Tiny Little Fractures

Chapter Seven

I know this sounds horribly sappy and depressing, but it was the little things about Jon that made him special to me. It wasn’t just his personality traits that made me fall in love with him, but the little features too. Like the faded freckles on his nose that got darker in random places. Like the ones on his back that he couldn’t see and belonged to me alone. His feet were so big he couldn’t buy shoes from regular stores. And his favorite thing to do on his day off was to watch cartoons so that he had something to talk about with his patients.

In the beginning, Jon and I had been roughly the same height. Then at some point I stopped growing and he shot up like a bean sprout. I stayed relatively short and he continued to get taller and taller. Later on people would joke that gravity would consume him or he’d roll over on me in his sleep and smother me. But despite our difference in height, Jon’s body fit well with mine. My head could rest on his arm as he wrapped it around me. I could feel him breathe against me and every part of him fit so perfectly with every part of me.

These little things mixed with those sparkling hazel blue eyes, dorky laugh, and genuine kindness made him the most handsome man in the world to me. He was perfect in my eyes. He was spacey sometimes because he thought too much. He lost his car keys nearly every day and it drove me crazy. He complained a lot about little things like his shoelaces coming untied too often or his sandwich falling apart in his lunch box. He got revenge in playful ways if you went back on your word or broke a promise. He got quiet when he was angry and was the king of the silent treatment.

At fourteen Jon had been awkward. He had braces and let his hair grow out so that he had the poodle thing going on again. His body hadn’t actually grown out yet and he was all shoulders and knees and bones.

Even then I thought he was perfect. I thought he was handsome and funny and sweet. We had been “together” since he first asked me out two years before then. And two years doesn’t seem like such a long time now, but back then we might as well have been married.

My friends used to make fun of me for being a virgin. Even though we all were. But I was the only one with a steady boyfriend. And even though we were too young to be thinking about s*x, it didn’t mean that we didn’t think about it. A lot. And so Jon and I probably had s*x a lot sooner than we should have. I don’t regret it, though. Sometimes things happen that you don’t exactly recommend other people to do, but things worked out alright for us.

It happened in my bedroom two summers after that first kiss. It was our vacation right before we were supposed to start eighth grade. My parents were working and my brother was at his babysitter’s house. Jon came over to watch TV because my house was a lot cooler than outside.

It wasn’t at all like the kiss where we’d innocently brought up the subject and considered trying it out on each other. We had talked about s*x before. We decided to wait until I was ready. Jon said he’d been ready since he discovered his first armpit hair.

We weren’t actually watching TV that day, and that was perfectly normal for us. When we were alone, we hardly did anything other than make out, with the occasional reach under my shirt. I hadn’t filled out my bras yet, but I was still one step ahead of all our other friends. Even though I didn’t kiss and tell, our friends knew about the bra privileges. They just didn’t know about the hand in the pants privileges. And I mean my pants and Jon’s hands.

The thing about bra privileges, though, is that they usually involve a few minutes of attempted bra removal. Usually when the bra was removed, that was the moment I decided to stop it from going any further. I would put my bra back on and we would go back to watching TV for a while until we started kissing and the whole cycle would start over. But that day it didn’t happen. And when the bra came off, it didn’t get put back on until much later.

It was awkward. People always ask me if it was special and romantic, and I guess it was just because it was with him. But we were young. We had no idea what we were really doing. And neither of us had ever seen much of another naked body before. So the act itself was a bit weird and uncomfortable.

But that didn’t stop us from trying again. And just like the kissing once we got used to it we got better at it. And then it turned into all that passion and romance that everyone expected. Only we did elbow each other in the face a lot and make stupid jokes and paused to laugh often. Stephanie always said if you can’t laugh in the middle of s*x with your partner, then you probably shouldn’t be having s*x with that person to begin with.

Jon and I laughed a lot. Both in the bedroom and out of it.

The last time we ever made love it was the night before he went missing. It was better than the first time, I promise. We had gone out to dinner that night because neither of us wanted to cook. We went to Taco Bell. It was nothing special. But we got home attached at the lips. We’d been together since we were twelve. We’d been having s*x since fourteen. We were married. And people always said the passion died after marriage. That wasn’t true. I was just as much in love with him then as I was at fourteen. Probably more, though. Definitely more.

