Perfect Glass (A Young Adult Novel (sequel to Glass Girl)) (24 page)

The view out the windshield was blindingly brilliant—so truly, deeply dark but full of stars that looked like they were supposed to look just hours before Christmas. Like hope. And possibility.

meg

T
he ICU was a horrible place—buzzing machines, shells of humans in beds connected to what looked a lot like battery cables and chargers. Or worse—Frankenstein’s lab. Nurses watched me walk by their station searching for Jo’s room. When I got to her door, one yelled for me to wait for a gown and gloves. She made me feel like I shouldn’t be there.

I stood motionless in the hall, staring at the slight rise I knew to be Jo’s figure under the hospital blanket. A yellow, paper-thin gown fluttered over my head, like a sail, and two arms reached around me, holding it open and ready for my hands to push through the sleeves. The gown was tied in place by someone I couldn’t see.

She stepped in front of me with medical gloves, the kind Wyatt and I blew up like balloons when we found them in our pediatrician’s office. I slipped them on and looked at the nurse’s face. She wasn’t much older than me—working the nightshift in the local ICU.

“Are you the granddaughter?” she asked.

“No. Just a friend.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You’re a good friend, then.” She held my shoulders. “When you go in, don’t be scared. She’s had some morphine for her coughing and the pain in her chest.”

I nodded once, took the paper facemask she handed me, and pulled it down over my mouth, passing from the safety of the hall to the sadness of ICU Room 212.

Jo’s left hand had slipped out of bed and hung in the space between the metal railing and the cold floor. I took it in my hands and carefully threaded her arm and all the connected tubes back until I could tuck it under her blanket. She woke and struggled to focus on my face.

“Meg.” Her voice was just a scratch of sound that barely competed with the beeping and screeching of the monitors. “I’m dying.”

“No, Jo. No, you’re not.” I forced a casual tone. “It’s just an infection. You’ll see. You’ll feel better in a couple of days and we’ll take you home again.”

“Let me say these things before they jam that ridiculous tube down my throat.” She waved her hand toward a Styrofoam cup of water on the bedside table, so I picked it up and held the straw to her mouth. She took a tentative sip. She tried to wipe her chin, but couldn’t get her hand raised high enough, so I did it for her.

“You were right,” she said. “I was wrong. About God. And for me to say that…if you knew how long I’ve lived in denial. Now there’s no more time. If you just knew.”

One lone tear snaked a slow trail down her cheek and I reached out to rub it away.

“It isn’t about the water. It’s the belief. It’s about what He does and it’s mysterious and secret and bigger than anything we know. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you otherwise. Especially crazy and bitter old fools.” This long declaration had exhausted her and she panted for a moment like she’d run a race.

“Yes, ma’am.” The world around me had narrowed down to a blindingly bright connection between Jo’s eyes and mine. All sound dissolved. I could only hear the whisper of Jo’s heart and the ocean of my own blood rushing in my ears. Nothing else. Nothing.

“Let me tell you everything,” she said. “Andrew died. My son died because I was painting in my studio. I was lost in some vision and I’d told him to quit bothering me. He went to the river alone and he fell. He slipped on the muddy bank. He hit his head and he died alone. Without his mother. And with no father. It was my fault and I know it.”

She raised her head for another sip of water, then relaxed into her pillow. I thought she had fallen asleep so I waited for whatever came next.

But with her eyes closed, she began to whisper. “If you have someone to love, then love. If you have someone to forgive, then forgive. You think, when you’re seventeen, there’s time enough for that, but there’s not. There’s no time at all.”

I squeezed her hand, trying to think of how to respond. But she took the burden from me and kept whispering. “You want to know why God gave us people to love? Because that’s the only way we can understand how He feels about us. Desperate and jealous.”

I scooted closer to Jo’s bed and leaned down over her, touching my forehead to hers. “That’s beautiful.”

“I loved a man once, but I didn’t love him enough. People make mistakes all the time. All the time, Meg, people screw up.”

Her throat seized up. She coughed and swallowed and tried to make it right again. Finally, she could whisper, just a breeze of sound. “When you’re here, though, dying in a hospital bed, none of that matters. Just love and forgiveness. Got that? And you must have gigantic courage, enough for a lifetime.”

