The Glass Harmonica

by Russell Wangersky

  Ron was suddenly overwhelmed by his father’s familiar smell and the look on his face, and it was like he was five years old all over again, holding on tight and trusting his father to make it all stop.

  “Can you fix it, Dad?”

  Ron couldn’t believe at first that he was even saying the words, but he couldn’t believe he was crying, either. This won’t happen again, he thought, willing the tears to stop, feeling them running hot down his face.

  Ron could see Tony shaking his head.

  “There are some things you can’t just fix,” Tony said. “Believe me.”

  107

  McKay Street

  KEVIN RYAN

  JULY 14, 2006

  FEBRUARY had turned to summer when Kevin Ryan first saw the yellow rubber gloves. His first impression, there in the dark, though, was neither that they were yellow nor that they were rubber.

  The gloves stood out under the dark blue sky and the orange of the street lights as if they were brilliant white and perfectly smooth: for an instant they seemed almost disembodied, floating there in the air, because the rest of the old woman’s clothing was so dark. She was bent unnaturally, as if her waist was too high, so that she seemed more like a moving pile of clothes than like a person.

  He saw her from a distance, while he was walking home from a downtown bar, one too many beers in him, unable to resist it when the bartender spoke to him, even if it was only to ask, “Another?” He was walking slowly, revelling in the sheer absence of people on the street. Except for the headlights of occasional cars sweeping over him, he felt wonderfully, perfectly alone. Except for her.

  She had a rake, and she was reaching along the gutter, raking the soaking wet and blackened leaves towards her feet. “You’ve got the red car,” she said carefully.

  Kevin Ryan nodded, and then, realizing that he’d be hard to see in the darkness, answered “Yes” as well.

  “I’ve seen you,” she said. “Seen you leaving. You’re up for work early in the morning.”

  “Pretty much,” Kevin said.

  “Here,” the woman said, handing him the rake. “You get them. I can’t reach that far.”

  The handle of the rake was wet and slick with black fragments of rotten leaves. As Kevin started to rake up the overwintered and oily-wet mess, he saw the woman bend down and start to pick up wet handfuls of them, stuffing them into a garbage bag. He thought the only real word he could use to describe her was thick. Every part of her he could see was stout, so that it seemed as if every joint bent only with the application of a steady and determined force. As she moved up and down, back and forth from the gutter, he got small glimpses of her face in the glow from the street light: snapshots, he thought, or perhaps single frames of a movie. The light caught her only in flashes—the tip of her tongue in the corner of her mouth, overlong eyelashes around black, bead-like eyes surrounded by leathery wrinkles—so that it seemed as if she were a collection of constituent bits, more a collage than a face.

  “There are two girls living in your basement,” she said, her face at that point partially turned away from him, the words careful and distinct.

  “Yes. Heather and Claire.”

  “They’re too loud late at night,” the woman said, turning back, her mouth small and disapproving as it shaped the words.

  “And they sleep all day.”

  The woman hefted the garbage bag up onto her shoulder with obvious effort, then pushed it up over the gate blocking the narrow lane between the houses, ignoring the thump as it fell. Kevin had cleaned the narrow space out several times before, a gap between the two houses barely the width of his shoulders. Once, he’d found a discarded fisherman’s sweater, once a clear glass beer bottle, another time one lone and soaking black man’s glove, its fingers bunched into a hollow, useless fist.

  The woman rocked slightly, put a hand against the side of the house as if she might suddenly topple over. Kevin took a step forwards to help and put out a hand, but the woman moved, unexpectedly nimbly, backwards and away from him, two small, quick steps for every single one of his.

  “Be careful,” the woman said, stopping in her open door as if frozen, looking hard at him, a foot extended without even looking down to hold the ginger cat back from coming out through the opening. The front door right there on the sidewalk, two straightforward steps to the inside. He wasn’t sure at first if she was talking to him or about him. Then, “Someone could grab them.”

  “What?”

