The Glass Harmonica (32 page)

And she had believed she was free of Mike Mirren.

“A leopard can't change his spots,” her father would bark.

But he never said anything about the apple not falling far from the tree—that was a sentence he couldn't seem to find among his collection of truisms and chin-pulling wisdom.

When her mother first went into the hospital, before the endlessly long stay in the nursing home but when it was just the two of them in the house, he'd cornered her in the backyard and said darkly, “I don't even know if you're really my daughter.”

He'd said it to her sharply, dismissively, and she always remembered that it was late spring, the tiny purple trumpets falling from the lilacs in back like confetti from a forgotten wedding.

He'd been looking down at his fingernails when he started saying it, ripping away at a ragged piece of his cuticle so that the raw trench started to ooze blood. And then he counted it out, piece by piece, finger by finger, as if there were some great calculating scorecard he was checking that only he had access to. “You don't look like me, you don't act like me. You're not like me. And on top of it, you've got no goddamn common sense at all. And you should have, if you're really mine.”

After that, there was nothing she could do, standing there, the light purple flowers settling on her shoulders as the wind shifted and shook the bushes behind her. The back fence leaned in the whole time, as if listening, strips of ragged white paint always close to falling free, and Helen remembered thinking it was just as well that the fence could hear, that it was just as well if everyone overheard all of it, determining then, in that moment, to be anything but this hard old man's daughter. And to hell with him anyway.

Then Tony had taken her outside and away, and for five years it had been absolutely perfect. First Ronnie was born and then he was two and then four, a serious, smooth little face, and when Tony was working nights, she and Ronnie would sit up and wait for the snowplow to go by, and though it wasn't his route, Tony would find a way to cut down their street, and he'd yank on the air horns even though everyone on the street would call in and complain. And she and Ronnie would wave like mad things at the darkened snowplow cab, the blue light on the roof lighting up the front bedroom in the apartment and all of Ronnie's toys.

And then her mother had to go and die, moving from inconsequential to invisible to interred, and Mike Mirren got all caught up in lonely, suddenly realizing what he should have noticed a decade before, and he and Tony worked out a deal without Tony ever coming to talk to her about it.

Tony came home and told her they'd got a house, and the surprise was that it was “a house you already know really well.” When she found out what that meant, Helen didn't know whether to be furious or distraught—and when Tony tried to hold her, tried to console her without even understanding what the problem was, she fended him off the same way she had fended off a dozen high school boys in her teens, cutting sideways out of his reach as easily as if they were trains on separate and diverging tracks.

To end up living with her father, to have to listen to him lecturing Ronnie in those same clipped sentences, was almost more than she could bear. Over and over again, she wanted to gather Ronnie up and take the boy as far away from the bitter old man as she possibly could. And every time, she couldn't get Tony to agree to go.

“He's poisoning Ronnie,” she told Tony late at night with the lights off in their room, whispering to keep her father from hearing from the room next door, imagining his body pressed up along the wall, his ear tight to the plaster and trying to discern every distant and bottled word, like he could suck the sound right through the wall.

“He's trying to do the same kind of thing he always tried with me,” she whispered. “Telling him the fat cats will always take him for whatever he's worth, that he's always got to watch out for the ones with money because they're the worst, that they're the ones who will find a way to take it all, even if it's a penny at a time. Who are these fat cats supposed to be, anyway? Has he got any idea at all what it is he's talking about?”

But Tony had been unwilling to listen. “The boy's like anyone else,” he said. “He's not going to take anything your father says to heart.” He stopped. “And you're making the old man out to be far worse than he really is.”

Helen already knew that wasn't true, knew it from the way Ronnie looked at his grandfather, knew it from the way Ronnie dogged the old man's steps when her father headed out to the store for the newspaper, a daily newspaper he couldn't do without but whose every story made him curse.

It broke her heart, but she felt powerless. Every time she moved towards him, every time she said anything about it, Ronnie stared at her as if she were something completely foreign to him. Over and over again, Helen wanted to walk up to her father and slap him across the face, tell him he had no right, but every time she found herself in the same room with him, she felt completely powerless.

“We shouldn't have moved here,” she said one weekend, watching Ronnie through the window in the kitchen as he and the old man worked around the backyard, out next to the lilacs and the stunted Japanese maple that Mike Mirren had always treated better than anyone in his family.

“Your father offered, and what were we going to say?” Tony said.

“Were we supposed to say that we liked living in someone else's basement apartment?”

“We could have told him that we were saving for a house.”

“Saving what? It's not like we were actually putting anything away. My cheque's all spent by the time the next one comes. Even now, living here, we're not putting anything away, and we don't even have to pay rent. We couldn't move now if we wanted to.”

“But I do want to,” Helen said.

Tony let his breath out in a heavy, angry rush and turned around, his back to her like some huge, unclimbable cliff face. “You've got to let this go,” he said. “We don't have a choice.”

As time went on, she was sure she sometimes caught Ronnie looking at her with something dark like hate in his eyes, and before she could speak to him, he'd dart back out of sight and disappear.

Ronnie had a way of simply vanishing—not a sound, not a motion, he'd just be gone. And with every month, he seemed more distant. It wasn't so much that he got in trouble as that trouble seemed to appear all around him. Sometimes she'd hear from neighbours that something serious had happened, but when she asked them about it, their eyes would hood and darken and look away, like they'd realized they'd already said too much. And she couldn't catch him red-handed at anything. If she asked, he'd just look steadily at her, his eyes big and black in the middle like they were sucking the light in. She thought he had to realize that he was doing it, had to know that his stare was unsettling.

