Glass Shatters (23 page)

I
COME TO ON THE COUCH IN
I
RIS’S LIVING ROOM, A
wool blanket tucked around my chest. Iris stands at the stove, still in her baby blue nurses’ scrubs. Steam swirls up around her as she stirs a pot of chicken soup. Ava sits perched on my thigh, her feet disappearing under her skirt like a mushroom. Her face is inches away from mine, her lips slightly parted, carrying an intent expression. I can tell she’s been sitting there, waiting, watching for me to open my eyes.

“I thought you were dead. You just fell down, like—” Ava makes a splatting motion with her hand. I notice my right arm, the sleeve rolled up, the scrape on my elbow red and brittled from the asphalt. “It was really scary.”

I take Ava’s hand in mine. Her small fingers wrap around my thumb.

“Ava, sweetie, can you go start getting ready for bed? PJ’s, teeth, you know the drill. It’s already way past your bedtime and you have school tomorrow,” Iris calls from the kitchen.

“Can Charles sleep at our house tonight? And can we have blueberry pancakes in the morning?”

“We’ll see. Now go brush your teeth.”

Ava swings her legs off the couch and lands on the floor with a slight thump. Before she ducks into her bedroom, she plants a small kiss on my stubbled cheek.

Iris sets the soup down in front of me with a wedge of
French bread. “It’s hot but you should be able to eat it without burning your tongue.” The aroma of dill and rosemary is intoxicating and I have to resist licking the bowl clean when I’m done. Meanwhile, Iris settles herself down on the couch next to me. She slides off her white orthopedic shoes. Her face is the lightest of pastel pinks. “Are you all right, Charles? Because if you’re not—”

“You don’t have to worry about me, Iris. I’m sure I was just dehydrated.”

“Oh yeah? And what about the gash on the back of your head?”

I touch the spot, just above my neck. The wound has been cleaned, covered with a swatch of gauze.

“Do you know how many bits of glass I picked out of that? What happened?”

“A fight. But everything’s okay. Really.”

“Is it? You’re falling apart, Charles, and last time that happened, you disappeared.”

I pause. “I miss them, that’s all. Julie and Jess. I keep thinking about them. All the time.”

Iris sets a hand on my arm, her gaze drinking me in. “Look, I understand, Charles. Believe me, I do. It’s not like I stopped loving Rory once he died. But you’re still a young man. You still have a full life ahead of you, if you just let yourself stay in the present.”

I sink back, full and sleepy. “Did I ever tell you the story of how I proposed to Julie? It was our first time hiking up Birch Lake Pass, out by Mount Christie. The yellow and orange wild flowers were just starting to bloom and when we got to
the top, the day was so clear that we could see all the way out across the lake until it descended into the horizon. I knelt down and my knee sank into the silty mud and I slid my mother’s ring onto her finger. I felt so sure, Iris. How am I ever going to feel that sure again?”

Iris’s expression falls. “Did you say Birch Lake Pass?”

“I remember the sign. The one in blue letters with the hand-painted sun in the background, right?”

“And you’re sure that’s where you proposed to Julie?”

“Yes. What’s this about?”

Ava calls out from the other room. “Mom, I’m ready for you to tuck me in!”

“One moment!”

Iris turns her attention back to me. “Maybe it’s nothing.”

“But?”

“But it’s just that last year, when I did that hike with you and Ava, I could have sworn you said you’d never been there before.”

“Mom?” Ava stands in the doorway, wiping at her eyes. She wears matching pajama tops and bottoms, light purple speckled with a universe of silver stars.

Iris takes my empty soup bowl and sets it on the countertop in the kitchen, then scoops Ava up into her arms. Before whisking Ava down the hallway, Iris turns to me and says, “It’s been a long day, Charles. I very well could be remembering wrong. I could’ve sworn, though …”

I
SPEND HOURS THAT NIGHT STARING UP AT THE CEILING
, at the grooves undulating across the paint. Shadows from the
trees outside waver like witches gathering in the nighttime. A black cat clock ticks above the sink, water dripping from the faucet. Iris sleeps in the other room, small sighs just approaching snores. I try not to make any noise as I tie up my shoes, folding the wool blanket into a neat corner on the couch. I leave a note on a Post-it on the fridge, the chicken scratch handwriting barely legible, and let myself out the back door without a sound. The night air sits crisp against my face, like the first bite of an apple. I like the feeling of being alone, of knowing that everybody else is asleep.

When I let myself into the house, I immediately sense something’s wrong. All the lights are off and I hear the loud rush of water from the bathroom, too loud. My shoes crunch against something hard. I look down and staring back up at me is the fractured face of a marionette, its blue eyes and blond hair a near replica of myself. The body has been split in two, the wood splintered like monsters’ teeth. Marionette parts are strewn across the floor, limbs and bodies and strings, clothes torn, tossed aside, the remnants of a massacre, the last of the marionettes finally wiped out. My heart beats in my throat. I avoid the rest of the marionettes and approach the bathroom.

Charles sits on the toilet lid, scrubbing remnants of blood out of the bowl of the sink. He hasn’t yet noticed the splatters on the floor. His left wrist is wrapped in gauze. A razor leans up against the toothbrush holder, the blade already sparkling clean. He looks up at me, his eyes like pools of water, a murky image of myself distorted by ripples. I look at him, crouched over the sink, nothing but fear, and I realize he’s less human than me at this point. There’s something so diminutive about
him, so defeated and hollow. Earlier this evening, lying awake and seething with anger at mistaking Ava for Jess, I tried to plan something to say to this Charles. I wanted to be cruel, to punish him. But seeing him again, I realize there’s nothing left. He’s tissue paper floating in the wind.

