The Weight of Glass

by Stuart Heatherington

  “Long enough to know better.”

  I studied her face in the darkness, thinking back to what she said about the little girl in the mirror. I tried to gather the countless ways she could come undone. There were so many, I believed it nearly impossible to imagine.

  “Lee,” she interrupted the dismal silence, “what was the worst thing you ever did?”

  I put my eyes squarely into hers. “What you said earlier. That I got him fired.”

  “Somehow, I don’t think you feel bad about that.”

  “Sooner or later they would’ve got him caught sticking his pecker in one of them.”

  Her head was shaking. “God I still remember the look on his face.”

  Black grooves stretched the length of the porch like longitudinal lines across some planet. I traced their furrows into the cindery shadows. Anger crawled out of their darkness and surfaced with the stench of hate all over it. “He deserved a hell of a lot more.”

  “Public crucifixion wasn’t enough?”

  “Upside down would’ve been nice,” I added.

  “You never asked for any help.” I caught the blemish of a smile fading into the corner of her mouth.

  “Did you always know it was me?” The whole time I’d been sure no one knew of my exploits into the ranks of revolutionary behavior. My last few years of high school, I became a one-man army. The Good Shepherd, long by then my sworn enemy, the focus of all my resistance efforts.

  “Had my doubts at first, but on the inside I knew. You were the only one that morning not surprised.”

  “Aren’t you the little Jessica Fletcher?” I stooped over to pick up my beer from the floor and raised the last swallow in the air. “Here’s to fuckhead. Hope you’re pushing a broom somewhere in hell, Tucker, you bastard.”

  Amy’s head sailed back in laughter, as she exchanged her empty bottle for a pack of Vantage.

  “What’s so funny?”

  She took a deep drag, tossing her lighter back on the floor. “You’ve forgotten, haven’t you?”

  “Not as young as I used to be. Brain likes to take personal time off without me knowing it.”

  She puffed her lips. “Like that surprises me.”

  “I’m not some book you read yesterday.”

  “You’re telling me you don’t remember his hands? Or even his feet?” She made a slicing movement above her ankle. “Or should I say the lack there of?”

  I closed my eyes when the memory hit me, the smile hard to refuse. “I can’t believe I forgot that.”

  “Three on the left and two on the right.” Her thumb snapped ash into the ceramic dish. “I prayed every night he’d lose the rest of them.”

  The Good Shepherd’s first few fingers were removed after I left for my sophomore year at Auburn. By the time he died in the fire, four years later, he possessed half the digits bestowed a man. He couldn’t leaf through his Bible without a concentrated effort. Then came his feet. Not just toes, but chunks of flesh and a heel needed to be removed. Eventually the right foot came off at the ankle.

  “Let’s share our secrets, Lee.” The hushed tones of her voice stirred the darkness, rolling off her tongue like the waves below us, striking some forbidden place inside me.

  “What secrets? I’ve done well to forget all mine.”

  “I know better.” Her eyes scolded me. “So, tell me. I want to know how you got him fired.”

  “Does it matter?” I saw myself swimming upstream with the direction she was leading. “It’s water under the bridge now.”

  She shook her head. “And more stagnant every day. Tell me.”

  “If sharing secrets did us any good, you’d be the first to know.”

  “It’s not fair. Things changed in the wake of what you did.”

  I treaded around those words carefully. “Is that what you meant by I wasn’t there?”

  She nodded her head. “Now you see.”

  I couldn’t express the way those three ordinary words formed on her mouth; like the sharpest of knives, they cut through the deepest chords of me.

  “I want to tell you something. You are my dear sweet brother, but when you went away, nothing stayed the same.” Amy looked at me above the glow of her smoldering cigarette, hand pulling her towel from her head. “My whole life fucking fell apart, and that’s not blaming you.” She touched my arm for reassurance. I didn’t matter.

  “I didn’t say you were.” But inside I sensed it gnawing at me.

  “Then you’ll understand when I say this. Fear made itself readily available in the darkness of that awful home and, for that, I’m still terrified of sleeping with the lights off. He made us afraid of the dark.”

  Amy sat there, blinking at me with her empty eyes. She looked nothing like my sister anymore, her body a worn down hostage in her own skin. From where I sat, she reminded me of a caged animal, something that had never tasted freedom. For a moment, I thought we aspired to birds, not knowing how to leave when the cage door finally opened. I stood up and went to my sister’s side. Her wrists lay cold and thin in my hands. She leaned forward and I took the spot behind her, resting her head back on my shoulder. The cool dampness of her hair adhered to my chest, and once trapped beads of water slipped down our skin and across my hips in the summer heat.

  “What did he do to you?”

  “It’s not what he did to me,” she said. “It’s always been what I let him do.”

  Amy looked back at me. Her face a grueling answer for the questions I wanted to ask; for the pain inside my chest, beating like thunder, and the bitter regret of my failure to protect her. I began to sob. The warmth of her lips touched on my cheek, her hand wiping the tears away.

