The Glass Harmonica (36 page)

The car slithered sideways onto McKay Street, slid in close and struck the curb under the snow at 35—and it seemed to Liz that Ronnie was out of the car and at the front door before the car was even at a full stop, and she couldn't decide if everything was moving incredibly fast or if she was in some kind of suspended slow motion.

And Ronnie started punching the man at 35 McKay, and it was angry and fast and definite, and the man's pudgy hands danced up in front of his face as if he were trying to ward off a cloud of particularly persistent flies. Ronnie's fists went right through the pudgy hands, and then the man was lying on his side in the snow.

She saw Ronnie pick up the shovel and raise it in the air, but still her hands stayed in her lap. She looked through the circle she'd wiped clear on the side window and watched the shovel rise and fall, and then rise and fall again. And the only thing she could think, as strange as it seemed, was, “I've lost control of my face.”

Liz couldn't even feel her face, couldn't imagine what it looked like, except that blood was surging all around her body, and for the first time since fall she felt warm inside the car, like the heater had burst into life unexpectedly. Then Ronnie was back inside the car and they were speeding away—and caught in Liz's throat was something that felt like a bubble of laughter, a bubble she had to swallow hard to hold in. It felt like laughter, urgent—but she knew it wasn't.

Later, but before the police came, Liz took the loonies from 35 McKay Street out of her pocket and put them on the foot of the bed, and then went to the closet to get the box.

32
McKay Street

VINCENT O'REILLY

JULY 14, 2006

V
INCE
got the shovel out of the shed and, holding on to the handle, tried to shake the same set of thoughts he had every time he touched anything in the house: the thought that the last time there was someone holding the shovel handle, it had been his father, and he was still alive.

Sometimes, that thought alone was almost paralyzing. He'd open the drawer in the kitchen and find himself just standing there, staring at the spoons, trying to figure out which one he could pick without covering up some important message from his past, every single one of them overlaid with fading fingerprints, prints that could never be re-created or replaced.

It seemed wrong to move anything. It seemed impossible even to stay in the house with the weight of all that hanging over him. The clothes in the closets, the things that should be packed up and sold or given away: he couldn't get away from the fact that every single thing in the house had its own particular weight and importance, far beyond the actual heft and shape of the physical space it inhabited.

He felt like he had been made curator by default in an obscure museum that never attracted any visitors, but where he was the only one who knew the history of each of the exhibits. It was a feeling that came at him from all directions.

Sometimes it seemed to him that the natural thing was to just take over the house and move right in, a custodian for someone else's vanished life, and in the next moment he'd be wondering how anyone could handle inheriting the family house and all the memories that crowded around inside it, that stuffed it so damned full. Then he wanted to pack the whole house up and be rid of it, to be out from under the burden of responsibility for protecting someone else's entire world—and, in a strange way, part of his world too.

He went out the door of the workshop with the shovel in one hand, the jewellery box in the other, safe at least in that particular project, and headed around towards the path to the backyard. He waved to Mrs. Purchase as he went. She was standing on the sidewalk across the street, staring at him as if either trying to figure out what he was doing or else just trying to establish who he was. Some things didn't change: Mrs. Purchase, always eager to mind everyone else's business, he thought. Mrs. Purchase, who was, he imagined, keeping her own collection of what-has-been and what-is-already-done.

The sun had burned the last traces of the morning fog out of the air, but the grass was still wet underfoot. Vincent could feel the dampness soaking in through the canvas sides of his sneakers as he walked next to the house, and when he looked behind, he saw his footprints as dark flattened spots, the rest of the wet grass still standing and pearled with the heavy dew.

He buried the box because he couldn't figure what else to do with it. The backyard was heavy, dark soil, a patch of ground his parents had cared for over the years, building it up and fertilizing it and spreading pesticides like water until everything was treated into its place, grass where grass should be and flowers in their even, bordered beds—and it seemed as good a place as any to put a thing that could only ever be his mother's, a thing that he couldn't look at without immediately thinking of her.

Vincent dug and hit solid rock almost immediately, and then moved over and dug another hole, until finally he had a narrow trench a little more than two feet down, the soil layered in thin, different-coloured stripes like the undisturbed layers of some archaeological dig. Then he dropped the shovel and picked the box up from where he had left it on the grass.

In front of him, a smooth bank of grey bedrock cleaved up from underground, growing out into a ledge and then a narrow cliff. His parents had placed a small trellis there, and he knew what shade of soft pink the roses would be when they eventually came out, and how, three summers out of four, the damp would rot the tips of the flowers, a brown stain stalling the buds before they had a chance to open. The way peonies swelled and then surrendered, giving in to mildew just as it seemed they were about to flower.

