The Glass Harmonica

by Russell Wangersky

  But despite all the ritual, he couldn’t shake the lingering emotional belief that they were still there. And in some ways, he thought, maybe they still were.

  Looking out the small, darkening window, Vincent saw a pair of runners scoot by on the road, their pace rhythmic and regular, and he thought absently that the shorter one—the one with blue stretch pants tight across her ass and the striped top—wasn’t bad-looking, compact and nicely proportioned. Yes, he thought to himself, she wasn’t bad-looking at all. And he wondered if his father would have agreed with that assessment. And that brought another thought.

  Maybe he’s still in the workshop somewhere, Vincent thought, tucked in under the boxes and watching from the shadows back behind the scraps of old tin flashing. Hiding behind the odd leftover rectangles of Gyproc, watching, silent, still intent on measuring everything I do. And maybe Mom’s somewhere in the living room, caught in among the order of some parts of it and the disorder of others, he thought. Hers the last finger on the remote, his the last straightened curtain after it was pulled aside to stare at whatever was going on out on the street this time. Every single doily and blanket precisely ordered by their hands, placed in the spots where they wanted them to be.

  He was the only one who really knew them, he thought, the Rosetta stone now of the O’Reillys, the only piece of the family with enough information left to know that his father sometimes grudgingly made waffles for his mother but that Evelyn only ever made Keith pancakes. He had forgotten about the shovel, had walked right back through the house without even noticing, his feet knowing how to get around the island in the kitchen and through the crowded living room without his eyes even paying attention. Walking through the door of his old bedroom, he realized that the space still made perfect sense—that nothing had really changed there, old posters still on the walls, the bedcovers still placed the same way, a rank of pillows at the head. Four pillows, and he would shove three of them off the bed every single night and wonder why he couldn’t just live with that one. The four pillows that his mother put back every single morning.

  Vincent also knew, without a doubt, that if he waited until dark and stretched out under the same covers he’d always had, he could look up and out through the same side window and see the same old constant wedge of stars, the same familiar and expected cycle of the ordered heavens that he could remember seeing for a child’s lifetime. He knew that the dusty, simple smell of the air in his closet would still unlock as many doors as it ever had, that it could make the clock spin backwards as if he were eleven all over again. He also knew, with absolute finality, that no matter how much he wanted them to, no matter how long he waited, no one would be coming in to wake him up and tell him to be ready in time for school.

  That sadness didn’t make stretching out on the bed and just waiting for morning any less attractive—and it didn’t make it any less possible, in that racing-heart way of ideas that seem right in the very moment that you have them and then spend the next few days looking impossible.

  After all, he thought, they probably needed landscapers in St. John’s more than they ever would in Victoria, where growing things was so damn easy. Maybe the problem was that, in St. John’s, they just didn’t know how much they needed landscapers yet. But that thought needled too, at odds with every reason he had for leaving, the thought that, by dying, his parents had managed what they never could have while alive. And maybe, if he’d been able to separate himself from the emotion, Vincent might have said that dying had cut off all of his parents’ sharp edges. It was an idea that had strange foreign purchase with him, that after spending so much time cutting the roots out from under himself, he might want to find those same severed roots all over again.

  It was unsettling, the clinging attraction of it: the thought of being able to spot people he knew and then wave hello, of going up to people he couldn’t wait to get a thousand miles away from just a few years before. At the same time, he had the unsettling feeling that going out and meeting those people would somehow be like holding magnets in either hand, moving them closer and closer together without knowing what the end result would be. Not knowing whether they would get close enough, opposites attracting, to pull each other together, or whether it would be a case of just close enough to feel the push of the two like poles, packed tight full of a similar charge, and so inevitably familiar that they ended up trying desperately to repel each other.

  “So what do you say? Feel like moving out here and starting over in a brand new place?” Vincent kept his voice light on the phone, the familiar beige dial phone in the kitchen, trying to make it seem as though it didn’t matter either way to him.

  In his head he was racing around, at one point decided, and at the next completely panicked. Feeling that he was betraying Faith, and at the same time that he might be betraying himself. And on the other end of the phone, he heard Faith’s voice catch and then stall, like the sound of a small airplane trundling through the sky towards you and then its engine stopping, the plane starting to fall away.

  58

  McKay Street

  JILLIAN GEORGE

  JULY 21, 2003

  JILLIAN GEORGE ran, leaving Sam Newhook behind.

  She ran fast and quietly, ran like someone who really knew how to run, no amateur here, her head down, hands coming up with every stride, looking straight ahead and never glancing behind. Her legs lashing forwards in the darkness, her feet coming down light on the pavement, wasting not one scrap of energy as they thrust her forwards.

  She only had a few blocks to cover, but she thought she had left it too late. From a doorway by the butcher shop, she’d stopped to see how badly they were going to hurt him, whether the beating was going to go on until they’d killed him or whether they’d break it off if he was smart enough to just stop fighting back.

