Under Shifting Glass

by Nicky Singer

  “Fit like a glove, don’t they, Jess? The new doors.”

  But actually there’s still a gale-force draft around those doors, and the word new would not pass a lie detector. There is nothing new about this car. All its components, the wood frame, the chrome trims, the headlights, they all come from the other cars, the “donor” cars, which squat in our garage. Other heaps of junk he raids to make Roger run. Roger who occasionally roars into life sounding, Mom says, like a wartime Spitfire.

  I was nine when Si made himself the little dolly on casters, nine when he finally admitted to himself that, as a mechanic’s assistant, I was a failure. That if he forgot the socket wrench (the heavy one from the toolbox marked war issue) he would have to crawl out from under the car and get it himself. The dolly made things easier—he could just roll in and out—but whenever I see it, I can’t help feeling his sense of disappointment.

  “How are the babies?” asks Gran pointedly, as though a real man would not be tinkering under a car when his newborn babies are lying tangled up in a hospital crib.

  “Heart ultrasound. EKG. CT scans. Blood work. Even skin tests—mouths and noses checked for bacteria and fungi and . . .” He suddenly pauses. “They’re fighting,” he says. “They’re giving it everything they’ve got.”

  And his eyes go fierce and starry again, not like the Si I know, and do you know what? That red hotness flashes across my chest a second time in one day. And I imagine how it would be if the twins come home and lie under the Morris Traveller 1000 and pass their father (their father) the war-issue socket wrench. And because there are two of them, one could always be under the car and the other hopping around for the wrench, so they’d never have to leave him and he wouldn’t be disappointed ever again. And, of course, I know I’m being ridiculous. I’m being totally unfair to these two babies, who might not even make it to being grown-up enough to get under a car, and in any case, just because they’re boys it doesn’t mean they’ll be any more interested than me in oil and grease and coveralls but, but . . . would he really have wanted them if I’d been good enough? If there’d never been a dolly?

  And then it hits me. I’ve separated them, haven’t I? I’ve put a knife down their join and I’ve put one twin under the car and the other hopping around for wrenches. And of course there’s been talk in our house about separation. But it’s so risky, so delicate, that even Si hasn’t talked so very loudly about it. And here I am, just dividing them willy-nilly, sticking the knife in. Statistic: Since 1950, seventy percent of separations result in one live twin.

  One.

  Just one.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve thought about dinner?” Gran says.

  “Take-out?” hazards Si.

  Gran rolls her eyes, as though this is the most ludicrous thing she’s ever heard, and then marches into the house to rustle something up.

  Which leaves me just standing there.

  Si looks up. “All right, Jess?” he says and then, with an expert kick of his left heel, he disappears under the car.

  29

  Si would have preferred take-out, I would have preferred take-out, but we get rice and frozen vegetables and leftover (Zoe would say pre-owned) chicken. Instead of discussing the babies, we talk, or rather Gran talks, about adventures with vases and coal buckets and garden sheds. I say nothing and Si doesn’t say much either.

  “Hope it hasn’t been too dull for you,” Si says, as Gran’s car finally pulls out of the driveway.

  “Gran told me about Clem’s little dip,” I jump in straightaway with this, because part of me fears that Si will disappear under the car again. Or back to the hospital. Or just disappear, plain and simple.

  “Hmm?” says Si.

  “Dip—in the night.”

  “Oh. The murmur. Clem has a VSD, a ventricular septal defect—what they used to call a hole in the heart. So there was a bit of a dip in his breathing last night. Monitor went off. But lots of kids have holes like these, apparently—and they can often spontaneously resolve. So we’re not worrying too much about that at the moment.”

  “What time did the monitor go off?”

  “I don’t know—somewhere round two o’clock, I think. Why?”

  You look frozen, Jess. Come on now, back to bed, it’s after two o’clock.

  “Are there explanations for everything, Si?” I ask then.

  “You mean real ones, scientific ones?”

