Glass Girl (A Young Adult Novel)

by Laura Anderson Kurk

  David smiled. “Wyatt was like a master carpenter or something. Our girls pretend it’s a fairy house. They want to paint it pink and purple.”

  “I’m glad it’s still here. The girls will remember him for that.” I smiled at Catherine and the girls who sat quietly in the back seat. Seven-year-old Audrey was one of those kids who stared at people who interested her. Sometimes it was unnerving. Ana Kate, the five year old, was more oblivious to others. She believed we were all just like her so there was no need to stare.

  The girls helped with my many bags, lifting things twice their size to get me in the door faster. They had months’ worth of toys and clothes to show me. I dropped my suitcase off in the guest room, and then joined them on the rug in the room they shared. The fashion show began right away and included everything from leather shorts that made me question Catherine’s judgment to ruffled pink tutus.

  After we played a princess board game five times and had a tickle fight, I gathered them both up and sat them in my lap. I had forgotten how little kids wiggle constantly and how they all kind of smell alike—a cross between corn chips and sweat. I kissed their moist cheeks and set them free.

  Catherine called me from the kitchen. “Come have hot tea with me. I need a girlfriend.”

  As I passed David in the hall, he smirked. “I’ve tried to satisfy her need for girl talk, but she doesn’t like what I have to say,” he said. “She’s missed you and your mom.”

  She pulled up a chair for me and set down a mug, into which she poured hot water over a chamomile tea bag. She made one for herself and then curled up on the bench on the other side of the table, wrapping a blanket around her shoulders. Their kitchen was like an old farmhouse kitchen—comfortable and scuffed up and soft with yellow fabrics and cushions on the chairs. Chipped white pottery lined the shelves of the hutch behind the table. Their sink made me feel connected to my predecessors when I washed dishes.

  “Now,” she said. “I need to see pictures of Henry.”

  I laughed and scrolled through the hundreds on my phone, looking for the one that would make her jaw drop. It was Henry sitting on Ben with a sunset behind them. I held it up and she said, “Shut. Up. He’s gorgeous.”

  She took my phone and looked through all my pictures, laughing at some and clicking her tongue at others. Tennyson had probably photo bombed my phone. “Saucy child,” she said. Definitely Tennyson.

  “I’m really glad you’re here.”

  “I’m glad I’m here,” I said. “I’ve missed you.”

  “Do you miss Pittsburgh?” She leaned down and picked up one of the several smallish dogs they owned. Peanut, I thought.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t think so. Right now, I miss Chapin.”

  She smiled. “It’s good to hear you say that.”

  I touched a family picture on the counter behind me. “The girls are so cute. And you’ve sheltered them well from my crazy family.”

  Catherine put her elbow on the table and rested her chin, watching me intently. “Your family isn’t crazy, Meg. If it is, we’re crazy, too. And I haven’t told them a lot about your mom. Just that she was really tired and needed to rest in a quiet place for a while.”

  “Which is true.” Although describing what we’d been through as a simple need for rest seemed sad.

  “Yes.” Catherine laid her head on her arms.

  Their chocolate lab, Stewart, meandered over next to me and laid his enormous head in my lap. I rubbed his velvet ears.

  Catherine slid a sack across the table to me. “I bought this on our last trip to Boston. I’ve been waiting for the right moment to give it to you.”

  “Thanks.” I recognized Harvard’s colors and the bag design from Harvard Book Store. I smiled. “I can already tell you this will infuriate my dad.”

  Catherine shrugged one slender shoulder. “Can’t please everyone.”

  I found a Harvard crimson hoodie in the bag and unrolled it. A university application dropped out with a thunk onto the table. “Subtle,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, I’ve never been known for that.” She stood. “More tea?”

  I shook my head. “I love the hoodie. I’ll wear it proudly in Wyoming.” I put it on and shoved my hands in the fuzzy pockets. “People will think I’m elitist, though.”

