The Sound of Glass (18 page)

He ran to a stack of books on the bedside table and pulled out a thick volume. He flopped it onto the bed and began flipping pages before coming to a stop and turning the book around so they could
all see the picture. “This is a DC-six—it looks just like it. See how the engines are kind of stubby-looking?”

Gibbes scratched the back of his head. “And these were used until about when?”

“The mid-fifties. That was the beginning of the jet age, when everybody started making the new turbo props. Like these.” He flipped through the book and stopped on a page. “This is a Vickers Viscount British turbo prop—it was a passenger plane they used here in the U.S. in the late fifties. The engines are skinnier than the DC-sixes. They’re round but more streamlined—see?” He showed them the page and then flipped through the book again until he found what he was looking for. “And this was the first really successful commercial jetliner—the Boeing seven-oh-seven. It’s way different-looking from the DC-six, isn’t it? I think those started in 1959.”

Gibbes stared at Owen for a long moment that made Loralee’s heart swell with pride. “You’re a really smart kid, Rocky. Thanks for all your help.”

Owen beamed, and Loralee had to look away so nobody would see the tears in her eyes.

Gibbes rubbed his finger along the top of the plane. “What is this made of?”

“Papier-mâché,” Loralee announced. “I know for sure because Mama and I went through a craft-making period when I was in middle school and made lots of stuff from papier-mâché. We made a Nativity set, but the baby Jesus ended up looking like the Pillsbury Doughboy, so we moved on to making pot holders using spandex headbands.”

Merritt began coughing, her face turning red as she faced away from them until the fit stopped. Gibbes just looked at Loralee with bright eyes and a big smile.

After clearing his throat, he said, “Well, somebody must have used an X-ACTO knife or something like that, because this plane has been cut apart and pieced back together.”

“But why put it together with clear parts?” Merritt asked, her brows knitted. Loralee wanted to press her thumb in the spot above her nose like her mama used to do, to smooth out any wrinkles.

Gibbes studied the plane. “Good question. But if I were to guess, I’d say if somebody were putting together a crash re-creation, they’d want to be as accurate as possible, showing which pieces had been found, and which ones were still missing.” He met Merritt’s gaze. “But why a crash re-creation would be up in the attic, I don’t even have a guess.”

“What’s with the hole in the side?” Owen asked, his eyes huge behind his glasses.

“I’m not sure,” Gibbes said slowly, his fingers gently probing the furled edges. “Does anybody have tweezers?”

“I do!” Loralee said without hesitation. To Owen, she said, “Sweetie, can you go get my pocketbook? I left it on the hall table downstairs.” As Owen ran out of the room she said, “My mama always told me to never go anywhere without tweezers, lipstick, and a roll of duct tape.”

Merritt was looking at her oddly again, but she didn’t look angry like she usually did when Loralee mentioned something her mama had told her. Instead, it looked like she was just confused.

Owen raced back into the room and handed her the pocketbook. It took her a couple of minutes to find the tweezers at the bottom, but she proudly held them up before giving them to Gibbes.

Leaning over, he reached inside the hole on the side of the plane and stuck the tweezers inside. Slowly, Gibbes plucked out a passenger seat with a man in a striped tie still strapped into it, the little white dot pattern of the cloth seat clearly visible. He held it up to eye level and examined it closely.

“This is remarkable. Each seat has those little white head covers on them, and the ashtrays in the armrests actually open,” he said, using the tweezers to demonstrate.

“And he’s got a little dopp kit on his lap,” Loralee pointed out.

“A what?” asked Merritt.

“It’s like a cosmetics bag for men,” Loralee explained. “Although I guess the guys would prefer to call them ‘toiletries.’ When I was a flight attendant I saw them all the time. I’m sure men still use them, but I’m not sure if they’re called dopp kits anymore.”

Gibbes carefully placed the man and his seat on the bedspread next to the plane. Owen got down on his knees to be at eye level, his elbows on the bed and his chin resting on his hands. His dark brows were angled over his forehead as he studied the man very carefully. “Why would the dopp kit be on his lap?” he asked.

“I was just asking myself the same thing, Rocky,” Gibbes said. He gently pinched the dopp kit between his thumb and index finger and tugged. “It’s glued down. Must have been a pretty heavy-duty glue for it to still be stuck.” His eyes narrowed slightly as he studied the man in the business suit, the vivid stripes on his navy blue tie, and the white handkerchief in the breast pocket. “When I travel, my toiletry bag goes inside my suitcase. I certainly wouldn’t carry it on my lap.”

They all stared at the plane model for a long moment, the silence finally interrupted by Owen.

“Mama?”

Loralee looked down at her son and resisted the impulse to lick her fingers and smooth back his hair. “Yes, sweetheart?”

