Give Me Your Heart

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Wanting the intruders to hear. Twenty minutes. No more.

  Wanting them to hear. My life. My real life. To which you have no access.

  It was then that they told her.

  Why they'd come to speak with her. Why her daughter had called the Upper Darby PD. What claims her daughter was making that involved her and her husband in the smothering death of the unidentified child found in Rock Basin Park.

  Stunned, Lydia looked from one detective to the other. Their names were lost to her now. Their faces were as blurred as faces reflected in water.

  Lydia began to stammer. "I don't understand—my daughter has accused my husband and me—"

  Smothering? Murder? A baby sister? The child in the tightly swaddled blanket, the soiled jumper said to be decorated with a row of pink bunnies?

  "...the murder? That murder? The little girl? In Rock Basin Park? My daughter Alva has..."

  Now the net was tightening around her, she could not breathe. A band tightening around her forehead. She was stammering, trying to speak. To deny, to explain. My daughter is sick. My daughter has blamed me. I don't know why. But she could not explain. She could not speak. One of the detectives caught her arm—she'd begun to faint. The other went quickly to bring her a glass of ice water.

  Ice water! At such a time, the detective had brought her ice water. Seeing that Lydia had, in her compact kitchen, a refrigerator that dispensed ice cubes.

  "I ... don't believe this. Can't..."

  She would not recall afterward what they'd said. What they'd said next. She had assured them she was fine, she would not faint. She could hear their voices, at a distance. She could see them as if through the wrong end of a telescope. Her vision was bizarrely narrowed, edged in black. For part of her brain, its visual field, had darkened. My daughter hates me. Blames me. But ... I am blameless.

  Her voice was begging. Her voice was near inaudible.

  "Please, I want to speak with her. My daughter. Please..."

  But she could not speak with her daughter, for her daughter did not wish to speak with her. So it was explained to Mrs. Ulrich another time.

  "...a misunderstanding! My daughter isn't well. If you've spoken with her, you must know. Alva has a history of..."

  But she could not accuse her daughter, could she?

  These men on a mission. Regarding her steely-eyed, assessing.

  A sixty-one-year-old woman. A professional woman. Accused of having smothered a child thirty years before. A child who'd possibly been her own daughter. Unless an adopted daughter. Two-year-old younger sister of the seven-year-old daughter. Unless the seven-year-old was also adopted. Unless Mrs. Ulrich had not herself smothered the child but had aided and abetted Hans Ulrich. Conspired with Hans Ulrich to commit the murder. Thirty years ago.

  "Why? Why now? Why on earth now? I've just sent her a check, Alva cashed. For five hundred dollars. I have the canceled check, it's one of many. I can show you. I've saved all the checks. Thousands of dollars. Why would she turn on me, her mother? Why now..."

  She was terrified to think, These are men on a mission. Mrs. Ulrich is their prey.

  Pink Baby Bunny was a high-profile cold case. Suddenly you are hearing of "cold cases" revived and solved everywhere in America. As crime rates decline. As old unsolved cases are reactivated. Older detectives, some of them coming back from retirement, are reactivated. Reinspired. Mrs. Ulrich was in their gun sights.

  "If I could just talk with Alva, if you could arrange for me to talk with her, please. In person..."

  "Your daughter doesn't want to talk with you, Mrs. Ulrich. We've explained."

  "But..."

  Men with a mission. Pitiless, professional. You could see.

  Or did they pity her? The trembling sixty-one-year-old woman whose life was shattering around her.

  Yet she was in their gun sights, she was their prey. Mrs. Ulrich. A trophy.

  They had driven in pursuit of her this morning from Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, to Bethesda, Maryland. As they'd flown, last week, to Carbondale, Illinois. To interview her accuser. To tape the accuser's statement.

  Her life shattered. Her professional life destroyed. Now she would retire: forced to retire. Even if not arrested, not formally accused. Her photograph in the papers, on TV. Lydia Ulrich. Director of. Questioned by police. Smothering murder, 1974. Two-year-old victim. Body left in park.

  Was she arrested? She was not arrested. Not yet.

  Should she call a lawyer? That was up to Mrs. Ulrich.

  Still her vision was radically diminished: a tunnel rimmed with black. The detectives' blurred faces at the end of the tunnel. If one day you open your eyes and can't see one side of the room, it's a brain tumor you have. Tunnel vision, it's panic.