  It was over fast enough for him to have a chance, she thought, so she took the opportunity to come out from cover and run, the street numbers unfolding as she went. She had a head start of well over a block when one of them saw her streaking away, but she had one clear disadvantage: as soon as they recognized her, they knew exactly where Jillian George was going.

  And she knew them. Jillian knew all of the guys chasing her simply by their shapes and voices, knew their parents and their houses. She was even passing many of their houses as she ran. She knew all of them from school, but it was like she didn’t know any of them at all. Later, she’d know that it was all wrong place, wrong time, that they had stumbled onto a situation where the voltage had already been cranked up, just waiting for a place to spark.

  Jillian could hear them coming down the street fast and she felt completely alone, as if every house was empty, no one looking out at the noise as they passed. No time to bang on doors and wait for someone to come to the front of their house: no way to take the risk of stopping and waiting and having no one come. It was better to run and keep running. She counted down the street numbers as she went, knew they were getting closer behind her, and decided, close to her parents’ house but not really close enough, that she wouldn’t be able to get there before they caught up with her.

  Instead, she cut down beside Albert Carter’s, heading for the back laneway so that she would come up behind her own house and in through the back door. The back door was always unlocked, so there would be no fumbling with keys, just the quick rush through the door, turning and slamming it home. She knew the rules and so did they: once inside she’d be safe, and they’d all melt away like water. Chances were they’d never even mention it again, like it was something as simple as a game gone wrong once the sharp anger of the chase faded.

  It was, she thought, her best chance.

  Except that, at the back of his house, Mr. Carter had blocked off the gap between the houses. Blocked it off right before the lane, a new ragged fence just a couple of feet long there, built out of rough lumber. Even in the dark, half lit only by the street light out front, she could see the crazy pattern of shiny nails sticking out throu
gh the wood in all directions where Carter, no carpenter, had pounded them through, missing the fence stringers so that the wood had spines everywhere, like some armoured prehistoric beast. No way to climb over, not from that side, and there were already heavy feet coming down the gap behind her from the front of the house, and she knew there wasn’t time to carefully climb the fence, no way to pick her way past the metal teeth.

  So Jillian stopped and turned around.

  It was dark, but she recognized a few of them. Ronnie Collins and Brendan Hayden. The Chaulks, out of breath and gasping for air, not used to running, especially Murray. Twig, as rangy as his nickname suggested, thin, long arms and legs, standing there as if he was waiting for instructions. Somewhere nearby, probably, Chris Wheeler too, or Larry Hayden—not participating, but always aware.

  “Okay,” Jillian said, her arms at her sides, hands in fists. “You caught me. So what now?”

  Ronnie was out in front of the other teenagers, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him. Then she felt his hands on her wrists. A part of her was afraid, another part resigned, a voice saying let’s just get this over with already. She wondered how Sam was, whether he was still out there bleeding, unconscious or worse.

  “So you like it when they’re from away, do you? Or is it just their money you like?” Ronnie said.

  “Come on, Ron,” Brendan said. “It’s bad enough already. The cops are going to be here any minute.”

  “Shut up, Brendan. Get out to the front of the house and keep your eyes open. You saw what happened to that guy—you want to be next?” Ronnie turned halfway towards Brendan, still holding Jillian’s wrists, but Brendan was moving back down towards the front of the house. “You’ll have your turn.”

  High up on a fence on the other side of the laneway, right down at the back edge of the property line, Larry Hayden was perched on the top of a garden shed, his eyes narrow in the dark, looking over the fence at the group of people and already thinking about getting away. Through the back window of the house, he could see Albert Carter walking back and forth through the light, carrying tools. Larry could see Brendan at the front in the gap between the houses, the long, narrow gap lit by one lone street light out on McKay Street, the dark bunch of the other four people silhouetted against the street light, moving like cut-out characters but with their actions absolutely clear.

  There wasn’t any sound at all from between the houses. Off to his right, a dog barked a few sharp warning barks and then stopped. It was the kind of night when the air hangs still and wet, like sweaty clothing, and sounds seem to come from far away, cleanly divorced from their source.

  No noise from between the houses still, but the motion of the cutout shadows brutal and sharp.

  2

  McKay Street

  ROBERT PATTEN

  JUNE 30, 2006

  THEY SAY you’re not supposed to feel anything, but that’s bullshit, because I could feel the whole damn thing, the moose still alive or dying or whatever and he was all the way inside the car with me then, kicking around through the back of my seat, flopping my head around like a fish in there, and I kept wanting to yell, “Fuck you, just hold fuckin’ still and we’ll do something about this,” and I’m sure that was when most of the damage was done.

  And there was plenty of damage done. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

  There’s a big curve on the Trans-Canada Highway down near the Avondale access road, see, just a big curve like so many others, and it’s tailor-made for moose down there, high ground looking out over a couple of ponds and a big long stretch of flooded bog. I’d even been in there trout fishing a couple of times, down where the beavers had it all blocked, all the hardwood cut out and dragged into the water and the beavers even starting in on the softwoods because they’d finished up everything else already.

