The Glass Harmonica

by Russell Wangersky

  They were too busy talking up the clients for that—and Dennis thought he’d be long gone before anything gave way under the right snow load, a big wall of glass smacking down into a mall. Piper and Associates could figure out for themselves just how they were going to pay for the lawsuits, running around trying to figure out what had happened and where, who did what wrong and when. Or maybe they would figure it out and be too embarrassed to let on.

  He opened the door and gave the pizza guy the money, a big handful of change, and suddenly he was nervous and trying not to drop any of the coins in the snow, trying to smile at the guy.

  “Gotta pay you in coin,” he said. “All I’ve got. It’s twenty-one dollars, right? Here’s twenty-six.”

  The pizza guy always made him nervous—Dennis couldn’t help it. Maybe it was the way the guy kept staring at him, steady, straight at his eyes, as if it was some kind of dare or something. Like he was trying to look right straight inside his head, rummaging around in his thoughts. Not blinking at all. It made Dennis think: wouldn’t your eyeballs dry out if you didn’t blink?

  Now the guy was smiling at him, smiling, but in a way that somehow didn’t look pleasant at all. “Pizza guys, we all like change.”

  Back in the living room, with the pizza box open and the steam rising from the hot cheese, Dennis couldn’t shake how relieved he was that the door was safely closed and the deadbolt knocked home.

  Sitting on the floor, he could hear the wind rising outside, buffeting hard against the front of the house like it was trying to get in. There are plenty of things I won’t miss about this city, Dennis thought, and the wind is certainly one of them. Then he thought about finishing his resumé on the computer, and rolling up all of the designs, making copies on the large-format copier at work without telling anyone. All the work he did, they certainly owed him a few copies, didn’t they?

  It felt like he hadn’t even gotten settled away to eat when the doorbell rang again. Dennis, annoyed, was thinking only that the pizza would get cold as he headed into the hall to open the door.

  32

  McKay Street

  EVELYN O’REILLY

  MAY 28, 2006

  THE HARDEST PART is the words. You really have no idea how hard that is. Not having the words, or at least not being able to get them out.

  Not that I was ever much of a talker—I let Keith do that. I always thought it was important to him to always be the one out in front. More important for him than for me.

  For a while after the stroke, I wasn’t even really putting anything together—it was all just like flashes, like things fluttering out there on the very edge of making sense. I can remember a little snatch of time that lit up in my memory like the sun breaking through clouds: Keith was fishing on a river up in North Harbour, and it was summertime, the river all little triangles of silver in the light. I was sitting on a stretch of fine red sand, leaning back, propped up on my hands, and I could feel the heat coming up into the palms of my hands and the backs of my legs. It was just an instant, really, before the clouds came back together in my head, but the sort of thing you could hang on to, like a life raft, while everybody is so busy trying to fill in the blanks for you, talking away at you like it’s really important that every single thing gets explained. They don’t realize that it’s embarrassing to be told things, over and over again, about a life you can’t remember. Like letting the side down, repeatedly.

  My father used to say that: “You’re letting the side down.” He must have said that a hundred times when I decided marrying Keith was more important than either finishing an English degree or starting teacher’s college. I stopped hoping to be a poet someday, and started with the hands-on everyday regularity of running a house and planning for babies, even if there was only ever going to be one—Vincent.

  Vincent, who came so terribly late, who didn’t come until I was almost forty, and by then we’d given up, really, because it looked like it was never going to happen. The doctor had wanted Keith to get tested, but Keith said no. It’s still hard that it hurts me so much. Keith said there wasn’t anything wrong with him, that if there was anything wrong, it was wrong with me. He could decide it just like that, end of story. He said he wasn’t going to—I could never say this out loud—that he wasn’t going to “jerk off in a cup just to prove some retarded doctor wrong.”

  Then, after Glenn, it was Vincent. And Keith was proud as could be, and he actually said to me, “See? Nothing wrong with me at all.” And I couldn’t say anything, couldn’t say anything at all.

  But at least out of all that we got Vincent.

  Vincent, who moved away.

  Vincent, who made absolutely the right choice even if I never get to see him now. My father would have loved Vincent, but he came so late my father was long dead.

  My father—it’s always a marvel to me that some things just pop up out of the fog. He had a moustache, a big walrus moustache, but I think I’m the only one who found that moustache special.

  I sometimes remember telling Keith that something was wrong with me just before the stroke, because I knew that something was happening. I know my own body, I wanted to tell him, know it far better than you can ever even begin to imagine, old man. Know each little twinge, from minor to magic. And I knew something was wrong.

  There was something about the way things looked, as if when I turned suddenly to one side, my eyes couldn’t figure out how to catch up and everything went almost two-dimensional, the whole world in flat planes. And at the same time, I had the most amazing feeling in my fingertips, almost like a buzzing that swelled and faded. I told Keith I was sure something was wrong, and he told me it was all in my head.

  All in my head. Funny—he was right about that, just not the way he meant it. There was the wall of dark then, everything breaking up into shards. They tell me I fell in the kitchen and Keith found me, and that in the ambulance they told him not to expect much.

