“It’s okay. Do you want me to get you some juice?”
“No, I...” Jen tried to think. Something wasn’t fitting...something wasn’t right. “Who did it?”
“They don’t know, honey,” Tanya said patiently. She stroked Jen’s hair off her face, looking sad. “But I don’t think he’ll be coming over much anymore. And that’s all for the better. We don’t need him around. Me and you, we can take care of Mom ourselves, right?”
“Sure,” Jen said, but that wasn’t true, because they both knew Mom wasn’t getting any better. Tanya was lying, but Jen knew it was only to make things easier, and she slid down onto the couch.
“I love you, Jennie,” Tanya said as Jen floated back to sleep.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The gun lay on the floor between them, and Dan crawled toward it, grunting and garbling, his leg spasming and dragging through a smear of blood. Jen couldn’t look away from the knife, the red eagle emblazoned on the steel. Her fingers curled around the handle, and she remembered how it’d felt that night, cold and heavy and inevitable in her hand. How could she have forgotten?
Why had Tanya kept it, all these years? She’d taken care of everything that night, somehow getting Sid’s unconscious body into his car, driving to the roadhouse and walking all the way home. She’d created a version of the story that would keep Jen safe, and then made her repeat it, over and over, until Jen believed it herself. To make sure, she’d given her the medicine that made their mom so confused, the pills that sometimes made her forget what happened in the hours before she took them. Before night gave way to dawn Tanya had cleaned up the mess in the backyard, and the next morning there was nothing left, no evidence that anything bad had happened at all except for a twisting uneasiness where the memory should have been.
For the rest of that year, Jen had trouble eating and sleeping. Sometimes she had bad dreams that left her sweating and trapped in her knotted sheets, dreams that were lost upon waking, their details drowned in a wash of dread. But other things happened, things that took her mind off the nightmares: before long their mother was in the hospital and the school counselor had her in her office with a pamphlet on the stages of grieving.
How could she have forgotten, though? All those years when she felt like she was trying to outrun something, to stay a few steps ahead of the snapping jaws of the past, she’d thought it was just the desperate losing battle of her mother’s cancer, the poverty that hounded them, the future that stayed maddeningly out of her reach. She’d run so hard, leaving everything behind—even Tanya. She saw that now—she’d sacrificed Tanya in her attempt to escape the shadow of what she’d done.
No wonder it had never worked, not really. Because Jen had been fighting the wrong enemy. It wasn’t the wretched house she grew up in, the hand-me-down clothes, the sagging splintered porch where Tanya smoked and brooded. It wasn’t even their mother’s slow and painful death. It was Sid; it had always been Sid.
Jen’s hand tightened on the knife’s grip, fury flooding her veins like poison. She should have killed him. For years, she had been trying to run away from him and the evil he had brought into their family, the unspeakable things he had done, the sound of his black-hearted laughter as he threw his knife and threw it and threw it. The glimmer of her sister’s pretty hair in the moonlight, trailing from her father’s fist.
Jen’s fingers were white from the effort of gripping the knife so hard. She’d been tasked with meting out hard justice once before. And now it was time again. You were just taking care of your own, Tanya had said all those years ago.
Jen watched Dan crawl across the basement floor, his fingers brushing against the gun, nudging it farther from his reach. He made an almost-inhuman sound, his lips stretching away from his teeth and his face drained of color. He drew one last gasping breath and flung himself forward, his face on the concrete floor, leg twisted beneath him, and propelled himself just close enough to grab the gun. She watched him pick it up, tears and mucus slick on his face, and use both hands to try to settle it in his trembling grip. Their eyes met, and everything she thought she’d seen in him at first—just a nice guy, he could have been anyone—evaporated as he pointed the gun at her face.
Jen brought the blade down.
Epilogue
On a warm spring day a few months later, Jen took Teddy to the cemetery.
“Hi, Daddy,” Teddy said, kneeling on the flat slab of marble and putting his hands flat on either side of the deeply engraved letters.
“T, H, E, O, D, O, R, E. Just like you,” Jen said, sitting down beside him in the grass. It was warm for May, warm enough that she’d brought an impromptu picnic when she picked Teddy up from school, banana and Nutella sandwiches with the crusts cut off and bottles of Orangina. The grass tickled her calves as she arranged her skirt over her legs. Sitting cross-legged in a skirt might not be ladylike, but there was no one else nearby to see.
“I’m going to give Daddy his present now.”
“That’s a good idea, sweetie.”
Teddy had already given Jen her own present: a drawing he’d made at school that featured a creature that looked like it might be a dog but was actually a dolphin, according to Teddy. They were doing an under-the-sea unit at school, and as he unfolded the picture he’d made for Ted, smoothing the construction paper flat on the marble, she expected a crayon rendering of a fish or a shark. Instead she was surprised to see a half dozen figures on the page, one of them twice as tall as the others, looming over them. They were drawn in a variety of colors. It was only because the tall one—with arms that stretched clear across the page and five long fingers on each oversize hand—was green that Jen suspected it was meant to be her. Teddy took the subject of people’s favorite colors seriously. His own favorite color was red, but none of the figures was red: there were two brown horizontal ones and two black vertical ones and one that Jen almost missed, because it was drawn in silver crayon, blending into the white page.
