Chapter Three
Vienna

When I leave the bar, I lapse. My mind is already at Turnbull Realty, at Wyland Turnbull’s car, and by the time my feet catch up, there’s no mending the situation. I’m a sore thumb in the Burling Gates main square with my flowery dress and inability to walk a completely straight line.

I stumble into Mr. Markie, manager at The Green Grocer and longtime admirer of Loretta. He looks at me like he’s seeing a tipsy ghost.

“Vienna, it’s been, well, it’s been a long time,” he says, righting me up with his broom-less hands. Years ago, he’d sweep in front of the sliding glass doors and greet customers as they trickled in. But when the Manor Market was built midway between Burling Gates and Blythesville, Mr. Markie stopped sweeping and started spending more time in his office. I remember as a girl watching him through the mirrored window of the wood paneled back room as my mother pretended to glance at the liquor aisle with minimal interest, and I’d study his glistening bald head in between his hands. I remember adulthood looking absolutely dismal.

“Thought I’d take myself out on the town,” I say and twirl around to show him my beer-stained dress. He feigns interest, his eyes darting, probably hoping someone is keeping an eye on me. The feeling is irritating.

“Hope you find your broom,” I say, not without malice, and again he gives me that slightly surprised, slightly confused look. I know it’s a rare sighting to see me in town. It’s a rare sighting to see me anywhere. If I do leave the home, I head to Blythesville—sometimes to the mall, sometimes to the Manor Market. Even though my heart loses a few beats every time I’m standing outside the glowing entrance of the buy-in-bulk mega store, I don’t think how it’s the last place I saw my mother breathing or what my hands are capable of mastering. 

I think about well-priced toilet paper and nobody knowing my name.

“Oh, all right. Say hello to your stepmother for me!” Mr. Markie says, and I roll my eyes at him as I turn away. Loretta’s not my stepmother. Dad has never made an honest woman of her, even though she’s the one who fronted the money for him to buy the funeral home from my grandparents. Alongside, of course, the pathetic settlement Manor Market forked over to him, his wife’s death having been inconveniently staged in front of their building.

Loretta used to work as a kindergarten teacher for years at Blythesville Elementary until she retired and cashed in her 401K to help make Dad’s dreams come true. She’s the one who consoled him the nights he borrowed my anxiety and would come down the stairs looking for Mom, even though Mom was already in the ground. She’s the one who cut the crusts off my sandwiches and begged Dad not to kick Troy out. She’s the one who does everything and gets nothing in return. 

Welcome to the world of pleasing my father.

“Hey, watch it!” someone shouts from their car, and I try to give them the finger, but my hand is stuck in my purse, rubbing the stiff beads of the rosary Rosa gave me the day of Mom’s funeral. I straighten out my walk and ignore the parents clutching their children closer and the sound of a teenage boy in a Royals cap, offering me a low, long whistle as I pass by.

The police station is around the block, and even though I can’t see it, I know it’s there. It’s always in my breastbone. I imagine Detective Morris, the detective who worked Mom’s case, perking up at his desk, sensing the wrong I’m about to deliver next. 

When I finally reach the car, I check the handles but know there will be no curling up in the backseat. Wyland always keeps his doors locked.

Logically, I know he’s parked in front of the curb at Turnbull Realty, and if I start pounding on his side doors with my heel, someone is bound to shout at me, or arrest me, or Wyland will catch me mid-kick. But it’s worse if I don’t because then he won’t see me at all.

I rear back my foot and punch it through the air until I hear my high heel scrape across his decades old BMW. There’s metal where paint once was, and I ignore the man stepping out of the photography studio who’s gaping at me as I fall to my knees, dizzy with the sting of being unable to cope.

“Vienna?” I hear the voice, and even though I knows it belongs to a woman, for a second I pretend it belongs to Wyland. I’ll look up, and he’ll run to me. He’ll tell me he’s being stupid. He’ll tell me he’s leaving his wife.

“Vienna, get in,” Rosa says. She’s parked her car in the middle of the street, and as the honks serenade her sprint to where I crouch on the sidewalk, she waves at the honkers like she’s sitting on top of a parade float. She tugs at me, and my body gives way to her warm brown hands. I’m inside Rosa’s car before the sun can set me on fire. Before Wyland can see the mess I’ve made of myself.

