was, Is he gone?
“It will be. It’s cloudy, but it’ll burn off.”
“Promise?”
I nodded.
“What do you want to do today?” she asked.
I shrugged. She hadn’t wanted to do anything for weeks, and I didn’t want to get my hopes up.
“I told Gray’s sister I’d help her clean out the rest of his house. She said we can take anything we want.”
Gray Wilder had been our closest neighbor, about a quarter-mile down the road from us, near the Pond. He had died that spring. He was the first dead person I knew. I was curious, and the idea of spending the day on an adventure with my mother thrilled me.
“I was thinking we might be able to find some things to sell at Boo’s,” she said.
My heart thudded in my ears. I wondered what Daddy would say if she came to him with another check. My hands shook with the prospect of another night listening to those words. But she held me so tightly, I couldn’t say no. She needed this. She needed me to agree. And I missed her.
We walked to Gray Wilder’s house carrying suitcases, and the sky threatened rain. It felt as if we were running away, but the suitcases were empty, and I wasn’t wearing any shoes. My mother walked slowly, noticing things: a late raspberry, the red almost brutal amid all that green. A hornet’s nest in the top of a tree. A perfect silver feather in the middle of the road. With her gestures, she tried to make all of this beautiful, to distract me from the gutted-out car over the bank near Gray Wilder’s house and the bag of trash somebody had dumped there. But my eyes lingered on the crushed Valentine’s candy box, empty aspirin bottle, and single filthy sneaker.
Gray Wilder’s house was a trailer on concrete blocks. It smelled like an outhouse when my mother finally found the key and let us in. I’d never been inside a dead person’s house before, and suddenly, I didn’t want to be there. We collected a few things from the living room: a clock made out of lacquered wood, a wicker magazine rack, two candles made of layered wax that looked like a sunset. But the smell got to me soon, and while my mother scoured Gray Wilder’s garage for something valuable, I waited for her outside on a rock, picking the dead skin off my feet. The sky rumbled angrily.
After a long time, she finally came out holding something wrapped up in the pages of a dirty magazine. She unwrapped it quickly, tossing the crinkled pages on the ground. In her face I could see something like desperation, as if her very happiness depended on what was inside the glossy pictures of skin and hair and lipstick. I couldn’t help but stare at the fragments of women’s naked bodies, at their pubic hair, shaved into tiny triangles, and at their swollen breasts, their colorless nipples. They reminded me that my own body (though I was growing in height) had yet to go through the magical transformations that some girls in my class had gone through one or even two summers before. I made myself turn away, looking up instead at the red glass vase in her hands.
“That’s pretty,” I said. I wanted her to know she had found it: the perfect thing that would save this day.
She set the vase on the rock next to me and looked at it. Without sun, the glass was dull and dark red, almost brown. I could smell rain coming. I could hear thunder somewhere, not too far away.
“Boo will love it,” I said. “She will. She has all of those vases, the Depression glass ones, remember? But she doesn’t have any red ones. I bet we could get twenty dollars for it.” My words were tumbling, eager and clumsy.
She picked it up again, smiling, and ran her fingers across the rim. But she hesitated halfway around, her smile fading.
“There’s a chip in it.”
“Where?” I asked, as if it couldn’t be true. As if she could have mistaken this imperfection. I stood up, went to her, looked at the glass. The chip was small but certain. The vase wasn’t worth anything.
She set it back down on the rock and walked away from me, disappearing into the garage. I picked the vase up and cradled it, briefly, like an infant in my arms. I set it back down, embarrassed, and felt the first cold drops of summer rain on my shoulder.
She was inside the garage for a long time. I could hear her feet shuffling across the dirt floor. When she came out again, she was carrying a hammer. My throat felt thick. She scooted me out of the way and contemplated the vase again.
I looked at her, and her face grew soft. In a glance, I asked her to please stop.
“It’s ruined,” she said, her eyes pleading with me. “Already.”
I stared at my hands. When I looked up again, she was standing over the vase with her eyes closed. When she swung the hammer back, her shoulder blades were sharp, like a bird’s wings at her back. And the vase made a sound like music when it shattered with one gentle blow.
Tears 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,”