The Year of Broken Glass

by Joe Denham

  We caught the last ferry off the island and agreed with some Lasquetian unfamiliar to both Fairwin’ and I to pay two hundred dollars for the two-day rental of this gas-guzzling though groovy piece of shit I’m now driving. We were happy to pay it, none of us looking forward to the otherwise near-hopeless enterprise of a scruffy-looking young man, an overweight middle-aged man, and a freaked-out-looking old man trying to hitch a ride to Tofino in the dark.

  Anna thinks I’m delivering in town or running the boat around from the inlet, and I called Jin Su to tell her I’d be coming early next week instead of tonight as I normally would be. I’ve yet to figure out what lie to tell next to rectify the discrepancy. I’m tired and hungry, but also excited by the possibilities at play here. What kind of money, if any, will this Miriam lady be able to lead me into, and what liberty will that then afford me? If I could, I would buy Anna out of what little equity we own in the Prevailer and begin our separation. I’m not sure beyond that; how I’d then approach my life with Jin Su and Emily, or how I’d explain them both to Anna, Willow and my mother.

  I’ve often wondered if Anna’s seeming indifference to my whereabouts the Friday nights I spend each week with Jin Su and Emily is indicative of her own infidelities. Perhaps she’s more than happy to be rid of me, making it easy to rendezvous with whomever her lover might be. And that could be anybody. Anna is one of those women who is every man’s type. I’ve come close many times to asking her, in the midst of one fight or another, but I fear such an unfounded accusation would only indicate my own betrayals, so I resist.

  Svend is quiet now in the back seat. I peer at him in the rear-view and he appears to be dozing off, his thick head wobbling above his shoulders. “So what happened to you?” Fairwin’ asks, his voice rough yet frail over the old car’s many whirs and rattles. “Last I saw you, you had that beautiful woman at your side—Anna right?—and that plump son of yours on your shoulders. Then, no more of your mother, no more of you.” I think for a moment about what to tell Fairwin’, and what not to. “I’m a crab fisherman,” I say. “And I have a daughter now. Emily.”

  “Emily. A daughter of yours and Anna’s must be very beautiful.”

  “She is,” I reply, then consider for a moment whether to, and how to, elaborate or clarify further. “Though some may not think so.” Fairwin’ takes his eyes from the road and looks toward me as I say this. “She was born with a port-wine stain on the left side of her face,” I continue. “On its entirety, from the base of her neck to the top of her forehead.” Fairwin’s look is one of puzzlement and concern. “Do you know what that is?” I ask.

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Neither had I. It’s one of the symptoms of Sturge-Weber Syndrome. It’s a vascular malformation in which the blood vessels, the capillaries at the surface of the skin, don’t contract, so the blood is always pooling to the surface, like a newly forming bruise. You know Gorbachev, that purple birthmark on his forehead? That’s port-wine.”

  Fairwin’ considers this for a moment, ever-thoughtful as he is, then asks. “And so like Gorbachev’s it will not go away then? Is there any treatment these days?”

  “There’s a thing called pulsed-dye laser. It’s painful, and to give it to her now we’d have to put her under general anaesthetic.”

  “How old is she?”

  “She’ll be five months May 1st. Ten days.”

  “And this laser treatment, does it work?”

  “I guess it varies. It’s hard to say whether it’s worth it.”

  “And what is this Sturge-Weber Syndrome? You said this was the outward presentation. Is there more?”

  Jin Su and Svend are the only people I’ve spoken with, other than our GP and the doctors and nurses at Children’s Hospital in Vancouver, about Emily’s condition. I realize now, telling it anew to Fairwin’, the magnitude of the stress I feel, the worry, for my daughter’s well-being, for her future. “There can be,” I reply. Svend lets out a great sigh, then begins to snore in the back seat. I look again to him in the rearview. He’s flopped over against the windshield and the sound of his snoring rising from his silhouette is enough humour to lighten the mood I’ve begun darkening into. “There’s the threat her left eye will develop glaucoma because of the pressure built up by blood pooling in the sclera. Also, it’s unlikely, but sometimes the damage travels up the trigeminal nerve to the brain, then calcifies the brain tissues and causes all sorts of problems, from seizures to severe retardation.”

