The Anatomical Shape of a Heart (19 page)

“Excellent. I'm glad to hear it.”

“You're really tiny,” Jillian said to me. “What's your shoe size?”

I thought about the shoestring warning. Was she angling for my shoes? I fought the urge to hide my feet behind my sketchbook satchel. “Uh, five?”

“That's small. I miss buying shoes. We only get the slip-ons,” she said, nodding toward a pair of Vans that were decorated with painted zigzags on the flaps. Then she tapped Jack on the shoulder. “Remember those purple heels Mom told me I couldn't have? She said they looked like porn star shoes.”

“I remember,” Jack said.

“They had the bows on the straps. I loved those bows. Why do bows make everything cuter? If you have a shitty present you want to give someone, you can slap on bow on it, and then it's okay. Doesn't really matter what's inside. If it's wrapped nicely, no one is going to complain. And really, anyone who complains about a present is a dick. Unless it's an inten—” She grimaced, sucking in a sharp breath, then tried again. “An in-ten-tionally bad present. Like, maybe if you hate someone, but you're forced to give them a gift in one of those white elephant tiger safari exchanges.”

“Like at Christmas,” Jack supplied. “White elephant.”

“White elephant,” she repeated. “But not us. You already know what I'm getting you for Christmas. Another lame portrait.”

My gaze jumped to the wall at the foot of her bed. A collection of things was taped there: a green felt-tip marker, a packet of sugar, a rubber duck, and six paintings of faces. One was an alien man who matched the alien woman in Jack's room.

“Shut up. I love your portraits,” he said.

Jillian ducked her head and beamed.
“You
shut up,” she said affectionately, squinting at him from the crook of her arm. Not crazy eyes, no. But there was something different about them, a weird, glassy look, as if she were drunk or high. The trembling hands and chain-smoking didn't help.

“I remember seeing the”—crap. What if it wasn't an alien?—“uh, the green one hanging on your brother's wall.”

“You've been to his room?” She said this like it was an accusation.

I looked at Jack.
Help me out here.

“That's right, she has,” he said smoothly. “Not my old room. The guesthouse.”

“I remember,” she said irritably, flicking her cigarette butt out the cracked window and lighting up another. The girl was a machine.

“Rupert said you need to go to sleep soon. Maybe you should make that one the last of the night.”

She ignored him and spoke to me. “I see why Jack likes you.”

“Oh?”

“You're a lake.”

“A lake,” I repeated.

“What do you mean?” Jack said.

She tugged the curl at her neck. “Calm like a lake. Still water.”

If only she knew how crazy my life actually was under the surface, what with my sneaking around behind my mom's back to draw dead bodies, being questioned by the police for romantic crimes committed by my felonious boyfriend, and having my cheating, gift-giving father trying to woo his way back into my heart.

“He's got enough craziness in his life, so you're the opposite,” she said, fanning smoke away. “And by craziness, yeah, I mean me. Did he tell you why I'm here?”

“Jillie,” he cautioned.

“It's better to talk about it openly—that's what Dr. Kapoor says. And it's not like I'm here because I'm on vacation. I'm schizoid. I hear voices in my head. Sometimes I see things that make me feel like I'm dreaming while I'm awake. And I'm not dreaming. I'm just screwed up, and they can't fix me.”

“They can, and they are,” Jack said.

“Okay, maybe I'm a little better.”

“A lot,” Jack said.

“Yeah, a lot,” she said dreamily. “Sometimes I'm a lot better. I really thought I was going to come home this summer until they nearly killed me with meds.”

“But they straightened it out.”

She laughed loudly and then spoke in a low, singsong voice. “‘Doctor, she hasn't tried to kill herself lately. Better fill her full of poison to stay on track.'” She made a gurgling sound effect and pantomimed swallowing a bottleful of pills.

“Not funny,” Jack said, pulling down her arm.

“I didn't say it was.” She sniffled and wiped her nose on her sleeve. “But it's all good now, because these old meds are the best. They make me feel pro … um, pro-duc-tive, and the doctors had to up my dose, so now I get a little buzz off them.”

