The Glass Forest

by Cynthia Swanson

  It started innocently enough. Movies, theater, dinner. Just spending time with a friend, she told herself. She was allowed to have friends, wasn’t she?

  But she couldn’t deny the growing attraction between them. No, not growing, she corrected herself. The allure had always been there. Ever since the night of the forestalled concert in Peekskill, David had been unforgettable.

  His smile overflowed with warmth. He smelled of chicory and leather. Sitting next to him in darkened Manhattan theaters, she would inhale deeply, slowly—memorizing the scent of him so she could recall it during her late-night train ride home.

  At Grand Central he would face her, giving both her shoulders a tight squeeze. Not quite an embrace—but more than a handshake, certainly. He whispered her name, then good-bye. He tipped his hat and said, “Until next time. I’ll call you.” She watched him stride off, her heart beating, her palms sweaty, anxious that he’d change his mind about her, that she’d never see him again.

  But he did call. He always did—at the office, of course. Was she free that evening to meet him? Yes, certainly she was!

  One night after dinner at Sardi’s, they stepped outside. It was a chilly November evening with drizzle falling, and Silja shivered in her raincoat. David pulled her close, and she turned into his embrace—naturally, as if she’d been doing so her entire life.

  Their lips met in a deep, hungry kiss. When they broke apart, David said, “I’ve wanted to do that, Silja, since I first laid eyes on you.” He kissed her again. “I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve thought about it.”

  “Me, too.” She hesitated, and then added, “And more than that, as well.”

  He smiled gently. “Is that so? Makes two of us.”

  Now it was up to her, Silja knew. David was a gentleman; he wouldn’t push her.

  She nodded over her shoulder. “The Hotel Piccadilly is two blocks away,” she murmured softly, pressing her face into his coat collar.

  He stepped back so he could look into her eye. “Are you sure, Silja? You’re absolutely sure this is what you want?”

  She didn’t hesitate. Instead, she nodded and took his arm. “Come,” she said firmly. “Come with me, David.”

  43

  * * *

  Ruby

  The scratches along the wall are so deep now, Ruby has paint under her fingernails. She turns and goes in the other direction so that her left-hand fingernails will be painted underneath, too. She starts humming, because there’s nothing else to do.

  Eventually she gets tired of fingernailing a line around the room at waist height. A straight line is as dull as a pair of socks that’s been washed too many times. So she starts strolling around the room, scratching out curlicues and random letters and nonsense words.

  She’s very careful to use her own handwriting. She wouldn’t want it to look like she was forging anyone else’s.

  Finally, she sinks down to the floor in a corner of the room. She grazes her nails into the old linoleum and finds that even if it’s worn out from chairs being moved around and people’s shoes and who knows what, it doesn’t give as easily as the paint on the wall does. The floor is scratched, but she can’t make it any worse.

  There is nothing else to do but close her eyes and imagine being somewhere else.

  • • •

  Ruby pretends she’s in the woods with Shepherd. She’d like to be anywhere except this room, but in particular she’d like to be with Shepherd. She closes her eyes, and it’s as if the skin on her eyelids is Prince Hussain’s flying carpet, a thousand and one nights of whisking her to places before and beyond this suffocating chamber.

  In her mind, she can be anywhere she wants to be. She can smell the tree bark and the earth, she can feel Shepherd’s hand in hers, reassuring as a thick rope anchoring the small, drifting watercraft that’s Ruby.

  Since she started meeting Shepherd in her family’s woods, everything has been better—not only her free time but even her school days. I have a secret, I have a secret, Ruby chants to herself while she walks the high school halls alone, while she sits on the school bus—near the front, where nobody bothers her but nobody talks to her, either. But it doesn’t matter that other kids shun her, because she has a secret.

  Shepherd has been meeting her for the past couple of weeks. It was risky—incredibly risky—but no one knew about it. Not Ruby’s parents and not anyone else.

