The Stopped Heart

for Gill Coleridge

I
T WAS A SUNNY DAY.
T
HE SKY WAS THICK AND HIGH AND BLUE.
Addie Sands was standing in the lane and she was screaming. There was blood everywhere. On her skirts, her wrists, her face. A dark hole where her mouth should be. There were no words. Nothing but the black taste of her screaming.

Nobody knew what to do. We all stared. We dared not go to her. I think some of us stepped away. At last my mother went over, grabbing her by the shoulders, seeing the blood, the mess of her hair hanging down, tears and cries and wet on her face.

For the love of God, Addie, what is it? What's happened?

Addie moaned. She tried to twist her head away. She would not let herself look at my mother's face.

Just tell me, my mother said.

Addie kept on weeping. She could hardly breathe for weeping. My mother had her by the shoulders. She kept hold of her.

Are the kiddies all right? Has something happened? Is it the school?

The kiddies. A quick, burnt feeling went through me.

Addie moaned and dropped to her knees. Right there in the
lane with the sun high up above and dandelions and dust and horse dung all around.

I didn't know, she said. How could I know?

My mother kept very still.

Know what? she said.

Addie could not look at her.

I thought he'd come to fetch the kiddies home.

Now my mother got it. Her face turned white. When at last Addie lifted her chin, her eyes did not go anywhere. They went straight through.

I thought he'd come to fetch them. I didn't know what he was going to do. He had this great big happy smile on his face—

Addie gazed at my mother.

He was smiling all the time he did it, she said.

M
ARY
C
OLES STANDS IN THE LANE.
S
KY STILL DARK, BUT ALREADY
birds are singing. The cottage too. Dark and unsteady, turned in on itself. She keeps her eyes on it, unsure at first what she's looking for, wondering if she's even got the right one. The second cottage you come to after the humpback bridge, Graham said. Is it this one? Does she want it to be? Brick and flint. Run-down. One smashed windowpane under the eaves. Paint flaking off the door. The little gate—yes, the gate—so rotten it's coming right off its hinges, he said.

She pushes the gate. The hinge gives, but the part that ought to move doesn't. Some kind of plant or vine stopping it. She hesitates, not wanting to force it. It didn't want me to go in, she hears herself telling him, it seemed to want to keep me out.

In the rented bungalow, in the middle of the night, she woke him up and told him her plan.

“What?” he said. “Drive there right now? On your own? Why on earth would you want to do that?”

She did not reply.

“Come here,” he said. “Come on. Come back to bed.”

But she was already up. Pulling on her jeans, sticking feet into boots, looking around for her keys.

“I need to see it. In the dark. I want to see what it's like.”

He stared at her, pushing hair and sleep from his eyes.

“But you'll see it tomorrow—”

“I want to do it now.”

“What, in the bloody middle of the night?”

“It'll be light in an hour.”

He gazed at her. His face unreadable, a man used to absorbing the blows. He threw back the covers.

“All right, at least let me come with you.”

She lowered her eyes.

“Please. I don't want you to. Don't make me explain it. I just want to go there on my own.”

Now she shivers, fingers closing around the car keys in her pocket. She knows it's empty. Empty for at least a year, he said, maybe more. More than a year? She lets go of the gate and stands for a moment, breathing in the earthy dawn smell of light and damp and things warming up. She thinks she hears an owl.

She had meant to go right up to it, look through the windows, see if she could get an idea of the inside. That's what she told him. And she knows she could do it if she wanted to. But she doesn't. She doesn't even try.

Instead, she stands there motionless for perhaps thirty or forty more seconds and then, as if someone had walked up and shoved her out of the way, she turns and hurries back to the car.

S
HE HOPES HE
'
LL BE ASLEEP WHEN SHE GETS BACK, BUT NO.
E
YES
open, iPod in one ear. Curtains half-drawn to let the light in. The open suitcases still spread on the floor. A sweater. Her unzipped, kicked-off boots. He turns his head.

“That was quick.”

