by Emma Scott
“So she let you go?”
Maybe I shouldn’t have asked but I couldn’t help it. I didn’t understand how people could turn on their own children. That kind of parental failure—no, violation—was completely alien to me. My childhood had been ridiculously free of troubles. Sure, Dad was hard on Theo, and Mom was a compulsive worrier, but that was the extent of my complaints. My parents were good people.
They should’ve been your people, I thought, looking at Kacey. In a weird twist of fate, we each ended up with the wrong set of parents. Mine would’ve loved her and doted on her. They would’ve nurtured her music and been proud of her accomplishments. They’d give firm, appropriate discipline instead of throwing her out of the house.
A terminally ill child was something her parents deserved. My plight, given to that cruel father and spineless mother, would make more sense. If Kacey and I switched families, I’d no longer be afraid of the emotional burden I was leaving behind, and she’d be cherished forever.
“My mom didn’t fight for me,” Kacey was saying. She chucked her cupcake away too. “She lost her voice when she married my dad. I don’t know if I can ever forgive her for that. But even so, I still call her sometimes. She doesn’t say much, but I think she likes when I call. To know I’m still alive anyway.”
“How did you survive on the streets?”
“I wasn’t on the streets. I followed Chett, the boyfriend my parents caught me with. He told me he wanted to marry me, so I tagged along as he followed one get-rich-quick scheme after another. I followed him here. He was running out of money, so he had this great idea I could be a model.” She made air quotes around the word. “I shut that shit down immediately.”
“Good.” My hands closed into fists and I jammed them into my pockets.
“But once I told Chett I wasn’t going to cooperate, it was all downhill. I was underage. I couldn’t drink, gamble, or even get into an eighteen-and-up club. He got tired of me real quick. Dropped me on my ass when he met someone else. Some showgirl.”
“What did you do?”
“I hitched back to California, thinking I’d try again with my parents. Go back to school. I did really well in school, actually.”
“I believe it,” I said.
Kacey smiled gratefully. “I made it as far as Los Angeles. I was staying at the YMCA and met Lola. She was nineteen, and in the same sinking boat as me. She’d just scraped enough money together waiting tables to get a cheap studio apartment and let me crash with her. When I turned eighteen, I got a job at the same restaurant, and we spent off days busking in parks. I sang and played my guitar while Lola played drums. A few months later, we found a want ad from a gal who wanted to put a band together, and the rest is history.” She held up her hands. “And that is why, to this day, I’ve never stepped foot in a casino.”
I nodded absently, my emotions roiled into a frothy rage at the men in Kacey’s life who had failed her so fucking badly. “What happened to Chett?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care.” She said it calmly enough but I’d learned by now that everything Kacey felt was revealed in her large, luminous eyes. She cared about everything, passionately.
She goes all the way up to eleven.
That thought helped to quell the anger that was chewing at my gut.
“Feel that?” Kacey asked. “That’s the night dying a slow and painful death thanks to my sob story.”
“I’m sorry I pried.”
She waved my apology away. “I don’t mind. I like talking to you. I don’t normally talk about my life. Ever. Then it gets bottled up and I do something stupid like call my parents. I get rejected, rejection makes me drink myself into a stupor, I start a riot in a green room and next thing I know, I’m waking up on my limo driver’s couch.”
“A vicious cycle.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Kacey said. “The couch part wasn’t so bad.”
A short silence descended. Despite every admonishment to keep to my schedule and not get close to this girl who was leaving in two days, I felt myself leaning in, wanting to hold up the pain she’d trusted me with. Wanting to give her something in return.
“Do you want to come to the glass studio tomorrow?” I asked. “You could see how it all works, or maybe watch me make something…”
I felt the back of my neck redden. I sounded completely arrogant and totally boring at the same time. As if I’d asked her to watch me polish my coin collection.
But then Kacey clapped her hands together. “Are you kidding? I’d love to.”
