Chapter Eleven
Vienna

My hand instinctually dives between my seat and the console, and I ignore the sensation of pulled skin and tiny cuts until I remove one of the fruit pies I bought at the gas station. They’re stashed throughout the car in a messed-up game of hide and seek I play, the girl who eats and regurgitates like a spawnless bird.

I drive off away from Heather, and as I stuff my cheeks with pastry and gelatinous fruit, I suffer a panic that only rivals the one I had the moment I killed my mother.

It’s one of those facts that has always cut so thick, so solid for me that I’m sure it’s printed somewhere in the reference section of the Burling Gates Middle School library. But nobody else has ever believed me except my brother. 

Definitely not my father.

When I told Dad, there was only the glow of our mute television in the living room and the burning joint Troy pinched between his fingers high in the oak tree in our backyard. It was before the fight, before my father kicked him out and Rosa became pregnant, so he hung around in secret sometimes, and I know it was because he couldn’t stand to leave me. 

“No,” Dad said. He sat in his pajamas. He wore the same pair every evening since my mother died, and they started to take on a stench representative of the way he looked.

“It’s true.”

“No, it isn’t.” He placed his arm around me and initiated the usual dance. He cried, and it was hot in my hair, and I couldn’t tell him he was squeezing my shoulders too tight. He whispered, “I love you” to his dead wife and fell asleep that way, his warm, unkempt body forcefully lulling against mine. I struggled out of his grasp and placed the blanket that was draped on the back of the couch over him. I looked through the window to the oak tree, but the tree didn’t light with fire because Troy was at the back door. He lifted his hand at me, and when he walked away, I wept hard and ran to my father’s toilet to vomit.

“She’s in shock,” Dad had said to Gram the next morning, the morning of my mother’s viewing. Gram and my father were talking in the office at the home, and Gram kept mentioning how cold it was, her heels hollow against the wood floor as she warmed up her fat arms with both hands. It hadn’t been cold. If anything, the place was sweltering with grown up bodies pretending to know my mother. 

“Vienna doesn’t know what she’s saying. We have the report, Louise was hit by a car, it was raining. The guy who hit her, well...” Gram choked through the facts, stopping when her son plummeted to the ground. He fell to his knees, convulsing with grief while Gram looked on not knowing whether to touch him or run. 

I knew it was all true. Eugene Machado had run over my mother and then sped off to slam his car into the side of an abandoned warehouse. People said things—that my mother was a tramp and Eugene was a scorned lover—but no one could connect the two of them. My father reasoned it was an accident, that Eugene was scared to go to prison and ended his life before reaping the consequences. All I know is the way my mother’s bare arm felt in my hand as I released it and watched her swiftly spin to the ground before Eugene’s car washed us in light.

A black suited portion of my father wedged through the crack in the door where I was snooping. His face blistered, swollen with knowing his bottle-hungry wife had left him alone with two slighter versions of herself. I took two fingers in front of my eye and pinched my father’s disheveled tie straight, only for it to stay mercilessly crumpled. I know exactly what I’m saying, I thought as grieving bodies floated and bumped around me, white blood cells sent to heal my pain. 

“Oh, Vienna, Vienna.” The nasally song set the tone for the seconds ticking through my mother’s viewing. Wyland’s mother pulled me from the doorway and embraced me, smothering me with her overly fragrant chest. The scent was terrifying, like a rose choking a gardenia, and for an instant I rolled my eyes backward and succumbed to the delicious feeling of being breathless. But just as quickly as my suffocation commenced, she pinched my twiggy biceps with caffeinated fingers and pulled me back, inching her face too close to my nose.

“If there’s anything, and I mean anything you need Vienna, you call me. I will come at two in the morning and check for monsters under your bed if I have to. And I will treat you as my own, you understand?” I searched Margaret Turnbull’s half-moon lids because looking her in the eyes was not an option.

“Yes,” I whispered, hoping it was adequate, and it was because again I plunged face first into Margaret’s chest and counted the seconds until I would black out onto the hardwood floor. I wanted to tell her she could help me by calling the police, by turning me in, but I hadn’t even told Wyland what I had done. And besides, if my father didn’t believe me, why would anyone else? Mrs. Turnbull was gone, replaced by the shuffling feet and rumpled pants legs of other mourners.

