Eat Your Heart Out (24 page)

I hate what I'm doing to him.

I love you. Tell me what to do.

Shannon.

Cheryl puts the letters down. She can't read anymore. She starts shaking all over.

She gets up off the bed, and without any warning she's sick. All over the floor.

“I need talk to Lori,” she says, to whom she's not sure.

“Who is David?”
Cheryl asks Lori as soon as she gets in the door. Lori is sitting in the living room, already in her nightgown.

“David who?”

“Mama's David. Who is he? Tell me right now.”

Lori looks like she's seen a ghost.

“Why?”

“Because I found the letters.”

“What letters?”

“The letters they sent each other. Who is he? Tell me.”

Lori turns away, only her profile visible. She looks as if she is in a naked place, frightened and alone.

“Okay,” she says finally. “He was a man your mother loved very much.”

“Did Dad know?”

“This is why I don't want to be telling you all this. You already think ill of your mother and . . .”

Cheryl opens her mouth to speak, but Lori cuts her off.

“If your father knew, he never spoke about it. I knew. I didn't like David from the beginning. I didn't think it was right. Your daddy was a good person and he loved Shannon. And in some ways, she did love your daddy, but not . . .”

“But not how she loved David?”

“No. Never how she loved David. More than I think people should love. It was scary almost.”

Every word goes through Cheryl like a bullet, the hot metal melting away her skin, leaving her organs exposed.

“What happened?”

“They got together, you know, after meeting at work. At some bar in town. Your mama didn't plan it. She told me once it was like she had no say, no control, no choice, and she was thrown into something head first, and before she could blink, they were heavily involved.”

“Did she want to leave Daddy for him?”

Aunt Lori brings her hands to her face, sucks in her lips, tight, and doesn't move.

“Forgive me,” she whispers.

She looks at Cheryl. “She was really torn up about it.”

“What does that mean?”

“I think she would have. But she loved your father, she did. She was just complicated, you know. He put up with a lot from her. He didn't understand her, but he did love her. Your mama wished that she could love him the same too, I know she did.”

Cheryl loved her father because he wasn't complicated. He loved her back, but he never really knew her. They were like two differed breeds, existing in different orbits, pretending they breathed the same air.

“What was David like?”

“Handsome. Dynamic. Different from your father. I hated him from the moment I met him, but it wasn't easy.”

“What did he look like?”

“Dark-haired. Very tall. He had a breadth to him, he was strong-looking. Blue eyes. There's a picture of him, upstairs in the hall, with your mama and I in it. Next to the bible verse. I keep it up because she looks so happy.”

Cheryl's body grows suddenly cold, her blood evaporating.

“He was magnetic. Funny, smart, stubborn. He wanted a lot more than this town had to offer. He was strange, though. There was something bad that surrounded him.”

Lori looks down, a new sadness shaping her features.

“He was a lot like Shannon,” she says privately.

“So what ended up happening?”

“When she married your daddy, she stopped seeing him. I know she did, she changed after that. It was like a light was sucked out of her. She changed altogether after she stopped seeing him.”

“Really?”

“He ruined her.”

I don't want to be ruined, thinks Cheryl. Please, she prays, don't let me be spoilt.

“It was him that did it? You believe that?” asks Cheryl, feeling bound. She doesn't really want to know the answer.

“I think, I think she had a hand in it. But she was weak. I think it was just bad luck that they ever met. Because I don't think she could control it. I think it got so big, so heavy, that she could never get out from under it.”

“But she did leave him? Eventually, she left him?”

“Physically, she left him. But if you want to know the truth, I think she loved him until her heart stopped.”

“Do you know where I could find him?”

Lori looks winded.

Cheryl found him
in the phone book. David Hawco. He owns a small gas station.

“Yeah?” he said when he picked up the phone.

His voice was slow and rough, and even though Cheryl knew they've never met, she swore she'd heard it before. He felt so familiar.

“Hi, ah, I have a problem with my windshields. I was hoping I could come in.”

There was a pause on the other end. She could hear him shuffling papers.

“How's 2:25?”

“Good.”

“See you then,” he said. She held the phone to her ear for a full two minutes after he'd hung up.

When she finally put it down, she was left wondering if closeness could be transferred through
DNA
. If that kind of love was passed on, through you, despite all the pain, the anger, and loneliness it created in you. If it lived forever, even if all you wanted was for it to die.

Cheryl is in
her car, outside the garage. It's boiling out, but she feels suddenly cold. She turns off her air conditioner. She undoes her window and breaths deeply.

It's 2:20. Five more minutes, she thinks. Don't worry, there is still five more minutes.

She wishes she'd had another drink before she left.

She flips down the visor above her. She looks at herself in the mirror.

Her makeup is too thick, she thinks. She was nervous and she put on too much. She finds a used tissue and wipes it away. But her touch is too rough, and her face feels tender. She puts the tissue down, now coloured and torn.

She sees a man, a silver-haired man, walk out of the garage.

Has to be David.

He lights a smoke. He walks closer to her but stops halfway between where she's parked and the front door of the shop. He doesn't see her, she's certain.

He stands, tall and proud. His face looks worn. There are other people milling around him, but no one talks to him. Even with people surrounding, he's alone.

He takes a few more drags and then throws the cigarette away. There is a hostility in his movements. Then, as if he can feel her watching him, he turns. Now they are staring at each other. His face moves, and he looks spooked. She's certain he's seen her. Then he walks toward her.

“Cheryl-Lee?”

How does he know my name?

“Cheryl-Lee?” he asks again.

“It's Cheryl now.”

