Under Shifting Glass

by Nicky Singer

  “Well, not problem. Look, it all happened a very long time ago and I’m sorry you found that letter. Such things are often best forgotten.”

  “I bet Aunt Edie never forgot,” I say quietly.

  “No,” Gran says at length. “A mother doesn’t forget a dead child.”

  It occurs to me she isn’t thinking about Rob now, but about her own dead child, my father.

  “What happened to him?” I ask. “To Rob?”

  “He was stillborn. That’s all. It happens. We never really got a good explanation.”

  I can’t help this random thought: If Si were telling this story, he’d know the details, he’d have done the statistics.

  “We were pregnant together, Edie and me. A time of joy, despite everything.” There’s something softer in Gran’s voice now, and further away, as though she’s no longer sitting in a car in a turnout in the pouring rain. “Edie just shone.”

  “She always shone,” I say.

  But Gran isn’t listening to me.

  “The man concerned, he was a musician, of course, a jazzman on tour, and he just flew right on back to wherever he came from. But Edie didn’t care—in fact, to be fair, I’m not even sure she told him. Edie only cared about the baby. Thought it might be her last chance.” Gran pauses. “The babies were due within a week of each other. Rob on the nineteenth and your father on the twenty-fifth. Though your father was late, of course. . . . Anyway, they would have been cousins, your father and Edie’s Rob.”

  I imagine Gran holding newborn Dad in her arms and Edie holding an empty blanket. It makes my throat go tight.

  “It must have been horrible,” I say. “For Aunt Edie.”

  “And a blessing,” says Gran sharply. “In a way. Those weren’t the days for having a child out of wedlock. And who knows how she would have coped financially. She was in cloud-cuckoo-land, really.”

  I don’t know anything about in or out of wedlock, or finances, or cloud-cuckoo-land, but I do know how I felt when Clem was gray and still. “Horrible,” I whisper.

  Gran clicks her tongue against her teeth. “Well, you’re right, of course. It was horrible for her. Especially seeing me and your father. And I never really understood that until . . .” She trails off.

  “Until Dad died,” I say.

  “Yes,” says Gran. “And even though your dad was hardly a baby, he was a grown man with a child of his own, but . . . well, I felt it then. The hole that a child leaves.”

  “She wrote that song, didn’t she, in memory of him? ‘For Rob.’”

  “Yes, she played it day after day, month after month. Drove us all mad with it. Drove me mad with it. I thought she needed to move on.”

  “It’s strange,” I say, and this, I realize, is partly what’s been bothering me. “I always think of her as such a happy person.”

  “Well, she was, or was again—particularly after you were born.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you.” And she starts the engine again. “You changed everything.”

  There seems to be something more to say, but Gran doesn’t say it. She just drives hard and fast and in silence until she comes to the intersection where you go right for her house and straight for ours. She turns right.

  “There’s another letter,” she says, “that you have to read, Jess.”

  67

  As she unlocks her front door, Gran starts telling me that she would have given me the letter sooner, only there’s been so much to do and the letter got muddled up with all sorts of other documents she’d cleaned out from the bureau and . . .

  And she leads me to her desk. The letter is not in sight. In fact, it’s in a blue file inside a green file in the very back compartment of a deep file drawer. I would call it hidden.

  “Here you are,” says Gran, and she thrusts it into my hand.

  For Jess, it says.

  The writing is loopy blue, loopy blue ink.

  For Jess.

  My heart does a somersault.

  This envelope is long, white, and businesslike, one of the self-seal types where you can lift up the flap and then seal it down again to make it look as if you haven’t read what’s inside. And that’s what I think has happened: Gran has read this letter already. But I can’t really complain, because I looked in For Rob, didn’t I?

  I pause long enough to wonder whether the contents of this letter addressed to me bang, bang, banged in Gran’s brain like the contents of Rob’s letter banged in mine.

  “Go on,” says Gran, impatient now. “Read it.”

