The Glass Harmonica

by Russell Wangersky

  As he read the shorthand notes, the words kept jumping out at him: several reports said “found near Maid of the Mist docking platform,” others had “near the ‘Whirlpool,’ Niagara River” or “in the water intake channel for Sir Adam Beck Hydro Generating Station, Niagara River.” It seemed to Brendan that the police must be just constantly pulling them in, and he couldn’t help but imagine there was a whole grim-faced detail of police boatmen out there on the river, clad in blue rainsuits and carrying long, wicked boathooks, working the misty shoreline below the falls, pulling bodies in over the gunwales day after day after day. “Look, Joe, there’s another one. Better haul him in too.”

  And Brendan resolved then that, no matter what happened, he’d never make a pilgrimage to that falls, not for a wedding or a honeymoon, and certainly not for a memorial service. Not to be part of a solemn group of besuited relatives flicking a hapless “In Memory” wreath out into the water just to watch it slowly drift away, perhaps following the same arc of current as the not-so-dearly departed, perhaps just pulling away towards those intakes all over again.

  You’re not supposed to just lose a brother, Brendan thought, the way he thought it three or four times every single day. At the same time, he couldn’t help but think that losing Larry hadn’t happened all at once, either. And even if you had lost a brother somehow, Brendan thought, you weren’t supposed to repeatedly find yourself punching your way into a police website that tried to identify unnamed and unclaimed bodies.

  You were especially not supposed to be hoping to find your brother in there among the unknown strangers.

  It wasn’t clear-cut and simple, it wasn’t like Larry had gone out hunting one day and by the next he still hadn’t come home and it was time to organize the search party. No, Larry had vanished slowly, like he was moving away, moving deliberately and carefully backwards one step at a time into heavy fog. Thinking about it, Brendan found he couldn’t even put an exact day on when his brother suddenly slipped out of sight. He’d go and reappear, leaving St. John’s but eventually calling from Toronto, for example. After Larry had turned up in Toronto, he’d had his own apartment for a while, and Brendan had even been up to see it once—a one-bedroom flat in a nondescript building next to a downtown park, remarkable only for the number of vagrants who stayed just inside the front door by the mailboxes, soaking up the warmth.

  Later, there hadn’t been an apartment, no telephone number for Brendan to call, but Larry had still sometimes kept in touch, calling collect every now and then from noisy pay phones just exactly when it seemed as if it had been too long since anyone had heard from him. The calls were far apart and short on detail. Sometimes, Larry would say that he was working. Calls from the fruit belt, where Larry had been picking peaches, and once or twice from job sites in Alberta. Most often, though, from Toronto, where Larry would be landscaping or picking up a couple of weeks’ work on a construction site before inevitably being the one fired again.

  Those calls, sometimes rambling, frightened Brendan, who wondered if someday it would be the police on the end of the line, asking if he was a family member and preparing to spill the details of some horrendous event that Larry had fallen into. But there was always a small snatch of the brother he knew just before the call ended, a gentle declination in Larry’s voice, a switch to a softer, quieter, more familiar Larry: “Take care, Bren, and tell Mom not to worry.” There was always just enough, still, of Larry in that distant voice to let Brendan wind back the alarm, to quiet the tremors that the phone calls always set off in his stomach.

  Then even those scattered phone calls stopped, and Brendan could remember the exact night when he’d woken up from a dream where Larry had been one of those shadowy, dirty men you run into on Toronto street corners, asking for change and sleeping under the viaducts. It was like Larry had suddenly become detached from the known Earth, like he was floating in his own particular orbit without the need for any fixed waypoint on the ground.

  After that, Brendan had waited enough time for his concern to feel legitimate, and then he called the Toronto police. They sounded professional, took details, age, height, hair colour, asked about distinguishing features like tattoos and scars, and then offered up the information that Larry Hayden hadn’t been arrested for anything, but little more than that.

