Perfect Glass (A Young Adult Novel (sequel to Glass Girl))

by Laura Anderson Kurk

  “I’m okay,” he said. “I just want to make things right for the kids.”

  “You need to talk about this,” I said. “You need to let yourself feel. It’s okay. It’s just me now.”

  “I hated it, Meg. I hated seeing them in the vans. They turned around to watch us disappear and their faces were hopeful. How could they be hopeful?”

  “Because you probably told them it was okay. Because they’re young enough to think governments won’t hurt them. And despite everything, what they truly want is a real home.” I ran my fingers through the fake fur on one of Tennyson’s coats, seeking comfort.

  “But I’m jaded enough to know they’re going to families who won’t love them,” Henry said. “They’ll see them as a way to get a check from the government. They’ll put them to work or worse…they’ll abuse them.”

  “But what if you’re wrong and the kids are right? What if they’re loved and cherished in these homes?”

  Henry sniffed and cleared his throat. “Do you remember that Dylan Thomas poem Mr. Landmann made us read last year—‘Being But Men’?”

  “Sort of.”

  “It was about how men walk into a forest afraid because they know all the things that can happen. They might wake the noisy birds and cause chaos. But kids come into the trees and see the magic. They climb them and see stars that the men were too afraid to see.”

  “Are you afraid?” I was glad he couldn’t see my face. I was afraid for him.

  “I know all the bad things that could happen,” he said. “Bad things, Meg. What if some pervert gets to our girls or beats up the boys?”

  We were both quiet, just breathing together.

  “Our kids are still wondering about the magic,” he said. “They could have a mom and a dad and their own room. Maybe they’ll have all new toys. They might see stars. I’m the one worried about all the possibilities, like waking up the scary birds.”

  “You don’t know all the possibilities. You’re just imagining the worst ones. Try imagining the good ones.”

  “‘Out of the chaos would come bliss,’” he quoted, then laughed.

  “Don’t laugh. It really could work out that way. These kids…Henry…they’ll never forget you. Can you imagine that?”

  I struggled with putting into words the significance of Henry’s presence there. The very thought of it made me want to cry. It was so vastly important—so much more important than where to go to college or what to do with your life or what to have for dinner. It was bigger than all of us. “They’ll forget all the details of what happened during this confused time, but they’ll never forget the way you made them feel—safe and loved.”

  Henry drew a shaky breath. “Do me a favor, Meg.”

  “Anything.”

  “Don’t fall for Quinn O’Neill.” Quinn’s name sounded like a contagion when Henry said it. “If you’re going to do this thing with him…go to this dance, don’t fall for him.”

  “Never,” I said. “I promise.”

  “Because I’m all filled up on sad right now.” He sniffed again and I could tell he was more in control. “And you can’t ask me to sit by and watch you get all caught up in this guy. I can’t handle that—thinking he swept you off your feet because he bathed in body spray and dressed up.” His voice sounded rough. “I know you think I’m being funny right now, but I’m completely serious. Don’t make me watch that happen.”

  “You know my heart,” I said. “It’s yours.”

  “You told me once you thought dances were ridiculous and that’s why we didn’t go to any last year,” he said. “But if you’ve changed your mind…if this is important to you, I’ll suck it up.”

  “I’m afraid I’ll regret it if I don’t go to one high school dance. And that has nothing to do with Quinn.” I tried those words out slowly, to make sure I really meant them. “I really want Thanet to go and I think Abby made me one of her conditions.”

  “Understood.” The line went quiet until he rushed into another thought that sounded like a list he’d made. “Remember that guys think about food and sex, and that’s about it. You may think he’s admiring your pretty dress when he’s actually admiring the way you fill it out and how soft your skin looks.”

  “Now you’re just being weird.”

  “Nope,” he said, with a dark chuckle. “Just honest, babe. But it’s sweet how you think the best of everyone.”

