Heart-shaped box (25 page)

Judas looked from Angus to Marybeth, her scraped jaw set, her lips a thin, grim line. The wraps around her dreadful, shriveled right hand were soaked through. Them and their hands. They’d be hugging each other with hooks before this was over.

“Look at the three of us,” Jude said. “Aren’t we a picture?” He coughed. The pins-and-needles feeling in his chest was subsiding…but only slowly.

“I’ll find a hospital.”

“No hospital. Get on the highway.”

“You could die without a hospital.”

“If we go to a hospital, I’m going to die for sure, and you, too.
Craddock will finish us off easy. As long as Angus is alive, we got a chance.”

“What’s Angus going to—”

“Craddock’s not scared of the dog. He’s scared of the dog
inside
the dog.”

“What are you talking about, Jude? I don’t understand.”

“Get going. I can stop my finger bleeding. It’s only one finger. Just get on the highway. Go west.” He held his right hand up in the air, by the side of his head, to slow the bleeding. He was beginning to think now. Not that he needed to think to know where they were going. The only place they could go.

“What the fuck is west?” Marybeth asked.

“Louisiana,” he said. “Home.”

T
he first-aid kit that had accompanied them
from New York was on the floor of the backseat. There was one small roll of gauze left, and pins, and Motrin in shiny, difficult-to-open pouches. He took the Motrin first, tearing the packets open with his teeth and dry-swallowing them, six in all, 1,200 milligrams. It wasn’t enough. His hand still felt as if it were a lump of hot iron resting on an anvil, where it was slowly but methodically being pounded flat.

At the same time, the pain kept the mental cloudiness at bay, was an anchor for his consciousness, a tether holding him to the world of the real: the highway, the green mile-marker signs zipping past, the rattling air conditioner.

Jude wasn’t sure how long he would remain clear in the head, and he wanted to use whatever time he had to explain things. He spoke haltingly, through clenched teeth, as he rolled the bandage around and around the ruined hand.

“My father’s farm is just across the Louisiana line, in Moore’s Corner. We can be there in less than three hours. I’m not going to bleed out in three hours. He’s sick, rarely conscious. There’s an old woman there, an aunt by marriage, a registered nurse. She looks after him. She’s on the
payroll. There’s morphine. For his pain. And he’ll have dogs. I think he’s got—Oh, motherfucker. Oh, Mother. Fucker. Two dogs. Shepherds, like mine. Savage fuckin’ animals.”

When the gauze was gone, he pinned it tight with alligator clips. He used his toes to force off his boots. He pulled a sock over his right hand. He wound the other sock around his wrist and knotted it tight enough to slow, but not cut off, the circulation. He stared at the sock puppet of his hand and tried to think if he could learn to make chords without the index finger. He could always play slide. Or he could switch back to his left hand, like he’d done when he was a kid. At the thought he began to laugh again.

“Quit that,” Marybeth said.

He clenched his back teeth together, forced himself to stop, had to admit he sounded hysterical, even to himself.

“You don’t think she’ll call the cops on us? This old auntie of yours? You don’t think she’d want to get a doctor for you?”

“She’s not going to do that.”

“Why not?”

“We aren’t going to let her.”

Marybeth didn’t say anything for a while after that. She drove smoothly, automatically, slipping by people in the passing lane, then sliding back into the cruising lane, keeping at a steady seventy. She held the steering wheel gingerly with her white, wrinkled, sick left hand, and she didn’t touch it with the infected right hand at all.

At last she said, “How do you see all this endin’?”

Jude didn’t have an answer for that. Angus replied instead—a soft, miserable whine.

H
e tried to keep an eye on the road
behind them, watching for police, or the dead man’s truck, but in the early afternoon Jude laid his head against the side window and closed his eyes for a moment. The tires made a hypnotic sound on the road, a monotonous
thum-thum-thum.
The air conditioner, which had never rattled before, rattled in sudden bursts. That had something of a hypnotic effect as well, the cyclical way the fans vibrated furiously and fell silent, vibrated and fell silent.

