long pause that we were both having trouble filling, and she let me in on Amber’s husband, her two kids, the neighbor lady who always sunbathes topless who Amber can’t stand but will still probably invite over tonight. I guess she was trying to give me a heads up, and parking in Amber’s circular drive next to a fountain the size of the Prius, I’m aware of how much I’m going to need it. 

I head up the walk and push the doorbell. Its boom can only be matched with the throbbing in my ears.

“Come on—” Amber says, slicing off the “in” at the end of her sentence. She shrivels her eyes at me, and faint traces of crows’ feet gain momentum from the corners of her eyes. She’s herself—red hair, and all—and I do my best not to remember the time I stumbled into Wyland’s room to find her in his bed.

“Uh...” I say just as Heather shoulders past her and grabs my wrist. 

“We’re leaving, Vienna,” and I don’t argue because Amber slams the large wooden front door behind us.

“What happened?” I ask as I do my best not to scratch a Mercedes parked in front of Heather as she pulls me behind her.

“I was talking about my mom, the funeral, and the subject changes to the color of Viola’s feces.” I ask, "Who?" and she screws her lips at me. “Viola. Rachel’s baby. The thirstiest child known to man.” I let her circle around me, her flip-flops scraping and smacking against Amber’s stained concrete driveway. 

“Then right before you show up, I mention you’re on your way, and they look at me like I’m crazy.” Heather turns back at the massive house, and yells at the front door, “She can’t even afford this freaking house, and I’m the crazy one!” I’m frozen thinking Amber will march out here and punch one or both of us in the face. Heather stops moving and places her hands at her temples. Her burlap bag has slunk off her shoulder and is caught in the crook of her elbow. She doesn’t look much different than earlier. In fact, Heather seems to be wearing the same crumpled men’s shirt and yoga pants she was wearing in my father’s office. She’s all shades of wrong standing in front of Amber’s mini-mansion, and when she laughs like she’s surrendering, I start to worry. 

“She thought you were Bonnie when you rang the bell.”

I jog my memory for a “Bonnie.” “You mean the topless next-door neighbor?” I ask. 

“One and the same. Apparently, her husband’s mistress is okay to invite over for dinner, but when I want to invite the skank burying my mother, it’s a whole other story!” Heather screams again at the house, and I try not to notice my bowels loosening. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean this, I’m sorry,” Heather wheezes. She’s facing her car now. She’s staring at it like it’s embedded somewhere in her past, and she needs to pry it loose. 

“I was just hoping they wouldn’t be jerks for once.”

“Listen, maybe we should do this another time,” I say. Relief claims my lungs, and I’m already thinking about my bed, the warm rose glow of my room. The somewhat satisfying chill of being on nobody’s radar.

“No, I’m starving. I need to talk. Something.” Her gaze breaks from the car, and she takes a bold look at my face. “Just meet me at a diner or something, okay. Please?” she says. It’s the please part that startles me, makes me wish Heather would have had the good sense to walk into any other funeral home than the one I work at. But there’s a spark in being needed, and I want to hold on to it until my hand begins to burn.

“Okay,” I say, and my flesh is match-stroked, hot and scalding to the touch. We get in our cars, and as I follow Heather to the diner, I scorch the earth beneath me.

#

I WAS TWELVE WHEN MY ovaries first began to ache. Time had dashed through the surface of the sky, and one moment my mother was alive at the Manor Market, the next she wasn’t. As time ticked and scarred the dark the night she died, I eventually fell asleep on my grandparents’ couch to the sound of Gram humming Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ra.

And then the dream came. Heather was balancing on a straight tower of books, looming over me. She hunched over—hair swept up in a hot wind—and I realized I could feel the sensation everywhere. Heather’s body crushed mine, voided it of all substance. My lips, chest, thighs turned to a powder that sprinkled down to my feet.

When I woke, there was blood everywhere. I had forgotten about tampons because my mother was dead. Gram helped me wash up and change clothes. She flipped the cushion on the couch.

