The Sound of Glass (25 page)

A flash of recognition swept across Gibbes’s face, or maybe it was something else. Either way, he definitely knew who she was. “Sandy? Sandy Beach?”

“That’s your name for real?” Maris asked, looking up at the stranger through her sunglasses.

“The one and only!” She threw her arms around Gibbes’s neck, pressing her considerable chest against his while his hands did a frantic search to figure out a safe place to land.

Gently he put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her back. “It’s been a while.”

“It has. I just moved back to South Carolina—been living in Vero Beach the last ten years or so.” She waggled her left hand. “Got divorced and decided it was time I come home. Florida was too small a place for me and my ex, if you know what I mean.”

I tousled Owen’s hair to distract him so he’d close his mouth and stop staring at the woman’s tattoo, which looked like a dragon perched on her shoulder, its pointed tail reaching toward her cleavage like a directional arrow.

She looked at me with interest, her gaze dropping to the two children, who were busy staring back like spectators at a zoo. “Is this your wife and kids?”

“No,” we both said simultaneously.

“I’m Merritt Heyward, Gibbes’s sister-in-law. And this is my half brother, Owen, and his friend Maris.”

She smiled at the children, her teeth yellowed with nicotine, before moving her gaze back to me. “Unless there’s another brother I don’t know about, I’m guessing you’re married to Cal?”

As if sensing my unease, Gibbes stepped in. “Cal passed recently, and Merritt has inherited our grandmother’s house.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” She looked at me again with renewed interest, or what I thought was interest. But there was something else in her eyes that I couldn’t identify. She took in my loafers and the modest shorts, lingering briefly on the knit top before settling on my straw hat. “You don’t seem his type.” Deep creases formed between her brows. “How long were you married?”

I wanted to tell her that it was none of her business. Instead I lifted my chin. “Seven years.”

“Seven years?”

I couldn’t imagine her sounding more surprised if I’d said we’d had seven children or that I was ninety years old.

She leaned forward, studying me. “You must be a lot stronger than you look, then. I dated him for almost a year and it almost killed me.” She stepped back, throwing a glance at Gibbes. “I should have gone for this one instead, but he was just a kid and I didn’t want to be one of those women, if you know what I mean.” She nodded her head in the direction of the children just in case we weren’t sure why she was censoring herself. “Not that it mattered, really. Us girls like the bad boys, don’t we?”

“No, not all of us.”

She tightened her mouth, accentuating the brackets formed by wrinkles on each side of her face. “Yeah, well, I just figured you did, because you married Cal.” She coughed a smoker’s cough, taking a moment to catch her breath. “It took everything I had to break up with him—even moved to Florida just to make sure there was enough distance between us. But I figured I was lucky to get away with just a broken heart instead of something else.”

It felt like somebody was squeezing me around the middle, stopping my heart and my breath at the same time.

“Sandy? Are you coming? Joe’s got a keg at his house—we’re moving the party there.” The group from the boat was clustered in front of two pickup trucks in the parking lot, carrying coolers and brightly colored beach towels, looking very hot and impatient.

She nodded, then turned back to us. “Gotta go—but it was great running into you, Gibbes. And meeting you,” she said to me. Her eyes were a dull green, as if the light had stopped penetrating them years ago.

“You, too,” I said, managing a small smile.

We watched her walk toward the group, tiptoeing her way across the hot asphalt.

“I wouldn’t pay her too much attention,” Gibbes said. “There’s a reason they used to call her ‘Sandy the Public Beach.’” Even though his words had been meant to comfort me, the storm brewing in his eyes matched my own uneasiness.

“Owen, I’m so sorry, but I’m not feeling well—it must be the heat. I need to go back right now. We’ll return another time, okay?”

Owen masked his disappointment quickly. “All right. Maybe tomorrow?”

“Maybe.” I walked quickly, unaware of the sun beating down on us or the sweat trickling down my face and back. As soon as I got inside the house, I tore off my hat, then stood in the front parlor between the two air-conditioning units, lifting my hair off of my neck, wishing the whir of the appliances could erase the woman’s voice from my head.
I was lucky to get away with just a broken heart instead of something else.

The children rushed in behind me, followed by Gibbes, who shut the door. I kept my eyes closed, hoping they’d keep going.

“Did you save this for me?” Owen said behind me.

Reluctantly I opened my eyes and saw him holding up the newspaper I’d found on the stairs and left on the hall table.

“I think it fell out of the recycling box. Why don’t you give it to Dr. Heyward?”

“But it has a picture of that plane on it, and I’ve been keeping those.”

