The Life of Glass

by Jillian Cantor

  The pains all went away, some slowly, some quickly, but the fear did not, the knowledge that a terrible disease could creep up on you at any second, that it could blindside you and take everything, swiftly and all at once.

  So you would think after all the worrisome information I’d found on the internet, I might have thought twice before Googling Sally Bedford. But I didn’t. Her name burned my brain, and it made my head hurt. I sat there, my throbbing head in one hand, the scrap of paper with her name in the other, and I debated whether I should try to figure out if I could have a brain tumor or if I should try to figure out who she was. I picked the second choice.

  It seemed like it would be a common name, but the first entry that popped up was for a Sally Bedford who worked at Charles and Large Accountants. No, that couldn’t be right. She couldn’t have worked at the same accounting firm as my dad. I would’ve heard of her before.

  I clicked on the website, and it took me to the C & L site, with a page that had pictures of their employees. Sally Bedford, it read under her name, senior office manager. The picture of her was grainy and small, so it was hard to see what she really looked like, but she wasn’t beautiful, not even close to my mother.

  Her hair was a mousy brown. She had olive skin and green eyes and this pointy little chin and a button nose that looked a little small for her face. It was as if someone had taken all of her features and squashed them incorrectly, because she looked entirely out of proportion. I wondered what her story was—and if it was interesting enough for my father to include in his notes, or if it was something he’d decided to pass up on. It was the only reasonable explanation I could think of for why he would have a note to call her in his journal.

  What Grandma Harry said still gnawed at me. But she must have gotten confused. Or maybe Sally Bedford was the name of a girl he’d dated in college and she’d ended up working at the same accounting firm, which didn’t really explain why he had that note in his book.

  I felt this anger at him, my father. It boiled up in my chest and burned my throat, giving me this terrible acidic taste in my mouth. It wasn’t fair that he wasn’t here for me to ask him, for him to make the worry subside. I imagined the way it might have gone:

  “Hey, Dad. Can I ask you something?”

  “What is it, Melon? You know you can ask me anything.”

  “Well, who’s Sally Bedford? Grandma said you dated her and I found her name in your book.”

  He’d laugh—I could still remember the sound of his laughter, big and roaring in a way that reminded me of a lion. “Dated her? Why, if you consider doing someone’s taxes dating them, I’d have racked up quite a few women over the years.”

  But that didn’t make any sense; why would Grandma Harry know about her then?

  “Dated her? Her parents own Sunset Vistas, and she helped us get Grandma Harry in. You know how easily she gets attached to people.” He’d laugh again and shake his head, as if to say that Grandma Harry was a nut job, but still he loved her all the same.

  But he wasn’t here. So there was no one to ask, no easy explanations.

  I crumpled up the piece of paper and threw it in my trash can. What difference did it make now anyway? I crawled into my bed, climbed under the covers, and put the pillow over my throbbing head.

  I fell into a deep sleep, and I had a dream about him. He was riding on my bike down the wash, and I was trying to keep up with him on foot, but he was just out of my reach, just ahead of me. I stopped running and put my head down to catch my breath. “Don’t give up,” he said to me as he kept on pedaling, fast enough to make it to the end of the Earth.

  I woke up tangled in sheets and sweating.

  The next morning, the first thing I did when I got out of bed was take the paper out of my trash can, smooth it out, and put it back inside the journal. If there was one thing my father loved, it was a good mystery.

  My mother hated mysteries. She didn’t have the patience to sift through the clues, to make it to the end, the answer, but like my father I loved to watch things unravel in such a way that they made sense.

  I was almost surprised to find Ryan waiting for me in the street on his bike when I walked outside, and then I felt a little silly thinking that one kiss with Courtney was going to make him ditch me. “Hey,” he said when he saw me, but he didn’t exactly meet my eyes.

  “Hey.” I hopped on my bike and we started riding next to each other up the street toward the hill. We didn’t say anything else for a few minutes, until finally I said, “So you and Courtney are like a couple now or something?”

