Chapter Nineteen
Vienna
 

It’s freezing, and I’ve forgotten a sweater, but my arms are almost numb to the cold at this point. It’s been forty-five minutes since I arrived, and after a quick entry through a metal detector, a pat down by a short, squat lady with a face the color of thick ash, I was escorted to this bench next to a skinny teenager with Mickey Mouse earrings, cornrows, and a look that tells me she could snap me apart just by blinking. 

I had emailed him the moment Rosa drove me home from the hospital. I sat with my laptop, sandwiched between my room’s bubble gum pink walls, and poorly ignored the toaster waffles Loretta had sat on my bed. I ate them, feeling them more than tasting them. It was a nice surprise to eat without regret. 

He got back to me a day later, and we scheduled a time for me to visit. But now I want to leave.

“Visitors,” a guard calls, a man with washed-out red hair and whiskers jutting out from his upper lip. Me, Mickey Mouse earrings, and a small bunch of others work into a line behind him, and as we file into the metal tabled visiting room, my eyes are instantly drawn to a man I used to know.

I go to hug him, forgetting what I’ve been told so a female guard shouts, “No contact!” and the embarrassment worms through me. And then I unexpectedly think of Dad, how he hasn’t touched his father in years.

“That one’s a real peach,” Granddad says with a soft smile. 

“Seems like it.” I don’t know where to go on from here.

“How are you feeling?” He asks. I know it’s not a general question. I’m sure Dad has filled him in, and I even made reference to it in my email. But the question has too many possible answers.

I go with, “Better.”

“You frowned you when you said better,” he gently says.

I take a breath, my skin realizing that the cold is fiercer in this room, so my legs and arms begin to dance with bumps. “My body is feeling better. And for some reason that makes me a little sad.” I’ve always known time to pass too quickly, but the last twenty-one days have slowed, uncomfortably so, and I know it has everything to do with the pain in my womb healing without my consent. 

“The important things often hurt the most. And healing is important. It means new things, a fresh start.” His eyes are blue like mine, and I let my pupils get caught up in them. I want to tell him how right he is, the start I have in mind that will change everything, but I’m not ready to release the details that are only now beginning to make sense.

“Why did you decide to see me?” I say and watch him fidget in his bright orange jumpsuit. 

“Your father wrote me. Told me what happened to you. I couldn’t put it off anymore.”  The orange does nothing for his complexion, and his hair is distressingly white. But his eyes are wet like they used to be. With dew, he’d always say. His mouth still straightens out wide as a wingspan. “I have to put my pride aside.” 

“She just wants to see you,” I say, and I think how I just want to see my grandmother too. Gram visited me in the hospital. She brought a small painting she did for me, the first in a long while. The color of mud swept up in a devastated circle. She didn’t tell me what it represented because she seemed separate from it like she didn’t want much to do with it. I could tell she didn’t want much to do with my father at the hospital either.

“That’s on her.” My grandfather stares into me, and I can see the day they carted him away. Troy and I were asleep and motherless. Gram lost her mind. My father lost his father, and nobody was left to pack my lunch for school.

“She told me to give you this.” I hand him the envelope Gram had given me at her apartment. I didn’t look at it just like she asked, but the entire drive over I could feel it staring at me. 

He takes it out and places the glasses that are sitting on the edge of our table onto his face. I’m sensing the others around us now, the hushed whispers of people at tables with loved ones. There are only a handful of us, visitors and inmates alike. I wonder who’s missing. Who didn’t show up. Who’s in their cell wishing they could light it on fire.  I see the girl with the Mickey Mouse earrings with an older woman who looks just like her—same angry eyes, same angry mouth.

Granddad clears his throat. His fist meets his lips. “She says she’ll divorce me if I don’t write back.”

“Sounds like her.”

“I’m going to take her up on that offer.”

“What?” I check his eyes, and they’re still wet but more so. They want to spill over.

