The Glass House People (11 page)

"But there are questions...," murmured Beth, beginning to weave the long strips of dough with tense fingers. She glanced at her grandmother and saw the old woman's eyes were closed.

"We never talk about it anymore," she went on musingly. "It's history now. That poor boy. He wanted to be a writer. Never got to publish anything, though, before he was—before he died."

"That's sad."

"He fell so hard." Her voice became dreamy, and Beth felt sure her closed eyes were seeing into the past, into history. "He fell so hard that I think we all knew he was dead before we even ran down to see. Smashed his head open on the radiator. An unfortunate accident. The doctor said he never knew what happened." She ran her veined hands through her short white curls. "But I've always thought he must have known. In that time while he was falling, he knew."

"Knew who had pushed him?" Beth's voice was the merest breath of whisper.

"Knew the old jealousy had won in the end. If
she
couldn't have him, then no one ever would. Least of all her sister."

But which sister? Beth held her breath a moment, feeling chilled in the hot kitchen. She didn't want to hear anymore. Yet Tom would expect her to finish the interview, and she wouldn't forgive herself for running away at this point. She let her breath out heavily.

"You mean Aunt Iris, don't you, Grandmother? Aunt Iris was the jealous one, right?" It must be so.

Grandmother didn't seem to hear. She caressed the interlocking latticework of the pies, all set neatly on the counter awaiting the oven. She spoke as if in a dream. "Ah, my poor, dear Iris. Always lost whatever made you happy, didn't you? And that Hanny Lynn—" Here Grandmother's voice grew hard and her fingers plucked angrily at the pies, tearing one carefully woven lattice. "From the moment she was born, she was a trial to you, poor little Iris...."

Beth ran from the kitchen, fighting tears.

After dinner, when the main course had been cleared, Grandmother brought in one of the peach pies. She set it in front of Grandad's place and announced that Beth had helped. Grandad gave her the thumbs-up signal. Hannah looked pleased. Aunt Iris didn't seem to hear; she just sipped her beer and closed her eyes. Tom tasted a bite and teased that the pie was just about as good as the ones he would have made if Grandmother let boys into her kitchen. Grandad responded with a laugh, but everyone else just bent over their plates, subdued.

Tom regaled the silent family with an account of his adventures that afternoon. While he was out with Romps he'd met a boy on the next block, named Mark, who had just gotten a laptop computer for his birthday and didn't know what to do with it. "Can you believe it?" asked Tom. "He's, like, a total illiterate at this point but really eager. So I said I could help him out, you know? And he invited me over tonight." He looked across the table at Hannah. "Okay, Mom?"

"Of course." She smiled. "I'm glad you've found a friend."

"I don't know, Hanny Lynn," said Grandmother with a worried frown. "Maybe we should meet this boy's parents first. We don't know those people. And kids today—"

"Now, Mama, I'm sure it's fine! You'll be back by ten, all right, Tom?"

Beth picked at her piece of pie.
Lucky Tom!
She longed for the chance to get out of the house. At home she'd call Violet and they'd hang out with her sisters, maybe go to a movie. Or she'd call Ray and they'd go out for Death By Chocolate at the Dessert Diner down the street from his apartment. Her appetite was nonexistent here, but back home—

Her thoughts were broken by the shrill ring of the telephone. Everyone started. Then Grandmother went to answer. She turned to the others with a puzzled expression on her face. "Beth? It's for you."

It must have been those thoughts of Death By Chocolate, flying across the Rockies, that made him call her at last. Darling Ray! Beth leaped up to take the receiver from her grandmother. "Hello!"

"Well, hi," said Monica's voice. "It's nice you're so glad to hear from me."

"Oh—hi. I thought you were my boyfriend calling from California. But I
am
glad to hear from you." She sat on the little stool in the corner and hunched over, aware that her family all watched from the table. The phone didn't ring all that much in this house.

"I finally got all your messages this afternoon," Monica said. "I've been out of town—back in Ohio with my mother and stepfather. They called just after I met you, I guess it was, because my little half-sister had fallen off her bike and broken her ankle and couldn't go to the summer day camp they'd planned for her—oh, it's a long story." She broke off with a laugh. "Anyway, never mind. Families are total trouble. I ended up going there to take care of Jenny while they worked. I'll tell you the gory details later. Can we get together tonight? There's a triple feature at the Waverley. Do you like science fiction?"