“Who’s that?” Jen asked, tapping the silver figure.
“That’s Livvy!” Teddy laughed, as though he couldn’t believe she didn’t already know.
“But Livvy’s favorite color is orange.”
“Yes, but this is her hair. With the lights.”
Ah, yes—now that Jen looked more carefully, the figure did appear to be mostly hair. Livvy’s recent highlights—her first, paid for out of her babysitting money—were a subject of endless fascination for Teddy, who liked to hold the bleached strands in his hands and stroke the pink tips. Livvy didn’t mind. She had seemingly endless reserves of patience when it came to her little brother.
“And is this me?” Jen asked, pointing to the tall figure, which appeared to be holding a candle over the rest of the scene.
“Yes, that’s when you killed the bad guys.”
Jen winced. She had hoped to shield her son from the truth of what had happened that night, and she still wasn’t sure who had told him. Of course, it was in all the papers. The kids at school heard their parents talking. He could have found out half a dozen ways.
“And see?” Teddy went on, moving his finger over the paper. “Here are the police guys. Here is your gun.”
He pointed to each of the black figures, and then the object she was holding above the scene. Jen’s heart skittered. The family therapist had cautioned her to allow Teddy to talk about what had happened whenever he liked, and not to interfere with his narrative, and Jen was fine with that, at least in theory, especially because his teachers all said he was doing great. Also, because once he started talking, he didn’t ever stop again, a worry that had lingered at the back of her mind for a while, despite the reassurances from the speech-language pathologist. But she wished that he wasn’t quite so fascinated with the deaths of the strangers who’d come to their house, and especially her role in them.
The hardest
thing for Teddy to grasp seemed to be that Dan and Ryan had tried to hurt his family. Teddy had always been a trusting boy, and he couldn’t understand why anyone would want to harm someone else.
The second hardest thing for Teddy was the move. They never went back to the house after that night, and Jen had to remind herself that for Teddy, it had never become a place of horror. After his sleepover in the basement the first night, he’d escaped the worst of it. When he didn’t show up at the Sterns’, Cricket called a couple times and then just assumed something had come up. Teddy spent most of the day in the park, as far as they could tell, though there was a rambling description of a house with worms in the floor, and when evening came he walked the wrong way and ended up in the downtown parking lot where the police found him. His memories of the day were of an adventure that he eventually tired of. So he couldn’t understand why he never got to go back to his old room, and it was only when the movers unpacked his things in his new room in the house Jen rented near the old library—a sweet cottage, with a porch that ran along the front and an old-fashioned laundry chute, in walking distance to both their schools—that he quit demanding to go back.
Jen had returned to her old neighborhood only once, when the house went up for sale in early spring. Tanya had overseen the packing and the move, after spending only one night in the hospital and a week recuperating at home. Jen had paid for a nurse, which earned her an earful. The bullet had missed Tanya’s organs and it was only because she’d hit her head on the stairs that she’d been knocked unconscious.
Jen drove over to Calumet on the Tuesday that the broker tour was scheduled. She wore sunglasses and parked two doors down, in the Camry she’d bought to replace her Audi. No one saw her. She watched people go in and out of her front door, wiping their feet on a mat she didn’t recognize, admiring the brass fixtures and stone urns she’d once been so proud of. All the evidence of what had happened there was long gone, and the sooner the house was owned by some new family, the sooner she could let it go.
One by one she was releasing the pieces of what had happened. A week afterward, a man called from Redman Rare Coins to say he had a check for Ted’s father’s collection of eighteenth-century American coins, which explained how Ted had planned to cover his gambling losses.
Sarah Elizabeth Baker came to the memorial service on the arm of a man she said she’d been dating for six months. When she stammered her way through a few rushed and tearful sentences, Jen saw her for what she was, perhaps for the first time: a smart and slightly awkward young woman who’d had a crush on her husband, nothing more.
The media turned up more than she ever wanted to know about Richard Yost and his nephew Dave Husted, but she was surprisingly unmoved by the details. Yost had disguised himself as ordinary, an everyman. In truth he was even less, an empty vessel that took on the shape of whatever con he was working. And Dave—it seemed to her that all one needed to know was that there had been a dangerous fire burning in him, hidden behind those handsome features, and Jen felt no remorse from having extinguished it.
Jen picked up her purse and dug through the contents for her cigarettes, tucked into the pocket meant for a cell phone. Smoking was something she’d taken up during the waning end of February, an old habit that had taken a little of the jagged edge off during those days of police interviews and insurance adjusters and lawyers and school counselors. She was going to quit again—soon—but for now, just even touching the crinkling cellophane of the pack could calm her down, bring her back into the moment. And if that’s what it took to be there for her children, then the surgeon general could just fuck off.