  “You could never be elitist. You smile too much and you don’t say, ‘Hmm,’ after other people talk.” She filled her mug with hot water and set the kettle down on a tile with a tiny blue handprint on it. “I just want my only niece to apply so I can visit campus again. I still have a ton of friends there.”

  “You know Dad would never let me pick Harvard over Penn.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Penn,” she scoffed.

  I chuckled and pointed at her. “Elitist.”

  David slipped in and scooted onto the bench with Catherine. “Girls are asleep,” he said. “You coming to bed anytime soon?” He reached for her shoulders to massage them.

  Catherine moaned. “Do you feel those knots?”

  “Mm-hmm,” he said.

  “Gotta talk to Meg about Adele first,” she said. “And then bed.”

  David looked up at me. The wrinkles around his eyes seemed deeper. “You tell her to come up before midnight for me.”

  I nodded and swallowed the lump in my throat. It hurt to see them together and so in love when my parents were thousands of miles apart physically and light years apart emotionally.

  David rapped his knuckles on the table a couple of times and then went upstairs.

  “I talked her doctor into letting me visit last week.” Catherine stretched her arms over her head. “It was…strange.”

  “How so?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She looked out the window and toyed with her blanket. “You know I can’t explain how it feels to see my big sister in a situation like that. It’s not like she was spaced out or rocking in a corner. But she’d lost all her sharp edges.”

  I nodded. “That’s a good way to put it.” My stomach twisted with nerves. “Her doctor said I could come by on Friday. Do you think…do you think it’s a good idea?”

  “Of course it’s a good idea.” Catherine twined her long, graceful fingers into mine. “While I was there, she put on her own makeup. I watched her.”

  “Wow, I can’t remember the last time she cared about that.”

  Catherine tilted her head and a frown pulled at the center of her brow. “And it’s not a hollow victory.”

  I nodded, a blurry, faded thought curling in my mind like smoke that wouldn’t materialize. “What do you think final victory will look like?”

  “For your mom?”

  I dragged my fingertips over my bottom lip and said, “Yes.”

  “Fresh stasis with new awareness,” Catherine said.

  “Fresh stasis?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “You know, like, equilibrium.” Her hands turned circles and touched at odd angles. “We all think when we’re young that we want excitement and highs and passion. To hell with ordinary.”

  I smiled and she chuckled. “But when we find ourselves in these adult bodies…when we wise up a little, or get slapped in the face by life, we realize we just want all things to be equal.” She put the heels of her hands together near her heart like the Yoga prayer position. “And we want to understand them better.”

  ***

  “Hello,” I whispered, trying not to wake the girls who dreamed glittery dreams just beyond the wall behind my bed.

  “Hey, cutie,” Henry said. He sounded sleepy and rumpled and I wanted to touch that place on his back between his shoulder blades.

  “Do you have baby cows yet?”

  He chuckled. “Fifteen born today. Can you believe it?”

  “Aw.” The ten-year-old animal lover in me was fully awake. “I can’t wait to see them. Are they so adorable and fuzzy with little funny faces?”

  “They come out kinda gooey and they smell bad. But, yeah, once their mamas get them all cle
an, they’re pretty adorable.”

  “What’s your plan for tomorrow?” I said.

  He yawned, cracking his jaw and then laughing. “I’ll be up at dawn moving cattle to different grazing pastures.”

  “On Ben?”

  “Nope. Truly’s my girl for that. What about you, babe?”

  “Not sure yet. My old school isn’t on spring break so none of my friends are free.”

  “Do something fun, okay?” Another yawn from Henry signaled the demise of this conversation.

  “What will your dad do when you’re in Nicaragua? Or when you go to college?”

  “He’ll hire a foreman. He’ll work somebody else into an early grave.”

  I laughed. “You’re probably sleeping through this phone call. Just hit end. I love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  I drifted off quickly. When the sun filtered in through the blinds and rested on my eyelids, I sat up and stretched. For the first time in so long, need propelled me out of bed.

  I had to return to the scene of the crime.

