The Glass Harmonica

by Russell Wangersky

  She was relieved, too: she approached every ring of the phone with palpable dread now, afraid that it would be Vincent calling to say that he had changed his mind about everything, that they were good together but . . . And every time she hung up, it was like she’d been given a reprieve, however short.

  The living room of their apartment was small and close, underfurnished and underdecorated, as if they were still in the process of trying to frame themselves up as a couple. Outside the big curtainless window, Faith watched a crow glide by and waited to see another, caught up in what Vincent always said about crows: “One for sorrow, two for joy.” She was startled at how that had burrowed into her confidence so quickly, too. It had gone so far in that if she saw one crow or even a raven, she wouldn’t stop looking until she’d found another, no matter how long the search took. Like the photograph: Sometimes it occurred to her that, unable to believe her good fortune in meeting Vince, she’d decided it must have been some kind of unwitting magic instead. And if it really was magic, then there were spells that had to be renewed and maintained every single day, charms that had to be handled and trusted, at least if she wanted to have any hope of it lasting. Maybe that was love, she thought. Maybe it was always doubting your good fortune, hunting for something to anchor what was otherwise only blind luck.

  They’d deliberately chosen to get the new apartment together, both of them giving up their individual spaces. It took longer than just moving into either one of their apartments would have done, but they did it anyway. Both of the places they gave up were fine, but they’d agreed it would be better to start fresh. “That way,” Vincent had joked, “you won’t be looking up at the ceiling and thinking about some other guy when you’re sleeping with me.”

  But there was a serious tone underneath the statement. It was like they were both getting rid of excess, leftover memories, agreeing to find a way for both of them to start in a place where the only memories they had were ones that they shared. This seemed especially important to Vincent: he treated moving like a formal, ordered process, a dignified clearing-the-decks of the past. Just taking care of things that had to be done.

  Faith liked that about Vincent: he had a curious, old-world formality about him, the only landscaper she’d ever met who would make the other workers stop swearing when they were all at the office and she was getting coffee in the kitchenette. And that was before they were even a couple, back when the effort singled him out in front of the other workers and gained him nothing, just gave them something to tease him about. And tease him they did, ruthlessly.

  But Vince hadn’t seemed to mind. Later, she’d learned that he had an ingrained need to feel that he was doing the right thing. It was a need that could be more than a little difficult. She knew that when she looked at him and his face was set a certain way, his chin pushed out and square, he was going to go ahead with something he didn’t particularly want to do but could see no way of honestly avoiding. She could hear it in his voice, too. It didn’t matter if she tried to find a way to talk him sideways away from it—hard as nails, he would stick his chin out and do whatever it was, even if it cost him dearly.

  She heard that solemn note over the phone when he called her from his parents’ house too. Faith knew that he was caught tight between what he wanted to do and what he thought he should do, and she wanted to scream over the telephone at him that it didn’t matter anymore what his parents would have wanted, that they were both dead and couldn’t care less what he did with the house or the yard or the workshop or any of it. That responsibilities get buried too. That with them both gone, his only obligations to the place were the ones inside his own head.

  Faith knew all about that: she’d spent most of her life trying to live up to the expectations of her own parents, parents who had been crushed by what they saw as the failures of her older sisters. She’d promised herself she’d never disappoint them the same way, until one morning she woke up and felt relief on her skin like a bursting boil, felt the easing that came with the knowledge that whatever she did or didn’t do, it would be her own world that felt the effect. And only her own world. Still, she kept up appearances, the good girl for her parents, even though she occasionally felt keenly the schism between reality and perception.

  She hadn’t said anything to Vincent about his concern over the phone, even though for months his parents’ feeling about the house had become a joke between them. She didn’t say anything because she knew how deep a family’s grain could really go.

  “A house is something,” Vince would intone, making his voice deep, trying to sound like his father. She’d start to laugh at that point, already shaking next to him on the bed. “A house is something solid, Vincent, something worthwhile. It means you’ve made a mark, it means you’ve actually done something. Put down roots. Made a life.”

  And then they’d laugh out loud like fools, both of them sure that Keith O’Reilly had been completely wrong, that the thing they had between them was far more important than anything someone could build out of wood and paint and glass.

  But that didn’t mean she wasn’t afraid now. Lately, over the long-distance phone lines, the humour had somehow gone out of everything, and Faith wondered just what it was in the distance between them that had made them suddenly so serious. Almost formal.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he’d say, his voice hollow over the phone so that she imagined the sound wasn’t coming through wires but instead through a long pipe stretching right across the country, losing energy with every kink and bend and turn. “There’s so much here,” he’d say. “So much that only I remember. And if I clean it out, it’s all just going to be gone. What’s it mean if the only place there’s anything left is inside my head?”

  Faith didn’t know what to tell him. She’d heard every single word as he’d said it, but the only thing she could think to tell him was that the strawberries were all gone now in the small garden they kept behind the apartment, and that there were going to be raspberries soon, their green berries now whitish yellow and hard but changing fast towards softer pink and then red. Somehow, those facts seemed crucially important. They felt like they might burst right out of her, and at the same time they seemed foolish and pathetic and unnecessary.

