Breaking Glass (39 page)

My dream of a line of daisies drifting on summer water superimposes itself over the water’s surface.

The line points to our tiny island on the far side of the reservoir. Pirate Island.

Dreams don’t lie
.

There’s a pile of old rowboats turned upside down a few yards away. I climb over the rocks to the jumble of boats. One boat has a set of oars. With the recent thaw, most of the ice has melted. If I’m lucky, I’ll have a clear path to the island.

I unstrap Veronica. Just in case I don’t make it back, I stand her in a place where someone will notice. Where someone will find her and maybe hook her up with a nice stump that will love her as much as mine does. There’s no reason to waste a perfectly good leg.

I push the boat into the water.

I pause to stare at the moon. It looks back at me, a white eye, and I wonder if I should be baying at it like all madmen do, because what I am about to do can only be classified as insane.

In the frigid air, I think I hear Susannah urging to me to join her and Mom in the depths. Already, I can taste the rank water gushing into my lungs.

Drowning is still my deepest dread.

But there’s no other way. I have to do this.

C H A P T E R
t h i r t y - e i g h t

Now

I suppress my terror and suck in quick breaths. The motion of rowing hurts my sprained arm, but I press on, navigating the ice sheets like a cheap re-enactment of the Titanic. But the moon dips behind a thick tuft of clouds and I’m plunged into near darkness. Lights wink on the distant shore and I question the wisdom of this slow cruise to hell.

I hit a snag fifty feet from the banks of Pirate Island. A crust of ice still surrounds the island and the boat can’t get through. I have no choice but to climb out onto the melting sheets and pray the water won’t swallow me like it did Doug Lewis.

I lie on my stomach and propel myself across the frozen surface, since hopping on one leg won’t do. I’d laugh at myself gliding across the ice like a seal, if the fear of falling through the perilously thin crust and into the black water below wasn’t chewing through my intestinal wall.

I’m a few feet from the shore when there’s a creaking groan and a sickening crack. The ice gives way, and I crash into the water, sputtering. It’s so cold it burns. But instead of slipping into panic mode, I fight wildly for my life. I flail and paddle until the ice that blocks my path breaks into pieces and my single foot finds a ledge. Miraculously, I flop onto to the rocks, my heart firing like an adrenaline-fueled machine gun.

The wind tears at me. In my soaked clothes, with the temperature well below freezing, it won’t be long until I’m flash-frozen. My phone is waterlogged, so there’ll be no eleventh hour rescue if I can’t get myself out of here.

I shimmy on my butt across the craggy snow-covered terrain. Blanketed in dirt and leaves, as if someone had tried to conceal it, is a rowboat beached on the shore. I shiver, and not just from the cold.

Because I know, somewhere on this island,
our
island, she’s here.

The ground evens out and I slither on my side, not sure what I’m looking for other than a place to get warm.

But something does catch my eye. In the center of the tiny island, surrounded by a stand of trees, is a snow-covered canopy. On closer inspection, I realize it is a half-collapsed old army tent and wonder if it’s a neglected campground from long ago.

And then I see it. Her shrine to us, the papier-mâché statue made of three twining tree trunks. Faded and nearly unrecognizable, it’s bedecked with garlands of shriveled flowers.

Cold penetrates my wet clothes, the chill squeezing deep into bone. By now, I’m quaking so violently, it’s hard to think. I’m not really sure why I’m here and why, suddenly, all I want to do is curl up and sleep.

I’ve had enough bouts with hypothermia to know the signs. If I go to sleep, I may never wake again.

I haul myself into the tent and root around for anything to warm me up, but it’s too dark, impossible to see much of anything. And it smells indescribably bad. There’s a jumble of clothes in the center of the tent. I feel around. It’s a sleeping bag, but it’s stiff and frozen as if it had been wet. I stumble on something colder and harder.

A hand.

My insides twist wildly. I’m going to retch.

I throw back the tent flap and a strip of moonlight falls across the body inside the sleeping bag.

I scream.

Susannah’s open eyes are sunken and filmy like dried-out eggs. Leathery gray skin has begun to draw back over her skull, her teeth bared in a ghoulish smile. Both hands are palm up, the ragged slashes where the tender flesh of her wrists has been slit black with dried blood. In one hand is a cell phone, in the other a small notebook sealed inside a plastic bag.

Shaking, I zip open the sleeping bag.

Susannah died in a black dress painted with skeletal white lines. But they’re not meant to represent bones. They’re roots.

For a moment, I’m lost in the strange beauty of the scene. In the dim moonlight, her hair splayed around her, Susannah in her death shroud looks almost like she’s asleep.

Susannah:
Then

Ryan had his secrets, too. I wonder what he would have done if he knew mine.

The moment I saw the way Derek Spake and Ryan looked at each other at the meet last spring, I knew that something had changed between them. I guess I just didn’t want to admit it to myself. I’d known about Derek’s orientation from our weekend art class together. I shared stuff with him, too. Mostly hinted about my things with older men.

How being with older men made me feel protected. Safe.

I just never happened to mention one of those men was Ryan’s father.

Yeah. I know. How low can you go? But Patrick was indescribably kind to me. I know he was old. But he was so hot. He was fascinated by me. Enchanted, he used to say. At the same time, he took care of me like the father I never had. Bought me things.

