Glass Voices

by Carol Bruneau

  Her voice now, when she finds it, is a whisper: “What should I call you?” For she’s come unravelled, may as well be a sock off the needles. Through grainy eyes, she spies a clot of paper near Harry’s pills. Embarrassed, Elinor—“just call me Elinor”—mutters about the leak and plumbers finding something near the sill, way down in the wall in the basement. A note? Rebecca glances up, little rivers in her makeup, and says nobody could make heads or tails of it.

  Harry at last has stopped his sobbing, and Lucy squeezes his hand, squeezes it for dear life. “Harry?” she hears herself, a damp croak. “There’s something you should know,” as if he needs it spelled out. She looks at Helena, Elinor, as she says it, taking in the whole of her as vague as someone on TV when the rabbit ears got bent, slowly fixing the ghost with another face, another voice, a tiny, wordless one. Rebecca sits there empty, all her scheming, the ending she’s cooked up, sweet and sour; and yet, a floozy warmth lights her ruined cheeks. Harry doesn’t open his eyes; his lips tremble, but he squeezes back. “I know, Lucy. The girls told me.” His words knit her together, and as if to celebrate, Elinor lugs the ’cordine onto her lap and wheezes out “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” ever so softly. A lullaby perhaps.

  The stars seem to ache when she flees outside, constellations dancing jigs and reels. The poor invaded moon shining, too, round as the Superball Robert had once that bounced so hard it could destroy a car by hitting it, he’d boasted. The wind is sticky, the grass so wet her toes feel numb as she kneels by the garden. Around her the lilies are done, but the asters are out, early; their tiny blooms mirror the stars—the heavenly bodies: Jewel’s voice comes back, as if from a science scribbler. Not even a year since Harry’s fall, which makes what’s happened all the more shocking, unfair. As if troubles can be cancelled, lent and borrowed. Yet she’s filled with an urge to kiss the ground, the way someone holy like the Pope might do at an airport, bum to the sky. Except, there’s a squeak from the porch.

  “You’ll catch your death out here, Missus.” Elinor’s eerie calm snares her.

  “How ever did you find us?” she calls out stupidly, knowing it’s been Rebecca’s doing. Breathing through pins and needles—her poor, poison knees—she takes in the sputtering arc overhead, the fading twinkle: a star for everyone who’s walked the planet. One for her and one for Elinor slouching on the step, her uncanny likeness haloed by the kitchen light, and one for Jewel. In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the words shower down inside her. Rubbing her eyes, wordlessly Elinor slips inside.

  The mudroom fills with rosy light as Lucy creeps back in. Moving down the hallway, her feet barely touch wood. In the front room, Elinor’s stretched out under a blanket, not asleep but resting her eyes. Lucy has to get a chair to reach the cup; dreadful now if she dropped it. The springs complain as she settles near Elinor’s feet, holding it out. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and isn’t everything possible in him or her? The shade of a smile on her lips, Elinor balances it in her palm. Seeing this gives Lucy wings; for a moment she’s lifted and held, but thinking of Jewel, lands with the hard earth for cushioning, her grief black. “Can you call me ma?” The word chafes; she wishes she could hide underneath it.

  Elinor smiles into her cup, harbouring secrets? “I had a mother, once. She just never outlived me,” she says, and how crazy. As dawn fills the room, Lucy feels as though a wave has broken over them, and drying, tightened her skin. She lets Elinor, nurse, cook and bottle-washer, help her upstairs; watches as Elinor clears off Jewel’s old bed, and shoves aside grocery bags full of who knows what—Valley luggage? From the next room, as the light at the window opens to nothing, she hears Harry ask over and over what day it is. A rough, kind hand draws the quilt up to her chin, against memories deep inside her of kerosene, canvas, a nun offering a newborn with flailing limbs. As she dozes, her mind becomes grit. For every one shall be salted with fire, and every sacrifice shall be salted with salt.

  When she opens her eyes, the light stabs them, her sight blurring once more with grief. But there’s something pressing against her, a weight against her hip. Lying there, Robert’s curled up in his uniform, that putrid green jacket, shredded jeans and muddy sneakers. The smell of beer—sickness—as he shifts in his sleep. As if I don’t see what you’ve been up to, twisting her fingers through his curls, ignoring the dampness on the quilt: drool. Clutched in his hand is an old penknife of his father’s, lost, she’d thought. It’s folded, the way her stomach feels, gripped again by their loss, a loss that jerks her upright. Gently, she shakes him. “You must pull yourself together, dear.” But isn’t it what a dad would say—his dad—and certainly not his mother?

