Under Shifting Glass (7 page)

What level are you on?
That's what they always ask at school. And:
Did you get a merit, or a distinction, or just a pass?
Zoe's always doing dance exams, always getting distinctions. And even Em and Alice, who both do singing, get the odd merit or two. With Suzuki you don't do exams. And anyway—who cares? Who cares! I've never wanted a
piece of paper with some official stamp to say how good or bad I am. I've just wanted to be able to listen and then play the way Aunt Edie played. But today is different. Today I want to be able to sight-read, to recognize every note on the stave, be able to lift my hands to the keys and make immediate sense of the fading dots. What if they fade right away before my eyes? What if I never find out what Aunt Edie wrote to Rob?
For
Rob.

I try again. I find the first note. I check to see if there are any sharps or flats. I look for the rhythm. Minims or quavers? Notes with dots or notes without? Gradually I assemble a chord, and then another, and something in the baseline, too, a sad, rocking sound. Then I think I hear something, catch something, like a melody coming by on the air, a haunting, hunted sound. And it's suddenly as if I can hear much more than I can play, a whole tune singing itself out loud. I stop playing and start listening and there it is, just as Aunt Edie always said it would be, a song in my ears, in my heart.

And also in my pocket.

The flask is singing. A song even sadder and stranger than the wolf lament of the previous night—and bigger, too. Much bigger—a huge song. Something that makes me feel that this is how God would have sung if, when he called the world into being, when he made the stars and the
seas and the land and the lions, when he crafted each spark of sky, each drop of water, each blade of grass, and every single hair in the lion's mane, he also knew that, one day, the stars would burn out, the seas dry up, and the land and the lions die.

I draw out the flask, oh so slowly, because it feels unholy to disturb this song.

You know how it is sometimes when you see someone crying and you know you can't comfort them? That even if you put your arm around them, it won't make any difference, they just have to cry until they're finished with it? That's how the song is making me feel.

I stand the flask on the piano. Its heart is swirling, gray and purple, the color of storm clouds and bruises. Gently, I unwind the sticky tape from the throat of the glass, not to hear the song better—I could hear it if I were on the other side of the world—but just because I think the song, the flask, needs to be free.

Then, of course, my hands begin to find the notes. I can just lay my hands on the piano and feel the music flow out of my fingers. I can play the sadness, play the stars and the seas and the land and the lions.

“How do you know that tune?” Gran is suddenly in the doorway, statue-still, face like she's seen a ghost.

My hands falter, they fall from the notes. The spell breaks.

“Where did you get that music?”

“Found it,” I say. “With the other music. Aunt Edie's music.”

“I haven't heard that since . . .” Her voice dies away.

“Since what?” I ask. “Since when?”

She unlocks, comes across the room, her footsteps hollow on the bare floorboards. “Never you mind,” she says.

“But it's such beautiful music.”

“Beautiful!” she exclaims. She stops in front of the stand and stares at the faded notes.

“And sad,” I say, “really sad. Who's Rob, Gran?”

Gran says nothing.

“It says
For Rob
,” I repeat.

“Does it.” And Gran takes the sheet of music and she folds it—no, she crushes up that paper and puts it in her pocket. “And what,” she adds suddenly and just to change the subject, “is that?”

It's the flask.

But it isn't swirling with storm clouds and bruises; it's just its quiet, colorless self.

“It's a bottle,” I say.

“Where did you get it from?” Gran asks.

“Just found it.”

“You seem to be finding a lot of things, Jess.”

“It was in the desk. Aunt Edie's desk.”

“I thought I cleared that bureau,” says Gran, and then I see her hand lift and the bottle becomes my precious flask and I know I don't want her to touch it. I like my gran, I really do, but I just don't want her to touch Aunt Edie's flask.

My
flask.

“No,” I cry.

But just before Gran's fingers reach the glass, there's that whoosh again, that wind out of nowhere, and into the air comes whatever it is that lies in the flask. The living, breathing thing, whirling and trembling. I hear it, so Gran must hear it, too. Only she doesn't, so her fingers keep reaching, they close around the neck of the bottle.