  Panic that your life is being taken from you. Tattered and flapping like flags in the wind.

  Body left in park. Believed younger daughter of. Smothered.

  The detectives were saying that they would play the tape of her daughter's statement, recorded the previous week in Carbondale. If Mrs. Ulrich wished.

  Yes. No. She could not bear it.

  She would call a lawyer, she would save herself. As Hans would have fought to save himself.

  Her life passing before her eyes, something tattered and torn flapping in the wind. Pitiful.

  The detectives were regarding her with pity. Suspicion, but also pity. Perhaps they would be kind. Perhaps they did not want to destroy her. In their mission to solve the notorious cold case, in their zeal for TV celebrity, they would not want to destroy an innocent sixty-one-year-old woman.

  Not arrested. Not arrested. Not yet!

  Her heartbeat was rapid but weak. It could not pump enough blood to her brain.

  If Hans were here! It was Hans they sought. The smotherer.

  If Hans were here, as soon as the detectives entered the apartment, even as he was shaking their hands, he would allow them to know This is my home; I am the authority here.

  As a mother she'd taken the sorrow of her life and transformed it into love for her daughter. By an act of pure will she'd transformed it. Evidently it hadn't been enough.

  She would explain. She could explain.

  There were no words. Language was being taken from her.

  The infant greedily sucking at her breast. Tugging at the raw nipple. Oh! it had hurt, as if the infant girl had teeth. But how lovely, the most sensual experience of Lydia's life.

  A woman's secret, erotic life. A mother's life.

  Hans had not known. Hans would have been astonished and revulsed if he'd known. But Hans had not known.

  "...the tape of your daughter's statement, Mrs. Ulrich? Would you like to hear?"

  She could not accuse her daughter, could she? Her daughter she loved; she could not.

  Could not plead, She is cruel, she hates me. Blames me, I don't know why. My only child. She is evil.

  The history of her nightmares. The history of her fantasizing. Delusions, hallucinations. Accusing others. Blaming others. Sexual molestations, rape. Threats against her life. Stalking. Plundering of her soul.

  She wasn't sure she could bear it, hearing her daughter's voice. The voice she hadn't heard in years. Gripping her daughter's thin clammy-cold hand in the hospital room in East Lansing. Vowing to save her. Not to abandon her, as Hans had done. Trade my life for yours if I could.

  History of nightmares. How was it the mother's fault?

  History of accusations. Causing wreckage in lives, then moving on. How was it the mother's fault?

  Not under arrest. Her name would not (yet) be released to any news media. Certainly she might call an attorney. Cooperation with the investigation was advised.

  Witnesses would be interviewed. Records and documents would be checked. Mrs. Ulrich might provide names. Mrs. Ulrich might take a polygraph if she wished. The body of Pink Bunny Baby would very likely be exhumed for DNA analysis.

  A match to Mrs. Ulrich?

  Unless the child had been adopted.

/>   Unless the child had been abducted.

  "...never spoke of this, Mrs. Ulrich? That you can recall?"

  "Spoke of...?"

  "Having seen your husband smothering a child. Telling your daughter it was only a doll."

  "Of course not."

  "This is entirely new to you."

  "Yes! It is."

  Wanting to scream at him. The enemy.

  Lydia was speaking more calmly now. A sob in her voice.

  She would not cry. Swiping at her eyes, which stung as if she'd been staring into a blinding sun.

  They would be impressed with Lydia's integrity. Her honesty.

  She'd taken a seat on the ottoman. Backless, because her posture was so impressive. She would not cry.

