Mark Teppo - Heartland

The bars were cold and hard and I was more tired than I realized; it took me a while to bend the Chorus to the task.

On the other side of the gate, the tunnels were clearly marked and I soon found a metal door. With a handle, even. It led me into the cramped basement of a maintenance shed, and at a desk near the ground-floor door, I sat down and checked my voice mail.

Marielle, returning my call. She was clinical and precise in her message. She didn't explicitly tell me to crawl off and die, but the sentiment was clear in her tone. She ended it with a long sigh, silence, and then, in a quieter voice: "Call me back."

I did, and she answered it on the second ring. "I got your message," I said.

She was quiet for a moment. "I probably wouldn't have said what I said if you had answered."

"Well, it was good that I didn't. It needed to be said."

"It didn't. I–I know you, Michael. I know you well enough. You didn't do any of it to hurt me. It's just. . "

"I have a crappy way of showing affection," I provided for her.

She laughed, and it sounded like something came loose in her chest when she did. "Yes," she said, "Yes, you do. You're like a cat who kills birds and leaves them in my shoes because you want to give me a gift."

"I am sorry."

"I know." She exhaled noisily.

"I kept the message," I said. "So I can play it back later, when I'm tempted to do something nice for you."

"You think that'll be enough to stop you?"

"I hope so."

"Me too. Though, there isn't much else that you could-"

"I could burn your house down."

"I've moved since the last time you were here, and no, I'm not taking you to the new place." There was some levity in her voice now, the pain of our history fading away into the endless well of memory. The imprint of my actions and the consequences would always be there, but we were moving past the recent incident. They wouldn't be forgotten-like all sins, they never are-but the other reasons we were bound to each other were reasserting themselves.

I glanced around the shed. "How about you come to my place?" I said. "It's a little small and smells funny, but it's cozy."

"Where?"

"Pere Lachaise."

She didn't answer right away, and I thought I had lost her.

"Were you there?" she asked finally.

Father Cristobel spun in the Chorus, a tiny knot of light sparking within their serpentine fog. She knew what had happened at the Chapel of Glass. She hadn't known I was there, but news of the chapel's destruction would have certainly been heard by the Watchers by now. My being at the cemetery-in relative proximity to the church-couldn't be a coincidence.

"I was," I said. "I'm so-"

"No." She cut me off. "You can't have been responsible."

"No, I wasn't. Well-"

"You're not at fault, Michael. You can't take that weight, nor will I accept it from you."

"He-" I tried again.

"Tell me later," she said. "It doesn't matter right now. You are safe. That is good enough."

My chest tightened, the Chorus grabbing my heart. I tried to speak, and found myself as tongue-tied as a ten-year-old boy with a crush on his babysitter.

"Can you find the grave of the painter?" she asked. "The one who shares a name with my godfather?"

David. Jacques-Louis David, the late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth-century painter who had been the herald of a new neoclassical style. He had a tendency to pick the wrong team politically, first Robespierre and then Napoleon, which made him rather unpopular in his death. Still, art was art and a number of his paintings hung in prominent places in the Louvre.

"Yes, I think so." I glanced around the shed. There had to be some sort of reference chart. If not here, then near any of the entrances. Through the tiny window of the shed, the light was russet and gold. Sunset already. The gates were closing soon, if not already.

"Meet me at the entrance nearest his grave," she said, reading my thoughts. "Half-hour."

On a shelf near the door, I found a dog-eared guidebook to the cemetery. Once I figured out where I was, finding David's grave and the nearest entrance was easy.

The guidebook offered the trivia that David's grave only held his heart. The rest of him was buried in Brussels. I knew how that felt.

Marielle showed up in one of the ubiquitous smart cars that were everywhere in Paris. A tiny two-seater that wasn't much more than a bubble of glass and aluminum lashed on top of an engine and drive chain. We rubbed shoulders, and every time the car went over a bump or a hole in the road, I nearly fell into her lap. In other circumstances, I would have found the constant physical contact terribly distracting, but as it was, I kept feeling like I should apologize.

"You need to stop that," she said while we waited for a light to change.

"What?" I asked.

She was wearing Escada. It was a scent I would always associate with her, and trapped in the tiny cab of the car, it became a narcotic. She was wearing a sienna-colored v-neck sweater beneath her long coat, and a slender strand of pearls lay across her clavicle and the hollow of her throat like a chain of moonlight. "That hangdog expression," she said. "It's like you've got more bad news."

"Sorry," I said.

"That too." She glanced at me, light dancing in her eyes. "I'm a big girl, Michael. I'm not a glass figurine." The light changed and she took her foot off the brake. "I'm going to need your strength. Not your sympathy."

"Okay." I swallowed heavily, pushing down the weight of the- call it what it is -the guilt. The Chorus took the weight in, swallowing it as easily as they swallowed the dreams and fears of other souls. "Did you know," I said, changing the subject, "David's body isn't buried in Pere Lachaise?"

"I know," she said. Glancing over her shoulder, she changed lanes. I shifted my gaze to the steering wheel, but not before she caught me looking at her throat. "He was declared a revolutionary after his death. He wasn't allowed back in France."

The car slowed and she turned a corner, slipping off the main road onto one of the tiny side streets of Paris. In the smart car, the road seemed wide enough, but with the two rows of parked cars it would have been a tight fit for any American-sized car. I was always amazed at how much denser the cities were in Europe, especially after spending a few months in Seattle. It was a constant topic of conversation in that city about the tight navigation of the hilly streets, but they were wide open compared to Parisian streets.

"There's a regulation actually," Marielle continued, "concerning the distribution of body parts in Pere Lachaise. Since David's heart is buried there, they had to remove the heart of another person."

"Seriously?"

"Chopin's. His heart is buried in a church in Poland."

"But his body is here? Because David's isn't?"

She laughed at my expression, and after a moment, I joined her. "I can't believe I fell for that." The laugh knocked something loose in me. Like ice falling off a roof in early spring. A thaw coming to the old, cold country.

"It's true," she said. "About Chopin."

"But there isn't a law."

"No," she admitted. "But some say the heart is the seat of the soul, and that the rest of the flesh is just raw meat." There was still a mischievous note in her voice, but the Chorus felt an echo beneath it, a sub-harmonic tone that reminded me of the psychic pulse she had manifested earlier.

The Chorus resurrected a memory of the painting in the narrow hall at the Chapel of Glass, the watercolor study of Christ and the flaming heart. The gift to Mary.

"Do they?" I said cautiously. "Well, they say a lot of things. In fact, they are always talking. Mostly gossip and innuendo, really."

"Is that so?"