Heartbreaker

by Claudia Dey

  When Pony lay down, you rolled up the sleeves of her shirt to look for a vein and saw on your daughter only bruises. They erupted until they joined. You ran your fingers over them. You could see in Pony’s eyes that, even with your light touch, they were sore. How could you not have noticed these? When you spent so many hours just watching your daughter, studying her face and her body, tracking her as she would soon track you, how could you have missed these? You stroked Pony’s arms. They were a deep blue from the bloodwork. Glancing from their stations in their dresses that were three sizes too big and always had to be spot-washed after a shift, the women cast their eyes over you. Yes, there was a vein. At her right wrist. By the bone. Thin, but it would work.

  Pony loved to nose around the gold-black bedroom, open any small boxes you had on the dresser, run her hands over the carpet under the bed. You made her sly. You avoided her questions about your past, and so Pony developed other methods of collecting information, getting what she needed—a criminality (the height of which would be robbing a drug dealer at gunpoint). It was the night of your party and Pony was ten and she had been inside your closet, trying on your low blue heels, flexing her toes to make them fit, when she eyed the fur throw stuffed into the corner; behind it, the white plastic bag. She had never seen the bag before. She sat cross-legged on the floor and laid out its contents. She shook the dust from them. The Heavy was trying to zip up your dress—the party one, the slinky one—when Pony came soundlessly down the stairs. A grin filled her face. Her teeth were uneven. She tried to cover them and keep her features slack as a gambler’s. In your white button-down and black pencil skirt, Pony was proud. The clothes hung from her frame. I could see her body trembling beneath them. She rolled the top of the skirt to keep it on (later she would make a belt out of duct tape), raised her arms above her head, and spun. You arrowed across the room to your daughter and wrapped your arms around her, around yourself—who you had been so many years before—until Pony pulled herself from your grip. “Let me go.”

  You told me how you got the waitress uniform. When you were nearly killed in the parking lot of an all-you-can-eat restaurant, the midway mark of your drive north, at the age of sixteen and a half.

  You parked at the back of the lot, closest to the highway. In the driver’s seat of the stolen Mercedes, you ran your hands through what was left of your hair, then spat into your palms and cleaned your face. You looked at yourself in the mirror. Joan of Arc. Freddie Mercury. Joan of Mercury. Ha. You swung the door open and stepped from the car. Your legs gave out. Don’t fall to the pavement. You wore another woman’s shoes. You had a taupe purse strung across your body. You tried to make your motions look ordinary, the purse look like your purse.

  The restaurant was big and noisy and crowded and terrifically bright. It felt like entering a fever. Everyone was talking. You cannot talk to yourself here. Wait for the car. When you get back to the car, say everything you must. Your mind was dark and fast and difficult to order. You set your gaze so it would not catch another’s. The back of the restaurant was a picture window looking out over a canyon that was a mile deep. You could watch the sun move across the canyon. Scenic view. Breathtaking. You found the expression morbid. Especially now.

  Above the buffet, there was a shotgun and, around it, the heads of animals. The rich food was under heat lamps. You stood in line and filled your plate. All you can eat. What a proposition. Every time, you switched things up. When you left your parents’ large house in the long car some six months before, you did not eat meat. Here, in the roadside restaurant, you ate meat; you ate every kind of meat; you could not eat enough meat.

  The diners had thin films of sweat on their faces. A gloss from driving, eating and talking inside the windowed room. They wore cotton shirts and bright slacks. Outside, their motor homes packed the parking lot and had names like LIVINITUP painted above the spare tires. Many of the old couples wore matching ensembles. You felt a sudden and expansive connection to all things. The people, but also the cutlery, the promise jewelry, the maps spread open on the tables. You could hear the chatter of the diners’ voices, but you could also hear the conversations they were having with themselves. You could hear their native thinking.

