Glass Voices

by Carol Bruneau

  “Your parents, your sister, gone. Their remains found under a house. A fire.” But she was barely listening, the nurse’s whisper barely audible above the blood rumbling inside her head. Harry’s people, too, she heard vaguely.

  But it wasn’t his mother or his brothers or his uncles and aunts he keened for. “Hush hush hush, stop,” they told him, “or you’ll open the wound in your chest.”

  IT’S A SATURDAY, BARELY TEN o’clock in the morning. Their footsteps echo down the bright, empty corridors, the hospital so quiet it’s as if it’s been evacuated. She feels a pang of guilt, the smell of the place dragging her back to those terse yet deadened hours the day before: she should’ve stayed the night, kept her vigil here, nearby, where her presence might’ve been felt, might’ve in some tiny, invisible way helped. She could’ve curled up on an orange chair, her cheek pressed to the vinyl, and no, not slept, but watched. The way one watches over a newborn, to ensure that it doesn’t stop breathing or choke or get strangled by the sheet. The same, but different; and a watched pot never boils, she reminds herself, but it’s not quite enough to loosen her guilt, the sudden feeling that, oh dear, by leaving Harry she’s let him down. Remorse arcs through her, and she has to take Jewel’s arm to keep up. He presses the button and they ride the elevator upwards, swiftly, too swiftly, since there are no other stops. In a way she wishes she could just keep going, rocketing up the last few floors through the roof.

  The nurse at the desk is talking on the phone, and points the way with her pen. Jewel marches ahead, to Lucy’s dismay: she’d prefer to pace herself with small, measured steps, as one would walk into the ocean, even on a perfect day. But that’s just how Jewel is, the sort who runs up, jiggling, maybe pausing for a split second before pitching himself in.

  Harry lies there unconscious, unchanged, the mound of his stomach barely moving under the blanket. Unchanged, except that instead of being florid, his face looks grey. He doesn’t so much as stir when they come in, not even when she leans close, her downy lip brushing his ear.

  “We’re here, Harry. Jewel and me.”

  The octopus tubes and wires seem to have multiplied overnight. A machine rather like a TV beeps and hums. A nurse slips in behind them, holding her finger to her lips. “He’s as comfy as we can make him,” she says. “Please, if you don’t mind, I have to say it. Rules. One at a time.” So Jewel quickly excuses himself, and says he’s going downstairs for coffee.

  AS SOON AS THE BABY could safely go outside, Lucy launched her search. Forgetting her knees and the wrench of giving birth, forgetting Harry, she started with the hospitals, the makeshift wards thrown up all over the city. She huddled in corners to nurse the baby, scouring the aisles and galleries of churches whose pews provided berths for the injured and dying.

  She stood through her parents’ and her sister’s makeshift funerals, clutching the baby the way others clutched relics: a melted watch, a scorched scrap of lace, lockets holding wisps of hair. She watched as they were lowered down, a single casket for the three of them.

  Trudging through her daily rounds she ended up, eventually, in the queue outside the schoolhouse morgue for the unclaimed and unidentified. She barely felt the freezing wind, holding the baby close. The murmurs of attendants drifted up through the cellar doors, muffled by the endless sound of boots scuffing stairs. Horses, carts and automobiles came and went with their deliveries and removals.

  Inside the cellar, it was as if snow had drifted in banks between the pillars, covering the sooty floor. Pipes snaked overhead, emptied of steam: it was so cold she could see her breath. The windows were boarded over, but there was light, just enough, from bulbs that dangled, haloed and fuzzy as the moon that hellish night. The bodies beneath the sheets were stones, bare and blue as the slate in Dad and Mama’s backyard. Many were headless, limbless as squared timber. Others mere assortments, knobs of flesh, tagged. Meticulously, too, with numbers, locations. Family of five, remains found near Rector Street, brought to mortuary in galvanized bucket.

  Daily she made herself look. The attendants were gentle, pulling back sheets from the smallest stones. Sometimes they held her elbow; once a fellow with scrubbed eyes offered to take the baby. Her heart pounded, arms turning to rubber so it was easy to forget the bundle against her chest. Her feet, swimming in donated boots two sizes too big, wanted to fly her upstairs. But she held together, picturing her innards, all those female parts slowly knitting, tightening, healing.

  From the number of teeth she knew this one or that could not be her daughter.

