Glass Girl
Laura Anderson Kurk
Copyright © 2010 Laura Anderson Kurk.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
All photos (cover image and author image) © Natalie Diehl.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN: 978-1-4497-0067-6 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4497-0069-0 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-4497-0068-3 (e)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010924400
Printed in the United States of America
WestBow Press rev. date: 3/8/2010
For Alan
I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were
frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly
fragile people are the strong people really.
Tennessee Williams
CONTENTS
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
About the Author
Wyatt told me once that if tenderness were a disease, I’d be terminal. “You’re just a little glass girl,” he’d murmur every time I blushed or cried or stared too long at someone. I didn’t mind it so much. The point was he knew that one day I’d break—not my heart—all of me. I suppose he was right. I feel physical pain when I see a stranger hurting. When it’s someone I care for, I come undone. I hit the ragged edge of desperation. I shatter into a million splintered pieces of inexpressible tenderness.
Robin, my counselor, the woman who had been trying to fill the fissures that opened on the day Wyatt died, her voice no more than background noise, tried to coax me into talking. I usually did my best to block her, but something she said at the beginning of this session slipped in, called to mind a memory as sharp as razor wire, and suddenly I was there again—in a happier time and place. I was little, and Wyatt sat next to me, all warm and alive.
“Meggie, you’re drooling on me! You’ve gotta wake up. Meg, we’re here.”
He whispered directly into my face and I could smell the waffles he’d had for breakfast. I couldn’t have been more than seven on this vacation because I’d just finished the first grade. Wyatt was ten and tall for his age. People treated him like he was much older, and he usually rose to the occasion.
Dad got a wild hair and decided his East Coast family needed to see the South. So we’d driven a rented black Suburban from Pittsburgh to Nashville, Tennessee. Mom insisted that if he was going to torture us like that we had to at least stay somewhere decent. We ended up at the Tennessean Hotel, a garish testament to the fact that Nashville considered itself the Hollywood of the South—really, you should see this place.
Every hotel employee patted my head and told me I would be blown away by the laser light show. I started believing them. The first night, after my bath, I begged Mom and Dad to let me stand outside our door to watch the show to beat all shows. Even at seven, I knew it was overplayed. Locals crowded into the atrium waiting for it to start. Then the lights went low, the fountain started dancing, and a few lasers pointed at the water changed colors in a predictable pattern. Somebody banged out a patriotic song on a white baby grand. Misplaced histrionics—that’s the only way to describe the crowd’s reaction.
“Mom, have they not been to Niagara Falls?” I clearly remember asking.
“It’s human nature to make a big deal out of something if you’re told it’s a big deal,” she’d whispered. “You just remember to let your own mind form your opinions.”
I’ll never forget the look in her eyes as she pressed her finger to my temple.
I didn’t ask to see the show after that night.
That memory wasn’t the one eating at my heart. On our second day in Nashville, Dad insisted we go to the local theme park. Wyatt and I thought it could have potential—he was into roller coasters and I was into cotton candy. We pulled into the parking lot that morning, ready to hit the gate as soon as it opened. It was July, and every paved surface in Nashville steams in July. I could already smell the asphalt around us heating up as Wyatt handed me the sun-block and bug spray, and I copied the way he put them on himself.
We piled out of the car loaded down with maps, cameras, and illegal water bottles and started the mile-and-a-half walk to the park gate. Ahead of us, I could see a crowd gathered around an older, red pickup truck. I worried that they were looking at a dog that had been left in the bed of the truck in this heat. As we got closer, I saw that the spectators, apparently locals, were jeering at whatever was in the truck.
Wyatt told me to put my hands over my ears, and I did, but I left slits on each side between my fingers. I never wanted to miss anything important.
“You stupid lard-ass! Did they drive you to town and forget about you?”
“What’s your dress made out of? A hot air balloon?
“There’s a weight limit on this axle, lady.”
Mom and Dad crossed us quickly to the other side of the row of cars, and Wyatt watched my face intently to make sure I couldn’t hear them. Did he know what was in the truck? I couldn’t see it yet, because I was too short. And then, just as we were directly behind the truck, the crowd walked away laughing, and I saw her.
She was gigantic. I mean it. She must have weighed five hundred pounds. Her body filled the entire bed of the truck. In fact, parts of her bulged over the sides of the truck, and I think that must have been painful.
Her short, black hair had probably been cut with dull kitchen shears, because it stuck out in greasy, spiky strands. She wore what looked like a blue bed sheet sewn together, with holes cut for her arms. More tragic still, it was too short for her, or maybe it had gotten hitched up in the back when she slid backward into the truck, and no one would have been able to pull it down around her knees if she was sitting on it. It fell awkwardly just to the very top of her thighs.