Try and understand what it feels like to grow up a stunted tree in a barren wasteland, always straining your face to the sun for a warm ray. Sucking on stones for water. I took sustenance wherever I could get it.

Patrick hated his wife, he’d tell me. He’d married the wrong woman. Someone who loved someone else. He was lonely. We clung to each other as a matter of survival.

And Ryan. Odd as it sounds. I loved him, too. Switching between the father and the son was like drinking two similar yet different wines, one rich and aged, the other light, sweet and new. Their love warmed the killing frost in my soul. I would have shriveled up and died without it.

And of course, there was sweet, awkward Jeremy Glass. His eyes were as dark and wise as the earth, but he hid them behind a joker’s mask.

I knew he loved me from the moment we met. But I also knew his love was a weight that would drag us both down. Jeremy was always there when I needed him. But he deserved better than me. I could never provide the kind of love he needed to keep him afloat. I just didn’t have it to give.

Yet, selfishly, I took what I could from him. I made his sweet obsession with me a side dish to Patrick and Ryan. I used him as a back-up flotation device to keep myself from drowning.

I supposed I thought I could go flitting between lovers, like a honeybee gathering pollen, forever. If I stopped, I’d have to look at myself. It was easier to look outside of myself for answers.

I guess I had it coming. Ryan was like a drug I couldn’t kick. His ocean-blue eyes. Perfect lips. Hair like woven sunlight. Body like a god—except those scars he never showed to anyone but me. Scars he said he’d gotten in a boating accident.

I never considered that he didn’t need me the same way I needed him.

That he needed something else.

Last spring, when I’d suspected something was brewing between Ryan and him, I had it out with Derek. I threatened him to get him to stay away from Ryan. Insisted Ryan was mine. But he’d thrown the threats back at me. Told me he’d tell Ryan I was fucking older guys. I’m not sure if he knew about Patrick. Maybe it was just a lucky guess. Spake may be a jerk, but he’s devious and smart. I couldn’t take the chance of Ryan finding out about me and Patrick.

So we were at an impasse, Derek and I.

This past October I caught them. I’d been out walking, looking for branches and twigs for my new art project. They were parked on one of the little-used dirt service roads that run through the nature preserve, the windows fogged up from their breath. I came right up to the car and peered in.

They didn’t see me. But I saw enough. There was no doubt what they were doing in there.

Instead of confronting Ryan, I invited him to dinner at my house. I needed to know if he was serious about Derek, or if it was just a fling. I was well aware of all his past lapses. Who was I to complain, with my track record?

But Ryan always came back to me. I was the default. I was home base.

Mother was out of town for the weekend, as usual, and I didn’t expect her back until Sunday evening. That Saturday night I made roast chicken and potatoes with peas. I lit candles. Poured wine. Dressed in my Pirate Queen outfit. Lit a roaring fire in the hearth.

Ryan smiled at me, candlelight dancing in his eyes. He took hold of my hand.

“I’m always going to love you, Suze. You know that. But I finally realized who I am. And what I need. I’m different. I just never understood.”

I sipped at my wine. I glanced appreciatively at my reflection in the dining room mirrors. The effect was hypnotic, sensual. Yes. I’ve always been able to work my special brand of magic.

“You don’t mean that, Ryan. This is just a phase.”

“It’s not a phase, Suze. I’m gay. I’ve always sort of known it. But, you know, with my dad, I just couldn’t go there.”

I sipped at the wine again and tossed my hair over my shoulder. I was tipsy, on my fourth glass. I’m not sure what I said. I know it was crazy, but I still felt certain he was mistaken. That he wanted me. I leaned over to kiss him, but he pulled away, spilling his wine all over his plate of food.

“I’m sorry, Suze. I didn’t know for sure until I met Derek. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

He was apologizing. Not begging, not pleading.
Apologizing
.

It was true. Ryan didn’t want me.

But I couldn’t let go. I threw my glass at the wall behind him and stood. I told him that I’d been fucking his father. How his father was the
real
man, and a better one than he’d ever be.

And that if he broke up with me, I’d tell his father all about him and Spake.

Ryan turned every shade of red imaginable, then whiter than a sheet.

“You’re crazy.”

“I know.”

“Let me go.”

“I can’t.”

Ryan stared at me silently, his lips moving, then stormed out.

I sat at the dining room table, gulped down the rest of the wine bottle, and cried.

Jeremy Now

The white painted roots form a delicate filigree at the edges of Susannah’s death shroud, coiling and twisting toward her abdomen, culminating in a large skull and crossbones.

The poison seed and its toxic roots.

No one murdered Susannah.

She did it to herself.

Nearby, on the tent floor, is the artist’s blade that made the cuts. Leave it to Susannah to end her life methodically and artistically, with the tools of the trade.

I swallow back nausea, but it’s no good.

I’m going to be sick.

I haul myself out of the tent and spew my insides out onto the snow.

Chest heaving, I lie on my back and stare up at the moon, tremors exploding through me in violent spasms.

I’m tired. So tired. I’ll sleep for a moment and then find the strength to go back in there and wrap myself in that filthy blood-encrusted sleeping bag.

No. If I sleep, I’m going to die out here. “I don’t fucking want to join you, Susannah!”

Why did you do this to yourself? Do you want to take me with you?

Darkness steals over the moon and I slip down the rabbit hole of oblivion.