  When I was about five, someone apparently asked me, in Mom’s hearing, what “Si” was short for. And I didn’t reply Simon, I replied Science. That became a family joke for a while, though I never found it very funny.

  “Yes,” I say, even though it’s not really what I mean at all.

  “There are explanations for everything we’ve been clever enough to work out so far,” Si says. “But there’s still a whole lot of stuff we don’t really understand. Which is why people still believe in God.”

  God again.

  “Or gods,” he goes on.

  I prepare myself for his Best Explaining Voice, though I only have myself to blame.

  “Take Helios,” Si says. “The Greek sun god who was supposed to drag his four-horsed chariot across the sky each morning and with it the rising sun. Each night, the ancients believed he, rather conveniently, traveled back to the east in a golden cup ready to ride across the sky the following day. That story lasted pretty much until we discovered that actually it’s Earth’s rotation that causes night and day. After that, Helios was out of a job.”

  This is quite interesting, and it’s also not nearly as involved as Si’s usual explanations, so I think he must be tired. In fact, when I really look at him, he seems exhausted. So I hurry up, and I tell him about waking up at the exact moment that Clem’s heart was murmuring.

  “Gran said it was just worry . . .” I start.

  “Reasonable enough,” says Si. “Though you’d also have to consider simple coincidence.”

  I consider it. If the flask is in some way connected to the twins, then how can it also be connected to this Rob person, or at least to the song Aunt Edie wrote for him? So maybe the howling and the waking up was just coincidence. But then again, coincidences don’t normally crush your heart up.

  “Coincidence is a perfectly rational explanation,” says Si. “Not everything happens for a reason, you know.”

  My face must not be liking this answer, because he goes on. “Trouble is, human beings seem to be wired to believe just the opposite. We find it difficult to accept that things can be random. That stuff just happens.”

  Stuff, I suppose, like Aunt Edie writing a really important song to someone I’ve never heard of. Just some random piece of nothing. And I’m about to ask Si who this nothing, random Rob is, when I realize there is no way Si will know because Si and Edie—they’re not even part of the same family.

  So instead I say, “I don’t think everything does come down to science.”

  “What?” says Si.

  “I mean,” I say, keeping calm enough to choose my example with care, “I mean, when you’re in a car, just driving along, and suddenly you feel there’s someone looking at you and you turn around, and there in the next car, there is—there’s someone staring at you. That’s not science, is it?”

  “Sixth sense,” says Si. “That’s what that is.” He smiles. “Which is just another way of saying we can’t explain it yet. Bit like Helios. Maybe in a hundred or two hundred years’ time—then we’ll have an explanation for car staring as well.”

  It’s his smile, his smug smile, that makes me take out the flask and put it on the kitchen table.

  “What would you say,” I ask and it all comes out in a rush, “if I told you that, when Clem’s heart was murmuring, this old bottle started pulsing, started howling, like some wolf, crying and howling and pushing black, black stuff into my bedroom and it wasn’t a dream, it really wasn’t. And what if I told you that the flask can sing as well, that it can sing something bigger than God, bigger than planets, and—
”

  “Jess, Jess, steady.” He puts his big, bony arm around my shoulder. Then he says he’s sorry.

  “Sorry?”

  “We’ve all been taken up, haven’t we, with the twins.”

  “It’s not that!”

  And I’m probably furious because I shouldn’t be talking to him about this sort of stuff. I should be talking to Zoe, my beautiful, dancing, mirror-image friend Zoe. Only I’ve pushed her away, haven’t I? I’m busy hating her and pushing her away when I’ve never needed her more than I do now. So it’s all my fault that I’m alone with Si and a flask that doesn’t make any sense.

  Si picks up the flask.

  I wait for the whoosh, the breath, and the butterfly beating under my hands. But nothing happens. The bottle, the flask, is still.

  He turns it around in his hands.

  “It’s a beautiful thing,” he says. “Eighteenth-century. Whiskey flask, if I’m not mistaken. They’re called pumpkin-seed flasks, I think, because of their shape.”

  He is giving it a name, he’s describing it, making it just some stupid historical object.

