Heartbreaker

by Claudia Dey

  I had read about John the Leader’s death. He went for a swim one night, a year after he founded the territory, and never came back. I could imagine his followers standing where I stood now. They knew he had drowned but could not accept it. He was an excellent swimmer. His followers looked out over the surface of the reservoir and pictured beneath it forces at work, currents and animals they could not see. And then they pictured their leader. His untamed head of hair, the way he switched between languages depending on which was closest to the thought he so urgently needed to express, no, expel, and they saw the same things operating beneath him. Forces, currents, animals. Yes, that was it. The drowning had been intentional. No one in the territory swam again.

  Until Billie.

  I have circled the reservoir many times over the last nearly forty-three hours, but now when I reach it, the pump at one end, and the hoses running from the water to the pump, in the center of it, about thirty feet from the shore, a shape floats. A human shape. The shape is partly clothed. The shape has no shoes on. 1:59 P.M. I look back to the roof of the Fontaine house. Pony is gone, the window left open, pushed back and forth by the northwest wind. Snow will be collecting on the dog, burying the dog, and the dog, so morbid, will be pleased. The northwest wind picks up. Just when you want tenderness. The window bangs against the house. The window breaks.

  One of the territory girls catches up to me, pulls off my father’s binoculars, and looks out over the black water, the white arms, the long, loose hair. “She was such a good woman, seriously. So kind. She was always giving us things. She was so generous that way. See this throw? She gave this to me. This fur throw? This was her fur throw.” And she holds it to my face. “She slept under it.” Then the girl with the DELUXE necklace in the good gold, the last of the territory gold, Pallas Jones, hollers with her incredible pipes, “Body in the reservoir!”

  * * *

  ONLY ON SATURDAY NIGHTS did my mother and I have time alone. My father would manage to get home from Drink-Mart, unlock the front door, and close it behind him before falling to his knees, then to his face like a man shot in the back. My father had a compact body. Dragging him along the hallway by his boots, my mother could handle him. “Let me,” she would say as she pulled him into their bedroom. Two single beds with pressed black bedcovers, turquoise and brown throw pillows, and between them, dustless, and hung too high, my portrait.

  In it, I am squinting, glaring at my father’s camera, but half–turned away. My hands are in my pockets. I look like something is flying at me. Him. “It was the best I could get, okay?” my father defended himself to my mother, bending the nails on the back of the wood frame, then positioning the portrait on their wall. In the dark square left by my old portrait. Fifteen, and just as reluctant, but spattered with acne. Now wrapped in a black bedsheet and stored in the crawl space. “It was the only one where the boy’s arm wasn’t over his face,” he lied. “Okay?”

  Training his lens, my father said, “We need a new portrait of you, Son. Never know what’s gonna happen here,” and I pictured him stabbing me in the neck. I was standing in front of my father’s truck. His fog lights mounted on the roof and, above them, the galaxy. I was eighteen. It was night. The earth spinning at a thousand miles an hour and my father telling me to hold still. “You sure aren’t that boy anymore,” he said, conjuring my old portrait, the one that needed replacing. “You’re a man now.” Flash. Am I? Am I a man? Okay. I’m a man. What kind of man? I wanted to ask my father. Flash. The affair with Billie had just begun. Did he know about the affair? Flash. Is that why he considered me a man? A cheat like him? Impossible. Billie and I were traceless.

  My mother had tried to have more children—for nearly two decades, she had tried—and I knew, of all her sadnesses, this was her primary one. I, in my singleness, was her primary sadness. No one in the territory knew about it. Like a dangerous animal, she kept it confined to the bungalow. She had to keep it in line. Keep herself in line. “You have to go to bed,” I would say to my mother, polishing the silver, scrubbing the shower, stone-faced, her hands raw. “You need to get some rest,” I would say, and she would look at me like I was ruining something for her. And then she would place me and tell me I was right. “What am I doing?” She would pull herself to standing. “What am I doing?” she would ask, not wanting the answer.

  Despite my status as some kind of phenomenon in the town—remember, undeserved—my mother felt inferior to the other women of the territory, all of whom had multiple children, were laden with children.

  * * *

  SEVEN THINGS:

  1. Except Billie Jean Fontaine. She was not laden with children.

  2. But she was an outsider, a newcomer, and this was a kind of defect.

  3. Having the one child fit her defect.

  4. Even though my mother wore her low blue heels every day for five years, Billie was never invited into our kitchen.

  5. Billie would say, “A woman does not love her friends as much as she is haunted by them.”

  6. I listened to the women in our kitchen try to talk about something other than Billie, and not be able to.

  7. “Who has a dog that obeys like that? A dog who does not tear at her dress when she is dancing like that? That is a woman who can speak to animals and the animals will listen.”

  For eighteen years, as the other women made and delivered babies, my mother was the one to lift the heavy objects around them. “I’ll get it,” my mother in her starched workdress would say. “Not in your condition. Let me.” Some days, unfolding cots, setting up medical lights, lugging coolers filled with bags of blood, pushing them forward to the loading dock, she felt like an invisible servant.

