Jar of Hearts

by Jennifer Hillier

when their only child didn’t come home, offering them reassurances that their daughter would be found, giving them answers that made them feel better, but were far from truthful.

Her fiancé doesn’t know what she’s done. He’ll soon find out. Geo looks down at her hands, folded neatly in her lap. Her diamond engagement ring, a three-carat oval with an additional carat of smaller diamonds encircling the center stone, is still on her finger. For now. Andrew Shipp has impeccable taste. Of course he does; it comes from good breeding, an important family name, and a big bank account. After he ends it—which of course he will, because the only thing that matters more to him than Geo is his family’s company—she’ll give the ring back. Of course she will. It’s the right thing to do.

When their eyes meet, a tingle goes through her. That goddamned tingle, even now, even after everything. From the first day they met to the last day she saw him, that tingle has never gone away. She’s never felt anything like it before, or since. Not even with Andrew. Especially not with Andrew. Her fiancé—assuming he could still be called that, since the wedding planned for next summer isn’t going to happen—never inspired that feeling.

It’s a torn piece of yellow notepad paper. On it, Calvin has scrawled a note in his small, neat handwriting. You’re welcome. Beside the two words, he’s drawn a small heart.

“I finally have closure. I can now let it go. I’d advise you to do to the same. You kept that secret a long time. Fourteen years … I can’t imagine what that did to you. It’s a punishment all its own.”

“Finally,” she repeats, taking a big bite of her burger even though she’s no longer hungry. It’s easier to lie when your mouth is full.

Geo tried to smile at him, tried to reassure him that she was okay, but Andrew wasn’t looking at her at all. He was glaring at the police officers, every inch of his body radiating that special blend of outrage and self-entitlement one can only have if one grew up with serious money.

TODAY IS GONNA BE THE DAY THAT THEY’RE GONNA THROW IT BACK TO YOU

And then the next thing Geo knew, years had passed, and it seemed like maybe the past would stay buried. A bad pun, but fitting nonetheless.

It’s finally hit her, that depression P. Martin warned her about. The overwhelming feeling that she doesn’t truly

belong here—that somewhere along the way a giant mistake has been made—is impossible to shake. And the cloak of denial isn’t protective at all. It doesn’t help. It suffocates her. It makes her vulnerable. It feels like someone took her life, shattered it into small pieces, and then put it back together, all messed up. The pieces are recognizable, but they’re all in the wrong places.

Punishment for consensual sex between inmates is a stay in maximum security. They’re already in maximum security.

She knows from experience that it takes a while before your soul comes back to you. And it takes even longer before your soul stops bleeding.

Geo nods, the full story coming back to her. In her media photos, as the wife of drug lord James Frank, Ella was always impeccably dressed, with long black hair and bright fuchsia lipstick.

“Hold your head high,” Ella says. “Carry yourself like you run the place. Don’t back down from anybody. The way you look, with your pretty white-girl hair and your pretty white-girl face, you’re never going to be invisible in here. Not after what you did on the outside. So own it. Someone gets in your face, you cut a bitch. You understand me? I can and will protect you, but I could get shanked tomorrow. And then where will you be?”

In the real world, you earned it through hard work, admiration, loyalty, and sometimes love. In prison, there was only one way: You earned respect through fear.

She looks down at her hands; they’re shaking. He wrote to her. Goddammit. The memories threaten to flood in, to break the barrier that Geo has spent years constructing around her head and her heart. She doesn’t want to think about him; it’s always been so much easier to pretend he’s not out there somewhere.

Her ability to

compartmentalize the different pieces of her life is the only fucki...

You murdered your best friend, and then you went on with your life like it never fucking happened.”

The pedophile tells her she wants bangs. This is Geo’s life now, surrounded by all manner of wicked human beings who do nothing to make the world a better place, who take and take and take, giving absolutely nothing back.

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Five fucking years. In some ways it feels like the time went by fast, and yet in other ways, it seems like nothing has changed at all.

But monsters, like everyone else, can evolve.

Everybody has a weakness. Kaiser’s has always been unavailable women.

stares at Walter Shaw, the father of his best friend from high school, the father of the woman he arrested. He’d sat at Walt’s table, had eaten Walt’s beef stew, had drunk Walt’s beer when he wasn’t home, had been in love with Walt’s daughter.

