I Carry Your Heart

It was an afternoon in the first week of December, and a brunette named Jill was sitting by a window in Bryant Park Grill. She furrowed her brow at a menu, the fingers of her right hand closing around the stem of her wine glass, which was slightly less than half filled with a pinot noir. It wasn’t lunchtime, but it wasn’t late enough for dinner. Jill had just managed to slip away from work (her second job and, assuredly, the less exciting of the two) for the rest of the afternoon, and had been the only person in the restaurant for quite some time.

There was snow on the ground outside; Bryant Park was all but empty. Jill looked up from the list of over-priced and yet-somehow-worth-it dishes to stare out over the expanse of mottled, browning snow and, beyond that, the taxi-cluttered vein of 42nd Street. She thought maybe she’d spend the afternoon at her apartment with another glass of wine and a book or two, or maybe she’d play the tourist and go see a show with her sister. She couldn’t decide between two items on the menu, so she thought about this, too, and nearly jumped out of her skin when her cell phone started screaming from its spot on the table just beside her bread plate.

It was only “Boogie Wonderland” (something she’d selected after a night of wine drinking and too much laughing, and kept it because it usually made her smile), but, in the stillness of the restaurant, it was enough to make her duck her head in mortification and mutter “Sorry, sorry”, even though no one - not even the wait staff - was around to hear it. Nevertheless, it was with a distinct tone of annoyance that she mashed in the ‘talk’ button and hissed a “Hello” into the receiver.

“Where are you?” Was the reply. No salutation, nothing at all, really. It was Heath, and he had a habit of leaping right into conversations with little or no preamble.

Jill pushed her thick bangs off her forehead and inspected her nails and said, “Bryant Park Grill, trying to decide between the mushroom ravioli and the strozzapreti. Where are you?”

She hadn’t known he’d already hung up. She listened for a second or two, said “hello” once or twice, and finally checked the screen of her phone, only to find it black and empty. She brushed it off as faulty reception, waved to get the waiter’s attention, and ordered the strozzapreti.

It was strange, having so much free time. Six months earlier, she wouldn’t have been able to slip away for a cup of coffee, let alone have nearly an entire afternoon to do as she pleased. Six months earlier, she would’ve been lucky to snatch three hours of sleep and a single meal over the course of an entire day. But, here she was: lazily sipping a glass of wine, well-rested, well-fed, and working in an office where people were occasionally allowed to take afternoons off. Jill reveled in it, knowing full well that it was only a matter of time before she’d be back to sleep deprivation and thoughts of having all the fingers on her right hand surgically replaced with various makeup application brushes.

She was a makeup artist, by profession, and decidedly good enough to have been hired for Warner Brothers’ latest Batman movie, whatever it was called, which was where she’d met Heath in the first place, with his knitted hats and slouchy jeans and quiet easiness that almost always made her forget that nearly everyone in the world knew his name. They’d become fast friends over white greasepaint and some rigid collodion.

Once production had finished up, Jill had returned to New York and started work in an office that dealt with cosmetic distribution and advertising, which felt like a vacation in comparison. She and Heath occasionally met for coffee at discreet, hovel-esque shops somewhere in the West Village, where they’d talk about nothing over watery cappuccinos instead of pots of eye black. Sometimes he’d be recognized by the masses, at which point Jill would slip away, melting into the crowd like she’d never been there at all. There were some days, though, when they’d forget the time and sit there for hours, undisturbed, hogging a corner table and discussing such mundane things as the weather, never touching on politics, never straying toward whatever would be awaiting them when they paid their bill and rejoined the muddle of New York City.

Jill crossed her legs under the table, her hands in her lap, eyes on the low, cottony clouds, which were now coughing out fat snowflakes that fluttered around in the taxicab wind, then finally came to rest and melted on the sidewalk. She decided that she might like some company, and also decided that the feeling came from the sight of the deserted Park, the distant cars and cluttered hustle-bustle of the city she loved so much. She didn’t have many friends in New York. With her two jobs, one of which required near-constant travel, she didn’t really have the time. She contented herself with her two cats and her sisters and occasional conversations with work colleagues, but didn’t extend herself much further than that. Well, she corrected herself, sipping again at her pinot noir, she didn’t extend herself past Heath.

