The Judas Glass
Page 30
The ’possums were too hungry to be shy. The larger one crouched over a corn cob. But they were curious, and did not move. I found myself able to speak. First a whisper, “Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you.”
They didn’t even know enough to be afraid, these pink, snouty creatures. But perhaps they sensed something in me, some harmlessness that was a part of their landscape, like the water and the reeds. They began to share the bare cob, gnawing it into chunks.
I wandered back to the site, the black scribbles that had been a house. A few scraps had been raked from the blackened geometry, a rind of carpet, electronic equipment fused and glittering. I whispered Rebecca’s name over the last place I had seen her, where the poplar roots were exposed above the trampled, ashy lawn.
But I did not linger there beside the snaking branches of the daphne, the trowel still in place, thrust into the mossy ground. I had somewhere to go.
I did not remember these streets—but I knew where I was.
These thoroughfares were oddly familiar, short, steep driveways, houses with painted wooden shutters that would not close, ornamental, and gardens of neatly clipped lawns and ferns. It was a street of ferns, fuchsias, rows of begonias.
I crossed a lawn, and found my way up the front steps to a door with a pleasing, tongue-and-handle door latch. The brass was warm, familiar. Closing my hand around it filled me with happiness.
This was a house I had never visited. But I knew exactly where to turn, where to find my way across a hall, my footsteps hushed by the firm nap of a carpet Bookshelves, an African violet, the walls uncluttered, everything simple, spare, tidy.
I knew this place.
Only the piano surprised me. I had expected a spinnet, a compact, handsome piano of no great musical quality but the sort of instrument for which one develops affection. Instead, here was a baby grand, a Steinway.
I nearly laughed out loud. Of course, the spinnet had been sold years ago, and this Steinway had been here ever since. I could find my way here with my eyes closed.
It’s easy to forget the beauty of a piano, the cream, the black. The hand almost does not want to interrupt the perfection. The pond is still. The fish sleep. The fingertips try to break the surface without flawing the peace.
Before I made a sound I warned myself that I could not do this.
I began to play, my hands finding the keys, my feet the pedals. I remembered the Fantasie only as I caused it to sound. It was like waking the music from a long sleep, from a coma, from a silence the music itself always resides in, a room beyond human habitation.
But I was in that room, playing the music I had been afraid I would never perform again, my hands knowing—a little stiff, but losing the stiffness with each heartbeat.
I played the music that would awaken my parents. I sensed them stir, sensing their disbelief, their love. They woke, and came through the house to the room where I sat playing Chopin in my sky blue gown.
59
“We knew you would come back,” said my father, in a shaky whisper. He put his arms around me in the sudden lamplight.
How did you know? I wanted to ask. How could you have so much faith?
But I could only look at him, actually seeing him for the first time in years. The light was very bright. I ran my fingers over the folds in his face, his mustache, his eyebrows while my pupils adjusted to this new glare, the gleam from the black satin of the Steinway.
How weathered he looked! Not like the wiry, smooth-faced young man I recalled, drying while Mother washed, folding the towel afterward with strong, slender fingers. But he looked wonderful—keen and joyful.
He wore the bathrobe I had given him one Christmas. I knew its feel, soft cotton, but I was surprised at the plaid, black and yellow. One pocket had been mended, the thread black, the stitches fine, my mother’s work. My mother was in the doorway, not coming any closer, her hands clasped.
They had prayed for this. Not before dinner, one of the Presbyterian blessings over broken bread, but privately, after the service had ended and the church emptied, in the evening, the Bible closed. If it be Thy will.
But a visitation like this could never have His blessing. Why didn’t I tell them that it wasn’t really me? Why didn’t I tell them that I was an image of their daughter, not Rebecca at all?
“I can’t stay,” I said, my voice soft, calm. My parents were quiet and exact, trusting the syncopation of events. I wanted to protect them from what was happening. Still, it sounded so harsh in my ears. I’m here, but I’m gone.
“Of course you can’t stay,” said my father, easily adjusting to this new reality, or trying to. Besides, the implications of my visit shook even my father. They loved me, but I should not be alive.
Home. These walls, this familiar rug I had not seen since childhood, my grandmother’s prized Persian, the only florid object in the house. And even it was handsome rather than ornate, masculine, puritan grays, pale desert-browns. “But you know how much I’ve wanted to see you.”
“We know exactly,” he said. “And anything we can do to help you now we will do. We’re your family, Rebecca. You know what that means.”
It was like him to say the right things without quite knowing it. He had more common sense than feeling, but in his way he was rarely mistaken. I was so full of love for them that I could not say more. His ancestors had designed ships, and while he had made a living drawing up plans for cottages and two-car garages, he retained some of this forefathers’ acceptance of any change in weather.
Still, his crispness surprised me. He had been sustained by uncanny faith. How could he have been so sure?
He read my thoughts. “I used to always want an explanation for things,” he said. “Every effect had a cause. I had to understand what happened. But no more, Rebecca. No more, darling daughter.” He took me in his arms again, and this time there were tears. “I don’t have to understand. I can only thank God that He’s allowed me to see you once again on Earth.”