“Really?”
She used her index finger to lift one of her dark brows in an arch. “Really.”
I leaned back, laughing harder than I had in months. Rusty gears inside me creaked from lack of use, and my embarrassment faded to nothing.
“I’ve been dying to see how you make that beautiful glass,” Kacey said. “I was beginning to think it was for show, Fletcher. You ordered them from Etsy and passed them off as yours to impress the chicks.”
“I’m legit, I swear.”
Her laugh echoed across the pond and within it, I heard traces of a beautiful singing voice. She started to say something else when music filled the plaza in front of the Bellagio: the haunting flute introduction of “My Heart Will Go On.”
Kacey grabbed my arm. “Is that the Titanic song? Oh my God, it is. Why are they…?” Her words trailed away as Celine Dion’s voice rose up and the Bellagio fountains began their show.
Jets of water arced up from the pond, swaying in time. They moved gently at first, almost shyly, like couples on a first date, touching and then collapsing over the expanse of water. Blue light illuminated them from below. As the song gathered momentum, more jets rose higher and crashed harder, creating clouds of mist. The colors changed to red, to pale purple, and then silvery white. The song hit its crescendo and Kacey’s grip on my arm tightened. Her eyes grew soft and she watched the water dance, but I could look nowhere but at her. The show was at my periphery, a backdrop to her.
The song mellowed to its final notes, and the tall jets of water were graceful arcs again, crossing each other in pairs, like dancers or lovers, then slipping beneath the surface as the song ended.
Kacey sniffed and wiped her eyes. “I wasn’t expecting that.” She looked up at me. “It was beautiful.”
“Yes,” I said softly. “Beautiful.”
At my apartment, I unlocked the door and held it open for Kacey. She smiled almost shyly at me as she went in.
Holy shit, this is a date, I thought, locking up. I just took Kacey out on a date and now… This is the end of the date.
“Thanks for the cupcake,” she said from the living room. “And the water show. Did you plan that?”
“I know this city. Aside from my time at grad school, I’ve lived here all my life. And it’s part of my job to know where all the best shows are.”
“You’re good at your job,” Kacey said. “You go above and beyond, actually.” She moved close to me, rested her hands on my forearms and craned up to kiss my cheek. “Goodnight.”
I waited until she stepped back to speak, not trusting myself to open my mouth while hers was so close to mine.
“Goodnight,” I said. I stared as she went into my bedroom. In a few minutes, she’d be in my bed, her hair spilling across my pillow…
This is bad. Very, very bad.
I changed to the sleep pants and t-shirt I’d stashed in the hall closet, and leaned back in the recliner. I laid my hand over my ailing heart that ached for reasons that had nothing to do with my chart or diagnosis, or any terrible biopsy. It ached because I could still feel Kacey’s soft lips on my cheek, and I missed her.
She was fifteen feet away, and hadn’t yet left Vegas with her band, but I missed her just the same.
Jonah worked all the next morning at the hot shop. He came back for me around noon and we grabbed some lunch at a Chinese place, talking and laughing about everything and nothing. After two lunches and a cupcake, I felt a litt
le bit like I’d become part of Jonah’s routine. It wasn’t true, but it made me happy to think so.
He drove us out to an industrial part of town on the outskirts of Vegas. The scenery outside my window was filled with more desert than civilization. Lots of warehouses and ramshackle buildings with aluminum siding. He parked the truck in front of what looked like a small airline hangar with three chimneys. The heavy metal door creaked as he slid it open sideways, and he ushered me inside the space.
Jonah laughed to see my expression. “I know it’s not much to look at.”
I couldn’t argue with him there. The hot shop was about a thousand square feet of cement and steel, hotter than the midsummer Nevada heat outside and smelling of burnt wood. An air conditioning unit was waging a losing battle against two furnaces—one large and one small—that lined a single wall. In front of one raging furnace was a bench that had rails on either side, like high armrests made out of stainless steel. Next to the bench was a table upon which sat a thick, charred dictionary, and tools soaking in a bucket of water: tongs and cups and strange-looking ladles.
