Chapter Sixteen
Heather

Amber Fritch had stayed the night. This was evident as Heather gathered her swollen limbs and steadied herself upright only to kick Amber in the head.

“Ow,” Amber mumbled. She massaged the place where Heather had skimmed her. 

“What time is it?” Heather asked. She searched her right side to find her alarm clock but found her somber television instead. “Why are we in the living room?” she asked. Her head felt cotton-stuffed, her mouth its equivalent. She glanced at an exhausted flower arrangement on the side table and saw from the white envelope poking out of the stems, it was from her father. She looked around the room knowing it was the only one she’d find. 

“We couldn’t move you off the couch,” Amber yawned. She stretched a reckless arm inches away from Heather’s face.

“We?”

“Yeah. Me and Wyland.” Heather’s stomach was weak. The act of remembering set sharp upon, her but something else attacked her senses too. Burning.

“What’s that smell?” Heather asked.

“Oh crap!” Amber scrambled, her copper hair and frantic limbs reminding Heather of a spooked crab as she headed to the back of the house. Heather noticed something else that didn’t settle completely right with her. Amber was wearing Wyland’s t-shirt and a pair of his basketball shorts.

Heather entered the kitchen, dusty with newborn sun. It streamed in through the slatted blinds and caught Amber in her frenzy sending a soft, white puff from the fire extinguisher onto a blackened skillet on the stove.

“Where did you find that thing? I didn’t even know we had one.”

“Back of your pantry,” Amber yelled over the sound of the extinguisher emptying itself. “Mothers are always prepared,” she chirped, her voice failing as the white puff puttered out. Amber stared for a vacant moment at the mess of black and white on the stove. Heather watched her shoulders sink. She tuned into the hostile tick of the cat clock on the wall. 

“I had made breakfast. Fell back asleep,” Amber said. She turned slowly around, and Heather watched Amber’s face shrivel with grief. Her day-old mascara leaked Rorschach wings across her cheeks. “I’m so sorry.”

“No, um, no don’t do that,” Heather said, her hand hovering above Amber’s back. She was uncomfortable watching a woman like Amber break down, especially with her feet bare and cold against the tile floor. She wanted to pack Amber up in the Corolla and drag her across town where she could dry her tears in her satin sheets and give Heather her husband’s t-shirt back. “Seriously, it’s fine. House is still standing. Nobody’s dead.” Heather took the extinguisher from Amber’s hands and placed it on the counter. She wanted to ask Amber why she was standing in her kitchen and not at home with the twins, but she didn’t. Heather let her arm rest against Amber’s shoulder, and she felt Amber’s body quivering with something more powerful than pain.

“Not for that,” Amber managed, rubbing her face against Heather’s collar bone. Heather winced at the thought of having to rub out the mascara from her top. 

“Then for what?”

“Brent left me,” Amber exhaled into her hands. She wheezed and coughed, and Heather had to bite hard on her tongue to refrain from asking her to stop.

“I’m sorry.” It was a lie. Heather wasn’t sorry. She didn’t want Amber in her kitchen. She didn’t want to play “friends” with her anymore. She didn’t care if Wyland was irked by her make believe friendship with someone who turned her nose up at knock off handbags. All she wanted to do was to curl up in bed and call Vienna.

“He kicked me out. Said I was crazy for accusing him of cheating all the time. And he was sick of...of me drinking. Taking the pills.” 

Heather stared hard at her friend, at the one person she mistook for the very definition of perfection. Amber’s right hand shook slightly, the whites of her eyes worn with yellow. Heather wondered how Amber was even able to function if she was hooked on the pills she gave her at the funeral. 

“He has my house, my kids. Who’s going to remind him to cut the crusts off their sandwiches? Who?” Amber rubbed her fingers under her eyes until the mascara streaks faded into light gray clouds. She looked awful, and Heather wanted to pity her, but she couldn’t when Amber was wearing her husband’s shorts.

“So, what happened last night?”

“What? Didn’t you hear me? About the crusts? On the kids’ sandwiches?” Amber said, her right hand frantically slicing at her left palm.

“I heard you. And I’m sorry, Amber, I’m just—where’s Wyland?”

“Work. It’s Monday.” Thank you, Sherlock, Heather thought, shaking her head to work out the leftover buzz from the day before. 

