The Unremarkable Heart

withdrawn? Secretive? There seemed to be a checklist for calling a case a suicide, and the detectives asked only the questions that helped them tick off the boxes. June recognized the complacency in their stance, the tiredness in their eyes. She often saw it in the mirror when she got home from school. Another troubled teenager. Another problem to be dealt with. They wanted to stamp the case solved and file it away so that they could move onto the next one.
    Washing dirt off their hands.
    June didn’t want to move on. She couldn’t move on. She hounded Danielle about the older boy until Martha, the girl’s mother, firmly told June to leave her alone. June would not be so easily deterred. She called Grace’s other friends into her office, demanding they tell her every detail about her daughter’s life. She turned into a tyrant, firing off warning shots at anyone who dared resist.
    She studied her daughter’s death the way she had studied for her degrees, so that by the end of it all, June could’ve written a dissertation on Grace’s suicide. She knew the left wrist was cut first, that there were two hesitation marks before the blade had gone in. She knew that the cut to the right wrist was more shallow, that the blade had nicked the ulnar nerve, causing the fingers of the hand to curl. She knew from the autopsy report that her daughter’s right femur still showed a dark line of fracture where she’d fallen off the monkey bars ten years before. Her liver was of normal size and texture. The formation of her sagittal sutures was consistent with the stated age of fifteen. There were two hundred fifty cc’s of urine in her bladder and her stomach contents were consistent with ingesting popcorn, which June could still smell wafting from the kitchen when she ran upstairs to find her daughter.
    The lungs, kidneys, spleen and pancreas were all as expected. Bones were measured, catalogued. The brain was weighed. All appeared normal. All were as expected. The heart, according to the doctor who performed the autopsy, was unremarkable.
    How could that be, June had wondered. How could a precious fifteen-year-old girl, a baby June had carried in her womb and delivered to the world with such promise, have an unremarkable heart?
    ‘What’s that?’ Richard asked, peering at her over the newspaper. When she shook her head, he said, ‘You’re mumbling a lot lately.’
    She couldn’t tell from his expression whether he was annoyed or concerned. Did he know that today was the day? Was he ready to get it over with?
    Richard had always been an impatient man. Twenty-one years in an eight by ten cell had drilled some of that out of him. He’d learned to still his tapping hands, quiet the constant shuffling of his feet. He could sit in silence for hours, staring at the wall as June slept. She knew he was listening to the pained draw of breath, the in-and-out of her life. Sometimes, she thought maybe he was enjoying it, the audible proof of her suffering. Was that a smile on his lips as he wiped her nose? Was that a flash of teeth as he gently soaped and washed her underarms and nether regions?
    Weeks ago, when she could still sit up and feed herself, when words came without gasping, raspy coughs, she had asked him to end her life. The injectable morphine prescribed by the doctor seemed to be an invitation to an easy way out, but Richard had recoiled at the thought. ‘I may be a lot of things,’ he had said, indignant, ‘but I am not a murderer.’
    There had been a fight of sorts, but not from anything June had said. Richard had read the words in her mind as easily as he could read a book.
    He’d just as good as killed her two decades ago. Why was his conscience stopping him now?
    ‘You can still be such a bitch,’ he’d said, throwing down a towel he’d been folding. She didn’t see him for hours, and when he came upstairs with a tray of soup, they pretended that it hadn’t happened. He folded the rest of the towels with his lips pressed into a thin line, and June, dropping in and out of consciousness, had watched his face change as if through a colored kaleidoscope. Angry red triangles blending into dark black squares.
    He was an old man now, her husband, the man she had never bothered to divorce because the act would be one more reason for her name to appear beside his in the newspaper. Richard was sixty-three years old. He had no pension. No insurance. No chance of gainful employment. June was his only salvation,