  THIRTY-NINE

  First, though, I needed to borrow the old VW Bug that sat unused in Catherine’s garage. It had been hers during her years at Harvard and she couldn’t bear to sell it. She’d painted it a garish yellow herself…using cheap, shedding paintbrushes. Sometimes as a kid, I’d stand in the garage and dig stray paintbrush hairs out of the paint.

  I lurched down our old street, working really hard with the gearshift for only modest forward motion. In the driveway, I performed the much-loved Beetle symphony—“Idle, Stop, and Handbreak.” The engine finally sputtered to silence.

  Digging my key out of my purse, I approached the house with trepidation. One, because I was alone and things hadn’t gone well last time I’d been here. And, two, because my mission was to retrieve my journal from my room.

  I unlocked the door and raced up the stairs, throwing open the window seat and blindly reaching in for the bound book I’d spent so much time with. The paper crinkled, stretched to its capacity by fluids like ink and salty tears. I smoothed it against my heart and took the stairs three at a time, locking the front door and sinking into the driver’s seat of the Beetle.

  No one was around on this spring day in suburbia. Grown-ups were at work and, since Pittsburgh schools were in session this week, no kids played in the street. Lawn service folks milled around, but they were used to ignoring regular civilians so I cracked open a window for some air and touched the cover of my journal on which I’d quoted Sylvia Plath—“I talk to God but the sky is empty.”

  I thumbed through the pages, reading my life. Hoping for some distance.

  But I was there again. I heard it verified for the first time that Wyatt was dead. I came home without him for the first time. I went to school—without him—and struggled to get down more than one Ensure a day. I was frail, brittle, skin and bones, and lost.

  There was no truth available to me. There was no compassionate Higher Power. There was only the smell of gunmetal. There was the reek of panicked high school kids. The stain of blood that the custodians were never able to completely remove from the green tile. A few weeks into our mourning period, a subcontractor arrived with new tile, but I still saw the stain where it had been.

  What still got to me is how quiet we were as we ran. No one screamed. Columbine students talked about the screaming, hadn’t they? In the locked classrooms—that’s where the noises started. Girls cried. Guys said, “Get down.” People climbed over each other to be the ones closest to the walls.

  Weren’t we supposed to be moving in slow motion? Actually, we moved so fast our edges blurred. We were one giant tangle of humanity trying to save our souls. Some of us were selfish. Others were natural heroes. Maybe they were angels who’d lived their whole lives for that moment.

  My ears rang in that locked classroom until there was no sound in my head but static. White noise. I lay down on the floor, under a desk, trying to cool my face on the tile. Voices whispered. Cell phones clicked. When I heard sirens, I sat up and listened harder. Had Wyatt escaped?

  Someone knocked on the door and we all jumped a foot off the floor. Principal Reynolds’s strained voice filled the silence and made us hold our ears. “It’s over,” he said. “Don’t open the door until a police officer shows his badge.” He repeated the same message at the door of the next classroom.

  Then the police cars arrived, parking at wrong angles behind our cars that we loved. I tried to figure out which classroom I was in. I couldn’t focus until I saw the bust of Shakespeare smirking at me from a shelf. English. Ms. Harrold’s room. She had been my favorite teacher. I spotted her, under her desk, looking at us with wild eyes. She was counting us. Making eye contact with each of us. She was mouthing, “It’s okay.”

  Another knock on the door made Amanda Jackson moan. My heart stopped beating and then picked up again with the wrong rhythm. I thought of conditions I’d heard of like supraventricular tachycardia. I thought of dying. I thought it would be easy.

  Ms. Harrold said, “Show me your badge, please.” But her voice was too quiet. It cracked with the effort. Metal hit glass as the officer pressed his badge to the window. “Officer Brock, Pittsburgh PD, Badge Number 11908.” The officer peered through the window, trying to see if there were injuries. “It’s over. The shooter is down. We need to evacuate the students now. Open the door.”

  But none of us trusted it. Even Ms. Harrold stayed put, visibly trembling. Brian Heffington, one of the kindest guys I knew, was at her side in an instant. He helped her up, walked her to the door, and flipped the lock open. Officer Brock entered the room slowly and calmly, probably at odds with how he really felt.

