House of Glass (22 page)

Chapter Thirty

Inches away, Tanya’s eyes shone in the faint light that seeped behind the stairs. Tanya had the gift of stillness. She’d always been able to keep her body motionless. Jen was restless, a fidgeter, and her thighs and ankles were cramping from crouching so long under the stairs.

She couldn’t see Livvy’s face. Through the spaces between the steps she could make out only the curve of her bare shoulder, the quilt that had slipped off her as she dozed in the chair, revealing the swell of her breasts under the thin tank top that Jen had found in the giveaway box.

Of course, Livvy wasn’t really asleep, and the quilt hadn’t slipped down by accident. Livvy had arranged it very carefully after dragging the chair over near the wall so that someone coming down the stairs couldn’t avoid seeing her lying there. She’d moved the lamp, too, so that she’d be bathed in light, almost spotlighted once they turned off the overhead bulb.

Jen worried that the plan was too contrived, too obvious, but she’d been outnumbered. After listening to Livvy’s idea, Tanya agreed that it was their best shot, and when Jen questioned whether the plan had any chance of working, she said “Come on, Jennie, they’re
men.
They’re driven by what’s in their pants.”

Because men, to her sister, were all alike, unable to ignore their animal natures. When Jen suggested that while Ryan would be distracted by the sight of her half-clothed daughter, Dan might have other things on his mind, Tanya only snorted.

Jen and Tanya crouched side by side under the stairs and didn’t speak. As the minutes ticked by, Jen decided that it would be better if it was Dan who came down to kill them, and not Ryan. For one thing, he was slower and clumsier, more likely to hesitate when she and Tanya made their move. And she couldn’t help thinking he was more likely to feel guilty and uncomfortable at the sight of her daughter stretched out seductively.

At last, when Jen’s knees were numb and her ankles quaked from the uncomfortable position she was holding, they heard a sound at the top of the stairs, the key being turned in the lock, the squeak as the door opened on its hinges.

Tanya reached for Jen’s hand and gave it a squeeze, a final encouragement, a promise to stay by her side. They heard footfalls on the stairs, slow and heavy, and Jen knew it had to be Dan.

“Jen?” he called. His voice was heavy, freighted with inevitability and exhaustion. “Aw, Livvy,” he muttered as he descended, and Jen knew that she’d been right, that it wasn’t lust that stirred in him when he looked at her daughter, but the weight of what he had to do.

But she also had a job to do. As his foot landed on the step in front of her face, she reached through the space between the stairs and grabbed his ankle, her hand closing around the smooth twill cuffs of her husband’s trousers. She yanked with all her might, and he stumbled, cursing as he scrambled to keep his footing, but Jen held on. Tanya made a sound like a rabid dog tearing the throat out of a rabbit and jammed their father’s knife into the back of Dan’s ankle, and Jen felt the tendon snap like a fistful of rubber bands, and he screamed and fell down the stairs.

Livvy had burst out of her pretend slumber the minute Dan stumbled, diving to the floor and rolling out of the way. As he went down, he shot the chair where she’d been lying a second earlier. A second bullet struck the wall, chipping the cinder block.

Jen still had his pants cuff in her fist, and she held on for dear life, even as he kicked at her with his good leg, smashing her knuckles. His hips were on the bottom step, his torso on the floor, his arms flailing. He kept screaming as Tanya seized his ruined ankle and kept slashing at it. Jen let go and scrambled
around the stairs in time to see her daughter kick Dan’s face, landing a square blow to his jaw. It made a cracking sound, like snapping kindling for a fire. He kept yelling until Livvy kicked him a second time and then the sounds he made were more like wailing. Blood bubbled between his lips, and Jen figured he’d bitten his tongue. She hoped he’d bitten it clear through.

“Quick, get his gun,” Tanya yelled. Dan grabbed Livvy’s leg, and she lost her balance and went down hard barely two feet away. He managed to jerk his leg free from Tanya and rolled onto his stomach, and Jen watched in horror as he struggled up onto his elbow, never letting go of his gun.