We drive a ways before Rosa asks, “What the heck was that?” She knows I don’t hang around in town. She’s been aware of my anxiety since we were in the second grade, and Mrs. Piedras took the both of us and Rosa’s brothers to a carnival in Blythesville. Rosa’s mother spent the entire time with me crouching against a bright blue port-a-potty, dousing me in holy water because it would keep my “crazies” away. It worked long enough for me to eat a bag of cotton candy. Soon after, I broke free again and nursed my panic behind a tire of a Ford Explorer in the parking lot. It took them two hours to find me.

“I was getting some air,” I say to the window. I cover my face with my hands when looking out the speeding window becomes too much.

“Ha.” Rosa pushes breath through her glossed lips and looks me over. “Have you been drinking?”

“No. Have you?”

“Vienna.”

“Fine. Yeah.” It tells Rosa more than I want it to because everyone knows I usually only drink when Troy’s around. Rosa swallows and nods then flips open the glove compartment and pulls out a package of peanut butter crackers.

“Eat.”

“I’m not—”

“I said eat.” I rip open the plastic with manic fingers, and two crackers flop onto my lap. I can feel the unsettling welling within me, and I hesitate.

“I know you don’t want to, but you need to,” Rosa says. I place the cracker at my lips and take a small bite. It’s salty and sweet, and I start to cry.

Rosa doesn’t say a word. She just lets me study her through my tears. Her hair is in a chignon, and because I didn’t tell her how pretty it looked when she picked up her check earlier at the home, I try now, but I’m gasping too hard. Rosa doesn’t speak until I’m quiet.

“You ready to tell me what’s been going on?” Rosa asks. 

“I’m pregnant,” I say and listen to the numbing buzz of the A/C blasting my skin raw. We sit nestled in the memory of Rosa’s pregnancy in the eighth grade. The moment she told me, the moment Rosa’s mother ripped her away from our family, the years we lived separate lives until the day Rosa walked back into mine when Mrs. Adalpe—the home’s former makeup artist—up and left for New Port, Rhode Island with a man she found on the Internet. All of it circuitously blends in the space between us, and in my blurry state, I cautiously poke a finger out, imagining I can feel it. 

I keep waiting to hear Rosa’s voice, but she’s put the kibosh on talking, and all I can think about is how stupid I was when I first found out I was pregnant. 

“It seems like you’re going to have a little one,” Dr. Walker had said when the results came back. My first appointment with him was three weeks ago when getting my anxiety under control seemed like a good idea. To keep from springing out of the exam room, I concentrated on the wiry tufts of hair inching out of his nose, his flat mouth, his sun-spotted hands fidgeting with his tie stay, like he was the one blindsided by a stick bobbing in a cup of urine.

“Seems like it,” I managed. He said he could still change my anxiety medication, something that wouldn’t interfere with the pregnancy. He handed me a new prescription as he left the examination room to see if he had any samples. I had smiled, thinking it was really the worst thing that could happen, but maybe that meant it was for the best. Maybe he’d stay.

The nurse came in and handed me the samples along with a new mother’s bag filled with literature on the logistics of baking a baby. 

“Congratulations, Mrs. Oaks,” she said, and I could tell she had caught her tongue slip as quickly as I did. The swollen-faced woman blushed and guided me out the door, her meaty haunches nervously dancing back and forth in their scrubs through the room’s threshold. I was certainly no “missus,” and the truth of that punctured through my picket-fenced hopes of a life with Wyland.

I had left Dr. Walker’s office with a plastic bag in hand, samples of formula and a book on breastfeeding jangling at odds with one another. The outside smelled like an early March frost, and it was cluttered with snotty-nosed children reaching for their distracted mothers’ hands. One woman with chalk-colored lips leaned her face in close to her daughter’s and hissed “stop being a brat” through the gap in her front teeth. The morning sickness tightened in my belly, and the smooth rhythm of anxiety cramped my knuckles. 

There was no way I could be a mother.

