The Glass Harmonica

by Russell Wangersky

  Mary walked into the kitchen and Kevin followed. He could see that she was taking things out of the kitchen cupboards and packing them up. The kitchen was just as overstuffed, as if a giant plant had taken root in the house and quickly outgrown its original pot. The counter was packed with utensils poking up out of containers, and a row of tubs labelled Sugar and Flour with masking tape covering the back half of the counters. Mary had one drawer open and was filling the box with a variety of strange and foreign kitchen equipment: what looked like a wire harp designed to slice eggs, a set of tongs with great wide curves. Mary caught him looking.

  “Jam tongs,” she said. “They’re for lifting the bottles out of boiling water when you’ve sterilized them.” She smiled. “Need anything? Help yourself. Lords knows she had enough of everything. When I did the bathroom and the hall closet, I found twenty-five pairs of tweezers and at least as many pairs of nail scissors. It’s like, when she couldn’t find something, she just went out and got more.” Mary shook her head. “I’ve been taking stuff out of here for days, and I don’t know where it’s all going. My basement for now, a car trunk full of boxes at a time. Ever done this? Every time you throw something away, you feel like some kind of family traitor. But I don’t see my brothers here, so they can put up with it. If they’ve got a problem, they can damn well come and do some of the work.”

  Kevin must have had a stricken expression on his face, because Mary looked at him and stopped, saying, “Sorry—you probably don’t need my whole family history here. But it’s so hard not to tell you when there’s so much to do and so few hands to do it.”

  Mary looked around the room and at the boxes open on the floor. To Kevin, the boxes had an air of futility, as if things were being gathered up with no clear plan beyond simple motion—things put in boxes because something had to be done.

  “It just never ends. I’ve got to get the place ready to sell in a couple of weeks, and I don’t know how that’s going to be possible,” Mary said. “There’s all the sorting of what to keep and what to get rid of, all of the things that were important to Mom and probably don’t mean anything to anyone else.

  “It’s not like she’ll know. It’s not like Mom will be coming back here or anything. There’s something serious wrong in her head, and there probably has been for a while. Alzheimer’s, maybe, a tumour—they’re trying to find out. Things that happened, she doesn’t always remember too well. Things that didn’t happen, well, she remembers them just fine. And she’ll argue with you about them until she’s blue in the face.”

  All of the cupboard doors were open, and for Kevin it was disturbingly like the old woman’s diary was open there in front of him: orange pekoe tea, oatmeal every morning, a more expensive brand of shortbread cookies that said “I’m an indulgence, but at your age you deserve it.”

  “I should have done this a long time ago. I should have come in and had a really hard look at this place before now. She could have killed you, you know.”

  “What?”

  Mary picked up a wooden spatula from a container next to the stove. “Everything’s fine, right? A little old lady just minding her own business,” she said. “Wrong.” She turned the spatula around so that Kevin could see the pattern of the stove burner charred deep into the back. “That’s just the start. She had the fire department here ten times a month, but I bet they never saw the electric kettle that she tried to heat up on the back burner of the stove. The whole base of the kettle was melted into one big black mass on the burner. But she’s complaining about the wires buzzing in the walls.”

  Kevin noticed that Mary wasn’t packing as much as simply dropping things into the open boxes. He felt like he should help, like he should start pulling open drawers and emptying them. Like it would be all right to simply slide the drawers out and turn them over, dumping everything at once into boxes.

  “I’m a nurse,” Mary said. “I should have caught on to all of this a lot sooner. You’re supposed to watch for things like ‘acuity,’ for whether patients seem disconnected from reality or their surroundings. But she’s always been a little like that, and there was no point where I could say she clearly crossed the line. I’ve come to see her and found burners on and the smoke detector going off, and I’m sure now I wasn’t the only one, but she’s always been able to convince me that it was just a one-time accident.” Mary smiled for a moment. “You just kind of figure she’s safe in here, doing her own thing, getting by. Marking time. Like always. But I suppose you can only really do that for so long.

