The Sound of Glass

by Karen White

  “It was only part-time, and it wasn’t really what I wanted to do anyway. This way I can be with you all day.”

  “What about that job Deborah Fuller told you about?”

  “The acquisitions manager at the art gallery? That’s not official yet—probably not until after the first of the year. It’s not a guarantee, but Deborah said she’d put in a good word for me.” With her gaze focused on the river, she said, “Although I don’t want to go to work full-time at first.”

  Loralee knew she was thinking about Owen, and how hard it would be for him without his mother. She wanted to reach over and pat Merritt’s hand, but held back. Merritt liked to pretend that she was a lot harder and pricklier than she really was, and for the time being Loralee would go along with it.

  “If you’re up to coming downstairs again later, we can see the Water Festival’s opening-day fireworks tonight. Gibbes said they’re really spectacular.”

  She wasn’t sure whether she could find the strength, but she nodded anyway, determined to be there. Gibbes would carry her if she asked. “Owen loves fireworks. I swear that’s the only reason we took him to Disney World—because he’d heard those were the best in the world and he wanted to see for himself.”

  A large delivery truck slowed as it approached the front of the house, then carefully pulled into the driveway. Merritt stood, and it appeared for a moment that she might start clapping. “It’s my new refrigerator. Finally! I’ve run out of room to store all those casseroles people keep bringing over.”

  She walked down the steps to greet the driver and his passenger, her face as animated as most women’s would be at a shoe sale. Loralee sat back in her chair and watched as the men loaded up the refrigerator on a dolly and wheeled it toward the house before hauling it carefully up the front steps and into the kitchen.

  It was the first time she’d been completely alone since her trip to the hospital, and while the men and Merritt were busy unloading the new refrigerator and packing up the old one, Loralee kicked off her slippers and pressed her bare feet onto the floorboards of the porch. It had been too long since she’d gone barefoot. Back in Gulf Shores she’d mostly run around barefoot, not because she didn’t have shoes, but just because it felt so good.

  She remembered nighttime games of Kick the Can and Monkey in the Middle, the hot nights and sticky mornings just happy memories now. She wanted to make sure that Owen knew how to play those childhood games and could teach them to the new friends he would make there. Loralee would have to tell Merritt the rules, since she was running out of space in her journal, but, knowing Merritt, she’d take notes.

  She breathed deeply, smelling the wet air that was a part of any coastal town just as much as the sand and water were, and she was reminded again of her girlhood. She stopped rocking, and after deciding that she felt strong enough to stand and walk, she moved slowly down the steps, holding on tightly to the railing, and into the front yard until she was beneath the ancient oak tree. Bracing one hand on the solid trunk, she tilted her head to see the silver-white leaf bottoms that always seemed to be winking when the wind blew. The tree had probably been there long before any of those houses, and maybe even before the river had decided to burrow into that corner of the world. And it would definitely still be there long after Loralee had passed from this earth. It was comforting, somehow, the permanence of it that was so much like the love between a mother and child.

  The cool grass in the shade of the tree felt good on her bare feet, so good that it didn’t bother her that passersby in cars thought she must be crazy, hanging out like that in front of the big house, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and yoga pants, her hair dull and lifeless but still long. She didn’t consider herself a vain person, but her hair had always been her crowning glory, and she was bound and determined that she would meet her Maker with long hair.

  She really wanted to cross the street to the marsh, to put her feet in the water one last time. Except she knew she’d already used up any extra reserves of strength and would most likely collapse in the middle of the road, giving Merritt a heart attack wondering where she was.

  I’m ready. The thought was so loud in her head that she imagined for a moment she’d spoken. Since Robert’s death and her diagnosis, she’d had one singular goal, one singular prayer. She’d even sworn that it would be her last and only prayer, asking that she could hold it together until she’d put Owen in a place where he would be loved and happy and well cared for. She’d taken a huge risk coming there, her only hope being that the little girl in the pictures and stories Robert kept close to his heart still existed in the broken woman she’d met on the porch of that house.