It was that motion, burying the truth in the sofa, that shriveled pin straight and stabbed right through me. Anyone could sit on the same spot and never learn my secret. I just had to know how to hide it.

“It’s hard, right? Seeing dead people.” Heather runs her knife down her stack of pancakes with a surgeon’s precision. We sit at The 56 Diner, a restaurant named after the highway that runs along Burling Gates’s tree-lined spine. In our booth we’re face-to-face, and I can’t stop staring at the dried flecks of skin on Heather’s lips.

“We don’t, you know, have to talk about that part.”

“If I didn’t want to know, I wouldn’t have asked.” Heather stabs her triangular portion of pancake and kneads her lower lip with her teeth. 

“I don’t see them often. The bodies. My work is mostly in the office. But I do other things. Keep the Kleenex stocked, make sure the bathrooms are tidy during the day, make sure Loretta’s wearing clothes...”

“That’s the crazy lady, right? I met her a couple of days ago,” Heather says. There’s a sweet string of syrup at the corner of her mouth, and she retrieves it with her tongue like a lizard. In the diner’s cold light, I can see I was right earlier—that Heather’s a mess. Her curtain of hair is tied back into a ponytail, strands of it arcing out near her ear. Her mascara is smudged into the shadowy skin beneath her eyes.

“I guess, depending on what day it is. She’s my father’s girlfriend and technically kind of raised me.”

“Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude,” Heather says, forcing the words through a barricade of pancake.

“Don’t be. She means well, Loretta, but she certainly is her own breed.” I think of our charade earlier, the one where I asked to borrow her car, and Loretta—morphing into Mama Lo—laid down the law. 

“Plenty of coffee if you stay out late and no talking on your cell while driving. And?” Loretta had said at the staircase, one purple-socked foot crossed over the other. She was wearing one of her favorites, a stained Tweetie Bird shirt. The character carefully balanced on a cartoon heart, cracked with too many tumbles in the dryer. The shirt reached down mid-thigh, and I tried to ignore the fact that both of Loretta’s legs were painfully bare. 

“No changing the preset radio stations.” 

“That’s my girl.” She handed me the keys she fished out of her purse. Loretta had left her bag on the floor near the stairwell, and I could already hear the mindless argument between her and my father when he would undoubtedly find it there, yet again. 

“Glad you’re going out. Your father and I have been worried about you lately. I know you’re no Miss Hardy Party, but it’s good to know you’re still seeing friends. When those go, life isn’t as kind.” I couldn’t help but smile even as I spotted a few stray hairs sprouting out from around Loretta’s knee. I remember the day she came to our house with bags of used clothes for me to wear to school, and when I started crying about Troy, she told me there’s nothing so hopeless in the world that it couldn’t be mended.

“She’s not so bad, I guess,” I say to Heather, poking the tines of my fork into my omelet. It’s a hard game pretending to eat, especially when your opponent looks like they do it for a living. I break off a piece and let it settle on my tongue. I can tell my meds have worn off because the taste is vile and conjures up images of wastebaskets, gin and tonics, Loretta leaving the bathroom. I breathe deep to quiet the booming in my brain.

“You’re like a bird,” Heather says, forgoing her straw and swallowing a few messy gulps of water. “So, the home. Didn’t your grandparents use to own it?” Heather dances the question so it maneuvers like a cellular squiggle across my naked pupil.

“Yes,” I say. I pray the answer will suffice.

Heather sighs and rubs a paper napkin over her mouth. “’I’ll be straight. I researched your home online. I didn’t really know much about, you know, the process. And I ran across a few articles about what happened. About your grandfather.” I clench my stomach through a cramp. I had gotten used to not having to hear about the arrest, the trial, the jail sentence. Gram, of course, periodically reminds me, but Burling Gates is a town where everyone knows everyone else’s business. Deluca’s mistake was old news. Until now, I guess.