My mother looked like a relative in an old scrapbook, a face I knew, a face I myself must resemble, but also the countenance of a stranger, unfamiliar kin. My mother stayed where she was, beside the African violet, her hand trembling, stretching toward me.
She knew, as my father did not, how wrong this was. “Rebecca,” she said, her voice broken. “It can’t be you.”
Much later, in the vegetable garden, my father showed me where the basil was, and the crook-neck squash, the toad’s-tongues of new green. His garden was tended thoroughly, to the point there were no weeds, no errant pebbles.
It was time to go. This time I could tell them I would return some night, and mean it, while the living say that they will see each other soon, and can only half believe their own promises.
It was still a discovery—how a step sinks into the lawn, damp welling faintly around the sole. “They’ll ask us and we won’t say a thing,” my father was saying.
“You’ll be our secret,” my mother offered. I could hear her unanswered question—why couldn’t I hide here, somewhere beyond daylight?
“You can tell them if you want,” I said. “What can they do?”
We love houses. As children we can hardly wait to grow up and live in one, our own house from which we’ll look out at the cars and the people passing by. Windows are what we love, I have come to believe. A way to possess the world, and to be apart from it at the same time, flowers in a box, the smell of morning through the barely opened glass. But to have windows we need walls, a roof—a house.
This was another place, another dwelling I could not remember, but as before, this sense of mystery was what carried me forward. Each breath brought me something new that I recognized just a half-beat late.
A patio spread at my feet, cracked, the cracks sealed with rubber paste. Bonsai maples held new, green leaves and behind the rows of wooden planters, a view of Berkeley and Oakland spread outward, glittering lights. Far away, yellow words jittered and winked, a blimp drifting over the port of Oakland.
This was like a dream of speaking a foreign tongue, sudden fluency, and more—poetry. I wafted into the house, folding through the crack in the sliding glass door. I passed down a hall. When I wore a human shape again I was at the bedside of a sleeping woman. She was gaunt, her gray hair spread across the pillow. A nurse drowsed in a corner chair, a magazine face down in her lap.
I looked down at my hands and started. I wore the dark suit, the broad, strong fingers, the body of Richard Stirling. I had to stifle a laugh. But of course it was Richard who wanted to do this, who felt he owed this debt.
I cut my lips with my teeth, biting hard. I bent down over the woman, and kissed her. Her lips had the bland warm flavor of Vaseline, and her breath was slow, constricted.
At the taste of my blood she stirred, and nearly woke.
“Joe?” she whispered.
He was asleep on the sofa but at the sound of my step, light and carpet-muffled, he was wide awake.
His hand fumbled at his hip. He was not armed, sitting in a bright yellow pool-robe. His hands searched further, pillow, sofa cushion. He was defenseless. “Why are you here?” said Joe Timm.
“I’m glad to see you well,” I said, my best, closing-argument voice. “Quite honestly—I was worried about you.”
He could not bring himself to speak for a moment. “You nearly killed me,” he said. There was no anger, no bitterness, only a matter-of-fact disbelief.
“But we were both lucky. I managed to fail,” I said. “Besides, I didn’t really want your life, Joe. You must realize that.” How strange and pleasurable it was to be Richard Stirling again, wanting more than anything to talk.
Joe looked drawn, new wrinkles in his forehead and cheeks. His handsomeness was half-erased, punished. There was a tremor in his hand, the kind that can be permanent, the mark of irreversible aging, or a shock from which one will never fully recover. “This isn’t possible.”
I was to blame for much of Joe’s strain. I was aware of this—I knew the wrong I had committed, and was here to try to atone. “Your wife has been ill again.”
He considered me, narrowing his eyes. “She suffered a relapse.”
“Pneumonia in both lungs,” I guessed, “leading to congestive heart failure.”
“Don’t do anything to her, Richard.”
“The antibiotics don’t work the way they used to,” I continued. “The microbes don’t die.”
“It is absolutely impossible for you to be here.”
“You fascinate me, Joe. I think I have never really figured you out. After all that has happened you become incredulous just because I drop by to say hello.”
“They found your bones,” said Joe after a long pause.
Joe’s living room was big and tasteful, Danish leather chairs, bright colors. Someone had been reading Gibbon. There was a red leather bookmark in the middle of volume two of the history of Rome’s decline, beside a cup of what smelled like lemon tea. “Surely not.”
“In the fire in your house, all that was left of the upstairs was a few gnarls of melted glass and your jaw, a couple of vertebra—”
“The remains were not mine.” I could not keep the sadness from my voice. “It was Rebecca’s body.”
“That was what puzzled the lab. There was no sign of Rebecca Pennant’s skeleton in the ashes. Only yours. Your body burned, Richard.”
I paced, not wanting to hear this.
“Much as I wanted you destroyed,” he said, “I have to be honest. I found it impossible to celebrate. It was a great loss. Something about you—”
“She burned.”
“No.” His voice was clear, no sign of weariness there. “You did.”
