Glass Shatters (25 page)

Discouraged, I abandon the double doors, pacing by the classrooms as students file in from recess, sweaty and disheveled. I imagine Jess sitting in one of the stuffy classrooms, completing worksheets in addition and subtraction. I imagine her gathering with the other students on the rug for story time, playing board games on rainy days and carrying too many picture books at once in her backpack. She had friends. She would have been the type of girl who didn’t care what her peers thought and thus was cool and popular in their eyes. And she would have had secrets, secrets that I would never know.

I round the corner. Tucked away behind a chain-link fence, there’s a garden filled with rosebushes beginning to bloom. It’s a memorial garden. A placard in the ground reads For Gordon Howe, bordered by a bare plot of dirt and a blank placard, as if the garden has been waiting for its next addition. Bouquets of flowers rest on the ground below Gordy’s placard. An invisible hand squeezes my chest.

I turn away from the garden, looking instead at the mural that they are painting on one side of the school. It’s a cloud of fairies upon a stage, dancing and twirling around one another. A gawky boy in green tights stands center stage, his brown hair up in a cowlick. It’s a still scene from the school’s production of
Peter Pan.
I search for Jess among the fairies, hoping for just one glimpse, and for a moment, I spot her in her ballet slippers and turquoise leotard, swirling around the young boy in green tights. But a moment later, her image shifts before me. It’s not Jess in the mural but Ava, her hair bright red against the turquoise, a spray of freckles across her face.

November 2, 2011

Age Thirty-Three

A
dream. Charles crouches down in the depths of the night, his face the alabaster white of bone. He is in his living room, and yet wisps of artificial branches and forest leaves crawl around him. A chorus of children’s voices breaks from the distance. A stage light snaps on behind Charles, buzzing louder and louder as it gets brighter and brighter. Charles sits on the hardwood floor and holds his knees against his chest. The chorus grows closer, their voices distorted, crashing over one another like cacophonous waves, their throats raw and rasping.

“Now repeat after me—I won’t grow up!”

“We won’t grow up!”

“I don’t want to go to school!”

“We don’t want to go to school!”

“Just learn to be a parrot!”

“Just learn to be a parrot!”

“And recite a silly rule!”

“And recite a silly rule!”

The chorus surrounds Charles, their warm, sweaty bodies crowding in around him, and Charles realizes that they are the Lost Boys from
Peter Pan,
barefoot and dressed in rags, mud smudged across their cheeks, a malevolent gleam in their eyes. They stomp up and down in time with the music, rattling the hardwood floor beneath them, as their ringleader comes out, Peter Pan. His felt hat tips down over his face as he carries a bundle of a blanket in his arms. Peter Pan looks up as he spits out the next line of the song. Charles discovers that Peter Pan is not a boy at all, but—

“Julie? Is that you?”

Julie is no longer a woman but a girl, small and diminished, a paltry version of her former self. She refuses to acknowledge Charles, screaming out for all to hear: “If growing up means it would be beneath my dignity to climb a tree, I’ll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up, not me!”

“Not I!”

“Not me!”

“Not me!”

Julie looks Charles directly in the eye, and with a snarl, she lets free the blanket, revealing a mess of shattered glass and blood held within. The Lost Boys vanish. Julie leans in, whispering into Charles’s ear: “I’ll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up …”

R
AINDROPS SLIDE DOWN THE BACK OF MY NECK, LIKE
fingers. I pull up the collar of my coat around me. I don’t move. I can’t bring myself to move. Finally, when the water has begun to cling to my eyelashes and soak through the cotton of my shirt, I tear my gaze away from the mural and continue toward the lab. The wetness seeps through my shoes as thunder and lightning crack the sky apart. I walk the several blocks down to the lab, the storm growing, fat drops of water slapping against my back, as a part of me wishes it would just wash me away, down the street and out to the ocean. I could float away, alone with my thoughts. I could disappear into the horizon.

I arrive at the familiar building, the beige paint turned brown in the rain. I stand outside the sliding glass doors as I did my first day, watching the doors glide open and shut as they wait for me to cross the threshold. I need to talk to Steve, to find out if there’s anything else he may have forgotten to tell me. I imagine the people of the town around me, tucked away into offices and apartments, schools and houses, their lives a vast, interconnected web of social interactions and relationships. My world, by comparison, is so small and dense that sometimes it feels like I can’t breathe.

The elevator is out of order so I slog up the stairs with zombie footsteps, the concrete reverberating throughout my bones. Panic flares up inside of me as I stand in front of the doors to the lab. I realize for the first time the gravity of what I did to Peter. He could have me arrested, charged with aggravated
assault. I could go to prison. But somehow I don’t care. My existence is singular—to find out what happened to Julie and Jess. I force air in and out of my lungs, pushing the panic away. I have to talk to Steve. I don’t care about anything else right now.