“Some people are just born to take,” he would say mysteriously, the words awkward coming out of a boy's mouth, and she realized that, somewhere along the line, he'd learned to speak with her father's voice.

Years after that, Helen still found herself trying to make sense out of the scraps of him she got to hear. Shortly before he moved out and into an apartment with that Liz, she'd heard him on the telephone in the downstairs hall, his voice different, the way it went when he was around the small group of other teens he ran with. Helen couldn't really put her finger on it—it was as if he pitched his voice lower when he was talking to them, as if the speed and cadence of his sentences changed, so that the words had an entirely different weight than they did when it was just the two of them together. Like he was someone else, someone she didn't know at all.

“We let him have it good,” she heard Ronnie saying into the phone in the hall. “Beat him well enough that he'd know he wasn't welcome here, right?” He stopped and listened for a moment. “Naw, he didn't recognize us. Cops haven't been around, have they? Jest a fight after the bars closed, some loudmouth comin' home and lipping off, that's all they'll think it was. Jillian won't talk either, not if she and her crowd's going to stay around here an' keep all their windows.”

She wanted to confront him about what she had just heard, but Helen realized then that she was scared—scared of her own son, scared of the way she knew he'd look at her. No little boy left in there, she thought. No little boy at all—and, for those last few weeks before he left, it was like having a stranger in the house, a total stranger who looked like Ronnie but wasn't him at all.

Thinking about it again, she shuddered, and even though it was snowing, she knew she couldn't stay in the house all evening, not with the weight of it hanging over her.

After her father died, they'd pulled up carpets and junked the old furniture. Tony had even redone the kitchen, putting new doors on all the cabinets—but every time she opened one up and looked inside, it was like her father's voice was coming out of it and right straight into her ears.

The walk to the bar—familiar steps regularly taken, and the bar itself so familiar, so separate, that she couldn't help but feel a weight lift. Same old stool, same lights, same pool table. Same video lottery machine every time, and the same game, too, picking numbers for a keno draw that came the moment her numbers were picked. Up at the bar, Mitt Jones and that guy with the white hair, then the required couple of lawyers still dressed in their suits for work but talking too loud, the pints of beer catching up with them. All we need now, Helen thought, is that slut Jillian George with her latest toy in tow, some professional something-or-other all cow-eyed for her until she loses interest and ditches him too.

It doesn't matter, she thought. None of it matters. It doesn't even matter that there is no escape here, no real escape at all. At least it let her think differently, let her move as if she had changed her life like changing the channels on a television.

Not that it was always an easy refuge. She'd been pinned up against the wall once, downstairs by the bathroom, by a sailor who said his name was Vlado, a big man with a watch cap and a scar through one eyebrow, whom she'd been politely friendly with for a short conversation, and she remembered thinking then, fleetingly, her back against the flat wallboard, that it was pretty much like the rest of her life, one big boozy man or another pushing her up against a wall somewhere and trying to force his tongue into her mouth.

But she'd never said it out loud. In fact, she thought, she'd never had anyone to say it to.

Back in the bar, and she was still doing her best to escape her father with every dollar she played. “Watch every penny. . .” She could hear him saying it, and she pressed the buttons on the machine viciously, as if the buttons could feel her rage.

Up at the bar, Mitt Jones was smiling at her, and Helen smiled back while tamping down the thought that his breath couldn't help but smell like rotting gums. Mitt was still smiling at her, his lips wide enough that she could see the browning gaps between each of his teeth.

Take that, Bud Whalen, she thought, I can still push the buttons. But the thought didn't give her the kind of relief she was hoping for. And she knew she'd keep playing the machine until the bar closed or the money ran out, unwilling to go back home to his turf, and to the damned body on the carpet upstairs, to all that guilt.

Damn him, she thought. Damn Tony. Damn him for taking me back to that house and leaving me alone in there with the ghost of the old man.

Twenty more dollars went into the machine, smoothly.

When she looked in her purse and saw that the bills had run out, she was neither surprised nor particularly upset. She had lost: she had won. Something in there between them both. Resigned, she thought. I just feel resigned.

Mitt smiled as she stood up and she smiled back anyway, just for form, even though there wasn't an ounce of energy left in her that felt like smiling. Helen closed her purse, gathered up her coat and headed back out into the snow. It was falling heavier now, wheeling around her so that she could never really get away from it, the wind picking at one side of her face, wrapping around her back for a gust or two and then pounding straight at her face again. The sidewalks were already filled to overflowing, the snow there knee-deep and hard to push through, so she walked out in the street, staying in the tracks left by scattered passing cars. Whenever there was a break between the row houses, the wind struck her so hard that she'd stagger slightly, and she imagined that the row of footsteps behind her must look like the uneven wobble of a drunk—except for the fact that they'd be filled in almost as fast as she was making them. Three drinks in, she thought, so it's only the wind.

Not a fit night, she thought, and she knew Ronnie would probably be busier than most nights, more pizzas to deliver to those unwilling to risk the snow and looking for an easy way out.

When she got home, throwing the last of her cigarette down into the snow, she saw that there was a police car next to the curb in front of the house. She knew it was waiting for her, knew it by the white cloud of exhaust that puffed out of the tailpipe before being snatched away by the wind. There were no tire tracks left behind the back wheels: the snow had filled them right in. Every now and then, the windshield wipers would flick once across the glass, as if they were too tired to do anything more. The car sat warm, melting and shedding the snow, waiting there like it was alive.