He had spent months rebuilding the Mustang, and Jessica McDermott Price had made it junk again in a single instant. She’d done things to him he thought only happened to characters in country-western songs, laying waste to his car, his dogs, driving him from his home, and making an outlaw of him. It was almost funny. And who knew that getting a finger blown off and losing half a pint of blood could be so good for your sense of humor?

No. It wasn’t funny. It was important not to laugh again. He didn’t want to frighten Marybeth, didn’t want her thinking he was drifting out of his head.

“You’re out of your head,” Jessica Price said. “You aren’t going anywhere. You need to calm down. Let me get something to relax you, and we’ll talk.”

At the sound of her voice, Jude opened his eyes.

He sat in a wicker chair, against the wall, in the dim upstairs hallway of Jessica Price’s house. He’d never seen the upstairs, had not got that far into her home, but knew immediately where he was all the same. He could tell from the photographs, the large framed portraits that hung from the walls of dark-paneled hardwood. One was a soft-focus school picture of Reese, about age eight, posing in front of a blue curtain and grinning to show braces. Her ears stuck out: goofy-cute.

The other portrait was older, the colors slightly faded. It showed a ramrod-straight, square-shouldered captain who, with his long, narrow face, cerulean eyes, and wide, thin-lipped mouth, bore more than a passing resemblance to Charlton Heston. Craddock’s stare in this picture was faraway and arrogant at the same time. Drop and give me twenty.

Down the corridor to Jude’s left was the wide central staircase, leading up from the foyer. Anna was halfway up the steps, with Jessica close behind her. Anna was flushed, too thin, the knobs of her wrists and elbows protruding under her skin and her clothes hanging loose on her. She wasn’t a Goth anymore. No makeup, no black fingernail polish, no earrings or nose rings. She wore a white tunic, faded pink gym shorts, and untied tennis sneakers. It was possible her hair hadn’t been brushed or combed in weeks. She should’ve looked terrible, bedraggled and starved, but she wasn’t. She was as beautiful now as she ever had been the summer they spent out in the barn working on the Mustang with the dogs underfoot.

At the sight of her, Jude felt an almost overwhelming throb of emotion: shock and loss and adoration all together. He could hardly bear to feel so much at once. Maybe it was more feeling than the reality around him could bear as well—the world bent at the edges of his vision, became blurred and distorted. The hall turned into a corridor out of
Alice in Wonderland,
too small at one end, with little doors only a house cat could fit through, and too big at the other, the portrait of Craddock stretching until he was life-size. The voices of the women on the stairs deepened
and dragged to the point of incoherence. It was like listening to a record slow down after the record player has been abruptly unplugged.

Jude had been about to cry out to Anna, wanted more than anything to go to her—but when the world warped all out of shape, he pressed himself back into the chair, his heartbeat racing. In another moment his vision cleared, the hallway straightened out, and he could hear Anna and Jessica clearly again. He grasped, then, that the vision surrounding him was fragile and that he could not put much strain on it. It was important to be still, to take no rash action. To do and feel as little as possible; to simply watch.

Anna’s hands were closed into small, bony fists, and she went up the steps in an aggressive rush, so her sister stumbled trying to keep up, catching the banister to avoid a pratfall down the staircase.

“Wait—Anna—
stop
!” Jessica said, steadying herself, then lunging up the stairs to catch at her sister’s shirtsleeve. “You’re hysterical—”

“No I’m not don’t touch me,” Anna said, all one sentence, no punctuation. She yanked her arm away.

Anna reached the landing and turned toward her older sister, who stood rigid two steps below her, in a pale silk skirt and a silk blouse the color of black coffee. Jessica’s calves were bunched up, and the tendons showed in her neck. She was grimacing, and in that moment she looked old—not a woman of about thirty but one approaching fifty—and afraid. Her pallor, especially at her temples, was gray, and the corners of her mouth were pinched, webbed with crow’s-feet.

“You
are.
You’re imagining things, having one of your terrible fantasies. You don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. You can’t go anywhere like you are.”