  “I’m ready,” she said softly to the tree and the air and to the place prayers went. She quickly said one more prayer, which technically didn’t break any promises, because it was for somebody else, then pushed off the tree and waited for a moment until she felt steady enough to walk back to the porch.

  She’d barely made it to her chair when the men reappeared with the old refrigerator strapped to the dolly, Merritt following closely behind and muttering something about her wood floors. Loralee tried to catch her breath, to fill her lungs with air so she could ask one of those men to carry her back up the stairs.

  The round-edged refrigerator looked even more antique in the bright light of day, much as she imagined the old countertops and cabinets looked against the brand-new stainless-steel model now in the kitchen.

  One of the men tilted the dolly back as far as it could go, preparing to lower it onto the first step.

  “Wait—stop a minute.”

  The men looked annoyed, but Merritt ignored them and bent to get a better view beneath the refrigerator. Screwing up her face, she stuck her hand into what looked like fifty years of dust and cooking grease that had managed to congeal beneath the appliance, trapping something on the bottom, and peeled off what appeared to be a folded piece of paper, yellowed and brittle with age. Strings and clumps of dust fell from the paper as Merritt shook it, then sneezed.

  The men continued on their way back to the truck, but Merritt didn’t raise her head.

  Worried by her silence, Loralee wheezed, “Whatever that is, I’m thinking it’s been stuck under the refrigerator for a long time.”

  Merritt looked at her with the eyes of a child who’d just realized she was lost in an unfamiliar place. “There’s only one word written on the front. ‘Beloved.’” Her hands shook, rattling the page. “I think I recognize the handwriting.”

  The rear gate slid down and clanged shut, and then the beeping sounds of the truck reversing came from the driveway, but neither one of them looked over.

  Merritt collapsed into the rocking chair beside Loralee’s, then carefully unfolded the letter and began to read.

  July 25, 1955

  My darling Henry,

  You will never see this letter; yet I feel compelled to write it. It is my farewell letter to you, the last words I will ever address to you whether or not you see them. Today our mutual misery will be over for eternity. Or at least until we meet again in the next life, wherever that will be. I will admit that I haven’t planned much further than today.

  I love you, Henry. I have since the first moment I saw you. But, you see, I hate you almost as much as I love you. And I know you must feel the same way, because when I count the bones you have broken of mine, like a lover counts petals from a flower with, “He loves me; He loves me not,” I always come up with a different answer.

  I cannot live with you any more than I can imagine living without you. But we have a daughter now, and it is her protection that has charted my course. I could not bear to see you lay a hand on her, and know that I was responsible for not protecting her.

  My handwriting is shaky, but still legible. As you know, it’s not because of nerves—I’m quite calm now that I know that I’m going through with this. It’s because two of my fingers are numb because of nerve damage received when you slammed my hand in the car door because
I didn’t exit the car fast enough for you. That was the proverbial last straw as I envisioned the tiny hand of our daughter suffering a similar fate.

  It was an easy thing, especially for a bright girl who always did well in science, to make a bomb and set an alarm that would detonate after your arrival in Miami, after it is securely stowed in your trunk and you are driving away to your next adventure with your latest lover. It was an easy thing to pack it with your toothpaste and shaving cream, then place it in your suitcase, tucked in among your neatly ironed and folded clothes. Just as easy as it will be to latch your suitcase after I’ve placed this letter inside and hand it to you, then watch you stow it in the car trunk. It will be easy up until the moment I watch you drive away from me for the last time.

  You are my beloved, and always will be. Forgive me.

  J

  Loralee stared at Merritt, wondering whether she’d ever seen skin so pale, so bloodless. “You know who wrote that?”