  “You’re lucky she wasn’t a smoker, you know. You would have all been dead in your beds. She would have left lit smokes all over the place, a couple of puffs before putting them down and then forgetting about them completely. And you know that this whole row of houses has to be as dry as a bone, just looking for a spark.”

  Kevin looked around the small kitchen, at the dated cabinets with the brass knobs worn away to their silver cores, at the ancient stove and fridge. Mary caught his eye, and when she spoke again, her voice was softer.

  “You can’t really judge the place by the way things are now. She used to have a real pride in this house, but she’s been on autopilot for years. It’s like one morning she woke up and decided the world had changed—that nothing was fair anymore and that there wasn’t a lot that she could trust.”

  “Was that when your father was kidnapped?” Kevin asked.

  “Kidnapped. Yeah, right. Like I said, she has an interesting grasp on the way things are supposed to have happened. Truth is, she doesn’t have much of a grasp on anything anymore.”

  “I could give you a hand,” Kevin said. “I don’t have much to do anyway. The girls are out somewhere and Cathy won’t be back from Montreal for another five days at least. I’ve never minded a bit of hard work, and you shouldn’t have to do this all alone.”

  When he said it, Mary held her face funny for a moment, and then her expression simply started to crumble. She had an egg beater in one hand, a steel potato masher in the other. She dropped them both into an open box with a clatter.

  “She was just supposed to go on gardening. Just working in the yard quietly and not really hurting anyone,” Mary said quietly. “She wasn’t supposed to get sick or have to go into a home. She was supposed to be here for years yet.”

  And then Mary was crying in Kevin’s arms and he couldn’t even say how it had happened. Then, he was sure he heard a distinctive voice with an Eastern European accent, heard it as clearly as if the woman speaking the words were right there in the room:“You go home now—you go home to wife and kids.”

  He knew that it was the time to make excuses and a dignified exit. Except this time, Kevin stayed right where he was. He knew it must be how the big mistakes sometimes started.

  But he stayed anyway.

  32

  McKay Street

  KEITH O’REILLY

  MARCH 15, 1980

  TWENTY-SIX YEARS earlier, Keith O’Reilly was still in his forties. And desperate.

  “It’s in the paper.”

  Keith said the words simply, the two of them in the truck, heading down the steep hill at Leslie Street, and it was like the words had just emerged on his lips and had then accidentally fallen straight out into the air. The words hung, like they could get caught in the cold air in the cab and hover there, waiting for something to crash into them and break them into pieces.

  Slush on the road, splashing up underneath the quarter panels on the truck, heavy and spattering. A clear day, the sun out, the temperature just the other side of melt, and the snowbanks were receding. It was still too early to start thinking about spring—too much disappointment in a St. John’s March. There would be snow again, but it would at least be the heavy, wet, clinging spring snow, the kind that tires ride up over and press down into hard white ice, the kind that doesn’t last as long with the wind turning warmer.

  “Whatcha mean?”

  “There’s a story in the paper. Today. About the girl.”
r />   Glenn frowned, but his eyes didn’t leave the road. Every time they passed a driveway, there was wet snow thrown out onto the road by someone clearing a large path to their door, and every time, Glenn’s hands seemed to flex tighter on the steering wheel as the front wheels thunked through it. Then the back of the truck would shake over it as well.

  “What’d it say?”

  “That she came down here from Labrador, that she was working at the Dominion on the cash and then she didn’t show up for work Thursday. And that now she’s missing, and that no one’s seen her. That she was nineteen years old, Glenn. Nineteen fucking years old.”

  Glenn still didn’t look away from the road, but Keith could see his mouth working slowly, could see it in the muscles of his cheeks, more like Glenn was chewing over a thought than anything else.

  “That’s what they got? That she didn’t show up for work? Doesn’t seem like a hell of a lot.”

  “The police are asking if anyone saw her getting into a vehicle, so they’ve got something, don’t they?” Keith said.

