Jar of Hearts

  Her father only had two girlfriends after his wife died, the first while Geo was in grade school and the second while she was in high school. Both women were very nice, but neither relationship lasted long. A few months each, if that.

  “You only get one heart,” Walt said to his daughter after the second one ended. He seemed sad, but not regretful. “I gave mine to your mother the day I met her. And she still has it.”

  For a long time Geo believed that was true. One heart, one chance at love. It had certainly felt that way with Calvin. At sixteen, she couldn’t imagine loving anyone the way she loved Calvin James—and the truth was, she never did. It had been different with Andrew, after all. Less passionate but more secure. More mature but less spontaneous. Less exciting but completely fucking safe. As a healthy relationship probably should be.

  According to her father, Andrew was married now, to a sales rep who used to work at Shipp. They had twin girls the year before. Geo didn’t blame him for moving on with his life. She’d have done the same.

  She hears the pressure washer turn on outside. Washing the garage doors is the last thing her dad needs today. Sighing, she heads upstairs.

  The last time she lived in this house, she had just turned eighteen. She had packed what she could for college, first staying in the dorms at Puget Sound State, and then renting a house a few minutes off campus with four other girls for her remaining three years. She could have lived at home and commuted to PSSU, but she knew she needed to get away. Once she did, she never moved back.

  And it wasn’t because her dad was difficult to live with. Quite the opposite. Growing up, she never had a curfew. There were never set rules to follow. She never even had a list of chores, because it was never necessary. Between the two of them, they managed to fill the holes her mother left when she died. Geo did the dishes because her dad did the cooking. She cleaned the inside of the house because he took care of the yard and maintenance. She rarely stayed out late, because Walt could never fall asleep until she was home and she didn’t want him to go to work tired. Because she was offered so much freedom, she hardly ever felt the need to take it. Funny how that worked.

  She debates going into her old bedroom first, but the idea of a bubble bath is just too tempting. Her bathroom looks exactly the same, and Geo smiles in anticipation of her first hot soak in years. She plugs the bathtub drain and turns on the faucet. She painted the walls a light purple when she was fifteen, and after five years of prison gray, the color is a welcome sight. Or had she been sixteen? She thinks for a moment. It was before she met Calvin, so that meant she’d just turned sixteen.

  Funny how she still does that. All the memories of her life are neatly divided into sections. Before Calvin. After Calvin. Before prison. And now, after prison.

  As the bathtub fills, she peels off her clothes and takes a look at herself in the mirror. She’s aged. It’s jarring. Not that she looks older than her thirty-five years—she doesn’t. If anything, she can pass for thirty. But she’s much older compared to the last time she saw her face in this particular bathroom, in this particular mirror, in this particular light. There are faint lines around her eyes that weren’t there when she was eighteen. There’s a new groove etched between her eyebrows, and her skin, once luminous, looks dull and tired after five years of mediocre jailhouse cuisine, sleepless nights, and minimal fresh air.

  But she’s home. Finally. She’s home.

  She sinks into the bathtub, the hot, soapy water engulfing her body. It feels so good, she groans. She closes her eyes and allows herself to relax.

  Twenty minutes later, she steps out, only because her finger pads have pruned and the water has begun to cool. She wraps herself in an old towel, her mood about fifty pounds lighter than it was the day before. It’s almost hard to believe that only that morning she was still in prison, eating runny oatmeal and overcooked eggs, a criminal among criminals.

  The good mood doesn’t last long. As soon as she steps into the bedroom—her childhood bedroom—it all comes back. Her father hasn’t touched her room, and it looks exactly as she left it. Just like that, it’s nineteen years ago.

  The floral bedspread. Calvin.

  The window he used to climb through late at night. Calvin.

  The empty jar on the dresser, which used to be filled with candy. Calvin.