  ROBERT RETRIEVES THE CAR IN time for the funeral, the same day Rebecca receives the hospital’s report. Not a thing anyone could have done, nothing that could have been predicted or prevented: this is what they tell her. A sliver of metal, shrapnel, working its way through a valve—a relic from a wound, a war wound. A ticking time bomb, a secret smaller than a minute. In the flickering light of St. Columba’s, Lucy focuses not on the casket or Father Langille or the windows, but on Robert’s wrinkled suit in front of her, and the teardrop of bare skin at the back of Rebecca’s dress. Glancing at the figure hanging from the cross, the apple on his tree, her tears are vinegar. She cannot look at the stained-glass Mother nearby cradling her jewelled Boy, not even when a mote of sunshine lights the infant’s cheeks. The fruit of thy womb. “The body and blood of Christ,” the priest intones, “who died and suffers now with you.” Such wild abandon, such crazy love. And so we must be fools for him. “That’s right, and I got a shiddle to sell you,” says Harry afterwards, reaching up from his wheelchair for Rebecca’s hand.

  In the basement, the league ladies put out tea and squares, a sweet feast on doilies. They serve and pour, hugging Lucy and murmuring sympathy. One looks like Mrs. Slauenwhite, who must be a thousand years old: her daughter. Their faces blur and she forgets names, yet she is grateful. For everyone there sipping tea like the drinking bird Harry used to have on top of the TV; the thought of it cheers her. Oddly, so does Benny, the sight of him in jaunty plaid, loading up his paper plate on the other side of the room, as grizzled as the old coot who shuffles forward, nudging Harry with his cane. Elinor tries to swivel the chair away, but the man manages to clip Harry on the shoulder. “What a goddamn thing,” he says, his jowls shaking. He tips his gaze from Lucy’s. “Just a young fella, too. I’m that sorry for youse.”

  Those monkey eyes, that familiar look; glory, how long since he’d come around hawking anything a person could drag sounds out of? Not much better than Benny. Nice fella, Jewel, he says: “What I knew of him. He was just a kid.” Edgar Boutilier, who’d started Harry fiddling; barking up the wrong tree if ever there was a wrong one, back when Harry himself was either hawking things or being in hock, and little she could’ve done but turn a blind eye.

  When Elinor pushes Harry towards a crowd from Blacks, an elderly gent surrounded by women, Boutilier limps along too, hovering as Lucy lays her hand on Harry’s shoulder. It’s as if she’s not there. “Guess he seen a lot,” Boutilier mutters, “old soldier and all, eh Harry? Buddy?” His gaze shifts, those eyes too bright. “Listen,” he says, “I never meant for him to see.” That night in the cove, she hears. “That frigging Babineau had it coming. But I never knew the boy was with you. Honest to Christ, I never seen him in the boat.” The feeling she has is about the same as when she’d watched the moon perch on a swaying, folded rooftop. But before Harry can speak, a woman—one of Birdie’s daughters?—tugs Edgar away, his soles scuffling over painted concrete.

  When Robert nudges Harry, “Who is that old bastard?” Harry blows his nose, three sharp blasts.

  GRIEF IS A DARKNESS WHERE the only sound is an endless foghorn. Though in a dream, somewhere above, in blue, haloed light, Helena laughs. Looking down, Lucy glimpses the baby inside her—the purl of a tiny thumb. Pushing, her body opens. But then h
e’s grown, weaving between rows of lilies, and when she holds out her hand he vanishes, a pile of ashes the wind scatters. Cartwheeling towards the sun, she catches the glint of water, sees clear to the seabed. Broken things: china, ivory stained with algae. Yet, flashing upwards, sprayed with sunlight, are the faces of both children as she’d want them to be.

  Work will set you free: that evil slogan from some program they’d watched before Harry’s fall. Words arched over a Nazi gate. Had Jewel seen things like that? Best not to wonder, to busy herself instead with what’s here. Her knitting a lost cause, though, replacing dropped stitches as tedious as reattaching nerves. But there are eggs, lemon for a cake. Worship with thy lips and thy hands. They live on Elinor’s “specialties,” casseroles she learned to whip up “when things got bad at home.” The tea she makes is weak and Lucy discovers why: tea bags dangle from the clothesline, to be reused. Waste not want not: the way she was raised, Elinor admits with some pride, saying how her first word was helener. How part of her died when her father did. How her mother got sick and her brother spent more time picking up pickers than picking apples, which was when Elinor had started going out to work—though she’d have been happier just playing piano.

