The Unremarkable Heart and Other Stories

  So it was that the day she drove to the prison, not the day that she was diagnosed with end-stage lung cancer, was the worst day of June Connor’s life. Her hands shook. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Standing outside the door to the visitor’s area, she let the fear take hold, and imagined all the horrible things that could make her weak before him.

  The feel of his lips when he kissed her neck. The times she had come home from school, exhausted and angry, and he had cupped his hand to her chin, or pressed his lips to her forehead, and made everything better. The passionate nights, when he would lie behind her, his hand working her into a frenzy. Even after almost twenty years of marriage, after loving him and hating him in equal parts, the thought of his body beside her still brought an unwelcome lust.

  He never closed drawers or cabinet doors all the way. He never put his keys in the same place when he got home from work, so every morning he was late for school because he couldn’t find them. He belched and farted and occasionally spat on the sidewalk. He took his socks off by the bed every night and left them there for June to pick up. There was not an item of laundry he knew how to fold. He had a sort of domestic blindness which prevented him from seeing dust on the furniture, carpets that needed to be vacuumed, dishes that needed to be cleaned.

  He had betrayed her. He had betrayed everything in their lives.

  This last bit was the only reason June was able to walk through the visitor’s door, force herself through the pat-down and metal detector, the intrusive rifling of her purse. The smell of prison was a slap in the face, as was the realization that five thousand grown men were living, shitting, breathing the same air in this miserable place.

  What was she worried about – her nose wrinkling, her hand going to her mouth – that she’d get lung cancer?

  And then Richard had shown up, a shuffling old man, but still much the same. Stooped shoulders, because he was tall but never proud of it. Gray hair. Gray skin. He’d cut himself shaving that morning. Toilet tissue was stuck to the side of his neck. His thick, black-framed glasses reminded her of the ones he’d worn when they’d first met all those years ago outside the school library. He was in two of her classes. He was from a small town. He wanted to teach English. He wanted to make kids feel excited about learning. He wanted to take June to the movies that night and talk about it some more. He wanted to hold her hand and tell her about the future he wanted them to have together.

  There was nothing of that excited eagerness in the old man who’d sat across from her at a metal table.

  ‘I am dying,’ she’d said.

  And he had only nodded, his lips pursed in that self-satisfied way that said he knew everything about June before she even said it.

  June had bristled, but inside, she understood that Richard had always known everything about her. Perhaps not the dropped chicken or the ugly shirt she’d gladly sent to the town dump, but he could see into her soul. He knew that her biggest fear was dying alone. He knew what she needed to hear in order to make this transaction go smoothly. He knew, above all, how to turn these things around so that he made her believe his lies, no matter how paltry the proof, no matter how illogical the reasoning.

  ‘I’m a good man,’ he kept telling her. ‘You know that, June. Despite it all, I am a good man.’

  As if it mattered anymore. As if she had a choice.

  The secret that horrified her most was that deep down, part of her wanted to believe that he was still good. That he cared about her, even though the hatred in his eyes was so clear that she often had to look away. She could snatch the truth from the jaws of a tenth grader at twenty paces, but her own husband, the man with whom she’d shared a bed, created a child, built a life, remained an enigma.

  June turned her head away, staring out the window. The curtains needed to be washed. They slouched around the window like a sullen child. Her hands still remembered the feel of the stiff material as she had sewn the pleats, and her mind conjured the image of the fabric store where she had bought the damask. Grace had been eight or nine then. She was running around the store, in and out of the bolts, screaming, so that June had finally given up, quickly buying a fabric she wasn’t particularly fond of just to get the annoying child out of the store.

  And then came the horrible realization that the annoying child would be in the car with her, would come home with her and continue screaming the entire way. Outside the store, June had sat in the blazing hot car and recalled stories of mothers who’d accidentally left their children unattended in their cars. Their brains boiled. They died horrible, agonizing deaths.

  June had closed her eyes, summoned back the cool interior of the fabric store. She saw herself browsing slowly down the aisles, touching bolts of fabric, ignoring the prices as she selected yards of damask and silk. No child screaming. No clock ticking. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do but please herself.

  And then her eyes popped open as Grace’s foot slammed into the back of the seat. June could barely get the key in the ignition. More shaking as she pressed the buttons on the console, sending cold air swirling into the car, her heart stopping mid-beat as she realized with shame that it was not the act of killing her child that brought her such horror, but the fall-out. What the tragedy would leave behind. Grieving mother. Such a sad story. A cautionary tale. And then, whispered but just as clear, ‘How could she …’

  Every mother must have felt this way at one time or another. June was not alone in that moment of hatred, that sensation of longing for an unattached life that had swept over her as Grace kicked the back of her seat all the way home.

  ‘I could just walk away,’ June had thought. Or had she said the actual words? Had she actually told Grace that she could happily live without her?

  She might have said the words, but, as with Richard, those moments of sheer hatred only came from longer, more intense moments of love. The first time June had held little Grace in her arms. The first time she’d shown her how to thread a needle or make cookies or decorate a cupcake. Grace’s first day of kindergarten. Her first gold star. Her first bad report card.

  Grace.

