Under Shifting Glass (20 page)

But the “For Rob” tune is changing; the minor chords, they're shifting slightly, just as they did in Aunt Edie's
front room. It's coming, I think, it's coming, the creation song, only it isn't notes; it's more like a breath, or one of those very gentle summer breezes that carry sounds from somewhere so far away you think you must be imagining it.

The breeze blows across Clem's forehead. There isn't much hair sticking out from under his white cap, but what there is quivers, one or two sandy strands of hair suddenly lifting, and, despite the harsh hospital strip light above, sparking gold.

Hair of the lion.

My heart lifts, but Clem doesn't react at all.

Clem is still a closed-up little clam.

The breeze increases in intensity, blowing not just on Clem, but up my arms, raising goosebumps. Behind Mom the curtains begin to buffet and the sounds, such as they are, come closer. Get louder. More major, less sad. Gran said you can't smell a promise, so I don't suppose you can hear hopes and dreams. But that's what I think I'm hearing: hopes, dreams, and the sudden whisper of a woman.

Rob, Rob, I'm here
.

She isn't here; my aunt isn't here. I'm not that stupid. But the hopes and dreams are. The hopes and dreams of anyone who brings new life to earth.

Which are my mother's dreams, too, as she hangs on, refusing to let go. Not now. Not ever.

Love can do that, I guess.

The song changes again, deepens and broadens, but it's nothing I could ever play, nothing I could ever sing. No wonder I couldn't put my hands on it in Aunt Edie's house. It's way, way beyond anything I've ever heard before. Huge and strange and beautiful. I don't really know how to describe it, except to say this is how I think the earth would sound if you could hear dawn breaking or the roots of a giant redwood searching the soil for water, or the petals of a mesembryanthemum unfurling to welcome the sun.

Wake. Wake, my darling boy
.

The words come on the breeze, tiny as a baby's snuffle, big as a storm wind. I cannot tell now which is stronger, the wind or the song, but the curtain behind Mom is flapping furiously. She moves her arm around Clem, perhaps to protect him, and that lets his head move, so he seems suddenly to be facing right into the wind. And all at once, he doesn't look so gray anymore; there's a more natural glow to his skin, there's a peachy color, a flutter of pink.

Of course—how could I not have known? Guessed?

I have to touch him, just to make sure. I have to feel what I can see, I have to touch the life that's coming back
into his cheeks. So I reach and touch and all the noise subsides. The wind and the song both end the moment he opens his eyes.

He looks straight up at me.

And, of course, he's just a baby and babies can't focus, so actually he's not looking at me at all, he's looking through me, past me, to whatever lies beyond.

Then his little blanket lifts, as though he's taken a huge gulp of air and his rib cage has to rise as he breathes.

And breathes.

And breathes.

We all stare at Clem's chest, at its rise and fall. Rise and fall. And no one says a thing.

Except my stepfather.

Si, the Man of Science, says, “Oh my God.”

Afterward, we talk about what happened in that room.

Mom says, “It was a miracle. I told you those babies were miracles, didn't I? Right from the beginning, I knew. God's graciousness, his gifts to us.”

Gran says, “I heard angels. Did anyone else hear that? It was like a choir, celestial music; I can't really describe it, voices far away and yet terribly near, and so beautiful, it just made me want to cry.”

And Si says, at first, “There was a strange sound in the room, not singing, I didn't hear singing, more like wind in trees, on the coast, where there's also the sea. And that curtain flapping madly as though there were some storm outside when there wasn't.”

“A miracle,” repeats Mom.

Si looks at her. “We have to be careful,” he says. “We're not out of the woods yet.”

Mom looks at him. “Did you ever wonder why the babies chose to be born at Easter? At the time of spring and rebirth and Jesus?”

Si says, “Maybe it was a mass hallucination.”

“Stop,” says Mom.“Just stop.”

And actually, he does. He stops.

It's not until I return home that anyone thinks to ask me what I saw or felt.

