The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel (2 page)

“I’m glad you did,” she said. Her words, carefully spaced, had a little click at the end. “I actually came here . . . to this bar . . . to look for you. I know that you live near here.”

“Oh.”

“I’m glad you spotted me first. I don’t know if I would have had the courage to go up to you. I know how you must feel about me.”

“Then you know more than I do. I don’t exactly know how I feel about you.”

“I mean about what happened.” She hadn’t changed position since he’d come back into the bar, but one of her fingers gently tapped on the wooden bar to the percussive music.

“Right, that,” George said, as though he were searching in his memory banks for what she could be talking about.

“Right, that,” she repeated back, and they both laughed. Liana shifted her body around to face George more squarely. “Should I be worried?”

“Worried?”

“Citizen’s arrest? Drink thrown in my face?” She had developed tiny laugh lines at the edge of her pale blue eyes. Something new.

“The police are on their way right now. I’m just stalling you.” George kept smiling, but it felt unnatural. “I’m kidding,” he said when Liana didn’t immediately speak.

“No, I know. Would you like to sit? You have time for a drink?”

“Actually . . . I’m meeting someone, in just a little bit.” The lie slid out of George easily. His head was suddenly muddled by her close presence, by the smell of her skin, and he had an almost animal urge to escape.

“Oh. That’s fine,” Liana quickly said. “But I do have something I need to ask you. It’s a favor.”

“Okay.”

“Can we meet somewhere? Maybe tomorrow.”

“Do you live here?”

“No, I’m just in town for . . . I’m visiting a friend, really. . . . It’s complicated. I would like to talk with you. I’d understand if you didn’t, of course. This was a long shot, and I understand—”

“Okay,” George said, telling himself he could change his mind later.

“Okay, yes, you’d like to talk?”

“Sure, let’s meet while you’re in town. I promise I won’t call the feds. I just want to know how you’re doing.”

“Thank you so much. I appreciate it.” She took a large breath through her nostrils, her chest expanding. George somehow heard the rustle of her crisp white shirt across her skin above the sounds of the jukebox.

“How did you know I lived here?”

“I looked you up. Online. It wasn’t that hard.”

“I don’t suppose you’re still called Liana?”

“Some people. Not many. Most people know me as Jane now.”

“Do you have a cell phone? Should I call you later?”

“I don’t have a cell phone. I never have. Could we meet here again? Tomorrow. At noon.” George noticed how her eyes subtly moved, searching his face, trying to read him. Or else she was looking for what was familiar and what had changed. George’s hair had turned gray at the sides, his forehead had wrinkled, and the lines around his mouth had deepened. But he was still in relatively good shape, still handsome in a slightly hangdog way.

“Sure,” George said. “We could meet here. They’re open for lunch.”

“You don’t sound sure.”

“I’m not sure, but I’m not unsure.”

“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

“Okay,” George said, again thinking that he could change his mind, that by agreeing he was only postponing a decision. Later George thought that there would have been times in his life when he simply would have told Liana that he didn’t think they should see each other. He had no need for justice, not even any real need for closure, and for that reason George didn’t believe he would have alerted the authorities. The mess that she’d gotten involved in was many years in the past. But it was bad enough that she must have been running ever since, and she would have to continue running the rest of her life. Of course she didn’t have a cell phone. And of course she wanted to meet somewhere public, a bar at an intersection in a busy part of Boston, somewhere she could take off from right away.

“Okay. I can come,” George said.

She smiled. “I’ll be here. Noon.”

“I’ll be here as well.”

Chapter 2

T
hey had met the first night of college. George’s RA, a gangly, nervous sophomore named Charlie Singh, had brought several of his freshman charges to a jam-packed keg party in McAvoy. George had followed Charlie up the crammed stairwell to a sweltering, high-ceilinged quad with window seats and scuffed hardwood floors. He drank a sour beer and made small talk with Mark Schumacher, one of the freshmen from his hall. Mark begged off, leaving George alone in a sea of attractive upperclassmen who all seemed engaged in making one another laugh riotously. He determined that he could leave the party, but only after he got himself one more beer. He mapped an approach across the room to the unmanned keg and picked his way through the flannel and khaki. He was edged out by a girl who took hold of the nozzle just as he was reaching for it; she pressed the knob, and nothing but foam and air sputtered into her lipstick-smeared cup.

“It’s empty,” she told him. She had flat, dark blond hair, cropped just under her jawline, and blue, blue eyes spaced far apart on either side of a heart-shaped face. The spacey eyes made her look a little dim, but George thought she was the prettiest girl he’d seen so far at college.

