Heart-Shaped Box

My mother had told me when I was young to marry for love, but she should have been more specific. I married a man I loved deeply, so deeply that I couldn’t notice the fact that he always had one foot out the door. He told me he loved me often; it’s the thing I wanted to hear the most. Maybe that’s why he said it.

If he was capable of falling in love, I’m certain that it would have been with me. But he was too removed from his own body to let himself fall. He dipped his toe into family life and would wade in the shallow end from time to time, but never so deep that he wouldn’t be able to pull himself out at a moment’s notice. Again, I never noticed until that moment arrived.

The more blinded you are to reality, the more vivid it becomes in hindsight.

*            *            *

When we had first met, I admired the fact that he was fiercely independent. I was even envious in a way. I didn’t think of the lifelong price that I would pay for his indifference toward the outside world. Time can be torturous knowing the person you love most in the world would be fine without you. At least, it was for me. Near the end, I started to think that he might be a soulless monster. And in a way, I wasn’t too far off.

We had been married nearly three years when his mother got sick. It was the first time I saw him cry. In fact, I can’t think of a genuine emotion he showed prior to that moment in time—not even when our little girl was born. She was perfect. I named her Jane; he barely noticed.

In a perverse way, seeing his grief for his mother’s illness gave me hope that he was becoming a softer person, a person with a heart beating in his chest. Hope is a dangerous thing when paired inseparably with self-delusion.

The brief softness grew cold and stale, but when the topic of his mother came up, I would see it again. When anything else was foremost in his mind, he was distant. I wouldn’t call him icy, or even particularly hurtful— those things require conscious thought, and I was never on his mind. He, in the simplest words, was nothing to me and the baby. He was a ghost. Sometimes I thought that if we stood in front of him as he walked, he would continue along just passing right through us as if we, or rather, he didn’t really exist.

In explaining it to a friend, a told her that his mind had committed suicide without taking the body along with it. He shuffles through life, checking the boxes of a life without really living it.

Weeks later his mother called the house in the middle of the night, the last night she would be able to do so. I was surprised to find that she had wanted to talk to me, not him. She asked if I could visit, and bring Jane for a visit. I asked about my barely-there husband, she said not to tell him. I have to say that I was floored. Sure, he hadn’t been a great husband or father, but as a son he loved his mother more than life itself, especially the life he was leading. I felt something deep within my stomach tighten, whatever it was didn’t release until after his mother had told me a terrible secret.

My precious baby and I made it to the hospital early the next morning. My mother-in-law was so weak that she could barely lift her head from the pillow. She was clinging to life through sheer force of will. Next to her on the small table by her bed, among the medications and untouched food tray, was a small, heart-shaped box. I saw her glance at it as we approached.

We talked for longer than we ever had. Mostly about Jane and the pleasantries of being a mother, though she kept looking over at the heart-shaped box. I laid my sweet baby next to her so she could feel her grandchild one last time, for it went without saying that the moments she had left were few, and were in need of meaning. Tears began to well up in her eyes. She cried just like him, the time he cried for her. The tears really started to come when she stared again at the box on the table. I asked her if he had given that to her when he had come to visit.

She said yes, he had given it to her… but no, not on his visit. She continued weakly, but with admirable fortitude. She said that he had given it to her long ago, and had told her that she was the only person meant to have it. She never knew where he had gotten it, but he said it was all his love. She had taken it as a metaphor, but as he grew, she wasn’t so sure.

With her last bit of strength, the sick old woman picked up the box off the table and handed it to me. She told me as the tears came faster that she should have given it to me long ago, but she had been selfish—and foolish. She said how wrong she was to have kept it for herself, and should have insisted that it be passed down. She passed away within the hour.

When I left the hospital, I didn’t return home. I couldn’t find the will to do it. I drove around with the heart-shaped box in my lap for what seemed like hours. When we finally did get home, I went straight to the nursery to tuck sweet Jane in for her afternoon nap. I hid the box among her closet of possessions, and rubbed her head, gently telling her that the box was hers, not mine. She would need it more than I would. I did not want his love anymore. I drew up my plans for how I would leave him later that night—I don’t want a husband whose love can be contained in such a small box, and given so sparingly.