The door at the top of the stairs banged against the wall, and Ryan clattered down the stairs. He managed two shots before he reached the bottom, but they went wide since he was trying to avoid hitting Dan. He stomped hard on Tanya’s wrist, which still jutted through the stairs, and she screamed as Dan barked something and fired.

Tanya’s body bucked and lurched, her head banging on the stairs above her, and then she slumped down to the floor, as formless as a bag of rice.

Livvy screamed, and Jen crawled the last few feet to her daughter, covering her with her body. Dan tried to get to his feet, and collapsed in pain, his gun falling to the floor and sliding out of reach, his useless foot twisted grotesquely. Ryan bounded over him and crouched inches away from Jen.

Up close, she could see a faint sprinkling of red along his hairline, the shadow of the acne that must have plagued him as an adolescent. She squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for the shot.

“Look at me!” Ryan shouted. Jen could smell his breath, hot and sour in her face. Livvy struggled to get out from under her, writhing and trying to push her off. But Jen would protect her daughter until her heart stopped beating. Her body would stop a bullet before it could reach Livvy, and if that was the cost of a few more seconds of her daughter’s precious life, she’d pay.

“I said,
look!
” Ryan grabbed her neck, his thumb crushing her windpipe, shaking her. She opened her eyes and stared at him, taking in the foamy spittle at the corner of his mouth, the bottom teeth that crowded and pushed against each other. He had a faint scar under his chin.

“Do you have any
idea
how fucked up this is? Huh?” More shaking. “This is all on you. Not me,
you!
” He waved the gun around the basement. “You got enough shit down here for a whole other house. You want to know what’s in my mom’s living room? A La-Z-Boy she pisses in when she’s drunk and a TV that weighs like five hundred pounds. How’s that fair?”

Underneath her, Livvy went still for a second, and Jen thought she’d hurt her somehow, crushed the breath from her, but then she felt her daughter’s hands at the back of her own head. She gave a mighty shove and Jen’s neck snapped forward and her forehead smashed into Ryan’s face, so hard she saw stars. The gun went off, and Ryan cursed and let go of her throat. Jen’s vision had gone blurry, but she dived for the floor, trying to find Livvy’s hand to drag her down with her.

Jen called her daughter’s name and blinked until her vision cleared. Ryan had his hand over his wrecked nose and blood was pouring through his fingers. He was on his knees, his free hand frantically scrabbling around on the floor. Livvy dived, fast and sleek like when she was on the soccer field, and came up with his gun in her hand.

“Mom—” she yelled, but Jen was already there. She grabbed the gun from her daughter and watched Ryan spin on his knees, realization dawning in his eyes as his hand fell away from his nose. Jen curled her finger around the trigger, and was surprised by how easy it was, the way they made these things so that a nice lady from the suburbs who’d never fired so much as a Super Soaker would know exactly what to do. She squeezed, and the blast rocked back through her shoulder.

Half of Ryan’s face disappeared.

A grunt behind her made Jen turn just in time to see Dan up on his hands and knees, crawling painfully toward his own gun, dragging his bloody leg. He had almost reached it when Livvy kicked it, and the gun went skittering across the concrete floor, spinning in a lazy circle as it slid, bouncing off the base of the shelves. Livvy stomped Dan’s hand and then jumped out of the way.

“Don’t you move,” Jen screamed. “Dan, don’t you do it.”

He was crying out in pain, holding his smashed hand close to his body. It was already swollen, the skin angry purple, and Jen hoped her daughter had broken every bone.

“Livvy, back up,” she said, needing her daughter outside the field of bodies. Tanya was sprawled next to the stairs, with one foot flung awkwardly over the other, an arm across her face. Ryan had fallen on his side, mercifully hiding the gore where his face had been. Dan was sinking slowly onto his stomach, whimpering and clutching his hand.

It was clear that Dan was beaten. Jen looked down at the gun in her hand. She turned it over so that she was looking at her fingers wrapped around the grip, her manicure still perfect except for a small chip in the polish of her ring finger.

She pointed the gun at Dan, aiming at his chest.