  “Grab them. Those girls. Chase them. Grab them. Take them. It happens. I’ve seen it before. One day they’re here, and the next they’re gone. You hear the car doors, then the tires. And no one wants to say anything, but you can see it on their faces, what they’ve done.”

  She stepped backwards and slammed the door.

  Kevin heard the bolt slide across, saw the front of the house lit suddenly by the headlights of a passing taxi turning the corner, the briefest moment of the lights, like a flashbulb going off to capture the moment for posterity.

  He found out later that her name was Edythe Purchase because of mixed-up mail. Edythe Purchase, and he guessed that she had worked for the phone company: her name on what he imagined were pension statements, looking at the return addresses on the envelopes. Three of them, bundled in with his mail on the front, a thick postal rubber band wrapped around all of it. He dropped her letters into her mailbox on his way to the car one morning, and felt her eyes on him with every step without even seeing her. She opened her door before he could get behind the wheel.

  “I saw it,” she hissed, and for a moment he thought she meant she had seen him dropping the mail into her box. “I saw it with my own two eyes, but people never believe me. Get far enough from the door and they’ll see you. Might decide to take one of yours next.”

  “But where would they take them?” Kevin looked over the woman’s shoulder, looking for someone else, anyone else, in the narrow hallway. All he saw was the narrow staircase over her left shoulder, balusters climbing upwards, and, in the shadows, another cat, yellow-eyed and baleful.

  “I don’t know. Maybe to be sex slaves. Maybe to be strippers in Montreal.” An undertone then, the words half a single breath breathed out. Mrs. Purchase fixed her eyes on him, coal-black and as expressionless as glass. “A few days in the papers, that’s all. That’s what you get. Then everybody forgets, everybody moves on to something else. You can’t convince them to do anything.” She looked hard at him, daring him to disagree. “You think you know better, but you don’t.”

  Then the door whispered shut.

  A week passed, and Kevin was up early, a cup of coffee in his hand, shivered awake by the rasp of the starlings calling in the tree branches, the racket compounded by the unexpectedly complicated effort of trying to figure out what the sound of the birds actually was.

  Outside, on the back deck, he could look across a range of yards—out over the back to the small triangle where a woman kept her two cats on leashes, off to the right where a riot of raspberry canes was spreading faster every spring, and then over to the other side and into Mrs. Purchase’s tidy yard, where the grass stayed as short as if it had been a misplaced golf green. Mrs. Purchase’s yard, where the rows of tulips faltered only when the legion of geraniums started their scarlet and sharp-smelling march in clay pots brought out from somewhere deep inside the house. A yard where, even this early, Mrs. Purchase was already outside, working among the perennials.

  He called out to her, “Hello, Mrs. Purchase,” the words thrown out like a rope over the shoulder-high, rust-red fence that circled his yard.

  She was out beyond the fence, patrolling the yard with a watering can, dressed in a cream-coloured dress with small burgundy flowers speckled over it. Kevin knew she had to have heard him, and though he even caught her eyes flicking over him, she gave no sign of recognition. Above her, the maple leaves on all the trees, his and hers, had been reduced to leaf skeletons, chewed away by an unexpected summer army of black, hungry caterpilla
rs. At night, the small black pellets of their droppings rattled down steadily on the remaining shreds of leaves, sounding for all the world like a constant and artificial rain.

  Sometimes, she watered plants in the individual terracotta pots—and sometimes, the water arced out of the neck of the watering can straight onto the ground, as if she was watering a flowerpot that only she could see, as if someone had snuck in moments ahead of her and stolen the pots before the curve of silver drops of water could land.

  Later that same evening, when the light was starting to fail and the ragged clouds had all put on pink edging, he saw her again out in her yard, Kevin looking down from the windows up high in his bedroom, and for a moment, in the fading light, he was convinced that she was dancing, circling the grass with a broom in her hands as a partner. Until he saw the cat, the nasty black and white cat with the green eyes, the cat with the red fabric collar and the single silver bell. It was a cat that Kevin knew well: it was the cat that came up on the deck and resolutely sprayed Kevin’s back door, its tail high and eyes blank as it looked over its shoulder, as if it knew exactly what it was doing and didn’t care if Kevin saw it.

