Heart-shaped box (31 page)

T
he sensation of falling
—
a weightless-sick
feeling in the pit of his stomach and the roots of his hair
—
has hardly passed before he realizes that the light is not so intense now. He lifts a hand to shade his eyes and blinks into it, dusty yellow sunshine. He makes it midafternoon and can tell somehow, from the angle of the sun, that he’s in the South. Jude is in the Mustang again, sitting in the passenger seat. Anna has the wheel, is humming to herself as she drives. The engine is a low, controlled roar
—
the Mustang has made itself well. It might’ve just rolled off the showroom floor in 1965
.

They travel a mile or so, neither of them speaking, before he finally identifies the road they’re on as State Highway 22
.

“Where we goin’?”
he asks at last
.

Anna arches her back, stretching her spine. She keeps both hands on the wheel.
“I don’t know. I thought we were just drivin’. Where do you wanna go?”

“Doesn’t matter. How about Chinchuba Landing?”

“What’s down there?”

“Nothing. Just a place to set and listen to the radio and look at the view. How’s that sound?”

“Sounds like heaven. We must be in heaven.”

When she says this, his left temple begins to ache. He wishes she hadn’t said that. They aren’t in heaven. He doesn’t want to hear talk like that
.

For a time they roll on cracked, faded, two-lane blacktop. Then he sees the turnoff coming up on the right and points it out, and Marybeth turns the Mustang onto it without a word. The road is dirt, and trees grow close on either side and bend over it, making a tunnel of rich green light. Shadows and fluttering sunlight shift across Marybeth’s scrubbed, delicate features. She looks serene, at ease behind the wheel of the big muscle car, happy to have the afternoon ahead of her, and nothing particular to do in it except park someplace with Jude and listen to music. When did she become Marybeth?

It is as if he has spoken the question aloud, because she turns and gives him an embarrassed grin
. “I tried to warn you, didn’t I? Two girls for the price of one.”

“You warned me.”

“I know what road we’re on,”
Marybeth says, without any trace of the southern accent that has muddled up her own voice in the last few days
.

“I told you. One that goes to Chinchuba Landing.”

She turns a knowing, amused, slightly pitying glance upon him. Then, as if he hadn’t said anything, Marybeth continues:
“Hell. After all the stuff I’ve heard about this road, I expected worse. This isn’t bad. Kinda nice, actually. With a name like the nightroad you at least expect it to be night. Maybe it’s only night here for some people.”

He winces
—
another stab of pain in the head. He wants to think she’s mixed up, wrong about where they are. She could be wrong. Not only isn’t it night, it’s hardly a road
.

In another minute they’re bumping along through two ruts in the dirt, narrow troughs with a wide bed of grass and wildflowers growing between them, swatting the fender and dragging against the undercarriage. They pass the wreck of a pale truck, parked under a willow, the hood open and weeds growing right up through it. Jude doesn’t give it more than a sidelong look
.

The palms and the brush open up just around the next bend, but
Marybeth slows, so the Mustang is barely rolling along, and for the moment anyway they’re still back in the cool shade of the trees bending overhead. Gravel crunches pleasantly under the tires, a sound Jude has always loved, a sound everyone loves. Out beyond the grassy clearing is the muddy brown sea of Lake Pontchartrain, the water ruffled up in the wind and the edges of the waves glinting like polished, new-minted steel. Jude is a little taken aback by the sky, which is bleached a uniform and blinding white. It is a sky so awash in light it’s impossible to look directly into it, to even know where the sun is. Jude turns his head away from the view, squinting and raising a hand to shield his eyes. The ache in his left temple intensifies, beating with his pulse
.

“Damn,”
he says.
“That sky.”

“Isn’t it somethin’?”
Anna says from inside Marybeth’s body.
“You can see a long way. You can see into forever.”

“I can’t see shit.”

“No,”
Anna says, but it’s still Marybeth behind the wheel, Marybeth’s mouth moving.
“You need to protect your eyes from the sight. You can’t really look out there. Not yet. We have trouble lookin’ back into your world, for whatever it’s worth. You maybe noticed the black lines over our eyes. Think of them as the sunglasses of the livin’ dead.”
A statement that starts her laughing, Marybeth’s husky, rude laughter
.

She stops the car at the very edge of the clearing, puts it into park. The windows are down. The air that soughs in over him smells sweetly of the sun-baked brush and the unruly grass. Beneath that he can detect the subtle perfume of Lake Pontchartrain, a cool, marshy odor
.

Marybeth leans toward him, puts her head on his shoulder, puts an arm across his waist, and when she speaks again, it is in her own voice.
“I wish I was driving back with you, Jude.”

He breaks out in a sudden chill.
“What’s that mean?”