And the whooshing breath, that big-as-a-storm-wind, tiny-as-a-baby's-snuffle breath, it comes eddying and circling toward me, and I stretch out my hands and suddenly it's between my palms. I can feel it beating there, like a trapped butterfly.

And for two seconds, or maybe two hundred years, I hold myself like a sheet of glass, terrified that, with a single movement, I could crush that breath forever, though some other part of me feels that, for all its trembling, that beating is the strongest thing in the world.

Finally, Gran puts down the bottle. “The things my sister kept,” she says.

At once the butterfly breath flies and curls itself back inside the flask.

I look at Gran's face. She has seen nothing, heard nothing. How is it possible for people to see and hear nothing?

“Well, enough time-wasting,” Gran says and smiles, as though we were both having the most ordinary of days. “Come on, we've got jobs to do.”

I slip the flask back inside my pocket and Gran sets me to work. I dry the vases she's washed; sort the good tools from the broken ones in Aunt Edie's shed; help her lift things, like the old coal bucket, that are too heavy for her alone. And actually it feels good to be doing some helpful,
simple things. Although maybe the joy is to do with the flask because I'm no longer afraid that, without a cork, without sticky tape, the butterfly breath will fly away.

Because it chose me, didn't it?

It sheltered under my hand.

It's about four o'clock before we set off for home.

I have another text from Zoe. She reminds me that tomorrow is the day we're going—with Paddy—to the Buddhist Center for our vacation project on Places of Worship. Will I just text her back to say I haven't forgotten?

We are going with Paddy because Zoe was in charge of the arrangements and she deliberately arranged the visit on a day she knew Em and Alice were both going to be away and Paddy wasn't. Zoe told me this was just an oversight, but I didn't believe it then and I don't believe it now.

I don't text her back. This is what my mother, who is a very gentle person, calls
holding a grudge
.

“Si called,” says Gran in the car. “He's coming back tonight. Check I'm feeding you properly.”

As Gran plans to sleep in her own house that night, I wonder why it is that she's driving me home, why Si hasn't come to collect me. I think Gran wonders this, too, when we pull into our driveway to find the garage doors open and Si on his back underneath the Morris Traveller 1000.

“Oh, for goodness' sake,” Gran says as she pulls up.

Hearing us arrive, Si slides out from underneath the car. He is lying on a little dolly, a wooden platform on casters that he made himself.

He looks like a daddy longlegs, too thin and sprawly for the platform. He's tall, Si, and bony, and has springy, sandy-colored hair. I'm not particularly tall for my age, but I'm also a bit bony and have that same sandy-colored hair. We also both have grayish eyes.

Don't you and your dad look alike!
Lots of people have said that to me. I don't tell them Si's my stepfather; it just causes complications. In fact there have been many times when I've pretended that Si is my father. It makes things easier, like at school, when they ask you to write stuff about your family. What does your father do for a living?
My father's a mechanic
. Actually Si is not a mechanic, but he might as well be, the amount of time he spends on this car.

He has been working on his “little moggie” pretty much the whole time he's been in my life. Him and the oily cardboard
and the spare parts and the wrenches and the tinkering.
Tinkering
. That's what Mom calls it, though she says it lovingly.

“You'd think he could leave it alone for one day,” says Gran. “With everything that's going on.”

“Hello, Angela,” says Si, as she gets out of the car. Then he swivels around to face me. “Hi, Jess. How's tricks?”

The dolly on which he swivels is my fault. If I had been the stepchild he wanted, it would have been Si lying—dollyless—under the car tinkering and me lying beside him. Me being interested in exhausts, radiators, crankshafts, and timing chains, and me wriggling out to fetch whatever bolt or socket wrench he had forgotten, so he could keep lying there, hour after hour. And it's not that I haven't tried to be interested, I have. I just never quite got the point of Roger the Wreck. Yes, that's what he calls it—Roger the Wreck. Because when he bought it, it wasn't really a car at all, more a sort of heap of junk. But over the years he's lovingly put it all back together again. He's screwed and bolted and joined and greased it into some sort of whole, bursting with the pride of it.