  "She began taking drugs in high school, I think. She was fourteen, wouldn't come downstairs to dinner one evening when Hans was home. He called her, insisted that she come eat with us. There was a wild stomping on the stairs—Alva had wound transparent tape around her head, over her face, she'd made a grotesque mask of her own face, distorted, hellish, she was laughing and flinging herself around as if she wanted to hurt herself. Hans and I were terrified ... She'd taken methamphetamine—we'd hardly known such a drug existed. Hans couldn't deal with it. I had to calm Alva, try to calm her—her skin was burning. I managed to unwind and cut the horrible tape away from her head, her eyebrows and eyelashes, clumps of hair, were pulled out—what a nightmare! Hans, the most agonistic of men, who hadn't a shred of belief in anything supernatural, said of our daughter, 'A devil gets into her,' sometimes 'A devil is in her.' But he never hurt her. Except once, that time in the park. The lilac bushes were in bloom—it should have been a beautiful time. Stands of lilac growing wild. That rich smothering smell, there's a kind of madness in it. Hans hadn't meant to hurt her. She was a torment to us. 'A devil, a devil is in her.' But after that he rarely touched her, even to hug her, kiss her. He was frightened, I think. Of what he might do to her. I was the one who loved her. I've never given up."

  Yes, she would be calling an attorney. This very day.

  Yes, she would cooperate with their investigation, for she had no reason not to cooperate. Her daughter's charges were absurd. Her daughter was mentally unstable. There was a medical history, there were medical records.

  The good that came of this would be, Alva would receive medical treatment. In Carbondale, or here in Bethesda. Lydia would make arrangements.

  Would not cry. Would not be destroyed.

  Yes, she would hear the tape of her daughter's accusations. She was prepared for the shock of it. She believed.

  Then, as one of the detectives moved to change the cassettes, Lydia asked him to wait a minute. She would be right back.

  Rising shakily to her feet. One of the detectives helped her.

  How brittle her bones felt! For the first time, she was feeling her age.

  In her bathroom Lydia ran cold water from a faucet, distracted by the stricken face in the mirror. Perhaps she did look sixty-one. Perhaps the detectives had not been surprised. The capacity to recognize the self is located in the left brain hemisphere, but in Lydia, so wounded, the capacity seemed to be damaged. Why is that woman so old? I remember her young.

  She could not bear it, the woman's eyes.

  In the medicine cabinet were numerous little bottles of pills. Old prescriptions she'd never thrown away. You never know when you might need sleeping pills, painkillers. She'd amassed a considerable quantity.

  More than enough. If necessary.

  Running water, Lydia opened the bathroom door stealthily.

  She'd hoped that in the mirror, which would pick up a reflecting surface in the dining room, she could see slantwise into the living room, where the detectives were. By now one was probably on his feet, stretching. Perhaps both. In lowered tones they would be speaking of their suspect. The mask-faces were animated now. They were alive now, scenting their prey. Their teeth were bared in exhilaration. Yet they were uncertain of the woman; she was nothing like they'd expected. The daughter's story was so far-fetched. Much of it was unverifiable. Much of it was common knowledge, widely reported in the media. The defense attorney would rebut their case. There was the daughter's medical history; they would investigate.

  But Lydia couldn't see into the living room. The glass door of a breakfront reflected only a doorway, a wall.

  Lydia was thinking of the famous experiment in childhood truth-telling and deception. Pandora's box, some called it. Several children of about the age of three were left alone together in a room, emphatically instructed not to look into a shut box. With a hidden camera, the children were videotaped. Nearly 90 percent of the children looked into the box, but when questioned, fewer than 33 percent confessed to having looked. When five-year-olds were tested, nearly 100 percent disobeyed and tried, often very convincingly, to deceive. Demonstrating that as children mature, their capacity for deception increases.

  Curious, Hans had wanted to test Alva at age two. Her disobeying, and her insistence upon her innocence afterward, had been so charming, Hans had only laughed. His beautiful little girl, so precocious! In a variant of the test, Hans offered a chocolate treat to Alva if she "really, really" told the truth. Some children, stricken with doubt, would have demurred at this. Not Alva.

  Lydia had laughed with Hans, though saddened by the child's precocious duplicity. And, somehow, the innocence of it. But Hans had been charmed. In Homo sapiens the talent for deception is our strongest evolutionary advantage.

  No trust. Preemptive war. The only wisdom.

  Summoning her strength to walk back into the living room, even to smile at her tormentors, Lydia saw that, as she'd envisioned, one of the detectives was strolling about, admiring the view from her windows. "Twelfth floor? Must be nice." Gently Lydia corrected him: "Tenth floor."

  They asked Lydia if she was prepared to hear her daughter's statement and Lydia said yes.

