The Weight of Glass

by Stuart Heatherington

  “That’s not fair and you know it.”

  “Is it?” Life stopped being fair a long time ago. “You knew. I know you did.”

  She crossed her arms as though she wanted to distance herself from me. “Lee, what if he finds out?”

  “Who cares?”

  “I do. I can’t lose you, too. Don’t be foolish. He’ll make it even harder on you.”

  “He won’t, trust me.” I tasted the venom in my words, so clear and concise. “If there’s one thing that that son-of-a-bitch has taught me, it’s that you hide behind what you fear the most. And Marcus knows what I’ll do to him.”

  “It’s not right, Lee. You can’t punish him for it.”

  “I’m not punishing him,” I said. “I’m getting—”

  From behind me a creak of boards stepped over my voice. Warren emerged from Marcus’ room like a curious crab out of the sea, his large hand clamping onto the doorjamb as the jointed length of his legs propelled him sideways. My stomach turned at the sight of him. A slick smile of oily teeth hid in a sneer that severed his face. As I turned away I could feel the glassy black gaze of his eyes shaping me up in a scissor of movement.

  I sidestepped him in the hall as the right side of my face exploded. Losing my balance, I lunged backward trying to break my fall. Pain shot through one of my fingers as I grabbed at the wall. My cheek smashed against chair molding, flesh separating itself across the bridge of an eye. Skin peeled off my temple, as warm blood blinded me.

  “Leeeee!” My sister’s scream filled the hall as the floor rushed up to connect with my head and shoulder. I slammed into the wood and found one of my back teeth dislodged—a molar—the bloody stump of it rolling down the baseboard. Amy’s feet glided along the wall with the movement of a ghost, disappearing from sight. The bloody tooth skittered away and vanished in a darkening haze. I found it again further down by the edge of the stairs, flipped onto its side.

  “Oh, God…” A sharp taste of copper spilled out of my mouth. I swallowed the metallic taste, and there was an instant when I gagged.

  A second blow ripped into my head.

  “Stop it!” My sister’s voice hung in the air, but I couldn’t find her. “You’re killing him.”

  Sounds of shuffling feet echoed in the hall. Pushing off my elbows, I brought my knees closer in, trying to get one foot under my chest. In front of me, the staircase became a storm of movement. Falling over, Amy grabbed my arm. I tried to focus. But there was Warren, lifting her up with his forearm and forcing her down the hall.

  “Get back to your room, you worthless whorrrre!” Warren screamed, then leaned beside me and whispered, “As for you, sinner, I’m going to cast out that demon! Make you right in the eyes of the Lord.”

  My head drowned in those words as his breath closed over my face.

  I pivoted around and started crawling. His foot smashed into my lower back. It brought the stairs rushing upward as I landed four or five steps from the top, arm twisting through the pickets and locking up my left shoulder. There was a loud pop from the socket as it wrenched a part, fire radiating up through my neck as I crashed on the stair landing. Lying there, blood gathering into my eye, I watched the clouded outline of Warren stepping toward me.

  His knee dropped onto my ribs. He lifted my face from the floor by the hair and shouted into my ear, “Let me tell you something, in this house, there’s no room for the devil’s worker. But hell has an opening, and I can see to it a light’s left on for you.” The floor smashed into my head again. “I rebuuuke you, Satan, in the name of the Lord. Cast out this demon into the pit of hell. And you will stay there if you know what’s good for you. Stay, stay, stay…”

  Out in front of my face was the tooth. It lay by itself on the floor. I made a feeble gesture to grab at it, saw the index finger on my right hand dislocated from having hit the wall. The knuckle loomed in a swollen ball; a distant heat rose out of it like a candle.

  Atop an old pine foyer table, sat a vase of pure white lilies, dropped off after the worst was discovered. Feeling the burning ache in my body pass miserably through shaken bone and fractured skin, I realized how frightened of the future I was. My mother’s passing, like a thief in the night, had grabbed up her memories and slipped off in the wake of her death, taking everything with it, including her unknowing protection. At that point I began to cry.

  Dr. Milton Gage’s face stirred me awake, his craggy, half-hidden brown eyes and cavernous nose looming over me, humming as he set the bandage around my left hand. Metal buckles held the strap over my neck in place, as a long, white sling wrapped itself under both arms and around my chest. There was friendly smile that seemed to come alive when he noticed I was staring at him.

  “Good to have you back,” he said, working his hands around the bandage and clipping it off with a pair of scissors.

  “Yes, sir.” The ache in my jaw magnified with the effort at communication. A clot of gauze stuffed that side of my mouth and it bothered me to speak clearly, took away the last of my dignity.

  “That was some fall you took.”

  I found the wall across the room so as not to stare him in the eye. I tried not to remember it, Warren attacking me from Marcus’ room, the feel of the stairs colliding with my body, the hard shooting pain and clarity of blood. “I suppose. Though I can’t recall much,” I lied.

