The Life of Glass

by Jillian Cantor

  “What?” I didn’t see anything wrong with my broken-in, comfortable jeans, my white shirt, and hooded sweatshirt.

  She sighed, grabbed a banana and the car keys, and she left.

  My mother sat at the table nursing her coffee, but she said nothing. I was hopeful, after the way she’d seemed the night before, that Kevin had broken up with her. But she didn’t say anything of the sort. In fact, she didn’t say much at all. She looked a little old sitting there, and tired, and all worn out, as if life had stretched her just a little too much in the past few years and she wasn’t exactly sure how to spring back anymore. “Are you okay?” I finally asked her.

  She smiled. “Just a little tired, sweetie.” She paused, started to say something, then stopped.

  “What?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing. I just stopped by to see Grandma Harry yesterday for her birthday.”

  Her birthday. I’d completely forgotten and probably earned Worst Granddaughter of the Year award, although I was tied with Ashley because I was sure she hadn’t remembered either.

  “It’s just so depressing to see her that way. Honest to God. I—”

  “She didn’t remember. Did she?”

  She shook her head. “And I didn’t have the heart to say it to her, to make her feel it all over again.” She reached across the table and squeezed my hand.

  Even thinking about it, fresh tears sprang to my eyes. I pictured him lying in the hospice bed, then another time, a time when he was whole, when he was laughing and telling me in his crazy, excited voice about some new fact he’d uncovered. I could hear his voice, the way he called me Melon, so I was this interesting, fun person that I never was with anybody else.

  There were a lot of questions hanging in the air—did my mother still remember him as vividly as I did, did she still miss him, was she really serious with this Kevin guy?—but I didn’t say a word. Finally, she said, “You’d better get going. You don’t want to be late for school.”

  Chapter 8

  By the end of October, Kermit was a mess, barely recognizable as a frog at all, just a pile of cuts and dried-up innards, and hardly even suitable to study, which is what we were supposed to be doing in preparation for the end-of-the-marking-period exam.

  I was trying to study, diligently looking back and forth between the carcass and my diagram, but it was hard to concentrate with Courtney hanging all over Ryan, whispering things in his ear and making him laugh.

  Finally, Jeffrey said, “Why don’t you two just get a room already?” He rolled his eyes at me, but I hastily looked away, not wanting to be seen commiserating with him on any sort of level.

  His comment sent Courtney into a fit of uncontrollable giggles and made Ryan turn bright red. I pretended to be really, really studying the frog because I didn’t want to have to look at either one of them, to see Ryan’s nervous stare or Courtney’s anxious one. No. No. No. Frog parts. Think frog parts.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, do you find dead frogs funny?” Courtney had giggled for so long and so loud that Mr. Finkelstein had actually gotten up out of his desk chair and made his way to our table.

  “No, sir,” Ryan said, and he pulled his goggles back down. He pretended to concentrate really hard on the frog. I could hear his breathing speed up, something that might be undetectable to anyone else but that I knew meant he might be heading toward an asthma attack.

  “You all right?” I whispered to him.

  He nodded, not taking his eyes off the frog for one second.

  I was a little late meeting Ryan after school. I didn’t always rush right out of English when the bell rang last period. Sometimes Mrs. Connor was finishing a thought, and she was interesting enough that the majority of us let her without jumping out of our seats and rushing for the door.

  Today we’d been talking about tragic heroes. “Every tragic hero has hamartia,” Mrs. Connor said. “Their tragic flaw.” She paused dramatically. “And this is what causes them to fall from greatness.” She was wearing a red feather boa, and she swung it quickly around her neck as if to emphasize her point.

  I wondered if it was really true, that every hero had to have this. It seemed impossible that there could not be at least one hero who remained entirely and truly heroic and did not succumb to some great flaw. But as Mrs. Connor said, heroes were just human beings, like the rest of us.

  By the time I got out front to the bike racks, the school had emptied out considerably, and the throngs of people that usually cluttered up the front steps were already well out into the parking lot and the street. So it was easy to spot Ryan, to see it all clearly.