  “You don’t understand!” I shout.

  “I’m a parent,” says Si. “That’s my job.”

  “You’re not my parent,” I shout.

  I have never said this to Si before.

  Ever.

  Si moves a little closer. “Jess,” he says. “Jess, it’s all right.”

  But it isn’t.

  30

  The following morning, Paddy’s mother’s car pulls up in our driveway at 10:30. Paddy’s sitting in the front and Zoe’s in the back.

  “Our big day at the Buddhist Center with Onion Bhaji,” announces Paddy.

  “Not Onion Bhaji,” says Mrs. Paddy. “Lalitavajri.” Mrs. Paddy has a name of her own—Sarah, I think—but everyone calls her Mrs. Paddy because she just looks like a bigger, smilier version of Paddy himself. That big, round, cheerful beach-ball face.

  I look at Paddy. He’s grinning. I don’t think he remembers anything that happened in the park. I don’t think he remembers that I would have liked to beat him to death. Zoe does remember. There’s something flickering and anxious about her.

  “In you get,” says Mrs. Paddy.

  I get in. I’m carrying my clipboard and my Places of Worship questionnaire.

  “Hi, Jess,” says Zoe.

  I look out the window.

  “As it’s Easter,” Mom said before she went into the hospital, “I don’t know why you can’t visit a Christian place of worship.”

  “It’s to broaden our minds,” I told her.

  “Going to a Christian church would probably broaden most of you kids’ minds,” Si remarked.

  The truth, which I didn’t tell them, is that we could have chosen a church or a temple or a mosque, for that matter. We probably would have chosen a church if Em or Alice had been part of our group. But, thanks to Zoe and the issue of the vacation dates, they got paired with Jack and we got Paddy.

  “I vote for Buddhism,” Paddy said. “Father Neville knows a big fat zero about Buddhism, so I reckon we’ll be on safe ground whatever we write.”

  “How’re things with the babies, Jess?” Mrs. Paddy asks as we head out of the cul-de-sac.

  “Fine,” I say.

  “And your mom?”

  “Fine.”

  “Well, give her my very best, won’t you?”

  I say I will and then Mrs. Paddy leaves the subject alone. Sometimes you have to be grateful for adults.

  Zoe then asks Paddy if he’s seen some new movie and it turns out he has, and she stops being anxious and flickering and starts one of those conversations that go: “Oh, my gosh, wasn’t it amazing when . . .” Or: “Yeah, but did you see—wow, I mean . . .” And they’re completely involved in the excitement of it all and I’m still staring out the window. Which is, of course, entirely my own fault.

  “You haven’t seen the movie yet, Jess?” says Mrs. Paddy, picking up on my silence.

  And I know the yet is just to let me off the hook, to make it clear that I’m not really some excluded saddo, it’s just that I haven’t seen the movie yet.

  “No,” I say. “Not yet.”

  “Bit too much going on at your house, probably,” says Mrs. Paddy kindly.

  Bit too much going on in my mind.

  About a million years later we arrive at the Buddhist Center.

  “Do you know what this building used to be?” Mrs. Paddy asks as we pull up.

  “No,” I say. Paddy and Zoe are still on the movie.

  “A shoe factory,” says Mrs. Paddy.

  We tip out onto the street.

  “I’ll be back for you in an hour,” says Mrs. Paddy.

  The double doors to the center open onto a small porch with hooks for coats and racks for shoes. Beyond this the ground floor is divided into an open-plan office, a library, a tiny kitchen, and a reception area with comfy chairs and cushions and rugs that looks like someone’s sitting room. We all hesitate long enough on the porch for someone to ask us our business and suggest we remove our shoes.

  “We’ve come to see,” Paddy pauses, “Lalitavajri.”

  “Ah, that’s me.” A small, smiling woman with oceans of curly orange hair rises from one of the comfy chairs. “You must be Maxim.”

  Paddy nods. “And this is Zoe, and Jess.”

