Chapter Ten
Heather

Wintertime, four years ago, and they were all sanctioned to their apartments except for those like Wyland who felt the need to forge forward and heat the Chicago snow and ice with each bundled step. He was completing his business degree, his father’s one requirement for entering the family business. He wasn’t the smartest, but he worked hard, pushed the limits, sacrificed until he could nestle a solid “A” between both hands. It took everything for Heather to shear the image of his pretty professor from her brain and pretend good grades came solely from benign requests for extra credit. 

“When did you learn to cut hair?” Renee had asked that morning in their kitchen, perched on the trash seat. It was a three-legged chair, the fourth leg anchored miraculously with duct tape. It smelled faintly of urine, and Heather hated how pitiful it looked. It was hard to see it and not think of the stinking mess inside her mother’s home, but it was swiped off a buddy of Wyland’s for free. Wyland was always going on about saving money for a better life in Burling Gates, so the monstrosity stayed in their tiny eat-in kitchen. Heather had scrubbed its fabric seat until a cuticle bled.

“In my teens. My grandmother was a hairdresser,” Heather lied. It was easy to say when wet logs of Renee’s hair were clumped in her fingers.

In truth, there had been no learning, just the rote recitation of “An inch off the ends. And for the love of Pete, no bangs.” Then Caroline’s giggle, a mass of vibration from her naked, rounded body on a dusty kitchen chair. Heather had started cutting her mother’s hair once her father left, and before that, the job was his. That was the odd note soiling the air—that her father could hate her mother, that Caroline could blacken his dinners and collect figurines the shape and size of fat little cherubs, but with a clockwork effort, they would still sit down at the kitchen table every two months, and Ben Hammel would cut his wife’s hair. 

“Hope your grandmother’s a good teacher,” Renee laughed. Birds, warmth. That “nobody else is in the room but you” feeling. Heather studied her client in clips, in the quick sight of a full lower lip, a wimpy upper one in comparison. Too much gum, too little teeth. A sweep of long brown bang and hair cut like a boy’s. It should have made Renee look like a middle schooler, but her long legs and the “V” that always snuck out of her blouse were the antidote. 

Heather snipped delicately, wet tips scattering on the “Life’s a Beach” towel secured around Renee’s long neck. “Isn’t she shaped like Vienna?” Heather had asked Wyland when they moved into the apartment in Chicago and met their next-door neighbor for the first time.  Wyland’s father was footing the bill unknowingly for the both of them, and the perk was moving out of her all-girls dorm for something that made Heather feel grown up. The downside was staying glued to the couch and stuffing clusters of cheese into her mouth, knowing someone who looked like Renee was only a few feet away.

“What? What kind of question is that?” Wyland asked. No answer. She shrugged, and later that night, Heather had cried silently in bed until she thought the shaking would kill her.

“How do you like your classes? Wyland told me you’re studying math,” whistled the damp part of Renee’s scalp. The scissors sliced and relaxed at their hinge. Heather could picture her husband with Renee in the elevator, his shoulder stuck to hers like dried gum. “She’s a math major. Wants to teach. College level,” he’d say because saying it made him the prince who wasn’t too far removed from girls who wore glasses. Renee studied chemistry. She was looking for her prince.

“They’re good. Hard,” was Heather’s answer. And then a quick change of topic. Heather couldn’t remember what they had talked about because five small hours later Wyland was in Renee’s bed, and Heather was in Renee’s bedroom. She waited a few minutes before she cleared her throat. The act was stunning, welcomed in a sick way because it whispered “Aha!” in Heather’s ear and proved she had been right about Renee all along. It proved she wasn’t crazy.

The forgiveness part wasn’t as hard as Heather assumed it would be. When the pair of them had looked up, startled deer pawing at the sheets, Heather didn’t say a word. She went back to her and Wyland’s apartment and took up where she had left off. A plate of cheddar, Ritz crackers, Oprah on the TV. Her fiancé’s shameful feet shuffling in like a steady gush of blood. Later that night she submitted herself to Wyland’s arms, and Heather ignored how similar love had become to placing the sharp ends of everything against the worming vein in her neck.

