Heart-shaped box (33 page)

O
n the second weekend of November,
the Dodge Charger pulled out of a churchyard on a red clay dirt road in Georgia, cans rattling from the back. Bammy stuck her fingers in her mouth and blew rude whistles.

O
ne fall they went to Fiji.
The fall after, they visited Greece. Next October they went to Hawaii, spent ten hours a day on a beach of crushed black sand. Naples, the year following, was even better. They went for a week and stayed for a month.

In the autumn of their fifth anniversary, they didn’t go anywhere. Jude had bought puppies and didn’t want to leave them. One day, when it was chilly and wet, Jude walked with the new dogs down the driveway to collect the mail. As he was tugging the envelopes out of the box, just beyond the front gate, a pale pickup blasted by on the highway, throwing cold spray at his back, and when he turned to watch it go, he saw Anna staring at him from across the road. He felt a sharp twinge in the chest, which quickly abated, leaving him panting.

She pushed a yellow strand of hair back from her eyes, and he saw then that she was shorter, more athletically built than Anna, just a girl, eighteen at best. She lifted one hand in a tentative wave. He gestured for her to cross the road.

“Hi, Mr. Coyne,” she said.

“Reese, isn’t it?” he said.

She nodded. She didn’t have a hat, and her hair was wet. Her denim
jacket was soaked through. The puppies leaped at her, and she twisted away from them, laughing.

“Jimmy,” Jude said. “Robert. Get down. Sorry. They’re an uncouth bunch, and I haven’t taught them their manners yet. Will you come in?” She was shivering just slightly. “You’re getting drenched. You’ll catch your death.”

“Is that catching?” Reese asked.

“Yeah,” Jude said. “There’s a wicked case going around. Sooner or later everyone gets it.”

He led her back to the house and into the darkened kitchen. He was just asking her how she’d made her way out to his place when Marybeth called down from the staircase and asked who was there.

“Reese Price,” Jude said back. “From Testament. In Florida. Jessica Price’s girl?”

For a moment there was no sound from the top of the stairs. Then Marybeth padded down the steps, stopped close to the bottom. Jude found the lights by the door, flipped them on.

In the sudden snap of brightness that followed, Marybeth and Reese regarded each other without speaking. Marybeth’s face was composed, hard to read. Her eyes searched. Reese looked from Marybeth’s face, to her neck, to the silvery white crescent of scar tissue around her throat. Reese pulled her arms out of the sleeves of her coat and hugged herself beneath it. Water dripped off her and puddled around her feet.

“Jesus Christ, Jude,” Marybeth said. “Go and get her a towel.”

Jude fetched a towel from the downstairs bathroom. When he returned to the kitchen with it, the kettle was on the stove and Reese was sitting at the center island, telling Marybeth about the Russian exchange students who had given her a ride from New York City and who kept talking about their visit to the Entire Steak Buildink.

Marybeth made her hot cocoa and a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich while Jude sat with Reese at the counter. Marybeth was relaxed and sisterly and laughed easily at Reese’s stories, as if it were the most
natural thing in the world to play host to a girl who had shot off a piece of her husband’s hand.

The women did most of the talking. Reese was on her way to Buffalo, where she was going to meet up with friends and see 50 Cent and Eminem. Afterward they were traveling on to Niagara. One of the friends had put money down on an old houseboat. They were going to live in it, half a dozen of them. The boat needed work. They were planning to fix it up and sell it. Reese was in charge of painting it. She had a really cool idea for a mural she wanted to paint on the side. She had already done sketches. She took a sketchbook from her backpack and showed them some of her work. Her illustrations were unpracticed but eye-catching, pictures of nude ladies and eyeless old men and guitars, arranged in complicated interlocking patterns. If they couldn’t sell the boat, they were going to start a business in it, either pizza or tattoos. Reese knew a lot about tattoos and had practiced on herself. She lifted her shirt to show them a tattoo of a pale, slender snake making a circle around her bellybutton, eating its own tail.

Jude interrupted to ask her how she was getting to Buffalo. She said she ran out of bus money back at Penn Station and figured she’d hitch the rest of the way.

“Do you know it’s three hundred miles?” he asked.

Reese stared at him, wide-eyed, then shook her head. “You look at a map and this state doesn’t seem so gosh-darn big. Are you sure it’s three hundred miles?”

Marybeth took her empty plate and set it in the sink. “Is there anyone you want to call? Anyone in your family? You can use our phone.”

“No, ma’am.”

Marybeth smiled a little at this, and Jude wondered if anyone had ever called her “ma’am” before.

“What about your mother?” Marybeth asked.

“She’s in jail. I hope she doesn’t ever get out,” Reese said, and she looked into her cocoa. She began to play with a long yellow strand of her
hair, curling it around and around her finger, a thing Jude had seen Anna do a thousand times. She said, “I don’t even like to think about her. I’d rather pretend she was dead or something. I wouldn’t wish her on anyone. She’s a curse, is what she is. If I thought someday I was going to be a mother like her, I’d have myself sterilized right now.”

When she finished her cocoa, Jude put on a rain slicker and told Reese to come on, he would take her to the bus station.

For a while they rode without speaking, the radio off, no sound but the rain tapping on the glass and the Charger’s wipers beating back and forth. He looked over at her once and saw she had the seat cranked back and her eyes closed. She had taken off her denim jacket and spread it over herself like a blanket. He believed she was sleeping.

