Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box

“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 Marybeth 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 .