Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box

Whatever she wasn’t telling him, he knew it was bad, a certain kind of bad. The specifics didn’t matter—that’s what he believed then. He had thought, at the time, that this was one of his strengths, his willingness to accept her as she was, without questions, without judgments. She was safe with him, safe from whatever ghosts were chasing her.

Except he hadn’t kept her safe, he knew that now. The ghosts always caught up eventually, and there was no way to lock the door on them. They would walk right through. What he’d thought of as a personal strength—he was happy to know about her only what she wanted him to know—was something more like selfishness. A childish willingness to remain in the dark, to avoid distressing conversations, upsetting truths. He had feared her secrets—or, more specifically, the emotional entanglements that might come with knowing them.

Just once had she risked something like confession, something close to self-revelation. It was at the end, shortly before he sent her home.

She’d been depressed for months. First the sex went bad, and then there was no sex at all. He’d find her in the bath, soaking in ice water, shivering helplessly, too confused and unhappy to get out. Thinking on it now, it was as if she were rehearsing for her first day as a corpse, for the evening she would spend cooling and wrinkling in a tub full of cold water and blood. She prattled to herself in a little girl’s crooning voice but went mute if he tried to talk to her, stared at him in bewilderment and shock, as if she’d just heard the furniture speak.

Then one night he went out. He no longer remembered for what. To rent a movie maybe, or get a burger. It was just after dark as he drove home. Half a mile from the house, he heard people honking their horns, the oncoming cars blinking their headlights.

Then he passed her. Anna was on the other side of the road, running in the breakdown lane, wearing nothing but one of his oversize T-shirts. Her yellow hair was windblown and tangled. She saw him as he passed, going the other way, and lunged into the road after him, waving her hand frantically and stepping into the path of an oncoming eighteen-wheeler.

The truck’s tires locked and shrieked. The trailer’s rear end fishtailed to the left while the cab swung right. It banged to a stop, two feet from rolling over her. She didn’t appear to notice. Jude had stopped himself by then, and she flung open the driver’s-side door, fell against him.

“Where did you go?” she screamed. “I looked for you everywhere. I ran, I ran, and I thought you were gone, so I ran, I ran lookin’.”

The driver of the semi had his door open, one foot out on the step-down. “What the fuck is up with that bitch?”

“I got it,” Jude said to him.

The trucker opened his mouth to speak again, then fell silent as Jude hauled Anna in across his legs, an act that hiked up her shirt and raised her bare bottom to the air.

Jude threw her into the passenger seat, and immediately she was up again, falling into him, shoving her hot, wet face against his chest.

“I was scared I was so scared and I ran—”

He shoved her off him with his elbow, hard enough to slam her into the passenger-side door. She fell into a shocked silence.

“Enough. You’re a mess. I’ve had it. You hear? You aren’t the only one who can tell fortunes. You want me to tell you about your future? I see you holding your fuckin’ bags, waitin’ for a bus,” he said.

His chest was tight, tight enough to remind him he wasn’t thirty-three but fifty-three, almost thirty years older than she. Anna stared. Her eyes round and wide and uncomprehending.

He put the car into drive and began to roll for home. As he turned in to the driveway, she bent over and tried to unzip his pants, to give him a blow job, but the thought turned his stomach, was an unimaginable act, a thing he could not let her do, so he hit her with the elbow again, driving her back once more.

He avoided her most of the next day, but the following night, when he came in from walking the dogs, she called from the top of the back stairs. She asked if he would make her some soup, just a can of something. He said all right.

When he brought it to her, a bowl of chicken noodle on a small tray, he could see she was herself again. Washed out and exhausted, but clear in her head. She tried to smile for him, something he didn’t want to see. What he had to do was going to be hard enough.

She sat up, took the tray across her knees. He sat on the side of the bed and watched her take little swallows. She didn’t really want it. It had only been an excuse to get him up to the bedroom. He could tell from the way her jaw tightened before each tiny, fretful sip. She had lost twelve pounds in the last three months.

She set it aside after finishing less than a quarter of the broth, then smiled, in the way of a child who has been promised ice cream if she’ll choke down her asparagus. She said thank you, it was nice. She said she felt better.

“I have to go to New York next Monday. I’m doing Howard Stern ,” Jude said.

An anxious light flickered in her pale eyes. “I…I don’t think I ought to go.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to. The city would be the worst thing for you.”

She looked at him so gratefully he had to glance away.

“I can’t leave you here either,” he said. “Not by yourself. I was thinking maybe you ought to stay with family for a while. Down in Florida.” When she didn’t reply, he went on, “Is there someone in your family I can call?”

She slid down into her pillows. She drew the sheet up to her chin. He was worried she would start crying, but when he looked, she was staring calmly at the ceiling, her hands folded one atop the other on her breastbone.

“Sure,” she said finally . “You were good to put up with me for as long as you did.”

“What I said the other night…”

“I don’t remember.”

“That’s good. What I said is better forgotten. I didn’t mean any of it anyhow.” Although in fact what he’d said was exactly what he meant, had only been the harshest possible version of what he was telling her now.

The silence drew out between them until it was uncomfortable, and he felt he should prod her again, but as he was opening his mouth, she spoke first.

“You can call my daddy,” she said. “My stepdaddy, I mean. You can’t call my real daddy. He’s dead, of course. You want to talk to my stepdaddy, he’ll drive all the way up here to pick me up in person if you want. Just give him the word. My stepdaddy likes to say I’m his little onion. I bring tears to his eyes. Isn’t that a cute thing to say?”

“I wouldn’t make him come get you. I’ll fly you private.”

“No plane. Planes are too fast. You can’t go south on a plane. You need to drive. Or take a train. You need to watch the dirt turn to clay. You need to look at all the junkyards full of rustin’ cars. You need to go over a few bridges. They say that evil spirits can’t follow you over running water, but that’s just humbug. You ever notice rivers in the North aren’t like rivers in the South? Rivers in the South are the color of chocolate, and they smell like marsh and moss. Up here they’re black, and they smell sweet, like pines. Like Christmas.”

“I could take you to Penn Station and put you on the Amtrak. Would that take you south slow enough?”

“Sure.”

“So I’ll call your da—your stepfather?”

“Maybe I better call him,” she said. It crossed his mind then how rarely she spoke to anyone in her family. They’d been together more than a year. Had she ever called her stepfather, to wish him happy birthday, to tell him how she was doing? Once or twice Jude had come into his record library and found Anna on the phone with her sister, frowning with concentration, her voice low and terse. She seemed unlike herself then, someone engaged in a disagreeable sport, a game she had no taste for but felt obliged to play out anyway. “You don’t have to talk to him.”