Another yawn slips out of him, and he stretches his arms in the air. “Again tomorrow?” he asks. “Back to where the tide pool still fills and empties like it did all those years ago when I proposed marriage? I like it there most of all.”
“Then that's where we'll go.”
“Wonderful!” He turns toward the bedroom, almost naturally, because it's been years since he's lost his eyesight. “And you'll watch over me, Ella? Like you always have. Be my eyes when smell and sound and taste won't do? Show me the burning orange of the sunset and the ice-blue of the ocean, as if your eyes were mine? You'll keep a watch over me, won't you?”
“I'll never let you out of sight,” she says.
Clayton smiles. “I love you, Ella.”
“I know,” she says.
As Clayton Saunders sleeps, he dreams of endless oceans and sandy white beaches and his wife's deep blue eyes.
And he dreams them all in living color.
The In-Between
The Inside
Sometimes when he closes his eyes, he can imagine the outside – the bright blue sky with a puff of white clouds just above the horizon, a flock of Canadian geese in silhouette heading south. The house in this imaginary picture sits in the middle of a long suburban block. Two and three bedroom homes, all perfectly manicured and freshly-painted. Sports cars parked in the driveways. He can imagine dew on the morning lawn, the smell of the damp earth, the feel of gravel under his naked feet. He imagines feeling small.
His name is Cody.
He is eleven years old.
His room sits on the second floor, above the living room. The window is shuttered from the outside, barred on the inside, and though it happens so rarely that he usually thinks of it as something of a miracle, a sliver of sunlight sometimes finds its way through and slices across the darkness like an angel in the night. He can see his hands on those rare occasions. A little boy's hands, with long, thin fingers and nails chewed down to the quick.
When the Mother comes home, he can always tell it is her and not the Father. She parks inside the garage and when she comes through the downstairs’ door, she locks it behind her. Her footsteps are whispers, even across the tile in the kitchen, even when she wears high-heels. She drops her keys and her purse on the counter, next to the cookie jar, then she heads to the refrigerator and pulls something out to hold her over until the Father arrives home. They always eat dinner together, in the dining room, with the hollow sound of their knives and forks against the good china echoing through the tomblike house like the rattling of bones.
Cody knows all this because he listens.
The Father rarely arrives home before the Mother. He drives a little sports car, something with an engine that purrs like a cat. The car has never been inside the garage. He parks it in the driveway, under the hot summer sun, in the brutal winter cold. It doesn't matter. All that matters to the Father is that the neighbors never forget what he is driving.
He loves his car.
Maybe as much as he loves the Mother.
Certainly more than either of them love Cody.
When the rain is coming down in torrents, the Father closes the driver's side door with the kind of loving gentleness most people reserve for the door to the baby's room. Then, with the comfort of routine, he snatches up the newspaper off the walkway and falls through the front door with an audible sigh, as if he were on the last leg of a long journey and the end is finally in sight.
His briefcase goes on the floor to the right of the entry.
His jacket goes on the coat rack.
The living room television goes on, and he sits alone, reading the newspaper, the sound of the pages crumpling and expanding, fighting and surrendering as he ventures through the sports section to the entertainment section, and finally the headlines, a lonely warrior trying to “unwind after his long day at the salt mines,” as he often jokingly refers to it.
Afterwards, he meets the Mother in the kitchen, and they prepare dinner together, talking back and forth in muted whispers, like children sharing secrets. The Mother shows off some new piece of jewelry she has bought, the Father asks if they can get away this weekend, maybe go over to the coast and spend some time at that hotel on the beach.
“What about the boy?” the Mother asks.
“He'll be fine,” says the Father. “He always is.”
And that is the end of that.
Sometimes the talk is about their investment portfolio or moving to a better neighborhood. Sometimes it's about a promotion at work or where they are going to go on vacation this year. Sometimes it's about his golf game or her next craft fair, where the Mother likes to look for porcelain dolls to add to her collection. (“They're like little people,” she is fond of saying. “Precious little people.”)
Cody knows all this, because he listens. When he presses his ear against the vent in the floor, their voices rise up through the ducting as clear and as sharp as if they are standing in the room with him.
Those are the times, when the voices seem nearby, when he almost feels like a member of the family.
Cody walks the edges of the room and stops at the window. He slips his hands through the space between the bars and flattens his palms against the glass. It feels warm. The sun is out today. First day in nearly a week.
There was a time when he could stand next to the window like this and hear the sounds of children's voices on the other side, rising and falling as they played freeze tag or kickball in the street below. Cody puts his ear against the wall, listens, and hears nothing. It's been a long time since the children last played. He misses their laughter.
In their place this day, he hears the Mother drive up outside. Beneath him, the floor vibrates as the garage door opens and she parks the car inside.
The garage door closes.
The engine shuts off.
The car door slams.
Cody moves around the edge of the room to the adjacent wall and listens against the panel of unpainted sheetrock. The Mother drops her keys and purse on the counter and goes to the refrigerator. She does not remove any food. Instead, she places something on the glass shelf near the top. Tonight, like many nights, she has brought something home for dinner.
