Heart-Shaped Box

Chapter One

Friday, July 2, 11:43 p.m.

South parking lot for the Ye Olde Pioneer Village Theme Park

Like the long stem of a flower, her neck curved away from him. He hesitated, then softly kissed Cindy’s nape, just where the tousled blond curls began. How many times had he kissed her there, at just that very spot? She was finally quiet in his embrace. As if in a dream, he gave her shoulders a squeeze, feeling the press of her open lips against the palm of his other hand.

But his body remembered what had happened, even as his mind shied away from the terrible weight of the truth. His heart hammered like a fist in his chest, reminding him of where he was, of what had happened.

When he said her name again, it came out a whisper. Cindy?

No answer. He had to let go, to face what he already knew. His arms loosened. Cindy (what was her last name now? Perez or something like that?) sprawled on the blacktop, her body half-turning as she fell. Her denim mini-skirt - Cindy’s interpretation of tonight’s western theme - hiked up, exposing slim, tanned thighs.

He was afraid to look at her face, but when he finally did he found that in the faint, filtered light she didn’t look too bad. Her eyes were half-open, and the tip of her tongue protruded between her teeth, but otherwise her expression was oddly calm.

He stared down at her, surprised by the speed of death. Unbidden, memories swamped him. The naughty smile Cindy used to give him, grinning up from the shelter of his arm, her lids at a knowing half-mast. The magpie way she collected things - shiny jewelry, dozens of shoes, pretty clothes, pretty boys. Now a single sob escaped him. He clamped his hand over his own mouth, silencing himself the way he had so recently silenced Cindy.

His mind was racing now, faster and faster, as he calculated what he must do. Leaning down, he grabbed the lapels of her yoked red satin western shirt and pulled. To his ears, the sound of the pearl snaps popping open was as loud as gunfire. Underneath, Cindy wore a bronze-colored satin push-up bra. He remembered how she used to go braless. Avoiding contact with her skin, he tugged her skirt up further. He lifted his head and listened. Nothing more than the thrum of distant traffic. Her purse was within arm’s reach. Grabbing her wallet, he got to his feet and stumbled off.

Cindy Sanchez had never been comfortable with silence, but now she lay quietly on her back in the overflow parking lot of Ye Olde Pioneer Village. Her blue eyes were still open, but filmed with dullness. The bright blood that was layered over her red lipstick was already beginning to brown as it dried.

Forgotten in her uncurling fingers, manicured to sharp crimson points, was a little wooden box. A heart-shaped box.

Chapter Two

Three months earlier

You

are invited

to the Minor High School

Class of 1979

Reunion

July 2 - 5

Ye Olde Pioneer Village

near Minor, Oregon

With Special Guest of Honor:

Sawyer Fairchild

Be there or be square!

Claire Montrose grimaced as she read the last line on the first page of the invitation. That was one of the problems with having come of age in the Seventies. It seemed like such a non-decade, forced to borrow its slang from previous times. What had come out of it that was worth remembering? Polyester sweater vests, disco dancing, the Waltons, eight-track tapes? Men’s pinkie rings, streaking, smiley faces, Bachman Turner Overdrive? Even the big events, like the end of the Vietnam War or the resignation of Richard Nixon, seemed like leftovers from the Sixties.

Inside the invitation was the schedule of events, encompassing everything from a barbecue to a dress-up dance. While Claire has never been to Ye Olde Pioneer Village, she has read about it in the Oregonian. It was a popular spot for Portlanders who wanted a little low-stakes casino gambling coupled with some amusements for the kids. In addition to slot machines and black jack, Pioneer Village offered family-friendly entertainment, which included everything from carnival rides to miniature golf to hourly reenactments of a stagecoach robbery. In the evening you could send the kids off to the supervised video arcade while you danced to the music of a washed-up singer still eking out a living performing his one twenty-year-old hit.

Claire sorted the invitation into the pile of other junk mail - unsolicited credit card offers, a plea from Oregon Public Broadcasting (which seemed to regularly forget that her membership was paid up through December), the heap of slick magazines that had been pouring into her mailbox every since she made the mistake of ordering a vase from Pottery Barn - and carried them to the recycling center Charlie had built under the sink. The invitation slid back out of the bin and landed with a plop on the blue-tiled floor. Claire picked it up again.

