Heartbroken

by Lisa Unger

  She didn’t expect Birdie to talk. She expected Birdie to say that she wanted to be alone. But her mother told her about the events of yesterday: a man near the shore, then disappearing into the house. It did sound frightening, unsettling.

  Still, none of that was enough to get to Birdie like this. If it was some problem with her vision, or even if there had been an actual intruder, it didn’t seem like any match for the formidable Birdie Heart-Burke. There was something else.

  “Did they ruin the ham?” Birdie asked.

  “No,” said Kate. She didn’t know if they had or not. “Dinner’s fine. Maybe you’ll feel better if you eat.”

  Birdie turned to look at Kate, her expression unreadable. Kate was silent, wondering if her mother would say more. Birdie went back to staring at the ceiling.

  Kate thought she heard something, the way her children’s voices carried through the walls at home. She listened, but she didn’t hear anything more. She walked to the window and looked down toward the dock. All she could see was black. A thick cloud cover blocked the stars.

  “It feels like rain again,” said Birdie.

  As if on cue, a few drops tapped on the windows, just a drizzle. Hopefully nothing more. Kate hated the island in a storm, especially with Sean and Brendan someplace else. When it stormed, she felt cut off, trapped.

  “If you’re all right,” said Kate, “I’ll see to getting dinner on the table.”

  “Do you think there was someone here?” asked Birdie. She sounded anxious. “Or am I losing my mind?”

  Everything in the room was made from wood—the walls, the dresser, the bed on which Birdie lay. It was rustic, lodgy, not what her mother would have chosen but just as her father liked it. He fancied himself an outdoorsman, though he seemed to wilt outside of Manhattan. He called himself a chef, though most nights at home, they had a cook or ate out. He liked to think of himself as an opera aficionado, but more often than not, he was soundly asleep before intermission. Of course he’d want a big log house for the island, something perfectly befitting his idea of who he was here—even though he could never seem to get off the island fast enough. Birdie looked somehow out of place in the room, sunken and small.

  “I’m sure you’re not losing your mind,” said Kate. “But that doesn’t mean there was someone here, either.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” said Birdie. She issued a disdainful snort. “You believe in Caroline’s ghosts.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” said Kate. She was trying to be patient, to remember that her mother wasn’t feeling well. “I just meant that there are more than two possibilities.”

  “John Cross thought I was batty,” said her mother. “You should have seen the way he looked at me.”

  “I’m not sure I like that guy,” said Kate.

  Birdie raised her eyebrows in surprise. “I don’t like him one bit,” she said. “New money annoys me. Where did he get that money, anyway? Certainly not from publishing. The wife must come from wealth.”

  Kate had to laugh. No matter what, Birdie was always Birdie. There was thunder. No. It was the girls storming up the steps, heavy and fast. Kate walked out of the room to greet them.

  “Those girls sound like a herd of rhinos,” Birdie mumbled as Kate closed the door behind her.

  “What is it?” she asked. They were both pale and breathless, as if they’d sprinted from the dock. They exchanged a look. Lulu shot a worried glance out the window behind her.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Kate was trying to be funny, but the girls didn’t laugh. She glanced around the room; she hadn’t noticed as she brought Birdie in, but they’d set the table. The ham was wrapped on top of the stove, the salad sat waiting on the counter. She was proud of them.

  “Maybe we did,” whispered Chelsea. She cast an anxious eye toward Birdie’s room. “On the dock.”

  Chelsea told Kate what she’d seen, someone on the dock—a man, tall and thin. Then there was no one there at all. It was an encounter just like what Birdie had described. Was there really someone on the island? It was hard to imagine. The island was so small, the terrain rocky and somewhat inhospitable. Other than the clearing around the buildings, and the lighted path that led between them, the land was wild, heavily wooded, and rocky. There was no place even to pitch a tent comfortably. But still, there had been three different sightings by two different people in different areas at different times of the day.

