Under Shifting Glass

by Nicky Singer

  The breath seems quite calm, but I feel that it must keep going to the windowsill for a reason.

  Not everything happens for a reason.

  Shut up, Si.

  Perhaps what I’m really saying is that if it were me with my nose pressed up against the glass, then I’d be looking out, wouldn’t I? I’d be searching for something. Trapped behind glass (the glass of the flask, the glass of the window- pane), I’d be all full of longing.

  “What is it you want?” I ask. “What are you looking for?”

  No reply.

  “Or is it who? Who are you looking for? Is it Rob?”

  No reply.

  “Who is Rob, anyhow?”

  No reply.

  “If I knew what you wanted,” I hear myself say, “I’d find it. I’d give it.”

  The light trembles. No, it shimmers, all of the colors inside it increasing in intensity.

  Part of me wants to touch each of those shimmering pearly colors, the vivid threads of blues and greens, the opalescent pinks and whites. Touch them not with some fat fist, but just with the lightest of fingertips, to give some reassurance, to say: I am here. I am with you—as Spike was for me. Though this urge to touch also feels intrusive, like touching the join between my brothers. So I put my hands together, cup them, like Mr. Brand did when he tried to catch a sunbeam. Only I’m not trying to catch anymore. I’m trying to offer, like you do with a gift or a prayer.

  And then it comes to me, the light: It touches me, it settles not beneath my hands, but in them. Like my hands are a nest.

  35

  Perhaps the breath lies in my cupped hands for just a few seconds, or maybe it’s a minute, or five minutes, or even an hour. I can’t say; I lose track of time. Nothing seems to matter very much anymore, and I have a sense of peace and happiness and of being full up, but not like when you’ve eaten too much, just in the way of being complete, of not needing to worry or search for anything anymore.

  Then, of course, there is a whoosh and a whistle and the breath flies back, as it always does, to the flask. But I am still in a slightly dreamlike state and my mind washes around until it finds something on which it can settle, and that thing is names.

  Lalitavajri.

  Supreme Striker.

  Zoe.

  Jess.

  Jessica.

  Even though this has been my name since I was born, I’ve never thought about it before and I don’t know what it means, so I take myself to the computer and do some Googling. The first site I try says Jessica means wealthy, which doesn’t feel like me at all. But what was I expecting? What name would be right for me? She who is alone? She who never quite seems to fit? She who makes stuff up? Next I Google Zoe. Zoe is apparently Greek for life, and that sounds like a much stronger, more interesting name than mine. But then I suppose Zoe is life; she’s just brimming with it, which is why I love her.

  Yes, despite everything, I love her.

  I move on to Richie and Clem. I can’t help myself. Richie is the Scottish form of Richard and means ruler of power, whereas Clem comes from Clement, meaning merciful, gentle. Clem, my gentle little clam.

  Then I realize what all this name stuff is actually about. The breath. Because when I look down at the pearly, pulsing thing, I think it should have a name. I think I shouldn’t be calling it Thing or It, or even The Breath, because it’s too big and important for that. And if Lalitavajri can have a name made up for her, why can’t I make one up for my breath?

  No, not my breath. The breath—the biggest and smallest thing in the world.

  What should you call such a breath?

  And I want to call it (or is it actually him? Or her?) Storm, but that’s too violent, doesn’t describe the lounging on the windowsill, the tender nesting. So I think of Snuffle, and that’s too small and far too like a kitten, and I begin to think this naming stuff isn’t as easy as you think and no wonder my parents stopped at Jess.

  Then the word bardo pushes itself into my mind and I start some more Googling, and I get a heap of stuff I don’t understand like simplex physics (which doesn’t seem so simplex to me) and octonionic space-time (which Si would probably understand perfectly) and also a big wiki article on the Six Bardos and other intermediate or liminal states.

  Liminal.

