The Sound of Glass (13 page)

We both stepped back as the dust motes thickened, holding our hands over our noses and mouths. I choked on the air when I finally took a breath, nearly gasping. We waited for a moment for the dust to clear before stepping forward.

Crudely made shelves, consisting of two-by-fours and thin planks about three feet deep, covered the entire wall from floor to ceiling. They were constructed of raw wood, unstained and unadorned, crooked in places, with bent nails peeping out from various sections. I didn’t want to stand too near, afraid they might come
crashing down, because despite the fact that the unit had obviously been there for a long time, it was apparent that an amateur who knew nothing about construction had made it.

As odd as the shelves were, they weren’t what drew our attention. It was the row upon row of what appeared to be large shoe boxes without lids—perhaps intended for short boots—tipped on their sides so that the openings faced out, that transfixed us.

“Dollhouses?” I was the first to speak, then regretted it. These were definitely not dollhouses—at least not like any dollhouse that I’d ever seen. Each box was a sort of tableau of a single room, but different from the other boxes, so that they didn’t all appear to come from the same house.

We peered closer, amazed at the intricate details of each little room, from the miniature furniture with tiny tubes of lipstick and a perfume bottle, to shoes with untied laces, and dressers with half-closed drawers. Tiny people with real hair and eyelashes lay in odd positions in the various boxes or, in one box, sat slumped over in an upholstered chair whose plaid fabric was faded in the way one would imagine a real chair that sat near a window might be. Right above the chair was a wall calendar with the bottom right corners curled up, the month and year emblazed in bold, black letters: May 1953.

“What in the . . . ?”

I found Gibbes staring into one of the boxes, an odd expression on his face. I moved next to him and peered inside. It was a replica of a 1950s-era bathroom, with separate hot and cold faucets—each tiny porcelain handle marked with a blue “C” or “H”—and an old-fashioned toilet. But it was the tub that was the center of attraction, and not because of the clawed feet or the chipped porcelain, but because of the figure of a woman whose top half was submerged in lifelike water, her pale blue eyes staring up at the ceiling in silent horror.

I stepped back, my gaze darting to the dozens of boxes that crowded the shelves, focusing on the miniature dolls and registering
why they were strewn about in such odd poses. A man in a business suit with a pocket square in his jacket lay faceup on an oval braided rug, a puddle of red surrounding his head right behind a deep gash on his forehead. Red splotches on the wood floor in the shape of footprints led out the door.

Another was of a woman apparently asleep in her bed, the floral quilt neatly tucked under her chin, an empty vial of pills with a tiny label on the side on the nightstand. Rose-printed wallpaper above a woman bent halfway into a kitchen sink was peppered with red spray opposite a window with a clean round hole surrounded by a cracked web of glass.

“What is this?” Gibbes asked, his voice quiet, as if he didn’t want to disturb the dead.

I shook my head. None of the scenarios I’d gone over in my head of what I might find in the attic had come close to this. Nothing in my worst nightmares had come close to this. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. It’s . . . macabre.” I wanted to say
sick
and twisted
, but I had to remind myself that Edith was Gibbes’s grandmother.

“I think I’ve seen enough,” I said, slowly backing up toward the door, unable to look away from the scenes of carnage in front of me.

“Wait. There’s something else.”

I took one more step toward the door, not completely sure I could handle seeing anything else.

On the floor to the far left, in the corner between the wall and the side of the shelves, was an oblong object about the size of a table lamp. I couldn’t tell what it was from where I stood, but I could at least be certain it wasn’t another dollhouse box.

Gibbes stooped down and picked it up, then carried it over to the table, brushing back the line of baskets with his forearm to make room.

“It’s a model airplane, but it’s missing its wings,” I said, hearing the surprise in my own voice.

“Yes, it is,” he said slowly. Very carefully, he tilted the wingless plane on its side, displaying navy-colored stripes with no insignia on the tail and a gaping hole on the right side of the fuselage. “And look,” he said, pointing to the mosaiclike side where pieces alternated between transparent plastic and something that was a hard, pasty white. “There are people inside, and luggage still below.”

