Vengeance: Mystery Writers of America Presents

by Lee Child

  THE UNREMARKABLE HEART

  BY KARIN SLAUGHTER

  June Connor knew that she was going to die today.

  The thought seemed like the sort of pathetic declaration that a ninth-grader would use to begin a short-story assignment — one that would have immediately elicited a groan and failing grade from June — but it was true. Today was the day that she was going to die.

  The doctors, who had been so wrong about so many things, were right about this at least: She would know when it was time. This morning when June woke, she was conscious of not just the pain, the smell of her spent body, the odor of sweat and various fluids that had saturated the bed during the night, but of the fact that it was time to go. The knowledge came to her as an accepted truth. The sun would rise. The Earth would turn. She would die today.

  June had at first been startled by the revelation, then had lain in bed considering the implications. No more pain. No more sickness. No more headaches, seizures, fatigue, confusion, anger.

  No more Richard.

  No more guilt.

  Until now, the notion of her death had been abstract, an impending doom. Each day brought it closer, but closer was never too close. Always around the corner. Always the next week. Always sometime in the future. And now it was here, a taxi at the foot of the driveway. Meter ticking. Waiting to whisk her away.

  Her legs twitched as if she could walk again. She became antsy, keenly aware of her pending departure. Now she was a businesswoman standing at an airport gate, ticket in hand, waiting to board the plane. Baggage packed. Luggage checked. Not a trip she wanted to make, but let’s just get it over with. Call my row. Let me onto the plane. Let me put back my seat, rest my eyes, and wait for the captain to take over, the plane to lift, the trail of condensation against the blue sky the only indication that I have departed.

  How long had it been since the first doctor, the first test, predicted this day? Five and a half months, she calculated. Not much time, but in the end, perhaps too much to bear. She was an educator, a high school principal with almost a thousand kids in her charge. She had work, responsibilities. She hadn’t the time or inclination for a drawn-out death.

  June could still remember going back to work that day, flipping through her calendar — standardized testing the following month, then the master schedule, which no one but June understood. Then the winding down of the school year. Grades due. Contracts signed. Rooms cleaned. The school was to be repainted this year. Tiles replaced in the cafeteria. New chairs for the band room. Lockers needed to be rekeyed.

  “All right,” she had said, alone in her office, staring at the full days marked on the calendar. “All right.”

  Maybe she could fit it all in. If she could last four months, maybe she could get it all done.

  So June had not taken her dream vacation to Europe. She had not gone skydiving or climbed a mountain. She continued to work at a job she had grown to despise as if what she did made a difference. Suspending students. Lecturing teachers. Firing a slovenly gym coach she’d been collecting a file on for the last three years.

  Clumps of hair fell onto her desk. Her teeth loosened. Her nose bled. One day, for no obvious reason, her arm broke. She had been holding a cup of coffee, and the heat from the liquid pooling on the carpet in front of her open-toed sandal was the first indication that something was wrong.

  “I’ve burned my foot,” she had said, wondering at the dropped jaws of the secretaries in the front office.

  What had forced her on? What had made her capable of putting on panty hose and pantsuits every morning, driving to school, parking in her spot, doing that hated job for four more months when no one on earth would have questioned her early retirement?

  Willpower, she supposed. Sheer determination to finish her final year and collect her full pension, her benefits, after giving thirty years of her life to a system that barely tolerated her presence.

  And pride. After all this time, she embraced the opportunity to show her suffering on the outside. She wanted them to see her face every day, to watch the slow decline, to note the subtle changes that marked her impending death. Her last pound of flesh. Her last attempt to show them that they were not the only ones who’d sustained damage. Jesus on the Cross had made a less determined departure.

  There was no best friend to tell. No family members left to whom she could confide her fears. June announced it in a schoolwide e-mail. Her hand had been steady as she moused over to the icon showing a pencil hovering over a piece of yellow paper. Compose. Send to all. No salutation. No tears. No quibbling. She was fifty-eight years old and would not live to see fifty-nine, but a sentence of death did not give her license to lose her dignity.

  You should all know that I have inoperable stage-four lung cancer.

  The first thing people asked was, Are you a smoker? Leave it to June to get the sort of disease that had a qualifier, that made strangers judge you for bringing on your own illness. And even when June told them no, she had never smoked, never tried a cigarette or even thought about it, there was a glassy look in their eyes. Disbelief. Pity. Of course she’d brought this on herself. Of course she was lying. Delusional. Stubborn. Crazy.

  It was all so eerily similar to what had come before that by the end of the day, June found herself laughing so long and so hard that she coughed blood onto her blouse. And then the horrified looks had replaced the pity, and she was back in those dark days when her only comfort was the thought that the sun would rise and set, the years would go by, and, eventually, she would die, her shame taken with her to the grave.

  Irony, June thought now. An incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs.

  The lung cancer had quickly metastasized. First to her liver, which gave her an alarming yellowish pallor, then to her bones, so brittle that she was reminded of angel hair pasta before you put it into a pot of boiling water. And now her brain, the last thing that she could truly call her own. All cancerous. All riddled with tumors, cells multiplying faster than the palliative radiation and chemotherapy could keep up with.