  “Ready to settle?” A waitress with tall hair, frosted lipstick, and matching nails filed into darts tapped the check on the plastic tablecloth. You had to reorient yourself. The sun had lowered itself in the sky. Had you fallen asleep? Yes, after five meals, you had fallen asleep. Yes, let us settle this. I will settle this. Myself, I will settle. You indicated to the waitress that you needed a minute. You composed your body, and when the waitress was turned away, you made for the back room. In it, there was a coffeemaker, a microwave, a cat calendar, a deck of cards, a half-full glass ashtray, a stack of serving trays, and spare uniforms hanging from a rolling rack. For a moment, in the room, you stood naked with an empty purse. Then, you put on the white button-down and the black pencil skirt, raised a tray above your head, and walked coolly back through the restaurant, keeping your shoes on, and fast as a fox, lifting mounds of cash from tables. You were really getting away with things now. You could hear shouting behind you. You stuffed the money into your pink underwear. You dropped the tray, had to abandon the shoes sprinting to the car.

  You would be dead if, rabid with hunger, you had not left the keys in the ignition.

  You had never heard a rifle shot before. The bullet made a humming sound just a few inches from your left ear. You cowered and, from under the dashboard, reversed into a motor home. Please don’t let my tailgate be hung up on another, bigger tailgate. Please don’t let me be stuck. You pictured your head mounted on the wall, between the heads of the animals. You cranked the steering wheel and squealed out of the lot. You could smell the smoke and rubber from your tires scorching the pavement. Eventually, you remembered to close the driver’s side door. Your fine-boned feet bare against the pedals. You looked down at the uniform. The black pencil skirt. The crisp white shirt. It was night, but you could just make it out: a burn mark on the left shoulder where the bullet had seared through cloth—it was still hot and you blew on it—and on the right breast pocket, a word stitched; you read it aloud, “Server.”

  At that time in your life, those months of driving—in the end, it would be a year of driving—you could laugh or sleep for days at a time. It was the driving that kept you straight. To steer, to signal, to refuel; these basic actions we rarely read into were the ones that saved your life.

  In the Banquet Hall, you bowed your body over your daughter’s, and inserted the needle into your own arm. Pony—always one for collusion, especially with you—kept perfectly still, and together you watched the bag above her fill with your blood. It had been a long time since you had seen so much of it.

  * * *

  AFTER PONY WAS BORN—holding her, nursing her, changing her, bathing her, soothing her; even when she was not in your arms, you moved as though she was, rocking your phantom daughter—your right arm grew stronger, and your left breast grew fuller. You would fall asleep on the carpet. In a chair. Standing up. You would say to The Heavy, “Motherhood is an inhabitation. My handwriting has changed. Look.”

  * * *

  I MET THE HEAVY only after the fire—I was born the moment he was disfigured, in the backseat of a locked truck—so I do not know his features the way I know yours, Billie Jean, but my mother did tell me that beneath the scarring lay the face of an undaunted man.

  Soon after you married The Heavy, the women came to the Last House. You had been living there since your arrival in the territory, eighteen months before. In town, you had had run-ins with the women, pleasant enough, but you could see they were still uncertain about you. Your hair was to your tailbone. Your consonants were their consonants. You kept your spine so straight it was as if you had never had to crawl or fight or beg or steal or kill. But, no matter how you answered their questions with their diction, you still gave off
the feeling of elsewhere.

  The women sat on the padded leatherette chairs in our kitchen. The chairs were beige and brown with a rose pattern sewn onto the backs. We had bought them together at Furniture City. I tried to direct you toward more sophisticated options, but you wanted to fit in, go unnoticed. You knew you were being talked about, and you hated being talked about. You knew that it took a person 170 milliseconds to identify whether another person was in their group. You knew that when ants gathered, they did two things: first, they formed a colony, and then they made a graveyard. You invited the women over for coffee. You would defuse them, be accepted into their group, be absorbed into their colony.