In truth, when she thought long and hard about it, the last six calls on her cell phone, both outgoing and incoming, were to or from Heath. She thought maybe there had been a call from her mother in the seventh space, and then a wrong number in the eighth, but the ninth, tenth, eleventh were him again. Nearly every text message she’d sent or received in the last month was the same, and she wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it. It didn’t help that he’d signed his last two text messages with a colon paired with a parenthesis: a tiny smile that didn’t nearly resemble his real-life grin but that still had somewhat the same effect. She nearly choked each time she saw either.

This, she assured herself, was the reason she had no desire to find new friends, to form new relationships, to accept the dinner offer from the charming - if not slightly effeminate - man in the office two doors down from her own. She had her jobs, she had her sisters, she had her cats, and she had Heath. Rather, she liked to think she had Heath. In truth, she desperately wanted to have him, wanted him to keep calling her and sending her his smiles. She desperately wanted him to take up all of her, so that she had no time or energy or space in her head for anyone or anything else.

She wanted to date Heath, to love him, but she didn’t want to entertain the idea long enough to get her hopes up, because he had a child and a messy breakup on his hands and, worst on the list, he had his face in magazines.

Her head was going too fast. Luckily, the waiter appeared with her strozzapreti and, after placing it on the table between the two forks on the left and the knife on the right, he offered to refill her wine glass. Jill agreed and thanked him, and then shifted her focus to the twists of pasta arranged artfully across her plate. She waited for the waiter to return with the bottle of wine before eating. In truth, it was delicious, and she was soon chewing contentedly and thinking of other things, like when she was going to find time to plan a surprise birthday party for her father, and how she was going to get her hands on the amazing patent heels she’d seen in Bloomingdale’s a few nights earlier.

Heath was all but gone from her mind when, suddenly, he was there. She hadn’t noticed him approaching, hadn’t seen the way he’d waved away the restaurant staff and their guttural noises of protest as he strode across the empty dining room to the unaccompanied brunette by the window. He dragged out the only remaining chair at her table and collapsed into it, and Jill dropped her fork into her plate in surprise, muttering “Sorry, sorry” again before righting herself and staring across the table. Heath grinned.

Jill’s initial reaction was to grin back wordlessly, singularly because she felt like someone had closed a fist around her esophagus (it was all because of that smile of his) and she couldn’t think of anything else to do. But, after a minute or two, prompted by the curious, crane-necked wait staff she could see if she looked over his shoulder, she shook herself and leaned forward.

“What are you doing here?” She said, her voice just barely above a whisper. Heath leaned toward her, too, and, for a wildly fleeting moment, Jill thought that, to a passer-by, it might look like they were whispering sweet nothings to each other over a late lunch. The flicker of elation that passed through her died when she realized, like anyone else surely would, that it was only she who had a plate, and he had yet to remove his horn-rimmed sunglasses and knitted skull cap.

“I was in the neighborhood.” He hissed back, and smiled. “What’s that?” He said, voice reaching a conversational level of volume. He’d already lifted a fork and was reaching toward her plate, sleeve hanging precariously over the table’s tasteful centerpiece of flickering candles.

“Strozzapreti.” Jill said shortly, knocking his fork aside with her own, and then relenting when he made another stab at her plate. “And if you’re going to be rude and eat my food, at least pull your chair closer so you don’t set yourself on fire.”

Heath grinned through his mouthful of seafood-stuffed pasta and obliged. The wait staff renewed their stares, and the china clattered ominously on the table, and Heath came to rest six inches from Jill’s left elbow. She sipped at her wine glass to hide her blush.

“I was sure you were going to order the ravioli. That’s part of the reason I came. This is good, though.”

“Someone’s going to recognize you.” Jill said lowly, sitting back in her chair, fork left abandoned on the edge of her plate. “Coffee shops are one thing, but Bryant Park is another.” She raised an eyebrow and glanced around. Heath chewed and shook his head, then tapped his sunglasses pointedly.

“That’s why I’m wearing these. What’s this called, again?”

“Strozzapreti.” Jill rolled her eyes. “And I hope you contribute to the bill.”

