The Glass Harmonica (30 page)

That could definitely be Larry.

He looked at the picture again, tried to imagine the face on the screen involved in some normal action, like talking on the phone.

Or smiling.

Or even just breathing.

Not only could that be Larry, Brendan thought, it had to be Larry.

And that would make it all simpler.

He clicked the website closed.

No need for all that, he thought.

Larry was dead, just dead, and that was the end of that.

And any secrets Larry thought he was lugging around with him, well, that was all just dust now too.

2
McKay Street

ROBERT PATTEN

JUNE 30, 2006

N
O, I'M NOT TIRED
. Just crippled. Remember?

It just seems like it's never going to end—every sunny day the same.

Here he comes again, around the corner with his little jogging shorts flapping like a flag. Does he think I like being out here, with some thin white hospital blanket with blue stripes tucked tight in around my knees like I'm the kind of formally made bed that drill sergeants bounce quarters off of?

I can look down and see the tips of my toes sticking out from under the blanket, right there, in some kind of pure white specialized elasticized socks that are supposed to help keep my blood from pooling down there and pulling the skin of my feet tight like sausages—and does he think there's anything to like about that at all? Like there's one single scrap of good in it anywhere?

Because there isn't.

“You should be glad you're still alive,” people were fond of telling me at first, back when there used to be plenty of visitors in my room, visitors who mixed those easy words with the strange sort of compliment, “You're one tough guy—other people would have been killed outright.”

Like I don't ever wish for that.

How much simpler would that have been, to have just died out there? I'll tell you: two simple paragraphs in the newspaper, and then forgotten. It would have been plenty simpler.

But enough blubbering.

It was bad enough that the nurses had us on the clock, trundling us out to the exact same place every single day, but it was even worse that he was like clockwork too, two-fifteen every single damn day, the clockwork goddamn Energizer Bunny, always running smoothly, always lifting one hand for that short little half-checked saucy wave.

Two-fifteen, time to wave to crippled Robert, hop-skip-jump and buddy was on his merry way. I could have broken his fucking wrist for every single wave. Once, I would have been able to do just that. Now I can't even pull my stupid white-socked feet back in under the blanket so no one can see they're so damned clean that it's obvious my feet haven't touched the floor since someone else bent down to put those socks on.

He probably just lives around here somewhere, trundling by the Miller Centre as part of his regular run around the lake. Quidi Vidi Lake is just down below us somewhere, walking trails and sports fields, not that I've seen any of that recently. It's probably just his regular running route, and it's not like it's anything he's trying to do to get under my skin or anything.

But he does. Get under my skin, I mean. And that's not the worst of it.

Four times now—and I've counted, believe me, I've counted every single time—he's gone by here with his wife or girlfriend, whatever the hell she is, not too much more than half his age and drop-dead gorgeous, long straight brown hair right down over her shoulders on its way to her ass, long-armed and long-legged, and you can tell by the way she moves just how limber she is. I know it's not polite to say about anyone, but she's the kind of woman you can't help but look at and wonder what she'd be like in bed. And they've got the stroller and the baby with them, both of them with their hands together on the stroller's handle, if that isn't enough to make you goddamn sick. And I'm pretty sure I knew her for years back on McKay Street, back when she was a neighbour from well down the street and her name was Jillian George. And she could always be counted on to be looking over your shoulder at the bar to see if there was a better-off guy coming in the door behind you. I guess in the end there was, all things considered. Seems to have done all right for herself, running around with him. You can tell she's got it all worked out.

I can almost imagine what his life is like. I can even hear him saying it. “I'm working the hours I want to now, no more rat race. I've checked out, just doing a little consulting work on the side, two days a week at the business school.”

Right.

No long, tiring drives heading out behind the wheel to Goobies or Clarenville or Gander to make sure that everyone has the kind of stock and promotional material they're expecting. No daily grind, putting on a smile for every one of the hundreds of store owners whose mouths pull down every time they see you pulling onto their lot, clearly thinking, “No customer here, just someone else selling me something.” And I can't be buying bottled water at every single store, just to make them feel better about it. Christ, I bought all that water, I'd be pissing my life away. Literally.

He's probably a lawyer who chucked it all in at fifty to live the better life, new wife, new kid, new focus away from court and clients. Sold his share of the law practice, just doing a little commission work for the government since he's been pitching a few bucks into the right political kitty all these years. Working himself back into the kind of shape he was in when he was in college and playing varsity something. Got his time down below what he could run when he was thirty.

And what a sweet deal that must be, starting all over with all the mistakes smoothed right over, with plenty of cash and plenty of spare time to be thoughtful, chockablock with all the brand new good intentions you didn't have a chance to have the first time around.

And what do I get to do? Not even have the good intentions. No starting over here.

If I ever do get back on the road, I'll just be flogging potato chips again and counting the long, slow days, the endless unrolling pavement on the way to an underpaid retirement. Hell, I can't even reach the wheelchair brakes and release them, even if I'd like to just let them go so I could just goddamn well roll straight out into the speeding, merciful traffic.

How fair is this? I want to yell at the guy. You get the girl, I want to shout, you get the girl and the life and I get the goddamn moose.