  The woods were so full of moose sign when I’d been in there fishing—crap and footprints and everything else all over the place—so much sign that you couldn’t help but keep looking around just in case there was a bull moose standing right there behind you, thinking that he was lonely and you were available.

  It’s tight spruce and fir in there, with the occasional big lonely birch left, but just a solid wall of fat grey trunks and fallen snags all over the place, windfalls mostly, rough terrain to cross because there’s peat bog-holes all around. And when you’re not scrambling over a snag, you’re toppling headfirst into something else with one of your feet up to the knee in soft bog.

  The moose are on the move in the mornings and evenings, because they feed in the valleys and they like to rest up on high ground. Out near the highway there, it was moose trails all over the place, they just shrug their way through any small trees, their routes meandering through the woods in all directions, big oval prints pounded right down into anything soft, clear as a bell, like they were left there deliberately.

  And I was on my own in the car coming back from Clarenville, the Doe Hills already well behind me and the sunset out behind me too, and up there I had the long shadow of the car cast out in front like unexpected company on all the downhill stretches, daring me to try to catch it. Every single thing all around was lit up with the orange of the sinking sun, and I was thinking that it was a Friday night and I’d be able to get back into town in an hour or so, the road wide open and dry, all the traffic coming the other way, people pouring out of the city for the Easter long weekend. Me in a white rig with potato-chip company logos all over the outside, Robert Patten, a manufacturer’s agent for a snack food company. We used to kid around at the warehouse that if there was salt all over the outside and you could eat it and it was downright unhealthy, we were probably responsible for selling it to you.

  And by Avondale, it was all of a sudden cutting down towards full dark, just at the point when there’s really a difference between high beams and low beams on the pavement out in front of you, and I was rocketing down a long, swinging curve to the left, knowing the road so well that I was already getting set for the big pullback in the other direction under the access bridge, caught between the guardrails that kept the cars from going off the road and down into the culvert.

  And he came up out of a little dirt road there on the right, right where campers sometimes set up on the edge of a pond, little more than a widening in the brook, really, and he came up fast through the one small gap in the guardrail.

  As quick as that.

  A big moose, a big slab-sided, fast-moving bull moose, fifteen hundred pounds of solid animal, and he was on his way across the highway before I even had a chance to think more about it than, “There you are.” Then, “Of course you are,” the brakes already right to the floor, because where the heck else would he be going, and where else would a moose be more likely to be?

  And all the planning—what a waste of time that turned out to be.

  I mean, you can’t be on the highway in Newfoundland all the time and not expect to see plenty of moose, not expect to eventually have to make a split-second decision about what to do. You have to plan and prepare and wonder, especially when you’ve come up on the wreckage of a few moose–car collisions, the kind of wreckage that you’d expect from a car hitting a block of meat that weighs more than a ton.

  The experts say aim for their backsides, because moose move forwards at different speeds but don’t ever back up. Aim at their backsides and then you’re supposed to be guaranteed at most a glancing blow, one that makes sure they won’t be coming through the windshield or flipping up and landing on your roof. A huge stupid animal standing on four thin stick-like legs, just waiting to topple onto your car roof and fold it down onto you in a great big bowl.

  And I’d seen plenty of moose through the years, even nicked a yearling male with my passenger-side mirror once, and I’d had close calls where they barrelled up out of the ditch and onto the pavement with no notice whatsoever. But never as close as this one.

  In the end, I didn’t get a chance to try to decide where I wanted to hit my m
oose. At 120 kilometres per hour, there wasn’t really time for that kind of decision.

  No decision at all, really. I just hit him.

  One moment, no moose, the next, all moose, and all over me.

  I was driving the best and newest of the three little company SUVs, the only one with working four-wheel drive for snow, because at thirty-five, believe it or not, I was the senior guy by then. In sales, you’re always moving on to the better commission and no one ever holds it against you. That’s just business. As it was, the level of my hood was right above knee level for a moose.

  And really, that’s what you don’t want.

  I saw brown fur in the headlights, and immediately after I hit him, he was past the headlights and into the windshield and then I didn’t see anything at all.

  My brother Tony is a mechanic, and when I went in to see him at lunch one day, he showed me a van he was working on, an auction purchase by the garage owner after it hit a moose, the animal coming right in through the windshield. Just a little project for Tony to fix up in his down time, so the owner could sell it off in the classifieds later without ever bothering to mention that it had been an insurance write-off. A nice sideline for the ethically challenged.

  Inside, there were tufts of torn-off moose fur on every projecting point: on the knobs for the windows, on the stump of the rear-view mirror, on every single seat belt mount from front to back. On the headrests.

  My brother told me that particular moose had finally stopped moving when it fetched up solid on the inside of the hatchback at the very back of the van, after it smeared its way over every single seat for the entire length of the vehicle. That the wildlife officers had opened the back of the van and the dead moose had fallen straight out onto the pavement, like someone had brought along a big meaty suitcase they hadn’t secured very carefully.