  What about that as a name? It doesn’t sound like a boy’s name or a girl’s name. And that’s good. Because, if we’re talking bardos, my beautiful butterfly breath seems like a bardo between genders: not exactly a girl, but not a boy either. Something that could be both, perhaps—or neither. On the negative side, Liminal sounds a bit like a lemon. But it means threshold (Si would be proud of my research), and that’s what I think my breath is: on the threshold of something, though I don’t know what.

  “How would Liminal be?” I ask the flask. “You know, as a name?”

  No reply. Not even the slightest twitch or swirl or glint of a fishtail.

  And I’m just about to justify my choice, start being persuasive, when I remember how I felt when Si took the flask in his hands and declared it to be an eighteenth-century whiskey bottle, a pumpkinseed flask. How he tried to tack it down, see around all its corners, know what it was, only he didn’t know at all.

  And I think, maybe I’m just trying to do the same thing. I’m trying to know something that perhaps can’t be known. And what this flask and its inhabitant need more than anything else is just some space, some peace and quiet to be whatever—whoever—it is. Free from people like me trying to tape up its throat or slap a name on its ever-changing colors.

  Which is, I realize suddenly, not unlike the way I sometimes feel myself.

  That sometimes I’m small and sometimes I contain mountains.

  How do you put a name on that?

  36

  Gran calls up the stairs to say she just has to pop to the store and will I be all right alone for a moment?

  I call back yes although, of course, I will not be alone.

  As soon as I hear the front door close, I take the flask downstairs and set it on the piano. Another thing I hate about the Tinkerbell piano, other than the fact that it has two nonworking notes, is that it stands in the hall. Yes, the hall. I think a piano should be in a room where you can go in and close the door, where you can be all lost in that piano for a while, with nobody coming and going and nobody interrupting and nobody hearing anything you play until you’re ready to play it to them.

  Si, who understands many things, does not understand this.

  Si says, “This space in the hall, it’s a perfect piano-sized space. What are you complaining about?”

  I’m complaining about them listening in. Them hearing me struggle to express whatever’s going on in my heart, here in the hall. Which is why I often play when people are out. Like now.

  I’ve been making up songs since I was about six.

  “They just flow out of her,” says Mom.

  But actually they don’t. They come very quietly and from somewhere far away and deep, and often I don’t quite hear them right at first. I have to be very quiet and still and strain to listen. Sometimes there’s just a note or two, sometimes a chord, and the words, if there are words, they don’t come until the tune has almost finished itself. Because it’s only when the song is almost complete that I begin to know what it might be about.

  Today the song, which has been whispering to me for a couple of days now, comes in small and fragile. I want to say to it, Be brave, I’m listening for you, I’ll find you, but sometimes it doesn’t work like that. Sometimes a song has to find its own bravery.

  I don’t know how long I sit at the piano, listening, and letting my hands wander gently, carefully over the keys. Then I hear a phrase I recognize, and I can put my fingers and my mind straight on it. But it’s only when I play it out loud that I hear what it is. It’s a hair from the lion’s mane in Aunt Edie’s song “For Rob.” It’s the smallest, tiniest thread and probably nobody would recognize it but me—but there it is, right inside this
new song. I listen even harder, expecting perhaps to hear other notes from “For Rob”—a spark of sky, a blade of grass—but I don’t. Instead there’s something else coming, something broader, richer, happier than anything in “For Rob,” and then I think perhaps it’s some blossom from the cherry trees in Aunt Edie’s “Spring Garden.” Only I can’t quite catch it, and the more I reach for it, the more it pulls away. I want to bring the two things together, the sadness of “For Rob” and the other happier thing; I want to make them fit, find their harmonies. But the harder I try, the more the music resists me. The song says, Do not summon me now, Jess, you do not know who I am. So I go quiet and patient again, start listening, whisper back to the song: I’ll wait.

  I’ll wait as long as it takes.

