Two Hearts

Chapter 1-1

Chapter 1

Nearly one year later…

It was Memorial Day, the beginning of another summer. Frank hated Memorial Day. He wasn’t fond of weekends, either, and Memorial Day always made a long one. Frank was painfully shy, a tad depressed, anxious, super-intelligent, a little bit odd, and quite odd looking—all according to Vaughn Hellier, said one day when he probably thought teenage Frank couldn’t hear.

Eavesdropping all around town, Frank discovered before he’d graduated high school most people who knew him thought the same. A history of mental instability in the family provided plenty of fodder for gossip.

“Celia Stone had problems, you know. She was some sort of crazy. Nerves…schizophrenia…You only had to talk to her to know.”

“Why else would a mother abandon her young child?” A couple of church ladies had this conversation while viewing Frank Sr. in the main funeral room at his wake, with Frank just several feet away. Their shrill voices carried. How could they not know?

“Maybe he is mentally disturbed,” Frank’s high school principal had speculated with his secretary one day. “He’s certainly…abnormal. Could be he’s the one who scared the mother off.”

Frank had often been picked on after the fire, even by his so-called friends. Everyone teased him—everyone—except Melissa. Melissa sat behind Frank in homeroom and was always kind. Frank liked Melissa. Maybe he even loved her.

Spending most weekend nights with a mortician, rather than doing the mashed potato to rock and roll tunes in the high school gymnasium, like other kids his age, didn’t help Frank’s reputation back then. Tending to dead people earned him a certain label beyond that attached because of his scars. It was the same sort of childish notions that kept trick-or-treaters away from the Helliers’ home on Halloween, even though Vaughn set out a bowl filled with the biggest and the best chocolate bars the supermarket carried. Boys who had grown into men still tittered and whispered to this day. They called Frank a “weirdo” whenever they happened to encounter him. Frank definitely acted weirder now, since that day ten months ago in the woods, since being struck by lightning. Even he knew it. He had been called a freak for no real cause most of his life. Now, there was reason—a good one—though no one knew what it was.

“Do not come any further,” Frank cautioned a daddy longlegs spider that had settled just above his bare chest. It hung from a single thread of translucent, delicate webbing connected to an oak tree just behind Hellier’s, not far from the spot where the lightning had changed him. “I tell you there is reason to fear, but is it so obvious to others without my warning? Was it always? Even before…?” Frank was acting again, speaking in character. He sometimes wondered if he was schizophrenic, like his mother might have been.

“I’m sure you don’t see yourself that way either—as a terrifying monster. Yet many run from you too, out of misplaced phobias. My naiveté once left an inkling of hope I might someday fill young hearts and minds with not only facts, but also a love of knowledge. The best time to reach a child is before their parents have imparted their own superstitions. Of course, if there was little chance before, now there is none. Now I would not only frighten children, I would hurt them.”

Frank was happy at the funeral home, anyway. Settled, at least, if not truly content. He was a full-on partner, now, caring for the bodies of people’s loved ones before they were buried. Frank’s career path had shifted from developing the minds of those who were just starting out in life to being the last person to see someone when theirs ended. He didn’t mind the work, and Vaughn Hellier was like a father to him now, who he truly loved—lately, from a distance.

Vaughn was in his late sixties. He and wife Marion had come to America right after the war. “We arrived as of nineteen forty-five from the old country.” If Vaughn had ever been more specific than that, Frank couldn’t recall. Judging by the accent, Frank figured they had come from Germany, maybe Austria. English was Vaughn’s second language. He was much better at it than Marion, at least according to him. “She does not speak it so well as I.”

Frank had never actually met Marion Hellier. Sometimes he wondered if Vaughn kept her away on purpose. He had a mental picture of Marion from Vaughn’s vague description, of a “short round woman” with “beautiful eyes” and a “radiant soul.” In his head, Frank made her look a bit like Aunt Pittypat from Gone with the Wind—from the novel, not so much Laura Hope Crews from the 1939 film. Frank wondered if he’d ever know if he was anywhere close. Probably not. Maybe Vaughn feared Frank’s face would frighten her too.

“I wish you would come and visit me daily,” Frank said to the arachnid. “I promise never to touch you—to bring you harm. Maybe you could be my companion…my pet.” Frank often watched with envy now as someone wrestled with a friendly pup in the park or cuddled a fat, lazy tomcat on a front porch. Considering his current affliction, it was fortunate he’d never brought home one of his own.

After the events of that July evening a year ago and the days that followed, Frank didn’t even want to think about what might happen if he accidentally stuck his finger into a goldfish bowl while tending to their feedings. Then he did imagine, and the farce of it made him smile. “Not so funny for them,” he said. “Unlike a character in a silly movie-house cartoon, in real life, the bug-eyed, sideways floating fish would not come back to life in the next act, good as new.” That made Frank frown. “I am a freak,” he told the daddy longlegs. “Perhaps the curse sought me out because that was my fate, my very nature from the start.”

Frank had recently reconciled himself to the notion that the only loving being he would ever have in his life was Vaughn Hellier, and that was only from eight to five, at work. “But you deserve more,” Vaughn had protested around last Christmastime. “Why shouldn’t you have someone as wonderful as yourself to be your mate, a perfect creature, like my Marion?”