Gibbes took the newspaper and flipped it over to read. After a moment he lifted his eyes to meet mine. “It’s about the crash. In 1955.” He turned to Owen. “Did you say you have more of these?”

Owen nodded. “Yeah. Mama said it was okay with you if I kept a few because they had stuff about planes.”

“Have you read them all yet?”

Owen shook his head. “No, sir.”

“Can I borrow them? I promise I’ll bring them back to you when I’m done.”

“Sure. I’ll go get them.” He took off up the stairs, his tread light as he crossed the hall upstairs to his bedroom.

“This is odd,” Gibbes said.

I turned toward him. “What is?”

“The plane was on its way from LaGuardia to Miami when it exploded over Beaufort.”

“I know—that’s what Deborah told us. Which makes sense, seeing as how, without even looking at a map, I can see that Beaufort would be on its flight path.”

He lowered the newspaper, then folded it in half. “But that’s not where it originated. It was only on a stopover at LaGuardia, where it was delayed for two hours. It started farther north.”

For a moment I imagined I could smell the scent of smoldering fire, of hot ashes falling like rain.
Never let the fire get behind you.
“Where?” I asked.

“Bangor. Bangor, Maine.”

I blinked several times, trying to get my thoughts in order, hoping to find something to say about coincidences and the world being a very small place. But my thoughts ran all the way up to the attic room, to the plane model with forty-nine dead passengers and crew
representing a plane from my hometown that had crashed in Beaufort, South Carolina. As incongruous as it seemed, I couldn’t help but think of Cal’s favorite phrase when talking about the causes of various fires.
There’s no such thing as accidents.

I looked up and met Gibbes’s eyes, and knew without a doubt that he’d heard Cal say that, too, and that neither one of us believed in coincidence.

EDITH

DECEMBER 1977

T
he house carried the scent of pine and cinnamon, owing completely to Cecelia’s decorating skills. Garlands artfully wrapped the banister, held in position with oversize red velvet bows, and festooned with pinecones sparkling under a dusting of frosty-white paint.

The enormous Christmas tree in the middle of the foyer reached almost to the ceiling, and C.J. had not been happy about having to cut off part of the trunk so Cecelia could put the gold star at the top. It had been a first Christmas gift from her parents two months after her wedding to C.J., which was most likely the reason for her insistence that it be put on the top of the tree, much as it was the cause for his reluctance.

Deck the halls with boughs of holly . . .
Christmas music sang out from the large stereo console in the parlor as Edith touched one of
the beautiful gold and red glass ornaments, the surface reflecting the large colored bulbs that wound through all of the branches—another sore spot for C.J. He would have been happy with a single strand, but had been outvoted by his wife and mother. He’d laughed when Cecelia said that, but there had been a look in his eyes that made Edith worry, an expression that made him appear too much like his father.

Cal began to cry in his room, screaming like he always did when he awakened. Edith paused to see whether Cecilia would go get him. She and C.J. were in their bedroom—the one that had once been Edith’s before her son’s marriage and his request to have the larger room for himself and his new bride.

Edith had heard arguing behind the closed door a little while before, which was the reason she’d put the Christmas music eight-track on the stereo, hoping to shut out their voices. She’d still been able to hear them, making her wonder whether the old house had absorbed the sound of arguing through generations, playing the same sound track over and over. She still held out hope that Cecelia would be different, that her daughter-in-law would be the one to break the pattern. But since Cal’s birth nearly four years earlier, Edith had found herself clinging to that hope as precariously as a sand castle clung to shore.

“Mama!” Cal screamed.

The bedroom door remained shut, so Edith began climbing the steps slowly, hoping her son or daughter-in-law would hear their son before she reached him. It wasn’t because she didn’t want to be with Cal. She loved her grandson. From the first moment she’d held him and seen his mother’s amber-colored eyes, she’d harbored the belief that he was his mother’s son. But lately she’d begun to see chinks in her firm beliefs, and the more time she spent with Cal, the more evidence to the contrary she discovered.

She waited outside the little boy’s room, listening to the rhythmic thumping against the wall and the squeak of the bedsprings
before gently opening the door. He stopped when he spotted her, then sat in the middle of his toddler bed, his eyes puffy from sleep, a plastic yellow and blue shape-sorter ball at the foot of the bed. Several yellow plastic shapes were scattered on the floor, far enough from the bed that they’d most likely been thrown.