“Then you need to take your anxiety meds, Vienna. We’ll figure this out. You’re only three months along. You have until fifteen weeks, and even then, you can fly out of state if you need to...” Rosa says, finally breaking her silence. I know she’s stuck at thirteen, researching ways out of her trouble behind her mother’s back. It makes a little more sense, the reason why Mrs. Piedras wouldn’t let me stay over at their home anymore or why she didn’t raise a big stink with the school when she found out what Troy had done to her daughter. Why she cloaked her family in darkness when reality came to butt heads with Sundays spent at Mass. The shame is thick-skinned, difficult to penetrate, and working through it feels futile. Sometimes, covering your face with both hands is the more viable option, and I hate having to know that firsthand.

Rosa pulls the car into the side parking lot besides Buster’s Grill. She turns off the engine and watches me take out my frustration on the peanut butter crackers. The food is heavy in my belly, a feeling that would usually click an anxious switch in me, but I’m too drunk to care. I look at the salted disc of cracker and see Mom’s face, calling me heavy, Heather Hammel’s “fat book” clutched in her fist. The baby pudge is long gone if it was ever there in the first place, and my legs run thin, my stomach flat. But my mother’s sentiment is always in the back of my mind, my cruel and reliable friend. With each bite I shut off my mom’s disapproval, Heather’s pinching fingers. My mind goes loose, and I relish the feel of uncaring.

“How’d it go at the center?” I say, eyes closed.

“The old biddies think my work is a ‘tad too progressive.’ I’d rather look progressive than like a dried-up old prune,” Rosa says at the windshield. A squat couple walks from the grill to their car, white plastic boxes in hand and get into a Tahoe with a faded "Missouri Loves Company" sticker plastered on the bumper. “Told them I’d be seeing them all again at the funeral home soon enough. Do you think they’ll call?” she says. I painfully laugh my reply.

As my teeth grind into the last bits of cracker, Rosa says, “So, how is he?” She nearly whispers it.

“Looks terrible. I’d say something like ‘a dumpster fire,’ but I’m not so sure I can judge right now.” I try not to look at Rosa’s face, but I do anyway. It’s a mistake. Rosa’s eyes are so brown they look like hot coals smoldering, and I can’t ignore the tears that line them. I can never forgive my brother for this, for loving Rosa and leaving her without a fight. And I’m not sure I can ever forgive Dad for kicking him out of our lives in the first place.

“Good,” Rosa says, and we leave it at that. Rosa hasn’t seen Troy in seventeen years, even though he’s only a town away, which makes the blow that much harsher. When Rosa asks about him, I know she’s daring herself.

“So. Is it whose I think it is?” She nods at my belly, wanting to know where the other twenty-three chromosomes are coming from. I take off my seatbelt and curl my legs into my seat. Rosa wraps an arm around my shoulder, and I rest my head in her lap. We sit like this on the bench seat, Rosa gently forking her fingers through a million strands, and we both watch as the sun through the windshield snags on my hair.

I can’t say his name out loud. I close my eyes instead, and dreamlike memory greets me: Wyland and me sitting with our backs against our high school building, pretending we don’t notice Heather Hammel, who’s pretending to read a book in her Corolla.

“He hit me again last night,” Wyland says in the memory. Our chests crush collectively, even Heather’s I’m sure because I know there’s a wire soldered from her heart to Wyland’s, even though he still calls her a troll for my benefit. I can see the wire firing between them. I’ve always gotten the sense he’s enamored by her. Maybe he doesn’t love her—maybe he’s not in love with her—but I know he sees something in Heather I don’t have, that he doesn’t have—control.

“Why does he do it?” I ask. I don’t want to know the answer, not really. I know Mr. Turnbull. He welcomes me into his house, tells jokes, pats his son on the back as he laughs and pokes fun at his inability to clean his room. He’s good-natured, has a lot of friends. He compliments his wife’s cooking. He doesn’t accidentally call me “Louise” like Dad does sometimes. It’s a hard turn for me to hate him.

“I’m not my brother.” Wyland’s fingers work the back of his head and struggle with the curls I’ve studied for ages. 

“You hit him back this time?”

“Heck, no. Only a few more weeks here, and then I’m in Chicago. He’s not really worth it anyway,” he says and studies our shoes. He wears an expensive pair of Nikes, and I wear a scuffed up, hand-me-down pair of Doc Martens. We’re no good for each other—even our shoes say it—but no part of me wants to hear it.