“I wasn’t trying to be political, Kai. But an adult dead body shows up, part of you can’t help but think, even just for a split second, ‘What could that person have done to deserve that? What situation did they put themselves in?’ But a dead kid shows up, and nobody thinks that, ever. Children are innocent. They’re small. They can’t defend themselves against predators. They’ve done nothing to warrant any violence against them. Bad things aren’t supposed to happen to kids. It goes against everything we as a civilized society think is acceptable. Your protective instincts kick

He was mine, and I felt it, and I know Henry felt it, because he looked up at me and we both just knew. And I thought, why the hell did we wait so long? Why did we think everything had to be perfect? Because children are perfect, and everything falls into place when you hold your child in your arms. All the things you think you’re going to worry about don’t matter.”

Nothing is more satisfying to humans than watching another person fail. Especially when it’s someone who has everything you don’t: beauty, brains, an education, a high-paying job, a rich fiancé.

Kaiser recognizes what she’s doing, because it’s something he does himself, every day. Julia Chan is compartmentalizing. She’ll make a hell of a lawyer someday.

“You save yourself or you remain unsaved.” ~ Alice Sebold, Lucky

Prison underwear is scratchy. So are prison bedsheets. So are prison clothes. Prison isn’t designed for comfort. It’s designed to keep the criminal away from the outside world, or the outside world away from the criminal. Which aren’t the same thing, and the distinction is important.

Geo knew exactly why her friend was being rude, and it was because the hot older guy with the cool older friends wasn’t interested in her. Well, you know what? Tough shit. How many times had Geo sat back and played wingwoman while guys hit on her best friend? There was even a term for it in this situation: grenade. In every girl group, there was the hot one, and there was the grenade. Angela was always the hot one, the one the guys wanted, the one they competed for. Geo was the grenade, the one the guys had to be nice to and treat with kid gloves, because if it blew up—if the grenade didn’t like you—then the entire group of girls would leave, and there went your chances with the hot one.

That first night with Calvin was the first and last time the relationship felt beautiful. The first and last time it didn’t feel complicated. The first and last time that Geo’s heart and mind were pure. If she could somehow isolate that one night and remember it all by itself, it might actually be a happy memory. After all, Calvin James was her first love.

The past is always with you, whether you choose to think about it or not, whether you take responsibility for it or not. You carry the past with you because it

transforms you. You can try to bury it and pretend it never happened, but that doesn’t work. Geo knows that from experience. Because ...

Dying from cancer isn’t pretty. Cancer takes its time, and it kills from the inside out.

Sometimes she wonders if this is why she truly ended up in prison—to save her from herself.

“You only get one heart,” Walt said to his daughter after the second one ended. He seemed sad, but not regretful. “I gave mine to your mother the day I met her. And she still has it.”

For a long time Geo believed that was true. One heart, one chance at love. It had certainly felt that way with Calvin. At sixteen, she couldn’t imagine loving anyone the way she loved Calvin James—and the truth was, she never did. It had been different with Andrew, after all. Less passionate but more secure. More mature but less spontaneous. Less exciting but completely fucking safe. As a healthy relationship probably should be.

Because she was offered so much freedom, she hardly ever felt the need to take it. Funny how that worked.

Funny how she still does that. All the memories of her life are neatly divided into sections. Before Calvin. After Calvin. Before prison. And now, after prison.

Geo takes the jar into her hands. She should have done this years ago, right when Calvin gave it to her. She hurls it at her bedroom wall as hard as she can, anticipating the satisfying sound of shattering glass. It smacks the wall, hard, indenting the Sheetrock and scraping the paint. But it doesn’t break.

In the beginning, he was all Geo could see. It was magical, at first. It was heady, trippy, whatever word best describes being young and intoxicatingly in love for the very first time. She loved the way he smelled and how his cologne stayed on her clothes long after he’d left. She knew the shape of his hand, and how it felt when hers was in it, the exact places his fingers squeezed. And it stayed magical even when it turned violent. That’s the part nobody explains to you.

A relationship isn’t supposed to make you feel out of control; it’s not supposed to consume you; it’s not supposed to change you into someone you don’t want to be. But how do you teach that? How do you explain to someone who’s never been in a romantic relationship what a healthy relationship feels like?

How do you explain to a sixteen-year-old girl who’s never been in love what love is supposed to feel like?

It was so easy to mistake control for love, to believe he was upset because he cared, that he was protective because he loved her so goddamn much. Sometimes

As she rinses out her mouth, she tries not to think about the woman in the picture, and how much it all reminds her of Angela. It’s becoming painfully clear that it doesn’t matter how long ago it was, it doesn’t matter how much guilt and remorse she feels, it doesn’t matter how much time and energy she’s spent trying to forget it, or how many years she’s served in prison. What happened to Angela that night will never leave her.

Something that changes you so profoundly never could. And not only because of how the world sees you, but because of the way you see yourself. It wasn’t just Angela who died that

night. Part of Geo did, too, and she’s long suspected it was t...