“He was, is, a good person.” I shrug, my bare shoulder swiping cold against my cheek. I don’t like thinking about it, Heather knowing more about me than I’ve allowed her to know. I wonder if she’s gone further, researched the few articles on my mother’s death, how the man who hit her with his car in the Manor Market parking lot sped full force into the side of an abandoned warehouse so he wouldn’t go to prison. How some people claimed my grandfather went crazy over his family falling apart and how he wanted to get caught for supplying chemicals to the meth ring. 

That part, I trust, is absolute malarky.

“Good people can mess up too. Everyone messes up.”

“Yeah. But this was, well, it was a royal mess up. He lost his job, his life, really. The woman he loved for so long, you know. And she’s not the same.” I think of Gram, her phone number tattooed against my lids every time I blink. I think of Granddad in his cell. Of me not having the stomach to visit him, of him refusing to see me in the first place.

“Your grandmother?”

“Yeah.” I feel like my old sadness is flinging off the covers again, rising to meet the morning sun. There were so many things Gram had made better—cookies, jokes, television shows because she used to dance along to their theme songs. And sometimes Grandded would dance with her. A tall, slightly limping shadow connected to Gram’s solid block of color. There were smiles on their faces like they had been carved with a sharp set of tools. And even Troy laughed, the sound cobwebbed but real. 

“So, what about you? How are you holding up?” I say. I set down my fork and rest my arm on the chrome-plated tabletop. My wrist sticks to it, its feather light hair matted with the grime and oil of assembly-lined food. I wipe my arm hard with a napkin then stop. Heather is staring at me.

“You’ve picked at your plate all night. What’s the point of going out to eat if you’re not going to do just that?” Her mouth glistens, sticky with the same shine in her eyes. “The baby needs the nourishment. Didn’t your doctor tell you that?”

“I don’t have one.” The truth slips through, and the result lightens the load tied to my chest. 

“You don’t have one?” Heather asks, an eye squinting as her lips contract. I can tell she is trying to process this, using the back of her forked hand to push back hairs pasted to her lip. She breathes hard through her mouth, and I can smell her, a sweet scent that overtakes the frying oil slick at my shoulders.

“No.  Listen, I don’t really feel like—”

“I don’t care what you don’t feel like. You chose this for yourself, so do something about it.” Heather spits each word and with it, wet clumps of cooked batter. The man in the booth behind her settles in his chair. I want to trade places with him.

“I didn’t choose this. I didn’t...I didn’t set out to do this.” The cold comes at me from an overhead vent. I feel stupid in my dress considering most of the clientele are truckers, and the restaurant is blasting everyone coherent with its goose-fleshed air. 

“Then what exactly did you set out to do?” Heather’s face is blank. Neutral. Her muscles have liquefied, and I can only make sense of her smudged lash line, the noise of her utensils punishing the table with a metallic blow. She knows, I think, my secret glowing, pounding loud inside me, but I refuse to let it play like this. I guide my fingers along my insides, where my memory thrives. I can read the bumps. I stroke the bruises and see Wyland’s lips saying, “She’ll never know about us.” I intend to keep it that way. 

The waitress comes by, lengthening an already awkward pause. She’s uniformed, and the name “Beth” is judiciously sewn near her collar. It feels wrong to me to know something like that about a person without asking first. Beth nods at Heather’s empty orange juice glass, and Heather’s swollen fingers deliver it to her for a refill. My pulse filters wildly through my veins. I don’t know what to say to her when Beth leaves but then I do.

“I set out to fix things.” The cramp returns, and I try to not let it show in my face.

Heather slowly nods then asks, “If you could have changed one thing about...your situation, what would it have been?” I can tell she needs to know. I have a feeling my answer is her answer, too. 

“I wouldn’t have been so hard on myself. Or anyone else for that matter.” I blink through my mother weaving her ache in my bones. I shut out her hand, her fingers grasping mine before I shoved them away, and she fell free and unbalanced to the curb and into the parking lot. I don’t think about the car. 

