The Glass Harmonica (25 page)

Inside, she could remember the living room and the kitchen, but not as well as she would have liked: she couldn't open the drawers, and her only memory of the backyard was with it always in bloom, as if winter never ever came. She tried hard not to think about the other parts, about being loaded into the car and taken away like a sack of potatoes, the woman in the car calling her Mom and telling the doctors that it couldn't go on the way it had been going.

“She's calling the power company ten or fifteen times a day now,” the woman had said while Edythe looked around the room—a waiting room, she decided, or an examining room, and there was a man in a white coat, all dressed up like a doctor, although you couldn't be too sure. People can pick any getup they like, Edythe knew, passing themselves off as anything at all. That's why you have to be careful at the door, she thought. Just close it quickly—or don't even answer it at all.

She looked at the man in the white coat again. Anyone can nod and take notes on a clipboard, she thought. You don't need a medical degree for that.

“She tells them that there's a problem with the electricity, and they have to come, even if they're sure it's going to be nothing.” The woman stopped talking, looked at Edythe and then leaned in close to the man in the coat. As if I'm hard of hearing, Edythe thought, and I most certainly am not. “The power company guys have taken to pretending they've found something and tell her it was a good thing she called. Otherwise she just keeps calling them back, over and over, all night long, saying the problem's come back and they have to check it out all over again. And then, if that doesn't work or if they don't come fast enough, she calls the fire department.” The woman shook her head. “That's only part of it. She's told the police everything under the sun, they don't believe a word she says anymore. The police say they'd charge her except that it's not really her fault, the way she is.”

What is she talking about? Edythe thought. Where there's smoke, there's fire, and that's why you need the fire department. You don't just wait to die there in your bed. But Edythe didn't say anything out loud, and the man in the white coat wasn't paying attention to her anyway.

Edythe hated it when people did that: when they talked about you and all around you, and if they ever got around to speaking to you at all, they either yelled or treated you like you were a complete simpleton. And you call the power company when there are electrical problems—you're supposed to, she thought. They have advertisements on the television telling you to do just that, for God's sake. And when you hear buzzing and crackling sounds in the wires, there are obviously serious problems. There is such a thing as a short circuit. They are the kinds of things that start electrical fires and burn you to death in your sleep. Not a day goes by, Edythe thought, when you don't hear about a fire somewhere in the city started by an electrical problem. Old houses, old neighbours.

“She doesn't remember my name or Bob's, or Dennis, and she looks at us like we're total strangers,” the woman said.

“Tests first,” the doctor said to the woman while he wrote in a file. Edythe noticed how the heavy paint was bubbling up at the tops of the walls, as if there had been a leak that had been painted over instead of being fixed. A large poster of a man on one wall, stripped away to his arteries and veins. A blood pressure cuff hanging from a box on a wall. One of those lights for looking in ears. So it's an examining room after all, she thought. Or it's supposed to look that way.

“We'll put her in semi-private,” the white-coated man said, “get an MRI and some other diagnostics and see where we go from there.”

They made her sit in a wheelchair and they took away her shoes, then another person she'd never seen before wheeled her to an elevator. The trip led to a room with three beds, two of them occupied. Edythe saw the room number, 437, and tried to save it up in her head where all the other numbers were. Too many numbers over seventy-five years: they jostled up there in awkward, overlapping quarters.

“Arnold. You have to get Arnold,” the woman closest to the door said as the nurse wheeled Edythe into the hospital room.

Edythe didn't like the way the other woman stared at her, the way she kept her eyes wide open and big and staring straight at her.

“Find Arnold,” the wizened woman said again, and Edythe could imagine the woman's hands clawing at her sleeve. Those gnarled, veiny hands, held up high in front of the woman's chest. Edythe didn't like looking at them, but had a hard time looking away.

Edythe didn't like the smell either. It smelled like soiled babies and old milk, and there was lots of noise. Machines beeping. Loud radiators. Someone calling out from down the hallway, the words muffled, indistinct and clearly urgent.

The nurse saw Edythe paying attention. “Don't worry about him, we'll close that door.” She stopped at the bed next to the window. “You're here. You're 437B, if anyone asks.”

Facing Edythe, an older woman sat as still as a statue, a length of tubing tucked up under her nose like some sort of clear plastic moustache. The woman stared at Edythe, her face impassive.

“Your roommates are Mrs. Tinden and Mrs. Walters,” the nurse said. “Mrs. Tinden shares the washroom with you, because she can still get around. Mrs. Walters stays put, and if she tries to get up, you can press your button and call the nurses' station. We don't want Mrs. Walters trying to get up.” We? Edythe thought.

The nurse came around to the front of the wheelchair and helped Edythe up and onto the bed. I don't need any help, Edythe thought as the nurse pressed gently on Edythe's shoulders, turning her and then lifting her legs up onto the bed. Edythe was looking out the window at the parking lot, at the standing cast-iron radiator, the thick institutional paint. There were tall curtains on rails, curtains that could be pulled around her bed to offer some privacy.

“I don't want to be here,” she said to the nurse. “I want to be home.”

The nurse was pulling thick sheets over Edythe's legs and didn't seem to be paying attention.

I'd leave if I could, Edythe thought. But they had taken her purse, her keys, her shoes and her clothes. She had kept her socks, but they had made her change into a suit of loose blue hospital clothes, too large for her frame.

“Make yourself comfortable,” the nurse said. “The doctor will be in later to tell you about the schedule for the tests.”

Mrs. Tinden was the goggle-eyed woman.

Mrs. Walters sat quietly, hoses hissing.