Anna said, “Are these imaginary?” Holding up the envelope in her hand. “These pictures?” Taking out Polaroids, fanning them in one hand to show Jessica, then throwing them at her. “Jesus! It’s your daughter. She’s eleven.”

Jessica Price flinched from the flying snapshots. They fell on the
steps, around her feet. Jude noticed that Anna still held one of them, which she shoved back into the envelope.

“I know what’s real,” Anna said. “First time ever, maybe.”

“Craddock,” Jessica said, her voice weak, small.

Anna went on, “I’m going. Next time you see me, I’ll be back with his lawyers. To get Reese.”

“You think
he’ll
help you?” Jessica said, her voice a tremulous whisper.
He? His?
It took Jude a moment to process that they were talking about him. His right hand was beginning to itch. It felt puffy and hot and insect-bitten.

“Sure he will.”

“Craddock,” Jessica said again, her voice louder now, wavering.

A door popped open, down the dark hallway to Jude’s right. He glanced toward it, expecting to see Craddock, but it was Reese instead. She peeked around the edge of the doorframe, a kid with Anna’s pale golden hair, a long strand of it hanging across one of her eyes. Jude was sorry to see her, felt a twinge of pain at the sight of her large, stricken eyes. The things some children had to see. Still—it was not as bad as some of what had been done to her, he supposed.

“It’s going to come out, Jessie. All of it,” Anna said. “I’m glad. I want to talk about it. I hope he goes to jail.”

“Craddock!” Jessica screamed.

And then the door directly across from Reese’s room opened, and a tall, gaunt, angular figure stepped into the hallway. Craddock was a black cutout in the shadows, featureless except for his horn-rimmed spectacles, the ones he seemed to put on only every now and then. The lenses of his glasses caught and focused the available light, so they glowed, a faint, livid rose in the gloom. Behind him, back in his room, an air conditioner was rattling, a steady, cyclical buzzing sound, curiously familiar.

“What’s the racket?” Craddock asked, his voice a honeyed rasp.

Jessica said, “Anna’s leaving. She says she’s going back to New York, back to Judas Coyne, and she’s going to get his lawyers—”

Anna looked down the hall, toward her stepfather. She didn’t see Jude. Of course she didn’t. Her cheeks were a dark, angry red, with two spots of no color at all showing high on her cheekbones. She was shaking.

“—get lawyers, and police, and tell everyone that you and Reese—”

“Reese is right here, Jessie,” Craddock said. “Calm yourself. Calm down.”

“—and she…she found some pictures,” Jessica finished lamely, glancing at her daughter for the first time.

“Did she?” Craddock said, sounding perfectly at ease. “Anna, baby. I’m sorry you’re worked up. But this is no time of day to run off upset like you are. It’s late, girl. It’s almost nightfall. Why don’t you sit down with me, and we’ll talk about what’s bothering you. I’d like to see if I can’t put your mind at ease. You give me half a chance, I bet I can.”

Anna seemed to be having trouble finding her voice all of a sudden. Her eyes were flat and bright and frightened. She looked from Craddock to Reese and finally back to her sister.

“Keep him away from me,” Anna said. “Or so help me I’ll kill him.”

“She can’t go,” Jessica said to Craddock. “Not yet.”

Not yet? Jude wondered what that could mean. Did Jessica think there was more to talk about? It looked to him as if the conversation was already over.

Craddock glanced sidelong at Reese.

“Go to your room, Reese.” He reached out toward her as he spoke, to put a reassuring hand on her small head.

“Don’t touch her!”
Anna screamed.

Craddock’s hand stopped moving, hung in the air, just above Reese’s head—then fell back to his side.

Something changed then. In the dark of the hall, Jude could not see Craddock’s features well, but he thought he detected some subtle shift in body language, in the set of his shoulders or the tilt of his head or the way his feet were planted. Jude thought of a man readying himself to grab a snake out of the weeds.

At last Craddock spoke to Reese again, without turning his gaze away from Anna. “Go on, sweetheart. You let the grown-ups talk now. It’s nightfall, and it’s time for the grown-ups to talk without little girls underfoot.”