  “Welcome,” says Lalitavajri. “You’re all very welcome.” Her orange curls bob as she talks. “Shall we go to the Shrine Room, then?”

  We follow her up three flights of stairs, passing a number of small rooms and closed doors, so the Shrine Room is a surprise. It runs the full length of the building, a spacious, airy room with a huge skylight beyond which frothy white clouds scud across the sky. At the far end of the room, where the altar would be in a church, there’s a golden screen painted with the image of the Buddha, and arranged simply on the floor in front of him are some candles and vases of flowers. The flowers don’t look store-bought, but like they’ve been cut from people’s gardens. There are a couple of branches, heavy with pink cherry blossoms; a few hyacinths in a jelly jar; and a vase with some tall bell-shaped flowers I don’t know the name of. There are also three bendy stems of eucalyptus.

  Yes, eucalyptus.

  Si would probably say it’s just a coincidence that some of the fragrant, oily leaves Aunt Edie pressed for me to smell are here in this room where I’ve come only because Zoe wanted to do the project with Paddy and Paddy thinks our Religious Studies teacher is a goon, but it doesn’t feel that way to me. It feels that this room is welcoming me.

  And then I think a bit more about coincidences. Was it a coincidence that instead of getting Aunt Edie’s piano, I got the bureau—and inside the bureau was the flask? And was it a coincidence that I found that flask? Or was that to do with my real father, whose slide rule wouldn’t fit? And was it a coincidence that Gran gave me that slide rule in the first place? How far back can you trace these so-called coincidences? All the things that might have happened but didn’t because you made this choice, not that one. All the coincidences that have led me into this room with the eucalyptus. And then I wish I’d brought the flask with me, instead of leaving it behind in my bedroom, thinking that this project was just some homework thing and not part of my real life. Maybe the flask would have had something to say about the eucalyptus.

  “Now,” says Lalitavajri, “how do you want to do this?”

  “We’ve got a questionnaire,” says Paddy, waving it as though it’s a map of the entire known universe.

  Lalitavajri sits down on a mat beside a golden gong and invites us to sit beside her.

  “Fire away,” she says.

  “What drew you personally to Buddhism?” reads Paddy solemnly.

  “Ah, that’s easy,” says Lalitavajri. “A world where kindness and generosity have the highest value.”

  And straightaway I feel bad, because here I am sitting cross-legged in this beautiful Shrine Room and a large part of me is still
holding a grudge against Zoe. And Paddy, for that matter. And Si, who calls himself my father, but is actually only the babies’ father. And the babies themselves, for being so dangerously muddled up together. And, actually, against myself. I’m holding a grudge against myself for being so stupid and never letting go, and . . .

  “And what for you is the most important belief in Buddhism?” asks Zoe.

  “That we can change,” says Lalitavajri. “That each one of us can be the most compassionate person we can be.”

  This hits me like a thrown stone. Or maybe it’s not Lalitavajri’s words but Zoe’s glance that hits me. I’m not looking at Zoe, but she’s looking at me. She’s giving me one of those totally nonscientific stares, which bangs right into the heart of things.

  The heart of me.

  “Now,” says Lalitavajri, “do you want to know about the statues?”

  According to Paddy’s list, we do. Also on his list are puja, gongs, and drums.

  “And what’s that?” asks Paddy.

  “Incense,” says Lalitavajri. “We use incense because it smells beautiful and, most importantly, it blows in all directions—like a smile. If you smile at someone they feel happy, and then they smile at someone else. Incense passes on like this.”

  Paddy smirks, but Lalitavajri smiles and Zoe smiles back. Quite a shy smile for someone so big and so bold and really—now I’m looking at her—so beautiful. I don’t know if I’m smiling, but I hope I am.

  “How do you think your shrine reflects the Buddhist faith?” reads Paddy.

  “Can I ask you first how the Shrine Room strikes you?” Lalitavajri asks.

  “Well, it’s kind of big,” says Paddy. “And empty, you know, compared with a church.”

  “And peaceful,” I say. I’m still looking at Zoe. “Somewhere you can think.”