  The doctor, an impossibly young man with a smattering of acne on his chin, had said, “The metastasis are quite pronounced.”

  “Metastases,” June had corrected, thinking she could not even have the luxury of dying without having to correct the English of someone who should clearly know better. “Five months.” He’d scribbled something in her chart before he closed it. “Six if you’re lucky.”

  Oh, how lucky June was to have this extra time.

  The tumors in her brain weren’t impinging on anything useful. Not yet, at least, so it would seem not ever. This morning, she imagined them as similar to the shape of a lima bean, with tiny, round bottoms that fit puzzle-piece-like into curving gray matter. Her speech was often slurred, but the gift of brain metastases was that oftentimes she could not hear her own voice. Memory was an issue, though maybe not. She could be paranoid. That was a common side effect of the myriad medications she ingested.

  Short-term-memory loss. Palsy. Dry mouth. Leaky bowels. Her breathing was borderline suffocation, the shallow gulps bringing wheezing death rattles from her chest. She could no longer sit up unaided. Her skin was cold, the constant temperature of a refrigerator’s vegetable crisper, and, in keeping with the metaphor, its texture, once smooth and even, was now entirely wilted.

  In the early days of her diagnosis, she’d had many questions about her impending death but could find no one to answer them. There were plenty of tracts in the doctor’s office on keeping a good attitude, eating macrobiotic diets, and making your way back to Jesus, but June could find nothing that spoke frankly of the actual act of death itself. There must have been information online, but if June wanted to read endless paragraphs of poor-me navel-gazing, she could walk down to the reading lab and start grading creative-writing assignments. Besides, she could not overcome her long-held belief that the internet was designed to render human beings functionally retarded.

  Years ago, w
hen June had had gallbladder surgery, she had talked to other patients to find out what to expect. How long was the recovery? Was it worth it? Did it take care of the problem?

  There was no one to talk with this time. You could not ask someone, What was it like when you died?

  “It’s different for everyone,” a nurse had said, and June, still enough life to feel the injustice of her situation, said, “That’s bullshit.”

  Bullshit, she had said. Bullshit, to a perfect stranger.

  Five years ago, the air conditioner at the house had finally given up the ghost, and the repairman, a former student of June’s who seemed disproportionately fascinated with the minutiae of his job, had described in great detail where the fatal flaw had occurred. Condensation had rusted the coil. The Freon had leaked, depriving the system of coolant. The hose to the outside unit had frozen. Inside the house, the temperature had continued to rise rather than fall, the poor thermostat not understanding why cooling was not being accomplished. Meanwhile, the fan had continued on, whirring and whirring until the motor burned out.

  Cause and effect.

  And yet, while June could easily find a semiliterate HVAC repairman to explain to her the process by which her air conditioner had died on the hottest day of the summer, there was no medical expert who could reveal to June the minutiae of death.

  Finally, on one of the last days that she was able to leave the house unaided, June had discovered a book in the dusty back shelves of a used-book store. She had almost overlooked it, thinking that she had found some New Age tripe written by a pajama-clad cultist. The cover was white with the outline of a triangle inside a solid circle. The title was an idiotic wordplay she could have done without — How Do You Die? — but she found comfort inside the pages, which was more than any living being had offered her.

  The following text will serve as a guide to the physical act of dying, Dr. Ezekiel Bonner wrote. Though every human being is different, the body dies in only one way.

  “Well,” June had mumbled to herself. There, finally, was the truth.

  None of us are special. None of us are unique. We may think we are individuals, but in the end, we are really nothing at all.

  June had taken the book home, prepared a pot of tea, and read with a pen in her hand so that she could make notations in the margins. At points, she had laughed aloud at the descriptions offered by Dr. Bonner, because the physical act of the body shutting down was not unlike that of her dying air conditioner. No oxygen, no blood flow, the heart burning out. The brain was the last to go, which pleased June until she realized that there would be a period in which her body was dead but her brain was still alive. She would be conscious, able to understand what was going on around her, yet unable to do or say anything about it.

  This gave her night terrors like she’d never had before. Not believing in the afterlife was finally getting its own back.

  How long would that moment of brain clarity last? Minutes? Seconds? Milliseconds? What would it feel like to be suspended between life and death? Was it a tightwire that she would have to walk, hands out, feet stepping lightly across a thin cord? Or was it a chasm into which she would fall?

  June had never been one to surrender to self-pity, at least not for any length of time. She considered instead the day ahead of her. She had always loved making lists, checking off each chore with a growing sense of accomplishment. Richard would come soon. She could already hear him downstairs making coffee. His slippers would shuffle on the stairs. Boards would squeak in the hallway. The hinges would groan as the door was pushed open. Tentatively, he would poke his head into the room, the curiosity in his eyes magnified by the thick lenses of his glasses.

  Her eyes were always open. The morphine wore off in the early-morning hours. The pain was like thousands of needles that pricked her skin, then drilled deeper and deeper into the bone as the seconds ticked by. She lay in bed waiting for Richard, waiting for the shot. She would stare at him as he stood at the door, his hesitancy a third person in the room. He would not look at her face but at her chest, waiting for the strained rise and fall.