“Sometimes, it’s better to break away than keep pretending. I’m not getting out of here, Vienna. I can’t have her holding on to me, hating her son for doing the right thing by turning me in. I can’t live knowing she’s dying.” He wipes his eyes beneath his glasses and keeps his fingers in his sockets. He drags them along the sides of his face, and the sagging skin beneath his lids turns pink with the force of his fingertips. “It’s my penance. If I’m ever going to find forgiveness in my heart for this mess I’ve created, I can’t be selfish anymore. I have to let her go.”

My face is twisting. I can feel my skin cells cavorting and tugging at each other. He looks bewildered.

“But that’s selfish just to give her up because you can’t take the pain. You can’t do this.”

“I have to do this.” He doesn’t ask me if I know what it’s like to be in love, and I’m at least grateful for that. I don’t know if my father filled him in completely about my situation, my indiscretion with another woman’s husband. I don’t know what it’s like to be loved the way Granddad knows it, my grandmother too. But I can see the sacrifice in him, and I realize that’s the ingredient that I’ve always been missing.

“What do I tell her?” I ask. He mulls it over, glancing up as the guard in charge quiets down an animated visitor, a woman who sits a few tables over from my left and whose gold hoop earrings knock hard against her head.

“Tell her I love her too much. Same goes for you,” he says, and I realize what this is. He’s cutting himself off from all of us, not just Gram. It doesn’t feel like letting go. It feels like punishment.

I have a hard time seeing his face clearly because my eyes are waterlogged, and my hands are averse to touching my face and acknowledging my grief.

“And Vienna, if it’s true what you said you did all those years ago to your mother, well...” He waits until I look up at him, and as I do I feel my cells aging. “There’s no greater prison than your own heart.”

The guard announces over the intercom that it’s time to leave. There’s no physical contact allowed, so I hug him hard in the way my teeth bite my lip, in the way I cry two feet away from him. He cries, too, and with each of my grandfather’s tears, I see my past wash away. 

I’m left clean. 

Later, in the car heading the hour drive home, I test this new pain with my finger, and it doesn’t hurt as nearly as it should, and that’s when I know it for what it really is. 

Forgiveness.

#

WHEN I DRIVE UP TO the home, there are several people in the yard and a block of cars in the driveway, but Heather’s Corolla is the one I notice first. We’ve only talked to each other once since the hospital. She called me, and our conversation was short because neither of us knew where to lead it. I’ve been grateful for the break from her. I miss her, and in another way, I don’t. I like the feel of life without having to look at my misery reflected. 

“Hey,” Heather says when she steps out of the car. I can tell it won’t be long now. Her belly dwarfs the rest of her, and she’s having a hard time walking my way, so I meet her in the middle of the front yard.

“Hey,” I say.

“Looks like a circus.” She nods at the litter of cars in the driveway. The sun beats down on my crown, so I rub at my hair. Heather is in her yoga pants and a black long-sleeved t-shirt. I can’t help but think she must be dying under it. I can’t help but notice she’s not wearing Wyland’s button-down.

“Open house tomorrow. A few of the vendors are already showing up to set up their stations.”

“I’m surprised your dad let you play hooky.”

“Me too,” I smile. The truth is, Dad’s been extremely un-Dad like lately. It’s there in my freshly poured cup of coffee or the laundry he folds and places on my bed during his lunch break. I can’t tell him to stop, and I’m afraid it’s because I don’t want him to.

It was actually his idea for me to leave earlier this morning to visit Granddad, even though I know he definitely needs my help. I told him about Gram, about how she needed me to see him, and I expected his protest. But he told me he thought it was a great idea, and I suspect it’s only because he knows I need it as much my grandmother does.

“He doesn’t live with me anymore,” Heather says, and it takes me a moment to place who she’s talking about. I nod but don’t really know what to say. “He’s at his parents. I have a new roommate, though. Amber.” I look up, a crowd of people dancing behind her head. She’s gone mad.

“Amber?  Fritch?  Really?” Everything is coming out like a question, and a small feeling of betrayal is welling up inside of me. First, Wyland. Now, Heather.

“She’s in rehab. She lives with me, and I make sure she doesn’t kill herself. Plus, she’s not a bad painter.” I nod, dumbfounded, having no clue what she’s talking about. 

