Glass Shatters (22 page)

“C
HARLES
?”

Time cracks apart. I feel myself fragment, the pieces cracking into fragments themselves. A dust storm of memory whorls through my mind, shattered images raining down on a wasteland. The images land like tattoos on my skin, four birthday candles smoking as Jess blows them out, a worried furrow across Julie’s face as she tries for the last stroke on an almost-finished painting.

“Charles?”

The voice lingers in the air as I look around, Steve’s voice, but I’m no longer in the lab, I’m running home along a deserted sidewalk, streetlamps glowing orange through a cold, impenetrable fog. My mind reengages with the environment around me. My knees buckle and I fall, landing on the dewy grass of somebody’s well-manicured front lawn. I begin to cry,
throaty sobs from deep in my chest, sobs that cause my whole body to shake, my cheeks streaked with salty tears. None of this has been mine. This isn’t my life. These aren’t my memories. I’m a nonentity. All along I suspected, knew that these weren’t my memories, that I was watching them from a distance as an observer, an outsider. The truth is that I’m only the echo, a servant indentured to the memories, the tragedy, the loss suffered by the first Charles Lang. I’ve never even met Julie or Jess, not really. I don’t have a history of my own. I have nothing from before I woke up in the laboratory, before I woke up on the couch in the living room, nothing that couldn’t be somebody else’s. All I’ve done is borrow someone else’s life.

I hate Charles for his selfishness, for his recklessness. But most of all I hate that every moment I’ve experienced with Julie, Charles has gotten to experience in real life. I hate that he got to feel her skin against his face, that at night, he said to her, “I love you,” and Julie said it back across the bed. I hate the first Charles Lang—I hate him with every part of me, because even if it’s only through his memories, even if I’ve never met her before, I’ve fallen in love with Julie.

I’ve fallen in love with the sweep of Julie’s hair and the one dimple in her right cheek. I’ve fallen in love with her creativity and talent and the depth of her instinct. I’ve fallen in love with who she is and who she has the potential to become. I’ve fallen in love with her image, and yet I’ve fallen in love with
her
too. Whoever Julie is beyond the memories, I know that I love her to my fullest capacity. I hate the first Charles Lang for thrusting on me a predetermined existence that has no hope for anything but sadness and mourning. But I
understand him too. I hate Charles and understand him at the same time. The memories he experienced, the pain they invoked—how can I blame someone for wanting to run away from that?

The back of my head throbs, and when I touch my sticky hair, I find that the blood is still wet. I’m reminded of the pain I felt from where the electrodes burned my scalp. I thought that pain would never dissipate. Suddenly I realize I’m breathing hard. The memory of what just happened returns to me in chopped images, mental photographs pieced together. I remember holding Peter against the wall. Waking up sprawled on the floor. Steve standing over me with a round-bottomed flask, flecked with blood. Peter locking himself in his office. Steve telling me to stay put, that he was going to get some bandages from the other room. And then I was running, running as fast as I could, down the stairs, out the door, my vision slipping and crackling like a film at twelve frames per second, the night distorted, the stars swimming around me.

I’m on my knees on someone’s lawn. I take a breath and look up. There she is, standing in the middle of the street, watching me. The moonlight reflects off of Jess’s hair, her cheeks rosy pink like a doll’s. She wears saddle shoes and pom-pom socks, a pink princess dress and a little white sweater. She smiles at me, waves when my eyes catch hers, and I slowly rise, mesmerized, taking one step forward, another, my breath steaming in the night. Jess takes a step backward, another, stumbling.

“Charles?” the little girl says, her pigtails bobbing against her head. Jess’s face melts away, replaced by Ava’s ridge of freckles and fiery red hair. She looks up at me, at my hopeful
arms, still outstretched. Smoke curls out from a nearby chimney. I shiver with the cold of the night air.

“Charles? Charles, what happened to you?” I hear a baby crying, howling from far away. The world sways. And as I look at Ava’s delicate figure before me, I wish I could have held Jess just once, could have felt her small, warm body tucked against my shoulder.

August 23, 2004

Age Twenty-Six

T
he curtains flutter against the windows. Charles jolts awake with a sick feeling in his stomach. The blackness of night is just beginning to warm into a deep purple-blue, and Charles immediately reaches across the bed to find the sheets cold and abandoned. He hears a loud moan from the bathroom. His bare feet thump against the hardwood as he runs down the hallway. Julie squats on the bath mat, her knees up to her chest, her back to the door. There’s a pool of wetness around her, seeping through her nightgown, and in the darkness, Charles can’t tell if it’s water or blood. Charles crouches down next to Julie and she clutches him against her, leaning and sobbing into his shoulder. He rubs a soft hand against her back while taking her elbow, helping Julie to her feet. He knows what’s happening and they cannot stay here. They must get to a hospital, before it’s too late.

