The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel Read online

  George froze. “I don’t know. Maybe I just feel like going home.”

  “Okay,” Irene said, then added, when George still hadn’t moved, “or we could just stand out here in the rain forest.”

  “I’m sorry, but I suddenly don’t feel so great. Maybe I’ll just go home.”

  “Is it that woman at the bar?” Irene arched her neck to peer back through the frosted glass of the front door. “That’s not what’s-her-name, is it? That crazy girl from Mather.”

  “God, no,” George lied. “I think I’ll just call it a night.”

  George walked home. A breeze had picked up and was whistling through the narrow streets of Beacon Hill. The breeze wasn’t cool, but George held out his arms anyway and could feel the sweat evaporating off his skin.

  When George got to his apartment, he sat down on the first step of the exterior stairway. It was only a couple of blocks back to the bar. He could have one drink with her, find out what brought her to Boston. He had waited so long to see her, imagining the moment, that now, with her actually here, he felt like an actor in a horror flick with his hand on the barn door about to get an ax in his head. He was scared, and for the first time in about a decade he longed for a cigarette. Had she come to Jack Crow’s to look for him? And if so, why?

  On almost any other night, George could have entered his apartment, fed Nora, and crawled into his bed. But something about the weight of that particular August night, combined with Liana’s presence at his favorite bar, made it seem as though something was about to happen, and that was all he needed. Good or bad, something was happening.

  George sat long enough to begin to believe that she must have left the bar. How long would she really sit there by herself with her glass of red wine? He decided to walk back. If she was gone, then he wasn’t meant to see her again. If she was still there, then he’d say hello.

  As he walked back to the bar the breeze pressing against his back felt both warmer and stronger. At Jack Crow’s, he didn’t hesitate—he swung back through the door and, as he did, Liana, from her spot at the bar, turned her head and looked at him. He watched her eyes brighten a little in recognition. She had never been one for outsize gestures.

  “It is you,” he said.

  “It is. Hi, George.” She said it with the flat intonation he remembered, as casually as though she’d seen him earlier that day.

  “I saw you from over there.” George tilted his head toward the back of the bar. “I wasn’t sure it was you at first. You’ve changed a little, but then, walking past you, I was pretty sure. I got halfway down the street and turned back.”

  “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

  They 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 d
im, 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

  At 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.”