She fiddled with a bag of malted milk balls—my fa
vorite candy—and when she finally opened it, it exploded, and the chocolate balls flew into the air in a thousand directions and fell. And in their falling, they made no sound. They landed on her soft body. Some hit the asphalt, but they were also silent.
Her eyes have haunted me. I only caught them for a second as they glanced our way, wondering what we had to say to her. “Don’t stare, Meg, it’s rude,” Wyatt said through his teeth, taking my hand in his and tugging me along gently.
But I wasn’t staring to be rude. I was intensely curious about the emptiness I saw there. I caught no hint of interest, no flicker of emotion. I looked back over my shoulder to make sure she was breathing. She turned and tilted her head as she watched me and then, most amazingly, she smiled. And it wasn’t a malicious smile meant to scare me into not staring. Hers was a smile with sweetness in it. She liked children—she must have children, grandchildren—and she liked me. Her eyes softened when I smiled back and waved, and she held her hand up to wave. And because I was there, she was happy.
I repeated this story to Robin when she asked me, again, why I would feel guilty about Wyatt’s death. I couldn’t explain away my guilt; I just knew that somehow I’d played a role. I should have been there! Because I wasn’t there, Wyatt died. I wish it had been me. My mother would be able to function if Wyatt were here instead of me. And Wyatt’s death was connected to everything ugly—that the hatred of that July day in Nashville was alive and well on that horrible day in Pittsburgh. It’s all connected—we’re all connected, bumping around into each other, some of us good, some bad, most a mixture. Every thought acted upon has consequences. Every one.
Robin cleared her throat and adjusted the throw that she had over her crossed legs—she used these visual cues to relax me—and looked at me calmly.
“Meg, you’re feeling pain, and it’s palpable; you’re feeling guilt, and it’s normal. But these feelings don’t define you. They are false constructs that your mind has created to make sense of your loss.”
She clicked her ball-point pen several times and took a long look at me, considering what to say next, what I would actually listen to.
“This assumption that you developed when you were little—that you are somehow responsible for the happiness, or even the safety, of others in your life, whose paths you cross, the woman in the truck—is wrong, and it is dangerous for you.”
She pulled out a leather-bound journal, thumbed to a page in the middle, and read quietly for a minute. Maybe she was waiting for me to say something. She’d be waiting awhile. I saw a smile flicker at the corner of her mouth, and her eyes softened.
“When we first met, I asked you to tell me about the Meg before Wyatt’s death, and you painted me a picture of a girl who wears her skin inside out. The people in your life have always treated you like you’re breakable. What was it Wyatt called you? A glass girl? Meg…you have to let that go. You’re tougher than you think. For goodness sakes, you are not responsible for his death. Your mother doesn’t wish it had been you. And the woman in the truck, she was trying to make you comfortable, not the other way around. You were the child, Meg…she was the adult.”
I didn’t cry. I just glared at her. I shifted uncomfortably and studied the black-and-white print on her wall, a picture meant to inspire her clients. The girl in the print had just reached the top of a mountain. She stood peacefully and looked at the sky. It said “Gratitude” under it.
“Look, Meg, we all have a gap after we lose someone. We think that it will always be this hole that’s obvious to everyone around us. It won’t. It’ll be filled with life. It will be something entirely different, but at least it won’t let the wind in anymore. You’ve been given the gift of knowledge, of wisdom—not that you wouldn’t prefer to have received it some other way—but now you have it. You’re marked. You’re different. And you’ve got an advantage over others your age because you know already how precious life and relationships are. One of these days you’ll find that someone recognizes your strength and wisdom and loves what you’ve become.”
Dear Wyatt—
We’re leaving Pittsburgh. When you look for us, don’t look here. I’m having a hard time, Wyatt. You know I’ve never handled change well. To say “I wish you were here” doesn’t even come close.
Love,
Meg
The cloud I’d been watching for several miles finally burst and steel gray rain came in torrents. August is a wet month in Pennsylvania. I was driving my brother’s black and silver Jeep west out of Pittsburgh on I70. I’d been sixteen for eight months, and I’d followed the driving rules that were given to Wyatt—no passengers that weren’t family, no texting, no loud music. This trip marked my introduction to highway driving in a blinding rainstorm. Nice.
