Heart-shaped box (13 page)

“Yeah, I read ’em,” he said. “I was hunting around for them when the shit blew up in our faces back in New York.”

He was sorry Danny had not found them. He had loved Anna and lived with her and talked with her every day they were together but now understood he had not learned nearly enough about her. He knew so little of the life she’d lived before him—and after.

“You deserve whatever happens to you,” she said. Georgia rolled away from him. “We both deserve it.”

He said, “They weren’t angry. Sometimes they were emotional. And sometimes they were scary, because there was so little emotion in them. In the last one, I remember she said something about how she had things she wanted to talk about, things she was tired of keeping secret. She said she couldn’t stand to be so tired all the time. Which should’ve
been a warning sign to me right there. Except she said stuff like that other times, and she never…anyway. I been trying to tell you she wasn’t right. She wasn’t happy.”

“But do you think she still loved you? Even after you put your boot in her ass?”

“I didn’t—” he started, then let out a thin, seething breath. Wouldn’t let himself be baited. “I suppose probably she did.”

Georgia didn’t speak for a long time, her back to him. He studied the curve of her shoulder. At last she said, “I feel bad for her. It’s not a lot of fun, you know.”

“What?”

“Being in love with you. I’ve been with a lot of bad guys who made me feel lousy about myself, Jude, but you’re something special. Because I knew none of them really cared about me, but you do, and you make me feel like your shitty hooker anyway.” She spoke plainly, calmly, without looking at him.

It made him catch his breath a little, what she said, and for an instant he wanted to tell her he was sorry, but he shied from the word. He was out of practice at apologies and loathed explanations. She waited for him to reply, and when he didn’t, she pulled the blanket up to cover her shoulder.

He slid down against the pillow, put his hands behind his head.

“We’ll be passing through Georgia tomorrow,” she said, still not turning toward him. “I want to stop and see my grandma.”

“Your grandma,” Jude repeated, as if he weren’t sure he’d heard her right.

“Bammy is my favorite person in the world. She bowled a perfect three hundred once.” Georgia said it as if the two things followed each other naturally. Maybe they did.

“You know the trouble we’re in?”

“Yeah. I was vaguely aware.”

“Do you think it’s a good idea to start making detours?”

“I want to see her.”

“How about we stop in on our way back? You two can catch up on old times then. Hell, maybe the two of you could go bowl a couple strings.”

Georgia was a little while in answering. At last she said, “I was feelin’ like I ought to see her now. It’s been on my mind. I don’t think it’s any sure thing we’ll be makin’ the trip back. Do you?”

He pulled his beard, staring at the shape of her under the sheet. He didn’t like the idea of slowing for any reason but felt the need to offer her something, some concession, to make her loathe him a little less. Also, if Georgia had things she wanted to say to someone who loved her, he supposed it made sense not to wait around. Putting off anything that mattered no longer seemed like sensible planning.

“She keep lemonade in the fridge?”

“Fresh made.”

“Okay,” Jude said. “We’ll stop. Not too long, though, okay? We can be in Florida this time tomorrow if we don’t mess around.”

One of the dogs sighed. Georgia had opened a window to air out the odor of Alpo, the window that looked into the courtyard at the center of the motel. Jude could smell the rust of the chain-link fence and a dash of chlorine, although there was no water in the pool.

Georgia said, “Also, I used to have a Ouija board, once upon a time. When we get to my grandma’s, I want to poke around for it.”

“I already told you. I don’t need to talk to Craddock. I already know what he wants.”

“No,” Georgia said, her voice short with impatience. “I don’t mean so we can talk to
him
.”

“Then what do you mean?”

“We need it if we’re going to talk to Anna,” Georgia said. “You said she loved you. Maybe she can tell us how to get out of this mess. Maybe she can call him off.”

L
ake Pontchartrain, huh?
I didn’t grow up too far from there. My parents took us campin’ there once. My stepdaddy fished. I can’t remember how he did. You go fishin’ much on Lake Pontchartrain?”

She was always after him with her questions. He could never decide if she listened to the answers or just used the time when he was talking to think of something else to pester him about.

“Do you like to fish? Do you like raw fish? Sushi? I think sushi is disgusting, except when I’m drinkin’, and then I’m in the mood. Repulsion masks attraction. How many times have you been to Tokyo? I hear the food is really nasty—raw squid, raw jellyfish. Everything is raw there. Did they not invent fire in Japan? Have you ever had bad food poisonin’? Sure you have. On tour all the time.

“What’s the hardest you ever puked? You ever puked through your nostrils? You have? That’s the worst.

“But did you fish Lake Pontchartrain much? Did your daddy take you? Isn’t that the prettiest name? Lake Pontchartrain, Lake Pontchartrain, I want to see the rain on Lake Pontchartrain. You know what the most romantic sound in the world is? Rain on a quiet lake. A nice spring rain. When I was a kid, I could put myself into a trance just sittin’ at my
window watchin’ the rain. My stepdad used to say he never met anyone as easy to put into a trance as me. What were you like growin’ up? When’d you decide to change your name?

