The Glass Coffin Read online

  When the pile beneath the tree had diminished, Jill went upstairs and returned with a large flat package. She handed it to me and said, “For you.”

  “You already gave me that gorgeous sweater.”

  “Anyone with a wallet full of plastic and impeccable taste could have chosen that. This is something I made myself.”

  “Since when did you get crafty?”

  Jill scowled in mock exasperation. “Just open your present.” I tore off the paper, prepared for a joke, but Jill’s gift touched my heart. It was a collage of photos of the two of us, starting with the days when I had been a young political wife and mother and Jill had been my husband’s press officer. In the twenty-five years of our friendship, we’d shared some amazing moments, and Jill had selected photos of both the public and private times with care. There were photos of the nights when we won elections and of the nights when we’d lost; of my kids knee-deep in the gumbo of a prairie barnyard during a campaign when the rain never stopped; of Jill and me at a glittering dinner with a prince; of all of us at a deep-fried turkey potluck in a town that no longer existed; of births and deaths; weddings, funerals, baptisms – in short of all the small ceremonies that make up a life. Across the bottom, spelled out in letters cut from shiny paper, were the words “The Best of Times.”

  I was fighting back tears when I turned to Jill. “I love this,” I said.

  “I’m glad,” she said. “I was going to call it ‘The Best of Times. The Worst of Times.’ ”

  “But you ran out of shiny paper for the lettering,” I said.

  She grinned. “Nope. I just realized that even the bad times were good because we were together.” Jill caught Bryn’s gaze. “That’s the way it’s going to be for us too, baby.”

  “You’re embarrassing me,” Bryn said.

  “Sorry.” Jill knelt and reached far under the tree. “A final present,” she said, “and it has your name on it.” Bryn took the package and opened it. Inside was a silver bracelet: wide, handsomely designed, and clearly pricey. Bryn balanced the bracelet on her fingertip for a few seconds, then dropped it back in its distinctive David Yurman box. “I don’t want it,” she said. “I’m not my mother. I have nothing to hide.”

  Taylor frowned at her. “When you get something you don’t like, you’re just supposed to take it and say, ‘Thank you for thinking of me.’ ”

  Bryn threw the bracelet into the pile of discarded wrapping. “Thank you for thinking of me.”

  Jill swallowed hard, then retrieved the box and took Bryn’s hand. “You’re welcome,” she said. “Come on, let’s get some food into us.”

  “Then we go tobogganing,” Taylor said. “We always do that on Christmas morning, then we come home and everybody’s supposed to have a long bath so we’re not bouncing off the walls at Mr. Mariani’s party.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” Jill said.

  It was the most glorious morning of the winter: a Grandma Moses landscape with a high blue sky, a round yellow sun, and snow so white it hurt my eyes to look at it. As we walked along the creek path, Taylor took the lead, planting her feet carefully to make footprints that were clean in the snow. As Bouviers do, Willie used his front paws to swim through the drifts along the way. Bryn started out with Jill but fell back to walk with Angus, who was dragging the big toboggan.

  When they came to the first and most dangerous of the toboggan runs, she grabbed his hand. “Let’s go,” she said.

  Jill stepped closer to check out the ice-slick slope. “This is your first time, Bryn, maybe you should start with something gentler.”

  “Jill’s right,” Angus said. “That slope’s a killer.”

  Bryn wrenched the sled from Angus, ran to the top of the hill, and threw herself on the toboggan. Within seconds, she had bellied down the hill and across the frozen creek where she rammed the bank and was thrown back on the ice. For an agonizing minute, she lay there, then she pushed herself to her feet, dragged the toboggan back across the creek, and climbed the hill. As she stood before us, flushed with triumph, she was lovelier than ever. The cold burnished her beauty, drenching her cheeks with colour, glancing off the sheen of her hair, but there was a wildness in her eyes that was hauntingly familiar. As she pulled the toboggan to the top of the run, I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. The day before she had told my son that she wanted him to take her virginity. Clearly, Annie Lowell’s daughter had entered the high-stakes game of reckless hedonism that had killed her mother. Dan Kasperski had called Bryn a time bomb; it seemed that somehow the fuse had been lit.