  He was hanging over the handlebars of his bike with his back toward me, and Courtney was facing in my direction, leaning toward him. She had on this really tight pink shirt that showed every ounce of perfect cleavage as she leaned over.

  I watched the two of them from my spot on the steps, and I knew just what was about to happen. Then it started to unfold, as if in slow motion. Courtney leaned in closer, closer, until I could no longer see her face clearly because it was on top of his, her lips on his, and they were kissing. Not a short, cute little peck, but a long, drawn-out Ashley-and-Austin-against-the-lockers kiss. My first odd thought was that Courtney was Ryan’s hamartia.

  I knew I was going to have to get my bike, but I didn’t want to walk over in the middle of the kiss, so I just stood on the steps for a few minutes. I tried not to stare, but every time I peeked back, they were still kissing.

  Ashley and the Nose tumbled down the steps behind me. I didn’t see them at first until Ashley elbowed me in the ribs. “Stare much?” she said. The Nose started laughing.

  I glared at her.

  Maybe Courtney heard the Nose laughing, because she pulled back, looked around for a minute, and then waved at me. “Oh hey, Meliss.” I waved back.

  “You should totally kick her ass,” the Nose whispered to me, and Ashley started giggling, as if trying to imagine me kicking anyone’s ass was an entirely ridiculous thought.

  Ryan still hadn’t looked up, and I knew he wasn’t going to.

  I walked over and grabbed my bike. “I gotta get home,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant, as if I didn’t have a care in the world. “See ya.”

  I hopped on my bike and rode down the hill so fast that I felt like I was flying. It was an out-of-control, scary kind of fast, so I knew I couldn’t stop it even if I wanted to, this wild, nauseating ride.

  And I rode and I rode.

  Past my house. Past Ryan’s. I kept riding. Not sure how to stop, not sure if I wanted to, until I found myself in the parking lot of Sunset Vistas, and I knew I was going to go in and visit with Grandma Harry.

  I was sweating when I chained my bike outside. The warm October sun had been beating down on me all the way over here, but the funny thing was, I hadn’t really even noticed until I stopped.

  Grandma Harry was eating lime Jell-O and watching General Hospital when I walked in. The TV was blasting, up at least ten notches too loud, the way I noticed it always was with old people. “Oh, Melissa, honey. I haven’t seen you in ages.”

  “I’m sorry.” I leaned down and kissed her, but I already felt sort of defeated, knowing she didn’t even remember my most recent visit.

  “How old are you now?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Oh my, you’re so old now.” She put down the Jell-O and held her hands up to her face. “Where has the time gone?”

  “What’s going on on GH?”

  “Oh this.” She waved her hand. “I’m only half paying attention. Sometimes I just sit here and daydream, you know, and these dang shows just come on. Background noise.”

  “Happy Birthday.”

  “Is it really my birthday?”

  “Yesterday it was. Sorry I’m late.” Even when Grandma Harry had remembered everything, she lied about her birthday. No one ever really knew how old she was, except for my mother, who’d come across her birth certificate when she helped her move from Scottsdale
down here into assisted living. And she had sworn on the grave of my grandpa Jack that she would never reveal my grandmother’s real age, so to Ashley and I, it still remained a mystery. At last count, she may have said somewhere around seventy-five, but my guess was that she was really closer to eighty.

  “Oh, honey pie. It’s so good to see you.” She grabbed my hand, squeezed it, and held on tight. “Thank you for coming. So tell me, what’s new with you?”

  I knew I could talk to her honestly, and she probably wouldn’t remember much of what I was saying to repeat it to my mother or Ashley, but I still couldn’t find the words to get out the truth. So I said, “Well, not too much.”

  “How’s school?”

  “We’re dissecting a frog in biology.”

  She made a face. “That sounds positively inhumane, honey pie.”

  “It’s not so bad,” I lied.

  “How’s your beautiful family?”

  I thought about Ashley elbowing me on the steps of the school, and my mother off on a date with Kevin, but I just told her that we were all doing great.