“Do you think I should change my name? You should pick out a new name for me. I want you to call me whatever you want to call me.”

“I already do,”
he said.

“That’s right. You do. From now on, my name is Florida. Anna McDermott is dead to me. She’s a dead girl. All gone. I never liked her anyway. I’d rather be Florida. Do you miss Louisiana? Isn’t it funny we only lived four hours apart from each other? We coulda crossed paths. Do you think you and I were ever in the same room, at the same time, and didn’t know it? Probably not, though, right? Because you blew out of Louisiana before I was even born.”

It was either her most endearing habit or her most infuriating. Jude was never sure. Maybe it was both at the same time.

“You ever shut up with the questions?”
he asked her the first night they slept together. It was two in the morning, and she’d been interrogating him for an hour.
“Were you one of those kids who would drive their momma crazy going, ‘Why is the sky blue? Why doesn’t the earth fall into the sun? What happens to us when we die?’”

“What do you think happens to us when we die?”
Anna asked.
“You ever seen a ghost? My stepdaddy has. My stepdaddy’s talked to them. He was in Vietnam. He says the whole country is haunted.”

By then he already knew that her stepfather was a dowser as well as a mesmerist, and in business with her older sister, also a hypnotist by trade, the both of them back in Testament, Florida. That was almost the full extent of what he knew about her family. Jude didn’t push for more
—
not then, not later
—
was content to know about her what she wanted him to know.

He had met Anna three days before, in New York City. He’d come down to do a guest vocal with Trent Reznor for a movie sound track
—
easy money
—
then stuck around to see a show Trent was doing at Roseland. Anna was backstage, a petite girl, violet lipstick, leather pants that creaked
when she walked, the rare Goth blonde. She asked if he wanted an egg roll and got it for him and then said,
“Is it hard to eat with a beard like that? Do you get food in it?”
At him with the questions almost from hello.
“Why do you think so many guys, bikers and stuff, grow beards to look threatening? Don’t you think they’d actually work against you in a fight?”

“How would a beard work against you in a fight?”
he asked.

She grabbed his beard in one fist and yanked at it. He bent forward, felt a tearing pain in the lower half of his face, ground his teeth, choked on an angry cry. She let go, continued,
“Like if I was ever in a fight with a bearded man, that’s the first thing I’d do. ZZ Top would be pushovers. I could take all three of them myself, little itty-bitty me. Course, those guys are stuck, they
can’t
shave. If they ever shaved, no one would know who they were. I kind of guess you’re in the same boat, now I think about it. It’s who you are. That beard gave me bad dreams as a little girl, when I used to watch you in videos. Hey! You know, you could be completely anonymous without your beard. You ever think of that? Instant vacation from the pressures of celebrity. Plus, it’s a liability in combat. Reasons to shave.”

“My face was a liability to getting laid,”
he said.
“If my beard gave you bad dreams, you should see me without it. You’d probably never sleep again.”

“So it’s a disguise. An act of concealment. Like your name.”

“What about my name?”

“That isn’t your real name. Judas Coyne. It’s a pun.”
She leaned toward him.
“Name like that, are you from a nutty Christian family? I bet. My stepdaddy says the Bible is all bunk. He was raised Pentecostal, but he wound up a spiritualist, which is how he raised us. He’s got a pendulum—he can hang it over you and ask you questions and tell if you’re lying by the way it swings back and forth. He can read your aura with it, too. My aura is black as sin. How about yours? Want me to read your palm? Palm reading is nothing. Easiest trick in the book.”

She told his fortune three times. The first time she was kneeling naked
in bed beside him, a gleaming line of sweat showing in the crease between her breasts. She was flushed, still breathing hard from their exertions. She took his palm, moved her fingertips across it, inspecting it closely.

“Look at this lifeline,”
Anna said.
“This thing goes on for miles. I guess you live forever. I wouldn’t want to live forever myself. How old is too old? Maybe it’s metaphorical. Like your music is forever, some malarkey along those lines. Palm reading ain’t no exact science.”

And then once, not long after he finished rebuilding the Mustang, they had gone for a drive into the hills overlooking the Hudson. They wound up parked at a boat ramp, staring out at the river, the water flecked with diamond scales beneath a high, faded-blue sky. Fluffy white clouds, thousands of feet high, crowded the horizon. Jude had meant to drive Anna to an appointment with a psychiatrist
—
Danny had set it up
—
but she’d dissuaded him, said it was too nice a day to spend it in a doctor’s office.

They sat there, windows down, music low, and she picked up his hand, lying on the seat between them. She was having one of her good days. They’d been coming less and less often.

“You love again after me,”
she said.
“You get another chance to be happy. I don’t know if you’ll let yourself take it. I kind of think not. Why don’t you want to be happy?”

“What do you mean, after you?”
he asked. Then he said,
“I’m happy now.”

“No you aren’t. You’re still angry.”

“With who?”

“Yourself,”
she said, as if it were the most obvious thing.
“Like it’s your fault Jerome and Dizzy died. Like anyone could’ve saved them from themselves. You’re still real pissed with your daddy, too. For what he did to your mother. For what he did to your hand.”

