The Glass Harmonica (11 page)

After a couple of weeks, they all had the same bored eyes, the same indifferent way of studying the ceiling tiles. The road from independence to resignation was a short one, Kevin thought. He'd pay them for lap dances and then talk instead, and he knew that it meant they'd single him out to each other as unusual and strange—perhaps even dangerous.

The clubs were never good places to be singled out as different. It was better just to pay for the overpriced beer and blend in.

Once, Kevin spent an hour talking to an Eastern European girl with ungodly huge breasts, uneven teeth and a lisp, until she sized him up and dismissed him gently. “You go home now,” she said, putting the twenty dollars he handed her into the small purse that all the girls carried—no room for pockets, dancing nude—and snapping the clasp shut. “You go home to wife and kids.” She put a cold hand on his cheek for a moment then, and he saw a row of thin white scars on the inside of her wrist.

In the cab, he tried to forget everything about her. It worked, for a while, except that her voice and the inside of her left wrist kept swimming back into his memory unbidden. And he wondered just what it was that she was going home to, seeing the thin white parallel lines like empty sheet music, waiting for their defining notes.

Out on the street in front of Kevin's empty house, he heard the engine of a heavy truck rev up, heard the bite of the tires on the pavement as the driver popped the clutch. From the sound of the tires, Kevin could imagine that he was watching the back of the truck fishtail slightly from side to side, the bright red gems of the tail lights shrinking to small glass beads as the truck pulled quickly away.

A strange and wandering thought struck him: Can you really tell anything from tail lights? Could you look at them and get some kind of idea of at least the model of the car that was driving away from you? In a moment of stress, could you even remember what those two small red lights looked like?

Kevin sat down heavily on the couch in the living room, wearing a bathrobe over a T-shirt and his underwear. Occasionally a car would whisk by outside, and the headlights would sweep across the ceiling above the level of the curtains. The room would light up for a moment, and then it would be even darker than it had been before.

There was, he noticed, a fraction of a second as a car was passing when you could watch the shadows of individual pieces of furniture move across the wall, as if the furniture had decided to rise on its heels and creep across the room, tugging at the curtains for a quick look outside.

He waited, wondering just where the girls were.

There was no way to reach them, and no real way to explain why he was even worried. No one to consult, no one to ask, no one to call.

And later, there'd be no way to explain to Cathy, either. He was pretty sure that the girls took advantage when she was away, that perhaps Heather realized how they could make him melt by just reminding him of those few short years when she had been a toddler. He would flash back to that if she gave him just the right hint of a familiar smile. He wasn't sure that she knew she was doing it, but he suspected. “Can I take the car?” sounding no more significant coming from her than “Can I have another cookie?” and really, he'd think, why not? Why not, when her eyes were so simple and innocent, her skin perfectly smooth and magically soft, without even a single scar?

The “why not” wouldn't sink in until much later, when all of a sudden he'd feel both ashamed and angry, sullenly wondering whether he'd just been played by a calculating, sharp-eyed stranger hiding inside the girl he once thought he'd always know.

With that, he got up and pulled the curtain open, looking outside to see if the car was there, and of course, it wasn't.

It wasn't, and the space where he had parked it earlier that evening looked as naked as if whoever had driven away had peeled up a patch of asphalt and taken it with them in the trunk as well.

There were moths circling in the glow of the street lights, hapless and confused, an amateur Aeroflot always on the near edge of a midair collision. And he was caught again on the knife-edge of trust and terror. Heather would be furious if she knew his fears, if she guessed that he was questioning whether she knew how to take care of herself. And yet, if something was wrong, he'd be losing valuable, irreplaceable time.

Heather with a rectangle of silver duct tape across her mouth, her arms pinned behind her back, caught between two faceless men on the bench seat of a speeding pickup truck.

Heather and Claire being thrown around in the pitch black of the trunk of a car, the trunk lid closing over their struggling bodies.

He heard a car stereo, loud enough that the Doppler of its bass shook warnings in the window glass of houses it hadn't even gotten to yet.

And then Kevin woke up, still on the couch, and it was daylight.

Outside, he could hear people shouting—two voices measured, the third high and frightened. He went outside without even stopping to put on his shoes, realizing it only when he felt the rough prickle of the concrete on the bottoms of his feet.

Mrs. Purchase was half in and half out of a small Toyota, the car muscled in tight to the curb, close enough that he noticed that the side walls of its tires were scuffed black from contact with the cement. Both her hands were still outside the car, turned backwards and with the fingers splayed flat against the roof so the couple holding her couldn't close the back door of the car without closing it on her hands.

“Come on, Mom,” the woman was saying. “Come on. We're just going to look. You don't have to stay—we just want to see if you'll like the place. They have gardens, too. You'll see.”

Mrs. Purchase batted ineffectually at the woman's hands with one of her own, not relinquishing her grip with the other hand, and Kevin thought of the powdery wings of a moth batting uselessly at the hot glass of the street light.

The woman who was holding Mrs. Purchase's wrists was someone whom Kevin could not remember having seen before.

“I don't know you,” Mrs. Purchase was saying quietly, urgently. “I don't know you.”