  Mrs. Purchase got close to the cat, over and over again, close enough to swing the broom, and every time, the cat moved a few feet away from her, often without even seeming to look at the woman as she swung.

  Kevin opened the window a crack and heard the late robins, their songs roiling out of the maples like syrup. And he heard Mrs. Purchase—small, breathless sentences, sentences bursting out of her, sentences that got shorter and sharper with every hurried stride.

  “Don’t know who sent you,” he heard her say, puffing hard by then. “But I recognize you. Lookin’ in the window at me. Bold as brass.” Her sentences came in little gasps, as if she had to take the time to swallow hard between forcing out each one. It made the short sentences sound round and perfectly formed, like a kind of ordered poetry.

  “Remember my husband Frank?” she said harshly to the cat.

  “He’d still have the restaurant.

  “If it wasn’t for you bastards.

  “He was always on time.

  “Always had the money.

  “But you always wanted more.”

  And she swung again, hard, the broom coming closer than it had any time before. The robins had all stopped singing by then, as if they had gotten involved in the chase and had decided to stop and watch.

  “I saw Keith take ’er. In the truck.

  “I know I did.

  “But the police didn’t want to hear about it.

  “Didn’t want to listen.

  “Said I’d complained too many times before.

  “Thanked me very much.

  “Ignored everything I said.

  “Sent me on my way.

  “But I still know it was him that did it.”

  Mrs. Purchase swung the broom again and the cat moved away with studied nonchalance, more interested in a stumbling long-legged crane fly, which the cat snagged out of the air with one paw.

  It was suddenly cold for a summer evening, the air coming in around the edge of the window in a quickening wave, and there was a hint of woodsmoke in it—hardwood, maybe birch—as if someone in the neighbourhood had shivered once too often in a chilly living room and had decided it was finally time to go ahead and set a fire in the fireplace.

  That night, late, Kevin woke up, the sheets around him soaked with sweat. The green numbers of the clock stared at him, well after three a.m. He hated being alone in the big bed, but he was: Cathy was in Ottawa, at yet another conference dedicated to making the world decidedly unsafe for anyone who would dare to try to cheat an insurance company. Cathy, who was away far more often than she was home, high enough up in the insurance company hierarchy that even the insurance frauds of a whole province weren’t enough to hold her interest.

  He loved his wife, but he knew how calculatingly cold she was too, how quickly she could unravel the most elaborate of compensation lies. She was the worst kind of nightmare for claimants: she was the dry, unforgiving voice on the telephone that everyone must dread hearing, a voice that could make even the legitimately disabled doubt the pith and substance of their injuries. One call and you would already be on the defensive, listening to Cathy’s carefully probing words, the way she tested every single sentence you uttered, like a climber checks his ropes, because his life depends on them. Kevin knew how the claimants felt: even telling the complete truth to Cathy, her eyes fixed on him, could leave him shifting in his socks, his eyes moving away as if trying to escape a lie that he hadn’t even started telling yet.

  Downstairs, the girls should be asleep, he thought. But he didn’t really know anymore. They kept uneven, unframed hours, the girls did, both on the edge of nineteen now, his daughter Heather and her best friend, and sometimes it would be five or six o’clock in the morning before he half heard the door close behind them and he could let himself finally fall off into a complete sleep. By then, hours of sleep had been wasted already, wasted in tossing and rolling, sliding an arm under the pillow and pulling it out again, listening for the dry hiss of the water pipes that would tell him they had to be home, because someone had flushed a toilet or cracked open a faucet somewhere else in the house.

  They’d worked out a simple code he could depend on if he was really worried: if the girls were home and sleeping, the door into their basement room would be closed; if they were out, they’d leave the door ajar. It was an agreement that was never formally made, never even talked about, only assumed—but it worked through complete constancy. To check, he didn’t even have to turn the lights on—just make his way down the long staircase in the black midnight, make the turn to the top of the basement stairs, bend at the waist and look.