“You’re scared.” I reach for his hand, but before I can make contact, he’s placed it safely in his lap. I look out from my left as if I’m looking beyond Heather and watch her studying us as she mimes putting on Chapstick in her car.

“I’m not scared, I’m smart. I go off to college, work hard, do well, come back and become part owner. I take half of everything he’s ever worked for,” Wyland says. The smile is small but still curls at the corners of his mouth. “That’s what I do. I make a killing and offer you a ride in my Corvette,” he adds. I smile, hoping it’s the truth. That he’ll come back because I know I’ll be stuck here waiting for him.

“She’s going.”

“What?” I ask.

Wyland nods at Heather in the Blue Phantom, wedged between a minivan and our shop teacher, Mr. Osterhaut’s, moped. “Heather. She had said she wanted to go to Chicago last summer. I emailed her, seeing if she ever got in. She did.” I try to not let his words break through my skin, but the wounds are raw in the afternoon sun. If I even say “Chicago seems nice” he’ll change the subject. But when Heather gets into Chicago, he sends her a congratulatory email. I want to cry, the kind of cry that will leave me more hurt than healed. But I nod. It’s all I can do. 

The thought sneaks into me. I ignore it, but it’s burning loud, bright. I can taste the spark, and for a second, I don’t spit it out. But I let it go and tell him because if I don’t, he’ll leave me forever, and I know he’ll never be coming back. 

“I killed my mother.”

“What?” Wyland looks over at me. He is so beautiful, and I wish I had said “I love you” instead.

“The night she died, I pushed her off the curb and then that car hit her.” Swallowing is an act of stifling my nerves, my grieving heart. It was a mistake to tell him. He’ll never want to see me again. He’ll regret knowing me. 

Wyland nods and settles the sound of my words in his head. And then he tells me, “You’d never do something like that, Vienna.” He glances over at Heather and for a moment it seems like he’s talking to her. “You’re not that kind of person.” 

We look up to the sound of Heather starting her car in the teacher’s parking lot. She has to pull in and back out a few times before she can angle herself out onto the road. Wyland waits until Heather turns onto Westbury at the other side of the school and then he tells me he loves me and that’s when I know he could never really love Heather. He could never regret knowing me. He presses his lips against mine, and his kiss triggers my forgiveness, if only for a moment.

He tastes like water.

“You ready?” Rosa whispers, and I sit up groggy with thought and the ruthless aftertaste of alcohol. I say, “Yes,” lying with my eyes still closed. 

#

THE NEXT DAY LORETTA greets me with, “Morning, Sunshine!” as she smacks the side of the coffee machine with her hand.

“Morning,” I say, feet moving toward her and her cheetah print robe. One of the pamphlets in my “baking a baby” bag talked about not drinking caffeine while pregnant, but I’m sure it would forgive me if it knew I had to deal with animal print this early in the morning.

“I take it you had fun yesterday. We didn’t even hear you come in last night.”

“Mm-hmm,” I say. Loretta loves gossip even more than homeless cats and secondhand clothes combined. So, I can only assume she’s hanging out of her chair to hear my answer.  When I turn around, she actually is. And so is her freckled chest.

“Umm, your...” I point and Loretta quickly covers up.

“Oops. Sorry. Sometimes I think they have a mind of their own.” I nod, quickly filling up “The Goal of All Life is Death” mug Loretta bought, and Dad begrudgingly accepted for his last birthday. They came to a compromise. He promised to use it if he could cover the quote with a piece of masking tape out of respect for the clients, so when I hold it in my hands, it feels like the words are trying to imprint my flesh. 

Using Loretta’s runaway breast as my ticket out of there, I head into the hallway and pretend not to hear her when she asks if I ended up meeting anyone.

As I walk to the office, I start feeling better about today than yesterday. It’s a little easier now that my secret isn’t solely mine. After leaving the parking lot at Buster’s Grill, Rosa had dropped me off three houses down from the home so I could sneak in. Not having to answer Dad or Loretta’s questions and hugging a toilet were the only two things I was concerned about.