“This doesn’t have to stay in my room, does it?”

“No, sir. And I don’t blame you, Rocky,” Gibbes said as he replaced the man and seat and then lifted the plane and wings from the bedspread. “I’m going to go stick it back where we found it.”

Owen let out a breath of relief as Loralee gave in and put her fingers to her mouth before plastering down that stubborn cowlick that would never lie flat no matter how hard she tried to coax it.

“I’ll call in the pizza order just as soon as I put this back, okay?”

“Pizza!” shouted Owen, and Loralee and Merritt laughed.

Merritt carried the two firefly jars to the door. “I’ll go put these
in the kitchen by the back door so they’re handy when you’re ready to use them. Although it looks like they’re old enough for a museum.”

“Speaking of which,” Gibbes said, “when is your appointment to go see Deborah Fuller at the Heritage Society?”

“Tomorrow morning.” She eyed him suspiciously. “Why?”

“She was a good friend of my grandmother’s and I haven’t seen her for a while. I wouldn’t mind tagging along, if that’s all right with you.”

Merritt took a moment to respond, but Loralee noticed that her face didn’t get that closed-off look that she’d grown used to seeing, the face that made it clear that Merritt was making sure you were kept a stranger. “Sure. I’m meeting her at ten o’clock.”

“Great. I’ll pick you up at nine forty-five.” He smiled, and it didn’t even look like he was getting ready to shoot his favorite dog.

Loralee put her arms around Owen’s shoulders, noticing again that his head was now as high as her shoulders and not remembering when that had happened. She sighed, feeling more tired than she’d ever been, but happy, too. She considered the day and all that had happened, her thoughts resting on Cal’s shoe box that held the old bullet and an airplane bolt, and remembered something else she needed to write in her journal.
To really know a person, find out what they choose to take with them, and what they leave behind.

She listened to Merritt’s footsteps fading down the stairs and thought of Cal and wondered what kind of person he must have been to have saved only those two things. And whether Merritt had ever known him well enough to understand.

MERRITT

I
reluctantly turned around to see myself in the mirror over the dresser in Loralee’s bedroom. Before I could protest, she yanked the rubber band out of my ponytail hard enough that it broke. She picked up a brush and pulled it through my hair, arranging it around my shoulders.

“See? Doesn’t that look better?”

“It looks heavier and hotter, and like it’s going to get in my face and annoy me. Where did you put my headband?” I searched the top of her dresser where I thought she’d tossed it.

“It must have slipped behind the dresser. Sorry.”

She didn’t look sorry at all, and I was about to suggest we pull the dresser out from the wall when the doorbell rang.

“That must be Gibbes,” she said, eyeing me critically. “Let me just put a little dab of lipstick . . .”

“What for? I’m just going to the Heritage Society, and Gibbes is coming with me.”

“You’re widowed, Merritt. Not dead. Why not put your best foot forward? My mama used to say . . .”

She caught my gaze in the mirror and closed her mouth. Although I don’t think I would have stopped her if she had continued. I’d begun to almost anticipate the little pearls of wisdom she felt obliged to drop at random intervals throughout the day. I’d somehow moved beyond being annoyed to being amused, to now actually listening to the grains of truth she and her mother had managed to learn from their lives in a trailer park in Alabama. It made the world seem smaller, made me feel connected by these universal truths. Maybe even made me feel a little less lonely.

I pushed the hair behind my ears. “You don’t need to be my friend, okay?”

“Why? Because I’m your stepmother?”

I looked down at my worn loafers, realizing how ridiculous they must look with Loralee’s dress. And seeing again how very different we were—how different she was from my own mother. “Because I never invited you into my life.” I paused, regretting my harshness and tasting shame on my tongue. In the last weeks my old anger had shifted like an arrow in a bow without a string, useless despite its potential to wound. If I were one for introspection, I might even say that my anger over life’s injustices had managed to become self-directed.

Her smile dimmed but didn’t fall completely.

“It’s not that you’re not a likable person, or that there aren’t people out there who I’m sure would love to have you in their lives. I’m just not one of them. We’re way too different.”

Loralee placed the hairbrush carefully on the dressing table. “And I married your daddy even though you thought the two of you already had a team and didn’t need new members. I get that. But I also believe that we have more in common than you think.”

I met her gaze in the mirror and almost laughed. With her blond hair, tanned skin, and bright lipstick, we looked like we had as much in common as a loaf of bread and a shoe. The doorbell rang again and I moved toward the bedroom door, eager to end our conversation before anybody’s feelings got hurt.

“You’ve got a big and generous heart, Merritt, and you need people in your life, no matter how much you tell yourself different.”