  “So you’re worried, of course. And Anna—how is she taking it?”

  That’s a good question. I think of the polarities of darkness and light I’ve brought home with me from Vancouver since Emily’s birth. How Jin Su and I have rode the highs and lows together of sadness and elation at our daughter’s existence, of fear and hope and anticipation as we wait to see what she will become, whether her birthmark is indicative of further damage, or the brunt of what she will be asked by chance of her particular genetic complexity to bear. It will be months, if not years, before we know. Anna and Willow have both unwittingly rode those highs and lows, and have lived in the shadow of anxiety the precariousness of Emily’s future casts around me. “Hard,” I say, in answer to Fairwin’s question. “I think it’s been really hard on Anna.”

  •

  We arrived at the Glass Globe beach house well after midnight last night. We pulled down the long driveway as quietly as we could, then Svend and I waited in the car while Fairwin’ hobbled his old bones up to a little cedar-shingled, wisteria-shrouded house. We watched him enter, and waited another fifteen minutes till he re-emerged and led us down a dimly lit path, over a long cedar footbridge, to the Globe House. Fairwin’ gave us each a key to our own room and I fell asleep quickly, exhausted, and slept soundly to the rhythm of the Pacific swell rising up and breaking against the shore.

  I woke up in the late morning to Svend at my door. “What’s up with these hippies and their houses,” was the first thing he said as he stepped into my room. “Really, what’s so wrong with a good old-fashioned rectilinear rancher?”

  I chided him then for being a redneck, but standing outside on the deck of the Glass Globe now, I see his point. It’s one of the more ridiculous buildings I’ve ever seen. It’s hexagonal, perched on high timber girders thirty or forty feet over a sandy beach. The long cedar bridge we walked out on last night connects it to the high bank property Miriam’s house sits upon some hundred-odd feet inland. But what really puts it over the top is not its location or elevation, but the building itself. It’s comprised of six separate, triangular rooms, touching only at each tip. The whole thing is connected by a single roof which, at its apex, houses a common, interior room from which a swirling staircase descends to the beach below. The six rooms have on their two exterior walls a large, bulbous, round window, each a different colour of the rainbow, with violet being the colour of the massive bubble skylight above the building’s central room. Svend and I are walking the perimeter deck of this thing, dumbfounded by the scale of its gaudiness, when Fairwin’ comes toward us over the bridge with a middle-aged woman in tow.

  Miriam Maynard is, judging by the aesthetics of her establishment, not what I had expected. She’s dressed in pleated slacks and suit coat, her grey-white hair pinned up behind her ears, a hint of mascara and lipstick tastefully applied—a businesswoman! Not the nightie-wearing, slippered, tea-sipping old hippie crone I’d have pegged as the owner of such a place.

  Fairwin’ manages introductions, then Miriam leads us up to her home, which is equally well kept and, well, as conservative in its decor as her dress and demeanour are. She doesn’t entirely diverge from the neo-hippie I’d imagined though. The living room walls are adorned with the work of Roy Henry Vickers and other contemporary Native artists, there are wood and soapstone carvings on the shelves, and her home has the smell of cloves, garlic and lemon. She brings us chai tea and raisin scones as we sit down in her living room to discuss my glass float. As I lift it from its tote
her eyes light up and she quickly reaches out for me to hand it to her. Again I hesitate, then notice them all notice, feel foolish, and set it into her slender, manicured hands. She turns it round and round, its opalescent sheen swirling in the room’s lamplight. “Beautiful,” she says, and it truly is. She inspects the insignia, drawing her eyes very close to its surface, then hands it back to me. “Follow me,” she says. “You need to see something.”

