The Broken Teaglass (35 page)

On the news, that evening’s top story was of the dead man found in Freeman Park. Not on the paved path where I had left him, but farther into the wooded area. Stabbed in the neck and bled to death under the evergreens. Derek Brownlow was 42 years old. It was
showtime
now. But oddly, I had a sudden craving for a cup of tea—sweet, milky, and warm. I put on a pot of water and watched it steam and bubble, trying to remember my last cup of tea. The exact temperature, the amount of sugar, how long it had steeped, the strength of the flavor. When I’d had that last sip, I had no idea I wouldn’t get another, I’d break my glass, I’d never experience the exact sensation of that cup of tea again. It had been, in retrospect, a particularly delicious cup of tea.

22

I switched off the stove and picked up the phone. By the time Scout answered, I’d lost it. I was crying. He wanted to know what was the matter, nearly yelling the question after I couldn’t answer his first couple of tries. I couldn’t form sentences, or even meaningful one-word answers. He hung up. A few minutes later, he was there, at my door. His cheeks were red from rushing there in the cold. His hair, usually so carefully styled with a round brush and
blow-dryer
, was tousled in all directions. He had never looked so cute. He had never looked so powerless. I wanted to hug him, for strength, and then push him back out the door. I was glad to have him there, but suddenly acutely aware that he couldn’t save me from anything. He followed me into the kitchen and watched me pour tea water from the pot to the sink. He wanted to know if I was all right. I said no. No, I said again. I’m crazy. You wouldn’t believe how crazy I’ve become.

23

He offered me one of my own kitchen chairs. Even upon seeing his reserved and intellectual girlfriend in such serious need of a
headshrinker
, he didn’t lose his composure or his gentlemanly way. What is it? he wanted to know. His calm was impressive, and it made the misplaced absurdity of the story all the more clear. That story and this calm couldn’t exist together in the same room.

24

So I opted for silence. Since the only other option was explicit speech, and all the inevitables that would follow: drama, crying, comforting, fingerprints, uncomfortable questions, men
in matching blue shirts, photographers outside the police station. I
opted out
of all of that. Because his quiet beckoned me like a warm bed, a soft pillow, a good book, a hot cup of tea.

25

I said, Momentary despair. Of an existential nature. It’s passed. Shut up, he said then, maybe for the first time since I’d known him. He was tired from his class. He pulled up another chair to sit next to me. He asked again what was going on. And I told him that I didn’t know what I needed, but it wasn’t talk. He insisted that there must be something, something deserving discussion. You were crying on the phone, for God’s sake, and you never cry. What was it? What was it? When I replied, it was something like, You need to trust me. It’s true, isn’t it? I never cry. I’m not a hysterical person like that. You need to trust that there was a good reason, without knowing what it is. You need to trust me when I say I need you here with me tonight, even if you’re not going to get a reason. At the time, I didn’t feel like I was
copping out
on the truth, or some unspoken requirement of disclosure between girlfriend and boyfriend. I was only asking him for something I needed, on terms I doubted he’d accept, but seemed worth trying. He looked around the kitchen, thinking and patting his hair down with his hand. The refrigerator hummed. He took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, put them back on. Sounds fair, he said.

26

I don’t remember how long we sat together like that, perched in the middle of the room on wooden chairs like little kids
isolated somewhere as punishment. He looked at my hands, took the right one, and ran a finger over the bandaged fingers, saying nothing. He got up after that, kissed me on the mouth, and made an omelet from the sundry contents of my refrigerator. He spent the night in my bed, sleeping in a pair of boxers. He hung up his
button-down
in my closet, ironed and ready for a second day of wear. I slept well that night.

27

We passed the next week or two in the usual way. Weekend hikes, book talk, disgust at the verb use of
impact
and the like. And he was still the smarter of the two of us, in all ways but one. There was just one thing now, it seemed, that I knew about the world that he didn’t. It wasn’t a specific piece of information, or some esoteric knowledge. It wasn’t even a story. It was only when the thing exploded later, into a fire-eating
callithumping
fat lady freak tent cinema-circus, that I began to understand the thing as a story. When they figured out who Derek Brownlow was, and what it meant.