  The memories surround her, crushing her, and panic takes over, sinking its claws in. Dizzy, she puts a hand on the wall to steady herself and takes several deep breaths. Closing her eyes, she forces herself to count down from ten, focusing on her chest rising and falling, her lungs expanding and contracting, listening to her breath as it moves in and out of her body. A simple relaxation technique, something she’d learned in yoga class years ago. By the fifth breath, she’s out of danger. By the eighth, she’s calm. Her heart slows back to its normal rate, and she opens her eyes again, more prepared.

  Calvin may not be gone, but he’s not here. And that’s good enough for now.

  A beam of afternoon sunlight is streaming in from the window, filtered by the pink lace curtains she’s had since she was a baby. The room is cast in a soft pink glow. The poster of Mariah Carey hangs in the same spot beside her closet door. Vanilla-scented candles in various stages of melt top the bookshelf. The second shelf is filled with Stephen King paperbacks, a stack of high school yearbooks, ribbons she’d won in dance and cheerleading competitions, and the stuffed gorilla her dad bought her at the Woodland Park Zoo when she was twelve. “Look, Ma, they caught a monkey!” a small child had exclaimed delightedly when they’d come out of the gift shop, Geo swinging the stuffed ape by one of its legs. Everyone around had laughed.

  The framed photograph of herself and Angela is still on her bedside table, unmoved after all these years. It was taken a month before her best friend died, when they were both sixteen and laughing on a sunny day at the fair. A frozen moment in time. It was the photo that Geo could never bear to look at afterward. It was also the photo she could never bear to put away.

  They had used that photo on Angela’s missing-person flyer, the one that had been pasted on lampposts throughout Seattle, the same one that had been in all the newspapers and on TV. They’d also used it in the courtroom years later, and Geo didn’t blame them. No one had been more in love with life than Angela Wong.

  She picks up the empty Mason jar, the one Calvin filled with cinnamon hearts to give to her. It had been a present, his way of apologizing after the first time he hit her. Geo never particularly liked the candy, which was the kind that was sweet on your tongue at first, only to turn hot the longer you kept it there. Cinnamon hearts were his favorite candy, not hers. But she’d accepted the gift anyway, because she thought the bright red hearts inside the glass looked pretty. Calvin ended up eating them all, the candy disappearing slowly, until only the empty jar was left.

  Geo takes the jar into her hands. She should have done this years ago, right when Calvin gave it to her. She hurls it at her bedroom wall as hard as she can, anticipating the satisfying sound of shattering glass. It smacks the wall, hard, indenting the Sheetrock and scraping the paint.

  But it doesn’t break.

  16

  In the beginning, he was all Geo could see.

  It was magical, at first. It was heady, trippy, whatever word best describes being young and intoxicatingly in love for the very first time. She loved the way he smelled and how his cologne stayed on her clothes long after he’d left. She knew the shape of his hand, and how it felt when hers was in it, the exact places his fingers squeezed. And it stayed magical even when it turned violent. That’s the part nobody explains to you.

  The first time Calvin hit her, it was after the Soundgarden concert. She wore, at his request, “something sexy”—in this case a low-cut black top and short skirt she borrowed from Angela. Some guy stared at her all night, and because she’d eventually smiled back at him, Calvin had been forced to punch the guy in the face. When they got back to his place later that night, they argued. Calvin
yelled and accused and smashed things. She yelled back, defensive at first, certain she’d done nothing wrong, which only enraged him more.

  It was confusing; he seemed to want other guys to notice her, but god forbid they looked too long, or smiled, or spoke to her. He wanted her to look sexy, but god help her if she acted slutty. It was all about lines with Calvin, very fine lines, and she never knew exactly where they were until he told her. And he didn’t tell her with words. He told her with punches, slaps, and shoves, all designed to make her feel small and unimportant and humiliated.

