Catfish

I had this friend Heather in high school, and she was a little crazy. She loved to prank people. One time she texted me pretending to be this guy I had a crush on, and another time, she got up in the middle of the night, and turned all the furniture in her house upside down.
At the end of our senior year, Heather hooked me up with a server job at the restaurant where she worked. She would swap the mashed potatoes with frosting, tell the customers their card was declined, or their cash was counterfeit. Usually the pranks ended with a laugh, and when it didn't, Heather would mollify the offended guests with dessert on the house, a chocolate mousse with rat turds for garnish.
On our breaks, Heather and I would go in the alley behind the restaurant and smoke. That was where Heather gathered the rat turds which she kept in a plastic bag. The rats were big as puppies and very friendly. Heather told me that her dad wanted to charge her rent and one third of the utilities to stay at the house since she was eighteen and had a job. Her mom said this was bull****, and so they would fight. Her mom was very controlling, and wouldn't let Heather go out at night. The tension in the house was unbearable.
Heather told me that she had to get out, and that she was probably going to leave town before the end of summer. She told me she had a plan. She told me that she was on her mom's facebook page when she noticed that her mom had added a new friend, Davy. Heather's mom's facebook didn't have a lot of personal stuff in it, just reposts of memes and games. Heather thought that Davy was cute and messaged him from a fake profile that she used as a catfish account. She'd send sexy pictures to guys and message them stuff like "Cleaning my room in my thong underwear" while we were smoking in the alley and feeding the rats. At any one time, she had at least four or five "boyfriends," all of them competing to throw money at her. It sounds bad, but if you knew Heather, you'd know that this was just one more of her pranks.
So she sent Davy some pictures, nothing too crazy, and there was no reply. She sent him a message that she was scrubbing the floor naked and thinking about him, and there was no reply. And in the mean time, he was liking stupid **** like her mom's meme reposts, among other things. She sent him more pictures of herself even though he didn't even seem interested, or maybe because he didn't seem interested. Finally, she sent him a picture of herself crying in the shower and self-harming. She said that she wanted to die, and that nobody would care if she did. He replied that he cared, and that he hoped she was getting counseling. He asked her if there was somebody irl she could talk to, and she said there wasn't.
Davy turned out to be a nice guy. He said that he was too old for her. He was thirty four. Heather told him she liked older men. Boys her own age, she told him, were immature ***** who thought it was cool to call a girl a slam pig. Davy said he didn't even know what a slam pig was. Class, Heather thought.
The best thing about Davy, she told me, was that he lived in Los Angeles, which is as faraway as you can get from upstate New York without falling into the ocean or leaving the country. And plus, she thought that she might be falling in love with him. She told him she was going to L.A. to see him whether he wanted it or not.
This is what happened, as Heather told it to me more than a year later.
When she landed at LAX, Davy was waiting for her at the gate. He looked even better than his pictures, and it was love at first sight. She was pregnant within the month, and they got engaged.
Heather had gone no contact with both her parents after she left Syracuse, but her grandmother was living in a nursing home near L.A. So Heather decided that she and Davy would go to the nursing home to tell her grandmother the good news. Heather at this point was visibly pregnant, about six months along. She introduced Davy, told her grandmother that they were engaged, and that she was going to have a baby. Davy smiled, bending down towards the old lady, as chivalrous as could be. Class, Heather thought. The old lady looked into Davy's face, and then seemed to choke. Her eyes rolled up horribly, bulging as if they were going to pop out. The nurses surrounded her, but it was too late. She was dead.
Heather was devastated.
Her mom flew to L.A. to handle the funeral. Heather didn't go. She didn't want to see her mom or dad, or any of them ever again. She wondered if she should cancel the wedding and courthouse it instead. She wondered if she should even get married. She thought about an abortion, but couldn't bring herself to do it. She wanted Davy's baby, and she would have it if it killed her.
She couldn't forget the look of terror and shock on her grandmother's face. Was that the look all people wore when they died? And yet, her grandmother had been fine until she saw Davy. She had looked at him as if he were something terrible, something not right.