  So I do, though it’s difficult to see the writing because my hands are trembling.

  My dear Jess, it says.

  My dear Jess,

  If you are reading this, then I will be gone. But not quite gone, I hope. I hope when you go to the piano you will think of me sometimes.

  It’s impossible, really, for me to express the joy you’ve given me, ever since you were a tiny child. Ever since that first time I lifted you onto the piano stool beside me. I don’t suppose you remember that day, do you? Well, most children that age crash and bang, but you put your tiny fingers down really carefully. You listened to every note you played. And every note I played, too. I don’t know how old you were then, not much more than three or four, I think. But I knew instantly. It was like looking in a mirror. You, too, I thought, are a maker of songs.

  I don’t know what you think, Jess, but I think there are connections between people. You aren’t my child, you aren’t my grandchild, but there’s some bone of my bone that is your bone, too. Blood of my blood. I couldn’t love you more if you’d sprung from my own body, my own soul.

  Over the years you’ve given me so many gifts. I’d like to give you one in return. I want you to have my piano. I want you to play and play, so when I’m up in heaven (if they let me in!) I can look down and say, “There’s my Jess.” And they’ll all say, “She plays better than the angels, doesn’t she?”

  With a very big kiss from your aunt,

  Edie

  I read this letter once, I read it twice, and I don’t want to take my eyes off the paper because I can feel Gran looking at me, I can feel her staring me down, because she wants to know—as she always does—what my reaction is. I feel her all needy because Aunt Edie has said what we tried so hard never to say—bang, bang, bang—that we were always pieces of each other. That we belonged.

  Like Rob and Clem.

  And I can see how this sits with Gran. It sits like me trying to make a friendship bracelet for Zoe that also included Em.

  Don’t you understand best friends?

  Don’t you understand that a great-aunt cannot be as close as a gran? Nowhere near as close?

  And that’s why, I guess, when Gran asked me what I wanted to have of Aunt Edie’s and I said the piano, her hand flew to her face as if I’d said the moon.

  Bang, bang, bang.

  But I know something about this feeling, a jealousy that stirs something deep, like when you think your best friend prefers beach-ball Paddy to you, or like when you read two simple words.

  For Rob.

  Or perhaps For Jess.

  I look up from the letter.

  “Aunt Edie wants me to have the piano,” I say.

  “Yes,” says Gran, and waits.

  And waits.

  “Only our house isn’t big enough, is it?” I say.

  “No,” says Gran, “it isn’t.” Her out breath is audible. “So you’ll still need to come over to my house a lot, won’t you?”

  And I say, “Yes.”

  68

  A week later, Si is back at work, I am back at school, and Mom is home more often. It’s not exactly normal—the babies are still in the hospital—but it’s more normal than it has been.

  On Saturday Si says, “Do you want to come out with me for a ride in Roger?”

  The only difference between going out in an ordinary car and going out in Roger the Wreck is the noise. And the running commentary from Si on the wheezes and
coughs and the perfectly fitting doors. And the fact that you don’t really go anywhere. You just drive. Or he does. He just drives around.

  “No, thanks,” I say.

  “It’ll be the last time,” Si says.

  “What?”

  “I’m going to sell Roger.”

  I get in the car.

  I smell the familiar odors of leather and oil, polished wood, polished chrome, cold, and dust. Si pulls out the choke and the engine spits to life. As we pull out of the driveway and into the road, I expect him to mention how quiet the engine is now that the timing chain’s been fixed. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t say anything at all. He drives down the cul-de-sac and turns left and I don’t ask where we’re going because it doesn’t matter. We roar up a hill to the screeching sound of the fan and we decelerate to the fut-fut noise of the exhaust and still Si says nothing.

  So it’s me who speaks first. “Are you going to get another car?” I ask. “Now that Roger’s running . . . so perfectly?” I imagine a new car, a new wreck, just a bit of trim and half an engine in the garage and me being twenty-one by the time it’s all fixed.