Were they here against their will too? Edythe thought. Maybe one of them was there to keep an eye on her neighbours, Edythe thought. What was it they called it on television? A plant? Maybe she shouldn't say anything at all—and for a little while, she didn't. But Edythe had never been in a place that was so noisy and yet so empty, that so needed to be filled up with words. The other women stared, and the silence tugged at Edythe. Down the hall, there was the sound of someone crying quietly.

“Men are all pigs,” Edythe said. “But you two don't need me to tell you that. Get to be women of our age and you already know.”

“Arnold?” Mrs. Tinden said quietly.

The other woman, propped up in a sitting position, just stared, her oxygen whistling softly.

“Len Menchinton?” Edythe said—and then the words were falling out of her in a rush, and she felt like she had to slow them down somehow to keep them from rolling right over each other. “He's a pig. For certain. Disgusting.”

The other women were silent—but they were paying careful attention, an audience open to whatever was coming next.

“You should have seen what I saw, with his hands all over her underwear. Ronnie Collins? Just an animal. Keith O'Reilly? I hardly know where to start.”

Mrs. Purchase looked at the women, one at a time. Looked straight at each one of them. Started talking again.

“You know what they're like. They preen and walk around like they're the cocks of the walk. So full of themselves and talking down to you so you'd never guess they were up to anything at all. Never guess that they've each got their dirty little secrets, that they are so ready to just roll around like dogs if you let them.

“I told Ingrid Menchinton about Len. I did. I had to. And I was right to, because you shouldn't be made a fool of, shouldn't be walking around with everybody quite able to see what is going on and you in the dark, everyone laughing at you. And it didn't do any good, you know. She's still with him—I see them in the big window in their kitchen, laughing, necking like teenagers, his hands right up there under her shirt. Some women just have no self-respect at all. I did right telling her, though, even if I was the one that got told off for it.”

Edythe paused, caught her breath, looked out the window. Even if it was only the fourth floor, the room was pretty high up, she thought, the hospital up the way it was, cut into the side of the hill. You could see for miles. She turned back to the two women, giving each one a careful stare before starting again.

“I should have told Evelyn too, whatever the consequences,” Edythe said. “I regret that still, for sure. To this day. But I tried to tell the police, and you know, you can't even trust them, they're in it for themselves. Like everyone.

“My husband Frank trusted people, trusted anyone who came in the door, and look what that got him. Now, he was a good man. You might have heard of him—no one could ever say a bad word. He ran a restaurant on Water Street called the Doryman. Got in trouble with the wrong people, he did. Bought St. Pierre liquor, French liquor, no tax stamps or anything, they told him everyone was doing it and no one would ever get caught. And him so innocent. One stupid mistake and then they were into him, made him pay protection money. Blackmail.” Neither of the women moved. Both of them stared.

Edythe, suddenly uncomfortable, found herself picking at the lint pills on the flannel sheet. The sheet said
Property of Eastern Health
on it in big blue lettering. There were scores of pilling lumps on the fabric. Every time she stopped talking, the room was quiet again. Only the hissing of the hoses.

“He told me about it. Told me they were threatening him, that they beat up Mike, one of the cooks, and broke his arm. Frank said he had to pay more and more, every week some new demand, and that they wouldn't listen to anything. I told him he should stand up to them. That it was a matter of principle. But he wouldn't. Because of me. He just kept paying. We were almost bankrupt, but he wouldn't go to the police. Told me they said they would hurt me if anyone said anything to the police.”

Edythe looked at Mrs. Tinden out of the corner of her eye. The woman hadn't moved, her hands still up tight in front of her chest. But she was staring at Edythe, wide-eyed.

“One night, after closing, he just didn't come home. Maybe they wanted more money than he had for them, maybe he finally decided he wouldn't pay anymore. I don't know. He never told me that he was going to do anything different, but he must have. I didn't believe it at first. He was their gravy train, their easy money. But they took him. Maybe they were trying to make a point to other businessmen downtown. I don't know. I never heard another word, and the police didn't do a thing, just told me there were no signs of disturbance in the restaurant and that people sometimes just decide to disappear. But they were taking the case seriously—that's what they told me every time I called. They were taking the case seriously.

“Someone must have got to them too. They get people. Sometimes people are just gone. There are people you don't cross. You don't cross the mob, for sure, I can tell you that. And you don't stand up to them either. Not if you want to walk away in one piece.”

Edythe paused and lowered her voice. She could see that both of the women were following her with their eyes, no other reaction.

“You don't know how evil people can be. You don't know until you see it with your own eyes. Ordinary people. Even people on your own street, people you run into every day.” Edythe smoothed the sheet across her lap, looked up again. “I knew it years ago,” she said primly. “I knew the truth of it.”

This was it, she thought. The big secret, the one no one ever wanted to listen to—but neither Mrs. Walters nor Mrs. Tinden was moving. Maybe they wouldn't leave, Edythe thought. Maybe they couldn't. Edythe felt the truth in her chest like she had swallowed a whole egg, big and round and just wanting to come back out. In a movie, she thought, the music would swell up now, dramatic, so everyone would know it was an important moment.

“I saw it all through the window. I saw Keith O'Reilly stop that truck, her just walking on the sidewalk, minding her own business, him calling out to her, ‘Get over here now, slut!' nasty like that, and then he was getting out of the truck, coming around the side where she was.”

Edythe felt flushed then, knew there was colour rising in her cheeks. It always did when she thought about Keith O'Reilly and that poor, innocent girl.

“He practically stuffed that girl into the truck. Grabbed her arm. Wouldn't let go. And a hand over her mouth so she couldn't scream or anything. He must have had it fixed so she couldn't get the door open again. The lock jammed so she couldn't pull it up. Her fingers scratching away useless on the inside of the glass. When he got in the cab, he hit her too. And I recognized her from the television. I recognized her right away, the day they put her picture up and said she was missing. I'm good with faces, always have been. And I know about responsibility. About civic duty.