He considered something for a moment. Pulling out his phone, he flipped on the flashlight and returned to the corner where he’d found the plane. Squatting down to see into the dark space, he then pulled out an old brown paper bag.

Returning to the worktable, he placed it on top.

“Let me,” I said, reaching for the bag and hoping it wasn’t crawling with those large flying cockroaches they called palmetto bugs in South Carolina. As a child I’d loved surprises and discovering new things. Maybe that part of me hadn’t completely disappeared.

The old paper felt soft in my hands as I unfurled the top. Gibbes flipped on his flashlight again as I pulled apart the edges and gently leaned forward. Staring up at us were about forty or so doll miniatures of people dressed in 1950s-era clothing. Some were strapped in plane seats; others were missing limbs or had grotesque wounds on their heads or bodies; most had grass or dirt clinging to their hair, skin, and clothes. What looked like two wings, also made in a mosaic fashion with two separate materials, were intermingled with the figures, the detritus of a catastrophe I couldn’t comprehend.

Our eyes met, and I wondered whether the same lost and scared expression I saw in his eyes was reflected in my own. “What is all this?” I asked. I knew he didn’t have the answer, but saying it out loud made it somehow more real and less dreamlike. Because I could handle reality no matter how brutal. I had a harder time with dreams.

“I have no idea,” Gibbes said softly, not taking his eyes from mine. I was reminded again of how during a fire it was what you
couldn’t see that killed you and not the fire. It seemed to me that all of this was the fire in the attic we’d only sensed, the poison leaking out undetected for years.

I looked out one of the dormer windows and saw the wind chime dangling from a long metal bar. The outside was hot and heavy, the sea glass still. But I could imagine it clinking together, its music like words trying to tell me something in a language I didn’t understand.

EDITH
APRIL 1961

E
dith sat in the stifling attic and took a long drag from her cigarette before stabbing it out in the small porcelain dish with the crimson climbing vines and the large “H” painted in the middle. Calhoun wouldn’t have allowed her to smoke, much less use his precious heirloom china as an ashtray, but he wasn’t there to stop her. He’d allowed her to pack his cigarette case, and to light his cigarettes, taking one puff to get it going, but she was never allowed to have her own.

She’d started smoking the day after he’d died, the day the tremors started each time she heard a plane rumble in the sky. Each time she thought of the suitcase and the note still under her refrigerator.

While all of her friends were buying the latest in home appliances—Betsy had a new pink Frigidaire with a matching stove—Edith kept her refrigerator, its white door damaged where
C.J. had banged his toys against it or run his tricycle into it with an intensity Edith hadn’t expected from a small child. She’d attributed it to the fact that he was a boy, and she, having been raised an only child with a gentle, brooding father, had no experience with little boys or children in general. Still, when she’d heard him thumping his head against his crib rails, sometimes for as long as an hour, she’d wondered. Betsy and even her doctor told her that many children did this as a soothing mechanism, finding comfort in the steady rhythm the way other children sucked their thumbs or wore a hole in a favorite blanket with constant scratching.

And it usually worked, and he’d settle down into a long sleep. But sometimes, usually after he’d heard the sound of a plane or thunder in the sky or a siren in the distance, he’d become agitated, and the head thumping would erupt into a complete and all-out tantrum.

His doctor told her that when he threw his tantrums she should leave him in a safe place and let him do it and not, under any circumstances, pick him up and coddle him, in order to avoid rewarding bad behavior. But she loved her son, and remembered that terrible night they had shared. Sometimes, when his screaming and thumping became too much for her to stand, she’d go into his room and pick him up, worried that he was remembering that night, too, and she’d cup the back of his head, his hair sticky and damp with sweat and tears, and allow him to bang his head against her. She would be left with a small bruise, a fist-size smear of blue and green right under her collarbone, but Edith hardly noticed. It wasn’t because she was overly familiar with bruises; it was more that she’d had a say in it, and therefore it was all right.

