The Heavenly Heart

by Jackie Lee Miles

  I wanted to tell Onetta I found my basket, but I was afraid it would magically disappear, punishment from the Easter bunny or someone close to him for finding it days before I was supposed to. I said nothing.

  I stopped looking for patience. I was too scared to continue searching through the house my parents insisted was just the right size. They were wrong. There were too many rooms. I got lost in it.

  The ceilings were taller than giraffes standing on stilts. The rooms were large and cold, even when the fireplaces were lit up like Christmas. Even when the thermostats confirmed it was seventy-two degrees, which mother assured me was perfectly comfortable and not to say another word.

  “You can’t possibly be cold, Lorelei,” she said very sternly.

  But I was, right down to my heart. Even so, I nodded that I wasn’t. My mother scared me. If I wasn’t careful she would start to yell. Tirades, my father called them.

  What scared me most about our house were the elaborate lanterns mounted close to the ceiling, which my mother loved.

  “From England,” she told our guests. “Still fueled with gas.”

  They had tongues that flickered menacingly. They sent shadows across the walls that frightened me more than anything that might have hidden under my bed. I stayed in the kitchen with Onetta, where it was safe and warm.

  I prayed every night to be brave, but nothing happened. I told Onetta God still didn’t hear me.

  “He hear you fine,” she said, and tried to smooth the creases out of my dress. I’d been running wild in the back yard all day, though Mother stated clearly that I wasn’t to.

  “I can’t hear him!”

  “In time you gonna, Miss Lorelei,” she said, and cupped my chin in one soft brown hand and gently wiped a smudge of dirt from my cheek with the other.

  I asked her why she called me Miss Lorelei.

  “’Cause your mama say to,” she said, and I climbed up into her lap. It was better than a warm feather bed.

  I wrapped my arms around her fat neck and squeezed. I loved her more than candy. She kept her mouth shut and did exactly what my mother said, like me. Maybe I wasn’t a coward. Maybe I was smart.

  You needs to listen with your heart, poor chile,” Onetta said, and patted my back like I was a baby in need of a good long burp. She was always calling me poor chile. I liked her words. They were soothing. They glided off her tongue like they were made of velvet. Still, my mother insisted we were very rich, so being called a poor chile confused me.

  “Listens with your heart, chile.” She said once more, and tapped the spot to the left of her bosoms. They were large as bed pillows and soft as duck down.

  I tried very hard to do just that, but my heart didn’t hear any better than my ears. I gave up, and relied on Onetta to pray for me. She prayed about everything, so I knew I was included.

  “Praise Jesus!” she said if the newscaster reported they’d caught a dangerous fugitive. But it wasn’t a figure of speech for Onetta.

  “Lord of all the glory, what that man doing now?” she said if our gardener was working with some new contraption to trap the Japanese beetles, which ate my mother’s hostas.

  Onetta prayed over her food, too, which I thought was nice. I told Mother we should do that.

  “What a splendid idea,” she said, like I’d suggested we take in a movie after Sunday brunch.

  Onetta ate her meals in the kitchen. “We don’t eat”, mother said. “We dine.” It was served to us on pretty plates in the dining room, except for breakfast, which we had in the sunroom around an enormous glass table that always had fresh flowers.

  Onetta brought it in on a fancy tray. Soft-boiled eggs in little cups, wheat toast with just a trace of butter, fresh strawberries and pineapple and bananas. And there was thick creamy oatmeal! Mine was cooked with whole milk (not water like my father’s) and laced with brown sugar and honey and just the right amount of cream on top. It was my favorite.

  We didn’t have bacon, which was my other favorite. I knew it was because my father might croak, but I pretended like my mother that it was because we choose not to eat food that came from a pig.

  “Filthy animals,” my mother said, and I nodded.

  My father would read the Wall Street Journal. My mother would put just the right amount of skim milk and a teaspoon of his favorite artificial sweetener in his coffee. He would stir it without looking up. She would pour herself another cup.