  Being in an abusive relationship was nothing like Geo expected. She knew hitting was wrong, of course. She wasn’t stupid. They had discussed the issue of domestic violence back in sixth grade health class. It was also part of the social studies curriculum in seventh grade. And then in her freshman year of high school, a police officer had come to St. Martin’s to give a talk about how to get out of an abusive relationship. On any given day, there were posters tacked up in the hallways, encouraging girls in bad relationships to seek help. Your guidance counselors are your friends. Talk to us. Everybody knew that violence in a relationship was wrong. Just like smoking, drugs, alcohol, unprotected sex, sex without consent, and so on. Nobody was clueless about this stuff. There was no lack of education; ignorance was not the problem.

  The problem was that none of those public service announcements addressed any of the real issues behind abusive relationships. A relationship isn’t supposed to make you feel out of control; it’s not supposed to consume you; it’s not supposed to change you into someone you don’t want to be. But how do you teach that? How do you explain to someone who’s never been in a romantic relationship what a healthy relationship feels like?

  How do you explain to a sixteen-year-old girl who’s never been in love what love is supposed to feel like?

  And another thing these “lessons” didn’t address? Just how quickly the abuse would start to feel normal. Geo’s father had never hit her, not once, ever. This was no pattern from her past that was repeating itself. She loved Calvin so much that she began to accept that this was part of the package, part of the price she had to pay to be with him. Because the alternative—not being with him—was unfathomable. And, of course, he didn’t always hit. Ninety-nine percent of the time, he was affectionate, kind, generous. It wasn’t like Geo was covered in bruises from head to toe. And it wasn’t like he was breaking her arm. So, okay, every once in a while he got mad. Usually because of something stupid Geo did. They would argue. If she pushed him too far—if she said something snarky or sarcastic or she hurt his feelings—he’d hit her. End of argument. No big deal. All couples fought. Most of the time, he didn’t hurt her. When things were good, they were great.

  But when they were bad, they were terrible.

  Deep down, though, there was a small part of Geo that liked it. Liked how worked up he could get, enjoyed how jealous he could feel. It was so easy to mistake control for love, to believe he was upset because he cared, that he was protective because he loved her so goddamn much. Sometimes she liked pushing those boundaries, seeing how far she could go before he snapped, seeing how crazy she could make him. It was her way of controlling him, too, because yes, it went both ways.

  And yes, she was fooling herself. None of it was okay. But she loved him. Every part of her loved every part of him.

  Calvin waited for her most days after school in his bright red Trans Am, and Geo would feel a surge of pride every time she bounced down those school steps. He would be leaning against the car, waiting for her. It was like a scene out of a movie. It was like Sixteen Candles, and she was the regular girl, and he was the ungettable guy. The other girls gawked, and while Calvin might smile at them, it was Geo he kissed, Geo he opened the car door for, Geo who drove off with him into the metaphorical sunset.

  He had a day job as a house painter, but he didn’t work all the time, and so he sold drugs—weed, speed, and painkillers, mainly—on the side to pay the bills, and to pay for the car. Geo was alarmed at first, but then she realized it wasn’t as shady as the movies made it out to be. His customers were mostly college students, suburban housewives, and overachieving high school kids. They would come to the apartment, money would change hands, everyone was polite. After a while, that began to feel normal, too.

  He never pushed her into having sex. He knew she was a virgin, and that she wasn’t ready. So they did other things, things with his hands and his tongue that made her cry out his name as her eyes rolled back in her head. But full-on sex, never.

  “I want your first time to be special,” he said. “I can wait.”

  It only made her love him more.

  Calvin took up an enormous amount of space in her life. The more time she spent with him, the less she saw Angela and Kaiser. Cheer practice, something that was scheduled three days a week after school, was becoming more and more of an annoyance for both of them.

  “I can’t see you tonight,” Geo said to him one afternoon. They were sitting in his car at the far end of the parking lot behind the school, near the wooded area. Classes had let out for the day, and she had practice in fifteen minutes. “My dad’s expecting me home for dinner, and I have so much homework.”

  She didn’t tell him her grades were slipping. She didn’t want him to think of her as a child. He was twenty-one, his high school days long behind him.

