Give Me Your Heart (12 page)

Botticelli Venus,
in a voice of (male) marveling.

Tells herself she is twelve hundred miles from Rock Basin Park. She is thirty-seven years old, not seven.

Thirty-seven, Alva? You must be joking.

Alva doesn’t joke. Taking cues from others, Alva is able to laugh on cue—a high-pitched, little-girl, startled sound like glass breaking—but she doesn’t understand the
logic of jokes.

Alva sometimes laughs if (somehow) she’s tickled. Breasts and abdomen palpitated by an examining gynecologist at the free clinic, echo exam where the technician moves a device around and
around, and pushes against, the thinly flesh-cushioned bone protecting the heart.

Yet why is it you can’t tickle yourself? Alva wonders.

Sometimes even in mirrors nobody’s there.

Can’t be more than, what
—
twenty-five?

Alva won’t contest the point. Alva doesn’t lie, but if people, predominately men, wish to believe that she’s younger than her age, as young as she appears, Alva won’t
protest.

The transparent tape they’d wrapped around her head, over her face, to smother her, to shut her mouth and eyes, shut her terrified screams inside, Alva hadn’t protested. Too
exhausted, when finally the tape was torn off.

Tearing off eyelashes, much of her eyebrows, clumps of hair.

Hadn’t protested. Never told. Who to tell?

Alva has learned: to modulate her voice like wind chimes, to smell like scented candles, to shake her long streaked-blond hair like a knotted waterfall past her slender shoulders. Her smile is
shyly trusting. Her eyes are warm melting caramel. Men have fallen in love with that smile. Men have fallen in love with those eyes. The exotic layers of cloth Alva wraps herself in, gauze,
see-through, thin muslins, sometimes sprinkled with gold dust. An unexpected glimpse of Alva’s bare flesh (is she naked, beneath?) inside the swaths of fabric, midriff, inside of a forearm,
creamy translucent breast.

Men follow Alva. Alva knows to hide.

Smother! A man’s gritty palm closing over her mouth, clamping tight to keep her from screaming.

Momma! Make him stop! Don’t let
—

The scream had to be swallowed. There was no choice.

Almost she can see the man’s face.

A perspiring face, red-flushed face, furious eyes.

Never tell! What we did to her, we’ll do to you.

For a long time she forgot. Now she’s remembering. Why?

She’s twelve hundred miles from Rock Basin Park and Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. Has not returned in many years. Maybe the man who claimed to be her father has died. Maybe it’s her
mother who continues to send checks, whose signature Alva avoids looking at.

Guilt money, this is. But Alva needs money.

Lately she can think of nothing else except
Only a doll, Alva. Like you.
Can’t sleep, can’t breathe. These terrible days of early warm spring when everyone else walks in the
sunshine, coatless and smiling. Airborne pollen, maple seeds madly swirling in the wind, a rich stupefying scent of lilac.

Lilac! In Rock Basin Park. Where she ran. Where she hid. Maybe he’d crushed her face in it: lilac. If not Alva’s face, the other girl’s.

Alva has never had a child. Alva has never been pregnant.

Men have tried to make Alva pregnant. Many times.

Children frighten Alva; she looks quickly away from them. If by accident she glances into a stroller, a baby buggy, a crib, quickly she turns her gaze aside.

It’s just a doll, Alva. Like you.

Amnesia is a desert of fine white sun-glaring sand to the horizon. Amnesia isn’t oblivion. Amnesia isn’t memory loss caused by brain injury or neurological deterioration, in which
actual brain cells have died. Amnesia is almost-remembering. Amnesia is the torment of almost-remembering. Amnesia is the dream from which you have only just awakened, hovering out of reach below
the surface of bright rippling water.

Amnesia is the paralyzed limb into which one day, one hour, feeling may begin suddenly to flow.

This Alva fears. Amnesia has been peace, bliss. Waking will be pain.

Alva, dear, is something wrong? Alva, tell me, please?

. . . know you can trust me, Alva. Don’t you?

Alva is childlike and trusting, but in fact Alva is not childlike and not trusting. Alva certainly isn’t one to tell. Not any man, of the many who’ve befriended her.