He looked at her with disconsolate eyes as she approached and sat on the side of the bed. She ran her hand through his fine, sandy-colored hair, sticky with sleep sweat. He was big for his age, just like C.J. had been, with thick, broad shoulders and heavy legs. C.J. liked to say he was born a USC linebacker, but Edith hadn’t had the heart to tell him that a parent’s dream for his child rarely came to fruition just from wishing.

She leaned down and kissed his forehead, and he sighed as if giving up his effort to fight whatever battle he seemed to have been waging since birth.

“Did you have a good nap, sweetheart?”

He threw himself down on the bed, kicking the plastic ball hard with his foot. “I don’t like that.”

Edith retrieved the toy and examined it. It was a baby toy, one that Cal hadn’t allowed her to pack away with all of the other infant and toddler toys when they took down the crib and brought in his new big-boy bed. Two incorrect shapes had been forced into the wrong holes and were stuck. She tugged on each one in turn, but neither would budge. She reached for one of the shapes on the floor and lifted it to show Cal. “This is a triangle—see? It’s got three sides.” She held up the toy. “Then you find the opening that is also a triangle, and it fits right in.” She gave the shape to the little boy, careful to make sure that it was correctly positioned.

“I want it to go there,” he said, pointing to a rectangular opening near the top. “It’s yellow.”

She’d already opened her mouth to correct him, then stopped. The top half of the ball was yellow. And to Cal it made sense that all the yellow pieces should go through the yellow holes regardless of whether they’d fit.

“I see,” she said, putting the toy aside. Since he was an infant, he’d had a clear view of the world and the way it should work. If his bottle was too warm or not warm enough, he wouldn’t drink it. If his shoelaces were uneven, he’d throw a fit until the shoes were removed and retied. If you told him you would take him for a walk after his nap and you forgot, he’d remind you and make you go even if it was pouring rain outside.

It worried Edith, and not just because C.J. had been the same way as a boy, but because it made the world a difficult place to live in if your view of it was always black-and-white—a difficult place for those who believed that, and for those who had the misfortune to love them.

Edith wanted to think that his strong personality had to do with the fact that he was an only child like his father, and wondered whether having a little brother or sister would help him to see that all things didn’t revolve around him, that sometimes your favorite shorts weren’t clean yet or your potatoes touched the Brussels sprouts on your plate. Cecelia had tried twice before, miscarrying each time, the last just three weeks earlier. She’d tripped and fallen down the stairs. She’d been far enough along that the doctors had been able to tell that it had been a little girl. Cecelia had taken it well, her eyes dry when they’d brought her home, and she’d immediately gone upstairs and closed the nursery door. It was almost as if, Edith thought, she’d become only a shadow of the bright, pretty girl she’d been when C.J. had first carried her across the threshold.

“I want to play fire truck,” Cal said, pointing a chubby finger toward his favorite toy, a large, bright red fire truck with a working siren and a ladder that went up and down.

Edith had mentioned the previous day that she’d play fire truck with him soon, and to him that meant right then. She thought of the Christmas presents she still needed to wrap, and her dress for the party that night, which she still needed to iron. And the seating assignments from the plane, which she’d recently acquired through her
friendship with a local newspaper journalist and that offered her so many more opportunities for further study of the crash. But Cal would scream until she’d played with him, so it wasn’t as if she really had a choice anyway.

“All right,” she said, standing up and lifting him from the bed. She helped him put on the big plastic fire chief helmet, then knelt on the floor next to the truck and waited for Cal to give her orders. He was always the fire chief, and she a firefighter who had to do everything he asked. It was her job to make the Lincoln Log structures that would go up in flames, but it was up to Cal to come up with the reason for the fire. He was very good at placing blame: The candle was left where the dog’s tail could knock it over; the man with the cigarette didn’t put it out all the way and the garbage caught on fire.

Edith had no idea where his scenarios came from, only that C.J. thought it funny when he read accident reports from the newspaper out loud at the breakfast table, each story concluding with one of them shouting out who was to blame. The only benefit to that, Edith had found, was that Cal had a deep-seated belief that there were no such things as accidents, just people not paying attention.

“Where are your little people?” she asked.

He pointed to a LEGO house they’d made together with enough bedrooms to house the small dolls she’d made for him. He hadn’t liked the Fisher Price people because they didn’t look real, with no arms, and legs and hair that came off. He liked the dolls Grandma Edith made, because they had painted faces and wore real clothes and had hair that moved. It wasn’t that he lacked imagination; it was just the way things
should
be.

“What’s burning?” Edith asked.

“A house. Somebody had real candles on the Christmas tree and it got burnt down.”

Edith remembered the story from the Sunday paper. A family of six had perished because the mother had wanted to give her own mother a reminder of the Christmases of her childhood.

