When My Heart Was Wicked

by Tricia Stirling

  Finally, we just let her go. My dad figured it was worth her keeping the child support money, as long as she stayed far away from us. Anna found a detective who was willing to give us information whenever Cheyenne was caught doing something. Going to prison for extortion, for welfare fraud. Finally, my dad was able to get the garnishment stopped. A year after that, he died of prostate cancer. And with him, every last shred of good magic.

  To punish myself for cutting, I decide to take a walk. I put socks and tennis shoes on over my sores. Outside, I think of the old fairy tales Anna told me, the ones where people’s feet ache and throb. The little girl in the Red Shoes, begging the executioner to cut off the shoes that won’t stop dancing, and with them, her poor bleeding feet. The stepsisters in Cinderella — one loses a toe, the other a heel. And the Little Mermaid, who feels as though she is walking on needles and knives. A little cut on the heel is nothing. I should have sliced off my pale pink sole.

  I don’t set out to visit Myrna, but before long I realize that’s where I’m headed. Myrna is out in front of her shop, picking spinach and chard from her garden.

  “Hey,” I say, walking in through the gate.

  “Lacy!” Her eyes light up like someone special is coming, not a mean-spirited teenager with seeping sores.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Harvesting some greens for dinner.” I think of our garden in Chico, the one I’d harvest from every night. I miss it, along with everything else. I miss the butterfly bush that drew all the butterflies. I miss the wild toad who ate our slugs at night and slept during the day in the toad house Anna made. “Come on inside, I’ll make tea.”

  We sit in her weird kitchen at the monster alien table after Myrna brings me a steaming mug of chamomile. It’s an iced tea day, the kind where you want to lie, catlike, in pools of sunlight on the porch, but Myrna always looks so cold, holding herself and shivering under her sweaters. I want her to drink giant sips, to make herself warm and strong.

  “What brings you?” she asks.

  “I’m having a bad day. I was mean to my stepmom. Cheyenne wouldn’t understand. I know you’re her friend, but …”

  “No, that’s okay. I do want you to feel safe here, Lacy. You can talk to me.”

  “Why are you so nice to me? Why do you want to be my friend?”

  “Well, I like you,” she says, as if she’s never thought about it before. “I recognize something of me in you,” she says after a moment. “We have something in common, I think.” She takes the tea bag from her cup and wraps it around a spoon. I sip my own tea. It goes down warm and feels good. I guess I was cold too.

  “I don’t think we have much in common,” I say. It sounds mean, and that isn’t how I intend it. It’s just that she seems like a nice person, and I’m not. But my foot is throbbing, and I don’t even have the energy to explain.

  “Well, then. Why are you having a bad day?”

  “Some kids at school started a rumor about me. I guess it’s not such a big deal, but —” I stop myself. I can’t exactly tell her that my mom was the one who started it.

  I try again. “I guess the reason I’m here is, I have a few questions about my mom. I know you’ll say I should just ask her, but I’ve already tried that. She won’t talk about it.”

  “Well, if it’s between you and your mom, I probably shouldn’t get involved.” Typical adult response. “But there’s no harm in asking. I’ll answer what I can.”

  “She went somewhere for a while. It was like she just disappeared. One day she was still there, being a mom, talking about taking me to Paris, and the next she was gone. Do you know where she went?”

  Myrna tilts her head to one side. “Hmmm,” she says. “I don’t know — your mom moves around a lot. Can you tell me more specifically when this was?”

  When it was. It was three years ago, in April. There was a beat-up-looking house on our street, the front yard full of weeds and tall grass. But in the backyard the owners kept chickens and some bunnies. It was April, and a new litter of bunnies had just been born. The owners — an old couple — I don’t remember their names — invited me into their backyard. Despite the way I looked, like a mean little kid who’d grown up too fast, they invited me back there to hold the baby bunnies. The kits — I remember that, the old couple called them kits — had huge feet, and their noses wiggled like funny vibrating triangles on a kids’ TV show. When I moved in with my dad and Anna, I knew by the time I came back, those bunnies wouldn’t be babies anymore. I wonder if they’re still alive today. I don’t know how long rabbits live.