“Jillie—”

“You want to know what it's like,” she said to me in a flat voice. She was looking in my direction, but I wasn't sure if she really saw me. “Everyone wants to know. It's better to talk about it when I can, because sometimes I can't, so I'll tell you. It's like when someone offers you candy, and you think, ‘I want that,' but then another part of you says, ‘Sugar is bad for you.' And for a moment you're torn, because you're not sure if you should eat the candy, and a little war goes on inside your brain. That's what happens to me all day long. A little war in my head. And it stresses me out. And the more I get stressed out, the more soldiers join the war, and sometimes a few of those soldiers will start talking to me. Then it's like a running commentary playing in the background, judging every move I make.”

“That sounds frustrating,” I said.

“That's a nice way of putting it.” She made a grunting noise and closed her eyes. “What was I saying? God. The rambling. It's enough to drive me crazy.” She gave me a quick smile before turning to Jack and smacking herself on the forehead. “Oh, yeah! Hey, I have a new puzzle for you. Can I show it? I know it's our secret, but she's been inside your room, so she can see it, right?”

“Yes,” Jack said, smiling at me from the bed. “She's a good secret keeper.”

Jillian mumbled something to herself and furtively glanced over both her shoulders before tossing the second cigarette out the window. Then she ducked her head below the bed and whipped out a manila folder overflowing with wrinkled papers. “I lost the new one.… Oh, wait. Here it is.”

Jack bent over it with her, studying whatever was written on the paper. And I did some studying of my own, using the opportunity to really look at Jillian. She was pretty. Heartbreakingly so. And though she didn't have Jack's dark double lashes, she shared his terrific bones and height.

But when I looked closer, what stood out the most wasn't genetic: Thick, shiny scars ran up both her inner forearms and across one side of her neck. The scars were shocking, and once I'd noticed them, I couldn't see anything else. A dozen questions raced through my head. It took everything I had not to gawk.

“This is a tough one,” Jack said. “I'm not sure if I can use any of these.”

“I thought there were a couple. ‘Screw' is always good.”

“I'm not using ‘screw,' Jillian.”

“Okay, okay. What about this one.”

Jack twisted the page and smiled. “Yeah. That'll work great. Here, let's see if Beatrix can find it.”

“It's a test,” Jillian said excitedly while handing the paper to Jack, who handed it to me; I guessed she really didn't like touching.

When I took the wrinkled page, I caught a glimpse of the other “puzzles.” They were all basically the same: homemade word searches. A grid of letters, most of them legible, some not so much. I sat back down and studied the one in my hand.

I wasn't sure what I was supposed to find. Nothing had been circled, but one word was bolded in the center of the grid: “Charlie.” It looked like she'd started with that and built words off it. And seeing how quite a few of those words were things like
kissing
and
licker
and the previously discussed
screw
, I didn't really want to get into exactly who Charlie was, but she told me anyway.

“Charlie's one of the orderlies. It was just a joke because he's too mean.”

“He's tough, not mean,” Jack said.

“No, I meant he's straight, or, um … what's the word?”

“Stoic.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She pointed at Jack and nodded. “Stoic.”

I studied the puzzle, searching for the word they'd found. The marker she'd used wasn't the same metallic gold that Jack used for his pieces. But it could definitely be called golden. And at the bottom of the grid, I spotted four letters that shook something loose in my brain. I could already envision it written in glittering spray paint.

“
Rise
?” I guessed.

Brother and sister shot me dueling grins.

And that was the exact moment I fell in love with Jack Vincent.

20

I've never really minded the scent of hospitals. Maybe it's because my mom's a nurse. It's familiar. Comfortable. Sure, I understand why some people might associate the scent with bad things, like tears and pain and death. But it should be associated with good things, too, like healing and hope and second chances.

And as I exited the psych building with Jack, I associated the scent with other positive things, like admiration. Understanding. And a strange sort of tenderness that melted the right ventricle of my heart.