Teachers. Social workers. Psychologists. Therapists. Older men eager to help Alva, who so mysteriously seems unable to help herself.
Some secret in your life, Alva? That has held you back,
kept you from fulfilling your promise?

This is true. This is true! Alva knows. Long ago she was a promising young dancer. She has been promising as a student, a singer, an actress. Promising as a spiritual being, and promising as an
artist/sculptor/jeweler. Alva’s most ambitious project was stringing together glass beads—hundreds, thousands of beads!— into exotic “Indian” necklaces and bracelets
sold at a crafts fair in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Alva has received payment for intermittent work in Christian campus groups, in feminist centers, Buddhist centers, organic food co-ops, neighborhood
medical clinics. She has worked in photo shops, frame shops. She has passed out fliers on street corners. She has worked in cafeterias. She has waitressed. She has been a model.

Alva never accepts money. On principle.

Alva will accept money sometimes. Only if necessary.

If desperate, Alva will accept meals, winter clothing, places to stay. (Alva never stays in one place for long. Alva slips away without saying goodbye.)

Like exotic glass beads, Alva’s life. But there is no one to string the glass beads together.

Men who’ve loved Alva have asked,
What is it—a curse, a jinx, something in your childhood? Who are your parents? Where are you from? Are you close to your mother, your father . .
. ?

Alva is mute. Alva’s head is wrapped in transparent tape. Alva’s screams are shut up inside.

Alva removes the envelope from the post office box. Opens it, tosses aside the accompanying letter, keeps only the check made out to Alva Lucille Ulrich. Guilt money, this is. But Alva needs
money.

Alva needs her medications. Alva has qualified for public health assistance, but still Alva must pay a minimal fee, usually ten dollars, for her meds.

Alva takes only prescription drugs. Alva has been clean for years.

You saw nothing. You are a very bad little girl.

Hiding in plain view. Nude model. The girl who’d been morbidly shy in school. Calmly removing her layers of exotic fabric, kicking off her sandals, slipping into a plain cotton robe to
enter the life studies room. Taking her place at the center of staring strangers, at whom she never looks.

The instructor, usually male. Staring at Alva too. At whom Alva never looks.

Venus de Milo,
it’s been remarked of Alva.
Botticelli Venus.
Alva scarcely hears what is said of her at such times, for it isn’t said of her but of her body.

Alva prefers large urban university campuses. Alva prefers academic art departments, not freelance artists or photographers.

Alva is an artist’s model. Alva is not available for porn—“erotic art.” Alva is not sexual.

Saw nothing. Bad girl.

It’s early May. It’s a sprawling university campus close by the Mississippi River. Far from Rock Basin Park. Far from Upper Darby, Pennsylvania.

Early May, too warm. Even Alva, naked, is warm. Students have shoved windows up as high as they can in the third-floor room in the old building on University Avenue. Alva has been sleepless;
Alva has had difficulty breathing. Alva is uneasy; these windows open to the sky. There are noises from the busy street outside, but still there is airborne pollen, swirling maple seeds, a smell of
lilac from somewhere on campus.

Smother!

Alva shudders. Alva stares into a corner of the ceiling. Alva holds herself so very still seated on the swath of velvet draped over a chair, Alva doesn’t appear to be breathing.

The child! In a soiled pink eyelet nightgown smelling of her panicked body. Eyes open and staring, sightless. Where the hand has clamped there is the reddened impress of fingers in the ivory
skin. A bubble of saliva tinged with blood glistens at the small bruised mouth. They are wrapping her in the blanket that had been Alva’s. They are wrapping her tight so that if she comes
awake, if she comes alive again, she won’t be able to kick and struggle. At dusk they will drive to Rock Basin Park, they will abandon her in a desolate place where there are no footpaths and
lilac is growing wild.

“Alva—”

The model slumps suddenly. So rigidly she’d been holding herself, blank features like a statue, blind eyes; now abruptly she has slumped to the floor, unconscious.

Waking dazed and confused on the bare floorboards. Someone is wrapping her in the velvet cloth. Hiding her nakedness. Sprawled awkwardly on the floor, shocked strangers staring at her, Alva is
no classic Greek figure but a stricken woman no longer young.

The art instructor, Doyle, has called Alva’s name. To hear “Alva” uttered with such urgency is to understand that the man has strong feelings for Alva that he has managed to
disguise until now.