He falls to his knees and listens through the floor vent as she puts on a pot of coffee and sits down at the kitchen table with a sigh. She's tired, he imagines as he hears the snap of a rubber band and imagines further that she is going through the mail.
The coffee begins to percolate.
The Mother climbs out of her seat, crosses the kitchen, and takes a cup from the cupboard. She stands over the stove, drumming her fingernails against the ceramic top in a patter that sounds something like soft rain against the roof.
The coffee finishes percolating.
The Mother fills her cup, then moves out of the kitchen, across the living room, and starts up the stairway. Her footsteps turn to soft whispers on the carpet, and he hears her hum a tune that he has never heard before.
Cody raises himself off the floor and hurries across the room to the door. He listens as the soft whispers and humming pass by, his splayed fingers pressed against the cool surface of the wood.
“Hi, Cody,” she says wearily.
Weakly, almost to himself, he says, “Hi.”
But there is no response.
The Mother opens her bedroom door, enters, and closes the door behind her. A moment later, Cody hears the bath water go on, like it does nearly every evening after the Mother has disappeared into her own private world. Like an hour glass, water begins to fill the tub.
Cody heads into his own bathroom, what was once a closet, lifts the lid of the toilet, pees, then wanders back into the room in time to hear the Father drive up outside. He listens at the window as the car pulls into the driveway and purrs a moment before the engine shuts off. The Father climbs out, dragging his briefcase with him, then closes the door and starts up the walkway to the front door.
He drops his briefcase on the floo
r to the right of the entry.
He hangs his jacket on the coat rack.
Cody moves to his left, following the sounds around the edges of the room until he can hear the Father turn on the television set in the living room. He hears the squeal of the chair as the Father sits down, the crinkling of the paper as he unfolds the pages, searching for the sports section.
There is the running water coming from the master bathroom, the crinkling of paper from downstairs, and he knows it will be this way for a time now. He stretches across the bed, his hands clasped behind his head, and his eyes close. The moment takes him drifting past the walls, beyond the darkness, where he doesn't feel so alone, where his dreams have a way of painting pretty pictures.
The water stops running in the master bath.
The Father folds up the newspaper and puts it away. He climbs out of his chair with another squeal from the leather, and moves into the kitchen. He takes a coffee cup down from the second shelf of the cabinets, fills it, adds milk from the refrigerator, then sits at the counter and sips his drink.
Across the hall, the master bedroom door opens. The Mother moves down the hall, then down the stairway, wearing shoes now that don’t make a whisper against the carpet.
Cody’s eyes open. He falls off the bed, crawls across the floor, and plants his ear to the heating vent.
“How was your day?” the Father asks.
“Brackton dumped the quarterly report on me. He had to go home early because his oldest girl—I think her name is Nancy—got arrested for shoplifting from the Penneys at the mall.”
“You're kidding. How old is she now?”
“Fifteen.”
“Isn't she the one who ran away from home last summer?”
“No, that was the boy – Leaf.”
“Glad they aren't my kids,”
“Me, too,” the Mother says.
“Hungry?”
“You forgot, didn't you?”
“What?”
“The party at the Hendersons.”
“That's tonight?”
“In less than half-an-hour. Pot luck. I bought some chicken and potato salad.”
“What about the boy?”
“He’ll be all right by himself. He always is.”
“How long has it been since we last saw the Hendersons?” the Father asks, putting an effective end to the previous line of conversation.
“Months,” says the Mother. “There's never enough time anymore. I still need to work on the flyers for next week's used book sale at the library.”
The Father says something else, something Cody can't hear, and then the sound of him climbing the stairs vibrates through the floor. Cody leans back against the wall. He hears the master bedroom door open and the Father rummage through the closet, changing out of his business suit and his dress shoes, taking several minutes to run the electric shaver over his five o'clock shadow, then emerging from the room again and tromping back down the stairs.
The front door opens.
Cody raises his head and listens.
The voices are muffled, the conversation indecipherable. They spend a moment at the door, debating something, then the door closes and Cody can feel the draft of cool night air slip under his bedroom door like a whisper calling him from outside.
He leans back against the wall and looks across the room at the silhouette of the boy on the bed. Evening shadows, like shrouded ghosts have taken their places around the silhouette, but already he knows the boy's features by heart. The arms that are crossed over the boy's chest. The sallow, emaciated body. The sunken eyes and the smell of death.
He knows all of these things. He has made their acquaintance before and they are not strangers.
Not strangers at all.
The In-Between
It was only a matter of time.
Cody sits against the wall, watching, and he can see the boy's chest expand with a new breath that fights its way into the tiny lungs, then quickly collapses again. The breaths are fewer now, coming farther apart.
It was only a matter of time.
Cody climbs to his feet, and the shadows resemble shrouded ghosts oh so much sharper as he crosses the room. He stops at the bed, both fascinated and saddened by the placid face looking up at him. It is his own face, of course. They are near peace now, both him and this other incarnation.
It was only a matter of time.
The soul needs its nourishment.
