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Karin Slaughter – Cold, Cold Heart
Also by Karin Slaughter
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Cold, Cold Heart
Karin Slaughter
COLD, COLD HEART
EVEN NOW, SHE could still feel the ice in her hand, a stinging, biting cold that dug into her skin like a set of sharp teeth. Had the flesh of her palm been that hot or the California climate so scorching that what had been frozen moments before had reverted so quickly to its original form? Standing outside his home, she had been shocked to feel the tears of moisture dripping down her wrist, pooling at her feet.
Jon had been dead for almost two years now. She had known him much longer than that, twenty-four years to be exact – back when he spelled John properly, with an ‘h’, and would never have dreamed of keeping his curly black hair long, his beard on the verge of hermitous proportions. They had met at a young adult Sunday school class, then become lovers, then man and wife. They had taught high school chemistry and biology, respectively, for several years. They had a son, a beautiful, healthy son named Zachary after John’s grandfather. Life was perfect, but then things had happened, things she tried not to think about, and the upshot was that in the end, the good life had called, and Pam had not been invited.
Her hair was too long for a woman her age. Pam knew this, but still could not bring herself to cut it. The slap of the braid against her back was like a reassurance that she was still a person, could still be noticed if only for the faux pas of being a fifty-two-year-old school teacher who kept her salt and pepper hair down to her waist. While women her age were getting pixie cuts and joining yoga classes, Pam had rebelled. For the first time in her life, she let her weight go. God, what a relief to eat dessert whenever she damn well wanted to. And buttered bread. And whole milk. How had she lived so long drinking that preposterously translucent crap they labeled skim milk? The simple act of satisfying these desires was more rewarding than any emotional joy that could be had from buttoning a pair of size six pants around your waist.
Her waist.
She made herself remember the good things and not the bad, the first few years instead of the last seventeen. The way John used to trace his hand along the cinch of her waist – rough hands, because he liked to garden then. The bristle of his whiskers as his lips brushed her neck, the gentle way he would move the braid over her shoulder so he could kiss his way down her spine.
Wending her way through various backwater towns as for the third – and hopefully last – time in her life she made her way toward the western part of the country, she forced her mind on the good memories. She thought of his lips, his touch, the way he made love to her. Through Alabama, she thought of his strong, muscular legs. Mississippi and Louisiana brought to mind the copious sweating when they first joined as man and wife. Arkansas, the perfect curve of his penis, the way it felt inside of her when she clenched him, her lips parting as she cried out. Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico … these were not states on a map, but states of mind for Pam. As she drove across the Arizona line, she found herself suspended between the road and the heavens, and the only thing keeping her grounded was her hands wrapped around the leather steering wheel.
The car.
All she had left of him now was the car.
Two years ago, he had called late in the evening – not late for him, but the three hour time difference put the ringing of the phone well into that block of time when a piercing ring caused nothing but panic. She foolishly thought of Zack, then the second ring brought more reason and she thought of her father, a physically frail man who refused to live in a nursing home despite the fact that he could no longer do much of anything but sit in his recliner all day watching the History Channel.
‘Papa?’ she had cried, grabbing up the phone on the third ring. A fire. A fall down the stairs. A broken hip. Her heart was in her throat. She had read that phrase in so many books, but not understood until now that it was physically possible. She felt a pounding below her trachea; her throat was full from the pressure of her beating heart moving upward, trying to force its way out.
‘It’s me.’
‘John?’ Even as she said his name, she imagined it spelled correctly, the ‘h’ flashing like a neon sign outside a strip club.
In keeping with his new California lifestyle, he had said it so matter-of-factly, as if he was discussing the weather: ‘I’m dying.’
She’d been glib, said something she had watched him say so many times on Oprah or Dr Phil: ‘We’re all dying. That’s why we need to make the best of our lives now.’
Such an easy thing for him to say. Independently wealthy people didn’t tend to have as negative an outlook on life as those who had to get up at five every morning to get dressed so they could go out and teach drooling teenagers the periodic table.
‘I’m serious,’ he had said. ‘It’s cancer.’
Her heart was no longer in her throat, but there was something stuck there that made speaking difficult. She managed, ‘What about Cindy?’ The petite, dark haired Pilates instructor who had been living with him for the last year.
‘I want you to be there when it happens,’ he’d said. ‘I want that healing.’
‘Come to Georgia, then.’
‘I can’t fly. You’ll have to come to California.’
Pam still cursed that day when they had first flown to California for a teacher’s conference. It had been a way to get out of Atlanta; an exciting adventure, their first trip out west. Their grief counselor had suggested they do something ‘fun’ to take their minds off what had happened and John had eagerly suggested the conference. Pam had stared out the window most of the flight, shocked at the vast and varied terrain beneath them. Dense forests with dirt roads cutting into them like lashes from a switch gave way to barren desert and nothingness. How could people live in such desolate places, she had wondered. How could people survive with nothing but cacti and tumbleweed out their windows?
