Breaking Glass (28 page)

A great heaviness tugs at me, as if the water has a magnetic pull. The air is elastic, a wall of resistance, and I’m so tired of pushing against it.

I can slip into the water and float free of this life.

It’s always been a fight to take the next step. The next breath.

With one leg, it’s even harder now.

Snow flutters down in powdery flakes. I gaze longingly at the rocks that slope to the reservoir’s edge, and begin to climb down.

Somehow, I reach the shoreline without falling. I stare deep into the murky water. I can see the smooth boulders that line the bottom. Beyond the dam, the rushing waters of the Gorge collect.

Like the tangle of roots that twist beneath the soil of Riverton, the water connects us, too. I’m gripped by a sudden aching desire to see my mother again. To curl up in her arms like the little boy who used to ask her to chase the monsters away.

A thought drops into my head. The jewelry box in my dream. I’m missing something. Are the clues to my mother’s death concealed inside it? Did she really never mean to leave me?

Tears pool on my lashes and slip down my cheeks. The water, dark and welcoming, calls me to be with my mother again.

Darkness catches me and descends like a shroud, blotting out the desolate terrain. I sink onto the rocks, consumed by it.

All you have to do
, says the wind through the trees,
is slip into the water. We can be together
.

I’m sprawled on the rocks beside the reservoir. Alone, the scent of vanilla lingering in the bitter air.

It would be easy enough to fill my pockets with stones like Virginia Woolf and sink to the bottom. The thought of the black water filling my lungs, choking off my air until my lungs explode, sends me into a panic. I can’t do it.

I’m even too freaking afraid to kill myself.

Instead, I gaze across the gray water. Tiny Pirate Island sits, a monument, a blip on the horizon, a hiccup of happiness in our pathetic history. I think of my Pirate Queen, the tree with three trunks, the Buffalo nickel—and what will never be.

I begin to haul myself back up the rock pile leading to the road, but slip, my palms grazing the sharp rocks. I cry out as a crutch slips from my grasp and clatters down the hill into the reservoir.

Heaving myself over more rocks, I climb until I make it to the road, relieved it was just my crutch and not me that met its end.

By now it’s getting dark. Snow falls steadily, blanketing the world in a lacy white haze. Cold penetrates my layers of clothes and finds its way into my bones.

With one crutch I can only move in awkward hops. The way back home is uphill. My crutch isn’t getting much traction. I debate calling Marisa to rescue me, but decide against it. I don’t want to explain what I’m doing out here. And I just can’t face her.

I jerk at the sound of a car rolling to a stop behind me. A door slams. Patrick Morgan strides toward me, chuckling softly. “Most people have the sense not to come out on a night like this.”

“It was daylight when I left,” I say through clacking teeth. “I just wanted to get some air.”

Patrick Morgan laughs thunderously. “You can take the boy off of the road, but you can’t take the road out of the boy, huh? It won’t be long, Jeremy, before you’ll be running for real.”

I nod, shivering too hard to respond.

Patrick Morgan helps me into the passenger seat, then turns the thermostat up to toast. As the warmth heats my bones, I steal a glance at the craggy lines of the elder Morgan’s strong features. Thick silver hair stops short of the stunning blue eyes, like a patch of crystal-clear sky breaking through storm clouds. I’m sure that in his day Patrick Morgan was just as extraordinary as his son, though these days Ryan is a pale shadow of his former glory, as tightly wound as an over-tuned guitar string. But the elder Morgan is almost Zenlike in his steady calm.

Patrick Morgan drives in silence, the black BMW hugging the snow-sheathed roads. It seems to be taking us a good bit longer than it should to reach my street.

His deep voice shakes me out of my daze. “I wonder what your father would say if he knew the risks you’ve been taking. The poor man has been through so much.”

“Risks?”

“I would consider hiking in a snowstorm on one leg to be a potential risk.”

“You have a point, there.”

“And trudging through an unplowed playground to sit on a swing. Not the smartest move.”

“Ryan told you we met?”

I glance out the window. Patrick Morgan is driving very slowly, and I realize we’ve passed the turn off for my street.

“Ryan was extremely upset when he came home this afternoon. What did you say to him?”

“I—” Suddenly the car is too hot. I tug at the zipper of my jacket. “I told him about—some of the things I’ve been going through.”

“Of course. It must be very hard for you,” he says mildly, “but is that all?” I can’t shrug off the feeling that I am on the witness stand and Patrick Morgan is cross-examining me.

“He said he was upset that we haven’t been that close. I told him it’s not his fault about the accident. It isn’t.”

The car rolls to a stop on a deserted, dark portion of Route 112. “That was very charitable of you, Jeremy. But I’m certain you brought up a few of the other things that have been on your mind. Like what you blurted out at our annual Christmas party, for instance. It wasn’t very polite.”

“I-I—,” I stammer, completely at a loss in the face of Patrick Morgan’s penetrating gaze.

“Ryan tells me you spoke about Susannah Durban’s disappearance.” He pauses while I squirm. “Jeremy, we all know how fond of that girl you were, and maybe your devotion made you a bit blind to her many flaws. Susannah was very troubled, as Ryan can attest.”

I hang my head, wondering how much of this so-called behavior I’d missed while I was busy laying flowers at the altar of my lovesick obsession. Was I truly that blind?

“It’s understandable that so much loss would be hard on a boy,” Patrick Morgan continues.

I nod, my voice trapped in my throat.

“But you’ve deeply upset my son with your line of questioning, Jeremy. Your very odd and provocative accusations.” His eyes blaze. I shrink lower in the seat, my heart thudding.

