The Glass Harmonica Read Free

all over, and two of them, plainclothes guys with big hands and sharp questions, came over to talk to me.
    I took them back to my workshop, to show them where I was looking from and what I could see, and besides, why have the cops getting Evelyn all worked up and everything? She wouldn’t have seen anything anyway—I could see the light from the television in the living room when I was on the phone, and once she’s sunk deep into the TV, there’s not much that’s going to get her attention short of another world war.
    The cops wanted to know a lot of stuff, like the make of the car and what the guy was wearing, but they just sort of stopped when I said, “It’s the Collins kid from Superior Pizza,” and after that it was like they weren’t even taking notes anymore. It was almost as if they were deflated or something, as if they were working up to solve a case that turned out to be all too easy in the end.
    After the cops walked back across the street, I went into the house to tell her, ready for her to think that I did the right thing, but also that I could have done it a little quicker. They’d got the lights all set up at 35 McKay like it was a movie set or something, so bright that the edges of the window ledges on the front of the house were casting sharp shadows as dark as smudges of soot. Grown men down on their hands and knees, sifting through the snow like kids playing in the sandbox, with their cars shunted in next to the curb even though we’re on a snow route and there’s not supposed to be any parking there anyway. Cops make their own rules when they want to. It’s supposed to be a tow-away zone—not that they’ll be towed away—and the plows will end up making a mess of the whole street because of it.
    Evelyn was in her chair in the living room, like always. Bob Barker and The Price Is Right is her favourite, and she was watching it on the Edmonton station. Thank God for cable.
    I can’t stand that show, but she’s been watching since before Barker’s hair turned white, and she’s settled away in there like she always is, her chair almost square in front of the television, the sound up on bust. The world’s not right now, not with Price Is Right on all hours of the day and night. With the different time zones, you could be watching the afternoon soaps right up until you go to bed, and watching them all over again the moment you got up. It’s just not the way it’s supposed to be, that’s all I can say.
    She didn’t even hear me come in, and I could see the white hair on the back of her head, the hair on the top lit by the changing colours of the television, and her hand still flicking the switch back and forth, back and forth, and I knew that out in the shed it must look like some kind of carnival show, only the one light left in the place and it keeps going on and off, on and off, like a ringing phone that no one ever picks up. And all at once I think back to the shed, of how I must have been silhouetted there, that flashing light drawing attention the way flashing lights always do. A bald, bent old man, caught in the act of lifting up a corner of a curtain like some nosy spinster aunt. And I realized that the Collins kid probably should have known that I could see him out there.
    Evelyn’s legs aren’t as strong as they were—sometimes her knees just buckle and she goes down in slow motion, her housecoat out all around her like the petals of a flower, her muscles trying to take the weight and just fading away. So I help her up and down the hall, like to the bathroom or the bedroom—the house is all on one level, at least there’s that, and I think like I always do that we’re like the blind leading the blind.
    Except she’s not blind at all, she can see as well as anyone. She just can’t speak is all, and hasn’t since the stroke—I imagine the words are all in there,