The Glass Harmonica (15 page)

Brendan didn't have an answer for that, so he lay as still as he could and made himself breathe with long, steady breaths, faking sleep. His last thought before he did fall asleep was that he was sure Larry was still awake across from him, still awake and staring at the wall and as rigid as a board.

Larry would end up leaving St. John's three years later, nineteen years old and admitting nothing, but knowing that, after what happened to Jillian, there would be a lot more than a few questions and a threat.

So he just left.

No one ever said anything to his face, but Brendan knew there was a prevailing feeling in the neighbourhood of “good riddance,” that Larry was different enough to make people uncomfortable and they were glad to see the back of him.

Brendan's father only talked about it once. “Nineteen means you can make your own mistakes and your own decisions,” Terry Hayden said, his face in the newspaper the whole time, his cigarette smoking next to him in the ashtray as if helping to make the point. And then he had pushed his chair back and headed to the front door to see if Ted Cooper had come to pick him up for work yet.

Brendan's mother continued to change the sheets on Larry's bed every time she changed Brendan's, smoothing the blankets flat and squaring the pillow up at the top, but she always did it silently, like a task plucked from memory and done absolutely automatically. She didn't explain, didn't even speak, didn't change her expression, just pulled the fitted sheet on the bottom, shook the top sheet so that it billowed and fell into place, tucked in the blanket and squared the comforter. And then she left, the clean sheets she had taken off the bed held tight against her chest.

Sometimes, Brendan would stretch out on his brother's bed and imagine that the entire world could look different from there, imagine that he could look at everything with his brother's eyes. And then he'd try to think about what Larry's eyes were seeing, wherever he was.

And what Larry knew and remembered.

Brendan saw Mr. Carter's new cat nosing through the front curtains of the house a few months later, and he stared for a few moments at the animal's flat, impassive face behind the glass. The cat stared back, looking as unconcerned about Brendan as if it were looking out at a picture designed merely for its own distraction.

107
McKay Street

KEVIN RYAN

JULY 15, 2006

I
T WAS SIX MONTHS
before Brendan would finally give up on Larry.

Down the street, in his own way, Kevin Ryan was giving up too. He had walked to the house several times, and each time he hadn't managed to bring his hand up and knock. He knew she was there: he'd been watching from the upstairs window when her car had pulled up, and he had watched the top of her head travel around the back of the car, open the trunk and take out the flattened cardboard boxes, and then watched her as she headed for the door.

But when he finally did knock, it took a few minutes before she answered. When she did, Kevin noticed the sheen of sweat across her forehead, her red hair tied tightly back out of her face.

“Hi, I'm Kevin,” he said.

“I know. From next door. I'm Mary,” the woman said. She was only a slip of a woman, her wrist where she was holding the door thinner than a child's, but Kevin thought she made up for her size by being packed with obvious energy—like a small animal quivering with incipient motion even though she wasn't actually moving.

“I was just wondering about Mrs. Purchase,” Kevin said. That wasn't completely true—what Kevin really had been wondering was whether he'd done the right thing at the right time. Whether he should have done something when Mary—because he recognized her now—and the other man were putting Mrs. Purchase in the car.

“I'm her daughter,” Mary said. “Why don't you come in? I've got a lot to do, and I'd rather talk while I'm working, if that's okay.”

Kevin stepped inside, closed the door. At the top of the stairs, he could barely make out the shape of a huge cat staring down at him. To his left was a small living room, and the only word he could think of was
overstuffed
. A fat grey sofa filled the space under the front window, with chairs on either side so close that their arms touched the sofa. A china cabinet with glass doors—china cups and saucers piled ten deep on the bottom shelf, the upper shelves filled with figurines so close together they looked like passengers on a rush-hour figurine subway. Every flat surface in the room—tables, the mantel—was covered with more knick-knacks, ancient, browning spider ferns reaching out over edges, their runners plunging all the way to the floor as if seeking some futile escape.

“What I was wondering is whether she's all right.”

“Depends on what you mean by all right,” Mary said dryly. “If you mean alive and pretty comfortable, sure. If you mean all right upstairs, that's something else again.”

Mary walked into the kitchen and Kevin followed. He could see that she was taking things out of the kitchen cupboards and packing them up. The kitchen was just as overstuffed, as if a giant plant had taken root in the house and quickly outgrown its original pot. The counter was packed with utensils poking up out of containers, and a row of tubs labelled
Sugar
and
Flour
with masking tape covering the back half of the counters. Mary had one drawer open and was filling the box with a variety of strange and foreign kitchen equipment: what looked like a wire harp designed to slice eggs, a set of tongs with great wide curves. Mary caught him looking.

