Jar of Hearts
“Well, we’ve known from the beginning that the new murders tie back to Georgina,” he points out.
“Georgina, yes, but they don’t necessarily tie back to Calvin,” Kim says, pounding her fist on his desk for emphasis, causing him to jolt. “We need proof—DNA, a witness, something—that Calvin James killed his own children. And we don’t have it yet.”
Kim’s right. Jesus Christ, she’s so fucking right. Despite his best efforts to stay objective, Kaiser fell down the rabbit hole that no detective worth his badge should ever fall into—he was looking to make the evidence fit his theory, instead of creating a theory based on the evidence. He assumed that because everything tied to Georgina, Calvin had to be the killer.
A potentially grievous assumption.
“He’s someone’s child,” Kaiser says again softly, more to himself than to his partner. “But whose?”
Kim stands up, rolls her chair back to her own desk. “You should go talk to Georgina. You always said there were things she never told you. If there’s anything left to know, you’re probably the only person she’ll tell. You guys have history. She trusts you.”
She says it lightly, but he sees it then. The stiffness of her body language, her lack of eye contact, the downturn of her lips.
Married or not, the end of their affair is Kim’s loss, too.
28
Kaiser met Georgina in science class. They were freshmen, it was the first day of school, and the first thing he thought was that she smelled amazing. The second thing he thought was that she was beautiful. Not in an obvious way, like Angela, whose presence could never be ignored, even on her worst day. But in a subtle, underappreciated way; the kind of beauty that isn’t trendy or obvious, the kind of beauty that seems plain at first glance until you get to know her better, the kind of beauty that doesn’t blossom until well after high school.
You can’t tell girls like this they’re beautiful. They won’t believe you. But that’s part of what makes them beautiful. Because it doesn’t matter.
Georgina took a seat right in front of Kaiser, her long dark hair brushing the edge of his desk as she opened her binder to a fresh sheet of three-hole lined paper. The classroom was only half-full, and she had her choice of desks. She clicked a pen filled with purple ink and wrote the date on the paper. September 3rd.
She turned around. “I’m Geo,” she said.
“Geode?” he said, misunderstanding her. What kind of messed-up name was that? “Like a rock?”
“Geo,” she said, spelling it out. “Short for Georgina, but I hate that name, so please don’t call me that.”
“Why not? It’s pretty. You might like it someday.”
“Doubt it.”
“Her name is Geo and she dances on the sand…,” he sang. He couldn’t help it.
“Like I haven’t heard that one before.” She rolled her eyes at his terrible rendition of the Duran Duran song “Rio.” “That song came out when I was, like, in kindergarten. You’re just like my dad. A big fan of eighties music.”
Well, that killed it. No teenage boy wants to be compared to a girl’s father. It shut him up, and she turned back around. For the rest of the class, all he could see was the back of her perfect head. Sometimes he’d kick her chair accidentally-on-purpose so she’d turn around to tell him to stop it. It was stupid, he knew. But he was smitten.
The friendship that followed was instant and easy, built on their shared struggle with science and desire to annoy the shit out of each other. He didn’t like Angela when Georgina first introduced them—her best friend bossed her around a lot, and would pull her away often to talk about “girl stuff,” which made him feel like the third wheel he was. But he and Angela grew on each other over time, and by homecoming freshman year, the three of them were inseparable. Oh, he had guy buddies, too, but his closest friends—his best friends—were two girls. And they trusted him, told him things about teenage girlhood most boys would never be privileged to know. He was often the voice of reason when they couldn’t make a decision on what to wear or eat, the one who could tell them which boys they liked were douchebags and which were okay, the one who played referee when they squabbled with each other (which wasn’t often, but when it happened, it was World War III for all of them).
He never told Georgina he was in love with her. But Angela knew, and they talked about it a few times. One of Angela Wong’s best traits was that she was honest. Unfortunately, it was also one of her worst. She had no problem telling you if your outfit looked like shit, if your taste in music was abhorrent, if you had something stuck in your teeth.
“She doesn’t think of you like that,” Angela said to Kaiser one August afternoon, the summer before junior year started. They were at the mall, and he was “helping” her shop for some new party outfits. Which basically meant heaping effusive praise on everything she tried on. Geo and her dad had gone to visit her grandmother in Toronto for the week, and he’d been forced to step in.
“Like what?”
“As more than a friend. You’ve been in the friend box for two years. Telling her how you really feel isn’t going to change that. All it will do is make her feel bad because then she’ll be forced to tell you she doesn’t feel the same way. Which, even though you knew it was coming, will feel like she lit a match and set you on fire. And then guess what?” Angela turned to him, looking pissed off, although none of this had even remotely happened yet. “At the end of the day, nothing will change. You’ll stay friends, but now it’s awkward. And by awkward, I mean awkward for me.”
“But I really think—”
“Start talking to other girls,” she said, pivoting in front of a three-way mirror, her glossy black hair swinging as she turned this way and that. She was wearing a pink dress that looked great on her, but judging by the displeasure on her face, great wasn’t good enough. “You’re a junior now. You’re not my type, but you’re cute. You’ll have girls lining up this year. Start asking some of them out. See how it feels.”
