The shed behind our house was where she worked. There was only one bare bulb hanging down from a cord in the middle of the room, but sometimes she would stay in there until long past dark. I could see the shed light from my bedroom window, hear the music coming from the little radio she kept in there. It wasn’t a proper place for an artist; there was no heat in the winter other than the small electric space heater, and no real way to keep cool in the summer. But she never complained. It was her place in the world, she said. She didn’t even mind the dirt floor or the leaky roof. The smell of rotten wood or the one smudged window.
She was a collector of glass: fractured pieces she gathered from the shores of Lake Gormlaith, the town dump where Daddy worked, and other people’s trash. And in her shed, she transformed the slivers into stained-glass panels that hung in every window of our house. She never bought the glass; there were so many things already broken here. Beer bottles break when thrown; so do glasses and vases and lamps. Windows shatter with angry fists. Debris is easy to come by in a place where people are sad.
We lived two miles up the road from Lake Gormlaith, away from the Vermont Life pictures of serenity and summer homes and ascending loons, deep in the woods where some people still managed without plumbing. We lived among people whose poverty could be seen in the length of their faces, in their tired speech, and in the heaviness of their eyes. Everyone here was hungry. Everyone here knew too much about pain.
There was a time before, when Daddy and most of our neighbors worked at the furniture factory in Quimby, turning trees into pulp and pulp into plywood desks and nightstands and entertainment centers. There was money enough then for Sunday breakfasts at the Miss Quimby Diner, new shoes from Payless, even a trip down to Boston or Atlantic City every couple of years. But when the furniture factory closed down, the men didn’t have anywhere to go during the day anymore. There were no jobs to go to. Arguments exploded like gunshots in these woods, where there used to be only the silence of water. And when people weren’t yelling at each other, you could still hear the hushed angry whispers rushing through the tops of the trees. Desperate anger. Anger made out of empty pockets and empty refrigerators and empty promises. And so my mother gathered our neighbors’ destruction and made it into something good. She rearranged their fury into transparent miracles that needed only a little light to come alive. She kept the shards in an old card catalog in the shed, each wooden drawer labeled by hue. By degree. Each row was a different color, and the first row was red. Poppy, ruby. Scarlet, crimson, maroon. Burgundy. Carmine and wine. Who knew there were so many shades of anger?
Daddy was lucky. When he lost his job at the factory, he found a new one right away at the landfill in Quimby, collecting money from the summer people who brought tidy bags of coffee grounds and banana peels in from their rented camps at Lake Gormlaith. By July, every camp on Gormlaith would be full, and the summer people made enough garbage to keep Daddy busy ten hours a day: mildewed bathing suits, broken water skis, watermelon rinds. Corn husks and inner tubes. In the summer, he came home smelling like other people’s garbage, but sometimes he would bring my mother some shimmering thing he’d found poking out of a trash bag, or buried under a pile of dirty diapers. He’d polish the pieces as if they were gems and offer them to her in the same way.
Of course, there was pain in our house, too. I would have had to be blind not to notice the sad way he extended his hand to her, and the reluctant way she accepted. I would have had to be deaf not to hear their careful arguments at night. My father’s job at the dump was a seasonal one. We all knew that summer would eventually end, and as much as we despised the summer people, we relied on them. Soon enough they would return to their real homes in New York and Connecticut and Boston, taking their money and their trash with them. The end of summer was a desperate time, even for us. I knew that instead of shopping for new school clothes, I’d have to pick through the summer people’s leftovers dropped off at my aunt Boo’s thrift shop. I knew that Daddy’s fingers would be blackened by newsprint, the classified ads preserved in piles all over the house. That my mother’s words would become careful, that all of us would have to move gingerly, until he found a winter job.
The first couple of years after the furniture factory closed, he worked pumping gas at a friend’s station, but it closed down when the big Shell station opened across the street. This year, he didn’t know where he would be working. Quinn had taken a job at the Shop-N-Save as soon as he turned sixteen. But despite my mother’s pleas to please let her help, to let her find a job in town waiting tables or at one of the shops, Daddy insisted that she stay home, that he could do enough. He said that he would give her the world he’d promised when she first loved him. And this made her angry. In my room, I held a heavy pillow over my head so their words couldn’t find me. The slivers here weren’t made of glass but of her sighs and his tears. But my mother was a magician, and she could mend things.
What I choose to remember, the beads my fingers linger on, are these: The days when Daddy and Quinn were at work and my mother belonged to me. The days that we went hunting. We made picnic lunches (cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches, bottles of Orange Crush or lemonade) and walked for hours, waiting for the sun to catch in the blue or green of something broken. Of course, sometimes we could walk all day without finding anything; sometimes the beach held nothing for us but tangled fishing lines, a soggy shoe, wet plastic bags. But other times, we’d find piles of glass in the road, the glorious remnants of an accident. Or a perfect piece of cobalt that used to be a wineglass. Those days, we felt like explorers or pirates, and we would sit down under a tree and eat our junk-food picnic as if we had been journeying for days without food, counting the shattered pieces like medallions of gold.
Sing for me? she would ask later as we lay, bellies full and brown, on the blanket she had spread by the water.
And as I sang, she would close her eyes. Sometimes it scared me, how far away she seemed, as if my own voice could send her away. But when I stopped, when I swallowed the only beautiful thing I knew how to make, her eyes would flicker open again, and she would return to me.
She was already further away than any of us knew.
In the evenings, she would put together the pieces we had found.
“Look,” she said.
I had tiptoed outside, past my father snoring softly on the couch, and past our dog, Sleep, who was doing just that on the front porch, to the shed. It was July, and the air was loud with crickets and the distant sounds of fireworks. The Fourth of July wasn’t for two more days, but the summer people were impatient.
It was so warm I didn’t need the sweatshirt I had grabbed on my way out. The door to the shed was open and light spilled onto the wet grass. I could see my mother’s shadow moving across the walls inside.
I knocked softly on the open door and peered in at her. She held up one of her stained-glass panes to the bare bulb.
“Look.”
The glass was indigo: not quite black, not blue. But beyond that confused color was the certainty of ruby and emerald and amber. The verity of red and green and yellow, an explosion of color, but still perfectly intact.
Outside, the air cracked and burned with Roman candles. And as I sat on the wobbly stool while my mother worked, I thought about the possibility of explosion. About calmness, and sudden detonation. Watching her hands work across the broken pieces, I felt almost sick with appreciation, but there was no way to tell her how much I needed her.
That night after I crept back into the house, nearly tripping over Sleep’s long body in the kitchen, the sickness stayed with me. It settled in my stomach and shoulders all through the night. If I’d been able to articulate the feeling, I might have realized that I missed her. Already, and she wasn’t even gone.
The next day was brilliant and we walked to the lake to lie in the sun. The grassy place near the boat-access area was littered with empty fireworks shells, burnt at the edges and quiet.
Mum spread a threadbare cotton sheet across the softest patch of grass at the shore, kicked off her flip-flops, and pulled her legs under her, Indian style. She shielded her eyes from the sun and looked across the impossible expanse of blue, unbroken by motorboats or sails that day.
A pair of loons had