“Mama! Where are you?” Nine-year-old C.J. shouted from somewhere in the house. His restless energy hadn’t dissipated at all, and Edith found it exhausting yet not worrying. He was a growing boy, and needed to run about and be loud and physical and make dents in walls.
Even after they grow into men.

She brushed her hand through the air to erase the thought and the smoke and stood. “I’ll be right down,” she called, but not too loudly. Even though Calhoun had been dead for so long, there were still things she couldn’t bring herself to do. Like shouting. Or wearing anything too loud or too short. Cutting her hair even though it was past her waist and so very hot in the summertime. Or driving. She’d like to drive, but she’d have to buy a car, and she hadn’t the first idea how to do that by herself. Her friends’ husbands would surely help her out, but she was uncomfortable being alone with them, and couldn’t imagine sitting inside a closed car with one.

“Mama!”

Edith’s gaze strayed to her pack of cigarettes, wishing she had time for another, and then past it to her current project. It was, of all things, a back balcony in an apartment building involving a clothing line, a block of firewood, and a woman. She examined the doll’s face for a moment, wondering whether she’d made it just the right shade of blue, and whether the print on the blouse was accurate enough. She wanted to hurry and finish it so she could go back to her biggest project, the one that consumed most of her waking thoughts. She was so close now to an answer that it was hard for her to focus on anything else.

It would have to wait until the following day when C.J. was at school. He didn’t like her spending time in her workshop any more than Calhoun had. He wasn’t allowed up there, and she was careful to lock the door when she left, putting the key in its hiding place in her closet. To make a prohibited place less appealing, she’d told him it was hot and stuffy, that there were lots of spiders, and all she did was work on her sea-glass wind chimes. She hoped she’d made it sound boring enough to him that he wouldn’t be interested in finding the key.

She took her cardigan off the back of her chair and slid it over her shoulders before heading down the attic stairs, being careful not to trip in her high heels. After carefully locking the door and
pocketing the key, she found C.J. in the upstairs hallway, bouncing a small rubber ball against the wall, which she’d told him not to do at least a dozen times.

“I’m here,” she said, reaching over and grabbing the ball in midbounce.

He looked annoyed. His shirt had a tear at the hem and the neck had some unidentified food stain. His dungarees had holes in the patches on his knees, and his high-top sneakers looked exhausted, with their tongues and laces dangling over the sides. But she didn’t say anything. Betsy had told her that the modern method of child rearing in that book by Dr. Spock was about choosing battles. C.J. played hard; that was all. Edith could accept that.

“Jimmy wants me to come over for dinner.”

“I’m sorry, sweetheart. But you know Tuesday is bridge night. Debbie Fuller is coming over to babysit, and I’ve got a Swanson TV dinner in the oven already.”

“No,” he groaned. “I don’t like Debbie Fuller, and I hate TV dinners.”

This was how he generally responded when things didn’t go his way. “I’m sorry that’s how you feel, C.J. But Debbie is responsible and reliable and I like her.”
She’s also the only babysitter who will still come stay with you.
“And I think you’ll like this TV dinner. It has a dessert—an apple cobbler.”

“I
hate
apple cobbler,” he shouted, rushing past her to the stairway and sliding down the banister. She’d told him too many times to count not to do that, that it was dangerous, but it didn’t seem to matter. He was like his father that way, a rushing, boisterous
presence
in a room. She’d loved that about Calhoun—once, a long time ago. She didn’t want to erase it completely from his son.

The doorbell rang and Edith answered it. Debbie Fuller was only four years older than C.J., but about a foot taller and years older in terms of maturity and poise. She wasn’t frivolous like those other girls who were suddenly no longer available to babysit when Edith
called. Debbie was a serious girl, her hair always crimped back in a tight ponytail and heavy bangs over thick, dark glasses. She was the oldest of six and the only girl, which was probably the reason she wasn’t daunted by watching C.J. the few times Edith left him.

“Hello, Mrs. Heyward,” Debbie said, her expression serious. She looked like one of those girls who was born old, as if their life’s plan were already laid out in front of them and they followed those plans with the seriousness of a nun. Edith might even have envied that about her, the knowing what the future held. Maybe then she might have done things differently.

