The Year of Broken Glass

by Joe Denham

  “I’m Figgs,” I say to him. “I’m the engineer.” He only nods, and only slightly, in reply. “I was a good friend of Miriam’s at one time, when her husband was still alive.” He nods again. “You want some water?” I ask, and again he nods.

  I draw him a glass of water at the sink, then set it down beside him and help him sit, arranging his pillows so he’s propped up on a forty-five-degree angle. I drop one down at my feet as I do this, for later, then I hold the glass to his lips and help him drink. Smith has him hooked up to a couple of different bags so it’s awkward accomplishing all this, but I do it to put him at ease. I think a man ought to die as he ought to live, with as much dignity and grace as this world will offer, and if it will be my hand that brings death upon him then it will be a hand of light turning him to the darkness. He manages a meek “Thanks,” as I take the glass from his lips, his voice passing through them like wind through a dry, hollow reed.

  I can hear the thrumming of Arnault’s chopper approaching outside the room’s walls. He radioed in ten minutes ago to let Smith know he’d be arriving, to be ready for his landing, as we’ll be steaming full speed from here as soon as he touches down. We’re ten miles or so off the coast of Maui and Arnault’s been gone the better part of the day. If he told Smith what he’s doing on the island, or even which island he’s on, Smith hasn’t let on. When he came down to inform me of Arnault’s approach, I knew now was the time to take care of this. They’ll all be rushing out to the deck to meet Arnault as he lands. If you can count on one thing about people at sea it’s that their boredom eventually gets the better of them and they’ll go running like clockwork to the slightest stimulus.

  “What happened to her? Where’s Miriam?”

  He closes his eyes when I ask this, and when he reopens them they’re glazed over with the look of tears, though none form, his ducts likely too dry. But the look is unmistakable, and I can see in it instantly that he loved her, and that he watched her die helplessly, against his best efforts and every bit of his will. I’m not sure what kind of response I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this. I suppose I assumed she’d drowned, or been taken or killed in violence, but I can already tell by the grief in his eyes that hers was a death of a different nature. She told me once after Horace passed away that she figured he was the luckiest man in the world to go out so quick and easy the way he did. No drawn-out fuss. An acute pain perhaps, but then an end almost instantly following. The only way to go. “How?” I ask. “How did she go?”

  “Blood,” he manages, though I have to lean in close to his lips to hear him, and he has to repeat it so I do. “Blood.”

  “Did you do it?” I ask him. I know the answer. Still something, perhaps what I’m about to do, makes me ask it. He moves his face once side to side in reply.

  “Inside her,” he says now, and I’m starting to get the picture.

  “Did it go on for long?” I ask, the thought of Miriam suffering as she must have starting to burn inside me. He nods in reply. I want to ask him why he didn’t help her, but I can see in his eyes he would have done anything, would have given his own life to save hers, and I’m starting to see that he might want this death I’m here to give him more than I know. Or as much as I’ve known during those times in my life when I’ve felt I couldn’t live with the things I’d done or seen.

  “Did you love her?” I ask, and there’s the flame of jealousy stoking inside me again. Both these extraordinary women. He’s had both of them. He’s had the love in his life I’ve never been granted, and I can’t comprehend why it’s been like this, how he’s been so fulfilled as I’ve been left so devoid, so vacant, except to say that for whatever reason, all that I’ve had in this life I’ve taken by guts and sweat and force. Nothing has been easily given, and it’s been my own folly that I’ve waited for love to be as though it should be the one exception, the one thing I shouldn’t have to snatch from the jaws of a life that won’t relinquish to me the slightest sustenance without a struggle. So be it. This man’s had his share of what will be mine for the taking. He can be with Miriam in heaven or hell, it’s of little concern to me now where she is and where he’s going. I hear the faintest “Yes,” slither off his tongue as I reach down to grab the pillow from the floor. I lift it before his face, his eyes wild with fright as he realizes what I mean to do.