  “I remember,” Myrna says, and for a moment I think she’s remembering the bunnies too. “That was when she went down south to stay with her parents.” I blink. I want to tell Myrna she has it wrong. Cheyenne doesn’t have parents; she’s been telling me that since I was tiny. She tells her own creation myth, in which she popped fully formed out of a dragon’s head, a spin on the Greek myth of Athena. Even though I knew that wasn’t true, I never imagined that I had grandparents. My father’s parents died when I was a baby, and I just figured my mom’s parents were dead too.

  I drop my head on the glass table, carefully, so as not to break it. “I’m so confused,” I say. My heel throbs. Myrna runs her fingers through my hair. Her fingers, like my own, are ice.

  At home, Cheyenne is sitting on the couch, petting a gray cat.

  “Hey!” I say. “I thought you were allergic.”

  “I know! So did I. Well, they say the gray ones carry less allergens.”

  “Do you ever tell the truth?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me I have grandparents? Why did you leave me alone in that house? I don’t even understand why you took me from Anna. You don’t love me.” The minute it’s said, I recognize the truth of it. I narrow my eyes. “You don’t even know how to love.”

  Cheyenne’s face darkens for a moment, but then it seems to clear. “Now relax,” she says. “Let me make you some tea.” She tosses the cat to the floor. I follow her to the kitchen.

  “You told me you were allergic to cats. You told me that’s why I couldn’t bring Mr. Murm! I told you Mr. Murm was my best friend in the world, and you still said I couldn’t bring him!”

  “Shhh.” She fills a mug with water and puts it in the microwave. “Please,” she says. “You’re hysterical. You need to calm down.”

  “Whose cat is that?” I don’t know why I’m fixating on the cat. There is so much more to this than the cat.

  “A man I met at the bar when I was still there. He has an orthodontic convention in Seattle and I told him I’d cat-sit.”

  “For how long?”

  “Just until Monday. Next question?”

  “You told me you don’t have parents.”

  She sighs. “Oh, Lacy. They are bad people. I didn’t want you around them.” She hands me the cup of tea. I drink. It makes me tired.

  “But you went to stay with them. Why didn’t you tell me where you were? Why didn’t you tell me where you were going? How could you just leave me here all alone?”

  “You know, I’m the mom here. I don’t owe you any explanations, but the simple truth is, I didn’t know I was going. But someone was after me, someone bad. I had to get away for a while, and I knew that was the last place anyone would look.”

  “So someone was after you and you left me alone in the house? Doesn’t that seem a little neglectful?”

  “No one was going to hurt you. I knew that.”

  “How? How did you know that? Why didn’t you take me with you?”

  “I told you already! I didn’t want you around my parents. I was trying to protect you.”

  I’m shaking with anger, but I yawn, and I struggle to get past it, the dull tiredness. “Okay,” I say, trying to get my thoughts in order. I sit at the table. “I have one more question.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Everyone at school is saying you called this guy, Drake. They’re saying you told
him I was crazy.”

  “Oh, I didn’t say that,” she says dismissively.

  My eyes swim. I try to focus on her. Her tea always makes me feel so weird. Good, but weird. I wonder, not for the first time, what exactly is in it.

  “But you did say something? You did call him?”

  “Well, Lacy, what was I supposed to do? My only daughter was sneaking out at night. You thought I didn’t know? I know everything you do. You’re my blood; I can feel your thoughts coursing through my veins.”

  “Why do you say things like that? It’s creepy.”

  “Don’t you remember, darling? We are fierce birds. But the world belongs to us alone, you and me. I don’t want you making the same mistakes I did, running off with the wrong boys. I just told that boy to be careful with you. I told him you had been through a lot, and you were fragile.”

  “But you didn’t tell him I’m crazy?”

  She sighs again. “I told him you were fragile. Delicate, something like that. I suppose I can see why he took it that way, but I don’t think I said the word crazy.”

  “Mom! The kids at school are saying I just got out of a mental institution. They’re saying I bit some guy. How could you do this?”