“Then—what am I? Who is this standing here?” I picked up the cup of herb tea, cold liquid splashing onto my cuff. “I’m real!”
“They found some other bones, too, but they weren’t human. The mirror was framed in some kind of animal bone. Nobody can figure out what it is or where it came from. Connie has no idea—”
“She kept telling me a different story about the mirror—”
“She hasn’t a clue what it was,” said Joe. “Where it originated, what it was made of—she knows nothing.”
“It found me,” I said. “Like a unicorn, finding the mirror in a virgin’s hand.” Or like Judas, stepping forward with his betraying kiss.
“Joe.” It was a voice from another room.
It was his wife’s voice, from the bedroom. I did not follow him there, but I could sense what was happening. It took him a long moment to see the change in her, to realize what had happened. He went in and sat at her side, the two of them murmuring.
I put down the cup of cold tea. I could pick things up, I could put them down. Great moments in Newtonian physics. But beyond that I was beginning to know what I had lost.
Then he stood in the bedroom doorway, leaning against it, his eyes closed. “Sometimes,” he said, “I wish I could forget everything, my whole life, and start all over again. Maybe this time I would really see life, really feel things,” he said.
“You make it sound like it’s too late, like your life is over,” I said.
“I’m going to quit the police,” he said. “Politics, too. I don’t know what I’ll do. But I can’t keep on like this.”
“You’re a good cop,” I said, surprised at my words, and at my sincerity. “We need people like you.”
“You’ll have the time you need to get away,” he said. “I’ll have to tell them what happened.”
“What did happen, Joe? Who came to see you?”
He did not even consider the question. “But I can’t wait forever,” he said. “I promised I would call them right away if I saw or heard anything.”
I understood then why Rebecca’s father—my father—had been so sure I would pay them a visit. They all knew. Richard was gone. Only Rebecca survived. When had it happened? That evening with the yellow mustard, the artichoke fields, the horse growing calm at my touch? Or somewhere else, some nameless place?
One night, one day, Rebecca had taken on my shape, and I had taken on hers, along with her memories. I had parted from myself, and only realized it now. For some reason as the wonderment faded I felt the oddest sensation.
Along with a sense of loss I felt as though a terrible thing, a calamity, was over, finished, irrevocably past. Nothing so terrible could ever happen again.
“Who is it, Joe?” his wife was asking from inside the bedroom. There was the rustle of bedding, a dressing gown. Her voice was strong, her step quick. She peered over his shoulder, a graceful woman. “Who’s there?”
Joe Timm met my eyes. He shook his head and gave me a tired smile. “A friend,” he said.
60
Sometimes I heard Richard’s voice.
Before I woke. He said my name, not calling me, speaking to me. He was here, beside me.
Look, he said. Look and see.
They keep the remains in a secret place. I stole into Dr. Opal’s office, pored through his computer files, solving each password, each code with little effort. They have hidden what is left of him, those spindles of charred kindling, his bones. And what is left of the mirror is somewhere in hiding.
The tallest structures in San Francisco are the pronged black skeletons that lift television up into the sky. Points of red blink off and on. The hills mature to summer blond. The fog never actually flows. It is suddenly there, a high tide parting around the peaks, the city, bursting without moving through the Golden Gate.
What has been joined can be separated, I believed, I would see him again.
I always had to pause, to take in the sight of traffic, the flashing red warning pedestrians to stay, people hurrying, ignoring the scarlet hand. People are all that holds the sky in place. The answers we give to each
other, when asked how we are, what our day was like. This is what the stars can never equal, this glittering minutia, the subtle accidents of lives.
I passed along the streets, crossing in the crosswalk, turning my face from shop windows. Tonight I was late, and I wore my human habiliments, flesh, garments, with a certain impatience.
There was a moon, three quarters, high above. A narrow sidewalk was overshadowed by hyperextended stalks of geraniums, the plants needing more sun. I stopped and listened, sensing heartbeats.
There was nervousness in the air. It was going to happen again.
I had never liked the place, but Matilda had insisted. It reminded her of old times, meetings to rearrange, folders to be filed. I humored her, although I knew the game could not last.
Perhaps I liked it, too, despite myself. I eased myself into the chair. For weeks now I had lived out of the tidy suitcase of my two selves, unpacking Richard because I loved him, wearing him, with his memories, his chatter, because I could not suppress the fear that I would never see him again.
I put my hand, Richard’s hand, over the telephone. Matilda had insisted on a combination fax/answering machine. Matilda was loyal to certain products, Sony, Panasonic. She remained loyal to me the way I had once been, and I let her believe, thinking it harmless.
I called her number, her private line, and her Spanish accent answered. I can leave a message of any length, said her voice, and I enjoyed the sound, her voice turning a common English message into amber.
I left no message. I knew I could risk another phone call, because I had weeks ago learned how to steal past the computers that trace calls, slipping my voice like a thread through a needle’s eye.
Stella Cameron was breathless, picking up the phone just as I was about to hang up. “The baby just squirted mustard all over my instructions to the judge.”
“What case is that?” I heard Richard’s voice inquire.