Heartbroken

by Lisa Unger

  It was then, in the moment when she was about to surrender, that the idea of the child inside of her became more than an abstraction. There was a voice calling out to her, and it offered something she was sure she’d lost: hope. In hope, she found an unexpected reserve of strength.

  He grabbed her hard by the hair again and yanked her up so hard that she heard her neck crack. “You better not be fucking with me,” he said. “Or I’m going to burn this place to the ground.”

  Summoning all of her will, she issued a guttural moan and began thrashing. She was going to fight him—and everything he thought he saw in her.

  chapter twenty-nine

  Sean had called his mother, who’d rushed right over to stay with Brendan. Now he was racing up the highway. The road was lightly traveled, bathed in amber light. He was just over the speed limit, reminding himself that this was probably nothing—a teenage girl afraid in the night.

  Even at seventy-five miles an hour, weaving past the stray car on the highway at four in the morning, he felt like he was wading through tar, time and distance expanding to confound him. The last call from Roger had said that he was on his way to the marina, that he’d call when he knew something. Sean fought the urge to call again. Instead, he called his father-in-law. “Call Joe,” he told the voice dialer.

  “Calling Joe,” it responded. For once, it actually worked.

  The phone rang, and the car sped. The landscape was a dark blur studded by streetlamps. It was hypnotic.

  “Joe Burke.” The old guy always sounded like he was at the ready, and Sean felt a familiar internal cringe at the sound of his voice—like the recruit in front of the drill sergeant, the employee in front of the big boss, the student before the teacher. Sean had never felt this way with his own father or anyone else. He didn’t owe anything to Joe: He didn’t take his money; hell, he didn’t even let Joe pick up the dinner bill. And still.

  “It’s Sean.” There was a pause when he considered adding your son-in-law.

  But then, “What’s wrong?”

  Sean ran the situation down for Joe, listened to the other man breathing on the line.

  “Did you call the police?” asked Joe when Sean was done. He didn’t sound the least bit concerned; maybe he sounded a little annoyed.

  “I did,” said Sean. “I’m on my way up there now.”

  “Don’t overreact,” said Joe. It was his way, Sean knew, to be cool, level, to assess and analyze before acting. But Sean felt himself bristling at the implication that he was overreacting. “Have you tried to reach Birdie?”

  “I’ve been trying to call since last night,” said Sean.

  “Why did you not go up with them?” asked Joe.

  “I had a showing,” Sean said. The words practically stuck in his throat. It sounded so stupid and lame—because it was. Why did he not just go with them? Why did they not wait for Sean? What was it about that stupid fucking island and Kate’s awful parents that had them all jumping through hoops all the time? Whatever the reason, it was the last time they would. “I had to work, Joe.”

  He heard Joe give a sniff that to Sean was the very sound of disdain. As if Joe ever did anything but work, as if he hadn’t always put that before everything. He just didn’t think anyone else’s work was as important as his.

  Sean was in no mood. “Why did you leave?” he asked. He was surprised at the anger in his own voice. “You were supposed to be there.”

  It could have been any number of “important reasons”—a golf game, a massage, or a “business lunch.” Joe had been semi-retired for years but still managed to act like he had no end of critical things to do.

  “The place was closing in on me,” said Joe. “It’s oppressive to be there alone with Birdie.”

  Sean didn’t say anything; he couldn’t. In over ten years, those might have been the only real and honest words his father-in-law had ever said—not some rambling story designed to show off something about himself, some vague pleasantry or adage, some declarative about the weather. Maybe that was what happened when you woke someone in the night. He didn’t have time to put on his mask.

  “Okay,” said Sean, for lack of anything better to say.

  “So,” said Joe. Sean heard the rustling of bedcovers. “You called the police. And they’re sending someone out?”

  “I spoke to Roger Murphy. He was going to take a boat over there.”

  “And you’re on your way, so that’s covered,” Joe said. “Call me when you get there.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going back to bed, son. Let me know if there’s something to worry about. Not much I can do now.”

  He heard Joe hang up the phone. After a moment of stunned silence, Sean started to laugh. He wondered, not for the first time, where Kate had come from, how she had turned out the way she had. It was a miracle.

  “Call Kate.”

  “Calling Kate.”

  “Hi, it’s me.” She sounded strong and clear, and he felt a blessed rush of relief. Then, “I can’t talk right now. Leave a message.”

  He fought back the crushing disappointment. “Hey, it’s me,” he said. He ran a hand through his short dark hair, which felt stiff and a mess. “I just wanted to tell you that I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t go with you. I’m sorry I didn’t make you stay and wait. I’m on my way. I don’t know if there’s really something going on there, or if Chelsea was just freaking out for nothing. But I’m coming. Brendan’s at home with my mother. Even if I get there and this is all some crazy misunderstanding, you guys are coming home with me. Because you know what? We need a break from your parents and from Heart Island. We really need a break. Okay?”

  He felt exhausted and overwrought and a little silly. Maybe Joe was right, maybe he was overreacting. He had to believe that it was better than underreacting. He didn’t want to be the guy who underreacted when people he loved might need him. “And Kate, I love you. I love you so much.”