  Lulu was shivering—from nerves or the cold, Kate couldn’t tell. She moved to put her arms around Lulu, and the girl sank into her and clung. Kate couldn’t believe how small she felt in her arms.

  “Okay,” said Kate. “That’s it. I’m calling the police.”

  Lulu shook her head. “You can’t. I had cell service for like one minute. Now it’s gone again.”

  “We’ll use the radio,” said Kate. She moved toward the door.

  “Mom,” said Chelsea. She lifted her palms in a gesture that reminded Kate so much of Sean. Her husband and daughter both had a dread of unnecessary drama. “I’m not even sure what I saw.”

  Though Kate wouldn’t have dreamed of calling the authorities under normal circumstances, she told the girls about Birdie’s experiences the day before, keeping her voice low and her eye on the door to her mother’s room. Birdie wouldn’t want them to know. The girls watched her with wide eyes.

  “There’s no one on this island,” said Lulu. “It’s a rock in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t see what Chelsea saw.” Her voice sounded shaky; she kept her eyes on the door. She sounded like she was trying to convince herself.

  “We were all over today,” said Chelsea. “We didn’t see anything unusual … until just now.”

  Kate pulled her phone from her pocket and saw that Lulu was right about the cell service. She thought about walking the perimeter of the island with a flashlight and checking things out for herself. But she didn’t want to leave the girls alone. Tamping down a rising sense of dread, she walked over to the door and shut and locked it. Then she leaned against it for good measure. The door felt flimsy and insubstantial, as were the knob and the lock. She couldn’t remember ever locking it, or any other door on the island, until they were ready to leave for the summer. There had never been any need.

  Chelsea went to the back door beyond the long dining table and locked that as well. Both the girls were watching Kate as if she should know what to do. Ghosts, intruders, her mother going senile, the girls hallucinating—not a comforting list of possibilities. I am breathing in. I am breathing out.

  Or maybe none of those things. The island had a way of making problems seem worse, more dire, than they actually were. With the sudden and violent storms, myriad strange noises, and the play of light and shadows, it was easy to get spooked here. And Kate, as the adult, had to be the one to keep her cool.

  It’s a crucible, Caroline had written. Everything is broken down there to its essential nature. And it’s not always pretty.

  “Look,” said Kate. “Let’s just eat. We’ll keep checking our cells. And the second there’s a signal, we’ll get someone out here.”

  “Okay,” said Chelsea. She didn’t look convinced that it was the best plan. “I mean, maybe I didn’t see what I thought I saw.”

  “Exactly,” said Kate. “Exactly.”

  Birdie opted out of dinner, so the three of them ate quietly on the back porch, which was roofed and screened in. The trees were black, wild, and whispering against the sky. Before Kate served the ice cream, the rain was pouring down so hard that it sounded like a hundred people dancing on the roof.

  chapter twenty-one

  Emily’s mother had been beautiful. Martha did some catalog modeling in the sixties. She was thin, like Emily, but tall and regal. She had big feline eyes, a long wide mouth, jutting cheekbones. Emily used to stare at the pictures from her mother’s modeling book. She often wondered what had happened to that girl in the pictures, so gorgeous and self-assured, so elegant and worldly. Where had she gone?<
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  It was more than just faded beauty. It was as if a light had drained from her, as if disappointment had sucked her dry. The woman Emily knew bore no resemblance whatsoever to that girl. The skin on her face had grown loose and dry. There were deep lines around her mouth. There wasn’t a shade or shadow left of Martha the stunning model, Martha who loved Joe Burke, Martha with everything ahead of her. That girl was Holly Golightly, a fiction. She was someone who only wished she existed, and could survive only in memories.

  Thyroid problems wrecked Martha’s figure. Smoking drew her face long and etched valleys in her skin. Drinking made her angry and depressed. But Emily loved her. None of that mattered to a daughter. If only Martha hadn’t been so mean. The stinging slap of her words still rang in Emily’s ears. You’re useless, Martha would complain when Emily hadn’t done something right. You have delusions of grandeur, she might say if Emily told her of a dream to be a ballerina, or a scientist, or a movie star. Then there were the days when her mother stayed in bed, barking orders from her darkened room.

