Heart-Breaker

by Claudia Dey

  I know, I said, looking over at you, not blinking. I too live a passionate life. Ask any of the other dogs. But you took no notice. You started to laugh. In your body, you felt only freedom. “The clearing.” I felt my ears go back. “Of course, the clearing. We have really underexamined that term.”

  “ ‘Machine wash cold separately. Delicate cycle. Do not bleach. Do not iron. Line dry in shade. Do not dry clean. Do not twist or wring.’ ”

  The coat that was no longer a coat. The shoes that were no longer shoes. The wallet that was no longer a wallet. To love was to black out. You found yourself floating away from Pony. The boy was only four years older than her. The Heavy would kill himself. He would get his hunting knife, go into the woods, make himself difficult to find, impossible to stop. He would spare you. Only to make you live with what you had done.

  You told me you could not remember the name your parents had called you, the name your father had written on the envelope. As you drove north, you emptied your mind of facts. The very first things you learned: your name, the names of your parents, your street address, your home phone number, the name of your school, your grandparents, your neighbors, your cousins, your father’s occupation. You wiped them out the way a disease would. You made bright spots on your brain where before there had been none. Height, weight, hair color—the physical description and photographs that would follow you—you would also change, even if it meant adding injuries to your already injured body. Hearing your name on the radio, you thought, I am a murderer. And I have a five-day head start.

  “ ‘Get on the main road, one mile, and make a left. There’s a small road, unmarked. If lost, look for the blue flagging tape. Follow the flagging tape to its end. Then veer right. When you get out, have your rifle ready. There’s a grizzly loose. We call her Killer, and she will kill you,’ ” the boy read to you. You didn’t want him to know you were searching him with your body. You went on. He went on. “ ‘When frostbite sets in, do as the Northern people do and wrap the undressed body around that of the sufferer. May it be my will that my mercy overcome my anger. From the ice floe, the man yelled down to the swimmer, Everything I know tells me this is impossible. All you need is love, love. Love is all you need.’ ”

  “Oh God! Oh my God! Yes!” Love is all you need to make you weak and say embarrassing things, you told me, not the boy, who was pulling on his black jeans—hastily?—you asked me for my opinion.

  The more the boy touched you, the more you felt skinned down to your past. It was frightening. You could not seem to get away from it. Could not seem to be this name, this new name that was supposed to make for a new woman.

  Nina? Was that what your parents called you? Only sixteen, and already a murderer.

  About the dead man, you had choices. You could dispose of the body in any number of ways you considered doable. His dead weight would be much easier to contend with than his fighting weight had been. You had time. About the disposal of the body, you did not need to rush. He was dead. Right? You put your arms out in front of you. Tried to get a breath. Heard a wheezing sound. Could not get your throat to open. Over the two days the man was in your house, you tried to get to the phone to call the police. Several times. You could not move to call them now. You tried to scream over the two days, but could not scream now. Could not get a sound to come from your body. Could not get a sound that would override all the other sounds. The fridge, the power lines, the traffic. The effort of everything. You spat out a tooth. And with that, you got a breath. You looked down at the man. You pushed against his body with your foot and then took a step back before he could get your ankle. Dead. Right? You pictured unloading him from your father’s trunk and into the fast-moving river nearby. You would do this alone. Help was past. You had always helped yourself, and this thought sent a charge through you. With it, you tried to lift the man, but could not budge him. How did I ever strangle him? The man looked familiar. Was the man familiar? No. He kept calling you by your name. How did he know your name? The pool? Did he come to the pool? Did you know the man? Did you? Identification, get the identification. Hands in the man’s pockets. Dead. Right? Not going to grab your wrists. Your hair. Nice pockets, good cloth. Like your pockets. Nothing. No identification. Nothing with a name, an address, nothing to tell you who he is. Was. No one was waiting for him, this is what you told yourself. No one was waiting for you, this you knew. How different were you, really, from the man you had just killed? Had you done everything you could? Could you have convinced him to let you live? No. If you had not killed the man, he would have killed you, and instead of his body on the floor, it would be yours. When the sun went down, you tried once more to move him. It was impossible. Killing was something that was not in you but went through you; there, that was the difference between you and the man.

