The Year of Broken Glass (37 page)

At first I didn't get what it was he meant by that, and then I understood. If it were cast by the moon it would be ever-changing, tilting and stretching out and in through the nights. But here in our little house on the corner of Fraser and Fourteenth there's only the street light's glare falling through our window, and the sound of the traffic sweeping past at all hours is a far cry from the wash of the waves on the beach beyond the bedroom he once shared with Anna. I know he longs for her. For his son, for their home and for that time. The time before he found the float. He came back to me changed, without the love I know he once had for me. I know he has it for Emily still, and I see him some days choosing to feel it for me, too.

Some days even, I think maybe that choice he's making, that effort, might lead him back to me, back to how it used to be between us, but then we go to sleep and he wakes in the middle of the night from one of his dreams and he puts himself inside me and it feels nothing like what it used to. Like it's not me he's loving at all but his own grief and anger, his memories of what he's lost, of what he'll no longer have in this life. In the morning I know he is ashamed, but there's nothing that I can do for him. He has to find his own way back to me, and though I can see him trying, for now he is still somewhere out there on that sailboat with that woman, or on the boat that sank and took Willow down with it. Or maybe he's still drifting alone, unconscious, yet to be washed ashore, his arms wrapped tightly around the glass float that lives now under this bed that we share, beneath this shadow-cage cast in perpetual stasis across our ceiling.

But I'm kidding myself with such thoughts. The fact is Francis washed up on a black-sand beach on the north coast of Maui some time after Arnault Vericombe's boat sank. His arms were locked around the float. He'd been holding onto it for dear life, literally, though he remembers nothing of this. What he does recall of the time following his rescue from the rowboat are only hazy snippets. Soaring in a roaring chamber. Anna singing to him in a white room. The man with the black eyes smothering him. He remembers Willow cupping his hand, something cold and hard in his palm. If it weren't for the fact that the Coast Guard also found Fairwin' Verge and Anna floating off the coast of Maui, that's all he would know of what went on. Which would be for the better, in one respect. But as it is, Francis has been to visit Fairwin' several times out on Lasqueti Island, and after each visit he seems to return with a greater sense of things.

When he first began these visits I had hoped it would bring some kind of clarity for him, some kind of closure, but every time he comes back with greater sadness and with more questions, and quite often upon his return I have to call in sick to my uncle for him so he can stay home in bed. He sleeps these days away, and then he's up in the middle of the night, going over again how he doesn't understand why the float wouldn't break, why it still won't break, and doesn't know why that man, the engineer, would have wanted to kill him—though he's not even sure that he tried to, only that he feels like he did, he dreams it. Fairwin' says the engineer was the only one in the room when Francis stopped breathing and that he was the kind of man that was capable of doing such a thing, though why he would have wanted to kill Francis Fairwin' can't say either.

Francis goes around and around these things in his head, obsessively, and I sometimes fear he'll never stop, that he's doing it to keep from facing what is for him still unfaceable, that Willow is dead, and that it is his fault, a result of the whole thing he got his son wrapped up in with the float. Sometimes I feel like the only thing that will ever release him from all this is its breaking, and in those times I take it from beneath our bed and I try to smash it myself. I've beaten it with a hammer as hard as I can. I've tossed it with all my might down onto the sidewalk in front of our house. I'd throw it in the trash, or back to the sea, if I didn't think it would lead only to Francis forever searching for it, forever lost to Emily and me.

After his first visit to Lasqueti, he came back with some of the old fire in his eyes. At first I thought it was because he'd been out on the water for the first time since his return. He swore he'd never fish again the very first day he arrived home. Within a month he'd sold the boat, settled up with Anna, and we'd bought this house with the money he had left and a letter to the bank from my uncle that said he would keep Francis employed. For the first few months living here, he refused to go see Fairwin' because that meant going by boat. This house was considerably cheaper than it would have been before the quake, but it's still all we can afford to make the mortgage and feed ourselves on what Francis earns, so chartering a plane is out of the question, and regardless Francis says he won't fly either. I think he feels like death is stalking him, like somehow he's living on borrowed time. Some days this makes him uncontrollably anxious and he skips work to take long walks all day alone. He says he just wanders around the city looking at all the restoration and new construction work. He says it helps him think, the aimlessness, but I think there's more to it than that. I think on those days he feels death is somehow at his heels and his walking and walking is an attempt to shake it. It was after one of these walks that he declared he had to go to Lasqueti, and the next morning he woke up before dawn and left.

He came back, as I said, with the old look in his eyes, focused intensity. And for a while it seemed that his spirit was finally returning to him from wherever he'd lost it out on the sea. He was still distant, distracted, but every day he grew more lively, animated, more like the Francis I'd known before he found the float. So I was hopeful, for a time.

Then he went to visit Fairwin' again. This time he returned with a near-manic look and energy about him. Over his shoulder he carried a duffle bag I hadn't seen before. He set it down in the living room, not bothering even to take his shoes or coat off first, unzipped it, and lifted out the float. Then he took my pestle from its mortar and placed them both on the coffee table in the living room. I was nursing Emily while I watched him do this. “Give her to me,” he said, holding his arms out toward her and me. It was with the same certainty of desire that he did this as he used to have when he'd reach for us, and seeing it there in him almost made me weep. But I held back my tears as I unlatched Emily and handed her to him. He set her on his lap and put her little fingers around the pestle, wrapping his hand around hers and the pestle as well. Then he struck the float, but nothing happened. He struck it again and again like this, but it stayed round and perfect as ever each time.
 