My mom drove ahead of me in her sedan, and ahead of her, my dad led us in his truck. Our little caravan raced to make it to Chapin, Wyoming before the moving truck hit town. The rain, an unwelcome complication, made me slow to forty, flip on my headlights, and turn down Ray LaMontagne. Dad caught my lagging position and slowed down, too. I saw Mom’s head turn to check me in the rearview. Yeah, I’m here. I’m here.
I couldn’t blame them for worrying. It had been a miserable year and three months since Wyatt died. He’d just turned eighteen, a senior at Canning Mills High outside of Pittsburgh. As cliché as it sounds, he was everything to me. From the moment they brought me home from the hospital he’d been my protector, my advocate, my best friend. I remember a picture of the two of us taken the day they brought me home. He was three and sitting in an enormous green corduroy chair. His head looked too big for his body and his hair appeared combed into place, maybe for the first and last time. They laid me in his lap, all pink and tiny, and he touched my cheek and said, “Sweet baby.” My parents said they were so relieved because they weren’t sure how he’d take to having a baby sister, the interloper.
My friends fought with their brothers, but I’d have gladly followed Wyatt off the nearest cliff. And I wasn’t alone in that; Wyatt was a magnet. The whole school adored him. Guys all wanted to be his best friend, and girls couldn’t get enough of him. He always had someone obsessing over him, calling at odd hours. And I was jealous and always a few steps behind, waiting for my turn.
When Wyatt died, I immediately faded into the background, which was okay because that’s where I’m most comfortable anyway. I’d always been reserved and shy but since we lost him, I have disappeared. Wyatt became the star, the hero and I was eclipsed, but I loved him so much that I never minded.
I tried to do what was expected. I clammed up around my parents, picked up the chores they were dropping, and kept the business of our life going. I talked to the people who came over to check on us, washed and returned the hundreds of casserole dishes and placed phone calls to wider and wider circles of people who hadn’t heard yet but for some reason needed to know. The last thing I wanted to do was to hurt my parents anymore, so I ate my grief and steeled my resolve. Every night I’d lock my door and try to glue all my pieces back together—all the shards that had worked loose again. I wasn’t complaining. It gave me time to steady my reactions, to learn to hide in the crevasses of life.
Our incomplete family headed west in a weak attempt to find our way back to normal. Pre-tragedy, Dad was a senior vice president for Miller Communications, the largest marketing firm in Pittsburgh. He grew up in Pittsburgh, and his deep connections with deep pockets gave him an advantage in the marketing world. Wyatt and I grew up in the house my grandfather built for his family. It always felt like Canning Mills was a safe bubble tucked away and untouched by the problems of the city. No one dreamed the unthinkable could happen there.
When Dad realized that we could never recover if we stayed, he reached out to friends who might know of a new position. As luck would have it, an old friend’s company had recently bought the Hotel Wyoming, a famously upper-crust resort in Chapin. This friend jumped at the chance to put Dad in charge of marketing the resort internationally, and Dad sold
it to Mom as a safe place for me to finish school. “Crime is non-existent in this town! People don’t lock their doors. Kids are safe at school. There are probably only seven hundred kids in the high school!” He’d made generous use of his gift of hyperbole.
Dad tossed the move to my mom like a Hail Mary. Their marriage had steadily disintegrated over the months. That was the biggest surprise through it all for me. Before, happiness just seemed an inalienable right for them. Since Wyatt died, I’d heard my mom threaten my dad with divorce on a daily basis. She did it in a whisper, through gritted teeth. She did it loudly, following him as he pushed a lawnmower through the overgrown grass. She stepped right through the muddy tracks that the mower was leaving in the soggy ground, pointing her finger in his face and screaming at him to look at her, not caring that the neighbors were watching. She called him at work and left messages with his secretary that he shouldn’t bother coming home. She watched him from the breakfast table as he came in hunting coffee, and sprang it on him before he could even take a sip. My dad endured her near constant threats with an inhuman patience. He told me that she didn’t mean it…that she wasn’t herself…that things would get better. And he never patronized her. He never walked away or got angry. He simply nodded his head and waited.
Mom and I used to be very close. We were best friends, despite the warnings in every parenting book that it’s not a mother’s place to befriend her children. My mom was definitely a non-conformist in her parenting philosophy. But one thing I knew, as well as I knew anything, was that she loved me. I always thought she loved Wyatt more, but she loved me, too, with the strength of a mother bear. She counseled me through skinned knees, stringy hair, training bras, braces, and the savage meanness of girls at school. She welcomed my independence—no, it was more—she practically forced my independence. She wanted me to see the world through clear eyes, without the blinders that the narrow-minded kids, parents, and teachers around us tried to place on me.
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