Heart-Shaped Box

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.

And out in the light, he sees Anna, sees her shimmering, glowing like a firefly, watches her turn from the wheel, and smile, and reach toward him, putting her hand over his and Marybeth’s, and that’s when she says, “Hey, you guys, I think this hairy son of a bitch is trying to sit up.”

47

Jude blinked into the clear, painful white light of an ophthalmoscope pointed into his left eye. He was struggling to rise, but someone had a hand on his chest, holding him pinned to the floor. He gasped at the air, like a trout just hauled out of Lake Pontchartrain and thrown onto the shore. He had told Anna they might go fishing there, the two of them. Or had that been Marybeth? He didn’t know anymore.

The ophthalmoscope was removed, and he stared blankly up at the mold-spotted ceiling of the kitchen. The mad sometimes drilled holes in their own heads, to let the demons out, to relieve the pressure of thoughts they could no longer bear. Jude understood the impulse. Each beat of his heart was a fresh and staggering blow, felt in the nerves behind his eyes and in his temples, punishing evidence of life.

A hog with a squashy pink face leaned over him, smiled obscenely down, and said, “Holy shit. You know who this is? It’s Judas Coyne.”

Someone else said, “Can we clear the fucking pigs out of the room?”

The pig was booted aside, with a shriek of indignation. A man with a neatly groomed, pale brown goatee and kind, watchful eyes, leaned into Jude’s field of view.

“Mr. Coyne? Just lie still. You’ve lost a lot of blood. We’re going to lift you onto a gurney.”

“Anna,” Jude said, his voice unsteady and wheezing.

A brief look of pain and something like an apology flickered in the young man’s light blue eyes. “Was that her name?”

No. No, Jude had said the wrong thing. That wasn’t her name, but Jude couldn’t find the breath to correct himself. Then it registered that the man leaning over him had referred to her in the past tense.

Arlene Wade spoke for him. “He told me her name was Marybeth.”

Arlene leaned in from the other side, peering down at him, her eyes comically huge behind her glasses. She was talking about Marybeth in the past tense, too. He tried to sit up again, but the goateed EMT firmly held him down.

“Don’t try and get up, dear,” Arlene said.

Something made a steely clatter nearby, and he looked down the length of his body and past his feet and saw a crowd of men rolling a gurney past him and into the hall. An IV bag, pregnant with blood, swung back and forth from a metal support rod attached to the cot. From his angle on the floor, Jude could not see anything of the person on the gurney, except for a hand hanging over the side. The infection that had made Marybeth’s palm shriveled and white was gone, no trace of it left. Her small, slender hand swung limply, jostled by the motion of the cart, and Jude thought of the girl in his obscene snuff movie, the way she had seemed to go boneless when the life went out of her. One of the EMTs pushing the gurney glanced down and saw Jude staring. He reached for Marybeth’s hand and tucked it back up against her side. The other men rolled the gurney on out of sight, all of them talking to one another in low, feverish voices.

“Marybeth?” Jude managed, his voice the faintest of whispers, carried on a pained exhalation of breath.

“She’s got to go now,” Arlene said. “There’s another amble-lance comin’ for you, Justin,”

“Go?” Jude asked. He really didn’t understand.

“They can’t do any more for her in this place, that’s all. It’s just time to take her on.” Arlene patted his hand. “Her ride is here.”

ALIVE

48

Jude was in and out for twenty-four hours.

He woke once and saw his lawyer, Nan Shreve, standing in the door of his private room, talking with Jackson Browne. Jude had met him, years before, at the Grammys. Jude had slipped out midceremony to visit the men’s, and as he was taking a leak, he happened to look over to find Jackson Browne pissing in the urinal next to him. They had only nodded to each other, never even said hello, and so Jude couldn’t imagine what he was doing now in Louisiana. Maybe he had a gig in New Orleans, had heard about Jude nearly being killed, and had come to express his sympathies. Maybe Jude would now be visited by a procession of rock-and-roll luminaries, swinging through to tell him to keep on keepin’ on. Jackson Browne was dressed conservatively—blue blazer, tie—and he had a gold shield clipped to his belt, next to a holstered revolver. Jude allowed his eyelids to sink shut.

He had a dark, muffled sense of time passing. When he woke again, another rock star was sitting beside him: Dizzy, his eyes all black scribbles, his face still wasted with AIDS. He offered his hand, and Jude took it.

Had to come, man. You were there for me, Dizzy said.

“I’m glad to see you,” Jude told him. “I been missing you.”

“Excuse me?” said the nurse, standing on the other side of the bed. Jude glanced over at her, hadn’t known