  “ ‘The broken-hearted are always cold,’ ” I read to Billie. “ ‘While they will never ask for warm liquids, they may ingest them if presented. Though not considered fatal, heartbreak can kill, if indirectly.’ ”

  Billie and I had considered lying to my mother. A few of the young girls in the territory were pregnant with the sons and daughters of the Delivery Man, and I could protect Billie by withholding her name and offering up one of theirs. Tristan, Lorraine, Rochelle. I would see the girls staring into the bonfire at the graveyard. They would ask each other, “Does the search for warmth explain, like, nearly every action here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that the same thing as love?”

  “No.”

  In their heads, they would mix up embryo and embargo. They would toss the Delivery Man’s amateur wood carvings into the flames. “Total former inmate,” they would say and watch his efforts burn. For the boys, the bonfires were smoke signals. They wondered whether a satellite might see them. Whether something might land here. A spacecraft. Opening its jaw and flooding them with light.

  10:45 P.M. November 17, 1984. Saturday. Sitting across from my mother in our silent kitchen, the waxed floor, the pressed dish towels, and me, her primary sadness, I could not lie. It was a risk after a long series of risks. My mother could have threatened me: Why would I do that? You have been so dishonest. Why would I cover for your dishonesty? I wanted to give something to my mother. To lift something heavy for her.

  I proposed the Mother Trick. I told my mother Billie Jean Fontaine was carrying my child and was, we thought, about three months along. Then, in the long quiet that ensued, I tried to read my mother’s face. On it, two things were happening: She could see how, pregnant, she would shift upward in the esteem of the women. This feeling in my mother, I did not want to see. A shallow feeling when I had lost track of how to have shallow feelings. Had I ever known how to have shallow feelings? Yes, don’t oversell yourself. I had layered three shirts when I first started to run to make me look older to Billie. I had tried to lift a bag of concrete and could not. I had held a pelt to my jaw and deliberated myself with a beard. Am I who I think I am? Not the time. And then something else crossed my mother’
s face: she sensed a fault line in Billie’s marriage to The Heavy, and was happy for it. In fact, it seemed to make her shine.

  After taking blood at the Banquet Hall, the women of the territory would gather in Rita Star’s kitchen. Some evenings, they would gather in ours. Brown, turquoise, spotless. Here, have some citrus, here, have a rest, now you lie on that cot until the black spots go away; in their unzipped jackets and matching dresses, the women performed their days for each other. How could they be tanned and pale at the same time? The women were confused by the teenagers, but went on draining them. These girls and boys with their big hair and their bad teeth, inching up their shirt sleeves, were the only things keeping this town alive. The women watched the hospital dramas and knew in other places the IV lines worked in the opposite direction, but whenever this point was raised, the women countered it. They stirred their instant coffee. “Blood is renewable,” the women reminded each other. “The only renewable resource,” they quoted the infomercial. “And besides,” they reasoned, “how else would we feed our kids?”

  When I came back from the truck lot, wanting only to be alone, the women grabbed at my cheekbones and my chin, held my shoulders, ran their tired hands over my face. “Look at him. Look at Debra Marie’s beautiful son, her fully loaded son with all of his limited edition and discontinued features.” And my mother, the primary sadness having left her body and been replaced by purpose, superlative purpose, announced, “I am pregnant.” The women took their hands off me and held them to their mouths, and then ran them over my mother’s stomach. At that early point, just foam.

  I watched my mother step down slowly from her truck and put her hands to the small of her back. I watched her as she arranged her features at will. How she had one face and then, as she needed, summoned a different one. When the other women decided whose kitchen to meet in after taking blood at the Banquet Hall, my mother spoke of her exhaustion. The other women grew nostalgic for their exhaustion. Two, three, four, five kids, they lit each other’s cigarettes, widened their eyes, and warned my mother her whole world was going to change. “When you have only the one kid, you still have something left to say,” the women told her and they laughed. Together they were jovial, understood. “The thing is,” my mother confided in me later, “I really do feel exhausted. I really do feel sick. The strain on my back is real.”

  In our bungalow, my mother sewed small clothes for the baby and large clothes for herself. Her body bent over the kitchen table, the lone, dim light above her. If my father called to say he was staying late at the truck lot, she did her sewing with the beige mound, her pregnancy, beside her. To give her skin a rest. She prepared the duct tape in advance. The silver strips hung from the edge of the kitchen table should she suddenly hear my father’s engine approach. She was agile. Going from one state to the other.

  I watched as Billie did not put her hands to the small of her back, and never spoke of her exhaustion. She had one face. The same face. In town, she made sure she still had something left to say. In town, no one ever asked Billie how she was feeling.

  After we swam, and I was just so relieved to be alive—min. darkness, max. luv—Billie would say, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a fire, build a little fire on the shoreline? Warm our bodies and be dried by the fire?” But I wouldn’t build a fire for her. I wouldn’t take the risk. I thought it was greedy, her wish for a fire. When we were already getting away with so much. When her house with her husband in it was only three hundred steps away. And Billie would say, “You are so young. Where’s your stupidity?” I didn’t want to say I was looking at it. I was looking at my stupidity. All the death-defying things I did to impress her.

