The Glass Harmonica

by Russell Wangersky

  There was stuff like that all over the workshop, he thought. Above the workbench there was the series of long cardboard Velveeta cheese boxes, the kind they hadn’t made for years, still stacked up one on top of the other. There were enough cheese boxes there for Vincent to remember just how many grilled cheese sandwiches he’d eaten growing up, and each and every box had something about the contents written on it in black Magic Marker. His father’s handwriting. Keith O’Reilly might be dead, but the writing looked alive, craggy and sharp and running up in unexpected peaks as if it had lost control of its temper travelling the rugged uphill grade.

  In the corner there was still the old space heater, even though that hadn’t worked since God knew when. And Christ, Vincent thought, there was enough crap in the place to fill the back of a pickup truck four times over, and there would still be more left to haul away. And all of it was precisely what he expected and, at the same time, none of it was even close to being the way he had thought it would be.

  He’d heard what had happened in a curious kind of past tense, knowing the end of the story at the very beginning and then being told the rest over the phone by a police officer who sounded like he was reading from someone else’s notes. The words came in bunches, in short, fractured sentences, as if the person who wrote them hadn’t been able to keep up with the way they’d been spoken. The quiet man on the other end of the telephone sounded almost bored.

  Vincent found out more from the neighbours when he got home.

  A young woman from slightly down the road and across the street, hardly more than a girl, really, had seen Keith O’Reilly out in the small front yard early in the morning, stretched out and lying flat on his stomach in his dark blue overalls with the dockyard logo still centred directly between his shoulder blades. He’d been face down on the gravel path next to the wet grass, his arms stretched out in front of him as if he were attempting a shallow dive.

  The girl told the police her name was Claire, that she couldn’t decide if he’d just fallen down or if he had been lying there overnight, so she’d hurried over, hoping she’d wind up being wrong and embarrassed and that he was just working on something low down in the narrow front garden. She told them she realized quickly that she was too late to help, individual, unnecessary details spilling out of her like water and running right over the officers—like the fact there was a can of white gloss enamel open next to him on the walkway but that the brush in his hand had settled down into the dirt instead of finishing the bottom of the trim. Things that didn’t mean anything but that pulled the story out of her in manageable order, so the officers listened and let their pencils hover in place until she got to the details that really mattered, at least as far as police reports were concerned: time, place and then time again.

  When the paramedics got there and rolled him over, she said to the police, she couldn’t help but notice that the first thing they did was to brush the loose gravel away from where it had stuck on his face. Much later, she told her sister the sight of the small, white, bloodless pockmarks where the gravel had lodged stayed with her for months. She told the police that the paramedics walked to the back of the ambulance to get the stretcher, and that they walked slowly. Somehow that said everything to Claire that she would need to know.

  The police officer told Vincent they weren’t really sure just when it was that his mother had died, just that she’d been in the chair and the television had been on when they’d gone in to tell her. It was as if she had just turned off, like a light bulb blowing, a bright and instantaneous flash going unnoticed in an otherwise empty room. The police officer didn’t put it exactly like that, but that was the way it all held together in Vincent’s head—his mother travelling from alive to dead in an instant, her filament failing with one last peaking spark.

  Vincent managed to keep himself from asking the police officer whether The Price Is Right had still been on when they found her or if Bob Barker had finally left the building for good. But he had wanted to.

  Out in the workshop on the side of the house, Vincent went back and forth next to the workbench, occasionally reaching out to touch individual, familiar things: the olive grey jacket that hung on a nail near the door to the kitchen; the big old radio that used to get warm to the touch when it was on for more than half an hour.

  A pair of cotton gardening gloves that used to be white, crumpled together stiffly on the workbench, coated with spruce pitch and curled as if there were still hands there inside them. There was a case with a dozen beer bottles, Old Stock, most of them empty but three with their caps still in place, as if his father was saving them for later, as if he still had it in mind to come back and finish them off. Six cigarettes in a crumpled package, tucked up within reach on a shelf even though his father had told Vincent he’d given them up years before.

  On the shelves, the scores of boxes with nuts and bolts, and one with more hooks and eyes than anyone would ever need. Vincent found himself taking the boxes down one at a time and opening them, and it was almost like Christmastime, because he wasn’t fully sure what to expect inside—the notes on the front made perfect sense to only one person, and he wasn’t there to explain it anymore.

  Every now and then, Vincent held one of the boxes a few inches above the workbench and then let it drop, waiting for the sharp snap of it to see if his father’s trick would work, to see if, as soon as he heard the sound, Vincent could be sure about what was inside the box as well.

  Nails and screws were constants in the collection, like underwear and socks in a dresser drawer. They were ranged and regular in their different sizes, but there were also barrel fuses and black plastic fuse seats; big triangular barn-door hinges that looked as if they would be capable of holding whatever weight could be thrown their way; small coils of lead solder and copper wire, able to create a necessary connection between two very different points.