  ***

  After we hung up and I’d accepted the dress from Tennyson and even later, as I drove to Jo’s to help her fix dinner and bathe, my thoughts were on Henry and his longing to make things right for the kids. The six words—make things right for the kids—tripped off the tongue like an item on a to-do list.

  But the impossibility of the six words made Henry’s longing more heroic than anything I’d ever known. And I prayed, hard, in the Jeep that every nuance of those six words would be met and checked and crossed through. That things would be made right for the kids, whatever that meant, and Henry could be at peace with himself. It’s all any of us could hope for.

  In my mind, I saw a string stretching from Henry’s heart at Quiet Waters to my heart. It was taut and it vibrated with Henry’s worries and fears and I felt them all.

  Deeply. I felt them all.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  henry

  From where I sat, in the tree house with Aidia, I could just make out the top of John’s head. He paced, stopped to kick at the dirt, and ground out his lecture in Spanglish over the phone. The person on the other end of the line kept hanging up on him and John would groan and hit redial.

  “I told you, the only thing I’m asking for right now is a list of addresses because I have money for my children,” he yelled. “Sí, tengo dinero para los niños.”

  “Come on, baby,” I said, hauling Aidia up to my hip so I could climb out of the tree house with her. “Let’s go remind John little ears are listening.”

  When I’d picked him up at the airport a few nights ago, he was bleary-eyed and blustery as a bull who’d been wronged. He’d wanted to set up meetings with every person who’d had a hand in that night raid on his home, his children.

  But no official would touch this with a ten-foot pole. Each day, two or three kids were moved to new homes. Packing children, watching them climb into the vans, and trying to keep a reassuring smile on our faces had nearly killed us.

  Maybe the hardest part was turning back to the kids who were still with us, trying to hide our tears. Honesty became a dirty word. We kept pretending the floors under our feet weren’t crumbling and the roof wasn’t collapsing, because the little faces watching us missed nothing.

  This morning, Raf and I worked on getting all the construction trash out of the flex building. Old paperwork and forgotten supplies lined the walls in boxes that had begun to disintegrate. We salvaged what we could and tossed what we couldn’t. I hooked a chain to our large metal dumpster and used the truck to drag it next to the windows. For a couple of hours, we pitched boxes of moldy, unrecognizable things directly into the dumpster. The work became equal parts therapy and frustration.

  “You ever heard the phrase ‘barking at a knot?’” I said during a short intermission.

  Raf rolled it around on his tongue, trying to translate it into something that made sense in Spanish. “Never. Is it something American dogs do?”

  I laughed. “Nah. It’s something American guys do, I guess. It’s what we say when we’re expending a lot of energy trying to do something that’s impossible, so you’re about as useful as a dog looking to untie a knot by barking at it.”

  “So we’re barking at a knot here?” he said.

  “Yep, woof.”

  Raf didn’t laugh. In fact, he seemed to be struggling with a five-dollar problem.

  “I think it’s good to get this place cleared out,” he said. “We can’t fix it until it’s cleaned up, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What’s going to happen to these buildings?”


  “No one’s sure yet. Sam and John are working on trying to get approval to turn this into a school or another kind of home for kids, if the government will allow it.” I heaved out a sigh. “What if we could round up all the kids and bring them home one day?”

  I must not have sounded convincing because Raf rolled his eyes.

  “I’ve been thinking about something, Henry,” he said.

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “I wish there was a way to remove these tattoos.”

  We’d long ago taken off our shirts to try to keep cool in the humidity. I knew he felt funny about his ink because after he’d shed his shirt, he made a point to work out of my line of sight all morning.

  “I’m pretty sure they can remove tattoos with lasers.” I said this without thinking it through. How could Raf afford laser tattoo removal?

  “In my gang, they believe the only way to remove tattoos is to pass a needle over the design again, but, instead of ink, you use the milk of a new mother.” He watched me closely for a reaction.

  “Why milk?” I scratched my head. “Why a new mother?”