This last statement stole his breath.
“What are you talking about? How do you know about what he did to my hand?”

She flicked her gaze toward him: an amused, cunning look.
“I’m starin’ at it right now, aren’t I?”
She turned his hand over, moved her thumb
across his scarred knuckles.
“You don’t have to be psychic or anything. You just have to have sensitive fingers. I can feel where the bones healed. What’d he hit this hand with to smash it? A sledgehammer? They healed real bad.”

“The basement door. I took off one weekend to play a show in New Orleans. A battle-of-the-bands thing. I was fifteen. Helped myself to a hundred bucks’ bus fare out of the family cash box. I figured it wouldn’t be like stealing, ’cause we’d win the contest. Five-hundred-dollar cash prize. Pay it all back with interest.”

“How’d you do?”

“Took third. We all got T-shirts,”
Jude said.
“When I came back, he dragged me over to the basement door and smashed my left hand in it. My chord-making hand.”

She paused, frowning, then glanced at him in confusion.
“I thought you made chords with the other hand.”

“I do now.”

She stared.

“I kinda taught myself how to make them with my right hand while my left was healing, and I just never went back.”

“Was that hard?”

“Well. I wasn’t sure my left would ever be good for making chords again, so it was either that or stop playing. And it would’ve been a lot harder to stop.”

“Where was your mom when this happened?”

“Can’t remember.”
A lie. The truth was, he couldn’t forget. His mother had been at the table when his father started to pull him across the kitchen, toward the basement door, and he had screamed for her to help, but she only got up and put her hands over her ears and left for the sewing room. He could not, in truth, blame her for refusing to intervene. Supposed he had it coming, and not for taking a hundred dollars out of the cash box either.
“S’okay. I wound up playing better guitar after I had to switch hands anyway. It just took about a month of making the most horrible fuckin’
noises you ever heard. Eventually someone explained I had to restring my guitar backwards if I was going to play with my hands reversed. After that I picked it up pretty easy.”

“Plus, you showed your daddy, didn’t you?”

He didn’t answer. She examined his palm once more, and rolled her thumb across his wrist.
“He isn’t through with you yet. Your daddy. You’ll see him again.”

“No I won’t. I haven’t looked at him for thirty years. He doesn’t figure in my life anymore.”

“Sure he does. He figures into it every single day.”

“Funny, I thought we decided to skip visiting the psychiatrist this afternoon.”

She said,
“You have five luck lines. You’re luckier than a cat, Jude Coyne. The world must still be payin’ you back for all your daddy did to you. Five luck lines. The world is never going to be done payin’ you back.”
She laid his hand aside.
“Your beard and your big leather jacket and your big black car and your big black boots. No one puts on all that armor unless they been hurt by someone who didn’t have no right to hurt them.”

“Look who’s talking,”
he said.
“Is there any part of you, you won’t stick a pin in?”
She had them in her ears, her tongue, one nipple, her labia.
“Who are you trying to scare away?”

Anna gave him his final palm reading just a few weeks before Jude packed her stuff. He looked out the kitchen window early one evening and saw her trudging through a cold October rain to the barn, wearing only a black halter and black panties, her naked flesh shocking in its paleness.

By the time he caught up to her, she had crawled into the dog pen, the part of it that was inside the barn, where Angus and Bon went to get out of the rain. She sat in the dirt, mud smeared on the backs of her thighs. The dogs whisked here and there, shooting worried looks her way and giving her space.

Jude climbed into the pen on all fours, angry with her, sick to death of
the way it had been the last two months. He was sick of talking to her and getting dull, three-word answers, sick of laughter and tears for no reason. They didn’t make love anymore. The thought repelled him. She didn’t wash, didn’t dress, didn’t brush her teeth. Her honey-yellow hair was a rat’s nest. The last few times they had attempted to have sex, she’d turned him off with the things she wanted, had embarrassed and sickened him. He didn’t mind a certain amount of kink, would tie her up if she wanted, pinch her nipples, roll her over and put it in her ass. But she wasn’t happy with that. She wanted him to hold a plastic bag over her head. To cut her.

She was hunched forward, with a needle in one hand. She pushed it into the thumb of the other, working intently and deliberately
—
pricking herself once, then again, producing fat, gem-bright drops of blood.

“The hell you doing?”
he asked her, struggling to keep the anger out of his voice and failing. He took her by the wrist, to stop her sticking herself.

She let the needle drop into the mud, then reversed his grip, squeezed his hand in hers and stared down at it. Her eyes glowed with fever in their dark, bruised-looking hollows. She was down to sleeping three hours a night at best.

“You’re running out of time almost as fast as I am. I’ll be more useful when I’m gone. I’m gone. We have no future. Someone is going to try and hurt you. Someone who wants to take everything away from you.”
She rolled her eyes up to look into his face.
“Someone you can’t fight. You’ll fight anyway, but you can’t win. You won’t win. All the good things in your life will soon be gone.”

Angus whined anxiously and slipped in between them, burrowing his snout in her crotch. She smiled
—
first smile he’d seen in a month
—
and dug behind his ears.