Chapter Fifteen
Vienna

All three of them in a pew. It was worse than an out of body experience because I was fully in my body at Caroline Hammel’s funeral yesterday morning, and if it weren’t for Loretta shooting me a series of concerned glances, I wouldn’t have taken the time to rummage for an anxiety pill in my bag in the office. It took the solid body of crushed up powder to keep me lucid, to keep me from locking myself in the morgue.

I took another one this morning, and watching Wyland’s wedding ring twist rhythmically against his sweaty water glass, I’m glad I did. I can still taste Amber’s bright fire hair, the way she kept kneading Heather’s hand. I can still see Wyland’s arm around Heather, his fingers lightly grazing Amber’s shoulder. The pill is lessening the sting of lemon spritzed in my sore, the base reality of relying on someone who has a hard time finding a use for me.

“Loretta was in rare form yesterday, huh?” Wyland says. The diner is a noisy hive, plates and silverware clattering, the chatter of hungry voices, so I watch his lips intently to catch each word. 

“She did manage an interesting number with her plunging neckline. Poor Dad never knows how to handle her. I actually owe her a couple hundred for her front bumper. I cracked it over the weekend,” I said. Loretta hadn’t reacted as I thought she would when I had driven home Saturday afternoon from Gram’s. I expected a parental chiding on her behalf, but instead, she had been frantic, asking if I was hurt when she caught me out in the driveway. I’m sure our clinic talk had something to do with it.

Wyland nods. I’m not sure he’s paying attention to me, and I can’t say that I’m in this moment either. Wyland had hugged me when we first awkwardly met at the diner door, and the smell was high school. It’s still in my nose, aggravating my senses, and my mind creeps to his bedroom, watching a body beneath the white sheet on his bed. It was breathing, it was warm when I placed a hand on it. It was Amber when it turned to face me.

“Sausage. What are you doing here?” I was lost. For a moment I asked myself what it was I was doing there because I never questioned Amber or her cruelty. After she and Heather had transferred to the all-girls school, Rachel picked up where she had left off, and it was almost like she wanted to show Heather and Amber up on how evil she could be to me. One time I locked myself in a bathroom stall after Rachel spread the rumor I was anorexic. I fell asleep on the stinging cold tiles and was woken by the janitor who poked me conscious with his broom. The worst part was that no one had been looking for me. The second worst part was knowing that Amber had fueled the rumor’s flames over at Saint Mary’s, and the third was having to consider that Amber and Rachel might be right.

“I, uh, I thought you were Wyland.” I was stupidly fixed to my spot, too close to Amber’s partial nudity. She gave me a look that said back up, and I did. When she removed the sheet and started to dress, I felt faint and turned my back to her.

“Well, he’s not here. Said he needed to get down to Turnbull and talk to his dad about something.” I nodded trying to place why Mrs. Turnbull wasn’t there carting off Amber by her porcelain ear. She was probably at her women’s group, raising money for some disease Burling Gates had never heard of before. The back door was unlocked like it always was, so I had run upstairs, not thinking to knock. Not thinking I’d be stumbling through a conversation with Amber.

“Oh...okay.”

“Listen, no need to mention this to anyone. One time thing, before he leaves for college.  Thought I’d give him a parting gift since he helped me get through Sister Warner’s English class from hell.” So, this is how it was then. My best friend was walking away from me and apparently with a girl who couldn’t even master the English language. Amber touched my shoulder and turned me around to face her. Her eyes took me in, really noticing me, and her lips twisted into a smile.

“You love him, don’t you. You’re really—” The door opened downstairs, and Amber lost her footing. 

“Hello?” Mrs. Turnbull called through the home. We waited until we heard her bedroom door close and snuck down the stairs through the front door. We ran until we hit sidewalk and were out of view of Wyland’s home. She looked at me, Amber, and it was the only real moment I was ever offered from her.

“He’s not that great if you want my opinion,” she yelled at me before skipping off across the street.    

“Listen, we both know why we’re here,” Wyland says, and Amber fades, but the words “he’s not that great” are written like a caption beneath Wyland’s chin.

“It would be the end of me,” he says. We’re a table away from the booth I had shared with Heather, and I glance at it too many times until the older black gentleman sitting in it looks up and smiles. 

“Don’t you get it?” Wyland continues, leaning on his arms, his head a pointed missile at my chest. “I don’t want this.”

