welled up in my eyes but did not fall. I blinked hard.
She sat down next to me and leaned her head on my shoulder without taking her eyes off the pile of crimson shards. There was no sun shining through the fragments. It was just a pile of glass.
And then she stood up and brushed the pieces into the palm of her hand. She looked at me sadly. “Sometimes things need to get broken,” she said.
I suppose I should have known then that it wouldn’t be much longer before she was gone. I should have seen the dull prisms in her eyes as we walked home in the rain with two suitcases filled with the dead man’s things. I should have noticed that all the sunlight had disappeared.
The only thing that remained of my mother after she left was glass: in every room, her slivered pictures reminders that there was a time before. That there was a time when things were almost beautiful here. The pane that hung in the window over my bed was the last one she made before she left and never came back. She used every color in this one, and at the very center was a piece she kept in the crimson drawer in the shed: a bubble of red from the glass vase transformed into a small heart inside the chest of a bird without wings.
If summer here were made of colored glass, this is the way the light would shine through the summer my mother disappeared: the dull green of turning leaves and branches reaching to a somber sky. But that summer she made me understand that it was not the glass that was beautiful, but the quality of light behind it. It was the sun, not the shards, that mattered. And when I peered through the heart, the world looked different. This was the way she might have seen things. When I forgot the tilt of her head or the smell of her hair, I looked through the bird’s heart to the world outside my window and imagined that I was she and that this was what she saw.
And that fall, when she was already gone, autumn sunlight shone through the crimson shard and made spots like blood on my sheets.
I don’t know what happened to that girl. I think she became lost a long time ago. I picture her wandering through the damp, dark woods of my past, looking for home.
This morning, after Becca left for school, I went to my closet and crawled inside (over boxes and under clothes) and found the shoe box with the rest of my mother’s envelopes. Not surprisingly, all of them were filled with glass. But even after the envelopes were unsealed, their contents strewn across the coffee table like transparent puzzle pieces, I went back inside the closet. Searching. I tore open lids and untied bags. I reached into pockets and unwrapped packages. I kept telling myself that I wasn’t looking for him. That I was only cleaning house. Trying to make it easier and more manageable for my friends, just in case. But finding my mother inside that closet meant finding him, too.
Finally, after an hour of excavating, I found the poem inside a wooden music box, one of the few salvaged relics of my childhood. The box was in the back of my closet, wrapped in the folds of an old dress that used to belong to my mother. But despite my attempts to protect it, the wood was chipped and the découpage of the Austrian Alps on the lid had faded. It came from the Trapp Family Lodge gift shop: he’d bought it for me during a class trip, slipped it into my backpack while I was sleeping on the bus ride home. It used to play “Edelweiss,” but the brass key to wind it up had broken off years ago.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I will be leaving behind. I have lived in the same apartment for almost five years, and the walk-in closet is a virtual tomb, a catacomb of gathered things. Of saved things. But what to me are sentimental tokens, to other people would probably seem, at best, like prospective yard sale items and, at worst, like possible Goodwill donations. That’s the way with sentimental things: it’s the memory the junk conjures that’s valuable, not the junk itself. The true past is manifested not in the broken baby doll, but in her missing arms. In the lost or stained pages of sheet music for your favorite songs, in the holes of your favorite dresses. My past is the song captured inside that wooden box, and the words the poem doesn’t say.
Perhaps she is hungry, having used her only bread as a futile trail home.
The paper was fragile, like chalky wings, and I was worried that it might crumble in my hands when I unfolded it. But remarkably, more than fifteen years after they were written, the words were still intact.
Edelweiss, edelweiss, edelweiss.
I remember falling asleep on the long bus ride back from Stowe. It was while I was sleeping that he slipped the music box into my backpack and changed everything. I didn’t hear him or feel him come or go, but when I awoke I knew that nothing would be the same again. Shivering, my head pressed against the cold window, I made a cloud with my breath on the glass and started to write his name with my finger. I stopped after the first letter, realizing that despite the gift, the admission, I could never write his name, not even in the clouds I made with my own breath.
He was my secret. He was everything I kept hidden and inside. Even at fourteen years old, I knew plenty about deceit: I had lied to (and been lied to by) everyone I had ever loved. I guess that’s why I wasn’t afraid. At least this secret belonged to me. But because I was only fourteen, I also lied to myself. I believed that he was the end of the world. He appeared after I’d already lost everything. He arrived just in time; I thought then that he was saving me.
I am aware of my body now, sixteen years and as many lovers later. I am ever conscious of skin and bones and marrow. The distant dankness of breath and the gentle yellowing of teeth. I am older than I seem. These creases run deeper than you’d think. I know who I am and what a body can and cannot do. But then, when I was a child, I knew only what he told me. And that was love and music, music and love. I only vaguely understood the power of one hand on my hip, defiant, or the potency of my braid swinging over my shoulder, loose hairs making me wrinkle my nose. I didn’t know that a single careless gesture of mine could be the end of his world, too.
I don’t know what happened to that girl.
He was already broken when I met him. I was wise enough to see right away that he was made of fragments too, that he was also comprised of slivers. He offered me his sorrow, not as an explanation, but as a gift. He gave me in whispers the names of his lost wife and then his lost child. Felicity. Felicity. Her name sounded like a constellation to me, like an imagined girl. But all that happened long before I knew him. When I met him, he was already broken. I know I’m not to blame for that, at least. And now, that is what comforts me.
I was not innocent. I am not innocent. But sometimes I look for ways to blame him for what is happening to my body now. I sometimes imagine that the decay began the moment I saw his face. That it infected me. That he started killing me all those years ago, and that now the dying is just finally settling in. I think that this must simply be the completion of our exchange: a life for a life.
After the birds descended, after the trail of bread was gone, where did she go? I imagine she spun on the tips of her toes, until dizzy, and the wet green of leaves could have been a kaleidoscope of tears.
After I reread the poem, I carefully folded it along its familiar creases and put it back inside the music box. I wrapped it up again in my mother’s soft blue dress (whose pockets were filled with their own secrets) and wondered what would happen to it after I was gone. Becca has the best intentions. She has denied me my thrift store, pawnshop, yard sale pleas. She’s told me that she’ll take care of my belongings if she needs to, but for now I don’t need to get rid of anything. That I should leave the door to my closet closed, keep the artifacts inside: my mausoleum of not-forgotten things. I’m grateful for her tenacity: I would never really be able to get rid of the closet’s contents. Like my mother, I have unwittingly become a reluctant but proud curator of broken things.
Autumn, and everything was falling.
