Glass Voices

by Carol Bruneau

  THOUGH SHE LONGS FOR IT, longs for it almost more than anything in the world, sleep eludes her. Thoughts shuttle and bump, the darkness hemming her in. Lord knows the time; the Little Ben has stopped, its useless hands glowing green. She imagines Harry in his bed again, the soundless drip-drip-drip of fluids. He might as well be on the other side of Pluto right now, as the past, that plague of memory, becomes a cord that winds itself around her. At a quarter to two she gives up, finally, puts on her slippers and goes downstairs. But the ghosts are there in the kitchen, too, the ghosts of smells: half a century of suppers, Harry’s beer, and underneath it all, a kind of primer, the odours of old lead paint and linoleum, the scent of newly foundered nails, for pity’s sake. She’s forgotten to wrap up the bread; no chance now of foisting it on the league. Not even the badgering deserve that, thanks be to no one for cheap or cost-free charity: O Caritas.

  Peckish, she saws off a slice just for the heck of it. It’s not so bad, with butter; passable, perhaps, dipped in milky tea. It almost revives her. And, oh glory, there’s the mail lying unopened on a chair for two days now: a coupon for Chinese food (“garden compost,” Harry would say) and the water bill, whose pollution charges make her think of the cabin’s spider-infested outhouse. The “arachnoshack,” Harry used to call it, until under Artie Babineau’s influence it got dubbed the shitter, his expression of course.

  Besides the bill, there’s a letter addressed to her in wavy, unfamiliar handwriting, which gives her a little shock, one quickly replaced by a flush, the same prickly heat as when she used to get those old flashes. But suddenly it’s as if it’s ten in the morning, the briskness of feeling fully awake like having the crow’s feet around her eyes pulled smooth. The mail is from the new priest, a form letter soliciting prayer requests.

  Sawing up the rest of the bread, she ventures outside to toss chunks of it from the stoop. Good Lord, if she happens to be awake and watching, Mrs. Chaddock next door will swear she’s off her rocker, this time of night. But the crows will appreciate it, Lucy tells herself, the pieces of crust a murky reflection of the stars, making a trail over the black grass.

  BY HOOK OR BY CROOK, somehow the post had made its way accidentally to Ida Trott, who must’ve found it amongst her own before, out of the blue, having the decency to deliver it. The envelope was already opened but Lucy wasted no time fretting over that, never mind the diapers boiling on the stove, Jewel scaling her shins. Plunking the baby in his crib, she’d torn across the yard, for she and Harry had no telephone, and luckily Artie did. Harry was there, of course.

  It was hard to hear with Lil and Artie bickering and that crowded, messy room spinning, the eyes in the buck’s head on the wall staring her down. The lady’s voice was blandly suspicious; the name she gave was Mrs. Margaret Edgehill.

  “You have a…child?” Lucy could barely breathe: it was like being flung and landing upside down under that buck, then jerked upright. “A girl?” The woman hesitated. But yes—yes, she’d seen their notice.

  The squabbling suddenly stopped. Harry breathed in her other ear as Mrs. Edgehill gave directions. Were they only sixty miles away? The woman’s voice could’ve come from another country, Lucy’s heart was banging so. Harry grabbed the phone. “Well, sure; first thing,” he said, looking shell-shocked as he hung up. “This calls for a drink,” Artie’d yammered, saying it’d been all over the paper, some kid found under an ash pan. A boy, he thought, eyeing Lil. “Speaking of kids,” Harry’d choked, “where’s—?”

  “That little hellcat?” Artie’d snorted. “At Lil’s mother’s. Look, I says, didn’t I Lil? It’s me or her. You know how I feel about kids.”

  THEY COULDN’T BOTH GO, BUT Harry got the day off to mind Jewel. She demonstrated how to funnel hot milk into a bottle, test the temperature by flicking some on her wrist. The times she’d taken the train she could count on one hand—for Sunday school picnics—and she scalded herself, rushing. As she was grabbing her purse and second-hand hat, Harry, holding Jewel like a stuffed turkey, told her not to get her hopes too high.

