The Glass Forest

by Cynthia Swanson

  Henry was so engrossed in watching Ruby’s activity, Silja began to wonder if he’d forgotten she was in the room. But he surprised her by speaking. “I’ll take care of Ruby,” he went on, without looking at Silja. “You don’t need to worry about us.”

  • • •

  It was hard on her mother. Mikaela, who had never needed a man around, now had to endure a man taking over the job she most adored: caring for her grandchild.

  “He should be working,” Mikaela badgered Silja. “What kind of man sits around all day minding a child?”

  “Hush, Äiti,” Silja chided her. “Henry has been to war. He was injured. He needs time.”

  Silja loved her mother; nonetheless, she dreamed of moving away from Mikaela and the Alku. She dreamed of the suburbs, of three-bedroom, two-bathroom houses smelling of green pine boards, unblemished paint, and wall-to-wall carpeting. She thought about bright schoolrooms full of charming, fresh-faced students. Children who would become Ruby’s playmates, her lifelong friends.

  But they couldn’t move—not now. They were stuck. Because in the spring of 1945, Silja began to suspect something was terribly wrong with her mother’s health.

  She didn’t know what it was. Mikaela coughed all day long. She said it was residual from her years of working in a laundry. “It was the chemicals and bleach. Everyone there developed a cough,” Mikaela said. “You shouldn’t concern yourself over it.”

  After much cajoling, Silja convinced her mother to see a doctor, and her fears were confirmed. Mikaela was diagnosed with lung cancer.

  Silja’s last few weeks of school were a blur of worry. On graduation day, Mikaela struggled onto the subway, coughing so much other passengers took seats on the opposite side of the car. Ruby nestled onto her grandmother’s lap. Mikaela petted the child, smoothing her hair back, kissing the top of Ruby’s head. Going up the subway stairs, Mikaela gripped Silja’s arm and stopped three times to catch her breath before they emerged onto Sixty-Eighth Street.

  After the ceremony, they had a small party at the Alku, with the neighbors and some of Silja’s classmates. They had champagne, something they’d never had in their apartment before—like so many Finns, Mikaela and Silja preferred beer to other alcoholic drinks. Henry kept a bottle of Old Crow rye whiskey in the kitchen cabinet, but he was the only one who drank from it.

  After the guests left and Mikaela and Ruby went to bed, Silja cleaned the kitchen. Glancing into the living room, she saw Henry sitting in the darkness, in the easy chair that faced the window, looking out onto Forty-Third Street. On the table next to him was the last, half-empty champagne bottle. He was draining it, pouring glass after glass and methodically, silently drinking.

  Silja watched his shadowy figure. She longed to go to him. She longed to sit in his lap, put her arms around him, and ask him to pour her a big glass of champagne. She wished he would clink his glass against hers and her heart would skip a beat, the way it used to before he went to war.

  No. What she really wanted was a life utterly dissimilar from the one they had.

  She didn’t want to just drink champagne with Henry. She wanted to bathe in it with him. She wanted to splash naked in bubbles and candlelight, playful and carefree as puppies. She wanted to touch him all over and feel him touch her—nothing held back and nothing off-limits, the way it was before he left for Europe. She wanted to stay up all night, rocking her hips with him inside her—time and again until they were spent, until they could only hold each other and close their eyes, never wanting to break apart.

  It was, she thought as she wrung out the dishrag, the only hope she still had.

  • • •

  Mikaela weakened with alarming speed. Within months, her bulk reduced until she was little more than saggy skin. She stopped eating and barely drank the broth and water Silja urged on her. She lay in bed, Ruby beside her, stroking the child’s hair until they both fell asleep.

  The morning her mother died, Silja was with her—only Silja, because she knew the end was imminent. A few hours earlier she’d knocked at the next-door neighbor’s and asked her to come over. When Agatha arrived, she asked, “Do you want me to sit with her, Silja?”

  Silja shook her head and said, “No, please—just take care of Ruby. Let Ruby say good-bye, and then take her away.”

