The Glass Harmonica

by Russell Wangersky

  But Tony had been unwilling to listen. “The boy’s like anyone else,” he said. “He’s not going to take anything your father says to heart.” He stopped. “And you’re making the old man out to be far worse than he really is.”

  Helen already knew that wasn’t true, knew it from the way Ronnie looked at his grandfather, knew it from the way Ronnie dogged the old man’s steps when her father headed out to the store for the newspaper, a daily newspaper he couldn’t do without but whose every story made him curse.

  It broke her heart, but she felt powerless. Every time she moved towards him, every time she said anything about it, Ronnie stared at her as if she were something completely foreign to him. Over and over again, Helen wanted to walk up to her father and slap him across the face, tell him he had no right, but every time she found herself in the same room with him, she felt completely powerless.

  “We shouldn’t have moved here,” she said one weekend, watching Ronnie through the window in the kitchen as he and the old man worked around the backyard, out next to the lilacs and the stunted Japanese maple that Mike Mirren had always treated better than anyone in his family.

  “Your father offered, and what were we going to say?” Tony said.

  “Were we supposed to say that we liked living in someone else’s basement apartment?”

  “We could have told him that we were saving for a house.”

  “Saving what? It’s not like we were actually putting anything away. My cheque’s all spent by the time the next one comes. Even now, living here, we’re not putting anything away, and we don’t even have to pay rent. We couldn’t move now if we wanted to.”

  “But I do want to,” Helen said.

  Tony let his breath out in a heavy, angry rush and turned around, his back to her like some huge, unclimbable cliff face. “You’ve got to let this go,” he said. “We don’t have a choice.”

  As time went on, she was sure she sometimes caught Ronnie looking at her with something dark like hate in his eyes, and before she could speak to him, he’d dart back out of sight and disappear.

  Ronnie had a way of simply vanishing—not a sound, not a motion, he’d just be gone. And with every month, he seemed more distant. It wasn’t so much that he got in trouble as that trouble seemed to appear all around him. Sometimes she’d hear from neighbours that something serious had happened, but when she asked them about it, their eyes would hood and darken and look away, like they’d realized they’d already said too much. And she couldn’t catch him red-handed at anything. If she asked, he’d just look steadily at her, his eyes big and black in the middle like they were sucking the light in. She thought he had to realize that he was doing it, had to know that his stare was unsettling.

  “Some people are just born to take,” he would say mysteriously, the words awkward coming out of a boy’s mouth, and she realized that, somewhere along the line, he’d learned to speak with her father’s voice.

  Years after that, Helen still found herself trying to make sense out of the scraps of him she got to hear. Shortly before he moved out and into an apartment with that Liz, she’d heard him on the telephone in the downstairs hall, his voice different, the way it went when he was around the small group of other teens he ran with. Helen couldn’t really put her finger on it—it was as if he pitched his voice lower when he was talking to them, as if the speed and cadence of his sentences changed, so that the words had an entirely different weight than they did when it was just the two of them together. Like he was someone else, someone she didn’t know at all.

  “We let him have it good,” she heard Ronnie saying into the phone in the hall. “Beat him well enough that he’d know he wasn’t welcome here, right?” He stopped and listened for a moment. “Naw, he didn’t recognize us. Cops haven’t been around, have they? Jest a fight after the bars closed, some loudmouth comin’ home and lipping off, that’s all they’ll think it was. Jillian won’t talk either, not if she and her crowd’s going to stay around here an’ keep all their windows.”

  She wanted to confront him about what she had just heard, but Helen realized then that she was scared—scared of her own son, scared of the way she knew he’d look at her. No little boy left in there, she thought. No little boy at all—and, for those last few weeks before he left, it was like having a stranger in the house, a total stranger who looked like Ronnie but wasn’t him at all.

  Thinking about it again, she shuddered, and even though it was snowing, she knew she couldn’t stay in the house all evening, not with the weight of it hanging over her.

  After her father died, they’d pulled up carpets and junked the old furniture. Tony had even redone the kitchen, putting new doors on all the cabinets—but every time she opened one up and looked inside, it was like her father’s voice was coming out of it and right straight into her ears.

  The walk to the bar—familiar steps regularly taken, and the bar itself so familiar, so separate, that she couldn’t help but feel a weight lift. Same old stool, same lights, same pool table. Same video lottery machine every time, and the same game, too, picking numbers for a keno draw that came the moment her numbers were picked. Up at the bar, Mitt Jones and that guy with the white hair, then the required couple of lawyers still dressed in their suits for work but talking too loud, the pints of beer catching up with them. All we need now, Helen thought, is that slut Jillian George with her latest toy in tow, some professional something-or-other all cow-eyed for her until she loses interest and ditches him too.

  It doesn’t matter, she thought. None of it matters. It doesn’t even matter that there is no escape here, no real escape at all. At least it let her think differently, let her move as if she had changed her life like changing the channels on a television.