  The women took in all of the details of the bungalow. The objects, the arrangements. The mantel, the curtains. The television placement. How the surfaces shone. Beige and brass and black trim. The new couch. Did you make that pillow? Billie Jean Fontaine could needlepoint. Impressive. And that blanket? Billie Jean Fontaine could weave. What else could Billie Jean Fontaine do? (Answer: crochet a badminton net, the women would discover the night of your party nearly eleven years later.) In the kitchen, the shelves were full. The jars faced the same way. In the living room, the carpet was covered in lines made by a vacuum. All around the women was order. It made them feel companionable. Yours was homesteading they could relate to. The women unzipped their coats, loosened their ponytails, and watched closely as you served coffee and, in spite of daylight, slipped alcohol into their mugs. This made the women clap for you. You lifted your eyebrows just so and winked. “Oooooo,” the women said. “She’s a naughty one.”

  I want to be one of many. I don’t want to be one of many. I watched you; just behind your eyes were your thoughts. In the woods to the southwest of the Last House, where the sinkholes would form, I had seen the skull of a wolf. This was how I saw yours. Thoughts do not live behind bone. They live inside bone, and bone is fragile. You were always talking yourself into and out of things.

  The women were used to tasks. Clearing brush, cleaning headstones, taking blood. Done. By comparison, getting to know you felt slow. They accelerated the process by experimenting with closeness. They told you, the new bride, things about themselves. Secret things. A woman makes herself vulnerable only so another woman will make herself more vulnerable. In hushed tones, the women talked about their husbands, their bodies, and what they liked done to their bodies. The women’s heads got closer and closer together around the kitchen table. There were no cards on it, but there could have been. You charted the dynamics of the game, who had the worst hand, the best poker face. The women refilled their mugs and marveled at The Heavy’s physical footage. They hoped you would take the bait. You didn’t. They compromised their privacy, and trusted you would do the same. It didn’t work. You talked, but Debra Marie, Rita Star, Pamela Jo, Cheryl Chantale, and Lana Barbara Sr., her brand-new baby in her arms, heard only omissions. What were you, anyway? The shape of your eyes, the pigment in your skin, that feeling you gave off. The feeling of elsewhere. Did the territory have resources enough to welcome you, a stranger? You would have to prove yourself to them. Prove your worth.

  A bit drunk, the women started to warm up to you. They angled themselves toward you and made offers of intricate hair designs. Hair fashions. Unlimited hair fashions. The women believed that to hold the head of another woman was to know her; to feel the hair of another woman was to read her. They put their hands on your scalp. I was sitting with my dancer posture at your feet—in their new sport socks and house sandals—when the women looked down at me.

  “Just because she doesn’t bark doesn’t mean she won’t kill you,” they said, and they laughed.

  “Kill you fast!”

  “Oh God, she’s showing her teeth!”

  “Will you look at that?”

  “Just like her mother!”

  And you stroked my head to calm me.

  The women took turns. They ironed and twisted your hair, pinned and sprayed your hair, all the while, listening. You told them the plot of the book you had read in the tree. The women loved drama. Your story was better than their night soaps. You concluded it “My parents died in a car crash when I was sixteen,” and some of the women gasped. “It was the only trip they had taken without me. My mother kissed me and said, ‘We’ll be back in a few days,’ ” you lied. “I would never see them again. I had no other family. I drove north to kill off my grief. If such a thing is even possible.” That last part, you flinched, was true.

  In the tree, you had read the book so many times you knew you could rely on your consistency. You could recite whole passages from memory. Surely, the women would test you. You needed to satisfy their notion of elsewhere, while stirring up their sympathy. You needed to be exotic, but not too exotic. You needed to secure your place in the territory. More than anything, you could not be found, and returned to the life you had fled.