  “I love you,” she whispered at my neck.

  “You shouldn’t.”

  “That’s not true. I owe you my life. And I want you to promise me something.”

  I managed to look at her then. “What?”

  “That you’ll always love me.”

  I wrapped my arms around her. “You couldn’t take that away.”

  “Then listen to my story, and remember your promise.”

  “Okay.”

  She took a deep breath. “He fucked me and I allowed him to.” Her words clutched at my heart and ripped the last strands of hope away, reopening all the old wells of hatred I covered up at seventeen. “I let him inside me the way I would never let another man again. Counting back, I don’t know how many times I died in that bed, but it’s more than I care to remember.”

  “Amy—” I closed my eyes, praying the darkness would make it better. But I knew a fool’s wish when I heard one. I wanted to crawl inside some box and scream until the fluid in my ears ruptured the sounds away.

  She shushed me. “You have to be quiet now. I’m only going to tell you this once. And I might not be able to make it through that, but you have to let me try. I have to share this with someone. So, just listen. Can you do that?”

  I gave her my word I would try, as troubled by her secrets as where they desired to take me.

  “How well do you remember the Good Shepherd?”

  “As fondly as impacted hemorrhoids.”

  Amy’s story filled itself in like a horrible reminder.

  “Once, I was made to sit on my hands, while on his lap. I could feel his erection pushing up to meet me. Felt it under my fingers. I’ve read books on the type of monster he was. When he took us by the hand into his study for prayer, I know why now. People like that do it for control. He’d read and pray over us, but mostly he wanted to hold you. And I couldn’t stand him touching me, and he knew it. But Darla… there were easier ways to attract her. So I failed to understand why he gave her your room when you left for Auburn.” She wiped her face with her sleeve.

  I shook my head. “You can’t blame yourself.”

  “Oh, yes, you can,” she whispered in my ear, her face a stillborn shadow in the birth of memory. “From that point on bedtime became something to fear. Grabbed us like the fucking hand of death.”<
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  I shivered in the night, the skin under my arms prickling, hair standing everywhere on my neck; Amy’s confession, the blood soaked mortar that held our youth together.

  “Darla never recovered after Mom’s passing. It was like a part of her died that day, the way it did with us with Dad. She wouldn’t talk to anybody.” Amy looked up at me in the darkness. “I still think it’s strange, how we define our existence in the living, like we’re so ashamed of death. My God, it’s the one thing that completes who we are.”

  “In that case, we must be the most complete people alive,” I muttered, remembering Mom’s death sent me on a path of destruction.

  Amy found her pack of cigarettes again. “Part of her closed me out, which made it harder to see the abuse.” She stopped as if remembering something distant in her mind and lit the end of another Vantage. “If there was one thing I wish I could forget, it would be the first night she came to my room. Only, by that time it was too late. The little girl in her was already dead.”

  I placed my arms across my head and swallowed back the splinters of our past. I pictured them side by side; arms entwined with the loss of innocence.

  “We grew apart after Mom died. She acted different—broke down walking to school for no reason. We’d be late with her sitting in the road. At the time, I didn’t understand why.”

  Amy stammered at the effort of her words. “Come to find out, he’d been touching her a month.”

  The desperateness in her voice made me dizzy with rage. All the anger from my childhood boiled up inside that place I longed to keep hidden, going beyond that part of me calling for justice, further down into the region where the marrow of a man’s soul screams for murder, and finds cause to carry out what is inherently born of one’s bone—the sin of blood and the power to bring it.

  “By dawn I’d made up my mind. That afternoon, when he hugged me, when the blood curdled in my belly, and the door to his study closed, I kissed him. Even then, the touch of my lips on his skin was a surprise, as if I might not go through with it.”

  “What did he do?”

  She thought about it a moment. “He understood I let my guard down. That there was an invitation to something more. For a second, I thought I felt him struggle with it, felt him try to reclaim whatever remained of being human. That was a lie. There was nothing left.”

  She grabbed my hand and squeezed it tight. “Later that night I heard my door open for the first time. The terrible sweat on his body when he crawled in my bed; the stale breath when he drew close to me. How he licked my tears when he entered me.” Amy patted her face dry with her shirt.

  “Five months, I spent dying inside. Nothing mattered by then. Not Darla. Not even Paul, who took a beating every day. I had one thing on my mind.” Her voice faded then, “I’ll always associate turning sixteen with ways of dying.

  “I carried a rope down to the barn and looped a knot out over the beam we used for our tire-swing. I don’t know why, but that place just seemed as fitting as any to shut it all down.

  “For a few minutes, I lay in the sawdust beds on the barn floor and just thought about what I planned to do.” Amy patted my hand, holding it tighter still. “And you know what? You saved me that day. The more I thought about it, the more I took on your passion for hate. Every wound he ever inflicted on you…I made it mine.”