  And somehow, she would force air into her constricted lungs. Richard would exhale as June inhaled. He would come into the room and tell her good morning. The shot would come first, the sting of the needle barely registering as the morphine was injected into her bloodstream. He would change the catheter. He would wet a rag in the bathroom sink and wipe the drool from her mouth as she waited for the drug to take away the gnawing edge of pain. He would ignore the smells, the stench of dying. In his droning monotone, he would tell her his plans for the day: fix the gutter, sweep the driveway, paint the trim in the hall. Then his attention would turn to her day: Are you hungry this morning? Would you like to go outside for a while? Would you like to watch television? Shall I read you the paper?

  And today, as always, he did these things, asked these questions, and June checked each item off her mental list, shaking her head to the offer of food, to the trip outside. She asked for the local paper to be read, wanting him here, unreasonably, after wanting him away for so long.

  Richard snapped open the newspaper, cleared his throat, and began reading. “‘A severe weather pattern is expected to hit the county around three this afternoon.’”

  His voice settled into a low hum, and June was consumed with the guilty knowledge of what the day would really hold. It was a secret that reminded her of the early days of their marriage. They had both been children of loveless unions, parents who hated each other yet could not survive in the world outside the miserable one they had created. In their young fervor, June and Richard had promised each other they would never be like their parents. They would always be truthful. No matter how difficult, there would be nothing unsaid between them.

  How had that facade cracked? Was it June who had first lied? The obfuscations had come in dribs and drabs. An ugly shirt he loved that she claimed had been ruined in the wash. A “forgotten” dinner with friends that she did not want to attend. Once, June had accidentally dropped a whole chicken on the floor and still put it in the pot for supper. She had watched him eat that night, his jaw working like a turning gear, and felt some satisfaction in knowing what she had done.

  Had Richard done that to her as well? Had there been a time at the dinner table when he had stared at her while relishing the knowledge of his crimes? Had there been a night when he made love to her in this bed, his eyes closed in seeming ecstasy, as he thought not of June but of others?

  “ ‘The school board has decided to renew the contract with Davis Janitorial for the maintenance of both the elementary and middle schools,’ ” Richard continued.

  Early on in this process, June had felt much derision for the simple stories told by the Harris Tribune to the twelve thousand residents of the small town. Lately, the articles had taken on the importance of real news — The Renewed Maintenance Contract! The New Bench Erected in the Downtown Park! — and June found herself thinking of all those foolish stories people told about near-death experiences. There was always a tunnel, a light up ahead they chose to walk toward or away from. June saw now that there was, in fact, a tunnel — a narrowing of life, making a story as simple as what the elementary school was serving for lunch that week take on infinite importance.

  “What’s that?” Richard was staring at her, expectant. “What did you say?”

  She shook her head. Had she actually spoken? She could not remember the last time she’d participated in a real conversation beyond her grunts for yes or no. June was capable of speech, but words caught in her throat. Questions caught — things she needed to ask him. Always, she said to herself, Tomorrow. I’ll ask him tomorrow. The Scarlett O’Hara of dying high school administrators. But there would be no tomorrow now. She would have to ask him today or die without knowing.

  “ ‘Harris Motors has asked for a side setback variance in order to expand their used-car showroom. Those wishing to speak either for or against the proposal can —’”

&n
bsp; His shirt was buttoned to the top, the collar tight around his neck. It was an affectation he’d picked up in prison. The pursed lips, the hard stare — those were all his own, conjured during the lead-up to the trial, when June had realized with a shocking sense of familiarity that for all their attempts, they had become the one thing they’d set out not to be: two people trapped in a loveless marriage, a cold union. Lying to each other to make the day go by quickly, only to get up the next morning and find a whole new day of potential lies and omissions spread out before them.

  She remembered glancing around the prison visiting room, seeing the other inmates with the stiff collars of their blue shirts buttoned snug around their necks, and thinking, You’ve finally found a way to fit in.

  Because Richard had never really fit in. Early on, it was one of the things she loved about him. Friends joked about his lack of masculine pursuits. He was a voracious reader, couldn’t stand sports, and tended to take contrary political views in order to play devil’s advocate. Not the ideal party guest but, to June, the perfect man. The perfect partner. The perfect husband.

  Before her cancer diagnosis, she had never visited Richard in prison, not once in the twenty-one years since he had been sent away. June was not afraid of losing the hate she felt for him. That was as firmly rooted in her chest as the cancer that was growing inside of her. What scared her most was the fear of weakness, that she would break down in his presence. She didn’t need a Dr. Bonner to tell her that love and hate existed on the same plane. She didn’t need him to tell her that her bond with Richard Connor was at once the best and the worst thing that had ever happened to her.

  So it was that the day she drove to the prison, not the day that she was diagnosed with end-stage lung cancer, was the worst day of June Connor’s life. Her hands shook. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Standing outside the door to the visitors’ area, she let the fear take hold and imagined all the horrible things that could make her weak before him.