  Things got clearer and clearer in the weeks afterwards, and the sharpest thought, the clearest recollection, that I have of anything is that one morning it was a hospital bed that I was lying in, the bed linens crisp and hard and institutional, a little rough under my fingertips the way the big washers make things. And then it was words and sentences in my head, and an order came back. Sort of. Because it’s an order that doesn’t always stay with me. Worse: it’s an order without any way to get the words out, all of them in there and stuck fast, like they’re piling up behind a dam that will never, ever break.

  That’s bad enough—but there’s the fact that everyone is always assuming something, too. “You must be cold, Evelyn,” they’ll say, and then it’s someone feeling so damned good about themselves just because they’re putting a blanket across my legs. And it’s easier to go along with it than to fight, but that doesn’t keep you from getting angry, especially if you’re not cold at all.

  I mean, you’d like to say, “If I wanted a blanket, I’d let you know, wouldn’t I?” But that’s just it. I won’t say it. Because I can’t.

  I’m resigned to the fact that I won’t talk again, but I’m less comfortable with the fact that I can hardly walk either. That I take a few steps and often fall, loose and boneless like I was made of rags. One whole side of my body is like baggage that I just drag along beside me. Keith always coming to help me to the bathroom, to help me into bed.

  I can imagine him talking bluntly to someone about it, the way he used to talk to Glenn, saying, “I didn’t sign up for this,” and “Seventy years old, and this is what I have to look forward to for the next ten years?” Out there somewhere in the house when he’s pretty sure I can’t hear him.

  Hear him? I can barely hear anything over the television, and I can’t get organized enough to change the channel or turn the darned thing off.

  I go around the house in my head now, and I think that I remember more about it than I ever did before the stroke. I remember more because I have to think so carefully about all of it. It’s like exercise, reall
y, like moving your muscles, like a test where no one ever gives you your marks, where no one ever gets around to grading your paper. I mean, I can draw the whole bedroom in my head as clear as that, every single thing in its place, and not only do I not have to check, the fact is that I couldn’t if I wanted to. So I guess I’m right every time.

  The bedspread, folded back. The comforter folded at the foot of the bed. I try to see how many pieces of it I can hold in my head, like it’s my job to tote them all up every time, to keep them safe in a way that nothing in my head ever feels safe.

  But I do know where every single thing is—what’s on the dresser, what’s in the top drawer—and if I think about it, I can move them all around, as if they were levitating and moving to new spots under my command. And when something moves, I know it, even if Keith always told me I’m just a stubborn old woman. He still says that to me—I think he likes the fact that I can’t talk back when he does.

  I was worried at first. I don’t know why. I was worried that he’d go through everything, sort it all out his way, that Keith would not be Keith anymore after all. That instead of being like a framer, he’d somehow have turned into a finish carpenter—a detail guy. That he’d look in the jewellery box and read the diary and then he’d know. If he didn’t know already. But I don’t think he does. I don’t know why I thought Keith would ever get around to sorting out anything in the house—anything outside his workshop, anyway. Rough and ready when I married him, and rough and ready now. Stunned as an ox, and blind to things that are right there in front of his face. And that’s not always a bad thing.

  I like to think he didn’t know about it at all, that he still doesn’t know. But then there’s Vincent. I’m terrified it will wind up in Vincent’s hands, that he will read it and that it will change everything. That it will do damage far beyond anything I can imagine. And I can’t do anything about it.

  It was a stupid idea. The worst idea I ever had. And I can’t do anything about it now.

  I thought at first it would be best for Vincent to know where things began, even if it would be hard. I didn’t want him going and looking up Glenn or anything like that. I don’t know if anyone can look up Glenn, really. After he left the yard, Keith heard that he had bought one of those silver Airstream trailers with his retirement package and had headed out for the southern United States. No one’s said anything about him for years.

  So I wrote it all down—how Glenn had come to the house, how I got pregnant right afterwards, how in the end I wouldn’t have changed any of it for the world because I ended up with Vincent. You get ideas like that sometimes—great big full-of-yourself ideas that you’re going to set everything right, that you’re some kind of guardian of truth, that you’re doing the right thing because you’re only going to say it like it is. Like you’re in white robes with a great big shiny sword. I mean, there has to be a boxful of sayings like “The truth hurts” and things like that, but all of them circle around the idea that people are supposed to be told the truth, no matter how painful it might be for them to hear it, no matter how much damage it does. It deserves to get told, because it’s the truth.

  I’m not so sure about that now. And I don’t know why I ever was.

  I know exactly where the diary is. Calling it a diary is a little too fancy, really. Just a notebook. Blue. One of those little lined notebooks that you might put grocery lists in.

  You never think anything’s going to happen to you. That’s the problem. I mean, you do in the long run—you know you’ll get sick eventually and die. But you never think anything’s going to happen to you today. So you don’t get things in order, don’t write up a list of where you do your banking or what you want done with your body after you die; there will always be time for that later. I could have moved that notebook a thousand times—I could have torn it up any one of the times when my brain was clear and I realized, as I often did, what a bad idea it really was. When I wasn’t thinking about how important it was because it was the truth. But I never got it done, and then there was the stroke.