  She thought it was important for Vincent to know that the honeysuckle was in blossom, and that the smell of it came in the windows at night, like it was the sweet, thick smell of dark itself, and that he could probably remember something of that smell if he just put his mind to it.

  She was sure that somewhere in her reaction was the answer to his question, that if she could somehow formulate it into words, he’d understand. At the same time, Faith was terrified it wouldn’t make any sense to him at all.

  117

  McKay Street

  HELEN COLLINS

  FEBRUARY 11, 2006

  THERE WAS so much to bear, Helen thought. Just so much to bear.

  She could tell they knew just by the way people looked at her. She could tell what they were thinking: Helen Collins, whose husband’s in prison. Helen Collins, whose husband was a thief.

  She could feel it even if they didn’t say it, feel it burrowing into her back as if their eyes shot out burning beams that could read it right off her skin, and she wanted to go up and throw it right back at them.

  “I haven’t done anything,” she wanted to shout in their faces. “It wasn’t me that did it.”

  She did say it out loud once, when the smooth-faced little jerk from the bank asked her how many months she expected the bank to let her skip the mortgage payments before she “got back on her feet.”

  “It’s not my feet,” Helen said. And then, “I’m as much a victim in this as anyone else.”

  “Well-ll,” the banker said, drawing the word out into two long syllables. “Well-ll, either way, I can only hold off head office for so long. There are rul-es.” That last word stretched out overlong and broken into two as if to give it more weight.

  The banker, Bud Whal
en, was younger than Ronnie, Helen thought, and he had an irritating way of looking as if he was only half paying attention. They were in a street-level office on Water Street, and the man’s eyes kept flicking towards the window every time someone walked by, looking away right in the middle of his sentences so she wasn’t even sure that he was listening to her.

  She couldn’t stand the way he had his hair all pricked up in short points with some kind of gel, tight and dark oily points that only served to show off the white of his scalp and the fact that his hair was starting to thin all across the top of his head. She couldn’t imagine it was a hairstyle he would have picked if he knew how it looked to everyone else. The sort of thing that he thought looked good but only because he saw his hair as the dark line that capped his face.

  “I’d make that payment right now if it wasn’t for Tony. There’s the fine to be paid, and restitution for the city, but I’m doing the very best I can. I pay what I can, and still they’re talking about garnishing the account. If you let them.” She smiled at him then, trying to make it seem unexpected and unplanned. She put everything into it, opening her eyes wide as if she were simply amazed by this guy, this Bud Whalen, Account Manager, making herself look as if she thought he was the most amazing Bud Whalen she had seen in her entire life.

  But it was no use. When she looked at him, Whalen was looking out the window again, his eyes distant and locked on a woman on the other side of the street. It was a big window, sealed glass, and Whalen could get no closer to that woman, that small, short-skirted blonde in the dark blue wool coat, than he could to a fish through the side of an aquarium.

  Dyed blond, Helen thought. You can always tell. Men just take it for granted, trust it’s real, never look past the obvious. Jump for the bait, mouths open.

  Without even thinking, she put a hand up to the side of her own head, checking her hair, unwilling to believe that he wasn’t going to eventually look back at her. Forget it, Bud, she thought, she’ll look right past the likes of you.

  “Either way,” Whalen said, “you’re going to have to find a way to come up with a payment soon.”

  “I intend to,” Helen said, standing up and doing her best to sweep out of the office. That’s the way she wanted it to look, as if she was sweeping out of the office, as if none of it meant anything to her at all.

  And she managed it, at least until she was back out on the street in the cold, where the resolve went out of her fast, like air from a mortally wounded tire. Then it was just the street again, the street and the faces and the long cold walk along Water Street and back up the hill.

  At the house, with the front door barely closed, Helen heard the mailman, heard the flat slap of the mailbox closing, his voice answering a question from someone down the street. Just more bills, she thought, more bills that Tony should be taking care of. Helen couldn’t help thinking that it would have been much better if Tony had just died. It would have been so much easier to take, so much easier to explain. “So sorry for your loss, Helen,” people would have said, sober, and she could have made out like she was bearing up under an almost impossible burden.

  So many things would have been better than this. It would have been better if he’d just left her before the police came, so she could have been the righteous jilted spouse. Or better still, if he’d never been caught at all.

  The house was quiet, only the occasional ticking sound, beams settling, the gentle, muffled ping of cooling or heating metal somewhere upstairs. And then she heard it, heard it again from upstairs, those two deep, indrawn, familiar choking breaths, and then, even though she knew she was imagining it, the heavy sound of someone falling headlong to the floor in the upstairs hall.

  She would always remember Tony running up the stairs, two, three steps at a time, his feet loud on the stair treads, then him shouting back down to her, “Call the ambulance.” She had taken the stairs far more slowly, urgency combined with dread. She could remember thinking that she was trapped between what she had to do and what she was afraid she would see. And maybe even a little afraid of what she hoped to see.

