Under Shifting Glass (10 page)

“Look,” I shriek, spilling over with happiness. “Look!”

They look.

“Oh,” says Paddy. “I see.”

He sees!

He leans forward, putting his hand straight through the pearly cat, and knocks on the windowpane.

“Sam,” he yells. “Look, it's Sam!”

Zoe joins him at the window. The pearly cat has reformed, close to the glass, but away from Paddy's huge, clumsy hands. Zoe will see it. Surely Zoe will see it?

She looks straight at the pulsing light, straight through it, out over the rooftops, down the street, and toward the rising mound of the park.

“And Alice,” she says. “That's Alice with him, isn't it?”

“Yeah,” says Paddy. “Come on—what are we waiting for?”

Paddy isn't waiting for much. He takes off down the stairs and Zoe would be with him, with hardly a backward glance, only I grab her elbow.

“Wait!” I cry.

“Huh?”

“Don't go,” I say.

“Why?”

I mean to say,
There's so much I need to share with you
. And,
Please, because it's scary having to deal with this all by myself
.

What I actually say is “Don't go. Don't go with him.”

“With Paddy?”

“Yes. No. I mean it, please.” And I give her one of those looks that, between friends, don't usually need words. The look that says simply:
Be there for me
.

“You're not making sense,” says Zoe.

“Wait,” I say again, unwilling to let go of her arm in case she just runs straight out of my life, but needing to get something from the bureau. I scrabble behind the arched door flanked by the two wooden pillars. “Look.”

She looks. I'm showing her the braided bracelet of pink and purple she made for me in fourth grade.

“So?” she says.

“Best friends,” I say. “That's what you said. When I wanted to wind Em in, when I wanted to make a bracelet for all three of us. ‘Don't you understand about best friends?' That's what you said.”

“I was nine,” says Zoe, incredulous. “Ten, max. What are you talking about?”

“Zoe!” yells Paddy from the front door.

“Look, either come or don't,” says Zoe. “I don't care one way or the other. But don't get all serious on me. Since when were we joined at the hip?”

I stand stunned. Loneliness never felt this big or close before. If it wasn't for the relief of getting rid of Paddy, I'd cry.

“Are you okay?” I finally manage to ask the iridescent breath on the windowsill.

No reply.

“I'm sorry about, you know, Paddy's hand.”

No reply.

“He's got stupidly big hands. Should really be a goalie, not a striker.” I'm making light of it, but it doesn't feel light.

“Why do you go there?” I ask then. “To the windowsill?”

No reply.

“You're not a, you know, consciousness, are you?”

In the Shrine Room the concept of a consciousness sounded quite reasonable, ordinary even. In my bedroom it sounds ridiculous.

“Or a soul,” I try. “An old soul. Like Mrs. Paddy said?”

No reply.

Sometimes I think I made up not just Spike, but half of the universe. The half that doesn't fit.

You're not making sense.
You're not making sense
.

I go to the window myself. I look out. Paddy and Zoe are already halfway down the street.

On the windowsill, the butterfly breath continues to pulse quietly.

“Are you looking for something? Well, I know you can't
look
, exactly . . .” Do I know that? What I mean is, I can't explain how something without eyes can look, but then I can't explain déjà vu, or the car staring thing, or . . .

The breath seems quite calm, but I feel that it must keep going to the windowsill for a reason.

Not everything happens for a reason
.

Shut up, Si.

Perhaps what I'm really saying is that if it were me with my nose pressed up against the glass, then I'd be looking
out, wouldn't I? I'd be searching for something. Trapped behind glass (the glass of the flask, the glass of the window- pane), I'd be all full of longing.

“What is it you want?” I ask. “What are you looking for?”

No reply.

“Or is it who? Who are you looking for? Is it Rob?”

No reply.

“Who is Rob, anyhow?”

No reply.

“If I knew what you wanted,” I hear myself say, “I'd find it. I'd give it.”

The light trembles. No, it shimmers, all of the colors inside it increasing in intensity.

Part of me wants to touch each of those shimmering pearly colors, the vivid threads of blues and greens, the opalescent pinks and whites. Touch them not with some fat fist, but just with the lightest of fingertips, to give some reassurance, to say:
I am here. I am with you
—as Spike was for me. Though this urge to touch also feels intrusive, like touching the join between my brothers. So I put my hands together, cup them, like Mr. Brand did when he tried to catch a sunbeam. Only I'm not trying to
catch anymore. I'm trying to offer, like you do with a gift or a prayer.

And then it comes to me, the light: It touches me, it settles not beneath my hands, but in them. Like my hands are a nest.

Perhaps the breath lies in my cupped hands for just a few seconds, or maybe it's a minute, or five minutes, or even an hour. I can't say; I lose track of time. Nothing seems to matter very much anymore, and I have a sense of peace and happiness and of being full up, but not like when you've eaten too much, just in the way of being complete, of not needing to worry or search for anything anymore.

Then, of course, there is a whoosh and a whistle and the breath flies back, as it always does, to the flask. But I am still in a slightly dreamlike state and my mind washes around until it finds something on which it can settle, and that thing is names.

Lalitavajri.

Supreme Striker.

Zoe.

Jess.

Jessica.

Even though this has been my name since I was born, I've never thought about it before and I don't know what it means, so I take myself to the computer and do some Googling. The first site I try says
Jessica
means
wealthy
, which doesn't feel like me at all. But what was I expecting? What name would be right for me?
She who is alone? She who never quite seems to fit? She who makes stuff up?
Next I Google
Zoe. Zoe
is apparently Greek for
life
, and that sounds like a much stronger, more interesting name than mine. But then I suppose Zoe
is
life; she's just brimming with it, which is why I love her.