Angela disappeared a couple of months later. It was hard to believe at first. There was a rumor that she ran away, but that didn’t make sense to Kaiser, because his friend had zero reason to leave her life. The only theory that did make sense was that something bad had happened to her, but nobody wanted to accept that. It was incomprehensible.
The sudden absence of Angela Wong created a huge hole where she had once been, and the only person in the world who could understand the unique sense of loss that Kaiser felt was Georgina. They should have freaked out about it together, supported each other, held each other up. Instead, Georgina pulled away. It started the Monday after Chad Fenton’s party, which was the last time anyone could remember seeing Angela, and the night Kaiser decided to ignore their best friend’s advice and take his shot.
After that weekend, Geo started avoiding him. It was subtle at first—not returning his calls, sitting in the library instead of eating lunch in the cafeteria, going straight home after school instead of finding him so they could go to the 7-Eleven. He chalked it up to her being upset about Angela and feeling awkward because of their kiss. But a couple of weeks later, it grew worse. She’d change directions if she saw him coming down the hallway. The few times they did speak, her responses were curt.
“Is it because of the kiss?” he finally asked her a couple of weeks later. He hadn’t wanted to bring it up, but not talking to her was like not breathing. He cornered her outside the front entrance of the school. He didn’t understand any of it. Their best friend had disappeared. Who better to help each other through it than each other?
She had laughed at him. Laughed. “As if,” she answered, and walked away.
Over the next month, Kaiser watched, helpless, as she spiraled. In the first few weeks after their friend went missing, Georgina was edgy, skittish, constantly looking over her shoulder, as if she half-expected that whatever had snatched Angela out of their lives might come for her, too. She was bothered by the rumors, defending her best friend vigorous
ly against stories that Angela left of her own accord, that Angela had a secret boyfriend, that Angela wanted to be famous. By mid-December, Kaiser barely recognized Geo. Her hair was greasy, her skin was broken out. Once, she even ran out of the cafeteria because she had to throw up.
She didn’t return after Christmas break. When he tried calling her house, her father told him that she was being treated for depression, and that he’d arranged for her to finish her junior year at home via tutor. They spoke for ten minutes, Walter Shaw telling Kaiser that Angela’s disappearance seemed to have triggered feelings of abandonment, loss, and grief from her childhood, as her mother died of cancer when she was five.
Kaiser continued to call every few weeks to see how she was doing, but if her father wasn’t home, the phone was never answered. On two occasions, he stopped by her house on the way home from school. The first time, Walter told him that his daughter wasn’t up for company. The second and last time, nobody answered the door. But as he was walking away, he looked up and saw Georgina’s face in the window, peeking out from behind her pink lace curtains. Pale. Exhausted. And terrified.
Whatever she was going through, it was hell; that much was certain.
The following September, Geo was back at St. Martin’s for her senior year. It was like the previous year had never happened. She seemed quieter and more contemplative, but she was smiling again, looking more or less like her old self, even though she’d gained a little weight. She didn’t try out for cheer or volleyball, opting instead to take extra classes to make up for the ones she’d failed in the first semester of the year before. She skipped all of the parties, and could be found in the library most lunch periods, doing homework. With no extracurricular activities, she was able to work a part-time job after school at Jamba Juice, where she was nice to the customers.
He stopped into the store one Saturday midway through the year, forgetting that she worked there. She took his order.
“How’s it going?” he asked her.
“Good,” she said, handing him his change, and it was like they were strangers. She turned to make his smoothie. There was no one else in the place.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey.”
She stopped, turned to him, her visor shading her face just enough that he couldn’t read her gaze.
“I’m okay, Kai,” she said. “That’s what you want to know, right? I’m okay. But I’m sorry, I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to hang out. I have to keep moving forward, okay? That’s what’s best for me.”
“I understand,” he said, his hands on the counter, leaning forward. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t still be friends. I lost her, too, you know. Or did you forget that part?”
She walked back to the counter. Touched his hand gently, offered him a smile. “I know you did. And I am so sorry for your loss. But you remind me of her, okay? You remind me of who we used to be. And I can’t be reminded of that. It nearly killed me. So, please. If I ever meant anything to you, you’ll leave me alone.”
He left without taking his smoothie, hurt in a way that went much deeper than a broken heart. He didn’t know her anymore; that much was obvious.
He never tried to talk to her again. He didn’t wave to her or even attempt eye contact if he saw her in the hallway at school. Once, when he was with the girl he dated briefly at the end of senior year, she was craving a smoothie and they stopped in at Jamba Juice. Georgina took their order, the both of them pretending they didn’t know each other.
“Whatever happened to you guys? Weren’t you good friends last year?” the girl said as they walked away with their drinks.
“Yeah,” he said. “We were best friends. At least, I thought we were.”
“We see what we want to see,” the girl said, sipping her smoothie. “Not what’s there.”
Kaiser can’t even recall that girl’s name now. Rachel something, or maybe it was Renée. They’d only gone on three or four dates before it ended over something stupid, the details of which he also can’t remember now. But he’ll never forget her words that day, which, cheesy and cliché as they were, sounded so profound to his not-quite-eighteen-year-old ears.
