Heartbroken

by Lisa Unger

  “What is this?”

  “Get out of the car,” said Dean.

  His voice sounded young and distant through the glass, a little boy playing cops and robbers. The man at the wheel did not look afraid. There was something about him. Yes, that was it. He was a cop or had something to do with the military. There were a few regulars like him at the Blue Hen. She’d always loved those guys, the way they seemed to know and understand things that other people did not. They had their crazy stories, brushes with death, had glimpsed elements of life that most were shielded from ever seeing. This man had that kind of look to him, cool and knowing.

  Emily moved to stand in front of the car. She was banking on him not gunning the engine and running her down. He turned his eyes on her, held her in a level, assessing stare.

  “We don’t want to hurt anyone,” she said. But it wasn’t her voice. It belonged to someone else, someone she didn’t know well and didn’t like at all. “We just need a car.”

  He seemed to consider his options. Then he opened the door and stepped from the vehicle. He wore a barn jacket and jeans, sensible brown shoes; a pair of work gloves peeked out of his pocket. He seemed so strong and safe, so good. Emily suddenly wanted to throw herself in his arms, turn herself in, and let him take her to jail, where she belonged. She was thinking that when he said it.

  “You don’t want to do this.”

  “No,” she said. She fought a rush of tears. “I’m sorry.”

  “Stop talking,” said Dean.

  “There are people who are no good,” the man said gently. “And people who have, for whatever list of bad reasons, thrown in with people who are no good.”

  “Shut up, old man,” Dean had said. He came around from the side of the car; the gun was shaking. He crossed between Emily and the man and headed for the driver’s-side door.

  “Which one am I?” she found herself asking.

  Dean shot her a look. What are you doing? Shut up.

  “You tell me.”

  “Give me your cell phone,” said Dean, pointing the gun.

  The man reached into his pocket and handed Dean an old flip phone. Dean dropped it to the ground and crushed it beneath his boot.

  Emily thought that most people would be having some kind of emotional reaction: anger, fear, begging for life. But this guy was calm, observant.

  “I don’t know what you’re running from,” he said. Emily knew he was talking to her. He’d given Dean a single glance and dismissed him as a lost cause. She’d seen that play out on his face as Dean had passed between the older man and the car. Even though Dean was holding the gun, the other man barely glanced at him a second time. “But whatever it is, you won’t get far.”

  “Get in the car,” said Dean. He was sweating, getting ever more agitated, shifting from foot to foot. For that reason, Emily moved toward the door. She couldn’t stand for anyone else to get hurt. But something in her was disappointed that the man wasn’t putting up more of a fight. She thought about what Carol had said when Angelo went for the gun. It’s not worth our lives or theirs. She was right. Nothing, no possession, no amount of money, was worth someone’s life. Emily could see that now that her whole life was gone. She wouldn’t have thought she had much to lose. But she’d do anything to get back to the place where she at least had hope for the future. This guy wasn’t going to fuss about his car, not when he had a wife and a son waiting for him to come home. He already knew what was important.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” he said.

  She paused at the door.

  “What the fuck?” Dean said. “Let’s go.”

  There must be something about her. People were always giving her unsolicited advice. Maybe it was because she was young, or because she was small, barely a size four. People always seemed to think she needed help, even when she viewed herself as handling things fairly well. She had gotten him to pull over, after all. They were about to drive off in his vehicle.

  “You don’t know me,” she said. It was true. No one did. Before yesterday, even she hadn’t known what she might be capable of doing. Maybe Brad was right about her after all. “Why are you still talking to him?” Dean was holding the gun high and breathing hard.

  The man looked down at his feet, moved to put his hands in his pockets.

  “Don’t move your hands,” Dean screamed. It sounded shrill and girlish, and it almost made Emily laugh out of sheer nerves. Dean could not handle being laughed at. He’d pull the trigger to get her to stop. Emily closed her eyes instead. She didn’t want to see what was going to happen next. How could you feel so in control one minute and so out of control the next? How could everything go from so ordinary to so chaotic in the space of a day? She rested her head against the door. The moment simmered with everything that could go wrong. She braced herself for the gunshot.

