Wuther

by V. J. Chambers

  “And that’s when I realized that I wanted to die,” said Heath. “But I didn’t die lying next to her. Then I came back here, and I got this.” He held up the pistol. “I was going to shoot myself. But I realized things were undone. I realized that all of this, everything that’s happened has been about getting to this point. This moment. For you. And her.”

  “Heath, you’re not making sense.”

  “It makes sense,” said Heath. “Of course it does. Whatever force was in Cathy and me, it’s now in the two of you.” He gestured wildly with the gun. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, kiss her already.”

  Gage looked startled.

  Thera felt her stomach lurch.

  They glanced at each other briefly, then turned away.

  She’d found Gage attractive a few times. And he’d saved her from Linton. But that hardly meant anything, did it? Of course, Heath was crazy, and if they didn’t do what he said, well, there was no telling what would happen.

  “She doesn’t want that,” said Gage. “And after what happened with Linton, I won’t force myself on her.”

  Thera licked her lips.

  Heath laughed. “Of course she wants it, you idiot. Look at her.”

  Gage turned to meet her gaze. His eyes were a warm brown—kind, concerned.

  She swallowed. “It’s okay.” Heath was nuts. They didn’t have a choice here. She understood.

  Gage tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear, his knuckles brushing against her cheek. He moved his face closer to hers.

  She slammed her eyes shut.

  His lips touched hers quickly, a peck. She felt him start to pull away. And something—she wasn’t sure what—possessed her. She wound her hand behind his neck and pulled him back, opening her lips to him.

  And his kiss was thorough and sweet—achingly so. She felt like a garden full of buds, and as Gage’s mouth moved on hers, they all began to slowly open into bright flowers. They basked in him, like he was the sun. It was intense. She found herself clinging to him, not wanting the kiss to end.

  But it did.

  Gage looked stricken. He backed away from her.

  Her face felt hot. Jesus, she’d forced him to do that, hadn’t she? What was she thinking? She looked down at her hands. If it was possible, this embarrassment was worse than being trapped in a house by a madman. She had no one to blame but herself for the way she felt.

  “Good,” said Heath. “Good. You see?”

  Thera couldn’t look at Gage.

  Gage spoke, his voice ragged. “You had your fun. Now put the gun down.”

  Heath did. He set it on the table. “Pick it up, Gage.”

  Gage looked at Thera, then back at Heath.

  “I couldn’t shoot myself,” said Heath. “I tried to do it, but it didn’t work. Because I’m not meant to. That’s not my role. You have to shoot me. Save her from me, and win her.”

  “That’s crazy, Heath. The whole thing is,” said Gage. “She’s not going to want to have a thing to do with me. Not after what I helped put her through. And I won’t shoot you. You’re the only father I’ve ever known.”

  Heath laughed a little. “Then I’ll have to convince you.” He turned to Thera. “Don’t worry, sweet one. He’ll stop me before I really hurt you.”

  What did that mean? Thera drew back.

  Heath lunged across the table, wrapping his fingers around her neck, squeezing.

  Thera coughed.

  Gage stood up. “Stop it. Let her go.”

  “Pick up the gun and make me,” said Heath.

  Gage squeezed his eyes shut. “Don’t do this. Don’t make me do this.”

  Thera’s eyes bulged. Her face was turning red.

  “You can’t let her die,” said Heath. “It’s the only way, Gage.”

  “Fuck you,” Gage gasped, grabbing up the gun. He put it against Heath’s head.

  Heath smiled, and it was radiant. “Do it. Send me to her. Please.”

  “Let her go,” said Gage, begging with his eyes.

  Heath tightened his grip.

  The gun went off.

  Thera gasped, drawing in a lungful of air, massaging her neck.

  Gage started to sob.

  that quiet earth

  2013

  “Well, I haven’t seen him since we got my dad out of jail,” said Thera. “Heath had him arrested, and we had to go down and clear it all up.”

  “You haven’t?” said her friend Crystal Lockwood, furrowing her brow. “But it sounds like you sort of had a thing for him.”

  Thera shrugged. “I don’t know. I was a prisoner. I was nearly raped. I got stabbed. I don’t know if I can trust whatever I was feeling at the time. I was pretty messed up, you know?”

  “If you say so,” said Crystal.

  “We’ve spoken on the phone a few times,” said Thera. “He invited me to Heath’s funeral. I didn’t go, of course. Gage cared about him, but I didn’t at all. I thought he was a horrible man. I still don’t understand how my mother could ever have loved him, but my father says it’s true.”

  “How’s your dad?” said Crystal.

  “Good. I mean, he’s probably never going to let me move out on my own. I figure I’m stuck under his roof for years. But he’s opened up a little bit. And he’s been telling me stories about my mom and his sister. And Heath. The whole thing is so twisted, you wouldn’t believe.”

  “After what happened to you in that farmhouse, I’d believe it,” said Crystal. “That was some twisted shit you lived through.”

  Thera laughed. “It was. Sometimes, I wake up, and I think I’m still there. I get so afraid.”

  “I bet you’re relieved when you know you’re safe.”