Lifting Alva to her feet. Alva is weakly protesting that she’s all right and wants to continue the sitting. But Alva is led away, to a quieter place. Doyle brings Alva’s clothes and
sandals to her, he brings a wet facecloth, a bottle of spring water.

“Your face went dead white, Alva. Just before you fainted.”

Alva shudders, remembering. The amnesia is lifting, like sun burning through a sky of clotted cloud.

Doyle is middle-aged, divorced. Doyle is stocky and bald, a gold stud in his left earlobe. A part-time faculty member in the art department. Painter, sculptor. Alva has never seen Doyle’s
work. Alva has scarcely glanced at Doyle until now. Though knowing—the kindness in his manner, the way he smiles at her, as he doesn’t so readily smile at others—he has been
intensely aware of her.

“Your beautiful face.”

Three days later, by chance Alva sees the headline in a newspaper Doyle has left spread open on his kitchen table.

By purest chance, since Alva rarely glances at newspapers.

In a state of mounting panic, Alva reads.

The unidentified child. Approximately two years old. Body abandoned in a park in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. A girl “tightly swaddled” in a
grimy blanket. A girl in a soiled jumper with “a border of pink bunnies” on it. A girl bruised about the face and torso, believed to have been smothered.

Alva learns that the “Pink Bunny Baby” case was one of the most notorious murder cases of the decade in the Northeast. Hundreds of thousands of fliers were posted; thousands of tips
were received by police; hundreds of individuals were questioned, investigated, released. The Pink Bunny Baby was never identified. No photograph of her was ever publicly released, only police
sketches of a beautiful doll-like face with widened, thicklashed eyes. Alva has been staring at the sketch in the newspaper. “My sister!” Alva begins to speak excitedly. Alva laughs, a
rising crescendo. When Doyle stands beside her, Alva points to the sketch of Pink Bunny Baby’s face. Beneath, the caption reads “Never-identified 2-year-old murder victim,
1974.”

“I saw. I saw who killed her. My sister. I was a witness.”

Phone rang. Friday evening. Believing it to be a friend, she lifted the receiver without checking the ID.

The voice was a stranger’s. Low-pitched, somehow insinuating.

“Mrs. Ulrich?”

Here was the wrong note. To her students and younger colleagues at the institute she was Dr. Ulrich. To friends and acquaintances, Lydia. No one called her Mrs. Ulrich any longer. No one who
knew her.

She felt a stab of apprehension. Even as she tensed, she spoke warmly and easily into the phone: “Yes, who is it?”

By the age of sixty-one she’d acquired a social personality that was warm, easy, welcoming. You might call it a maternal personality. You would not wish to call it a manipulative
personality. She was a professional woman of several decades. Her current position was director of a psychology research institute at George Mason University. She’d been a professor at the
university for eighteen years, much admired for her collegiality and ease with students. Her deepest self, brooding and still as dark water at the bottom of a deep well, was very different.

“. . . of the Upper Darby police department. I have a few questions to ask you, preferably in person.”

Upper Darby! She’d moved away nearly twenty-five years ago.

Lydia, her husband, Hans, and their young daughter, Alva.

Her friendships of that time, when she’d been an anxious young wife and mother, had long since faded. Her husband had had professional ties in the Philadelphia area, but long ago.

“But—why? What do you have to ask me?”

“Your husband is deceased, Mrs. Ulrich? Is that correct?”

This was correct. Hans had died in 2000. Already four years had passed. For seven years in all, Lydia and Hans had not been living together. They had not divorced or even formally separated,
because Hans had not believed in any outward acknowledgment of failure on his part.

The detective, whose name Lydia hadn’t quite heard, was asking if he and an associate could come to her residence in Bethesda to speak with her the following day, at about 2
P.M.
They
would drive from Upper Darby for an interview of possibly forty minutes, or an hour.

The next day was Saturday. This was to have been a day of solitude. When she needn’t be Dr. Ulrich. In the evening she was going out with a friend; through the long hours of the day she
intended to work, with an afternoon break for a long, vigorous walk. As a professional woman, she had learned to hoard her privacy, her aloneness, while giving the impression in public of being
warmly open and available.