  “So quit cheer,” Calvin said.

  “I can’t quit.” She was appalled at the suggestion. “I’m a cheerleader. Nobody’s ever quit cheer before. Do you know how hard it is to make the team?”

  “But it’s so stupid.” Calvin traced a finger up her bare thigh. The hem of her school kilt was short when she stood; it was practically nonexistent when she sat. Reflexively, she spread her legs a little, closing her eyes as his fingers brushed the outer edge of her panties. She wanted them inside her, but she was still shy about asking. Thankfully, she didn’t have to. He leaned over and kissed her again, his tongue intertwining with hers, tasting faintly of beer, cigarettes, and cinnamon hearts. It was a taste she would forever equate with feeling like a child and an adult at the same time, which is really what a teenager is. His fingers slipped inside her panties and stroked her, and it felt like she was melting and firming up at exactly the same time.

  “Quit,” he said again. His middle finger entered her a little deeper, but not much; she was a virgin, after all. His thumb kept pressure on exactly the right spot. It felt good, so good that it couldn’t possibly be the same thing as what they’d learned about in sex ed. She spread her legs even wider, feeling an orgasm approaching as he kissed his way down her neck. “If you quit, we’ll have more time together. Then I won’t have to stop.”

  Abruptly, he pulled his hand away. She gasped at the sudden absence of pleasure. It almost hurt.

  “It’s time for practice,” he said. “Better get going. You don’t want to be late.”

  She stared at him in disbelief, but the clock on the dashboard didn’t lie. She had two minutes to get to the gym, but she could have finished in ten seconds if he hadn’t stopped. “You’re mean,” she said.

  “Then don’t go.”

  She couldn’t not go. She’d already been late the last three practices. Trying to put herself back together, she flipped down the visor and quickly checked her face. “I hate this as much as you do.”

  “Doubt that.”

  “I can’t quit,” she said. “Angela would kill me.”

  He snorted. “You care way too much about what she thinks.”

  “She’s my best friend.” She gave him a look. “I’ve known her since the fourth grade.”

  “Then she’ll understand that cheer is stupid and that you now have better things to do.”

  “She won’t see it that way.” Geo pushed the visor back up. “She’s not exactly understanding.”

  “She’s a bitch, if you ask me.”

  “Stop it!” Geo smacked his thigh lightly. “Don’t say that. This has been hard for
her. We used to do everything together, and since I met you, I hardly see her anymore. I think that’s why she’s so grumpy—”

  “Bitchy.”

  “—irritated all the time. I need to spend some time with her.” Geo grabbed her knapsack. “It’s Kaiser’s birthday tomorrow. We’re taking him out for pizza and a movie.”

  “I thought we were going out tomorrow.” Calvin’s eyes darkened.

  Geo braced herself. She knew what that look could lead to. Which is why she’d told him here, at the parking lot at school, a minute before she had to leave. Their fights never escalated when there was a chance someone could see them, and by the time they talked about it again the next day, he’d be calm about it.

  And truth be told, Geo didn’t like it much when they went out. She was underage, so if they went to a bar, there was always a buddy he’d have to talk to in order to sneak her in without scrutinizing her fake ID. She didn’t like the taste of alcohol so she rarely drank. The bars were always dark, shoddy, and filled with smoke. Some guy would always look at her wrong and then Calvin would be “forced” to have words with him. It was exciting at the beginning, but after a couple of months, it had lost its appeal. She missed sleepovers with the girls, poring over old yearbooks and gossiping about who looked better and who looked fat. She missed pizza and Diet Coke, hanging out at the mall, going to the movies. She missed the Friday night parties after the football game.

  She missed being sixteen. She even missed Kaiser, who sometimes got on her nerves with his puppylike adoration, but who made her laugh like no one else. She couldn’t tell her boyfriend any of this, though, because that world didn’t include him. And Calvin didn’t like anything he wasn’t included in.