Hearts and Kisses

Valentine's Day was a silly day to have a first date. It'd been years since we went on it, but I specifically remember thinking that. I was 16, standing in front of my old wooden dresser. My foggy reflection stared back at me from the mirror as I dabbed on red lipstick beneath smudgy, black-lined eyes. I was bright, brimming with life.

My dad had been in the family room. He was nestled into velvety orange couch cushions, sipping on a warming Budweiser. Scenes from an old Hawaii Five-0 rerun flashed across our small tube TV as I passed, giving him a peck on the cheek.

"How late are you going to be out, Casey?' He had asked. His voice was deep and rich, and his bushy mustache danced along each syllable. Dad's eyes had barely flickered over to me from the TV.

My mom had died a few years before, and he wasn't so good at maneuvering my dating phase. He basically just pretended like I wasn't doing it while simultaneously asking the questions a responsible father should.

"Not too late, dad. Beach Patrol kicks everyone out by ten anyway, and the Cineplex has been so lame-o lately," I reassured him—something I always tried to do regardless of how successful I was.

"Okay, bud." Another blink in my direction, followed by a big old dad sigh. "Be safe."

"Always am." And I was out the door.

Even though we lived in southern California, it was surprisingly balmy for February. I could smell the rain in the air. I remembered hoping that the party wouldn't be a complete drag because of the weather.

The beach was only a quarter of a mile away, and I could hear the waves crashing as I sat on the wooden porch. I pulled out at least twenty helpless blades of grass, picking them apart one by one as I waited.

I had spent years hoping that Billy Vesara would ask me out. Was I a little disappointed that he had wanted our first date to be at a beach party on Valentine's Day? My hopelessly romantic teenage brain didn't care in the slightest. It was totally psyched. It didn’t even care that he was late for it, either. It felt the same when he picked me up in his shitty red pickup truck with a creamy white can of Miller Lite already cracked open. Even more when he presented me with a bottle of Sunset Blush Boone's Farm.

My brain wasn't the slightest bit deterred when he ignored me the whole night nor when he hit on Becky Huge-Tits right in front of me. I knew I had the real prize anyway.

Those big, baby-blue eyes were lined with dark brown lashes, and they were everything. He was tall. He played football. And none of the teachers cared that he smoked cigarettes on campus. He was too charming for trouble. I mean, come on.

So, maybe I had been a little bugged about Becky. But she became a drop in the ocean when he finally kissed me. He had brought me back home. Walked me to my front door. We stood toe-to-toe beneath the yellow porch light as the rain started pattering down on the rooftop. If I had to pick a word to describe the end of our date, it would have been “perfection.”

"I'm sorry I was such a jerk all night," Billy had said as he put his hands around my waist, pulling me in even closer. "I was nervous."

A cigarette was still on his breath as he spoke words that made my silly teenage heart sing.

"Why were you nervous?" I teased.

"Are you kidding?" He smiled that smile that made all the girls giggle when he walked by. "You're the coolest chick in all of Oceanside. Not to mention the most beautiful. Smart. Funny. Why wouldn't I be nervous?"

He had rendered me speechless, but that was okay. He kissed me before I had enough time to look like a total dork. And it was life-changing. It was the kind of kiss that made my knees buckle beneath me. His lips were like butter, and the delicious leather of his jacket overpowered the sea smell that perpetually lingered on us all.

It consumed me. I knew right then and there that nothing was ever going to compare to the way Billy Vesara made me feel. All night, my brain hadn't been involved at all, and it sure as hell wasn't in that moment either. But he was always going to be the reason for my beating heart.

Our relationship was a little rocky throughout the rest of high school. As it was for most teenagers. But I was his, and he was mine. And we were made for each other. Years went by. Eventually, we got married. He asked me to marry him on Valentine's Day. "A tribute to that first date we’d had together,” he had told me, laughing after I'd said, "Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!" We were only twenty-one then, so we had the ingeniously romantic idea to get married on Cupid's Day, too.

After a few years in the honeymoon stage, we found out that we couldn't have kids. We mourned together. Then we replaced that part of our lives with adventures. Together, we saw all of the United States, Canada, most of Europe via an extensive backpacking trip, Russia, and Japan, and that's only to name a few. We lived together. By the time I was thirty-two, most of my life had basically been dedicated to Billy.

