Through Shattered Glass

by David B. Silva

  I can’t you tell you how I knew this. Only that it was one of those things that instantly seemed self-evident. Like when you realize a half-second too late that you aren’t going to make a yellow light.

  Rick started his way through the crowd, in no apparent hurry, never taking his eyes off the girl. I moved with him at a different angle, step for step. It was the only angle I had, and it quickly became evident that it wasn’t going to be enough to get me there first. He had the line on me and he had the jump. All I could do was hope to get there before it was too late.

  But if that’s what I was thinking, then I was fooling myself.

  Maybe half-a-second more...

  Maybe then...

  Just before he arrived at the girl, Rick pulled a knife from the inside pocket of his jacket. It was the same knife Uncle Chet had given him when Rick had been a boy. The Generation IV. He kept it low, at his side, but the colored lights reflected dully off the matte-silver finish, and I saw it clearly. I saw it and I realized my brother was playing out the same fantasy he had played twenty years ago, or something as near to that fantasy as he could construct in his mind.

  He pounced on the girl, knocking over the chair and sending her sliding across the floor on her back.

  No one around them seemed to notice at first. It was as if the two of them were ghosts, playing out one final death scene for the benefit of no one but themselves.

  Rick leaned over her, pausing momentarily to study her face. Later, he would say that he had stopped to look into her soul, to make certain she was really Jude. Then he raised the knife above his head.

  Someone screamed.

  I fought through the last hurdle of kids.

  The girl, whose name I would later learn was Kimberly Hall, looked past my brother and stared directly at me. Her eyes were light blue, the color nearly drowning in its own white terror. Her mouth opened wide, but the scream inside her never made its escape.

  Rick plunged the knife into her chest, nearly all the way up the shank.

  The girl took in a depth breath that slowly gurgled out again. A trickle of blood ran out of her mouth, down the side of her chin. She stared toward the ceiling, her eyes instantly glassy, her mouth opening and closing like a fish gasping for air.

  I pulled Rick off and looked down at her, thinking of Peg, thinking of everything that had brought me here, to this moment and place, and the thousand things I might have done to prevent it.

  She closed her eyes.

  “Just watch,” Rick said.

  “Shut up! You hear me? Just shut your goddamn mouth, Rick!”

  “Watch.”

  There was nothing else I could do but watch. I had never seen a person die before, and in all honesty, I hope I never do again. I watched her eyes close, and I watched a subtle change ripple through her features like a wave. It reminded me of the shimmering I had seen earlier. Only this time I thought I caught a glimpse of something more. I thought I caught a glimpse of a hundred-year-old woman, deep black sockets where her eyes should have been, loose, weathered flesh, a mouth of rotting teeth...

  It was there.

  And then it was gone.

  And she was dead.

  Kimberly Hall was dead.

  14.

  That was twelve years ago.

  Rick was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. He’s run his course of appeals. Tomorrow he’s scheduled for execution in the electric chair, which, I suppose, is what stirred this all up again.

  He never stopped writing, though I admit I stopped opening his letters years ago. I couldn’t endure the pain any longer. They all read alike.

  There are nights when I still can’t close my eyes without seeing her face staring up at me. I don’t know if what I saw at the moment of her death was real or not. I guess I’ll never know. Traci tells me it’s something I use to protect myself from my guilt, and I suppose that’s as good an explanation as any. But I pray she’s wrong. I pray it really was Jude Fairclough who died that night. Because, as Rick said in one of his letters: some roads in life don’t allow you to turn back.

  Metastasis

  “It's back,” Melanie said.

  The bedroom window was open, the curtains drawn back. Midnight had swept through half-an-hour or so earlier. The month was July. Nine days earlier, a high pressure system had locked in over the coast, bringing high temperatures and a sopping humidity. It was rarely comfortable inside the apartment before the sun went down.

  “What's back?” I whispered.

  “The cancer.”

  “Jesus, Melanie.”

  The moon had risen above the apartment complex across the way. Its light poured into our bedroom, grayish-white, and fell across her body like velvet. “I can feel it inside me,” she said.

  I sat up, and stared numbly out the window. There was nothing I knew to say. Nothing that could express the dryness in my throat, the fear in my stomach. We had both known the cancer might return. It was just that ... that things had been going so well. I ran my hand across her bare back in wide circles, not saying anything at all.

  “I love you, Jimmy.”

  “Maybe it's something else,” I whispered.

  “Maybe,” she said, not really believing.

  I stared through the bedroom window at the peaceful night, wondering when it was all going to end, this cancer stuff. Night became a conscious, faraway dream for me, dark and sulking. The silence between us became a bottomless pit, its mouth open wide, waiting to taste the next spoken word.

  There were no more spoken words that night.

  We slept in late the next morning, till nearly ten o'clock. It was Saturday and the only item on the calendar was a mailing Melanie had promised to do for a local environmental group called Earth Care. The newsletters (which focused on a recent Time article about the greenhouse effect and global warming) had been delivered the day before. They were sitting in stacks on the dining room floor, a little more than a thousand copies altogether.