  Finally, in the hallway before the ambulance crew got there, there were those damned eyes that would never do what they were supposed to do and just close, so that her father lay there flat on the floor as if inspecting the ceiling and being surprised by whatever he saw there.

  Even after he was dead, she still heard him. Every single day. “Watch every penny,” his voice would say, “so dollars take care of themselves.” “Penny wise, pound foolish.” “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”

  It had been a mistake ever to move in with her father, Helen thought, even though Tony jumped at the chance. He had jumped at the chance to get a house without a mortgage, practically fell over trying to ingratiate himself with the old man, and he kept telling her it was the solution to all of their problems. What she couldn’t tell Tony was that she had been looking to get away when she’d married him, that he was her hope for something new because he was a guy with a good job and a chance to move somewhere far away from Mike Mirren and every single one of his sayings for every single thing that had happened or could happen. She couldn’t tell Tony that she’d wound him in carefully, deliberately, making sure at every moment that he didn’t feel the hook.

  The thing was, Tony had been so perfect in the beginning that she felt like she’d won the lottery. She’d told her friends that he was a real gentleman, but it was much more than that. Tender and kind, he had a way of holding her loose in his arms like she was a child on his hip. That sounded wrong, saying it like that, but what she meant was that she really felt like part of a whole when he was holding her, as if they were the kind of pair the ministers always talked about: “till death do you part” sounded so overwrought until you actually believed it.

  And she had believed she was free of Mike Mirren.

  “A leopard can’t change his spots,” her father would bark.

  But he never said anything about the apple not falling far from the tree—that was a sentence he couldn’t seem to find among his collection of truisms and chin-pulling wisdom.

  When her mother first went into the hospital, before the endlessly long stay in the nursing home but when it was just the two of them in the house, he’d cornered her in the backyard and said darkly, “I don’t even know if you’re really my daughter.”

  He’d said it to her sharply, dismissively, and she always remembered that it was late spring, the tiny purple trumpets falling from the lilacs in back like confetti from a forgotten wedding.

  He’d been looking down at his fingernails when he started saying it, ripping away at a ragged piece of his cuticle so that the raw trench started to ooze blood. And then he counted it out, piece by piece, finger by finger, as if there were some great calculating scorecard he was checking that only he had access to. “You don’t look like me, you don’t act like me. You’re not like me. And on top of it, you’ve got no goddamn common sense at all. And you should have, if you’re really mine.”

  After that, there was nothing she could do, standing there, the light purple flowers settling on her shoulders as the wind shifted and shook the bushes behind her. The back fence leaned in the whole time, as if listening, strips of ragged white paint always close to falling free, and Helen remembered thinking it was just as well that the fence could hear, that it was just as well if everyone overheard all of it, determining then, in that moment, to be anything but this hard old man’s daughter. And to hell with him anyway.

  Then Tony had taken her outside and away, and for five years it had been absolutely perfect. First Ronnie was born and then he was two and then four, a serious, smooth little face, and when Tony was working nights, she and Ronnie would sit up and wait for the snowplow to go by, and though it wasn’t his route, Tony would find a way to cut down their street, and he’d yank on the air horns even though everyone on the street would call in and complain. And she and Ronnie would wave like mad things at the darkened snowplow cab, the blue
light on the roof lighting up the front bedroom in the apartment and all of Ronnie’s toys.

  And then her mother had to go and die, moving from inconsequential to invisible to interred, and Mike Mirren got all caught up in lonely, suddenly realizing what he should have noticed a decade before, and he and Tony worked out a deal without Tony ever coming to talk to her about it.

  Tony came home and told her they’d got a house, and the surprise was that it was “a house you already know really well.” When she found out what that meant, Helen didn’t know whether to be furious or distraught—and when Tony tried to hold her, tried to console her without even understanding what the problem was, she fended him off the same way she had fended off a dozen high school boys in her teens, cutting sideways out of his reach as easily as if they were trains on separate and diverging tracks.

  To end up living with her father, to have to listen to him lecturing Ronnie in those same clipped sentences, was almost more than she could bear. Over and over again, she wanted to gather Ronnie up and take the boy as far away from the bitter old man as she possibly could. And every time, she couldn’t get Tony to agree to go.

  “He’s poisoning Ronnie,” she told Tony late at night with the lights off in their room, whispering to keep her father from hearing from the room next door, imagining his body pressed up along the wall, his ear tight to the plaster and trying to discern every distant and bottled word, like he could suck the sound right through the wall.

  “He’s trying to do the same kind of thing he always tried with me,” she whispered. “Telling him the fat cats will always take him for whatever he’s worth, that he’s always got to watch out for the ones with money because they’re the worst, that they’re the ones who will find a way to take it all, even if it’s a penny at a time. Who are these fat cats supposed to be, anyway? Has he got any idea at all what it is he’s talking about?”