  June came back to herself in her dank bedroom, the sensation one of almost falling back into her body. She felt a flutter in her chest, a tapping at her heart; the grim reaper’s bony knuckles knocking at the door. She looked past the dingy curtains. The window panes were dirty. The outside world was tainted with grime. Maybe she should let Richard take her outside. She could sit in the garden. She could listen to the birds sing, the squirrels chatter. The last day. The last ray of sunlight on her face. The last feel of the sheets brushing against her legs. The last comb through her hair. The last breath through her lungs. Her last glimpse of Richard, the house they had bought together, the place where they had raised and lost their child. The prison cell he had left her in as he went off to live in one of his own.

  ‘A house on Taylor Drive was broken into late Thursday evening. The residents were not at home. Stolen were a gold necklace, a television set and cash that was kept in the kitchen drawer …’

  She had loved sewing, and, before her life had turned upside down the second time, before the detectives and lawyers intruded, before the jury handed down their judgment, June had thought of sewing as a metaphor for her existence. June was a wife, a mother. She stitched together the seam between her husband and child. She was the force that brought them together. The force that held them in place.

  Or, was she?

  All these years, June had thought she was the needle, piercing two separate pieces, making disparate halves whole, but suddenly, on this last day of her life, she realized she was just the thread. Not even the good part of the thread, but the knot at the end – not leading the way, but anchoring, holding on, watching helplessly as someone else – something else – sewed together the patterns of their lives.

  Why was she stuck with these thoughts? She wanted to remember the good times with Grace: vacations, school trips, book reports they had worked on together, talks they had ha
d late at night. June had told Grace all the things mothers tell their daughters: sit with your legs together. Always be aware of your surroundings. Sex should be saved for someone special. Don’t ever let a man make you think you are anything but good and true. There were so many mistakes that June’s own mother had made. June had parented against her mother, vowing not to make the same mistakes. And she hadn’t. By God, she hadn’t.

  She had made new ones of her own.

  ‘We didn’t raise him to be this way,’ mothers would tell her during parent–teacher conferences, and June would think, ‘Of course you did. What did you think would happen to a boy who was given everything and made to work for nothing?’

  She had secretly blamed them – or perhaps not too secretly. More often than not, there was a yearly complaint filed to the school board by a parent who found her too smug. Too judgmental. June had not realized just how smug until she saw her own smirk reflected back to her at the beginning of a conference about Grace. The teacher’s eyes were hard and disapproving. June had choked back the words – we didn’t raise her this way – and bile had come into her throat.

  What had they raised Grace to be? A princess, if Richard was asked. A perfect princess who loved her father.

  But how much had he really loved her?

  That was the question she needed answered. That was literally – and here she used the word correctly – the last thing that would be on her mind.

  Richard sensed the change in her posture. He stared at her over the paper. ‘What is it?’

  June sent the message from her brain to move her mouth. She felt the sensation itself – the parting of the lips, the skin stuck together at the corners – but no words would form.

  ‘Do you want some water?’

  She nodded because that was all she could do. Richard left the room. She tilted her head back, looking at the closed closet door. There were love letters on the top shelf. The shoebox was old, dusty. After June died, he would go through her things. He would find the letters. Would he think her an idiot for keeping them? Would he think that she had pined for him while he was gone?

  She had pined. She had ached. She had cried and moaned not at the loss of him, but of the idea of him. Of the idea of the two of them together.

  June turned her head away. The pillowcase felt rough against her face. Her hair clung to wet skin. She closed her eyes and thought of Grace’s silky mane of hair. So black it was almost blue. Her alarmingly deep green eyes that could penetrate right into your soul.

  ‘We’re almost out of bendy straws,’ Richard said, holding the glass low so that she could sip from the straw. ‘I’ll have to go to the store later.’

  She swallowed, feeling as if a rock was moving down her throat.

  ‘Do you care if I go before or after lunch?’

  June managed a shake of her head. Breathing, normally an effort, was becoming more difficult. She could hear a different tenor in the whistle of air wheezing through her lips. Her body was growing numb, but not from the morphine. Her feet felt as if they were sliding out of a pair of thick, woolen socks.

  Richard placed the glass on her bedside table. Water trickled from the straw, and he wiped it up before sitting back down with the paper.

  She should’ve written a self-help book for wives who wanted their husbands to help more around the house. ‘Here’s my secret, ladies: twenty-one years in a maximum facility prison!’ Richard cooked and cleaned. He did the laundry. Some days, he would bring in the warm piles of sheets fresh from the dryer and watch television with June while he folded the fitted sheets into perfect hospital corners.

  June closed her eyes again. She had loved folding Grace’s clothes. The tiny shirts. The little skirts with flowers and rows of lace. And then Grace had gotten older, and the frilly pink blouses had been relegated to the back of the closet. What had it been like that first day Grace had come down to breakfast wearing all black? June wanted to ask Richard, because he had been there, too, his nose tucked into the newspaper. As she remembered, he had merely glanced at June and rolled his eyes.