Heather nods at the window, the full weight of her face in the reflection. “Yeah, well...” She breaks her trance and turns back to me. “You know I’d suggest we go out again, invite Wyland. But I’m not much on having dinner with imbeciles.” She smirks, and I tentatively smile at her. I don’t know what she knows about me and Wyland, but honestly, I’m sure it’s everything. I almost reconcile with the notion because Heather living with her life held in unsteady hands offers me a sick sense of relief. At least I’m not the only one. 

“He’ll probably be calling you soon,” she adds, and I pinch my leg hard. “About the open house.” 

“Oh, right. We’ll be expecting his call,” I say. It’s a possibility I’ve been dreading, hoping really that Mr. Turnbull takes pity on me and declines to take part in Loretta’s budding three-ring circus. But knowing what I do about Owen Turnbull, any opportunity to take on new clients is something he’d never pass up. The dread is harvesting my insides, but I keep smiling like an idiot.

“So, what will happen with you and Amber?” I ask. Heather masters another bite of pancake, and I wait as she swallows it down with more juice.

“She’ll talk smack about me behind my back to Rachel and smile to my face. It’s pretty much her M.O.”

“Then why be friends with her?” I catch her off guard. For a moment I can see she doesn’t have an answer, so she rubs her mouth, and I have to still my hand from picking white bits of paper from her lips.

“Because I’m a glutton for punishment.” She returns to the window and studies our figures—hers overpowering, mine meekly breathing. “It’s like hating someone, absolutely not being able to stand them but all the time knowing your hate is more about you than them.” Heather’s eyes are barely open, feeling what she’s saying almost more than she’s saying it.  “Sometimes when Amber talks, I feel like freaking sitting on her just so she’ll shut up. But I feel like that because she has everything, and it’s not just about the money either. It’s more about how terrible she is, but no matter how terrible, she’s still happy.” 

I’m given the moment I’ve always wanted. Heather Hammel is miserable. Instead of closing my own eyes and relishing the moment, I say something I don’t know that I truly believe.

“People like that aren’t really happy.” 

“But they think they are. Maybe that’s the point.” She takes another bite of pancake for emphasis, and I watch her mouth work hard at it. 

Heather takes a break from her plate to rummage through her bag and retrieves a tattered business card. “Take this. My doctor. Call him and see if he can squeeze you in.” She swallows, her throat undulating against her skin. “You may not have meant this but neither did that kid of yours so make the call. You don’t have to be weak or hopeless. I’ve seen how that can play out, and trust me, it’s no good.” She turns again to the window as if watching that same thing play out against the glass. “You’re strong enough, you know,” she adds. It feels like smoke when she says it, and it travels up my thighs, the thickening middle of my belly. It touches the tissued lining of my heart, and the words become real. I’m strong enough.

The waitress brings our checks, and as I reach for mine, Heather takes it.

“His treat,” she says and pays the bill. We grab our things and walk together in silence until we’re outside. My flesh is still pickled with cold, and the rain doesn’t alleviate the chilled buzz running through me, but I don’t want it to.

“You have plans Saturday?” Heather shouts. There is no reason to shout, but there’s something about the rain that makes everything feel hurried, urgent. 

“No, why?”

“I need help at my mom’s. It’s, um, a mess at her place, and I need help going through a few things. We need to get it on the market. And I thought I could pick out her outfit for, uh, the funeral. Wyland has a golf game with his dad. Won’t cancel it so...”

“I can help,” I yell, and the ringing feels good. The raindrops thump against my crown and make dark puddles on my dress. 

“All right, I’ll call you Saturday morning,” Heather says. I nod, and we break and float to our separate cars. When I’m inside, I turn the engine on and crank the warm heat from the vent. I am shocked by it, the bumps in my skin coarsening then smoothing over until I’m fully myself again. 

I can feel the cushion turning.