Parked outside her mother’s home beneath Saturday’s morning sun, Heather took note of how she was no longer vulnerable to life’s razored edges, not like with Renee. There was power now, the needle in a vein feeling of being better than Wyland, feeling sorry for Vienna, and housing their indiscretions like jewels in a box. 

The night before, Wyland had been asleep when Heather finally went inside after coming home from the diner. It was a pretend slumber, but she didn’t test it. She was too tired, and sticky, and unwilling to feed him what he already knew so she took a shower. She washed away the diner’s pancakes working through her bowels and the eggs in her teeth. She scrubbed the heat she used to have for her husband before he became her husband and watched it slurp through the shower drain. She closed her eyes to memories of cutting his hair.

When he left that morning, it was her turn to pretend to sleep, and when she had woken up, she had to come to terms with her situation, the reason she stayed with a man she did not love and who couldn’t possibly love her in return. The reason for confronting him or Vienna was the furthest thing from her mind. 

If she looked at it in the sunlight that beamed off her cracked dashboard, Heather knew it was because of the feeling that had always won her over. She wanted to be in control. 

Now in the car parked outside her mother’s home, Heather accepted the car engine rumbling beneath her. Its noise was in her teeth, distorting the equilibrium in her ears. What she couldn’t accept was how dismal her mother’s house looked framed in the passenger side window. An askew black shudder, a taped-mouth door the color of rusted metal. Rain settling in the cracks of the walkway because the walkway buckled and held on to everything. The faceless gnome in the garden. One of the few evenings Heather had partied during high school, she had come home drunk as a skunk. It was a terrible night, the kind of night that made the next morning’s school day seem like a dark hole into oblivion. The cheerleaders had made fun of her, and she would have never gone if Amber hadn’t begged her to. In Tina McCafferty’s basement they had said she was a cow, and the only reason they invited her was for the sheer entertainment of it. This, after she had confessed her love for Wyland, her loathing for Vienna, and had imbibed enough hot whiskey to thunder her insides. Amber had just smirked, sucking on Heather’s delicious confession. And when Heather arrived home after walking the night with unsteady feet, that garden troll, that obnoxious plaster gnome hunkered in the wet earth, had look at her with two smug-colored eyes.

“You know, screw you,” she had said, teetering on her thick but diffident legs. They wouldn’t heed her command to go inside, to sink beneath the sheets of her bed. Instead, they wobbled and bucked, keeping her chained to a small circle in the front yard. They kept her close enough to smell that stupid gnome’s breath.

She had felt the bat before she spotted it, the sort of feeling she’d revisit years later in college—the way alcohol could make her feel all things, even the things she had bullied herself into forgetting. It was a baseball bat in the neighbor’s yard—a long, hard tongue against her shin, snug against her spine. It was cold and unbreakable in her hands. It reminded her that she wasn’t wearing enough clothes, low-slung jeans, a tiny top. She had wanted to look like the other girls, but she only looked like what she always looked like. A cow. 

She swung. She missed at first and stumbled into the stinging brick of the house. She felt the open wound in her shoulder, and it made her angry. She swung again but this time she didn’t miss.

Her mother never knew about the gnome. How could she? It was out of view from the window, and Caroline hardly took to the windows anyway. If she ventured outside at all, she’d stick mainly to the backyard, never the front. So, for years the creature with a gap for a face had twitched in a sad patch of dirt, and Heather had never done anything about it. Not even when she had come back to Burling Gates for good.

Heather took a donut from the pink cardboard box in the seat next to her. She wasn’t sure why she had brought it, why she even brought a thermos of decaf. The house wasn’t fit for breathing, let alone ingesting. Maybe she just wanted to make this seem normal. Maybe she was just nervous.