  She stared at me for a moment, then frowned. “You have sad eyes, honey pie.” It was strange how so much of her mind was missing, but she still seemed to notice me more than anyone else had lately.

  “Do I?”

  She smiled at me and nodded as if saying, It’s okay, you can tell me everything, and a part of me wanted to. She was my father’s mother, after all, my only real blood connection to him other than Ashley, and Ashley didn’t seem to count. “Sometimes I feel like everyone’s leaving me,” I whispered.

  She grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “Oh, honey pie. I’m right here, aren’t I?”

  I nodded, though I was thinking that she wasn’t. Not really. Not the person that she was or might’ve been. Just this old lady who kind of looked like my grandmother but couldn’t always remember exactly what it meant to be here.

  We sat there quietly, just staring at each other, until she smiled and said, “Now tell me, how’s your beautiful family?”

  “We’re fine,” I whispered. “Fine. Fine.” I forced a smile, and I stood up.

  It felt pointless to repeat myself, to talk into nothing, to feel that everything I said sat in her brain for a moment until it vanished into dust. I leaned down and hugged her. “Happy birthday,” I said. “I’ll come back soon.”

  “Oh please do,” she said. “I can’t tell you how much this means to me.”

  I took the long way home because I wanted to ride, wanted to pedal and pedal and pedal and push harder and faster. I was really sweating by the time I got in the house, so I took a soda out of the fridge and took it into my room to drink it.

  I turned on the ceiling fan, and I took off my shirt, which was soaked through with sweat, and I rummaged in my drawers until I found an old bikini top of Ashley’s. And then I sat on the floor and flipped through my dad’s journal. I hadn’t picked it up in a few weeks, but now I needed it again. Needed it to give me hope or inspiration or an iota of what I’d actually gotten from him when he was still alive.

  I read through a few pages, trying to find something interesting, something that would make me laugh or see things differently. That’s what I loved about his facts and his stories, the way they made you think about things that you never ever thought to think before, as if to remind you that there was always some completely new way to look at the world.

  I found this one story about an eighty-nine-year-old woman named Ida Mae who went skydiving for the first time when she married a sixty-year-old skydiving instructor. It’s the kind of eighty-nine-year-old I would’ve imagined Grandma Harry to be if she wasn’t stuck inside Sunset Vistas, her memory cells falling away by the second.

  Then I turned the page, to a list of random facts about weather. I learned that lightning strikes six thousand times a minute and that men are six times more likely to be struck than women. I thought about the summer monsoon storms, the great big bolts of lightning that lit up our sky, our city. We could watch them, high above the mountaintops, beautiful and dangerous all at the same time, from our back patio.

  Just before my father got sick, one of those lightning strikes hit a tree in a forest on top of one of the mountains that surrounds us. It ended up burning thousands of acres and most of a small town before it sizzled out. We saw the cloud of smoke, big and thick and oddly white and puffy, hanging up above the mountain for weeks.

  It was there when we went to Dr. Singh’s office that day and found out that something terrible had happened in my father’s body too. That’s the way my father first explained his illness to me. “It’s kind of like the fire, Melon. Right now it’s burning out of control. But the doctors are going to try to stop it. They’re going to give me medicine to keep it from spreading.”

  The next week my father started his treatment, and I came to learn that by “medicine” he meant chemo, and with chemo there was another kind of destruction: hair that fell away in clumps, pale skin that stretched across a body that became bony and way too thin when it couldn’t hold down food.

  Dr. Singh was a short, skinny, dark-haired man who looked nothing like a firefighter, which confused me for a few weeks. But then a miraculous thing happened. The firefighters finally won, the smoke died down, the forest stopped burning.

  When the road up the mountain reopened and my father was between rounds of chemo, he drove me up there. The devastation startled me—all the beautiful evergreen and oak trees stripped bare, the world of the forest, ashy and dead-looking.

  “One little strike of lightning, Melon,” my dad mused, “and look at all of this.”