“Got it,” I whispered, reaching for a tissue on her table to stop my tears.

She opened her eyes, which were milky and unfocused. The pain had overwhelmed her and I watched, terrified, as a team of nurses and doctors rolled a ventilator into the room and began hooking things up. Jo complained and swatted at the hands that prodded and invaded.

“This is it, Meg,” Jo said, with a trace of her old wryness. “If pneumonia doesn’t kill me, these people will. So say goodbye to me.”

When she was oblivious to our world through the wonders of sedation, when the tube had been slowly worked down her throat then hooked to the machine with a simple click, I backed out of the room. I’d stayed as long as I could, as long as she was aware of my presence. Now, there was nothing to do but pray as her chest rose and fell in a rhythm that was too perfect but not good enough.

The Whitmires had already claimed two reclining seats and blankets in the waiting room. They planned to spend the night in case they were needed, a sacrifice I knew Clayton would pay for the next day when he tried to catch up at the ranch. I called my house, waking my parents, and told them I’d be at Jo’s house for the next few hours.

***

The key for Jo’s studio was kept in the Porky Pig cookie jar on the third shelf of the pantry. I’d watched Jo go up on her tiptoes many times to retrieve it. I blew the crumbs off the key and used it in the rusted lock, which had to be cajoled and forced open. I felt like a thief. She’d never invited me in and I had never asked.

I fumbled for a light in the dark studio, finally finding a chain hanging from a single bulb fixture on the ceiling. Soft light flooded the room and the scene shocked me to my toes.

I’d expected dust and disorganization, tubes of expensive oil paint left open, jars of gray water holding stiff brushes, fumes from poor ventilation, cobwebs.

But the truth of the room was more overwhelming.

It smelled like a combination of the citrus paint solvent my mom used and the wet dog odor of rolls of primed linen canvas. But it also smelled like Jo. Not the Jo I’d been bathing in the sink lately or the Jo I’d left languishing in the ICU. But a powerful Jo. A vibrant one. The artist-at-work Jo, where the sweat and tears of creation met. The one I imagined existed years and years ago.

I’d stumbled upon the inner sanctuary of a woman who loved the world. Loved the faces of people she saw. Loved the way a hand looked when it was relaxed. Loved the way a woman looked when she touched her own face. The way a man looked when he opened himself to her. Loved the way wind changed a tree or a field or a child’s hair. The beauty of a neck meeting a shoulder. The softness of a smile that wasn’t forced.

The studio, decrepit from the outside, grew larger and more open as you walked further into the room. The ceiling slanted upward toward a huge window at the back. Easels with paintings in progress were placed directly under two skylights and the moonlight touched the canvases. In the back corner, I found a sink and a counter, where jars and containers and palette knives and brushes were clean and neatly arranged.

Jo told me once that she was an old woman everywhere but in her studio. “There I’m only myself,” she’d said. Standing in the middle of masterpieces that only Jo had ever seen and touched, I knew what she meant. She was working on a new series—one the art world would say was a very un-Jo Russell-like series. In fact, I couldn’t find anything about them that would be called Western Art by a critic.

I had my phone out before I’d thought through my decision. When she answered, I said, “Mom, I need you to come to Jo’s studio right now.”

She walked through the door twenty minutes later, obviously sleepy. If I’d had any doubt I’d discovered brilliance, it dissolved when my mom was moved to tears.

We spent the rest of the night flipping through canvases, cataloguing them, and making notes, until finally, when the sun shone through the skylights onto the paintings and made the colors seem translucent, we collapsed on the floor.

My mom had hardly spoken all night.

“Well?” I said.

“Well,” she said, laughing softly. “No one else has seen these?”

“Not since I’ve been around.”

“This,” she said, waving her hand through the air, “is a life hidden away. Buried.”

“But why?” I said. I didn’t know why her words made me want to cry.

“Look at them, honey. They’re so tender. She doesn’t want anyone to know these things about her soul.” Mom rocked forward and hugged her knees. “We can’t show these to anyone without her permission. I’ll have to cancel the show until she’s able to make the decision.”