  A trace of embarrassment colored his features. “Okay, so not just any new mother, right? A girl who’d only been with her husband because her milk would be pure enough to cover up the bad ink.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “The sweetest thing in life erasing the dirtiest thing in life,” he said.

  I fake punched him in the arm. “They talk about things like that in their gang socials or whatever they call their get-togethers?”

  “Nah, man,” he said. “My mom told me that when I came home with the clown on my chest. She cried and said I’d never be rid of it and even my gang brothers believed it would take something like the Virgin Mary’s milk to clean me now.”

  “She hated that you’d been jumped into the gang?” I said.

  He looked at me like I’d sprouted horns. “Hated it? She wanted me in the gang.” He rubbed the back of his head and stared at the floor. “She just hated the tattoos. But me in the gang…that helped her career. She told me once there were two ways for her to get inside the heads of these bangers. Either I joined, but stayed on the fringes, or she dated one. Guess which one I chose.”

  I shook my head. “That’s no kind of choice, Raf. You were the man of the house and you did the only thing you could do to protect your mom.”

  “But I didn’t protect her.” The lines around his eyes deepened. “I killed her.”

  “You didn’t kill her,” I said. “They killed her.”

  “Sí,” he whispered. “I keep telling myself that.”

  I reached over and squeezed his shoulder. Raf’s body began to shake with the force of his sudden tears. He put his back to me to hide his emotion. For a gangster turned orphan, tears were the final humiliation.

  “What would you do differently if you could go back?” I asked, after a minute.

  He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and stared at the wall, truly considering a question he’d no doubt asked himself a million times.

  “I really liked Ana,” he said. “My neighbor. ¿Entiende? We hung out after school every day. I stood on her porch that day and I heard her crying inside. I heard Franco, un veterano, telling her to shut up.”

  I didn’t even want to move. I didn’t want to mess up this moment. “What’d you do?”

  “I kicked the door in,” he said, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his throat. “It surprised him and she was able to run. I figured I was dead anyway, so I might as well take him down with me.” He brought his fist down on his thigh. “Nunca pensé que dolerían a mi mamá. I never thought it would hurt my mother.”

  Raf’s voice wavered and broke, adopting the husky tones of a guy trying to control emotion. I’d been right there myself too often in the past months. This kid…he broke my heart.

  “I know you don’t want pity,” I said. “And that’s not what I’m offering. I’m just saying I wish things had been different for you.”

  Raf nodded and sucked in air, reining himself in again. In that moment, he was completely without guile. It showed in the way he let his shoulders fall forward, making his skinny chest look even scrawnier and in the way he pulled his hair off his forehead, self-consciously drawing attention to the faint, silvery scars that ran from his cheekbone into his hairline.

  I saw him. I saw his dark eyes and dark skin. I saw how difficult it was for him to play the tipo malo.

  “Listen, you’re a guy who’s seen a lot of bad things, but you’re smart enough to know there’s another side to life.” I stared at him, at all the details I’d missed. “You know good exists. Think about how many people you could reach just by saying, ‘I’ve been there.’”

  “No one would listen to me.” He picked at a piece of tape on the floor until he ripped it away, balling it up and tossing it behind him.

  “Oh, yeah, they would. They’ll be down in the muddy gutters until they see that clean water sings. You’ll show them.”

  “Maybe.” He put his shirt back on.

  I clapped him on the shoulder before I stood and got back to work. We worked late into the night. I heard the goings-on in the dining hall and dorms—John taking care of Aidia, Equis shooting hoops, Rosa serenading us with a Luis Enrique song. Under all those normal signs of life, an undercurrent of anxiety laced with sadness ran through Quiet Waters.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  meg

  Jo’s moments of clarity were rare—to the point I worried she’d pull a gun on me if I didn’t announce myself and my purpose loudly. She hardly recognized anyone, not Henry’s mom when she came to visit, sometimes not even Quinn’s mom, but she always knew me. That was more burden than blessing, actually.

  Because, I mean, she knew me.