Dan had brought evil into her home. He’d shot her husband and her sister, and Jen would never have another chance to find her way back to them. Because of him, she had lost the two people who had loved her more than anyone else in the world.

Shooting Ryan hadn’t exactly been a challenge, given that he was only a foot away, although she couldn’t even remember aiming. But she’d done it. She had killed him. A shudder passed through Jen’s body, a loosening of her bones. She’d taken a life, a life that had once meant something to someone.

The young man she’d killed—whatever his real name was—he deserved to die, after what he’d done to her family: shooting her husband, allowing her son to escape, forcing her daughter to endure two days of terror.

But Jen didn’t deserve to have to kill him. She didn’t deserve to have to be a killer. She would carry that with her always, and the thought enraged her.

“You—” she said, her voice shaking, pointing the gun at Dan. “You came into
my
home. You don’t
belong
here.”

Dan winced. His gaze traveled to Ryan, and his face twitched in grief.

“Why did you choose us? Why did you choose my family?”

He didn’t respond, too weak with exhaustion. Jen’s finger ached to pull the trigger, and she contemplated killing a second man. This time it wouldn’t be self-defense, as it had been with Ryan, but pure revenge. The tremor traveled from her finger up her arm, into her whole body, a shudder of longing. She wanted to kill him, badly. Hungered for it. Instead she edged carefully toward her daughter, giving him a wide berth.

“Livvy,” she said, handing her the gun. “Stand here, right here, and if he so much as moves, shoot him.”

Livvy took the gun from her and slid her hand around the grip. She didn’t look frightened now.

Jen went to Tanya, crouching down next to her on the floor. Maybe she wasn’t all the way gone, maybe there was life in her yet...Jen put her fingers to her sister’s wrist, prodding gently, hoping against hope.

“Mom,” Livvy said. “That was the doorbell. I heard it.”

Jen glanced up sharply. Was that possible? Or was Livvy imagining things? It was the wee hours of the morning, the time when the neighborhood lay absolutely still under the blanket of night. Who would be out at a time like this? Could someone have heard the screaming, the gunshots? An insomniac out walking a dog, a teenager returning from a party?

But what if Dan or Ryan had called someone? Some low-life friend of theirs who had come to help them carry away the loot from the botched assault on the Glasses’ lives?

“Look through the peephole,” Jen said. “If you don’t know the person, if it’s not a neighbor, don’t let them in. Do you hear me? Do
not
let them in. Come right back down here.”

“Okay,” Livvy said. “But what about you?”

“Get me the other gun,” Jen said, and her daughter went over to the shelves and picked up Dan’s gun like it was car keys she’d accidentally dropped, like it was nothing. Livvy had to be in shock, Jen thought—the horror of the night would find her later.

She took the gun from her daughter and, watching her climb the stairs and disappear through the door at the top, she felt that same protective rage again, that surge of bloodlust. She was still crouched down next to Tanya, and Dan looked like he was about to pass out from the pain, barely able to sit up.

“Do you believe in...” she started as she reached for Tanya’s hand. She meant to say “Hell,” because if it existed, he would surely have earned his place there. But as she tried to say the word, her fingers found the thing that Tanya was still holding in her hand, the cold, ridged steel of the knife. Jen gently took it from her sister’s fingers and examined it up close, the dot of red that wasn’t a dot at all. How could she have forgotten? The image swam into view and fixed itself there, expanding until it took up all of her mind, the memory of it sudden and sharp like yesterday, and the gun fell to the floor as she closed her hands around the knife and remembered.

Chapter Thirty-One

September, 1983

Sid had been in the backyard since late afternoon, drinking beer and eating pistachios. He cracked them between his teeth and spit the shells toward the fence.

“He might leave soon,” Jen said softly to her sister. She’d been hanging around Tanya all evening, unable to resist the draw of her sister’s suddenly mysterious mood. Tanya smelled like the Amaris that she’d stolen from a boy and nail polish remover and cigarettes.

Tanya rubbed the cotton ball lazily over her toes, taking off the polish she’d put on only last week. “He’s not going anywhere.”