  She couldn’t depend on Henry. When he’d glanced in on Mikaela that morning—when he’d seen her gray face and heard her slow, irregular breath—he told Silja he was going out. He put on his hat and walked out the door without another word.

  Now Agatha and Silja stood beside Mikaela’s bed. Ruby, seated on the bed holding Mikaela’s hand, looked at Silja questioningly.

  “Kiss Grandma,” Silja told Ruby. “And tell her good-bye.”

  The small girl—not quite three, but wearing a solemn expression that made her appear years older—leaned over and put her lips against Mikaela’s pale cheek. “Good-bye,” she said obediently, and then added, “All better soon, Grandma.”

  Agatha led Ruby from the room. Silja sat next to Mikaela, listening to her shallow breathing.

  “You can go now, Äiti,” Silja said softly. “Take your rest.” She kissed the dying woman’s ashy forehead. “We’re going to be all right.”

  Silja closed her eyes, then opened them again, looking at Mikaela’s face—the face she knew better than anyone’s. “Go peacefully, Äiti, and know that I’ll be all right. Ruby will be all right.”

  As if she understood, Mikaela drew in a final breath. Silja waited, but her mother didn’t exhale.

  “Lepää rauhassa,” Silja whispered. “Rest in peace.”

  17

  * * *

  Ruby

  Ruby stares through the darkened panes of her bedroom window toward the forest. With the lights off in her room, she can see into the blackness, can see the congregations of pine trees, the thick-trunked oaks. She knows there are foxes out there and raccoons. If she were out there, she would see them, as they would see her.

  “Animal eyes,” her father used to tell her. “Ruby, you have night vision like a wild animal. You get that from me.”

  And then her father would add something like, “Your mother can’t see a damn thing in the dark. Or in the daylight either, for that matter.”

  The scorn in his voice made Ruby cringe, but he did have a point.

  In Finnish, Silja means “blinded.” Not so very long ago, Ruby asked her mother about her name, and she told Ruby its meaning. “I don’t know why Grandma named me that,” Ruby’s mother said. “Maybe she just thought it was a pretty name.”

  • • •

  In the unlit bedroom, Ruby thinks about how she despises this house. It isn’t a house people should actually live in. It brings to mind a movie set, nothing out of place unless the scene requires it. She knows that’s how her mother designed this glass house—to be as near as she could get to living inside the glamorous, fake world of the movies.

  But that’s not how Ruby thinks of the house. It reminds her of the glass display cases in the pet store in downtown Stonekill—a store that Ruby and her mother used to browse, particularly to visit the puppies. The birds were housed in thick-walled glass cases—parakeets in one case, finches in another, and in the third, a solitary, nonverbal parrot with a green and turquoise head. Nobody bought the parrot or even gave him much attention. He sat silently on his perch behind the glass for years until one day when Ruby went into the shop, he was gone. She didn’t ask but assumed he’d died of old age or sadness, or maybe both.

  The parrot didn’t move much, but the finches and parakeets flew madly around their cases, fluttering near the glass walls and ceiling of their prison cells. They’d zoom up and around and down, but there was no way out unless somebody bought them and took them home.

  The birdcage Ruby lives in feels like that, too. It isn’t a house with a soul, like their old house in town was. Thinking about the old house makes Ruby feel so sad she has to change her thoughts, like changing out of a wet blouse wh
en you come inside after being unjacketed on a rainy day.

  There’s only one thing Ruby likes about this glass-walled birdcage: it’s on one level. Unlike the pet store cases with their lack of escape route, Ruby’s room has a wide casement window that opens effortlessly. She climbs out, hops onto the soft dirt a few feet below, then closes the window almost but not all the way, so she can get back in when she’s ready to return to the aviary in the woods.

  And off she goes. Free.

  She reaches into her sweater pocket and takes out her Camels and the Zippo her father gave her last year because he said everyone should have a dependable lighter. This one was his during the war. It’s embossed with an American flag she can barely see because it’s so worn down, but she knows it’s there.

