Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box

“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.”