  “Well?” Harry would ask from his cot. But the wind just shook what remained of the maples outside the school, and the lineups grew shorter. They celebrated Christmas in the church shelter, and Harry’s bandages came off, all but the dressing on that left socket and another below his collarbone. Feeding himself soup cooked by someone from Massachusetts, he dropped the spoon. Laying the baby down, she picked it up, then he let the baby suck his finger. So what would they call him? He needed a name.

  She thought of a hand she’d seen, a ring swollen into a finger. The stone missing, but the gold still shiny. Like the ring she’d had, a sapphire that had belonged to her grandmother. She’d shown it once to the baby—her real baby, her little girl. Helena’s eyes had the same fierce sparkle: the sun on a hard, autumn ocean. She’d thrown a holy-rolling fit when Lucy’d put it away. Who knew now but that the ring was lying like a filling on the harbour floor, or was part of the clouds, a spangling of dust.

  “Jewel,” she declared without a second thought, despite Harry’s gasps about pansy this and pansy that. Touching the baby’s scalp, stunned by its peachy feel and the soft pulsing triangle where the bones hadn’t yet knit, she spoke dizzily, as if perched on high and looking down, repeating “Jewel August Caines.” Harry just covered his face and made a disgusted sound.

  SLIPPING FROM HARRY’S ROOM, SHE finds Jewel waiting for her in the corridor. He’s pacing back and forth, breaking bits off a Styrofoam cup. The squeaky snap hurts her ears, sharpened as they are for the sound, any sound, of life besides the respirator’s, that bullish, mechanical breathing: as if each inhalation is hope and each exhalation despair. Approaching quietly, she takes the cup from him, then reaches for his hand, squeezing it so hard he grimaces and tries to make a joke.

  “Well, he’s still with us, at least.” As if his father’s down in the basement, tinkering. That boyish brightness belies his age, of course, his experience. He knows as well as anybody, how, in the flick of a cat’s wet paw, things can change, and not necessarily for the better. The same way bad can worm its way through the good, and surface like a splinter or even a sliver of bone. What could she do but nod?

  He lights up the second they reach the car; never mind that she hates his smoking. She worries about his chest. He should take better care of himself; if Rebecca had more sense, she’d see that he did. His eyes glitter as he starts the engine, and instead of pulling out right away, he just sits for a minute tapping the wheel.

  “Stop it, dear.” His misspent energy only salts her anxiety. “I know you think it’s foolish, but…maybe if you’d concentrate, you know.” Say a prayer, she means: to comfort or prepare himself? Thinking it makes her swallow. If one believes…

  “He’s a tough old crank.” He stares at the bumper ahead, and it’s clear he wants her to say something, a motherly something: Yes, yes, your father surely is. But her heart’s slipped back to that cool, medicinal room, and guilt floods in, filling the cavity. They’ve stolen away from the hospital so quickly, so quietly, as if lingering would’ve only invited, hastened, defeat. It’s the watched pot theory. Or maybe Harry’s like a geranium: left to his own devices he might pull through, a watched plant not unlike a canner!

  “That’s right, son,” she concurs after a bit, her sentiment an echo of his, bold if weary: “Your father never would do anything without a fuss.”

  “Cripes, Ma. Look at that�
��lunchtime already.” A distant thunder, the noon gun goes off on the Hill. For the first time in a while, she’s glad when he invites her back to his and Rebecca’s. Rebecca will be waiting, he says.

  “Well,” she hesitates all the same; even under the circumstances, it wouldn’t do to appear too eager. “I suppose that dough will keep. It’ll be a while before your father can eat, anyhow.”

  BOUNCING THE BABY BETWEEN THEM, she and Harry stood waiting five hours to place the ad in the newspaper. The lineup had snaked right around the block.

  Girl, 16 months, last seen Young Street and Campbell Road; light brown hair, grey-blue eyes; pale green flannelette nightdress with smocking.

  Her description might have gone on and on; dreadful, having to whittle it down, but such a mob, everyone frantic to find their missing, and only so many pages, so many column inches. Always the chance someone had found her, carted her off, Harry’d pointed out after Lucy’s final trip to the morgue. As she nursed the baby, a feeble hope had flared.

  For weeks she lined up at the Relief Commission, the Red Cross and all the other shelters, posting a plea: If you have her, please return her. As if her little girl were a watch or diamond ring. It felt doubly futile, listing her own name in care of St. Luke’s shelter. But somebody must know something, she pleaded to anyone who’d listen: ministers, orderlies, filing clerks. Smiles faded when she gave the flat’s location.