Lately Tanya’s voice had sounded all wrong. Kind of...lifeless. And it wasn’t just that: she didn’t talk to Jen unless she had to, walking to school alone sometimes and pretending to be asleep when Jen whispered to her after they’d turned the lights out in their room. Jen tried to tell herself it was because her sister was in high school now, that next year when she started ninth grade, things would go back to normal. But Tanya seemed to have veered off in some direction Jen couldn’t follow, not because she couldn’t learn to dress or talk or put on makeup the same, learn to like the same music and actors and mannerisms—Jen knew she could do all of that if Tanya just gave her a chance—but because Tanya had receded from her. And that both mystified and wounded Jen almost unbearably.

Sid was throwing his knife lazily at the stump he’d lugged down from the woods past the creek and set up on a pair of cinderblocks. He’d spray-painted a crude orange bull’s-eye, the outer circle dripping down into the bark—a much more effective target than the cans he’d tried setting on the fence. He hit the circle about half the time. Whenever the knife lodged near the center, he’d laugh and take a long pull on his beer, belching and pounding his chest afterward. When he missed, he cursed and stomped around trying to find his knife in the mangy sod.

He swore he got the knife in Vietnam, but he was vague about how. It had a red bird embossed on the handle, an eagle or some other bird of prey, its beak wide like it was screaming. Sid said the knife was rare because it folded, said it was worth a lot of money. Once he said he’d killed the man who taught him to throw. Other times he said he taught himself. If he spent all the time he spent throwing the damn thing working instead, their mother said, he could have built her a whole new house by now. Or at least caught up on his child support.

Soon it would be dark, but Jen had an uneasy feeling her sister was right: Sid wasn’t leaving anytime soon. He had been hanging around later and later, despite the fact that their mother had made a few threats to call the cops. In the end, she always gave up and just hunkered down on the sofa with her afghan pulled up to her chin, the TV droning on and illuminating the flat planes of her face with flickering blue. Sid had wormed his way further into their lives as the weeks went by, getting food from the kitchen when he was hungry, watching TV from the sagging love seat, going through their mother’s mail. He was always gone by morning, but sometimes Jen would hear him walking in the hall outside their bedroom door as she drifted off to sleep.

“Go get the knife, Tanny-Bear,” Sid called in his voice like coarse sandpaper. “Landed in the squash patch.”

“Get it your own goddamn self,” Tanya muttered, tossing the used cotton ball onto the porch and twisting the lid back on the nail polish remover.

“I’ll do it,” Jen volunteered, jumping to her feet, losing her place in her history textbook.

“No.”

Jen glanced up, surprised by the vehemence in her sister’s voice, but Tanya was already striding across the yard. Her mother had planted squash, along with a row of pole beans and lettuce, early last spring before she got sick. The beans and lettuce were long gone to seed, but no one had done a thing about the squash, and the vines trailed out of the bed, rolling their pale underripe fruit into the yard. Jen watched her sister push the moldering leaves and vines around with her foot, then bend to pick up the knife. Sid watched, too, drinking steadily from his beer, crushing the can in his fist as Tanya handed him the knife. He dropped the can to the ground, and Jen knew it would still be there in the morning, along with the plastic ring that held the six-pack together.

“I’m going to bed,” Tanya said disgustedly as she stalked past Jen, who hesitated only for a moment before she gathered up her sister’s nail polish and remover and used cotton balls and went after her. By the time she’d brushed her teeth and changed into her pajamas—neither of which Tanya bothered with, stripping off her jeans and socks and shoes and leaving them in a heap by the dresser—her sister had her Walkman earphones on and was flipping through a magazine, nestled into the bottom bunk under the blankets that she never straightened. She didn’t say a word as Jen climbed the ladder to the top bunk, and when she turned off her light a little while later, Jen did the same, even though she wasn’t really tired yet.

Maybe that was why she heard it, later. Usually Jen slept like the dead, but this night—because she was restless, because she wasn’t tired enough to fall all the way asleep—she heard everything. The click and whoosh that was the turning of the knob, the door dragging over the carpet. The rustle of her sister, below her, sitting up in bed.