  They’d asked if Larry had ever done anything like this before, taking off and not telling anyone, but Brendan kept that answer to himself. If he’d ever been missing, if he’d ever pulled up stakes and just disappeared. They’d asked if he’d ever been convicted of anything in Newfoundland, whether he might have fingerprints on file with the police, and Brendan had said no, even though it had been very close to a lie. Whether Larry had been married or divorced, whether there was anything obvious he might be running from.

  It seemed to Brendan as if it was suddenly very important for the police to find a reason to not be concerned, as if they were looking for just enough information to feel comfortable dismissing Brendan’s call and putting the whole thing safely on the back burner forever.

  And Brendan thought about when Larry had left, about Constable Peter Wright and Constable Reg Dunne coming to the door, his mother bringing the police officers upstairs to Larry and Brendan’s room, standing behind them when they started to ask the boys their questions, and how she had her arms folded across her chest, her mouth a thin, hard line.

  They had never been a close family, even though they’d grown up right on top of each other, just two brothers and Brendan’s parents in the two-storey row house. Brendan and Larry had shared a bedroom—front left bedroom at the top of the stairs, a ten-foot-by-ten-foot room pressed up tight against the Chaulks’ next door, close enough that, if they were quiet and both lay on Brendan’s bed, they could hear Laura Chaulk tearing careful, deliberate verbal strips off her husband in the bedroom.

  But while they might have been closely packed into their room, Larry and Brendan weren’t that close themselves: Brendan moved separately with a pack of neighbourhood kids, a gang ranging up and down McKay Street as if it was their own personal playground. Larry, meanwhile, seemed to haunt the edges, always around but never really part of anything.

  Brendan and Ronnie Collins and the two Chaulk boys, Murray and Twig, could be carefully stealing mail from old Crazyman Carter’s mailbox, and Brendan knew he would be able to turn around at any time and, if he was careful enough, find Larry lurking at the corner or next to a fence, half his face hidden, watching them. Or they’d be running around with Vincent O’Reilly, throwing crabapples from Mrs. Purchase’s tree against the fronts of houses after it got dark, and Larry would somehow always know where they had been and what they had been doing.

  Several times, Brendan remembered wishing that Larry would just die, that his brother would stop dogging his steps, peering at him all the time like some vagabond scrap of conscience, his eyes always hollow and staring, always looking as if there was something strange going on back there in his head, some strange calculation in which Brendan was being measured—and failing—every single time. The only benefit was that whatever calculation, whatever judgment, Larry was making was religiously private: everything went in, but nothing ever seemed to come out.

  Yet.

  Brendan at least had that fleeting safety, and the fear that it might change.

  Everyone in the neighbourhood knew Larry and stayed out of his way, and everyone had something to say about how odd he was—as soon as they were certain he was out of earshot. They weren’t always right about that. Larry could appear from between magazine racks just as Mrs. Butler was telling the drugstore clerk about seeing him down in the rose bush at the end of her yard. Or his head would pop up over the fence just as neighbours were discussing how long it would take before he did something weird enough to put him in the boys’ home.

  Larry would watch everything, big eyes sucking it all in, but it never seemed to slip back out of him. Everyone knew he was peculiar, but they didn’t ever catch him at anything. He
was just Larry—Larry who always knew too much.

  Brendan knew that Larry had been around somewhere when Ronnie killed the cat, knew that Larry knew all about it, even if Brendan couldn’t figure out exactly where his brother had been when it happened. There wasn’t much room between Mr. Carter’s house and the one next door, so Larry would have had to have been at one end or the other.

  Brendan and the Chaulks had all watched, stunned into silence, as Ronnie had smashed the cat’s head against the dark blue clapboard of the side of Mr. Carter’s house, over and over again, long after the cat had stopped making any sound at all. The noise had been horrible: not really meowing at all, more a kind of unnatural screech that you’d imagine should have been coming from metal being scraped hard across metal.

  Brendan felt the loose feeling in his stomach again just remembering the sound, and remembering, he knew, was only a fraction of what the noise had really been like. And Brendan couldn’t help but think that Ronnie made it all look so easy, the short, hard swing, focused and simple, like throwing a baseball, and then precisely and deliberately repeated, as if it were a motion Ronnie was already well familiar with.