When he opened the jewellery box one last time, the music sounded tinkly and far more tinny than it had inside the house. Vincent stirred through the jewellery with his index finger for a moment and lifted the opal brooch, remembering his mother's words about bad luck and his father's brief crestfallen look—a look that had been erased by a stony stare. His mother had then been forced to jolly Keith O'Reilly along by pretending she was more grateful than she really was. Faith would love it, he thought, and it would be as if, by moving it across the country, he had changed the whole sense of it, and it could start fresh in the way it had been intended.

Underneath the brooch as he picked it up, the brief blue flash of the cover of a slender notebook, and for a moment he thought about hooking the book up through the pile of tangled jewellery to see what was written inside. Something important enough to be tucked in with his mother's treasures. Instead, he closed the box sharply. The music stopped in mid-verse. Then Vincent simply dropped it straight down into the hole, nudging it squarely into place with the blade of the shovel, and began to fill the hole in again.

When he put the shovel back in the workshop, he looked around at the rows of boxes and the tools hanging from hooks and leaning against the wall, and then he turned off the light decisively, turned it off as if he knew for certain then that he would never be coming back, that there was only the quick hard work of emptying the place and nothing more. It would be a job for a thick skin—what to keep, what to give away, what to throw away—and he knew that each decision would have to be made in a way that brooked no question, that would be right simply because it was a decision made.

And how do you do that? Vincent thought. How do you take the whole place apart, every marked-up wooden spatula, the butter dish they'd always used even though it had been set too close to the stove element and one corner was melted and ruined? How do you go through and deconstruct it all without tearing down every single memory too?

Two-by-fours and plaster, Vincent thought all at once, and the thought stopped him cold. Remembering how these simple walls had spent so much time hemming him in. And how frightening it would be simply to surrender all that hard-earned freedom and fall right straight back into that grasp again.

Vincent picked up the phone and called Twig Chaulk, even though he wasn't Twig anymore. Now he was just Terry, a smiling, much fuller face on real estate signs all over the city—and pretty much the only realtor's mug you would see anywhere in the neighbourhood. If anything sold on McKay, Terry Chaulk usually sold it.

“Hey, Twig, it's Vincent. Listen, let's just go ahead and sell. And I want it listed ‘as is.'”

“What do you mean?” On the other end of the phone, Twig sounded as if he was taken aback. They had talked about pulling out the bathroom vanity and putting in something newer, sprucing the place up a bit, maybe making a couple of thousand dollars more on the sale.

“I mean just the way it is. Every bit of it. If you want to leave the stuff there, fine. If you want it all stripped, then hire Wheeler or someone to come in and haul it all out.”

Twig sounded incredulous. “Vincent—wait a minute, now. You're pretty much just throwing money away, doing that.”

“I don't care. Donate everything to charity. I'm not taking it all apart. I'm going out the door now, and I want the last memory I have of the place to be just the way it is.”

Twig fussed for a few minutes on the phone but realized quickly that he wasn't going to change Vincent's mind. “I'll make a few calls,” he said.

“I'll leave my keys in the mailbox,” Vincent said.

He felt the smooth oval face of the brooch through the fabric of his jeans with a fingertip as he walked through the kitchen, picking the house keys up off the counter with one long, even sweep of his arm. Knowing as he did it that even his habit of locking the door made him someone very different from the couple who had lived in this house for so long.

109
McKay Street

KEVIN RYAN AND
MARY PURCHASE

AUGUST 11, 2006

T
HE HOUSE
was empty now except for the bedroom Mary had grown up in. Everything else was in cardboard boxes, or else was ready to be there, the whole house just one seriously full trunk load of the car away from having been emptied out completely.

Two towels in the bathroom, always the same pair. A face cloth draped on the edge of the sink. Two toothbrushes standing together in a hard white plastic cup.

In the kitchen, one last open box, flaps yawning, a box that they kept putting things into and then taking them out of again whenever they needed to make a meal. One step forwards, two steps back, Kevin thought hopefully, stirring scrambled eggs, watching the steam rise as the eggs went from flat and opaque to mounded and wet.

The rest of the rooms were empty. The runner was still on the stairs, but the front room was stripped right down to the hardwood floor, the fireplace with its round screen staring out across the room like an open mouth, the coiled-up cable from the television left behind like a sleeping snake. They had made love there once, late at night and urgent, Mary's back flat against the wall as groups of passersby passed the front room, their conversations on the sidewalk louder than Kevin's and Mary's breathing. It seemed to Kevin that they had made love in every room, as if they were marking their terrain, as if Mary was intent on overwriting almost every memory of the place with something new and treasured.

There were no curtains left downstairs, so all the rooms were flat and ringing with echoes whenever either Kevin or Mary walked through them. The basement was so wide open and empty that even light bulbs seemed like an unnecessary luxury—and at the same time, to both of them, the house seemed filled to bursting.