“Jam tongs,” she said. “They're for lifting the bottles out of boiling water when you've sterilized them.” She smiled. “Need anything? Help yourself. Lords knows she had enough of everything. When I did the bathroom and the hall closet, I found twenty-five pairs of tweezers and at least as many pairs of nail scissors. It's like, when she couldn't find something, she just went out and got more.” Mary shook her head. “I've been taking stuff out of here for days, and I don't know where it's all going. My basement for now, a car trunk full of boxes at a time. Ever done this? Every time you throw something away, you feel like some kind of family traitor. But I don't see my brothers here, so they can put up with it. If they've got a problem, they can damn well come and do some of the work.”

Kevin must have had a stricken expression on his face, because Mary looked at him and stopped, saying, “Sorry—you probably don't need my whole family history here. But it's so hard not to tell you when there's so much to do and so few hands to do it.”

Mary looked around the room and at the boxes open on the floor. To Kevin, the boxes had an air of futility, as if things were being gathered up with no clear plan beyond simple motion—things put in boxes because something had to be done.

“It just never ends. I've got to get the place ready to sell in a couple of weeks, and I don't know how that's going to be possible,” Mary said. “There's all the sorting of what to keep and what to get rid of, all of the things that were important to Mom and probably don't mean anything to anyone else.

“It's not like she'll know. It's not like Mom will be coming back here or anything. There's something serious wrong in her head, and there probably has been for a while. Alzheimer's, maybe, a tumour—they're trying to find out. Things that happened, she doesn't always remember too well. Things that didn't happen, well, she remembers them just fine. And she'll argue with you about them until she's blue in the face.”

All of the cupboard doors were open, and for Kevin it was disturbingly like the old woman's diary was open there in front of him: orange pekoe tea, oatmeal every morning, a more expensive brand of shortbread cookies that said “I'm an indulgence, but at your age you deserve it.”

“I should have done this a long time ago. I should have come in and had a really hard look at this place before now. She could have killed you, you know.”

“What?”

Mary picked up a wooden spatula from a container next to the stove. “Everything's fine, right? A little old lady just minding her own business,” she said. “Wrong.” She turned the spatula around so that Kevin could see the pattern of the stove burner charred deep into the back. “That's just the start. She had the fire department here ten times a month, but I bet they never saw the electric kettle that she tried to heat up on the back burner of the stove. The whole base of the kettle was melted into one big black mass on the burner. But she's complaining about the wires buzzing in the walls.”

Kevin noticed that Mary wasn't packing as much as simply dropping things into the open boxes. He felt like he should help, like he should start pulling open drawers and emptying them. Like it would be all right to simply slide the drawers out and turn them over, dumping everything at once into boxes.

“I'm a nurse,” Mary said. “I should have caught on to all of this a lot sooner. You're supposed to watch for things like ‘acuity,' for whether patients seem disconnected from reality or their surroundings. But she's always been a little like that, and there was no point where I could say she clearly crossed the line. I've come to see her and found burners on and the smoke detector going off, and I'm sure now I wasn't the only one, but she's always been able to convince me that it was just a one-time accident.” Mary smiled for a moment. “You just kind of figure she's safe in here, doing her own thing, getting by. Marking time. Like always. But I suppose you can only really do that for so long.

“You're lucky she wasn't a smoker, you know. You would have all been dead in your beds. She would have left lit smokes all over the place, a couple of puffs before putting them down and then forgetting about them completely. And you know that this whole row of houses has to be as dry as a bone, just looking for a spark.”

Kevin looked around the small kitchen, at the dated cabinets with the brass knobs worn away to their silver cores, at the ancient stove and fridge. Mary caught his eye, and when she spoke again, her voice was softer.

“You can't really judge the place by the way things are now. She used to have a real pride in this house, but she's been on autopilot for years. It's like one morning she woke up and decided the world had changed—that nothing was fair anymore and that there wasn't a lot that she could trust.”

“Was that when your father was kidnapped?” Kevin asked.

“Kidnapped. Yeah, right. Like I said, she has an interesting grasp on the way things are supposed to have happened. Truth is, she doesn't have much of a grasp on anything anymore.”

“I could give you a hand,” Kevin said. “I don't have much to do anyway. The girls are out somewhere and Cathy won't be back from Montreal for another five days at least. I've never minded a bit of hard work, and you shouldn't have to do this all alone.”

When he said it, Mary held her face funny for a moment, and then her expression simply started to crumble. She had an egg beater in one hand, a steel potato masher in the other. She dropped them both into an open box with a clatter.

“She was just supposed to go on gardening. Just working in the yard quietly and not really hurting anyone,” Mary said quietly. “She wasn't supposed to get sick or have to go into a home. She was supposed to be here for years yet.”

And then Mary was crying in Kevin's arms and he couldn't even say how it had happened. Then, he was sure he heard a distinctive voice with an Eastern European accent, heard it as clearly as if the woman speaking the words were right there in the room:“You go home now—you go home to wife and kids.”

He knew that it was the time to make excuses and a dignified exit. Except this time, Kevin stayed right where he was. He knew it must be how the big mistakes sometimes started.

But he stayed anyway.