It was only after the funeral, after Granddad’s arrest and Rosa became pregnant that somebody believed me. My brother.

“Where’s Daddy Dearest?” Troy rasped into the phone. I could hear the black in his lungs, see him stitched into Gram’s couch with a cigarette snared between two fingers. 

“Morgue,” I said, the word slipping my lips like the sliver of evening sun dripping through the window. Fortressed behind stacks of boxes, I sat in one of the extra rooms on the home’s second floor. I had found our old house phone and plugged it into the wall next to Dad’s box of cadaver books. It was only weeks ago I had hovered in his hands above my mother’s coffined body, kissing her chalky mouth goodbye, and now I slept footsteps away from where I had suspended mid-air.

“You should lock the door on him. So, what’s up?” Troy said. I shivered partly from my bare feet glued to the September chilled floor and partly from the fear of not being believed. 

“I did it. The night mom died.”

“Did what?” Troy paused, and I imagined him dragging on his cigarette, our grandmother too entrenched in bill sorting to look up and say anything.

“I killed Mom.” The seconds were there swimming beneath my skin. The dying sun seemed to billow with them.

“What are you talking about, Sausage? You didn’t kill mom. That degenerate and his car killed her.”

I looked up at one of the wood-paneled walls and concentrated on the rounded edges of a nail hole. “No. I killed her. I pushed her, and she lost her balance and that’s how she died.” I had sunk to the floor. It was strong and solid beneath me and ran cold against my skin. The warmth couldn’t reach me in that room.

I waited for the click or a string of carefully braided curse words. Instead, I could feel Troy’s head bobbing through the phone.

“You didn’t mean to,” he said. I didn’t argue with him although every inch of me knew he was wrong. “It’s okay, Sausage,” he added weakly, listening to me cry. I never questioned why he thought I could be capable of something like that because we both knew the way our mother had enclosed her fingers around me, the way she tugged and pulled until my seams grew weak. 

As I force bits of pastry through my strained lips, I don’t allow my mind to index the details, the worst moment of my life. Instead, I curl the car to a stop at a light and glance over to my left at a man in a BMW. He looks me over, and his right eye squints when he smiles. It’s a sewn together slit, tailored like the small-mouthed buttonholes in his suit, and the shock of blonde fringe across his forehead is the color of Wyland’s. He looks away when he processes my sticky face and the tears trailing through the crumbs. 

How dare you for sleeping with my husband. The notes had been quick drawn, still smoking from Heather’s scabby lips. I wanted to tell her I’m sorry. That I’m tired of everything. 

The time I had spent with Wyland—the married man version—was brittle and loose. Sand through my fingers, in my shoe. I found grains everywhere but never had the patience to count them. Those moments bound in a three-month span weren’t definitive. They felt like loose change in the couch cushions.

So, when Heather had mentioned the marble, the tile, the street name like she had tattooed it in her skin, I couldn’t place it exactly. But now it starts to color as my foot finds the gas, and the Prius lights a burning trail to Gram’s apartment.

Our affair wasn’t expected, hadn’t happened as easily as two fingers snapping. I had first learned Wyland was back in town three years ago, and the way I learned it made me feel like a townie. I had been birthed from the Burling Gates cloth, and knowing the one boy I had loved forever and truly had moved back to town made one thing evident: I had never moved away.

“You knew him, right, Vienna?” Mrs. Marks, the school librarian had asked me as our hands brushed past one another folding sweaters, whipping straight wrinkled pants. We were in the gymnasium, setting out clothing for the school’s charity drive. I had volunteered for the last eight years, breaking my strict “avoid Burling Gates like the plague” policy every winter because I knew full well that Loretta hadn’t just brought me and my brother clothes from the church’s basement when we were younger. I knew Loretta picked from these same rectangular folding tables when the home was officially purchased, and the pot of money between Dad and Loretta was more like a coin purse. And even though Loretta had scrimped, saved, and sacrificed for a man who would always be committed entirely to his dead wife, I knew she had never once mentioned to the volunteering mothers who the stacks of shirts and pants were for, the soft scent of bodies in their seams. I was eternally grateful for that. 