  She had this way of making me open up like I hadn’t since Henry left. All my secrets slipped out like they’d been oiled. She knew how Wyatt died and how close I’d come to joining him. She knew about my mom’s depression and long treatment.

  She knew I worried that if Henry didn’t come home soon my head would explode. And I feared that if he went to Laramie without me, he’d meet a tight-jean-wearing cowgirl. She knew how Quinn felt about me and what that did to my self-esteem. It was juvenile, really, my reaction.

  She listened to me pray before I fed her dinner and, even if she didn’t bow her head or say, “Amen,” she stayed quiet and she watched my mouth move. One time I opened my eyes while I prayed and I caught a look on her face that changed everything for me. I saw the truth she’d tried to hide. Longing. A trust. A belief. She believed. But she was still angry.

  She waited for me every day on her porch, huddled in a blanket in her rocking chair. Her body showed signs of malnutrition now. I knew the signs because I’d watched the videos in health class—the ones that pounded us over the head about anorexia. I hated seeing the sickness in time-lapse photography. Normal to dead in twenty seconds never looked pretty.

  Today, she seemed too weak to stand when I parked in her drive. Neighbors stared from their front windows. I burned with shame for her as I lifted her and helped her inside, out of the freezing temperature. Lately, she seemed to forget that December in Wyoming could actually kill you. These people living twenty feet from her door couldn’t be bothered to walk over and make her go inside?

  It felt like we’d been waiting too long for this “spell” to pass, since well before school’s winter break started. Once I had Jo fed and settled into her chair to watch Wheel of Fortune, I called Jenny and told her I was afraid Jo wasn’t coming back this time.

  “Is there something we could do?” I said. “Vitamin E? Fish Oil? Yoga for the elderly?”

  “A drop in the ocean,” she said. “Her brilliant, beautiful, creative mind is dying, chunks of it at a time.”

  “No,” I insisted. “There’s got to be something that’s proven to reverse neurological damage. More puzzles. Sudoku. I’m going to teach her how to play a new card game.”


  “Didn’t she agree to a show at your mom’s gallery?”

  “Yes, but I pushed her to it. I annoyed her until she finally said yes to shut me up. She doesn’t remember it.”

  “Is it scheduled?” Jenny’s voice had gone soft.

  I hung my head and stared at the worn rug in Jo’s living room. “The Thursday after New Year’s.”

  “Wow,” Jenny said.

  “Yeah,” I whispered because Jo glanced up at me. I moved into the kitchen and leaned against the chipped tile counter. “Which is why I think I’d better tell my mom to pull the plug. She’s told me every day to bring Jo in with works from the last two years. I just couldn’t find the right time to disappoint everyone.”

  “Wait on pulling the plug, okay?” Jenny said. “There is something that can help Jo’s mind. And that is called ‘having something to look forward to’.” Jenny’s voice faded in and out; she was trying to cook dinner while she talked.

  Quinn’s smooth voice rose in the background. He was having a conversation with his sister.

  “Can you sneak into her studio tonight and see what she’s got framed, just sitting around gathering dust?” Jenny said. “And, also, look at the paintings on her bedroom walls. I bet you and I are the only people who’ve laid eyes on some of those. I’m no art critic, but there are a few of hers I can’t stop staring at. That woman’s eyes see things we don’t see.”

  “My mom quotes William Blake all the time—‘The eye altering, alters all,’” I said.

  “I want to meet your mom,” Jenny said. “Hey, do you have a second? Quinn wants to talk to you.”

  Yeah, because the Winter Formal is in less than four weeks and I’ve been avoiding him. “Sure.”

  “Okay, bye, sweetheart. I’ll probably see you tomorrow at Jo’s. I’m bringing her some food to heat up on Christmas Day.” The phone dulled out as it passed hands and Jenny said, “I told you to hold your horses, Quinn.”

  Then a low chuckle and a boy breathing and a squeaking door and, “Hey, Kavanagh, Merry Almost Christmas.” Why did Quinn’s raspy voice have to sound like the front man for a band?