Joe Hill: Heart-Shaped Box

“Is that catching?” Reese asked.

“Yeah,” Jude said. “There’s a wicked case going around. Sooner or later everyone gets it.”

He led her back to the house and into the darkened kitchen. He was just asking her how she’d made her way out to his place when Marybeth called down from the staircase and asked who was there.

“Reese Price,” Jude said back. “From Testament. In Florida. Jessica Price’s girl?”

For a moment there was no sound from the top of the stairs. Then Marybeth padded down the steps, stopped close to the bottom. Jude found the lights by the door, flipped them on.

In the sudden snap of brightness that followed, Marybeth and Reese regarded each other without speaking. Marybeth’s face was composed, hard to read. Her eyes searched. Reese looked from Marybeth’s face, to her neck, to the silvery white crescent of scar tissue around her throat. Reese pulled her arms out of the sleeves of her coat and hugged herself beneath it. Water dripped off her and puddled around her feet.

“Jesus Christ, Jude,” Marybeth said. “Go and get her a towel.”

Jude fetched a towel from the downstairs bathroom. When he returned to the kitchen with it, the kettle was on the stove and Reese was sitting at the center island, telling Marybeth about the Russian exchange students who had given her a ride from New York City and who kept talking about their visit to the Entire Steak Buildink.

Marybeth made her hot cocoa and a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich while Jude sat with Reese at the counter. Marybeth was relaxed and sisterly and laughed easily at Reese’s stories, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to play host to a girl who had shot off a piece of her husband’s hand.

The women did most of the talking. Reese was on her way to Buffalo, where she was going to meet up with friends and see 50 Cent and Eminem. Afterward they were traveling on to Niagara. One of the friends had put money down on an old houseboat. They were going to live in it, half a dozen of them. The boat needed work. They were planning to fix it up and sell it. Reese was in charge of painting it. She had a really cool idea for a mural she wanted to paint on the side. She had already done sketches. She took a sketchbook from her backpack and showed them some of her work. Her illustrations were unpracticed but eye-catching, pictures of nude ladies and eyeless old men and guitars, arranged in complicated interlocking patterns. If they couldn’t sell the boat, they were going to start a business in it, either pizza or tattoos. Reese knew a lot about tattoos and had practiced on herself. She lifted her shirt to show them a tattoo of a pale, slender snake making a circle around her bellybutton, eating its own tail.

Jude interrupted to ask her how she was getting to Buffalo. She said she ran out of bus money back at Penn Station and figured she’d hitch the rest of the way.

“Do you know it’s three hundred miles?” he asked.

Reese stared at him, wide-eyed, then shook her head. “You look at a map and this state doesn’t seem so gosh-darn big. Are you sure it’s three hundred miles?”

Marybeth took her empty plate and set it in the sink. “Is there anyone you want to call? Anyone in your family? You can use our phone.”

“No, ma’am.”

Marybeth smiled a little at this, and Jude wondered if anyone had ever called her “ma’am” before.

“What about your mother?” Marybeth asked.

“She’s in jail. I hope she doesn’t ever get out,” Reese said, and she looked into her cocoa. She began to play with a long yellow strand of her hair, curling it around and around her finger, a thing Jude had seen Anna do a thousand times. She said, “I don’t even like to think about her. I’d rather pretend she was dead or something. I wouldn’t wish her on anyone. She’s a curse, is what she is. If I thought someday I was going to be a mother like her, I’d have myself sterilized right now.”

When she finished her cocoa, Jude put on a rain slicker and told Reese to come on, he would take her to the bus station.

For a while they rode without speaking, the radio off, no sound but the rain tapping on the glass and the Charger’s wipers beating back and forth. He looked over at her once and saw she had the seat cranked back and her eyes closed. She had taken off her denim jacket and spread it over herself like a blanket. He believed she was sleeping.

But in a while she opened one eye and squinted at him. “You really cared about Aunt Anna, didn’t you?”

He nodded. The wipers went whip-thud, whip-thud .

Reese said, “There’s things my momma did she shouldn’t have done. Some things I’d give my left arm to forget. Sometimes I think my Aunt Anna found out about some of what my momma was doing—my momma and old Craddock, her stepfather—and that’s why she killed herself. Because she couldn’t live anymore with what she knew, but she couldn’t talk about it either. I know she was already real unhappy. I think maybe some bad stuff happened to her, too, when she was little. Some of the same stuff happened to me.” She was looking at him directly now.

So. Reese at least did not know everything her mother had done, which Jude could only take to mean that there really was some mercy to be found in the world.

“I am sorry about what I did to your hand,” she said. “I mean that. I have dreams sometimes, about my Aunt Anna. We go for rides together. She has a cool old car like this one, only black. She isn’t sad anymore, not in my dreams. We go for rides in the country. She listens to your music on the radio. She told me you weren’t at our house to hurt me. She said you came to end it. To bring my mother to account for what she let happen to me. I just wanted to say I’m sorry and I hope you’re happy.”

He nodded but did not reply, did not, in truth, trust his own voice.

They went into the station together. Jude left her on a scarred wooden bench, went to the counter and bought a ticket to Buffalo. He had the station agent put it inside an envelope. He slipped two hundred dollars in with it, folded into a sheet of paper with his phone number on it and a note that she should call if she ran into trouble on the road. When he returned to her, he stuck the envelope into the pouch on the side of her backpack instead of handing it to her, so she wouldn’t look into it right away and try to give the money back.

She went with him out onto the street, where the rain was falling more heavily now and the last of the day’s light had fled, leaving things blue and twilighty and cold. He turned to say good-bye, and she stood on tiptoe and kissed the chilled, wet side of his face. He had, until then, been thinking of her as a young woman, but her kiss was the thoughtless kiss of a child. The idea of her traveling hundreds of miles north, with no one to look out for her, seemed suddenly all the more daunting.

“Take care,” they both said, at exactly the same time, in perfect unison, and then they laughed. Jude squeezed her hand and nodded but had nothing else to say except good-bye.

It was dark when he came back into the house. Marybeth pulled two bottles of Sam Adams out of the fridge, then started rummaging in the drawers for a bottle opener.

“I wish I could’ve done something for her,” Jude said.

“She’s a little young,” Marybeth said. “Even for you. Keep it in your pants, why don’t you?”

“Jesus. That’s not what I meant.”

Marybeth laughed, found a dishrag, and chucked it in his face.

“Dry off. You look even more like a pathetic derelict when you’re all wet.”

He rubbed the rag through his hair. Marybeth popped him a beer and set it in front of him. Then she saw he was still pouting and laughed again.