“That’s how it started with your mother.” His words ring in my ear like the crack of a judge’s gavel. “First the paranoia. The visions. The complex intrigues. The conviction that people were out to get her. Then came the drinking. Then…”

I’m hunched in the seat, jumpy with the pointless urge to run. Doubts flutter inside my stomach like moths in a jar.
Am I really just crazy like her, after all? I did almost jump in the reservoir
.

“In Riverton, we all pitch in to help each other. Mrs. Morgan tried everything she could to help your mother. It was heartbreaking to watch her best friend unravel. But in the end, no one could save her from herself.” Patrick Morgan’s deep voice drips with the mournful tones of an undertaker.

“But you, Jeremy. You can still be helped. I’ve spoken to your father about appropriate facilities once you’re fitted with a leg. Very progressive places that will help you cope, deal with your addictions, and help you learn to manage your illness.”

I have no response. He’s tied a noose around me with his words. And he very well may be right. I might be full-out insane. A danger to society. A danger to myself.

After all, I’m the guy who’s been fucking a ghost. And then, the memory of the locket bubbles into my addled brain.
Trudy knows
.

“What about Trudy Durban? Did she try to help?”

For a moment, Patrick Morgan’s face contorts into a twisted mask of rage and I’m afraid he’s going to reach over and snap my neck. But his flexible features smooth and his voice oozes out, calm and reasonable.

“Trudy Durban is a reckless woman who cloaks herself in religious trappings. She never could face the fact that her daughter was out of control. That others had to step in and try to save the poor girl. She couldn’t have helped your mother even if she’d wanted to.”

He stares at me, his face lit eerily by the glow of the dashboard lights. “Remember to mind your manners, Jeremy. I’m going to speak to your father to ensure that you visit Dr. Kopeck regularly and get the meds you need to control your illness before it consumes you.”

He drives me home, physically carries me into the house, settles me onto my bed and says with an odd smirk, “and Jeremy, I think we should keep our little talk to ourselves. You can keep a secret, too, can’t you?”

C H A P T E R
t w e n t y - s i x

Now

The light on the answering machine is blinking. Five messages from my dad.

He’d been trying frantically to reach me for hours. He got called out of town on urgent business for the remainder of the week. He’ll be back sometime during the day on New Year’s Eve. He will have Marisa stop by to bring food, check in on me, and bring me to my appointments.

So I’ve got the house to myself. I can tear the house apart and hope to find the liquor I know my dad couldn’t bear to throw out and drink myself to death instead of the more watery alternative. Or I can figure out what really happened to Susannah. And my mother.

The answers, I’m convinced, are in the attic. If I can connect the dots, understand the clues, it will come to me. This can’t be that different than the way historians piece together facts. If they can do it with artifacts and lost civilizations, I can find the root of my own mysteries.

With one crutch gone, I sit on the bed and contemplate the damn wheelchair, vowing to figure out an alternate mobility device. After a flash of inspiration, I fashion an ad hoc crutch from a mop handle. The attic climb is easier with the strength I’ve built in my arms, and the good news is that I can clomp around to my heart’s content without worrying about Dad hearing me.

The jewelry box is exactly where I’d left it the last time, buried at the bottom of a carton of yellowed newspapers and my mother’s trinkets. I pull it out and sit it on the floor in front of me, frightened of what I will find.

And what I might not.

I turn the box upside down and hold it up to the light. There’s nothing unusual. I tap it and there’s an odd, hollow sound. Carefully, resting the box against my leg, I dig my fingernail into the bottom side and pry open the false bottom.

Jammed in the hollow space is a yellowed envelope stuffed with neatly folded newspaper clippings dating back thirty years.

The missing rectangles. But these aren’t coupons.

They are all articles of varying length about the accidental drowning of a boy named Douglas Bernard Lewis. He was an extremely handsome kid, a football quarterback. He died when the ice on the reservoir cracked and he’d fallen in. There’d been no one there to save him.

I’m struck by the horror of it. To die alone in the cold depths of the reservoir with no one to hear your screams. To drown in black water.

My mother seemed obsessed with the death of this boy. The name is vaguely familiar. Shivering, I wonder if she was thinking of him when she drove her car into the Gorge.

In addition to the newspaper clippings, there are snapshots of a house at 115 Garden Crescent. My mother’s neat handwriting has labeled it,
The Lewis’ house
. Then, there is the photo of a modest house with a For Sale sign in front. Next, the house boarded up, vacant. Each photo, dated on the back in my mother’s neat handwriting, tracks the neglected state of the house as nature reclaimed it, until ten years later, when the house was torn down and a new house was built in its place. Still, there are photos of the new house that date right up to the week my mother died. There are also photos of Douglas Bernard Lewis’ grave, a single flower laid on the stone, year after year, dated in the same manner.

There are images of the boy, frozen in youthful exuberance. My heart squeezes with sympathy for his family. If my mother felt this badly, how terribly did his death impact the people he left behind?

I sprawl on the dusty attic floor, trying to tease out the thread that connects my mother’s death to Susannah’s death, to the drowning death of Douglas Bernard Lewis. The answer hovers somewhere just out of sight.

Supported by my makeshift crutches, the papers tucked under my arm, I clomp to the staircase, then set them down. I’m tentatively easing myself down the ladder, rung by rung, when dark spots crawl across my vision like caterpillars on a windshield.

I don’t feel myself let go of the ladder, but I’m falling backward, the papers releasing from my hand. They flutter around me in slow motion, like stop-action moths. I sink into darkness and remember exactly where I’d heard the name of Douglas Bernhard Lewis.