  Through the rain she ran all the way to the siding near the post office. The Ocean Limited was running a little late. But once she’d climbed aboard, each clack and grind swelled the hope inside her. Someone had left a newspaper and she read it front to back, then counted lakes and cows as they rolled deeper inland. When the train finally made Truro, she got out Mrs. Edgehill’s letter and started walking; street names floated up as if in a dream. Outside a big grey house she stopped: 158 Willow. Her lungs pinched as she climbed the steps. The details in the letter had been sketchy; she’d absorbed little more over the phone, and as she pressed the bell her hope fluttered. If the child inside were hers, wouldn’t she have known? Wouldn’t she be certain, emboldened somehow by the leaded glow through the panes? For now we see through a glass…but then…Oh, yes, she told herself, anything is possible.

  A tall, silvery woman appeared; Lucy’d expected someone thicker, dowdier. Margaret Edgehill rang a little bell and a girl Lucy’s age took her coat. Showing Lucy inside, Mrs. Edgehill repeated what she’d put in the letter, about her husband dying at the Front and how she’d seen the advertisement one day when the help was cleaning windows using old papers. Then she rang for the child.

  Waiting, Lucy thought her heart would explode. The blood washed from her face when the maid reappeared with a little girl. Both of the child’s eyes were covered with patches—she was maybe three or four years old. Mrs. Edgehill tugged on a string sewn to the little one’s sleeve, pink to match her dress and the bow in her russet hair. Sitting the girl on her knee, Mrs. Edgehill murmured into her ear. Biting her cheek, Lucy had tasted blood.

  The maid returned with tea and milk and crumbly fudge, which Mrs. Edgehill fed to the child as Lucy felt the parlour sway like the coach car. Horrible to stare, but she made herself study each delicate feature, the little mouth and chin with its jagged blue scar, the tip of the small, straight nose. A numbness spread inside her, a numbness like that induced by ether. What colour were her eyes—do you know? she imagined a monster inquiring. “Can she hear all right?” she asked stupidly, wishing she’d brought a candy apple. When she touched the child’s hand, the girl shrank against her guardian’s shoulder. As if watching through gauze, Lucy imagined the silky feel of her cheek.

  “How…old?”

  “We’re not sure,” Mrs. Edgehill had smiled wearily, prying small fingers from hers. Saying the nurses had thought maybe three, three-and-a-half. Her voice trailed off, the look in her eyes beseeching: “The tea, goodness, it’s cold…and you’ve come so far.” The child had scratched a mole on her wrist, a mark the shape of a bean. Staring at the carpet, Lucy could not wait to leave. “Another pot,” her hostess had instructed the maid, over Lucy’s objections. “We can’t interest you in a sweet?” But by then Mrs. Edgehill had sounded uninterested. Sliding from her lap, the child felt for the candy dish, then tottered over with it, her foot hooking something. Lucy’d reached out too late, as Margaret Edgehill caught her. “The train isn’t for another couple of hours, you know.” Patting the child’s wrist, Lucy had risen, thanking her anyway.

  At the station she waited on the platform, grateful for the drizzle keeping the other travellers inside. The wet had seeped clean to her skin, in a grimly satisfying way rounding out the numbness, giving flesh to her despair. It was dark and pouring by the time she disembarked, and Harry wasn’t there to meet her—just as well, sparing her his knowing look: Best not hope too much; when life throws surprises, usually they ain’t so good. Ida’s chickens scattered as she slouched past, the old lady herself inside, waving. At home, a perfect stranger bounced Jewel on her knee. “Mum-mum-mum,” he brayed, when he saw her. The woman’s face seemed kind of familiar; she said her name was Erma, Lily’s ma, and that Mister had an errand.

  Lucy kissed the top of Jewel’s head and counted the hairs, hugging him till he cried. When Harry finally appeared it was plain he
’d been drinking, as if he’d known from the start her trip would be a wild goose chase, all of it too much to hope for. His breath sweetened with rum, he’d rubbed her back, but still it had been as if the mildewed walls would fold in and crush her.

  THE MEMORY, WHEN SHE LETS it, still streaks the dark: the rain falling straight down as she stumbled outside trampling circles in the goldenrod. As if she’d partially lost her sight, too, tears sharp as darts; and somewhere in the fog—fog as persistent as all that splintering grief—had been Mama’s voice singing her favourite hymn: I bind unto myself to-day the strong name of the Triniteeee. In the window’s glow, Harry’d held the baby, Jewel wailing and reaching out; and the singing had tilted, then risen—a toddler’s, words barely formed: Wundun bwidge iss fawin down.