The police asked me that when they questioned me. I thought it was over-the-line. Why did they need to know when I last had s*x with my husband? Why did they need to know the details? It was later that my lawyer explained they wanted to know how good our relationship was. They also asked if he’d ever hit me. If he forced me into it. If I liked it. If a woman was going to kill her husband, surely they didn’t have a healthy and active s*x life. It didn’t matter. Our neighbors had heard me complaining about the soup and my mom’s alibi checked out.

Not that it really meant anything to them. It just meant I hadn’t been present when he’d been taken. They still thought I might have hired someone to do it, and they kept an eye on me after that. But no one could give a good enough reason for why I would want to kill my husband. Our friends told them we were in love. Our parents called us soulmates. Our neighbors said we were only ever loud in the bedroom and that they never heard us argue.

So they let me go. They didn’t have enough evidence to keep me. There was no body. No way to know for sure what happened to him. I still thought they suspected me, though. Sometimes I saw them watching me from afar as if I’d suddenly lead them to his body.

I found the card the day after our anniversary. My mom left first thing in the morning after making breakfast and coffee. I headed down the stairs to get to work. I lived in the same building Jon and I had picked out. The rent was easy and the place was nice. I never had any problems with the neighbors. Why would I leave it? Just because every square foot held a memory of Jon? I guess that didn’t matter either. Every thought in my head held memories of him.

Our mailbox was a set of metal boxes along the wall at the bottom of the stairs. Mine was a small square one in the corner bottom. I used my key to open it and pulled out the pile of junk as if I was eager to read them. The only reason I still checked the mail was to make sure the bills were paid. Other than the occasional birthday or Christmas card from a distance relative, I never got anything personal.

There was a card in the mailbox. It was a square pale blue envelope with no return address but a Kissimmee Florida postmark. I really hoped it wasn’t another anniversary card. I got one the year before. My grandmother sent it to me with the best of intentions, and I felt awful for the way I’d yelled at her. But I really hoped she took the hint and didn’t send another one. However, I didn’t know anyone in Florida.

I carried the pile of mail to my car and tossed them into the passenger seat. I didn’t plan on sifting through them until I was bored during Pop Quiz or lunch. The card was beginning to bother me, though. So I stuck the key in the ignition and ripped the envelope open. It was sealed with tape, rather than the sticky stuff on the back. I tore into it and pulled it out.

“Happy Anniversary,” the card said in big swirly print above some flowers.

I felt my already melancholy day turn completely sour. Who in their right mind would send an anniversary card to me? What the hell could possess a person to do something like that? But I didn’t know anyone in Florida at all, and that lack of return address struck my curiosity. I flipped it open and read the inside.

“My heart is full of tiny little fractures,” was all that was written under the sentimental greeting. There was no signature. No name.

When we were kids, Jon broke his arm after crashing his bike into a parked car. My mom took me to see him later that day after they got home from the hospital. He was loopy on pain medications. I found him sitting on his living room couch watching Blue’s Clues with his little sister. When I asked him how he was, he said, “I'm okay. My arm is just full of all these tiny little fractures.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. From then on it became a sort of inside joke between the two of us. Like when things were worse than they appeared. Like the time I crashed my car and told him it was fine; it was just full of tiny little fractures.

My first thought was that the card must be a cruel joke. Manipulating someone’s handwriting is easy. Jon’s writing wasn’t entirely unique. His capital letters were always gigantic compared to his lower case letters. And sometimes the lower-case letters were written like their capital counterparts. Just smaller. The lines that crossed through his T's and J's would stretch halfway across the word. And he was a pediatrician. He wrote a lot of prescriptions and signed a lot of things. It was easy to manipulate his handwriting.

Someone had to know about the tiny little fractures joke. I must have made it a million times, but not with anyone other than Jon. Someone could have overheard it, but they wouldn’t get it, would they? If Jon were to tell me his heart was full of tiny little fractures it would mean it was worse than it appeared. It would mean it was broken.

He told me that once. In those exact words. “I'm all right,” he’d said. “My heart is just full of tiny little fractures.”