Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [71]
The heart is really two hearts and four parts: the right and the left, and the up and the down. The right heart pumps blood through the lungs, the left through the body. Even when there is nothing more for it to do, even when you have already lost ten ounces of blood, which is all an average-size person needs to lose to bring on heart failure, the left heart keeps pumping, bringing old news to nowhere. The right heart sits still as a cave, a thin scrim of blood barely covering its floor. The less air you have, the faster the whole heart beats. Still less and the bronchioles, hollow, spongy flutes of the lungs, whistle and squeeze dry until they lie flat and hard like plates on the table, and when there is no more air and no more blood to bring help from the farthest reaches of the body, the lungs crack and chip like old china.
Mrs. Warburg and I both went to psychics.
She said, “A psychic in East Cleveland. What’s that tell you?” which is why I kept talking to her even after Mr. Warburg said he didn’t think it was helping. Mrs. Warburg’s psychic lived in a rundown split-level ranch house with lime-green shag carpeting. Her psychic wore a white smock and white shoes like a nurse, and she got Mrs. Warburg confused with her three o’clock, who was coming for a reading on her pancreatic cancer. Mrs. Warburg’s psychic didn’t know where Anne was.
My psychic was on West Cedar Street, in a tiny apartment two blocks away from us on Beacon Hill. My boss’s wife had lost a diamond earring and this psychic found it, my boss said. He looked like a graduate student. He was barefoot. He saw me looking down, and flexed his feet.
“Helps me concentrate,” he said.
We sat down at a dinette table and he held my hands between his. He inhaled and closed his eyes. I couldn’t remember if I had the twenty dollars with me or not.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
We sat for three minutes, and I watched the hands on the grandfather clock behind him. My aunt had the same clock, with cherrywood flowers climbing up the maple box.
“It’s very dark,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s very dark where she is.”
I found the money and he pushed it back at me, and not just out of kindness, I didn’t think.
I told Mrs. Warburg my psychic didn’t know anything, either.
The police came on Saturday and again on Monday, but not the same ones. On Monday it was detectives from New York, and they did not treat me like the worried roommate. They reminded me that I told the Boston police I’d last seen Anne at two o’clock on Thursday, before she went to Teddy’s. They said someone else had told them Anne came back to our apartment at four o’clock, to get her sleeping bag. I said yes, I remembered—I was napping and she woke me up, because it was really my sleeping bag; I lent it to her for the trip. Yes, I did see her at four, not just at two.
Were you upset she was going on this trip with Ted? they said.
Teddy, I said. Why would I be upset?
They looked around our apartment, where I had to walk through Anne’s little bedroom to use the bathroom and she had to walk through my little bedroom to get to the front door, as if it were obvious why I’d be upset.
Maybe you didn’t like him, they said.
I liked him, I said.
Maybe he was cutting into your time with Annie.
Anne, I said, and they looked at each other as if it was significant that I had corrected them.
Anne, they said. So maybe Teddy got in the way of your friendship with Anne?
I rolled my eyes. No, I said. We double-dated sometimes. It was cool. They looked at their notes.
You have a boyfriend? they said. We’d like to talk to him, too.
Sure, I said. He’s in Maine with his family, but you can talk to him.
They shrugged a little. Maine, with parents, was not a promising lead.
They pressed me a little more about my latent lesbian feelings for Anne and my unexpressed and unrequited love for Teddy, and I said that I thought