Maybe she should go. She was no longer the girl she had been in high school, the girl who was too smart, too tall, too skinny and who looked much younger than she was. Now maybe all her old handicaps were actually to her advantage. At 37, it was good to be smart, tall, thin and look younger than you actually were. And then there was Dante to consider. Claire could bet that no one from her high school would show up with a Metropolitan Museum of Art curator who looked more like a pirate. The part of her that still thought in terms of license plates, a legacy of ten years of working for Oregon’s Specialty Plate Department, thought maybe she should BYTDAPL - bite the apple, in license-plate speak. (Until she had quit a few months ago, Claire had spent eight hours a day approving or denying applications for vanity plates, deciding if the abbreviated or encoded messages were obscene or otherwise objectionable.)

But did it really matter if she would hold up well under scrutiny? Would she really have anything in common with people she hadn’t seen in twenty years? The first step, Claire decided, was to sit down with her high school annual, look at the faces and think about whether she wanted to see them again.

Claire picked up the phone. Only a few months ago she wouldn’t have bothered to call her mother before coming over. Jean had always been at home, sitting in her darkened apartment for hours on end watching - and all too frequently phoning - the QualProd shopping network. Indirectly, it was Jean’s addiction to QualProd that had cut the cord binding Jean to the TV. She still watched, of course, but now it was as little as five or six hours a day instead of sixteen. Jean had met her new boyfriend, Zed, at a Shoppers Anonymous meeting. A good fifty pounds lighter than Jean, Zed was a Teamster, a wiry guy who favored half-unbuttoned shirts worn with two gold chains. When he was in town, he took pains to keep them both occupied and away from temptation, squiring Jean to stocked trout ponds and line dancing and monster truck pulls.

But evidently Zed was on the road, because Jean answered the phone on the first ring. She sounded disappointed when she realized it was only her daughter. Claire arranged to come look through the box of school souvenirs still buried in the closet of what was now the guest bedroom in her mother’s apartment. Then she changed into a pair of black running shorts and wrestled a running bra down into place. Hoping to catch a little sun, she put on a tank top instead of a T-shirt. After all, it wouldn’t do to go to the reunion looking as pale as skim milk. She realized she was already thinking about it as if she would go.

Two hours later, Claire was back in her own living room and staring at what was supposed to be her own picture when her roommate Charlie bustled through the front door, her arms full of shopping bags. Charlie - short for Charlotte, not that anyone ever called her that - said, What’s that, Clairele?

Claire turned the cover of her high school annual toward her friend. It was embossed with a badly drawn cartoon miner wearing overalls, a plaid flannel shirt, work boots and an outsize head lantern. Minor had been founded by a miner who had been both unable to spell or to find the gold he was convinced must lie just under the ground. As a mascot, the miner hadn’t had the guts-and-glory image of the symbol of rival schools. Secretly, Minorites always envied their opponents with more appropriate names like the Warriors or the Bobcats.

Pictures from your high school?

I got an invitation to the twenty-year reunion today. Claire felt strange saying it - twenty years! - but knew that any complaints to Charlie would fall on deaf ears. At seventy-nine, pretty much anyone seemed like a baby to Charlie. I’m trying to decide whether to go or not.

Charlie put her Nature’s bag on the coffee table and settled down next to Claire on the couch. Let me see your picture.

Claire found the M’s again. Her picture, with its blank background, was easy enough to pick out. It had all the charm of a mug shot. At Minor High, it had been traditional for seniors to spurn the photographer who came to the high school. The plain photographs taken in the cafeteria were for the babies - the juniors, sophomores and freshman. Instead, the seniors scheduled sittings at Waltham’s Studio Portraits. As a result, all the photos around Claire’s were of students leaning against artificial trees or posing in front of a muraled sunset.

But studio portraits had been an extravagance the Montroses couldn’t afford. Jean (who hadn’t married either of the men who had fathered her two children) barely scraped by on a monthly disability check from a local grocery store chain where she had once slipped on a squashed Thompson grape. The money hadn’t really been enough to support a single woman and two growing girls. Claire had started working as soon as she turned sixteen, and her earnings from Pietro’s had been carefully portioned among the gas, electric and phone companies, each getting just enough to alleviate the threats to cease services.

Tangled in emotions she couldn’t sort out, Claire looked at her old self. Her younger self offered back a tentative smile, half-hidden by flyaway curls. The black and white photograph had leeched the color from her red-gold hair, leaving it pale gray. Maybe it was just as well. Just before her senior picture was taken, she had over-done it with a bottle of Sun-In, resulting in a halo of bright orange hair. She flushed now as she remembered how she had told everyone it was her natural color.

