The Weight of Glass

by Stuart Heatherington

  The Weight of Glass

  _____________________________

  A NOVEL OF SUSPENSE

  The Weight of Glass

  By Stuart Heatherington

  Copyright 2010 by Stuart Heatherington

  Ring the bells that still can ring

  forget the perfect offering.

  There’s a crack in everything

  that’s how the light gets in.

  Leonard Cohen, Anthem

  Prologue

  Excerpt: A Life Less Wasted

  By Amy Macon

  I remember exactly where I stood when my childhood passed away. After all, I’ve died in that hallway a thousand times over the years.

  What I’ve come to understand is the end of childhood and the loss of innocence are two different things. One I surrendered and one was taken away.

  Sometimes, at night, like a snapshot, I let it all come back. I’ll never forget the stained nightdress that hung around my knees. How the shadows of a dying Poplar tree swallowed up my bare feet. Just past the window, I could see the lulling sway of an old rope. It held our sister’s tire swing in a tangled fist.

  The silence of the hallway felt oddly peaceful, like standing over a familiar grave. It comforted the fear boiling up inside me and trapped my feet to the floorboards when the only thought was to run. I needed that. Because when I stepped in his room, the snores and the faint scent of his breath stole nearly every ounce of my strength.

  I hid in the corner for the longest time, fingers trembling over the cap of an old Mason jar. Wrists and elbows a mess of troubled knots. It was then I realized something. I no longer felt the sharp edges of sadness in my heart. They were gone.

  With two silent steps, I found myself at the end of his bed, certain our stepfather would never hurt us again. A deep breath filled my chest, one I never let go. Then I removed the jar's lid and shook out its contents.

  Life is about choices. Some we make. Some are made for us. In the end, we own them all.

  1

  My dead sister lay on the seat next to me, a pool of ashes in a brushed nickel container.

  She disappeared nearly thirty years ago. Some stranger grabbed her off the road. Sheriff told us, with all the blood, she’d been murdered. Damned if he didn’t get that wrong.

  Memories are the symptoms of the things that make us sick with loss. Maybe it explained why her death swelled like the weight of a tumor inside my chest. I suppose a man would go to some distance to carve out that kind of cancer. Most would if they found out they buried a lie.

  Up ahead, an empty stretch of pavement merged into a bridge. The soft mist of a fog ate at the corners of the windshield as a gray backwash filmed the side view mirror. In the watery reflection of night, the road swam with life.

  Off in the distance, a strand of lights guarded the salt marshes of Fripp Island, South Carolina. I steered onto the island’s bridge, braking halfway across. Just sat there a moment, eyes feeling the place out again. Coming back made it harder to breathe.

  A phone lit the edge of the seat. I fingered the display over. The fourth call in an hour. It vibrated twice before I did anything with it.

  “About time you answered, Lee,” Amy lectured.

  “Actually, I’ve got to go,” I said. “I’m expecting another message from you any—”

  “Oh, sue me.”

  I pictured my oldest sister’s face, the twist of anger behind her lips I sometimes confused for a grin. “Didn’t think I’d make it?”

  “Excuse me?” Amy said. “I was worried about the weather, Mister-I-said-I-would-call.”

  “Give me a break. I’m not five.”

  “Doesn’t mean you don’t act like it, Lee,” Nicole Fields, Amy’s other half, threw her two cents into the receiver.

  “Do you have me on speakerphone? I could swear I just heard Satan’s little helper.”

  “Hello, assbag. And I meant that affectionately.” Nicole’s accent touched home like a postcard from New York.

  “Ahhh, the devil’s bitch. What are you up to?” I said. “Pulling the wings off flies again?”

  “No. Didn’t see the reason in killing off your whole entourage. Even piles of shit need their friends,” Nicole replied, a light-hearted playfulness in her voice.

  I chuckled. “Always good to hear your voice, Nicole. By the way, how is Satan?”

  “For God sake, that’s enough,” Amy interrupted. “I can’t tell when you’re playing and when you’re not.”

  “Keeping tabs on you,” Nicole said anyway. “Why don’t you call your sister more often?”

  “Technically, hell still hasn’t frozen over.”

  “Now you’re just being mean.” Amy said. “She’s not even on the phone anymore.”

  “I’m not that bad,” I said.

  “Let’s not kid each other. You should open up phone calls with an apology.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because you really are an asshole sometimes,” she explained. I imagined her sitting in the studio of that exposed metal and brick Manhattan loft she called a home, with legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. “Luckily, you can practice with me. Say I’m sorry, Amy, my dear sweet, loving sister, whom I adore and wish nothing but the best for—I’m an asshole. The words should come second nature to you.”

