Heart-Shaped Box with Bonus Material

by Joe Hill

  “I’d rather ask questions,” she told him, “than answer them.”

  She had kept him at bay with those foolish, pointless questions for almost half a year: Were you ever in the Boy Scouts? Do you shampoo your beard? What do you like better, my ass or my tits?

  What little he knew should have invited curiosity: the family business in hypnotism, the dowser father who taught his girls to read palms and talk to spirits, a childhood shadowed by the hallucinations of preadolescent schizophrenia. But Anna—Florida—didn’t want to talk about who she’d been before meeting him, and for himself, he was happy to let her past be past.

  Whatever she wasn’t telling him, he knew it was bad, a certain kind of bad. The specifics didn’t matter—that’s what he believed then. He had thought, at the time, that this was one of his strengths, his willingness to accept her as she was, without questions, without judgments. She was safe with him, safe from whatever ghosts were chasing her.

  Except he hadn’t kept her safe, he knew that now. The ghosts always caught up eventually, and there was no way to lock the door on them. They would walk right through. What he’d thought of as a personal strength—he was happy to know about her only what she wanted him to know—was something more like selfishness. A childish willingness to remain in the dark, to avoid distressing conversations, upsetting truths. He had feared her secrets—or, more specifically, the emotional entanglements that might come with knowing them.

  Just once had she risked something like confession, something close to self-revelation. It was at the end, shortly before he sent her home.

  She’d been depressed for months. First the sex went bad, and then there was no sex at all. He’d find her in the bath, soaking in ice water, shivering helplessly, too confused and unhappy to get out. Thinking on it now, it was as if she were rehearsing for her first day as a corpse, for the evening she would spend cooling and wrinkling in a tub full of cold water and blood. She prattled to herself in a little girl’s crooning voice but went mute if he tried to talk to her, stared at him in bewilderment and shock, as if she’d just heard the furniture speak.

  Then one night he went out. He no longer remembered for what. To rent a movie maybe, or get a burger. It was just after dark as he drove home. Half a mile from the house, he heard people honking their horns, the oncoming cars blinking their headlights.

  Then he passed her. Anna was on the other side of the road, running in the breakdown lane, wearing nothing but one of his oversize T-shirts. Her yellow hair was windblown and tangled. She saw him as he passed, going the other way, and lunged into the road after him, waving her hand frantically and stepping into the path of an oncoming eighteen-wheeler.

  The truck’s tires locked and shrieked. The trailer’s rear end fishtailed to the left while the cab swung right. It banged to a stop, two feet from rolling over her. She didn’t appear to notice. Jude had stopped himself by then, and she flung open the driver’s-side door, fell against him.

  “Where did you go?” she screamed. “I looked for you everywhere. I ran, I ran, and I thought you were gone, so I ran, I ran lookin’.”

  The driver of the semi had his door open, one foot out on the step-down. “What the fuck is up with that bitch?”

  “I got it,” Jude said to him.

  The trucker opened his mouth to speak again, then fell silent as Jude hauled Anna in across his legs, an act that hiked up her shirt and raised her bare bottom to the air.

  Jude threw her into the passenger seat, and immediately she was up again, falling into him, shoving her hot, wet face against his chest.

  “I was scared I was so scared and I ran—”

  He shoved her off him with his elbow, hard enough to slam her into the passenger-side door. She fell into a shocked silence.

  “Enough. You’re a mess. I’ve had it. You hear? You aren’t the only one who can tell fortunes. You want me to tell you about your future? I see you holding your fuckin’ bags, waitin’ for a bus,” he said.

  His chest was tight, tight enough to remind him he wasn’t thirty-three but fifty-three, almost thirty years older than she. Anna stared. Her eyes round and wide and uncomprehending.

  He put the car into drive and began to roll for home. As he turned in to the driveway, she bent over and tried to unzip his pants, to give him a blow job, but the thought turned his stomach, was an unimaginable act, a thing he could not let her do, so he hit her with the elbow again, driving her back once more.