  Not that it was always an easy refuge. She’d been pinned up against the wall once, downstairs by the bathroom, by a sailor who said his name was Vlado, a big man with a watch cap and a scar through one eyebrow, whom she’d been politely friendly with for a short conversation, and she remembered thinking then, fleetingly, her back against the flat wallboard, that it was pretty much like the rest of her life, one big boozy man or another pushing her up against a wall somewhere and trying to force his tongue into her mouth.

  But she’d never said it out loud. In fact, she thought, she’d never had anyone to say it to.

  Back in the bar, and she was still doing her best to escape her father with every dollar she played. “Watch every penny. . .” She could hear him saying it, and she pressed the buttons on the machine viciously, as if the buttons could feel her rage.

  Up at the bar, Mitt Jones was smiling at her, and Helen smiled back while tamping down the thought that his breath couldn’t help but smell like rotting gums. Mitt was still smiling at her, his lips wide enough that she could see the browning gaps between each of his teeth.

  Take that, Bud Whalen, she thought, I can still push the buttons. But the thought didn’t give her the kind of relief she was hoping for. And she knew she’d keep playing the machine until the bar closed or the money ran out, unwilling to go back home to his turf, and to the damned body on the carpet upstairs, to all that guilt.

  Damn him, she thought. Damn Tony. Damn him for taking me back to that house and leaving me alone in there with the ghost of the old man.

  Twenty more dollars went into the machine, smoothly.

  When she looked in her purse and saw that the bills had run out, she was neither surprised nor particularly upset. She had lost: she had won. Something in there between them both. Resigned, she thought. I just feel resigned.

  Mitt smiled as she stood up and she smiled back anyway, just for form, even though there wasn’t an ounce of energy left in her that felt like smiling. Helen closed her purse, gathered up her coat and headed back out into the snow. It was falling heavier now, wheeling around her so that she could never really get away from it, the wind picking at one side of her face, wrapping around her back for a gust or two and then pounding straight at her face again. The sidewa
lks were already filled to overflowing, the snow there knee-deep and hard to push through, so she walked out in the street, staying in the tracks left by scattered passing cars. Whenever there was a break between the row houses, the wind struck her so hard that she’d stagger slightly, and she imagined that the row of footsteps behind her must look like the uneven wobble of a drunk—except for the fact that they’d be filled in almost as fast as she was making them. Three drinks in, she thought, so it’s only the wind.

  Not a fit night, she thought, and she knew Ronnie would probably be busier than most nights, more pizzas to deliver to those unwilling to risk the snow and looking for an easy way out.

  When she got home, throwing the last of her cigarette down into the snow, she saw that there was a police car next to the curb in front of the house. She knew it was waiting for her, knew it by the white cloud of exhaust that puffed out of the tailpipe before being snatched away by the wind. There were no tire tracks left behind the back wheels: the snow had filled them right in. Every now and then, the windshield wipers would flick once across the glass, as if they were too tired to do anything more. The car sat warm, melting and shedding the snow, waiting there like it was alive.

  She walked to the side of the police car and the window rolled slowly down, a small breath of warm air escaping and touching her face for just an instant.

  “Tony?” she asked.

  “No,” said the policeman, and she recognized Reg Dunne unfolding himself from behind the wheel and reaching a hand forwards to open the car door. “Not Tony. This time, it’s Ronnie. And it’s serious.”

  58

  McKay Street

  JILLIAN GEORGE

  OCTOBER 7, 2005

  THE WORST of it wasn’t that they’d attacked her, that Ronnie had held her hands and ripped her shirt open, or that he’d had his hands all over her in an awful combination of anger and some perverse kind of intimacy.

  More than two years had passed, and there were still parts of it she could pull up out of her memory completely intact, as if it were starting all over again. The physical parts came back to her first, but they weren’t the worst of it.

  His hand hard over her mouth, even though she wouldn’t have screamed anyway. Because screaming wouldn’t work. His other hand tearing at the front of her pants. Then the way he’d stopped and stepped back, smiling and out of breath. She’d been sure that Ronnie was going to rape her, she’d even started steeling herself for the pain there in the alley—and then it was like he didn’t need to, like the whole thing was a violent show. Leaving her with the implication, the reality that it could happen, almost any time he liked.

  She tried to think of her entire body like it was a collection of ever-dying, shedding cells, so that every single part of her he had touched had long since been replaced by new, fresh skin and tissue. That worked sometimes. Most of the time, though, it felt too easy.

  And the worst of it wasn’t that she saw them in the neighbourhood all the time, either, those same people who had stood lookout, who’d looked away and done nothing while Ronnie was attacking her. It wasn’t Twig Chaulk or his brother, neither of whom even made eye contact with her anymore.

  Worst of all were the houses, she decided.

  It was the houses, the whole neighbourhood, that she couldn’t stand anymore. The generations of it. The way it was all piled up there, stuffed with history that couldn’t be undone—the way it cared about no one and nothing, eyes closed, back turned. Like nothing that happened could make any difference at all, like it was all just another useless coat of paint.

  She had to get away from here, she thought—and not just get away for weeks, either. Get away entirely. Forever. Somehow.