  “Oh, Lacy, really. You think kids didn’t tell rumors about me when I was your age? We frighten them. We are beautiful, we are interesting.” She sits beside me and swings her full dark hair to the side. She moves like a goddess, tan and slender in her white dress. But cat hair clings to her belly and the area underneath. It is lewd, like a weird circus snapshot.

  “I’m going to my room now,” I tell her, too exhausted, unable to process it all. I think I should stop drinking my mom’s tea.

  I awaken in my bed, a little hungry and very cold. Evidently I fell asleep. Evidently I missed dinner. I go into the kitchen and make myself a turkey sandwich. I’m back to eating meat again. The gray cat is sleeping on the couch. I pick him up and try to take him to my room, but he hisses and scratches me and runs off.

  From my bed, I start The Catcher in the Rye, homework for tomorrow. I don’t get what all the buzz is about. The main character seems like a jerk. Kind of a sweet jerk, but still a jerk. But I like Mrs. Kesey, and I know she’s passionate about the book, so I’ll keep muddling through, just not tonight.

  Instead, I go out into the cool evening to water my plants. Cheyenne is sitting cross-legged next to the swampy pool. She looks like she’s meditating, and her hair floats like coils, like snakes, in the air. She really is beautiful. But she is so much more than her looks. Like a terrible child who seems peaceful when he sleeps, Cheyenne looks so gentle when she’s at ease.

  In case she is meditating, I walk quietly past her and turn on the hose. My plants are nearly dead. I can’t understand it. Maybe it is the Sacramento soil. I never had this much trouble in Chico. That lone poppy plant flourishes, its blooms scarlet against its leaves. I pluck a leaf from it and smell it, and suddenly Cheyenne is behind me.

  “What are you doing?” she demands.

  “Nothing. I’m sorry. I was just —”

  “You were just what?”

  “I was just wondering why all my plants are dying. This one’s so healthy. I don’t know how to help my plants. Everything I touch dies.”

  As my eyes fill with tears, Cheyenne’s fierce gaze softens.

  “Now, that’s not true,” she says. “You know, I was thinking about that rumor. We could do something to get back at Drake for spreading it around.” I shiver because part of me, the part that can’t even for a moment forget being called those names and left crying against a tree, wants to. Wants to just keep casting spells until, like Stacia said, he loses the capacity to swallow. Until he’s as broken as a bird that has flown into a window.

  “I guess he was in a car accident,” I say. “He’s in the hospital.”

  “Oh my goodness, is he okay?”

  I stare at her. It is so hard to know whether she’s being sincere. “I guess so. I don’t know. We aren’t exactly friends anymore.”

  “Well, think about it.” She reaches her hand out for the leaf I’d plucked. “If you want my help getting back at him, let me know. I don’t know if you remember, you and I used to be pretty good at casting revenge spells on our enemies.”

  “I was five. I didn’t have any enemies.”

  “So you do remember.”

  “Yes. I remember.” I do, but I wish I didn’t.

  “Good. Our minds are powerful. Our minds can move mountains.” She smiles. “In the meantime, you stick to your garden and let me tend to mine, all right?”

  “Sure,” I say, putting the leaf in her palm. She closes her hand around it and watches me as I go back into the house.

  “Our minds our powerful,” she had said. “Our minds can move mountains.” Ancient wisdom, words I grew up hearing. It was those words that led me to do what I did on that night, so many months after Cheyenne’s belly started to grow.

  I lay in bed that night, imagining the thing inside her — an alien shrimp with a veiny skull and black eyes. If he were allowed to be born, then he would come between us, between me and my mother, between us and Paris. We had just started getting along and now this thing would come and take it all away. And I hated him. And I was jealous.

  So I lay there imagining him, and in my mind he became still. His curled body unmoving. In my mind, he became dead. I whispered, Dead, dead, dead. I fell asleep with that image in my head. Beady black eyes clouded over with that death wisp of gray.

