Heart-Breaker

by Claudia Dey

  She stopped coming downstairs. She stopped washing her body. Her bedroom had two windows. One looked out at the yard, the other onto the reservoir. She stood before the windows. The Death Man’s gulls in a gray knot on our yard, and only three hundred steps away, the water. Why did these birds of water not return to their natural place?

  When she moved, my mother did not make use of her joints. Her legs remained straight. When she lay on her bed, she placed a stiff arm across her body. Beneath it, her organs pained her. Her skin hurt. Her teeth were sore. Just under her collarbone, she was being rushed at, drilled. The Heavy tried calling some of the territory women.

  “She is not herself,” Shona Lee explained.

  “Exactly!” he shot back. Exactly. But Shona Lee left him alone with that. He was deserted with questions. For The Heavy, it was the most upsetting thing. Where does a herself go? And how can a man bring a herself back home?

  * * *

  “WHEN YOU LOOK OUTSIDE, you see the woods. You see the town, the people of the territory. I don’t see the woods, the town, the people. I see a set.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  My mother tried to further explain her state. “It’s like a film set. All of it. Nothing is real.”

  “Still don’t understand.”

  “When you look at me, you see your mother.”

  “Yes. I see my mother. I am looking at my mother. I am looking at my mother!”

  “When I look at you, I don’t see my child. I am not looking at my child.”

  And my mother was like the other women of the territory, gasping and shuddering, when she said that. Like we were at final resting. My final resting.

  After that, my mother stopped speaking to me for days on end, and the change that had come over her accelerated. The muscles of her body, that of a runner, withered until her indoor tracksuit hung from her frame. When she moved, I could see her elbows and her ribs, her nipples. The Heavy tried to bring her things on a tray. The things mounted. Her bedroom took on a stench. The stench of the discarded. Just a couple of months before, my mother had emptied her bedroom, emptied her drawers, her closet. Her party dress, white heels, gold eyeshadow, pale pink workdress, gold hoop earrings, hairpins, perfume, tan pantyhose. Anything that had come close to her body she lifted into her arms and left in a heap at the edge of our property for Pallas and Future to rifle through. Free Day. A day for the broken and unwanted, as is.

  Her head was teeming with sentences. I stood at the end of her bed and tried to read the ticker tape of her mind: Who is this girl asking me to identify her haircut? Telling me she has feathered her hair? Do I like it? Wanting to swim. Wanting to light my cigarette. Wanting to tell me a story, tell me about her day, thrill me. What is this about a plan? You have to have a plan. Loading our truck bed with jerry cans of gasoline. Twenty jerry cans. She is about halfway there. She is saving money. She has saved up so much money. Heading south. Taking me and The Heavy away from here, beyond the territory. Getting me back to where I started. Getting my rigging back. Myself back. She is practicing her driving. Lana lets her. On her father’s truck. At first, she didn’t, but now she does. Lana’s paranoid, but telepathic. Friendship is telepathy. Love is telepathy. We used to be telepathic. Why is this girl so angry? Holding the receiver to my ear, talking about eternity?

  “I am in the middle of something,” my mother spoke at last. “You have to stop interrupting me.”

  And my mother’s hair collected into hard strands. Her skin turned sheer as paper. She was bloodless. She was heatless. She was gone. The Heavy did not have to tell me. The way she moved, the sounds she made. From Lana, in the large darkness of the founders’ bus, I had heard the stories. All skin, all bone, all animal. By the time my mother left, she looked just the way she had when she arrived.

  * * *

  IN THEIR RUBBER APRONS and dish gloves, their cleaning supplies in their pails, the women of the territory set down their mops and tie their scarves over their mouths.

  “Have mercy.”

  “Yeah, I already covered that with Debra Marie.”

