The Glass Harmonica (22 page)

“Everyone thinks Newfoundlanders are friendly because we look right at your eyes and always say something: ‘How about the weather,' ‘There's rain coming,' something like that,” he said. “But it doesn't mean we like you—it really only means we're being polite.”

But he did like her after all. Weeks went by and she had put up with his puns, when he called her Faith-f because she'd eaten a doughnut from the box in the office kitchenette, or Faith-less when she called in sick.

“You're one of the lucky ones,” she told him bluntly after they spent their first night together. “People spend years hoping to someday have Faith.”

Sometimes he felt he had done exactly that, that he had spent years hoping to have some faith, and he couldn't believe how seamless it all felt when they started spending nights, and then days, together in his small apartment.

“Faith, Hope, Charity, Chastity,” he'd call out to her from the bedroom in the first few months when he was trying to get her to come back to bed, teasing that she was so slow that she probably should have been Chastity after all.

“How about we stick with Hope?” she'd call back, making coffee in the small kitchen. “Because at least then you'd have a Hope.”

And they'd laugh and get coiled up in the sheets and fall asleep wound around each other until the sun finally woke them up, and they ended up being late for work together, too.

That had stayed with him for days—the thought about having a hope, maybe just for a clean, straightforward future—winding around in his head while he shovelled dark mulch and peat in and around flower beds.

That hope seemed far away back in St. John's. Roaming in his parents' bedroom, picking things up one at a time and setting them down as if he were trying to find something hidden among them, Vincent found the old jewellery box on top of the dresser, the one that played “Für Elise” when it was opened. As soon as the song started, it was painfully familiar because two of the small metal tangs had been broken off the tinny little harp for years, so the music played with two scattered missing notes, like the musician had broken off a crucial mental tooth and simply left a hole behind that you were supposed to fill in by yourself from memory.

When Vincent looked inside the box, there was the same jewellery that had always been there. Small-time, really, Vincent thought, but he could picture each piece around either his mother's arms or her neck, and he could imagine it too, in his father's blunt-fingered hands, big, stubby hands that turned the gold chains and bracelets over and over curiously, as if they were impossibly difficult to make and as if some clue about their manufacture was hidden away in them somewhere, a clue that was always on the side away from his touch.

A slim blue diary lay flat on the bottom, down underneath all of the jewellery, with a single rubber band wrapped tight around it, a pen tucked in neat under the garter of that band. Alone in the bedroom, Vincent kept looking over his shoulder, expecting to hear someone else moving around in the house, or at least something as simple as a dry, thrown-away cough. He felt like he'd get caught peeking into his mother's private belongings, even though there was no one left to catch him at anything. And then he wondered what was supposed to happen to old, mostly cheap jewellery when its owner dies, anyway. Maybe someone would want to buy it, he thought, but selling it seemed somehow disrespectful. At the same time, it wasn't the sort of thing he could see keeping: Faith wouldn't want it, and probably no one else would either. Away from where it belonged—and whom it belonged with—it was as if its value, its meaning, would be immediately diminished.

For a fleeting moment he thought about getting the round-nosed shovel from the workshop and digging a hole in the backyard, taking the jewellery out and burying it all so that it would either be lost forever or else be found by someone new someday, someone for whom it would be a preciously discovered and brand new treasure. Like the treasure it had been to his mother, he thought, every single time his father had come home and gruffly pushed another store-wrapped and -bowed box towards her.

Vincent bundled all of the jewellery up in a worn dishcloth from the hallway linen closet and stuffed it into a pocket of his suitcase, the gold chains all tangled into the bracelets, charms that had been like small totems catching at the pilled fabric of the cloth, thinking that Faith would know what to do with it. Then he stopped, took it out again and dumped all of it back into the jewellery box, covering the diary with chains and necklaces. His worry, not hers.

On top, the opal brooch that his mother had opened and looked at, and then she'd said, “Keith, don't you know that opals are bad luck?” There was the heavy, old-fashioned charm bracelet with no room left for new charms—each piece, now, with no one who knew its complete story.

“Für Elise” stopped with a snap, as it always had, the moment the jewellery box lid closed. Vincent put the box on the kitchen counter and walked through the door into the workshop, his decision made, looking for the shovel.

As he looked around the small workshop, the thought hit him: he was a homeowner, even if it was not the way he'd ever imagined it would happen. Whenever he thought about the house when he'd been in Victoria—and that hadn't been often, he had to admit—the house had his parents set firmly, irritatingly and constantly inside, like it was a clock and they were part of the necessary workings. After memorial services and funerals and everything else, he thought he should be able to get past that idea, that he should be able to see that thick line between life and death and recognize that things had changed. That the house went on without them, two-by-fours and plaster and glass and shingles and little else.

But despite all the ritual, he couldn't shake the lingering emotional belief that they were still there. And in some ways, he thought, maybe they still were.

Looking out the small, darkening window, Vincent saw a pair of runners scoot by on the road, their pace rhythmic and regular, and he thought absently that the shorter one—the one with blue stretch pants tight across her ass and the striped top—wasn't bad-looking, compact and nicely proportioned. Yes, he thought to himself, she wasn't bad-looking at all. And he wondered if his father would have agreed with that assessment. And that brought another thought.

