Through Shattered Glass

by David B. Silva

  “Go home? I can't go home. I don't have a home. Not without Ellie.”

  “It's not what you think.”

  “You brought her back, didn't you?”

  “You think it's that easy?”

  Yes. Oh God, Yes. It has to be.

  “I want it to be.”

  So do I. Jas seemed as if he were going to say. The actual words were never spoken, though, but something in his expression quietly changed. He softened his stance, and stared off into a distant corner of the room. “You really want to meet Purdy, then I'll introduce you.”

  “Thanks,” Foss whispered.

  “Don't thank me. Not yet.” He shook his head, then started to move. “Over here, on the left. You'll have to wedge between the Chronicles and whatever the hell that other stack is.”

  They shouldered their way along a narrow aisle carved out of stack after stack of old magazines and newspapers. Jas went first, stopping every so often to flip a light switch. Apparently, he had torn a wall out between the adjoining apartments, that was the only way Foss could imagine the seemingly endless layout. Straight ahead, at the entry to an unlit room, they finally came to a standstill.

  “You're sure?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He flipped on the light, and there she was—though not quite as Foss had expected to find her.

  In his mind, he had pictured a beautiful eight-year-old girl with dirty-blonde hair and piercing-blue eyes, with a child's smile and canyon-wide dimples. He had expected, as crazy as it now sounded, that she might even say a sweet, “Hello.” But that's not what happened. She was sitting on the floor, her back against the wall, her hands folded stiffly in her lap; and from where he was standing, a good eight feet away, he could see where over time her skin had mummified. She wore a smile, sure enough, but it didn't belong to a happy child. No helloes from this little girl, her voice had turned to dust a long time ago.

  He turned to Jas. “She's …”

  “Dead.”

  “But I thought you could bring her back?”

  “I never said that.”

  “But the hand, the papier-mâché hand?”

  Jas turned the light off, leaving both of them standing in a grayish-yellow glow not much different from the color of Purdy's skin. “I tried to tell you—”

  “Jesus, Jas, I thought ...”

  You weren't listening. It wasn't the Thalidomide. It was emotion, pure emotion.”

  “But you didn't bring her back.”

  “No.” He shook his head, a sense of unease showing through now. “I didn't bring her back. Not the way you were hoping I would. Not like that.”

  Foss felt something cold flow through his veins. “Like what, then?”

  “More like a doll, I guess. A paper doll.”

  “Like the hand?”

  “Yes.”

  “One that looks like Purdy? That moves like her?”

  “What I'm telling you is that it isn't Purdy.” He started to shuffle back down the aisle of newspapers toward the front room, as if that were going to be the end of the conversation. But it wasn't. “I don't know you as well as I should, Fossy. I don't know what kind of a man you are, what's important to you, what you're willing to sacrifice. I don't know how much you and I are alike, if we're alike at all.”

  “That didn't seem to bother you last time I was here.”

  “Things were different then.”

  “What's changed? I'm still the same man.”

  He stopped and turned slowly about, as if he wanted to make sure that what he was going to say would hit home. He looked older than a man in his thirties. Foss thought maybe it was the lighting in the room. “But I'm not the same man,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “You give a little; it takes a little.”

  “I don't understand.”

  “I know you don't.” He started walking again. “That's the point.”

  They stayed to the left, following a corridor that cut through a room of what—at a glance—appeared to be romance novels with their covers torn off. In the end, they turned up in the living room. On the other side of the Georgian sash windows, it was still snowing, the flakes looking like white butterfly wings fluttering in the air. For an instant, Foss was as peaceful as he had been since Ellie's death. But that was lost the moment he caught a small movement out of the corner of his eye.

  She was sitting on the couch, a life-size paper replica of an eight-year-old girl. Mechanically, her head turned toward him—making the dry, crinkling sound of paper being crumpled—and she smiled. It was a child's smile, with canyon-wide dimples.

  “Jesus, it's actually alive.”

  “She can't talk,” Jas said, sitting on a nearby stack of newspapers.

  “Does it matter?”

  “No. Not to me. I just thought you should know.”

  Foss knelt before the paper girl, mesmerized, and touched the back of his hand to her cheek. Every part of her was perfection – the eyes, the ears, the lips, the hair, a paper sculpture that seemed more alive than some of the people he had known during his life. Her cheek felt cool and soft, and dusted with something that felt like paper fuzz. Before he drew his hand away, she reached out to him, wrapping her tiny paper fingers around the soft flesh of his arm. As if she needed his touch as much as he needed hers.

  It was all he could do to keep from crying. “Oh dear God,” he said softly. “She feels, doesn't she? Like a living, breathing human being, she feels.”

  “Yes.”

  Foss glanced over his shoulder, his eyes watery. “And Ellie? Can you bring her back, too? Like this? Can you make her this alive?”

  Jas nodded, though something grim swept across his face. “But not me. You. You have to do it. And there's something else you should know.”

  What?

  “It started a few days after we met at the soup kitchen.”

  It doesn't matter.

  Whatever it is, it's not enough to make me change my mind.

