Glass Shatters (28 page)

August 22, 2009

Age Thirty-One

C
harles wakes up tangled in the covers, his eyesight bleary, the moon a yellow crescent in the night sky. He hears rustling beside him and turns to discover Julie lacing up her tennis shoes, wearing a pair of sweatpants and a hoodie, pulling her hair back into a ponytail. But Julie doesn’t look like Julie. She looks like Iris, freckles across her face, her hair auburn, her stance more heavyset. Charles doesn’t seem to notice, though. He rubs his eyes and looks at the clock. It’s already midnight.

“Julie, sweetie, what are you doing?” he asks, his voice thick and groggy.

“I can’t sleep, and neither can Jess. She’s been up for hours.”

“Have you tried giving her warm milk? Or turning on the radio?”

“We’ll be back soon.” Julie leans down to tie her other shoelace.

“Come back to bed, Julie. It’s too late to be hiking.”

“Not a hike, just a little walk around Birch Lake. We’ll be careful.”

“Please?”

Julie leans in and plants a kiss on Charles’s forehead. “Go back to sleep, darling, and I’ll come snuggle with you when I get home.”

Jess stands in the doorway, waiting for Julie in a pair of light-up Velcro sneakers. Except she doesn’t look like Jess. She looks like Ava.

“Just be safe, okay?” Charles is too tired to know what else to say, too tired to even be fully awake, and he rolls over in the bed, closing his eyes, falling into nothingness.

Charles wakes up alone the next day, wakes up to the sound of rain. At first, he thinks that maybe Julie and Jess are up early, that they’re out running an errand, out for breakfast. But there’s no note. Jess’s bed isn’t made. The car is in the driveway, and when Charles checks the hamper, Julie’s hiking clothes aren’t there, nor are her tennis shoes back in the closet. After calling the police, Charles steps into the bathroom, lathers up his face with shaving cream, and as he drags the razor across his cheek, he cuts himself deliberately, just to feel something. But the pain isn’t enough. Why didn’t he stop them? Why didn’t he know? When the police arrive, two burly men with grizzly voices and grizzly beards, Charles finds that he can’t speak. His words are like a snake, slithering back down his throat.

I
LIFT MYSELF OUT OF THE MUD, RUNNING, CLEARING
snarled roots and vast, swampy puddles. Why did Julie and Jess look like Iris and Ava in the memory? I can’t even begin to come up with an answer for this. The rain roars around me, beating my face, my back. My wet shoes suck against my feet with each step I take. Nobody else is out. Everybody is home. The asphalt along the road smells like chemicals and earth, the trees twist in the wind, the grass is drowning, silt and debris flood the storm drains. I see Iris and Ava’s house in the distance, light pouring out of the windows like warm honey, the shutters chattering against themselves like teeth. I splash across the driveway, the water up to my ankles, and as I climb the stairs up to the porch, the rain turns into hail. A particularly large hailstone dents the hood of a nearby car. Another clatters off the mailbox.

Iris answers the door, her hand over the receiver of the phone, her forehead knit into a furrow. “Charles, are you okay? There’s someone—”

I take the phone from Iris, the line crackling and rasping until a faint voice breaks through from the other side.

“Charles? Is that you? Charles?”

“Yes, it’s me.”

“It’s been so long. I never thought I would hear from you again.”

Mrs. Hollingberry sounds like a porcelain vase about to shatter apart. I look down at my feet.

“It hasn’t been that long, has it?”

“Over fifteen years.”

“Fifteen years?”

“Since I moved down to New Mexico … are you okay, Charles? You sound … well, I’m concerned.”

A feeling like seasickness sways through my gut. “You’ve been living in New Mexico for fifteen years?”

There’s a hesitation from the other end. “Yes, Charles, in Santa Fe. I moved there after Julie died. You know that.”

It takes all the effort I can muster to speak again. “After Julie died?”

“After Julie died in the car accident. You’re sure you’re all right, Charles?”

The phone drops from my hand and clatters against the hardwood.

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 game, 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 starts to feel sick. He wants nothing more than to run the other way. But instead Charles stands there, entrapped.

The next thing Charles remembers, he is at the scene of the accident. He must have blacked out. He doesn’t know how he got there. Sirens cut through the night air, the area cordoned off with yellow tape. He pushes through the firefighters and the paramedics, his hands shaking so hard that he can barely walk. All he wants to do is look away but he can’t. He sees large claws of jagged metal twisted in on themselves. A rubber wheel engulfed in flames. The accordion hood smashed in, the front bumper contorted into a mangled frown. Shattered glass from the windshield, shards like teeth crunching under his feet against the asphalt. His parents’ bodies have already been removed from the car, zipped into black body bags, stowed in the ambulance. But Charles sees Julie’s reflection in the glass from the windshield, bloody and fragmented, her lips blue without oxygen, splinters of bone and gray matter stuck to the seat cushions, a single eye still open, the pupil dilated. Julie wasn’t supposed to be in that car. She wasn’t supposed to come, to surprise him. Charles turns and before anybody can say anything, he sprints away from the accident, into the trees by the side of the road, as fast as he can, as far as he can, not wanting to believe, not wanting to think.

It’s only later that Charles finds out what Julie wanted to tell him in person: she was pregnant. A girl, four months. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. It wasn’t. It wasn’t …

T
HE NEXT THING
I
REMEMBER IS RUNNING UP THE
driveway, a large swathe of purple wisteria against my back. I rattle the key in the front door but the lock is sealed shut. I pound my fist, yelling to be let in. Finally, I throw myself against the door with a leap. The wood splinters, my sleeve ripping as I hurtle into the entryway. The room is silent, dark in a thick and airless sort of way. Something is different. I realize that all of the marionettes are gone.