  Helena. The name had broken from her, a cry that glanced off dripping branches, lifting through the woods. It was as though she’d crossed to another place, where the dead brushed past, then laid themselves down flat and faceless as cards. The only sound the patter of rain; and yet, for a slick, hazy moment it had been her little girl in Harry’s arms. A glimmer of blue through grey, Helena smiling, her sapphire eyes, her rosebud mouth touching glass—till Jewel waved his chubby fist.

  DAWN BRINGS A RACKET OF starlings and it hits her, the queer certainty that Harry’s fading. He must be. At this moment, alone in the silent ward. The nurses on coffee break sharing recipes or the latest on the soaps—the stories, the ladies from the league call them, Rebecca too. Oh, the stories. Hungry for afternoon amusement, Harry—the picture of health, sort of, just last week—switching the TV on and off, disgusted. Griping how all they were was women whining and crying and stealing everybody else’s lover boy.

  Theft, she thinks, as a gnawing starts inside. Almost but not quite dislodging dread, it’s hunger, another, louder emptiness descending as if from on high. She’s had nothing much besides bread and tea for a couple of days now. But how can she eat when Harry’s lying there, hovering, drifting towards what? How can she think of food?

  Dialling almost frantically, she feels a rushing in her ears. “Is he…?” She can’t bring herself to say it over the phone, especially not at this pale hour. The nurse’s good-natured twang reminds her of Rebecca’s, without the put-upon pout, or even Robert’s; she sounds girlish enough to be in high school, but with her head screwed on straight. For a second, a giddiness seizes Lucy and she’d like to ask—to forestall the bad news?—how the nurse feels about “the land” and the moon, and, oh, for pity’s sake, about young women taking off their shirts and rolling in mud at that concert just weeks ago in some field down the States. ’Magine,” Harry’d said, seeing it on the news. “Can’t get my head around that, can you?” Harry trying in his silliness to be “hip,” which makes her think of bones and steel pins. Or being “in,” as they also say on TV, which makes her want to ask, in what?

  “We’d phone if there was a change,” the girl says evenly. “Best you can do is steal some sleep.” Oh, the kindness of strangers! Stealing: Lucy’s mind flits around the notion, as if someone’s picked Harry up and stuck him in their pocket. The very thought a reminder of the times she’d have given, no, thrown him away.

  SO WHAT, DOLLY, IF HE drowned his sorrows: didn’t he have a right to? That’s how he’d put it, pushing the baby into her empty hands, throwing up his own. The mornings especially weighed her down that lonely, desperate autumn, mornings and the baby’s crying, and Harry’s wincing. The scar below his collarbone a jagged tattoo as he lay there, young still, but more like an old man, one who could’ve easily given up. Telling her to get a diaper on Jewel before he whizzed, he’d say, “There’s a christening I don’t need.” And she’d oblige, a girl playing house, yet old herself, old enough some days to lie down and die, even as she did what she had to, folding, tucking, wiggling in pins. “Practice makes perfect, Lucy,” Harry’d tease, watching. Like kids they bickered, kids mimicking adults, except it was serious. The train ride and Truro a puff of smoke as grey as the rest of it. “You getting up today, or what?” Lucy stifling “your highness,” then letting slip a question, how Lily was last night. “Like a buttercup,” he had the gall to answer, in the same breath asking for tea and calling her the frigging Inquisition.

  Oh yes, his was the high life, all right. One day he didn’t get up at all, but had an excuse. A fellow had escaped from the prison—a Hun on the lam! Artie’d heard it straight from a guard: “Scalp you like a red Indian, them Huns,” he said. “Any sense, though, and the bastard would’ve shipped off to the fatherland.” But Harry’d figured the “bastard” could be hiding right out back in the woods, and stuck around all day keeping things locked up. But by evening, heading next door for cards, he left everything wide open. “Da-da-da-da,” Jewel babbled as she rocked him, the moon glimmering through the window. Watching it rise across the cove, over the wooded hill almost but not quite ringed by water, she thought of the shark, then imagined someone drifting in a dory. Ending up where? Stranded off a shoal in the harbour or washing ashore in Europe, the window seemed to answer, to be counted among the dead soldiers.

