Heartless

 

 

"Go to you bosom: Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know." ~ William Shakespeare

"The heart is deceitful of all things. Who can understand it?" ~ Jeremiah 17:9

"The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing." ~ Blaise Pascal

I was told a story once. A long time ago, when the bells in Norley still rang, before the Allied Widows Brigade sold them for the war effort. It was the first story my sister and I ever heard as children. The bells rang out six times and my stepfather would pull us close, sidling his ugly green chair nearer the fire with a gritty squeak on the hearth.

His thick-threaded argyle sweaters smelled like a schoolroom. I'd bury my face in his chest until my nose filled with chalk and dust and old books. His round lenses caught the firelight, mirroring the flames so I couldn't see his eyes. His practiced professor's voice had the versatility of a songbird or a cello - soaring, murmuring, choking, or chortling at all the right moments.

The story was about a girl who'd been born without a heart. The girl's mother had been the object of a warlock's affection. When the warlock knew he could never have her, he cursed their child to heartlessness. The girl in the story always defeated the warlock in the end, usually taking back her heart in a blazing, beautiful act of defiant love.

I always cried. Elena never did. I always wondered why, but then, Elena never cried about anything.

This Good Friday, some fifteen years later, my stepfather died. I sobbed at his casket Easter afternoon. I held my mother while Elena looked on with mildly interested dry eyes.

Today is Monday. Elena has been playing a mechanically perfect, but tortuously cheerful tune on her piano all morning. Meanwhile, I made mother's tea and set to bagging up his sweaters - all but one, which I'll keep in a grocery bag in my dresser. I've gone to it at least twelve times already, drawing courage from his essence, bookish and warm, lingering in the threads.

That's how I found it. The locked container in the pocket, no bigger than my palm, with my father's name etched into it. I broke the lock and found a parchment letter inside, scrawled in spidery black ink, addressed to him - its contents so elegantly executed, yet so insidious in nature I can't bring myself to share the exact words.

The girl - the heroine of my stepfather's story - was Elena.

My stepfather was the only one who knew how this story began. Until just now. And I'm still not certain how it's going to end.