“I guess her life isn’t what I always thought it was. Perfect,” she says. A van pulls up, the Burling Gates Cat Shelter. They start lifting out crates of cats, and I have to hold my tongue from laughing. Loretta.

“I guess not,” I say. I try to find the joy in the thought of a newly downtrodden Amber, but there’s none there. 

“And my father’s in town.”

“Father?” I knew Heather’s father had left when she was younger, but nobody really talked about it, Heather especially.

“Yeah, he was living in Maryland. Apparently, my mom left him her house in her will.”

“Heather, that’s wonderful. You don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” She goes quiet, and I can tell this is where our road ends. There’s a severed cord between the two of us, between us and Wyland. We don’t need each other anymore.

I give her the hug I couldn’t give Granddad and don’t mind feeling her belly curving into mine. Even though loss’s phantom limb keeps buzzing through me, I don’t mind it at all. 

“Thank you,” she says into my hair, and I nod. We let go, and there is Heather Hammel on my lawn thanking me. I take the image, crop it, and keep it for myself.

“Goodbye, Vienna Oaks,” she says and lumbers through gravity to her car. I hear cats meowing, brochures rustling, my father gasping when he comes outside to see the menagerie in his front yard, but I don’t hear Heather Hammel leave.

I never want to know that sound. 

#

IT’S MY MORNING. AFTER visiting my grandfather and growing succinctly apart from Heather Hammel, last night was nothing but pencil and paper and faces critically drawn with my steady hand. I place them in a manila envelope I find in my father’s desk and place the package in my purse along with a note to the one person who needs it most. 

“Ready for the insanity?” my father asks, two mugs of coffee in his hands as he steps into the office. I reach for his face with my eyes, and it’s no longer a surprise how time has ravaged him. It’s ravaged me, too; it’s just that for the first time, I’m aware of it.

“Yeah, I think so. Is Loretta dressed?”

“Surprisingly so,” he says. I wonder what he thinks of me. I know he’s reached out, been kinder, but I wonder if it’s because he’s making up for his mistakes or mine. 

“How’d it go?” he asks, and I know he’s talking about me visiting Granddad. He didn’t mention it yesterday, so I didn’t either. I can’t say it feels any less sore thinking about it today.

“He’s going to divorce her,” I say, and I’m surprised to see my father’s face falling to the floor.

“He can’t.” He places the coffees on the desk and sits in one of the guest chairs across from me. “Why?”

I work out the “why” in my head before I tell him. I didn’t think it would hit him like this. His mother hates him, and his father’s locked away. I’m not sure how much else could destroy him. 

“He doesn’t want to hurt her anymore. He thinks by him being in there and Gram still relying on him, that’s the reason why she carries so much hate, why she’s always hurting you. She can’t let go, so he’s going to do it for her.” I don’t have the guts to look up, so I stare at the computer keyboard in front of me. The letters waltz in pairs when my eyes blur. 

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“He thinks it does.”

“He’s wrong.” I do it. I look up. It’s the wrong choice but the right one because he’s the same father that cried in my hair when my mother died. 

“I love you,” I say. I hold my stare, even though it’s agonizing to see him lost in a chair. I stand up and walk around to hug him, until my freshly curled hair goes flat with tears. I feel his body straining as he leans into me instead of away. My calves burn from crouching down to his level. 

“And I, you,” he says, and I know he can sense it. The way this pain feels something like forgiveness.

“I’ll go check on Loretta. Make sure she’s still dressed,” I say, and he chuckles into his handkerchief. I grab my bag that I had left near the door when I came in, and my mother watches me leave him from her spot on the wall. I touch the frame of the painting then close the door behind me, my heart pounding out the sound of her name.

“Hey there, Sunshine,” Loretta says. Exiting the office, I spot her in the viewing room. She’s sitting in a pew toward the back. 

“What are you doing?” I walk the center aisle and sit down when she scoots over. It’s six, the Open House won’t start until nine, but my father was right. She’s dressed, and lucid, and working a cream-colored blanket with her hands.