  Tetanus

  Diaz, César. Like an upright bat, quivering wings folded over to hide its wizened face, the boy was sitting hunched over the table beneath glaring fluorescent lights, shaved head bowed, rocking back and forth and humming frantically to himself. Arresting officers had banged him a little, torn his filthy T-shirt at the collar, bloodied his nose and upper lip. His eyes, wetly glassy, frightened and furtive, lurched in their sockets. He was breathing hard, panting. He'd been crying. He'd sweated through his T-shirt, which was several sizes too large for his scrawny body. He was talking to himself now, whispering and laughing. Why was he laughing? Something seemed to be funny. Spittle shone at the boy's red fleshy lips, and the nostrils of his broad stubby nose were edged with bloody mucus. He took no notice of the door to the windowless room opening, a brief conversation between two individuals, adults, male, Caucasian, figures of authority, of no more apparent interest to him than the tabletop before him. He was eleven years old; he'd been taken into Trenton police custody on a complaint by his mother for threatening her and his younger brother with a fork.

  "César? Hello. My name is..."

  Zwilich spoke with practiced warmth, calm. Pulling out a chair at the counseling table, at his usual place: back to the door. Outside were Mercer County guards. Mercer County Family Services shared cramped quarters with the Mercer County Department of Parole and Probation and was adjacent to the Mercer County Youth Detention Center, which was an aggressively ugly three-story building made of a stony gray material that looked as if it had been pissed on over a period of many years, in jagged, whimsical streaks. You came away thinking that these walls were covered in graffiti, though they were not.

  Early evening, a Friday in late June. Parole and Probation had shut for the weekend, but Family Services was open for business, and busy.

  One of those days that, beginning early, swerve and rumble forward through the hours with the numbing, slightly jeering repetition of an endless stream of freight cars. Even as Zwilich's life was falling into pieces he was speaking in his friendly-seeming and upbeat
voice to Diaz, César, whose latest arrest sheet lay before him on the table, beside a folder stamped "Mercer County Family Services: Confidential."

  "...and I'm here just to ask you a few questions, César. You've been in counseling with Family Services before, I think. This time we need to clear up some problems before you can go home. Can you hear me?"

  The batlike boy sneered, smirked. You had to think that he was very frightened, yet his manner was hostile, insolent. He was rocking from side to side, gripping his scraped elbows. He was muttering to himself and laughing, and Zwilich, an adult male in his mid-thirties, old enough to be César Diaz's father and wishing to project a fatherly or older-brotherly manner, wishing to convey to César Diaz that he sympathized with him, respected him, he was on his side and not on the side of the enemy, had no doubt that if he could hear the obscene words the boy was muttering, a hot flash would color Zwilich's cheeks above his patch of whiskers and his heart would kick in revulsion for the boy, but luckily Zwilich couldn't hear.

  He would tell Sofia, It's been one of those days.

  Which? Which days?

  A day of temptation. Terrible temptations.

  And did you succumb?

  Goddamn, he was not going to succumb. He'd had a few drinks at late lunch to buoy his spirits, and the prospect of a few drinks this evening, alone or with another, somewhere improvised, filled him now with a gassy sort of elation, like a partly deflated balloon someone has decided, out of whimsy or pity, to inflate.

  Zwilich spoke. Kindly, with patience. Such evil in him, his secret little cesspool glittering deep inside the well of his soul; it was his task, a sacred task, to keep the lid on. Yet the boy resisted. Staring, stubborn and unyielding, at a bloody smear on the table before him, where he'd wiped the edge of his hand after having wiped a skein of bloody mucus from his nose. Zwilich was thinking that César Diaz, exposed in pitiless fluorescent lighting, might have been drawn, with finicky, maniacal exactitude, by Dürer or Goya. No mere photograph could capture his essence. His forehead was low and furrowed in an adult expression of anguish indistinguishable from rage. His bony boy's head had been shaved, as if to expose its vulnerability, breakable layers of skull bone upon which a scalp, reddened with rashes and bumps, seemed to have been fitted tight as the skin of a drum. A very ugly head, an aborigine head, crudely sculpted in stone and unearthed from the soil of centuries. The arresting officers had pegged César Diaz as possibly gang-affiliated, but Zwilich thought that wasn't likely; the kid was too young and too scrawny—no gang would want him for a few years. The shaved head was more likely Mrs. Diaz's precaution against lice.