“Thanks so much for coming, Debbie. I’ve got two TV dinners in the oven for you and C.J. I hope you like meat loaf.” She closed the door behind her.

“Yes, ma’am,” Debbie said without smiling. “That will be fine.” She held a stack of heavy schoolbooks, and Edith admired her optimism. The only time she ever got anything done with C.J. around was when he was at school, watching
Gunsmoke
and
Dennis the Menace
on television, or sleeping.

She led Debbie toward the kitchen. “Why don’t you come put your books down on the kitchen table while I go find C.J. Mrs. Williams will be here any minute to pick me up. We’ll be at the Butlers’ house tonight, and I’ve written her phone number on the pad by the phone.”

She put her books down while Edith opened up the back door and called for C.J. When she turned back to Debbie, she was watching Edith closely. Edith ran her tongue over her teeth, making sure they weren’t smeared with lipstick. She was patting the back of her chignon to check for loose bobby pins when Debbie finally spoke.

“This might be the last time I can come babysit.”

“Oh, no, Debbie. Why? Am I not paying you enough?”

The teenager shook her head, her lank ponytail shaking, too. “No, ma’am. That’s not it. It’s just . . .” She fidgeted, turning her Keds-clad feet outward onto the sides of the soles.

“It’s okay, Debbie. You can tell me.”

She looked at Edith with pale blue eyes and she suddenly knew what Debbie was going to say. “Last time I was here, he hit me. On the arm. Hard enough to make a big bruise. Mama saw it and said I couldn’t come back here unless you promised that C.J. wouldn’t hit me anymore.”

It was as if Edith had turned to ice, as if one small tap anywhere on her would make her crack into a thousand little pieces.
Sins of the father.
She managed to hold on to her composure. “I’m so sorry, Debbie. So truly sorry. I’m sure he didn’t mean it. I’ll talk to him. Tonight—before I leave—and I’ll make him promise to never hit you again.”

With a tentative smile, she nodded. “Thank you. I know he didn’t mean it. We were playing cards and I was winning. . . .” She stopped, either because she knew what she was saying wasn’t making it any better, or because she suspected that Edith didn’t want to hear it.

Edith opened up the back door and called for C.J. again, her voice more strident. She pictured him hunkered down beneath the oak tree, digging in the dirt with the penknife he’d found in his father’s desk. Since he was a small boy, C.J. had always hidden in the garden when he was upset, finding refuge beneath the heavy arms of the oak tree and within the fragrance of the gardenias and roses Edith tended with a mother’s care. She thought it was because as a baby she’d set up his playpen in the oak’s shadow while she tended her garden, and that must have brought warm memories to him. But sometimes, when he looked at her with his father’s eyes, she saw the dark sky exploding in fire all over again, as if he were remembering things he shouldn’t.

Edith eventually found C.J. on the ground by the garden wall, whittling on a stick. They had their talk, and he seemed penitent enough that Edith chose to believe him. He didn’t protest when she asked for the knife, or when she told him he shouldn’t use his fists
when he got angry. He even allowed her to hug him and he hugged her back, his soft, “I’m sorry,” choked with tears. He was truly sorry; she knew this. Just as much as she knew that he was his father’s son.

When Edith finally pulled away from the house in Betsy’s Buick, she’d glanced up at the dormer windows, an orange glow coming from the light she’d left on. She probably wouldn’t be able to sleep again tonight and would spend most of it working on her special project in the attic. She needed it to be done with, for the answer to her question to be found. It was what kept her going, besides her son. She had to believe that there was an answer, a reason. An explanation more complicated than anything she’d come across before in her work. More than that, it was a labor of love, a show of solidarity with a woman she’d never met. It would be her crowning glory, a nod to her own past. A promise to a secret kept.

She slid a cigarette and her lighter out of her pocketbook, catching sight in the side-view mirror of the lit attic window one last time before Betsy turned the corner and the old house disappeared from view.