“You sure it’s empty?”

“I don’t know,” she said with a drawl that meant she wasn’t from New England. “I haven’t really ever done this before. Have you?”

George hadn’t, but he stepped forward and took her cup from her. “I think you pump this thing. I actually don’t know either, but I’ve seen it done.”

“Are you a freshman too?”

“Yes,” he said as a stream of beer went half into her cup, and half over his wrist and down his sleeve.

They spent the rest of the evening together, smoking her cigarettes by an open window, then exploring the campus late at night. They made out under an arch that linked the college chapel to the main administration building. George told her how his father—a farmer’s son—had invented a mechanized system for slaughtering poultry and had made more money in one sale than his grandparents had made in their lifetime on the farm. She told him how her dad was an ambulance-chasing lawyer in a small town, then added, as George slid a hand under her shirt, that she was a girl from south of the Mason-Dixon Line who had no intention of having casual sex just because she was at a college in New England. The way she spoke was not censorious but matter-of-fact, and her almost-innocent directness, plus the brief feel of her full breast held by a thin, satiny bra, was all it took to make George fall immediately in love.

He escorted her back to her dorm and dropped her off, then half ran across campus to get into his unfamiliar bed with the freshman orientation handbook. Her name and address were in it, but no picture. He stared at the name, though, and the blank space where her picture should have been. George felt he had never met a creature like her before. Unlike the alternately repressed and opinionated members of George’s family clan, she had seemed wide open, talking as though the words were falling directly from her thoughts. When they had met by the keg, she had stared at George in a way that felt challenging and yet completely innocent. She stared at him like she had been newly born into the world. There had been something almost spooky about it. Then George remembered the hungry way she had kissed him, pushing hard against his lips, their tongues touching, one of her hands on the back of his neck. George’s roommate, whom he had barely met, was snoring loudly from across their double room. George touched himself through his boxers and came almost immediately.

When he woke up the next day, he wasn’t thinking about independence, or college, or the classes he’d be starting soon. He could only think of Liana. Hungover but giddy, he went and sat alone in Mather College’s dining hall for three hours to make sure he’d see her. Liana showed at eleven, coming in with another girl and going straight to the cereal station. Her hair was still damp from the shower, and she was wearing a pair of tight-fitting khaki pants and a white cotton sweater. George’s mouth went dry when he saw her again. He got himself coffee (thinking it would look more sophisticated than the grape juice he’d been drinking) and pretended to run into her as she was filling her bowl with Froot Loops.

“Hey, again,” he said, willing his voice to sound sleepy and disinterested.

She introduced him to Emily, her roommate, a private school girl from Philadelphia who was wearing a faded Izod shirt and tennis skirt, then asked him to join them at their table. When he did, Emily, out of either discretion or disdain, excused herself after eating half a bowl of Grape-Nuts. Liana and George looked at each other. She was, he thought, more alarmingly beautiful in daytime than she’d been the night before. Her skin, in the raw daylight of the high-ceilinged dining hall, looked fresh-scrubbed and poreless, her eyes a translucent blue, flecked with hints of grayish-green. “I’ve been waiting here for three hours,” George admitted, “just to see you.”

He thought she’d laugh, but all she said was, “I’m glad.”

“I’ve had a lot of cereal.”

“I would have come earlier, but Emily asked me to wait for her and then took an hour getting dressed. I don’t think I’m going to like her much.”

They were together for the next three months, and while both made concerted efforts to develop other friendships, to spend some of their time apart, at the end of most nights they would find each other, even if it was just to stand and kiss in the cold black shadows of the college chapel, halfway between their two dormitories. She was true to her word about having sex—she had no intention of moving too fast in that department—but a steady progression of allowances led to an evening in late November, the two of them naked and nervous in George’s single bed, his roommate, Kevin, away for the night.

“Okay,” she said, and he fumbled with a condom he’d had since junior year of high school. He entered her slowly, one hand on her waist and one cupping the underside of her raised thigh. She lifted her pelvis to meet his and tilted her head back, biting her plump lower lip. It was that sight, more than the feel of her hips moving beneath him, that caused George, to his shame, to come almost immediately. He apologized, and she laughed, then kissed him deeply. She said it was her first time, but thankfully there was no blood. Later in the month, when Emily, done early with exams, had left to return to her home in Pennsylvania, George and Liana had a week together in her dorm room. The entire Eastern Seaboard was hit by an ice storm so bad that half of Mather’s finals were delayed. George and Liana studied, chain-smoked Camel Lights, occasionally left the dorm to go to the dining hall, and had sex. They tried every position, finding ways to make George last longer and the easiest ways for Liana to come. Each day felt like the discovery of a brand-new country hiding behind a low door in a wall. The intensity of that week bordered on an almost unbearable sadness for George. He’d read enough books to know that youthful love comes only once, and he wanted it never to end or go away. And he had been right: that week spent in Liana’s single bed, not much bigger, or more comfortable, than a foldout cot, had seared itself into his memory.

