Glass Girl (A Young Adult Novel) (15 page)

He stood, then paused and turned back toward me. “You know, your grandfather used to say that we were never promised an easy time on this earth. Life’s about how we react to the hard stuff.”

“I’m not sure what that means,” I said.

“I’m not either,” he said, with a wry laugh.

Watching him walk away, I memorized how thin he was so I’d have a comparison point. Suddenly shaking all over, I hugged my knees to try to force my body to be still. I no longer felt like flesh and bones. I was more brittle than that.

His bedroom door closed and he was quiet the rest of the night—and the next morning as I got ready for school. Putting my ear to his bedroom door, I touched the knob and fought my desire to open the door so that he could comfort me.

I was a string on an instrument wound too tightly to play right. The ringing in my ears returned—the sound I’d heard for weeks after we buried Wyatt.

Still it surprised me when something deep inside me broke. Even broken, I made it to school and I walked to English. My mind stayed focused on my mom and her choices. When those thoughts had crossed my mind before, I’d swept them away. They wouldn’t go away anymore.

After a time, Henry slid into the seat next to me. He reached for my hand and then leaned toward me. “What happened?” he said. “What’s wrong? You’re pale.”

“I think I need to take the day off.” I reached down for my backpack. “I’ll be fine. I just need to…”

He touched my arm to stop me. “Hold on, Meg. Are you sick?” He stood up and gathered his things. “I’ll drive you home.”

I opened my mouth to object, but found I couldn’t. I had no objection. He probably should drive. He took my backpack from me just as Mr. Landmann breezed through the door, smiling at the early arrivals, and whistling an upbeat tune. “Morning, guys,” he said.

Stopping in my tracks, I couldn’t go any further. “I’m okay, Henry. I can make it through English.”

“Are you sure?” He glanced at Mr. Landmann. “Because he would understand if you’re sick.”

“I’m sure.” I shuffled sideways toward my desk and sat. Henry followed me, keeping his eyes on my face the whole time.

He leaned closer, lowering his voice. “Something happened. You have to tell me what’s wrong. Have I done something?”

I shook my head. “Of course not.” I pleaded with him to believe me. “I’ll be fine in a minute.”

“If you need to talk, then let’s go, right now. We’ll walk out of here before class starts—you and me. We’ll take a drive.”

I glanced up at him. “It’s my parents.” Shaking my head against the details that wanted out, I gave him the most basic explanation. “Things are really messy right now at home.”

Mr. Landmann started class abruptly, as usual. His
modus operandi
was to begin by reciting a poem or a passage from whatever we were studying. So, without warning, he said,

"Hope" is the thing with feathers—

That perches in the soul—

And sings the tune without the words—

And never stops—at all—
Then, in utterly absurd irony, Mr. Landmann called my name. “Meg, I’d love to hear your interpretation of Dickinson’s poem.”

You’ve got to be kidding me!
I struggled to maintain composure. Henry shifted in his seat, probably trying to figure out a way to intercede for me.

“Well, if you take the poem at face value,” I said after a long pause, “you’d think she’s saying that ‘hope’ is with us, all of us, and it’s strong enough to sing to us, no matter what storm we’re enduring or how far away from normal we are.”

“Taken at face value, you say. So tell me what you think lies under the surface, Meg.” Mr. Landmann’s body language said “gotcha.” Why would he turn on me like this? I thought we had an understanding. I got to be weirdly, intensely quiet and turn in great assignments, and he got to ask other people the questions.

My mouth went dry. “She’s obviously making fun of people who are naïve enough to believe this. I mean, what hope could
she
possibly feel? She was so completely introverted that she stopped leaving her house when she was our age. Then, even weirder, she stopped leaving her bedroom. She would only talk to people through a door. She was suicidal. She was in love with a man she couldn’t have. She hid her poetry and ordered her sister to burn it when she died. She didn’t live like she believed in hope.”

Mr. Landmann looked at me like he was studying a member of a newly found tribe in the jungle. “Let me understand. You think she was being dishonest when she wrote about hope? Speaking tongue in cheek, if you will? You believe, personally, that it is possible for hope to fail us or to not even exist, and that’s what Dickinson is trying to tell us?”