  He avoided her most of the next day, but the following night, when he came in from walking the dogs, she called from the top of the back stairs. She asked if he would make her some soup, just a can of something. He said all right.

  When he brought it to her, a bowl of chicken noodle on a small tray, he could see she was herself again. Washed out and exhausted, but clear in her head. She tried to smile for him, something he didn’t want to see. What he had to do was going to be hard enough.

  She sat up, took the tray across her knees. He sat on the side of the bed and watched her take little swallows. She didn’t really want it. It had only been an excuse to get him up to the bedroom. He could tell from the way her jaw tightened before each tiny, fretful sip. She had lost twelve pounds in the last three months.

  She set it aside after finishing less than a quarter of the broth, then smiled, in the way of a child who has been promised ice cream if she’ll choke down her asparagus. She said thank you, it was nice. She said she felt better.

  “I have to go to New York next Monday. I’m doing Howard Stern,” Jude said.

  An anxious light flickered in her pale eyes. “I…I don’t think I ought to go.”

  “I wouldn’t ask you to. The city would be the worst thing for you.”

  She looked at him so gratefully he had to glance away.

  “I can’t leave you here either,” he said. “Not by yourself. I was thinking maybe you ought to stay with family for a while. Down in Florida.” When she didn’t reply, he went on, “Is there someone in your family I can call?”

  She slid down into her pillows. She drew the sheet up to her chin. He was worried she would start crying, but when he looked, she was staring calmly at the ceiling, her hands folded one atop the other on her breastbone.

  “Sure,” she said finally. “You were good to put up with me for as long as you did.”

  “What I said the other night…”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “That’s good. What I said is better forgotten. I didn’t mean any of it anyhow.” Although in fact what he’d said was exactly what he meant, had only been the harshest possible version of what he was telling her now.

  The silence drew out between them until it was uncomfortable, and he felt he should prod her again, but as he was opening his mouth, she spoke first.

  “You can call my daddy,” she said. “My stepdaddy, I mean. You can’t call my real daddy. He’s dead, of course. You want to talk to my stepdaddy, he’ll drive all the way up here to pick me up in person if you want. Just give him the word. My stepdaddy likes to say I’m his little onion. I bring tears to his eyes. Isn’t that a cute thing to say?”

  “I wouldn’t make him come get you. I’ll fly you private.”

  “No plane. Planes are too fast. You can’t go south on a plane. You need to drive. Or take a train. You need to watch the dirt turn to clay. You need to look at all the junkyards full of rustin’ cars. You need to go over a few bridges. They say that evil spirits can’t follow you over running water, but that’s just humbug. You ever notice rivers in the North aren’t like rivers in the South? Rivers in the South are the color of chocolate, and they smell like marsh and moss. Up here they’re black, and they smell sweet, like pines. Like Christmas.”

  “I could take you to Penn Station and put you on the Amtrak. Would that take you south slow enough?”

  “Sure.”

  “So I’ll call your da—your stepfather?”

  “Maybe I better call him,” she said. It crossed his mind then how ra
rely she spoke to anyone in her family. They’d been together more than a year. Had she ever called her stepfather, to wish him happy birthday, to tell him how she was doing? Once or twice Jude had come into his record library and found Anna on the phone with her sister, frowning with concentration, her voice low and terse. She seemed unlike herself then, someone engaged in a disagreeable sport, a game she had no taste for but felt obliged to play out anyway. “You don’t have to talk to him.”

  “Why don’t you want me to talk to him? ’Fraid we won’t get along?”

  “It’s not that I’m worried he’ll be rude to you or nothin’. He isn’t like that. My daddy is easy to talk to. Everybody’s friend.”

  “Well then, what?”

  “I never talked to him about it yet, but I just know what he thinks about us taking up with each other. He won’t like it. You the age you are and the kind of music you play. He hates that kind of music.”

  “There’s more people don’t like it than do. That’s the whole point.”