  “Lucy Locket lost her pocket, Kitty Fisher found it,” she crooned into the blackness, never mind what might be lurking: who cared? There was only the sky after all, an upside down bowl, and the three of them, the small, noisy triangle of their hearts beating their separate rhythms: hers, Jewel’s and Harry’s. The sun would rise, the days unfold, and yet… How could tomorrow come, how would she stand it, without some sign? Something as small and inconsequential as a falling star, a shard of glass or a doll’s arm washing up: or was this asking too much? Something, it no longer mattered what, to let her know that, despite everything, somewhere inside the great black bowl Helena floated, alive. Something Harry would miss, no doubt, off dealing cards: God forgive his stubborn soul.

  When he went to work next day, it was all she could do to get dressed. If there’d been someone to talk to—but who, Lil? If stubbornness was Harry’s right, pride was hers. And on the heels of pride came what? Shame. How easily these got muddled in the fog of despair. She longed to be able to separate it all into strands, like pulling apart a length of rope or a palm leaf, the kind they gave out at church before Easter.

  Fresh air helped the concentration, as did the lapping of waves, so perhaps it was their fault they drew her. The baby bundled against the autumn chill, she’d scaled the rocks. The tide was low, just turning. Something had swung on the current—a crate?—but as the wind pulled it, she saw that it was curved in the shape of a torso, a woman’s, swollen. A guitar coming unglued, with a man painted on it, a man under a palm tree strumming another guitar, like the one someone had played on their wedding day.

  The October sun spangled the Arm—diamonds?—but the fog inside her had spread till all she felt was its cold vapour, the numbness that was a cousin now, a “cousint,” as Harry would say, or a Siamese twin. Laying Jewel in a nest of boulders, she listened for reason: Mama’s. Not a hymn, but instructions. Lucy, girl. Go home, make a stew. Wash the floor. Instead, a voice not Mama’s, not hers, but the fog’s, had hissed: Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children alone…

  Sparkling at first, the water dulled as it swirled and bit at her ankles. Yellow as the heel of a bottle, it seemed to sharpen the stones; good thing she had shoes, thanks to small miracles. Reaching through swaying weed, she scooped up a rock, amazed, a little, by the cold, her dripping sleeve. It fit in her pocket, just. But what about Harry, and Jewel? The water didn’t answer. Somewhere behind her, far behind her, Jewel’s cries were a gull’s. The cold sawed into her thighs, but so what? The weight of her coat and of the fog itself was shroudlike. A foretaste, as the wind tugged so gently, and the waves rose. The spirits of the dead—the living?—taking her hand…

  Mum-mum-mum, Jewel’s wails were almost hers now, about to greet Mama. The rock an anchor, so there’d be no doubt. Soon, in the drop-off, would be her little girl,
sweet baby girl, rising through greeny black to meet her: their reunion a swift, sparkling shower…

  The clack of marbles grinding together. Stones. Fraulein! Splashing. Ice. A hand gripping her elbow, not Mama’s at all but, suddenly, a man’s. Miss! Jewel’s screaming yanked her back, as had the man’s arms dragging her, and his smell of sweat and fear.

  Her heels left a slug’s trail on the rocks. His wet coattails, their ragged hem, and the edges of his sleeves where grubby hands began and ended. All she saw, really, were his hands, and the side of his stubbled jaw as he ducked into the bushes, disappearing, an olive flash through the twigs and the blood-red huckleberries. Marooning her ashore with Jewel’s shrieking as she clutched him, millstone and lifesaver anchoring her to land.

  HARRY, COMING IN FROM WORK as usual and going straight to Artie’s, never suspected a thing. And that Sunday she’d returned to St. Columba’s, where Father Marcus, the short, balding priest, preached that despair was a sin against one’s hope in Christ. A blaze of sun lit the window, a bejewelled scene of Jesus himself blessing loaves and fishes. The red of his cloak bleeding over her skirt, the glow from his hands warming hers. Shamed by the sky-blueness of his eyes, she drank in the safety of Mass, Latin soothing as cocoa. Her gaze roaming, she carefully avoided the figure above the altar: those greying limbs, that sagging head. Lift up your hearts. We lift them to the Lord: the priest’s voice was as perfumed as Mama’s. Tears tickled both Lucy’s cheeks while people blessed themselves as if swatting flies. The breaking of bread, the breaking of hearts. That we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Mama’s scorn for Catholics hardly mattered now, as she fixed on Mary’s statue, Mary mother of sorrows, that smile like melting ice cream, and let the incense lull her. Afterwards, she ducked past the priest’s hand, his murmured Bless you.