  Once, the paper ran an article about a baby found alive under a tea chest, another under a washtub, not a scratch. Neighbours had kept him as their own till the mother turned up, the father missing and all twelve siblings gone. Inside the Relief Office, Harry at her side, Lucy rattled the page before the man at the counter. You heard things like that, he told her, shrugging. That one had gone to an orphanage: no one left to claim him.

  “What about trains?” Harry stepped up. Relief trains had come that black day and the next, blizzard and all.

  “Surgical cases,” the fellow volunteered, what couldn’t be handled here. Some to the Valley, Truro. Some taken as far as Toronto. “Traunno,” he dragged it out.

  “Children?” Harry twisted his cap. The baby’s scent was like smelling salts.

  The fellow nodded and someone in the lineup coughed. “No records. In all the confusion…the name, again?”

  “Hel-en-a,” Harry enunciated. “But she doesn’t talk so good, you know, not two yet.” The baby voice inside Lucy’s head repeated Ewinno. The man had ticked something off a list. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Outside, they’d passed a man on the sidewalk—part of a man, eyes bandaged, no limbs, a stump of a body on a board with wheels mired in the slush. A cup of pencils dangled from a hook. She’d stared at some pigeons holed up in the eaves overhead as Harry dropped in a nickel. “Hope you get what’s owing ya,” Harry’d piped up.

  “Means frig-all to me, mack. You been to Ypres?”

  It was like being asked if he’d been to Purcell’s Cove, and no, Harry hadn’t enlisted, barred from service by a weakness in his left eye, the one he’d ended up losing. What if he had gone to fight? It hadn’t borne thinking of as they’d hurried away, losing themselves amidst the storefronts’s shabby elegance. But after that, even sleep turned cruel: in her dreams Lucy stood in endless lineups, faceless people offering her a choice.

  Pointing at Jewel. You can have your daughter, in exchange for him. Harry saying, Collateral? Waking in a sweat, she’d find herself about to hand her son over.

  AS JEWEL TURNS DOWN THE lane past the yacht club, past the boatyard full of cradles, Lucy starts having second thoughts; dread is more like it. Already she pictures the kitchen cluttered with Rebecca’s magazines, the sink full of dishes, and, heaven forbid, more doughnuts. That’s just the half of it; something about their chaos, the mess, always makes her feel like she’s forgotten something, neglected some important chore of her own. Maybe it has to do with her habit of watching, minding things: “Jesus Murphy, Ma,” Jewel once said, “it’s like you’re everyone’s guardjan angel.” There’s just something about their house, packed as it is with Rebecca’s knick-knacks and efforts at keeping up-to-date, that makes a person feel like they’re in a pink and orange swamp, sinking in a quicksand of lizard green. Oh, it’s nasty to think this way, and she really doesn’t mean to judge. It’s easy to be critical, she’s found herself at times defending both his parents to Robert. Let them that live in glass houses throw rocks, she’s even said. But at the moment that’s neither here nor there: what she needs suddenly, urgently, is order, the reassuring calm of home and of every item small or large having its own, albeit dusty, place.

  And then, who knows, maybe some invisible order exists beneath Rebecca’s clutter and her Better Homes and Gardens-gone-wrong approach to decorating, a wacky order born all the same of an urge to manage things? Eyeing Jewel, Lucy finds this possibility reassuring, enough at least to get out of the car. Anxious not to offend anybody, at the doorstep she waits politely listening for Robert’s music. But it’s unusually quiet; after noon, and he’s still asleep?

  “That kid would slough till suppertime, you let him.” Jewel starts in, and she elbows him, another little habit of hers.

  “Watch your tongue!”

  “Coffee, Ma?” is the first thing he says once they’ve made it through the minefield of shoes and purses in the hallway, all of them Rebecca’s. Her majesty must have overslept too; in she staggers wearing a yellow robe, thick and fuzzy like the mauve one they gave Lucy last Christmas. Except for her reddish hair Rebecca could almost pass for a chick.

  “Ma,” she murmurs sullenly, reaching for Lucy’s hand.