  “Yeah.” Thera bit her lip. “But, you know, it’s funny. About what you were saying about Gage. When I realize I’m safe, I’m also kind of disappointing that he’s not around.”

  Crystal gave her a knowing look. “You are into him.”

  “I can’t be, though,” said Thera. “We barely know each other. And we don’t have anything in common. He grew up on a farm, and he dropped out of high school, and he fixes cars for a living. What would we even talk about?”

  Crystal shrugged. “From the way you described that kiss, maybe you wouldn’t have to do much talking at all.”

  Thera gave her a withering look. “You’re bad.”

  Crystal grinned. “And that’s why you love me.”

  She smiled at her friend. “Maybe.”

  “You have his phone number, right?” said Crystal. “Maybe you should call him.”

  “And what would I say?” said Thera. “Hi. Remember how we were forced to kiss at gunpoint? I thought it was kind of hot. Did you?”

  Lock laughed. “You could just ask how he is.”

  “It’s odd, because I’ve been thinking a lot about him today,” she said. “Like, maybe I should see him or something? But… it’s too weird. It would never work. We’re too different.”

  “Maybe different works,” said Crystal. “Your mom and your dad were different.”

  “I don’t think they really worked, though,” said Thera. “And Heath and my mother were too much the same.”

  “Maybe it’s about balance,” said Crystal. “If you think you want to talk to him, you should. Call him. See how he is. What’s the worst that could happen?”

  Thera sighed. “All right, fine. You’ve convinced me. I’ll call him. But you stay right there, because afterwards, we’re going to analyze everything he says.”

  Crystal laughed. “You got it.”

  Thera took her phone out of her pocket. She scrolled through her contacts. “You know, maybe I should just text him?”

  “Call him,” said Crystal. “Texting is chicken.”

  Thera sighed. She selected his name and pressed send. She put the phone to her ear, her heart beginning to pick up speed.

  The phone rang.

  Thera bit her lip.

  It rang again.

  “Maybe he’s not g
oing to answer.”

  It rang again.

  “If he doesn’t answer, should I leave a voicemail?”

  Crystal shrugged. “Whatever you want.”

  “I don’t know what I—”

  “Hello?” said Gage’s deep voice on the other end of the phone.

  She gulped. “Um, hi. It’s Thera.”

  “Hi,” he said. “It’s funny that you’re calling me.”

  “It is?”

  “I’m, uh, in Baltimore.”

  She got up out of her chair. “Why are you in Baltimore?”

  There was a pause, then a nervous laugh. “I was actually coming to see you.”

  “You were?” she said.

  “I know it’s weird. Like, I should have called first or something, not just driven an hour and a half, but… I don’t know. I did it on a whim. You… busy?”

  She grinned. “I’m not busy at all.”

  …four months later…

  Thera laid her head down on Gage’s shoulder.

  She felt his arm tighten around her waist.

  Together, they stared at the farmhouse.

  “You’re not going to miss it?” asked Thera.

  “Of course I am,” said Gage. “But this place is full of so much death. I can’t walk through rooms without thinking about Linton or Heath. And then Matt, Floyd, and Isabella too? It’s like the place belongs to the ghosts.”

  “You believe in ghosts?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know one way or the other, I guess.”

  She peered up at him. “Well, it’s a big step, coming to the big city, Gage. You sure you’re going to be able to handle it?”

  He laughed. “I am going to have a native to show me the ropes.”

  She thought of the apartment that they’d selected together, the one that they’d be moving into the following day. Her father had given her a long, boring, grown-up speech about how she was taking things a little bit too fast, and that she and Gage should try dating for a while longer before moving in together.

  But Thera knew that this relationship was solid. She couldn’t explain how. It was a sensation somewhere deep inside her. Gage fit with her.

  Or maybe it was only that they’d been through a traumatic experience together, and it had bonded them. Or something.

  Whatever the case, her father seemed to like Gage, and it wasn’t as if she was moving that far away. She was going to be ten blocks from her father’s apartment.

  Gage held her close. “This place should be boarded up. Left alone for a while. Maybe it needs to air out emotionally.”

  “Maybe,” she whispered. Frankly, the farmhouse gave her the creeps. She was glad Gage didn’t want to stay here. She’d be happy never setting foot inside again.

  He kissed her on top of the head.

  She grabbed him by the hand and tugged him after her. Flattening herself against her car, she ran her hands over his firm chest. “So, you remember the time we were forced to kiss at gunpoint?”

  He smirked at her. “Are you going to do this again? For real?”

  “I thought it was kind of hot,” she said. “Did you?”

  He pressed his body against hers. “I think you’re hot.”

  She grinned up at him. “You want to try it again? Kissing, that is?”

  He caressed her chin. “I never want to stop.”

  His lips found hers, and she melded her body into him. It was always like this when they were close, like she was growing, strengthening, blossoming. She moaned softly and tangled her hands in his long, dark hair.

  In the distance, the wind breathed through the abandoned cornfields, whispering like children’s laughter.

  afterword

  Wuthering Heights has been one of my favorite books ever since I happened to pick it up as a girl. I read it for the first time at about twelve years old and was enraptured and repulsed and disturbed and ultimately intrigued by the character of Heathcliff. I am wholeheartedly in love with him, but not because I’d ever want to have a relationship with him. More because he is complicated and frightening.He’s a challenging character that I have drawn from time and time again.