“This is what has to happen. Eating and making an appointment. You need to talk to an OB. You need to gain a little weight. It’s up to you if you keep it or not, but either way, it’s important that my best friend gets healthy.” I had nodded at Rosa from the passenger’s seat, the slits in the leather biting at my legs.

“Okay,” I said. I concentrated on a peeling part of dashboard to help keep the crackers down. Rosa stretched across the bench to hug me. Her smell is always patchouli—sometimes with hints of formaldehyde—and I inhaled it until my lungs burned and the crackers ominously danced in my belly.

After sneaking upstairs and avoiding a few creaky steps, I walked the wooden floor of my room. I sketched on loose pieces of lined paper because I keep forgetting to buy another pad. I shaded pictures of my face, of Dad’s. Mom’s. I threw up twice in the toilet, each time a shameful attempt at guessing whether it was because of the pregnancy or because of the booze. I felt like my mother and decided that was the last time I would ever allow myself to feel like that again. 

I have to be better.

The vacuum snorts me lucid as I walk past it in the viewing room on my way to the office. Dad—already crisply dressed in his best funeral suit—makes straight paths against the wood. More efficient than sweeping, a time saver, as he always says. The one time he caught me with a broom he jokingly threatened to dock my pay, although I’m still not sure how much of a joke it was. 

“You look nice,” he says, not looking at me. He’s wedging the head of the vacuum cleaner around the base of a potted plant. 

“Thanks.” I have on one of my staples, a cream knitted dress with rose blooms the size of cabbage heads silk screened onto it. My makeup is done as always, hair loosely curled and settling beneath my shoulder blades.

“Back-to-back today. Etta Gunther at ten and Adil Sharma at one. A viewing. A funeral,” Dad says. I know this, considering I’ve already talked to the families, but I’m sure he’s still wary of my outburst over Parker and my subsequent memory swipe of the Patterson’s cremation plans. If only he knew the truth, maybe he’d give me a pass. 

Maybe not.

“Overdose. Car accident,” I say, and he nods. 

“You did your homework.” Because there’s always a test. He’s slicked his hair back, and I know it’s only a matter of time before a few strands make a break for it. Mom always called it “finger in a socket” hair, and my parents would laugh as she’d run a shaky hand through it.

“Have fun yesterday?”

“I did,” I say. As Dad works the cleaner, I spy his cuff links popping out from beneath his jacket. It’s the pair Granddad gave him before his sentencing and the pair Gram treats like the Holy Grail. 

“Did you tell him ‘hi’ for me?” he says, and I pretend I can’t hear him over the noise, the unnatural sound of vacuum cleaner against wood. “You know who I’m talking about,” he says. He turns off the vacuum. 

“Sure,” I say to my shoes. “He said you two should go fishing some time.” My heart. It can’t decide if it wants to stop or break through my ribs. I don’t know how he knows I met with Troy, but maybe he figures it’s because yesterday was the anniversary. Or maybe he knows Troy’s hand is automatically the one I reach for when life gets a little rougher. 

“You know he’ll hurt you, Vienna. Troy’s genetically conditioned to hurt,” he says. It’s true. Almost. 

I think about the pink plastic trash bucket, mom’s head angled so it could catch the drunken contents of her stomach. Once when I was ten—years after Mom became a Clinique counter dropout—I ran my fingers through my mother’s hair the way Troy used to do and tried to find the reason he’d leave them snagged in the mess for so long.

My brother wasn’t with me because by this time—he had started hanging with an older crowd—and even though he would still sit on the couch with Mom in the evenings, he’d grow restless and go hole up in his room. So, I was now the one in charge of doling out Mom’s weekend doses of alcohol whenever Gram was busy at the home. And that weekend, after pestering us with a shrill chorus of “Are you sure you guys will be okay?” Gram attended a funeral directors’ convention in Kansas City to work her “magic” for better deals on chemicals.  I tried to not resent being alone, watching Mom swig her drink down while she critically studied my body with a squinty eye until she fell victim to sleep.

After I took off her house shoes and propped a pillow beneath her heavy head, I decided to sketch in my room. I had a whole collection at that time—portraits of everyone in my class, including my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Donovan. I loved those sketches and hated them too. The rush of moving my hand in vicious tics was one thing but having to look into Heather Hammel’s eyes after I completed the dead curve in her mouth was another. I kept them in an empty manila envelope I had found in the cramped bedroom my father used for an office. I then placed it between my mattress and bedspring, my whole world, a lifetime of embarrassment flimsily protected in a ten-by-ten room.