Eventually, my dad passed away, and we moved into my childhood home. Still traveling fanatics, we didn't spend much time there. Our life wasn't perfect, but it was ours. As our careers grew, we left Oceanside less and less and started to settle into our domesticated lives more and more. 

“And that brings us to the present.” It felt like I had been talking for hours by the time I got to that last bit. My voice was hoarse. I stared absentmindedly at a cooling cup of coffee on a cheap, brown-coated tabletop in the middle of a well-lit, sterile room.

The department store-dressed detective sat across from me, watching me with hardened brown eyes. His partner stood, arms crossed in the opposite corner. 

I knew what we were really doing here. They didn’t care about our quote-unquote love story. All they wanted to do was to rule me out as a suspect. Or pin me down as one. 

Really, they were probably just hoping that, somewhere along my story, I would say something that would either confirm or deny the tragically unimaginative theory they'd likely been brewing for hours. 

“So when’s the last time you actually saw Mister Vesarra?” The suit in the corner asked me. 

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. As always, we went out, had some drinks, ate dinner, and then went home. “After our date, he went over to a buddy’s house. The third Friday of every month is their dedicated poker night. Valentine’s Day didn’t change that. So he left.” I chewed on my cheek, realizing we’d had our last kiss in the same spot as our first one, on the same day, too. A chasm was opening up aggressively in my chest, threatening to grow and grow until all I was, was hollow. 

Billy had still consumed my mouth like it was the first time kissing me. He had given me one of those charmer smiles of his before turning on his heels and leaving. 

“And you never heard him return?” 

“I never heard him return,” I echoed. 

A long pause drew out between us. A tactic, I’m sure.

“Did he gamble a lot, your husband?” The detective sitting in front of me, Detective Roy, asked me. Perhaps they no longer thought a silly little wife was going to carve out her husband’s heart in cold blood on their thirteenth wedding anniversary. Maybe he owed a hefty debt to some bad people, and that’s how he wound up murdered on our front lawn on a Saturday morning in February.  

I stared at the detective. My mind was unnervingly quiet. “Once a month, every month for the last decade is all I know of, detective.” My voice was dry. There was nothing left.

He must have realized how sick I was of being there because he quipped back defensively, “We’re just trying to piece together what happened, Casey. Someone did something seriously awful to your husband. We want to know who, and we want to know why.” Roy punctuated each word with two fingers to the table for emphasis. He had a white ring around his finger where a wedding band probably sat outside of working hours.

My eyes blinked slowly. I was tired. I’d been there since 7:30 that morning and had no idea what time it was now. “I know.” I cleared my throat. “I just don’t know what exactly you’re looking for from me.” 

Detective Roy looked back at his partner, who gave him a short nod. Then he looked back at me. “We’re going to let you go home, Mrs. Vesarra. For now. You’ve been here longer than you needed to be.” He sighed in a way that reminded me of the way my dad used to. “I’m sure you have a lot of things to sort out at home. We can continue this once things have settled down for you a bit. As much as they can, at least.” 

My drive back home was a blur. So was turning down my dirt driveway and parking in front of the dilapidated garage Billy had “been meaning to fix up” for years now. I didn’t look at the rusty-stained patch of grass in the front yard as I walked up to the front door. Nor did I let my eyes focus too hard on the pieces of our lives scattered around the house, now belonging just to me. 

That pit in my chest yawned open a little further. Longing for a heart that’s gone cold. A heart that was no longer a resident of the chest it had been beating in for the last thirty-four years. That’s how our neighbors had found Billy that morning. Lying face first on the lawn. Cold. Heartless. None of the first responders could find it anywhere. 

A few people suspected some kind of cult ritual. “I mean, who takes a heart?” David, our long-time neighbor, had wondered aloud throughout the chaos. His wife, Penny, sat with me on the couch, stroking my hand. “You don’t see many of those these days,” he had added. “Cults, I mean. But they’re not gone.” Even with everything, I still anticipated one of his over-explained conspiracy theories. “You know we have a friend whose cousin's brother had his heart cut out, too. Right Pen?”