  This time he went farther, just to be completely sure.

  Downstairs, the door was open; peering inside, he saw the bedclothes thrown back, the lights off, and knew that neither of the girls was home. And Kevin knew the simplest thing to do was just to try to suspend his worry and go back to sleep. To hope, maybe trust, that they would be back in the morning, and then they actually would be—exhausted, staggering, maybe even hungover—but safely home and then down the stairs to bed.

  But in the darkness of the stairs, climbing up, he couldn’t help hearing Mrs. Purchase’s words again.

  “Might take one of yours next.”

  That’s foolish, he thought. Just another night out—they didn’t even have the car. At least, he didn’t think they had the car.

  They’re together, walking back from somewhere, he thought. Probably getting coffee at one of the all-night places, winding down from dancing and poker-faced with exhaustion.

  “Might take one of yours next. Sex slaves. Montreal.”

  He could only imagine trying to explain it all to Cathy.

  “But they’re supposed to be in college,” she’d say.

  Cathy was big on the order of things, on personal responsibility and making sure that responsibility was imposed if it wasn’t properly assumed. He could hear the words already. “But you know it’s a weeknight. They’re barely nineteen. What were you thinking? How did it all get this far?” Then, as if prompted by Mrs. Purchase: “Don’t you know what strip clubs are like?”

  And to make matters worse, he’d have to admit to her that he did, that he’d been to the clubs, to see the peelers, as the guys at work called them, especially when he was on the road alone in Toronto or Montreal. There would be no way to lie, no way that he could keep his eyes from dodging, and he knew she’d catch it at once.

  He remembered the clubs too well. The anonymity of them—no one to suddenly walk up and say, “Hey Kevin, whatcha doin’ here?” as if that wasn’t immediately obvious.

  In the big clubs, it seemed like there were hundreds of them. Maybe it was the lights and mirrors, but it was like being surrounded by young, soft bodies with powdery skin that was so smooth and fine that it seemed to trap the dim light. It was hard to imagine a
nyone’s skin could ever be that taut, he’d think. That taut, that perfect, and that smooth. And it was easy to imagine, easy to believe, that some of them were fifteen or sixteen, depending on shabby and smudged fake driver’s licences to get them in the door and onto the ratty stage. Easy enough to imagine them getting off buses in the downtown of some big city, fresh from Quispamsis or Gaspereaux or Canso, with eager little faces, still soft and unformed, keen only to get away from whatever sort of hell they believed themselves to be in.

  After a couple of weeks, they all had the same bored eyes, the same indifferent way of studying the ceiling tiles. The road from independence to resignation was a short one, Kevin thought. He’d pay them for lap dances and then talk instead, and he knew that it meant they’d single him out to each other as unusual and strange—perhaps even dangerous.

  The clubs were never good places to be singled out as different. It was better just to pay for the overpriced beer and blend in.

  Once, Kevin spent an hour talking to an Eastern European girl with ungodly huge breasts, uneven teeth and a lisp, until she sized him up and dismissed him gently. “You go home now,” she said, putting the twenty dollars he handed her into the small purse that all the girls carried—no room for pockets, dancing nude—and snapping the clasp shut. “You go home to wife and kids.” She put a cold hand on his cheek for a moment then, and he saw a row of thin white scars on the inside of her wrist.

  In the cab, he tried to forget everything about her. It worked, for a while, except that her voice and the inside of her left wrist kept swimming back into his memory unbidden. And he wondered just what it was that she was going home to, seeing the thin white parallel lines like empty sheet music, waiting for their defining notes.

  Out on the street in front of Kevin’s empty house, he heard the engine of a heavy truck rev up, heard the bite of the tires on the pavement as the driver popped the clutch. From the sound of the tires, Kevin could imagine that he was watching the back of the truck fishtail slightly from side to side, the bright red gems of the tail lights shrinking to small glass beads as the truck pulled quickly away.