Bleeding Heart

She still hadn’t recovered from her father’s death thirty-four years earlier when her mother passed away as well. The years in between had been but a flash, a once-around-the-clock and over sort of experience. Here, then gone. In a way, despite having been her parents, they had been her only loves. Nobody else had been able to fill their places. No man could hold a candle to her father; no daughter could reach as high as her mother’s ankles. In other words, her parents had been perfect (in her eyes, which is the important thing here) and her life felt like it had ended when her mother too was gone.

Now it was necessary to clear out the old house. As long as her immortal mother had been alive, she had not given that mammoth task a thought. Seriously, she had never even remotely entertained the idea of stripping the house bare. Why? The house clearly had been born furnished. It would be wrong to remove its internal organs: sofas, metal bed frames, ironing board, china cabinet, electric mixer… That would leave it naked, defenseless. 

But she lived hundreds of miles away and would never go home again. She knew that. Others had written about it. Thomas… Somebody, she thought. She hated that saying, and had never read the novel. Too painful, like the poem by a nineteenth century woman who fell in love with the nail in her heart. She too was in love with the house-home, despite the torturous relationship she had always had with it.

Some day she might write that story, because it was the story of her life, but maybe she wouldn’t, maybe she’d just take it to her grave, since there really wasn’t anybody to pass it on to. The grave as an option was more sensible. That having been said, she found herself doing the clearing out, which was in fact a purging. 

She was in the cellar. They hadn’t called it basement very often, because ‘cellar’ was a more appropriate term. It had a rock then cement then dirt floor - one type for each of the three sections - and every inch was covered with time. Time balled up in droplets of old water or oil. Time swinging like pale gauze from the old ceiling boards of who-knows-what-type-of-wood. Time turned dark and twisted along the rough-hewn stones of the walls. Time of the sort people don’t like to touch, because it can cling to them and maybe can never be removed. Time, the only thing that is eternal.

She had almost never been near a certain part of the stone wall, but she had been told by her father that he kept his maps in some of the chinks. She had known them to be maps of The Thousand Islands up in the St. Lawrence River, and hadn’t seen the maps from the War yet. She had never wanted to know about the war, because she only knew her father as perfect, kind and gentle, hard-working and always ready to help. Her father as a killer did not fit that image of him, so the War, the Nazis … - all that stayed out on the fringes and pertained to some other father. Definitely not hers.

Anyway, she hadn’t paid attention to the sooty - or grimy - walls after her father was gone, but now the real estate agent demanded they be scrubbed. 

(If he’d seen them, he wouldn’t have dared suggest it!, she thought.) 

It was easier to get near them now because tools and equipment had been stolen even before her mother had died. She no longer had an excuse and went to inspect the rolled-up papers that threatened to crumple into dust and mice when she touched them. But the old maps neither crumpled nor did gave up any scurrying residents. They just lay there… well… like they were dead.

Looking now at the maps she had hardly ever looked at seemed foolish, a waste of time. She would just toss them, then use a hand vac to get a least the top layers of dust off. Except as she shifted the unwieldy papers so they fit in her arms, glad to have worn rubber gloves as well as a duster like housecleaners do, the fingers of her left hand touched something kind of slippery, very smooth.

It was a pink satin heart, a box like the ones people used to give and get chocolates in. Not real satin, probably, but close enough. This heart-shaped box was still shiny and looked like it was from the 1950s or possibly before that. Looking more closely, it might not have been pink originally; it could very well have been blood-red or some strong color that had faded over the decades.

Even storing things out of the sunlight doesn’t always protect them, she thought. Pink or vintage? What color are you? She was addressing the still heart as if it were (still) alive. What is wrong with me? She asked herself this, while wiping away a few tears. A box of this sort must have been a Valentine’s Day present from her father to her mother.

Not possible. Her mother stored precious little in the cellar; the closets on the first and second floors were big, plus there was somewhat of an attic. Her father was the one who kept things in the basement. What would he have been doing with a satin heart, regardless of the original color? She had to look. Dried-up chocolates with that white mange chocolate gets, a forgotten effort to hold onto a special occasion. Nothing extraordinary.

There was, in fact, a dried-up square of chocolate that might still have its caramel or buttercream filling inside, equally dried up. It gave her the creeps. She could imagine hundreds of little bugs crawling around in the filling, then stopped thinking like that. She lifted it out of the heart-shaped box and set it back in a niche, just to have it out of sight. Then she was better able to survey the rest of the contents, which were numerous squares of dingy paper with writing on them. The little squares were made from larger squares of paper, perhaps once folded more tightly, but now their edges were warped, flung apart by some secret wind inside the heart.

Just as with the maps, she thought it wasn’t necessary to open the papers and look at them. What was to be gained by prying - prying? - years later into her father’s life? Prying? Did I just say prying?