  “No,” says Si. “No one could replace Roger.” He pats the walnut dashboard. “This little moggie. He’s my first and last.”

  “Your last?”

  “Don’t look so surprised.”

  But I am surprised. I’m stunned. That would be like me shutting the lid on the piano and saying, That’s the last time I’ll ever play that, and expecting other people to believe me. Expecting to believe myself. And I realize I’ve never thought of this before, how this car is Si’s piano, the place where he goes to be totally himself.

  “But what are you going to . . .” I’m struggling for words, “. . . tinker with?”

  Si laughs. “I think I’ll be tinkering with the babies quite a bit. Or at least they’ll be tinkering with me.”

  The image of him spending his special moggie time with the babies makes me feel okay for him; even more, it makes me feel warm inside.

  “And—if I get any time left over from that,” Si continues, “which I’m not expecting, I might start a vegetable garden.”

  “A vegetable garden!” I imagine it. Si digging in the ground—having first read a gardening manual cover to cover. Si planting carrots in not-completely-straight lines. Si checking charts and adjusting the watering and the feed. The carrots growing into knobbly specimens of randomly different sizes. Si saying, Look at these utterly perfect carrots.

  Then I feel warm about Si himself. My stepfather.

  “Have you told Mom?” I ask.

  “What—about the babies or the vegetable garden?”

  “About giving up the car.”

  “Yes, of course. In fact, it was partly her idea. See, the house is very small, as you know. But the garage . . .”

  “Is huge,” I say.

  “Exactly. So we thought we’d convert it. Knock a window in the side, French doors, carpet. Make it into a playroom.”

  “A playroom?”

  “Yes, for the boys.”

  And I know he’s saying something he’s never said before, never even dared to think. He’s saying the babies are going to come home. That they have a future, that they are going to grow big enough to need a playroom.

  There’s a gale-force wind coming through Roger’s perfectly fitting doors and it’s blowing at Si’s hair, and he’s smiling and smiling.

  “That’s wonderful,” I say.

  And it is.

  So how come my insides twist with jealousy?

  Again.

  69

  The babies don’t come home, not for weeks. Which is just as well, because that’s how long it takes to clear the garage. The oily cardboard is folded up and thrown away, old tire rims and engine parts that look like saucepans are advertised, wrenches are systematized, the old toolbox is put under the stairs, and the Morris Authorized Dealer plaque with its picture of a red bull walking on black water is nailed up on the kitchen wall.

  “Hang on,” says Mom, “I don’t remember saying that my kitchen was the new garage.”

  They almost have an argument about it, which actually I’m glad about because, for months and months, no one’s had the courage or the energy to have an argument, so that makes things more normal, too.

  When you can almost see the garage walls again, men come and knock out a window and other men come with doors and sheets of glass. Concrete is laid and plaster skimmed.

  And all the time, I look at the space. I look at just how much space there is in that playroom.

  Zoe looks, too. “Awesome,” she says, doing a cartwheel and a couple of backflips. “Perfect dance studio.”

  “Or grand piano space,” I say.

  Of course I’ve told her the grand piano story.

  “So why don’t you ask?” says Zoe. “Why don’t you mention it?”

  So simple. So Zoe.

  I say nothing. It’s all very clear to me now. Gran lost her only son. She doesn’t want to lose her only grandchild. With the house getting busier, with the twins taking up so much of Mom and Si’s time, what space will be left for old Gran? She needs me to have a reason to visit her, to be clamoring to visit.

  “I’m not like you, Zoe. I’m not as good at saying things as you are.”

  Mom chooses green for the carpet. “Green’s a very restful color,” she says. And then the walls go Linen White, which is actually a kind of cream. And finally, the weekend before the babies are due to come home, it’s finished.

  Si stands in the space and Mom stands in the space and I stand in the space.

  “It’s a beautiful room,” says Mom. “I can just see them playing here.”