  When Emily was little, she used to wish that she could know the young woman in the pictures. That girl was happy and kind, laughing and light. The girl with a champagne glass on a picnic blanket, the one holding a bouquet of roses, the one on Santa’s lap smiling in a way that said sometimes naughty is nice. Right now that was the woman Emily wanted to call. “Mama,” she wanted to say. “I’ve done awful things, and I’m in terrible trouble.” And her mother would say, “Come home, baby. I’ll take care of everything.”

  No, that wasn’t how it would go. Her mother would say, “You idiot. What have you done? I told you he’d ruin your life.” The worst part was that she’d be right.

  Emily and Dean walked down the floating dock, each of them carrying a bag. Emily had their few supplies. Dean had the bag with the money and the gun. The dock wobbled beneath them; the water, black as tar, slapped hard against the side. Conditions were bad: A high wind lashed at them, and the rain felt like needles on her face. Maybe tonight was not the night. It couldn’t be more different than the other times she had come here. Maybe it was an omen. She yelled to Dean that maybe they should find someplace else to spend the night. He either didn’t hear her or didn’t feel like answering. Since awakening, he’d been edgy and cross.

  The rain had worsened by the time they found a boat with a key on board. He’d chosen a boat called Serendipity. Emily had always loved that word. It spoke of when unexpectedly good things happened, things that were surprising in a happy way. Or something like that.

  “These are the kind of people who leave a spare key somewhere,” said Dean when he read the name. He said it with a smirk, as if all people who looked for good in the world were fools who deserved to have things taken from them. Sure enough, when he unsnapped the canvas cover and climbed into the hull, he found one under the captain’s bench.

  Emily remembered that, too, from her visits here. That people left keys in their boats and cars, left their doors unlocked. It was isolated, and everyone knew everyone, her father had said. Emily remembered thinking how that was so nice, and about the gates on her mother’s windows in their house on the bad side of town. How did you wind up in a place where you didn’t need to lock yourself in and gate the world out?

  She and Dean were loading their gear into the boat when they heard a shout and saw the beam of a flashlight moving toward them. Dean quickly took the gun from the bag and shoved it in his pants. As a lightning bolt sliced the sky over the distant mountains behind the approaching front, Emily felt that familiar lash of hope and fear.

  “Let me do the talking,” said Dean. He climbed back up onto the dock. He waved his arm in greeting, as if he had every right to be there. Emily felt as though fear had turned her to stone. She stood rooted with the boat rocking beneath her. Go away, she thought. Please, please go away.

  The hooded man approached. “What’s going on here?”

  “Hi, there,” said Dean. “We’re Anne and Rob Glass? We’re doing a home exchange on Heart Island?”

  Emily couldn’t see the other man’s face. But she imagined a deep frown of skepticism and distrust.

  “No one told me about any exchange. Far as I know, the Burkes are still on the island. And it’s the middle of the night.”

  His voice was gruff and unpleasant, but something soared inside Emily. Did that mean Joe was here? She imagined herself running into his arms, his big warm embrace. My little Em! She started to shiver. Everything on her, from her jacket to her underwear, was soaked through.

  “I know,” said Dean with a little laugh. He was such an easy liar. Even she would believe him. “We had bad weather. And we got lost … those damn navigation computers. They are always wrong, aren’t they?”

  The other man was silent for a minute. Did he not notice that Dean had his hand in his pants? Let us go, prayed Emily. How much are they paying you to be the night watchman here? Let us go.

  “And this is not the Burkes’ boat.”

  “Right, right,” said Dean. “They told us to look for Serendipity, that the key would be under the captain’s chair. And here it is.” He held up the key. The other man didn’t say anything. Dean was so sure of himself, so convincing, that Emily thought the other man was going to let them go, maybe with some warning about the weather.

  “I’m going to have to check on this,” he said.