  Slowly, Merritt nodded. “Yes,” she said, carefully folding the letter like the edges were giving her splinters. “My grandmother.”

  chapter 31

  EDITH

  OCTOBER 1993

  Edith finished the tiny stitches on the Eton tie, knotting it off by hand. It was perfect, the dimensions proportional to the real height of Henry P. Holden. She’d been to his interment, and that of that poor woman from Pittsburgh. Or was it Poughkeepsie? It had been nearly forty years, and some of the details were getting foggy. Both unclaimed victims had been buried at the same time in separate graves, at the charity of the parishioners of Saint Helena’s.

  The names had been printed in the newspaper, and when she’d seen Henry’s name, recognized it from the luggage tag, she knew she had to go. She’d almost called the funeral home to suggest bringing a fresh suit of clothes, but then realized that she couldn’t. Not ever. But she’d remembered to ask the undertaker how tall he’d been, so that when she made his doll replica, it would be exact. That was how she knew how long the tie needed to be and where it would fall when she’d placed Henry in his seat on the plane.

  But the funeral for the man she’d never met but knew so much about had been years before—before C.J. had grown up to be just like his father. Before Cal was born and then Gibbes. Before Cecelia had died. This last was what had convinced Edith that she couldn’t be a passive bystander anymore, quietly working in her attic to solve a crime from bits and pieces of discovered wreckage. Her silence since the crash and the discovery of the suitcase and the letter had been just that—passive. But Cecelia’s death had pushed Edith to reach out to Henry’s widow—the faceless woman whose first name began with the letter J. Not to condemn her. Never that. Edith knew too well what J. Holden had been through. Knew how each beating had diminished her, had warped her thinking to the extent that she could place a bomb on a plane and not expect anything to go wrong. Could not anticipate anybody else getting hurt. Nobody except somebody who’d lived that life, who’d felt her own psyche lessened, would know that.

  No, Edith had reached out to Mrs. Holden to let her know that she was not alone. That she—and Cecelia—and doubtless countless others formed an odd sisterhood. One where the members survived in secret and sometimes even enacted a revenge that was as stealthy as the violent acts they’d been forced to endure.

  Edith slid open the makeshift drawer she’d created beneath the sea-glass table for odds and ends. Among the rubber bands, buttons, paper clips, and glue, she kept one large envelope identical to the one she’d already sent to Henry Holden’s widow.

  Every once in a while, Edith toyed with sending her another letter. Maybe she hadn’t received the first one, the one with the handkerchief Edith had taken from the suitcase and the note from Edith explaining that she knew how the plane crashed. How the killing of innocent people had been an accident but the death of Henry P. Holden was not. That the secret would forever be safe with her.

  Using her thumb and forefinger, Edith picked up the small dopp kit she’d painstakingly made, with tiny replicas of combs and razors and little soaps made from slivers she’d taken from C.J.’s bar of soap he’d left by the sink. With a tiny dab of model airplane bonding glue, she stuck the dopp kit in Henry Holden’s lap.

  Over the years, while working on her plane model, putting each piece together as it was discovered buried in the marsh or in a farmer’s field, that one niggling fact wouldn’t leave her alone. Henry Holden’s suitcase hadn’t contained a dopp kit, although there’d been an indentation among the tightly packed items just big enough for one to fit. It wasn’t until Edith had read a newspaper report about the plane’s two-hour delay at LaGuardia that it had begun to make sense to her.

  Technically, the dopp kit shouldn’t be on Henry’s lap. But she was vain—vain about her attention to details and the small objects she’d made for the kit. As long as she knew that it was wrong, that the actual dopp kit had been obliterated, vaporized in the first second of the blast by the bomb neatly tucked inside of it. Luckily for Edith, it hadn’t been in the suitcase, where it was supposed to have been. If it had, she never would have found the suitcase in her garden. Instead, Henry Holden had retrieved the dopp kit after his dutiful wife had dropped him off at the airport and presumably given him a chaste parting kiss. He had retrieved it because he was going to Miami and was—possibly? probably?—going to see somebody where a closer shave might have been required. Something he could take care of once they were in the air, in the tiny onboard bathroom. So he’d taken it out before checking his suitcase to be loaded beneath the plane.