  * * *

  2:07 P.M. The water of late October seeps into my steel-toe boots, then fills my black jeans, and weighs down my hoodie and my parka. I already see death when I see water, and now I am traversing the frigid reservoir, high and churning, to recover a corpse. In my head, I hear my father’s voice. He is talking about the rush. Wanting it. Seeking it out. It tells you that you matter. You have an effect, Son—my father would spear me in the chest with his finger—you can change the course. No I can’t. There are forces more intelligent. Forces more mighty. Forces we might perceive, but cannot understand. A force. What would you call it? Do you have a name for it? You must have a name for it. Tell me! Tell me what you would call this because I don’t have a name for it—and though I am careful to keep my head up, I inhale a mouthful of water arguing with my father, no, I am arguing with myself, and coughing, I wrap my arm around the shoulder of the corpse, which, given the hair, I will guess is female, but if I look at her closely, I will drown, which I have heard only great things about, that it’s basically like taking a tranquilizer, and, though I am tempted, I tilt my head up toward the sky, which is colorless and, by me, unmoved.

  I watched my mother hold the damp cloth to her face and her neck. “Don’t just stand there. Take a shower,” she said. I took a shower, and at my feet, the water rose pale pink. The bathroom mirror was fogged and I saw how low it was. Too low to capture my face. The mirror stopped at my shoulders. My shoulders, which were broad and just framed by the mirror. I burned my bloodied shirt with the owl feathers and the foam and spread the ashes over the dirt of our backyard. I didn’t know if Billie had made it home. I didn’t know if Billie could walk. I didn’t know a body could bleed that much. When my mother lay back in her bed with her hair design pulled out, I asked, “What about the blood?” and what I meant was what about the blood that had come from Billie’s body, will Billie be okay with that much less blood? And my mother, looking up from the baby in her arms, ordered, “Take the black sheets from the linen cupboard and put them all in the wash. Burn a tarpaulin in the yard.” And when my father parked his truck in the driveway, I waited a few minutes before I slammed the back door. My father met me there and, his eyes glistening, said, “It’s a girl.”

  He wanted to smoke with me outside. Smoking was one of the ways we spent time together. I hated smoking. I smoked with him, and, when he’d finished his cigarette, he said, “We’ll call her Debra Marie Jr.” The tarpaulin still smoldering, I scanned the yard for owl feathers, and my father put his arm around my shoulder. I let him. His voice wavering, he said, “The baby looks just like you.”

  I drag the corpse onto the embankment and lie down beside it. Above me the mouth of the girl in the fur throw—which has been cut up the front, and sleeved and collared with safety pins and duct tape for a coat—moves rapidly. My heart pulses in my head, my stupid heart. The majority of the girl’s outfit is broken. Her ripped daypants, dyed and eaten away by bleach. Streaked with bicycle grease. I can see her bluing legs, her white underwear. I look away from the girl and down at the ice casing my boots, my jeans, my parka. Casing my ball cap, my hood. I look like I am in a hazmat suit. No. A body bag. Yes. Winter, like death, when we are left alone with our questions. Why, Billie? How, Billie? What, Billie? Should I have built a fire for you? Told you I loved you? “What could I have done? You know the answer.”

  “He is totally talking to himself,” says Deluxe from inside many coyotes. “Maybe he has hypothermia?”

  Again, have heard only the best things.

  Around me, the search teams gather. They have never come this close to the reservoir. They look down at the spill of long dark hair, the nude body, mostly preserved in a rectangle of ice. Their sons and daughters give each other boosts and shimmy silently to the tops of the pine trees, thin and new, that ring the water. They have never seen anything dead. They picture their faces serene against satin. No.

  My father breaks the silence. “John?”

  “Not much left of the face.”

  “But a man.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Must be John the Leader.”

  “Must be.”

  “He finally surfaced.”

  “John.”

  “Wow.”
<
br />   “It’s a sign.”

  “Yeah, but of what?”

  Then, turning their eyes on me, “The boy can float.”

  “The boy can fucking swim,” the men say in disbelief.

  “Supernatural, all right.”

  “Super Fucking Natural.”

  “Super Almighty Fucking Natural.”

  * * *

  I DID NOT KNOW how to figure out whether Billie had made it home. I could not leave my bungalow again to check the clearing, or to watch for Billie in the windows of her bungalow. My father had already asked me where I was that day. Why I wasn’t at the truck lot. How no one can sell a truck the way I can. I barely have to speak, and the truck sells. All I have to do is walk around the truck and, shortly after, my father watches it drive off the lot. If a territory man sees me sitting in the driver’s seat, even of the most featureless truck, I sell it to the man. Of late something seemed to have gotten into me. I wasn’t selling as many trucks, and today, I didn’t even show at the lot. He needed me. The family needed me. I had a sister now, a little sister, and my sister needed me. I had to come to the lot and sell the trucks off it. My father selling me on selling until he left the kitchen and in his sock feet paced the hallway with the crying baby. Not a bad man. Both of them making noises. Years old. Hours old.