  No one even mentions lunch, a relief, really, for who could think of food with Harry in such a state? But, ever the hostess, Rebecca takes over spooning instant coffee into mugs, while Jewel goes downstairs to rouse Robert. It can’t be healthy sleeping below ground, especially for someone who must be still growing, someone whose head sometimes seems less than clear. No wonder the boy gets ideas. Maybe he doesn’t get enough light? But if she mentioned it, Rebecca’d be all over her like a shirt, an itchy one. Well, if he were hers, he’d sleep upstairs like any civilized person. Like one’s child, not a pet.

  A few minutes later Jewel comes slouching back, clearly peeved; he makes a slurping sound sipping his coffee. On top of their new green fridge sits a Tupperware container full of doughnuts; mercifully, no one mentions these either.

  “Dunno what to do about him.” He wipes something off the rim of his mug: lipstick? “I told him, look, ‘Your gran’s here. You saw your grampa—the least you could do…’”

  Rolling her eyes, Rebecca rubs Lucy’s wrist; her fingers feel sticky. “Oh, give it a rest, huh? Not like you weren’t a kid, once.” She pauses, drumming her fingertips on the plastic placemat, which has big lime-green flowers on it, the colour not unlike a pair of those shoes in the entry. “Don’t you think you should call?”

  “The hospital? We were just there.” As he lights a cigarette, the flick of his lighter is a reproof.

  “You’re always so quick to rip him up,” Rebecca harps half under her breath.

  The coffee doesn’t even taste like coffee, so bitter it’s sweet—but who is she to comment?

  “Dear?” she murmurs, more to smooth feathers than to ruffle what’s on everyone’s mind. “Well, Harry’s…hanging on.” For dear life, she means, and that murkiness crowds round her heart. Yet such a stupid expression, as if he’s in a closet somewhere, waiting to be pressed. “We’ve just come from the hospital,” she repeats, but neither seems to hear as Rebecca hauls herself up, her bulky robe catching on a corner as she squeezes by. Gaping, it shows a slash of pink nightie. Her fluffy slippers look like dusters as she tramps to the stairs.

  “Bucky? Get up here, now!”

  It’s as if she’s screaming down to a monster, the basement the oozing depths of the swamp, a kind of underworld beneath the upst
airs clutter. Rebecca disappears. The coffee seems to burn a hole in Lucy’s stomach, that and her nerves, and the thought of quicksand bubbling and settling reminds her of the dough rising at home. It’ll be useless now, the yeast spent. She was stupid to make it, the time better spent…on what, dusting? Never mind: suddenly all she wants is to be alone in her own digs, where the appliances are white and the floors no-nonsense lino and fir. None of this overwhelming carpet that Rebecca so favours.

  “It’s okay—let him be. I’ll catch up with him next time,” she tells Jewel, but too late. Soundlessly Rebecca reappears, rolling her eyes. She picks up Jewel’s cigarette and lights one of her own off it.

  “He’s wanting you to come down, Ma.” She coughs into her lapel; against the cheery yellow her face is sallow. But there’s an eagerness there, that look in her eyes that’s like a leash or lasso, has been since the first time Lucy glimpsed it.

  “If you don’t come back in ten we’ll send somebody down,” Jewel quips, and clutching at her robe, Rebecca holds the red end of her cigarette near his shirt, and goes Hsssst.

  Trudging stiffly to the stairs, Lucy watches her shoes sink into the dark brown shag. A dust trap, that carpet, but Rebecca’s fixation on fashion overrules sense, any day. Even if she were the most fastidious housekeeper in the cove, which she is not.

  Panelled in wood to match the rug, the rec room and hallway to Robert’s lair are like a tunnel, the gloom broken by a single light fixture, bubbled amber glass that makes her think of an insect’s abdomen. The music starts as she steps over a heap of laundry, a keening that makes her ears sting. The singer shrieks as if in pain; good grief, what passes for entertainment!

  Robert’s door is open, but she knocks anyway. He’s doubled over on the side of his bed, as if he’s ill. But then she sees he’s listening raptly, though he barely looks awake enough to have put the needle on the record. He nods to her, which must mean welcome. The music is fuzzy now and slightly less high-pitched, like an air-raid signal piercing a dirty day, the sound dampened by wind and rain. Like the practice sirens that used to flatten her to the cellar floor during the war, when Jewel was overseas. But then the wails grow muddled and eerie, like a foghorn at the ends of the earth—or on the moon, yes, the moon, she thinks, but not soon enough. Not before the sound pulls at the strings inside her, memories like a marionette, motionless, grey and faceless but ever-present.