  “It’s okay,” the man said. Emily started to breathe again. “You can have the car. I’m going to stand here and let you go.”

  When she opened her eyes again, the man was staring down at his shoes, trying to avoid eye contact. He’d identified them as something wild, something to be soothed or avoided until they decided to move on. She climbed inside. The interior was warm, the seat big and plush. It was nice inside, maybe the nicest car she’d ever been in. Everything soft and clean with bright dashboard lights, red, green, white. Clean, organized, well maintained. Dean climbed inside, keeping the gun pointed out the open window. He couldn’t hit the side of a barn that way. Didn’t he know that? He wasn’t just a bad person. He was also an idiot. The guy was letting them go, that was the only reason they were driving away in his car.

  “Give me the gun,” she said.

  When he did, she tucked it down under the seat. He locked the doors, put his hands on the wheel. The man moved closer to the shoulder to get out of their way, and Dean roared off. Emily watched the other man disappear in her side mirror. Just like that, he was gone. She wondered how he would get home. He had a long walk ahead of him; they were in the middle of nowhere.

  “We should have killed him,” said Dean. He sounded angry and regretful, as if it was her fault that they hadn’t. Maybe it was her. That was what she’d wanted to say to the other man. There are bad people, yes. And there are good people who get tangled up with bad people, sure. But sometimes can’t good people help bad people to be better? Maybe if she hadn’t stayed with Dean through all of this, even worse things would have happened. Maybe that man would be dead.

  “He can identify us,” Dean said. “They’ll put it together.”

  “He’ll have to walk hours before he gets anywhere.”

  “Unless he gets someone to pull over.”

  “No one pulls over anymore.”

  “He did,” said Dean.

  “They don’t pull over for a man walking in the road. Maybe a girl. Maybe.”

  She didn’t say anything else. She was glad that Dean hadn’t had it in him to hurt an innocent person, whatever the reason. Brad had done all the shooting at the Blue Hen. At least Dean had that going for him—he wasn’t a killer and a rapist.

  That got her to thinking about Brad. She reached for the radio, hoping for some news. But Dean reached out to stop her. His fingers were long and thin, and the skin on his hands felt cold and dry. “Let’s wait a minute,” he said.

  She didn’t want to know, either. She didn’t want to know what had happened to Carol or if they’d found Brad. She didn’t want to know how much the police had figured out by this point or if they were looking for the Mustang. Maybe, for a little while, they were better-off without the answers.

  She opened the glove compartment, started rifling through the neatly stacked papers. She found the vehicle registration. Jones Cooper—it was a good name, a solid one. The name of a person who had never done anything wrong in his entire life. Tucked in the far corner, she felt a compact leather folder and opened it to see a gold shield. The space where the number would have been was replaced with a plate stamped “retired” i
n red. She closed it and put it back where she had found it.

  “What’s in there?” He seemed calmer now that they were moving. Or maybe he’d popped a pill in his mouth. Who knew? But she wasn’t going to get him upset again.

  “Nothing,” she said. She shut the door. “Just some papers—receipts and whatnot.”

  He didn’t say anything, just stared at the road ahead. “Turn on the radio,” he said. She did.

  Remarkably, Dean had had the foresight to grab the Garmin from her Mustang. So they easily found their way to the marina. It was nearly midnight, and so quiet. There were a few other cars in the lot. Most of the summer people were gone by this last week in August. She remembered that. The air was already cool, the water colder. Once winter settled, the area was virtually uninhabited. They needed supplies, more than what they had. They needed enough to last them the winter. But Emily hadn’t wanted to risk stopping and being spotted. She felt paralyzed, drained. Her plan hadn’t involved anything further than their arrival.

  “Is this it? Are we here?” Dean asked, sitting up and looking around.

  “Yes,” she said. “We’re here.”

