Heartbreaker

by Claudia Dey

  The Heavy picks up his speed. We blow by the perimeter. 8:31 P.M. October 26. Saturday. A wall does not suddenly form behind us. We had believed this as children; we had been told that if we ever left the territory, even stepped a toe over the line, a steel wall would rise and it would be unclimbable. No doors to open, no grips to use. No way to reenter. To see your people again. Even though we knew there was no logic to it—the Delivery Man came and went every month—we pictured ourselves stranded in oblivion, at the mercy of larger animals.

  So far, only static from the CB.

  2:09 A.M. Pony is asleep. The Heavy is driving fast, and outside the truck windows are trees, miles and miles of trees. The Heavy looks out at the trees, and then back to me, in the rearview mirror—his eyes are my eyes—and there it is, a quiet at last, my second strength: son of The Heavy.

  My father.

  * * *

  I THOUGHT GREAT PARTS of the land would be on fire. The people of the territory talked about the world beyond the perimeter this way. Or submerged by water. Or pavement. Sometimes, I pictured a grid of beige bungalows identical to our own. Snowmobiles corroding in the yards. The Delivery Man had told Pony it was two days before you hit the end of navigable road and arrived at a small airstrip to get you over the water. “Airstrip won’t be there long,” he said. “Already, trees are coming down around it.” We were still a while away from knowing whether the Delivery Man had ever told the truth.

  * * *

  6:45 A.M. My watch alarm goes off. I wake up to see Pony is driving. I look behind me. Nothing but open road. The highway is smooth and unbuckled. Not the gravel roads we are used to. Pony drives even faster than The Heavy. She has her hunting glasses on. She has rolled down all of the windows. Her hair snaps in the wind like flags pointing in every direction. Their dog is in the passenger seat on The Heavy’s lap with her eyes closed and her head leaning out.

  The air has the same sharpness as the territory air. The light is the same, and this morning, it is gold. 7:59 A.M. October 27. Sunday. We are almost twelve hours past the perimeter. We have refilled the tank three times. Seventeen jerry cans left. Ample water, bullets, canned food.

  Where will this road end? In a crater, an inferno, a rush of water? I have spent my entire life inside a ten-mile radius. There is something to be said about a place you can memorize. As the road goes on and on, uninterrupted, I see that the world is bigger than a lifetime and just as unknown to me. It has been sixty hours since Billie left. She could be anywhere by now.

  As if reading my mind, Pony turns on the radio. She cranks it. A guy with a slight drawl talks about sports. He comes in loud and clear. He talks about a team, their winning streak. “And that caps a stellar season for 2018.” I can tell Pony wants to slow down to absorb this information, but she wouldn’t dare. We’ve lost enough ground as it is. It’s not 1985. We’re thirty-three years into the future. The Heavy would tell me that, in a fire, you can actually hear the flames suck the air from a room. This is how it feels now in the truck. Pony shuts off the radio. She doesn’t even throw me a look. She doesn’t have to. We stare through the windshield, and the bubble we have been living in breaks apart.

  I squint into the sun. The sky is cloudless. Satellite view: a narrow highway that winds through dense forest, and two trucks on a crash course. Driving toward each other at very high speeds.

  We nearly collide with the matte black truck. The road is just wide enough for both of us. A slight swerve and then the high pitch of the brakes as we each come to a stop and gear into reverse. It’s Billie. In the driver’s seat. FONTN. It’s Billie.

  She is in The Heavy’s arms. The moment she gets out of the truck, this is where she goes. She wears The Heavy’s spare outerwear, his socks, his workboots. She broke into the aluminum supply box with her bare hands, she tells us. She holds Pony for a long time. She holds me. She has to glide between us. The size thirteen boots. She looks down, laughs at herself—the laugh is brief, barely leaving her throat—and then she stands with The Heavy, who can only look at Billie, their dog settling herself at their feet. One of Billie’s hands goes straight to the dog’s fur, up and behind her ears. The dog’s eyes shut. Steam comes from her mouth. Everything falls still. Not even a single bird. The driver’s side door to The Heavy’s truck swings open. The truck is on an angle. Partly in the ditch. Motor hums. Billie left it running. From the stereo, a song plays. I don’t know the song. Something about love. Trading everything for love. “I figured it out,” Billie says, looking from The Heavy to me. “When I was driving, I put it all together.”

  Billie tells us she had tried to empty her mind as she had so many years before, but found she couldn’t. Her life was what she wanted. We were what she wanted. She had turned around, she says. She was coming back for us. We would leave the territory together. We would find a new place together. “Forgive me,” she says to The Heavy. “Forgive me,” she says to Pony and then to me. She had nearly hit a bison. Last night. It stepped into her high beams and stayed motionless in the middle of the highway. “You cannot believe how dark it was,” she says, “and then suddenly.” She extends her arms to indicate the beautiful animal and then takes in a breath. She came to a stop about a foot from its body. Its massive, peaceful body. “You know the truth when you look into the eyes of something wild,” Billie says. The four of us stand in the space between the two trucks. There is no end in sight to the road. The sun rises higher and higher. It is white now, and, with it, comes decision. We wonder how far we can go.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to Jennifer Lambert and Martha Webb for their expertise and heart. Thank you also to Anne McDermid, Suzanne Brandreth, Charlotte Cray, the teams at HarperCollins, The Borough Press, and Random House––especially the brilliant Anna Pitoniak.

  For close reading and radical thinking: Ishan Davé, Martha Sharpe, Jason Logan, and my sister-in-arms, Heidi Sopinka.

  For tracking down Jimmy Page and other forms of genio: Jill Connell.

  On how not to get killed by a wild dog and countless other life-giving directions: Michael Ondaatje.

  Grateful acknowledgment to the short films of Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, the parlor games of One Yellow Rabbit Performance Theatre, Annie Baker’s John, the Talmud on mercy, Brian May on asteroids, Pico Iyer on ant colonies, and, dearest to me, Alisha Piercy on hair—also the many journalists who have written about free divers—notably, Alec Wilkinson.

  For solidarity: Caia Hagel, Jason Collett, Chala Hunter, Damian Rogers, Allie Yonick, Michelle Giroux, Alysha Haugen, Daniela Gesundheit, Tom Daniels, Gabrielle MacLellan, and Kerri MacLellan. For talk and wisdom of all kinds: Marie-Josée Lefebvre, Christie Smythe, Christine Pountney, Michael Winter, and, rarest bird, Gillian Frise.

  Thank you always to Marion Bowers, the Kerr family, my beloved parents, Peter and Janet Dey, and my sister, Sarah.

  For the above and all that is beautiful and true: Thank you to Don Kerr and our boys, Dove and Austin, my company in this wilderness.

  For Morwyn.

  And in memory of Chas Bowers, librarian, caretaker, and a lion of a man.

  By Claudia Dey

  Fiction

  HEARTBREAKER

  STUNT

  Plays

  TROUT STANLEY

  THE GWENDOLYN POEMS

  BEAVER

  About the Author

  CLAUDIA DEY is the author of Stunt, a Globe and Mail and Quill & Quire Book of the Year. Her plays have been produced internationally and nominated for the Governor General’s Award and Trillium Book Award. Dey’s writing has appeared in many publications, including The Paris Review and The Believer. She has also worked as a horror film actress and as a cook in lumber camps across northern Canada, and is co-designer of Horses Atelier. Claudia Dey lives in Toronto. Heartbreaker is her American debut.

  claudiadey.com

  Twitter: @claudiadey

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nbsp; Instagram: @claudiadeytona

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