“Yeah, okay. But what happened last night? I don’t remember anything after taking that horse tranquilizer you gave me.” Heather walked over to the kitchen table and sat down; her legs relieved their load. She rubbed her belly, took stock of Dolores, and felt her daughter’s limbs kicking wild and unfocused. Heather sighed her relief through her lips. 

“Oh, well I followed you guys home. I told Wyland I’d help him get you to sleep, keep an eye on you. We got to talking. I told him what’s been going on with me and Brent. He was attentive. He listened to me,” Amber said. Her face lightened as she walked to where the sun puddled in the kitchen. Heather felt her hand twitch.

“That’s Wyland. Mr. Attentive.”

“I told him I didn’t have anywhere to go. I mean I’ve been staying with Rachel, but she said I was messing with Viola’s sleeping patterns,” Amber said, rolling her yellow-tinged eyes. He asked that I stay over, and I thought you’d be fine with it. And don’t worry, no hanky panky.” Amber smirked through a hiccup.

“Well, I really hope you wouldn’t sleep with my husband while I was unconscious...or otherwise,” Heather said blankly, shifting in her seat. It felt like Dolores was maneuvering her foot somewhere near Heather’s spleen.

“I was just kidding. I mean because of our history or whatever.”

“What ‘whatever’ are you referring to right now?” Heather asked. Amber’s face blanched, the blood beneath her skin traveling to the area under her chin. There were splotches, hives that paraded like dime sized hickeys down the tendons of her neck. She wouldn’t stop looking at the nicks in the table. 

“He never told you, did he?” Amber whispered.

“Apparently not.” Dolores’s foot dug deeper, and Heather willingly experienced the hurt. 

Amber sighed, her eyes swinging with the tail of the cat nailed to the kitchen wall. “We used see to each other in high school. Wyland and I.” From somewhere in the back of the house Frankenstein purred, and Heather imagined he was curled in the cabinet under the bathroom sink. She wanted to join him.

“You two had a relationship?”

“What? No, oh no, no we would just hook up sometimes when I was with that slob Gary, and he was with Vienna.” 

“What do you mean ‘with’ Vienna? You mean as friends?” Amber’s inflamed neck said what her voice couldn’t. It was something Heather had feared and shuffled to the back of her thoughts for years, but it was always there, poking her brain with its forked tongue, its steel-tipped horn. Wyland had lied. 

She had seen them together before, of course—countless times in her Corolla, and one particularly embarrassing time in high school when she was at Manor Market pushing a cart that screamed “pathetic.” It had been a hard day of avoiding Tina McCafferty, Amber, and the rest of the cheerleaders on the Monday after the basement incident, so Heather tried to focus on everything in increments. Classes, lunch, bathroom break, more classes, car, Manor Market. She needed Midol and socks, her mother needed underwear, and, of course, she packed the cart with enough Pepto-Bismol to keep Caroline functioning. Heather walked the long, wide aisles of the store wondering what each person she passed thought of her. In her uniform, she was sure they assumed she was privileged, maybe a doctor’s kid. Perhaps her cart was filled with goods she would ship off to charity, for the needy suffering from period cramps. She smiled a little, but then stopped when she saw Wyland, Vienna. They looked at her, their hands dangling inches apart, and she knew they had just been holding them seconds before, but she ignored that part.  They turned left, and she turned right, and Heather sighed with relief that the Midol was buried at the bottom. 

Amber shook her head and rays of light sparkled across the kitchen. “I mean he never said they, you know, did it or anything. I just figured they did because they were always together.”  “Always together” echoed in Heather’s head. 

“And I would have told you about me and Wyland, but I thought you knew already. I mean you two are married. And I wanted to say something about Vienna, but Rachel said it was useless to bring up the past, that if you hadn’t figured it out already then, well, it probably wouldn’t do any good to stir things up,” Amber said. She removed a snaking path of snot beneath her nostrils with the back of her hand. It was the truth really. It probably wouldn’t have mattered if Heather knew about Wyland and Vienna or even Amber’s indiscretion beforehand. But it was a reminder that there was nobody left for her, not even a fake friend.

“Just leave.” 