  Miriam’s house sits on a property that juts out and eventually drops—a scraggy, northwest-facing point of basalt—to the sea. At each side of the point are two fields. One of long grass bisected by a slender footpath which leads to the bridge and the Globe House; the other a large apple orchard which gives way to forest and a steep trail of root-strewn, sinuous earth. The three of us follow Miriam slowly down till we come to sea level. We traverse swampish terrain, little ochre-tinted pools and fans of devil’s club, then a narrow trail through thick salal, tall, dry grasses, and finally out to a ball-field-sized dune of soft white sand rising up to the west and again falling away toward the sea hundreds of feet beyond. There is a wide horseshoe of stones piled waist-high to the seaward side of the dune. Set down in the sand, arranged in patterns and lines, are hundreds and hundreds of glass fishing floats of every size and colour.

  “The wall keeps them from being buried by windblown sand, and even with protection it’s a daily duty to tend to them,” Miriam explains. “They spell ?ukwiiya?um ciłciłn’i,” she says lightly. “That’s Nuu-chah-nulth, the indigenous people’s language, for Safe journey, grey whale.” Miriam leads us toward the glimmering floats, the morning sunlight reflecting in their array of colours. “Some have nothing embossed on the seal,” she explains, pointing to the row of floats now at our feet. “Like these ones. They’re generic floats made in Taiwan and China, probably within the past thirty years.”

  Listening to Miriam tell of her beach full of glass floats I realize something I’d been trying to place while following her down through the forest. In the soft yet self-assured, authoritative tone of her voice is the echo of Anna’s. It’s a dead ringer. And I see in this woman, this stately, upright, elegant woman, her eyes kind and body relaxed, the woman I once imagined Anna growing into in her older years. What happens? You spend a decade living—eating and sleeping and working and dreaming—side by side with someone, and through that time and sharing that person is altered, till suddenly you watch her in the light of your shared kitchen cutting carrots, or from a distance at a street corner talking with someone she knows well and you don’t. Or you look at her beside you in your bed, the bed you have loved each other in, conceived and birthed your child in, and she is asleep, her brow furrowed, her jaw clenched down and grinding in the night, and you don’t recognize her, don’t know her, have never known her, though it’s clear by virtue of the years that she’s now closer to you than ever.

  “There are floats of all sizes and of many shapes,” Miriam explains as we follow her further through the rows. “Now this one,” she nearly whispers as she stoops to lift a cylindrical, transparent float from the sand, brushing it off with the care one might show dusting a dish of fine, centuries-old china. “This one was blown in Japan, probably post-World War II. See the kanji symbols?” Miriam hands me the float, its insignia set not on either end’s seal but instead along its side. I run my fingers over the raised kanji, then pass it carefully to Svend before the jinx I’ve been under catches up with me. Miriam waits quietly till we’ve all inspected the float, then takes it from Fairwin’, sets it back down in its pocket of sand, and steps over it, reaching for a round float of green glass a few rows beyond. She brushes the sand from it as attentively as she did the last, and a little smile plays across her face.

  “This float was brought here by a guest visiting from France. People come from all over the world to stay at the Globe House and place a piece of their own collection on this beach.” She holds the seal-end toward the three of us so we can all see it. The markings on the seal are of the capital letters C and M. “The C is for Christiania, the M for Magasin. This float was blown in Norway around the turn of the century. At that time, what is now the city of Oslo was known as Christiania. Magasin means Market. In 1898 the store contracted four Norwegian glassworks, Dramman, Hundal, Hadeland and Biri, to manufacture floats and emboss them with its own CM trademark to be sold on its shelves.” She hands this float to me too and the three of us again pass it around.

  There’s an offshore wind arriving high in the trees where ravens clonk and skip from branch to branch. The surf can be seen and heard rising on the other side of the small cobble wall. I think of Anna at home, Saturday morning, maybe out in the garden by now, putting seeds in with Willow at her side. And of Jin Su and Emily in the confines of their little apartment high above Main Street. Perhaps Emily has finally learned to sit up unassisted and she’s doing so now, teetering, smiling her fiery smile with her mother seated beside her on the polished bamboo floor. They’d be looking out over the city together through the thick-milled floor-to-ceiling glass. Out to the downtown high-rises and the still snow-capped mountains above, which go on and on north beyond the city, peak to valley, peak to valley, giving way finally to tundra, then to the Bering and the Beaufort Seas. It’s a calamity inside me. There are so many worlds. And here I am, on this crazy beach in Tofino, searching and hoping for a stroke of luck, some quick cash, a patchwork fix for the mess I’ve made, am making, of mine.