“I think to call hope a ‘bird’ that sings without ever stopping was her way of saying hope isn’t real enough, concrete enough, to matter. It’s cartoonish.”

“Such cynicism, Meg. I didn’t expect that from you.” He touched the smart board, bringing up a picture of a delicate flower with a note next to it. “Actually, I tend to think Miss Dickinson did know of hope and I think I can explain why I’ve come to that conclusion. But I certainly respect your opinion.”

He turned to the class. “Did you know Dickinson was best known in her community, around the time she wrote this poem, for her love of gardening? She spent hours tending impossibly difficult garden patches and writing about exactly what each plant needed to have a chance. I think the act of nurturing tender little leaves out of the cold hard New England ground is itself a thesis on hope. This is, after all, one of her earlier poems, perhaps before life, and maybe mental illness, had turned her into a harsher critic of hope. If she ever was a critic as Meg believes.”

“Henry, what do you have to say about this poem?” The class turned to Henry, wondering if he would support my theory.

His face looked so troubled that I had to fight the urge to reach out and smooth his forehead. I didn’t like to see those lines there. He leaned forward, glanced at me, and cleared his throat.

“Well, I tend to read the poem a little more optimistically, I guess. I think Dickinson tried to put into words the hope that she felt and a bird fluttering in her soul was the nearest image she could come up with. I think that’s a pretty good description of the way hope feels. Kind of a flutter, but definitely there if you’re patient enough to wait on it. But there’s a lot about her that I don’t understand, so I could sure be wrong about that.”

Mr. Landmann’s lecture couldn’t puncture the fog that settled around me. I sat, silently fighting angry tears and digging my nails into my hands. Tennyson mouthed, “Are you okay?” I didn’t respond. Henry didn’t take his eyes off my face and, after class, he helped me up and walked me out. He took my hand in the hall and without a word led me outside to the parking lot. He opened the passenger door of his truck and helped me in. I slumped over in the seat in tears. He climbed into the truck, pulled me toward him, and held me. His arms were all that held the pieces of me together.

“M
eg, no kidding. You’ve got to start talking.” Henry sighed loudly. “I can’t be in the dark here. I need to know what’s wrong with you.”

“Promise me you won’t tell anyone.” I was hanging on by a thread.

“I would never do that,” he said, stroking my hair. “You can trust me with anything.”

“I don’t have a family like yours, Henry.”

“That’s okay. Families are different and they all have their issues.” He bent his head to speak quietly into my ear and his warmth made me a little dizzy.

“She’s gone. My mom. She left us to go back to Pittsburgh a few weeks ago. I didn’t want to tell you. She needed….” I stopped myself before the words tumbled out. I couldn’t say it all. He knew enough now.

Henry shifted so he could hold my face and wipe my tears with his thumbs. “It’s all right,” he whispered. “You’re going to be okay, Meg. I’m sorry you’re hurting.” He tucked me against his chest. “Your parents will work this out. There’s nothing God won’t do to fix this.”

That touched a nerve, because I’d heard that over and over since Wyatt died. People who meant well could say things like that about God and walk away. It made them feel better even though they’d done nothing and nothing had changed. The fact was God had not been there in the school when our world changed and he had not been here as my mom slowly disappeared.

“You don’t have to say that.” I tensed and sat up.

“Say what? That they’ll work it out? Your parents obviously love each other a lot. I’ll never forget the story you told me about how they met.”

“Not that. About God.”

Henry turned toward me until his back rested against the driver’s window. “What?”

“God hasn’t bothered with my family in the past,” I said, with more heat than I intended. “So when someone says that, or believes it, I usually disappoint them by giving examples of how wrong that is. I don’t want to do that to you.”

He nodded and started to respond, but closed his mouth instead. He backed out and drove for twenty or thirty minutes toward his ranch, turning onto an old farm road with a sign that said, “Whitmire Tract #1328.” Cows wandered slowly toward the road. Some of them blocked our way, but Henry rolled down his window and yelled at them while he inched the truck forward slowly. He parked next to a small cabin that looked like the slightest wind might topple it.