  The first time was coincidental. He was driving near the high school just after dismissal bell, and Ruby saw his car and waved. He pulled to the curb and rolled down the passenger-side window, leaning over to ask if she wanted a lift. Ruby said she usually took the school bus home, but a ride would be nice.

  She explained how to get to her family’s property the back way, through the cemetery. She showed him a thicket of trees beside the crumbling old road winding through the cemetery. From there, you could tell if there was any activity in her family’s forest—any reason not to hop over the stone wall onto their land. Ruby warned Shepherd that if he saw activity, he should never step over the wall. But if all was clear, it was fine to come over.

  He furrowed his brow. “Maybe it would be easier if you’d just call when you want me to visit.”

  “I could do that,” Ruby conceded. Shepherd gave her his telephone number, which has come in handy many times since.

  • • •

  Ruby waited such a long time to have a friend. And now she has one. She smiles, thinking about seeing him the night before. About everything she told him.

  And then she frowns. She doesn’t want to admit it, even to herself, but she’s just a tiny bit worried. She’s made some bold decisions in the past twenty-four hours. She hopes she doesn’t regret them later on.

  If Shepherd were here, he’d tell her in his gentle, low voice that it would be all right. “You can’t control everything, Ruby,” he’d say. “But you can control your own state of mind. Close your eyes and let your mind be free of worry. Let it go, and it will go, Ruby. Trust me.”

  That’s what Shepherd would tell her. She wishes she was with him now.

  44

  * * *

  Silja

  1958–1959

  Silja drove the long way home from the station. She was still getting used to the speed and agility of her new car, an MGA roadster convertible. The car—an absolute indulgence, she knew, but she deserved it—gave her a thrill every time she revved up around the curvy Stonekill roads. I should have traded in that awful Buick a million years ago, she thought. What in the world was I waiting for?

  Her mind wandered to thoughts of David. Only two days until she’d see him again. She hummed as she drove, a mindless tune, enjoying the crispness of the early-fall evening.

  It was with reluctance that she pulled into the driveway. She hopped out of the car, opener key in hand. She inserted and turned the key in a keyhole attached to the side of the garage, and the door magically rose on its tracks. There was no need to push the door up and pull it down by hand.

  She slipped the MGA into the garage, next to Henry’s truck—more faded and rusty every year, like an old coffee can left in the yard. She returned to the keyhole and turned it the other direction, ducking back into the garage under the closing door.

  Inside the house, she changed into dungarees for her customary early evening walk in the woods. Henry was nowhere to be seen, and Ruby was doing homework at the kitchen bar. Silja waved to her daughter as she opened the sliding door to the backyard.

  “Make sure to stop in and say hello to Dad while you’re out there,” Ruby told her.

  Silja stopped and turned. “What do you mean, honey? Where’s Dad?”

  Ruby shrugged. “Take your walk. You’ll see.” She turned to her books and, without looking up, added, “Make sure to go all the way to the back.”

  Silja walked into woods bright with autumn foliage. She wandered past tall trees, squat bushes, thorny vines. Over the years, Henry had created a maze of faint pathways throughout their
three acres. Unlike Henry and Ruby, who both knew their way around seemingly by instinct, Silja never really understood the rhyme or reason of the paths. But she made sure to never go in the woods after dark. As long as there was a bit of lingering light, as long as she could look to the west and see the zigzagged roofline of her house, she could find her way out.

  Toward the back of their property, near the sagging stone wall that separated their lot from the old Dutch cemetery, she came across Henry. He was digging vigorously in a small clearing. He had a space approximately ten foot square roped off, and he was entrenched two feet deep.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  His head came up and he wiped sweat from his brow. “Bomb shelter,” he said simply.

  Silja was speechless. “Why in the world would you do such a thing?” she asked. “Do you really, truly believe the Russians might drop the bomb on us?”

  He gave her a long look before answering, as if he couldn’t believe she was asking the question. Then he said, “Everyone believes that, Silja.” He gripped the handle of the shovel more tightly. “Everyone with any sense, anyway.”

  She shook her head and turned on her heel. She went back to the house, stepped inside, and began fixing herself a martini.

