The Glass Harmonica (42 page)

You never think anything's going to happen to you. That's the problem. I mean, you do in the long run—you know you'll get sick eventually and die. But you never think anything's going to happen to you
today
. So you don't get things in order, don't write up a list of where you do your banking or what you want done with your body after you die; there will always be time for that later. I could have moved that notebook a thousand times—I could have torn it up any one of the times when my brain was clear and I realized, as I often did, what a bad idea it really was. When I wasn't thinking about how important it was because it was the truth. But I never got it done, and then there was the stroke.

Since then, I've tried three times that I can remember clearly, getting up out of the chair by myself the hardest part, and I've wound up on my face on the carpet every single time, never even made it into the bedroom. Stuck just lying there, staring up close at the little tufts of carpeting until Keith came in and found me. What scares me most is that I might get halfway—that I might actually have it in my hand when I fall, and that Keith will come in and find me with it, find it thrown out in front of me where it's fallen from my hand, with me able to look right at it and still not able to reach it. And that there will be no way I can stop him from reading it.

Keith's been outside a long time now. Painting trim, I think that's what he said he was going to be doing. He had his overalls on when he went out to the back room. He's always at something, as if keeping his hands busy enough will make him forget anything else that might be missing in his life. He'll come in—he cycles like a little anxious moon, orbiting in and out all day long just to make sure I'm still breathing.

Sometimes it's like my memory is as sharp as if I'm looking at the ground through binoculars, everything fine and textured, as if I could reach over and feel it with my fingers, memorable as the rasp of sandstone. Every little thing in perfect pitch and balance. When I was a girl, I had a record my father gave me, called “Music for Glass Harmonica,” and I played it over and over, the kind of haunting notes that make you think of fog or something just as ethereal. It's the strangest kind of instrument, really—it can be as simple as crystal wineglasses filled with different amounts of water, and you rub your finger around the rims and each one makes its own particular note. I wonder if people aren't like that too. You see something, hear something else about it, see something else, and all of it gets put together into one unique package in your memory. And then that's the only way you can tell it. And only you can tell it, too.

I like that idea. Me and Helen Collins and even that Carter man who never came out of his house—we're all some sort of breakable crystal, each of us a glass filled to a certain point, and that's the note we sing, because we can't sing anything else. Not one of us the same, each one changing every day.

And breakable, too. Just look at me. I'm filled to just the right level, almost to the top, and I can't squeeze out a single note now. But every bit of music is still right here.

The television can be on, chattering away with one game show or another, the room almost dark, and I can be miles away, caught up in a summer from years ago, hearing the water rushing over rocks in a river, the ragged line of the treetops against the sky. Out on the juniper barrens under August sun, the air thick with the smell of the hundreds of plants you're crushing under your feet, each smell distinct and different and combining into a complex wonder so that you could just stand there for hours, just smelling it all and trying to hold it in your head, impossible to completely remember until you get a chance to smell it again.

I've seen a thousand bog flowers, each one different and special, and I'd sometimes think that there were actually so many that it would be impossible to come up with a combination of colour and shape and size and scent that didn't already exist, if you had the time to seek it out.

He'll tell you he has a heart of gold, Keith will, that he's always the first one to lend a hand. He probably believes it, too—but it's not really as simple as that. Maybe he did once, but I doubt it. He's certainly been good to me since the stroke, but whether that's anything more than a simple sense of duty, I'll never know.

He told me about the man across the street, told me in short, bare sentences as if he was trying to make sure I wasn't too upset by it all, but stuck here, it all unfolded in my head like a storybook, all of the description gone so that I had to think of it as played out by stick figures, unless he stopped long enough for me to make up my own details. And he told me that he would have done something, even if he was an old man taking off after someone much younger, except he had to be sure he would be able to care for me, and I tried to look at him as if I believed him. The truth is that he hasn't ever picked a fight that he didn't already know he would win. He'll take any kind of abuse when he knows he's outmanned. But that's a cruel thing for me to think. There's none of us out there without our own faults.

I have a clear picture of Keith hefting his old knapsack out of the trunk of the car in by the Four-Mile, an economy of movement that showed he'd done it all hundreds of times, his fishing rod already in his other hand, a hat pulled down tight so the bill covered his face. We even used to call it a rucksack then, that knapsack, made of heavy canvas that turned dark green when it got wet, and it fit there in the middle of his back like it belonged. And we'd have sandwiches in waxed paper, sandwiches I had made, crispy bacon and thin-sliced onion and butter on thick bread, and a fire for the kettle and Keith's hatchet. A bottle of rum for a belt back there in the woods.

And we'd be miles into the woods and he'd be tucking the bottle back into the knapsack and he'd look at me out of the corners of his eyes—inspecting, feral, hungry—the sort of look you recognize if you've ever seen it before. He'd kiss me then, sloppily wet and smelling rich and plummy, his clothes still full of the stale sharp of woodsmoke, and we'd duck back into the trees again, all hands and mouths and shedding clothes. The great musk of the peat and the moss rising up thick all around us so that it was like it wasn't just Keith and me there on the ground, but a great moist, hot world all around us, all hunger and desire and marvellous need. It didn't even matter to me that it was so quick.

But that was only half of it. Sometimes he'd be by the side of the river drinking thirsty great slugs of rum straight out of the bottle, his head tilted back so that I could see his Adam's apple shifting up and down with each swallow, and he'd turn a kind of mean that I don't think anyone but me ever really saw. He could pull the back of his hand across his mouth afterwards in a way that made me know he wanted to slap me with that same hand, and alone and outweighed up there in the woods, there wasn't a whole lot I could do about it except pay for whatever sin he'd decided I'd committed this time.

