The stained glass box that had held it was smashed; ruby tears scattered the fountain. The ruins of the valentine lay amidst splinters of red glass and oak leaves mottled with rot. Soaked through, it had been half-devoured by birds. I didn't know whether it had been ripped away strip by ragged strip, or swallowed mouthful by mouthful, a bloody red delicacy fought over by many. Either way, it came as no shock that there was nothing left but a few anemic tatters. This was a cemetery, after all, and in the land of the dead the birds were reigning lords.

They perched everywhere: on the crypts, on the cypress and oak, on the eavestroughs where the rain ran rivers into the sodden earth. At the funeral forty years ago their ancestors had screamed obscenities from the trees as the preacher droned on and on about love and eternity. Furious screeches and feathered rage. I clutched Sister Constance-Evangeline's black habit in a hailstorm of birds and terror, covering my ears until all I could hear was the rushing of blood--the beating of wings. But the birds didn't frighten me now as they did then. I slogged through the mud toward the fountain.

The heart was in ruins, but a sinewy strand of scarlet crepe still twisted around the rusted wire frame. Bleached by sun and leeched by rain, the crepe was white as aged scar tissue. When I touched it, it collapsed into stringy fibers. The last damp mouthful of air trapped within the empty chamber expired on a breath of wind. Gently, I replaced what was left of the heart in the fountain bowl. Stained amber with the sap of cypress needles, it seemed more like a Canopic jar, and my heart, my heart lay dead within. I tried to remember the day when they buried my mother, but I felt as empty as that dead husk. Forty years will do that to you. It wasn't that I didn't understand the pain; I just couldn't feel it anymore.

For stone angels and dead whores there is no pain, I reminded myself. A crepe heart does not beat. A lifeless body does not suffer the ravages of nature's savage little ways, nor does it endure the gut wrenching of scavengers as they tear it to shreds. For the dead there are no haunting regrets, no aching remorses, no taunting dreams to torment deep into the night. There is no laughter, no music, no dancing. No dream of an Isle of Capri? Mixed blessings.

The blessings of heartless angels.

The workings of the human heart have always been a mystery to me. The heart of my mother, Lana Lake, has been the greatest mystery of all. Nothing remains of that heart now but a dry, empty chamber, a mummified fist wrapped around a hardened clot where once had been caged a wild and fiercely beating thing, scarlet and raw as ripped silk.