  She lights a Camel and walks, inhaling and exhaling, thinking and not thinking. There’s a rustle nearby, and a raccoon trots out from the trees, onto the path in front of Ruby. They exchange glances before going their separate, perpendicular ways.

  She could live out here. She could disappear into the forest.

  The Shelter is back here. A person would have to know where it is—at the back end of the property, near the cemetery wall—and would have to roll a heavy boulder to the side; no small feat. The person would need to brush dirt away, then twist the big round metal door in the ground—it takes both hands and all one’s strength to turn and lift it. Only then could one descend the iron ladder rungs into the dark.

  For someone not used to it, being that far underground might feel unnerving. Ruby herself has been inside the Shelter many times, and it’s never particularly bothered her. Still, she has no intention of going down there tonight. Even a passing thought of using the Shelter as a hiding place is absurd. She wouldn’t feel safe there.

  Her father, if he were here, would beg to differ. “The safest place on earth,” he used to say about the Shelter.

  Well, it wouldn’t be the only thing Ruby and her father disagreed about.

  Few people are aware of the Shelter. Certainly not the police—when they were in the woods the other day, they didn’t go anywhere near it. Why would they?

  But Uncle Paul knows about it.

  Why did Uncle Paul bring his wife and baby to Stonekill? Everything would be so much easier if they weren’t here.

  Even so, Ruby admits that PJ draws her in—which isn’t something she would have expected from a baby. She’s been running it over and over in her head, searching for understanding.

  As she walks she decides it’s because PJ reminds her of baby pictures of herself. Her mother used to show them to Ruby. Her mother kept photographs in a shoe box in her closet. Most of her photographs were of the glass house; she started taking pictures when construction began, and continued until the house was finished and all the fancy new furniture was moved in. But among her pictures, she had a smattering of family photographs from over the years.

  In Ruby’s favorite photo from when she was little, she’s sitting on her isoäiti’s lap. It’s one of the few Finnish words Ruby knows: isoäiti. It means “grandmother”—but Ruby never called her grandmother Isoäiti, or even the more familiar Finnish term for grandmother, which is mummi. Instead, Ruby just called her Grandma. She thought her grandmother would have liked to be called Mummi—she sometimes called herself that when she talked to Ruby. But Ruby’s mother said they were Americans, and they should use the American word.

  Another Finnish word Ruby knows is Alku, where they lived when Ruby was a little girl. It means “beginning.” The Alku was called that because it was the first co-op built in Finntown. But for Ruby’s family, the Alku was more like an ending.

  Ruby was just shy of three when her grandmother died, but she remembers everything about her. Before she got cancer, Grandma was soft and round as a ball of yarn. Her skin always felt warm, even on the coldest winter days.

  In the photograph, Ruby’s grandmother has her arms wrapped around Ruby, and Ruby is curled up against her chest. Grandma is smiling and Ruby is not. But that doesn’t mean Ruby was unhappy. Just because a person isn’t smiling doesn’t mean she’s troubled.

  She thinks about the last time she saw her grandmother alive. Ruby told her it would be better soon. “You were such a sweet little thing,” her mother has said about this. “You thought Grandma was going to get better. You thought she would get out of bed and be well.”

  Ruby’s mother didn’t need to recall this moment for her, because Ruby is pretty sure she remembers it.

  Why would she have said such a thing? Did she truly think her grandmother was going to get better? Even now, Ruby doesn’t think that’s what it was.

  Instead, Ruby believes her small self had some innate sense of what was to come. She knew Grandma would feel better once her ragged breathing stopped.

  For some people, there comes a point when things get better simply because the breathing stops.

  • • •

  Today at lunchtime, when Aunt Angie offered to let Ruby give PJ his bottle, she was tempted. But she knew he wouldn’t find her warm and comforting like she used to find Grandma. If PJ were in her arms, he would feel like he was being held by a prickly, oversize insect. What baby would want that? He’d surely cry. So she shook her head no.

