Breaking Glass (3 page)

Clouds of cotton breeze over me, my eyes closing. The drugs are claiming me again. I almost forget Ryan is still here, beside me.

“That’s not what we fought about, Jer,” he says softly.

Behind my closed lids, I still see only Susannah’s face. “Then where the hell is she, Ryan?”

C H A P T E R
t h r e e

Then

“
Pirate Queen?” I repeated, at a loss for words. My brain, which was used to snapping facts into place like Lego bricks, groped helplessly for something to latch onto.

“In the playground. With the bossy kid. I gave you a Buffalo nickel. I bet you still have it.”

I scratched my head and blurted, “Wait. How long ago was this?”, just before Mr. Wallace turned around to glare menacingly at us.

Then it all comes back to me. We were eight, Ryan and I. Ryan’s babysitter and my mother were sitting on the playground bench, yakking with the other babysitters and parents. Ryan and I were deep into an epic Pirate Quest. Ryan was Captain Hook. I was the first mate.
Of course
. We had a six-boy team of trusty crewmen at our command. We’d just landed on the deserted island, and according to the map (the one I’d scribbled in crayon on a napkin in the lunchroom earlier that day), we were getting close.

The last thing we needed was a girl intrusion. Girls were gross. Yucky. Annoying. A pathetically skinny girl with dark skin, a mop of lighter curls, and eyes like lime-green lollipops swung silently from the monkey bars, watching our every move. We ignored her. Until she jumped down and stalked over to us, all knees and elbows, topped with a ridiculous orange bow that was almost as big as her head.

“I’m the Pirate Queen, and I bet I know where the treasure is.”

Ryan leaned on his long pirate’s staff, a big stick we’d found in the woods that lined the playground. My gaze shifted between the girl and Ryan as he sized her up. He squinted. I squinted, too.

“No, you don’t,” he said. “Girls don’t know anything.”

“Oh, yeah? If you let me on your treasure hunt, I’ll tell you where it is. Take it or leave it.”

Ryan swung the sweaty curls from his eyes and squinted harder, his lip curled into an exaggerated sneer. “First, you have to pay us a pirate bounty,” he said. Even then, he was great at playing a role.

But the girl was, too.

She shrugged and pulled a four-leaf clover and a Buffalo nickel from her pocket.

Ryan pocketed the clover and tossed the nickel to me.

She seemed to be on her own at the playground. After an hour of intense play, a car pulled up and honked. The Pirate Queen bounced off with a quick goodbye.

“I would marry that girl,” I said to Ryan, watching her go, the Buffalo nickel in my pocket.

“You’re a dork,” Ryan said. “Girls are stupid.”

We never saw her at the playground again.

And there she was. The Pirate Queen. And her name was Susannah.

Susannah Durban.

After class, in the hall, Susannah pulled me aside. “So, do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Still have the nickel.”

In my mind, I scanned my cluttered shelves full of mementos. I never threw anything out, especially something potentially valuable. I knew just where it was, but I hesitated. I didn’t want her to peg me for the geek I was. “Um, probably.”

“I’d like it back.”

Proximity to this girl was pumping icy fire through my veins. I was helpless under her command. If she’d told me to walk down the hall like a chicken, I’d have probably done that, too. But I summoned my cool and kept my head together. It was a skill I’d be perfecting over the years. “Sure. Okay. I’ll look.”

“Will you walk me to my next class, Jeremy? I have no idea where West Hall 3 is.”

I cleared my throat, honored, yet disturbed that in my feverish state I hadn’t offered to be her knight in shining armor first. “Sure,” I bumbled. “That’s the Bio Lab. I have that fourth period.”

She glanced at me and smiled a darkly shy cat smile, as if she knew she’d just taken permanent possession of my soul.

On the walk to West Hall 3, I tried to make casual conversation and wondered if she could detect the tremor in my voice. I’d had crushes before, fleeting little fancies that blew in and out with the breeze, all, of course, unreciprocated. But this was different. This was not a breeze. This was a hurricane gale. “So, uh, what brought you back to Riverton after all these years? The thriving cultural scene?”