28

The police had put together Brownlow’s
track record
. The very tenuous connection he had to this office was either unknown or ignored. More important, of course, was the girl he’d tried to kidnap near Philadelphia so long ago, for which he’d gone to jail. And worse still: the nurse in Pennsylvania whom no one could quite prove he’d killed. She’d died under the worst possible circumstances, and was found in pieces in a state park. Suddenly those two witness reports of seeing a girl enter the park at dusk seemed important. She looked like a high school girl, they said. They
were pretty sure she’d been carrying some books. It didn’t take long for the local news to think up an alliterative nickname for the poor girl.

29

The Glass Girl. The moniker didn’t do much for me at first. I had grown unused to the word “girl” in my feminist women’s-college days. But a Glass Woman wouldn’t be very intriguing, would she? A woman wielding a shard of glass would just be a crazy, snaggle-toothed bitch. But a Glass Girl could have long, silky hair and a dimple, like the Bad Seed. It was comic relief, this
cornball
superhero. Glass Girl!

30

In a way, I became attached to the absurd alter ego. To think I could indulge in a little amused disdain that night, the first time I saw it all on the news? For a moment or two, before the images began. I won’t write about the worst of them, but you can probably guess. Naked. Duct tape. Garden
loppers
. Just like the poor nurse. Before death or after? Anything he wanted. It occurs to me as I write this that I should be crazy. For months I’ve been waiting for it. I started waiting when that first newscast ended. Instead of shutting off the TV, I sat staring at my bandaged hand as the next show came on. I imagined this hand separated from the rest of my body, oozing something black from where the wrist used to be, white fingers curled and grasping at nothing but the dirt burying them. Wheel. Of. Fortune. Said the people in the studio audience on the TV. People who think it’s about cars and leather couches, and whether or not you get them for free.

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When the papers went crazy, I knew everything might very well explode. Still, I resigned myself to the stern presence of my fellow word
mavens
. There was at least an odd comfort in submitting to the long silence of the day. Reliable and insistent, it served as a kind of protector. I was reading a book about drug slang, underlining the word “stash,” and you came to my desk. When you saw what I was reading, you said, Now you’re talking. You said that junk slang was your favorite, and wanted to know if there was a chapter on junk. Then you asked if I’d finished that other book yet. No, I whispered. I was unraveling fast. Was it a trick question? What exactly had been in that article that I hadn’t had time to read? Was there something suspect near the corpse? Were you smiling, Red, because of something you knew?

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Then you said you thought I’d have finished it by now, that you’d heard I eat books like candy. I wondered from whom you could have heard this. And I thought you were just taunting me, Red, and that you knew very well where the book had gone. Were we now sharing an explosive secret? No, I said, trying to give you a
killer
stare. I wouldn’t have you in on it. I said again, No, not yet. And you said all right. I think I saw you hesitate before you walked away. None of the usual wink. Just a defeated posture as you moved on to the pencil sharpener.

33

In those first few days of media interest, I became a sort of
aficianada
of doom. Disembodied appendages can become a
study of any discipline you wish. Mathematics: How many pieces could my body be reasonably split into, with standard gardening tools? A few hours at my desk, that one. Science: I found a moldy heel of bread on the top of my refrigerator, turned gray and green in its plastic package. Would similar patches have sprouted on my face, or does human flesh rot differently? History: Red. You’ve seen far worse than me. How do you get these poor soulless body parts out of your head?

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I spent most of those evenings with Scout, often in a deliberate attempt to numb the impulse to ask such questions. Once, when I seduced him into the bedroom and put both of my hands in his dark hair, I imagine his head coming off his body in my hands. His body and mind could just as easily be a
cut-and-paste
job as mine. This made me afraid of both, afraid of myself, afraid of my affection for him. I invited him into my bed to chase away the nightmare. He ended up entering the nightmare instead.