“And I hope you are ordering dessert.” Heath said, leaning back in his own chair, still chewing but smiling, too, hands clasped behind his head.

They sat for a moment in silence, Jill regarding Heath with a sense of only just concealed smugness at the fact that he had come to meet her, of all people, for lunch. Perhaps only slightly off mark, she thought the situation was made even better by the fact that he’d shown up unannounced. It made her feel like they had something, though she wasn’t sure what it might be. She was convinced, though, that he was one of three things: brazen enough to feel that he could drop in on anyone any time he liked, bored and just as lonely as she herself was, and found her to be the most convenient cure for said boredom, or comfortable enough with her to know that she wouldn’t mind, not even the slightest bit, if he showed up at her table and helped himself to things on her plate.

Perhaps he was some combination of the three. Jill wasn’t sure she knew him well enough to know for sure, but she didn’t think it mattered, because he was smiling at her, now, and she was thinking about ordering the Belgian chocolate cake off the dessert menu, because it might mean he’d keep smiling at her for a little while longer.



Much to Jill’s immense delight, Heath stayed for dessert. Also quite nice: he paid half the bill, and then insisted that she accompany him on a walk. He said he didn’t know where he was going, but, since she didn’t either, it only made sense for them to go wherever together. Unable, and, what’s more, unwilling to argue with him, Jill had slipped on her jacket and followed him from the restaurant, out into the grey of December and cement, hands clenched in her pockets against the cold.

They strolled, sometimes in animated conversation, sometimes in companionable silence, through the streets, scouring nearly thirty blocks, from 5th Avenue all the way down to Washington Square. It was snowing steadily by the time they reached the arch, and they found themselves all but alone, standing in the middle of what Jill thought would’ve made the prettiest snow globe money could buy. They each looked at the other, not smiling, not saying anything, but staring and not getting bored, perhaps not needing to move because the world outside them was moving enough. The snow swirled around and not between them, and Jill thought for a minute that she’d like to reach out and touch him, to press the palm of her hand flat against his chest. She didn’t.

It wasn’t long after she’d had the thought that Heath told her she should see his apartment. So they set off, walking seven blocks east and eight blocks south. It was around the corner of 1st and East Houston that Jill found her fingers tangled with his, and a block after that, she was tucked beneath his arm, crowded against his ribs, sheltered from the snow. It was languid, slow-motion, time-warped. Everything around them was fast and slow at the same time, but, for all Jill knew, she and Heath could’ve been standing still. She couldn’t stop staring at his face.

Heath’s apartment in SoHo was barely lived in. Really, the only things that looked like they might’ve been used at all were the chess table and the bed. Jill found herself drawn to the first, and she sat cradling pieces in her hands while Heath brewed cups of coffee in the kitchen and hummed to himself. Jill noted the photographs of his daughter, Matilda Rose, hung on the walls beside pictures of his sisters and mother, whose names she couldn’t remember but whose first letters spelled out “K.A.O.S.” when they were strung together like the tattoo on his wrist.

Heath re-entered, carrying two steaming mugs, and slowed when he saw her there, a pawn in one hand and a knight in the other. He smiled wide and set the coffee cups down on the edge of a bookshelf beside the chess table, and spent the next thirty minutes trying to teach Jill to play. Jill’s mind was moving too fast, though, to really absorb what he was telling her. It fluttered between the way his hands looked to the way they might feel to how he kept smiling at her and, oh God, how she couldn’t breathe when he did.

Heath didn’t say anything when he finally reached across the chess table, knocking several pieces aside when he did, and grasped Jill’s forearm, his palm pressed against the veins that stood out the way tire tracks on the snow outside might. He stood and lifted her out of her chair, too, forgetting the coffee on the bookshelf and their unfinished game, and walked backwards across the room, through the open door to his bedroom. Jill stared up at him like there was nothing else to look at. In truth, for her, there wasn’t.

And, for the rest of the night, which seemed to be simultaneously the longest and most short-lived of her life, Jill couldn’t get close enough. Something bubbled and rose to the surface of her skin, and she wanted to sink into Heath, to sleep in his breathing, to feel his skin on every inch of hers and never move from the space between him and his bed sheets. She discovered the hollow in the center of his chest, and still, the snow swirled outside and the coffee got colder and colder. Needless to say, Heath and Jill did not.