Riverton has exactly three restaurants, a nature preserve, an ice cream shop called Awesome Cow, a library, a supermarket, and the Riverton Historical Society. The Society was founded through the largesse of the Morgan dynasty, primarily to document and showcase their near century-long stranglehold on the town and to preside over the properties they’d donated to the state. In it you can see old photos of the whole Morgan brood, from their original dry goods store to the three mansions overlooking the river, one now a historic site. There’s a young and handsome Patrick Morgan on his wedding day when he married Ryan’s mother, Celia. If you squint, you can even see my parents holding hands in the background. You can see pictures of Patrick, with numerous athletic trophies. There’s a graduation photo on a framed yearbook page, Patrick and his friends in caps and gowns, beaming megawatt smiles in black and white.

“Ha! My mom’s a realtor. She was showing a house in Riverton that day when I told you I was the Pirate Queen. Last month, she found out that the house she grew up in was on the market. So she grabbed it, and back to Riverton we are.”

I struggled to focus and connect this exotic creature to the little waif from the playground. The pointy ankles and skinny ribs were all smoothed over in streamlined curves. I was actually short of breath, as if I’d just sprinted a mile. “Your mother grew up here? So did my parents. Maybe they all knew each other.”

“Maybe,” she said, her gaze suddenly distant, then added, “Hey. Where is that bossy kid with the big stick? Does he still live in Riverton?”

“His name is Ryan. Ryan Morgan. If your mother is from here, then she has to know the Morgans. They basically own this town.”

Now

Time in the hospital is formless. Shapeless. People come and go, but coherent thoughts are hard to come by. I drift slowly up from my dreams to find Dad by my bedside, his eyes even more shot through with red veins than before. I have a fleeting thought of how quiet the house must be with him rattling around alone without me to hassle.

“Jeremy,” he says. “They’ve operated.”

The words shock me off my cloud of cotton fuzz. “On
me
?” Dad gives me his sorrowful one-cornered smile, as if there’s a tax on using both sides of his mouth. Or maybe they don’t work in tandem. I realize I can’t even remember what his two-cornered smile looks like, or if he’d ever had one.

“On your leg, Jeremy. The break was very serious. Your tibia was fractured in three places. The doctors say you have compartment syndrome, which is when—”

It’s a known fact that Dad reverts to jargon during times of stress. Usually it’s legal jargon, but medical terminology is more suited to the occasion. I cut him off with my own trademarked brand of issue avoidance. “Did you know that there are historic records of bones being set all the way back to 3000 BC?”

“Jeremy.” He sighs. “This is serious. You’re going to be off your feet for a while. And—and they won’t know if the surgery took for about a month.”

The last words sting like the peeled skin of a blister. “
Took
? What does that mean? My leg wasn’t cut off and reattached, was it?”

Dad’s face is blotchy and purplish. The breath whistles out through his nose. “No. It’s all there.” He stands abruptly. “I’m going to send the surgeon in to speak to you. Maybe she can explain things better than I can.”

“Dad, just a second. Was Ryan there when they loaded me into the ambulance? He says he was. And his car should have been there. He says it’s on the police report. Did you see the report?”

He stares at me for a beat as if I’m speaking a different language. “Does that really matter right now, Jeremy? Look at you.”

“It matters to me.”

Dad heaves a sigh. “I saw the police report, Jeremy. The truck driver that hit you called the accident in and waited with you until the ambulance came. There won’t be any charges filed. There was no one else there. Ryan went for dinner with his parents after the show.”

“But, Ryan was there with Susannah! I saw his car. I saw him. He says the police talked to him after the accident. Asked him if he’d seen it. Why would he lie?”

My father’s face grows red. “Jeremy. Please. You were in a terrible accident. What you think you remember may not have been what actually happened. I’m an attorney, so I know—people have been convicted on the false memories of witnesses. Be careful about what you claim you saw, because your recollections may be faulty.”

“I know what I saw. Ryan was there. We just talked about it. Ask him.”

“Patrick Morgan made sure I got a copy of the report, and there’s absolutely no mention of Ryan being a witness at the accident scene.” Dad wipes his brow and continues in a low and soothing tone. “This will all blow over when Susannah turns up. So settle down. You have other, more important things to think about right now. Like your health. The doctor will be along in a minute.”

Dad scoots out of the room, leaving my confused mind to make sense of the conflicting accounts.
Why would Ryan say he was there if he wasn’t?