  Quickly, you looked away from the body. Your nightgown. Tables overturned, chairs on their sides, curtains torn, rooms that you’d grown up in, but never wanted to walk into again.

  “An owl can take a deer,” the boy said. “To look at their size, you would think it would be the opposite.” And the boy, without paying much attention to the length of his strides and the length of yours, took you to a clearing in the woods, one you had never been to before. There, he sat you down and put a blindfold over your eyes. It was then you knew you would do anything for the boy. If he asked you to, you would leave your daughter for him. Your body shuddered with the ugly admission. Ugliest. Unthinkable woman, unthinkable mother. Take that back. Cannot even keep your wallet straight from your shoes straight from your coat straight from your daughter. You would never leave your daughter. Love had disoriented you. Reorient yourself, and if anything, leave love. How?

  “Raise your hand when you hear the owl.” The boy gave you plain instructions, and when next you thought you’d feel his body on yours, you heard his footfalls grow distant. You sat there as you had been told. I will hear the owl; I will match the boy; I will win and the only eyes that matter to me will see it.

  Many times, you wanted to raise your hand in the clearing, but you could never be sure the sound you heard was the owl. You didn’t want to be wrong. To embarrass yourself further. This boy so contained and you so uncontained. You did not even know how he held his fork, what position he slept in. You did not know anything about him other than the order in which he dressed himself, that he liked running, and he disliked questions.

  You did not raise your hand once.

  Eventually, it grew so quiet you wanted to shout to be sure he was still there, but resisted—that would be giving in.

  You knew you could pull the blindfold from your face at any time, so you sat on your hands to keep them from doing so.

  When night came and it was clear the boy had played a trick on you, and whatever had happened between you was over, you raged—this was his way of telling you he no longer loved you (if, in fact, he had ever loved you)—and still you sat there as you had been told. They will find me dead. Here, they will find my body. My old body that could not hear the owl. Hearing only yourself, the sudden pitch to your breath, your breath shortening, you saw what your life had become. A woman stranded alone in the woods, left by a boy who had humiliated her into thinking she was loved by him; she was so outmatched. A boy can take a woman.

  “Owls are soundless,” he said as he lifted the blindfold from your eyes. You saw it was still light out. He had been steps away, watching nothing but you. The boy told you the owl had flown inches from your head a dozen times. He kept waiting to see if you might hear it. He wanted to give you the chance. He thought if anyone would be able to hear it, it would be you.

  “I’m pregnant,” you told him in response. You felt loved. The feeling broke you and you confessed, “And I killed a man. It happened in another world and another time. When I was sixteen.”

  * * *

  YOU TOLD ME you left the strangled man’s body where it was, knowing in
five days, your parents would come home to it. When they did, your mother and father searched the battered rooms for you, tearing them further apart, fearing they would find you dead too. Finally, screams came from the large house. Standing over the body, the police tried to make sense of things. There could have been a second man who killed the first man, stole the car, and kidnapped the girl. Though they could find only two sets of fingerprints throughout the house, this seemed most likely, given the girl was just over a hundred pounds. No way she could have done this to the man. I mean, look at him.

  Seeing your picture on the news. Standing poolside. Your braces had just come off. You could run your tongue over your teeth. It wasn’t a good picture. Recalling it now, you were relieved the boy would never see it. Who you were in that moment. Who you had constructed yourself to be since. It was your first day of lifeguarding. Whoever had taken the photo made you feel unsure about it. It was your father, you remembered. He had insisted on driving you to the pool, and, unused to his attentions, you didn’t know what to do with them. When he said smile, you forgot how to move your mouth.