  As a high school English teacher, I was overjoyed to find a stack of over one hundred Wuthering Heights books in the book closet of my new school. Ha! I thought. I’ll teach that to my seniors.

  And I did. For six years, I reread and made notes on Wuthering Heights, and I struggled along with my Advance Placement 12th graders to try to figure out what the themes were in the book and how exactly we could use it to answer the open question on the free response portion of the AP exam. (I have yet to run across a prompt it doesn’t work for.) At first I floundered, but by the end of the fifth year with the book, I finally felt I’d gotten to its center. It was the story of the clash of elemental forces, and these forces were embodied in various characters over the two generations of Bronte’s story. It was a powerful novel, rough around the edges, and deeply unsettling still today. It was about obsession, about love that destroys and love that heals, about the cycle of abuse, about the wounds of childhood and their affect on adult life, about racism and classism and oppression.

  I also thought it was rather flawed.

  Poor Emily Bronte was younger than me when she died, and Wuthering Heights was the only novel she published. It’s not without its brilliance. In fact, the novel enthralls me. But, as heretical as it might be to say, it’s badly handled. It begins in a tangle of confusion. The handful of first chapters are only understandable upon reading the entire book and understanding, in fact, who all of the characters in Wuthering Heights are. Bronte obviously meant to entice readers, to whet their appetite to discover who these characters were. But it was a mangled attempt, and there were far, far too many people to know what was going on.

  The climax of the book is misplaced. It builds like a steam engine to Cathy’s death, and then it begins a long, slow fizzle. All of the characters run out of steam. Even Heathcliff, whose machinations are the only thing driving what’s left of the plot forward, is muted and less bright. And the book ends when he eventually gives up and dies.

  Because in the universe of Wuthering Heights, people seem to simply be able to will themselves to death. It’s very gothic of them.

  The book functions in much the way that many novels from the 18th century did, as a found novel, the entire thing being (supposedly) the diary entries of a man named Lockwood. I can’t for the life of me ever understand why everyone felt the need to put on these kind of affectations back then. (The whole of Frankenstein is one letter from a captain of a ship heading to the North Pole, for instance.) Found novels are inherently problematic in that they require all kinds of strange bits of stretching to get to the story.

  In one part of Wuthering Heights, we are expected to believe that we are reading the diary of Lockwood, who is recounting the story told to him by the maid Nelly Dean, who is recounting a letter she received from Isabella. We are removed from the characters we care about by at least two degrees at all times. Sometimes more.

  Finally, my students and I used to joke about how strange it was that Cathy was suddenly pregnant out of nowhere. We discussed how much an unmarried woman during Bronte’s time period would actually understand about where babies came from. Was Bronte ignorant? Or was it common during the time for women to hide their pregnancies so well that no one knew about them until the mother was about to deliver? Was it possible that Cathy simply gained no weight when she was pregnant? How had it not been worth mentioning that Cathy was pregnant until two paragraphs before the baby was delivered?

  But all throughout my teaching career, I never had any intention of modernizing Wuthering Heights. I never even thought of doing it, even though I positively adore modernizations of classics, and my favorite might be Clueless.

  I guess I didn’t realize that people did it very often with books. I thought it was kind of a movie thing. It never occurred to me.

  But then I started to run into various mode
rnizations of Wuthering Heights. I read Catherine by April Lindner and The Heights by Brian James. I was reading them for my own enjoyment, because I adore Wuthering Heights.

  But I began to get frustrated. No one seemed to be doing it right, I thought. For one thing, I was annoyed that the modernizations tended to overly demonize the Hindley character (Matt in my incarnation). I thought that Hindley was a complicated character, but that he was ultimately pitiful. Too often, he came across as the villain in the books.

  Similarly, I wasn’t finding that Cathy and Heathcliff were demonized enough. I found that they were too sympathetic, when they were meant to be vicious, selfish characters.

  In fact, all of the main characters in Bronte’s novel seem to be horribly flawed in various ways.

  I wanted to capture the flaws.

  And then, when I decided I was going to do it, I realized I had a chance to slightly adjust the way that Bronte had told the story.

  I jettisoned any bit of found story from the novel. For a little while, I toyed with the idea of Thera finding her mother’s diary or something. But I decided against it. I didn’t want the story from Cathy’s perspective. At least, not completely from her perspective.

  Instead, I decided that I would jump back and forth between the past and the present, and that I would jump into anyone’s head that I felt like, and the story would be from multiple points of view.

  And as I began, I ran into all kinds of problems. The class divide was next to impossible to duplicate. The idea of being married simply isn’t the same in today’s day and age. And there was incest between cousins to be contended with. And there was the fact that everyone died from being sick, which made no sense in a contemporary setting.

  While I was fixing those things, I added something else. On a whim. Just for myself, I suppose.

  I added a mother for Heath, and I made Mr. Earnshaw kill her. For no good discernible reason. I just did it.