  Jill’s mind had obviously hit the same groove as mine. “Evan’s death has transformed her,” she said. “She was always so careful. Now it’s as if she doesn’t care what happens to her. I’d think it was grief except that she hated him.”

  “Whether she hated him or not, her father was the dominant force in her life,” I said. “She’s lost her moorings.”

  “How do I get her back?” Jill asked.

  “You’ve already made a start,” I said. “Your handling of that business with the bracelet was exactly right – firm but low-key, and this afternoon we’re going to find out how to help Bryn deal with what happened in her life before you knew her.”

  “If the past is prologue, how can we change the future?”

  “Angus’s football coach always says, ‘Never give up. Never give in.’ ”

  Jill grinned. “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll be sure to write that on our locker room wall.”

  Dan and Kevin Hynd were waiting for us when we got to the house on Wallace Street. There was a welcoming fire in the stone fireplace and the smell of fresh coffee in the air. Dan’s living room was warm with homemade quilts and framed photos of people in happy times. It was a space that spoke of comfort and family, but as Kevin flicked on the video machine, it was clear that the footage Evan MacLeish had shot of his daughter’s life was a violation of both.

  The tape we were watching was one of a dozen. It was labelled simply “Girl,” and it was clearly part of a work-in-progress. While the screen was still black, Evan’s voice, intimate, absorbed, read what appeared to be notes to himself about editing and mixing the rough cut, then he announced the date of the edit: December 12 – ten days before his marriage to Jill. I glanced over to catch Jill’s reaction; her face was stony.

  From the opening frames, “Girl” was a jolt. The films Evan made about his first wives had been conventional in form: roughly chronological, the story of a life. In each case, the power had come from Evan’s stark, unwavering focus on a woman in the process of destroying herself. Linn Brokenshire’s biography followed the inevitable arc of the life of a saint: religious ecstasy; testing; suffering; death. The film about Annie Lowell had been infused with the hectic, anarchic spirit of a woman who refused to live by the rules her medical condition dictated. Both were stunning emotionally, but technically conservative.

  In “Girl,” Evan was using form to reveal dysfunction – film as psychopathology. He crosscut present and past to mimic the jagged bursts of memory that imprison even the healthiest among us. He began in the present with Bryn, in black, sitting on a window seat, framed against a grey late-autumn sky. Given her outbursts, I expected that she would be an unwilling subject, hunted down and run to ground, but she had a model’s easy relationship with the camera.

  As she hugged one leg, she was almost seductive. “He told me to think of her as a mother,” she said. “That is such a sick joke. The only thing my mother ever did for me was kill herself.” Bryn tilted her head and a mocking smile curved her lip. “Oh right,” she said. “Annie did give me the gift of life.”

  Immediately, Evan cut to a scene that celebrated motherhood so exquisitely that Mary Cassatt could have painted it. Annie and Tracy Lowell were picnicking on a spring green lawn. Both were in white, both wore daisy chains in their hair. They were identical in every way except that Annie was hugely and triumphantly pregnant. They were grown women and there was something
consciously girlish about the way in which they drew together whispering and laughing. Finally, Tracy leaned down and put her face against Annie’s belly, and Annie’s hand came up and stroked her sister’s hair. It was a moment of such astonishing intimacy that I felt like an intruder witnessing it. But I wasn’t the intruder. Evan MacLeish was.

  Bryn at seventeen was on screen. “I just don’t get this whole mother thing. Somebody gets pregnant – that’s her trip, not mine. If it’s supposed to be about love, then I totally don’t get it. From what I hear, Annie never loved anybody but herself.” Bryn checked her nail enamel. “That’s actually not true. She loved Tracy, and Tracy loved her. At least I think so.”