  And after that, there were other, more esoteric pieces that defied all description. Like the four mercury switches, carefully taken out of thermostats somewhere and nested there in small wrapped bundles of Kleenex, like eggs. Lined up in a row, like the four of them were supposed to mean something. And Vincent couldn’t help but think that, somewhere, there were four thermostats unable to contact their furnace, shells of themselves rendered mute and incapable of explaining what it was their personal duty to explain: that they were meant to topple over and complete the circuit with that familiar white-blue spark. Their sole purpose now forever unfulfilled.

  Outside, the afternoon gave way to the beginnings of early evening, and Vincent was suddenly aware of the light changing above the tattered strip of cloth that acted as a curtain.

  Faith hadn’t come with him on the long, hopscotched flight from Victoria, talking to him instead about her job and how one of them had to keep some money coming in, explaining it all with her hands up busy around her face, waving the way they did when she was using them to try to distract you from the fact that she didn’t really have a point.

  He’d already been packing his clothes in the small bedroom by then, getting ready for the skip and jump of Victoria–Calgary–Toronto–Halifax– St. John’s, the only flights available and none of them cheap. And he wondered distractedly just when in their relationship she’d started throwing her hands up like that, and whether it would ever be the kind of thing that eventually grated on you enough that you asked for your apartment key back. Feeling at the same time like, by even thinking it, he was betraying her right then. It was a feeling that rang with a ping as sharp as a penny dropped on sheet metal.

  Because Faith, and even Victoria, had been a haven.

  When Vincent had left St. John’s in the first place, it hadn’t been the kind of “don’t want to leave but I have to work” thing everyone else talked about before going. It hadn’t been that way for him at all. So many of them were people forced by economics to cut and run, to set down shallow roots somewhere else, but somewhere else they were always insisting could never be home. For Vincent, i
t had been a pell-mell flight to away, a desperate need to be anywhere else—at least to be far enough away that he couldn’t feel either his mother’s or his father’s hand reach out and touch his shoulder. He knew that, for some people, family and friends were the kind of anchor that kept everything making sense. For him, they were the kind of anchor that felt like they were holding him down, his face completely underwater and drowning.

  Back then, leaving was critical. It was a time when it was simpler being away, a time when, in fact, everything had been simpler. His parents were safe in the familiar walls of their home, close enough to be reached with an occasional long-distance telephone call, but far enough away that they couldn’t look across McKay Street and see just what it was he was up to, and whom he was up to it with. They couldn’t ask about Faith Monahan or question him carefully about “who her people are,” nor would they know every sin that the entire Monahan family might have been responsible for, and feel they had to tell him those sins, too. Faith wouldn’t have to go through that cat-and-mouse game that always ended with judge, jury and executioner.

  He’d brought a girlfriend home once to meet them, a girl from the neighbourhood named Jillian George, only to be told after he’d come back from walking her home that “no one in that family has ever amounted to anything” and that he really should be setting his sights higher. And that, as his mother had put it, if they had to “grope each other like animals in an alleyway,” they might have at least not done it up against the side of Mrs. Purchase’s house where their behaviour would become a topic of conversation for the entire street.

  Once Vincent was in Victoria, he knew they couldn’t keep asking him every single morning what he thought he was going to make of his life, where he thought he would end up or why he hadn’t wound up in a solid career. His mother said she didn’t understand why he hadn’t thought about staying in school and becoming an architect or a lawyer. His father said that even trying to get on full-time at the dockyard for a while would be better than just shifting from menial job to menial job.

  “And I still know a few guys down there, even a supervisor or two,” his father had said. “I can put in a word . . .”

  But Vincent didn’t want anyone putting in a word.

  He just needed to put a safe distance between himself and anyone he knew—and he couldn’t even explain why, any more than he could explain that meeting up with old high school buddies all over again held no more magic for him than meeting long-forgotten aunts and uncles. A recognized but distant face, a slight, emotionless connection, the politeness of near strangers—he didn’t see the point.

  He had started with a Victoria lawn company on the very first day he’d gotten to British Columbia, amazed that it was only May and everything was already in full bloom. Out in the amazing rich green, there were farmers paying workers minimum wage just to show up and pull the renegade daffodil bulbs from their fields, bulbs that just seemed to be waiting to branch out in every direction. It was all-day, bent-back work, but it was also out in the warm air and the occasional sun, the temperature and wind unthreatening in a way that seemed completely foreign to Vincent. He would look up and see big trees fountaining down green all around him, and it was like he’d woken up and found himself transported to a sort of tamed rainforest.

  For Vincent’s mother, bulbs had been something you had to steward through the winter, protecting them carefully in your garden so that they could poke up tentative in the spring, desperate and spindly, something you had to nurture instead of treat like a weed.

  But in Victoria, it turned out, lots of things were different. Like Faith.

  Faith worked in the lawn company’s front office, and she’d filled in the forms for him when he had started work. She was small and quiet, with a face he could only describe as sweet at first. Sweet, because she said so little that you almost missed her in the office. She was always sitting when he saw her, her legs invisible under a steel desk that must have dated from the 1950s.