‘Look,’ John had said, pointing out the oval plane window to the patch of red dirt that represented the state of Arizona. ‘That’s where Ted Williams is.’
Ted Williams, the baseball player whose decapitated head had been cryogenically frozen by his nutty children.
‘Liquid nitrogen,’ John had explained. ‘His body’s floating in a vat next to it.’
Pam looked away from the window for the first time. She allowed herself a quick glance at John, his steely blue eyes, his long eyelashes that were more like a woman’s. She loved him profoundly, but could not see her way across the chasm that had opened up between them. She wanted to touch his hand, to revel in the way his voice changed, got deeper, when he was teaching someone something new.
Instead, she asked, ‘Why did they have to decapitate him?’
John had shrugged, but she saw the corner of his mouth twitch into a smile.
‘You know,’ he began. ‘The only other organ in the body with similar chemistry and composition to the brain is the intestines.’
Pam should have laughed. She should have made some silly comment about how we all really are shit-for-brains, but she had simply said, ‘I know,’ and let the low hum of the plane’s engines fill her ears as they flew into the unknown.
Zachary had never been on a plane. His life had revolved around the Atlanta suburb of Decatur where Pam and John had lived all of his life. This was where he played baseball, went to the mall and, judging by the empty condom packets Pam found in his pockets when she washed his jeans, managed to screw every girl in his class.
At sixteen, he had his father’s height, his mother’s sarcasm and his grandfather’s addiction. The autopsy report revealed an alcohol level nearly six times the legal limit. The coroner had seemed
to think it would comfort Pam to know that Zach had been so intoxicated that he had probably been unaware of any pain as his car had skidded off the road, tumbled down a ravine and wrapped itself around a tree.
‘I’m dying, Pam,’ John had said on the phone. ‘Please. I want you here with me.’
Brain cancer. No pain because there aren’t any nerves in the brain. She wanted to make a joke, to remind him of what he had said about Ted Williams, the decapitated popsicle, but John had brought it up himself. ‘Remember when we first flew out to California?’ As if she had ever been again after that conference. She was lucky if she could afford a vacation to Florida during the summer, and then it had to be with a couple of other teachers so she could afford to stay somewhere nicer than the roach motel eight miles from the beach.
‘I want to be put into stasis,’ he’d told her. ‘I want to be cryogenically frozen so that I can be reanimated one day.’
She had laughed so hard that her stomach had literally clenched. The tears in her eyes were from the pain, she had told herself, not from any sense of losing him.
Yet, she had not thrown away the ticket when it came, had not told him to go fuck himself with his first class plane ride and his fucking millions the way she had so many times before.
Millions. It had to be several millions by now. Biological Healing was still on several bestseller lists and she knew that it had been translated into at least thirty different languages. At this very moment, people in Ethiopia were probably reading about John’s theory of using the ‘mind-body connection’ to overcome loss and suffering. The funny thing was, Pam was the one with the doctorate in biology. John was just a high school science teacher with a message and he had through some fluke taken his message to the world.
‘Grief,’ John told an agreeable Larry King, ‘knows no one particular language.’
He had written a book about losing Zack, then losing his wife. Pam thought that’s what she resented most, being lumped in with Zack as if she had died, too. She hadn’t had that luxury, had she? She had been left behind to go to the morgue so that she could identify her son’s body because John could not. She had sorted through Zack’s address book to find his friends from soccer camp and baseball camp and band camp so that they could be notified. She had been the one to go to the mailbox and find the letters, a hundred at least, from Boy Scouts and pen pals that Zack had accumulated throughout his sixteen years of life. Because John had been so incapacitated by grief, it had been Pam who had chosen the suit for Zack’s eternal rest, then bought the new one when the funeral director kindly explained that it was several sizes too small.
The suit had been two years old. She had bought it when Zack was fourteen so that he could wear it to his cousin’s wedding. Fourteen to sixteen was a lifetime. In two years, he had grown from a boy to a man and as she had taken the dark blue suit and tie out of the cleaner’s bag where it had hung in the closet for two years, Pam had not even considered the possibility that Zack had outgrown it. The running jokes about his eating them out of house and home, the fact that he needed new shoes every two months because his feet kept getting larger, had been lost to her, and standing in his room, smelling his sweaty, teenage smell that clung to his sheets and thickened the air, she had almost smiled at the thought of the old suit, taken it off the closet rod with some relief because that was one less decision out of the way.
John had to be sedated so that he could go to the funeral. He had leaned against her as if she was a rock, and because of this, Pam had made herself rock-like. When her mother had taken her hand, squeezed it to offer support, Pam had imagined herself as a block of granite. When a girl who had been in love with Zack – one of many, it turned out – had collapsed, sobbing, against Pam, she conjured in her mind several slabs of marble, cold, glistening marble, and built a fortress around herself so that she would not fall down to the ground, weeping for her lost child.
Pam had been the strong one, the one everyone turned to. She steeled herself against any emotions, knowing if she allowed them to come, she would be overwhelmed, stoned to death by the guilt and grief and anger that would rain down.