  “He doesn’t think much of musicians at all. You never met a man with less music in him. When we were little, he’d take us on these long drives, to someplace where he’d been hired to dowse for a well, and he’d make us listen to talk radio the whole way. It didn’t matter what to him. He’d make us listen to a continuous weather broadcast for four hours.” She pulled two fingers slowly through her hair, lifting a long, golden strand away from her head, then letting it slip through her fingers and fall. She went on, “He had this one creepy trick he could do. He’d find someone talkin’, like one of those Holy Rollers that are always kickin’ it up for Jesus on the AM. And we’d listen and listen, until Jessie and me were beggin’ him for anything else. And he wouldn’t say anything, and he wouldn’t say anything, and then, just when we couldn’t stand it anymore, he’d start to talk to himself. And he’d be sayin’ exactly what the preacher on the radio was sayin’, at exactly the same time, only in his own voice. Recitin’ it. Deadpan, like. ‘Christ the Redeemer bled and died for you. What will you do for Him? He carried His own cross while they spat on Him. What burden will you carry?’ Like he was readin’ from the same script. And he’d keep going until my momma told him to quit. That she didn’t like it. And he’d laugh and turn the radio off. But he’d keep talkin’ to himself. Kind of mutterin’. Sayin’ all the preacher’s lines, even with the radio off. Like he was hearin’ it in his head, gettin’ the broadcast on his fillings. He could scare me so bad doing that.”

  Jude didn’t reply, didn’t think a reply was called for, and anyway was not sure whether the story was true or the latest in a succession of self-delusions that had haunted her.

  She sighed, let another strand of her hair flop. “I was sayin’, though, that he wouldn’t like you, and he has ways of gettin’ rid of my friends when he doesn’t like them. A lot of daddies are overprotective of their little girls, and if someone comes around they don’t care for, they might try and scare ’em off. Lean on ’em a little. Course that never works, because the girl always takes the boy’s side, and the boy keeps after her, either because he can’t be scared or doesn’t want her to think he can be scared. My stepdaddy’s smarter than that. He’s as friendly as can be, even with people he’d like to see burnt alive. If he ever wants to get rid of someone he doesn’t want around me, he drives them off by tellin’ ’em the truth. The truth is usually enough.

  “Give you an example. When I was sixteen, I started running around with this boy I just knew my old man wouldn’t like, on account of this kid was Jewish, and also we’d listen to rap together. Pop hates rap worst of all. So one day my stepdaddy told me it was going to stop, and I said I could see who I wanted, and he said sure, but that didn’t mean the kid would keep wantin’ to see me. I didn’t like the sound of that, but he didn’t explain himself.

  “Well, you’ve seen how I get low sometimes and start thinkin’ crazy things. That all started when I was twelve, maybe, same time as puberty. I didn’t see a doctor or anything. My stepdaddy treated me himself, with hypnotherapy. He could hold things in check pretty good, too, as long as we sat down once or twice a week. I wouldn’t get up to any of my crazy business. I wouldn’t think there was a dark truck circling the house. I wouldn’t see little girls with coals for eyes watchin’ me from under the trees at night.

  “But he had to go away. He had to go to Austin for some conference on hypnogogic drugs. Usually he took me along when he went on one of his trips, but this time he left me at home with Jessie. My mom was dead by then, and Jessie was nineteen and in charge. And while he was gone I started havin’ trouble sleepin’. That’s always the first sign I’m gettin’ low, when I start havin’ insomnia.

  “After a couple nights, I started seein’ the girls with the burning eyes. I couldn’t go to school on Monday, because they were waitin’ outside under the oak tree. I was too scared to go out. I told Jessie. I said she had to make Pop come home, that I was gettin’ bad ideas again. She told me she was tired of my crazy shit and that he was busy and I would be all right till he got back. She tried to make me go to school, but I wouldn’t. I stayed in my room and watched television. But pretty soon they started talkin’ to me through the TV. The dead girls. Tellin’ me I was dead like they was. That I belonged in the dirt with them.