  And invisibility was a state Faith would have understood completely—because she herself felt invisible. Everyone went by her as they came into the office, and everybody passed by her again on the way out, and except for the occasional cast-off words in her direction, she wasn’t really sure if they were talking to her at all. It was, she thought, an extension of high school, where everything seemed to go by in front of her but without touching her. Not experiencing anything as much as constantly observing it from the outside. And then there was Vincent—Vincent who always talked to her, always looked right at her, straight into her eyes, and she thought it meant more than it did. Months after they became a couple, she had told him about that, and he had laughed.

  “Everyone thinks Newfoundlanders are friendly because we look right at your eyes and always say something: ‘How about the weather,’ ‘There’s rain coming,’ something like that,” he said. “But it doesn’t mean we like you—it really only means we’re being polite.”

  But he did like her after all. Weeks went by and she had put up with his puns, when he called her Faith-full because she’d eaten a doughnut from the box in the office kitchenette, or Faith-less when she called in sick.

  “You’re one of the lucky ones,” she told him bluntly after they spent their first night together. “People spend years hoping to someday have Faith.”

  Sometimes he felt he had done exactly that, that he had spent years hoping to have some faith, and he couldn’t believe how seamless it all felt when they started spending nights, and then days, together in his small apartment.

  “Faith, Hope, Charity, Chastity,” he’d call out to her from the bedroom in the first few months when he was trying to get her to come back to bed, teasing that she was so slow that she probably should have been Chastity after all.

  “How about we stick with Hope?” she’d call back, making coffee in the small kitchen. “Because at least then you’d have a Hope.”

  And they’d laugh and get coiled up in the sheets and fall asleep wound around each other until the sun finally woke them up, and they ended up being late for work together, too.

  That had stayed with him for days—the thought about having a hope, maybe just for a clean, straightforward future—winding around in his head while he shovelled dark mulch and peat in and around flower beds.

  That hope seemed far away back in St. John’s. Roaming in his parents’ bedroom, picking things up one at a time and setting them down as if he were trying to find something hidden among them, Vincent found the old jewellery box on top of the dresser, the one that played “Für Elise” when it was opened. As soon as the song started, it was painfully familiar because two of the small metal tangs had been broken off the tinny little harp for years, so the music played with two scattered missing notes, like the musician had broken off a crucial mental tooth and simply left a hole behind that you were supposed to fill in by yourself from memory.

  When Vincent looked inside the box, there was the same jewellery that had always been there. Small-time, really, Vincent thought, but he could picture each piece around either his mother’s arms or her neck, and he could imagine it too, in his father’s blunt-fingered hands, big, stubby hands that turned the gold chains and bracelets over and over curiously, as if they were impossibly difficult to make and as if some clue about their manufacture was hidden away in them somewhere, a clue that was always on the side away from his touch.

  A slim blue diary lay flat on the bottom, down underneath all of the jewellery, with a single rubber band wrapped tight around it, a pen tucked in neat under the garter of that band. Alone in the bedroom, Vincent kept looking over his shoulder, expecting to hear someone else moving around in the house, or at least something as simple as a dry, thrown-away cough. He felt like he’d get caught peeking into his mother’s private belongings, even though there was no one left to catch him at anything. And then he wondered what was supposed to happen to old, mostly cheap jewellery when its owner dies, anyway. Maybe someone would want to buy it, he
thought, but selling it seemed somehow disrespectful. At the same time, it wasn’t the sort of thing he could see keeping: Faith wouldn’t want it, and probably no one else would either. Away from where it belonged—and whom it belonged with—it was as if its value, its meaning, would be immediately diminished.

  For a fleeting moment he thought about getting the round-nosed shovel from the workshop and digging a hole in the backyard, taking the jewellery out and burying it all so that it would either be lost forever or else be found by someone new someday, someone for whom it would be a preciously discovered and brand new treasure. Like the treasure it had been to his mother, he thought, every single time his father had come home and gruffly pushed another store-wrapped and -bowed box towards her.

  Vincent bundled all of the jewellery up in a worn dishcloth from the hallway linen closet and stuffed it into a pocket of his suitcase, the gold chains all tangled into the bracelets, charms that had been like small totems catching at the pilled fabric of the cloth, thinking that Faith would know what to do with it. Then he stopped, took it out again and dumped all of it back into the jewellery box, covering the diary with chains and necklaces. His worry, not hers.

  On top, the opal brooch that his mother had opened and looked at, and then she’d said, “Keith, don’t you know that opals are bad luck?” There was the heavy, old-fashioned charm bracelet with no room left for new charms—each piece, now, with no one who knew its complete story.

  “Für Elise” stopped with a snap, as it always had, the moment the jewellery box lid closed. Vincent put the box on the kitchen counter and walked through the door into the workshop, his decision made, looking for the shovel.

  As he looked around the small workshop, the thought hit him: he was a homeowner, even if it was not the way he’d ever imagined it would happen. Whenever he thought about the house when he’d been in Victoria—and that hadn’t been often, he had to admit—the house had his parents set firmly, irritatingly and constantly inside, like it was a clock and they were part of the necessary workings. After memorial services and funerals and everything else, he thought he should be able to get past that idea, that he should be able to see that thick line between life and death and recognize that things had changed. That the house went on without them, two-by-fours and plaster and glass and shingles and little else.