‘Write about it,’ she had told John, begged him, because she could not listen to his anguish anymore without unleashing her own. ‘Write it in your journal.’
He had always kept notebooks, and just about every day he jotted down his thoughts like a little girl keeping a diary. At first, she had thought this habit strange for a man but later came to accept it as just another one of his endearing eccentricities, like his fear of escalators and belief that eating raw cookie dough would cause intestinal worms. When it started, she was glad when he stayed in his office writing all night instead of coming to bed, where he invariably cried himself to sleep, tossing and turning from nightmares, calling out Zack’s name. She had ignored these terrible nights as long as she could, wished them away because to acknowledge them would be to acknowledge the loss, and she could not bring herself to do that, could not admit that they had lost their precious boy.
Finally, in the heat of an argument, she had mentioned John’s fitful nights and he had turned on her like an animal, accused her of being cold, of not dealing with her emotions.
There was a switch.
John was always the rational one, Pam the emotional one. He had always used logic to defeat her and invariably won every argument because he didn’t let his feelings get the best of him. Even nine years ago when Pam had found out that he was cheating on her with one of the front office secretaries from school, he had out-logicked her.
‘You’re not going to leave me, Pam,’ he had told her, arrogance seeping from every pore. ‘You don’t have enough money to raise Zack on your own, and you won’t be able to teach at the same school as me because no one likes you there. They’ll all be on my side.’
Sobering to hear from the man you love, not least of all since every word he said was true.
Through almost twenty years of marriage, he had consistently been the more reasonable one, the one who said, ‘let’s just wait and see’ when she was certain that a raspy cough from Zack’s room in the middle of the night was lung cancer or that the rolling papers that fell out of his notebook one day in the kitchen meant he was a meth freak.
‘Let’s wait and see,’ John had said when she told him she thought Zack had taken some wine from the refrigerator.
‘Boys will be boys,’ John had said when she found an empty bottle of vodka in the back of Zack’s closet. The cliché had made her want to scratch out his eyes but she had listened to him, made herself calm down because the irritated way John glanced at her, the quick shrug of his shoulders, made her feel like a hysterical mother instead of simply a concerned parent. At school, they both dealt with overreacting parents on a daily basis: mothers who screamed at the top of their lungs that grades must be changed or they would go to the school board, fathers who tried to bully teachers into not failing their sons by threatening to sue.
The phone call had come at nine o’clock on a Friday evening – not one in the morning, not a panicked, wake-up-to-catastrophe time of night. Zack had left home earlier with Casey and some friends, and John and Pam were watching a movie. The Royal Tenenbaums. Pam was making herself watch the entire movie – not because she enjoyed it that much but because she knew Zack did, and she wanted to talk to him about it in the morning. He was at that point in his teenage life where any sort of discussion with his mother was pained, and she sought out things – literally, things: movies, football games, funny articles in the paper – that they could comfortably talk about.
‘I’ll get it.’ John jumped for the phone – he always liked to answer it – as Pam fumbled with the remote control to mute the television.
‘Yes, it is,’” John had said, his tone of voice low, slightly annoyed. A telemarketer, she thought, then John’s face had turned white. What a silly phrase, Pam had thought as she sat on the couch, her feet tucked underneath her, to say that someone’s face turned white – but it
had. She sat there watching it happen, a line of color draining down his neck like a sink being suddenly unplugged until all the red was gone from John’s usually ruddy skin.
Then, he had whispered, ‘Yes, we have a son.’
We have a son. The first words John had said to her when she had come out of recovery. The birth had been difficult, and after sixteen hours of labor, the doctor had decided to do a Caesarian. Pam’s last memory had been the sweet relief of the pain being taken away by the drugs (she would have freebased heroin by then), and John’s crouching trot beside the gurney as they rolled her into the OR, tears in his eyes as he whispered, ‘I love you.’
He whispered again into the phone. ‘We’ll be right there.’
Only he wasn’t right there. It was the ghost of John who had sat in the passenger seat of the car as she drove to the county hospital. It was his ghost who had floated through the front doors, waited for the elevator to come. Pam had taken his hand, shocked at how cold it was, the skin clammy, his calloused fingers like ice.
Zack, she thought. This is how Zack’s hand will feel.
John had stood frozen outside the morgue. ‘I can’t do it,’ he had told her. ‘I can’t see him like that.’
Pam had, though. She had looked at her son, stroked back his thick, black hair and kissed his forehead even though it was caked with dried blood. His eyes were slit open, his lips slightly parted. A long gash flayed open the line of his jaw. She took his hand and kissed his face, his beautiful face, then signed the papers and took John home.
Pam’s second trip to California had been very different from the first one. First class was a whole new world to her, from the hot towel to wipe her face to the warmed nuts to the endless supply of alcoholic beverages. A well-dressed man stood in baggage claim, her name on the placard he held in front of him. The black Town Car was spotless, a bottle of cold water waiting for her as she climbed into the back seat.
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