“Yes.” That’s as much as I could offer my old librarian, whose fingers were sucked dry and whose skin reminded me of thinly sliced headcheese. It was as if Wyland had walked in that moment, and I was caught in the thick of it, the reality that venturing out and becoming somebody was never an option for me.

After that day, I started to do my hair and slick my lips with the best shades of lipstick. I started dressing better, opting for springtime dresses, knee-high boots instead of cut-offs or galoshes. My paycheck was saved for the mere purpose of pretending I earned more than I did. But for the longest time, I didn’t see him. Six months. Six months until courage balled its fist and knocked against my breastbone. I drove by Turnbull Realty. I parked near the curb a couple of storefronts down. I waited. 

What I hadn’t expected to see was Heather behind the wheel of the Turnbull’s old Lincoln Town Car. “The Boat” as Wyland coined it when I would sit next to him strapped in the back, and Mrs. Turnbull would arc her gnat-like body with the wheel’s direction. We’d get ice cream—a treat for Wyland, a secret for me—and Mrs. Turnbull would smile and nod to no one in that way she did. The spark from her diamond earring would set our booth ablaze, and a feeling washed hard at my dirty creases. Respect.

It was part of the reason why I’ve avoided Mr. and Mrs. Turnbull since graduating high school. Their door was "always open.” They were “here” for me as was evident of Margaret Turnbull suffocating me in her chest the day of my mother’s viewing. But their offers fell on my scarred ears, and the message was received like static through a speaker. I didn’t want them to know how hot my failure stung. I didn’t want them to know me as the girl who never left Burling Gates, so I became accustomed to swerving around aisles in the grocery store, avoiding the packed waiting room at the doctor’s office, just so I wouldn’t have to compile a list of lies to caulk the cleaved joints of my life.

When I had seen Heather stumble The Boat into a space just two spots in front of me, it was this same avoidance that punched the clock in my heart. I wanted to strain my car around and sit locked in my cold, shelled room, stabbing my pencil in circles until I could shade the exact shape of my misery. But fear glued my thighs to the seat, and instead, I watched as the one woman who knew how to break me—even better than my mother—dissected the dirty fall leaves with purposed feet. Heather was still with him, which meant he wouldn’t be with me.

That night, Rosa had drug me out to The Watering Hole, a club crusted with locals, built with obnoxiously loud women and men looking for a conquest or forgetting their last. The place had malted, sticky with breath and spilled drinks. In my knotted gut, I knew there might be a few people I’d recognize there, the fistful of classmates who were left behind alongside me and Rosa and the misguided who were more than pleased to call Burling Gates home. I was scared someone would spot me, and I fingered the dark with both eyes but already knew Wyland wouldn’t be one of them. 

“Just tell me why,” Rosa said. We perched on tall stools at a round table, two birds in a tree a stone's throw from the floor. We drank martinis—Rosa’s contribution, claiming I deserved a drink, and even though I never drink unless it’s with Troy, I took her up on the offer. The stabbed line of olives kept poking at my lip. 

“I don’t—”

“Don’t tell me you don’t know. We both know how long you’ve loved him. And we both know how long you’ve been aware that he’s married. So why bother with him?” There was no avoiding Rosa’s question. With a mane of hair, pony-tailed and draped over her sleeveless shoulder, Rosa was a body with force, curved and unavoidable. 

“Because it’s not okay. Rosa, I don’t think it’s supposed to be this way. I wasn’t supposed to fail. And now he’ll know I did.” When my tongue moved the “f” through my teeth, tears fell. Rosa stood up and came to my side, her anchored arms sliding around my waist, and I found a mound of hair, a nest to fall into. Someone in the club had whistled at us. 

It would be okay because of Rosa, and because I had a job, and because it probably wasn’t the most soul-sucking thing in the world to live where you were born even if the thought felt akin to the concept of defecating where I ate. I was determined to take a new approach, enmeshed in the intricacies of a working funeral home, setting up easier modes of information storage, making myself known with the different distributors that kept the home stocked with chemicals and coffins. For over two years, I became accustomed to Dad looking at me differently, filling up my coffee mug a minute before I entered the break room. His version of “thank you.”