  All they needed to do was find themselves a boat that could take them to Heart Island.

  part two

  heart island

  The island was, for each of us, a personal fiction. We each wrote a story about it in our minds. And so it belonged to each of us in a different way. That’s why, when it came time to share it, we just couldn’t do that. We all fancied ourselves kings and queens of that place, our siblings playing only supporting roles in our memories. Each of us imagined that one day Heart Island would be ours and ours alone. And only one of us was right.

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF CAROLINE LOVE HEART

  (1940–2000)

  chapter twenty

  Maybe that’s why she told me things she never could tell them. About the affair she had, about the dark things that happened. She waited until after Daddy was gone. Only Mother and I knew that she’d married Daddy for all sorts of good reasons—position, family, friendship—but passionate love was not one of them. Those days, she said, romantic love wasn’t the most important thing when it came to marriage. In all her life, she truly loved only one man, someone she never could have married. But “affair” is too tawdry a word for what my mother shared with Richard Cameron, so wrong for what they were to each other.

  They’re all of them gone, and only I know the truth. And now, Kate, you know, too. I hope it’s not too much of a burden. I know I can trust you not to judge them, because you have a poet’s heart, like mine. You see it all. It’s funny how, as time rushes on, even the biggest things matter not at all. When you read this, we’ll all be gone. Isn’t that funny? And once upon a time, there was all this terrible pain and trauma, love and grief. And now it’s just a dream we all had. An awful, wonderful dream.

  The journals sat in a box in Kate’s closet for more than two years before she found them. She had taken the box with her name on it from Caroline’s apartment when she and Theo cleaned it out after Caroline’s death. She had watched as Sean carried it to the trunk of their waiting car, then brought it into their house. Still, she couldn’t bear the thought of looking inside. Caroline had left all her money, possessions—even her small Manhattan apartment—to Kate and Theo, a fact that had inexplicably enraged their mother.

  “Not even a piece of jewelry for her sister,” Birdie had said. She had everything money could buy and turned up her nose at any gift anyone ever dared to give her. No one gave her anything anymore, least of all Caroline.

  In Caroline’s final days, Birdie had sat with her, reading from a book they’d loved as girls, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Watching her there, peaceful, reading to her dying sister, Kate could almost see some capacity for tenderness that Birdie had never exhibited. Birdie even found it within herself to hold her sister’s hand. When they were both in good health, one of them would storm off inside an hour, or an uncomfortable silence would fall over the gathering, one of them stewing about what the other had said or hadn’t. The endgame of Caroline’s illness was the only time the two of them had occupied the same room without an argument erupting. Of course, she was in a palliative state, barely aware of her surroundings.

  “Mom,” Kate had said. In the war between Birdie and everyone else, even Birdie’s dead sister, Kate always tried to smooth things over. “You can choose any of the pieces you want.”

  Caroline had an entire dresser full of jewelry, some of it valuable, some of it costume. All of it large and chunky, glittering, the exact energetic opposite of anything Birdie owned or liked.

  “That’s not the point, is it?” Birdie said. For a second, Kate thought Birdie sounded almost grief-stricken. Then her mother shrieked into the phone, “She looked like a gypsy with all that garbage on her hands and around her neck. And those long skirts, ridiculous scarves. She was a circus act.”

  How could Birdie rage while her daughter grieved? Kate wondered. It was pathological that Birdie could even make her own sister’s death about how she’d been slighted. Had the long hospital visits been an act, something she did because it was appropriate? Or had she been able to contain her vitriol, even remembering happier times between them? Or was this how she grieved, her rage a kind of catharsis?

  “So why do you want her jewelry, then?” It was all Kate could think to say. Her mother had hung up the phone.

  Kate knew that the box contained correspondence, among other things. Her aunt had published some poetry in small journals. Kate assumed that the original drafts, along with stories Caroline had made up for her and Theo when they were young, were all in there. She expected love letters (Caroline had a number of searing love affairs in her time, another thing that drove Birdie mad), cards, pictures Kate and Theo had drawn for her as kids. Because those were the types of things that Caroline saved, the emotional detritus of life, the things that Birdie discarded as clutter.