  She’d been thinking about it for months, about the small universe of McKay Street, the way it all just seemed to repeat itself. Like they were all the same people, all destined to live out the same behaviour. She knew that three generations of her family had lived there in the same house at number 58—that three generations had made their way among the same small circle of friends and acquaintances, knitting children and grandchildren into the fabric of a small and definable world. It was one thing to be proud of it, she had thought, and another thing entirely to be stuck in it like a long-dead spider caught in amber. And she knew for certain that she had to be the one to get out, and soon. She just didn’t know how.

  There were leaves in the street now, she saw, brown, brittle maple leaves from down by number 35 where three big maples filled a side yard. The wind had blown the leaves up and down the street, all along the curbs, like they were everyone’s responsibility. And they would be, she thought: everyone would clean up the ones in front of their own doorstep, or else watch them break down into black mush through the freeze and thaw of winter. One person’s trees, everybody else’s job.

  Jillian was in front of her father’s house, a house she expected to live in until the point when everything would change. She thought about that every day: the point when everything would change. When home wouldn’t be this blue two-storey row house with fake black shutters on either side of the small vinyl windows. The windows had been bigger once, but her father and brothers had taken out the old single-pane ones with their vertical-sliding sashes and had replaced them all with energy-efficient two-pane versions that slid side to side. A big part of the windows’ cost had been covered by the electric company, mouthing saving electricity while expecting the same big cheque every month. The whole winter after they’d finished the job, her father would walk over to the thermostat and tap it proudly with his index finger, as if lecturing it on the fact that he’d found a way to keep its errant behaviour under strict control. Never realizing, she thought, that it was the only thing he really controlled.

  Her two brothers were selling drugs for a living now, buying bigger and ever more expensive cars that looked out of place on the street and took up too much of the available parking. Jillian was waiting for someone in the family—anyone—to ask either of them where they were getting all that money. No one ever did, and she wasn’t sure if that made everything better or whether the tacit acceptance just dragged the whole family in, complicit.

  Not that she could talk about it: Jillian was painfully aware that she was a twenty-three-year-old woman living in the only bedroom she’d ever had, a bedroom now dressed up like a cheap apartment so she could pretend she’d found some kind of independence. There was the small white bar fridge she’d bought that ran with a steady and reassuring whirr at night, a dressing table and mirror so that she didn’t have to stand in the shared bathroom to do her face and hair, even a Yale lock on the door that her father had installed without her asking.

  She remembered watching him screw the lock onto the door, the tip of his tongue through his lips, as if he were making something as involved as the world she was looking for with something as simple as a twenty-four-dollar brass lock. The way he had handed her the key as if it were the key to the city or something.

  “There,” he’d said, almost with finality, as though he expected she could live inside those small four walls forever, behind the one vinyl sliding window that no prisoner would ever be small enough to crawl through and make an escape. “Now it’s like you own it. You want to paint it purple, you want to put up wallpaper, you want to never make your bed again as long as you live, it’s all your choice.”

  Jillian always made her bed anyway. She hung up the black slacks and the uniform shirt they had her wear at the coffee bar four blocks away, where she was a “barista” now instead of serving staff. It was a job she neither liked nor despised, but one she knew would never be enough to get her out of her room and away.

  And every time she looked at the lock, she wondered if her father had missed the point entirely. Missed it like he missed the fact that Matt and Carl were moving ecstasy on George Street, missed it like he had obviously missed the fact that they had to have their stash somewhere in the house. Probably the basement, she thought, given the number of times they made t
heir way up and down the narrow basement stairs before they went out in the evenings.

  And Jillian wondered how he missed the fact that no matter how much you wanted things to stay the way they always were, the good parts changed and slipped away while the bad parts were marked down all over the place, underneath the edges of everything, like they were written with permanent ink and a stranger’s looping, unfamiliar script. Like they were just waiting there for you to turn something over and trip over them all over again.

  And sometimes she wondered if perhaps her father knew all those things, and had just deliberately chosen to ignore them for a more comfortable security.

  Jillian turned and walked away from the front of the house, ticking each place off on her fingers as she went. The houses of boys she’d slept with, the houses of boys who told their friends she’d slept with them even though she hadn’t. The houses of girls who had promised to be “friends forever,” and then weren’t friends, and then got friendly again just in time to get married or move away. And every single one of the houses was packed tight with information she wished she didn’t know. How much better it would be, she thought, to walk by them as “a green one and a white one and, look, another green one,” and not have to think of them as Mrs. Purchase’s house or the O’Reillys’ or “the house where I kissed someone who we made fun of because he left our school to take French immersion.” And he’s now happily married in Ottawa with a federal job, as far away as if he sprouted wings and took flight.

  The leaves caught in the wind and swirled around her feet as she passed the houses that had belonged to the lucky ones who sold off high and moved away, and the ones where new people had moved in and were trying to import their own rules, never realizing until too late that they didn’t have an irresistible force to throw against the immovable mountain that was McKay Street. The other ones, too, the ones that just sat there like no single thing would ever change, older every day and more decrepit, just waiting to crumble away into dust.