  Since then, I’ve tried three times that I can remember clearly, getting up out of the chair by myself the hardest part, and I’ve wound up on my face on the carpet every single time, never even made it into the bedroom. Stuck just lying there, staring up close at the little tufts of carpeting until Keith came in and found me. What scares me most is that I might get halfway—that I might actually have it in my hand when I fall, and that Keith will come in and find me with it, find it thrown out in front of me where it’s fallen from my hand, with me able to look right at it and still not able to reach it. And that there will be no way I can stop him from reading it.

  Keith’s been outside a long time now. Painting trim, I think that’s what he said he was going to be doing. He had his overalls on when he went out to the back room. He’s always at something, as if keeping his hands busy enough will make him forget anything else that might be missing in his life. He’ll come in—he cycles like a little anxious moon, orbiting in and out all day long just to make sure I’m still breathing.

  Sometimes it’s like my memory is as sharp as if I’m looking at the ground through binoculars, everything fine and textured, as if I could reach over and feel it with my fingers, memorable as the rasp of sandstone. Every little thing in perfect pitch and balance. When I was a girl, I had a record my father gave me, called “Music for Glass Harmonica,” and I played it over and over, the kind of haunting notes that make you think of fog or something just as ethereal. It’s the strangest kind of instrument, really—it can be as simple as crystal wineglasses filled with different amounts of water, and you rub your finger around the rims and each one makes its own particular note. I wonder if people aren’t like that too. You see something, hear something else about it, see something else, and all of it gets put together into one unique package in your memory. And then that’s the only way you can tell it. And only you can tell it, too.

  I like that idea. Me and Helen Collins and even that Carter man who never came out of his house—we’re all some sort of breakable crystal, each of us a glass filled to a certain point, and that’s the note we sing, because we can’t sing anything else. Not one of us the same, each one changing every day.

  And breakable, too. Just look at me. I’m filled to just the right level, almost to the top, and I can’t squeeze out a single note now. But every bit of music is still right here.

  The television can be on, chattering away with one game show or another, the room almost dark, and I can be miles away, caught up in a summer from years ago, hearing the water rushing over rocks in a river, the ragged line of the treetops against the sky. Out on the juniper barrens under August sun, the air thick with the smell of the hundreds of plants you’re crushing under your feet, each smell distinct and different and combining into a complex wonder so that you could just stand there for hours, just smelling it all and trying to hold it in your head, impossible to completely remember until you get a chance to smell it again.

  I’ve seen a thousand bog flowers, each one different and special, and I’d sometimes think that there were actually so many that it would be impossible to come up with a combination of colour and shape and size and scent that didn’t already exist, if you had the time to seek it out.

  He’ll tell you he has a heart of gold, Keith will, that he’s always the first one to lend a hand. He probably believes it, too—but it’s not really as simple as that. Maybe he did once, but I doubt it. He’s certainly been good to me since the stroke, but whether that’s anything more than a simple sense of duty, I’ll never know.

  He told me about the man across the street, told me in short, bare sentences as if he was trying to make sure I wasn’t too upset by it all, but stuck here, it all unfolded in my head like a storybook, all of the description gone so that I had to think of it as played out by stick figures, unless he stopped long enough for me to make up my own details. And he told me that he would have done something, even if he was an old man taking
off after someone much younger, except he had to be sure he would be able to care for me, and I tried to look at him as if I believed him. The truth is that he hasn’t ever picked a fight that he didn’t already know he would win. He’ll take any kind of abuse when he knows he’s outmanned. But that’s a cruel thing for me to think. There’s none of us out there without our own faults.

  I have a clear picture of Keith hefting his old knapsack out of the trunk of the car in by the Four-Mile, an economy of movement that showed he’d done it all hundreds of times, his fishing rod already in his other hand, a hat pulled down tight so the bill covered his face. We even used to call it a rucksack then, that knapsack, made of heavy canvas that turned dark green when it got wet, and it fit there in the middle of his back like it belonged. And we’d have sandwiches in waxed paper, sandwiches I had made, crispy bacon and thin-sliced onion and butter on thick bread, and a fire for the kettle and Keith’s hatchet. A bottle of rum for a belt back there in the woods.

  And we’d be miles into the woods and he’d be tucking the bottle back into the knapsack and he’d look at me out of the corners of his eyes—inspecting, feral, hungry—the sort of look you recognize if you’ve ever seen it before. He’d kiss me then, sloppily wet and smelling rich and plummy, his clothes still full of the stale sharp of woodsmoke, and we’d duck back into the trees again, all hands and mouths and shedding clothes. The great musk of the peat and the moss rising up thick all around us so that it was like it wasn’t just Keith and me there on the ground, but a great moist, hot world all around us, all hunger and desire and marvellous need. It didn’t even matter to me that it was so quick.