Charlie pulled the annual from Claire’s lap and began to page back through it. It was a catalog of styles that had come and gone and in some cases come back again. Cowl necked sweaters, flared pants, blouses with floppy self-bows, men’s shirts with collars as big as elephant ears

Seen from the perspective of a twenty-year absence, it all looked a little silly. The boys wore ties as wide as six-lane freeways, and their hair was long and shapeless. Most girls had ridiculous-looking feathered bangs that bore the marks a curling iron (a styling necessity, as Claire remembered it, as otherwise the wearer was unable to see). Everyone looked both young and hopelessly dated. Claire knew, though, that in two hundred years it would all run together in people’s minds, with no clear demarcation between the first and second times polyester was popular, between shrink-to-fit Levis and jeans worn so big they bagged around the wearer’s hips, between clunky wedge sandals from the Forties, Seventies and Nineties.

Claire thought about the painting she had inherited the year before, a small painting of a woman holding a letter. It had turned out to be a Vermeer, painted around 1650. She had learned a lot about Vermeer as the painting’s authenticity was debated. On one of her visits to New York, Dante had shown her a near-perfect copy of another Vermeer painting. For some time, it had even been attributed to the great painter, although it had actually been made twenty years after his death. The only giveaway was the woman’s missing sidecurls. The real Vermeer had them, and the fake did not, because the forger had found the style hopelessly dated. Three hundred and fifty years later, the modern viewer couldn’t tell the difference. Both women had costumes and hairstyles that the mind simply classified as old.

Charlie had reached the first page of the annual, which bore the inscription, Dedicated to our teacher of the year: Sawyer Fairchild. The page was filled with a close-up photo of a young man with a heart-shaped face, long dark hair and sideburns that tickled the corners of his full mouth.

Is that whom I think it is? Our candidate for governor? Charlie asked. She was probably the last living American to use ‘whom’ correctly, but then again, her native tongue was German. In Dachau, nearly sixty years before, she had lost a husband, a small son and all affection for her homeland. Sometimes when people heard her accent, they would insist on knowing what she was. Charlie would always lift her chin and reply that she was, of course, an American.

Claire nodded. Yes, that’s Sawyer. He was so much a part of our class that they’ve invited him back to the reunion. He was a student teacher for a year before he went into politics. Supposedly, he was teaching us biology, but it was clear he didn’t care if we never learned anything about cell division. He wanted to teach us about life. I remember how he used to have us push our desks back and then sit in a circle in the middle of the room. And Sawyer would pull down all the blinds, turn off the lights, and light a candle in the center of the circle. He would have us all hold hands, and we would take turns talking about what we wanted to be when we grew up. Not do, but be. Claire remembered how Sawyer had said that was an important distinction. And how in the dark, kids would talk about things they never had before to anyone. And how everyone else listened and didn’t laugh, not at anyone, not even after the lights were turned back on.

And what did you say you wanted to be, Clairele? Charlie said in a soft voice, as if they were sitting side by side on the cool linoleum in that darkened classroom, twenty years before.

Claire’s smile was rueful. Oh, a teacher. Like about ninety percent of the other kids. We all looked up to Sawyer. He was so different from the rest of the teachers. I think he was the first adult I knew who wanted me to call him by his first name. He wasn’t that much older than us, but we knew he had been through a lot. He only started to talk about Vietnam a couple of times, and both times he stopped and stared off into the distance. All the girls were in love with him, and all the boys wanted to be him. Any guy who had the ability to grow facial hair started trying to coax sideburns, hoping Sawyer would notice. But Sawyer treated everyone the same. He paid attention to everyone.

It sounds as if he had the charisma even then.

He was the first adult I knew who admitted there were things about the world that he didn’t understand, and who said that stupid things were stupid. When I think back on it, he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, but he turned that school upside down. The teachers hated his long hair, and he didn’t make much of a secret of the fact that he had smoked a lot of pot in the past. But at the same time, they had to treat him as sort of a hero. A year as a POW, a year in the hospital getting skin grafts on his legs, and even still he has that terrible limp. All of us kids loved him because we felt he understood us, that he wasn’t one of ‘them,’ Claire hooked her fingers to make quote marks, you know, the adults. When we voted him teacher of the year, his name wasn’t even on the ballot. I remember there was a big fuss because you weren’t supposed to be able to get the award if all you were was a student teacher.

But he didn’t teach after that, did he? Charlie asked.

Claire shrugged. He must have figured out that he could influence a heck of a lot more people if he were a politician than if he were a teacher. Twenty-five kids or two point five million people - it’s a pretty easy choice if what you’re hoping to do is make a big difference.