She picked up the painting I’d noticed so many weeks ago—the one of the boy that was obviously Jo’s son running through the room. “This would slam through the art world. It’s like Frida Kahlo turning to impressionism. Or Matisse becoming a cubist.”

I shook my head at her. “Whatever that means.”

“Yeah,” she scoffed. “Whatever that means. Because it’s nonsense, really, to say an artist has to stay in one style her entire life. She must paint her own mind and her own heart. And, believe me, what an artist sees in her mind changes as life is lived. Jo is…she’s more layered than anyone knows.”

“Look at this one.” I picked up a small painting of a man with dark hair and a short, dark beard. He wore a loose shirt, cobalt blue, unbuttoned at the top, showing a prominent, knobby collarbone. He looked complicated and hungry. She’d captured him focused intensely on a book, his face pressed against a wall like he was resting. Or waiting.

Jo always, always painted on primed linen canvases. This one was too stiff to be linen and too thin to be the cotton duck canvas everyone learns on.

My mom took it from me and studied it for a moment before turning it over and scratching at a corner.

“This is paper,” she said, the wonder obvious in her voice. “She used laid paper, which is usually for charcoals, and painted this gorgeous, perfect portrait. I’ve never seen this done.” She touched the spot on the man where his strong jaw became a delicate neck. “He’s so beautiful. She loved him a lot.”

I stood behind her to look at the painting. From this angle, I could see my mom had touched wet paint on one of Jo’s canvases and wiped it on her shirt. She had a bit on the ends of her hair. This was the thing about her that always made my dad smile. She couldn’t be around paint without spreading it.

“See, here?” she said. “How loose the brush strokes are? You can see the paper between the strokes. There’s writing. ‘My only,’ and ‘truly,’ and ‘just disappear,’ and ‘a worse torture.’ And here—‘have not slept since I saw you.’ She left this whole wall undefined, behind his head, for a reason. I need a good light, but I think this is a letter.”

We stared at each other.

“We should lock up,” I said. “Walk away and never look back. We’ve stepped all over Jo’s heart.”

henry

“Y
ou’re legal tomorrow, baby. The Big Eighteen.”

“Legal for what?” she said, laughing.

I smiled at her. “I can’t really get into all that. I dreamed about you last night. When I woke up it was like someone had kicked me in the chest.”

“That bad, huh?” Meg was still sleepy. The temperature in Chapin was probably barely above zero right now, so she was buried under several quilts. I could just make out the strap of her tank top where the blankets followed her shoulders.

“I should have let you sleep late,” I said, “but I needed to see you.”

“No, it’s okay. I wanted to see you, too.”

“I want to more than see you, Meg. I can’t tell you how disappointing it was to wake up alone in this metal bunk bed in Nicaragua when I’d just been talking to you in the gym at Chapin High.”

Her smile was a slow curve of lips that I couldn’t resist tracing with my finger. “Why the gym, goofball? Couldn’t you have dreamed us at the beach? I’m never warm anymore. I just want to be warm.”

“I’ll take you to the beach when I get home,” I said. “My dream was weird. You were painting and you had blue paint all over you. I walked over to you so I could touch you and then it was over.”

I don’t know if it was the intense pressure of last night, but something drove my spirit out of my bed and hurled it straight into the puke-green halls of Chapin High School. I was sitting next to Thanet in the basketball gym.

“Where is she?” I’d said.

“She’s painting the aspens,” he’d answered.

Painting. I’d never known Meg to paint. But from the bleachers, I could just make out the white aspens and an almost shocking blue sky behind them on her canvas. One aspen in the forefront, tall and crooked, had stretched out a branch, thrusting it protectively across the smaller aspen standing slightly behind. It reminded me of a man doing what he was made to do. I wanted to be that for Meg.

“Jo’s in the hospital,” Meg said, rolling to her side and positioning her laptop on the pillow next to her.

“What happened?”

“She stopped breathing last night when I was at her house and I had to call 911,” she said. Meg’s eyes were red and I knew she had been and would be crying. “It was terrible. She’s got pneumonia and she’s on a ventilator. Your parents slept in chairs in the waiting room last night.”

I sighed. Here I’d been thinking Meg was having an old-fashioned Christmas holiday with gingerbread houses and plans to go to a dance with a punk. Turned out her world was as tough as mine.