  I imagine the boys running up and down, maybe playing soccer with a squashy patchwork ball.

  “Yes,” says Si. “And I can see you playing here, too, Jess.”

  “What?”

  “I can see you—”

  “We can see you,” says Mom.

  “Playing here,” they say together.

  There’s a rumble in the driveway, as if the biggest moggie in the world were reversing over the gravel. Outside the French doors is a moving van. “Surprise,” says Mom.

  I can’t help my hand flying to my mouth, like my mouth was a little moon.

  Because, of course, it is a surprise and yet I know at once what it is.

  Two men get out of the van and press some buttons and the back door scrolls and clatters upward. Revealed, brass feet first, is the grand piano.

  Aunt Edie’s beautiful, beautiful grand piano.

  Its lid is down and it’s all tied up to keep it secure.

  “Gran told us,” says Mom, “about Aunt Edie’s letter.”

  And suddenly Gran is here, too, parking in the cul-de-sac. She must have followed the moving van, so as to be here at this moment when the men are throwing the blankets off the piano and preparing the dolly.

  It’s hardly any time at all before they swivel the piano and prepare it to come down the ramp, as though it were earth’s most majestic creature emerging from Noah’s Ark after the Flood.

  They have to put boards on the gravel to stop the piano from sinking in, and they have to put boards up to the French doors, too. Everyone is talking at once.

  The men are saying (through puffs and heaves), “A little to the left, Rod. I said left.” And, “Mind that window, Dan. Dan!” And it reminds me of the time when the men puffed upstairs with the desk. A time that seems both yesterday and a million years ago.

  Mom says, “Gosh, it looks a little larger now that it’s actually here,” and Si says, “Of course, it will need retuning; I’m not sure pianos like being moved that much,” and Gran says, “Edie got one sent out to India once.”

  I say nothing at all; I just watch this huge, shining piano coming into my home.

  Aunt Edie’s piano.

  My piano.

  Gran says, “Are you pleased?” She grabs me by the arm. “Are you pleased?”

  “
It’s a gift,” I say.

  “Yes,” says Gran flatly. “From Edie.”

  “And also from you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes.” Because I know what it’s cost her. “Thank you so much, Gran.” Hugging her, I realize I’m about half an inch taller than her and will probably get taller still. “Do you know what this means?”

  “What?” she says.

  “If you want to hear me play now, you’ll have to come over to my house.”

  “You think?” she says.

  “Yes. And since I’ll be playing a lot, you’ll have to come over a lot, won’t you?”

  I might be wrong, but I think there’s a tear in those tough, dry eyes.

  70

  It’s a school day when the twins finally come home.

  “Can I come and see them?” says Zoe. “Can I, can I, can I?”

  Of course I say yes, although Zoe, being Zoe, would have bounded in anyway.

  The space in the hall that used to be the perfect place for the Tinkerbell upright piano is now perfect for a double stroller. All the equipment in our house is double, including the Moses baskets on their double rocker in the playroom.

  “When they get bigger,” says Mom, greeting me, greeting Zoe, “they’ll have a basket each, although they’ll rock together. You see how one push moves both baskets? But for now . . .”

  For now, the babies are small enough still to be side by side, lying together on a floaty blue mattress surrounded by floaty white blankets. They look like they dropped straight from heaven and are still clutching little bits of sky and cloud.

  Zoe looks in the basket. Both boys are fast asleep, their lips wobbling with dreams. “Oh,” she exclaims. “Oh, look at them. They’re so cute, so gorgeous, so . . . scrunchy.”

  “Scrunchy?”

  “Yumptious. Yummy. I could eat them up.”

  “You could?” I peer in the basket. I try to see my brothers as Zoe sees them, and for the first time, they don’t fill me with fear. There they are in their basket, quite ordinary.

  “Yes,” I say, “they’re adorable.”

  “Couple of pests,” says Mom. “That’s what they are. You don’t have to get up in the night for them.” But she’s smiling like she has just invented the universe.