The Constant Heart

by Craig Nova

  “They’re going to confirm the time,” she said. “Tomorrow afternoon. They’re going to throw me a note and I’m going to throw them a joint. Jake, you’re never going to forget it.”

  I held a heavy book in my hands, photos, of course, but I wasn’t looking at it. The pile of books I had made to get a good view swayed a little as I leaned forward. Sara stood in the street, on the other side of the traffic, and she flicked a joint up to the window. At the end of the block, a generic four-door car pulled into the drive at the front of the prison, and two men got out, one with short hair and one with a shaved head and a gold ring in his ear, as though that was going to fool anyone.

  The books on the shelves seemed to pass in a blur, in a sort of streak of faded gilt and old cloth as I ran past them, by the table that looked so much like something from a jury room. On the stairs I took the steps three at a time, appearing, I’m sure, as if I were on an invisible skateboard. Then Mrs. Kilmer looked up, oozing a sort of black sourness at the noise and the speed, and as I said “Buzz me out, buzz me out,” she slowly put down her pen, just touched the button, and said, “Now, you know the rules . . . ,” but I had already vaulted the little fence with one hand, a move I had learned in gymnastics on the side horse. The glass door of the library seemed oddly green, like tinted glass, and when I reached the street, the two men, one with that gold earring, were already closing in on her like the cops they were. I said, “Sara, Sara, Sara, look out . . . ” She turned first to me, as though I had some special request to make to those women in the brick building, but by that time one of the cops had his badge out and the other had her by one arm. Then the one with the badge put it away and took out his handcuffs from the back of his pants, from under his jacket, and when he did that his gun was there, too, on his belt in a black holster. Sara kept her eyes on me, and in that moment when the cuffs clicked over one wrist, she went right on staring at me, and when they twisted her arm behind her she said, “Jake, Jake, for god’s sake help me. Can’t you help me?” And, at the same time, the women in the building howled and called names I had never heard before, when I thought I had heard all the swearing there was, the sound from the building so loud as to make the bricks vibrate. The cops tightened the cuffs. The cop with the gold ring and the shaved head gave the finger to the women in the building, his beard so heavy that, although he had shaved just a few hours before, he looked like he was turning blue. “Jake,” said Sara. “For god’s sake. Please.” Then they put her in a car, just like on TV, one of them with a hand on her head to guide her into the backseat. I didn’t think they really did that, but they do. And as they guided her into the backseat, she turned her face to me, her eyes steady, everything about her suggesting that there was one person in the world she could depend on, only one, and we knew who that was. Then, when the car went by, she said, “Jake, Jake, Jake . . . ,” the words trailing away, like something I learned about later, a kind of Doppler effect. Then I leaned against the wall of the library. But just for a minute. Then I got on the bus with its plume of black exhaust, paid my fare, already hearing that buzz from those high-tension lines that came into the kitchen.

  MY FATHER ANSWERED the phone at work, which was in a building that had been an asylum for the criminally insane years ago, but the state built a new place and turned the asylum into the headquarters of the Department of Fish and Game, and then into the headquarters of the Department of Environmental Protection. My father answered the phone from his office, which had once been a place where they had done electroshock therapy.

  “How come you’re home so early?”

  “How do you know I’m home?” I said.

  “The buzzing. What’s going on?”

  “Please, please,” I said. “Come home.”

  He waited as someone said, “Here’s the result of the fish population study, done by electroshock, on the lower part of Furnace Creek . . . Looks good, don’t you think . . . ”

  “Yes,” my father said. “I’ll look at them when I get home.”

  I sat in the kitchen and imagined him getting into the car and starting it, the engine coming alive, and then how he would go up to the main drive and turn, leaving that black building, which still looked like a place where they locked people up for axe murder or aggravated rape, and turn toward home. Maybe he listened to the news. That would be typical of him, I guess, to see if what I was worried about was bigger than just a problem of my own.

  My mother came in, too, with some bags from the supermarket, bright celery, like a pet, sticking out of the top. She had the mail, too, and one of those brochures from the ashram. The same long-bearded guru on the front and the same odor on the paper, like incense and dope.

  My father sat opposite me now. My mother stood behind him.

  “So,” my father said. “She’s been arrested? Is that what you are telling me?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  My father opened the drawer of the kitchen table where we kept the phone book and ran his finger down to the C tab and flipped it open. Crandall was the name of his lawyer.

  “Oh, no,” said my mother. “We don’t have to get involved.”

  “I think we are involved,” said my father.

  “Who’s going to pay for the lawyer?”

  “Us,” said my father.

  “But I had planned to make a contribution to the ashram this month,” said my mother.

  “It’ll have to wait,” said my father.

  “I’m not in the mood to wait,” said my mother. Then she turned to me and said, “Why don’t you get a haircut and stop hanging around with these cheap sluts?”

  My father took the phone from its hook by the icebox and began to dial, and while he did, he gave me the look, which said, just as loud as though he were speaking, “This is a time to be quiet, Jake. I’m telling you.”

  “If you feel that way,” I said to my mother. “Why don’t you go down to the bowling alley for a few games.”