She looked up as Kevin let the screen door slam behind him, walking towards the trio. Mrs. Purchase's pupils pulled into sharp focus as she recognized him.

“I told you,” Mrs. Purchase hissed plaintively at Kevin, her eyes wide. “I told you what can happen. You just don't know. I saw her in the front seat. I did. I told them. I told them years and years ago. And I never saw her again.”

104
McKay Street

ALBERT CARTER

NOVEMBER 15, 2002

T
HE LETTER
was on the kitchen table, the envelope beside it. Three and a half years before Mrs. Purchase told Kevin about the girl, Albert Carter had already written it all down. But what he'd seen was buried, lost, mixed in with everything else. Carter picked the letter up, meaning to fold it and seal it in the envelope. He picked it up over and over again, but always put it back down on the table again, the pages still smooth, the typed letters sharply black against the white paper.

He had crossed out some words, filled in others, but he tried to keep it as neat as he could, the changes between the lines in fine, careful script, black ink, the letters in each word looping up so that every letter was at exactly the same height, as if they'd been written between two ruled lines. The Jesuits, Albert thought grimly, they'd done their job with him. They'd been perfectionists about everything. Disciplined—severe even—not like the way things were now.

He spread the letter out flat on the kitchen table, the morning light streaming in behind him from the small yard, and started to read it again.

To the Right Honourable Prime Minister and to the Justice Minister of Canada:

First of all, in this case I am not the Instigator. I am not the cause. That is for certain.

As Prime Minister, and as Justice Minister, you should both know that. You should both understand that clearly. I am not to blame, I am just a citizen of this country like anyone else, and I have the right to have the quiet enjoyment of my property, even if lying, instigating Chris Wheeler doesn't seem to think so.

I should say first of all that I have lived at 104 McKay Street for 47 years now, and during that time I have been no trouble to anyone. There is not one living person who would have said that I was any problem at all, not even the least bit of a nuisance.

Live and let live, that is my personal motto, and it always has been.

At least, until lying Chris Wheeler moved here with his blue Nissan Sentra—Newfoundland and Labrador licence RPN 3L3—and his huge car stereo, on which he plays loud music at night, and since his lying, instigating friends started spending so much time here, disturbing the peace with their foul behaviour.

McKay Street in St. John's, Newfoundland, is a good street. It is a quiet street, not a street where you expect to hear loud music all the time. It is part of a neighbourhood that's been full of families for years, a downtown neighbourhood that was busy when driving was a luxury. Most of us are older now, and if anyone is to blame, it should be the City, because they gave Peter Kavanaugh permission to subdivide his house into two apartments and then move, lock, stock and barrel, out of town, leaving his property in the hands of a succession of tenants, none of whom could really be trusted.

Leaving all of his troubles behind for the rest of us.

Leaving us with lying Chris Wheeler.

Lying Chris Wheeler, he is the worst tenant Peter Kavanaugh has had yet, the worst, laziest, most deceitful tenant yet, and Chris Wheeler has told so many people lies about me now that I swear I cannot go anywhere without people staring at me, and Heaven only knows what they are thinking.

Even my friends look at me differently now, people who have known me for years and who should know better. People for whom I have never had a bad word, people I have gone out of my way to help. But instigator Chris Wheeler, he has dragged my name through the dirt, and I am sure he is the reason why everything has changed.

I know there are those who will say that you shouldn't listen to me, who will whisper, who will write their anonymous letters and say that you should ignore someone who has had a conviction registered against them already for disturbing the peace.

Even the police might have something to say about me, might say “Listen, Prime Minister, we remember that man.” But they are not the only ones who remember things.

Let me say that I remember them, Constable Peter Wright, badge number 432, and Constable Reg Dunne, badge number 881, and I remember that they didn't even listen to my complaints, not even when my cat was killed and they wrote the things I said down in their black notebooks and then closed them up and forgot the whole thing.

And later their fellow officers listened to the likes of lying Chris Wheeler and his lying skeet friends Roger McInnes and Rory Andrews and that quiet one, Alma Jones, the police listened to them when they said that they were just playing music and I came out for no reason, carrying a shovel and swearing and waving my fist, and that then I broke some of their beer bottles next to Wheeler's precious car.

The judge went further than the police, said it was “beyond a reasonable doubt” that I had struck lying Wheeler's car with my shovel, because all three of his friends stuck to their made-up lying story, and the judge even ordered me—
me
—to pay Wheeler. Pay him for paint for his car—when I am the one whose rights were being abused, and are still abused on a regular basis.

I thought the judge would have some sympathy for what was happening to me, because he looked as though he was just about my age—there on high and all fancy in his black robe, but able to understand the sorts of things people our age have to deal with, his face perched up above his robe like a shrivelled old angry apple, but I was wrong and he didn't understand at all.

He probably lives in a big house in the east end somewhere, with a huge garden where he can work way up in the back and never even hear the street noise, let alone have to deal with the likes of Wheeler. I imagine he never has to deal with neighbours at all, beyond a little chat if they meet putting the garbage out by the curb. And his neighbours are hardly likely to slink over to his fence and pitch their trash into his yard when he's eating a fine dinner and listening to classical music.