  There’s a deceleration of time that occurs in such moments, a honing of the world down to a singular tunnel of space. In this his mind and my mind are conjoined, and as I press the pillow down over his mouth and his nose and his eyes, it’s like I’m doing so over my own. We both give only the slightest struggle, his in his body’s weak resistance and mine in the slight stirring of emotion, the one that makes murder a counterintuitive act, that makes most people so certain that what I’m doing here is the gravest of wrongs, though they’re all only the perfect storm of circumstances away from doing the same themselves. I lean in on him as his feeble hands try one last resistant grasp on my forearms before they slacken, and it’s then that I come back to the world and hear the commotion approaching from beyond the door. Quickly I pull off him, drop the pillow to the floor, and kick it beneath his bed as I sit.

  Anna comes into the room in a rush of excitement. “He got it!” she blurts out as she approaches the bed. Willow, Arnault, Smith and Fairwin’ all enter the room behind her, Arnault holding the float in his arms. He turns the bright overhead fluorescent on. Oscillating as I am in that state of heightened, piercing perception I just went into with Anna’s husband, the float comes into enhanced view in my eyes, and I could swear there is a swirl of colour whirling inside it, like it has its own centrifugal energy, its own orbited centre. An entire world in that orb of glass.

  “Wake up Ferris,” Anna is saying to her husband from the opposite side of the bed. “Wake up.” She shakes him at the shoulders as Smith leans across me. “Oh my God, he’s not breathing!” she yells out, hysterical, as Smith palpates his neck for a pulse. I slip out from beneath him and step back behind them all.

  Smith looks up at Arnault quickly. “The resuscitator,” he says, and he immediately pries open the unbreathing mouth and seals his lips over it. Arnault begins rifling through the cabinets beside the sink. “Other side, under the anaesthetics,” Smith instructs him, then breathes again, trying to give back to the body the breath I’ve just taken from it. Anna’s husband is still here, I can still feel him, not inside me but locked like a shackle around a link of chain, so that now it is me who feels suffocated, feels the need to struggle for release. I’m about to leave the room when Arnault tears the ventilator from its bag, attaches the mask to the tube, and hands it to Smith, who sets it down over the face I’ve just leaned the full weight of my life upon and starts to pump.

  As soon as the breath comes back to the body Arnault leads the kid, who’s now holding the float in his hands, to his father’s side. Then he turns toward me, looking me square in the eyes. I have the sense he knows, which doesn’t occupy me as much as it maybe should, lost as my concern is in the sight of Anna falling over her husband, tears gushing from her eyes. “Get a tray from the galley and a hammer,” Arnault commands me. I slip out of the room, freeing myself from the spellbind between Anna’s husband and myself.

  In the galley I retrieve what Arnault requested, pausing for a second at his drawer of well-sharpened knives, considering… but that’s just the intensity of the past few minutes getting the better of me. There will be other times, and better ways, and so I come back to the room with the tray and hammer. Arnault takes them both from me and sets the tray down on the bed beside Anna’s husband.

  “Hold your father’s hand,” he says to the kid, taking the glass float from his hands and putting the hammer in its place. The float he sets down in the tray. “Lightly, son, just as we talked about. Start by cracking it a bit, so we don’t lose the pieces.” Anna’s husband is still unconscious, but everyone else is riveted to the child. He taps at the glass with the hammer, to no consequence. “A bit harder
,” Arnault says.

  Standing as I am in the doorway I can hear a distant thunder pulsating the air. I step from the room out to the galley and look out the window. I can see the silhouettes of two choppers coming straight at the boat against the last light in the southwest sky. Gibbon. I run back into the room as Arnault nearly screams at the kid. “Smash the fucking thing then!” Willow brings the hammer down on the float with all his force, but it just ricochets off.

  “Arnault,” I say, but he doesn’t even turn in response. He tears the hammer from the kid’s hand and puts it in the unconscious hand of Anna’s husband. “Here,” he says tersely, putting the kid’s hand over his father’s. “Now. Strike it like this. Hard.” The kid does, but still nothing happens.

  “Arnault!” I holler at him now, and he turns to me finally as something explodes out on deck. Then there’s another explosion that shakes the boat violently. I run down the hallway, through the galley and out onto deck.