“You're supposed to be asleep,” she says.

He smiles and puts an arm out from under the duvet, reaching for her. She stands there looking at it, the hand.

“Well?” he says.

“Well, what?”

She sits down on the edge of the bed, a little more heavily than she meant to. Feels him shifting his legs. She lets him hold her hand, warming her.

“You found it?”

She nods.

“And? Tell me.”

She hesitates.

“It's nice.”

“Nice?”

“All I did was stand in the lane. I heard an owl. I think it was an owl. And then I came back.”

She feels him thinking about this. His eyes on her. His hand moving to her bare knee.

“You're freezing.”

She says nothing. He takes hold of her hand again.

“All right, but what do you think? Is it what you imagined? Do you like it?”

“I don't know what I imagined,” she says. “But yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“I like it. I do.”

He sits up, encouraged, grabbing another pillow to push under his head.

“It needs a few repairs, I know that—the roof and so on. And I'm sure there's a bit of damp. But the basic structure is fine. Did you go around the back? Did you see any of the garden?”

She shakes her head.

“You'll be amazed. It's enormous. Seriously, I think there was once an orchard. It goes on forever.”

She looks at her hand lying there in his.

“That's nice,” she says.

He smiles.

“Just imagine. You'll be able to garden again.”

She sighs. Feels him squeeze her hand. A moment of silence. Both of them thinking the same thing.

“So you can see us living there, then?” he asks, his voice suddenly shaky.

She swallows. Remembering the gate that would not budge. The heavy darkness of the glass-eyed windows, sucking up the light. She tells him that she can.

T
HE NIGHT HE CAME, A STORM.
J
UST LIKE HIM, IT SEEMED TO
come from nowhere. A freezing wind. We woke before dawn to the crack of thunder. Greasy light. Rain coming down. The dog pestering at the door.

My father was already up to milk the cows. My mother, feeding the baby, dark-eyed and vacant and fidgety from no sleep. I think he told her to get back to bed but she wouldn't, just kept her eyes on him while he made a cigarette.

They'd been angry with each other for a long time and not just because of Isaac Roper. And then when the kid came along, he wasn't expected to live and all in all my father said that would be the best outcome. But he was two months now, lusty and alive, and sometimes I thought he would suck the life out of her.

We sat in the kitchen while the storm raged. It was a big one. It lit up the walls, the floor, the table, the hearth. We heard the rain pelting on the roof of the privy. The dog grew so afraid she stopped crying and turned her face to the wall.

With the next crack of thunder, my mother pulled the baby
against her and went over and opened the door. A cold gust of rain and blackness blowing in.

Sally, what the hell? my father said.

She shut it again, shushing and joggling the baby. He lit his cigarette. Lightning ripping across the sky.

I didn't want to count, but I couldn't help it. One, two—three and the sky cracked open. Upstairs the little ones started to scream.

Over us now, my father said, putting the cigarette back in his mouth.

My mother's eyes were on the ceiling.

Eliza, she said.

What?

Up you go.

I sighed.

They'll calm down in a minute, I said.

Keeping his eyes on the table, my father folded his tobacco pouch. Another clap and upstairs you could hear Lottie and Honey wailing. Maybe the twins as well. My father looked at me.

Just do it, he said.

I began to go, but even as I did, there was another bright flash and then a sound like the whole world tearing itself into pieces. The ground shuddered and the air outside the window turned black. My mother screamed. I ran to the door.

No! she cried, but I'd already pulled it open.

For a moment we didn't understand what it was, the thing that we were seeing. Then we did. Suffocating the house and blocking out the light, the great big tangle of its roots standing stiff against the flashing sky.

My mother screamed again. My father swore. The old elm tree that used to stand beside our cottage was standing no longer. It was down on the ground and under it was a man.

T
HE SALE GOES THROUGH VERY QUICKLY.
T
EN DAYS LATER,
they've exchanged contracts and are told they'll have the keys by the end of the week. Mary is glad. She is beginning to realize how much she needs to get out of the rented place with its shiny brown furniture and smells of frying and Febreze.

