Heart-Shaped Box

“Are you sure?”

“That it was the ghost?”

“That he missed.”

He came to his feet, his legs unsteady, knees threatening to give. He took her wrist, helped her up. The whining in his eardrums was already beginning to clear. From a long way off, he could hear his dogs, barking hysterically, barking mad.

26

Heaping their bags into the back of the Mustang, Jude became aware of a slow, deep throb in his left hand, different from the dull ache that had persisted since he stabbed himself there yesterday. When he looked down, he saw that his bandage was coming unraveled and was soaked through with fresh blood.

Georgia drove while he sat in the passenger seat, with the first-aid kit that had accompanied them from New York open in his lap. He undid the wet, tacky dressings and dropped them on the floor at his feet. The Steri-Strips he’d applied to the wound the day before had peeled away, and the puncture gaped again, glistening, obscene. He had torn it open getting out of the way of Craddock’s truck.

“What are you going to do about that hand?” Georgia asked, shooting him an anxious look before turning her gaze back to the road.

“Same thing you’re doing about yours,” he said. “Nothing.”

He began to clumsily apply fresh Steri-Strips to the wound. It felt as if he were putting a cigarette out on his palm. When he’d closed the tear as best he could, he wrapped the hand with clean gauze.

“You’re bleeding from the head, too,” she said. “Did you know that?”

“Little scrape. Don’t worry about it.”

“What happens next time? Next time we wind up somewhere without the dogs to look out for us?”

“I don’t know.”

“It was a public place. We should’ve been safe in a public place. People all around, and it was bright daylight, and he went and come at us anyway. How are we supposed to fight somethin’ like him?”

He said, “I don’t know. If I knew what to do, I’d be doing it already, Florida. You and your questions. Lay off a minute, why don’t you?”

They drove on. It was only when he heard the choked sound of her weeping—she was struggling to do it in silence—that he realized he’d called her Florida, when he had meant to say Georgia. It was her questions that had done it, one after another, that and her accent, those Daughter of the Confederacy inflections that had steadily been creeping into her voice the last couple days.

The sound of Georgia trying not to cry was somehow worse than if she wept openly. If she would just go ahead and cry, he could say something to her, but as it was, he felt it necessary to let her be miserable in private and pretend he hadn’t noticed. Jude sank low in the passenger seat and turned his face toward the window.

The sun was a steady glare through the windshield, and a little south of Richmond he fell into a disgusted, heat-stunned trance. He tried to think what he knew about the dead man who pursued them, what Anna had told him about her stepfather when they were together. But it was hard to think, too much effort—he was sore, and there was all that sun in his face and Georgia making quiet, wretched noises behind the steering wheel—and anyway he was sure Anna hadn’t said much.

“I’d rather ask questions,” she told him, “than answer them.”

She had kept him at bay with those foolish, pointless questions for almost half a year: Were you ever in the Boy Scouts? Do you shampoo your beard? What do you like better, my ass or my tits?

What little he knew should have invited curiosity: the family business in hypnotism, the dowser father who taught his girls to read palms and talk to spirits, a childhood shadowed by the hallucinations of preadolescent schizophrenia. But Anna—Florida—didn’t want to talk about who she’d been before meeting him, and for himself, he was happy to let her past be past.

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.