At midday, the amber light that suffused the hotel room made Ingrid Moe's pale skin seem more golden than it was. She sat stripped to her waist on one of the twin beds, Alice beside her. Jack sat on the other twin bed, staring at the tall girl's breasts.
"He's just a child--I don't mind if he watches," was how Ingrid had put it.
"Maybe I mind," Alice said.
"Please, I'd like to have Jack here while you do it," Ingrid told her. "He's going to look just like William. You know that, don't you?"
"Yes, I know," Alice answered.
Possibly Ingrid didn't mind the boy seeing her because she had no breasts to speak of; even so, Jack couldn't take his eyes off her. She sat very straight with her long fingers gripping her knees. The blue veins in her forearms stood out against the gold of her skin. Another blue vein, which began at her throat, ran down between her small breasts; that vein seemed to have a pulse in it, as if an animal lived under her skin.
Alice had outlined the whole heart, which touched both the side of Ingrid Moe's left breast and her rib cage, before Jack got the idea that it was not a broken heart--not a heart ripped in two, as he'd thought Ingrid had requested--but an unbroken one. (Without a mirror, Ingrid couldn't see the tattooin-progress; besides, she kept staring straight at Jack, who was paying more attention to her breasts than to the tattoo.)
Even when Alice did the outlining on Ingrid's rib cage, the girl sat completely still and didn't make a sound, although tears flowed freely down her cheeks. Alice ignored Ingrid's tears, except when they fell on the girl's left breast; these errant tears she wiped away, as perfunctorily (with a dab of Vaseline on a paper towel) as she wiped away the fine spatter of black ink from the outlining.
It wasn't until Alice began to shade the heart red that the strangeness of it became apparent. Given the slight contour of Ingrid's breast, the plump little heart seemed capable of beating. The rise and fall of Ingrid's breathing gave the tattoo a visible pulse; it looked real enough to bleed. Jack had seen his mother tattoo a heart in a bed of flowers, or frame one with roses, but this heart stood alone. It was smaller than her other hearts, and something else was different about it. The tattoo held the side of Ingrid Moe's left breast and touched her heart--the way, one day, an infant's hand would touch her there.
When Alice was finished, she went into the bathroom to wash her hands. Ingrid leaned forward and put her long hands on Jack's thighs.
"You have your father's eyes, his mouth," she whispered, but her speech impediment made a mess of her whisper. (She said "mouth" in such a way that the mangled word rhymed with "roof.") And while Alice was still in the bathroom, Ingrid leaned farther forward and kissed Jack on the mouth. The boy shivered as though he might faint. Her lips had opened so that her teeth clicked against his. Naturally, he wondered if her speech impediment was contagious.
When Alice came back from the bathroom, she brought her hand mirror with her. She sat beside Jack on the twin bed while they watched Ingrid Moe have her first look at her finished heart. Ingrid took a good, long look at it before she said anything. Jack didn't really hear what she said, anyway. He'd gone into the bathroom, where he put a gob of toothpaste in his mouth and rinsed it out in the sink.
Maybe Ingrid was saying, "It's not broken--I said a heart ripped in two."
"There's nothing the matter with your heart," Alice might have said.
"It's ripped in two!" Ingrid declared. Jack heard that and came out of the bathroom.
"You only think it is," his mom was saying.
"You didn't give me what I wanted!" Ingrid blurted out.
"I gave you what you have, an actual heart--a small one," Alice added.
"Fuck you!" Ingrid Moe shouted.
"Not around Jack," Alice told her.
"I'm not telling you anything," the girl said. She held the hand mirror close to her tattooed breast. It might not have been the heart she wanted, but she couldn't stop looking at the tattoo.
Alice got up from the twin bed and went into the bathroom. Before she closed the door, she said: "When you meet someone, Ingrid--and you will--you'll have a heart he'll want to put his hand on. Your children will want to touch it, too."
Alice turned on the water in the sink; she didn't want Ingrid and Jack to hear her crying. "You didn't bandage her," Jack said--to the closed bathroom door.
"You bandage her, Jackie," his mother said over the running water. "I don't want to touch her."
Jack put some Vaseline on a piece of gauze about as big as Ingrid Moe's hand; it completely covered the heart on the side of her breast. He taped the gauze to her skin, being careful not to touch her nipple. Ingrid was sweating slightly and he had a little trouble making the tape stick.
"Have you done this before?" the girl asked.
"Sure," Jack said.
"No, you haven't," she said. "Not on a breast."
Jack repeated the usual instructions; after all, he was pretty familiar with the routine.
"Just keep it covered for a day," the boy told Ingrid. She was buttoning up her shirt--she didn't bother with her skimpy bra. "It will feel like a sunburn."