  “Wait, how long were you in Europe?” The police questioned your parents while they worked on identifying the dead man, establishing the time of death and the location of the car. They were sure if they found the car, they would find you.

  The police asked the public for help. A sixteen-year-old girl has gone missing, they said on the news, and then spoke your name. When you heard it, you knew you had already separated yourself from your original name. How easy it had been to do. Appearing then disappearing. Driving north, you tried out a different name with every encounter. Scissors furious through your hair, cut so short, when you stole a suitcase from the back of a car at a rest stop, a man hundreds of miles later thought you were a choirboy going to a wedding in your white three-piece suit. All your thoughts were survivalist. What to eat, where to sleep, how to get water and gas. You had to be inventive. Sometimes you found leaks from the valves of the gas pipelines along the way. Sometimes you were forced to make a bodily trade.

  As a lifeguard, you had had to save someone only once, and despite your instinct to rush to the drowning boy, you did as you were trained. While he took in more and more water, you did not go anywhere near him. You pushed a flotation device at him and kept your legs straight out in front of you should you have to kick the boy away. Your eyes fixed on each other, you asked him factual questions. Get the name. Your instructor had told you it was critical to get the name, get the name of the drowning person, and use it like hell. “What is your name?” you kept asking the boy, and when he hurled it at you, you used it like hell.

  It was the boy’s father who had attacked you. You made the connection when you were painting the Mercedes sedan in the empty parking lot of the mall. You remembered him from the pool. The other lifeguard made teasing comments about him: he was always staring at you; he was obsessed with you; he didn’t come to the pool to watch his son; he came to watch you––in your bathing suit with your whistle looped around your neck. He just wanted to get you alone in a room. Be saved by you, the other lifeguard taunted. You shrugged it off. You took no notice of the boy’s father. To your eye, he was old. He was a different species altogether.

  You had not chosen the territory as a destination. Had never heard of the territory. What guided you was a graph in your head: physical space versus physical bodies. You wanted the axis where the lowest number of human bodies occupied the highest square mileage of open space.

  As you drove north, you refused to mark time the way you had before. Instead, you watched the weather. You could see a storm approaching long before any warning on the radio. With your windows rolled down, you measured the temperature, the wind, the snowfall. The ice formed on the roads and then the snow made them impossible to pass and then the rains came and, with them, higher speeds. You covered so much ground in the spring that by the time you fell from the driver’s seat, wearing only the black lace underwear and the knee-length white suit jacket, onto the territory, you could barely walk. With your gas tank nearing empty, you made out the shape of a low building and a man walking toward it. A body. Space. Vast amounts of space around the body. Your axis. You had found your axis.

  After being in a single, seated position for such a long time, you had stopped using many of your muscles. You spent that first summer in the territory being reintroduced to them. While the women talked about the mud on the ground, and the men constructed boardwalks between the bungalows, The Heavy devised exercises for you and, with you in the Last House, felt fulfilled by nursing. Felt fulfilled by you.

  * * *

  THE BOY CALLED IT forensic when you gave him the gift of a thick strand of your hair, and the secret name you had always wanted for yourself on the envelope. Loosely handwritten.

  The question of faces. “I will never be able to convince The Heavy that the baby is his.” Everyone in town remarked upon your skin. And your hair. What had been a fit body took on a formlessness, but this was the pattern for wives and husbands. The women had wondered when it would be your turn to stop wearing a belt. You wore your winter coat long after the thaw, but while the people scrutinized you, no one thought it was odd. You were from elsewhere. When they were hot, you were cold.

  In the bedroom, you threw up a fencing around your body. You came to admire The Heavy for a new quality; he was, at that point, an unsuspecting man.

