She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be

by J. D. Barker

  Classes began on January 14.

  Ten days later, I turned eighteen.

  The winter of 1993-1994 proved to be one of the worst in Pennsylvania history. At one point, the drifts along Mifflin Road were nearly seven feet tall. Because most classes were within walking distance (and I quickly grew tired of scraping ice from the windows), my Honda sat unused in front of the apartment, nearly vanishing beneath a blanket of white. When spring finally arrived, I had to buy a new battery to get the car started. A new bloom of rust sprouted on the trunk, a few inches from the lock. I’d watch that spot grow over the coming years.

  There were parties, but I didn’t touch a single drink. Keggers, frats, sorority socials. The alcohol flowed, pot was readily available, ludes, shrooms. I even saw coke at one party, but it was college coke, no doubt cut with baby aspirin, flour, and God knew what else. I didn’t touch any of it. Instead, I was the guy in the corner with a can of Pepsi, sometimes a twelve-pack of Pepsi. I smiled and tried not to look too creepy as everyone else got wasted around me.

  I wanted to drink, no doubt about that, but in watching the other students at all those parties, particularly the early ones, a realization came to me—they drank to enhance the social experience. It opened them up, took away inhibitions, it was a release. I only drank to forget, to numb, to hide. Alcohol helped to bring them out, alcohol turned me in. They drank to be together, I drank to be alone.

  As I watched them all drink, as the laughter and shouting and dancing grew louder and slurred, I felt this gap growing—them and me, they and I, and I found a new way to be alone.

  At Penn, everything was celebrated. Tonight we were celebrating what we hoped was the final snow melt of the season. It was the twelfth of March. Someone actually found it, a small mound of brown slush, on the west corner of Spruce Cottage across from the telecom building. Either that same someone or a different someone roped it off, set up a keg ten feet to the left, a boom box on a table to the right, and an improptu party started right there. In the fall, we had gathered around large bonfires. Tonight, we encircled this small patch of snow and watched it melt.

  Welcome to college life.

  “Come on, let me hypnotize you,” she said again.

  I only half heard her. She was one of them. This usually happened a few hours into most parties. Aside from the previously mentioned uplifting effects, alcohol also brought courage, and at some point, one of them would inevitably cross that invisible barrier and find their way over to me. I suppose I was a good-looking guy, probably seen as some kind of challenge to them, off in my isolated corner. Damn near every girl reminded me of Stella, though. The ones who didn’t reminded me of Gerdy, and that hurt just as bad, sometimes worse.

  This girl said her name was Kaylie. She wore a flowered sundress over black tights and under a denim jacket. Her hair was strawberry blonde and curled under just above her shoulders.

  More Gerdy than Stella.

  A doctoral student working on her PhD in psych, she told me when she first introduced herself.

  An unknown beverage sloshed around in her red Solo cup.

  I took a drink of my Pepsi. “You don’t want to hypnotize me. I’m boring.”

  “You don’t look boring. You’ve got this brooding, James Dean thing going on.”

  “James Dean, huh?”

  “Totally. A rebel for sure.”

  “Then maybe you shouldn’t be talking to me. What if I’m dangerous?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Are you dangerous?”

  Everyone I care about seems to die, so yeah, probably.

  “Are you any good at it?” I said.

  “At what?”

  “Hypnosis.”

  She shrugged. “My roommates say I am. Professor McDougal said I’m the best he’s had in his class in a decade, but I think he’s just trying to get in my pants.”

  “You’re not wearing pants.”

  She looked down at her legs and processed this information in that slow way drunk people do. Then she looked back at me and smiled. “Nope. No pants.”

  I spotted Willy across the crowd, watching me. He gave me a thumbs-up and nodded vigorously.

  “I should probably get home,” I said, glancing in the direction of my apartment.

  “You can’t leave until the snow is gone, that’s the rule.”

  “Well, you did say I was a rebel.”

  “Please let me hypnotize you.”

  “What do you think you’ll learn?”

  She tilted her head. Some of whatever was in her cup spilled over the side and landed on my shoe. “For starters, why you’re at a party and you’re not drinking.”

  “Maybe I’m not very good at it.”

  She stepped closer and took a drink. This time, I smelled the rum. “It’s not that hard.”

  “You’re not doing it right, either. You’re drinking rum at a keg party.”

  She brought a single finger to her lips and smiled. “Shh. Maybe I’m a rebel…too.”

  Willy was still watching, and I wondered if he’d phone Matteo tonight to report in or hold off until morning. He would at some point.

  I counted at least twelve people wearing white coats.

  “Do you live on campus?” I asked her.

  She nodded to the left. “East Residences.”

  “How about I walk you home,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  Apparently, the melting snow had been forgotten.

  Kaylie and I crossed the quad and took a shortcut past the tennis courts. At some point, her hand found mine.

  She lived in Geary Hall on the second floor.

  She fumbled with the lock, pushed the door open, and stumbled in, falling on a bed to the left. Her roommates weren’t home.

  I turned on the light, closed the door, and helped her out of her shoes and jacket. Her cup of rum disappeared somewhere along the walk. I hadn’t noticed her drop it or set it down.