  “Usually Jessie got back from school at two or three. But she didn’t come home that afternoon. It got later and later, and every time I looked out the window, I saw the girls starin’ back at me. My stepdad called, and I told him I was in trouble and please come home, and he said he’d come quick as he could, but he wouldn’t be back until late. He said he was worried I might hurt myself and he’d call someone to come be with me. After he hung up, he phoned Philip’s parents, who lived up the street from us.”

  “Philip? Was this your boyfriend? The Jewish kid?”

  “Uh-huh. Phil came right over. I didn’t know him. I hid under the bed from him, and I screamed when he tried to touch me. I asked him if he was with the dead girls. I told him all about them. Jessie showed up pretty soon afterward, and Philip ran off quick as he could. After that he was so freaked out he didn’t want to have anything to do with me. And my stepdaddy just said what a shame. He thought Philip was my friend. He thought Philip, more than anyone else, could be trusted to look out for me when I was havin’ a rough time.”

  “So is that what’s worrying you? Your old man is going to let me know you’re a lunatic and I’ll be so shocked I won’t ever want to see you again? ’Cause I got to tell you, Florida, hearing you get kind of crazy now and then wouldn’t exactly be a newsflash.”

  She snorted, soft breathy laughter. Then she said, “He wouldn’t say that. I don’t know what he’d say. He’d just find somethin’ to make you like me a little less. If you can like me any less.”

  “Let’s not start with that.”

  “No. No, on second thought maybe you best call my sister instead. She’s an unkind bitch—we don’t get along a lick. She never forgave me for being cuter than her and gettin’ better Christmas presents. After Momma died, she had to be Susie Homemaker, but I still got to be a kid. Jessie was doin’ our laundry and cookin’ our meals by the time she was fourteen, and no one has ever been able to appreciate how hard she had to work or how little fun she got to have. But she’ll arrange to get me home without any nonsense. She’ll like havin’ me back, so she can boss me around and make rules for me.”

  But when Jude called her sister’s house, he got the old man anyway, who answered on the third ring.

  “What’n I do for you? Go ahead and talk. I’ll help you if I can.”

  Jude introduced himself. He said Anna wanted to come home for a while, making it out to be more her idea than his. Jude wrestled mentally with how to describe her condition, but Craddock came to his rescue.

  “How’s she sleepin’?” Craddock asked.

  “Not too well,” Jude said, relieved, understanding somehow that this said it all.

  Jude offered to have a chauffeur d
rive Anna from the train station in Jacksonville to Jessica’s house in Testament, but Craddock said no, he would meet her at the Amtrak himself.

  “A drive to Jacksonville will suit me fine. Any excuse to get out in my truck for a few hours. Put the windows down. Make faces at the cows.”

  “I hear that,” Jude said, forgetting himself and warming to the old man.

  “I appreciate you takin’ care of my little girl like you done. You know, when she was just a pup, she had posters of you all over her walls. She always did want to meet you. You and that fella from…what was their name? That Mötley Crüe? Now, she really loved them. She followed them for half a year. She was at all their shows. She got to know some of them, too. Not the band, I guess, but their road team. Them were her wild years. Not that she’s real settled now, is she? Yeah, she loved all your albums. She loved all kinds of that heavy metal music. I always knew she’d find herself a rock star.”

  Jude felt a dry, ticklish sensation of cold spreading behind his chest. He knew what Craddock was telling him—that she had fucked roadies to hang with Mötley Crüe, that star fucking was a thing with her, and if she wasn’t sleeping with him, she’d be in the sack with Vince Neil or Slash—and he also knew why Craddock was telling him. For the same reason he had let Anna’s Jewish friend see her when she was out of her head, to put a wedge between them.

  What Jude had not foreseen was that he could know what Craddock was doing and it could work anyway. No sooner had Craddock said it than Jude started thinking where he and Anna had met, backstage at a Trent Reznor show. How had she got there? Who did she know, and what did she have to do for a backstage pass? If Trent had walked into the room right then, would she have sat at his feet instead and asked the same sweet, pointless questions?