The Glass Harmonica (35 page)

Ronnie was already pulling over to the curb, and Liz was thinking, why does a guy like that get to have a whole house to himself? A big house like that, and obviously only one guy in the whole place. He's got to be in there all on his own, because who the hell would get hooked up with a guy like that anyway?

She'd seen him before, knew he was the architect. He was a big, soft guy, carrying enough extra weight that his face seemed somehow indistinct, like a landscape where all the identifying parts had been softened by distance. She'd watched him from the car, full of front-seat judgment every time his door opened. He kept his hands out in front of him, too, busy, she thought, and she was sure that when he opened the door this time, he'd be doing it again. He always did. She'd noticed it before, noticed that it made him seem sort of old-womanly, those two white, pudgy hands working over each other as if they were trying to stay out of trouble. She almost laughed at a sudden thought—that maybe the hands were just unable to keep themselves from getting all worked up about pizza.

It had already been a long night, she thought. Every night was a long night.

It was the kind of business where you don't even begin to make any money until it's late, and the money you might make is all tied up in someone else's hands, the worst part of it being that it was goodwill cash, late nights and booze bringing out the goodwill like absolutely nothing else. Some nights, everyone would tip. Other nights, no one.

On good nights, Ronnie would be humming early, and it was like the world was absolutely perfect, like the moon was rolling out completely full every single time. On the bad ones, he'd be complaining about gas prices in the first hour, banging the dash with his fist for emphasis. Then someone would cut him off and he'd forget all about pizza, running right up against the other driver's back bumper, headlights on high beam, sticking to the other car like glue, daring them to stop so that he could pile out of the car and try to haul them right out their side window, throwing fists before they even had a chance to ask him what his problem was.

Liz hoped for a good night, hoped for the kind of night when everything went like clockwork, when the pizzas were ready and the customers were civilized and the night ended early with a pocketful of tips and a slow fall towards warm sleep just after three in the morning.

And 35 McKay was right there in the door before they'd even stopped, like he'd been listening for their car the whole time. As if his entire fucking snowy world depended on a still-hot pizza in the back seat of a piece-of-shit delivery car.

Huddled against the cold, up against the side door of the car with the vinyl hard and unyielding against the point of her shoulder, Liz thought about their apartment, imagined that she was in bed, listening to Ronnie snore, the shallow, simple breaths that she could listen to for hours. In and out, in and out, Liz not sleeping but perfectly content to be awake, every single thing in her world set in its perfect order, in its perfect place. And she thought about getting out of bed and taking the box out of the closet while Ronnie slept, about opening the lid and going over all the treasures, handling each one and remembering where it had come from and how it had ended up with her.

And she imagined that Ronnie wouldn't wake up, that he wouldn't wake up because then she would have to explain. And Liz wasn't sure that she could.

She couldn't remember exactly when it had started. It was like one day her hands just did what they were meant to do. At parties in the summer, Liz suddenly found it impossible to keep her hands off things. In one house it was a grey soapstone walrus, just a small sculpture with one of its short tusks splintered anyway, and she had wrapped it up in her jacket almost without thinking. Once, a yellow-handled paring knife, absolutely nothing special about it except that it had been on a cutting board, cutting lime slices to perch on the edge of margarita glasses at a Mexican-night party.

If she'd been asked why, Liz might have said that it was like trying to capture a piece of wherever they were, a way to save a part of some particularly good time. Like a totem—like some proof they belonged there, in a particular spot all their own, that they would someday be back, and that everything would be wonderful all over again.

The next time, a small art deco jewellery box, empty—she didn't take things because they were valuable. They weren't even things that she really wanted for any reason. And all of it went into the shoebox, so much now that it was hard to get the lid back on.

She wasn't worried even about getting caught. Liz thought about it, and wondered sometimes if it was because she hoped she
would
get caught, hoped she would be forced to explain, the process of explaining making it all clear to her as well. As long as it wasn't to Ronnie. She was afraid that she'd get the blank stare, that cold look he saved for anything he couldn't bother understanding.

But, she thought, he was so good at the things that made sense to him. She could remember having sex with Ronnie on the floor in a bathroom at someone's house, and when he'd turned to unlock the door, she'd snatched the hand soaps from the dish on the sink, mostly because they were shaped like little shells: a pale blue whorled snail, a yellow-brown flat scallop. She didn't even like the smell of them, but that didn't matter.

She had slid both of them into her pocket, and later, sharply aware of how they had taken on the warmth of her body, she had held them in her hands for a few moments before putting them into the box as well. The smell bothered her for months whenever she opened the box, but any annoyance went away as soon as she could see the smooth curves of them and could imagine them as they had been, lying in the dish next to a stranger's sink.

That would be the thing to have, she thought: a small, light blue dish just to hold seashell-shaped soaps. What was wrong with wanting a bathroom where the sink didn't have a rust stain tonguing its way down towards the drain—one where the faucets and sink were brand new and clean?

When Ronnie wasn't around, she'd sometimes take the box out and line up every single thing on the edge of the bed. The box was packed tight, a worn washcloth folded over the top of the items before she closed the box lid up and slid it back into the bottom of the closet. She'd written
Sewing Stuff
on the top of the lid in big square letters with Magic Marker, thinking these words would be as likely as anything else to keep Ronnie from ever looking inside—although she couldn't help but wonder what he would think if he ever did open the box and saw her collection of oddities.