But in a while she opened one eye and squinted at him. “You really cared about Aunt Anna, didn’t you?”

He nodded. The wipers went
whip-thud, whip-thud
.

Reese said, “There’s things my momma did she shouldn’t have done. Some things I’d give my left arm to forget. Sometimes I think my Aunt Anna found out about some of what my momma was doing—my momma and old Craddock, her stepfather—and that’s why she killed herself. Because she couldn’t live anymore with what she knew, but she couldn’t talk about it either. I know she was already real unhappy. I think maybe some bad stuff happened to her, too, when she was little. Some of the same stuff happened to me.” She was looking at him directly now.

So. Reese at least did not know everything her mother had done, which Jude could only take to mean that there really was some mercy to be found in the world.

“I am sorry about what I did to your hand,” she said. “I mean that. I have dreams sometimes, about my Aunt Anna. We go for rides together. She has a cool old car like this one, only black. She isn’t sad anymore, not in my dreams. We go for rides in the country. She listens to your music on the radio. She told me you weren’t at our house to hurt me. She said you came to end it. To bring my mother to account for what
she let happen to me. I just wanted to say I’m sorry and I hope you’re happy.”

He nodded but did not reply, did not, in truth, trust his own voice.

They went into the station together. Jude left her on a scarred wooden bench, went to the counter and bought a ticket to Buffalo. He had the station agent put it inside an envelope. He slipped two hundred dollars in with it, folded into a sheet of paper with his phone number on it and a note that she should call if she ran into trouble on the road. When he returned to her, he stuck the envelope into the pouch on the side of her backpack instead of handing it to her, so she wouldn’t look into it right away and try to give the money back.

She went with him out onto the street, where the rain was falling more heavily now and the last of the day’s light had fled, leaving things blue and twilighty and cold. He turned to say good-bye, and she stood on tiptoe and kissed the chilled, wet side of his face. He had, until then, been thinking of her as a young woman, but her kiss was the thoughtless kiss of a child. The idea of her traveling hundreds of miles north, with no one to look out for her, seemed suddenly all the more daunting.

“Take care,” they both said, at exactly the same time, in perfect unison, and then they laughed. Jude squeezed her hand and nodded but had nothing else to say except good-bye.

It was dark when he came back into the house. Marybeth pulled two bottles of Sam Adams out of the fridge, then started rummaging in the drawers for a bottle opener.

“I wish I could’ve done something for her,” Jude said.

“She’s a little young,” Marybeth said. “Even for you. Keep it in your pants, why don’t you?”

“Jesus. That’s not what I meant.”

Marybeth laughed, found a dishrag, and chucked it in his face.

“Dry off. You look even more like a pathetic derelict when you’re all wet.”

He rubbed the rag through his hair. Marybeth popped him a beer and
set it in front of him. Then she saw he was still pouting and laughed again.

“Come on, now, Jude. If you didn’t have me to rake you over the coals now and then, there wouldn’t be any fire left in your life at all,” she said. She stood on the other side of the kitchen counter, watching him with a certain wry, tender regard. “Anyway, you gave her a bus ticket to Buffalo, and…what? How much money?”

“Two hundred dollars.”

“Come on, now. You did something for her. You did plenty. What else were you supposed to do?”

Jude sat at the center island, holding the beer Marybeth had set in front of him but not drinking it. He was tired, still damp and chilly from the outside. A big truck, or a Greyhound maybe, roared down the highway, fled into the cold tunnel of the night, was gone. He could hear the puppies out in their pen, yipping at it, excited by its noise.

“I hope she makes it,” Jude said.

“To Buffalo? I don’t see why she wouldn’t,” Marybeth said.

“Yeah,” Jude said, although he wasn’t sure that was what he’d really meant at all.

Raise your lighters for one last schmaltzy power ballad and allow me to sing the praises of those folks who gave so much to help bring
Heart-Shaped Box
into existence. My thanks to my agent, Michael Choate, who steers my professional ship with care, discretion, and uncommon good sense. I owe much to Jennifer Brehl, for all the hard work she put into editing my novel, for guiding me through the final draft, and especially for taking a chance on
Heart-Shaped Box
in the first place. Maureen Sugden did an extraordinary job of copyediting my novel. Thanks are also due to Lisa Gallagher, Juliette Shapland, Kate Nintzel, Ana Maria Allessi, Lynn Grady, Rich Aquan, Lorie Young, Kim Lewis, Seale Ballenger, Kevin Callahan, Sara Bogush, and everyone else at William Morrow who went to bat for the book. Gratitude is owed, as well, to Jo Fletcher, at Gollancz, in England, who sweated over this book as much as anyone.

My deepest appreciation to Andy and Kerri, for their enthusiasm and friendship, and to Shane, who is not only my compadre but who also keeps my web site, joehillfiction.com, flying with spit and imagination. And I can’t say how grateful I am to my parents and siblings for their time, thoughts, support, and love.

Most of all, my love and thanks to Leanora and the boys. Leanora
spent I don’t know how many hours reading and rereading this manuscript, in all its various forms, and talking with me about Jude, Marybeth, and the ghosts. To put it another way: She read a million pages, and she rocked them all. Thanks, Leanora. I am so glad and so lucky to have you as my best friend.

That’s all, and thanks for coming to my show, everyone. Good night, Shreveport!