  A bomb shelter. It was the most preposterous thing she’d ever heard.

  Ruby was still sitting at the bar, doing her math homework. “How long has Dad been out there?” Silja asked.

  Her daughter shrugged. “All day, I suppose. He started right after you left this morning, and he was still at it when I got off the school bus this afternoon.” She turned the page of her math textbook and chewed thoughtfully on her pencil’s eraser tip.

  Silja shook her drink, poured it, and took a deep, satisfying sip. “What do you think?” she asked. “Do we need a bomb shelter?”

  Ruby looked up from her book. “Well, it can’t hurt to be prepared,” she said. “And besides, Dad needs something to do.”

  Silja tilted her head, curious. “Dad needs something to do?”

  Ruby stared at Silja, as if she couldn’t believe the question. “Of course,” she said. “You see—don’t you, Mom?—how restless he is. Sure, he has his odd jobs and his correspondence course. But they don’t take up enough of his time or his energy. He’s like a prowler, always skulking around. Except he has nothing to steal, so he has to invent other business to keep himself sharp.”

  Her words took Silja by surprise. Certainly, Silja was aware of Henry’s hang-ups and quirks. But she hadn’t realized Ruby noticed such things.

  Silja took a long look at the slender girl—her daughter who had none of Silja’s curves but instead had been blessed with a strong, lithe body. Ruby got straight A’s in every subject, although English was her favorite. She didn’t have many friends—no, Silja corrected herself, ever since they’d moved to Stone Ridge Road, Ruby didn’t have any friends. She was quiet and obedient at home. She still liked board games, though she had outgrown Monopoly. She preferred chess, with one or the other of her parents as her opponent. Ruby enjoyed winning, of course—who doesn’t?—but she didn’t gloat. She was a gracious winner. A respectful daughter. She never gave a hint of trouble.

  In that moment, Silja realized something: her only child was nearly grown, and she had spent more hours of Ruby’s childhood away from her than Silja cared to count. It seemed just yesterday that Ruby had been a solemn child—the little girl Silja read to by the hearth in the old house on Lawrence Avenue, in those treasured moments she shared with her daughter. And now look at her, Silja thought—fifteen years old, a sophomore in high school.

  It hadn’t worked out the way Silja once expected it to. Ruby was supposed to be the eldest daughter in a large family. A family that Silja was meant to be home with, a family she was meant to take care of while Henry provided for them.

  In a few years, Ruby would be off to college. And then, Silja wondered—then what would she do? She’d be stuck here with Henry—living alone with the man who wouldn’t grant her a divorce, her husband who wouldn’t release her to be with another.

  She looked up and saw Henry coming back through the woods. He was shirtless, covered in dirt. His muscular, tanned body gleamed with a fine sheen of sweat.

  Silja felt a faint longing deep within her. But—attractive though he still was—her desire was not for Henry.

  Not anymore.

  • • •

  She called Kristina, whom she hadn’t seen in several years, and asked her to coffee. “It’s about Ruby,” Silja told Kristina over the telephone.

  They met on a Saturday morning at a diner on Route 9, some miles south of Stonekill. Kristina suggested it, and Silja didn’t protest. She knew Kristina didn’t want to be seen around town with Silja any more than she wanted to be seen with Kristina.

  “I’ll get right to the point.” Silja poured creamer into her coffee and stirred. “I’m worried about Ruby. She seems fine, on the surface. And yet . . . ”

  She trailed off. Kristina dropped a lump of sugar into her coffee. “And yet?” Kristina prompted. Her eyes met Silja’s.

  “I don’t know.” Silja put up her hands helplessly. “I guess I just hoped . . . I thought maybe she would develop some interests. Cheerleading, or a sport. Or playing an instrument. Something.” She drummed her fingers on the tabletop. “She comes home every day and does her homework. She gets good grades. She doesn’t ask for much. But . . . ”

  “But she must want something,” Kristina finished, nodding. “Of course she does. All high school kids do.” She took a gulp of coffee. “See here, Silja—I don’t have kids, but I know teens. Some of them figure it out on their own. Some need a little direction. Ruby is a smart girl. A capable girl. But capability isn’t the same thing as understanding one’s own needs. Ruby needs someone to look up to. Someone to help her fill in the blanks.”