  There are so many things Lucy wants to ask, Elinor’s life a jigsaw puzzle with most pieces missing. Sometimes she lets things slip: how she’d started her monthly, to everyone’s dismay, at one of Mother’s teas, blood on the Persian carpet patterned with men on horseback. How a school friend stole her lucky rabbit’s foot. Lucy would rather not hear about the brother, the step-brother, twenty years older, or how deer ransacked the orchards, or how someone accused Elinor of stealing milk money, which is what drove her from Coltsfoot, her home in the Valley, to the city and eventually to Benny, never mind that he’s old enough to be her dad.

  The house smells of bleach, everything scrubbed, scoured. Even Harry, his hair newly Brylcreemed. A little dab’ll do you, Elinor teases. In the dimness of grief, her vacuuming threatens to swallow them, and every last dust mite and mote. Against the cupboards’ whiteness, Elinor’s hair looks iron-grey, her tan yellow. A tot under an ash pan frozen to the snow: a pearl inside a cast-iron shell, unharmed. The thought will always twist Lucy’s stomach, and she has to ask, “Was it nice, where you grew up?” But in her mind’s eye, anyway, the faces from that faded clipping dissolve, the way rain appears to dissolve a pane of glass. When Elinor picks up the accordion something changes: the pooling of their lives rushes forwards. There’s a grace as notes spill over, as clear as the comb of water at the edge of a dam. No looking back. Grace is the peace Lucy makes with what none of them, not even Elinor, can know.

  Rebecca arrives just as the cake is done; it’s the first time she’s been dressed since the funeral. “You’re baking?” She sounds stunned. Without makeup her face looks smaller, farther away, and all Lucy can think of is Lil—drunken, disorderly Lil. But Rebecca’s eyes follow Elinor fixing Harry’s lunch, filled with a kindness—affection?—Lil wouldn’t’ve shown anybody in a skirt. As she leans close, her whisper is scratchy, and Lucy’s scared she’ll cry. But it’s not about Jewel, it’s something Elinor’s confided, how, every year, instead of celebrating her birthday, in December old Mrs. Van Buskirk would order a cake with Happy Anniversary on it. “Can you beat that, Ma?” More than Lil ever did for you, she’s willing to bet, and not just because she needs to excuse that other reluctant mother.

  Blinking at the ceiling, Rebecca cocks her head, listening? “You know, Ma, when she first came, she told Benny she was just going out for chigarettesch,” she imitates Harry, blinking harder, trying to be funny. She is, too, and Lucy could almost laugh, even when she says Benny depends on Elinor something fierce.

  Lucy swallows. “The way Jewel did on you, I guess?” She catches Rebecca’s arm before either of them can back away. “You were good to him. I know you were, though I never gave you credit.”

  Rebecca stares, her voice a bit sarcastic: “Coming from where I did, you mean.”

  Taking a deep breath, Lucy stares back. “Maybe I blamed you for your mother’s antics.”

  HARRY KEEPS ASKING ABOUT ROBERT’S plans, never mind that everyone’s in limbo. After making himself scarce—scarcer than his dad when Lucy used to cook beef tongue—the boy just appears one day, the hall light giving his paleness a glow that makes her reach up and hug him fiercely. Never mind that money; he’s so thin, he can’t be healthy, she thinks, as he babbles about Sheryl, yes, yes, his girlfriend. He can help today, not with painting, but maybe the garden? Wouldn’t know a dahlia from a dandelion, she mumbles. But it’s now or never for the lilies; the clouds lately remind her of the billowing ones in Westerns. The kind that say, to her anyway, Get along little doggie, pee or get off the pot. Not to Robert apparently, oblivious. Threatening rain, and nothing on his feet but holey sneakers. Any luck and it’ll hold off, while Elinor’s minding Harry. But there’s a problem finding tools; they turn the mudroom upside down looking for the trowel. A chance to pop the question, Harry’s question, and he says he’ll hit Vancouver by Christmas, some park people camp out in.

  “In a tent?” she can’t help herself. “In December?”

  As she gropes through the clutter, he shoves his hand in his pocket, holds something out the way she might a missing sock. Blushing, he presses it into her palm, a little wad of money. Ones, twos, and fives; she never was sure of the total. “I never meant to steal it, Gran,” he pleads.

  Finding the trowel, she swings it, snorting as the sting returns of being so badly let down. “I ought to put you over my knee and smack you one for each buck, Bucky.” He looks down, startled. But she’s busy tying on her plastic bonnet.