He knows now what happened to Georgina. He knows why she stayed away from St. Martin’s junior year, why she hid at home, why she refused to see him. Nineteen years later, it all makes complete sense, and Kaiser wants to punch himself for not figuring it out sooner, when it should have been so goddamned obvious.
You see what you want to see, not what’s there.
PART FIVE
ACCEPTANCE
“I know I can’t take one more step towards you
’Cause all that’s waiting is regret
Don’t you know I’m not your ghost anymore
You lost the love I love the most
I learned to live half alive
And now you want me one more time.”
~ Christina Perri, “Jar of Hearts”
29
The positive pregnancy test only confirmed what Geo already suspected.
Her cycles had always been predictable, every twenty-nine or thirty days. When she missed two in a row, she bought a pregnancy test at Rite Aid, cutting her last class so she wouldn’t run into anybody she knew. The directions were pretty clear, and she peed on the stick as soon as she got home, bathroom door locked tight in case she had mixed up her dad’s schedule and he came home earlier than she expected. The results were fast, less than thirty seconds. The instructions said it would be either a plus or minus sign, and that any hint of blue in the plus sign meant she was pregnant.
The stick was so fucking blue it was almost purple. She wrapped it in paper towels and stuck it at the bottom of the wastebin, then sat on the toilet seat lid and cried.
She was pregnant with Calvin’s baby. And it wasn’t a love child. How could it be, when it was rape?
She made an appointment at Planned Parenthood for the following week, and then spent the days in between genuinely questioning whether it would be better to run out onto the street and let herself get hit by a bus. When she arrived at Planned Parenthood on a Wednesday morning (having faked sick to her dad, so he’d write her a note to get out of school for the day), her appointment had been delayed for about twenty minutes while they dealt with an emergency. It was long enough for Geo to completely freak out.
She called her father from a pay phone in the parking lot, sobbing, and he came to pick her up. She told him about the pregnancy, how she didn’t want the baby, but neither could she bring herself to abort it. She refused to tell him who the father was other than that he was someone who didn’t go to St. Martin’s (true) and that she never wanted to see him again (also true). Walter Shaw listened, growing more upset with every word. He told her to go to bed. She did.
When she woke up the next morning, her dad was waiting for her at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee in front of him, a cup of herbal tea for her.
“Whatever you want to do, we’ll do,” he said, and she burst into tears again.
Walter’s normally stoic face was filled with anguish. “It’s because I work all the time and you don’t have a mother, right? You wanted something of your own to love?”
“God, Dad, no.” Despite her emotional state, Geo managed to roll her eyes. “It just … it just happened. Trust me, this wasn’t anything I wanted, even on a subconscious level.”
“If you were sexually active, I could have made you an appointment at the—”
“Dad, please.” Geo knew her face was red. She felt the heat creep up her neck and stop at her eyes. “I wasn’t … sexually active. It only happened one time.”
She closed her eyes, remembering the weight of Calvin on top of her, her inability to move or draw anything deeper than a shallow breath. No, she hadn’t wanted it. Yes, it was rape. No, she couldn’t tell anybody. If she told someone, and they arrested him, who knew what Calvin would say? About Angela? About her?
Sometimes karma came for you later. Sometimes karma came for you right away.
>
“So what do you want to do?” Walt asked her gently.
“I think adoption makes the most sense. Not that I can imagine giving birth, oh god.…” She shuddered. She couldn’t let herself think about that now. “But I can’t imagine getting rid of it. And I can’t imagine being a mom.”
Her father nodded. It was hard to tell how he felt about what she had said. It would certainly make both their lives easier if she had an abortion. An abortion meant she could finish out her junior year with nobody the wiser. Her body wouldn’t have to change; no weight gain, no stretch marks. There would be no painful delivery, no watching someone take the baby, no having to live with wondering what kind of person he or she would grow up to be.
She was nine weeks along. It wasn’t even a real person, right?
But it was. To her, it was.
“But I can’t … I can’t go to school pregnant, Dad,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to know.”
Walt’s face was set, but grim. “I’ll speak to your guidance counselor. We’ll figure it out.” He cupped her chin with a warm hand. “Are you sure about this? If you don’t want to have it at all, that’s okay. It’s your decision. And there’s still time.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I … I can’t deal with any more death. Of any kind.”
Walt assumed she was talking about her mother. Which she was, but only to a degree.
They agreed she would finish out the first semester, but Geo was so nauseated she was missing school, anyway. After Christmas break, she didn’t go back. She wrote her exams by proxy, then did the rest of her courses via correspondence and tutor. It wasn’t too difficult to conceal her changing body; she carried small, and spent most of her days in her dad’s old shirts and a pair of sweatpants that she rolled below her belly. If she did need to go out—to a doctor’s appointment, or to the library—she wore a bulky jacket or sweater.
It was ironic to her how she could spend those days with someone else all the time—her baby, growing inside her—and still feel utterly alone. It was almost like her pregnancy was the culmination of all her secrets, in physical form.