  “That’s the question they ask about anyone—and since no one’s been saying anything, I guess so far nobody saw anything,” Glenn said. He looked over at Keith: the other man was looking out the side window of the truck, fidgeting. Then Glenn said, “C’mon, Keith, think about it. After all, it’s not like anyone’s really going to be looking for her, is it? They’ll go through the motions for a while, then more important things will come along. So stop worrying.”

  The truck eased down the long hill towards the harbour, slowed for the traffic lights and the sudden left turn, and when they got to the dockyard gates, Keith looked up, almost frightened by the sight of the huge fishing trawler looming down at them from up on the blocks, a big Latvian factory-freezer hunched up there and waiting for the workers to come back.

  There was always an otherworldliness about the dockyard for Keith, the way the big ships were up on shore like they’d been tossed aground by massive waves that had themselves pulled back and disappeared, leaving everything behind them in the wrong place. The ships looked too tall and heavy to float properly, great slab-sided metal boxes that really should sink like stones, more like fortresses than vessels. Each one different, each one with its own particular problems, each one designed with a specific purpose by a marine engineer whom no one had ever heard of.

  They’d had to bring the exterminators in on the Latvian ship first.

  The Novlyov had been crawling with armies of rats and roaches, and a whole shift of dockworkers had flat-out refused to go down below and start work on the propeller shaft until the rats were dealt with—the propeller shaft and its channel low down in the bottom of the boat, dark and greasy and the kind of place where the rats could hide by the dozens.

  The propeller shaft had bent as the huge vessel had slowed enough to accidentally let its own trawl lines slide back over the prop, the trawl wires binding tight and twisting the shaft out of alignment. Even after the crew had managed to unwind the trawl cables from the propeller, the slight bend in the shaft had been enough to make the whole ship hum with an even, regular vibration every time its crew tried to bring it up to a reasonable speed. No speed, no trawling. And no trawling, no fish, so the captain had reluctantly made port to have the repairs dealt with.

  Not without complaint, though. The captain had complained about the cost of the exterminators, and had complained even more when the yard foreman told him he’d have to take the whole crew off the vessel until the work was done. The exterminator’s vent covers were coming off as Glenn drove towards the gate, the vessel’s crew bunched up next to the tool shed with their bundles of clothes, waiting to go back on board. Some of them had found their way out to the city dump and had spent their time digging up and packing their pockets and clothes with dozens of cans of thrown-away tinned peaches, all of the cans well past their expiry dates and buried at the dump by a food wholesaler. Later, the peaches would be the cause of scores of cases of on-board diarrhea and, finally, the source of a better batch of homemade alcohol than anything the prisoners had been successfully making in the St. John’s penitentiary.

  Glenn stared at the exterminators beetling over the deck in their white suits, taking the plastic wrap off, dropping it over the sides of the ship like glassy parachutes, where it blew around on small gusts of wind while other members of the extermination crew tried to gather it up before it blew into the harbour and out of reach.

  “Can’t tell you how much that fumigation stuff stinks,” Glenn said. “Gets in your nose and won’t come out. Sour as anything. Like tin on your tongue, only worse. But at least it meant I had the place all to myself. Made me think when I was lighting the torch, though—make a spark and take the chance of blowing the decks right off.” Then Glenn smiled, his mind moving quickly to other things. “Betcha they try the water trick. It looks like their style.”

  Occasionally, vessels from Soviet republics, short on hard currency, would have the crew sneak out in the middle of the night just before the vessel was to leave dry dock and fill the potable water tanks from the fire hydrants. It was free water, something they’d have to pay for once they were docked wharfside, and it often made the vessels so heavy the D9 pusher couldn’t shove them out of the dry dock and back into the water. Then the foreman would complain about the weight and the captain would deny everything and there’d be a stalemate, the vessel building up day charges, all work stopped dead, until finally someone relented and drained enough of the water out of the tanks so that the ship could finally be shifted.