  I could have slept with her, but I didn’t.

  Instead, I waited until she fell asleep, then turned her on her side. A quilt was bunched up at the foot of the bed. I pulled it over her shoulders and tucked her in.

  The walk back to my apartment on Mifflin should have taken about twenty minutes, but I didn’t get back until around four in the morning. Willy’s door was closed. I could hear him snoring.

  There was an envelope on my bed.

  The envelope wasn’t thick enough to contain cash, and unlike the others, this one had my mailing address printed neatly on the front with a canceled stamp postmarked Pittsburgh, PA. The return address was Matteo’s office. Inside, I found a folded letter along with a smaller envelope:

  Jack,

  Dewitt asked me to send this to you. Your aunt left it for you before she died, with instructions to give it to you on your eighteenth birthday. I apologize for the delay, completely my fault—he dropped it on my desk with a Post-it note on the top, and it got buried before I saw it—you’ve seen my desk! (I’m working on it. I swear!) If he’d hand me things instead of…sorry, I’m sure you don’t care. Again, I apologize for the delay.

  Hope you’re kicking some butt at Penn! Go, Lions!

  Sincerely,

  Tess

  Dewitt? I chuckled. I had completely forgotten Matteo’s first name was Dewitt.

  I dropped the letter on my bed.

  The smaller envelope was sealed, about half the size of a normal one. The kind that usually held thank-you cards or other small notes. Auntie Jo had a box of them. She used to keep her tips organized by date and shift—she said this helped her figure out the best shifts to take and which to avoid. I’m not sure that really mattered. It seemed like she worked all the time regardless.

  My name was printed on the front.

  I tore the envelope open.

  The page inside only contained fourteen words, but I probably read those words over and over again for the better part of an hour. Her handwriting was twitchy, barely legible, written close to the end of her life:
/>   The box your father left for you? It’s in 68744. The worthless shit.

  Jo

  At some point, I sat on the edge of my bed. I didn’t remember doing that. My hand was shaking. The only sounds in my room were my deep breaths and the rapid thump in my chest.

  The sun started to rise by the time I found the strength to get up and shove some clothes into my backpack. Ten minutes later, I crept across the floor of our apartment toward the door, carefully avoiding the noisier boards near the center of the room under the rug. In his room at the end of the hall, Willy still snored, and probably would for a few more hours—Sundays being one of the few days he slept in.

  At first, the Prelude wouldn’t start. The engine coughed and sputtered, choking the winter from its throat. Then the motor caught with a single backfire. Once it turned over, the engine quickly smoothed out. Hondas were reliable that way.

  I gave the gas pedal a few pumps, then backed out onto the deserted road.

  My mind reeled, unable to put together a solid thought.

  The box.

  When I asked Auntie Jo about the box, she always denied it existed, said my father hadn’t given her anything before he died, nothing at all. I searched for years, more times than I could count. I’d never given up. I simply ran out of places to look.

  Of course that’s where she would have hidden it. Nobody would look there.

  I’d be in Pittsburgh in two and a half hours. In that time, I’d have to sort this out, figure out a next step.

  68744 was the number of my father’s grave plot, one of those obscure facts Auntie Jo had drilled into me as a kid.

  About an hour into the drive, I realized my “next step” wasn’t necessarily a single option of multiple options. I had no other options. I tried to think of something, anything at all other than the obvious choice, which clearly wouldn’t be a possibility for any sane person but slowly became one for me as I thought more and more about it. That realization didn’t help the churning in my stomach, the sour taste in my throat.

  Auntie Jo wouldn’t lie about something like this. She hated my father, hated everything about him. But she wouldn’t lie about something this important, not to me.

  The letter from Richard Nettleton to my father had been addressed to her.

  I had always suspected that, on some level, Jo knew what was going on. Even if she hadn’t told me, the dream told me as much.

  I knew the box was real, knew it, even if she denied it.

  Her way of protecting me, waiting until I was old enough, I suppose.

  The box was key, always had been.

  But could I?

  Could I dig up a grave?

  My father’s grave?

  If the box was there—and as the miles churned beneath the noisy wheels of my Honda, I became absolutely convinced that it was—could I leave the box hidden in his grave forever? Forget about it? What if someone else found it? Someone in a white coat?

  What if (and this was a big what if), what if something in that box might help me find Stella?

  I couldn’t forget about something like this.

  I’d have to look.

  The sane choice was to not dig up my father’s grave.

  But digging was clearly my only choice.

  Somehow, I made peace with that. My brain twisted and turned it, churned the facts until this was not only my only choice but the right choice, and one that could not wait.

  At the turnoff for I-376, I stopped at a small hardware store in Hollidaysburg and bought a shovel. I couldn’t risk doing such a thing in Pittsburgh, where I might be recognized. The only hardware store near my apartment in Brentwood was Keener’s. The store had been there since 1939—Harold Keener would not only recognize me but might pick up the phone and call Matteo when I purchased something as odd as a shovel.