  “Oh, good girl, Jess,” Gran bustles through the front door with a bag of groceries in each hand. “I meant to tell you to get on with your practice.”

  Practice.

  I get up and shut the lid of the piano.

  37

  In the evening, Mom calls. Her voice from the hospital sounds stretched thin.

  “Are you all right, Jess?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Si must have told my mother about her strange daughter and the singing flask. Can that conversation really have only been last night? It seems like a million years ago.

  “I know it must be difficult for you . . .”

  “It’s fine, Mom. I’m fine.”

  “Sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “You know I love you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Si loves you, too.”

  Do I know that?

  “He really does.”

  I say nothing.

  “I’m sorry I can’t come home,” says Mom. “Not yet, anyway.”

  “It’s okay. I’m fine. How are the babies?”

  She lets out a little sigh. “We had some results today. Some of the tests came back.”

  “Yes?”

  “They share a liver, Jess. Separate hearts, but only one liver.” She pauses. “Do you know what that means?”

  “Yes,” I say. Because Si has told me. The more organs the twins share, the more difficult any separation is. “Why can’t they stay together?” I burst out then. “Why can’t they?”

  “I don’t know,” Mom says. “I don’t know anything anymore.”

  And then, very softly, she begins to cry.

  38

  Si has barely been home since I informed him he was not my parent, and when he does finally appear, he goes straight into the garage and gets out Roger the Wreck’s dolly.

  “I have to fix the timing chain,” he announces.

  It’s the timing chain that drives the camshaft that, in turn, opens the valves that let the fuel mixture in and the exhaust out. I know this because, for nearly a year, Si’s been talking about the function and importance of a timing chain and how this particular one could break at any time on account of The Rattle.

  “Hear that rattle, Jess?”

  Actually, no. Mainly because this boneshaker of a car makes so many bangs and clatters and rattles that distinguishing The Rattle from any number of other rattles is beyond me.

  “It’s a very distinctive sound,” says Si. “Like a bike chain slopping.”

  And the faster the car goes, the louder the rattle.

  Apparently.

  Anyway, here we are on Good Friday, and Si is all cover-alled up with his tools laid out beside him.

  “I have to fix it today,” says Si.

  For a whole year he hasn’t fixed it.

  Why now?

  And then I have a totally nonscientific, nonrational thought about the timing chain. Maybe that’s why it’s called a timing chain, because the timing is crucial. Si has to fix the chain today, otherwise . . . otherwise . . .

  Otherwise what?

  The monsters will get us.

  Have you ever played the Sidewalk Crack Game? Zoe and I used to play it all the time. If we step on a single crack in the sidewalk on the way to the park, the monsters will get us. At five, Zoe and I knew every crack between the culde-sac and the swings. We never stepped on a single one, and that’s how we kept safe.

  I decide the broken timing chain is a crack. If we can mend it today, Si and I, then the monsters won’t come. They won’t get me, and more importantly, they won’t get the twins.

  “Do you need some help?” I ask Si.

  He stands quite still then and looks me straight in the eye and I hold his gaze. Si could win an Olympic medal for talking, but he doesn’t talk now. Which makes me want to say I’m sorry about the parent thing, but I don’t know how to, so I just go to the back of the garage and find a pair of blue coveralls. As I roll up the sleeves and the legs, I remember how this man, who is not my father, used to lift me onto his shoulders at the end of a walk too long for my toddler legs. I remember how he was never impatient with me when, with Mom already waiting in the car, I cried for him to take me back into the house so I could check on Spike. And—speaking of monsters—I remember how he would make sure to close the door of my closet at night because he knew I feared the things that lurked there in the dark. I return to Si looking like the Michelin Man. I still don’t say anything to him, but he speaks to me.

  “Thank you, Jess,” he says. “Thank you very much. I could really use some help today.”

  And he smiles one of those smiles like incense.

  “First up, the radiator,” says Si.