  The silence on the other line crackled. He pressed the button on the steering wheel that ended the call. It was under two hours to the Blackbear marina. He inched his foot down on the gas.

  Kate approached the main house along the path. Though the rain had lessened a bit, she could hear the water slapping against the rocks. Across the channel, Cross Island was dark. It was a ten-minute swim in calm water. One might shout from island to island. But it seemed liked another planet, unreachably distant.

  After she watched the girls head away from the house, an odd stillness had settled over her. It was very clear what she needed to do. She needed to get the gun, get her mother, and get all of them off the island, even if that meant taking the boat out in a storm.

  The open water had always been a problem for Kate. She was comfortable in a pool, a safe and predictable small body of water. But the wide expanse of a sea or the lake, with its incalculable volumes, its deep mysteries, caused a rising tide of panic within Kate. As a child, she’d refused to swim at Heart Island, was white-knuckled on the necessary boat rides (and often seasick), absolutely rejected the kayak. Kate remembered Birdie raging at her refusal to jump off the dock and swim with the family. Once, in a fit, Birdie pushed her. You can swim, Katherine, she shrieked. Kate remembered how the dark water seemed to engulf her, to pull her down. Her panic caused her to take in water, her mind growing blank with fear. It was her father who dove in after her, lifted her onto the dock, and held her while she threw up lake water and bile. Her mother stood by, arms crossed, the ugliest twist of anger and disapproval on her face. How Kate hated Birdie in that moment.

  “You can swim, Katherine,” Birdie had said. She walked up to stand before Kate and Joe. “You know you can.”

  “Shut up, Birdie,” said Joe. Kate buried her head in his chest. She thought, If not for him, she would have let me drown.

  “You would rather she gave in to her fears?” said Birdie. She sounded indignant, as if she had been wronged. “We face the things that frighten us, Kate. Or they swallow
us whole.”

  Kate could hear the gulls calling, the generator humming in the distance.

  “Are you trying to prove to everyone what a monster you are?” Joe asked.

  “This is ridiculous,” said Birdie. She marched off in that way she had, stomping her big feet, her whole body and aura stiff like an exclamation point. She called back, “I’m a monster because I don’t want my daughter to be a sniveling invalid standing on the shore of life.”

  Joe raised Kate to standing, wrapped her in a towel, and led her back up to the house. How old had she been then? Maybe ten.

  “What happened?” he asked her.

  “She pushed me,” said Kate.

  “I know,” he said. “But why didn’t you swim back?”

  Kate couldn’t answer him. She didn’t know why. The water had seemed so black, so dense. It seemed to want to pull her down into its depths.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I was scared.”

  “Are you sure you’re not doing this just to spite her?” he asked. But his tone was gentle. “Maybe you didn’t swim because you knew how badly she wanted you to.”

  “No,” she said. “I was scared.” She’d been adamant. But even then hadn’t she wondered if, on some deep level, maybe it was true?

  She was shivering from the cold. The skin on her hands looked blue and was covered with gooseflesh. The dock was hard and splintery beneath her bare feet.

  “Okay, kid,” said her father. “Okay.”

  On the porch, he knelt down in front of her, moved the wet hair back from her face. “She loves this place. She wants you to love it, too. She wants to know you’ll come here and take care of it when she’s gone.”

  Even at ten, Kate knew he was making excuses for things that could not be excused. He wanted to make it all better, to make it seem less awful than it was.

  “She loves it more than she loves anything, even us,” Kate said.

  “That’s not true,” he said, his tone growing cold. “Now go get yourself dried off and dressed for dinner.” He stood and turned away from her, looked back toward the dock. She felt in that moment, as she so often did in her childhood, that there was no soft place to put her head down and be safe. She had felt that way until she met Sean.

  As she was coming around the side of the house, she heard a high-pitched scream. It rocketed through her, and she pressed her body against the shingled wall, feeling her heart start to race, her mouth go dry. When she looked around the corner, all she could see in the dim light shining from the porch were two forms—a man and a woman.

  The larger form was clearly the aggressor, with a hold on the other’s neck. The smaller was all flailing limbs, uselessly trying to break free. Her helplessness awoke something within Kate, some powerful desire to protect and defend.

  She could see that it was the girl who’d called herself Anne. The woman looked so small; she could have been a child. Kate remembered how strong he was, how merciless: This was the man who’d attacked her by the boat. Her whole body remembered the crush of his arms around her chest.

  Unthinking, Kate found herself hurtling toward them, crashing her body into him with the full force of her fear and anger. They both went tumbling, rolling and coming to a hard stop against a tree. Kate felt a sharp pain in her side, but adrenaline kept it at bay because he was on her again, his weight bearing down like a stone. His face was eerily blank as she flailed at him, trying to get out from under him.

  She heard the girl screaming. Get off of her! Get off of her! It struck Kate as a powerless and nonsensical demand, as though he might abruptly abandon whatever agenda had brought him here and they’d work everything out. Panic began to crowd out other thoughts as she struggled to take a breath. The girl leaped on top of the attacker, knocking him down. Kate saw the flare gun lying beside her, and she crawled for it. It was beneath her fingers when the monster was on top of her again, landing on her hard, knocking the wind out of her.