  Kate couldn’t stand it to see how Caroline’s rich and beautiful inner life had been reduced to piles of paper in a box. So the box sat waiting. Every time she went into the office closet, it sat there—an invitation, a recrimination, and a plea all at once. Until finally, one afternoon when she was alone, she opened the box.

  The journals were sealed inside another box within the larger one. The box was buried, as though hidden, at the very bottom beneath the predicted piles of letters (tied, of course, with red ribbon), chapbooks of poetry, envelopes of old photos. There was Kate’s christening gown wrapped in white tissue and Theo’s baby shoes. Written across the top of the smaller box, in Caroline’s scrawling cursive: For the eyes of Katherine Burke only.

  Upon retrieving it, Kate felt a flood of guilt. It had the essence of urgency; it was something Caroline had wanted her to see. And Kate had let it sit there unopened. Yet even when she had it in her hands, feeling how much her aunt wanted her to read what was inside, it still took another few months for her to break the seal. Why? She didn’t know except that she had a kind of dread in her heart when she looked at that box.

  Kate couldn’t have known that within it were all sorts of secret things, little and big. That when she opened Caroline’s and Lana’s journals and started to read, she would see her family, her mother, her history in a whole new way. She would learn things about her grandparents’ marriage that Kate was sure even Birdie never knew. She would learn, in Lana’s own words, about her affair with Richard Cameron. There was no way to know any of that at the time, and still, she shrank from whatever was inside.

  Clothbound and stained, pages covered margin to margin with almost identical handwriting, the journals opened doorways in Kate’s perception she didn’t even know were closed. They answered questions Kate had about her mother and introduced more. Kate had only the vaguest memory of her grandparents. But through Lana’s journals, they both came to life, full-bodied, flawed, and fascinating. Caroline painted a vivid picture of her childhood memories of Heart Island, and Kate saw Birdi
e through fresh eyes. The middle child, Kate’s mother was always crushed between Caroline’s beauty and sweetness and Gene’s expansive, athletic golden-boy personality. In all her life, Kate had never thought of her mother as a little girl and how she might have been formed.

  In important ways, the histories she’d uncovered were Kate’s own, even though most of the players were long gone. Because it was her story, she felt she had a right, even a compulsion, to tell it. Kate wondered whether Caroline knew that the journals she’d left to her niece would cause her to reconnect to her heart’s first desire, to write. Kate suspected that Caroline had known, all too well.

  “Are you feeling better, Mom?” Kate asked. She sat in the small sitting area off to the side of her parents’ king-size wood-framed bed.

  They’d barely extracted themselves from John Cross, who had wanted to escort them back to the island. Birdie, once she came to, had been a bit sharp with him. We’d like our privacy, please, Mr. Cross, she said when he tried to help her down to the boat. They’d left him looking somewhat miffed on the path down to his dock. I’m sorry, Kate said. Don’t apologize for me, whispered Birdie.

  Birdie’s eyes were open now; she was lying on her back, arms folded over her middle, gaze fixed on the ceiling. “I’m fine,” she said. “I haven’t been feeling well since yesterday. Since I saw him. Maybe before. Then my sciatica.”

  “So there was someone here?”

  “Yes,” Birdie said. “No.” The wrinkle of a frown, an annoyed exhale. “I don’t know. I really don’t know what I saw.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  Kate wanted to reach for Birdie’s hand, pale and delicate, palm turned up on the sheet. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t touch her mother that way; there was no precedent for physical closeness. She knew only how to kiss her mother quickly on the cheek, perhaps squeeze her bony shoulders. Kate’s own children draped themselves over her at every opportunity—even now, when Kate’s friends were complaining of adolescent and teen children who couldn’t stand to be in the same room with their parents. Kate still kissed them both on the mouth, pulled them into long body-connecting hugs. Birdie was ice; if you held on too long, it hurt.