I smile back at the gentleman in the booth, fractionally listening. I am lost in limbo, lost in my thoughts that are now cavorting into yesterday when Heather had buried her mother in the ground. I wasn’t there for that part, the part that always features the squeaky creak of turning wheels and the sudden realization that the end is as final as it sounds. Instead, I sat in an empty pew in the viewing room, the same seat Heather had taken alongside Amber Fritch who looked like the overgrown version of her younger self—larger, still flat chested but layered with a sense of entitlement. I didn’t like seeing the two of them together, Heather frankly disheveled and Amber decked in glittering diamonds. It was unfair the way life had been sweet to Amber, ripe for the plucking. It was unfair how the intolerable always manage to get so lucky. 

In that pew, I couldn’t help thinking of Heather’s face when she had caught me and Wyland in the break room. Caught. That’s not the right word; we weren’t doing anything except tolerating each other, Wyland doing a better job of it than me. I shouldn’t have wiped at his tie when he spilled a drop of coffee, but there it was again, another habit snapping at my flesh until I manage to do what I do best: what’s expected of me.

My father had joined me in the pew, bothering my thoughts. His suit rubbed against my bare arms, and I pretended for a moment it was my grandfather sitting next to me. “I need to talk to you,” Dad said. 

“What about?” I was hoping Rosa would join me, but we only exchanged a few terse words when she had left earlier instead of staying to read in the morgue like she usually does. I ignored Loretta’s raised eyebrow and mumbled something about Rosa being on her period. For some reason, that excuse always goes unchecked with Loretta.

“Yesterday, Heather came in to drop off her mother’s suit.”

“I know. Loretta told me,” I said.

“Before she left, she said something odd. She congratulated me on becoming a grandfather.” Ow. One of my ribs was spearing my heart, and all I could feel was a relentless stabbing. “I asked Rosa what Heather had meant.”

“What did Rosa say?” I spoke up too soon. Dad’s head teetered on its neck.

“She said she had no clue.” I sighed, and just as quickly, swallowed my breath back up. “So do you know?” he asked. I felt like water was rushing inside of me, churning. Drowning me.  “Do you know what she was talking about Vienna?” he asked again when I didn’t answer. It was my moment if I wanted it. And I realized I desperately did.

He listened. I’ll give Dad that. And he didn’t ream me out on the cost of a child or how he refused to babysit for free. He just sat there, and for a few hard minutes, I saw my own grief reflected onto him, and I was grateful for the reprieve. But still, I couldn’t tell him whose it was. And he didn’t ask.

“What are you going to do?” he said. 

“No clue.”

“Well, whatever you decide, let me know. You might need to take maternity leave, and I’ll have to calculate that,” he coughed, partly grunting as he wrenched himself out of the pew. “You know, Loretta. She likes talking. She’d be good at this,” he said, almost in a daze. And I hated him so much at that moment. I had given up my childhood for him to cry in my hair, and he couldn’t even think to hold my hand.

“All right,” said the mouse in my throat. He walked away, and he was good at walking away. I’ll give him that, too.

The salad I ordered is watching me, mocking me because I’ve only stabbed it with my fork twice. “I don’t care what it will do to you,” I say more to it than Wyland.

“What?” he asks, his white-sleeved arms coming dangerously close to the leftover omelet on his plate.

“I just don’t care if it’s the end of you.”

“Vienna, what are you saying? You want this? You want to have this thing and out yourself to Heather? We can’t do that to her.” He grows quiet, and again I can feel the love we used to have, now divided and parceled out to someone who isn’t me. I look away from him. I try to still the nausea that is conquering my stomach with quiet breath. 

“What happened?” I ask. 

“What?”

“What happened? Why didn’t we end up together?” I’ve never asked him that, not when he went off to college, not when we started sleeping together for the second time in our lives. I felt like asking it would ruin everything, and I could never let the horrible reality, the idiocy of that hit me, but it pummels me now, and I don’t let it stop. 

“Are you okay?” he asks, and I realize I’m not. The pain becomes carnivorous, different than the nausea that’s become routine. It’s radiating from my pelvis and wrapping tight from my spine. My legs move without my permission.

“Just answer me. Please.”

He sighs and manages his fingers through his curls. “You know everything about me, Vienna. I needed that. When we were kids and the stuff I went through with Dad and you with your mom, we needed each other. But I feel like, I’ve moved beyond that. We’re older and our worlds are different.” His eyes. I remember them young and unlined, but now the crinkles around them radiate in time with my pain. 

“I love you Vienna. I always will. And I’ll remember you as a friend even if you hate me, but things are changing. And when things change, you’ve always just stood still.” I can’t tell him I could have changed. I could have gone to Chicago with him because I know it’s not true. He never wanted me to go, not because he didn’t want me to but because he knew I couldn’t handle the world on my own, dragging him down with me. 