“There’s no use hoping,” Frank had responded. “There was a one in a million chance of it happening before, because of the way I look. Now, there’s no chance at all.”

“‘Why would you say such a thing, dear boy?’ Vaughn asked me.” The spider had come to rest upon Frank’s leg. The thickness of Frank’s trousers seemed to provide enough safety, so he conversed with it, and it sat and listened. “I told him I didn’t wish to talk about it, but he persisted, until I walked away.”

Frank felt suddenly nervous, not only because the sun had disappeared behind thick, menacing clouds, but also about the closeness of the bug. He stood and shook his pant leg, forcing the daddy longlegs down upon his shoe.

“I better go,” Frank told him. “Forgive me if that was too jarring.” The spider did not scurry off, but moved rather slowly, seemingly unperturbed. “Perhaps I will see you tomorrow,” Frank said as it made its way to the ground. “Perhaps not,” Frank added, as a rumble of thunder sounded in the distance. .

“It was a clichéd dark and stormy summer night, May thirty-first, 1965. The kind no one wanted to be out in. Except it wasn’t night at all. The black clouds above altered the daylight, making it appear much later than it was. The radio weatherman had forecasted a cold front would barrel through the northeast, and here it came.” As Frank stepped out of the woods and onto the main road, he quieted himself. He’d been narrating his actions and the setting aloud, once again as if he was in one of the old books Vaughn brought to him at work. Knowing he might run into someone on the main thoroughfare, he figured he’d better stop.

Frank’s windbreaker’s hood did very little to protect him from the downpour he’d lingered beneath the trees too long to avoid. His raven hair, a bit longer than the summer before, quickly became plastered to his head, and his deep, dark eyes couldn’t help but blink and twitch against the water dripping from it.

Frank had taken off his glasses and put them in his pocket. He couldn’t see very well without them, but couldn’t see at all with them on, all foggy and wet from the rain. At least now there were outlines and shadows, spooky ones, yet nothing that would bother him, or even acknowledge his existence, because he seemed infinitely more eerie to them.

Frank made himself smaller against the stiff wind. His drenched jeans clung to his body, showing off his buttocks, well-developed from exercise, a lot of walking and riding his bike. Melissa, now a cashier at the gas station store halfway between the mortuary and the woods, had once mentioned that. She called him “hunky” on occasion, according to Vaughn, and one time, she definitely stammered something like “You’re a bit too thin, but your muscles show too, when you come in in just your undershirt. Plus, I can tell you walk and ride a lot by the shape your legs and other stuff back there is in.”

Frank had ended up so flustered by his elementary-school sweetheart’s brazen, complimentary words, he couldn’t actually recall the specific ones she’d used. Had she been flirting? Was she interested in him somehow? That was impossible, he’d deduced. She was simply being kind, out of obligation or pity.

That night, the two-speed had stayed at the mortuary. Frank didn’t mind the walk. Besides, riding a metal bicycle when violent streaks of electricity cut the darkness every several seconds seemed less than prudent. Frank had known there would be lightning, even before the newsman’s warnings. Frank could predict storms better than any meteorologist now, even without fancy weather maps and charts.

He pulled at the dampness in front, where his pants had soaked right through to his undershorts, right to the skin and hair behind them. Then he shivered—not only from the cold. The lightning came, and then a loud crack of thunder, right to the second he knew that it would. “Three, two, one…” Another flash. Another boom. The storm was right overhead. Standing outside the little store, counting the seconds to the next flash and rumble, Frank debated going inside.

Should I?

He knew there would be only rain for a while now. That was a certainty. The thunder and lightning was finished for a time, and so he opened the door, using the rubber sole of his sneaker, just in case. Despite the stifling humidity of summer not yet quelled by the movement of air, he was chilled to the bone. “Can I get a cup of coffee, please?”

“Hello, Frank.” Melissa was at the counter. She turned down the transistor radio beside her, quieting The Beach Boys, until the chorus to “Help Me, Rhonda” was barely audible. Hooking several locks of dark hair behind her ear, she smiled her friendly, beautiful smile. Her green eyes sparkled. Frank found them enchanting—until he saw his own reflection in them. “How are you this evening?” Melissa asked.

Self-conscious about my rear end and the clinginess of my trousers that leaves little about it to the imagination, that is how. “Hi. I’m fine.” Frank kept his unease more or less to himself. He smiled back, though now he was looking at the floor.

The tiny store was nearly empty. That wasn’t unusual. Frank never stopped if he saw a crowd. Everyone was probably in the park that night, picking out the perfect spot beside the lake for the fireworks. Now they were getting pummeled, even huddled under one small tent, because the rain was blowing sideways. Frank chided himself for almost laughing, but it served them right. Fireworks were for Independence Day, not one set aside to remember fallen heroes and loved ones gone from earth.

The only other three people in the store stood laughing and goofing around in one corner by a tall shelf of doughnuts, pastries, and bread. One of the men was smoking. Frank was envious of their comradery. He was also intrigued, watching two of them share the same cup, each taking turns sucking from its straw.

“What ya staring at, Freaky Frank?” one asked.

Had he been staring? He probably had been.

“Take a picture. It’ll last longer,” said another.

“Or better yet, just get out.” There was no mistaking who that was. “Get lost for good, faggot.”

Frank turned away. His heart had seized when Renny spoke to him. Now it began to race.