  It was noon by the time we finished breakfast and moved into the dining room. Melanie cut a handful of newsletters off one of the stacks, and sat down at the table. “Get a chance to read the article?”

  I nodded. “Last night. Before I came to bed.”

  “And people think nuclear war is scary.”

  “It is scary.”

  “I know,” she said. “I didn't mean it to sound like that. It's just that no one seems worried about what's going on in our own backyards. The things we eat. The way we acquiesce to every scientist and politician and quote—professional—unquote who happens along. Doesn't it make you wonder sometimes if we aren't giving away too much of ourselves?”

  I stared at her, trying to look past the words, because they didn't sound like they belonged to her. “Are we still talking about the article, or are we talking about something else?”

  “The article,” she said.

  I didn't believe her, but I left it alone.

  We worked on into the afternoon.

  It was another wicked day. Mid-nineties. High humidity. The air conditioner had given out its last breath of cool air on the previous Wednesday, and the manager had promised to replace it within the week. For the time being, though, we were forced to keep the windows closed and the drapes drawn during the day. Inside, it felt dark and oppressive and peculiarly isolated.

  We worked in silence for another ten or fifteen minutes. The process becoming mostly mechanical, a chance to drift off into your own thoughts. Then Melanie looked up from the newsletter in her hands, and said evenly, “I've decided to make an appointment to see Dr. Perry.”

  “You already have a checkup scheduled, haven't you?” I looked at her, realizing unmistakably that I had secretly hoped last night had been the end of her cancer talk. It was a bitter realization, followed by an equally bitter taste of guilt.

  “That's more than a month away. This won't wait that long.”

  “You really believe it's the cancer?”

  She nodded solemn
ly.

  “Want me to call him for you?”

  “No, I'll do it.”

  Ovarian cancer.

  Melanie had been thirty-three years old when the doctors first diagnosed it, almost two years ago. She liked to swim at the Y in the afternoon, and play volleyball at the high school on Wednesday nights. She liked to read mysteries before she fell asleep in bed, and bake berry pies when the berries were in season and she could pick them fresh off the vines. Maybe that was the thing I loved most about her, that indefatigable enthusiasm she had for life.

  We had lost our only child, Ruby Ann, to a miscarriage in '86. It was a loss that nearly tore apart our marriage. A year went by when everything had seemed shrouded in a thick, dismal fog. Sometimes I would wake up, the bed next to me cold and empty, and I would find Melanie sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a warm cup of coffee, staring blankly out the kitchen window. I wondered at times like those if I would ever have her back again. In the end, though, she stubbornly pulled herself out of her depression, and for awhile we were able to piece our fragile lives back together.

  Until the cancer.

  The awful, consuming cancer.

  “There's nothing showing up on the scan,” Dr. Perry told us a week after Melanie had first brought it up. We were gathered together in a cramped examination room; Dr. Perry on a small stool in front of us; Melanie sitting on the examination table, dressed in a hospital gown, her fingers gripping the rounded edge of the stainless steel table.

  “Then you've missed something,” she said quietly.

  For God's sake, I thought, listen to the doctor.

  “We didn't miss anything, Mrs. Slayden.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  The good doctor sighed. “Your white cell count is normal.”

  “So was the scan, honey.” I took her hand in mine, as if she were a child (later, I'd hate myself for patronizing her like that, for not listening to her). “And so was the doctor's examination.”

  “We're talking about my body. I know what I'm feeling. I've felt it before. The cancer's back.”

  I looked to the doctor, who folded his arms and leaned back on his stool. He had seen this reaction before. Maybe many times before. “I know you've been through hell and back ...”

  Melanie's chemotherapy had ravished her body nearly as much as the cancer it was supposed to fight. They had kept her overnight when her temperature hit 104 after her first session. A few days later, she received a blood transfusion for her anemia. Then her hair fell out, and it was at that point the secret was out and the denial had become pointless.

  She slept long hours during the six months of chemo. Sometimes I would stand in the bedroom doorway, studying her, thinking how different she looked from the woman I had married. Her face lost its color. Her eyebrows disappeared. By the end of her chemo she had vomited away nearly fifteen pounds.

  When her hair finally grew back, it was dark and curly. She didn't care much for the way it looked. For months afterward, she would stare at herself in the bathroom mirror, fingering her hair or her cheeks—which had become sallow and sunken—turning from one profile to the other, wondering out loud what had happened to her.

  She had been through hell and back.

  And she had survived.

  Listen to the doctor, I thought.

  Three or four weeks filed by, temperatures consistently hitting the low-to-mid nineties, the humidity hovering right around eighty percent. The air conditioner still hadn't been repaired. At night, we opened the windows to the cool breeze blowing in off the ocean. Mornings, we woke up early—before the temperature had started to climb—closed the windows, drew the curtains, and hoped the night breeze would keep the house cool a few extra hours.

  The summer had turned out to be one of the hottest on record.