  •

  We hike back up to Miriam’s house in silence, each of us contemplating where we’ve just been. There are places on this earth which, by virtue of human creation or some localized perfection of the planet’s biorhythm, seem home to some energy, sacred, elevated beyond that which is normally sensed. Jin Su says it’s why the monks always live high in the mountains, where the energy is clear, unmuddled by human cacophony. She says she’s never felt it, always in the city as she is, inside the electricity. I think I have, alone on the water, though only to a degree, and wonder what it might feel like on a wind-powered boat in the middle of the open ocean. At any rate Miriam’s beach of glass has that sense, that marriage of human homage and nature’s magnitude, and it sets us all outside of time a bit as we climb back up the steep embankment together, offering and taking each other’s hands when needed, and walk through the brightening orchard and into Miriam’s home.

  “There’s one more thing I’d like to show you,” she says, and leads us down a hallway to a door at the back of the house. Taking a key from her pant pocket she unlocks it, ushering us into a room lined with hundreds of shelved books, most of an aged appearance. There are pencil sketches of fishing boats, wharves, trees and children’s faces pinned to the walls. At the far end of the room there is a rustic hutch upon which a small collection of glass fishing floats sits. She leads us to them and lifts one of clear glass into her hands.

  “This float was blown in 1949 by the Northwest Glass Company in Seattle. It’s thought there were only twelve made. Of those twelve, only five have been found.” The float is in the shape of a doughnut, with a walled hole clear through the centre. “The hole is for hanging the float line through. It was a good idea, but proved too time-consuming for mass production. I was given this one by an old patron from Alaska when she passed away. She found it on the shore of Bristol Bay while collecting seaweed for her garden.” Miriam smiles and sets the float down, not offering this time for us to hold it, then lifts another from the hutch-top. “This one is a binary double ball, not as rare a shape, but see the violet hue at each base.” She holds the float up into the daylight coming through the room’s only window. “That’s the fire’s colouring, also rare.” She shows us a large, unblemished float of deep cranberry and explains how the Japanese used gold to create the hue; and a float of light green with a thin spindle of glass falling through its centre like a stream of water in stasis; and another clear one with a small amount of water trapped inside it—water, she tells us, which was absorbed through porous imperfections in the
glass while suspended in Arctic sea ice, where it was found by some of the first Canadians to attempt the North Pole on foot.

  “And this is my most prized,” she says, lifting from the hutch a rather ordinary-looking dark green float, still encased in its beige twine mesh, with BV embossed on the seal. “The trademark is that of Biri Glassworks, one of the four I mentioned earlier who made floats for Christiania Magasin. This float was one of the first blown there in 1841, and was given to me by my mother’s father, Kjell Biri, the last of the Biri glassblowers. It was never sent to sea.” This float she sets in my hand, holding onto it still by the bind of its meshing, and looks me closely in the eyes.

  “These are all very rare and valuable treasures, Mr. Wishbone,” she says, a little grin rising in her lips as she says my name. “But their rarity and value are nothing compared to what you have brought here with you.” She lifts the float from my hands and places it back on the hutch, then turns and waves for us to follow, which we do, back down the hallway to her living room.

  “There is considerable mystique around the float which you have found,” Miriam continues, seating herself on the chaise lounge beside my float. She lifts it again from its tote. “To my knowledge there have been less than a dozen discovered. No one knows where or when they were blown, though all those found have been in the North Pacific. Most agree they were likely among the first Japanese floats, blown just prior to the First World War. Every one of them is now owned by a single collector, a Mr. Sunimoto in Hawaii. I’ve never seen one of these floats before, but this one is remarkably unworn for its probable age, and its exceeding thickness and opalescence is of particular uniqueness as well. I couldn’t put a price on it, but through the right people this float may fetch you a very substantial sum.”