“You're painting all the words for her,” I said, looping the handles of my sketch bag over my shoulders and clamping it between my elbow and ribs. Chilly night air gusted through my open jacket.

“She feels trapped. She loves the city, but she's been terrified of it ever since she got sick. Too much noise, too many people. And you saw her on a good night—a really good one. Some days, she shuts down completely and won't talk. She's lost all her friends, and she hasn't been out in public doing normal things for so long. I just wanted to show her that the walls aren't closing in and that there's something out there. Something that's hers.”

“Something to give her a reason to keep going.”

“Yeah.”

We strolled down the sidewalk, both quiet, until we ended up at a bench near the back parking garage entrance. Jack stopped and sat me down. “I need to tell you the rest before I lose my nerve.”

“Tell me.”

A long breath gusted from his lips. Legs spread, he leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees, cracking his knuckles. “It happened at Thanksgiving, when we were sophomores. Things had slowly been going downhill for her for months. She dropped out of all her extracurricular stuff at school and started staying at home more. Her grades fell. Her friends stopped coming over. One teacher called my parents in, all concerned about the way she stared in class, like a zombie. The teachers all thought it was drugs.”

“But it wasn't.”

“No. But I thought it might be, too, for a while. She went from being homecoming princess to someone who stopped wearing makeup and dressed like a slob. My parents got her on an antidepressant, which helped for a little while. But after a few months, she started saying strange things and complaining about hearing voices. She seemed agitated and tweaky. And that's when she started secretly smoking. She said it calmed her nerves. We later found out that something like eighty percent of people with schizophrenia smoke. The researchers don't know why, exactly—there's a ton of theories they can't agree on. But for Jillie to smoke? It was just so out of character.”

He shook his head and waited for a couple of students to walk past before continuing. “Anyway, early that October, she went into a rage at school. It was our old school, before I transferred to the one I go to now, and we were in the same class, so I saw it happen. She couldn't answer a history question about the Colonies, and Mr. Davis snapped and mocked her. The next thing I knew, she'd dumped over her desk and was screaming crazy stuff, running erratically, knocking things over. She grabbed a stapler and lobbed it at Mr. Davis. It hit him in the face. Hard. He had a black eye for a couple of weeks. And Jillian got an overnight stay in a psych facility across town.”

“Not here?” I asked.

“No, and they said she was bipolar. Gave her meds. My dad made good with the teacher and the school. And a week later, she was back in class. No report filed with the police, nothing on her school record. It was as if it had never happened. But by the middle of November, she started skipping school. Ran away for two nights. One of our neighbors found her in the ravine behind our house—she'd been camping out in his shed.”

“Jesus.”

“She'd gone off her meds. Not that they were the right ones. But that's when I first noticed the cycle thing. She gets agitated, withdraws, gets agitated, withdraws.… And by the time Thanksgiving weekend rolled around, she was agitated. Talking to herself. Constantly startled and on edge. Making a lot of weird gestures. Stopping in the middle of sentences.

“We were having family over that afternoon,” he continued in a lower voice. “And I was in the kitchen, arguing with my parents about her. My dad didn't want my grandmother to see Jillian like that. He was talking about checking her back into the hospital for the holiday, and my mom was defending her, and I was arguing with both of them. And Jillian walked in on it.”

He cracked his knuckles and looked away toward the slowing traffic, so I couldn't see his face. But the tension stiffening his arms was telling.

“It all happened so fast,” he said. “Everyone was yelling, and then I saw the knife glint in the kitchen light, and Mom was bleeding through her shirt. Dad wrestled Jillian away, and she wasn't Jillie—not in her eyes. She was someone else. But there wasn't time to … do anything about it. Mom was bleeding out on the floor, and Jillie had gone catatonic. Dad told me to lock her in the basement. He thought she might run again. Maybe try to hurt someone else.”

He didn't say anything for a while, so I pressed. “What happened to your mom?”