Free Heart-shaped box by Joe Hill Page A

man than black marks over his eyes and a curved razor on a golden chain. He wondered, abruptly, what Anna had cut her wrists with, became conscious all over again of how cold it was in the kitchen, that he was leaning toward the kettle to absorb some of its ambient heat. Jude was suddenly certain she had slashed her wrists with the razor on the end of her father’s pendulum, the one he’d used to mesmerize desperate suckers and to search for well water. He wondered what else there was to know about how Anna had died and about the man who’d been a father to her and who had discovered her body in a cold bath, the water darkened with her blood.
    Maybe Danny had turned up Anna’s letters. Jude dreaded reading them again and at the same time knew that he had to. He remembered them well enough to know now that she’d been trying to tell him what she was going to do to herself and he’d missed it. No—it was more terrible than that. He had not wanted to see, had willfully ignored what was right in front of him.
    Her first letters from home had conveyed a breezy optimism, and their subtext was that she was getting her life together, making sound, grown-up decisions about her future. They arrived on rich white card stock and were composed in delicate cursive. As with her conversation, these letters were filled with questions, although, in her correspondence at least, she didn’t seem to expect any answers. She would write that she had spent the month sending out job applications, then rhetorically askif it was a mistake to wear black lipstick and motorcycle boots to an interview at a day-care center. She would describe two colleges and wonder at length about which would be better for her. But it was all a con, and Jude knew it. She never got the job at the day care, never mentioned it again after that one letter. And when the spring semester rolled around, she had moved on to applying for a spot at a beauticians’ academy, college forgotten.
    Her last few letters were a truer picture of the place she’d been in mentally. They came on plain, ruled paper, torn out of a notebook, and her cursive was cramped, hard to read. Anna wrote that she couldn’t get any rest. Her sister lived in a new development, and there was a house going up right next door. She wrote she heard them hammering nails all day long and that it was like living next to a coffin maker after a plague. When she tried to sleep at night, the hammers would start up again, just as she was drifting off, and never mind that there was no one over there. She was desperate to sleep. Her sister was trying to get her on a treatment plan for her insomnia. There were things Anna wanted to talk about, but she didn’t have anyone to talk to, and she was tired of talking to herself. She wrote that she couldn’t stand to be so tired all the time.
    Anna had begged him to call, but he had not called. Her unhappiness wore on him. It was too much work to help her through her depressions. He’d tried, when they were together, and his best hadn’t been good enough. He’d given it his best, it hadn’t panned out, and still she wouldn’t leave him alone. He didn’t know why he even read her letters, let alone sometimes responded to them. He’d wished they would just stop coming. Finally they had.
    Danny could dig them out and then make a doctor’s appointment for Georgia. As plans went, it wasn’t much, but it was better than what he had ten minutes before, which was nothing. Jude poured the tea, and time started up again.
    He drifted with his mug into the office. Danny wasn’t at his desk. Jude stood in the doorway, staring at the empty room, listening intentlyto the stillness for some sign of him. Nothing. He was in the bathroom, maybe—but no. The door was slightly ajar, as it had been the day before, and the crack revealed only darkness. Maybe he had taken off for lunch.
    Jude started over toward the window, to see if Danny’s car was in the driveway, then held up