No, she hadn’t said it, but she had thought it. Yet her father had been perfect. He had never done anything wrong or illegal or mean in his life (except kill Nazis?) That meant he had nothing to hide. He’d had so little in his life and nothing had been shameful. But the heart was out of place. And it was full of folded squares that seemed to have words and drawings. It needed to be seen.

She was shocked to find note after note, like the letters school kids write, trying not to get caught while declaring their love. Or used to write, before texting in class became the way to do that. Twenty? Thirty? She could only guess. They weren’t all on the same type or age of paper. Some were pink, others yellow, some a dark beige - unless that coffee coloring had come from steeping in years. Some were lined, some were cut unevenly, others had ragged sides, and a few even looked like they had deckled edges. Some, when unfolded from the little square, became the shape of a house, a tree, a dog.

The messages were all fairly similar: I miss you, I love you, I want you back. I’ll never act like I have again. I want you to love me, I need you, my heart is broken, how can I go on? And she was stunned, because her mother had never even considered leaving her father. They were the perfect couple, so much in love. Plus, given the number of hours they both had to work in order to pay the bills, she knew neither could have managed to have an affair.

Serves her right for snooping… but she wasn’t, she was trying to clear the house out so she could sell it. And her reward had been this? She searched for something that would identify the intended recipient of the notes. Had they been delivered by hand and then rejected by the object of her father’s affection? Had he merely written them and then hidden them all so nobody would ever know about his feelings? 

Yet they were just notes, and could have been written by anybody to anybody. Her parents had certainly inherited some odd objects. Like the stuffed birds her mother had gotten from her grandfather’s office. (He had been a dentist with very Victorian tastes.) Or the trumpets from a séance held to contact a dead child. Or the unfinished tablecloth whose ecru crochet cotton had grown even more ecru over the years and whose tiny gauge crochet hook had rusted. Surely that had been the case here. Heart-shaped boxes were a dime a dozen.

Then she looked more closely. On the bottom of the cardboard heart there were some words. Only four, two on each side: Dear Jenny. Love, Tom. Tom was her father’s name. Jenny was not her mother’s. She was devastated. However, the past was past, and she had work to do, stones to scrub, faded maps to toss in the trash. Faded maps and maybe dead loves, because obviously her father had taken this one to his grave.

Later that evening, she was sitting on the steps in the hall. As a girl, she’d thought it to be an interesting space, a kind of a limbo between the first and second floors of the house. In the winter, the outer door was too thin to keep the cold out, but other times of the year it was fine. She would sit on her symbolic steps and imagine things that had all been un-imagined now, with both parents gone and one suspected of… the unspeakable. She felt betrayed, even though it was her mother who had been the victim of infidelity. She knew this way of thinking was useless. It also made her head ache. A lot. Her heart, too, had been broken by the pinkish, hidden, satin heart.

I have to sleep on this, she told herself, and she was right.

The next morning, she was - shakily now, after yesterday’s discovery - shuffling mindlessly through some papers her father had left on his workbench in the cellar. Probably he had realized that his heart - ironic, right? - was giving out and he didn’t have the strength to work on his carpentry projects any more. The papers she found were in even worse shape than the maps and heart, because they had been just lying on the bench, out in the open, for about thirty-five years. 

What are these? The elegant, magnificent handwriting was certainly her father’s. The writing she’d worked hard to imitate and had been successful at doing so. The flying butterfly capital letters and the roll at the end of words was exquisite. An uneducated man, but his handwriting could fool anybody into thinking differently. Here were some beloved writings by an almost-perfect father and she had to know what they said.

The pages turned out to be no more than a family tree, written in paragraph form. Her father had tried to put down what little he knew about his family, and she knew a few of the names there. She had met his stepmother, who was mean and cranky and had dementia and had called her names. She had never known, however - and the reading made the spike in her heart twist again - that his real mother had left him when he was less than two years old. Run off, forgotten him. And she remembered something. 

She also had to do something urgently.

It was only fifteen minutes to the cemetery the next town over. Her father had taken her there to put flowers in the urns. The stones didn’t have their/her last name engraved on them, so she had never paid much attention as a girl. Still, she found the plot easily now and saw the newer inscription that told how Genevieve’s ashes had been interred with her parents. 

She stared. It was raining hard or she was crying. She moved closer to the cold, ugly stone, not caring if it were granite or marble. She looked Genevieve straight on and spat as hard as she could. Spitting out her pain, disgorging the red inside her, pushing the high flush of her cheeks onto the stone, she spat as long as she could, until she too was dry inside, like the heart in the form of a box. Or the box in the shape of a heart. It was all the same. Neither of her parents was here anymore to see how she felt, sick over having doubted. She truly hurt right now and yet she had to pull out the spike inside her thoughts, ease the pain.

She spat again.

This is for my father.