It had felt almost right for a while, and there had even been chatter in my head of sewing up a pair of big girl panties and putting a down payment on a house. I looked for a while, opting for an agent with Kiplinger Properties to show me around because I was over Wyland. I was an adult now.

“As you can see, this one won’t stay on the market long. Updated, fresh paint, enough closet space to fit a family of five!” Eleanor Kiplinger was more scent than woman. She was a petunia with two stumpy legs and a behind that fought against her pantsuit. Her voice talked to the double-paned windows, the Berber carpet. Soon I was wrapped so tight in Eleanor’s sound, I hardly noticed the way it never paused to breathe.

I had touched everything in that house until it felt a part of me. Everything seemed cold, but in a good way, a clean way. The faucet bit, the toilet chilled, the floor ran up my arm, an army of bumps. Eleanor raised an eyebrow when I had crouched down, but I hadn’t cared. I wanted this place. I wanted this future.

“Hello, hello, hello!” A voice, a man’s boomed through the front door and caught Eleanor’s off guard. I immediately stopped touching the floor.

“I’m sorry Eleanor, I think we’re a little early. You mind if I show these folks around? I have an appointment at two.” There could have been one or a hundred of them. I didn’t notice how many people had elbowed through the doorway because I could feel my organs moving in my stomach. He didn’t look the same, not the high school Wyland. Not the Wyland who had sent photos from Chicago until I had stopped writing back. His hair was cut, shorn as close to his head as I had ever witnessed it. A few curls struggled to straighten themselves. They looked confused.

“That’s fine, Wyland. I think we’re finishing up here.” Eleanor glanced at me, sizing my reaction. She was given a side profiled fish stare, my lower lip disconnected from my top, my eyes popped and bright as bulbs.

“Hi,” he said to me, and the couple behind him nodded. The child at their legs raced his tiny car across my freshly painted windowsills. I could see my adult dream pop a hole with each furious squeal of the car’s plastic wheels. I smiled and followed Eleanor’s scent out the front door.

“So?” Eleanor had asked, and I replied with “I have to think about it.” And, of course, I did but not about the house.

He called three days later. Said a buddy of his worked with Eleanor “The Ice Queen” and snuck a look at her planner to find my number. Wyland’s voice on my cell re-invited itself into my ear. I lost a real sense of Vienna Oaks from that moment on. I lost sleep, lost weight. I lost my nerve.

“What if she finds out?” I had asked in the kitchen, the one with the black and white tile. My mind finds its fingers, kneads the memory. In the car, my skin paces a snail’s crawl, and it feels like it’s a being beyond myself. The thought of Heather’s back against the outside wall—her head and hands heavy with grief—buries its splinters so deep, I have to pinch and pull to feel them.

“She won’t. All she does is stay at home. It’s pathetic.” He had taken a swig of the coffee I had brought him. I watched the way his lips curved around the plastic lid in someone else’s kitchen. I had wanted to feel those lips, the ones I had sketched in my room. The ones I’d think about in bed, in high school when I’d shut my eyes and pretend he was breathing there with me. So, it made sense to me, sitting at a table in someone else’s house, discussing the detailed steps of an affair I could taste along with the air freshener Wyland had soaked the living room with. The soured notes of chemical lavender had made their bed in my teeth.

“I’m sorry,” I had said before I could stop myself. I struggled my hand across the oak table and toured his bared skin with my fingertips. The apology hadn’t been for him at all but for his wife, the woman who had made my minutes into nightmares as a child. And even though Heather had changed the very DNA that danced and twirled to the beat of who I was—made it fearful, made it tremble—it no longer mattered. Heather Hammel was pathetic. Heather Hammel was on the losing end. 

The car clips a curb as I turn. A soft “dang it” escapes my lips. I straighten the wheel and drive into a parking spot, and I watch as the nerves in my hands quiver. I have a hard time turning off the engine.

I know the impossible—that my love is stacked and assembled for a boy, a girl, and a ghost. A hard-edged love for Wyland. A fearful love for Heather. A love for myself before I ever pushed my mother into a permanent sleep. I think how I’m the only one in the world who’s screwed as tight as a nail in the wall.

But then I look up and see Troy through the window.