He had been searching for it, or its equivalent, ever since.

They took their exams, and the bright ice from the storm that had temporarily locked the world underneath its shell melted into slush and rivulets of mud. Two days before Christmas they said their good-byes before leaving for their respective home states, Liana by car and George by train.

Liana had given George her parents’ phone number in Florida but begged him not to call. “The chances of me actually being there are slim to none,” she’d said. “Really, don’t bother. If they catch wind of a boy calling me from college, there’ll be about a thousand questions to answer. They’ll send me back here with a chastity belt.”

“You serious?”

“I am,” she’d said with her pronounced Southern drawl, an accent that had never fit his conception of a Florida girl. He pictured surfers and convertibles, but she said the kids from her town of Sweetgum—the white kids anyway, not the Mexicans or the blacks—listened to country music and drove pickups.

“You can call me,” George had said, writing down his parents’ phone number.

“I will.”

But she hadn’t.

And when he returned to Mather College in January, he heard the news.

She wouldn’t be returning to Connecticut.

She had committed suicide at her home in Florida.

Chapter 3

A
t a quarter to noon, George was the first patron at Jack Crow’s. One of the many things George liked about this particular bar was that it hadn’t yet succumbed to the citywide brunch craze. It opened at lunchtime, even on the weekends. No lines outside the door for eggs Benedict and ten-dollar Bloody Marys. No jazz trio playing in the corner.

Even early in the day, Jack Crow’s was cold as a meat locker. The smell of Lysol just barely edged out the smell of stale beer. There were no waitresses visible, so George walked up to the bar and ordered a bottle of Newcastle.

“You’re here early,” the owner said, returning to the lemon he was sectioning into wedges.

“I’m sick of this heat, Max.”

“You and me both.”

A rumpled newspaper sat on the bar, and George took it with him to a booth toward the back, sitting down where he could watch the door. He opened the paper but couldn’t focus on the words, just peered over its top toward the entryway. By the time he’d finished his beer, it was ten minutes past noon. The front doors had opened three times—first to admit a young Japanese couple who were each pulling a suitcase on wheels, then the mailman, who quickly dropped a rubber-banded bundle of mail on the bar. The third time the doors opened a regular named Lawrence came in. George raised the newspaper slightly so he wouldn’t be spotted as Lawrence went immediately to his usual seat at the distant end of the bar, closest to the kitchen.

George got up to order another beer. Kelly, one of the waitresses, was now behind the bar cleaning glasses. As George approached the wall phone behind her rang, and she snatched it, tucking the handset under her chin. George listened to her say, “Jack Crow’s, how can I help you?” Then she paused, raising her eyes to look at George. “Yeah, I know him. I’m looking right at him. Hold on.” She held the phone out to George just as he reached the edge of the bar. “Some lady. For you.” Kelly shrugged as she handed over the phone.

George took it, knowing who it would be.

“Hello?”

“Hi, George. It’s Liana.”

“You okay?”

“I’m fine, but I’m not going to make it to meet you. It’s a long story. I let someone borrow my car, and now I don’t know where she is. I don’t suppose there’s any way you could come to me?”

“Where are you?”

“New Essex. You know it?”

“Sure. On the North Shore. I’ve been there.”

“Do you have a car? Would you be willing to drive up here?” Her voice sounded shaky to George. And she was talking abnormally fast.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine except for the fact that I don’t have my car.”

“You sure?”

“What was it you said last night?
I’m not sure but I’m not unsure.
Something like that. I won’t lie. I’m in a little bit of trouble—not right this instant but in general—and I was hoping you could do me a favor.”

When George didn’t immediately say anything, she asked, “You still there?”

“I am. I’m listening.”

“Trust me when I say that I am
well
aware that I am the last person who should be asking you for a favor. I’m hoping that maybe you’ll hear me out.”

“You can’t ask me now, over the phone?”

“I’d like to ask you face-to-face. Do you have a car?”

“I do.”