The boy struggles to draw another breath, this one so shallow it's barely discernible. A burning sensation settles into Cody's chest with the weight of a bad flu or an early case of pneumonia. He coughs, then realizes the boy is no longer struggling for one more breath. The struggle is over now.
It was only a matter of time.
No longer can these walls keep him prisoner.
No longer can this darkness keep him blind.
Cody leans over the dead body and kisses the boy on the lips.
“Good-bye,” he whispers. Even after years of torment, years of being the invisible, unwanted boy, there is a sense of sickening loss at having to leave behind the only life he has ever known.
But the time has come now.
The house is quiet, and the quiet, with all its mystery, is calling him.
He goes to the door and passes through its hollow core as effortlessly as if it were a gaping threshold drawing him into another universe. It has been a long, long time since he has been on the other side. He looks across the hallway at the slightly-open door to the master bedroom, and turns to the stairs on his right.
The stairwell is lined with photographs: the Father as a boy in his Little League uniform, the Mother receiving an award of appreciation for her work with the library, a photo of them on their wedding day, another of them on vacation at a ski resort in the Sierras. There's a handwritten note beneath this last photo that says: our first vacation away, alone, since Cody's birth. They are smiling joyously, snuggled arm-in-arm, a beautiful snowcapped peak their only backdrop.
There are other photographs as well.
Though none of them include Cody.
Downstairs, in the living room, he drags his fingers over the keys of the piano, listens to the sounds and smiles appreciatively. He wonders why he can't remember anyone ever playing the piano, and wonders if in some strange way the piano is to the Mother the way the car is to the Father.
The case, behind the music stand, is lined with the Mother's porcelain dolls. Each doll, each “little person” as the Mother likes to call them, is perfect. Not a wrinkle in the clothing. Not a smudge of dirt or a speck of dust. Not a frown or even a hint of anything suggesting displeasure. Just perfect little people who are there when she needs to show them and out of the way when the showing is done.
Cody takes a doll in his hands. It is a boy, with a broad white collar over a black jacket, with black shoes and huge brass buckles, with a round black-rimmed hat that sits flat atop its head. It smells of attics and steamer trunks, and the porcelain is cool and smooth to the touch.
He puts it back where it belongs, where it will be safe.
Across the room, the trophy case, made of rich, dark mahogany that shows the powerful grain of the wood, stands in the corner, floor to ceiling. For the most part, it holds the Father's golfing trophies, though there are a few from the Father's high school days in track and field, and a solitary trophy at the back for something called The Houghton Award For Excellence In Team Management.
Cody stares at the trophies for a long time, fascinated by the wood and brass, by the depiction of men in motion. It has grown dark outside, and the shadows have made their way across the white living room carpeting from one wall to the other now. He looks up and sees a streetlight go on through the curtains at the front of the house, then wanders into the kitchen.
Beneath a mailbox magnet, a calendar is pinned to the refrigerator door. The month is October. The last day is circled, with a note about dinner at the Henderson's handwritten into the tiny box in red ink. Th
ere is another note above this, printed in black. It says: Halloween.
He sounds the word out slowly, one syllable at a time. Hal--low—een. And when his cheeks fill with air, he grins happily. It's a good word. Halloween. It's a word that nudges at him like a playful friend, familiar somehow. He touches the calendar, unable to put a meaning to the word, then drifts out of the kitchen the same way he came in.
Next to the huge windows in the living room, he stops on the Spanish tiles that serve as the foyer. There is an uneasiness rolling in his stomach. Before him stands the ornately-carved double doors the Mother was so excited about when they were installed last winter. The carvings are of serpents and naked women, of plants and vines and leaves.
Cody passes his hand through the door near the spot where one of the women is reaching out toward a snake, and he can instantly feel the cool night air on the other side. It is the first time in longer than he can remember that he has felt so alive.
He steps through the door.
The Outside
The porch light is on, and its bright cast falls like a halo over a huge bowl of candy sitting on the concrete landing. There are Snickers and M&Ms and Butterfingers filled to the brim of the bowl, all undisturbed.
He steps out into the front yard, stands on the cool, damp lawn, and looks down the long line of streetlights that mark this little piece of the suburbs. There are no cars in the driveways. The parents are all gone. There are no voices in the evening air. The children are all hidden.
There are no masquerades
–he remembers now, the meaning of Halloween: ghosts and goblins, masks and capes, children and candy, trick or treat—
there are no masquerades roaming in small groups, laughter as their companion, faces painted, pillow cases bulging with the evening's take of candy.
There is none of that.
But they are beginning to emerge from the houses now, one after another, all up and down the street, children like Cody himself, ghosts, too long invisible, too long ignored because there aren't enough hours in a day. They pour from the houses, a hundred other young souls, left unnurtured when what they needed most was nurturing, and the street is as cold and as empty and as lifeless as any street without laughter and children, and the bowls of candy are left untouched, and the Mothers and the Fathers will hardly notice when they arrive back home, and they will hardly notice tomorrow when they get up and there's no laughter in the streets, no children playing in the front yards. But eventually … eventually … they will come to notice.
Through Shattered Glass Page 9