  I wondered if that’s when my dad found the facts about lightning, that week, just on the brink of something terrible. I pictured the way the facts might make him feel better, might make him calmer. Lightning was so common, and very rarely did it destroy as badly as it had on the mountain.

  I closed the journal and put it back on my desk, and then I noticed a little piece of paper on my floor that must have fallen out of the front pocket of the book. I picked it up and opened it and read it over a few times trying to figure out exactly what it might mean. It said, Call Sally Bedford. Sally Bedford. The woman Grandma Harry had mentioned to me, that I’d assumed was one of my father’s college girlfriends. But then what was he doing with a note to call her in his journal?

  I heard the doorbell ringing somewhere in the distance, so I put the piece of paper back inside the journal before I went to answer it. I wasn’t thinking about the fact that I was still in a bikini top and jeans, because there was something about that note, written in my dad’s familiar scrawling strokes that really unnerved me. And I wasn’t even thinking to check who was at the door, because I just assumed it was going to be Ryan or Courtney or the both of them.

  So I opened it annoyed and only half paying attention, and when I looked up I saw Max Healy standing on my front porch. Suddenly, I remembered the bikini top. I tried to fold my arms over my chest sort of nonchalantly as if I always stood that way.

  Max whistled, and I felt myself turning red. “Who are you?” he said, which was a strange question, considering he was the one who rang my doorbell.

  Ashley and the Nose must have been in her bedroom, because I heard them barreling down the front hallway until they were close enough to the door to push me out of the way. “Hey, Max,” Ashley said in that supersweet voice she usually reserved for Austin, so I wondered if they’d broken up. Maybe he would become Mr. October after all. “Come on in.” Ashley glared at me, and I knew she wanted me to leave, but I didn’t.

  “Who’s that?” Max pointed to me.

  The Nose laughed. “That’s Ashley’s sister. And she was just leaving, weren’t you?” Ashley glared at me again and motioned with her head toward the front door, but I didn’t know where she expected me to go dressed like this.

  “Hey.” Max gave me a little wave.

  I felt my heart pounding as I waved back to him. “See ya,” I said, and I turned
on my heels and headed back toward my room.

  “Don’t pay any attention to her,” I heard Ashley say.

  Yes, don’t pay any attention to me. I’m invisible.

  Chapter 9

  I came to learn that there is an awful lot you don’t want to know that you can learn on the internet. If I wasn’t feeling well or I developed a symptom, I tended to go a little overboard and look it up on Google. Then I’d end up on some website for some strange disease, which I would convince myself that I had in a matter of minutes.

  Right after my dad died, I got this weird eyelid twitch, which was really annoying. My bottom lid would just twitch and twitch, no matter what I did to try and stop it. I looked it up online and settled on Parkinson’s disease. I told my mother that I needed to go for an MRI.

  “I’m sure you’re fine, sweetie.” She brushed me off, the way she did about most things.

  “Look at it.” I pointed to my eyelid, which had started twitching like crazy while I talked to her.

  “That happens to me when I get tired,” she said, all nonchalantly, not even caring that I may or may not have this terrible disease.

  I sighed. “But I have a bad feeling about it.”

  She stopped what she was doing, came over, and gave me a hug. She pulled back and looked directly at me. “I’ll tell you what, sweetie. Let’s give it a few weeks and see if it goes away on its own first.” I could hear it in her voice, that my mother was sick of doctors, that she couldn’t believe that there could really be anything wrong with me, that lightning would strike us twice. I didn’t want to be the one to take her back to that awful place again, so I nodded.

  She was right; the twitch did stop after a few weeks, and after that I promised myself that I wouldn’t look up any more symptoms on the internet.

  But it was hard to stop. Especially if something was bothering me, if I was home all alone with nothing else to think about. I didn’t mention anything else to my mother though. I figured each time that I would do what she said and see if it got better on its own in a few weeks. And each time I held my breath, waiting for something to subside: stomach pain (appendicitis or an ulcer), sore throat and swollen glands (lymphoma), pain in my chest (a clogged artery).