The Glass Harmonica (33 page)

She walked to the side of the police car and the window rolled slowly down, a small breath of warm air escaping and touching her face for just an instant.

“Tony?” she asked.

“No,” said the policeman, and she recognized Reg Dunne unfolding himself from behind the wheel and reaching a hand forwards to open the car door. “Not Tony. This time, it's Ronnie. And it's serious.”

58
McKay Street

JILLIAN GEORGE

OCTOBER 7, 2005

T
HE WORST
of it wasn't that they'd attacked her, that Ronnie had held her hands and ripped her shirt open, or that he'd had his hands all over her in an awful combination of anger and some perverse kind of intimacy.

More than two years had passed, and there were still parts of it she could pull up out of her memory completely intact, as if it were starting all over again. The physical parts came back to her first, but they weren't the worst of it.

His hand hard over her mouth, even though she wouldn't have screamed anyway. Because screaming wouldn't work. His other hand tearing at the front of her pants. Then the way he'd stopped and stepped back, smiling and out of breath. She'd been sure that Ronnie was going to rape her, she'd even started steeling herself for the pain there in the alley—and then it was like he didn't need to, like the whole thing was a violent show. Leaving her with the implication, the reality that it could happen, almost any time he liked.

She tried to think of her entire body like it was a collection of ever-dying, shedding cells, so that every single part of her he had touched had long since been replaced by new, fresh skin and tissue. That worked sometimes. Most of the time, though, it felt too easy.

And the worst of it wasn't that she saw them in the neighbourhood all the time, either, those same people who had stood lookout, who'd looked away and done nothing while Ronnie was attacking her. It wasn't Twig Chaulk or his brother, neither of whom even made eye contact with her anymore.

Worst of all were the houses, she decided.

It was the houses, the whole neighbourhood, that she couldn't stand anymore. The generations of it. The way it was all piled up there, stuffed with history that couldn't be undone—the way it cared about no one and nothing, eyes closed, back turned. Like nothing that happened could make any difference at all, like it was all just another useless coat of paint.

She had to get away from here, she thought—and not just get away for weeks, either. Get away entirely. Forever. Somehow.

She'd been thinking about it for months, about the small universe of McKay Street, the way it all just seemed to repeat itself. Like they were all the same people, all destined to live out the same behaviour. She knew that three generations of her family had lived there in the same house at number 58—that three generations had made their way among the same small circle of friends and acquaintances, knitting children and grandchildren into the fabric of a small and definable world. It was one thing to be proud of it, she had thought, and another thing entirely to be stuck in it like a long-dead spider caught in amber. And she knew for certain that she had to be the one to get out, and soon. She just didn't know how.

There were leaves in the street now, she saw, brown, brittle maple leaves from down by number 35 where three big maples filled a side yard. The wind had blown the leaves up and down the street, all along the curbs, like they were everyone's responsibility. And they would be, she thought: everyone would clean up the ones in front of their own doorstep, or else watch them break down into black mush through the freeze and thaw of winter. One person's trees, everybody else's job.

Jillian was in front of her father's house, a house she expected to live in until the point when everything would change. She thought about that every day: the point when everything would change. When home wouldn't be this blue two-storey row house with fake black shutters on either side of the small vinyl windows. The windows had been bigger once, but her father and brothers had taken out the old single-pane ones with their vertical-sliding sashes and had replaced them all with energy-efficient two-pane versions that slid side to side. A big part of the windows' cost had been covered by the electric company, mouthing saving electricity while expecting the same big cheque every month. The whole winter after they'd finished the job, her father would walk over to the thermostat and tap it proudly with his index finger, as if lecturing it on the fact that he'd found a way to keep its errant behaviour under strict control. Never realizing, she thought, that it was the only thing he really controlled.

Her two brothers were selling drugs for a living now, buying bigger and ever more expensive cars that looked out of place on the street and took up too much of the available parking. Jillian was waiting for someone in the family—anyone—to ask either of them where they were getting all that money. No one ever did, and she wasn't sure if that made everything better or whether the tacit acceptance just dragged the whole family in, complicit.

Not that she could talk about it: Jillian was painfully aware that she was a twenty-three-year-old woman living in the only bedroom she'd ever had, a bedroom now dressed up like a cheap apartment so she could pretend she'd found some kind of independence. There was the small white bar fridge she'd bought that ran with a steady and reassuring whirr at night, a dressing table and mirror so that she didn't have to stand in the shared bathroom to do her face and hair, even a Yale lock on the door that her father had installed without her asking.

She remembered watching him screw the lock onto the door, the tip of his tongue through his lips, as if he were making something as involved as the world she was looking for with something as simple as a twenty-four-dollar brass lock. The way he had handed her the key as if it were the key to the city or something.