“Thinking,” she says. She smells sweet, and I know she’s spent the morning preparing, wanting to make my father proud, even though representing the cat shelter probably isn’t the way to do it. Trying and never measuring up. It seems to be an epidemic around here. 

“I shouldn’t have ignored it. I knew you were pregnant; I knew you were talking about yourself and not a friend. I just didn’t want to overstep my bounds. You know how I don’t like to interfere.” I give her a look, but don’t say anything because this is the first time she’s mentioned my miscarriage. She’s kept busy instead, offering to bring me breakfast, lunch, dinner, a cat to cheer me up. She had her car repaired without telling me and brought mine back from the shop.

“It wasn’t your problem to fix, Loretta. You didn’t do anything wrong.” I watch her pull her fears through the blanket, fingers linked through the yarn. She tugs and tugs.

“I didn’t do anything right. I never do.” The door to the office opens, and I wait for my father to enter, to change the subject and save us, but he doesn’t. I can hear him shift his weight up the stairs.

“Well, then, we’re not that different.” I’m looking at the wooden holder at the back of the pew in front of us. It contains a tissue box and cutouts of the serenity prayer. I remember Loretta sitting in the break room, snipping squares of paper with this prayer on it and an excess waterfalling off the side of the table. My father had commented on the mess, and that’s all he had commented on. 

“Thank you.”

“For what?” she asks.

“Everything.” I hug her and hope she can feel the years she made me feel human—made my lunch, combed my hair, clothed me. I forget those parts because I sometimes see her the way my father sees her, a stand-in. But I know this isn’t the filter he wants on his heart. I don’t want it on mine either.

“Oh. I don’t know what I’ve done, but you’re welcome.” She is truly mystified, and this is something I’ll miss about Loretta. Her humility. 

We sit, and I watch from the corner of my eye as she pats her eye with tissues from the box in front of us. Her hands are gentle on her face, and I remember the way it felt when she took my palm and shook it for the first time at The Green Grocer. I felt like I had mattered.

I’ll lose that feeling, I think as the quiet bubbles around us, and for an instant, the air goes black. If I follow out my plan today and sever myself completely from my mother’s face, I’ll lose what it feels like to be human.

Bitter, medicinal, the measured taste of losing to win.

I don’t even flinch when Loretta takes my hand, and the baby blanket falls to the floor.

#

BODIES EVERYWHERE. My purse has become my best friend, and I follow its lead, taking corners, revolving around the staircase, drifting through the lot of business owners here to showcase their services. I find the morgue, enter it. I greedily take the last crumbs of comfort Rosa has to offer.

“You look nice,” she says, and I repay her the compliment. You would never know she has a teenaged daughter who’s heading into her second trimester. She doesn’t keep the worry and stress in her face, but I glimpse it in her hands. They have nowhere to go.

I take them, and she’s surprised how close I stand to her, but I need to drink in those little moments when I sat on her bedroom floor, and she’d absolve my sinful heart. 

“What’s this for?” she asks, but she doesn’t let me go.

“It’s a thank you. And an apology.” I step back, and she’s eighth grade all over again. Scared, alone. Without her best friend.

“For what?”

“I wasn’t there for you when you were pregnant with Maya.” I’ve said the thing we’ve never talked about. Even when Rosa turned twenty-one, graduated from beauty school, and came to work for my father, we didn’t talk about it. Even when she told me she applied for the job because she wanted us to start over, wanted Maya to know her aunt and grandfather, we didn’t talk about why we needed to start over in the first place. 

“We don’t need to—”

“Yes. I do.” We’re bright and clean in the white room. The effect sends a shiver on its course through my skin. My pride loosens through my pores.

“You were right. I was wrong to be with Wyland. I was wrong to talk to Heather. I need time for myself now. I need to figure out what’s next.” I don’t tell her that I already know, and I wish I could, but I know she’d chain me to her metal chair and tell me to stop being stupid. But it’s not a stupid thing. It’s the only thing.

“Thanks. You take some of Loretta’s emotional truth serum or something?” She smiles, and her teeth bounce the cold white light into my eyes.