“What happened?” says Zoe. “What happened, what happened, what happened?”

“I heard the universe,” I say, “whispering.”

Zoe says, “No surprise there, then.”

It's wonderful to be able to tell her everything, every little detail. When I finish, she says, “You know that letter you wrote? The one you left on the doormat, about how your heart's all messy?”

“Yes?”

“Well, it isn't. And you know what?”

“What?”

“Being your friend. It's just . . .” Zoe pauses, “. . . amazing.”

Of course, the flask is empty. Though not empty in the sense of lonely or miserable, it's just empty in the sense of not being full. It remains iridescent, cool to the touch, beautiful. Not at all everyday—the flask could never be that.

I wonder what I should do with this marvelous empty flask?

I don't know, so it sits on my windowsill like a piece of unfinished business. Also unfinished is the business of Aunt Edie's letter—and Gran. I want to talk to Gran about Rob. I want to know everything there is to know about the little boy who gave his life's breath to my brother.

“So why don't you just ask her?” says Zoe.

So simple. So Zoe.

I remember the look on Gran's face when she came into Aunt Edie's sitting room when I was playing “For Rob.” That look, I now realize, was pain.

“I don't think I could,” I say.

“Why?”

“I think it would hurt her.”

“Why?” says Zoe again. “I mean, it didn't happen to her.”

“I can't explain. I just feel, I feel I ought to . . . protect Gran.”

“Your gran's an
adult
,” Zoe says. She puts a big stress on
adult
as though if you were an adult, you'd be beyond hurt. It's the first time I've ever really thought about adults hurting.

We leave it alone, then, Zoe and I, but the letter doesn't leave me alone. It bangs around in my head. It's like it was with the twins: Even when I'm not thinking about it I am thinking about it. About him. Rob. Aunt Edie's Rob. I mean, I didn't even know she was married.

I carry the letter around like I used to carry the flask. In my pocket. It bangs around in there.

Bang, bang, bang.

It's there when I come down for breakfast, or go to the park, or sleep. It's there when Gran drives me home from yet another visit to the hospital.

We're not out of the woods yet
. That's what Si said, and it's true, though the doctors are surprised, in fact the doctors are amazed, at the progress the twins are making. Especially Clem.

The drive back is rainswept, the windshield wipers going so hard the outside world seems a blur and the inside world, the one that includes just Gran and me, appears very small and close. There's a box of Kleenex on the dashboard of the car, but when I want to blow my nose, I reach inside my pocket (the one that has the letter in it) and pull out an old tissue. With it comes the letter; I have it half in my hand and half not, so it spins a little and falls into my lap, the right way up. You can see the writing.

“What's that?” says Gran.

“A letter.” Did I deliberately pull the letter into my lap? There doesn't seem to be anything up my nose that needs blowing.

“I can see it's a letter,” says Gran.

“From Aunt Edie,” I say. “To her son.”

Gran nearly swerves into a stop sign.

“What did you say?” asks Gran.

But I know she's heard. “I found it.” I say. “In the bureau.”

We are passing a turnout; Gran brakes sharply and in we go. She yanks up the hand brake and turns off the car engine. Rain cascades down the windshield.

“Give it to me.”

She takes the letter. I know it by heart, so I don't need to see the words to hear every one of them in my mind as Gran reads.

When she finishes, Gran doesn't say a word; she just takes a tissue out of the box on the dashboard.

“I never even knew Aunt Edie was married,” I begin.

Gran does blow her nose. “She wasn't. That was part of the problem.”

“Problem?”

“Well, not
problem
. Look, it all happened a very long time ago and I'm sorry you found that letter. Such things are often best forgotten.”

“I bet Aunt Edie never forgot,” I say quietly.

“No,” Gran says at length. “A mother doesn't forget a dead child.”

It occurs to me she isn't thinking about Rob now, but about her own dead child, my father.

“What happened to him?” I ask. “To Rob?”

“He was stillborn. That's all. It happens. We never really got a good explanation.”