  He nodded knowingly. “You’ve got a nice knot on your head, to go with that shoulder I popped back in. Looks like you had a fight with a horse and didn’t know which end you ought to be fighting.” He held something out in front of me and my vision blurred, trying to bring it into focus. “Can’t do a whole lot for this either, unless you believe in the tooth fairy, and that just seems a little much for someone your age.”

  I stared at him blankly, knowing I couldn’t say anything. In the back of my mind I knew Warren was listening, probably standing in the hall. The thought of it made me ill.

  He grabbed something out of his bag. “Your hands still look a mess. You going to be able to keep them changed out?”

  I tried to lift my right arm and winced.

  “You know you were out cold when I set that finger? Same for the shoulder.”

  “How long before I can play football?”

  He shrugged.

  I chewed over his silence carefully.

  He kept busy wrapping my hand until it was sheltered in a cocoon of white.

  “Depends on how you tolerate pain. I’ve never been much for it. Pain and I mix like oil and water.” His face wedged up into a grin.

  A steady flow of relief eased over me and I breathed again.

  “Were you worried?”

  “Not much. I can take a lot.” The gauze puffed out my cheek when I smiled. “Have you seen my sister?”

  He grabbed a pair of scissors. “Not since earlier, but your brother was in here just before you woke up.”

  “Paul?”

  “No, the other one, what’s his name…Marcus—Warren’s boy.”

  Dr. Gage scooted close as he tied off the bandage and taped it. “Just between you and me, he’s not quite right in the head, that one. Rather too serious for his own good. Just stood up against the wall there—not saying nothing—and watched me go to work on you.” He looked over a couple more spots on my face and sighed with a heavy tremor. “There’re plenty of people I’ve seen in my day who sit there and take it all in, but none that smile the whole time. He looked like the cat that swallowed the ever-loving canary, only he and the taste of yellow were becoming a bit too friendly, if you catch my point.”

  11

  Amy held up her hand and stopped me. “I remember Dr. Gage putting you back together. He wasn’t stupid. Warren told him you fell down the stairs.”

  “But he wasn’t going to do anything. Nobody did back then,” I said.

  Charlie groped at the air. “Now I understand why you beat the shit out of Lloyd Worbler’s daddy so bad.”

  I bit the inside of my lip, remembering the two teeth I be
at out of his head and the drive to the hospital.

  Amy looked at me. “Hank Worbler?”

  “Junior,” I said, wanting to forget the memory.

  “I don’t remember hearing anything about that.” Amy crossed he legs up in the hammock. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “What? You really think life can’t stir the coffee unless you put a spoon in it? I don’t call when the power goes out, because you can’t do anything about it. Besides, it was under control.”

  “Who’s Worbler?” Nicole asked.

  “Lloyd Worbler was Hank’s second son,” I said. “You wanna talk about a family with issues?” I whistled. “Hank was never right in the head after the accident. What with his wife in rehab monthly, it was a wonder his two boys survived getting out of that house.”

  “You said he got his head run over by a truck.” Charlie eyes squinted like she’d seen it happen.

  “It was a tractor. Back tire rolled over him after it popped out of gear. Nearly crushed Hank’s skull. He came out of the hospital with a three-second fuse, soaked in gas,” I said.

  “What happened?”

  “Charlie brought Lloyd Worbler home one night.” I looked at her rubbing her belly. “Why was he over again?”

  She thought it over, face looking years younger in the dim light of the porch. “Let’s see…that was seventh or eighth grade. We only had one class together. Math with Margaret Kiplinger. It had to be one of her Algebra finals. She had the worst case of death-breath on the planet. Tic Tacs wouldn’t go there to die.”

  I pictured skinny Lloyd Worbler and remembered the marks. “All I know is when I saw the bruises I didn’t even think about it. We just drove over to his house, and there’s Hank sittin’ on the front porch. Half a six pack spent between his knees. And the first thing I said was, ‘Is it too hard for you to keep your hands off your son?’ Not, hello or nothing. Just plain old good to get in your face.”

  Nicole sat forward. “What’d you do?”

  “Daddy punched him in his nose three times.”

  “After he explained that it wasn’t my fucking business. And I told him that’s where he was wrong.”

  “Then he punched him in his nose three times,” Charlie repeated.

  “Did it stop? The hitting.” Nicole asked.

  “I don’t know.” And I didn’t. “It’s not the sort of thing you follow up with a door visit.”

  Amy touched my leg. “I think you did the right thing.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” I wish somebody would’ve done it for us.

  “So, nothing happened to your stepfather?” Charlie asked. “Nobody ever arrested him?”

  Amy pulled herself to her feet and stood up, hand grabbing the ashtray from the railing. She reached up and double-clicked the fan above our heads as she walked off to the end of the porch and circled back halfway. Long oval blades twisted through the smoke filled shadows. Overhead I could hear the tink tink tink of the metal pull chain, its soft echoes a nervous vibration in the rafters. My sister’s eyes flittered in a memory as she wrapped her arms inside each other, one elbow tucked loose into a hand, the other carrying the ember of a cigarette back and forth to her lips.