  “You need to understand what you're getting into,” Jas said ruefully, as he unwound the black winter-scarf from around his neck. With great care, he removed the last layer, as if it protected an open wound. Underneath, in the soft glow of the 75-watt bulb, it appeared as if he had pasted a column from last week's food section across his neck. Dry, dirty-white newsprint. Red and black ink. Fused into his flesh, like a scab over an abrasion.

  This is, Foss thought dimly, a man who loves his daughter.

  “It's a trade-off, you see. A little of me for a little of her.”

  “Can't you stop it?”

  “I'm not sure I want to.”

  “For God's sake, why not?”

  “Because I'm not alone anymore.”

  That's not enough.

  Foss felt his legs weaken. He sat flat on the floor, staring at Jas and realizing—more clearly than he wanted—this man was his reflection; and worse: maybe it was enough. Isn't that what he'd come for? To put an end to the loneliness once and for all? He glanced from Jas to Purdy, noticing for the first time the patch of pink skin fused into her paper neck.

  “You want your wife back?”

  The way I remember her? That perfect? Or something just close enough to take away the ache inside, to fill the emptiness she left behind?

  “I don't know.”

  “Tell the truth, Fossy.”

  The truth? Christ, could there still be such a thing? If there was any shred of it left in him, it had to be something that went like this: With Ellie, even a paper Ellie, at least a little piece of him would go on living. Without her, everything inside was eventually going to shrivel up and die.

  That was the truth.

  The cold, painful truth.

  All the truth Foss had ever needed.

  The Night In Fog

  1.

  I’m going to tell you this story and you might believe it, and you might not. It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other. I’ve been carrying this around for nearly twenty years now and even though it’s Rick�
�s story and not mine, if I don’t let it out it’s going to eat a hole in me. So I’ll tell you as much as I can ... you believe as much as you want ... and maybe that will be the end of it.

  2.

  This was how it all came up again:

  “I need to see you,” Rick said.

  It was the first time I had talked to my brother in nearly five years. I’m ashamed to admit that. Family ought to stand for something. But life has a way of taking you where it will. It had taken Rick and me down strikingly different roads.

  “Can you come?”

  I glanced at the calendar pressed against the side of the refrigerator and held there with a Hersey’s magnet. It was Friday, October 30th. Tomorrow would be Halloween and I had promised Traci I would take the kids on their rounds. Then on Sunday there was dinner with her parents. I flipped the page and glanced at the following weekend. “When?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Christ, Rick.”

  “It’s important, man.”

  “I’ve got a full weekend already. Can’t it wait?”

  “She’s back.”

  It had been such a long time since he had talked about her that it nearly went right past me, unnoticed. My first thought was ... she? Then it registered, the tone that had been in his voice as he had said that singular, difficult word ... she ... and a sick, dreadful ache stirred inside me. Not again, I thought. Please, not again.

  “We’ve been over this,” I said. “A thousand times.”

  “It’s different this time. It’s happening to someone else.”

  3.

  This was how it all came up in the first place:

  Rick, who was twelve and still doing time at Buckeye Junior High where I had done my own stint two years earlier, said, “You won’t believe what happened today.” We didn’t have much in common. Never had. Rick was one of those kids who for the life of them couldn’t seem to fit in. He was the square peg: bad jokes, glasses, kind of a geeky-looking kid who spent most of his time alone.

  “Probably won’t, so don’t bother me.”

  “I ate lunch with a girl.”

  “So?”

  He said her name was Jude Fairclough. She had transferred in only two weeks earlier from some school down in the Bay Area, and she sat in front of Rick, two rows over in English. Her hair was reddish-brown, he said. Her eyes light blue, her face sprinkled with freckles. He never said it out loud, but it was easy to tell he had a crush on her.

  I guess I thought that was okay.

  At least until I began to wonder if Jude Fairclough even existed.

  4.

  “Just this one last time,” Rick said over the phone. “I’ll never bother you again, Bryan. I promise.”

  I knew that wasn’t true. There would always be one more time. It was never going to end. Not in Rick’s mind. And I hadn’t missed the significance of the date, either, though he probably thought I had. October 31st was tomorrow. Halloween. That was the first time the real monster in Rick had come out.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m renting a place in Weed.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, digging around in a drawer for a pen and a piece of paper. I didn’t know what I was going to say to Traci, but when she heard it was Rick, she would probably be okay with it. She had always been concerned about my relationship with my brother. I found a pencil instead, and an old envelope from Pacific Gas and Electric. “What’s the address?”

  Softly, he said, “Thanks, Bryan.”

  “It’s okay.”

  After that Halloween night, Rick had spent the next nine years behind bars. I had visited him only twice. Both times shortly after he had been sent to the Youth Authority. Both times in the company of my parents. My mother died two years later from a heart attack, no doubt largely due – at least in my mind – to the living hell Rick had put her through. I never went for another visit after that. Dad went alone, struggling hard to hold onto what little family he had left, even in the face of what Rick had done.

  5.