Life went on in that lazy pattern for weeks. Jill would find herself wandering down to SoHo, climbing the stairs to knock on the door to Heath’s apartment, and he’d answer with a grin on his face. The furniture was always arranged differently, she noticed.

Later, sometimes several hours later, they’d go for dinner (there was a place down the street that had the best jerk chicken, Heath would say), and then they’d end up back at his apartment, tumbling around like teenagers that had only just learned how, only much, much better. Jill was content, she loved waking up to Heath’s eyes, open and especially dark in the night because he never slept. In his own way, Heath didn’t want those weeks to end, but he knew they would eventually. He found himself caught up in another movie, and Jill was working on a set, doing makeup for a romantic comedy which, she said, was incredibly boring.

Heath made sure to send her a smile every day he didn’t see her.

It was the last week of January that Heath was back in New York. Jill wasn’t. She sent him smiles because, from the way he’d been talking, she figured he might need them more than she did. His text message inbox was full up of them in two days, and he lay awake at night, thinking about Bryant Park in December and the pretty brunette by the window. He thought about his daughter, so far away. But, mostly, he thought about sleep.



Jill didn’t receive a smile on January the twenty-second. She was too busy to dwell on it, or even notice at first. She went about her day with the same mechanical efficiency she went about every day. She stole five minutes around five o’clock, and stumbled out into the California sunset, cup of coffee in hand, cell phone tucked deep into the pocket of her jeans. There was no snow, there. Nothing but sand and dirt and trees. She missed Bryant Park, knew that there would be snow on the ground, snow falling around her, if she could only be there to see it.

But she was working and, for once, she wasn’t thinking about Heath. She was thinking about whether “Rose” was a dark enough shade of lipstick for the pretty blonde playing the lead, or if she should perhaps use the shade called “Plum Punch” instead.

Her phone, having been set to “manner mode” for on-set hours, buzzed against her thigh. Assuming it was a smile from Heath, she sipped her coffee and continued on her train of thought, content to look at it later, maybe before she went to sleep. But the buzzing continued for much longer than it would have had it only been a text message. Jill retrieved it, glanced at the screen. It was her mother. She answered lazily, sipping from her coffee just before and yawning just after.

“Jilly, have you heard from Heath today?” Her mother said, and Jill wondered if maybe it was just something about her greetings that didn’t merit a real salutation. She could hear the family dogs barking in the background, and had it not been for the clipped tone of voice, no part of her mother’s question would have struck her as out of the ordinary. Jill’s mother loved Heath, loved the idea of her daughter dating (if that’s really what it was; Jill wasn’t even sure herself) a celebrity.

“No, Mom. Nothing, today.” Jill said, rubbing at her forehead and then pouring the rest of her coffee out in curlicues over the pavement she was standing on. She wanted to lie down, she was so tired.

“Jill…”

It was at her mother’s hesitation that Jill’s head snapped up. The ellipses, Jill imagined, hung in the air in front of her, and she could imagine her mother pinching the bridge of her nose.

“Jilly, have you been watching the news?”

“No, Mom, I’ve been on set all day. What’s wrong?”

She had terrible mental images of bombings, of shootings, of broken people lying in the streets. In every one of her visions, Heath was standing, whole and beautiful as ever, among them, trying to help, or something of the nature, which would explain away the fact that he hadn’t sent a smile. She would forgive him immediately, of course. Not that there was anything to forgive. She forced her mind back into a more complacent state and waited.

“It’s Heath, Jill.”

“What about him?” Jill said, still standing frozen despite the perpetual-summer heat pressing down like hands. She listened hard, though her mother wasn’t saying anything. The dogs barked again, and her mother sighed.

“Mom?”

“Jilly, I’m sorry. Heath… Jill, honey, the news is saying Heath died this afternoon.”

Jill stopped breathing and her head broke free of its restraints, sprinting ahead, around and around in chaos. She threw up black coffee, turning all the curlicues on the street into black holes. She imagined sinking into them, sinking into Heath, into the hollow in his chest.
She put her head in her hands and cried, her cell phone laying, its screen cracked, on the ground beside her. She vaguely thought about all the smiles lost with it - almost a month’s worth - and she thought about Heath, she thought about Bryant park, and she mourned harder than she ever had for the person she thought maybe she could’ve been in love with.