  Arnault’s chopper is in flames and there’s black smoke billowing up from below the cap rail of the bow. I watch as a fire blaze issues from one of the circling choppers and slams into the hull, again shuddering the boat across its length. The alarms start wailing under the compressive thunder of the choppers and Arnault comes out on deck as another shot issues from one of them and again the hull is torn open and set ablaze.

  We each have our duties in such a scenario, and mine is to get the pumps drawing from the bilge. I jump back into the cabin and start to the back of the hallway. Smith is before me in the middle of the passageway, fumbling frantically with a phone in his hands. As I arrive at his side I see it’s a red Motorola, the duplicate of the one Jeremy Gibbon had given me, and as he looks up at me the panic in his eyes is laced with the kind of terror that comes over someone when they suddenly recognize that it is only by their own mishandling of circumstance that things have turned terribly wrong. But there’s no time for that, not now, so I push past him and through to the engine room access, where I look below and see water swirling in. I drop down the ladder and land in it up to my shins. The wash-down hoses on this boat both draw from different thru-hull ports, and on each one there is a ball valve that can be switched over so the intake is rerouted to two screened wide-diameter pipes in the bilge: one under the main engine, and one on the other side of the bulkhead separating the engine room from the hold.

  I slosh over to the main and plunge my arm into the water, feeling for the first of these valves. As I get my fingers on it another artillery slams the boat, throwing me face down into the water. I emerge just as another tears open the sidewall of the engine room and the sea rushes in, a gushing white torrent, and I go under again and feel my body slam against the steel stairs I’ve just descended. Then I’m blind and inside it, the dark sea, I’m inside it and there’s no escaping this time. It’s inside me, and in this there’s a completion, a perfection, just as I’ve always wanted and dreamt there would be.

  IF HE SPEAKS of it at all it’s in the middle of the night. He’ll wake beside me, feverish with sweat, in a terrified panic. That’s also when he’ll allow me to make love to him. It’s always one or the other. He’ll climb on top of me and put himself quickly, fully inside me, or else he’ll start talking. When he does it’s more like he’s telling himself the story than he is telling it to me, staring up at the shadow of the bars on our bedroom window cast across the ceiling. We lie beneath it together like two captives, staring up at it as he speaks. A couple of nights ago, after he’d finished telling me again about the man he sees in his dreams—the man with the roughest of hands, the smell of bearing grease on his skin, the look of death in his coal-black eyes—he said to me how odd it was to him that the shadow never shifted.

  At first I didn’t get what it was he meant by that, and then I understood. If it were cast by the moon it would be ever-changing, tilting and stretching out and in through the nights. But here in our little house on the corner of Fraser and Fourteenth there’s only the street light’s glare falling through our window, and the sound of the traffic sweeping past at all hours is a far cry from the wash of the waves on the beach beyond the bedroom he once shared with Anna. I know he longs for her. For his son, for their home and for that time. The time before he found the float. He came back to me changed, without the love I know he once had for me. I know he has it for Emily still, and I see him some days choosing to feel it for me, too.

  Some days even, I think maybe that choice he’s making, that effort, might lead him back to me, back to how it used to be between us, but then we go to sleep and he wakes in the middle of the night from one of his dreams and he puts himself inside me and it feels nothing like what it used to. Like it’s not me he’s loving at all but his own grief and anger, his memories of what he’s lost, of what he’ll no longer have in this life. In the morning I know he is ashamed, but there’s nothing that I can do for him. He has to find his own way back to me, and though I can see him trying, for now he is still somewhere out there on that sailboat with that woman, or on the boat that sank and took Willow down with it. Or maybe he’s still drifting alone, unconscious, yet to be washed ashore, his arms wrapped tightly around the glass float that lives now under this bed that we share, beneath this shadow-cage cast in perpetual stasis across our ceiling.