118
A
Cavendish Street,
Victoria, B. C.

FAITH MONAHAN

JUNE 15, 2006

F
AITH
hung up the phone, thinking about Vincent and the idea of moving across the country to a cold place she'd never been, to a neighbourhood that Vincent had always talked about as if he were trying to explain the detailed inner workings of a circus freak show. And she was trying hard to imagine what Vincent's face looked like without giving in and going to look at a photograph.

It was like a secret proof, something she wouldn't tell anyone else. If she could just remember his face all by herself, just draw it up there in her memory, she told herself that it had to be real. If she was able to just hold it right there in her head, then she really did love him. And he must really love her.

Half the time, she hated that little game, and hated herself for playing it. The rest of the time, she clung to it desperately, like it was a talisman that kept her safe. It had been over a month since he had gone back east after his parents died on the same day.

When it happened, their boss, Mr. Latham, had been fine with Vincent going—“Go ahead, sort it out, bud, take as long as you need”—but Faith knew Latham's patience was fading fast now. It was heading for August, the height of the landscaping season, when everything was growing like mad and had to be raked or clipped or cut, and they were already shorthanded because Larry Hayden, Larry-who-had-replaced-Vincent, had put a stone rake right through his foot, up through the bottom of the sneakers he wasn't supposed to be wearing on the job in the first place. She had told Hayden about the workboots when he'd been hired on, that he would need to have a pair, steel toes and instep, and he'd said he'd get some as soon as he had his first cheque, that he travelled light and didn't have that kind of money yet.

She also told Larry that he was only going to be kept on until Vincent came back, and he'd had an answer for that too. “I knew a Vincent once,” he'd said, thoughtful. “Friend of my brother's.”

He said he didn't mind short-term work, either. “It's good to keep moving,” he said. “Sometimes staying somewhere familiar is as much a prison as the real thing, even without the bars. You could ask my brother Brendan about that.” He looked out the window in the office, as if gathering in that the trees and open air were still there. “History's a great thing, but it likes to bite you on the ass.” Then he looked at her. “Sorry, miss.” The way he said it reminded her of Vincent.

Larry was quite happy to be guaranteed only a few weeks' work, even though the foreman liked him, even though the foreman said he always worked hard right through the day, right up until the day he stepped on the rake. Faith liked Larry's face every time she saw it, the way it was always smooth and untroubled, as if any kind of pain simply swept right over him without actually touching his skin.

Larry told Faith that, when the rake had gone into his foot, he'd felt the individual tines scraping along the bones of his foot like chalk on a blackboard. “Like a sound, but really a feeling instead,” he'd said.

The doctors had spent hours cleaning the five separate puncture wounds, washing the holes and talking about “anaerobic bacteria” and infection and “necrosis” while Larry leaned back on the smooth white plain of the hospital bed, leaving long stains of dust and sweat behind him like he had created some kind of rank amateur Shroud of Turin. Larry told her the doctors had said “the only way it could have been worse is if you'd let someone bite you.” They'd told him there were more bacteria in the human mouth, “but only a few more than you'd find in good old Saanich topsoil.”

And she'd had to go in and tell Mr. Latham they were short of workers all over again, that Larry had a doctor's note for three weeks and he'd really be gone for every bit that long. Larry had already told her he was going to get in his camper and go up the coast, and she could just hold his insurance stubs until he was back working because there'd be no one to take them out of the mailbox while he was gone anyway.

“Your boyfriend say when he was going to be coming back?” Latham asked when she told him about Larry, peering out over a wasteland of invoices and other scraps of paper on his desk with his sad-sack face drawn up all in long flat planes.

“Not yet.” When he heard the way her sentence fell off at the end like a small wave breaking over itself before it could reach the shore, Frank Latham almost regretted asking.

Almost. “Well,” Latham said, “when you're talking to him, tell him we sure could use him here.”

Back in the apartment, Faith slid the phone onto the counter and went into the living room to look at the photograph again anyway—“just a refresher,” she told herself, and wondered just when it was that she'd gotten superstitious.

She was relieved, too: she approached every ring of the phone with palpable dread now, afraid that it would be Vincent calling to say that he had changed his mind about everything, that they were good together but . . . And every time she hung up, it was like she'd been given a reprieve, however short.

The living room of their apartment was small and close, underfurnished and underdecorated, as if they were still in the process of trying to frame themselves up as a couple. Outside the big curtainless window, Faith watched a crow glide by and waited to see another, caught up in what Vincent always said about crows: “One for sorrow, two for joy.” She was startled at how that had burrowed into her confidence so quickly, too. It had gone so far in that if she saw one crow or even a raven, she wouldn't stop looking until she'd found another, no matter how long the search took. Like the photograph: Sometimes it occurred to her that, unable to believe her good fortune in meeting Vince, she'd decided it must have been some kind of unwitting magic instead. And if it really was magic, then there were spells that had to be renewed and maintained every single day, charms that had to be handled and trusted, at least if she wanted to have any hope of it lasting. Maybe that was love, she thought. Maybe it was always doubting your good fortune, hunting for something to anchor what was otherwise only blind luck.