  More than the heat, though, Melanie had been bothered by our last visit with Dr. Perry. On the way out to the car, she had hardly said a word.

  “What is it?” I asked during the trip home.

  “I want a promise out of you,” she said without looking at me.

  “What kind of a promise?”

  “I want you to promise that whatever happens to me, you won't call a doctor.”

  “Don't be ridiculous.”

  “I mean it, Jimmy.”

  “You're just upset.”

  “Promise me.”

  “How can I--”

  “Promise me.”

  I shouldn't have—in fact, I remember crossing my fingers, like a child trying to make peace with a little white lie—but I did end up giving her my word. I guess I figured that would be the end of it.

  After that, a slowly-widening abyss seemed to grow between us. It was more than just between the two of us, though. It was between Melanie and the rest of the world. She became withdrawn, silent. Sometimes it felt as if a dark cloud had settled over the apartment. I would look at her from across the room while she was reading or watching television and a foreboding somberness that belonged to her would stir inside me. That was as close as she let me come.

  More honestly, that was as close as I wanted to come.

  Between Melanie and the doctor, I wanted most to believe the doctor.

  Melanie wouldn't let me do that.

  In mid-August we sat down to do the next Earth Care mailing. The Cupertino Courier, a local newspaper, had run an article a few weeks earlier about a study in western Ontario where scientists had slowly made Lake 302 more acidic by adding sulfuric and nitric acids to the water. The purpose was to observe and chronicle the chemical and biological damage.

  “Did you get a chance to read it?” Melanie asked as we were working.

  “Not all of it.”

  “Nearly all of the species in the lake, in adapting to the higher acidic levels, went through an evolutionary change. The crayfish developed harder shells. The white suckers adopted larger eyes. That kind of thing.”

  “Over a period of how long?”

  “The changes came relatively early, but after seven years there wasn't a species in the lake that could reproduce. Even the white suckers, which had initially thrived, had begun to disappear.” She placed the last newsletter on top of a stack, then studied me for a reaction. “Every form of life in Lake 302 died out, Jimmy.”

  “Isn't that what they expected?”

  She stared at me a moment longer, as if she couldn't believe my question, then she turned quietly back to folding newsletters.

  “Well, isn't it?”

  “I suppose,” she said softly.

  “Then what's the matter?”

  “I don't know. Nothing, I guess.” She shrugged. “I was just thinking ... how sometimes it feels like we're turning the world into a giant science lab. I mean we've got test-tube babies and lakes with experiment numbers and—”

  “That's how we solve problems, Melanie.”

  “Yeah, I know. It's just that ...” She stopped there. Her gaze, both faraway and thoughtful, drifted toward the open window.

  “Hey, are you okay?”

  “I don't think so,” she whispered.

  “What is it?”

  “I'm scared, Jimmy.”

  The apartment became an empty church at midnight, hushed and listening. I moved around the table, put my arm over her shoulders, and she melted warmly into me, one frightened soul into another. Entwined with her, I felt both helpful and helpless. Maybe we both felt that way. “I love you, babe.”

  “I know.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Nothing.”

  Late afternoon faded into evening, evening into night.

  Before going to bed, I pulled back the curtains and opened most of the windows in the apartment. The cool breeze off the ocean had shifted south. Here, the air was stagnant and hot, the temperature hovering near the 85 degree mark. It reminded me of the time we went down to Texas to visit Melanie's sister. That had been in the middle of a late-summer heat wave as well.

  “Jimmy ...”

  “Yeah?”
I climbed into bed next to her. It was the first time in weeks we didn't immediately roll away from each other, looking for sleep on the wallpaper patterns of opposite walls.

  “Do you believe in God?”

  “Only when I need him.” I thought she would smile, but she didn't. “Why?”

  “I don't know, just wondering.”

  A familiar silence maneuvered its way between us, and I caught myself thinking back over the past few weeks, wondering what was happening to Melanie, to our relationship, to everything I had always held close to me.

  “What's happening to us, Melanie? Why won't you tell me what's bothering you? All this silence, it's driving me ...” I stopped short of saying it, though I'm not really sure why. It was the truth. I had already inched up to the edge and looked into the abyss that was threatening to swallow us both. The blackness, the quietude, were maddening. “It's the cancer-thing, isn't it? The visit with Dr. Perry.”

  She didn't answer.

  “We can try another doctor, if that's what you want. Someone from a different hospital.”

  “No,” she said firmly. “No more doctors. You promised.”

  “Then what do you want me to do?”

  She paused, and even in the shadowlight I could see her switching emotional gears again. Softly, as if it hurt getting it out, she said, “You can hold me.”

  We held each other for a long time.

  Sometime around midnight, the heat inside the apartment finally broke. Melanie opened her eyes for the first time in nearly an hour. “I love you, Jimmy Slayden.”

  “You're such a fool,” I said lightly. I snuggled up against her, inhaling her wonderfully sweet scent, not wanting to ever lose the memory of that smell. “Just don't lock me out, okay?”

  “I won't,” she whispered.

  But she did.