Page 22 of Matchmaking for Psychopaths

“How is my daughter tonight?” my mother asked during our weekly phone call.

I was hungover, a state that was becoming habitual for Sundays. That was the kind of drinker that I was. I either abstained or consumed until I was sick.

“I’m good,” I told her.

“And your fiancé?”

“He’s good too.”

I hadn’t heard from Noah or Molly. I expected her rage. I expected him to come knocking on the door, begging for forgiveness. I wasn’t sure what to do with the silence. Had my plan failed?

“I hear it’s cold there,” my mother said next, a comment that made me sit up straight on the couch.

It was cold, but how did she know? I purposefully hadn’t told her which state I lived in, never mind which city.

Was it possible that she’d found me? The weather was one of the reasons I’d initially settled in Minnesota, as my mother didn’t tolerate freezing weather, because heavy coats obscured her beauty.

Apparently I hadn’t gone far enough. I ran through a list of countries where I could hide—Wales, Thailand, New Zealand…

“What did you say?”

“I said it’s cold here,” my mother replied, and I slowly relaxed back into the couch.

“I remember being young and in love,” my mother reminisced, reverting to our previous topic of conversation like she’d never mentioned the weather at all.

She took in a breath that was loud enough to hear through the phone.

Sometimes I tried to imagine her surroundings while she talked to me.

I’d never visited her in prison, so I had no reference outside of the facilities I saw depicted on television.

On a show that Molly and I watched, a cast member was arrested while cameras were rolling.

While she was cuffed, the rest of the cast was on a party bus, getting drunk and discussing the possibility of her guilt.

She can’t have done what they said she did, they concluded, with the caveat that maybe she had.

Maybe she was hiding a criminal self for the length of their friendship.

When she was found guilty and sentenced to a decade in prison, they changed their tune.

I knew it. I was in denial about the truth. She lied! We were never really friends.

Though I knew that my mother was in a maximum security prison and the cast member somewhere more casual, in my mind they were locked up together.

I imagined a line of pay phones, a row of jumpsuited women with receivers pressed to their ears.

My mother still looked just as she had when I was young—beautiful and terrifying.

“Your father knew he loved me immediately,” she continued. “I was with someone else when we met. I bet you didn’t know that.”

I did know that. I knew all about their love story.

My mother frequently talked about my father, leaving out the inconvenience of his death.

She repeated the same anecdotes again and again, as if describing it enough might make it one of the romantic comedies that we’d watched together, instead of a horror show.

Here was how it went:

My mother was with a boyfriend in a restaurant. They were having a nice meal when my father walked up to the table and said, “Excuse me, but you’re the most striking woman I’ve ever seen in my life. I think I’m in love with you.”

If it had been anyone else, it wouldn’t have worked. My father could do and say things that other people couldn’t get away with. He could take another man’s girlfriend while she was on a date with him. That was why I burned his manifesto. No one should be that convincing.

“Thank you,” my mother had said. It was common for people to compliment her, because she was an attractive woman.

I understood from a young age that I would never be as alluring as her, and that maybe that wasn’t a bad thing.

My father was too charismatic, my mother too beautiful, and the combination was disastrous.

Her date thought things had ended there, but my parents met up in the bathroom and had sex. They didn’t need a conversation to establish what was happening; they just knew. Physically, my mother returned to the table, to her date, but mentally, she was gone.

“What happened to your boyfriend?” I asked my mother once.

“Who?” she’d replied, as though she didn’t understand the question.

My mother remembered only the things that she wanted to remember. When I told her how I’d starved as a child, about the hours that I was left alone, she acted like I was making it all up.

“Stop telling lies,” she told me.

“Why would I make any of that up?” I asked.

“Because,” she said, “you’re determined to hate me.”

What I didn’t say was that she’d already given me more than enough ammunition to despise her.

The thing that stopped me from saying it was that, despite everything, I still loved my mother.

There were depths of cruelty that I was unwilling to explore because I was worried what might come out of my mouth if I allowed it to open.

“I hope that you’re making your fiancé work for it,” she told me. “I made your father do all kinds of things before I would marry him—nice meals, fancy jewelry, you name it. ‘What can you do for me that no one else can?’ I asked him, and he showed me. That’s what love is.”

“What exactly did he do?” I asked, not sure that I wanted to know the answer.

“That woman died,” she said.

“What woman?” I asked before I realized she had changed the topic on me. She did that whenever I asked something that she didn’t want to answer. She was referring to the woman from the week before, the one who had been stabbed in the prison.

“Her family is suing,” she continued. “They’re claiming that it was negligence. Someone needs to tell them that no one liked her. Not everyone has a right to life.”

My mother was still talking— describing the best dates my father had ever taken her on—when the doorbell rang.

Noah.

“I have to go,” I said.

My mother started to protest, her words changing from sweet soliloquies about the years spent with my father to a curse-laden rant about what a terrible daughter I was.

I pressed the end button. It was nothing that I hadn’t heard before.

Besides, part of my motivation for getting back together with Noah was her .

A stupid, stubborn part of me forever wanted to please my mother, regardless of what she did or said, and she wanted me to be with Noah.

Above all else, she was fixated on a rom-com ending.

I flung open the door, expecting to find Noah standing there. I pictured all the ways that I was going to make him beg. Instead, I found a heart.

The heart was a pink helium-filled balloon that floated at eye level. We put something similar in the Better Love office on Valentine’s Day. The end of the balloon’s string was attached to a box wrapped in red paper. Whatever it was, the gift was clearly romantic.