His face is so clear to her, it's like someone took a permanent marker and outlined every feature in his face. His eyes are the same colour as the turquoise stone around his neck. He won't take them off her and she can't look away, even though he hurts to look at.

“You're not here for your car.”

“I'll be back
tomorrow,” David yelled to a black guy working the desk inside the garage. The only black guy Cheryl's seen since leaving the city.

They left as quickly as they could but didn't speak until they were far away from everyone else, captured by the fear of being overheard. Why does this already feel so secretive? Cheryl wondered.

He seems so nervous.

“I'm not here to tell you that you're my father, don't worry.”

He looks at her and smiles. His face is so different when he smiles.

“I already know that, girl.”

They are seated
and smoking. Mel's, like everywhere else in Wellington, has not yet complied with twenty-first-century smoking bylaws. They reach for the menu at the same time and their hands brush ever so slightly.

“How do you know me?” she asks because she can't think of anything else to say.

“We've met.”

“What?”

“A couple of times. She brought you to see me when you were a little baby, but you wouldn't remember that. I knocked on your door one time asking for her, and you told me she wasn't home. You must've been about fifteen. You looked so much like her . . . like when I first met her. I guess I frightened you with all the staring because you told me ‘Take a picture, it lasts longer' and then slammed the door in my face.”

“Sorry.”

“It's all right.”

Cheryl can't remember the meeting. Must have been a couple of months before she left home. Things were so bad she's purposefully forgotten everything that happened around then. She has forced whole years out of her head and is proud of it.

“I would see you around town, and I would try not to stare but the resemblance was something shocking. Still is.”

“People keep telling me that.”

“It's a compliment.”

“Not to me.”

A waitress comes, and they order coffees and pie.

“Then one day, I just stopped seeing you.”

“I left.”

“Your mom told me.”

When?

“How often did you two speak?”

“Almost never. But we spoke a lot when we did.”

“Lori told me you stopped speaking.”

“We stopped being what we were. But we would never have stopped speaking. Not possible. We converse in my head all the time.”

They both laugh but briefly, spooked.

“So, how is she?”

“Mama?”

“Yeah.”

Oh, fuck.

“You don't know?”

“Know what?”

Oh, fuck.

“She died.”

His face stops. His pupils widen and his irises become bluer than they were a second ago, bluer than any blue she's ever seen. She wants to look away, but she can't.

“When?” he whispers.

“Last week. Funeral's tomorrow.”

He nods.

“What happened?”

“She fell. No one was there to help her.”

“Was she drinking?” he asks.

Cheryl says she doesn't know, suddenly self-conscious that he can smell the alcohol on her breath.

“I'm sorry. How did you not know?”

He nods again.

“I don't have a lot of friends,” he says.

“I never knew about you until last night. I found the letters you sent each other—I asked Lori who you were.”

“After talking to Lori you must think I'm a pretty bad guy.”

“I'm just pretty fucked up right now. You were a big part of her, a big part that I never knew about.”

He looks down and fiddles with a ring on his finger.

He's married.

“Look, you gotta know that if she was alive I wouldn't tell you anything.”

“Okay.”

He looks up at her again. Somewhere, she's known these eyes, in an unsayable way, her whole life.

“So what do you wanna know?”

“Well . . . I guess, when was the last time you saw her?”

“A year, a year and a half ago. Shannon and I, it didn't matter if we didn't see each other for ten years, I'd see her again and nothing had changed.”

“So what does your wife think about that?”

He doesn't flinch.

“I'm not apologizing to you. You get old and being alone's not so desirable as it once was.”

“Did Mama know?”

He nods.

“So . . . is it true that you stopped being together? Or were you always . . . together? Like when my dad was around?”

“We were never really . . . I was young and I was mean. But we stopped sleeping together when she married your father.”

He sighs so heavily that Cheryl can feel his weight all over her.

“Being with your mother felt like home, but not in a good way. Not everybody likes home. Sometimes that comfort can make you all the more uncomfortable.”

“How so?” Cheryl asks, but she has the sickening feeling that she knows exactly how and so.

The coffees and pie arrive. He waits until the waitress leaves.

“I never had anything like that with anyone but your mother. We knew each other on our insides. I don't think people should know each other like that. I did bad things to her.”

The way he speaks, the way he moves, the violence in his eyes, he is so much like Ben.

“The best sense I can make of it is that we were both as drawn to each other as we were repelled. I loved her, but it never hurt me to hurt her. Sometimes I would force myself to try, to try to love her right, but I never could.”

“Do you regret it?” she asks for herself.

He doesn't move.

“I'm just trying to be honest. I'm not proud of how I was.”

Cheryl nods.

They both eat their pie in silence.

“Was she different when you two were together?”

“Somewhere I think people are always who they are and there's no changing them.”

“So she was always bad?”

“She was helpless.” He looks so sorry for her.

He can see that helplessness in me, she thinks. Soon she hates looking at him more than she's ever hated anything, but she can't look away. Cheryl feels a wetness down her face. Her heart has crept up her chest and is beating in her throat.

“You should have helped her, David.”

He looks at his coffee. Cheryl feels like a rope has been cut between them, and she can look down again now. She grabs a napkin and wipes her face. Then the sick rising. I have to leave, she thinks. He looks up at her again.

“You know the strange thing?” he says.

“What?” Cheryl says, scared to look up.

“I thought I saw her yesterday.”

About ten minutes
later she's in her car, leaving. He told her to come find him anytime she needed. When they were saying goodbye, he put his hands on her cheeks, holding her face. His hands were so rough, and she knew it wasn't her he was trying to reach.