  For the first time, you had more than yourself to protect. You were pregnant with The Heavy’s child. You were three months along. You did not want to tell him until you knew the pregnancy would last; he would not survive another loss. You knew she would be a girl. Your daughter would be born in the summer. Summer was a beautiful time here. You would tell The Heavy your news when the women were gone, when he entered the bedroom, emptied his pockets onto the nightstand, and let his jeans fall to the floor. You pictured his reaction. You would stay up all night together. He would tell you his nickname for his sister. You would give it to your daughter. You felt your eyes prick with the thought. The women misread you; they rubbed your back, made soothing sounds. “What was your mother’s name?” they asked, wanting more from the book. And when you told the women the name of the mother, your book mother, they said, “Of course,” to the seamless story, “of course.” You felt the story of the book, the tragedy of an orphan, would be a passport to the territory. You were right. The women put the ends of their sleeves to their eyes. Alcohol functioned like dreams; it rendered them defenseless. The women set about making you one of their own.

  You knew the lie was safe; no one in the territory would have read or heard of the famous book. Their tabloid magazines were expired. John the Leader had the antennae installed in such a way that the few programs they got on their televisions were outdated. He had warned his followers that if anything happened to him, time would slow to a stop. When you disappeared that late October evening, the people of the territory thought the year was 1985. They hadn’t caught up with the rest of the world—and how could they be expected to? Their points of reference were old, and they just kept circulating like stale air.

  The truth, you told me, was that your parents simply began leaving when you were fifteen. This was not a shift that was declared. It just happened. They needed to be alone with their agonies and their faults, and besides, you were so capable. Soon, you would be sixteen. What then? You were top of your class. You could cook. You were punctual. You had beautiful manners and distinctive hair that fell thick and straight down your back. Enviable, your mother called it. Enviable hair. You had a job. You were a lifeguard. It amazed you that your parents could speak about you, their daughter, in such general categories. They would list your qualities, list you, and mistake this to be knowing. Look at her grades. Look at her manners. How responsible she is. How competent. Look at her as she pulls children from water and fills them with air.

  But you are missing everything, you wanted to tell them. You are missing everything.

  They traveled more and more, for longer stretches. When they started to go to Europe for five days, eight days, ten days, leaving the cream-colored car in the driveway and you alone in the large house, you no longer had anyone to impress. With no one there to see your efforts, what was their point? You understood you had developed your talents for your parents, so that they would take notice of you. They would call you in the middle of the night and tell you about their hotel. About their room. Their view. Tell you about t
he weather, about time.

  When our circuit had shortened to be out of the master bed, into the hallway, into Pony’s bedroom, and back to the master bed, the house dense with darkness, Pony’s sleeping body, but you, keen to solve something, you said, “I guess you’re right. When I say my nights are too full, I should ask myself full of what? What are my nights full of exactly?” You told me that night made everything bigger. You could manage your fear during the day, but at night, it became unruly. You could not sleep for fear. You talked to me as a method of survival. “A girl forms herself. How can a mother matter? How can I possibly matter? Maybe it’s less about how much time I spend checking Pony’s breathing, and more about how much time I spend on fear. Fear is the feeling of being chased. No. Of something approaching. No one tells you when you’re growing up that this feeling will go from being exciting to being sinister.” You were no longer speaking your mind but ransacking it. “What is going to get her?” You confronted yourself. “What is going to get her?”

  You have to try— But you cut me off. “I am trying. I am trying hard, Gena. I am trying so hard. Can’t you see how hard I am trying?”

  * * *

  A YEAR AND a half earlier, you got our timing right, and there he was, the boy they called Supernatural on the other side of the empty band of gravel and, upon seeing you, crossing over. “Hey.” A parka and, underneath, a starched white undershirt. The collarbones. The black jeans. His skin was flushed. Yours was too. There were very few pairs of running shoes left in the territory. You both wore the heavily treaded boots. You stood in the road, facing each other, catching your breath. At that point, I was the only one in shape. “Hey,” you echoed his greeting. You did not mean to sound so flirtatious.