  He shrugged. “Not really. I don’t know.” I knew he was thinking that Courtney wouldn’t ever want to date him, really date him in an Ashley/Austin sort of way. The knowledge that she did was burning up in my brain, this secret so heavy that it wanted to explode right out of me, but I kept it inside anyway.

  Instead, I changed the subject. “I think my father had a secret.”

  “Yeah? What makes you think that?”

  “I don’t know. Just something I found in his journal. And something my grandmother said.”

  “Isn’t she, you know, a little loony tunes?” He lifted up a hand and twirled his finger in the air.

  “No.” I felt insulted for her. It must be awful to be so old and instantly dismissed just because you couldn’t remember. “She’s just a little forgetful.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Say it.”

  It took him a minute. We rode up the hill, and he started breathing extra hard, so by the time he did finally say it, his words were heavy. “Mel, he’s been dead a year and a half.”

  “So?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Just forget it.”

  I knew what he was implying, that once you were dead your secrets no longer mattered, that there was only so long you could hold on to the past before it consumed you, until it ate you up and swallowed you whole. But it mattered to me. My father’s secrets were still important, worth knowing, because in a way that was all I had left of him, some sort of odd legacy.

  But before I could say anything else, we pulled up in front of the school. Courtney was already standing on the front steps. She waved to me and then ran up to Ryan and gave him a big hug. “Hey, Ry,” she gushed. She turned to me. “Hey, Meliss.” It was annoying, that habit she had of shortening our names in peculiar ways.

  Courtney was hanging on him, and she whispered something in his ear that made him laugh. I chained my bike to the rack. “I’ll see you guys inside,” I said, but neither one of them seemed to hear me. I slipped quietly past them and walked down the hall to my locker alone.

  I had my head in there, putting in books I didn’t need and pulling out ones I did, when I heard a tapping on the metal door. I looked up.

  Staring right at me, his big brown eyes all sparkly and sweet-looking, was Max Healy. “Hey there, Ashley’s sister.” He smiled. He had this sort of cocky smile that seemed to say he knew just how gorgeous and nice and funny he was, and if you couldn’t recognize it, well then, too bad. He also had really, really nice teeth. Short and square and not at all horselike.

  “I have a name,” I said, surprised by the no-nonsense sound of my voice, because I hadn’t thought the words through before they popped out of my mouth.

  “A secret name?”

  I felt my neck getting hot, and I knew it would only be a matter of seconds before the flush spread across my face and I was completely bright red. “Melissa,” I finally mumbled, and then looked back into the locker as if I were searching for something very urgent, which, unless you were counting piles of old gum wrappers and balled-up math homework, I wasn’t.

  When I looked up again, he was gone.

  I spent most of the afternoon picking off my red nail polish. I did it meticulously, so that by English last period there were only a few tiny specks of red remaining on my left pinkie. As soon as the bell rang, I jumped up and ran
out, even though Mrs. Connor was still talking.

  I reached my bike before Ryan and Courtney got there, and I unlocked it, jumped on, and starting riding. I didn’t even look back, didn’t want to know if Ryan was standing there, a little disappointed that I’d ditched him or not caring in the least.

  I didn’t feel like going home, so instead I rode to Walgreens, where I spent a half hour looking through different colors of nail polish until finally settling on Glorious Grape, mainly because it was on clearance and I had less than three dollars on me.

  When I got home, Ashley’s car was in the driveway for the second day in a row, and I knew there really must be trouble in paradise. She was in her room, talking on the phone, but I walked in and sat down on the bed anyway. She shooed me away with her hand, but I pretended not to notice.

  I took the Glorious Grape out of the bag and started on my left hand. I still hadn’t mastered how to do the right one, and I wondered if it was something you were born knowing how to do, if it could be your genes that determined whether or not you could really make yourself look pretty. Courtney could do both hands in less than two minutes and have them look equally perfect. “Sorry”—she’d grinned when she caught me watching with my mouth open—“I’m a little ambidextrous.” That’s what my father would’ve called a million-dollar word.