It's a bright, warm day. Blue sky. Late spring. They know they can't get inside yet, but they drive over anyway. To look at the garden, he says. Now that we know it's ours. To stand there and think about the possibilities.

Possibilities. She knows that all he means is to encourage her, to scoop her up and carry her along.

“I love you,” she says, understanding exactly how much his optimism costs him.

“What?”

Biting her lip. On the edge of her vision, bright fields of something—corn, is it, or barley?—speeding past.

“I just do. I love you.”

He glances at her.

“Well, that's good.”

“It is?”

He smiles, his eyes back on the road, fingers brushing her knee.

“Yeah. It is.”

He slows down when they get to the village.

“Look,” he says, “a post office—that's rare enough these days. And a co-op. Useful.”

Her eyes are on the neat, clipped green with its swings and slide and hanging rubber tire. Grateful for a reason to look away, she takes in the co-op with its metal racks of newspapers
and black buckets of bright roses and foil trays for barbecues.

“But I think there's also a farm shop up that road beyond the church,” he says. “Local produce—”

“What about it?” she says.

“Well, it's what we want, isn't it?”

She looks at him and he laughs and for a few quick seconds, the laugh could almost be his old laugh—warm and permanent and real.

T
HE COTTAGE LOOKS SMALLER THAN LAST TIME.
S
MALLER AND
darker. They stand there together in the lane, shocked all over again that it's theirs.

When he brought her here a week ago, the morning after her nighttime visit, they had to walk around with the stupidly young estate agent following them. At one point, moving across the upstairs landing in an attempt to get away from him, Mary had cried out so loudly and abruptly she'd made them all jump.

“Christ almighty!” Graham had grabbed her shoulder, turning her toward him. “What is it, darling? What's the matter?”

She glanced down the long passage that led to the second bedroom, her heart still thudding.

“There was—I don't know—I heard something.”

“What do you mean? Heard what?”

She took a breath.

“Someone said my name.”

Graham tried to laugh and so did the boy estate agent.

“Your name?”

She nodded.

“Mary Coles. They said Mary Coles.”

“And where exactly was this person?”

She stared at Graham.

“Just there.”

“Where?”

“Behind me. It felt like they were right behind me.”

The boy made a face. “Whoa! You're freaking me out now.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket, glancing at it as he rubbed his hair. “Well, I'm one hundred percent certain there's nobody here,” he said.

Mary felt embarrassed.

“I know that. I don't know what it was. I imagined it, obviously. I'm sorry.”

The phone buzzed. The boy threw them a look of apology and walked over to the window where a pile of dead bluebottles lay on the sill.

“These old houses,” he said as he dialed a number. “I don't know what it is with them. All sorts of strange noises, I guess.”

“That's right,” she said.

“Could it have been the pipes?” said Graham.

She looked at him.

“No,” she said. “Not pipes.”

The boy walked back toward them, texting now.

“It's been empty for a while. I guess that can feel a bit creepy.”

She watched his white, bitten fingers moving over the phone.

“It's not,” she said.

“You what?”

“It's not creepy.”

He blinked at her, put the phone back in his pocket.

“Well, of course, it's full of potential.”

She couldn't help it, she smiled. I'm going mad, she thought with a casualness that took her breath away. Don't expect too much of yourself, the counselor had said. There will be good days and bad days, ups and downs. The trouble was she had become so used to not expecting too much of herself that these days she seemed to expect almost nothing.

Graham touched her shoulder again.

“Are you OK? Do you want to go and sit in the car?”

She laughed and told him of course she didn't want to do that. They finished the tour.

As they walked out into the bright, leafy garden, the boy asked Graham if they'd seen the movie
Scream
. He said they hadn't. He told him they should see it. The first one, anyway, which was by far the best. “But don't worry,” he said, “it was only your wife that made me think of it. I'm sure there are no slasher maniacs here.”