I shook my head, trying to find the words to let her know that my heart had been closed up for years. It made life easier that way. I reached the doorway, grateful to have escaped.

“You could have told us to leave.”

I paused in the doorway without turning around, Loralee’s soft voice doing nothing to deaden the impact of her words. Anger, shame, and loss flooded my lungs, making it impossible to breathe.

I clenched my eyes, remembering something Cal had once told me, and how I’d often thought of it when he became angry.
Fire is an event, not a thing. Heating wood or other fuel releases vapors that quickly combust with oxygen in the air, resulting in a fiery bloom of gas that heats the fuel even more, releasing more vapors and continuing the cycle.

“I still can,” I finally managed.

“But you won’t.”

I didn’t respond as I made my way down the stairs to the door. Gibbes was leaning against the railing, his hands shoved into his front pockets, his long legs crossed casually at the ankles. I noticed the way he stood because Cal had never leaned like that. He’d always stood with his feet apart, balanced on his toes, almost in a wrestler’s starting pose. I’d always thought he looked like an animal getting ready to pounce.

Gibbes straightened as his gaze flickered over me. “Nice dress.”

“It’s Loralee’s.” I tugged on the hem of the skirt that was a good four inches above my knees, and tried not to think about how much of my scar was showing. “For some reason, she chose to wash all of my clothes today and nothing is dry. She lent me this. Apparently
she doesn’t have anything longer than streetwalker size. I’m just thankful my feet are a half size smaller than hers.”

He slowly scanned my body from the low V-neck of the white knit wrap dress to the short hem that made me think maybe it wasn’t actually a dress but a long shirt and I should go get a pair of pants to wear under it. Except I didn’t have any that weren’t wet.

“I don’t see anything wrong with it.”

He said it with a straight face, but I was sure I heard a hint of laughter in his voice. I marched past him and down the steps, still tugging at my hem and hoping he’d put on sunglasses so the sun reflecting off my legs didn’t blind him.

He held open the passenger door and helped me in, averting his gaze as I climbed in and the wrap of the dress widened alarmingly. He turned on the car and the air-conditioning blasted. Leaning toward me, he reached out to adjust the fan’s direction, and I flinched without even being aware of it until I’d done it. He looked at me oddly and I thought he was going to say something, but quickly changed his mind.

“The Heritage Society is just down on Carteret, so it should take us only about five minutes, depending on how many tourists are jaywalking across the street. We have time, so if you’d like, I could take you the long way around and give you a little tour of the backstreets.”

Besides a few necessary trips to the grocery store and drugstore, and once to Hilton Head to buy shorts for Owen at the mall, I hadn’t seen much of the immediate neighborhood. I’d looked at a street map, so I knew that Beaufort was relatively small, with neatly laid-out streets in straight lines, the water forcing a slight rounding at the edges of the grid to accommodate the river and marshes that surrounded the city.

The water was everywhere, a constant presence that reminded me of a bear in the woods that needed to be kept at bay. From my front porch I could see the ebb and flow of the tides, the river
leaching the water from the marsh twice a day, and then refilling it with stealth. It fascinated me as much as it terrified me, and I’d gotten in the habit of looking up the time for high and low tides during the day to reassure myself that the water wouldn’t come any closer to my house. Maybe that was why I hadn’t strayed too far, fearing that the water would creep too close if I weren’t there to keep watch.

“That would be nice. Thank you.”

Gibbes pulled out of the driveway and took a right on Bay Street, away from the downtown area, driving slowly so I could get a good view of the antebellum mansions that perched on the bluff like proud matrons surveying their domains.

He slowed in front of several of them, pointing out historical facts about the owners and about events that happened in the houses during the Revolutionary and Civil wars. The white clapboard Federal-style homes reminded me of Maine, but only briefly. The palmetto trees and giant magnolias in their front yards were an easy reminder that I was far from home.

“They call this one the Secession House,” Gibbes said, pointing to an antebellum mansion on Craven Street with a pink-painted first floor. “There’s an inscription on the basement wall in this house saying that the first meeting of secession in South Carolina was held there.”

I nodded, only half listening. Not because I wasn’t interested—I was. I loved history, and had enjoyed visiting historical sites with my father when I was a girl. There was something about the past; the reassurance that others had lived and loved and survived before me gave me something to cling to in the present. And Southern history was new to me. I’d studied the Civil War in school, of course, but to see the small Confederate flags on graves as we passed St. Helena’s churchyard made it somehow more relevant.

But mostly I was busy studying Gibbes and the relaxed way he held the steering wheel with only one hand, the other arm resting on his door. Cal had gripped the wheel with both hands, his jaw set
as if he were ready for battle. And we’d rarely spoken on car trips. Saying the wrong thing in the small confines of a car would have had consequences I hadn’t wanted to contemplate.