I knew Troy had been stealing my sketch pads because Dad would bring one home for me after work at the Manor Market, but he’d never bring something home for Troy. Since I knew my brother wouldn’t be home until my shadow completely disappeared from the floor in my room, I ventured down our short hall to where he sporadically slept and opened his door to an abomination. It used to be cleaner than mine, but considering he refused to let Gram near any of his stuff anymore when she came to clean, I wasn’t surprised that it smelled like Mom’s toilet when it clogged. 

There were dirty clothes in tiny mountains on the floor. No sheets on the bed. I didn’t want to touch anything but realized I didn’t need to. Troy probably reasoned I wouldn’t dare walk into his room and simply tossed my sketch pad under his bed. I pawed around until I found it, still bound and intact. I brought it out onto my lap and noticed a red smear across the grainy cover. I dipped my finger into it. Blood.

I should have run and pummeled my fists into Mom’s snoring back until she groaned awake, but instead, I did something that wasn’t at all me. I reached under again, felt around—my heart now a throbbing cyst in my ears—and pulled out a tin box, crusted and stinking. I dared the little girl inside of me to open it and look at everything my brother was made of. And when I did, I was met with the bulbous mess of rotting hearts.

“I was afraid they’d get Mortimer.” I turned, and there he was, eyes so wet they looked sticky.

“But Mortimer’s dead, Troy,” I said, referring to the bird Gram and Granddad had gotten me the week before that had fatefully choked on a seed and croaked. 

“I’m sorry,” is all he could say, and I retched up a warm puddle of saliva. He took the box from my rust-colored hands and shut it. It was a dull sound, like patting a pillow. 

“Don’t say anything, okay?” He sat on his bed on top of a brown stain on the mattress, a dried-up puddle that came to three points like a box elder leaf. “They don’t need to know.” He nodded out the door to where Mom burped and drooled in heavy sleep. I shook my head and picked up the scent of our mother’s favorite drink on his breath.

“I just...I just don’t know if I can stop, you know?” He took my face with both eyes. He was pleading with me, but I could only grasp for straws when answering him.

“I won’t tell.” 

“I know you won’t,” he said. The blood was drying on my hands, forming cracked branches around my fingers, and it’s all I could look at when he said, “You’re my sister.”

I look at my father, the dead vacuum cleaner in his hand. A strand of slicked down hair is already bulging at the side of his head.

“I’m not the one who abandoned him,” I say. He looks like I’ve jammed the vacuum into his gut.

“He’s not your son. You have no clue what it’s like.” He clicks the vacuum cleaner back to life, and it’s as if he’s been battling the potted plant this whole time and not treating me like a child. I want to scream, “I’ll know sooner than you think!” but I keep the nervous thought in my colon where I know it will pester me the rest of the day. 

“Tell Loretta to put some clothes on,” I say above the racket. He bobs his head in recognition, a naked Loretta being bad for business.

In the office, my head hurts. I reach for the aspirin I keep in one of the desk drawers but stop. I’m not sure pregnant women can even take aspirin. I’m not sure of anything anymore. I sit in the chair, solid navy-blue leather against the floral messiness of my dress. I’m not showing—not yet—but when I sit, my paunch seems to grow, and I place a tentative hand on it. It’s a gift I’m afraid to unwrap, so I search online for the courage to tug at the bow.

Before we open at eight, I spend a half hour searching pregnancy facts, scarring myself with pregnancy pictures, and checking our business email. There’s one sent from our contact page on the home’s website. The body and subject are empty, but the return email address catches my eye. Hturnbull@linkmail.com. I think I’m going to be sick until I know it and barely make it into the wastebasket next to the desk. I’m a wilted flower when I hear the bell tinkle over the front door—soft, padded footsteps making their way through the open office door to the desk.  A pair of flip-flops and their set of poorly painted toenails meet with my face.

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you’re pregnant,” the flip-flops murmur. I grab the desk, lifting myself up with shaky hands and am met with Heather Hammel’s full belly, the dead curve in her mouth.