“You leave the furnaces on?” I asked, fanning myself as the heat wrapped around me and squeezed.
“I turn them down at night,” Jonah said, “and fire them back up for the day. It takes too long to get them hot enough otherwise. Alarm system over there—” he nodded his head at a wall unit with blinking lights—”alerts my phone if there’s a problem.”
I meandered past a rack of stainless steel pipes on the near wall, each about three feet long. Beside that was a small metal table with nothing on it.
“So this is where the magic happens,” I said.
“On a good day.”
“What makes a bad day? You break something?” My feet crunched shards of glass on the cement floor as I walked between the furnaces and the metal table.
“Breaking a finished piece would definitely suck, yes.” Jonah rapped his knuckles on the wooden table with the strange-looking tools. “Mostly a bad day is one where I haven’t gotten enough done.”
“The gallery has you on a pretty tight deadline?”
Jonah wore a strange expression on his face, a thin smile that didn’t touch his warm brown eyes. “You could say that.” He glanced at his watch. “Tania’s on her lunch break. She’ll be back soon and you can meet her.”
“Does it always take two people to make a piece?”
“Not always,” Jonah said. “I make most of the individual pieces myself—those that are going to be for sale at the gallery. But for the larger sections of the installation, I need help.”
I glanced around. “Where’s your installation?”
“Through that door.” Jonah indicated a door on the far wall. “That’s where I keep all the finished pieces.”
“So…” I rocked back on my heels. “Can I get a sneak peek? Seeing as how I won’t be here in October for the gallery opening, it’s only fair.”
“I’ll show you but it’s not going to look very impressive.”
He led me to the back room. Dim light streamed in from the windows, illuminating dozens and dozens of cardboard boxes, some open and overflowing with packaging bubbles or the little curls of Styrofoam my grandmother called ‘ghost poop.’ Other boxes were sealed up tight and stacked, no more than three feet high, with FRAGILE stamped all over. Other flattened cardboard boxes were stacked in piles or leaned against the cement walls, waiting to be filled. On one long worktable—easily twenty feet long—were pieces of Jonah’s installation.
I moved slowly toward the table, paranoid I would break something even without touching it.
Long curls of yellow and orange glass were laid out next to ribbons of blue and green, infused with gold flecks and dark purple swirls. White, frothy glass took up another section of the table, pearly with incandescence. The last section held glass sculptures that took my breath away: delicate sea horses and sea dragons, glowing white jellyfish suspended in black spheres, and even an octopus, its tentacles curling a good foot and a half long and its skin rippling with ribbons of color.
Carefully, I let my fingers trace the blunt edge of a piece of glass that looked like a large ice cube with coral fronds. Within swam a sea turtle—perfectly rendered.
I looked at Jonah, so many questions trying to pour out of my open mouth that none did.
He jammed his hands down the front pockets of his jeans. “Not much to look at right now. Most of it is already packed away.”
I shook my head. “These are amazing. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”
“Thanks.”
“The rest is in the boxes? To send to the gallery?”
He nodded. “I won’t be able to wire them together until I’m in the gallery space itself.”
“But how do you know what to work on if you can’t see the whole thing? That’s like…writing a song but never playing it through until show time.”
Jonah shrugged, and tapped his temple. “I have it up here.”
I think he mistook my shocked expression because he waved his hand like he was getting rid of a bad smell. “God, that sounds pretentious as hell.”
“No, I think I get it.” I gestured to the table. “This looks like an archaeological dig of Atlantis. Like you’re finding the pieces one at a time, and can’t put them all together yet.”