“Merritt?”

I jerked my eyes to meet his and for a second I thought it was Cal. But only for a second, until I realized that just the eyes were the same. Ever since our trip into the marsh, I’d stopped seeing Cal when I looked at Gibbes. The marsh had exorcised that ghost, at least. Or maybe it was Gibbes himself who’d done that.

I realized he’d asked me a question. “I’m sorry. I must have been woolgathering. What were you saying?”

“I was asking how you and Cal met.”

“Oh.” I stared out the window at a small white clapboard church with colorful stained-glass windows. “There’s nothing much to say, really. It’s all in the past.”

“Those who refuse to acknowledge the past are condemned to repeat it.”

I glared at him. “You’re starting to sound like Loralee.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

I didn’t argue. Gibbes turned on his signal to take a left on a small street with weeds and grass escaping from large cracks in the asphalt. I felt an odd affinity for the spots of green, knowing what it felt like to think you’d escaped, only to be hit by the next oncoming car.

“My brother is dead, Merritt. But I started missing him a long time before that. I just want to know a little bit about him, about his life after he met you.” He paused, his fingers thrumming on the steering wheel to a beat only he could hear. “I’m not trying to make you uncomfortable or sad.”

I looked down at my hands, wanting to tell him about the Cal I’d first met. The man who sensed my loneliness and filled up all the empty spaces in my heart. At first. But I couldn’t tell Gibbes any of that without telling him the rest.
I don’t want to hurt you.
I turned
back to the window. We were back on Bay Street, passing the marina with the sleeping sailboats rocking lazily on the water, their sails folded like window shades. The tide was high, only the tips of the sea grass visible, and for a moment I imagined they were holding their collective breath, waiting to be pulled from the water.

I cleared my throat. “He came to the museum where I worked. He said he was there from the fire department and was doing a safety inspection.” I remembered myself stammering and flushing, completely taken off guard by the tall, strong fireman who couldn’t seem to stop looking at me. “He asked me out to dinner that night. We were married five months later.”

Gibbes didn’t say anything, and when I looked at him he seemed deep in thought.

“It’s funny, really,” I continued. “Because I found out later that he wasn’t officially a fireman yet—he’d applied, but he hadn’t been offered the job. After we were married, I was going through some paperwork and saw that the dates didn’t make sense. When I asked him, he said he’d seen me on the street and followed me to the museum and figured out an excuse to meet me.”

Gibbes parked the car in front of the Heritage Society offices, a converted Victorian house with pink fish-scale tiles and a green roof. He pulled the key from the ignition, but didn’t move right away. Finally he turned to me. “Didn’t you find that odd?”

My fingers plucked at the skirt of Loralee’s dress. “Not at first. I thought it was romantic. It wasn’t until . . . later. After we’d been married for a while. It was as if . . .” I stopped, remembering to whom I was speaking.

“It was as if what?”

It was getting warm in the car with the air conditioner off. I lifted my hand to my throat as if that would help me breathe. “It was as if he were a child who wanted a toy very badly, but then lost interest as soon as it was his.” I met Gibbes’s eyes. “Every time he looked at me, it was like he expected to see somebody else.”

The words stung as they exited my mouth, and I realized I’d never spoken them out loud before. Maybe being a doctor made Gibbes a good listener, or maybe I was desperate to dissect my marriage, to understand where I’d gone wrong, and it didn’t matter who was available to listen.

“The man you’re talking about wasn’t my brother.”

I reached for the door handle, eager to get out of the truck and suck in the thick, heavy air. The metal slipped from my hands twice until Gibbes reached across and pulled it for me. I slid from the SUV and leaned against the door, breathing heavily, my skin clammy with sweat.

“I’m sorry, Merritt. I didn’t mean to upset you. It’s just . . .” He shook his head. “My brother was so shy around girls. He always had a girlfriend, but that’s because they usually threw themselves at him so that he couldn’t say no. And they . . .” He stopped.

“They what?” I prompted.

“They weren’t like you at all. They weren’t like any girls we went to school with, or even like my grandmother or her friends.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, thoroughly confused.

Gibbes glanced at his watch. “Come on. We’re going to be late.”

I didn’t press him for an answer as we headed toward the front door, but only because I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it.

The building smelled like an old house—of wood polish, cedar, and the faint aroma of ashes from the fireplaces. Heavy Victorian furniture filled the foyer and was set up much like I imagined it would have been when it was a home, complete with lace doilies thrown over the backs of upholstered chairs.

Cynthia Barnwell was in the front parlor at a large rosewood desk with heavily carved legs, an ancient computer monitor and keyboard on top. I heard the
click-clack
of the keys as we walked in, and she peered over bifocals at us and smiled.