“I would appreciate it if you drove up here and at least listened to what I have to say. You can trust me. I’m trusting you. There’s nothing stopping you from calling the police and giving them my address.”

George breathed through his nostrils, looked at Kelly, the waitress. She glanced at his empty bottle of beer, mouthed, “Another?” George shook his head.

“Okay. I’ll come up. Where exactly are you?”

“Thank you, George. Do you know Beach Road? I’m staying at a friend’s house just behind St. John’s, that old stone chapel.”

“Okay. I might know where that is.”

“After you see the church on your right, there’s an unpaved road called Captain Sawyer Lane. It’s the house at the very end. More like a cottage. I’ll wait for you. Anytime this afternoon is fine.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

George handed the phone back to Kelly. “Uh-oh,” she said in her strong Boston accent. “Starting to get phone calls at your local bar. Never a good sign.”

“Thanks, Kel. Maybe you’ll take messages for me when I’m not here.”

“You wish.”

George thought about ordering another beer, plus something to eat, but decided instead to go immediately to see Liana. Talking to her had tightened up his stomach, not just because she was back in his life but because she sounded genuinely scared. He left Jack Crow’s and walked the two short blocks to the garage where he kept his Saab.

George would never have considered himself a car person, but the Saab 900 was the first and only car he’d ever fallen in love with. He’d bought one with 100,000 miles on it just after graduating from college, added another 100,000 to its odometer, and had then begun to look for a replacement. He’d been replacing his Saabs ever since. The current car was his fourth, the first with the Special Performance Group option; Saab had made only about fifteen hundred of them back in 1986, and they only came in Edwardian Gray. Garaging his Saab was a major expense, but he loved her far too much to leave her on the street.

Liana’s location, on a traffic-free day, was about forty-five minutes north of Boston. Tucked between inlets, New Essex was an old quarry town by the sea. Half the granite in Boston originated there, and there was a massive hole in the ground to prove it, but the primary reason people went to New Essex was to eat fried clams and steamers, to gaze at the rock-strewn shore, or to visit the kitschy galleries that had replaced the old fishing shacks around the harbor.

George made it to the center of town at a little past one thirty. He wound his battered Saab past the granite statue of a quarryman that crowned the tiny rotary at the heart of downtown and took Beach Road north. It was another muggy day. The sky was a chalky blue, and the sea, glimpsed through gaps in the evergreens, was slack and gray. George slowed the car down to look for the markers. He rounded a corner and saw, up ahead at the next bend, a stone church fronted by a bell tower. He drove past it. There was a lone man sleeping on a bench in the church’s garden. He was dressed in long pants and a long-sleeved shirt, each a navy blue; he sat rigidly straight, but his chin had drooped to his chest. George had the sudden and alarming thought that the old man had died on that bench and the world hadn’t noticed, or had decided not to wake an old man sleeping in the sun.

After passing the church, Beach Road swung sharply inland, and the view of the sea was blocked by white pines. The green sign for Captain Sawyer Lane was bleached nearly unreadable, and the road itself was deeply rutted. George turned in and drove a few hundred yards, past a 1970s deckhouse that was camouflaged in the woods on the right. He kept going, and the road dead-ended at an old shingled summer cottage that would have looked abandoned had there not been a shiny white Dodge pulled up to its decrepit front steps. George parked behind the Dodge, killed his engine, and got out of the car. The driveway was a combination of pebbles and shells. Behind the cottage were a marshy inlet and a pier that appeared older and less reliable than the house. George climbed the steps and knocked on the unpainted door. Nothing stirred. The breeze from the sea gently rocked the surrounding pines. George knocked again; the wood felt hollow, as though it had rotted from the inside. He was about to try the door when a man came around the side of the house and said, “She’s not here.”

George turned. The speaker was a short, neat man wearing suit trousers and the type of silky expensive shirt that you don’t see too often in Massachusetts. He had a smile on his face notable for its unfriendliness. “Who’s not here?” George asked.

The man’s smile got wider, and he took a couple of steps toward George. “Really?” he said. He had grayish-purple teeth, as though he’d drunk too much red wine for breakfast.

“Who is it that you’re looking for?” George asked, hoping to turn the tables on him. The man was pretty small, but something about the way he carried himself made George almost physically recoil. He reminded George of a pit bull, the kind you’d normally see muzzled and straining against a leash.

“I was looking for Jane,” Pit Bull said, as though she were a mutual friend. “She’s been staying out here. What are
you
doing here?”