“I don’t know, Dave,” Penny sighed. She looked like she hoped someone would come rip his heart out, too, so that he’d stop talking. 

Back in the present, I made my way up the carpeted stairs. I turned down the hallway filled with hanging photos of Billy and me on trips we’d taken over the last ten years. The last one we went on stuck out like a sore thumb. A hiking trip to Montana. Our gaping, smiling faces pressed cheek-to-cheek were poised purposefully in front of a mountain-covered landscape. They mocked me from their perfect, colorfully dyed cardstock. Even though it was only a few weeks ago, that girl was gone. That life was gone. 

It hung on the wall in an old frame whose wire was long enough for me to turn the picture around without taking it down.

So I did. 

The last couple of years had been hard. Ever since we stopped traveling and started working more. That last trip, I had begged him to go on it. It had been nearly a year since our last one, and I was desperate to leave California. Even for a weekend. Billy had been hesitant, saying he had too much going on here. But eventually, I’d worn him down. 

Our friends had started to notice the rift growing between us a while ago. My high school friend, Samantha, had reassured me that she and her husband had gone through something similar. “You’ll get through it. It’s normal. Like growing pains.” 

Her husband was a member of Billy’s poker group, so she felt confident that she was in just the right position to stitch us back together. But the ache in my chest had already started eating me away slowly from the inside out.

Maybe Billy could have closed it back up, something that I’d never find out now. That seemed like the hardest part. Not knowing how things would have turned out had he not needed that heart to live. 

The hallway opened up in the kitchen. We had just renovated it a few years prior. Ditching all the old, cream-colored appliances and cheap corian countertops, we opted for sleek stainless steel and black granite. The layout stayed the same, though. 

I made for the fridge. The white light washed over me as I grabbed one of Billy’s beers, still waiting for him to come home and crack one open. I ignored the dinner I was going to make later.  

As the day continued, the beers dwindled, and that cavity in my chest grew bigger. This must be what being a grieving widow feels like, I thought to myself. Somewhere in the day, I had mindlessly thrown together that dinner in a big roasting pan. Meat surrounded by roughly chopped carrots, onions, and purple-colored potatoes. I tried to ignore the red center as I worked. The image of my husband’s body, strewn out, bloody and gaping, was still burned in my brain like one the pictures in the hallway. His baby blue eyes wide with fear and shock. 

By the time my oven dinged around 6:00, I had met with the funeral home, formalized plans, notified family and friends, and had my husband’s eternal resting place marked. 

Exhausted, I set the table for one, a routine I had gotten used to over the last year. But now, everything felt different. Everything was different. The last beer was sweating in front of my plate, and steam leaked from the black, ovular roaster in the center of the small table. I set down the ceramic bowl that I'd made a caesar salad in.

As I sat down to eat, my phone pinged. I looked down to see a text from one of my coworkers, Stacy.

Kind of ironic that he lost his heart on Valentine’s Day, though. 

It was entirely inappropriate, but that was Stacy. We had been texting each other on and off throughout the day. 

There wasn’t a thing Stacy didn’t know about me. Even though I met her at work, she’s always felt like more of a sister to me than even my oldest friends ever had. She always had my back. Was always honest with me. Even when she knew it would shatter my heart into a million pieces.

She was the realest, most honest and true thing that I had. 

Not really. 

I sent the text back before turning my phone on silent. I grabbed the colorfully crocheted pot holder I had made in 5th grade for Mother’s Day and removed the lid from the pan. I grabbed a wooden spoon and scooped roasted veggies onto my plate, juices dripping across the table as I worked. Then scooped out some of the cream-covered greens.

When my plate was about half full, I discarded the serving spoon and reached in with my fork. The prongs pierced the oblong-shaped organ with ease. Blood and other fluids rippled up through the puncture marks and ran down the sides. I hauled the dead, lifeless thing onto our wedding china with a thud, fork and all, unnaturally brown and steaming. 

It cut through like chicken. It even smelled like chicken. My first bite didn’t really taste like chicken, though.

I chewed. I swallowed. Then, cut off another chunk. 

“Cheating bastard.”

The pit in my chest finally smiled.