Jen flashed a quick grin. It happened, sometimes, a thought that would pop into her head that she would swear came straight from Tanya. She was still on careful footing with her sister, who had refused all her pleas to go to the family counselor. But at least they were spending time together. Jake rode his bike over sometimes, and Tanya would pop by with a bucket of chicken, or Jen would take a casserole and a bottle of wine over to her apartment. Jen was thinking of inviting a few friends to Easter dinner, and Tanya had already said she’d help cook.
They might never be close again the way they had once been, all those years ago when they shared a cramped bedroom in a cursed house. But Tanya had risked her life to save her, just as she’d risked everything to save Jen once before. And Jen had once fought for her, as well. That story had been buried for three decades, and it would stay buried now. Jen would never tell it to a living soul.
For so much of her life, she had forgotten who she was. She had wasted so much energy trying to control everything around her, when the one thing she was meant to do had been in her grasp all along: she took care of her own.
Teddy had found a dandelion growing a few inches from his father’s stone, and he was trying to uproot it without breaking the stem. At home, Jen paid him a nickel for every dandelion he dug out of the yard with the roots intact.
A yellow jacket swerved close and hovered near the sweet expanse of Teddy’s neck where his blond hair curled, just as his father’s always had. Without thinking, Jen shot out her hand and closed her fist around the insect. She could feel its wings beating frantically against her fingers as she carried it a few paces away. She released the yellow jacket behind a tall white marble monument, and it flew up into the sky.
Jen had let it live, and she wished it a good life—warm sunshine, blue skies and sweet nectar. But if it had harmed her son she would have crushed it.
Woe to anyone who ever threatened what was hers again.
Jen took in a breath and let it out slowly, allowing the fire that roared within her to return to a smolder. Teddy had managed to get the dandelion free and was now expanding the hole.
“Mom!” he said. “I saw a worm down there. A big one. Want to help?”
“Sure,” Jen said, and together they dug, dirt under their nails, the sun on their faces and their dead at rest below.
* * * * *
Acknowledgments
This book was conceived over a lunch with two of the most dedicated publishing folks I know: my agent, Barbara Poelle, and my editor, Erika Imranyi. Little did they know that the fairly straightforward back-of-the-napkin outline I took home in my purse would take us on such an interesting journey. I would like to thank them for both high expectations and the grit to see the process through: this one is also for you two.
Thank you, also, to the Harlequin team for making me feel welcome at every step of the way. From warehouse to conference room to rooftop, you set the bar high, and I’m honored to be a part of the endeavor.
House
of
Glass
SOPHIE LITTLEFIELD
Reader’s Guide
Questions for Discussion
The Glasses’ marriage is somewhat fragile at the beginning of the book. Are the issues genuine, or a product of Jen’s imagination? Is she justified in doubting Ted?
Livvy is also at odds with her parents at the outset of the book. Is this normal teen behavior, or is there something more concerning at work? How does it affect her development as the story progresses?
Teddy has a condition in which he doesn’t speak. Ted and Jen handle this very differently. Who is right? How does this condition affect the family and the Glasses’ marriage? How does Teddy’s decision to speak near the end of the book fit into the story?
Jen and her sister, Tanya, grew up under difficult circumstances. How did these dictate the choices each made in adulthood?
Sid’s death brought up a variety of emotions for the sisters, especially given their estrangement. Are there lessons here on the consequences of grown children attempting to distance themselves from painful childhood memories?
Several red herrings cast suspicion
on a variety of characters, including Sid, Livvy’s boyfriend and even the family gardener. Given the circumstances, did Jen’s speculation make sense, or was it merely the product of her hysteria?
Livvy endures a horrific encounter with Ryan. Where does she get the strength to endure and fight back?
Tanya’s arrival marks a turning point in the course of events, but also results in her grave injury. Is she the true heroine of the story? Are there limits to what she would do for her sister and her family?
Ted’s final moments are spent reliving the choices he made that led to the invasion. Does he ultimately bear the largest share of the blame, even posthumously? When, if ever, did he behave heroically?
As a mother, what are some of the challenges that Jen faces during the events of the novel, and how does she rise to confront them? How do you feel about her actions? Would you respond similarly or differently, and how?
A Conversation with Sophie Littlefield
House of Glass is an emotionally charged, ripped-from-the-headlines thriller about a family put to the ultimate test. What was your inspiration for this story?
A number of years ago, a home invasion took place in Connecticut. A family of four was imprisoned, abused, and all but the husband killed. Details of the case, and the subsequent trial and conviction of the killers, held the country in thrall and dominated the news for weeks.
I was unable to watch or read accounts of the case. Though I often write about violent characters and dark impulses, I have a low tolerance for real evil and suffering, and often take the coward’s path, burying my head in the sand until the story is supplanted by fresher news.
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