  “That it?”

  “Unless you wanna kiss my ass later?”

  “All right, but just for you. I’m sorry. I’m an asshole, and you’re the greatest living lesbian on the planet.”

  “See, that wasn’t so hard.” I heard the sound of satisfaction, as if Amy had managed one side of a Rubik’s Cube. “So where are you?”

  “I’m at Fripp. But it’s not the same anymore.”

  “What’s not?”

  “The island.” I noted the crowd of new houses on the road.

  Amy’s voice softened. “Darla with you?”

  The sound of our sister’s name rang like bells for the dead. A loud, unbearable noise intensified by the memory of her skipping shells in the surf or the fact I had instructed her in the fine art of building sand castles on its shores. “Shouldn’t have to do this again.”

  “We made a promise.”

  I held my breath for a second. “Jesus, you had to bring that up, didn’t you?”

  “How often does someone die twice in a life? Besides, what were you gonna do--mail her back return to sender?”

  I didn’t have answers to either of those.

  “It’s our sister. Spreading her ashes is the whole reason I’m flying down.”

  I bit my lip, the thought of it made my stomach churn.

  “Lee, it’s some closure for us. You know that right?”

  The hell it’ll be, I thought. Shit like this was the reason they invented Prozac.

  “Ground Control to Major Tom. Are you ever happy anymore?”

  “Look, I’m trying to change.”

  “You say that like you mean it. By the way, where are you with the book? You were supposed to let me know a week ago.”

  My neck drifted back onto the headrest, and I rolled my eyes.

  “Lee? Goddamnit, talk to me.”

  Listening to Amy on the phone, I glanced across the seat. Her memoir laid flipped open on the passenger floor. Its words were an unjustified margin of black teeth the way they brought on a shiver. The night it arrived I managed the first thirty pages, and it shook something wicked out of the cracks of me.

  “You need to read it,” Amy pleaded. “You owe me that.”

  “That’s before you told me what it’s about.”

  “Would it matter if I did?”

  “I don’t owe you shit.”

  “You owe me the truth, Lee.”

  “Th
at’s where you’re wrong. I’d rather forget our childhood. And just act like it never happened.”

  “Please,” she said. “You know I love you. You know that, right?”

  Her words touched at the fabric holding me together, and, as hard as it was to describe, it threatened to tear me apart. “I can’t do this right now.”

  “This what?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “What about tomorrow?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “There’s not going to be any seeing about it.” She hung up.

  When I looked up, two deer stepped out of the woods, their piercing white eyes a bright reflection in the lights. Oh, shit! I worked the brakes, chest catching under the seatbelt, teeth locking into place. Darla’s ashes slid off the leather into the glove box with a metallic thud. The tail of the car veered to a stop in the center of the wet pavement. I heard the urn spin across the floorboard, the brief sound of running steel in a pinball machine.

  For a second or two, I focused out the window on the two doe standing close enough for me to touch. The island was filled with them. Looking down in the floorboard, I grabbed the urn and set it back where it belonged. But my eyes stayed there, hovered over a medal barrel now exposed in its cloth, pawn shop ticket flipped out of the trigger guard. The reminder of my latest purchase drove a hot, uncomfortable spike of guilt into my head. Glancing up, I saw the deer were still there. Their large eyes pressed into mine with a tremor of uncertainty. We both turned to leave, them into the woods and me to an old road and an empty house surrounded by a shifting grave of dunes.

  2

  Excerpt: A Life Less Wasted

  By Amy Macon

  I hid the memories of my childhood for the longest time. Stored them in the cellar of my mind. Maybe that’s why, at the age of fifty-four, I have continued sleeping with the lights on. Sometimes I let them come out.

  A large part of me likes to pretend nothing ever happened, and often throughout those years of heartache, I delighted myself with thoughts of how splendid it'd be to have been an orphan.

  Oh, God, I would have never regretted being an orphan.

  Our stepfather was liked and admired by all who knew him, impressed by his impeccable manners and speech. His gift of personality divined honey from stones. But they never really knew him at all. Not the way his eyes feasted on you when you looked away.

  What I came to realize, was evil is nothing, if not often charming and personable. And Warren Tucker was a man for whom being well-liked and admired, enabled his evil.

  *****

  Summer of 1967 - I was nearly eleven when our father suddenly passed and shortly thereafter our mother remarried.

  Olivia Macon, a widow with four mouths to feed, mounting debts and facing foreclosure, had few if any options and few if any suitors.