“Yeah, I like to think so.” His eyes roved over the scattered pieces of his art. “I think part of working with glass is that you don’t know exactly how it will turn out. The shape and flow of it… The fire dictates so much of what the glass does, how it changes the color and form. With some pieces, like the sea life, I design it from top to bottom, obviously. But for the installation as a whole, I try to follow it, instead of forcing it to be what it doesn’t want to be.”
A short silence fell. He glanced down at me and the eyebrow went up. Laughter burst out of me and I elbowed his side. I loved hearing him talk about his art. Art I knew nothing about, but was so incredibly beautiful, even strewn all over a table in pieces.
“Okay, show me,” I said. “I’m dying to see how you do this. You can work and entertain me at the same time.”
He looked thoughtful for a minute, then nodded, as if answering a private thought.
We went back to the main floor of the hot shop. Jonah grabbed one of the stainless steel pipes from a rack on the wall and I took a seat on the bench with the two rails.
“I’m going to need that,” he told me. He pulled a chair from the opposite wall and set it up for me near the bench.
“Are you going to make something for the installation?”
“No,” he said. “A small piece. To sell at the gallery. I think a perfume bottle.”
“I love pretty perfume bottles.”
“Do you?” he asked, his face turned away, as he put one end of the pipe into the larger of the two furnaces, spinning it in his hands, back and forth, all the while. When he pulled the pipe from the furnace, a small molten sphere clung to the end, about the size of a tennis ball. He went to the stainless steel table and rolled the glass over it, back and forth until it resembled a thick arrowhead, then put it into the smaller furnace, like he was roasting a marshmallow over a campfire. The fire inside this smaller furnace glowed ten times as hot as the larger one that held all the melted glass.
Jonah rolled the pipe in his palms over and over. Sweat had broken out over his neck and biceps, and I watched those muscles move as he worked.
“Kacey?”
I tore my eyes from his arms. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Color?” He carried the pipe with its glowing arrow of glass to a shelf full of trays. I kept a safe distance from the torch in his hands and saw that each tray was filled with crushed bits of glass in various colors.
“Go ahead,” he said.
“Purple,” I said solemnly. “For Prince.”
“Good choice.”
Jonah pressed one narrow side of the glowing arrowhead shape into the tray of violet-colored crushe
d glass. Deftly, he turned the pipe, and pressed the heated glass down on the other side. It looked spongy as it picked up the glass bits. With two streaks of purple crumbles now clinging to the melted glass, Jonah took the pipe to the small furnace, always rolling the pipe in his hands. When he pulled it back out, the crushed glass was melted down.
“Why do you roll the pipe back and forth?” I asked.
“If I don’t keep it moving at all times, the glass explodes into a searing hot mess of liquid pain that scorches all it touches within a twenty-foot radius.”
I crossed my arms and gave him a dirty look.
“It keeps the gather centered.”
“Anyone ever tell you you’re a smartass?”
He grinned. “A few people. Once or twice.”
I had to agree with Lola—he was pretty damn adorable.
I took my seat in the chair and Jonah put the far end of the pipe to his mouth and blew a short breath into it.
“That glass is blown,” I said, laughing.
“If you think that’s funny, the small furnace is called a glory hole.”
“For real?”
“For real.” He sat on the bench with the metal rails. “Get your mind out of the gutter, Dawson.”
“Can’t. It likes it there.”
Jonah smirked at me, his eyes warm. He sat facing forward on the bench, like sitting a horse, and set the blowpipe along the rails so the glowing ball of glass was in front of him. He used the rail to roll the pipe with one hand and took up a wooden ladle from the bucket of water. The glass hissed and sent up steam as he cradled it in the wooden ladle, rolling them together so the arrowhead shape became a small sphere.
“When did you know this was what you wanted to do?” I picked up a pair of tongs that looked like they were made of two knife blades. “How does one fall into glass blowing?”
“By drinking my weight in beer and whisky shots and almost getting arrested for drunk and disorderly,” he said. “Which, in Vegas, is no small feat I might add.”