Instead of the doctor, a very small person, her tiny face lost in a fury of dark hair, shuffles in hesitantly, like Dorothy approaching the Wizard. She’s wearing a white uniform and holding a package.

“They said it was okay to come in. Is this a bad time?”

I glance at my leg. It’s swathed in white gauze and suspended by an elaborate system of wires and pulleys the Brooklyn Bridge would envy. “Are you a nurse?”

She shakes her head. “I’m Marisa. I work for Mrs. Durban.”

Mrs. Durban. Susannah’s mother. I’d met her maybe three times, but we’d barely spoken. Something about her fierce eyes and harsh features put me off. I can’t imagine working for her, and feel pity for this slight girl.

I detect a faint accent. Her eyes are large and luminous. She looks about eleven. She looks like she’s about to pee her pants.

I check out her boobs. Definitely not eleven.

I know this girl. She goes to my school. But she’s nearly invisible there, someone who slips from shadow to shadow, barely stirring the air as she moves.

She hands me the package, messily wrapped in brown paper and covered in marker scribblings. I turn it over in my hands and spot my name in the jumble.

Marisa is skittish, like a cat at the edge of a riverbank. “Mrs. Durban found this in Susannah’s room. She asked me to bring it to you.”

“So no one’s heard anything from Susannah yet?” I ask, still turning the package over and over. My fingers tremble. I’ve lost track of time in the hospital. How many days have I been in here? Two? Four? A week?

“No. Not that I know of.” Marisa says, and turns to leave.

“Do you want me to open it now?” I ask, though I regret it instantly. The package is meant for me. Susannah wrote
my
name on it. Me.

I glance at my phone on the bed table. My calls to Susannah have gone to voicemail, text messages unanswered. Where is she? Is anyone looking for her? Suddenly, I’m afraid to open the package.

“I have to go now,” Marisa says. And she does.

I’m alone with my trussed-up leg and a package from Susannah.

The phone shuddering beside me nearly jolts me off the bed. It’s a text. A YouTube link from Susannah.

I click the link and it directs me to another one of her animations. Leaves float through black space in the herky-jerky, stop-action way that is Susannah’s style.

She wanted to study animation
, I think. She’d just come back from visiting her way older half-brother, Dennis, in Rhode Island. One of her mother’s cast-offs, Susannah called him. She’d often wondered how many more there were. Going to RISD meant everything to her. Why on earth would she run away now, when she was almost free? Where would she go?

I think of her face as she told me she skipped out on the college tour, and watch the small screen cluttered with Susannah’s personal iconography. Old gravestones. Torn lace. Faded cigar boxes.

Before she’d left, I’d barraged her with interesting tidbits about Rhode Island and she’d scribbled them in the ratty little notebook she took wherever she went. The first circus pitched its tent in Newport in 1774. The world’s oldest operating carousel is in Watch Hill. Hence, the pen from Watch Hill.

And, sure enough, a carousel horse flies past an eerie circus tent.

I shudder.

This is recent.

And I wonder—has Susannah been keeping secrets of her own from me? From everyone?

The scene closes in on a mound of dirt. A pair of disembodied hands unearth a peeling cigar box. The box opens. Inside is a word in old wood-type lettering. And I have my answer.

SECRETS

Shaking, I rest my phone upside-down on the bedside table.

My eyes close, and all I can see is her face, watching me, asking me silently what I’m going to do, forcing me to relive the many ways I’ve failed her.

I lie there, the package sitting on my lap. An hour. Two hours. Time here is, again, shapeless, measured by the beeps of the equipment I’m connected to. I step onto the cloud that has lowered itself like a magic carpet.

Then

As if she’d conjured him just by the mention of his name, Ryan ambled down the hall, headed straight for us, his eyes locked on Susannah. I guess I might have wished somewhere deep inside my animal brain that Susannah would have been as mesmerized with me as I was with her, but that tiny hope was quickly snuffed out when I saw the look in her eyes.

I knew that look. It was the glazed expression most girls got when they laid eyes on Ryan Morgan.

Susannah’s lips had fallen open, as if she’d been struck dumb by a holy vision, and I wondered where that tough little Pirate Queen had gone. Gritting my teeth, I imagined Ryan as he looked at her, the saintly corona glowing around his head full of wavy gold hair.