Glass Shatters (9 page)

“I understand, Charles. Julie and Jess had just disappeared and it’s only natural that you were looking for a way to connect.”

“I lied to her.”

“She’ll be okay. Her feelings are hurt, but we all make mistakes sometimes.” Iris squeezes my shoulder, then smiles. “Dinner’s ready. Why don’t you set the table for the two of us? I imagine Ava’s going to eat in her room.”

I take the silverware and the plates from the counter, setting them on placemats decorated with little dancing ballerinas. I appreciate Iris’s kindness and consideration, but I also don’t understand why I would’ve lied to Ava. It seems out of character, and I can’t believe I wouldn’t have realized that such a significant lie would be sure to backfire.

I wait for Iris to serve the risotto. My gaze drifts across the
living room to a glass shelf filled with vintage model cars, Corvettes and Thunderbirds and even a few Model Ts. But of all the cars, my eyes are most drawn to one in particular, a 1971 Mercedes-Benz sedan, brown exterior, beige interior. A perfectly average car, except that it leaves me feeling queasy. I know that car, and then I picture him, my father, sitting behind the wheel, leaning back, smoking Lucky Strike cigarettes with my mother curled up in the seat next to him.

October 22, 1996

Age Eighteen

C
harles sits at the small wooden desk in his dorm room, working quietly and methodically on a problem set for genetics. His room is sparse, austere—a thin twin mattress with gray bedding, a dresser filled with folded socks and shirts, a poster of the periodic table of elements above the desk. Charles stands and walks over to the window to try to push it open farther. Although it’s late October, the weather is unseasonably warm for Northern California. Charles wears checkered boxers and a Star Trek T-shirt. A pair of navy pants and a white dress shirt lie draped over the head of the bed. He has the radio tuned to the World Series, the Yankees versus the Braves, although Charles doesn’t really care about the outcome.

He told his parents there was no need to come for the weekend. It was a long drive and there wasn’t much to show them. Besides, the campus would be overrun with other parents dawdling around. But Charles’s mother insisted on coming anyway, and that was that. Charles certainly couldn’t tell her the truth, that he wished they would never visit, that he was tired of his father being sick and of his mother pretending everything was fine. He wishes Julie were coming instead. He hasn’t seen her for three months now, and even though they talk all the time, he wants nothing more than to see her face, to look into her eyes, to hold her in his arms. The last time they spoke, she said she had something to tell him. Something she wanted to wait to share until they were together.

Charles gets up for a glass of water and checks the clock over the dresser. He was so absorbed in his problem set that only now is he realizing his parents are over two hours late. Just then, Charles hears a knock on the door.

“One moment!” he calls out, yanking on his pants. The shirt will have to wait.

When Charles opens the door, however, it’s not his parents but the dorm’s residential advisor, an awkward girl with a blond ponytail and freckled cheeks. She tries to speak but every time she opens her mouth, nothing comes out.

“What’s going on?”

“There’s a policeman here. He wants to talk to you.” As Charles follows the girl down the hall, his mind runs through all of the offenses he committed in the last week or so. He’s not a bad person but a mischievous one, and he and his cohorts in the engineering department have spent the past several months one-upping each other with various pranks. Could it be about the swimming pool? Or the sheep brain gone missing?

The police officer takes off his hat and clutches it in his hands when he sees Charles turning the corner. His face is pale, ghastly. And instantly Charles feels sick. He wants nothing more than to run the other way. But instead Charles stands there, entrapped, as the officer tells him that there’s been an accident. The officer continues talking, but Charles doesn’t hear any of it. He sinks to his knees and feels his chest crushing in on itself. Soon everything turns black.

The funeral takes place the day after Halloween, the weather having turned dark and morose, a sudden cold front. Several of the graves are still strewn with toilet paper from the night before. Charles has hardly spoken a word over the last week or so. He cannot believe his parents are dead. Charles remains fixated on the broad-shouldered man in the back of the crowd, holding a photograph of Charles’s mother. He imagines his mother resting peacefully in this man’s arms, kissing his thin, soft lips. He thinks of Plato and the allegory of the cave, of how nothing about his life has been any more real than a couple shadows cast against a wall, and what is worse is that he understands, he understands why his mother made the decisions she did, why she looked beyond her marriage for affection, for love. At the same time, Charles knows that every day he is becoming more and more like his father, and he fears that he’s destined to be left behind as well.

“A
RE YOU ALL RIGHT
?”

Iris has her hand against my forehead. My face is damp, a trickle of sweat running down my temple. I seem to have dropped the model car on the hardwood floor. The front has
cracked apart, little bits of glass from the headlights scattered around it.

“I didn’t lie.”

“What?”

“I didn’t lie to Ava. About my father.”

Iris throws the car in the trash and wets a paper towel. “It’s okay, Charles, it doesn’t matter what you said.”

“My parents are dead, Iris. They died in a car crash when I was eighteen.”

Iris crouches, wiping up the glass. When I say this, she stops what she’s doing and sets down the paper towel.

“And the man living at your house?” she asks. She frowns slightly. I sit down at the table, folding my hands together. I see my parents’ graves, two flat, gray headstones, their lives reduced to names and dates. The walls feel like they’re narrowing around me, tilting, about to fall over.

“I don’t know,” I finally say. “I don’t know who the man is.”

PART II

May 4, 1996

Age Eighteen

T
he night air is warm like fresh honey, the grass calm beneath his bare feet. The stadium feels monolithic, and Charles imagines he is Julius Caesar, carrying his empress across treacherous terrain. Julie giggles at his chivalry, although eventually she demands to be let down so that she can run around the field herself, doing cartwheels and somersaults, twirling around the football field’s yellow end post. Her dress flies around her, emerald-green fabric overlapping on itself so that it looks like forest leaves. Normally, when there’s a game, the stadium is packed with at least five hundred people, yelling and hooting and waving their arms beneath bright fluorescent lights. But tonight, it’s all theirs. Everyone else is inside the gym, disco balls spinning, streamers flying, music bumping, “This Is How We Do It” and “Gangsta’s Paradise” and “I’m Every Woman” filtering out across the field.

Charles has tried his best to be a proper prom date. He donned a tuxedo for the first time in his life, trimmed the dead ends off his shoulder-length hair, shaved the scruff, and slapped his cheeks with cologne. He arrived at Julie’s house with a proper corsage made from white roses and baby’s breath, sliding it onto her slender wrist, placing a blanket on the passenger seat of his father’s car in case Julie got cold. But the prom itself seemed impossible. It was too loud to talk, too crowded to see, and it soon became clear to Charles that with all of his twisting and turning and flailing out of time with the music, he was most definitely the worst dancer in the entire room. After three songs, he ripped the knees of his pants, after five, he elbowed a girl in the nose, and after six, overwhelmed by the noise and the sweat, by the guilt he felt for the toes he crushed, Charles was sure he was going to faint if they didn’t duck outside.