“Tanny-bear.” It was Sid’s voice, a harsh whisper.

“Go away.”

“Aw, don’t be like that. Your mama won’t give me nothin’.” The stink of him wafted up, his drunkenness mixed with his sweat, metallic and sour.

“I’ll scream—”

Tanya’s words were cut off abruptly, except for a choked mewling. Jen’s heart seized. She knew how strong Sid’s deceptively lean body was. She’d seen him rip a fender off his car with his bare hands after he drove into a mailbox. She’d seen him snap one of her mother’s kitchen chairs into pieces one night when she wouldn’t fix him something to eat.

“Be a good girl, or I’ll fetch your sister,” Sid whispered. In response, Tanya squeaked, and a moment later there was a muffled cough as she tried to get air.

“Not here,” Tanya whispered, and there was a quiet shuffling as she got out of bed and followed Sid out of the room.

Jen lay still for a second after she was sure they were gone. She rolled over and stared at the outline of the door in the darkness. She didn’t want to know what was happening, but it was too late—she couldn’t keep from knowing anymore. The way Sid watched Tanya when she reached for the plates in the cabinet, or bent to pet the neighbor’s cat. Jen had seen her father put his hand on her sister’s waist, his scarred and knobbed hands dirty from a shift at the garage, splayed over the pearly cotton of her tank top, and slide his palm down to the place where the hem of her shorts curved around the swell of her rear.
Don’t wear those shorts around him,
Jen had wanted to beg, but that would make it real, this numbing and nauseating fear. And she couldn’t let it be real, because what then? What could she possibly do about this evil that had worked its way so stealthily and relentlessly into their house? Their mother was powerless to stop it; the neighbors indifferent; Sid inveigling, twisting and sly, stealing and watching and waiting and wanting until his black-hearted desires burst from the very seams of him?

She heard the back door rattle; the screen door always did that no matter how hard you tried to close it quietly, and she couldn’t let Tanya go out there alone with him. Jen tiptoed slowly through the house, heart pounding so hard she was sure it would wake their mother, and when she got to the back door she paused, her hand shaking on the handle. If Sid saw her... She looked around for something, anything, to arm herself with, but all she saw was a mason jar holding a few asters from the garden and the dinner dishes drying on a towel spread out on the counter. She couldn’t see them through the screen, but the yard was dark, the only light seeping sickly from the house two doors down, where Mr. Birckenhoffer installed a light up on a pole over the shed after someone broke in and stole some of his tools.

But Jen could hear them. She could hear Tanya, anyway, quiet sobbing punctuated by the clank of metal on glass, probably the little patio table where her mom kept a pot of geraniums, every summer but this one, when she was too sick. Now there was just a pot with last year’s dead roots.

“That’s right,” Sid snarled, barely keeping his voice down, then a deep groaning.

Jen squeezed her teeth together and pulled the screen door open, putting her free hand flat against the juncture of screen and frame to quell the rattle, and there was no sound as she stepped outside, bare feet silent on the rough concrete.

The light from down the street didn’t reach the corners of the yard, the dark recesses and shrubby edges, but it managed to reach the side of the house just fine, casting a sickly pall over the rake leaned up against the siding, her mother’s old gardening clogs that she hadn’t touched all year...and her sister, backed up against the corner of the house, on her knees. Sid had his hand wrapped in her hair.

No.
No.
Jen made it in three steps, feet pounding sharp earth, and there were Sid’s pants around his ankles and there was the table where he’d tossed his wallet, his keys, his...

The red bird seemed to wink at her as she closed her hand on the handle of the knife. It was hard and cold and it fit her hand just right—it flicked open as easily as it had a thousand times for her father, and it slid into his side so smoothly, like slitting the Easter ham for cloves. She pulled her arm back and brought it down twice more before Tanya pulled her away, saying
Jennie no
but Jen couldn’t stop. She had to keep going until she was
sure,
and how could she be sure unless he was dead? She struggled to break free of Tanya’s grip so she could finish him off, and he watched her with fear in his eyes, clutching his stomach and huffing out wet bubbled breaths.