  All four of them had been cutting through Mr. Carter’s yard again, a quick heft up and over the fence with strong teenaged arms, and then a quick, quiet rush along the side of the yard until you got to the gap between Mr. Carter’s and Mrs. Harris’s next door. They’d often stop there and reach out to slam a fist against the side of the house, and then run before Mr. Carter could find his way to the door. They’d hear him swearing, hear his progress through the back of the house as if he was forcing his way through piles of rubbish, struggling to get to the door in time to catch them.

  Every time, they’d start right at the back corner, running down between the houses, pushing at each other with their elbows to try to force their way out of the narrow opening ahead, each boy trying to be in the lead.

  Except for that time.

  That’s when Ronnie had stopped to pet Mr. Carter’s cat, not expecting it to arch its back in panic and swipe out a paw and rake its claws straight down the back of Ronnie’s arm.

  They hadn’t expected Ronnie’s reaction either, hadn’t expected him to snap his arm out quick and grab the cat by its neck, his hand crushing into the fur.

  Ronnie was breathing hard when he dropped the lifeless body onto the thin gravel strip next to the house, and Brendan remembered thinking it was like some great force had come along and sucked every single bit of air out of the space between the houses. There was no sound afterwards, except for Ronnie’s breathing, all of the shapes in the darkness sharp-edged, like Brendan’s eyes had learned a new and more effective way to focus.

  “Little bastard scratched me bad,” Ronnie said, twisting his arm so that he could look at the parallel stripes running down from the point of his elbow, parallel scratches that were barely bleeding.

  Murray and Twig were already gone, fading out of sight the way they always seemed to be able to do, fast and so quiet that you could almost imagine they could make themselves disappear, moving together without a single spoken word to co-ordinate their actions. They hadn’t made a sound, not even a whispered, “Jeez, Ronnie,” before stepping backwards and running.

  Then Ronnie had turned towards Brendan, and it was like his eyes had changed completely, as if they had slipped from one person to another in an instant. “It never happened, and you never saw nothing,” Ronnie said, menacing and taking two steps so that his face was inches from Brendan’s. Almost no light left in the failing evening, and the brightest parts of Ronnie were the whites of his staring eyes and his teeth, and it was an expression that stayed with Brendan for months.

  But when the police came to the house, it was Larry they wanted to talk to—Larry, who hadn’t been part of it at all—and Brendan remembered feeling a strange combination of relief and disgust: relief that he wasn’t going to be questioned, disgust that Larry was wrongly going to get the blame. Again.

  The first police officer, Constable Wright, had walked his mother back towards the landing of the stairs, talking to her. The other one, Reg Dunne, was from the neighbourhood, and he leaned in tight to Larry’s face and said something fast and quiet that Brendan couldn’t make out.

  “What did he say?” Brendan asked his brother later.

  Larry had shrugged. “He said they knew it was me, and that the weirdos always screw up eventually. That he’d be waiting to see me in the lock-up, and he said ‘because your mommy’s not always going to be around.’ That they had a special way of dealing with people like me.”

  “You gonna tell?”

  Larry shook his head, and when Brendan had reached up to turn off the light at the head of his bed, he could see Larry in profile lying on his back in bed, his eyes wide open and staring at the ceiling.

  “You could just tell ’em,” Brendan said in the darkness, the words coming out in a long, smooth slide like one exhaled breath. “Wasn’t nothing you did. Was Ronnie. He’s always getting into trouble anyways.”

  Brendan heard his brother move heavily, turning his shoulder down into the mattress, his face towards the wall now. “And what?” Larry said. “An’ have Ronnie come after me instead?”

  Brendan didn’t have an answer for that, so he lay as still as he could and made himself breathe with long, steady breaths, faking sleep. His last thought before he did fall asleep was that he was sure Larry was still awake across from him, still awake and staring at the wall and as rigid as a board.