She looks fondly up into his face.
“Hey. We almost got it right. Didn’t we almost get it right, Jude?”

“Stop it,”
Jude says.
“You’re not going anywhere. You’re staying with me.”

“I don’t know,”
Marybeth says.
“I’m tired. It’s a long haul back, and I don’t think I could make it. I swear this car is using some part of me for gas, and I’m about all out.”

“Stop talking that way.”

“Were we going to have some music?”

He opens the glove compartment, fumbles for a tape. It’s a collection of demos, a private collection. His new songs. He wants Marybeth to hear them. He wants her to know he didn’t give up on himself. The first track begins to play. It is “Drink to the Dead.” The guitar chimes and rises in a country hymn, a sweet and lonely acoustic gospel, a song for grieving. Goddam, his head hurts, both temples now, a steady throbbing behind his eyes. Goddam that sky with its overpowering light.

Marybeth sits up, only it isn’t Marybeth anymore, it’s Anna. Her eyes are filled with light, are filled with sky.
“All the world is made of music. We are all strings on a lyre. We resonate. We sing together. This was nice. With that wind on my face. When you sing, I’m singin’ with you, honey. You know that, don’t you?”

“Stop it,”
he says. Anna settles behind the wheel again and puts the car into drive.
“What are you doing?”

Marybeth leans forward from the backseat and reaches for his hand. Anna and Marybeth are separate now
—
they are two distinct individuals maybe for the first time in days.
“I have to go, Jude.”
She bends over the seat to put her mouth on his. Her lips are cold and trembling
. “This is where you get out.”

“We,”
he says, and when she tries to withdraw her hand, he doesn’t let go, squeezes harder, until he can feel the bones flexing under the skin. He kisses her again, says into her mouth,
“Where we get out. We.
We
.”

Gravel under the tires again. The Mustang rolls forward, out under the open sky. The front seat is filled with a blast of light, an incandescence that erases all the world beyond the car, leaving nothing but the interior, and even that Jude can hardly see, peering out through slitted eyes. The pain that flares behind his eyeballs is staggering, wonderful. He still has Mary
beth by the hand. She can’t go if he doesn’t let her, and the light
—
oh, God, there is so much light. There’s something wrong with the car stereo, his song wavering in and out, drowning beneath a deep, low, pulsing harmonic, the same alien music he heard when he fell through the door between worlds. He wants to tell Marybeth something, he wants to tell her he is sorry he couldn’t keep his promises, the ones he made her and the ones he made himself, he wants to say how he loves her, loves her so, but cannot find his voice and cannot think with the light in his eyes and that humming in his head. Her hand. He still has her hand. He squeezes her hand again, and again, trying to tell her what he needs to tell her by touch, and she squeezes back
.

And out in the light, he sees Anna, sees her shimmering, glowing like a firefly, watches her turn from the wheel, and smile, and reach toward him, putting her hand over his and Marybeth’s, and that’s when she says,
“Hey, you guys, I think this hairy son of a bitch is trying to sit up.”

J
ude blinked into the clear,
painful white light of an ophthalmoscope pointed into his left eye. He was struggling to rise, but someone had a hand on his chest, holding him pinned to the floor. He gasped at the air, like a trout just hauled out of Lake Pontchartrain and thrown onto the shore. He had told Anna they might go fishing there, the two of them. Or had that been Marybeth? He didn’t know anymore.

The ophthalmoscope was removed, and he stared blankly up at the mold-spotted ceiling of the kitchen. The mad sometimes drilled holes in their own heads, to let the demons out, to relieve the pressure of thoughts they could no longer bear. Jude understood the impulse. Each beat of his heart was a fresh and staggering blow, felt in the nerves behind his eyes and in his temples, punishing evidence of life.

A hog with a squashy pink face leaned over him, smiled obscenely down, and said, “Holy shit. You know who this is? It’s Judas Coyne.”

Someone else said, “Can we clear the fucking pigs out of the room?”

The pig was booted aside, with a shriek of indignation. A man with a
neatly groomed, pale brown goatee and kind, watchful eyes, leaned into Jude’s field of view.

“Mr. Coyne? Just lie still. You’ve lost a lot of blood. We’re going to lift you onto a gurney.”

“Anna,” Jude said, his voice unsteady and wheezing.

A brief look of pain and something like an apology flickered in the young man’s light blue eyes. “Was that her name?”

No. No, Jude had said the wrong thing. That wasn’t her name, but Jude couldn’t find the breath to correct himself. Then it registered that the man leaning over him had referred to her in the past tense.

Arlene Wade spoke for him. “He told me her name was Marybeth.”

Arlene leaned in from the other side, peering down at him, her eyes comically huge behind her glasses. She was talking about Marybeth in the past tense, too. He tried to sit up again, but the goateed EMT firmly held him down.