  Harry’s vests and boxers droop from the clothesline, and what resemble tiny, muddy mermaid’s purses. Waste not, want not, she imagines Jewel snorting. ‘“Miss Nuts-and-Bolts,’ the old man called her,” Robert remarks cattily, asking how long Elinor’s sticking around. “Long as someone keeps feedin’ her,” he mimics his dad.

  “As long as she keeps us going,” she corrects him, with a sharpness she’s not used till now.

  Rain plasters his T-shirt to his chest, and she nips back in for the umbrella, then shows him where to dig. The lilies bend in the downpour. On his knees, his eyes on the dirt, he murmurs that he wasn’t planning to keep the money for good. “You don’t believe me, but it’s true,” he says, and she knows he’s hoping she didn’t tell Jewel.

  Hogging the umbrella, well, allowing herself the lion’s share, she takes her sweet time. “Your dad would’ve been disappointed. If he knew.” Stooping, she shields him a little as he tugs up roots, and with unusual gusto hacks them apart. “They’re living things,” she nudges him, as the rain seeps through her old coat, kept for these chores. Already she’s picturing the lilies multiplied, spread around the yard: the lilies of the field, the roots pale and fleshy against the grass, as she hooks her arm through his, directing: There, and there. After digging a couple of holes he peers up through his straggly hair.

  “Do we have to do this today?” He asks if he can come back tomorrow, or Saturday.

  She’d like to cuff him, but his look makes her laugh. “Not if you need the money,” she says slyly. “You’re hitting the road soon, aren’t you?” A worm makes him jump, but he shrugs it off, jamming a fistful of tubers into the ground, rocking slowly backwards.

  “Enough of this shit,” he mutters, as if he’s too smart for her, too smart for the world, “when I hit BC—”

  THE HOUSE IS SMALL, WITH a third person around—she will not say third wheel—the bathroom the only hide-out, with Harry’s walker serving as a towel rack. Even this room feels different, the work of younger, brisker hands. They get into debates about Harry’s care, Elinor sure he sleeps better without the TV. Sometimes it’s like being a guest in her own house, leaving things as spotless as she finds them. A relief when Elinor goes home to Benny. Stumbling upon Elinor’s bible, the stain
book reclaimed from Rebecca, Lucy reads: S for Schedule. Hit-or-miss housekeeping results in frazzled nerves, it says, ineffective work, wasted time, cross children and unpleasant husbands. Should your schedule hopelessly elude you, do not attempt to catch up with it…let it come round to you. Amen, a-women: it’s hard to argue with such wisdom.

  Then one afternoon Rebecca asks about the water. Lucy has to think what she means, the Aspirin bottle a relic in her purse. The cache of empties likely still in the trunk, though Robert dropped off her suitcase and the sheepskin for Harry. A keepsake now: when Harry sits on it in his wheelchair, he says he can feel Jewel’s “touch” coming through. The sort of comment that, from him, makes her think his mind’s going.

  Uncapping it, Lucy wets her fingertips, a little flame starting in her cheeks as she presses them to Harry’s slack jaw. Thy will be done. Elinor says there’s a sucker born every minute, and goes to get his snack. A bunch of hocus-pocus, he slurs, batting the bottle away: “Gwan!” Rebecca sniffs it, saying Lucy could’ve saved herself the trouble and got some of the stuff blessed by Father Whasisname; they all could’ve saved themselves the trouble. There’s silence, but then Rebecca holds the bottle to Harry’s lips. “Be a sport. Pretend it’s beer.” As he takes a little slurp, she murmurs, “Walk, sinnah!” Like Jewel would’ve, mimicking the TV preacher they watch sometimes for fun. Lucy’s aghast—for Harry’s sake. But he sputters, laughing, and through a glint of tears Rebecca chuckles.

  “Buncha foolishness,” Elinor clucks, returning with a tray. The look Harry gives her is the look a bird would give its mother. “Feelin’ anything, buddy?” she rubs his shoulder, then hoisting the accordion onto her lap, squeezes out a Quiet Time number, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” His clapping shakes the mattress. It’s as if one of his old cronies has stepped in for a drink. Elinor grins the way he used to, her mouth wide and straight. Then she pops in his pill—“Open sesame, bud”—giving him some magic water to wash it down. For a second, Lucy can almost picture a finicky gloved hand stroking a child covered in soot: a tar-baby, a tar-toddler. Dinah won’tcha blow.