  “Oh,” said my mother. “Oh. And that’s just the kind of thing that little bitch was always hanging around to hear about.”

  My father put the phone down.

  “Jake,” he said. “Two things are going to happen. And they are going to happen right now. First, I’m going to call Crandall. The second is that you are going to apologize to your mother. And you are going to do it as though you mean it. You better mean it.”

  That buzzing came into the kitchen. I tried to imagine what the field had been like when it didn’t have any houses and the sheep on it looked like small clouds on a green sky.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I really am.”

  My mother sat down in the living room with her brochure and looked at the quote of the month, a line that was always included with each month’s promotion. “The infinite mystery is consciousness . . . ”

  SARA WASN’T EIGHTEEN yet, and Crandall represented her in juvenile court. That meant my father and I could only look in the little square windows of the door to the courtroom, since the juvenile court proceedings were confidential. So we looked in those little windows, although Sara turned around once and looked at my father and then me and then bit her lip. Crandall spoke, and through the buzz-mumble made by the door I could make out all of it. According to Crandall, it was just a schoolgirl prank. The other lawyer, a man who looked like he had body odor, read Sara’s record, and then Crandall came back with more buzz-mumble.

  “What can they do to her?” I said.

  “A lot of things,” said my father. “They could try her as an adult.”

  “Oh, no,” I said.

  “We’ll have to wait,” my father said. “Too bad we can’t go in.” The hall had the same scent as the polish they used in the library. “But, Jake, I want to ask you something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If Sara had been able to get you in there, into that prison, would you have gone?”

  More buzz-mumble through the door. It was the other lawyer’s turn.

  “Jake?” my fat
her said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Probably.”

  “To take advantage of those women?”

  “No,” I said. “No.”

  “Why then?” he said.

  “You know,” I said.

  “To prove something?”

  “Yes,” I said. Sara’s hair had grown out now and it was half red and half black.

  “Well, Jake,” he said. “Let’s face it. Sometimes you have to make hard decisions. No one is going to escape that.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m beginning to see that.”

  “Well, all of this is a secret between us,” said my father. “OK? I mean about what you would have done or not done. It’s our business. So we’ll just keep our mouths shut.”

  “No lectures?” I said.

  “Not from me,” said my father.

  The judge didn’t try Sara as an adult, but sent her to a home, a sort of mild prison for young offenders, until she’d turn eighteen. Then, depending on her behavior, they’d decide what to do from there.

  “Well,” said my father. “The first thing is for you to go visit her. I’ll find out what we can give her. I guess Tampax and maybe some pajamas and slippers and a bathrobe. Or maybe just some money. For the dispensary.”

  So she was arrested and then put in a detention center for troubled girls.

  Mrs. Kilmer was ready to buzz me right up the next day. It wasn’t so much that she was cheerful but more like someone who had had a mathematic proof accepted by the Journal of Theoretical Mathematics.

  “You see,” she said to me. “What did I say? That little slut got what she had coming to her. They say she was trying to get into the prison or something like that. What the hell was she doing?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Why, I bet she was trying to sell them dope. The little slut.”

  “Don’t call her that,” I said.

  “Un-huh,” she said. “She had you wrapped around her finger, didn’t she? Why, what was she doing with you up there in the stacks?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “A gentleman,” she said. “My god, we have a gentleman here. Why, you have some standard? Is that it?”

  She said this as though another person, a sort of ghost of the library, stood next to her.

  “He’s sticking up for the little slut,” she said.

  It wasn’t only that Mrs. Kilmer hated Sara, although she did that for sure. She was one of a number of women who don’t hate men so much as they hate life. And what were Sara and I, at that age, seventeen, but life and promise personified? Mrs. Kilmer buzzed me through and I sat with the picture of the Horsehead Nebula that Sara had always liked.

  I bought some Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups at the Russian’s, a six-pack that he probably got at Costco, and for some reason he gave me a break on the price. At the supermarket I got some medium-absorbent Tampax, some toothpaste, mouthwash, and a toothbrush. My father had given me fifty dollars in cash, which I put in the bag with the other stuff and hoped no one would steal it. Then I went to the Staples down the street and got a notebook, a pen, and some glue. I don’t know why I got the glue. It sat in the bag with the other stuff, its little bottle with the flat nipple-like thing at the end, and I took the bus out to the Dukakis Center for Troubled Girls. No barbed wire or anything like that, but a fence around it that looked like one around a new tennis court. Some trees had just been planted and were held up by guy-wires that had little pieces of hose around the places where the wire touched the trees, so as not to hurt them. The bus stopped and I got off its steps, which were black and worn. The bus pulled away, leaving a cloud of exhaust, which had a smell of the future about it: something burning and ominous in a way I couldn’t sum up but which left me uneasy.

  It was a new building, made of cinder blocks and with doors painted cheerful colors, which made you feel like you had ants or grit in your sandwich. The walk to the front door didn’t go in a straight line, but in a long, lazy S, as though to show that the path of life wasn’t always straight, as though any young woman who came to this place didn’t know that. The grass was thick and beautifully mowed, and the surprising thing was that to the touch it seemed real. No AstroTurf. But grass.