  It was clear that, at first, we had tried to stack the magazines in the corners of the living room, but the towers grew too tall even for The Heavy to add to, so we laid them out on the floor, which could have been read as a strategy against the mice. I had constructed a second bedroom for myself, moving a spare mattress beside the couch, and around it, piling coolers and unusable electronics, a crimping iron, a ceiling fan, a Betamax, so that if I chose to sleep there, nothing could sprint across my face. I did not admit it was my night mother who frightened me. Her ghost touch, her eyes that never closed.

  The television, and behind it, the tarped-off section of the house being built for my mother. The blue room. For my mother to return to her thinking, her native thinking. “To return to herself,” The Heavy said to me one August night, guiding lumber through his Skilsaw. But as quickly as The Heavy could build it, termites started in on the wood. The beams framing the room had begun to slope and thin. “A difficult room,” The Heavy said, pulling down the hood of the Easiest Chair.

  In small armies, the termites were making it to the furniture so the edges of our tables were pocked, legs of chairs uneven. The women tested the furniture, and if it was weak, they cracked it over their thighs and fed it to the bonfire they had going on our front yard.

  A red squirrel had made its way into the house, so The Heavy and I had set up a trap in the cooler at the end of my makeshift bed, a string from the open lid to his hand, peanut butter on a slice of bread inside it. When the squirrel went for the bait, The Heavy slammed the lid shut. Carrying the cooler outside, The Heavy set it down and then lost his nerve. He could not flip the lid open. What if the squirrel was hurt? How could we send it back to the wild?

  Earlier that spring, we had seen a deer frozen in midair. It had been running, we supposed, from a bear, and following its mother, had reached a gully, and when it tried to jump, its hooves got stuck in the overhanging brush, and the more it struggled to free itself, the more ensnared it became. The mother deer could not get at it and the bear could not get at it, and the deer was frozen like that in midair. “Nature is unsentimental,” my mother said when we told her the story. Looking at the cooler, The Heavy shook his head. “I can’t do it. I can’t free the squirrel.” And he glared at the woods. “Not to that.”

  Now, the squirrel’s tail is in one of the women’s rubber gloves, its spine flexing back and forth. “Was chewing through the electricals,” she tells the others. The squirrel’s open mouth nearly reaches her hand. “Now that’s a sure way to lose a family to fire.”

  “Reservoir frozen over can do nothing for an inferno.”

  “Not frozen over yet.”

  “Soon enough.”

  “Losing a family to fire.”

  “Let’s not talk about that now.”

  And the woman hurls the squirrel like a discus from our bungalow and into the flames. Her necklace says PAMELA.

  * * *

  WHEN A PART of the night sky split away from itself, The Heavy and I watched as it flew at me and then grazed my face. The Heavy, concerned the bat might get tangled in my hair, and his hair, picked up his badminton racquet and, sweat dripping into his eyes, swiped at it until we heard contact. We flicked on the lights, all of which worked back then, and searched for the body of the bat, eventually finding it, small as a coin and soft in my hand. The Heavy and I agreed, in its stark workings, only death could tell you a thing’s true size.

  “Will you look at this?” The women have made it up to my bedroom. They stand in my doorway. Mops and pails. Hair the color of gunmetal. I am lying on my bed, on top of my disease book, looking up at my SETTLE YOUR HEAD flag. Is it getting dark out? It is. Despair.

  “God. Oh God.”

  “Will you look at the
se walls?”

  “What do you even call that?”

  “What, all the handwriting there? The charts?”

  “You call that—”

  “The walls of the insane.”

  “That’s what you call that.”

  “ ‘Questions Answered versus Questions Unanswered.’ ”

  “ ‘Daytime versus Nighttime.’ ”

  “ ‘My Mother versus The Heavy.’ ”

  “ ‘My Mother versus Herself.’ ”

  “ ‘My Mother versus Me,’ ” one of the women reads. “Will you look at that? Covers a whole wall.”

  * * *

  FIVE THINGS shortly before 6:00 P.M.:

  1. When the women return with cans of white paint, they don’t know whether to put the cans down on the hallway carpet and then lift their hands above their heads.