  He begins by loosening the radiator hoses, talking as he goes, explaining what he’s doing, and I’d forgotten this about his maintenance work, how very instructive it is, as though he’s passing on wisdom that will, one day, allow me to construct an entire engine from scrap metal and memory alone.

  I help him lift out the radiator.

  “Now for the crank pulley bolts,” he says. “Pass me the wrench.”

  And I do. Like some junior doctor in an operating room.

  Which, of course, makes me think about the twins. Though, in fact, I’m never not thinking about the twins.

  “Mom told me,” I say, “what the tests said. That they share a liver.”

  “Yes,” says Si. “Not great news.”

  “So what do the doctors say now?” I ask. “About the operation?”

  “Depends which one you ask,” says Si, as he puts metal to metal and turns. “At the last count there were about twenty-two of them.”

  “Twenty-two!”

  “Four surgeons, four anesthesiologists . . . Can you pass me that hammer?” I pass him the little copper mallet and he begins a soft tap-tap-tapping. “Remember, always go gently on a crank pulley,” he says, tap-tap-tapping. “Although they won’t all be in the operating room at once. They have to work in shifts. Ah, here we go.” The crank pulley comes out. “Now for the timing chain cover. Ratchet, please, and socket.”

  There are about twenty small tubular attachments in the socket tray. “What size?” I ask.

  “Nine-sixteenths should do it, I reckon.”

  I pass him the right socket and he screws it onto the ratchet head.

  “But when are they going to do it?” I ask. “The operation?”

  “Not for a few months still,” says Si. His arm is deep inside the car engine. “It’s safer for the babies if they can grow a bit first. Hmm. I think I’m going to have to go at this from underneath.”

  I get out the jack for him and wheel it under a jack point.

  “Haven’t forgotten everything, then, have you?” says Si. And he’s pleased with me, and right now I like him being pleased with me.

  He cranks the car up and then goes to fetch the dolly.

  And with the dolly come the twins, of course, one underneath the car and one hopping about for a wrench.

  “And what,” I say, “what are their . . .” Only I can’t finish the sentence.

  “Chances?” says Si. “Good. Basically good, I think. But no one’s really prepared to stick their neck out. The
re are so many different factors to be taken into consideration.”

  He slips himself under the car and I go with him, elbowing my way along the oily cardboard so I’m lying right beside him. Almost as close, I think, as Clem is to Richie. But not quite.

  “If it was just their livers that were joined, that would be one thing. But it’s also the lower sternum and the ribs and some part of the abdominal cavity and . . .” He pauses to fit the socket head over the lowest bolt.

  “But the heart, they don’t share a heart,” I say. I hadn’t realized I’d been hanging on to this fact. “That’s the main thing, isn’t it?”

  “Well, apparently there may be a small joining of the pericardium, after all.” He begins to turn the wrench. “That’s the covering of the heart. And Clem’s VSD doesn’t help, and . . .” He spins the ratchet. “Ow! Ow! Jeez!” A stream of curses follows.

  Instead of catching the bolt, he’s caught his knuckles.

  He kicks himself out from under the car, still cursing, and I scuttle out behind him.

  His knuckles are bleeding and I don’t like the blood, not because my stepfather is hurting, but because the blood came when he was speaking about Clem and that brings the monsters closer. I mean, why did it have to be Clem, the weaker twin, the one who dips—why did it have to be Clem’s name all spilled and spattered with blood?

  “Half-inch,” says Si, sucking at his fist. “Should have used a half-inch, not a nine-sixteenth. Idiot.”

  I need to do something to help. “Want me to get you a Band-Aid?”

  “Yes—over there.” He nods at a cabinet at the other end of the garage, beneath the Morris Authorized Dealer sign and a bunch of red onions. “Top drawer, I think.”

  I find an old box with a random selection of differentsized Band-Aids and help him patch himself up. Mom would have made him wash his hands first.

  “First rule of mechanics—check your socket size. Right. Let’s try again.”