  “Stock report pleasing?” she would say, and raise her brow while she set the silver coffee pot back down on the sideboard.

  When it was, my father was happy all day. He’d whistle softly or kiss the back of my mother’s neck while she leaned over the stove to taste whatever delightful concoction Onetta had left us for dinner.

  If the Dow-Jones was down there was gloom everywhere. My father worshipped money like Onetta worshipped Jesus.

  Onetta told me when her youngest boy Thomas got sick with meningitis she prayed all day and night.

  “Even while you worked?

  “Every precious minute till that boy be well.”

  We didn’t pray at our house, but we probably would have if someone were dying. Of course my father was in danger of doing just that, but he and my mother refused to believe it. They refused to consider things that were unpleasant. The ones they couldn’t, they ignored. They were very strange people. But I loved them like they were normal.

  “That’s unconditional,” Paige said. She was my oldest friend. “Good for you,” she added. She didn’t like my mother. She thought she was a phony.

  I knew there were others who didn’t like her, either. It made me love my mother even more. I told myself when she was born her parents put her in a pot to grow like a flower. She was fertilized and given sunlight so she would flourish. Then she was nurtured with poison, instead of water, and her insides ended up like weeds.

  I thought this from the very beginning of my memory and had compassion for my mother imbedded in my heart long before it had a name I could pronounce.

  And of course, there was the fact my father was sometimes cruel to her and she loved him, worshipped him, and absolutely adored him. I’m not sure why my father treated her this way. It was a total mystery.

  I wanted to tell her to be cruel to him and see what happened. It couldn’t have been any worse. Maybe he would have wanted to woo her back if she’d played hard to get. The girls at school who did this drove the boys crazy. Instead, she tiptoed around him like their relationship was made of eggshells and would crack if she wasn’t careful.

  But my father was extremely charming when he chose to be. Other times, he was like an expensive fishing line. He cast my mother into the sea of despair, then, slowly reeled her in. She didn’t complain. She was caught on his line like a lure. He was all she wanted. It’s true love, she said, but it looked like pure hell. Like some kind of horrid affliction.

  “True love,” she said, and once again I heard the story of how they met. It always ended the same.

  “I never looked at another man,” she said. “I still haven’t, I’ll have you know.” Perhaps she should have. And maybe she should have let someone look back. It might have done her good. Maybe she’d have learned to like herself better if someone else had liked her even more.

  “Did he have a bad heart when you met?” I asked.

  It’s seemed to me he’d been sick forever. My mother said, no, he was an airline pilot, having the time of his life, and then some.

  “He didn’t have to work, you know,” she said. She was sitting at her dressing table. It was covered with elaborate jars, and lotions and potions, and sable brushes of every size. There were fancy brass lamps attached to the wall on both sides. She could adjust the brightness by dialing a tiny switch that was mounted in a secret spot beneath the dressing table drawer. I was crazy happy when she let me control the dial.

  “He’ll never have to. He did it for the glory and then he caught a virus.”

  She brushed her cheeks with a bronz
e blusher that made her glow. I picked it up and dusted mine. It turned my pale skin orange. She took the brush out of my hands and shook her head.

  “It destroyed his heart muscles,” she added

  I touched the spot on my chest where I felt mine beating. I was seven. Maybe he still had it and I would catch it next.

  “He’s different now,” she said. “Before his heart gave out we were incredibly happy, Lorelei. He wasn’t angry then.” She shook her head firmly and appeared very convinced that this was so.

  At seven, I knew nothing of my father’s anger. I hadn’t seen it. He didn’t yell, or even raise his voice. I wanted to ask how it was that she could tell he was angry, but I noticed her face was sad. I changed the subject. I put this question with all the others, in case they could be answered later.

  Now it is later and Pete’s answering many of my questions. I’m figuring out the others on my own. I stretch my legs and breathe in air still pure as ice. I listen quietly as my mother asks my father if he’d like to go to a meeting with her this evening at St. Benedictines. It’s a support group for parents who’ve lost their children, she says.