“Listen, let’s not let this ruin our friendship.” Amber offered her hand to Heather, and Heather stared at the nothing she held in her palm.

“I need you out of my house.” Heather’s body lifted from its seat. Her thumb and pointer finger curled into a starving “o.” She unlocked them and set into the flesh of Amber’s upper arm.

“What about my clothes?” Amber said as Heather forced them both to the front of the house and opened the door to a sky full of light.

“I’m sure they’ll make a lovely donation to the women’s shelter,” Heather said, thanking everything holy Amber’s purse was within reach. She shoved it at her ex-friend’s sunken chest.

It was that look of helplessness that was flame hot in Heather’s belly. Amber’s eyes as slack as her mouth, her hands at her sides, purse slapping against her bare legs. It was her fear that Heather inhaled, but it didn’t feel the way it used to in middle school, when girls would line up like deer anticipating their slaughter. It was an empty high, and on the exhale, she wanted to find her bathroom, open the cabinet, and shove her whale-sized frame inside without the least bit of worry as to how she’d shove herself back out.

Amber’s eyes found gravity and sizzled at Heather. “You’re living a lie, Heather. Be mad, whatever. I don’t care. I have enough stuff to worry about right now. But the last time I checked so do you. There’s no hope for you either, you know.” Amber swallowed, her two bare feet balancing the threshold of Heather’s front door. “You’re no better than me.” She left, managing the stones of Heather’s walkway with embarrassing focus and shoeless feet. She climbed up into her Mercedes, its nose propped up onto Heather’s front curb.

Heather closed her eyes but could still feel the rhythm and beat of Amber’s vicious words.

Later, when Heather opened the cabinet door beneath her bathroom sink, there he was, a black jolt of hair in the corner beneath the plumbing. Heather laid her head down against the tile, the cold spreading against her temple and stared at the cat until she could see him when she closed her eyes. 

Her dream ballooned around her—trapped in a mall, everyone in the food court mooing at her, her mother wading through sandwich wrappers between the tables, discarded refuse clinging to her waist. It popped gracefully when her cell phone began to ring. Heather slunk on hands and knees—her belly grazing the tile—and found her phone in her purse on her bedroom floor. It flashed Vienna’s number. 

“Hello?” she said, feeling minutes, eons misguided and putting the only hope she had left in the voice on the other end.

“Uh, hi.” It was Rosa. Heather listened to what she had to say, and when Heather hung up, the only sound was the clock in the kitchen, ticking.

#

HEATHER DRESSED IN the dusky pink light decanting through the windows. She had been asleep for hours until Rosa’s call, and by five-thirty, Wyland still hadn’t come home so Heather had driven herself to the gas station, picked up a bouquet of slightly wilting flowers, and found herself sitting in a plastic-chaired waiting room with Vienna’s family. She kept glancing at her cell phone in one hand, crinkling the plastic wrap of the bouquet with the other. She almost wanted her husband to call.

“Who’s this one again?” Frances Oaks said in the seat across from Heather. Heather recognized her from the Internet, the oil painting in the foyer of the parlor. When taunting Vienna on the front lawn of the funeral home, it was a stout, smooth-faced Frances who would shoo Heather, Amber, and Rachel away with a wave of her arm. Heather remembered it now, Frances’s dresses, colorful material that rushed in and around her legs. Heather remembered wanting that—a grandmother dressed in colors who could make everything bad go away with a wave and a look.

The woman sitting before her wasn’t the one built from Heather’s memories. She looked like she had seen hell firsthand.

“She’s Vienna’s...friend.” Rosa talked through her fingers on Frances’s right, discreetly closing her mouth and nostrils to the stench the woman’s wounded leg delivered. First trimester and Heather would have been knocked out for the count, but sitting with belly engorged, hands on her armrests, Heather took in Frances’s leg with interest, and against all reason, began to like her.

“I told her I was glad she’s been out seeing friends. I thought it was doing her some good, and then this happens,” Loretta said, placing her chewed-up Kleenex against her cheek. She was seated on the other side of Rosa who seemed to be having trouble maneuvering between Frances’s scalp itching and Loretta’s blubbering.