  When the pain came on, you went to the clearing in the woods as you and the boy had planned. It was daytime, which concerned you. Not what you had pictured. You had pictured nighttime, nighttime, which is trackless. You could not take the truck. You would have to walk. “Taking the dog for a run,” you spoke hurriedly to the man and the girl who watched you pull on your coat. A face that was pale. Why a coat when it was spring, so fleetingly spring? But they did not read into your actions; time will do that to relationships. We walked the band of empty gravel, but we had to do this very slowly or it would have happened there. This was fast, you told me. Faster than Pony had been. I know the pain. I know the pain the way I know an enemy. You worried you would not get to the clearing. We paused when we had to. You took deep breaths and urged your body forward. You trained your eyes to examine the perimeters. You could not make any noise; close by, an entire town was awake. We stepped onto the abandoned logging road, and you fell to your knees and crawled toward the clearing. I stayed right by your side. The forest was at its most perfect. Dense with life multiplying all through it. Undisturbed by men. You pushed your face into the ground to scream. The boy intercepted us and he carried you the rest of the way; in his arms, you thought, he is ready. But then you looked up at him and could see he was frightened. This boy who had been steady and had fascinated you appeared scared, gangly—had his complexion always been so flushed, so uneven?—and his child was descending rapidly through your body. Your eyes went back to the perimeters. The boy said things to you, sympathetic things, but you thought, What is sympathy? Is sympathy even feeling? The boy reaching for you, and you, suddenly unreachable. And cold. You felt only cold toward the boy. You understood now he thought birth would be romantic. Birth is fast and bloody, you wanted to tell him, but could not. Of all things, birth is most like slaughter.

  “Hand me something I can break,” you hissed at the boy.

  “A woman’s body knows just what to do,” said Debra Marie in a conciliatory tone, when she stepped from the woods into the clearing and stood with the boy over your body. She got down on her knees and placed a damp cloth on your back. “Get the fuck away from me,” you may have said to Debra Marie, her workdress stuffed with owl feathers and foam. Her pregnancy keeping time with yours. You too had listened to the girls on the CB. You too would have the baby. Hand over the baby.

  7​:00 P.M. October 24, 1985. Thursday. Billie Jean Fontaine runs out the front door of her bungalow with her truck keys and a cigarette. (Unjust. Not the plan. Searing pain.) Truck departs
. Truck has not been recovered. Color: matte black. License plate: FONTN.

  Dog follows Billie out. Dog returns the next night. Exactly twenty-four hours later. 7:00 P.M. October 25, 1985. Friday. (I was in the woods behind the house with a decent view of Pony Darlene in a red ski jacket, tan dance tights, and yellow hunting glasses holding my father’s rifle between her shoulder and jawbone, the way you would a telephone receiver. And behind her, the women of the territory carrying out a full-scale extermination, then incinerating all that remained of the Fontaines’ life. Okay. Pony’s hoardings.)

  The dog’s return tells me the truck cannot be that far away. Adjacently, Billie cannot be that far away. Say it again. Billie cannot be that far away. Billie cannot be that far away. Reason to live. Last reason to live. Only reason to live. Still. Reason to live. The dog’s snout is drenched in blood. The dog is known to be gory, oversexed, and a recluse. The dog is known to be of violent extraction. The people cannot decipher whether the blood is human or animal, and, though of a spectacular intelligence, the dog will not say a fucking thing.

  7:00 A.M. October 26, 1985. Saturday. The present. The second morning Billie Jean Fontaine has been missing. Yes, that is the word the territorials are using now. Missing. When she left, she was dressed in nothing but a tracksuit. Grave concern. Temperature below freezing. Sky the color of steel. Snowstorm possible. Word is circulating The Heavy kept spare outerwear, workboots, and fuel in the cab of his truck. Three to five jerry cans. He cannot recall the exact amount. It’s five. He also has an aluminum supply box bolted to the truck bed. It is single-locked, and contains a rifle, spare ammunition, a set of flares, a bottle of lighter fluid, a pack of matches, and a wineskin filled with water. The Heavy installed this after his last truck was totaled, and he began to think in emergency scenarios.