“All right. Where is everybody when the fire starts?”

He studied the large LEGO house, pointing out all the places the dolls should be.

“Are you going to save everybody?”

He nodded, his face serious. Despite his rather fatalistic outlook toward the cause of the fires he and his imaginary crew fought to extinguish, it was always his goal to save every life. It was the right order of things, the way he saw how to make all the pieces fit together. Edith took a great deal of consolation from this, from his clear knowledge of right and wrong. Surely this meant that despite everything else, he might still find his way in the world.

They played for nearly half an hour—or, rather, Cal played while Edith followed instructions. This was the part of her grandson she enjoyed most, when he was absorbed in his role-playing and he was happy because he could control the miniature world he’d created. His chubby fingers were surprisingly agile at manipulating the small levers on the fire truck and moving the doll-people down the fire ladder.
He’ll be fine.
Edith found herself thinking that often, ever since she’d first gone to his crib when he’d been just an infant and found that the reason for his high-pitched crying was that a corner of his blanket had exposed one tiny foot.

“Oops.”

Edith paused in her efforts to tie the laces on the older sister’s shoes (Cal had informed her that the sister was going to have a burned leg because she’d stopped to tie her shoes instead of running to safety), and focused on Cal.

Cal held the mother and father dolls in both hands at the top of the staircase. The plastic LEGO flames were still downstairs, where the fire had started in a fireplace that hadn’t been properly banked for the night, blocking the front door. Before Edith could ask how they were going to escape, Cal lifted the man’s arms and shoved the woman, making her topple down the stairs until she lay facedown on the black and white tiled foyer floor.

“Oops,” he said again, but in the deep voice of the father. “It was an accident,” he said again, the low rumble of that voice coming from a child sending chills up Edith’s spine.

But there are no such things as accidents,
she wanted to say. Her thoughts paralyzed her, thoughts that no mother should have about her children. Thoughts that could lead to very dangerous places.

Leaning close to her grandson, she said, “It wasn’t really an accident, was it?”

He kept his head down and shook it. “She made the man angry. That’s why he pushed her.” His voice was small and childlike and choked with tears.

Edith swallowed. “Even when we’re angry, we use our words and not our hands, remember?”

Cal nodded slowly. “But sometimes when the man gets mad he forgets to use his words and instead does bad things.” He looked up at her and his eyes were bright with tears. “Can you fix her?”

Edith picked up the doll. Even without lifting the nightgown, she could feel the neck lolling loosely in her palm, and one arm was bent in a way it shouldn’t have been. “Yes,” Edith said, already standing, needing to get out of that room as soon as possible. Wanting to circumvent a tantrum for ending their play session so suddenly, she said, “I’ll let you come up to my workroom to watch me work while I fix her.” She leaned forward, looking into his eyes. “But it will have to be our secret.”

She saw his need for rules and structure battling with his desire to see what went on up in her attic workroom, a place he’d been forbidden since he was old enough to walk.

“Can you do that, Cal? Can you keep a secret?”

“Yes,” he said quickly. As if he’d been asked that before and already knew the answer.

A door slammed in the hallway, and they were both silent as they listened to C.J.’s heavy tread pass their door, then jog down the stairs before crossing the house toward the kitchen. A minute later,
C.J.’s car sped out of the garage and down the drive, its tires crunching on the oyster-shell driveway.

Edith slipped the doll into her pocket. “Let’s clean up first, all right? And when your mother goes out to the beauty parlor later we’ll go upstairs.”

He regarded her with a serious face. “Okay.”

Edith began making the bed while Cal carefully tucked his dolls back into their beds and parked the truck where it belonged next to the LEGO fire station. They were almost finished when the bedroom door slowly opened and Cecelia stuck her head inside.

“Oh, hello, little man. I thought you were still sleeping.”

“Mama!” Cal ran to her with arms outstretched, gripping her tightly around her legs.

Cecelia bent to hug him, their hair blending together. When his father was around, he was much less demonstrative toward his mother, but Edith sensed that their bond went beyond mother and son. Sometimes, it seemed to Edith, it was more about just the two of them in a two-person boat, where they decided how fast and where to go, and there was no room for anybody else. Except when C.J. was around, and his physical similarity to his son seemed to meld them together to form a single person instead of just a team.

“We were playing fire truck,” Edith explained, glad the doll was hidden in the pocket of her housedress. She noticed that Cecelia was wearing the emerald green cashmere turtleneck sweater C.J. had given her on her last birthday, but the neck was pulled up as high as it could go instead of being folded over, hiding as much skin as possible.