  He checked each of us. Asked for our names. Made a list. Then he lined us up and we filed in behind him, making our way down the darkened hall. We bumped into other silent lines of kids going in the same direction. We looked like we were much younger and our lines were headed to the cafeteria or recess or the carpool line. Or it could’ve been a fire drill. Except for the stone-faced police officers weaving between us with rifles.

  Once we got near the school’s massive metal front doors, kids whispered. Someone said Wyatt’s name. People stared at me. Lightning struck and life as I’d known it ended. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t move. Officer Brock said, “Someone tell me this girl’s name.”

  I sank to my knees and then lay down. My arms bent over my ears.

  “Oh my God,” a girl said. “That’s Meg Kavanagh. I just heard her brother died.”

  “Meg, can you hear me?” Officer Brock spoke gently. He knelt on the floor next to me.

  I could only nod. Then he lifted me and carried me directly to a paramedic. Darkness billowed and waved like soft, warm water. I wanted it to cover me. It touched my hair first. I put my fingers through it and it rippled against my cheek and down to my shoulders. It took my mind and I breathed it in.

  I found a note to Wyatt in the middle of my journal. One of the first I’d written him after that day. He’d never written me back. I told him how angry I was. That he had no right to sacrifice himself like that. I accused him of having the same quixotic, starry-eyed tendencies as Mom. They were both bleeding hearts. He’d died for that.

  I closed the journal and rested my head against the seat, warding off panic that came around like a bad habit. I’d had my first panic attack a few days after we buried him. I remember feeling like I couldn’t cry anymore and, as I lay in my bed, this unbearable tightness started in my lungs. My life felt very unreal. I looked down at my body and was surprised that it was mine. My flesh was transparent, like I was disintegrating. Nothing held me firmly tethered to this world.

  The first time it happened, I sat up quickly and got so nauseated I had to run to the bathroom. Then the shaking started, like my muscles had a mind of their own. I felt so pathetic because I couldn’t control my own body. I couldn’t sleep—I paced the floor all night. These attacks happened every night for days until Mom and Dad sent
me to Robin. She taught me how to breathe through an attack. She told me panic attacks wouldn’t kill me.

  At Wyatt’s funeral, the minister droned on and on about how there’s a time for everything, even a time to die. But that made no sense to me. The world was suddenly and entirely evil. I had to survive in a world full of depraved idiots who might or might not bump up against me and ruin my life. A crap shoot with deadly implications.

  And yet, I saw it, finally, for what it was. That awful moment in my school. What Wyatt did was pure and beautiful, and it was his gift to me. To me. It meant I was special to him. I’d seen his face as he ran toward Matthew and it had held not a shred of fear. His last moments on earth were all for me.

  That was it.

  That was humanity at its finest and my brother had achieved it.

  Tell me how people could deny a greater purpose for mankind, a divine mission, if they had witnessed something like that. It’s not possible. When I looked back, searching for the meaning, and I saw the truth of what my brother did…I believed. I believed. I believed.

  I pulled my cell phone from the pocket of my jacket and texted Henry my entire heart. Within seconds, my phone buzzed with his reply.

  Sweet Meg. Sweetheart. Though he brings grief, he will show compassion, so great is his unfailing love.

  ***

  When I’d left the halls of Chapin High all those months ago, I’d walked away as a victim. I’d returned as a survivor.

  As soon as the heavy doors closed behind me, I paused to take it all in.

  Just a short distance down the main hall, with light from her open classroom door touching her shoulders, Ms. Harrold looked up and smiled.

  We met halfway.

  FORTY

  “Welcome, Pittsburgh passengers, to United Flight 441 with service to Casper, Wyoming via Denver.” The flight attendant looked rumpled and worn out already, and we had a long flight ahead of us.

  I settled into my seat and plugged in earbuds to discourage conversation. My mind was peaceful for the first time in a long time. I’d been so nervous about visiting my mom that I’d chewed both my thumbnails off. What happened, though, was not what I’d expected. It was more…much more.