Cheeks packed tight with bear claw, Heather watched the Prius sparkle down Gulling Boulevard. She felt drunk, like Vienna was navigating her sternum with all four wheels. She could feel Vienna’s smile in the orifice of her ear. Her rod-thin fingers in the spaces between her ribs. Heather’s excitement sparked a cluttered mass of flames, and the thought of combusting was of no consequence. The feel of a match between her fingers was intoxicating. Like smoke in a lung. 

“Hey,” she said when Vienna had pulled up and parked behind her. The girl was wearing a turquoise jumper and wedges at least two inches tall. Straps the color of snake tongues wound up her calves. “Oh.”

“What? What’s wrong?” Vienna asked. Her mouth twisted into a kewpie “o,” a small section of teeth exposed. Heather caught herself wondering what her husband saw, his face so close to Vienna’s. But this was nudged out by another thought. The way Heather’s fingers had felt digging into Vienna’s starving bicep in middle school.

“Nothing, it’s just dirty and cramped in there. You think you’ll be okay in...that?” Heather let her finger float to Vienna’s middle. The bump seemed to have multiplied its cells overnight, but Heather reasoned this was only because she knew whose baby it was. She noticed because she was shackled to Vienna’s gut. Its breath and life were essential to the oxygen pumping erratically in Heather’s lungs. To the baby girl swishing her solid strokes in Heather’s belly. Dolores Caroline.

“Yeah.” Vienna smiled and piloted a route around the puddle on the walk with deft feet.  She pointed at the maimed gnome and mused, “Your mom wasn’t a fan, huh?” and Heather just shrugged and shouldered by her, leaving the coffee and donuts to stale in the car. She put the key into the lock, and when it clicked, so did her heart.

The smell. It curdled and blanketed their shoulders. It kept them warm with the gut rot stench of decaying animal parts and the musk that comes when water sits and soils itself.

“Oh,” Vienna said, instinctually grabbing for the facemask Heather fished out from the wide pocket of her sweats. This was stupid, Heather could hear rote and recited inside her skull.  But Vienna circled around her and walked in, a type of curiosity Heather was sure coupled nicely with the desire to work with the dead.

“Should you be doing this? In your condition?” Vienna asked. Heather didn’t have the heart to tell her their conditions weren’t so different, so she said it was fine. She did it before, and she could do it again. “But we can’t possibly move all this stuff. Or anything, really,” Vienna added.

“No. I brought a notebook in my bag. I’ll list the things that can be sold. I’ll pick up Mom’s outfit for the funeral, and I think I can get Wyland’s dad to gift us some money to rent a cleaning crew to trash the rest of it.” It was worse than wishful thinking. It was the stuff elves and wicked witches were composed of, but Heather couldn’t stop babbling, pretending she had drafted any sort of plan, because if she didn’t, she would crumble as easily as the gnome’s delicate face.

“Heather, it stinks in here. You couldn’t get her outfit dry cleaned in time, and even if you did, I’m not sure it would...” Vienna let her sentence dangle when she saw the golf club in Heather’s hand. Its metal offered a small glint in the anemic light. 

“You’re right,” Heather said, dry-eyed. She took the lamp down first, the Tiffany’s reproduction her mother was certain would cash in a couple thousand. There was the oil painting of a Lassie-inspired collie, a nice find courtesy of the Home Shopping Network. She stabbed the dog in the eye and drew the metal shaft down until it hit frame. She could hear Vienna gasp and move backward into a brittle stack of newspapers. The papers quaked downward, sending with them a swirl of jaundiced snow. The TV next. The stupid box had been a third parent, and when Heather came after it, the burning behind her shut lids could only be matched by the burning in her belly. Scattered glass chimed at her feet. 

“Heather, please stop.” Vienna was coughing behind her mask. The sound was muffled, but her eyes were not. She was choking.

Heather suddenly saw the golf club as something separate from herself. She dropped it, expecting to hear a hard clank against the floor but instead, a smothered thud.