  A woman who could easily have been Mrs. Kilmer’s cousin sat at the reception desk. The room itself was painted a pastel green, sort of like the best possible version of money, and as I came in the door, the voices of young women, from the gym behind the reception desk, came into the room. I guessed they were playing volleyball.

  “I’d like to see someone,” I said to the woman at the reception desk, who went right on typing at her computer, a new one with a flat screen, when she said, “Are you a family member or immediate relative or has your visit been approved by the court or a probation officer?”

  “I’d like to see Sara McGill,” I said. The paper of my bag made a sad wrinkling.

  “Are you a family member or immediate relative . . . ”

  “No,” I said.

  Her eyes, dark as ink in a bottle, turned in my direction.

  “Then what are you?”

  “Just a boy. A friend.”

  “Hmpf,” she said. “Forget it. You don’t get to see her unless you are an immediate family member or your visit is approved by a probation . . . ”

  The bag made a crinkling noise as I put it on the counter in front of the computer. Then I took out the notebook and wrote in it, “I love you,” and pushed it back in the bag.

  “Can you give this to her?” I said.

  “Does it contain contraband, metal, knives, weapons, inflammable material, controlled substances, or other items on this list . . . ?”

  She gave me a clean, crisp list.

  “No,” I said.

  “OK,” she said. “I’ll give it to her. No personal messages though.”

  She reached into the bag, took out the notebook, ripped out the page, and gave it back to me.

  The bus didn’t come for an hour, and as I sat on the bench I put the paper on the seat next to me. The idea, when you made one of those origami things that Sara made, was to start with a fold that made a sort of triangle, although you had to fold the bottom of it to get it even. I creased the edge with my thumbnail and folded it again, each step coming without even thinking about it until I was left with a heavy, small triangle, just like the ones she had thrown up to the window of the women’s prison. Then the bus came and I climbed the steps through the cloud of exhaust that swept up from the rattling exhaust pipe.

  THEN , ONE MORNING, as though my father had gotten through a moment of profound confusion, he came into the kitchen and kissed my mother on the cheeck and she seemed so glad to have him do that. She said, “Well, Romeo, what’s gotten into you this morning?” as though it was a joke that he already knew the punch line to. He sat down and whistled, “Oh, what a beautiful mornin’, oh, what a beautiful day . . . ”

  A letter from Sara came a week later, and it said, “You know, they must think I’m dim or something here because the first thing I did was run a pencil back and forth on the first page of the notebook, where I could see an indentation, like someone had written something on the first page but it had been torn out. And they left the little lacy stuff in the spiral part of the notebook when you tear a sheet out. So I got your message. Sweetheart. We should have been more honest. And, get this, Mr. Junior Astronomer, how about unintended consequence? Now that I’m in here, I can see something I didn’t really understand before. You were always curious about that Constant thing. You know, Einstein’s attempt to make something work. Well, how did that come out? Sara.”

  The letter was on stationery that was so thin you could almost see through it. The return address was her name, the address of the place, and a number, too. That number would have made Mrs. Kilmer happy.

  I wrote back and said that I didn’t know about the Constant, not yet. And after a few weeks, she wrote back to say, “Well, Jake, do me a favor. Find out, will you? It would be
nice to have something to depend on.”

  Then I put the next letter I wrote in an envelope with her number on it, too, in addition to her name.

  I worked through the calculus books I stole from the bookstore, and then began with integral equations. I liked calculus because it showed how one thing was related to another.

  Sara’s letter arrived, and my father brought it in and put it on the graph paper where I was working out a problem, and he didn’t say a word, not about the handwriting, which was done so carefully as to seem awkward, since you could see the line she had drawn to make the letters straight and hadn’t been able to erase, although you could see she had tried. And he didn’t say anything about the number.

  “Well, you let me know when you find out what that Constant thing really means,” she wrote. “And get this. Now my mother writes to me.” Some spots were here and there where some moisture had gotten on the paper and had dried. They left a little wrinkle. “But Jake, you’re the only one who ever kept his word to me. I asked for help. You gave it. Or you and your father. So, good luck, Mr. Junior Astronomer. Everyone in this place reads the National Enquirer, Star, Globe, and the National Examiner. I’m going to get out of here and get famous. Do you know how much money there is in being famous? How about a screenplay? I’ve got a killer idea. I’m going to make you proud. Sara.”

  THE MIDDLE FORTIES and early fifties are a hard time for a man, although I didn’t know that at the time. When Sara got arrested, my father was a wildlife biologist, as I’ve said, and he worked for the state. There were things he knew that no one else did, particularly about certain birds, such as ruffed grouse, and fish, too, such as brook trout. He had done a paper on bears and what seemed like their random attacks. A lot of it had to do with garbage that the bears ate and how doing this made them lose their fear of people. He also found that the smoke from burning trash when there was food in it seemed to make them very cranky. The study about random attacks had been published in the U.S. Journal of Wildlife and had been translated into German, which he was pretty proud of. This German magazine came with the pages uncut, and he sat at the kitchen table with a steak knife, slipping it in between the uncut sheets and slicing them with a slow, constant, and careful motion. He had a drink when he did this and took a particular delight in the roughness of the cut pages.