  “If only that had been the case.” The words felt hopeless, because they were.

  “Why didn’t somebody do something?” Charlie asked.

  “Because we never told anyone.” Amy’s lips quivered in admission. She meandered from one section of screen to the next, darkness sharing her face with the shadows of the past. All these years later, the pain was like a confession without absolution, and it had slowly been destroying her.

  “You told me once that you can’t sleep in the dark anymore,” I said to Amy, her back silhouetting the screen. “Is that still true?”

  She didn’t reply. It was as if I hadn’t asked her anything. My beautifully exhausted sister stood in the protective armor of her silence.

  Nicole stared at Amy’s back when she didn’t respond. “The answer would be yes. She still does. Always with the bathroom light on and maybe—if I’m not the last one in bed—with the latch thrown. We’re the only couple I know with a deadbolt on the bedroom door.”

  The answer made me cringe. “I never told you this, but he made us both scared of something. You the dark and me of closed spaces.”

  When Amy turned around there were tears in her eyes. “He did something to you the day before Mom’s funeral, didn’t he? Because you changed that day. That was when you went away.”

  It wasn’t like I packed any bags; I didn’t change, as much as I died. And that was the hardest thing to accept. “Sooner or later we all die inside, don’t we? Some a little more than others.”

  “Yes.” There was a miserable clarity in her answer. “Yes, we do.”

  I felt my head cock to the left as if needing to analyze what I wanted to say next. “Back then I couldn’t describe it really—what he did to me. You could say he buried me alive, and somehow that would’ve been close enough, because that’s what it felt like.”

  12

  1972 - Silence bore up the empty congregation hall with open arms, cold lifeless hands for the dead. I sat alone in the wake of that painful quiet, reasoning with the shell of my mother. Gone were the mourners, the empty reciprocation of smiles among strangers. They no longer filled the vacant pews on both sides of the pulpit. Grieving faces had given over their seats for stillness to fill.

  The Good Shepherd had received friends and family at the church as opposed to our home and the entire town had come to pay its respects. Visitation had been over for hours, but I found my way back. I was drawn to her the way a child wants to be forgiven, sought something that would take away the shame. And for the two hours I spoke to her in the desperateness of a boy and the broken whispers of a man, sometimes holding her hand as if a guide.

  I let my eyes close for a time, thinking I would rest them. I didn’t want to sleep. But exhaustion fed off my despair anyway. When I woke it was past midnight on the wall, and I made my way beside her casket one last time.

  Having been in the water for seven hours, visible signs of lacerations covered her head, the effects of her floating face down in a river of rock and branches. And although I knew it was my mother, she didn’t look fully recognizable in my eyes. Thin scratches were followed by a plague of deepening ones that cradled her hairline like chips and cracks in the surface of fine china.

  I remembered leaning in to kiss her goodbye and feeling an explosion in my head, a painful sensation of darkness rushing in to fill a hole, subtle shades of black crowding behind my eyes. When I came to, I lifted up, gasping for breath. Somewhere above my head, I struck a padded surface and lights erupted in my skull like tiny stars constricting the canvas of a much darker sky. I reached behind my head and cringed at the bulging knot that grew off center there. Under my fingers I pressed the swollen texture of my own flesh. When I tried to sit up again I couldn’t. I pushed back with my legs and the soles of my shoes seized up against a hardened floor, only it wasn’t a floor at all. Not a floor in the sense of being able to stand, because I knew I was lying down. I was crushed into a box of some sort. I kicked at it, chest tightening as my breathing became more and more erratic. Forgetting about the pain, I rocked my shoulders, slamming into the top until panic seized the muscles in my throat.

  “Somebody, help! I’m in heeeeeere!” Here was nowhere—it was a black hole, one that made any real leverage next to impossible. Getting my legs drawn up enough to gain some kind of momentum wasn’t working; there wasn’t any room. Why had this happened to me? What was this place, this thing I was in? I wanted to know how I got here. I cried out loud again, pushed my arms out to my sides and found solid walls.

  A thought shook through me as I began to grope around in the dark. Working quickly, I wedged my arms up past my waist, patting around with my hands.

  There it was, the unmistakable cold of Mother’s dead face, her lips sown shut and the hair that half hid those tiny fractures and lines. If
terror were a ladder, then I was descending into madness. The sound of my screams mirrored it. I couldn’t contemplate the reason or the why. Why didn’t matter anymore, just the damn darkness merging with the understanding that I was trapped inside a coffin. By then the screams were coming out of my mouth one after another, loud terrified things met my ears with an out-of-control complexity.

  The stiffened body shifted beneath mine. But it wasn’t her anymore. It was something else entirely. Something too scary to imagine, wearing a bag of cracked scars for a face. I swore I could feel the thin hiss of her breath against my skin, all warm and hungry. A thing with breasts mashing under my weight, as I pummeled the head of the coffin in terror.