Reese glanced down the hall at Anna and her mother. Anna met her gaze, moved her head in the slightest of nods.

“Go ahead, Reese,” Anna said. “Just grown-ups talkin’.”

The little girl ducked her head back into her room and pulled her door shut. A moment later the sound of her music came in a muffled blast through the door, a barrage of drums and a screech of train-coming-off-the-tracks guitar, followed by children jubilantly shrieking in rough harmony. It was the Kidz Bop version of Jude’s last Top 40 hit, “Put You in Yer Place.”

Craddock jerked at the sound of it, and his hands closed into fists.

“That man,” he whispered.

As he came toward Anna and Jessica, a curious thing happened. The landing at the top of the staircase was illuminated by the failing sunshine that shone through the big bay window at the front of the house, so that as Craddock approached his stepdaughters, the light rose into his face, etching fine details, the tilt of cheekbone, the deep-set brackets around his mouth. But the lenses of his spectacles darkened, hiding his eyes behind circles of blackness.

The old man said, “You haven’t been the same since you came home to us from living with that man. I can’t tell what’s got into you, Anna darling. You’ve had some bad times—no one knows that better than me—but it’s like that Coyne fella took your unhappiness and cranked up the volume on it. Cranked it up so loud you can’t hear my voice anymore when I try and talk to you. I hate to see you so miserable and mixed up.”

“I ain’t mixed up, and I ain’t your darlin’. And I am tellin’ you, if you come within four feet of me, you’ll be sorry.”

“Ten minutes,” Jessica said.

Craddock whisked his fingers at her, an impatient, silencing gesture.

Anna darted a look at her sister, then back to Craddock. “You are both wrong if you think you can keep me here by force.”

“No one is going to make you do anything you don’t want,” Craddock said, stepping past Jude.

His face was seamed and his color bad, his freckles standing out on his waxy-white flesh. He didn’t walk so much as shuffle, bent over with what Jude guessed was some permanent curvature of the spine. He looked better dead.

“You think Coyne is going to do you any favors?” Craddock went on. “I seem to recall he threw your ass out. I don’t think he even answers your letters anymore. He didn’t help you before—I don’t see why he will now.”

“He didn’t know how. I didn’t know myself. I do now. I’m gonna tell him what you did. I’m gonna tell him you belong in jail. And you know what? He’ll line up the lawyers to put you there.” She flicked a look at Jessica. “Her, too—if they don’t put her in the nut farm. Doesn’t make a difference to me, as long as they stick her a long way off from Reese.”

“Daddy!” Jessica cried, but Craddock gave his head a quick shake:
Shut up
.

“You think he’ll even see you? Open the door when you come knocking? I imagine he’s shacked up with someone else by now. There’s all sorts of pretty girls happy to lift their skirts for a rock star. It’s not like you have anything to offer him he can’t get elsewhere, minus the emotional headaches.”

At this a look of pain flickered across Anna’s features, and she sagged a little: A runner winded and sore from the race.

“It doesn’t matter whether he’s with someone else. He’s my friend,” she said in a small voice.

“He won’t believe you. No one will believe you, because it just isn’t true, dear. Not a word of it,” Craddock said, taking a step toward her. “You’re getting confused again, Anna.”

“That’s right,” Jessica said fervently.

“Even the pictures aren’t what you think. I can clear this up for you if you’ll let me. I can help you if—”

But he had gone too close. Anna leaped toward him. She put one
hand on his face, snatching off his round, horn-rimmed spectacles and crushing them. She placed the other hand, which still clutched the envelope, in the center of his chest and shoved. He tottered, cried out. His left ankle folded, and he went down. He fell away from the steps, not toward them—Anna had come nowhere near throwing him down the staircase, no matter what Jessica had said about it.

Craddock landed on his scrawny rear with a thud that shook the whole corridor and jarred the portrait of him on the wall out of true. He started to sit up, and Anna put her heel on his shoulder and shoved, driving him down onto his back. She was shaking furiously.

Jessica squealed and dashed up the last few steps, swerving around Anna and dropping to one knee, to be by her stepfather’s side.