It was from Noah. It had to be. It was exactly the kind of sweet gesture that he would make. He didn’t have a lot of time, but he’d mastered the art of romantic delivery.

I was giddy when I picked up the box and brought it inside.

I returned to the couch and examined the outside of the box for a card, and found none.

The wrapping was so neat that I suspected that it had been done professionally, as Noah had always been hopeless with gift wrap.

It was touching that he’d put in so much effort to get me back.

I hoped that this was the first of many gifts to come.

I peeled back the tape, doing my best to avoid tearing the paper. The box beneath was of a shiny, high-quality cardboard. My fingers trembled as I took the top off and looked inside. What could it be? Diamonds? Keys to a new car? There was no limit to what Noah owed me after what he’d done.

It was immediately clear that whatever was inside wasn’t any of those things, though exactly what it was proved difficult to process.

It lay on a pile of tissue paper that had once been pink and flecked with gold and was now stained the reddish brown of what I soon realized was blood.

The thing itself was of a meaty purple hue and about the size of a fist, which was one of the reasons that I didn’t instantly recognize it; I would have thought it would be bigger.

Not wanting to touch it with my bare hands, I put on a spare pair of gloves that I used for cleaning, and delicately removed it from the box. As I examined the shape, its identity suddenly became clear.

“It’s a heart,” I said. The silent air around me gave no response.

A funny thing about working as a matchmaker was that I was surrounded by hearts at all times.

They were in the company logo, and they adorned every piece of clothing that Nicole owned.

They were so prevalent that it was easy to forget that, in addition to being a symbol of love, the heart was an organ that beat within our chests.

Rather than having a cute shape, the thing in front of me was ugly, lumpy and asymmetrical.

If I looked closely enough, I could identify the ventricles sticking out of the sides.

The giddy feeling remained, though it had become the inverse of itself, the excitement of something awful.

My initial, irrational, impulse was to feel my own chest, as though someone might have broken in and removed the thing from between my ribs.

I was relieved when I found my heart beating away, as steady as ever.

The questions came as a barrage.

Who had sent it, and why? Noah worked at a hospital.

Though he didn’t work in surgery or on corpses, he could probably access a disembodied organ if he really tried.

However, it seemed out of character. His standard gift-giving strategy was going to a jewelry store, naming his price range, and selecting the piece of jewelry he thought I would like the most, a practice he’d picked up from his father.

On top of that, he had no reason to send such a vicious gift. We’d slept together the night before!

I tried to think of who else might do such a thing.

Molly certainly had motive, and she knew all the ways in which I was linked to death.

However, she was squeamish. She was one of those people who threw up when they saw someone else vomiting, fainted when their blood was drawn at the doctor’s office.

She also worked in tech, a profession notorious for its lack of tangible human elements.

Personality wise, Aidan seemed more likely.

He had no reason to send me such an object, except that I had turned down his suggestion of a date, which really was one of the more dangerous things that a woman could do.

He hadn’t seemed angry. If anything, he’d seemed amused, as if Noah and I being together was a funny joke.

Maybe I’d misinterpreted things. Maybe I’d gotten too comfortable working with my clients, like a snake charmer who’d forgotten that the reptiles could bite.

After all, he’d done something that had informed him of his psychopathy.

An intrusion: Could it have been my mother? She had a proven track record of dismantling bodies. I reassured myself that she was in prison and that she didn’t know where I lived or what I’d changed my name to. Next to her, Aidan was a comforting possibility.

The next question: Who or what had the heart belonged to?

Could it be human? I delicately placed it back in the box, peeled the gloves off my fingers, and washed my hands with scalding water.

I fetched my laptop and opened an incognito browser window.

I knew better than to search for things like what does a human heart look like? out in the open.

I compared the image results with the thing in front of me.

The coloring on mine was off—grayer than the deep red hues of the ones that were pictured, probably due to the fact that mine was dead and disembodied—but otherwise it matched.

I hadn’t done well in biology class in college, mostly because it required levels of effort that I wasn’t accustomed to. Now I was getting a crash course.

If the object was indeed a human heart, that meant that somewhere out there was a human body that was missing its heart. The knowledge overwhelmed me. I shoved my laptop aside and ran to the bathroom as my stomach emptied its contents. This was bad. This was very, very bad.

I knelt on the bathroom floor, noting a dust accumulation along the floorboards that I’d failed to clean, and considered what kind of message the heart was intended to send.

Even if my mother had nothing to do with the gift, it was undoubtedly related to her.

Everything went back to my parents. The cruelty of life: no matter what I did, how I altered myself or changed my name, I would always be their child.

I know who you are, the heart said from the other room.

I know what you’ve done, it hissed.

I got up from the floor. I was dizzy. Anyone else would’ve called the police.

That was the right thing to do. I had an organ of mysterious origins in a box in my living room.

However, I didn’t trust the police. If I were capable of diagnosis, I might have identified my distrust as a symptom of PTSD.

Sirens made my skin itch and flashing lights made me want to hide.

Besides, how would I explain the heart? It seemed possible that the delivery was a setup designed to destroy me. Once I’d called the police, I would have ceded control to them, and I was unwilling to do that.

I had a plan before I’d even thought about making a plan.

My parents hadn’t taught me much. They didn’t know how to cook or clean.

I’d taught myself how to read out of spite when I was four and another little girl had taunted me for my illiteracy on the playground.

My second-grade teacher was flummoxed when I, her smartest pupil, didn’t know how to tie her own shoes.

The one thing my parents had taught me, the single thing that I knew thanks to them, was how to dispose of body parts.