  I parked on Cramer off Brownsville, about three blocks from my apartment, and walked the rest of the way. Parking near my building wasn’t an option. Honda Preludes were a fairly common car, but a black one parked in front of my building would probably get recognized as mine. I left the shovel in the trunk.

  Construction on Krendal’s Diner was nearing completion and a sign hung in the window—Carmozzi’s Pizza, coming soon!

  I walked past and tried not to look through the newly whitewashed windows for fear of what might look back.

  Nearly three months had gone by since the last time I stepped into my apartment building. The place felt foreign to me. The halls seemed narrower and musty, in need of paint. I climbed the steps and slipped into my apartment unnoticed. Even Ms. Leech’s door remained closed. No grocery list on the door, not on Sundays.

  My apartment was dark. Every surface, thick with dust.

  I crossed the room, past the stack of posters still on the table, past Gerdy’s dress still on the floor, and reached for the thick blinds over the window, then thought better of it.

  If someone were to look up. Someone who knows me…

  I settled into Auntie Jo’s chair near the window and waited for night to come. My right knee bounced nervously, and the ghosts of my past howled all around, cackling at my ear, anxious for what came next.

  At a little after one in the morning, I parked on Nobles Lane, probably within ten feet of the place I left my bike as a kid on the day of the Great Chase.

  If I closed my eyes, I could still hear the sound of those four SUVs racing up behind me, with Dunk and Willy chattering from the radio.

  When I opened my eyes, I saw nothing but a dark, deserted road, edged by woods. Nobles Lane had no street lamps, no traffic, and the few homes sat far back from the road.

  A light drizzle had started up a little after midnight and remained steady since. When I pulled off the pavement, the Honda’s tires dipped slightly in the muddy earth, and I cursed myself for not thinking about the possibility of leaving tracks behind. I should have brought a jacket, too. The temperature dropped into the forties and was still sinking. As grave-robbing went, I wasn’t very good.

  At this hour, every sound seemed amplified, from the groan of my trunk to my footfalls as I ran through the woods toward the cemetery, with the shovel in hand. I came out of the trees about a hundred feet west of our bench, and I couldn’t help but think of the painting in Stella’s room.

  Shadows clung to the sides of the mausoleums, wrapping the stone structures in the blanket of night, cradling them in the rain. I knew I was alone, yet I felt eyes on me. I half-expected someone in a white coat to slip out of the woods, to step out into my path, maybe more than one someone, all with thoughts of that box. In the time I spent in this cemetery growing up, I had yet to see a caretaker or any form of security. Someone locked the front gate promptly at nine each night and opened it again in the morning, but even that person eluded me through the years. I imagined anyone working in a cemetery, in the solitude of it, would eventually become a silent part of that cemetery, able to move through the grounds one with the wraiths and gloom, nothing more than a whisper among the gravestones.

  As I came over the hill on the south end of the cemetery, my parents’ graves came into view, Auntie Jo now beside them under the sweeping arms of the large red maple tree, their gravestones glistening in the rain.

  Could I really do this?

  Oh, how I wished for a drink. I would have probably drank pure grain alcohol at that point, if I had it on hand. A beer, cough syrup, whiskey, anything. My skin tingled with the craving, the mouth of every pore open wide. I had nothing, though, and I pressed on anyway.

  When I finally reached the graves, as I stood over my father’s resting place, I turned slowly and searched the cemetery grounds for signs of anyone. I saw no one, but that feeling of being watched remained, a prickling at the back of my neck.

  The shovel felt heavy.

  God help me. I plunged it into the dirt and began to dig.

  The ground was softer than I expected.

  2

  Elfrieda Leech sat up in her bed and cocked her head.


  She heard something.

  A creak of the floorboards, the groan of old wood.

  The numbers on the analog alarm clock beside her bed flipped from 3:03 in the morning to 3:04 with a slight mechanical whir and the click of plastic on plastic.

  As she did every night, Elfrieda set the thermostat in the hallway to seventy before going to bed—seventy-two during the daytime, seventy for bed, always—yet her bedroom felt horribly cold. She listened for the steady drone of the furnace but heard nothing.

  An icy breeze slipped over the nape of her neck and her shoulders, and that wasn’t right, either. She never opened the windows.

  Never.

  Another creak. From the hallway this time, she was certain of that.

  Elfrieda kept a loaded .38 in her nightstand drawer. She also had one in her dresser, another taped to the back of the toilet, two more in the living room (the first under the left couch cushion and the second taped to the bottom of the end table) and yet another in the kitchen on the counter in a metal tin labeled flour. Although she had never fired a single shot, each weapon was cleaned and meticulously oiled every other Thursday. The first had been purchased two days after she was attacked by those horrible people in white, the ones who wanted things that did not belong to them. She purchased the others in the years following, after deciding she no longer wanted surprises in her life. First only one, then the second when she realized she couldn’t get to that first gun hidden in the bedroom if she was in the kitchen, then the others when she decided a weapon should always be within arm’s reach, regardless of where she was in her apartment. She nearly bought one for her purse too, but that seemed silly since she no longer left home. The nice man who had sold them to her did so over the phone and even delivered for an additional fee.