It was a sharp contrast, the sudden slap of flesh on flesh while all around us the world was holding its breath, and once I found myself lying face down on a small rocky beach, blood dripping slowly out of my nose, looking at the ground while an ant slowly foraged in among the river sand, and I remember thinking that there was nothing the ant would be able to do if the river rose even a few inches—a great wide watershed up there above us so that all the rivers in the basin could rise startlingly quickly—nothing the ant could do but struggle and be buoyed along by it all, and hope that it would eventually find its little feet on shore again.

The funny thing was that I always thought it had nothing to do with me at all, when he hit me, that it was really about every other single thing in the world, and it was like I was just the canvas he happened to have in front of him. I suppose it's really like that for everyone—nothing that special about me. It didn't stop, it didn't ever stop. I kept it away from Vincent as much as I could, but I think he always knew. At least, he knew something. Children are like that: they can feel the currents in a room the way eagles find thermals—their wings just happen to be in the right place, and they rise and fall accordingly. But the obvious parts, when Keith's mood went jet-black—it was like bad weather coming, even if Keith didn't realize it, and I'd try to steer it right into me when I knew the clouds were about to split, and sometimes I paid dearly for that.

Part of my job, part of my choice, I guess.

Once, we hit a dog on a dirt road heading home and we didn't even stop, a small, sandy-coloured, short-haired dog, and we left it there trying to haul itself off the road, dragging its back end like its spine had been broken. And Keith was furious, and kept talking about the dog when we pulled around the bottom of the Eight Mile pond where the beaver dam used to be, the car going too fast in the loose gravel. How it was the dog's fault for straying onto the road, the owner's fault for letting it go around untied, the highroads department for letting the alders grow in too close on the shoulders.

And “Sometimes you just get what's coming to you,” and he said it through clenched teeth, because we were just above the Cataracts bridge then and sliding sideways on loose gravel towards the guardrail. He pulled the car back under control then, the old Chev we'd had for years, and we rattled across the battered concrete bridge deck, and he looked across at me for a moment as if, if he'd had a gun with him, he would have had no problem at all pressing the barrel up next to my ear and pulling the trigger.

Like staring into a shark's eye, that's the way I think about it now. Big and black and unblinking. And I still shiver. And I wonder just exactly what he knows, and when he knew it.

Some days, my memory just isn't so good. To be honest, I still wander, and sometimes things get in the wrong order in my head, so that Vincent is a little boy and then he's all grown up, like it happened in minutes, and I get distracted and lost. I think children come out as opposites of their parents—forced to be big where their parents are small, allowed to be small in the parts where their parents are too large. At least, that's the way I think about Vincent.

Sometimes, still, the words go away inside my head, and it's like I'm grabbing at unfamiliar shapes looming all around me in the dark.

Right now, I wish I could rub my hands together, just wring them to make the blood flow a little more quickly, to stop the endless buzzing. Like bees in my fingertips and there's something so familiar about that, so familiar that I should be able to figure it out—so strange and yet so familiar. Like I should remember something important about it. But it's all like fighting your way through spiderwebs, so much work just to put some order to the simplest things.

When Keith comes in, maybe we can get all of the fishing gear, jump into the car and just go. I should probably be getting ready now, get changed. I can see the closet, his clothes on the left, mine on the right, and I know exactly what I'd wear.

The little bright leaves must be out on the alders by now, the fish sharp and fast and hungry now that there are bugs around again. Out above North Harbour—there are three or four big rivers out there, the kind where there's enough water for big fish but you can still cross them in hip waders. The partridgeberries will be flowering white confetti, and there will be all those fine smells that you forget going through the winter, when the most familiar smell is the heat coming on in the radiators and sending the burning fine dust back up into the air. There's no smell like the wet smell of spring—the fullness of it, the complicated roundness of it.

Keith would say I'm just getting carried away by it all, that it's just a smell, even though I know he'd be lying about that, because I'll never forget the way he came in our first winter together and held his cloth gloves under my nose so I could smell the fir sap.

“There,” he said. “There. Now you know you've smelled it, and part of you will never be able to forget.” And that's in him too, the wonderful piece, and it's all part of the same man. Part and parcel.

We'll find a place there where I can sit and he can fish, and we might stay there until the sun angles down behind the hills and it all starts to feel like long sleeves of dark are running down along the arms of the valley, so that we're in evening already while the high ground is still lit bright with the sun.

And sometimes it's like something inside my head is blossoming somehow, like my head is filling up and warm. Pressure, not unpleasant or painful, but clearly there. Reminds me of waking up and finding Keith's hand weighted and warm in the middle of my back.

And sometimes I can't even think of the right words, as if they are all right there and yet don't make sense.

Sometimes things rush right at me, the way I imagine a subway train must sound, pushing all that wind and noise out in front of it. Lights seem to flicker. Or is it me? There's also a claustrophobia. Maybe that's not the right word. There's a feeling I get, as if the world is going to come in and find me here, even that a person is going to come in here to rob the place, and I'll be unable to get out of this chair. I'll be unable to do anything, unable to stop it, unable to make a sound—and I don't even know just what it is that they'll do. Not even that they'll hurt me—I think I'm long beyond that now. I think it's that they'll look at me and know that they can safely ignore me, that then they'll go through the drawers and rob the place, knowing that I can hardly tell anyone what happened. Then everything will only be there in my head—all my little treasures gone, except for in my memory.