There was a big brass button she'd found at Ronnie's parents' house the first time she'd ever been there, and a single paper bill from Trinidad and Tobago—she'd worked that out from under the Plexiglas bar top downtown, prying it a bit closer to the edge every time the bartender turned his back, Ronnie tied up and laughing with a bunch of his friends when it was supposed to have been only the two of them, out on a formal date. But there were guys there from Ronnie's neighbourhood, and they came over like they owned Ronnie and owned the bar too, slapping each other on the back and seeing who could knock back his drinks the fastest. By the end of the night, the damp bill was folded up in her purse and no one was the wiser for it.

There was a blue felt baby mitten she'd taken from a woman at the grocery store. Well, not so much taken as picked up and kept when it had fallen. The baby was in a cart at the checkout, and the woman was unloading groceries and looking the other way. The baby had regarded Liz with an overly serious look, eyes studying and not blinking, its feet poked out at her, legs ending in knitted bags, and Liz was going to give the mitten back, was actually bending down to pick it up and hand it over, but then tucked it in her pocket instead.

On the walk home, Liz put the mitten under her nose and was amazed that it smelled so strongly of baby—like powder, and also something sour and spoiled. After a day in the box, though, it just smelled like the soap.

There was a spare key to the first apartment she and Ronnie had rented, and a battered toy car she had found in the garden before the landlord told them that the backyard was “technically” only for the downstairs tenants, because they had the deck up top, and Liz shouldn't be down there “poking around.” They hadn't lasted long there: hardwood and sun, the ad had said, but it didn't say anything about the mice, or about the way the wind blew in all around the useless storm windows and ate up more heat than they could afford to keep paying for.

There was a shell, two earrings Liz had grabbed in a flash from a bar counter, and the lid from a sugar bowl that was shaped like a cow. Somewhere in a house in Conception Bay South where a woman had tried to pick Ronnie up, smiling all night and pushing her chest out at him, there was the rest of the sugar bowl, the black and white chest and legs and the startlingly pink udder, but Liz had the top of the smiling cow, and when she put it on the bed, it was like the animal was swimming deep in the bedclothes, the comforter almost up to its neck. There was a glass wine stopper, a lavender sachet from another bathroom, and a wedding ring that someone had been silly enough to take off and leave on her dresser for the evening. Liz had seen it when she and Ronnie were putting their coats on the bed, and every time she picked it up, Liz thought to herself that if she had a wedding ring, it would never leave her finger, not even if she was going into surgery. Sometimes she'd stop for a second when the ring came out of the box and think about its owner tearing the room apart in the search for it, desperate. Serves you right, Liz thought every time. Serves you damn right. And that was one thing she never felt bad about taking, not even for an instant.

Ronnie was coming back to the car. She rolled down the window and he tipped a small avalanche of coins into her cupped hands. Why does it have to be coins when the guy's got so much money? She didn't say it, though, the coins warm in her hands in the damp cold of the car. Why not bills and keep-the-change? And just why does he get so much money in the first place? Why does he deserve it?

The fact is, Liz thought, he doesn't deserve it, and one hand closed over some of the coins. She slid that hand into her pocket. Then Ronnie was back in the car, dropping onto the seat heavy beside her. And Liz watched the man at 35 McKay as he closed the door, staring right at him, trying to catch his eye to let him know that he didn't deserve it at all, that it wasn't right.

She thought he saw her at the last moment, caught her eye and snapped the last few inches of space between the door and frame shut fast. Because he knows, she thought, he knows it somewhere inside that big doughy body, and he feels guilty about it, too. She felt the stack of coins through the denim of her jeans, the tips of her fingers tracing the edges: eight loonies all touching each other, overlapping in her pocket, as warm now as her own skin.

They were only at the pizza shop for a few minutes before Ronnie was storming back to the car. He was out in front of her before she could even stand up from the booth, and from behind, she could see that his hands were already clenched into fists. Past the four small red tables with the cracked tops, past the front window with its incongruous see-through cityscape stencilled on the glass.

Outside, even though they had really only just gotten in the door, their feet made brand new slashes in the deep fresh snow, and Liz noticed that the street lights were surrounded by globes of light reflecting off the falling snowflakes. The heavily falling snow was eating up all the sound, so that everything moved through a breath-holding hush, each movement seeming that much more sharp and deliberate.

“We're going back to see that fucker,” Ronnie said as she caught up with him and got into her side of the car. Liz couldn't help but notice that, just like every other time, just like every single time all night long, the car was already cold, so cold after the heat of the pizzeria, where the big oven hunched against the wall, so squat and square and hot that it seemed as if it should be glowing.

“Why?” she asked, settling against the already-cold seat.

“Bastard shorted us,” Ronnie said. “Thinks he can get away with it, too.”

Liz almost told him then—but she didn't. The words were right there, she could feel them, tripping to get out and explain. It was, she thought, almost as if the words got stuck, as though they got held up on the fact that if she told him, she'd have to tell him all the rest too. She'd have to tell him about all the other things, and in the process she would have to try to figure out how to tell him
why
, when she wasn't completely sure herself. To tell him it wasn't about soap and mittens and rings at all, that it was about
them
, about what it was that they deserved together, and also about what they would never have, no matter how hard they tried. That it was a box packed full of proofs, and that all it really proved was failure—and it was, all at once, as clear to her as that. Clear and sharp and all at once there, and Liz knew that there was no way to say it and have it make any sense at all.

So she didn't say anything, and the car swung wide on every corner, and Liz was afraid they'd hit someone else coming the other way because Ronnie was driving so fast and dangerously. And there was a little part of her that hoped they would crash, that hoped in one great smack everything would be taken out of their hands.

It was as if, once set in motion, everything had no choice but to end up at its logical end. It was as if she had no voice, and also as if she could not lift her arms, as if the door handle was right there in front of her but she was incapable of understanding even something as simple as how a door handle worked. Everything unfolding in a simple, direct, unstoppable order.