  “You mean me.”

  “Well,” Kristina said. “You are her mother, after all.”

  They were both silent, drinking their coffee. The waitress came by and asked if they wanted to order anything to eat, but both refused.

  “How are you, in general?” Kristina asked. “It’s been . . . a long time.”

  Silja nodded. “I’m well. Work is going well. I love my house.”

  Kristina asked, “Do you still go to the movies?”

  Silja could feel her mouth curving into a smile. “Not much around here,” she admitted. “I used to, but . . . ” She ducked her head, feeling suddenly shy. “Now I just go in the city sometimes. With . . . friends there.”

  She was dying to confide in someone. She wanted to gush about David, to testify her love. Talk about how sublime it felt to be enfolded in his embrace. How much she relished twisting her wedding ring off her finger and tossing it on a hotel nightstand before climbing into bed with David. How she longed to take the damned thing off forever, maybe throw it into the river, accompanied by a joyful, satisfied laugh.

  How, for the first time in years—at least for a few hours each week—she was fulfilled. The way a married woman should be.

  But she couldn’t say such things to Kristina. She couldn’t say them to anyone. “Thanks for the advice about Ruby.” She finished her coffee and stood, leaving a couple of dollar bills on the table to cover her own coffee and Kristina’s.

  • • •

  Throughout the fall, Henry continued to dig. He said he wouldn’t be able to complete the bomb shelter before snow flew, but he wanted to have the space laid out. By the middle of October, he’d deemed the hole nearly big enough. He put the project aside for the winter, planning to rent a small concrete mixer in the spring to pour the floor and walls.

  In the meantime, he created a makeshift drafting table in his room, using milk crates and a wide, worn-out board. Silja hated how it looked; she averted her eyes every time she passed the doorway to his room. He spent endless hours there, poring over a little government-issued pamphlet he’d sent away for, entitled The Family Fallout Shelter. He
drew up plans. He consulted how-to books for ventilation advice and dry-cell battery power usage.

  “Fifteen feet down,” he said, spreading a drawing on the kitchen counter to show her. “That’s overkill—the recommendation is ten—but better safe than sorry. The space itself will have a ten-by-twelve footprint, not counting the entrance. You see,” he went on—his voice earnest, his finger pointing at a partition on the drawing, “you have to have at least one right-angle separating the entrance. That prevents most of the radiation from entering the main space.”

  “Does it now,” Silja murmured, sipping her martini. “Fascinating.”

  She went out to take a look one frosty evening just before it began being too dark for her evening walks after work. In the last rays of sunlight, Henry stood beside the hole, wearing a wool plaid jacket and dungarees. His breath was visible in the cold. Silja wrapped her arms around herself and stepped closer to the hole.

  “Eight-inch-thick walls,” he told her proudly, sweeping his hand across the hole. “And the roof will be steel beams and concrete blocks. No one—nothing—will be able to penetrate it.”

  Silja could feel a small smile playing on her lips.

  “You think this is funny, Silja?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “No, of course not,” she replied. “It’s very serious business, Henry.” She stepped closer and inspected the hole. “I appreciate you taking these steps to protect our family. Truly, I do.”

  Of course, she was lying. The whole thing was absurd.

  Henry didn’t answer; at first she thought he believed her. But then he said, “This doesn’t worry you at all, does it?”

  “No,” she told him. “It doesn’t worry me. Because it’s not going to happen. We will never need a bomb shelter. No one is dropping a bomb on us, Henry. It’s just propaganda. It’s just fear-mongering.”

  “Oh, really? And on what authority do you have this information?” He began hauling long two-by-eights across the shorter sides of the hole—they would keep out animals, he’d said, over the winter. “What do you know, with your swanky dealings in the city all day long? Who provides you with inside information on what the Soviet government may or may not be planning?”