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A wounded, resentful version of my face—but blue-white and open-eyed and dead—started glancing back at me in mirrors and watching me when I was failing to sleep. In time, the image began to resemble a dead-prom-queen costume, sometimes dripping black blood from a heavily lipsticked mouth, or wearing a ripped ruffled dress. Eventually, it became more cinematic, bearing little resemblance to me, easier to shut off, like a bad movie on TV. Almost comical on occasion. Almost. Dead prom queen on intimate terms. Dead prom queen
demythologized
. Not frightening so much as unsettling,
constant, and familiar. An unwanted pet you feed out of obligation. Weeks later, the dead prom queen lingered only out of habit.

36

Next to the fear, though, came a twisted sense of power. I was the star of this little show, and the less I said—the longer I stayed quiet—the more they loved me. In fragile, soundless, faceless form, I was a real
hot ticket
. And if it was silence they loved, I could string them along for as long as I wanted. They would spoil me forever, crown me with a glass tiara that could erase from my head the impulse to calculate the value of one life for another, or one life for several, or the tenuous value of life in general.

37

But Channel 9 couldn’t dance with me forever. The Glass Girl stories
wound down
as police hit a dead end and reporters got bored. I watched this happen with a mix of relief and apprehension. Relief because it seemed I’d be left alone after all. Apprehension because once Channel 9 left me, to whom would I direct all my defenses, and all my knowing silence?

38

Whatever Scout noticed, if anything, he didn’t mention. He talked into all the spaces I’d started to leave blank. This didn’t seem natural for either of us, but still, we tried to spend our weekends much as we always had. He made his omelets. I was learning to make pies, a welcome distraction. I’ve never been good with these things, and at first the crusts would tear
or crumble in my hands. But I was determined to make him a decent crust, if only once. Maybe it was the careful way he always scraped the omelet pan clean. Maybe it was the painful,
aw-shucks
way he carried his unusual height, always scrunching forward at the waist, as if to make himself smaller. But probably it was the expression on his face when I talked. Not so much a look of affection, but of interest, of an effort to hear the real meaning of my words, even as they’d grown spare and superficial. For these things I began to regard him as a sincere and obedient boy, deserving of some boyish reward. Pie.

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So I rolled out dough and peeled apples and waited for the pieces to come together in some sensible order. They didn’t. There was no
epiphanic
moment in which that man’s shit-eating grin suddenly slid into an appropriate slot in my mind like a puzzle piece. No clarity came. Only a different determination of sorts. Eventually.

40

In the meantime, we ate an awful lot of pies. Three a week at one point. We always sipped tea with it, and he always seemed to find topics for engaging, if somewhat one-sided, conversation. He told me about his grandfather’s dementia. The poor old man was now confusing the details of his own life with those he had read in some biographies of Charles Lindbergh. He told me about his old Latin teacher who chainsmoked and who, one day, soon after retiring, put on a flowered sundress
plus
a wig, then hanged himself in his study. Maybe he was trying to convince me that he had a stomach
for strange stories? Was it the pie or the silence that eased these stories out of him?

41

Sometimes I wish he knew better how to ease a particular story out of me. Not because I needed to tell it, but because I wanted to. Not to everyone, but to someone. That distinction was, however, the main problem. After telling once, who could stop telling such a story? And who could find the right face to put on after the telling, or the right words to continue a conversation after that story was used up? Who could carry that story and still have the strength to carry everything else she’d had before she acquired it? Who wouldn’t be reduced to the birdsong of that story? Not me. But complete silence didn’t suit me, either. I know there was a puritanical day when people were more disciplined about such things. Secrets were real, in the sense that they were not told, and people carried them dutifully to the grave. A real secret doesn’t outlive the person who carries it. It becomes ashes and dust and blows away into nothing. It’s very simple, how you make a secret disappear from this earth. Do I think I’m so special, then, to want a different end for mine? I suppose so. I want mine to be told. Infinite silence doesn’t satisfy me any more than
billboarding
myself for all to see. Can’t there be something in between? Can’t there be a way to tell it endlessly but still maintain a dignified silence?

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