A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [142]
I have scraped my memory like a glacier through my mind, with as much cold rationality as a person like me is able to muster, trying to determine, trying to remember when each story was told to me. What was outside the window when Andrew spoke of Annabelle? There is a flicker of white, but whether this is the white of trilliums on the forest floor or the white of snow floating though the pines I can’t now say. Perhaps it’s the continuous white of cotton sheets that stays with me for, during the hours we spent together, we clung to that bed as if it were an island and we the only two survivors of one of Annabelle’s marine disasters. And what age were we at this time or that time? What made him decide that we needed a particular story on a particular day or during the course of a particular year? Was his hair brown, or grey or white, as he spoke the words? In the end, though, it does not matter, just as it does not matter that although I believed that he had returned because—miraculously—he wanted to begin again, he had really returned because he had forgotten that we had ever stopped. What matters was the miracle that we ever met at all, the miracle of the life I never could have lived without the idea of him, and the arm of that idea resting on my shoulder.
All the while I have been talking to you I have been listening for the sound of Andrew’s voice, because they are his stories, really, these things he told me. But now I have to admit that I have been listening in the way I listened to a stethoscope that belonged to my father. When I was a child, I removed it from his office so many times that eventually, as a kind of joke, I suppose, I was given an instrument of my own for Christmas. I loved the rubber earpieces that shut out the noise of the world. But, even more, I loved the little silver bell at the end of the double hose, a bell I could place against my chest in order to listen to the drum, to the pounding music of my own complicated, fascinating heart.
Jerome remained silent while Mira folded up the papers and placed them on the arm of the couch. He was trying to remember the last time he had been read to, who had done the reading. It would have been during his childhood, but the feeling associated with the faint memory was good, warm. There had been an encircling arm, so it would have been early on—his early childhood. Sometimes there had been stories, he suddenly knew, sometimes poetry.
“God,” said Mira. “How sad, how terribly, terribly sad. Do you think we’ll ever see her again?”
“ ‘The boy stood on the burning deck,’ ” said Jerome quietly “ ‘when all but he had fled.’ ”
“Jerome … ?”
“Wait,” he said, not looking at her, then slowly turning, his eyes wide. “I think it was him.” Mira was searching his face.
“I think it was him.” He closed his eyes, then opened them again and grabbed Mira’s arm. “It was my father,” he said with amazement, the shock of something resembling pain, or perhaps joy, making it necessary for him to have to steady himself. “He read to me,” he said with wonder in his voice. “It was my father who read to me.”
He leaned back to allow the memory to take shape and could hear the sound of his father’s voice reading a story about a toy canoe launched at the head of Lake Superior, not far from where they had lived in the north. The small watercraft had been taken by currents of water far from its birthplace. Moving through one Great Lake after another, past cities and farms in the company of freighters and pleasure boats, tumbling over the falls of Niagara, rotating in whirlpools, passing perhaps Timber Island, reaching the St. Lawrence River, floating under the bridges of Montreal and Quebec City, it always carried with it the certain knowledge of the eventual salt sea as a desired destination. What had happened then? What had happened once this tiny object reached the desired destination?
It could only have been overwhelmed, Jerome decided, swallowed up—destroyed, in fact—by the enormity of its