  “I think it would help.”

  “Help what?” he says. My father likes to irritate my mother by asking what she refers to as perfectly retarded questions. He’s been doing it for years. He has a degree in it, she says.

  She will pretend he didn’t answer at all, and make a statement about the weather or something equally safe. I know this because I’ve been a witness to their peculiar behavior patterns for sixteen years.

  I want to scream. “Why don’t you have a knock-em-out-drag-em-out-and-be-done-with-it kind of conversation?”

  We weren’t allowed to raise our voices at our house. It was a sign of bad breeding my mother said. But my mother raised hers all the time when she went on her tirades. Pretty confusing.

  My parents didn’t have shouting matches like my friend Paige’s occasionally did. Mine played a game of cat-and-mouse.

  “Passive-aggressive,” Paige said. I was intrigued.

  “Basically it’s where one cuts the other, then, convinces them they’ve stabbed themselves,” she said. She was so smart. I knew she’d go to Yale or Harvard.

  Her parents were quite rich, too. But they were normal. Her father earned his money in real estate. My father inherited his from his parents and my mother’s came from a trust fund her grandmother left her.

  “My mother doesn’t have any,” Paige told me. “She says half of what my father has is hers. She doesn’t need any.” We laughed. It is just the type of quip Paige’s mother was known for. It’s what her father loved about her. Well, that, and she had huge breasts and looked like Pamela Anderson.

  Pete nods his head and motions for me to follow. He has a place he wants to show me. I tell him just a minute like he’s my mother and has interrupted me at a critical moment. I finish watching my real mother as she looks out the Palladian window that leads to her garden.

  “So, you are sure you don’t want to come along?” she says, and turns to look once again at my father.

  “Very,” he says.

  She wants to know how he intends to handle the loss of their daughter. She stumbles over my name. He looks her straight in the eye.

  “I have a splendid plan,” he says, using one of her favorite words.

  My mother stands mute, but I know that she’s holding her breath, hoping he won’t slap her again with his words.

  “I’m going to find each and every person that has a piece of Lorelei in their body,” he says. “I’m going to find out if what they got for what we paid was worth it!”

  “Well,” my mother says without flinching, like he’s simply announced he plans to take up stamp collecting. “Have you received permission from the doctor to travel?” She looks at her watch and puts on her driving gloves.

  I’m fairly certain my father hasn’t needed permission for anything since he stopped crawling and learned to walk. She should have asked him something more appropriate, like, “Have you lost your mind?”

  SIX

  The Silver Lining

  I tell Pete I am going alone this time.

  “It’s a girl thing,” I say. It’s Christmas on earth and I’m anxious to see my friends, Paige and Annalise. I like them equally well, but it’s hard to have two best friends. It’s like a juggling act or being a mother to more than one child. You have to work hard not to play favorites.

  Annalise is naïve and funny, while Paige is smart and confident. I’m headstrong and daring. We’re a dangerous mix, but I wasn’t aware of it until it was too late.

  Annalise’s father is a doctor, a neurosurgeon. Her mother is a pediatrician. She rarely sees them, but doesn’t complain. They haven’t sent her off to boarding school, like they did her older sister Gabrielle, who did.

  She has a governess who home schools her. They are grooming her to be a doctor, like Gabrielle, who is now in medical school at Vanderbilt. Secretly, Annalise wants to be a rock star. She’s gifted and very musical and can play most every instrument imaginable, so why not?

  Of course her mother will lock her in a tower before she lets that happen, which scares the hair off Annalise, since they really do have one, sort of. It’s a circular room with a huge pointed roof that sits on the far side of their home. It can easily be seen as soon as you spot their stacked-stone estate. It’s more like a castle and has these electric gates that surround it.

  Annalise keeps her cell phone fully charged and programmed with all of the emergency numbers in case she ever ends up there.

