The Glass Ocean(114)

            I should tell him, but I don’t. He is in the kitchen, sitting in front of the stove. He is deeply sunk in his chair, chin on chest, legs extended; deeply sunk into himself. He doesn’t look up when I come in. Because his posture repels contact I do not go to him as I would like to do. Instead I go to the settle, sit. We are paralytic, both of us. Harry Owen is the one who moves: energetically, around the kitchen, producing bread, butter, cocoa powder, milk.

            You must do something—must look for her—find out, at least, where she has gone—

            My paralytic father doesn’t reply. His chin sinks lower.

            —why she has gone, what she thinks she is doing—

            It’s funny, isn’t it? That they don’t ask me? That I don’t say? We are in collusion, we three.

            Abruptly my father says, I’m going out.

            And then he does, putting on his boots but neither hat nor coat nor gloves, slamming out into the storm, a fringe of snow entering in his wake, scattering wavelike across the kitchen floor. A subsequent creaking of hinge informs us that he has entered his shed. The lamp he lights there, which my mother once sought in a moment of trouble, is a dulled spark, waxing and waning behind swirling clots of white.

            In silence Harry Owen and I consume buttered toast with cocoa.

            • • •

            He will emerge from his shed only sporadically in the days to come, entering snow shouldered, silent, disinclined to interact with either one of us.

            Harry Owen says, We must do something!

            To which my father replies, savagely, I am doing something!

            • • •

            What is he doing? He is in his shed. He has taken apart, left splayed out on his bench, Thomas Argument’s gifts to my mother. All the delicate innards exposed, mirrors and springs and coils, guts, butchered remains, glistening offal. And he is making glass. Manganese and cobalt fused with sand and lead oxide at 2,500 degrees; violet shading to white, amethyst shading to red; initials formed in gold enamel around the delicate turning of the unimaginable mouth: CGD’O, CGD’O, CGD’O.

            Lamp and furnace, furnace and pot and lamp and lehr.

            • • •

            He hasn’t seen the note on the mantel. It stands as she left it.

            The sea fans, too: still spread out on the floor, just as they were in the moments before I fell asleep. A line of demarcation. This is how the world used to be. Now the parlor is a room to pass through, hurriedly, on the way to somewhere else. Scene of an accident nobody wants to revisit. The wrong touch could shatter everything.

            Though we’ll have to clean it up eventually.

            • • •

            Harry Owen’s beard is sharp with urgency. You must do something about Clotilde. You must find out where she’s gone, with whom, to whom—she could be hurt, in danger, ill, needing our help and our intervention, our, our aid—you should at least tell somebody, report it—check the station, the harbor, the constabulary—

            • • •

            I think about the rough sea, and my mother on it. The distance between us opening up, opening wider. The black waves, the depths beneath. And what inhabits them.

            This is exciting.

            • • •

            My father, though, is obdurate—rising from his chair, deigning at last to put on his large coat, which he wears rucked up carelessly in the back. He is returning again, compulsively, to the more certain warmth of his furnace and lamp, to the glass that is more responsive to his loving ministrations than his Clotilde could ever be.