She stayed there until the sun sank down, and then finally stood because she knew they’d be looking for her soon, if they weren‘t already. She was having trouble breathing, thinking about all the smiles she’d never see again, so she was going to tell them she couldn’t work anymore. She wouldn’t tell them why; they’d know soon enough, but they wouldn’t know the half of it. She wasn’t sure anyone would.

That night, on the redeye to New York, she dreamt about snow, and that Heath was standing out in it, smiling with his eyes closed, his face painted white and his hands full of chess pieces. When she woke up, she cried so hard, her eyes swelled shut.



In June, the world, in all its fickle glory, had all but forgotten Heath Ledger. News reporters found something else to scandalize, makeshift memorials on Broom Street in SoHo were picked up with the morning trash, and things continued as if nothing had happened, as if Heath himself had never happened.

Five months had passed. Flowers bloomed fiercely in any space not paved and painted and trampled on. Someone else lived in that apartment in SoHo. Jill had the afternoon off from work.

She sat again in the Bryant Park Grill, her glass of pinot noir untouched and rippling a little in front of her. She wasn’t alone in the dining room, this time; it was only one-thirty in the afternoon. People in suits were gathered around tables eating watercress and talking seriously about whatever it is people in suits talk about. But Jill sat at the table by the window, ignoring her wine and thinking about things.

After the funeral, she’d taken a week off from the romantic comedy job and stayed home in bed. Heath’s family had been in town, cleaning out his apartment, and it was with an air of muted surprise that she’d opened her door one day to find one of Heath’s sisters (she hadn’t known which one) standing there, her arms tight around Heath’s chess table.

“He wanted you to have it,” the Sister had said, setting the table town so that it wobbled a little. Jill heard the pieces rattling in the drawer underneath. “Apparently, he updated his will a little after Christmas.”

Jill chose not to read into her statement, whatever it was supposed to mean. She thanked the Sister, ended up hugging her, ended up crying with her, even though it had been clear neither of them knew or particularly wanted to know the other. It hadn’t mattered. They were missing the same person, had holes in them that wouldn’t be filled. The Sister had left with a small, shy smile on her face and some tissues from Jill’s bathroom pressed into her hand.

After she was gone, Jill had sat at the chess table. She’d stayed there all day.

But it was June, now, and Jill was staring out the restaurant window without really seeing anything. The waiter assigned to her table took her order and, without thinking, Jill asked for the strozzapreti. He left and she still stared.

Bryant Park looked so different in spring. Jill had ventured down to Washington Square a few days earlier and noted the same thing there, too. There were more people milling about, for one thing, and, for another, things didn’t look so colorless. Flowers bloomed and children laughed and women in pretty dresses read books about love. The parks were alive. Jill snapped her mind back into herself and blinked once, her eyes taking in the assault of color, of movement. She wondered what it would’ve been like to walk along with Heath when it wasn’t snowflakes falling on them, but sun and heat. She knew she’d never find out, but she wondered.

Her food came, but she didn’t eat. She just paid and left, walking down 5th Avenue slow enough to watch the world run by. She remembered the feeling of having Heath’s arm draped over her shoulders, of everything around them going too fast and too slow all at once. She brushed the tips of her fingers over the skin behind her left ear, imagining the tiny, simple heart she’d gotten tattooed there a few weeks earlier in memory of him, and felt okay, if not a little sad.

Heath was gone, dead far too early, far too suddenly. Jill missed him so much it hurt sometimes; missed his smiles and the coffees they never drank. But she had him, still, because she had the parks and the snow in winter and the chess table and the tiny smile. Sometimes, all the mismatched pieces fit themselves into the empty space inside her and, when they did, she thought about how she’d laughed with him instead of how she’d cried when he’d gone.

Maybe she would hurt when December came around, when the snow fell and everything got cold. But, more than that, maybe more than anything, was that she wasn’t hurting too bad in June. It was such a nice day.

Jill took a walk in the park.