  That night, there was blood everywhere. My mother moaning in the bath. Water was running and there was blood in the water and her face was twisted up in pain. Her moans shook the apartment. She took blood from her own body, where it flowed and flowed between her legs, and she took her bloody hand and rubbed it on the baby’s head. She wrapped a silver chain around his ankle, and recited incantations as she held him to the mirror. As she did, I felt a jolt, like my own spirit was trying to fly away. I clenched my fists and held my ground, and before long, she tore the chain from the baby’s ankle and threw it at the mirror. Then she stared into her reflection, biting her lip until it bled. I ran back to my room and hid beneath the covers until she came for me. “Get in the truck,” she simply said. “We’re going to the river.”

  “The baby?” I asked.

  “A boy. But he’s dead.” I felt it then. Triumph in my heart. I was so bad I didn’t even know to feel sorry.

  Mrs. Kesey looks increasingly uncomfortable by the day. I know why she sits on the top of her desk — it’s because her belly’s too big to fit in the actual seat. She brings a big water bottle with her everywhere she goes, and she drinks from it constantly. It’s mean to say she reminds me of a pig, especially since she’s so nice. But with her pink skin and pregnant belly, I can’t help but think it.

  “God,” she says, then, “mmmph.”

  “Are you okay, Mrs. Kesey?” Martin asks.

  “This kid is playing hockey with my uterus,” she says, which makes us all squirm, I’m sure. It makes me squirm, anyway. Who wants to think about uteruses?

  Happily, she quickly launches into the subject du jour, The Catcher in the Rye. “What do you guys think?” she asks.

  “It’s funny,” one of the football players says, “but kinda stupid.”

  “That Holden guy’s sexy,” Olive says. “You can tell he’s really good-looking.”

  “But nobody talks like that,” says one of Olive’s friends. “Everyone’s a phony and everything’s ironical.”

  “And he says his friends are sexy, like, the guys,” says a boy I don’t know. “That’s not cool, man.”

  “Well, the language might be antiquated, but the themes are universal.” Mrs. Kesey shifts on her desk. “I want you to think about that as you continue reading. I want you to think about ways you can relate to Holden, ways where he might be having feelings similar to feelings you might have from time to time. Lacy? You don’t look impressed. What do you think?”

  “
I don’t really like it,” I say. “I think he’s kind of a jerk. He’s so judgmental about everyone, but he doesn’t seem that great either. He’s a liar, and he keeps flunking out of schools, so he’s not all perfect.”

  “Ah, good point.” Mrs. Kesey goes to the dry-erase board. Unreliable Narrator, she writes. “Holden is what we call an unreliable narrator. We can often trust everything the narrator of a book tells us, but in this case, we can’t. Like Lacy said, he tells us one thing, but we see him act in opposite ways. Can anyone think of any examples of this?”

  Instead of examples, I think of myself, and suddenly I do relate to Holden Caulfield. If my life were a book, I’d be an unreliable narrator. I keep telling myself I want to be good, a good person, a good friend. But I’m not, and I’ve known it all along. I’m worse than a phony. Or maybe that’s exactly what I am.

  We have a substitute for chemistry. While we file into class, she sits at Mrs. Burke’s desk, reading a book. When the bell rings, she doesn’t stand up. She doesn’t even look up or take roll. We sit at our tables quietly for about a second before it dawns on us that this is going to be a free period.

  Kids start to move around, switching seats. The noise level grows. The teacher buries her face deeper into her book.

  “Let’s go,” I say to Martin, feeling suddenly daring and a little bit flustery.

  We grab our books and head out to the hallway. Stacia has seventh-period history. We go to her room and catch her eye through the door window. She sees us and raises her hand, says something to the teacher, and is out.

  The halls are empty. I used to cut class all the time when I was a kid, but for some reason I stopped. I guess it was part of my good girl campaign. We leave through the parking lot and cross the street and walk a couple of blocks to the park where Stacia and I went after the binding spell.

  The park is quiet. At the playground, a few mommies push their kids on baby swings or wait to catch them at the bottom of the slide. The mommies watch us out of the corners of their eyes. We stop short of the playground and drop our bags in a sunny spot.