  Larry would end up leaving St. John’s three years later, nineteen years old and admitting nothing, but knowing that, after what happened to Jillian, there would be a lot more than a few questions and a threat.

  So he just left.

  No one ever said anything to his face, but Brendan knew there was a prevailing feeling in the neighbourhood of “good riddance,” that Larry was different enough to make people uncomfortable and they were glad to see the back of him.

  Brendan’s father only talked about it once. “Nineteen means you can make your own mistakes and your own decisions,” Terry Hayden said, his face in the newspaper the whole time, his cigarette smoking next to him in the ashtray as if helping to make the point. And then he had pushed his chair back and headed to the front door to see if Ted Cooper had come to pick him up for work yet.

  Brendan’s mother continued to change the sheets on Larry’s bed every time she changed Brendan’s, smoothing the blankets flat and squaring the pillow up at the top, but she always did it silently, like a task plucked from memory and done absolutely automatically. She didn’t explain, didn’t even speak, didn’t change her expression, just pulled the fitted sheet on the bottom, shook the top sheet so that it billowed and fell into place, tucked in the blanket and squared the comforter. And then she left, the clean sheets she had taken off the bed held tight against her chest.

  Sometimes, Brendan would stretch out on his brother’s bed and imagine that the entire world could look different from there, imagine that he could look at everything with his brother’s eyes. And then he’d try to think about what Larry’s eyes were seeing, wherever he was.

  And what Larry knew and remembered.

  Brendan saw Mr. Carter’s new cat nosing through the front curtains of the house a few months later, and he stared for a few moments at the animal’s flat, impassive face behind the glass. The cat stared back, looking as unconcerned about Brendan as if it were looking out at a picture designed merely for its own distraction.

  107

  McKay Street

  KEVIN RYAN

  JULY 15, 2006

  IT WAS SIX MONTHS before Brendan would finally give up on Larry.

  Down the street, in his own way, Kevin Ryan was giving up too. He had walked to the house several times, and each time he hadn’t managed to bring his hand up and knock. He knew she was there: he’d been watching from the upstairs window when her car had pulled up, and he had watched the top of her head travel around the back of the car,
open the trunk and take out the flattened cardboard boxes, and then watched her as she headed for the door.

  But when he finally did knock, it took a few minutes before she answered. When she did, Kevin noticed the sheen of sweat across her forehead, her red hair tied tightly back out of her face.

  “Hi, I’m Kevin,” he said.

  “I know. From next door. I’m Mary,” the woman said. She was only a slip of a woman, her wrist where she was holding the door thinner than a child’s, but Kevin thought she made up for her size by being packed with obvious energy—like a small animal quivering with incipient motion even though she wasn’t actually moving.

  “I was just wondering about Mrs. Purchase,” Kevin said. That wasn’t completely true—what Kevin really had been wondering was whether he’d done the right thing at the right time. Whether he should have done something when Mary—because he recognized her now—and the other man were putting Mrs. Purchase in the car.

  “I’m her daughter,” Mary said. “Why don’t you come in? I’ve got a lot to do, and I’d rather talk while I’m working, if that’s okay.”

  Kevin stepped inside, closed the door. At the top of the stairs, he could barely make out the shape of a huge cat staring down at him. To his left was a small living room, and the only word he could think of was overstuffed. A fat grey sofa filled the space under the front window, with chairs on either side so close that their arms touched the sofa. A china cabinet with glass doors—china cups and saucers piled ten deep on the bottom shelf, the upper shelves filled with figurines so close together they looked like passengers on a rush-hour figurine subway. Every flat surface in the room—tables, the mantel—was covered with more knick-knacks, ancient, browning spider ferns reaching out over edges, their runners plunging all the way to the floor as if seeking some futile escape.

  “What I was wondering is whether she’s all right.”

  “Depends on what you mean by all right,” Mary said dryly. “If you mean alive and pretty comfortable, sure. If you mean all right upstairs, that’s something else again.”