“It’s not time yet, Charles, it’s too early,” Julie wails as Charles leads her to the car, a trail of fluid dragging behind her. Her face is swollen, her eyes chapped and puffy. Charles has never seen her so distraught before. He can’t feel anything. He cannot allow himself to feel anything right now.

“It’s okay,” Charles says as he lays Julie down in the backseat. “It’s all going to be okay.”

Julie looks up at him. “What if I lose her?” she says, her question somehow accusatory. “What then?” Charles remains silent. He doesn’t know how to respond. This isn’t supposed to be happening. She’s at least five weeks early. Charles turns on the car radio.

“Turn it louder,” Julie says. Charles turns the volume loud enough to discourage any thoughts, any fears, turns it so loud that the words of the song become static in their ears. The streets are empty in the early morning, with only the shriek and lights of a passing ambulance rippling through the stillness.

When they reach the hospital, everything flashes by in a blur. The emergency room, the nurses, the doctors. Julie gets whisked away to the delivery room just as her mother arrives. Mrs. Hollingberry wafts into the hospital like some sort of fairy-tale creature, a loose, flowing dress sifting around her body. The doctors direct her and Charles to the waiting room. Julie has insisted on being alone. Not even Charles will be allowed in until after the birth.

Mrs. Hollingberry and Charles share a cherry Danish and an instant coffee from the vending machine, watching the sunrise through the narrow windows. They’re the only ones in the waiting room except a lone janitor swooping his mop across the floor. Mrs. Hollingberry’s gaze drifts toward the ceiling, searching for something. Charles wonders if Mrs. Hollingberry realizes why Julie wants to be alone. That Julie doesn’t want anybody else to see if the baby is born dead.

After several hours of reading
Newsweek
and
Time,
absorbed in speculations about the November elections, Charles turns to Mrs. Hollingberry and taps her on the shoulder. For hours she has been staring out the window, her eyes hardly blinking. It’s as if something of her is no longer there. She doesn’t seem to be herself.

“Do you think it’s a bad omen? That the baby’s this early?” Charles says. Mrs. Hollingberry’s eyes are almost violet, sparkling in the morning light. Charles folds his hands together, twisting in his plastic chair. Even though he asked, he doesn’t want to hear the answer. Normally Charles isn’t one to believe in these things, omens, fate, and prophecies. At the same time, however, the sick feeling in his stomach persists, and there’s something noxious about the air around him. His thoughts are polluted as he imagines Julie screaming in pain, blood pouring over the bed, a gray infant body resting between her legs. He sees no future without them.

Mrs. Hollingberry doesn’t respond.

“Mr. Lang?” It’s one of the doctors, a young man with thick blond hair and a wide smile.

“Yes?”

“Congratulations. Your wife has just given birth to a healthy baby girl,” he says, reaching out to shake Charles’s hand. “Because she was born prematurely, your daughter will have to be kept overnight in the neonatal ICU for observation, but so far, everything looks great.”

Charles exhales. He’s in a haze as he follows the doctor and Mrs. Hollingberry down the hall. Charles takes Julie in his arms, planning never to let go. Mrs. Hollingberry watches from a distance, murmuring something under her breath to herself.

“I don’t know what I would’ve done if …” Charles feels Julie against his cheek. Her skin is so pale, dark circles under her eyes, but she is more beautiful than she has ever been.

“Shhh. It doesn’t matter now,” Julie says, nuzzling Charles’s shoulder. A nurse walks into the room with the baby in her arms, freshly cleaned and wrapped in a white blanket, her eyes sealed shut.

“Would you like to hold her?” the nurse asks. Before he knows what he’s doing, Charles is holding his daughter, a baby so small she’s hardly bigger than a honeydew melon. He holds her against his heart, feels her faint breaths. She feels like nothing, and a part of Charles is afraid that if he blinks, she’ll disappear.

“Jessica.”

“What?”

“I think we should name her Jessica, after my mother,” Julie says. “What do you think? We could call her Jess for short.” Charles turns around to discover that Mrs. Hollingberry has vanished from the room.

“Yes, of course.” Charles holds Jess in one hand and squeezes Julie’s shoulder with the other.

Later that day, when Jess has been taken to the ICU for observation, Charles sits in the recovery room, watching Julie sleep. He feels himself close to drifting off when he notices a book of baby names on the counter next to his chair. He takes the book, flips it open. The name “Jessica” appears on the first page:

“Jessica, based on the original Hebrew name Yiskāh (
), means ‘foresight,’ or being able to see the potential in the future.”

And for a moment, Charles wishes he could just know. He would give up excitement, give up surprise, he would give it all up if he could just be sure that everything was going to be okay.