“I have to go,” I manage, lifting my weight from my chair. I feel a million times heavier, and my legs feel unsteady. They don’t know what to do with the pain.

“How are we going to fix this?” he says, looking up at me. 

“We won’t.” I grab my purse, an excruciating task. I follow the beat of pain taking my belly hostage to the front door.

“What about the open house?” he calls out behind me, but I ignore him. I’m too busy looking for the sun, its warmth guiding me out into the parking lot.

In the car I feel unholy. The light is leaving me, and it’s something more than the physical pain. It’s the voided sense of being alone. 

I decide to head for the clinic. I have time to stop in and talk to someone, maybe take something for the pain. I start to cry because I’m kidding myself. I know exactly what’s happening even as I take corners and stop at traffic lights. I find my father’s windbreaker in the back and cover my lap with it.

I pull into the parking lot and kill the engine. A group of uniformed high schoolers sway and chant with signs. One on the fringe stabs at his nose, and I can tell he doesn’t want to be there. He holds a “Life is the Only Choice” poster board, and it wilts in his hands, bowing to the ground while most of the others wield their signs upward, penetrating the sky. They chant and dance around each other. The pain blurs them all together.

I’m held hostage along with the others who sit idle in their cars, some looking for imaginary change under their seats, others cramming their chargers into the orifices of their cell phones. I hold on to the ache in my belly with my skintight arm, the bone in my wrist vulgarly bulging. I can’t stop thinking.

“Excuse me. Excuse me?” There’s tapping at the passenger-side window. I look over and see one of the protesters, a girl with long blonde hair twisted into a tight braid at the nape of her neck. I pause for a moment, breathless, sweating. I roll down the window.

“I just wanted to tell you a little bit about why God hates abortion.” The girl digs into a messenger bag slung across her shoulder and feeds a stack of pamphlets through the two-inch gap in the window. They rain down and slap into a puddle on the seat. I look up and roll down the window until there is nothing between me and the girl.

“Oh, uh, usually I’m waved away or practically ran over,” the girl says. She’s wearing a plaid skirt, a white button down and a vest with St. Mary’s insignia. It reminds me of the times Wyland and I would spy Heather Hammel in her uniform after school. We saw her once at Manor Market—her cart loaded with socks, underwear, freezer meals—and I remember the way Wyland dropped my hand when she glanced over at us. 

“Are you okay?” the girl asks me, and I stare at the brick building before me where the nurses have gathered outside for a cigarette break, withering beneath their smoke. I want to ask the girl to help me, to drag me inside. But the words dry inside me before I can deliver them. I just shake my head at her. 

“Uh, okay well we’re made in his image, and well, if we kill what’s made in God’s image then we’re sinning. Life is never ours to take.” The girl looks like she might faint. I swallow my spit. 

I concentrate through the windshield on an Asian nurse streaming a long line of smoke out the side of her mouth. The girl fishes inside her messenger bag as if checking for her cheat sheet. I turn the car back on with shaky fingers and creep Loretta’s damaged Prius away from the girl with the braid, the protesters, the car-dotted lot. I turn away from the clinic and onto the street. 

My heart is windblown, frost bitten. It’s dead in my chest. The truth is a blatant road sign as I force my eyes open to the traffic. It’s something I remember reading on Heather’s lips in eighth grade when Rosa’s world stopped turning, and Troy was forced away: God doesn’t hate you. But you sure as heck do. 

I make peace with the roads, numbly navigating their crooked turns with weak hands. I’ve ruined Loretta’s cloth seats, and beneath the windbreaker I found in the backseat, my lap is mangled with the aftermath of losing.

As I park in the driveway of the home, Loretta pulls up in the hearse behind the Prius, and I watch from my side mirror as her slight reflection grows massive.

She taps on the glass, and it requires everything I have left to push the button and watch the window disappear. “Hey honey, how was lunch with your friend? Vienna are you okay?”  Loretta has opened the door now, sticking her head inside and too close to my shoulder. I’m strapped with the safety belt. It’s the only thing keeping me upright. “Honey, you look really pale. You want to come in?” I shake my head “no” because I don’t want to leave my baby there, alone in a seat. I don’t want to rest my head. 

Loretta grabs at the windbreaker. I can hear her scream, yelling for my father to come outside. My father’s hands grip my shoulders, cradle me in his arms. I don’t want to leave my baby, but I don’t want to stop hearing his heartbeat either. 

I think about the girl at the clinic, what she had said about life, and I have a raw thought that maybe she’s right seeing I can’t even handle my own. But I can’t focus on her uniformed body, her hazy-edged face for long because the outside sun begins to dim. 

The inside sun, too.