Eventually he batted it from the table, set Emily down at his feet, and left the house cursing. He didn't come back until well past dark, well past the time I'd put Emily down. I'd been sitting up waiting for him, worrying, for many hours when he finally came through the door. He was soaked right through, dripping a puddle on the old wood floor in the entranceway where he stood, shivering. I went to him and stood in front of him, saying nothing, looking for the look that had been there earlier. But he looked again as though he were staring out from inside a dream. All he said was, “It's so cold this year, Jin Su. Why is it always so cold?”

It's true, it's been colder this fall than I have ever seen or thought was possible, but I knew then as I know now there is more in what he was asking than that. I have no answer for him. The truth is I don't know Francis well enough to know what it is he needs from me or anyone else, so I keep most of my thoughts to myself and go through these days with him, caring for our daughter, trying to care for him, hoping something will change inside him so he will eventually come back to me, to us, fully himself and alive, instead of as this ghost that wanders through our home, sleeps beside me in this bed, and wakes from one dream into another, trying to take from me something I can't give him, something no one can give him, because what has happened has happened and nothing can change that. Nothing can bring back what's died from the world. Not any amount of wishing or hoping. Not the breaking of any magic antique fishing float. I have no way of explaining why it won't break. But to take it as evidence of some mystical prophecy is a leap of faith, and it's that faith that Francis is clinging to now; and it's that faith that is keeping him locked away in the past, like he's caught inside a globe of glass himself, and I fear sometimes that, as with the float, we'll never find a way to break it.

•

This morning I decided to take the float from beneath the bed and let it loose. I thought while I lay awake after Francis fell back asleep last night that keeping the float hidden from view isn't going to help. Treating the thing like some sacred object has only given it more power than it already has over Francis, and if I can't break the thing the least I can do is try to break the spell it has him under. He has never explained to me why it was he was striking the float with Emily that day. He won't discuss much of whatever it is he and Fairwin' do, or what it is Fairwin' has told him, during their visits. Aside from his middle-of-the-night recallings of what he remembers, Francis won't discuss any of it with me. He won't let it out into the light of day and I've realized this must end. Until now I haven't challenged him on anything, but this way of being is killing him, slowly, and it has to stop. So I took the float from its box beneath the bed and gave it to Emily to play with. She's been batting it around the house most of the day, crawling after it as it rolls across the kitchen floor, down the hallway, across the living room. I wish I could do the same with all of Francis's grief. Just wrap it up into a ball and give it to our daughter for her to bash around the house.

With that in mind I've decided to tell Francis I want him to go back to being a fisherman. I'm sure this will upset him at first. But I also know that his decision to sell the boat was one made in grief and out of fear, and I know he'll never emerge from either until he faces them. Until he faces the sea. He says he won't go back out because he won't give the sea a chance to take more than it already has from him. But what about all that it's given? My family have been fishermen on both my mother's and my father's side for as long back as anyone can remember, and if I know one thing it's that once a fisherman, always a fisherman. For those who come to love working on the sea, no job, no life, can ever compare. Even my uncle, as wealthy as he's become since immigrating to this country and working in the city as a fish buyer, bought himself a salmon troller a few years ago so he could get back out onto the sea. He earns nothing fishing compared to what his business makes him, and some trips out he really does make nothing, but that's not the point.

And it's not the point for Francis either. This life we're living isn't his. He's a fisherman, and the look I no longer see in his eyes is the look every lover of the sea gets from being out upon it. I want him to go and find that again, because I've come to realize this shroud of fear we're living under is killing me, too, and I didn't come to this country to live like this. People here don't realize the opportunity for freedom they have. They seem to use whatever they can to make it so their lives are ones of suffering and loss. Francis, I've come to see, is no exception, and without the infusion of freedom he used to get from fishing he's turned into another one of the hungry ghosts in this city, oppressed by his own fear and inertia.

I hear his footsteps coming up the front porch. I've thought all day of how I'll get this through to him. How I'll tell him without turning him further away from me, without presenting my thoughts as ultimatums. But as I hear him approaching the front door I act without thinking. I go to the entrance hallway so that I'm standing before him as he comes in, shivering again from the cold. “You should wear more layers,” I say, as he closes the door behind him. He hadn't noticed I was here, and this is unlike the habit I have of giving him time to enter the house unaccosted. So my words startle him, which is what I want. I want him shaken.

“Jesus Jin Su,” he says as he takes off his jacket. “What's going on?” he asks, a faint, forced smile on his face. I reach up and kiss that smile, and take him by the hand, pulling him into the house. “I've got to get out of these clothes. I'm freezing,” he protests, but I don't care, I want this out of me right now. It's been almost five months of this and enough is enough.

I lead him into the living room and sit him down on the sofa. It's a long, narrow room that looks to the east, to the wall of our neighbour's house, so close you can almost touch it. Emily is on the far end of the room opposite us and as I sit down beside her father I watch her look up with the joy she gets when she hears his voice for the first time at the end of the day. “Yiiiiieeeee!” she shrieks, and rolls the float toward us, crawling after it. It rolls quick and smooth across the floor and stops at my feet. I pick it up and hold it before Francis.

“This,” I say. “This thing may never break Francis. But I won't live my life with it hidden like some sickness beneath our bed.” An anger rises to his eyes as I say this, which is what I want. Anger, hatred, joy, it doesn't matter. I just want a reaction from him, some emotion, and as he reaches for the float I see the contempt in his eyes and I hold it away from him so more might come. I stand and walk across the room, pick up Emily, and hand her the float. “What's the problem Francis?” I ask as he rises, too. “What the hell's going to happen? It's not like she's going to wreck the thing. What the hell does keeping it hidden accomplish?”

Afraid to go himself, Francis sent Fairwin' to Hawaii to retrieve the float. Ever since his return Francis has wished it was still there buried in the sand. He fears whoever it was that sunk the boat will come looking for it. But that hasn't happened. “You're not hiding it from anyone but yourself now, Francis,” I say.