  She felt her head knock heavily against the rocky ground. For a moment, everything was scattered, a puzzle of sound and motion—a woman screaming, his breath on her face, the smells of sweat and blood and rain. There was a loud pop, a hiss, and a violent flash of orange. Then it all went dark.

  chapter thirty

  Joe Burke had stopped loving his wife so many years before that he couldn’t remember what it was like to feel anything but indifference for her. When he looked back on their life, even the night they met, he couldn’t remember ever loving her, not really.

  He remembered that when he first saw her there was some spark, some energy, that drew him to her. There was something about her—slim and patrician, practical and smart—that appealed to him. She wasn’t like the other girls he knew, puffs of perfume and makeup and crinoline. When Birdie smiled, there was real depth. She had thoughts, opinions, ideas, and she didn’t hide that fact to make herself pretty, more desirable. Her whole bearing felt like a dare: Come and try to have me, if you think you can handle it. And Joe Burke was not a man to back down from a challenge.

  She’d been right—right for his parents; she was attractive, came from wealth, stood to inherit. Marrying her was “marrying up,” as his mother liked to say. Birdie and his mother hated each other on sight. Maybe that was right, too. Joe’s mother was a doormat. She’d let her husband beat their children and run around on her and put her in an early grave. No, Joe was not one of those men who wanted to marry his mother. He had wanted an interesting woman, a strong woman, and a woman who would be his match. What he hadn’t realized was that Birdie, who was all of those things, was also cold and withholding. That wasn’t clear to him until long after he’d made his vows. And vows, as far as he was concerned, were not meant to be broken. Stretched, maybe bent, but not broken.

  He hadn’t been able to sleep again after Sean’s call. Birdie was one with the island. Frankly, he pitied the idiots who would breach that boundary—if that was the case. But Kate and Chelsea did not have the same constitution as Birdie. They did not belong to Heart Island in the same way. Chelsea was a reasonable girl; if she said something was wrong, maybe there was.

  Sean’s call had been the second unsettling one of the day. Joe had just returned to the blessed noise and bustle of the city after the oppressive quiet of Heart Island. The island always seemed so nice at first. Then it started to weigh on him—the silence, the isolation, Birdie’s endless litany of demands and complaints, her deafening silences.

  Even though he hadn’t heard from Martha in years, he recognized her number. It was seared in his memory. He had called it so many times with such breathlessness. The voice on the other line had brought him so much pleasure, so much comfort, and in the end, so much misery. He almost didn’t answer; it couldn’t be anything but bad news. Why else would she call after all these years?

  “Joe?” she said. Her voice sounded older, smokier. But he remembered when it had been sweet and young. When she’d been everything that Birdie wasn’t—soft, yielding, eager. He remembered the feel of her lean body, that velvet skin beneath his fingertips. Even now, a lifetime later, he could feel the tickle of arousal.

  “Martha,” he said. He used to call her Martie, a sweet diminutive of her name that seemed more in line with who she was then. “Why are you calling?”

  He heard her take in a breath. “Emily’s in trouble, terrible trouble.”

  He’d thought of Martha’s little girl, too. She was nothing like his Kate. He always knew Emily wasn’t his, but he played along because it was a game he enjoyed. The game of house with these other two, the two who wanted him so desperately, who needed him. He’d often thought Birdie could replace him with anyone. Not his Katie. The moment Kate was born, he’d looked into her eyes and felt as if he’d always known her. But with Emily—my little Em, he used to call her—though he loved her, he knew that she was not his. But he could love her, because she loved him so much.

  “What kind of trouble?” he asked.

  Martha told him, and he could hardly b
elieve it. He felt a rush of sadness, of guilt.

  As if she sensed his sorrow, wanted to use it against him, she said, “She needed a father.”

  “I’m not her father, Martha.”

  “But you could have been.”

  He felt the old rise of anger; all the things he’d said a million times lodged in his throat. You knew I was married. I told you I wouldn’t leave my family. I always knew the baby wasn’t mine. I cared for you both anyway. All these years, I’ve sent you money.

  “I’m sorry,” he said instead. Because really, what else was there to say? He listened to her crying on the other line. She should know not to do that. Tears made him go cold inside; they always had.

  “I wanted you to know in case she came to you. In case she called.”

  “Why would she?” he asked. “How could she even remember me?”

  The silence on the line told him everything.

  “She has your last name,” Martha said. “I never had the heart to tell her she wasn’t yours after all.”

  He let the words, their implication and meaning, sink in. Somewhere down on the street, he heard a fire engine roar.

  “So all these years, she thought I was her father,” he said. “And what? That I abandoned her, didn’t want her? That’s what you call having a heart?”

  “You did abandon her, Joe.” There it was, the cloying, self-dramatizing tone that came out in her when things got ugly.

  “And you lied to her, manipulated her—just like you did me.” How quickly old angers rose from the buried depths. You thought you’d forgotten about the ancient hurts and disappointments, but brush back the dirt and there they are, calcified, harder than ever.