And at other times, the times when she seemed to see clearly, Heather would realize that it was all just a horrible accident, and nothing more than that. Her grandmother had been sick. She'd had a stroke six months before, the doctors had said, and it was only a matter of time.
And so Heather went back and forth, round and round. A sign from God, or a horrible accident? Which?
Davy gave her space. He let her grief. And in spite of herself, Heather began to feel better. She began to plan the wedding, which was going to be six months after the baby came. It was not the best of timing, but she didn't want to elope like her parents had done without even a picture to show for it. David helped her. It was one of the things Heather loved about him. He was the most masculine of men, and yet he did not consider the selection of table linens, chair covers, and even the color of the napkins to be beneath him. They spent their weekends at craft stores and estate sales looking for the perfect centerpieces. She couldn't believe this man of her dreams was going to be her husband and she was going to be his wife.
Heather didn't invite her parents to the wedding. She invited me, and a few other of her friends from back home in upstate New York. Davy had a lot of family in upstate New York too. Heather was amazed to find this out until she remembered that Davy and her mom were facebook friends, and that her mother's facebook page was where she had first clicked on his profile picture out of boredom, and it had turned out to be the answer to her prayers.
The week before the wedding, Heather began to have second thoughts. She didn't care if her dad came, but she wanted her mother to see her get married. It had become an obsession that gnawed at her. She kept thinking of her parents' elopement, two of her father's work buddies for witnesses, not a single family member. Davy had never met her parents. He didn't even know their names. She didn't talk about them. Her parents didn't even know she had a child of her own now. The baby had been born healthy and a whopping eight pounds. The delivery had been quick, just one big push and it was over before she knew it. And it was a girl, just as Heather had always known. A magnificent little human, a miracle.
But something was wrong, and Heather knew it as surely as she knew that she was going to die. She felt it especially when she looked at the baby, but she couldn't understand why. The baby was perfect, and resembled her and Davy so absolutely that it was as if the child was the purest distillation of their most essential and best selves. The nameless dread hung over her like the hangman's noose, the blade of the guillotine, a nightmare disguised as a happy dream. She would wake up in the middle of the night, sweating, not knowing who or where she was, gasping, the memory of her grandmother's dying face like a scream that had stuck in her throat. Why? she would wonder, the rest of the question lost to her dreams, a long tunnel of seeking that led nowhere.
She called her mother. Heather told her about the baby, and asked her if she would like to come to the wedding. Her mom didn't seem thrilled to find out that she was a grandmother, but she said she'll try to get a flight out. She called back a couple of hours later, and said that she got a flight to LAX that would arrive at noon on the day of the wedding, and that was the best she could do. The ceremony was at five thirty in the afternoon, then cocktails, then the passed apps, cake cutting, Champagne toast... She didn't say anything about Heather's father, and Heather didn't ask.
The morning of the wedding, Heather's mom called and said that her flight out of New York was delayed, and so she had missed the connecting flight. The earliest flight she could get to LAX would arrive at four, and traffic meant at least an hour to get from LAX to the church. She would miss the beginning of the ceremony.
The officiant had just pronounced Heather and Davy man and wife when the church doors opened and her mom came in. She walked down the aisle, and about halfway down she suddenly stopped. We all turned to look at her as she covered her mouth like she was going to be sick. And then she turned and ran out.
The story that Heather's mom Dina eventually told was this. She and Davy had gone steady in high school. They went together for two years and then they had a huge fight and broke up. Shortly afterwards Davy's family moved to another city. Dina was already pregnant when she started going steady with the man she would eventually marry, the man Heather would know as her father. When Davy and Dina reconnected on Facebook, Dina told him that he had a daughter, but he had never thought to make the connection between Dina's revelation and the girl that walked off the plane in LAX because he only knew Heather under her catfish account. Heather's grandmother was the only other person who knew who Heather's bio-Dad was. When Heather turned to Davy after her mom ran out of the church, she saw in him the same look that had been on her grandmother's face when she died. Unobscured by the ravages of age and illness, Heather saw clearly what that look signified on the face of her husband, not only terror and shock, but also the slow horror of recognition and understanding.


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