“Just breathe. It’ll be okay,” Heather said to a mass of spice-scented ropes, Vienna’s hair. She settled Vienna’s breathing with her own—a slow, strong inhale, an even slower exhale. “You okay?” Heather asked, and when Vienna’s ivory fingers ceased their shaking, she took a step back and looked Heather in the eye. She removed the mask.

“Outside,” she managed, and Heather followed her out the front door.

Neither of them spoke. Heather waited for Vienna to turn on her corked heals, wasting no time to avoid the rain puddle. But she didn’t.

“How long?” Vienna said when her words finally charged at the air. 

“How long what.” Declarative. No question in Heather’s reply. Heather touched her ripe belly and dreaded searching for the answer. She could feel Dolores’s desperate kick.

“This. This, Heather. How long has your mother lived like this?” Vienna teetered tall, head cloud-bound. It was hard for Heather to look up at that angle and see the sun’s frankness to the right of Vienna’s head.

“Years. A long time.” A final strong kick against her hand. It was admitting failure somehow. She couldn’t help her mother. She couldn’t save herself. 

Vienna removed her hand from the back of her neck and let it fall unchecked against her thigh. Heather would have looked like a squat monkey making the same motion but everything Wyland loved about Vienna was in that one fluid drop. It hurt, infected her like a cavity. 

“Are you kidding me? You lived here? Growing up you lived here?” Vienna took a step toward her. 

“Yes.” Heather felt her chin protrude against her will.

“While you were torturing me for being ‘fat’ and for who my mother was, for who you thought she was, you were living here? Like a lunatic? With a lunatic?” The cavity festered, and Heather almost placed her hand at her mouth. She was used to it from her father, from herself. But it had been a long time since someone else said the simple truth out loud, and to hear it was a scalpel slivering her liver.

“She wasn’t... She wasn’t that. She had her hang ups, sure. It was just that we couldn’t afford any help. I couldn’t help her.” Maybe she whispered it. Heather wasn’t sure if her lips were even moving. Only a throb in her teeth. A cold sweat in her liver. The incessant need to pee pulsing in her groin.

“You forced me into a nightmare. My whole existence was a fraction of a life, and you made me think my mother was evil.” Vienna stopped, and the sunlight lit her crown on fire, a halo of white circling her scalp. Her eyes were expelling the truth. They were wide, angry. But her lips kneaded it, letting it sink through her skin into her bloodstream. “I had the hardest time looking her in the eye because of you. I had the hardest time...” Vienna’s jaw unhinged itself and her eyes were frantically trying to make sense of the busted walkway. “...because of you and your crazy mother.” Her shoulders straightened, and she seemed to grow six feet in front of Heather. Heather embraced how warped it was, Vienna having any right to spit hate at her when she had taken her husband, his boundary-breaching love. But then she figured it was only the response to a lifetime of wrong, of wrong Heather had a hand in sculpting. “How dare you,” Vienna said. The word “crazy” read like a ticker in her pupils.

Heather sucked in a deep breath, swallowing what she was planning to say before she regurgitated it. “How dare you for sleeping with my husband.” There it was, out in the open. Heather could physically feel her control slipping out of her hands, and if she were forced to place it, she was sure it was culminating heavily in her bladder. 

“What are you...”

“24 Field Grove. The marble. The checkered floor. The crown molding. The place you go to be with the father of my kid. Ring a bell?” Heather watched the blue in Vienna’s eyes freeze then break. A nerve jumped in her perfectly crafted lip. Heather waited for a second wave of shouting, but none came. Just the sound of a swallowed tongue and cork splashing through water.

Heather watched Vienna fit herself inside the Prius, her moves not so graceful this time. She jerked, and tugged, and slammed the door shut so hard, Heather was sure it could have woken her mother. 

On the concrete walkway, Heather licked the delicious crumbs of catching her opponent defenseless, passing her tongue over her chewed up lips. She’d worry about the outcome later. The separation, the divorce. The knowing that she was absolutely alone in the world except for the suddenly frightening prospect inside her stomach. But for now, she’d relish the taste of an unwanted victory and momentarily ignore the pool of urine soaking through her pants.