I try my key card. The light blinks red. I try again. Red. Once more. The light blinks red but the door cracks opens this time. Steve peers out, his green eyes orbiting around the hallway until they land on me.

“Charles—”

“Can I come in?”

“You shouldn’t be here.”

“Is Peter—”

“Home for the day. The bruises on his neck are still pretty swollen. But you know how he is—he could pop in at any time. And if he sees you—”

“Please, Steve, all I’m asking for is a few minutes.”

Steve gives one last cursory look around the hallway, then motions for me to follow him in. “Just a few minutes, though. It’s for your own good.”

I’m surprised by how normal it feels to be inside the lab again, how comforting I find the sterility, the antiseptic smell, the rooms whitewashed in fluorescent lights. Steve leads me into his office, shuts the door behind him. His desk is cluttered with manila folders, manuals, and books. I sneak a glance at one of the titles—
A History of the Microbiology of HIV and AIDS.
He has several diplomas on his walls from the University of London, as well as a number of framed photographs. The majority of the photographs are of Steve and Richard, a tall,
handsome man of Indian descent, dressed in a tweed coat with a smile bursting at the seams.

Steve takes his glasses and wipes them on the edge of his shirt. When he puts them back on again, his pupils seem magnified as they stare through me.

“How’s your head?”

“Still painful.”

“Let me take a look,” he says.

“It’s fine.”

“I’m not asking.”

I lean my head over the desk, wincing as Steve pulls up the back of my cap, the bandage around my head soaked with dried blood.

“Don’t move,” he says, getting up and retrieving a first aid kit. He slowly cuts the bandage away, treating the wound with hydrogen peroxide and fresh gauze.

“It could’ve gotten infected, you know. You have to be very careful about these things,” Steve says. He looks at me with the kind of serious regard that doctors reserve for their patients. “Why are you here, Charles? Believe me, I’m happy to see you, and you know how much I care about you, but you shouldn’t come back to the lab anymore. Not after what happened with Peter.”

“You know I’m not really Charles.”

Steve pauses for a moment. “I know,” he finally says.

“And it wasn’t my fault. With Peter.”

“Look, I’m not here to make judgments. I don’t need to take sides. I just want to help, if I can.” Steve finishes up with the gauze, packing up the first aid kit and stowing it in the cabinet.

“Steve, I’m here because I want to know what happened to Julie and Jess. So if there’s anything you haven’t told me, anything at all …”

Steve rinses off his hands. “There’s nothing left for me to tell. Charles never really spoke about their disappearance to anybody at the lab. The old Charles, I mean. We didn’t even know anything had happened until a few months after the fact, and we had no idea about the severity of how it affected him until he had the breakdown at the office. He was very private, even with me.”

“Were there any news articles about it? Any press coverage?”

“No, nothing, which is odd, of course. Charles must have done everything he could to keep the incident out of the media, maybe even paid them off?”

“But you started working here before they disappeared, right?”

“Yeah, I started working here six months earlier, in February 2009.”

“And you didn’t see them at all during those six months? For dinner or …”

Steve sits down in his desk chair, setting his chin against his left palm. “No. I didn’t see them. Charles didn’t say it specifically, but it seems that Julie felt very betrayed when I left for Europe, perhaps deservedly so, and was still pretty angry with me even after all those years.”

“Six months, though, that’s a long time. There was no attempt at reconciliation? Or Jess, you didn’t meet her?”

Steve sighs. “I haven’t told anybody this before, because I’m not sure at all that it’s true, but I considered the possibility
that maybe Charles was purposefully keeping Julie and Jess away from me. That it was Charles’s decision, not Julie’s.”

“But why would he have done that?”

“I’m going to be blunt,” Steve says. “That kind of controlling behavior, of trying to isolate Julie and Jess—these are patterns often seen in situations of domestic abuse.”

“Which would also bring up the possibility that Julie and Jess ran away, that they disappeared on purpose.”

“Right.” Steve takes off his glasses again, massaging the spot on his nose between his eyes. “But I really don’t think that was the case. I grew up with him. We were best friends. And I just can’t imagine Charles would do that.”

“Do you think there’s any chance that Julie and Jess are alive?”

“I suppose there’s always a chance until you know otherwise.” Steve plays with the wedding ring on his left hand, a silver band engraved with his and Richard’s initials.

“Steve?”

“Yes, Charles?”

“What happened after I—well, before the other Charles and I returned to the house?”

“Peter and I took care of you. You both nearly died. We nursed you back to health until you were well enough to be sent home. Peter was devastated by what happened to the other Charles. By his decision. By the aftermath. Peter didn’t have many friends and he cared a lot about Charles.”