Heart-shaped box (32 page)

T
hen he was in the halls,
a six-foot-tall, 240-pound man, fifty-four years of age, the great bush of his black beard in ratty tangles and his hospital johnny flapping open in the back to show the scrawny, hairless cheeks of his ass. The doctor jogged beside him, and nurses gathered about, trying to redirect him back to his room, but he strode on, his IV drip still in his arm and the bag rattling along beside him on its wheeled frame. He was clearheaded, all the way awake, his hands not bothering him, his breathing fine. As he made his way along, he began calling her name. He was in surprisingly good voice.

“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?”

H
e 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.”

“Well,” Jude said. “We weren’t far from my daddy’s place, and I knew my aunt was there. She’s a registered nurse.”

“That so? Tell me about the car that hit you.”

“A truck,” Jude said. “A pickup.” He glanced at Nan, who nodded, just slightly, eyes watchful and certain. Jude drew a deep breath and began to lie.

B
efore Nan left his room,
she hesitated in the doorway and looked back at Jude. That grin was on her face again, the stretched, forced one that made Jude sad.

“She really is beautiful, Jude,” Nan said. “And she loves you. You can tell the way she talks about you. I spoke to her. Only for a moment, but…but you can tell. Georgia, is she?” Nan’s eyes were shy, and pained, and affectionate, all at once. She asked the question like she wasn’t sure if she really wanted to know.

“Marybeth,” Jude said firmly. “Her name is Marybeth.”

T
hey were back in New York
two weeks later for Danny’s memorial service. Marybeth wore a black scarf around her neck that matched her black lace gloves. The afternoon was windy and cold, but the gathering was well attended nonetheless. It seemed everyone Danny had ever chatted up, gossiped with, or blabbed to on the phone was there, and that was a lot, and none of them left early, not even when the rain began to fall.

I
n the spring Jude recorded an album,
stripped down, mostly acoustic. He sang about the dead. He sang about roads at night. Other men played the guitar parts. He could handle rhythm, but that was all, had needed to switch back to making chords with the left, as he had in his childhood, and he wasn’t as good at it.

The new CD sold well. He did not tour. He had a triple bypass instead.

Marybeth taught dance at a tony gym in High Plains. Her classes were crowded.

M
arybeth found a derelict Dodge Charger
in a local auto graveyard, brought it home for three hundred dollars. Jude spent the next summer sweating in the yard with his shirt off, restoring it. He came in late each night, all of him tanned, except for the shiny silver scar down the center of his chest. Marybeth was always waiting just inside the door, with a glass of homemade lemonade. Sometimes they would trade a kiss that tasted of cold juice and motor oil. They were his favorite kisses.

O
ne afternoon,
close to the end of August, Jude wandered inside, sweating and sunburned, and found a message on the machine from Nan. She said she had some information for him and he could call her back anytime. Anytime was now, and he rang her in her office. He sat on the edge of Danny’s old desk while Nan’s receptionist patched him through.

“I’m afraid I don’t have a lot to tell you about this George Ruger person,” Nan said without any preamble. “You wanted to know if he’s been mentioned in any criminal proceedings in the last year, and the answer to that appears to be no. Maybe if I had more information from you, as to exactly what your interest in him is…”

“No. Don’t worry about it,” Jude said.

So Ruger hadn’t brought any kind of complaint to the authorities; no surprise. If he was going to bring a suit, or try to have Jude arrested, Jude would’ve known about it by now anyway. He hadn’t really expected Nan to come up with anything. Ruger couldn’t talk about what Jude had done to him without risking that it would come out about Marybeth, how he’d slept with her when she was still in junior high. He was, Jude remembered, an important figure in local politics. It was hard to run a really effective fund-raiser after you’d been accused of statutory rape.

“I had a little more luck concerning Jessica Price.”

“You did,” Jude said. Just hearing her name made his stomach knot up.

When Nan spoke again, it was in a falsely casual tone, a little too cool to be persuasive. “This Price is under investigation for child endangerment and sexual abuse. Her own daughter, if you can imagine. Apparently the police came to her home after someone called in an accident report. Price drove her car into someone else’s vehicle, right in front of her house, forty miles an hour. When the police got there, they found her unconscious behind the wheel. And her daughter was in the house with a gun and a dead dog on the floor.”

Nan paused to allow Jude a chance to comment, but Jude didn’t have anything to say.

Nan went on, “Whoever Price drove her car into took off. Never found.”

“Didn’t Price tell them? What’s her story?”

“No story. See, after the police calmed the little girl down, they took the gun away. When they went to put it back where it belonged, they found an envelope with photos in it, hidden in the velvet lining of the pistol’s case. Polaroids of the girl. Criminal stuff. Horrible. Apparently they can establish that the mother took them. Jessica Price could be looking at up to ten years. And I understand her girl is only just thirteen. Isn’t that the most terrible thing?”

“It is,” Jude said. “Just about.”

“Would you believe all of this happened—Jessica Price’s car accident, dead dog, photos—on the same day your daddy died in Louisiana?”

Again Jude did not reply—silence felt safer.

Nan went on, “Following her lawyer’s advice, Jessica Price has been exercising her legal right to remain silent ever since her arrest. Which makes sense for her. And is also a lucky break for whoever else was there. You know—with the dog.”

Jude held the receiver to his ear. Nan was silent for so long he began to wonder if they’d been cut off.

At last, just to find out if she was still on the line, he said, “That all?”

“One other thing,” Nan said. Her tone was perfectly bland. “A carpenter doing work down the street said he saw a suspicious pair in a black car lurking around earlier in the day. He said the driver was the spitting image of the lead singer of Metallica.”

Jude had to laugh.