“No,” I smile, and I let my vision go. The sound of her voice leads me.

“I don’t know how to handle this, Vienna. I haven’t told anyone about Maya, not even Mom. Just you. But I, I need someone to help me with this, and I just wish for all the world I could rely on Troy.” Her voice goes small, and my eyes snap open. 

“Let me talk to him.”

“I don’t know...”

“Let me.” She feels her collarbone, and she studies the pros and cons invisibly suspended mid-air.

“Okay,” she says. I hug her again, and the grief in her hands finds her throat. She cries, and her tears heal me. They’re sticky sweet like Coke on my forehead. Like candy through her fingers.

“It’ll be okay, right?” she asks.

Before I answer Loretta pokes her head in. “Vienna, um, I need to speak to you. There’s someone here. To see you.” She looks concerned, but I smile at her. I look into Rosa’s almond-colored eyes for the last time and whisper, “I love you.” She says, “Me too,” and lets go.

I don’t turn around to see her fortressed in her books and her makeup, but I configure the image in my mind, and I don’t allow it to pry itself loose.

I start to turn left out of the morgue, but Loretta turns right near the back door. She stops me and says, “He’s here.” I know she means Wyland. My father wanted to call up Turnbull Realty and request Wyland didn’t man their booth, but I told him not to. I’m assuming Mr. Turnbull doesn’t know the exact reason why Heather left her son, and I have a hunch everyone involved would like to keep it that way. 

“You’ll be okay?” she asks, and I nod although I’m not sure.

I open the back door and the light takes me. It’s a devastating truth how dark the inside of the home is. I move out onto the deck, and there he is, his back to me. He’s facing our old oak tree out in the yard.

I walk out to meet him, and he turns around when he hears my steps. His face isn’t the one I pretended it was at the house on Field Grove the first time we broke Heather’s heart. It’s not the face of the boy who told me I wasn’t capable of killing my mother, either. It’s just Wyland, a relic of time and disappointment, a weak vestige of my former friend. 

“How are you?” he asks. His hands grip the railing behind him, and it looks like he’s waiting in fear for me to pierce his chest with a sword.

“Been better.” I walk up until I’m shoulder-to-shoulder with him, and his arms relax. He smooths his hair with his hand. When it falls, he takes my fingers. A spark snaps alight, but I quickly suffocate it.

“I’m sorry,” he says. I can tell he means it, even when I let his hand go.

“I know. Me too.” There is noise all around us. People inside, outside wandering about from booth to booth, but nobody nips at our peace. Here, we’re all alone.

“Everything. For everything, I mean the diner, not telling her, for...you know.” He can’t say “baby,” and that’s the line between us. I know it’s more than that. He knows it’s more than that. But the difference is in his regret and in the lack of mine. 

“We both chose this. We’re both at fault.” The question I want to ask speaks up. There’s no use ignoring it, not now. “Why didn’t you want to be with me?” He doesn’t move. He’s still, and the little boy edges out. He’s twelve, and he’s scared because his father beats him. He’s sixteen, and he’s scared because his father beats him. He’s eighteen, and he’s leaving, and he’s not taking me with him because when he sees my face, he sees his old pain.

“She doesn’t know, you know, about me. About what it was like growing up for me.” He’s talking about Heather, and I note how he can’t say her name. He’s sweating in the heat, in the truth, and the sharp cut of his curls around his ears is dark with salt. 

“I used to feel guilty about it, always asking her about her life, knowing the crap she went through and making her believe I had this golden childhood.” He moves inches away from me, a clearing between us where the sun breaks through and drowns the deck we stand on. “But she gave me what I needed. I needed to be the hero.” He pauses a beat, and I catch the worst image of his lips slightly parted. “That’s stupid,” he says, and he shakes his head, the dark at the edges of his hair turning in the light. “You were always that for me, Vienna. Escape, safety. Salvation. But I needed to know what that felt like for once. I needed to be that man my father has always said I couldn’t be.” He sacrifices his eyes to the sun, and his hand instinctively travels to his forehead to shield his face. 