I can't help this random thought: If Si were telling this story, he'd know the details, he'd have done the statistics.

“We were pregnant together, Edie and me. A time of joy, despite everything.” There's something softer in Gran's voice now, and further away, as though she's no longer sitting in a car in a turnout in the pouring rain. “Edie just shone.”

“She always shone,” I say.

But Gran isn't listening to me.

“The man concerned, he was a musician, of course, a jazzman on tour, and he just flew right on back to wherever he came from. But Edie didn't care—in fact, to be fair, I'm not even sure she told him. Edie only cared about the baby. Thought it might be her last chance.” Gran pauses. “The babies were due within a week of each other. Rob on the nineteenth and your father on the twenty-fifth. Though your father was late, of course. . . . Anyway, they would have been cousins, your father and Edie's Rob.”

I imagine Gran holding newborn Dad in her arms and Edie holding an empty blanket. It makes my throat go tight.

“It must have been horrible,” I say. “For Aunt Edie.”

“And a blessing,” says Gran sharply. “In a way. Those weren't the days for having a child out of wedlock. And who
knows how she would have coped financially. She was in cloud-cuckoo-land, really.”

I don't know anything about in or out of wedlock, or finances, or cloud-cuckoo-land, but I do know how I felt when Clem was gray and still. “Horrible,” I whisper.

Gran clicks her tongue against her teeth. “Well, you're right, of course. It was horrible for her. Especially seeing me and your father. And I never really understood that until . . .” She trails off.

“Until Dad died,” I say.

“Yes,” says Gran. “And even though your dad was hardly a baby, he was a grown man with a child of his own, but . . . well, I felt it then. The hole that a child leaves.”

“She wrote that song, didn't she, in memory of him? ‘For Rob.'”

“Yes, she played it day after day, month after month. Drove us all mad with it. Drove me mad with it. I thought she needed to move on.”

“It's strange,” I say, and this, I realize, is partly what's been bothering me. “I always think of her as such a happy person.”

“Well, she was, or was again—particularly after you were born.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you.” And she starts the engine again. “You changed everything.”

There seems to be something more to say, but Gran doesn't say it. She just drives hard and fast and in silence until she comes to the intersection where you go right for her house and straight for ours. She turns right.

“There's another letter,” she says, “that you have to read, Jess.”

As she unlocks her front door, Gran starts telling me that she would have given me the letter sooner, only there's been so much to do and the letter got muddled up with all sorts of other documents she'd cleaned out from the bureau and . . .

And she leads me to her desk. The letter is not in sight. In fact, it's in a blue file inside a green file in the very back compartment of a deep file drawer. I would call it hidden.

“Here you are,” says Gran, and she thrusts it into my hand.

For Jess
, it says.

The writing is loopy blue, loopy blue ink.

For Jess
.

My heart does a somersault.

This envelope is long, white, and businesslike, one of the self-seal types where you can lift up the flap and then seal it
down again to make it look as if you haven't read what's inside. And that's what I think has happened: Gran has read this letter already. But I can't really complain, because I looked in
For Rob
, didn't I?

I pause long enough to wonder whether the contents of this letter addressed to me bang, bang, banged in Gran's brain like the contents of Rob's letter banged in mine.

“Go on,” says Gran, impatient now. “Read it.”

So I do, though it's difficult to see the writing because my hands are trembling.

My dear Jess
, it says.

My dear Jess
,

If you are reading this, then I will be gone. But not quite gone, I hope. I hope when you go to the piano you will think of me sometimes
.

It's impossible, really, for me to express the joy you've given me, ever since you were a tiny child. Ever since that first time I lifted you onto the piano stool beside me. I don't suppose you remember that day, do you? Well, most children that age crash and bang, but you put your tiny fingers down really carefully. You listened to every note you played. And every note I played, too. I don't know how old you were then, not much more than three or four, I think. But I knew instantly. It was like looking in a mirror. You, too, I thought, are a maker of songs
.