  Among the many things for which Warren Tucker became admired by the many who knew him was that he was a man among men, taking upon himself the trouble and inconvenience of a mother and her four children and ministering to their needs as well as those of his congregation.

  Our mother prided herself on such a godly man.

  Facing the despairing wilderness, she heeded the sudden call to Jesus.

  The courtship lasted a few weeks; their marriage attended by the entire assembly of the New Gospel Baptist Church. Everyone smiled except her children.

  Distraught, to say the least, I still mourned the recent death of my father. The anger at her betrayal of his memory mounted to a rage that she should marry and so quickly.

  We were informed the day of their wedding.

  My oldest brother, Lee, voiced his resentment more than any of us.

  Perhaps he had a greater sense of concern. Perhaps he understood the subtle polarity between truth and deception. Whatever the reason, he never fully shared it. Instead, out of the sacrificing gesture of a loving brother, he'd become the barrier for what would become Warren Tucker’s hatred of his stepchildren.

  It was a burden he grudgingly bore until leaving us to enroll at the University of Auburn.

  Lee and my mother argued, and she demanded, “You can’t do this to me.”

  He pleaded, “Mom, you don’t understand.”

  “SHUT UP! I don’t won’t your opinion anymore,” she screamed.

  I sat silently, watching through a veil of tears, studying Mr. Tucker from across the small room. A thin smile spread under his eyes, then bled into a mask of complete indifference.

  Shadows swept over the long wooden drape of his jaw. He reminded me of an unforgiving king, all bones and nobility.

  “So, that’s it?” I asked him. “You’re just going to move us away?”

  My mother began to respond, but he intruded, offering matter-of-fact, “You'll see, my little bell. You'll find new things and new friends. Pretty, young thing like you. It'll be easy.”

  My skin crawled listening to him, the finality of those words a hard rake across my sides. I slid into the corner of the couch when he tried to touch my shoulder. Knots of wet tissue wrestled inside my hands. Our mother had ruined our lives with one fateful word. “Yes.”

  “Amy,” Mr. Tucker folded his hands in his lap. “God shined His words on me last night. Something fierce, they were so bright. Told me to open our eyes. Wonderful things are in store for this family.”

  “What things?”

  “It’s not for you to question God. When Moses led his people into the wilderness, he didn’t ask where and for what for. Only that the Lord take him where He—”

  “Do I look like Moses?” Lee snapped.

  I felt the couch jerk back as Warren sat forward, one fist closing under his leg, lips a straight razor of disgust. A furnace burned in my legs, watching his face unlock on my brother.

  “Watch your mouth!” Mother gasped. “Warren took the position of that church’s pastor. And we’re going whether you like it or not.”

  I had never experienced real fear, but in that moment, it swallowed me whole. My brother exposed a fine line with Mr. Tucker. One I didn’t want to cross.

  Lee asked, “What about Dad’s grave?”

  My mother turned her back, walking over to the window before speaking. “We can always come back and see him.”

  Lee began to cry. “No, we won’t. That’s a lie, and you know it. You’ll never come back.”

  Mr. Tucker stood up and moved toward my brother, constrictions rolling into his temple. He moved like a snake, taking an offensive posture. His long jawbone slowly unbuckling as he stalked my brother with a smile that matured out of nowhere. “I think we need to take a walk, son. Have us a conversation, a little man to man. Just the two of us.”

  He turned to my mother, asking, “You won’t mind will you, Olivia? It’ll give us a chance to work out our differences.”

  Lee spun around. “I’m not going outside with you.”

  “When it’s all said and done, I think you will.” Mr. Tucker planted his sights squarely on him. “Besides, we got us a lot to talk about.” He casually draped his arm around my brother’s shoulder, hand a rigid circle on the back of his neck.

  Lee’s face cleaved on to me, the sudden desperation in his eyes weakening the bones around my heart.

  I looked away in an instant, guilty at the relief spreading through me. My body trembled at the thought of being alone with Mr. Tucker.

  Mother called after them, “Lee, open your heart to God, and listen to him. That’s all I ask.”

  “I have no doubt he will, Olivia. I promise.”

  Mr. Tucker marched him out the door.

  I didn't want to stay alone with my mother for another moment. I ran through the foyer into the kitchen and up the rear stairway to my room.

  Across from the bed, a row of windows blew in a hot breeze. I sat upon the floor crying, my Sunday school dress crumpling around my legs.

  I gasped for breath, something all at once utterly foreign, chest a quiver of spasms.

  I heard sounds, loud voices rising to th
e window.

  “Stop it! Let me go,” Lee yelled.

  I slid up on my knees, hiding myself at the edge of the windowsill, glancing down into the backyard.