Tanya kept her arms wrapped around Jen but she still had that knife tight, so tight in her hand, slashing the air trying to reach Sid. If she could just get Tanya to let go of her, she would keep cutting him until he was nothing but pieces of flesh and a pile of bones, a gutted mess on the ground like a hunted deer.

Tanya twisted Jen around and the knife fell to the ground. Tanya picked it up and snapped it closed against her thigh and put it in her pocket, faster than Jen could move. She kept her hand on Jen’s wrist—she was strong like Sid—and she didn’t let go. Sid was on his knees, a spreading stain leaching from his shirt down his pants and onto the pavement. He started to lean, slowly tipping, putting one hand flat against the side of the house at the last minute to catch himself, then slipping down.

Jen whimpered, finally going limp in Tanya’s arms. Their faces were inches apart. Tanya hadn’t taken her makeup off before she went to bed, and her eyes were ringed with mascara. “Don’t look at him, Jennie. We’ll fix this,” she said fiercely. “We’ll make it so this never happened.”

Jen could feel her legs starting to give out under her, aftershocks of adrenaline rendering her boneless. But Tanya gripped her tighter.

“Did I kill him?” she asked, words caught in the air between them. “Is he dead?”

“We’ll look in a minute,” Tanya said, but she didn’t let go. “But it’s going to be okay. You were just watching out for me, right, Jennie? You were just taking care of me. There’s nothing wrong with that. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Jen nodded, not sure at all if it was true. The feel of the knife going in, the twist as she yanked it back—she hadn’t hesitated; each thrust had made the next one easier. The first to stop him, all the other times to obliterate him, to make it so Sid had never come back, so he’d never touched her sister.

“It never happened,” Tanya said, pulling her close the way their mother used to, gathering Jen in her arms and nestling her face in the crook of her shoulder. “Do you hear me?”

Jen heard, and she wanted to believe it, wanted to so badly. But she couldn’t.

Not at first, anyway. But later, when Tanya led her gently into the house and sat her on the sofa and washed her hands tenderly with a rag dampened under the faucet; when she wrapped Jen in their mother’s afghan; it was starting to seem like it might be true. Because how else could Tanya be talking to her, softly and steadily?

“I need you to take these,” she said, opening her palm to show Jen two of the little white pills her mother got from a friend who was a nurse, the ones she took on nights when the pain was especially bad. “They’ll help you go to sleep.”

“I’m not sleepy,” Jen murmured, but she took the pills, anyway, swallowing them down with a sip of water from the glass Tanya gave her.

“Now close your eyes, honey,” Tanya said. She took a clean cloth and dabbed Jen’s face tenderly with cool water. “I’ve got to go do something, but before you know it I’ll be back.”

“Don’t go,” Jen said drowsily. “Don’t leave me alone.”

“It won’t be long, I promise. I’m going to take Mom’s car. Don’t worry. Dwayne’s been teaching me to drive, I’ll be fine.”

“Mom’ll be mad...”

“Mom won’t know. We won’t tell, okay?”

“Okay.”

“You won’t worry, will you?” Tanya asked anxiously. “Because I’m going to be right back, and everything’s going to be okay.”

“It never happened,” Jen said drowsily.

“That’s right, honey. It never did.”

And she was gone.

* * *

When Jen woke the next morning, she was still lying on the couch, covered with the afghan and the blanket from her bed. Tanya was sitting in a kitchen chair pulled up next to the sofa. When Jen opened her eyes, Tanya was watching her, chewing on her hair with her knees pulled up to her chin.

“You’re awake!” she exclaimed, and then tried to smile. There were dark circles under her eyes and her hair was lank.

Jen was groggy, trying to remember how she had come to be sleeping on the couch. It was something about Tanya. Tanya needing help, Tanya crying...no, was she the one who had been crying?

“I’ve got some bad news,” Tanya said, grabbing Jen’s hand and holding it tight. “Listen, um, Sid got in a fight last night. At the roadhouse.”