“It doesn’t affect just you,” the man next to Frances said. He seemed even worse off than Vienna’s grandmother with his bloodshot eyes and sores across his cheeks. He kept a Dixie cup with him that Heather assumed he used for spitting dip, but a light pink smudge across the lip told her it was blood. She tried not to stare.

“I wasn’t saying it affected just me. I just...” Loretta started to sob and couldn’t finish her sentence. Rosa’s arm lifted like a robotic appendage and started to swipe at Loretta’s back. She glared at Heather until Heather looked away.

“Knock it off, Troy,” Frances grunted, a drift of dandruff snowing onto her shoulders with each tug of her fingers. Troy. Heather had forgotten about the incident that had tested the foundation of their eighth-grade year. She looked over at Rosa despite the gnawing in her stomach telling her not to, and she crafted the past as if she could see it before her.

“When I’m right, I’m right,” Heather had said to the rest of Mrs. Stark’s eighth grade class. The news had just been delivered. Rosa Piedras wouldn’t be coming back to Burling Gates Middle School because she was pregnant by a high schooler. Troy Oaks.

Mrs. Stark had put Roger Torres in charge of the class while she hunted down the health teacher’s video on safe sex. Heather’s puffed-up chest had carried her to the front of the room where she turned around, and in every desk, she saw one person: her mother.

“Piedras the skank and Oaks, the hapless rogue,” Heather had said, her heart smiling at using two of the words she’d stockpiled from the word-a-day calendar found under her mother’s dresser. She walked to the second row of desks and settled in front of Vienna who was clutching something inside her purse.

“What’s that?” Heather said, nodding at Vienna’s hidden fist.

“Nothing.”

“We’ll see about that,” Heather said, clutching Vienna’s arm. She was wearing that oversized army jacket again, the one with the stains that Heather swore were swipes of dried blood, but Vienna claimed were from paint that had spilled in her garage. It smelled, but at least it kept the shock of neon orange Vienna wore as a top from outright blinding Heather. “Rosary beads? You’re praying for that tramp you call a friend?”

“Stop. Please,” Vienna said. Heather lingered for a while, making a figure eight in front of Vienna’s desk. She felt like the male peacock she read about in an animal science book dug out of the fireplace in her living room. She spread her colorful wings wide hoping Wyland would catch a glimpse, but when she smirked at him, he looked like he could kill her.

“You think God is going to save your trampy friend?” Heather said, jutting her chin out and slanting her head like she had seen Erica Kane do on All My Children. 

Vienna’s pale cheeks flooded with color. Her mouth looked angry. “I don’t know okay.  Okay, Heather?” The class grew tense with quiet, and even Heather shut her jaw to the sound of Vienna standing up for once. “Maybe God hates her,” she said, kneading one hand with the other. “Maybe he hates all of us,” she whispered.

Heather couldn’t think what to say. It would become the first of many times she’d be quieted, stalking her thoughts for words that would explain away her failure in college, her failure of a marriage. But now she found the answer even as Wyland’s balled-up fist twitched to punch her, and Vienna’s eyes were too spent to look at her.

“God doesn’t hate you. But you sure as heck do.” Heather heard herself say. It came out before she could stop it, the words vile as the original moment she stole them from. Her father and mother in the kitchen and her mother saying one of those nonsense things again, something along the lines of “God hates me. Maybe I should just kill myself.” And the worst part, her father’s face blank as a white-painted fence, his lips saying, “God doesn’t hate you. But you sure as heck do, Caroline,” and that being the last thing Heather would ever hear her father say in person. The finality of it was brutal enough, but the honesty of it was torture. 

Heather had stopped talking, walking until her back felt the hard surface of her seat, and Mrs. Stark rolled in the TV announcing, “Time to learn the truth.” 

“Heather, Vienna’s ready for you,” Elbert Oaks said, quietly shuffling into the present with his funereal feet.

“Oh. All right.” Heather hoisted herself up off her chair, nodding at Vienna’s rag tag cast of family members who either didn’t look at her or wailed hopelessly into their tissues.

She followed behind Vienna’s father and concentrated on the noisy flowers in her hand to keep from focusing on the real thought that tugged at her. But as Elbert opened the hospital room door and Heather caught a glimpse of Vienna’s life-torn body covered in bed, she thought it in spite of herself: Heather was tired of giving God a run for his money.