  2. Or just lift the cans in surrender.

  3. It has become no problem for me to kick a door closed while pointing a rifle.

  4. Even when empty, a rifle will always be perceived as loaded.

  5. I told myself that to study my mother was to know her still.

  Lying under her bed, I recorded my mother on my Deep Space Tapes. If she said something I could not understand or did not want to hear, I taped over it with something I did. I turn on my cassette recorder now and listen to her low voice, the low voice I love. “Nostradamus. Now that is a name. The time to die is during a storm. We have the trees all wrong. When we picture their tops, we look up to the branches. But it is the root systems, these are the faces of the trees, and they are underground. A man should have a packet of salt in his pocket should there be occasion to salt something. A child is the only true astonishment.”

  Men do not bring mothers back. Women do not bring mothers back. Children bring mothers back.

  * * *

  IT WAS FIVE years ago, the night of our party, when The Heavy was zipping my mother up and she started to talk about not feeling old but looking old. “Big difference,” she said. The guests would arrive in an hour. I could tell my mother was nervous. The Heavy got her to swing her hair around to the front of her party dress so he could really get at the zipper, the zipper was giving him a hard time. Her hair was to her tailbone, and he said her hair—while he loved it, wanted to make a cave out of it and live there and have a hundred more daughters—was slowing things down. I watched her fine-boned feet lift off the floor as The Heavy worked the zipper. “Everyone thinks it’s a gradual decline, but the truth is aging is catastrophic. One night you have a certain face, and the next day, upon seeing people, you have to tell them who you are. All at once. And it’s not just time. Everyone thinks, Oh, it’s just time. Blame time. But time is content. Time is nothing without content. Time is the speeding vehicle. Content the fiery crash.” And my mother turned to me. “Can I borrow that?” She climbed our stairs unsteadily, half-zipped, with my roll of duct tape. I had been making a belt with it.

  When my mother came back down the stairs and walked the length of our living room, an extravagant, radiant thing, The Heavy thought to take her portrait. “It’s time, Billie Jean,” he said. I was too stunned to sit at my mother’s feet and gaze up at her, as was our people’s way, and The Heavy was too stunned to order me into his frame, so there was my mother, alone, in her zipped-up party dress, the silver one, with rhinestones glued around her eyes, and The Heavy deciding on a close crop. “What a portrait, what a portrait.” My mother remained perfectly still. I had never seen her so still. She was always in motion. Always between things. Talking to herself. The list in her head, and then her laugh, uncontained. But, she sat, looking into the camera, searching the camera, not knowing how to smile on command. I remember how The Heavy moved the emphasis between the words. “What. A. Portrait.” Her narrow feet in her low white heels, just slightly crossed at the ankles. She had seams that ran up the backs of her stockings. The Heavy put his camera away, and my mother had me sit on the floor in front of her, and she worked my hair into a design that matched her own.

  It was my mother’s portrait that held Supernatural’s attention this morning when he stood in our living room. In his large beige boots. His thief clothes. Standing on my spare mattress, keeping his balance. His arms at his sides, hands clenched into fists.

  * * *

  MY MOTHER’S PORTRAIT hangs above our mantel, felted with dust. I watch Debra Marie reach for it and wipe it down until it gleams.

  “What is that noise?” The women press their ears to the wall.

  “It’s here too.”

  “And here.”

  “Oh I know that noise,” says one of the broader women—tight ponytail, chipped tooth, CHERYL—and she finds the ax. “Get that Pony Darlene Fontaine outside.”

  It’s dark now. A million stars. An October night. Nearly twenty-four hours since my mother walked out this same door. I stand on our front porch. Broken phone, broken fridge, 88. That about sums it up. I look in our mailbox. A postcard.

  SORRY!!!

  LOVE, LANA

  Telepathy, after all.