  We were back in Bryn’s past, excavating her life through footage that showed the astonishing closeness of the sisters. There wasn’t a single scene of Annie alone with her daughter. Tracy was always present, and the dynamic between the two women and the child was disturbing. When Annie and Tracy linked arms to form a hammock for the baby, they rocked the child so violently that her small face was contorted with terror. There were other vignettes – all theatrically perfect, all oddly creepy. It took me a moment to pinpoint the source of my unease, then I noticed that as the sisters built a sandcastle on the beach or sang children’s songs or played with a little puppet theatre, they were so obsessed with one another, they forgot that Bryn was there. The Lowell sisters’ pas de deux allowed no room for a third. When the inevitable scene of the car crash shattered the silence of Dan’s living room, my heart ached not just for Bryn but for Tracy and the magnitude of her loss.

  On screen, the seventeen-year-old Bryn had half-turned from the camera; against the dark and roiling clouds, her profile was an ivory cameo. “They tell me I didn’t talk for a year after it happened. I don’t remember. They say I never sat still. I just wandered through the house looking. I don’t remember. I don’t remember that time at all.” She brought her face close to the camera’s lens. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “Daddy got the footage.”

  Indeed he had, and it was harrowing. As he followed Bryn through the rooms of the museum in which she lived, Evan kept the camera at her level. The little girl’s search became our search; we saw the rooms and the people in them as she saw them: distant and unknowable. Claudia, thirteen years younger, her fair hair in a thick braid, kept reaching out to the child, trying to comfort her. Every time her aunt’s fingers touched her, Bryn screamed. A fashionable woman with a wedge of shining silver hair and a curiously unlined face often followed the child, but she made no attempt to either communicate with the little girl or to touch her. Only once did the woman speak, and it was to the camera. “Chesterton says that suicide is a far worse crime than murder, because the murderer kills one person, maybe two or three. The suicide kills everyone.” The woman stared thoughtfully at her jewelled hands. “I wonder if Annie knew or cared what she was doing?”

  The only person Bryn seemed interested in was Tracy. The little girl would crawl up on Tracy’s knee and run her hands over the face that was a duplicate of the face that had disappeared forever. Tracy never responded to the child’s touch. She seemed catatonic. Finally, the child exploded, punching her aunt with her small fists. “Where’s the other one?” she demanded. “Dead,” Tracy said. And that was the end of Bryn’s childhood.

  By the time she was eleven, Bryn had created inner walls that were high and thick. Seemingly confident that the camera couldn’t reach anything that mattered, she ignored it. But like the worm that inches towards the heart of the rose, Bryn’s adversary moved inexorably towards her core. The scene in which the camera finally penetrated Bryn’s private world was beyond brutish. Evan had caught his daughter at a pivotal moment on the cusp between childhood and adolescence. She was standing naked in front of a full-length mirror. The only light in the shot came from sunshine pouring in through an open window, dappling a body that, in Karl Shapiro’s memorable phrase, was “smooth as uncarved ivory.” The camera lingered as Bryn’s hands tenderly explored the changes in her taut body. Eyes half-closed, dreaming her private dreams, Bryn was slow to pick up on the camera’s presence. When, finally, she did, she crumpled: folding her body in on itself, attempting to cover her nakedness, pleading, “Daddy, don’t. Please. Just don’t. The other kids – their fathers don’t do this to them. Please. Please. Just stop.” But the camera continued to roll until Bryn fell to the floor, naked and weeping.

  There was a final scene, Bryn at seventeen talking to the camera. “I wish he’d die,” she said. “He used you on my mother too, you know. And against the wife he had before. He’s a parasite. He can’t live without us. But my mother and the wife he had before got back at him. They killed themselves and that moved them permanently out of the range of your lens. I could do that too.” She tossed her head. “If I took him with me, it might be worth it.”

  As soon as the film was over, Dan leapt up and turned on the lights. Seemingly, he didn’t want to leave us alone in the dark with our thoughts. “There are other tapes,” he said, “but this picked up the coping mechanism I wanted Jill to see.”

  “The way Bryn addresses the camera directly – as if it were separate from her father,” Jill said. “She’s so … seductive with it. What’s that about?”