  Ashley said, “I have to call you back. The imp won’t leave me alone.” She pressed the END button. “Melissa, really. Can’t you do that in your room?”

  “Will you do my right hand?”

  She sighed dramatically, flopped down on the bed, and rolled her eyes. “Hold out your hand.”

  I did, and I watched the way she wiped the brush over my thumbnail with a perfectly steady hand. Yes, clearly, her DNA had blessed her with this talent even though it had gotten lost somewhere in mine. “What’s up with you and Austin?”

  “Nothing’s up with Austin.” She glared at me.

  “You don’t have to be so defensive.”

  “Whatever.” She didn’t say anything for a minute. Then she said. “Talent scouts. For the minor league.”

  That meant nothing to me. “So?”

  “So, you idiot, they’re coming to watch practice this week, and I didn’t want to make him nervous.”

  “Oh.” This was the first inkling I had that Ashley actually cared about Austin in some real way, and it caught me completely by surprise. “So he might be, like, a real baseball player or something?”

  “Hold still so you don’t smudge them.” I looked down and saw she’d finished my nails. They were perfect—bright purple in this odd grape bubblegum kind of way but clearly painted by a professional.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Hey, do you know who Sally Bedford is?”

  She shook her head. “Why?”

  “Well, no reason really. It was just someone Dad used to know. Grandma Harry said something about her.”

  “Oh crap,” she said. “I totally forgot about her birthday. Did you?”

  I shook my head. “I stopped by to see her yesterday.”

  “You are such a freakin’ kiss-up, aren’t you?” She sighed. “Go wait for them to dry in your own room, okay?” She gave me a little shove and picked up the phone again. “Go,” she said. “What are you waiting for?”

  In my room, I thought some more about Sally Bedford, because it was better than thinking about Courtney and Ryan, together in her perfect pink bedroom, making out. Or thinking about my headache, which was throbbing more today than yesterday.

  Eventually, I heard my mother come in, and I thought about going in the kitchen and asking her. But then I thought a) she knew who Sally was and would never tell me because there was something awful that I wouldn’t want to hear, or b) she didn’t know who Sally was and then I’d create this little shadow, this little nagging doubt in her mind that I’d created in my own, or c) she would tell me in no uncertain terms that I was hanging on to the past way too hard and way too long, and it would be much more hurtful to hear it straight from her than implied from Ryan.

  So I sat there for a while, just thinking, trying to hatch a plan. And I decided that I would have to meet her face-to-face. That I would have to find her so I could ask her myself how exactly she’d known my father and my grandma Harry.

  Chapter 10

  There are only two seasons in the desert—summer and winter—and there never seemed to be much in between. On the last day of October the temperature was 97 degrees, and by mid-November the high was in the 60s, but the lows at night were in the 30s, so it was a chilly ride to school. I found my winter coat buried in the back of my closet and the blue gloves my mother bought me the winter we were in Philadelphia, when I’d felt real, biting cold and experienced true snow for the very first time.

  I watched my breath frost the air as I rode my bike to school, alone. Because Ryan and Courtney had officially become a couple, Ryan had asked me, almost sheepishly, if I would mind if he rode his bike across the wash to Courtney’s house and then walked to school with her some days. “Yeah. Whatever,” I’d said. “It’s a free country.”

  And then “some days” turned into every day, and I was stuck riding to school by myself.

  In biology we were almost finished with the frog, and Mr. Finkelstein had announced that next semester, when we started on the pig, we’d be switching lab partners. I almost wanted to puke when I saw Ryan and Courtney exchange knowing glances, and Jeffrey gave me a nudge with his elbow that I pretended not to notice.