Henry’s face looked determined, almost fierce, like he was trying to will away my pain. I’d been on my own, emotionally, since Wyatt died. I hadn’t even been able to unload on my parents for fear of what it would do to them. And how screwed up was that? Henry was here now and he was strong enough to take it. I wouldn’t burden him with Wyatt, but he could sit with me and I could borrow his strength.

He helped me out of the truck, found a key under a loose board on the porch, and opened the door.

The cabin was clean inside, but sparsely furnished with just a cot, a chair, a table, a sink, and an old stove. A fireplace took up one corner of the room and firewood lay neatly on the stone hearth. Henry lit a lamp on the table with a match.

“It’s like going back in time,” I said.

“It’s one of the first houses built on the land for ranch hands. My dad keeps it up so we can use it as shelter in case we get caught out here in a storm. And my mom thinks it’s ‘cute’.”

“It’s so quiet.” I pressed my face against the front window to stare at the tall grasses blowing in the wind. An enormous, knotty oak shaded the cabin and made it feel like we were hidden.

“I come here a lot to get away from things,” he said. “It’s just a place where I can think. Sometimes I spend the night.”

He moved the chair close to the fireplace and motioned for me to sit. And then he went to work building a fire. When he had it going well, he sat on the floor by my feet and I slid down next to him.

“Thank you.” I didn’t take my eyes off the fire.

He rubbed the small of my back gently. “You don’t need to thank me. I just want you to be okay. I thought it might clear your head.”

Things were simple here—a warm fire, a big-hearted boy, and time. “I like it here.” No need to jinx things by admitting I already felt a little better.

“Look,” he said. “I just want to say that it might not be tonight or tomorrow or the next day, but eventually everything is going to be okay.”

“I hope so. She had a hard time, my mom. And…she never felt like it was her choice to move here. She never wanted to leave Pittsburgh. She said she just needed to be closer to…family.”

“I’m sure it’s complicated. Seems like life gets really complex the older we get. Maybe someday you’ll understand her decision better.” He picked up my hand and traced my fingers with his. “Give it a little time.”

I closed my eyes, memorizing how it felt to be touched like this. Like there was nothing else he’d rather do. Nowhere else he’d rather be. “I’ve handled worse,” I whispered. “I had to quit relying on her to manage my emotions a long time ago. I just needed to vent.”

“You don’t have to downplay this with me.” He shifted and cupped his hand under my chin. “Feel what you feel when you’re with me. Don’t hide.”

“It’s just that your family seems so perfect, Henry.” It wasn’t that I wished away my own family, just that I wished for more of my own family.

Henry chuckled. “We’re far from perfect, Pittsburgh. We’ve got things that are broken, too. We’ve all given my parents fits at times. I’ve got one sister who worries us all the dang time. We’re just human and we try. We have faith.”

“You seem very well put together.” I shrugged. “I’ve just…I’ve seen some things that aren’t right. That aren’t just. And a God who loved people would have stopped those things. So either he’s there and he doesn’t love us anymore or he’s not there. The second option hurts less.” I paused to see how Henry reacted. His eyes were so full of…something. “I’m sorry. I can tell this is very important to you.”

“Faith is important to me,” he said. “But don’t apologize. We all struggle with belief every day if we’re honest. I’ve lost people that I loved and I’ve seen some evil things, too. But every day, I come back to this—there
is
a God and he
is
involved in our lives. Awful things happen. Evil things…but that’s because we live on Earth where we get to decide how to spend our time. We make crappy decisions.”

The questions I’d always had bubbled to the surface. “But if you were God and you loved us, wouldn’t you make everything nice and safe?”

“Meg.” He focused on my face. “It wouldn’t be real love if there weren’t the possibility for another response to him. If we couldn’t choose
not
to love him, then our love would be empty. That’s why there’s evil in this world, because there’s free choice in this world. He allows the one to prove the other.”

He waited for me to respond but I had no words left. I simply nodded—not in agreement but in acknowledgment.

“He just wants us to love him back. He craves that from you even more than I do.” He rubbed my cheek with the back of his hand. “This is what it is. The promise is that when everything crashes, he’ll stand there with us. And someday we’ll understand the meaning of it all. Right now, we accept it on faith.”