I take the washcloth from Charles’s hand and turn off the faucet, guiding him from the bathroom to the living room couch. I tuck the blanket around him as one might swaddle an infant. He seems barely aware of what’s going on. When he attempts to speak, nothing comes out. Einstein appears from the darkness, circling and plopping himself down in Charles’s lap. A film crackles on the old black-and-white TV, Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr embracing at the end of
An Affair to Remember
. They wipe the tears off of one another’s faces as they kiss, Grant’s chiseled jaw against Kerr’s smooth and creamy skin.

“Don’t worry, darling,” she says. “If you can paint, I can walk. Anything can happen, don’t you think?”

I
WAKE UP THE NEXT MORNING ON THE LIVING ROOM
rug, tangled among a shamble of pillows and blankets as Charles sleeps on the couch, his breath coming out in little tufts of air. Einstein cuddles into his chest, cooing in time with each breath. A sheet gathers in a tangle at Charles’s feet. I pull it back over his shoulders. He twitches slightly with a dream. I wonder what he’s dreaming about. I wonder what it would be like if I could see into his mind, if he even realizes who I am.

I pack a bag for the day—a brown bag lunch of peanut
butter and jelly, a thermos of coffee, my wallet, a foldable umbrella. Black storm clouds roil in the wind, like charcoal smeared against the sky. Before I leave, I gather anything that Charles may use to hurt himself. I take the knives from the kitchen, the razors and pills from the bathroom. I pass the marionettes, the loose bits of string scattered across the floor. Their faces express everything and nothing at the same time.

The air outside is brisk and cool. Leaves swirl around my feet. I concentrate on my steps, on the way my shoelaces curve around one another as if they’re holding hands. Finally I reach my destination, the stairs of a public library near Ava’s elementary school. It’s an ornate brick building in the colonial style, two white Ionic columns as sentinels beside the front door. I made a mental note of the library’s location the first time I passed by, imagining that it may be of use at some point. For someone at the forefront of modern technological research, it has seemed unusually hard for me to connect with the outside world, but the library is an answer to this, an emporium of books, microfiche, and interconnected networks.

I pass by the novels and collections of Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, of Kurt Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick, and my heart longs for these familiar words. Images flash across my mind, men burning books in blazes of fire, robots hurtling through the skies, World War II veterans whipping through time, electronic sheep bleating from the rooftops. I want to sink into one of the brown leather armchairs with a dozen books in my lap and never move again, never acknowledge the outside world. I want to escape into the words of others, words that would allow me to pretend to be human and happy and
loved. Instead, I continue to the back room where Jurassic-age computers are hooked up to cables coiling around the tables’ legs.

I’ve decided that I will no longer be complacent. I will find out what happened to Julie and Jess. I reason to myself that there’s nothing to lose, since if I never know what happened to them, I’ll only assume the worst. I imagine Julie here with me, sitting at the computer across from me, flipping her dark hair back as she grins, chewing the end of her pencil. I imagine Jess flying up and down the children’s aisle, her leaps and bounds like a dance, taking every book on ballet that she can get her hands on and flopping into her mother’s lap. I shake my head. A cursor on the computer pulses, waiting for me to make my next move, the bright Google logo uncomfortably cheery as I type in, “How do you find out if someone is dead?”

I glance over my shoulder, at an old lady humming to herself, at a group of young moms reading to their toddlers, hoping nobody has seen what I typed. I wonder what I would think if I came upon someone who wrote what I just did, if I would judge that person, if I would find the question unsettling. But for all I know, there’s no mystery to what happened to Julie and Jess. Perhaps the mystery only exists in the world of Charles Lang’s mind, the only mind to which I have access.

I click on a link to the Social Security Death Index. It takes me to a page where I’m asked to fill out information for a search. The questions are objective and uninvolved, and I can’t help wishing there were more to be asked, more than their
first and last name, their date and location of birth. What was her greatest wish? What was his deepest secret? What did she dream about at night? What was he most afraid of? My hands shake as I type the information into the form. I realize how little I know about Julie, about a woman whom I love yet who is barely more than a name to me. I don’t know when she was born, nor where, though I can guess. All I know is Julie, Julie, Julie.

I breathe out a deep sigh as I press the enter key. The first list has over one thousand people. Julie M. Lang. Julie Lynn Lang. Julie A. Lang. Women who have died in Ogle, Illinois, in Miami, Florida, in the Bronx, in Missouri, in Ohio, women who died fifty years ago and young girls who died a week before. I shift the mouse, click “Refine Search,” limit it to women born between 1973 and 1983. I try again. The closest to come up is a “Julie H.” who died in California in 1996, ten years before my Julie disappeared. I click on the link, wanting to know this other Julie, wanting to know where she was born, how long she lived, her cause of death, if she was happy, if she was fulfilled, if she believed there was meaning in life. But of course, the website cannot tell me any of these things. All it can tell me is that there once was a Julie H. who died in California in 1996.

I type in Jess’s name now, willing the computer to go faster. The results pop up onto the screen. The only Jess Lang died in Boulder, Colorado in 1986. I release a breath long held, the air claustrophobic in my lungs, forgotten within me. I must have been loud because the old man sitting at the table across from me puts his finger up to his mouth in a shushing
gesture. But if only he could know the relief that I feel, that at least there is a possibility, however small it may be.