“Fit like a glove, don't they, Jess? The new doors.”

But actually there's still a gale-force draft around those doors, and the word
new
would not pass a lie detector. There is nothing new about this car. All its components,
the wood frame, the chrome trims, the headlights, they all come from the other cars, the “donor” cars, which squat in our garage. Other heaps of junk he raids to make Roger run. Roger who occasionally roars into life sounding, Mom says, like a wartime Spitfire.

I was nine when Si made himself the little dolly on casters, nine when he finally admitted to himself that, as a mechanic's assistant, I was a failure. That if he forgot the socket wrench (the heavy one from the toolbox marked
war issue
) he would have to crawl out from under the car and get it himself. The dolly made things easier—he could just roll in and out—but whenever I see it, I can't help feeling his sense of disappointment.

“How are the babies?” asks Gran pointedly, as though a real man would not be tinkering under a car when his newborn babies are lying tangled up in a hospital crib.

“Heart ultrasound. EKG. CT scans. Blood work. Even skin tests—mouths and noses checked for bacteria and fungi and . . .” He suddenly pauses. “They're fighting,” he says. “They're giving it everything they've got.”

And his eyes go fierce and starry again, not like the Si I know, and do you know what? That red hotness flashes across my chest a second time in one day. And I imagine how it would be if the twins come home and lie under the
Morris Traveller 1000 and pass their father (their
father
) the war-issue socket wrench. And because there are two of them, one could always be under the car and the other hopping around for the wrench, so they'd never have to leave him and he wouldn't be disappointed ever again. And, of course, I know I'm being ridiculous. I'm being totally unfair to these two babies, who might not even make it to being grown-up enough to get under a car, and in any case, just because they're boys it doesn't mean they'll be any more interested than me in oil and grease and coveralls but, but . . . would he really have wanted them if I'd been good enough? If there'd never been a dolly?

And then it hits me. I've separated them, haven't I? I've put a knife down their join and I've put one twin under the car and the other hopping around for wrenches. And of course there's been talk in our house about separation. But it's so risky, so delicate, that even Si hasn't talked so very loudly about it. And here I am, just dividing them willy-nilly, sticking the knife in. Statistic: Since 1950, seventy percent of separations result in one live twin.

One.

Just one.

“I don't suppose you've thought about dinner?” Gran says.

“Take-out?” hazards Si.

Gran rolls her eyes, as though this is the most ludicrous thing she's ever heard, and then marches into the house to
rustle something up
.

Which leaves me just standing there.

Si looks up. “All right, Jess?” he says and then, with an expert kick of his left heel, he disappears under the car.

Si would have preferred take-out, I would have preferred take-out, but we get rice and frozen vegetables and leftover (Zoe would say
pre-owned
) chicken. Instead of discussing the babies, we talk, or rather Gran talks, about adventures with vases and coal buckets and garden sheds. I say nothing and Si doesn't say much either.

“Hope it hasn't been too dull for you,” Si says, as Gran's car finally pulls out of the driveway.

“Gran told me about Clem's little dip,” I jump in straightaway with this, because part of me fears that Si will disappear under the car again. Or back to the hospital. Or just disappear, plain and simple.

“Hmm?” says Si.

“Dip—in the night.”

“Oh. The murmur. Clem has a VSD, a ventricular septal defect—what they used to call a hole in the heart. So there was a bit of a dip in his breathing last night. Monitor went off. But lots of kids have holes like these, apparently—and they can often spontaneously resolve. So we're not worrying too much about that at the moment.”

“What time did the monitor go off?”

“I don't know—somewhere round two o'clock, I think. Why?”

You look frozen, Jess. Come on now, back to bed, it's after two o'clock
.