  * * *

  I STAND BESIDE the bonfire with Supernatural’s rifle in my hands. We have never had a bonfire on our property before. The Heavy would not allow it. The small bodies of bats, squirrels, and mice. Animals. Generations of animals. Broken electronics, empty coolers, black towels. Black bedcovers, dirty dishes, broken furniture. Spare mattress, crimping iron, ceiling fan, Betamax. Out the front door and into the bonfire. The broad woman, Cheryl, still holding the ax, stands in our front doorway and watches the snakes that have been living inside our walls throw themselves in mounds across the hems of her nightpants and her sport socks inside her house sandals, all of which she will later soak in a bleach solution. Pamela diverts the snakes into the fire.

  Vacuums, dustbusters, power drills. Fixing the tanning bed in the basement. “I have just the thing.” The blue room completed. Wall built. Tarpaulin pulled down and into the bonfire. I watch the women mob the house. They move between the windows. Mothers in my house. Mothers circulating the rooms. Mothers standing in the window frames. Not my mother. “Step back there, Pony Darlene, you’re starting to smoke.” A bucket of dirt is thrown onto the flames and quickly refilled.

  I reach for the ignition of the nearest truck. The keys are in it, but looking behind me, I see there is no way I will be able to back it out, not with the way the group has parked their vehicles. Just when I go to investigate the last vehicle to arrive—Shona Lee with a Delivery Day basket full of fresh goods for us—I hear a voice over the CB. Static. Static. It’s Traps’s voice, searching. “Traps here.” Static. “Do you read me?” I take on the voice of one of the mothers. “10-4. Over. Come in. Come in, Traps.”

  “We did our door-to-door and another tour through town, checked everywhere. Nothing.” Traps says he and The Heavy will start back. Ground is frozen. Gives them some hope. Winter is on its way. No one tries to die in the winter.

  “How’s”—he pauses—“Pony Darlene holding up?”

  “She’s”—I pause—“emotional.”

  “Yeah, she sure is. Hard to understand how a mother could leave her own daughter behind.”

  “Sure is,” I say to Traps. “Sure is.”

  Has she left? Has she left me behind?

  * * *

  I LEAVE THE TRUCK and run around to the back of the house. The last time my mother took me down to the reservoir, I refused to go in. It was the middle of the night, late September. One month ago. Perfect for freezing to death. No way. Get real. Dream on. She would hardly speak to me, and suddenly her face was hovering above my face and then she was holding me by the wrist and dragging me to the water.

  I watched her from the shore as she did her circuit. From one end to the other, from one end to the other. There was always a circuit to be com
pleted. There was no moon, and I could barely make out her body. She stopped in the middle of the black water and called out, “Time me!”

  “But it’s so cold!” I shouted back, raging in my nightdress and my nightpants.

  “Time how long I can hold my breath!”

  “It’s almost October!”

  And my mother took a succession of quick, shallow breaths, then arched her back, and dropped beneath the surface.

  I am standing three hundred steps from the reservoir and haven’t even thought to check it. But, I would have heard her go in. I would have heard her dive in. I would have heard the entrance. No. This is not true. Why didn’t The Heavy think to check it? Surely, he did, and the water is not a concern. Right? Impossible. Right? The Heavy knew about her swims. He never wanted to learn and once, in a fury—“Why did you have to go and make a scene like that in front of the portrait?”—threw his outerwear into the water. My mother dove in and brought it back to him. She stood naked on the shoreline, and she slung the wet jacket onto her shoulder. She swayed her hips. She always found a way to be forgiven.

  My mother had never asked me to time her before. She had never held her breath like that. I shifted from foot to foot, trying to stay warm. I counted as she had asked. Devotional section. She was impossible to say no to. And it was in the water that she most resembled herself. The herself The Heavy and I so desperately missed and were trying to bring home. I blew on my hands and put them in the large pockets of my nightpants. Thick beds of fallen leaves on the water. Branches bare and black against the sky. Birds hanging in the air. Not the Death Man’s. Were they the Death Man’s birds? When it had been one minute, one minute and a half, nearly two minutes, I panicked. She had been under for too long. Do I run and get The Heavy? Then, what could The Heavy do? What could The Heavy possibly do? He didn’t know how to swim. How could he help?