Through the years, Claire had loosely followed Sawyer’s career. He had moved to Portland, lost his first campaign for state senate and won the next. While in the senate, he had gained a reputation as a consensus builder who got things done - expanding mass transit and recycling, working for anti-discrimination laws. Then he had been tapped by the White House for Secretary of Transportation. Despite his high-level job, Sawyer had never given up the spark of iconoclasm that had marked his days as a student teacher. He still refused to wear a tie, and was famous among the White House press corps for showing up at highway ribbon cuttings wearing boot-cut Levis, snakeskin cowboy boots and beautiful old Pendleton shirts.

Now Sawyer was back in Oregon, running hard for governor against a one-note anti-tax activist whose campaign literature lumped Democrats with devil worshippers. Even Republicans said privately that Sawyer would probably win. And most people speculated that a governorship might just be a steppingstone back to Washington, D.C. - only the next time Sawyer would be the one choosing the Secretary of Transportation.

Will you vote for him? Charlie asked, turning the page.

Claire didn’t have to think twice. Of course. Even if the choice wasn’t so limited, I still would. She reached out and turned the page of the annual open on Charlie’s lap.

It began with the highlights of the school year - the sporting events. As a feeder school for several sparsely populated surrounding counties, Minor had been able to pick and choose only the best for its teams. So what if a third of each class failed to graduate - the football team always went to state!

The section began with a full-page photo of a football player forever frozen in mid-leap, a football tucked under his arm. The opposing team milled in his wake. Claire didn’t need to look at the caption to know who it was.

That’s Wade Merz. Even I knew he was the best football player Minor ever had. Off the field, Wade had worn his sunglasses constantly, indoors or out, rain or shine, and only answered to the nickname Suede. His hair was blond, but Claire now realized that because of the sunglasses she had had no idea what color his eyes were.

Did he make a career out of it?

Claire shook her head. Three hours before the homecoming game, he got arrested for drunk driving. I heard that there was a scout in town that day, but when the game started, Wade was still sitting in jail. His grades were terrible, so that would have been the only way he went to college. The scout left at half time. Now Wade owns Wade’s Auto Haus. Maybe you’ve seen it - it’s kind of by Susie and J.B.’s on Eighty-Second.

Wade’s Auto Haus was sandwiched in between a pawnshop and an off-brand fried chicken franchise. Although she hadn’t spoken to him since high school, Claire sometimes saw Wade in the parking lot when she drove past on the way to her sister’s house. It gave her a secret thrill to see him, to know what he was doing when he knew nothing about her. A big man now running to fat, Wade seemed to spend most of his time polishing cars with his butt. He still wore his trademark sunglasses, but unlike the typical used car salesman, he favored well-tailored suits and crisp white shirts stiff with starch.

Charlie flipped through the pages devoted to the basketball players, lanky and awkward-looking, then the baseball and track teams. Girls were represented only on the track and tennis pages.

Activities followed the sports section. The title page was decorated with a few candid snapshots of popular students. There’s Cindy Weaver. Claire touched a photograph. She’s Cindy Sanchez now. She used to date Wade. In the picture, Cindy was surrounded by half-dozen boys, her face turned up in a laugh.

That woman who adopted the girl who might have been Lori’s?

Claire nodded. A few months before she had done a favor for an old friend and tried to track down the child Lori had surrendered years before to a secretive adoption agency years. At one point, it had looked as though Cindy might have been the one who had adopted the child. Claire tapped a finger on the bottom of the photograph, on the laced-edged white anklets Cindy was wearing with her black spike-heeled pumps. I’d forgotten about Cindy’s jailbait look.

She did look mature for her age, Charlie said tactfully.

Claire had a hundred memories of Cindy, who had been Minor High’s head cheerleader, party girl and general bitch. Cindy leading a routine, her large breasts seemingly without benefit of a bra. Cindy pulling Claire’s hair while she sat behind her in social studies, for no reason that Claire had ever figured out. Cindy showing up late for graduation rehearsal, her face pale and her eyes red. Later, Claire had heard a rumor that Cindy had spent the morning aborting Wade’s baby.

Oh, look, there’s Belinda Brophy. Claire pointed to a girl that she had overlooked in the picture of Cindy. In the photo, Belinda stood literally in Cindy’s shadow, looking up at her with the same rapt attention the boys did. I kind of liked her even if she did hang around Cindy. She was one of those girls who always wanted to be popular, but wasn’t ever going to make it. Belinda had been too plump, too plain, too shy. "So she did the next best thing and turned herself into Cindy’s closest friend. Of course, Cindy used Belinda just as much as Belinda used Cindy. I don’t think Cindy