“Don’t try and get up, dear,” Arlene said.

Something made a steely clatter nearby, and he looked down the length of his body and past his feet and saw a crowd of men rolling a gurney past him and into the hall. An IV bag, pregnant with blood, swung back and forth from a metal support rod attached to the cot. From his angle on the floor, Jude could not see anything of the person on the gurney, except for a hand hanging over the side. The infection that had made Marybeth’s palm shriveled and white was gone, no trace of it left. Her small, slender hand swung limply, jostled by the motion of the cart, and Jude thought of the girl in his obscene snuff movie, the way she had seemed to go boneless when the life went out of her. One of the EMTs pushing the gurney glanced down and saw Jude staring. He reached for Marybeth’s hand and tucked it back up against her side. The other men rolled the gurney on out of sight, all of them talking to one another in low, feverish voices.

“Marybeth?” Jude managed, his voice the faintest of whispers, carried on a pained exhalation of breath.

“She’s got to go now,” Arlene said. “There’s another amble-lance comin’ for you, Justin,”

“Go?” Jude asked. He really didn’t understand.

“They can’t do any more for her in this place, that’s all. It’s just time to take her on.” Arlene patted his hand. “Her ride is here.”

J
ude was in and out for twenty-four hours.

He woke once and saw his lawyer, Nan Shreve, standing in the door of his private room, talking with Jackson Browne. Jude had met him, years before, at the Grammys. Jude had slipped out midceremony to visit the men’s, and as he was taking a leak, he happened to look over to find Jackson Browne pissing in the urinal next to him. They had only nodded to each other, never even said hello, and so Jude couldn’t imagine what he was doing now in Louisiana. Maybe he had a gig in New Orleans, had heard about Jude nearly being killed, and had come to express his sympathies. Maybe Jude would now be visited by a procession of rock-and-roll luminaries, swinging through to tell him to keep on keepin’ on. Jackson Browne was dressed conservatively—blue blazer, tie—and he had a gold shield clipped to his belt, next to a holstered revolver. Jude allowed his eyelids to sink shut.

He had a dark, muffled sense of time passing. When he woke again, another rock star was sitting beside him: Dizzy, his eyes all black scribbles, his face still wasted with AIDS. He offered his hand, and Jude took it.

Had to come, man. You were there for me,
Dizzy said.

“I’m glad to see you,” Jude told him. “I been missing you.”

“Excuse me?” said the nurse, standing on the other side of the bed. Jude glanced over at her, hadn’t known she was there. When he looked back for Dizzy, Jude discovered his hand hanging empty.

“Who you talkin’ to?” the nurse asked.

“Old friend. I haven’t seen him since he died.”

She sniffed. “We got to scale back your morphine, hon.”

Later Angus wandered through the room and disappeared under the bed. Jude called to him, but Angus never came out, just stayed under the cot, thumping his tail on the floor, a steady beat that kept time with Jude’s heart.

Jude wasn’t sure which dead or famous person to expect next and was surprised when he opened his eyes to find he had his room to himself. He was on the fourth or fifth floor of a hospital outside of Slidell. Beyond the window was Lake Pontchartrain, blue and wintry in the late-afternoon light, the shoreline crowded with cranes, a rusty oil tanker struggling into the east. For the first time, he realized he could smell it, the faint briny tang of the water. Jude wept.

When he’d managed to get control of himself, he paged the nurse. A doctor came instead, a cadaverous black man with sad, bloodshot eyes and a shaved head. In a soft, gravelly voice, he began to fill Jude in on his condition.

“Has anyone called Bammy?” Jude interrupted.

“Who’s that?”

“Marybeth’s grandma,” Jude said. “If no one’s called her, I want to be the one to tell her. Bammy ought to know what happened.”

“If you can provide us with her last name and a phone number or an address, I can have one of the nurses call her.”

“It ought to be me.”

“You’ve been through a lot. I think, in the emotional state you’re in, a call from you might alarm her.”

Jude stared at him. “Her granddaughter died. Person she loves most
in the world. Do you think it will alarm her less getting the news from a stranger?”

“Exactly why we’d rather make the call,” the doctor said. “That’s the kind of thing we don’t want her family to hear. In a first phone call with relatives, we prefer to focus on the positive.”

It came to Jude that he was still sick. The conversation had an unreal tinge to it that he associated with a fever. He shook his head and began to laugh. Then he noticed he was crying again. He wiped at his face with trembling hands.

“Focus on what positive?” he asked.

“The news could be worse,” the doctor said. “At least she’s stable now. And her heart was only stopped for a few minutes. People have been dead for longer. There should be only minimal—”

But Jude didn’t hear the rest.