  Meanwhile, her heart was in her throat. The administrator in June was cataloguing Grace the same way she catalogued the black-clad rebels she saw in her office at school: drug addict, whore, probably pregnant within a year. She could already see the paperwork she’d have filled out when she called the young woman to her office and politely forced her withdrawal from classes.

  June had always dismissed these children as damaged, halfway between juvenile delinquents and adult perpetrators. Let the justice system deal with them sooner rather than later. She washed them out of her school the same way she washed dirt from her hands. Secretly, she thought of them as legacy children – not the sort you’d find at Harvard or Yale, but the kind of kids who walked in the footsteps of older drug-addled siblings, imprisoned fathers, alcoholic mothers.

  It was different when the errant child, the bad seed, sprang from your own loins. Every child had tantrums. That was how they learned to find limits. Every child made mistakes. That was how they learned to be better people. How many excuses had popped into June’s mind every time Grace was late for curfew or brought home a bad report? How many times did June overlook Grace’s lies and excuses?

  June’s grandmother was a woman given to axioms about apples and trees. When a child was caught lying or committing a crime, she would always say, ‘Blood will out.’

  Is that what happened to Grace? Had her bad blood finally caught up with her? It was certainly catching up with June now. She thought of the glob of red phlegm that she’d spat into the kitchen sink six months ago. She had ignored the episode, then the next and next, until the pain of breathing was so great that she finally made herself go to the doctor.

  So much of June’s life was marked in her memory by blood. A bloody nose at the age of seven courtesy of her cousin Beau, who’d pushed her too hard down the slide. Standing with her mother at the bathroom sink, age thirteen, learning how to wash out her underpants. The dark stain soaked into the cloth seat of the car when she’d had her first miscarriage. The clotting in the toilet every month that told her she’d failed, yet again, to make a child.

  Then, miraculously, the birth. Grace, bloodied and screaming. Later, there were bumped elbows and skinned knees. And then the final act, blood mingling with water, spilling over the side of the bathtub, turning the rug and tiles crimson. The faucet was still running, a slow trickle like syrup out of the jar. Grace was naked, soaking in cold, red water. Her arms were splayed out in mock crucifixion, her wrists sliced open, exposing sinew and flesh.

  Richard had found her. June was downstairs in her sewing room when she heard him knocking on Grace’s bedroom door to say good night. Grace was upset because her debate team had lost their bid at the regional finals. Debate club was the last bastion of Grace’s old life, the only indication that the black-clad child hunched at the dinner table still belonged to them.

  Richard was one of the debate team coaches, had been with the team since Grace had joined back in middle school. It was the perfect pursuit for two people who loved to argue. He’d been depressed about the loss too, and covered badly with a fake bravado as he knocked first softly, then firmly on her door.

  ‘All right, Gracie-gray. No more feeling sorry for ourselves. We’ll get through this.’ More loud knocking, then the floor creaking as he walked toward the bathroom. Again, the knocking, the calling out. Richard mumbled to himself, tried the bathroom door. June heard the hinges groan open, then heard Richard screaming.

  The sound was at once inhuman and brutally human, a noise that only comes from a mortal wounding. June had been so shocked by the sound that her hand had slipped, the needle digging deep into the meat of her thumb. She hadn’t registered the pain until days later when she was picking out the dress Grace would be buried in. The bruise was dark, almost black, as if the tip of June’s thumb had been marked with an ink pen.

  The razor Grace used was a straight-edged blade, a relic from the sha
ving kit that had belonged to June’s father. She had forgotten all about it until she saw it lying on the floor just below her daughter’s lifeless hand. Grace didn’t leave a suicide note. There were no hidden diaries or journals blaming anyone or explaining why she had chosen this way out.

  The police wanted to know if Grace had been depressed lately. Had she done other drugs? Was she withdrawn? Secretive? There seemed to be a checklist for calling a case a suicide, and the detectives asked only the questions that helped them tick off the boxes. June recognized the complacency in their stance, the tiredness in their eyes. She often saw it in the mirror when she got home from school. Another troubled teenager. Another problem to be dealt with. They wanted to stamp the case solved and file it away so that they could move onto the next one.

  Washing dirt off their hands.

  June didn’t want to move on. She couldn’t move on. She hounded Danielle about the older boy until Martha, the girl’s mother, firmly told June to leave her alone. June would not be so easily deterred. She called Grace’s other friends into her office, demanding they tell her every detail about her daughter’s life. She turned into a tyrant, firing off warning shots at anyone who dared resist.

  She studied her daughter’s death the way she had studied for her degrees, so that by the end of it all, June could’ve written a dissertation on Grace’s suicide. She knew the left wrist was cut first, that there were two hesitation marks before the blade had gone in. She knew that the cut to the right wrist was more shallow, that the blade had nicked the ulnar nerve, causing the fingers of the hand to curl. She knew from the autopsy report that her daughter’s right femur still showed a dark line of fracture where she’d fallen off the monkey bars ten years before. Her liver was of normal size and texture. The formation of her sagittal sutures was consistent with the stated age of fifteen. There were two hundred fifty cc’s of urine in her bladder and her stomach contents were consistent with ingesting popcorn, which June could still smell wafting from the kitchen when she ran upstairs to find her daughter.