  From my brother’s letters over the years:

  Jude Fairclough ... she was a truly beautiful girl, Bryan. You’ve got to remember, when you’re twelve, you scare easy. The dark scares you. Being alone at night scares you. But most of all, pretty girls scare you. I wouldn’t admit it then, but she really stirred up something in the pit of my stomach, something I’d never felt before. It wasn’t a feeling I liked much, Bryan. Not then, and not now. But it was a feeling I didn’t want to lose, either. Kinda like riding the roller coaster even when you know it makes you sick.

  That first day, like I told you before, I caught up with Jude in the cafeteria, maybe twenty minutes into the lunch hour. She was sitting alone at a table in the back. There was a banner on the wall behind her with huge red-and-black letters announcing the Halloween dance, which was only a week away. I remember that as clear as can be. She looked tiny and lost sitting there beneath it, and I remember thinking how hard it must be transferring into a new school already a couple of months into the year.

  “Hi.”

  She looked up from her plate, where she was still working through her peas and carrots. Her smile was like sunshine, warm and bright. “Hi.”

  I sat down across from her. “So what is it you want to show me?”

  “It’s right here.”

  I watched her rummage around in an old canvas tote bag that looked something like the reusable shopping bags old ladies take to the grocery stores these days. It was the size of a small painting, with wide straps that she curled back as she peered down inside. I thought of a magician, you know, reaching into his top hat and pulling out a rabbit, that old routine? And like she had read my mind, she came out with ... not a rabbit, but an old cigar box.

  She placed it on the table between us.

  There was a moment of truth, Bryan, when I thought she was seriously giving thought to whether she should share it with me or not. Looking back on it now, you’ve gotta know that I wish it had never happened. I wish to God she would have thought long and hard, then shaken her head and said, “No. This isn’t right.”

  Maybe that would have been the end of it.

  Right then and there.

  Maybe none of the rest would have ever happened.

  But we both know it didn’t go like that.

  I looked at that box, Bryan, and it reminded me of Granddad. He used to love to smoke cigars. You remember that? The same brand. Dutch Masters Palmas. I used to keep a collection of his cigar boxes at home at the back of my bedroom closet, on the floor. Used them for baseball cards and marbles and stuff. There wasn’t anything fancy about them. Dutch Masters was printed in red across the front edge and in black, bold letters across the top. Next to the label was a portrait of four men wearing those wide-brimmed Pilgrim hats they were always wearing in our early U.S. History books.

  I looked at her. “Yeah, so?”

  “What’s your favorite season?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Spring? When the flowers are in bloom? Or maybe Fall, when it’s still warm, but the sky’s gray?”

  “Winter,” I said, thinking of snow. It never snowed much in the valley, but remember the snow on Lassen and Shasta? What was it? Maybe an hour’s drive, maybe a little more, to either place? I doubt I ever told you, Bryan, but I always liked the snow. There was something about the crisp air and the pure whiteness everywhere. It always made me feel alive.

  She nodded, then motioned to the box. “Go on. Open it.”

  It was too late not to open the box by then. I mean, it had probably been too late the moment I had found Jude sitting in the corner by herself. But this is the God’s honest truth, Bryan: some roads in life don’t allow you to turn back.

  I raised the lid, which was hinged with nothing more than a thin sheet of cardboard, and up out of the box came a huge breath of cold arctic air. It felt as if I had opened the freezer door at the Holiday Market. I know this sounds incredible, but it was actually snowing.
>
  White, crystal flakes swirling around the edges of the box.

  Frost in the corners.

  Cold enough to make you shiver.

  Snowing! It was snowing!

  It was like nothing I had ever seen before, and I stared at it, couldn’t move a damn muscle, for a good long time before I looked up at Jude.

  “Like it?”

  I nodded.

  “Thought you would.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “It’s the way you imagined it, isn’t it? The cold wind ... the snow ... like opening your bedroom window in the middle of winter?”

  “Yeah, but how did you—?”

  “Close the lid. I want to show you something else.”

  The cigar box had turned cold in my hands. Across the front, a thin film of ice had formed, the white crystals making it nearly impossible to read the words: Dutch Masters. But the moment I dropped the lid, in an instant, I mean no longer than a snap of your fingers, the ice was gone.

  “Now, open it again,” she said.

  I gave it some thought, Bryan. I swear I did. Not much, I admit, because I was curious, just like you would have been curious. But I gave it some thought, then I raised the lid, and I watched a thick, syrupy blackness rise up like a cloud of volcanic ash. Inside the box, it was suddenly as if I was standing on the edge of a cliff looking up at the sky. Far in the distance, I could see a quarter moon, and beyond that ... the glitter of billions of stars.

  I snapped the lid closed.

  “Something, isn’t it?” Jude said.

  It was something. I didn’t understand it, but it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen.

  I opened the box again, and this time I did one of those stupid things you do on a dare. I reached into it, past the brim, and found myself buried up to my elbow in the darkness. It was as if I had dipped into a pool of water at night when the surface and everything beneath is as black as oil.

  “It feels cool,” I said, wiggling my fingers. “How deep is it?”