Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box

It was beginning to settle in that Florida was dead. When he had first heard she’d killed herself—when Jessica Price threw it in his face—it had not meant anything, because he couldn’t let it mean anything. Now, though, there was no running from it. He felt the knowledge of her death in his blood, which went heavy and thick and strange on him.

It did not seem possible to Jude she could be gone, that someone with whom he’d shared his bed could be in a bed of dirt now. She was twenty-six—no, twenty-seven; she’d been twenty-six when she left. When he sent her away. She’d been twenty-six, but she asked questions like a four-year-old. You go fishin’ much on Lake Pontchartrain? What’s the best dog you ever owned? What do you think happens to us when we die? Enough questions to drive a man mad.

She’d been afraid she was going mad. She was depressed. Not fashionably depressed, in the way of some Goth chicks, but clinically. She had been overcome with it in their last couple of months together, didn’t sleep, wept for no reason, forgot to put on her clothes, stared at the TV for hours without bothering to turn it on, answered the phone when it rang but then wouldn’t say anything, just stood there holding it, as if she’d been switched off.

But before that there’d been summer days in the barn while he rebuilt the Mustang. There’d been John Prine on the radio, the sweet smell of hay baking in the heat, and afternoons filled with her lazy, pointless questions—a never-ending interrogation that was, at turns, tiresome, amusing, and erotic. There’d been her body, tattooed and icy white, with the bony knees and skinny thighs of a long-distance runner. There’d been her breath on his neck.

“Hey,” Danny said. He reached out, and his fingers grazed Jude’s wrist. At his touch, Jude’s hand sprang open, releasing the phone. “Are you going to be all right?”

“I don’t know.”

“Want to tell me what’s going on?”

Slowly Jude lifted his gaze. Danny half stood behind his desk. He had lost some of his color, his ginger freckles standing out in high relief against the white of his cheeks.

Danny had been her friend, in the unthreatening, easygoing, slightly impersonal way he made himself a friend to all of Jude’s girls. He played the role of the urbane, understanding gay pal, someone they could trust to keep their secrets, someone they could vent to and gossip with, someone who provided intimacy without involvement. Someone who would tell them things about Jude that Jude wouldn’t tell them himself.

Danny’s sister had OD’d on heroin when Danny was just a freshman in college. His mother hanged herself six months later, and Danny had been the one who discovered her. Her body dangled from the single rafter in the pantry, her toes pointed downward, turning in small circles above a kicked-over footstool. You didn’t need to be a psychologist to see that the double-barreled blast of the sister and the mother, dying at almost the same time, had wiped out some part of Danny as well, had frozen him at nineteen. Although he didn’t wear black fingernail polish or rings in his lips, in a way Danny’s attraction to Jude wasn’t so different from Georgia’s, or Florida’s, or any of the other girls’. Jude collected them in almost exactly the same way the Pied Piper had collected rats, and children. He made melodies out of hate and perversion and pain, and they came to him, skipping to the music, hoping he would let them sing along.

Jude didn’t want to tell Danny about what Florida had done to herself, wanted to spare him. It would be better not to tell him. He wasn’t sure how Danny would take it.

He told him anyway. “Anna. Anna McDermott. She cut her wrists. The woman I was just talking to is her sister.”

“Florida?” Danny said. He settled back into his chair. It creaked beneath him. He looked winded. He pressed his hands to his abdomen, then leaned forward slightly, as if his stomach were cramping up. “Oh, shit. Oh, fucking shit,” Danny said sweetly. No words had ever sounded less obscene.

A silence followed. Jude noticed, for the first time, that the radio was on, murmuring softly. Trent Reznor sang that he was ready to give up his empire of dirt. It was funny hearing Nine Inch Nails on the radio just then. Jude had met Florida at a Trent Reznor show, backstage. The fact of her death hit him fresh, all over again, as if he were just realizing it for the first time. You go fishin’ much on Lake Pontchartrain? And then the shock began to coalesce into a sickened resentment. It was so pointless and stupid and self-involved that it was impossible not to hate her a little, not to want to get her on the phone and curse her out, except he couldn’t get her on the phone, because she was dead.

“Did she leave a note?” Danny asked.

“I don’t know. I didn’t get much information from her sister. It wasn’t the world’s most helpful phone call. Maybe you noticed.”

But Danny wasn’t listening. He said, “We used to go out for margaritas sometimes. She was one hell of a sweet kid. Her and her questions. She asked me once if I had a favorite place to watch the rain when I was a kid. What the hell kind of question is that? She made me shut my eyes and describe what it looked like outside my bedroom window when it was raining. For ten minutes. You never knew what she was going to ask next. We were big-time compadres. I don’t understand this. I mean, I know she was depressed. She told me about it. But she really didn’t want to be. Wouldn’t she have called one of us if she was going to do something like…? Wouldn’t she have given one of us a chance to talk her out of it?”

“I guess not.”

Danny had dwindled somehow in the last few minutes, shrunk into himself. He said, “And her sister…her sister thinks it’s your fault? Well, that’s…that’s just crazy.” But his voice was weak, and Jude thought he didn’t sound entirely sure of himself.

“I guess.”

“She had emotional problems going back before she met you,” Danny said, with a little more confidence.

“I think it runs in her family,” Jude said.

Danny leaned forward again. “Yeah. Yeah . I mean—what the Christ? Anna’s sister is the person who sold you the ghost? The dead man’s suit? What the fuck is going on here? What happened that made you want to call her in the first place?”

Jude didn’t want to tell Danny about what he’d seen last night. In that moment—pushed up against the stony truth of Florida’s death—he wasn’t entirely sure what he’d seen last night anymore. The old man sitting in the hallway, outside his bedroom door at 3:00 A.M., just didn’t seem as real now.

“The suit she sent me is a kind of symbolic death threat. She tricked us into buying it. For some reason she couldn’t just send it to me, I had to pay for it first. I guess you could say sanity isn’t her strong suit. Anyway, I could tell there was something wrong about it as soon as it came. It was in this fucked-up black heart-shaped box and—this will maybe sound a little paranoid—but it had a pin hidden inside to stick someone.”

“There was a needle hidden in it? Did it stick you?”

“No. It poked Georgia good, though.”

“Is she all right? Do you think there was something on it?”

“You mean like arsenic? No. I don’t get the sense Jessica Price of Psychoville, Florida, is actually that stupid. Deeply and intensely crazy, but not stupid. She wants to scare me, not go to jail. She told me her stepdaddy’s ghost came with the suit and he’s going to get me for what I did to Anna. The pin was probably, I don’t know, part of the voodoo. I grew up not far from the Panhandle. Place is crawling with toothless, possumeating trailer trash full of weird ideas. You can wear a crown of thorns to your job at the Krispy Kreme and no one will bat an eye.”