Yes, despite everything, I love her.

I move on to Richie and Clem. I can't help myself.
Richie
is the Scottish form of
Richard
and means
ruler of power
, whereas
Clem
comes from
Clement
, meaning
merciful, gentle
. Clem, my gentle little clam.

Then I realize what all this name stuff is actually about. The breath. Because when I look down at the pearly, pulsing thing, I think it should have a name. I think I shouldn't be calling it
Thing
or
It
, or even
The Breath
, because it's too big and important for that. And if Lalitavajri can have a
name made up for her, why can't I make one up for my breath?

No, not
my
breath.
The
breath—the biggest and smallest thing in the world.

What should you call such a breath?

And I want to call it (or is it actually him? Or her?)
Storm
, but that's too violent, doesn't describe the lounging on the windowsill, the tender nesting. So I think of
Snuffle
, and that's too small and far too like a kitten, and I begin to think this naming stuff isn't as easy as you think and no wonder my parents stopped at Jess.

Then the word
bardo
pushes itself into my mind and I start some more Googling, and I get a heap of stuff I don't understand like
simplex physics
(which doesn't seem so simplex to me) and
octonionic space-time
(which Si would probably understand perfectly) and also a big wiki article on the Six Bardos and other
intermediate or liminal states
.

Liminal.

What about that as a name? It doesn't sound like a boy's name or a girl's name. And that's good. Because, if we're talking bardos, my beautiful butterfly breath seems like a bardo between genders: not exactly a girl, but not a boy either. Something that could be both, perhaps—or neither. On the negative side, Liminal sounds a bit like a lemon. But
it means
threshold
(Si would be proud of my research), and that's what I think my breath is: on the threshold of something, though I don't know what.

“How would Liminal be?” I ask the flask. “You know, as a name?”

No reply. Not even the slightest twitch or swirl or glint of a fishtail.

And I'm just about to justify my choice, start being persuasive, when I remember how I felt when Si took the flask in his hands and declared it to be an eighteenth-century whiskey bottle, a pumpkinseed flask. How he tried to tack it down, see around all its corners, know what it was, only he didn't know at all.

And I think, maybe I'm just trying to do the same thing. I'm trying to know something that perhaps can't be known. And what this flask and its inhabitant need more than anything else is just some space, some peace and quiet to be whatever—whoever—it is. Free from people like me trying to tape up its throat or slap a name on its ever-changing colors.

Which is, I realize suddenly, not unlike the way I sometimes feel myself.

That sometimes I'm small and sometimes I contain mountains.

How do you put a name on that?

Gran calls up the stairs to say she just has to pop to the store and will I be all right alone for a moment?

I call back
yes
although, of course, I will not be alone.

As soon as I hear the front door close, I take the flask downstairs and set it on the piano. Another thing I hate about the Tinkerbell piano, other than the fact that it has two nonworking notes, is that it stands in the hall. Yes, the hall. I think a piano should be in a room where you can go in and close the door, where you can be all lost in that piano for a while, with nobody coming and going and nobody interrupting and nobody hearing anything you play until you're ready to play it to them.

Si, who understands many things, does not understand this.

Si says, “This space in the hall, it's a perfect piano-sized space. What are you complaining about?”

I'm complaining about them listening in. Them hearing me struggle to express whatever's going on in my heart, here in the hall. Which is why I often play when people are out. Like now.

I've been making up songs since I was about six.

“They just flow out of her,” says Mom.

But actually they don't. They come very quietly and from somewhere far away and deep, and often I don't quite hear them right at first. I have to be very quiet and still and strain to listen. Sometimes there's just a note or two, sometimes a chord, and the words, if there are words, they don't come until the tune has almost finished itself. Because it's only when the song is almost complete that I begin to know what it might be about.

Today the song, which has been whispering to me for a couple of days now, comes in small and fragile. I want to say to it,
Be brave, I'm listening for you, I'll find you
, but sometimes it doesn't work like that. Sometimes a song has to find its own bravery.

I don't know how long I sit at the piano, listening, and letting my hands wander gently, carefully over the keys. Then I hear a phrase I recognize, and I can put my fingers and my
mind straight on it. But it's only when I play it out loud that I hear what it is. It's a hair from the lion's mane in Aunt Edie's song “For Rob.” It's the smallest, tiniest thread and probably nobody would recognize it but me—but there it is, right inside this new song. I listen even harder, expecting perhaps to hear other notes from “For Rob”—a spark of sky, a blade of grass—but I don't. Instead there's something else coming, something broader, richer, happier than anything in “For Rob,” and then I think perhaps it's some blossom from the cherry trees in Aunt Edie's “Spring Garden.” Only I can't quite catch it, and the more I reach for it, the more it pulls away. I want to bring the two things together, the sadness of “For Rob” and the other happier thing; I want to make them fit, find their harmonies. But the harder I try, the more the music resists me. The song says,
Do not summon me now, Jess, you do not know who I am
. So I go quiet and patient again, start listening, whisper back to the song:
I'll wait
.

I'll wait as long as it takes
.

“Oh, good girl, Jess,” Gran bustles through the front door with a bag of groceries in each hand. “I meant to tell you to get on with your practice.”

Practice.

I get up and shut the lid of the piano.

In the evening, Mom calls. Her voice from the hospital sounds stretched thin.

“Are you all right, Jess?”

“I'm fine.”

Si must have told my mother about her strange daughter and the singing flask. Can that conversation really have only been last night? It seems like a million years ago.

“I know it must be difficult for you . . .”

“It's fine, Mom. I'm fine.”

“Sure?”

“I'm sure.”

“You know I love you?”

“Yes.”

“And Si loves you, too.”

Do I know that?

“He really does.”

I say nothing.