Joe Hill: Heart-Shaped Box

“Mr. Coyne,” said the doctor. “Mr. Coyne, she isn’t well enough—you aren’t well enough—”

Bon raced past Jude, down the hall, and hung a right at the next corner. He quickened his step. He reached the turn and looked down another corridor in time to see Bon slip through a pair of double doors, twenty feet away. They gasped shut behind her, closing on their pneumatic hinges. The glowing sign above the doors said ICU.

A short, dumpy security officer was in Jude’s way, but Jude went around him, and then the rent-a-cop had to jog and huff to keep up. He shoved through the doors and into the ICU. Bon was just disappearing into a darkened room on the left.

Jude went in right after her. Bon was nowhere in sight, but Marybeth was in the only bed, with black stitches across her throat, an air tube poked into her nostrils, and machines bleeping contentedly in the dark around her. Her eyes opened to puffy slits as Jude entered saying her name. Her face was battered, her complexion greasy and pale, and she seemed emaciated, and at the sight of her his heart contracted with a sweet tightness. Then he was next to her, on the edge of the mattress, and gathering her into his arms, her skin paper, her bones hollow sticks. He put his face against her wounded neck, into her hair, inhaling deeply, needing the smell of her, proof she was there, real, proof of life. One of her hands rose weakly to his side, slid up his back. Her lips, when he kissed them, were cold, and they trembled.

“Thought you were gone,” Jude said. “We were in the Mustang again with Anna, and I thought you were gone.”

“Aw, shit,” Marybeth whispered, in a voice hardly louder than breath. “I climbed out. Sick of being in cars all the time. Jude, you think when we go home we can just fly?”

50

He wasn’t asleep,but thinking he ought to be, when the door clicked open. He rolled over, wondering which dead person or rock legend or spirit animal might be visiting now, but it was only Nan Shreve, in a tan business skirt and suit jacket and nude-colored nylons. She carried her high heels in one hand and scuffled quickly along on tiptoe. She eased the door softly shut behind her.

“Snuck in,” she said, wrinkling her nose and throwing him a wink. “Not really supposed to be here yet.”

Nan was a little, wiry woman, whose head barely came to Jude’s chest. She was socially maladroit, didn’t know how to smile. Her grin was a rigid, painful fake that projected none of the things a smile was supposed to project: confidence, optimism, warmth, pleasure. She was forty-six and married and had two children and had been his attorney for almost a decade. Jude, though, had been her friend for longer than that, going back to when she was just twenty. She hadn’t known how to smile then either, and in those days she didn’t even try. Back then she was strung out and mean, and he had not called her Nan.

“Hey, Tennessee,” Jude said. “Why aren’t you supposed to be here?”

She had started toward the bed but hesitated at this. He hadn’t meant to call her Tennessee, it had just slipped out. He was tired. Her eyelashes fluttered, and for a moment her smile looked even more unhappy than usual. Then she found her step again, reached his cot, planted herself in a molded chair next to him.

“I made arrangements to meet Quinn in the lobby,” she said, wiggling her feet back into her heels. “He’s the detective in charge of nailing down what happened. Except he’s late. I passed a horrible wreck on the highway, and I thought I saw his car pulled over to the side of the road, so he must’ve stopped to help out the state troopers.”

“What am I charged with?”

“Why would you be charged with anything? Your father—Jude, your father attacked you. He attacked both of you. You’re lucky you weren’t killed. Quinn just wants a statement. Tell him what happened at your father’s house. Tell him the truth.” She met his gaze, and then she was speaking very carefully, a mother repeating simple but important instructions to a child. “Your father had a break with reality. It happens. They’ve even got a name for it: age rage. He attacked you and Marybeth Kimball, and she killed him saving the both of you. That’s all Quinn wants to hear. Just like it happened.” And in the last few moments, their conversation had ceased to be friendly and social in any way. Her plastered-on grin had disappeared, and he was back with Tennessee again—cold-eyed, sinewy, unbending Tennessee.

He nodded.

She said, “And Quinn might have some questions about the accident that took off your finger. And killed the dog. The dog in your car?”

“I don’t understand,” Jude said. “He doesn’t want to talk to me about what happened in Florida?”

Her eyelashes fluttered rapidly, and for a moment she was staring at him with unmistakable confusion. Then the cold-eyed look reasserted itself and became even colder. “Did something happen in Florida? Something I need to know about, Jude?”

So there was no warrant on him in Florida. That didn’t make sense. He had attacked a woman and her child, been shot, been in a collision—but if he was a wanted man in Florida, Nan would already know about it. She would already be planning his plea.

Nan went on, “You came south to see your father before he passed away. You were in an accident just before you reached his farm. Out walking the dog by the side of the road, and the two of you got hit. An unimaginable chain of events, but that’s what happened. Nothing else makes sense.”

The door opened, and Jackson Browne peeked into the room. Only he had a red birthmark on his neck that Jude hadn’t noticed before, a crimson splotch in the rough shape of a three-fingered hand, and when he spoke, it was in a clownish honk, his inflections soupy and Cajun.

“Mr. Coyne. Still with us?” His gaze darting from Jude to Nan Shreve beside him. “Your record company will be disappointed. I guess they were already planning the tribute album.” He laughed then, until he coughed, and blinked watering eyes. “Mrs. Shreve. I missed you in the lobby.” He said it jovially enough, but the way he looked at her, his eyes hooded and wondering, it sounded almost like an accusation. He added, “So did the nurse at the reception desk. She said she hadn’t seen you.”

“I waved on the way by,” Nan said.

“Come on in,” Jude said. “Nan said you’d like to talk to me.”

“I ought to place you under arrest,” said Detective Quinn.

Jude’s pulse quickened, but his voice, when he spoke, was smooth and untroubled. “For what?”

“Your last three albums,” Quinn said. “I got two daughters, and they play ’em and play ’em at top volume, until the walls shake and the dishes rattle and I feel I am close to perpetratin’ dough-mestic abuse, you understan’? And this is on my lovely, laughin’ daughters, who I wouldn’t under normal conditions want hurt for any reason nohow.” He sighed, used his tie to wipe his brow, made his way to the foot of the bed. He offered Jude his last stick of Juicy Fruit. When Jude declined, Quinn popped the stick into his mouth and began to chew. “You got to love ’em, somehow, no matter how crazy you feel sometimes.”

“That’s right,” Jude said.

“Just a few questions,” Quinn said, pulling a notebook out of an inner pocket of his jacket. “We want to start before you got to your father’s house. You were in a hit-and-run, is that it? Some awful kind of day for you and your lady friend, huh? And then attacked by your dad. Course, the way you look, and the condition he was in, he probably thought you were…I don’t know. A murderer come to loot his farm. An evil spirit. Still, I can’t think why you wouldn’t have gone to a hospital after the accident that took off your finger.”