“I’m a salesman,” George said. He came down off the steps so that he was standing on even ground with the other man. Pit Bull was at least a full foot shorter than George, if not more.

“What are you selling?” he asked.

“I’m glad you asked that. I’m selling everlasting life.” George reached out his hand to shake Pit Bull’s, aware that his palms were beginning to sweat but wanting to at least keep up the pretense that he didn’t know Liana/Jane and that he wasn’t particularly scared to be alone in the dark woods with a man who looked like he could snap George in half the way he could snap a towel in a locker room.

They shook hands. George was not surprised that the stranger’s hand was dry and cool to the touch. He went to let go, but the man held on, digging into the back of George’s hand with his thumb so that George had no choice but to straighten out his fingers. Pit Bull squeezed hard, jamming George’s knuckles together. “Jesus,” George said, trying to pull his hand away.

“Don’t move,” Pit Bull said, his smile now more of a smirk, and George did what he said. The way he was gripping George’s hand made it pretty clear that if he squeezed just a tiny bit harder knuckles would explode like rocks in a crusher.

“I don’t know who you think—”

“Shhh. Don’t. I’m only going to ask you once, so I want you to give me straight answers or else I’ll crush every bone in your hand. I’ve done it before, and I really hate doing it. I’m squeamish about some things. Not about blood, of course, but the feel of turning someone’s hand into a limp glove filled with gravel makes me sick to my stomach. Even thinking about it, I don’t feel too good. So I don’t want to do it, and you
really
don’t want me to do it, so just tell me everything you know. Okay? When did you last see Jane?”

George hesitated one brief fraction of a second, long enough to conclude that there was no decent reason to try to lie. “I saw her last night. In Boston.”

“Where did you see her?”

“A bar in Beacon Hill, called Jack Crow’s. She’s an old friend. I knew her in college, and I asked if we could get together, and she told me she was staying here and I could come see her tomorrow. That’s the whole story.”

“Why’d you lie to me?” Up close the Pit Bull had tiny features on an acorn-shaped head and waxy skin that looked pinpricked all over with minuscule pores. His nose was flattened along the bridge like he’d lost a couple of fights, which was hard to imagine. His hair was short and heavily gelled, and he smelled of astringent aftershave lotion, something with a lot of alcohol in it.

“Look, I know that . . . that Jane has a history of trouble, although I honestly know nothing about what is happening right now. You looked like someone she might want to avoid.”

The man laughed, and it was possible that he beamed a little, as though proud of George’s assessment of him. “Look, if you see her before me, then tell her that she really ought to avoid me at all fucking costs. But she knows that already. What’s your name?”

“George Foss,” George said, willing himself not to lie. He could feel the interrogation winding to its close, and he wanted to keep the bones of his hand intact.

“Good, George. You’ve been telling me the truth, and I like that about you. Do you want to know my name?”

“Only if you really want to tell me.”

Pit Bull tilted his head back and barked with laughter again. His chin and neck were incredibly smooth, as though he’d had a professional shave that very morning. George felt a slight loosening of the grip on his hand and almost considered trying to pull away and make a run for it.

“George, I like you, and I am going to tell you my name so that we’re on a first-name basis. It’s Donnie Jenks, and I hail from the state of Georgia, and I can always tell when someone is lying to me, and you haven’t been lying to me, at least not since that bullshit session with which we started our friendship. So if you see Jane, you can tell her that Donnie Jenks is in town. Will you do that?”

“I don’t plan on seeing her, but yes, I will if I do. I promise.”

“So before I go I want to leave you with something, just so you know that I’m serious.”

Donnie Jenks pulled George forward with his right hand so that George’s hips spun, then turned his own hips and punched George in the kidney with his left fist. George felt the pain in an instant, a small detonation unleashing its ruin in his lower back. He dropped to the ground, a wave of blackness passing over him as though he were about to pass out.

“Donnie Jenks. J-E-N-K-S,” the short man said. “Tell Jane she has one goddamned life left, and it’s a short one. You try and help her in any way and I’ll shorten your life as well. You remember all that?”

George managed to nod, and the man turned and walked away, loafers crunching on the driveway.

Spit flowed into George’s mouth, and he turned his head and vomited violently, continuing to spasm even after his stomach had emptied itself of a distant breakfast and the beer he’d had for lunch. He heard the Dodge start up and drive away. He had enough strength to push himself a few feet over, turn onto the side where he hadn’t been punched, and put his head down. He stayed like that for over ten minutes, staring at his own stomach contents on the crushed-shell driveway.