Maybe he's still in the workshop somewhere, Vincent thought, tucked in under the boxes and watching from the shadows back behind the scraps of old tin flashing. Hiding behind the odd leftover rectangles of Gyproc, watching, silent, still intent on measuring everything I do. And maybe Mom's somewhere in the living room, caught in among the order of some parts of it and the disorder of others, he thought. Hers the last finger on the remote, his the last straightened curtain after it was pulled aside to stare at whatever was going on out on the street this time. Every single doily and blanket precisely ordered by their hands, placed in the spots where they wanted them to be.

He was the only one who really knew them, he thought, the Rosetta stone now of the O'Reillys, the only piece of the family with enough information left to know that his father sometimes grudgingly made waffles for his mother but that Evelyn only ever made Keith pancakes. He had forgotten about the shovel, had walked right back through the house without even noticing, his feet knowing how to get around the island in the kitchen and through the crowded living room without his eyes even paying attention. Walking through the door of his old bedroom, he realized that the space still made perfect sense—that nothing had really changed there, old posters still on the walls, the bedcovers still placed the same way, a rank of pillows at the head. Four pillows, and he would shove three of them off the bed every single night and wonder why he couldn't just live with that one. The four pillows that his mother put back every single morning.

Vincent also knew, without a doubt, that if he waited until dark and stretched out under the same covers he'd always had, he could look up and out through the same side window and see the same old constant wedge of stars, the same familiar and expected cycle of the ordered heavens that he could remember seeing for a child's lifetime. He knew that the dusty, simple smell of the air in his closet would still unlock as many doors as it ever had, that it could make the clock spin backwards as if he were eleven all over again. He also knew, with absolute finality, that no matter how much he wanted them to, no matter how long he waited, no one would be coming in to wake him up and tell him to be ready in time for school.

That sadness didn't make stretching out on the bed and just waiting for morning any less attractive—and it didn't make it any less possible, in that racing-heart way of ideas that seem right in the very moment that you have them and then spend the next few days looking impossible.

After all, he thought, they probably needed landscapers in St. John's more than they ever would in Victoria, where growing things was so damn easy. Maybe the problem was that, in St. John's, they just didn't know how much they needed landscapers yet. But that thought needled too, at odds with every reason he had for leaving, the thought that, by dying, his parents had managed what they never could have while alive. And maybe, if he'd been able to separate himself from the emotion, Vincent might have said that dying had cut off all of his parents' sharp edges. It was an idea that had strange foreign purchase with him, that after spending so much time cutting the roots out from under himself, he might want to find those same severed roots all over again.

It was unsettling, the clinging attraction of it: the thought of being able to spot people he knew and then wave hello, of going up to people he couldn't wait to get a thousand miles away from just a few years before. At the same time, he had the unsettling feeling that going out and meeting those people would somehow be like holding magnets in either hand, moving them closer and closer together without knowing what the end result would be. Not knowing whether they would get close enough, opposites attracting, to pull each other together, or whether it would be a case of just close enough to feel the push of the two like poles, packed tight full of a similar charge, and so inevitably familiar that they ended up trying desperately to repel each other.

“So what do you say? Feel like moving out here and starting over in a brand new place?” Vincent kept his voice light on the phone, the familiar beige dial phone in the kitchen, trying to make it seem as though it didn't matter either way to him.

In his head he was racing around, at one point decided, and at the next completely panicked. Feeling that he was betraying Faith, and at the same time that he might be betraying himself. And on the other end of the phone, he heard Faith's voice catch and then stall, like the sound of a small airplane trundling through the sky towards you and then its engine stopping, the plane starting to fall away.

58
McKay Street

JILLIAN GEORGE

JULY 21, 2003

J
ILLIAN GEORGE
ran, leaving Sam Newhook behind.

She ran fast and quietly, ran like someone who really knew how to run, no amateur here, her head down, hands coming up with every stride, looking straight ahead and never glancing behind. Her legs lashing forwards in the darkness, her feet coming down light on the pavement, wasting not one scrap of energy as they thrust her forwards.

She only had a few blocks to cover, but she thought she had left it too late. From a doorway by the butcher shop, she'd stopped to see how badly they were going to hurt him, whether the beating was going to go on until they'd killed him or whether they'd break it off if he was smart enough to just stop fighting back.

It was over fast enough for him to have a chance, she thought, so she took the opportunity to come out from cover and run, the street numbers unfolding as she went. She had a head start of well over a block when one of them saw her streaking away, but she had one clear disadvantage: as soon as they recognized her, they knew exactly where Jillian George was going.

And she knew them. Jillian knew all of the guys chasing her simply by their shapes and voices, knew their parents and their houses. She was even passing many of their houses as she ran. She knew all of them from school, but it was like she didn't know any of them at all. Later, she'd know that it was all wrong place, wrong time, that they had stumbled onto a situation where the voltage had already been cranked up, just waiting for a place to spark.

Jillian could hear them coming down the street fast and she felt completely alone, as if every house was empty, no one looking out at the noise as they passed. No time to bang on doors and wait for someone to come to the front of their house: no way to take the risk of stopping and waiting and having no one come. It was better to run and keep running. She counted down the street numbers as she went, knew they were getting closer behind her, and decided, close to her parents' house but not really close enough, that she wouldn't be able to get there before they caught up with her.