  In English we were reading Oedipus, and I was stuck on the paper we were supposed to be writing about his tragic flaw. In class, Mrs. Connor gave us a hint that it had something to do with the fact that Oedipus thought he was above the gods, that he could escape a prophecy. But I really thought it was his curiosity that got him in the end. That if only he’d left well enough alone, none of the tragic stuff might have happened to him. It was this thought that made me tuck Sally Bedford away in the back of my mind for a little while. Part of me wanted to go to Charles and Large and talk to her, but it was probably too far to ride my bike there, and I hadn’t gotten up the nerve to ask Ashley to drive me.

  The week before Christmas break we had midterms, and the biology one on the frog was supposed to be tough. Courtney and Ryan invited me to study with them, and I accepted, mainly because I had no idea how to tell the difference between a frog liver and a frog heart and I didn’t want to fail the first semester of biology.

  I met them at Courtney’s house the Saturday before the test.

  “Meliss.” Courtney hugged me when she opened the door. “It’s been so long since we’ve hung out.” She ushered me up to her bedroom, where Ryan was already stretched out on her high bed. It felt strange to see him there, all lean and long and lanky, in a position he’d been in on my bed dozens of times. But here he looked like someone else, like her Ryan. “You know what?” Courtney announced as soon as I sat down. “We need to find you a boyfriend so we can all double-date. Wouldn’t that be great, Ry?”

  I looked at him, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Yeah, sure.” He didn’t sound entirely convinced.

  “Who do you like at school? Come on, Meliss. You can tell us.”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer. If I said no one then she would scour the pages of Ryan’s old yearbook until she found someone suitable, and if I said someone then I knew she wouldn’t let up about it. “We should study,” I finally said.

  Paco ran into her room and started yipping, and then he sat down in my lap. I watched Ryan carefully, because I knew dogs made him wheeze. He cleared his throat a little. “Shouldn’t you put Paco in the other room?” I said to Courtney.

  “Why?” She looked genuinely confused, so I knew that Ryan hadn’t mentioned his allergy to her. What an idiot.

  “Never mind,” I said. But Paco gave me a sort of curious, insulted look, as if he thought I wanted him gone. He sniffed the air a little and ran out of the room. Ryan’s shoulders relaxed, and I knew he was relieved that he wasn’t about t
o have an asthma attack in front of Courtney, or worse, that he’d have to explain to her that he didn’t quite love her beloved Paco as much as he’d probably said he did.

  Courtney left to get Paco some food, and Ryan came down on the floor and sat next to me. He nudged my leg with his foot. “We should have a little ceremony next week for Kermit, to celebrate his demise.”

  I laughed, despite the fact that I was still annoyed with him. “I think it’s a little past that point, don’t you?” Kermit was no longer a frog; he didn’t even much resemble a dead frog. He was just sort of this thing now, lifeless, a specimen, so that he really could’ve originally been anything at all.

  “But still, the poor guy deserves something, after all he’s been through. Don’t you think? It’s not that easy being green,” he started singing in the funny off-key way he has of singing everything.

  “You’re terrible.” I started laughing again, because the truth was, Kermit wasn’t even exactly green anymore, just sort of this weird rusty-brown color.

  “What’s so funny?” Courtney walked back in.

  Ryan stopped singing. “We were just talking about poor Kermit.”

  She made a face. “Ugh. I can’t stand it. Let’s just study and get it over with already.”

  I agreed. The sooner we were done with this, the better.

  I received a seventy-two on my frog exam, which was enough for me to earn a solid C in biology for the semester, a grade I was actually a little bit proud of, because I’d done absolute minimal dissecting and studying all fall. I got an A in Mrs. Connor’s English class because she thought my take on Oedipus was original, not wrong, even though I didn’t exactly go for her idea of the whole thing. I loved teachers like that, who liked it when I thought out of the box or when I disagreed with them or, as my dad always used to say, found the other silver lining, the one nobody else thought to look for. But of course, teachers like Mrs. Connor were rare at Desert Crest. I was fortunate to have ended up with her.