  But I’m kidding myself with such thoughts. The fact is Francis washed up on a black-sand beach on the north coast of Maui some time after Arnault Vericombe’s boat sank. His arms were locked around the float. He’d been holding onto it for dear life, literally, though he remembers nothing of this. What he does recall of the time following his rescue from the rowboat are only hazy snippets. Soaring in a roaring chamber. Anna singing to him in a white room. The man with the black eyes smothering him. He remembers Willow cupping his hand, something cold and hard in his palm. If it weren’t for the fact that the Coast Guard also found Fairwin’ Verge and Anna floating off the coast of Maui, that’s all he would know of what went on. Which would be for the better, in one respect. But as it is, Francis has been to visit Fairwin’ several times out on Lasqueti Island, and after each visit he seems to return with a greater sense of things.

  When he first began these visits I had hoped it would bring some kind of clarity for him, some kind of closure, but every time he comes back with greater sadness and with more questions, and quite often upon his return I have to call in sick to my uncle for him so he can stay home in bed. He sleeps these days away, and then he’s up in the middle of the night, going over again how he doesn’t understand why the float wouldn’t break, why it still won’t break, and doesn’t know why that man, the engineer, would have wanted to kill him—though he’s not even sure that he tried to, only that he feels like he did, he dreams it. Fairwin’ says the engineer was the only one in the room when Francis stopped breathing and that he was the kind of man that was capable of doing such a thing, though why he would have wanted to kill Francis Fairwin’ can’t say either.

  Francis goes around and around these things in his head, obsessively, and I sometimes fear he’ll never stop, that he’s doing it to keep from facing what is for him still unfaceable, that Willow is dead, and that it is his fault, a result of the whole thing he got his son wrapped up in with the float. Sometimes I feel like the only thing that will ever release him from all this is its breaking, and in those times I take it from beneath our bed and I try to smash it myself. I’ve beaten it with a hammer as hard as I can. I’ve tossed it with all my might down onto the sidewalk in front of our house. I’d throw it in the trash, or back to the sea, if I didn’t think it would lead only to Francis forever searching for it, forever lost to Emily and me.

  After his first visit to Lasqueti, he came back with some of the old fire in his eyes. At first I thought it was because he’d been out on the water for the first time since his return. He swore he’d never fish again the very first day he arrived home. Within a month he’d sold the boat, settled up with Anna, and we’d bought this house with the money he had left and a letter t
o the bank from my uncle that said he would keep Francis employed. For the first few months living here, he refused to go see Fairwin’ because that meant going by boat. This house was considerably cheaper than it would have been before the quake, but it’s still all we can afford to make the mortgage and feed ourselves on what Francis earns, so chartering a plane is out of the question, and regardless Francis says he won’t fly either. I think he feels like death is stalking him, like somehow he’s living on borrowed time. Some days this makes him uncontrollably anxious and he skips work to take long walks all day alone. He says he just wanders around the city looking at all the restoration and new construction work. He says it helps him think, the aimlessness, but I think there’s more to it than that. I think on those days he feels death is somehow at his heels and his walking and walking is an attempt to shake it. It was after one of these walks that he declared he had to go to Lasqueti, and the next morning he woke up before dawn and left.

  He came back, as I said, with the old look in his eyes, focused intensity. And for a while it seemed that his spirit was finally returning to him from wherever he’d lost it out on the sea. He was still distant, distracted, but every day he grew more lively, animated, more like the Francis I’d known before he found the float. So I was hopeful, for a time.

  Then he went to visit Fairwin’ again. This time he returned with a near-manic look and energy about him. Over his shoulder he carried a duffle bag I hadn’t seen before. He set it down in the living room, not bothering even to take his shoes or coat off first, unzipped it, and lifted out the float. Then he took my pestle from its mortar and placed them both on the coffee table in the living room. I was nursing Emily while I watched him do this. “Give her to me,” he said, holding his arms out toward her and me. It was with the same certainty of desire that he did this as he used to have when he’d reach for us, and seeing it there in him almost made me weep. But I held back my tears as I unlatched Emily and handed her to him. He set her on his lap and put her little fingers around the pestle, wrapping his hand around hers and the pestle as well. Then he struck the float, but nothing happened. He struck it again and again like this, but it stayed round and perfect as ever each time.