“There,” he'd said, almost with finality, as though he expected she could live inside those small four walls forever, behind the one vinyl sliding window that no prisoner would ever be small enough to crawl through and make an escape. “Now it's like you own it. You want to paint it purple, you want to put up wallpaper, you want to never make your bed again as long as you live, it's all your choice.”

Jillian always made her bed anyway. She hung up the black slacks and the uniform shirt they had her wear at the coffee bar four blocks away, where she was a “barista” now instead of serving staff. It was a job she neither liked nor despised, but one she knew would never be enough to get her out of her room and away.

And every time she looked at the lock, she wondered if her father had missed the point entirely. Missed it like he missed the fact that Matt and Carl were moving ecstasy on George Street, missed it like he had obviously missed the fact that they had to have their stash somewhere in the house. Probably the basement, she thought, given the number of times they made their way up and down the narrow basement stairs before they went out in the evenings.

And Jillian wondered how he missed the fact that no matter how much you wanted things to stay the way they always were, the good parts changed and slipped away while the bad parts were marked down all over the place, underneath the edges of everything, like they were written with permanent ink and a stranger's looping, unfamiliar script. Like they were just waiting there for you to turn something over and trip over them all over again.

And sometimes she wondered if perhaps her father knew all those things, and had just deliberately chosen to ignore them for a more comfortable security.

Jillian turned and walked away from the front of the house, ticking each place off on her fingers as she went. The houses of boys she'd slept with, the houses of boys who told their friends she'd slept with them even though she hadn't. The houses of girls who had promised to be “friends forever,” and then weren't friends, and then got friendly again just in time to get married or move away. And every single one of the houses was packed tight with information she wished she didn't know. How much better it would be, she thought, to walk by them as “a green one and a white one and, look, another green one,” and not have to think of them as Mrs. Purchase's house or the O'Reillys' or “the house where I kissed someone who we made fun of because he left our school to take French immersion.” And he's now happily married in Ottawa with a federal job, as far away as if he sprouted wings and took flight.

The leaves caught in the wind and swirled around her feet as she passed the houses that had belonged to the lucky ones who sold off high and moved away, and the ones where new people had moved in and were trying to import their own rules, never realizing until too late that they didn't have an irresistible force to throw against the immovable mountain that was McKay Street. The other ones, too, the ones that just sat there like no single thing would ever change, older every day and more decrepit, just waiting to crumble away into dust.

Sam Newhook hadn't even spoken to her afterwards. Like it was somehow her fault or something. Like she was to blame.

She'd seen him from a distance, half a block away, a couple of days after it happened, his face all ballooned out and coloured like a California plum. His eyes were blackened as if he were wearing a mask, but he'd hurried away from her and in through his front door, closing it quickly behind him. His house had since been bought by a couple who both worked at the same bank branch and who ticked rhythmically down the street every Saturday morning on his-and-hers, expensive-looking mountain bikes. His bike was bright orange, hers bright yellow, and both of them looked complete with helmets and spandex bicycling suits, black with rich blue stripes up the sides, like they belonged to the same cycling team and were just waiting to burst out and win their event. He always rode behind her, single file, as if he liked looking at her ass, or else, Jillian thought, she couldn't be trusted to do anything right and he had to keep a constant eye on her.

Jillian had never spoken to them, even though they took individual gloved hands off their handlebars and waved any time they passed someone they recognized from the neighbourhood.

She had heard somewhere that Sam had changed jobs too, changed everything like he had just changed his shirt, or, lizard-like, had given up on his entire skin and just sloughed it off. She imagined it hanging in a closet somewhere, a glassy, clear sleeve that was the shape of his whole body, complete down to the silly, empty little pocket where his penis would have been when his skin was still attached. And she envied him his ability to shed his skin, if he actually did have it, wondering offhandedly if the problem was that her skin just went too deep for the same skill ever to work for her.

She was still wondering about that when she turned the corner at the very end of McKay Street. She didn't see the jogger with the short grey hair and the quick smile until he ran right into her, and with the force of the collision, they both fell.

2
McKay Street

ROBERT PATTEN

JUNE 30, 2006

S
IX MONTHS
to the day after the accident, and the hospital switches me to “life skills.”

It sounds a lot better than it actually is. What it really means is “Cope, buddy,” but they don't come right out and say it that way.

A different wing of the hospital, a different schedule, and I'm not outside with the same crowd anymore. And on the last day I'm there, I don't even know I'm moving yet, and Evelyn looks over at me with that strange glassy look she's had the whole time she's been in here, that glassy look where her eyes seem to be looking right through you, and she says “Go, Vince” to me as clear as a bell. And then she mutters something about taking a chance when it's offered, and then she's asleep. She looks more like herself than ever when she's sleeping.