It’s strange to hear. He was always saving me from myself, from Heather Hammel, and he never even knew it. All those pictures I sketched of his face, all those times I looked at my work, and all I could think was there he is. My way out.

“I guess when we slept together, I just needed you again. I needed you to save me,” he says. My body is petrifying and moving is a need I can’t fulfill. It’s horrible how I didn’t understand any of this from the beginning. I’ve lost minutes, I’ve lost everything about myself, and all this time I’ve been the hero. I can feel it in him now, his need for me. I can feel how tired he is from losing all the time, from not believing he’s capable of a win. For once, I can see beyond myself.

I don’t do it because I want it but because he needs it. I don’t even check to see if anyone has walked around the side of the house. Hearing has left me, so I’m not sure if the back door opens, and the inside of the home is privy to us standing alone in the cold glare of sunlight. I step in and make his lips meet mine. It’s the past and our present and the pain of three hearts whittled to their nubs. He doesn’t taste a thing like water.

“I have to go,” I say. His face is pained and beautiful, but I let it go. The rush propels me forward, and I can only feel my purse throbbing against my leg, the manila envelope emanating its heat from within. I walk around to the front, past people as quickly as my legs will take me, and then I turn around on the sidewalk, and there it is. My home.

I see Gram and Granddad dancing on the porch. I see Troy in a tree, hot smoke piping through his lungs. I see Heather Hammel besides me, dressed like a princess on Halloween shouting, her angry fist clutching Halloween candy. Rosa with her makeup case, Loretta with her hitched up skirt. My mother, dropping me off and letting me go and stumbling back to her car. They’re all there. I pinch the image of the home through my fingers. I ignore the ruby red-mouthed woman at Hair Today’s booth who’s staring at me. I ignore the noise and sounds of the front lawn and make it what it’s always been between my two fingers. My life.

I walk away. I start down the sidewalk and turn from Halfway Drive onto Bristol. I keep walking, and my veins pump, my muscles move. I go the way that passes by the park and see my mother and me sitting on top of the wooden benches. We are beautiful together, and I’m sad I always missed that part. I watch her put her hand in my hair, the bottle still at her lips, and I forgive her because she’s wearing her mauve shirt, and her feet are bare, and she opens my chips and smiles as I crunch my way through them. She’s never looked better.

I walk, and it feels like my heart is leading me. I pass by The Green Grocer knowing Mr. Markie is alone and overwhelmed in his office. A piece of my organ breaks off for him, for him loving Loretta and for that love going unfulfilled. I pass by the fruit, colorful, hopeful in their wooden boxes, and I don’t even see April Patterson before I run into her.

“I’m so sorry,” I say and then recognition washes over me. Parker’s mother looks a kind of tired I’ve never been faced with, but she weakly smiles at me. I look down, expecting the urn to still be in the crook of her arm, but instead, she’s holding her daughter, Montgomery’s, hand. 

“It’s no problem.” She goes quiet, and I think it’s easier if I just walk past her, but she finds my arm with her fingers and gives it a slow squeeze. “Thank you, you know.” I nod. I’m going to miss that part. Planting the tiniest seeds of hope in a person and watching them birth through a layer of grief.

She’s the one who walks away, and with her, another piece of myself. I watch April Patterson breach life without her son. He’s placed on a mantle or maybe tucked with the things she needs most in the back of her closet. But he’s lulling in the outside more than anywhere. I spy the way he’s harbored through her when she doesn’t let go of her daughter’s hand. 

I carry on to the post office with a lighter chest and see the blue box waiting for me. I fish for the manila envelope inside my purse and hug it to my chest like I’m contemplating whether to mail it or not, but I know I will. I know it’s best because on the inside are memories and truths I’ve shaded with pencil. Dad with his hair reaching for the sky. Loretta, her hand nestled against a cat’s black fur. Gram in her swirling skirts. Granddad in his suit standing against the doorframe of the home. Rosa, a tube of lipstick in hand, and Maya, three-years-old with a grin the color of sunshine. Troy in his army jacket, his hand in our mother’s hair. Wyland with his curls haloing from his head.