  The dopp kit, so carefully packed by his loving wife, just like the rest of his things, had stayed in the overhead space, ticking away, while Henry and the other forty-eight passengers and crew on board waited at La Guardia before finally taking off again two hours past the time they were supposed to.

  Edith often found herself during the day timing how long exactly two hours seemed to be. She’d make a note of the hour, and then get busy with a task, looking up periodically to see how long it was. She supposed that sitting in a plane during the boring hours in flight must have seemed interminable to Henry and his fellow passengers. But she found herself often wondering whether, had they known that those two hours would be some of their last minutes, the time would have passed by so much more quickly.

  Two hours. It haunted her. And oftentimes she wondered whether those two hours haunted Mrs. Holden, too. Wondered when she’d realized her horrible mistake, her flaw in reasoning that had killed so many innocent people. The simple fact remained that if the plane had not been delayed, they would have reached Miami on time. And Henry would have been driving away from the airport—alone?—with his suitcase and dopp kit in the trunk of the rental car at the time the bomb was supposed to detonate. Or perhaps he would have opened the dopp kit midflight and discovered the little extra item his loving wife had packed there. Yes, it haunted Edith. Almost as much as she imagined it haunting Mrs. Holden.

  The mistake in judgment was the only justification that Edith had as to why she hadn’t told the police when she’d finally figured everything out. The death of all those passengers had been an accident. The death of Henry P. Holden had not been; albeit, in her opinion, it had been justified. Cecelia’s death had simply firmed her conviction.

  “Edith!” Cal shouted from somewhere in the house, followed by a loud slamming of a door that Edith felt all the way up in the attic. He’d started calling her by her first name shortly after his father’s death, when he’d assumed the role of man of the house. She didn’t like it, but didn’t make the mistake of letting him know.

  Edith turned off the lights in the attic and hurried down the steps to the upper level. Ten-year-old Gibbes stood in the hallway holding his book bag, still wearing his school uniform, having just returned home, his eyes wide.

  “Edith!” Cal shouted again, something dangerous in his voice. He’d been working in the garden, digging holes for her new rosebushes. It was his day off from the fir
ehouse, and he’d wanted to do physical labor to work on his muscles. She’d planned on hiring somebody, but the roses were already there, waiting inside burlap bundles to be planted.

  “I’ll be right there,” she called, then froze as she listened to his heavy steps in the hallway below, and the sound of something solid being dragged against wood floors. Dear God, no. He wasn’t supposed to be digging near the bench. But maybe he’d decided that that was where the roses should be, despite what she’d told him. No, no, no. Panicking, she turned to Gibbes. “I need you to go to your room and shut the door and lock it. Don’t come out until I tell you to. Do you understand?”

  Gibbes nodded and ran toward his room, but turned back. “What if you need me?”

  “Don’t come out.” She kissed his forehead, then headed down the stairs, pausing only a moment until she heard the lock turn in Gibbes’s door.

  She thought she could smell the moist earth and the acrid odor of rot before she reached the bottom of the stairs, then nearly gagged on the stench and her own fear when she saw Cal in the foyer holding the suitcase, a trail of dirt leading from the kitchen.

  When he saw her, he slid the suitcase toward her, the metal hinges scraping the wood floor. “This is from that plane, isn’t it?”

  His voice was low, and to an innocent bystander it wouldn’t have been threatening. But it made Edith’s skin feel as if ants had dug a hole and begun to march beneath it.

  There was no point in lying. Edith had found that agreeing with Cal regardless of whether he was right or wrong was the best way to go. “Yes. It fell in my garden the night the plane exploded.”

  “Then why is it here? Why didn’t you give it to the police?” He had a way of emphasizing his words to make sure you understood that you had done something wrong and he was about to call you on it. And that he expected retribution for your wrongdoing.