  I smiled then, a weak, sick-feeling that did not sit well on my face. “Was I that obvious?”

  “Of all times I saw it in your face, your eyes betrayed you most of all. I wonder if he saw it in mine?”

  My anger flourished like a flower bright with rage, which was now both a stranger to me from my childhood, in its hybrid nature and color, and something comfortable in the shape of the man I’d become.

  “That was the day I discovered the means to an end.”

  4

  Excerpt: A Life Less Wasted

  By Amy Macon

  Long ago my childhood became a graveyard for the shipwrecks of memory. Broken masts lay compressed along its shoreline. Like inverted crosses rising from the water, the emotional events of my youth scuttled upon shallow rocks and slipped gently into its currents. Throughout the years, I found forgetting an acceptable form of therapy; my demonstration of its ability masterful.

  But then I’m sure the children who suffered as we did seek out love affairs with razor blades and the comfort food of pills and wine. Anyone can tell you reminders fade away, but honestly, it’s easier forgetting when you’re dead. Because if we seek hard enough to stir the clouds of memory, those things we learned to drown below the surface, every now and then, they find a way back. It’s only then the realization is made. Sometimes dead is better.

  *****

  May of 1973 - I remembered the sharp clarity of Toby Hollapeter’s recessed eyes and jet-black hair, the greasy, unkempt quills standing off the sides of his head where he slicked it back from his flattened face and even flatter nose. We shared a biology class my senior year. I guess that’s where it all began, where I planned to take back some of my life.

  Toby stayed in trouble most of his eventful youth. Multiple arrests for fights and public drunkenness were the norm with him. He even beat up his mother once, left her in the hospital with a broken jaw. So the surprise did not come with word of his failed senior year, but that he would repeat it. Maybe it was part of some deal that he served his probationary period from high school. Who knows? But I’m thankful he did.

  I only knew him well enough to say hello in the halls, if we even spoke then. It’s funny how you grow up in a town the size of Bascomb and not actually discover anything about its people. Maybe it’s the choices we make that leave us in the dark. I chose never to have anyone over to our house because I knew a great deal about the shape of shadows and how they crept around our home. What it meant when the lights went out.

  We sat across from each other in Philip Ryebald’s class. He taught biology that year. I used to have the biggest crush on him. A lot of the girls did. It wasn’t because Ryebald came across as good looking or anything, just smooth like creamed sugar. Lee once told me that he was the best teacher he ever had. I agreed that he was skilled at a lot of things, but he was extraordinary in front of a classroom. I think there were times when it seemed I could sit forever and listen to him because he made everything so wonderfully exciting. He turned a discussion on the reproductive organs of frogs into Tea at Tiffanys.

  Show and tell was what I remember most about his class. Even now, I can’t forget the face he made when Toby Hollapeter brought his project up to the front of the room. It may have been the only class Toby ever showed up for on a daily basis, and that’s a credit to Ryebald. To by was normally cutting half the day in the field house smoking, but never for that lecture. He liked Ryebald; I’m sure of that. Mostly, I think Ryebald tried to help keep him out of trouble by being his friend. Lord knows Toby didn’t have any.

  “Toby,” Ryebald said, cutting his glasses two rows over, “why don’t you lead us off today with your project.”

  Toby sat slumped in his chair, arms draped across the top of a red bag that bulged at its sides. “Do I have to be first?”

  “Come on, give yourself some credit. You’ll be fine.”

  Toby carried the cinch sack under one arm to the front of the class and placed it on the main lab table. He fidgeted with the tie strap and stepped back.

  “Alright, let’s see what you have.” Ryebald stepped up. From the side of the room, I watched as he peered inside the open sack. His eyes unfolded, face opening up like a present. I half expected a white rabbit or an endless string of handkerchiefs to emerge.

  It was nothing like that.

  Instead, he pulled out a large lidded jar. One of those I bought jaw breakers out of for two cents a pop at the local pharmacy. When he set it on the specimen table, I heard some of the students murmur along the front row. Their collective breath cast a cold shudder over half the room; the sound of it alone caused the rest of us to scoot up on the ba
cks of our chairs, anxious for a better view. Someone leaned in and asked, “Are those what I think they are? Oh, my God!” A scream erupted. Shelly White jumped out of her seat and fled to the back of class, chest heaving under a cry of sharp breaths. Her eyes visibly shook; face a matted tangle of fingers and fear. I could see her legs shivering against the wall, quicker and quicker.

  I turned around with a sense of trepidation. At that point, I didn’t know if I wanted to get any closer. The thick cut of the jawbreaker jar shined under the ceiling light. Like a milky eye that glistened in the dark, I found something hauntingly beautiful about it. Behind me, students clamored out of their seats to get a better view. I could feel hands on my back as they brushed past.