Heather, her belly filled with promise.

I mail them all to my grandmother. The letter inside says to make sure they get to their rightful owners. It also says Granddad has set her free, and even though there’s pain in that, there’s also opportunity. I tell her I’ve wired some of the money from my savings account to her. I tell her to get Troy into rehab, and when he’s clean, to help him reconnect with Rosa and his daughter. I tell her to pay off her bills. I tell her to find the ties she has to her son because I know they’re there no matter how hard she pretends they’re not. There’s nothing extinguishable about the burning roots that connect a mother to her child. 

I listen to them venture down the steel belly of the mailbox. I stand awhile, stalling, but I force my feet until they’ve arrived at their last stop. 

I pause at the front doors, and before I walk inside, I dig out my phone from my purse. I think to call Troy because there’s no one else left, but that’s the rote thing, the habitual thing, so instead of calling my brother and using him to settle my nerves, I experience the fear triggering my senses. I have to trust that Gram will take care of him better than I ever did. 

I go inside, and I’m tuned into everything. The door handle is cold, and slick, and refracts the shape of my face. The tiles are black and white, and some of the white ones have been battered with black scuffs. At the desk, I give the officer my name. His tag says Officer Tran, and his face is apathetic to the shaky sound of my voice. I tell him why I’m there, and then I sit, waiting for someone to relieve me from sitting. I try to take in more details of the station, but she creeps in, even though I try and stop her. In my head, I’m screaming “We made peace at the park,” but she’s still walking with my hand gripped tight in hers. I’m too old for this, for hand holding, but it hurts to break free. Her heels splash the parking lot of Manor Market, and the rain is sticking her hair to her head. I feel like I’m being dragged against my will.

“It’s fine, Vienna. I’m fine. Stop worrying.” She’s shouting above the sound of water hitting the ground and cars starting their engines. The whole time in the car, I was shouting at her, something I never do, telling her she drank too much, and she shouldn’t be driving. I could have stayed home, but my guilt outgrew me and is firmly locked in my mother’s hand. I can’t shake it free.

“You’re not fine,” I say too low for her to hear.

“You don’t need to worry about me. I’m the adult, you’re the child. You can’t even begin to understand,” she says. She uses her other hand to wipe strands of hair out of her eyes. I protest in my head. I understand—I of all people understand what’s wrong with her because I’m always receiving the brunt end of it.

I see the car coming as we step up on the curb. It feels like a chance, and even though my guilt has grown a foot taller from where I stand, I turn my back to it. My mouth tastes like metal.

“Not true,” I whisper again. My hand hurts with a wet ache. My fingers tremble against my will.

She turns to me and bends down like I’m a child. She levels her eyes with mine, and they’re blue, streaked, and cold. I lose her when I look into them.

“You won’t do it differently either, you know,” she says, and the drink on her breath breaks into my nose. “You’ll be just like me.” I feel like screaming, crying, and I don’t know if it’s the words or the way she practically sings them. All I can see are the headlights round and bulbous, shooting stars in our pathway, and then my hand finally escaping the sharp feel of her fingers. She turns to stand back up, but before she can stretch her legs straight completely, I push with all the might I’ve tensed inside my twelve-year-old body and watch her dance slowly to the ground. The sound that comes next. It’s life, surrendering.

“Ms. Oaks? Don’t know if you remember me, but I’m Detective Morris.” A man a few years older than my father stands in front of the bench. White shirt, tie, gun slung around his waist. I’m launched out of thought as he outstretches his hand. 

“I hear you have some information on your mother’s case?” he asks, and I nod. I say, “Yes,” and he motions me to follow him, so I stand up, but before I move, I breathe everything in. 

It batters my heart, this moment. The plaque on the wall, the flag anchored and floating above our heads. I know what I’m going to say won’t change anything. But before I catch a bus to start over, start new in Chicago, I have to surrender my past.

I want the detective to hold me because being this free is almost harder to bear than being kept, fastened tight in the past, in memory. I keep my distance, though, and feel the crack of ribs, of opening up.   

I watch my ruined heart take leave.