The Mystery of Hollow Places
Rebecca Podos
ONE
The bedtime story my dad used to tell me began with my grandmother’s body.
Back when my dad wasn’t yet my dad, but a young forensic pathologist at Good Shepherd Hospital in the city, a dead woman landed on his table. She was middle-aged and unremarkable, her hair colorless, her face like a vacant moon. Gone already when the ambulance brought her in, she’d died in a park in the evening, quietly and alone. After she was cleaned and scraped and stripped, my dad performed the autopsy. A run-of-the-mill operation until he dug down deep and found her heart.
It wasn’t the bloody blue thing he’d expected, but a pocked stone the size of his fist. As he lifted it to snip it loose, the veins crumbled away from it, turned to dust. My dad held the heart to the light, rapped on it gently with his knuckles, then locked it in his desk drawer until early the next morning, when he came back with a rock hammer and chisel bought from a hardware store a few blocks away. He laid a blue cloth across the exam table—the kind they use to cover bodies—and settled the heart on the cloth. Hands sweaty inside his surgical gloves, he turned it over until he found a dark seam in the stone. Carefully, he slotted the chisel against it, and with a chink, chink, chink, CRACK, the heart split in two. Inside the thick gray rind of rock there were no vessels, or tissues, or anything warm. Instead, a pocket of crystals like clear teeth winked up at him. This happened, he knew from his school days; with enough time and the right conditions, precious stones could grow in hollow places.
Weeks later, the dead woman’s daughter was finally tracked down. She’d been studying abroad in Switzerland. She was brought to my dad in the Good Shepherd morgue to claim the body in the cooler. He showed her pictures of the dead woman, taken when the ambulance ferried her in. The daughter shook her head. She hadn’t seen her mother in years beyond counting; this could be anyone’s mother.
My dad showed her the shabby dress the dead woman had worn, the chipped jewelry, the low-heeled shoes. Still the daughter shook her head. None of it was familiar.
At last, he unlocked the desk drawer and took out the stone heart, wrapped many times over in the big blue cloth, which smelled always of formaldehyde and earth. When he placed the halves in the daughter’s hands, her face crumpled. “Yes, this is her,” the daughter said softly. “She was a lonely woman.”
He plucked a tissue from the box, then turned back and saw tears glittering on her round cheeks and her unpainted lips, and the way she clutched the heart with one small hand and her long brown hair with the other. In that moment, he said, he knew for certain he was looking at my mother.
When my stepmother became my stepmother, I asked her if she knew about the heart. By then, Dad hadn’t mentioned it or shown it to me for years. I’m not sure why I brought it up, except to prove to Lindy that we had plenty of stories before she came along, stories she played no part in. But my stepmother sat my father and me down that evening and persuaded him to tell me the whole truth.
After my grandmother died in the park by Good Shepherd Hospital, Dad said, he devoted himself to my mother. He married her in the spring and moved them out of the city, into a quiet house with many windows and few doors. He left the morgue early each night and brought her presents—a candy bar from the vending machine, daisies from a flower stand at the train and bus station in Sugarbrook. Dad loved my mother so much he felt his heart would split, and then I was born and I was loved by both of them. But my mother grew sad, stiff, and cold, like her mother before her. (“Nothing to do with you, Immy,” Lindy interrupted. “It was just in her chemistry.”) One night, my mother left us, taking a suitcase, no money, and half of the heart with her. She sent the divorce papers through a process server a little while later. Of course Dad was sorry, but he had his daughter to think of. Ready to put the past behind him, he quit his job at Good Shepherd, trading his scalpel and surgical gloves for pens and paperweights.
This much I knew already. My father writes popular medical mysteries, the kind you read in airports. Since I was little I’ve been sneaking his books into my room, books with thick spines and blood spatters on the covers, and reading them under my blanket. They’re all about a handsome forensic pathologist who solves deaths that seem extraordinary but are in fact perfectly explainable. Someone poisoned the dead man’s salmon fillet, or switched the dead woman’s asthma medicine with dry ice. Nobody’s organs ever turn to stone. There’s no magic in his books at all.
But I believed my dad about the heart. I still believe. He had proof—the half left behind—and though I haven’t seen it in forever, I remember it perfectly. A semicircle of gray stone, its inside sharp with small crystals. He would show it to me at night and, sitting in my nest of stuffed bears, I’d run one finger over the roughness of it. “It wasn’t your mother’s fault,” Dad would say with a sigh, “or her mother’s. The women in that family were cursed. They could be lonely wherever they were. But not us, Immy. We have each other. So we’ll never, ever have to feel that way.”
As he spoke, Dad cradled our piece of the rock, which I was never allowed to hold. He clasped it to his own chest as if to protect it, as if it weren’t already broken.
TWO
It’s after ten on Thursday night when Lindy hands Officer Griffin her second cup of coffee. While they talk, I splash what’s left in the pot into my own Mystery Writers of America mug. It’s thick and semicool and tastes like horribly burned toast. Dad has always been the master of coffee in this house. That’s how it works: Lindy is the appointment keeper, the bills mailer, the tax filer, while Dad’s the coffee maker, the grocery shopper, the homework checker. At the moment my homework sits upstairs untouched, my English essay blank but for my name, date, and class number. I’m not worried. Lindy will write me a note. Something like: