Breaking Glass Page 3

  I think of her face as she told me she skipped out on the college tour, and watch the small screen cluttered with Susannah’s personal iconography. Old gravestones. Torn lace. Faded cigar boxes.

  Before she’d left, I’d barraged her with interesting tidbits about Rhode Island and she’d scribbled them in the ratty little notebook she took wherever she went. The first circus pitched its tent in Newport in 1774. The world’s oldest operating carousel is in Watch Hill. Hence, the pen from Watch Hill.

  And, sure enough, a carousel horse flies past an eerie circus tent.

  I shudder.

  This is recent.

  And I wonder—has Susannah been keeping secrets of her own from me? From everyone?

  The scene closes in on a mound of dirt. A pair of disembodied hands unearth a peeling cigar box. The box opens. Inside is a word in old wood-type lettering. And I have my answer.

  SECRETS

  Shaking, I rest my phone upside-down on the bedside table.

  My eyes close, and all I can see is her face, watching me, asking me silently what I’m going to do, forcing me to relive the many ways I’ve failed her.

  I lie there, the package sitting on my lap. An hour. Two hours. Time here is, again, shapeless, measured by the beeps of the equipment I’m connected to. I step onto the cloud that has lowered itself like a magic carpet.

  Then

  As if she’d conjured him just by the mention of his name, Ryan ambled down the hall, headed straight for us, his eyes locked on Susannah. I guess I might have wished somewhere deep inside my animal brain that Susannah would have been as mesmerized with me as I was with her, but that tiny hope was quickly snuffed out when I saw the look in her eyes.

  I knew that look. It was the glazed expression most girls got when they laid eyes on Ryan Morgan.

  Susannah’s lips had fallen open, as if she’d been struck dumb by a holy vision, and I wondered where that tough little Pirate Queen had gone. Gritting my teeth, I imagined Ryan as he looked at her, the saintly corona glowing around his head full of wavy gold hair.

  I wanted to pull her aside and warn her that, though I loved him like a brother, angelic Ryan was already, even in ninth grade, hell on girls. In eighth grade he’d torn through about five relationships, leaving a trail of flaming wreckage behind him, broken-hearted nymphettes who followed me around, hungry for any little crumbs of information about him I could provide.

  But I did no such thing. Despite his flaws, my loyalty was to Ryan. Steadfast and true, I squeezed my sweaty hands into my pockets, clenched them into fists, and clamped my mouth firmly shut.

  Now

  The weight of the package on my lap pulls me back. So does the persistent throb in my leg. Where are the nurses when you need them?

  I tear open the package.

  Inside is another package wrapped like a gift. On it is a label. The word SECRETS is stamped across it.

  I tear it open, terrified, yet desperate to know what’s inside. Terrified to learn what burden she wants to place on me. Terrified that I owe her and that I’m partly to blame for her pain.

  It’s a wine-colored velvet pouch with a flap. Inside are five candles, a pendant on a red cord, a piece of chalk, and a parchment envelope. The pendant is the Kabbalah one Susannah always wears. The one Ryan gave her. I strain to recall if she was wearing it the night she disappeared, but there is no way to know for sure; she’d been wearing a jacket. My hands sweaty, leg grinding with pain, I pull the paper from its envelope.

  There’s a Post-it note stuck to it, written in Susannah’s neat hand.

  I’m entrusting my secrets to you, Jeremy.

  The pain chews its way up my leg. I read the title of the paper under the Post-it.

  To Summon The Dead

  Where the hell are those nurses?

  The pain shoots pointy roots up my spine and into my cranium. I reach for the call button and stuff the package under my pillow, squeezing my eyes against the tears.

  In the time it takes to blink, the pain brings a flash of crystal clarity. And I know.

  I may never run again.

  History is only a crutch that won’t support me any longer.

  But history, because of my love of it and of her, is why Susannah is entrusting her secrets to me.

  C H A P T E R

  f o u r

  Then

  The look of rapture on Susannah’s face was reflected in Ryan’s. It was a look of curiosity and wonder, a look of such intensity that I knew anything I did to come between them was pointless. Right there in the hall near West Hall 3, I witnessed two people falling in love.

  It felt like horses were trampling over my chest, like my ribs were cracking, the bone shards jammed into the soft tissue of my lungs.

  But I kept the smile pasted on my face and managed to speak between painful breaths. It was a skill I’d come to master over the next three years. “Susannah. This is Ryan Morgan. The bossy kid from the playground. Ryan, meet the Pirate Queen.”

  Ryan’s blue eyes dilated, his mouth falling open like he was about to take a bite of the most luscious ice cream cone ever. “Huh?” he said, eloquent as usual.

  “From the park. It was like five, six years ago? Remember when we used to play pirates, and this girl came along and you said that girls were—”

  “Yeah! I remember. I said girls were stupid.”

  I didn’t mention that I was the one who’d vowed I was going to marry her.

  Susannah smiled and flipped some stray curls out of her face. “You really said that?”

  Ryan chuckled. “What did I know when I was eight? Where’s your class? I’ll take you there.”

  And just like that, he slipped a muscled arm over her slim shoulder and they drifted away as if I wasn’t there. As if they’d been standing alone. I watched them go, the ridiculous smile clamped on my face like a too-tight mask.

  Now (November 26th)

  Six days later, I’m carted out of the hospital, a pincushion on wheels.

  I’ve had no further contact from Susannah and there’s been no sign of her. Search teams have combed the reservoir banks and turned up nothing. Trudy Durban has been on the news nightly, pleading for information about her whereabouts, leaving me to ponder why she’s never called to ask me what was in the package.

  Dad rolls my chair out to the car, my casted leg pointing the way like a battle standard.

  My leg, the doctor tells me, is on probation. Okay, that’s not how she put it. Compartment syndrome. Nerve endings starved for oxygen. Potential tissue death. I heard every other word, but I got the point.

  Wrapped in gauze and held together by pins and rods, my leg has a month to plead its case.

  I’m sent home with a set of crutches, metal ones, with cushions to support my armpits and protruding rubber grips that comfortably fit my grasp. There’s a sturdy permanence about them, unlike the one-size-fits-all wood crutches you can buy in the local drugstore.

  I don’t trust them.

  Dad’s had a narrow makeshift wood ramp built over half the steps so I can roll in through the back door. His study-slash-den on the first floor is to be my home while I recuperate. I maneuver the wheelchair to the window and watch the sparrows land at the feeder Dad and I set up on the ancient gnarled oak at the end of our driveway last winter. I want to fly away too, but instead I’ll be collecting dust like the artifacts on my shelves.

  Days pass. I don’t want to think about what’s going on with the crushed bone beneath the raw skin of my injured leg. I can’t feel my toes, but even after three painkillers my shin still announces its throbbing presence. A forbidden sip from the Civil War canteen from last year’s re-enactment, cleverly hidden behind the towers of DVDs in the wall unit, can’t stop it, either.

  I rise on the crutches and stumble around the room, back and forth, back and forth, dragging my Eiffel Tower of a leg. It’s good resistance training, I tell myself. By the time I get the cast off, my other leg should be made of iron.

  Th
en I bench press. Ten times. Twenty times. Fifty. Until my arms burn and my neck sinew is about to snap.

  I fall into the chair, soaked with sweat, and watch the birds some more.

  It doesn’t work. The pain is still there.

  I flick on the TV and turn to the local news. The media feeding frenzy over Susannah’s disappearance has reached a fever pitch. Trudy Durban’s pleas have hit a chord. She is convincing, a grief-stricken mother, begging for word of her daughter. Even the town which had rejected her thaws to her pleas. But there’s no sign of her. Thirteen days and counting since Susannah disappeared. Since my leg began its battle for survival.

  Kabbalah. Susannah’s latest in a continuum of shifting passions. Before her trip, I’d found an old book on it. I’d made a passing effort to bone up on it so I could appear interested, but it’s not enough to help me now.

  Are the clues to her disappearance somehow linked to her interest in ancient Hebrew mysticism? Lately, Susannah’s art had taken on a distinctly spiritual quality. She’d started an amazing drawing, a brightly colored diagram of numbers, circles, and Hebrew letters superimposed over a gnarled tree drawn with gray ink on black paper. She’d smiled cryptically and told me it was the Tree of Life. She’d never shown me the finished art.

  I think about what little I learned of Kabbalah, or know about the Jewish religion in general. Dad never pushed for much except for a menorah at Chanukah and Passover dinners at my aunt’s in New Jersey. Mom wasn’t much of a Christian, either, except at Christmas, when her exquisitely traditional ornaments emerged from attic boxes. Every December they’d hung from a live spruce Dad and I chopped down from the woods behind our house. It has been a long time since we’ve had one of those.

  I close that door fast. Memories of my mother are not safe terrain.

  Religion was never a big factor in my upbringing. As far as I knew, it was even less so in Susannah’s; according to her, her mother was raised Jewish, but converted to Catholicism. Susannah claimed she was everything and nothing.

  But while I immersed myself in history, running, and other less acceptable pursuits, Susannah was searching for something more.

  What was she looking for? Had she found it?

  I review what I’ve learned and find nothing to help me. The writings of the Kabbalah are highly spiritual teachings intended to explain the workings of the universe, the connection of the earthly plane to the divine, and the human soul’s relationship to all of it. Very positive stuff. Nothing diabolical or demonic in there that I could find.

  Yet I remember Susannah was particularly interested in the explanation of what happened to the soul after it passed to the next plane.

  I shiver and think of the velvet pouch, buried at the bottom of my gym bag. What other, darker roads had Susannah’s quest led her down?

  During my hospital stay, someone from Durban Realtors kept calling my cell and hanging up. Probably Mrs. Durban or Marisa, wanting to know what was in the package Susannah left me. I wonder if Marisa ever told Trudy Durban about the package in the first place. I imagine she would have torn it open, even if it was addressed to me.

  I shudder. I can’t face Mrs. Durban. Then I’d have to admit I was there that night. That I failed to help Susannah because I’m a drunk.

  Time is rapidly taking on a new shape. Instead of the smooth lake of history, a place I can wade into and do the backstroke, it’s a whirling funnel that tapers to a single point, impaling me on the memory of the night Susannah disappeared.

  Suddenly, I can’t get away from the surge of memories that press against my skull, threatening to crack it wide open. I fight the useless urge to run. Birds with clipped wings can’t fly.

  Then

  Ryan didn’t call, text, or show up on Facebook that night. But I did see he’d added a new Facebook friend to his impressive stable. I stalked Susannah’s privacy protected profile, learning nothing and not daring to add her. At midnight, the friend request from her came in, and without hesitation, I accepted and jumped to her page. Photos of her. Photos of her art. Crazy art. Wild art. Towering constructions of junk teetering in unknown backyards, a much skinnier, younger Susannah smiling beside them. And then a chat window opened.

  Hey, thanks for adding me. Sorry about what happened today. I get easily distracted.

  I was seething, aching, worse than the aftermath of any marathon run. But I knew from the start that girls like Susannah didn’t go for dorks like me. It wasn’t the natural order of things. And there she was, offering an olive branch. Maybe even offering a chance at friendship.

  And so, for fear of getting blocked from her circle, I became a satellite, a planet caught in her orbit. Agreeable Jeremy Glass, who didn’t care if his heart was passed through a meat grinder, as long as he got to breathe the same air.

  No problem. I typed, each idiotic keystroke like a nail hammered into a coffin of my own making. See you in class tomorrow.

  Now

  My phone trembles on the unmade bed. A text. Probably Ryan again. He’s been checking in every day, sometimes twice, along with a few other kids from the track team. After pressure from Dad, I’d long since apologized for my outburst, claiming it was the drugs that loosened my tongue. Under the circumstances, Ryan forgave me. Now he and the guys want to visit, but I’m just not in the mood to see anyone.

  I propel my wheelchair to the bed, rolling over and around the clothes and other crap scattered across the floor. Though Dad has tried to straighten up, the mess has grown to epic proportions and leaning down from the wheelchair to pick up my clothes makes my leg explode with pain.

  I freeze, staring at my phone until my eyes burn.

  The text is from Susannah.

  Maybe, I tell myself, she’s finally getting in touch. Maybe this entire episode really is an elaborate prank of hers, some ill-conceived attempt at the performance art she’d admired after a class trip to visit trendy galleries in Chelsea. Eventually, everything Susannah saw, learned, or thought about filtered into her art.

  She wouldn’t go back to her brother in Rhode Island. Maybe she’s got other half siblings, or estranged uncles. Maybe she’s located her mysterious father. By now, she’s realized the whopper of a mistake she made by running off. Maybe this whole thing is about punishing Trudy Durban, payback for being a lousy mother. It’s a well-known fact that Trudy is a bitch with a dangerous temper and a violent streak. In one notorious incident, Trudy shot a neighbor’s dog that had wandered into her yard, claiming the dog was possessed. Susannah claimed that one time Trudy had even threatened her.

  Improbably, I picture Susannah by the ocean in a white dress, her bronze curls lifted in the salty breeze.

  The vision crumbles. Instead, I see her closed eyelids, paper-thin and bluish, dried leaves and bits of dirt caught in the snarled strands spread around her like seaweed.

  My temples throb. I open my eyes and read the text. I’m breathing hard. No actual response to my repeated texts. No confirmation that she’s read them. Nothing but another private link to a stop-action animation.

  Ryan does a herky-jerky hula across a colorized photo of a backyard. It’s my backyard. He stops at my tire swing and strikes an Egyptian-like pose by the gnarled oak tree at the end of our driveway, and pulls off his smiling face like a mask to reveal a frowning face beneath. A flowering bush sprouts. A sign is pitched into the ground.

  SECRETS—DIG HERE

  Shaking, I sit in the chair and watch the sun sink between the naked trees. I doze and wake up, my neck cramped, back stiff. It’s late now. Dad has left me dinner on a tray and probably gone to bed. We’ve spoken so little since I got home. What is there to say that won’t dredge up the stuff we can’t talk about?

  I lie back on the reclining leather lounger in front of the flat screen and flick on an old movie from Netflix. Some study. I’m pretty sure this is where Dad kicks back and watches porn, though sadly I can’t find any evidence of that. Instead, I watch some stupid eighties movie about girls and nerds, which hits
a bit too close to home.

  I don’t realize I’ve fallen asleep again until I wake gasping, heart thudding against my ribs. My lungs are filling with water. I claw at my throat, unable to breathe. Unable to scream, until I finally choke out a cry for help.

  It’s starting again.

  With my usual defenses stripped away, I’m powerless to stop it. Now there’s nothing to hold back the return of the terrors.

  Then

  I was nine when Mom picked me up from camp that afternoon, the summer after encountering the Pirate Queen. It was just an ordinary day and Mom was there, like always, but that day something sharp scraped inside my stomach, ordering me not to get in the car. On occasion, Dad left the office for a bit and drove me home for Mom. For some reason I couldn’t explain, I distinctly remember wishing this were one of those days.

  Even though the loop of that day has replayed so many times in my head, I can’t remember anything particularly unusual about Mom as she strolled over to my cluster of unruly campers. She was neatly groomed as always, prettier than most of the other moms, that army of frowzy, chubby, and harried women who emerged from their refrigerated SUVs, clutching their containers of iced coffee, to claim their young.

  Mom’s blond hair was pulled into a crisp ponytail, her refined features free and clear of makeup. She patted my head and kissed me on the cheek. I caught a whiff of her French perfume and a splash of cinnamon mouthwash, but as she pulled away I saw that feral wildness in her eyes, the empty hopelessness I’d sometimes glimpse when she thought I wasn’t looking; the glazed look of a wounded deer as it lies dying on the forest floor.

  Her hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly the knuckles were white. She glanced at me in the rear-view mirror and smiled, but her eyes were puffy and red.

  If I’d refused to get in the car with her, maybe it never would have happened.

  Mom might still be alive.

  Now

  I hear myself screaming.

  Hair unkempt, Dad comes skidding into the study in his bathrobe. I fight to draw breath into my constricted airways. He settles beside me on the chair’s armrest and pulls my sweaty head against his chest. “It’s okay, Jeremy. It’s okay,” he murmurs.