  “If they only took half their tanks, we could just shove them out, no problem,” Glenn said. “You’d know it if you were driving the dozer, you’d feel the weight of it and all, but no one would say nothing. But everybody’s got to be greedy. Everyone’s got to go whole hog, have more than their fair share, take two handfuls of everything every single time. That’s life.”

  Keith didn’t say anything for a moment.

  When they reached the gatehouse, Glenn’s green pickup was waved straight through. He pulled into the employee parking, stopping the truck. Glenn pulled the keys out of the ignition, tossed them up in the air and caught them again. Then he reached across with the keys in his open palm, held them in front of Keith and smiled wickedly.

  “Want to borrow the truck?” he said. “Or have you gotten that out of your system by now?”

  Keith didn’t answer, and he made no effort to get out either, his arms still and heavy and hanging at his sides. “Where did you . . .” he started, but Glenn cut him off quickly.

  “There’s stuff you don’t really want to know, so just don’t ask,” Glenn said. “There are a lot of places in a ship that get closed off and then never get opened up again, Keith. You know that. Means there are a heckuva lot of places where no one’s ever going to look. A boat looks pretty little out there all alone on the ocean, but it’s pretty damn big inside, full of nooks and crannies.”

  Keith still didn’t move, his hands now in his lap, fingers moving against each other. “You gotta understand. It wasn’t . . . She . . .” Keith said, and then stopped. “Bold as brass, she was. Right there on McKay. I just stopped to ask if she was looking for someone and she climbed right into the truck. Like she knew the game.” He looked down at his hands. “We drove down here. I brought her under the overpass there where it’s good and dark, backed in up behind the pillars. You know, out of the way where no one’s going to see you. Things got carried away. I was telling her what I wanted and she just went crazy. I thought we had a deal, I thought we were going to do it right there, and then she said she wasn’t like that, and she was trying to get out of the truck, and then she was out and running.”

  He stopped talking, looking down at his hands in his lap, looking at them as if they belonged to someone else. He turned his hands palms up, looking at the legacy of scars from cuts and marks that cut across the pads of his fingers and the heels of both his hands. Work scars.

  Glenn shoved him w
ith his shoulder, trying to get his attention. With that, Keith started talking all over again. “I just wanted to talk to her, to try and calm her down. I got past her and then put it in reverse, tried to cut her off just so we could talk. It’s so fucking hard to see anything backing up with that big camper top on there, and I caught her with the bumper, drove the truck and her right up against a telephone pole. Didn’t even feel it until I hit the pole, too. And it was over like that. I got out to see if there was anything I could do, but . . .” Keith’s voice trailed off. “I was on Water Street then, lights on up and down the street, like there were people awake everywhere. I mean, anyone could have come out and they would have seen it all.

  “You and your damned broken mirrors,” he said. “You can’t see anything in that piece of junk. It shouldn’t even be on the road.”

  Glenn’s voice went hard. “So you’re saying it’s my fault now? Somehow it’s all my fault for not fixing a mirror I never use anyway? It’s my fault, for lending you the truck when you asked me for it?”

  Keith sighed heavily, slumped down against the door, the vinyl hard and slick in the cold. “No. That’s not—”

  But Glenn cut him off. “You call me, you tell me you’ve got a problem, and I come and help, no questions asked. Then there’s a dead body in the back of my truck—a dead girl—and you’re a mess, you can’t even tell me what happened till now, and I take care of it for you. All of it. And it’s my fault?”

  “No, no,” Keith said. “I didn’t mean that. It’s just that, well, someone’s going to be asking questions, and eventually someone will say they saw something . . .”

  “Well, if anyone asks about any of it—and they won’t, you can be certain they won’t—but if they do, you just say that you were with me,” Glenn said. “And I’ll tell them that we were together, that we were downtown having a couple of beers, and we walked back up to your place together. Simple as that. ‘Truck in the driveway all night long, officer. Someone must be mistaken, officer. ’And forget about it, Keith. You can just owe me. For all of it.”