"Sure!" She liked anything—
anything
—that would get her out for an evening. They arranged to meet at the Waverley, and Beth hung up with a lighter heart.

"You'll have to introduce me to your brother," Monica said as the girls stood in line for their tickets. "I broke up with my boyfriend back in Cleveland before I came to live with Dad, and I just haven't met anyone I like yet."

"Tom's nice," Beth said. "He's only fifteen, but he's tall, so he looks older. People usually think he's my
older
brother." She rolled her eyes. "The only thing
really
wrong with him is that he's a computer maniac. It's like the worst kind of maniac you could ever come across."

The girls sat in the old theater's center section in deep, padded seats and shared a large tub of buttered popcorn. Before the triple feature started they talked in low voices. Monica told Beth how she had moved from Cleveland just after Christmas to live here with her father. He owned the old-fashioned candy shop down the street from the movie theater, and they lived in an apartment upstairs. The theater smelled a bit musty but was cool and dark. A man on the stage in front of the thick royal blue curtains played dramatic music on an ornate organ. The music seemed to come from another time, as if accompanying a silent movie. As she listened to Monica's chatter, Beth felt her shoulder muscles relaxing. She slouched down in her seat. She hadn't realized her body was so tense.

The organ player took a bow and the thick curtains parted to reveal the modern movie screen. Then the films began—classic science fiction oldies, including Beth's all-time favorite,
Star Wars.
Something about the film reminded her of Aunt Iris's painting, the one she planned to work in glass. She was annoyed to have thoughts of home intruding on her night away. But the scenes from the painting kept flickering in her mind as if they, too, were scenes from a film. Was the connection simply the rockets? Or the battle for good over evil?

Later that night, Beth and Tom took Romps for his last run before bedtime. As they walked, Tom chattered on about his new friend, Mark, and the new computer. Beth told him that Monica wanted to meet him. She noticed that his step seemed bouncy again, as if some of his tension, too, had evaporated during his evening away from the house.

They returned to the house and hesitated for a moment outside the front door. The house was quiet, the upstairs windows dark. Without saying a word, they walked over to the glider at the end of the porch and sat down. Romps jumped up and pressed his little gray body firmly between them on the seat cushion. Tom kicked the glider into motion and kept it going. The night air was still warm and heavy with the scent of jasmine. Beth scratched absently behind Romps's ears, and he wagged his stumpy tail and fell asleep.

"He snores like Grandad," commented Tom.

"Must run in the family."

"Like madness."

Beth was silent for a long moment before speaking. "Not madness, really. Unhappiness."

"Are you going to tell me, Holmes? Fill me in on what Grandmother told you. Let's have the whole story."

"You know," Beth said slowly, "you and I have been talking about uncovering secrets as if the past were just part of a story—or a game. Like Clue, you know? Aunt Iris in the Billiard Room with the Candlestick. Or, in this case, Aunt Iris on the Landing with the Big Shove. But—well, when I was talking to Grandmother I could
feel
it, you know? That what happened in the past isn't over yet—it's still real, and it's still part of their lives. Our lives, too, really, since we're here, and since we sort of belong."

"That's creepy. Like being haunted?"

"Sort of." A little melodramatic, but life sometimes was. Was that what her mother had meant when she said the house was haunted?

Tom reached over and stroked Romps's gray back. Then he cleared his throat. "Come on! What ghastly things did Grandmother tell you?"

He would have to know sooner or later, but Beth's words came slowly. "She said, well, that Mom always had it in for Aunt Iris. She said Mom would do anything, you know, to make Aunt Iris miserable. She as good as said Mom pushed old Clifton Becker down the stairs!" Beth tapped the porch floor emphatically with her toe. As the swing jerked back, sudden tears welled under her lids. Romps stirred in his sleep.

"That's totally disgusting! God, think of having your own mother believe such lies about you!" Tom's voice was tight. "Makes me sick."

Beth's foot tapped rhythmically to keep the swing in motion.