  “Don’t do that, man,” said Dean. “Like you said, it’s late.”

  Emily heard how his tone had shifted from amiable to menacing. It was just a shade’s difference, but Emily’s heart started to thrum. She heard a rushing of blood in her ears.

  The man started to back away from Dean, who took out the gun. “Don’t move, man,” he said. “Just stay where you are.”

  The other man raised his hands in the air, the flashlight beam shooting off into the night sky, leaving them dark.

  “Give me the lines,” said Dean.

  “The what?” said Emily.

  He turned to flash her an angry look. “The rope, for Christ’s sake,” he snapped. “Don’t you know anything?”

  The man on the dock took advantage of Dean’s momentary distraction and started to run up the dock toward land. He was slow and limping. Dean gave chase, and Emily watched them both lumber up the dock while it rocked violently beneath their footfalls.

  Just as the man reached land, Dean was on him. Emily saw them both go down, though it seemed to be happening on a small screen far away. It was a movie she was watching with the sound down, strange and slow.

  Violence in the real world was clumsy and awkward. Flesh on flesh didn’t make much sound, she was thinking when she heard a high-pitched scream. It was girlish, and it radiated through her as something inside recognized a primal yell of pain. She was startled, knocked from the trance she’d been in, and ran after them. She found herself stumbling along the rocking dock, and the distance between her and them seemed to stretch and go.

  “Don’t, Dean,” she yelled. She wasn’t sure what it was that she wanted him to stop. She couldn’t see what he was doing. She just knew that it was bad and wrong.

  As she approached, she heard the gun go off. It was a sharp, quick sound that seemed to echo all around them and then be absorbed completely by the rain. She stopped running. She could hear Dean panting as she approached, see him straddling the other man.

  “Stupid motherfucker,” said Dean. “Why’d you have to run like that? I was just going to tie you up.”

  He sounded sad and desperate, like a little boy, and Emily was seized with a terrible hatred for him.

  “What did you do?” she asked. “What did you do?”

  Her voice, shrill and loud, sliced through the darkness, and Dean turned, startled. The man beneath him was utterly still, his legs splayed as if he were running in a weird, twisting gait. Life recognizes death, somehow.

  “What did you want me to do?” he screamed. He stood and moved toward her. “He was going to call the police.” He came up close
to her. “I had to do something.”

  She hauled back and slapped him hard across the face. He stared stunned, stricken, lifted a hand to his cheek.

  “Look what you’ve done to us,” she shrieked. The words were bursting out of her, like they’d done at her mother’s. She couldn’t stop herself from screaming with all her rage and sorrow. “You’ve ruined us. You’ve destroyed us. How could you do this to us? I loved you.”

  “Emily.”

  She started pounding on his chest, beating at him in all her fury. She was screaming about how she had wanted so much for them and why had he done this and they could have had everything. The rain poured down on them, and the lightning and thunder seemed to ramp up with her growing misery. Dean just stood there until she exhausted herself, her arms aching from hitting him, and laid her head on his chest, weeping. She felt his arms close around her.

  “I’m sorry, Em,” he was saying over and over. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m pregnant,” she wailed. Because it didn’t seem right to say it that way, as if the words were too weak to make him understand, she said, “I’m carrying our child inside me.”

  He held her tight, and then she felt him start to shake, too. At first she thought he was laughing. But then she realized that he was crying. And they stood like that, the rain coming down on them, the water splashing over the dock and the seawall, the boats rocking in their slips. They might have stayed there forever if Emily hadn’t seen someone else approaching in the darkness. It was a large man moving toward them quickly.

  “Dean,” said Emily. “There’s someone else.”

  Dean spun around and drew the gun again. Emily’s stomach clenched when the other man walked into the light. His face was swollen black and blue around the eyes and jaw; his hair hung in great wet chunks around his face. And he had that same blank, empty stare, that same mirthless, hungry smile. Seeing the gun, and the body on the ground, Brad kept his distance.