  She’s reached the rock, that ancient rock with all its secrets. She stubs out her Camel against it, taking care to make sure it’s fully extinguished before she tosses it. Her father taught her to pay attention back here. “Have respect for the land, Ruby,” he told her. “The land will take care of you when people no longer do.”

  She moves on, crunching through the underbrush. Reaching into the neckline of her blouse, she pulls out her mother’s pendant. She can’t see it in the pitch-black of the forest—even her animal eyes aren’t that sharp—but she knows how stunning it is: a large, teardrop-shaped sapphire on a long, heavy chain.

  This necklace simply showed up one day, but it quickly became her mother’s favorite piece of jewelry. Ruby’s father never asked where her mother got it. He assumed she bought it for herself, the way she’d bought herself so many presents, big and small, over the years.

  Ruby winds the chain of her mother’s necklace around and around her fingers. She stops walking and pulls the photo of her mother, the one she carries everywhere, out of her pocketbook. Using her father’s lighter, she takes a good look at it.

  Not all of her mother’s photographs were stored in the shoe box. Some came from other places, and this is one of them. Ruby studies the background and thinks about places that are perpetually sunny, places as warm in her memory as a melting ice-cream cone.

  She runs her hand over the image of her mother’s fine, soft hair. She remembers her mother being happy, the way she looks in this picture.

  18

  * * *

  Silja

  1945–1947

  A month after Mikaela went to her grave, the one-year anniversary of Henry’s homecoming was upon them. Though they did nothing to mark the occasion, when Silja noted the date on the kitchen calendar it gave her pause. Since his return from Europe, Henry had done nothing except brood, care for Ruby, and take walks, which he said he did to improve his health. It did improve—over time the limp all but disappeared—but he still showed no interest in finding a job or going to college. Nothing had changed in the bedroom, either.

  Other veterans weren’t like Henry. They came back from Europe and Japan determined to better themselves. Get an education, begin careers. Take care of their families.

  Silja felt cheated. And yet she still loved him with all her heart. Why is that? she wondered. What makes me love a man like this?

  He was still so beautiful. Saying that made her feel shallow, but it was true. She was someone who could look at her husband and think, Cary Grant—and that made it all better. She could pretend he was someone different inside.

  She began to suspect his problems had more to do with his head than his body. She read about a program initiated in early 1944 at Mason General,
a Long Island psychiatric hospital, for returning vets with nervous conditions. Most were selected for the program before they got off their transport ships. They were transferred directly to Mason General. They spent weeks in therapy—one-on-one with doctors, in groups, learning new skills and how to adapt to stateside life.

  Why hadn’t Henry been offered this program? Surely, he’d have qualified. How had the army missed it?

  Silja attempted to make inquiries, but that got her nowhere. “Your husband can speak with his veterans’ affairs office,” Silja was told. “But he’ll have to make the call himself, ma’am.”

  One winter evening after Ruby was in bed, she tried to show him an article she’d clipped from the Brooklyn Eagle.

  Plan Three-Day Court

  Play for Mason Patients

  Basketball tournaments are a dime-a-dozen during February and March, but when one of them is listed for December, that’s news, brother. But there’s a darn good reason why this one is being held so early in the season. Fifteen hundred reasons, in fact.

  For that’s the number of “battle fatigue” patients recuperating at Mason General Hospital at Brentwood, L.I. When the weather was warm, most of the GIs entertained themselves with a bit of softball and volleyball, but they can’t do too much nowadays. So Lt. George Menarick conceived the idea of a three-day hoop event, which will find the leading service teams of the area competing tonight, tomorrow, and Wednesday. A handsome plaque and gold basketballs will be the winner’s reward.

  “You see, there’s fun and games, too,” Silja said to Henry. “They do the hard work necessary to convalesce, but they also get to blow off steam.”

  Without a glance, Henry pushed the paper away. “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “I don’t need a shrink, Silja. I’m fine.”

  “No, you’re not.” She nudged closer to him on the davenport. “Admit it, Henry. You’re not yourself—and you haven’t been since you came back.”