Tom peered at her in the darkness. "Grandmother was lying. Right, Beth?"

Beth hesitated. Of course her grandmother was lying. Or else simply mistaken. Her mother would never ... But Beth's thoughts tangled as she came up against her mother's sometimes unpredictable behavior. She knew well how impulsive and hot-headed her mother could be. Hannah liked to think of herself as a laid-back, California-mellow type, Beth knew, but there was a whole other side to her, a side Beth tried to ignore. It was the side that covered a barely contained fury, the side that had appeared in Beth's dream of her mother driving them over a cliff. And look at how weird Hannah had acted just this morning upstairs with Grandad. Beth remembered how her mother sometimes flew into a snit if a waitress was slow or if the newspaper boy missed a delivery. Her eyes would fill with a helpless rage that was inappropriate to the situation.

It seemed to Beth that Hannah's erratic nature had shown itself frequently this past year. At first she'd been all for Beth's plan to set up the stained-glass shop with Ray after high school—she'd even suggested they spend a year or so living in an artists' community in the mountains. But then she'd changed her mind and carried on about the necessity of a college education and nagged Beth to send off for applications to four-year colleges. She went on about graduate school, about Beth's becoming a lawyer or an accountant or something, making a "good name" for herself! And there had been the time last spring when Hannah had left her job, broken off with the man she'd been seeing casually—and then cried for days in her bedroom. And now she'd dragged her children cross-country.

Beth had a sudden image of her mother as an octopus, all her insecurities the tentacles reaching out to grab onto the lives of everyone else around her. Only Hannah's troubles seemed to matter now. Only
her
perspective counted. Beth took a deep breath. Was she being unfair—or could something like this have happened once before? Was it really so inconceivable that Hannah, feeling jealous of her then-beautiful older sister and in love with her sister's fiancé, had reached out that night with fury in her eyes and given him a good hard shove?

"You
don't
believe Grandmother, do you?" pressed Tom.

"Look," she said softly. "I don't
know.
All I know is that people do things they don't mean to do. People act without thinking. And people sometimes change. They grow up, they feel bad about what happened in the past, you know, or something." She felt old as she said this. Much older, suddenly, than Tom.

"So what are you saying? That Mom pushed Whatsisface down the stairs and felt sorry later?"

"I don't want to think that, really. But I can't help wondering—"

Tom leaped off the swing, nearly knocking Romps to the floor. "That stinks, Beth! It really does!"

She cuddled Romps on her lap. "Tom, listen! I'm only saying—"

"We're talking about
Mom,
Beth! God, you're as bad as Grandmother, if you can think things like that!"

"Tom—!"

But he wouldn't listen. He darted across the porch, tore open the screen door, and ran inside. Beth held Romps and jostled the swing into motion again. Where did you draw the line between blind loyalty and clear understanding? She wanted Tom to understand that she was trying to be Sherlock Holmes—as he'd suggested. To look at facts, to consider the situation with cool logic. Considering Hannah as a suspect was only logical. It didn't mean their mother had done anything. It didn't mean Beth didn't love her! It meant only that she'd realized suddenly, while in the kitchen with Grandmother and the pies, that everybody had a different memory of what happened here all those years ago, and that Hannah's own story might also be clouded by time.

First thing in the morning, Beth dragged herself outside for a run with Romps. There was still dew on the grass and bushes, but by the time she got back to the house the sun was hot and she could tell it would be yet another muggy day. When she walked up the porch steps and smelled breakfast cooking and heard Aunt Iris's quarrelsome voice in the kitchen, she felt too sick to go in. So she sat on the porch until Grandad came out, with Tom behind him trundling a wheelchair. The black look Tom shot Beth told her he hadn't forgiven her for last night. But she decided to go along on the walk with them anyway.

Grandad grumbled a bit as they set off down Spring Street together, Beth's hands holding the padded handles of the wheelchair firmly, Tom walking alongside with Romps on the leash.

"Didn't get much sleep at all last night," Granddad muttered. "What with the heat. Imagine you kids didn't, either. Makes the bones ache." Beth tried to ease the big wheels gently over the cracks in the sidewalk, but he grunted whenever they hit a bump. "I can walk all right on my own," he said. "Just so we don't go too far."