Glass Shatters (29 page)

BOOK: Glass Shatters

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“Charles? Charles!” I call through the house, turning on the lights. I don’t know why I didn’t realize the truth sooner. No missing persons report. No news articles. No school records. No photographs. Julie didn’t go missing three years ago. Julie died in 1996, at the age of eighteen, the fall of Charles’s freshman year of college. Every memory of Julie after that was a fabrication, a delusion. And Jess? Jess was never even born. Maybe, deep down, I knew the truth. Maybe I knew but didn’t want to believe it.

I wind my way back to the entryway. In the wisps of moonlight that break into the house, I discover a set of paw prints, caked in white plaster, leading to a bookshelf by the front door before vanishing. I steady myself, squaring my feet and lowering my center of gravity, ready to heave the shelf
aside. But when I push against the side panel, the shelves immediately slide aside with no resistance. I take a book from the shelf, examine its empty husk. It’s fake, they’re all fake, hollow on the inside. I push the bookcase aside and of course, it’s there, it’s been there all along, a hole in the wall, about three feet by three feet, the drywall crumbling along the edges. I crawl inside and begin climbing the stairs to the second story, dusty, wooden stairs that creak with each step. My hair stands on end. I wonder if I’m hallucinating the smell of smoke in the air. But with each step I take, the smell grows more acrid and pungent. And it’s warmer than it should be.

“Charles?” I call out again. The upstairs is small, more like a studio apartment, with a bedroom, bathroom, and closet. The carpet in the bedroom is matted and stained, with imprints of where the bedposts used to sit. Cobwebs drape in the corners and the only furniture in the room is a large wicker trunk, lid open, spilling over with old patterned housedresses. Smoke pours out of the bathroom, clinging to the ceiling.

“Charles? Are you in there?” I duck into the bathroom, covering my mouth and nose with my shirt, pulling back the moldy plastic shower curtain. I find the marionettes in the bathtub, flames charring and melting their faces, their bodies crinkled and unrecognizable as Julie or Jess or Charles. I grab a sooty glass cup from beside the sink and fill it again and again, scooping brown, rusty water over the marionettes until the fire smolders, the smoke mixing with steam. The marionettes are no longer recognizable.

I step out into the hallway. My chest feels like it’s collapsing. I hear a faint moan from above. There’s a fraying
string hanging down in front of me and I pull hard, a step-ladder unfolding from the ceiling, leading up into the attic.

I’m blinded by the effect, by the enormity of it all. Charles sits cross-legged in the middle of the attic, illuminated by the fluorescent lights above, blood seeping out of his ears and nose, his eyes glazed over, his limbs twitching with convulsions every few seconds. The walls are plastered with photograph clippings from newspapers and magazines, thousands upon thousands, hanging from the rafters, spread across the wooden floor, photographs of women who look like Julie, of little girls who look like Jess, of men who look like Charles. There’s one from the
New York Times
of a blond man and a brunette woman meandering across the beach at Coney Island, hand in hand, their pants rolled up to their knees. Another from
Newsweek
of a blond scientist in the lab, his eyes stark against the white of his lab coat. There’s one from
Mothering
magazine of a grinning baby girl, her hair only fuzz, her cheeks plump and pink, holding a sign that says, “Happy Birthday, Daddy!”

A web of strings and pushpins crisscrosses the room, connecting the photographs to one another, as if trying to create meaning. The walls are also covered with writing in red Sharpie. Most of these are notes that Charles wrote to himself, questions, speculations. But soon I discover that there’s also a narrative, an alternate narrative, an alternate ending that he’s written in which Julie never died, in which Charles and Julie and Jess live happily ever after. He believed in those memories, in that idyllic life he created with Julie and Jess. He couldn’t deal with his grief so he changed the narrative. And when Steve and others from the outside world threatened to uncover
the falsity of his creations—that was when Julie and Jess disappeared.

“Charles? Charles, have you taken anything?” I ask him. Tears trickle down his face, winding through the wrinkles on his cheeks. He crumples into my shoulder.

“Why didn’t they ever come back?” he begs. “What did I do wrong? Why did Julie and Jess have to disappear?”

Charles wobbles and sways with the exertion of speaking. I take his shoulders in my hands, meaning to lay him down across the floor, to let him rest. But instead, my fingers creep closer and he gives a guttural squawk as my fingers wrap around his throat. He looks up at me as his breathing slows, and his eyes are like the universe. The dawn of time. When his breathing stops, I can’t let go. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to let go.

T
HAT NIGHT
, I
DREAM ABOUT
C
HARLES AND
J
ULIE ONE
last time. It’s a brilliant summer day, blazing asphalt, blasting music, the smell of salt in the air. Charles and Julie can’t stop grinning, the wind blowing in their hair. Julie drives. Normally it’s Charles but today it’s Julie, her cheeks pink, sunburned from the beach. Her brown hair flies in her face, beautiful, long silky hair. Charles sits in the passenger seat, his hair wet and messy from the ocean, a pair of sunglasses propped on his nose. He’s drumming away on the dashboard as Julie sings along to the radio, softly at first and then as loud as she can. Her voice is like lavender. Like rain. It’s a voice that I will never be able to get out of my head.

Jess sits in the backseat, wrapped in a towel and drinking strawberry lemonade. Her lips are lined with salt and sand and sugar from the lemonade until she licks away the very last of it. And they are finally happy. They are so happy together as they fade away into the melting sunset. This is all they ever needed. This is all they ever wanted.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Brian Evenson for his unending support and constant graciousness, and to Thalia Field, Erik Ehn, Marcus Gardley, Renee Gladman, and all of my other brilliant writing professors at Brown University. To Michael Martone, Wendy Rawlings, Kellie Wells, and the rest of the faculty at the University of Alabama for their kindness and their generous feedback. Of course, to my sister, Stephanie Meyers, for reading nearly everything I have ever written. You are the best. And to my father, Ken Meyers, for never trying to make me go to law school. To Ivy Pochoda and Meredith Bailey, thanks for your excellent editorial skills, and to the dream team both currently and formerly at PEN Center USA—Libby Flores, Lilliam Rivera, Michelle Franke, Amanda Fletcher, and all the others. Thank you to everyone who has helped to make this novel happen. Thank you for believing in me—I believe in you too.

About the Author

photo credit: Stephanie Meyers

M
ICHELLE
M
EYERS
is a fiction writer and playwright born and raised in Los Angeles. Her writing has been published in the
Los Angeles Times, Juked, Grey Sparrow Journal, decomP
, and
jmww,
among others, and her plays have been developed and/or produced all across the United States. She was a 2015 PEN Center Emerging Voices Fellow in Fiction and received her bachelor’s degree in Literary Arts and Writing for Performance at Brown University. Meyers is currently an MFA candidate in Fiction at the University of Alabama’s Creative Writing program.

SELECTED TITLES FROM SHE WRITES PRESS

She Writes Press is an independent publishing company founded to serve women writers everywhere. Visit us at
www.shewritespress.com
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Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Part I