  “I’m calling the police, the fire department, child services, all of them,” she says. “She’ll never get away with it.”

  Annalise explains that her mother will be charged with child abuse. People will no longer want to take their children to her. And her father will be considered an oddball for allowing such a thing to happen.

  “Who, in their right mind, will want their brain operated on by him?” she says.

  We’re at Lenox Mall. Annalise’s mother’s chauffeur has driven us. His name is Henry and he wears a silly cap and suit, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He’s English, Annalise says, like their butler. They have a full staff of servants. They are far richer than my father or my mother. You might think that doctors can’t possibly make the kind of money to afford stuff like this. Probably, many don’t. But, Dr. Chambers, Annalise’s father, has written papers in medical journals. Thousands of them, Annalise says. And he has a Nobel Prize in Medicine for pioneering techniques that made many others obsolete. He’s known for his brilliance and skill. People travel from around the world to seek him out if they need their heads cut open.

  “Why not?” Paige says. “If someone has a knife in your brain, pretty good doesn’t cut it.”

  “Right,” Annalise adds proudly.

  Paige’s father, remember is the one in real estate. He owns King Realty, which only sells homes fit for a king, naturally. Her mother is the one with the wonderful sense of humor and the big breasts who looks like Pamela Anderson, who makes us laugh until we nearly piddle in our pants.

  We finish up our Christmas shopping and drag our packages back to the limousine. Henry places them in the trunk. We climb into the back—without waiting for him to open the door like Annalise’s mother does—and raid the refrigerator. She has removed all of the liquor. There are three cans of Sprite lined up in a row.

  Paige hands them out, and quickly spots a tiny bottle of gin tipped on its side. It’s tucked in the corner next to the light. It’s the type the airlines give out. She twists off the miniature top and passes it around. We lace our Sprite and toast each other. Henry is none the wiser. He looks in the rear-view mirror at us and smiles like we’re perfect angels.

  Actually, I am.

  SEVEN

  The Golden Window

  “How did it go?” Pete says.

  “Great!” I say, quite aware it’s a Christmas I didn’t actually experience for real. It’s th
e first one since I ended up here. But experiencing it through the Silver Lining is awesome. It’s possible I have the best of both worlds.

  “Nobody died!” I chirp. Pete’s face is sober as I say it and I realize that in going back things may not always be so cheerful.

  I watch the real Christmas, going on without me, through the Golden Window and see my parents having their usual round of parties. They decide to attend.

  “It’s time,” my mother says. In going, they receive many additional condolences for their loss.

  It is strange to think of myself now that I’m gone from them as a loss. Was I formerly a gain? Like the stock market my father keeps his eyes riveted on.

  “He’s doing beautifully”, my mother says, when others ask.

  It’s true. He’s regained the right amount of weight and has a great tan. They go back to Palm Beach for New Years, having decided attending parties is one thing, but holding one of their own is another, when you have a daughter who’s newly dead.

  My mother’s hair now has foil highlights. It looks totally cool. She’s more beautiful on the outside, than ever. And she may be making strides on the interior; my father, too. They are treating each other in ways I wanted them to when I was there. It’s pretty strange. They must be up to something.

  My father’s packing his suitcase. He has a list of names and addresses of some of those who have my organs. I’m curious. What’s he think he’ll gain by meeting them? Even so, I’m also excited to meet them, if only from afar. Although it upset my mother a lot when birthing destinies was suggested to her by the hospital chaplain, I like the idea. I don’t want to miss this. Just think? Maybe a movie star has one of my kidneys! If so, I hope it’s Kirsten Dunst. I really like her. Probably not, though. I don’t recall her mentioning to the press she was in need of one.

  My father kisses my mother goodbye and says he’ll be home in a week and to call his cell phone if she needs him. She’s off to another meeting at St. Benedictine’s for parents with dead children. It’s being held in the basement of the church and sounds very morbid. No wonder my father would rather chase organs for his grief recovery.