  “She’s trying to use the only tool she has to bring the camera over to her side against him,” Dan said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Of course, I’ve never had a patient who was abused the way Bryn was abused.”

  “How could they let him do that to her?” Jill said. “They were there – Claudia, Tracy, Caroline – I could fucking kill them all.”

  Kevin patted Jill’s knee. “Chill,” he said. “Also, atomize. Break the problem down into manageable parts. What’s your first priority?”

  “Bryn,” Jill said.

  “Good choice,” Dan said. “We’ve left it a little late today. My parents are expecting me for dinner. If you can bring her by at eight tomorrow morning, I can see her before I start my regular day.”

  “You work Boxing Day?” I said.

  “My busiest day,” Dan said. “For the kids in my practice, Christmas is never a holly-jolly experience.”

  “And Bryn and I are adding to your workload,” Jill said. “I appreciate this, Dan. I honestly don’t know where else I’d go.” When she stood, she seemed to lose her balance. Kevin’s hand shot out and grasped her elbow. “Steady as she goes,” he said.

  Jill closed her eyes and leaned into him for a moment. “Words to live by,” she said.

  “Hey, I almost forgot,” he said. “Christmas isn’t over yet. I have a present.”

  “For me?” Jill said.

  “Nope,” he said. “For Joanne’s tree.” He handed me a Day-Glo painted sunburst. Inside was a photo of Jerry Garcia. “I noticed you didn’t have a tree-topper,” Kevin said. “Nothing’s going to bring him back, but it’s good to have a reminder that his sweetness will live forever.”

  By the time Taylor and her swooshy dress swished exuberantly past the doorman at the Hotel Saskatchewan, Jill had come up with an agenda for the evening. She had abandoned her plan to kill the people who hadn’t protected Bryn in favour of cozying up to them. Dan had convinced her that knowledge was power; the more she knew about her troubled stepdaughter, the more she would be able to help her.

  The dining room into which we walked would have warmed Ebenezer’s frozen heart. The hotel was celebrating a true Victorian Christmas: dripping candles, real holly, mistletoe balls, fat geese, turkeys, glazed hams, silver tureens of potatoes, turnips, Brussels sprouts, and, for dessert, trifle and flaming plum pudding. Dickens might not have been able to lull me to sleep, but his iconic feast still had the power to set the Ghosts of Christmases Past rattling.

  Tracy and Claudia were waiting at our table. A tiny red teddy bear holding an envelope lengthwise between his paws was on the table at the empty place between them. Both women had taken pains to look festive. Tracy was wearing the sequined white shirt she had worn to the rehearsal
dinner, but she’d added an armful of silver bangles and a pair of earrings that looked like links of frozen silver teardrops. Claudia was wearing a tailored jacket and slacks in metallic emerald green; her hair was smoothed into a chic chignon, and for the first time since I’d met her, there was mascara on her pale lashes and a flume of shadow on her lids. When they saw us, they rose expectantly.

  “You both look beautiful,” I said. “I love what you’ve done with your eyes, Claudia.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “I’m glad my mother didn’t hear you say that.”

  “She doesn’t approve of makeup?” I said.

  “Au contraire,” Claudia said. “From the time I was three years old, Caroline put mascara on me. She said I was so fair that I looked like a lashless chick. She found it painful to look at me.”

  Her comment sucked the wind out of my conversational sails, but other people’s sorrows didn’t register with Bryn. “We’ve had a real family Christmas,” she said happily. “Church and stockings and tobogganing and then a really cool holiday party. This is the happiest Christmas I’ve ever had.”

  “You had some lovely holidays with us,” Claudia said. “Remember when I took you to that matinee of Peter Pan and you liked it so much we went again that night.”

  “I don’t remember,” Bryn said.

  “How can you not remember?” Tracy said. “I gave you that dress Annie wore when she played Wendy.” Tracy smiled at her memories. “She was just sixteen, but the audience absolutely ate her up. I can still remember how the applause would roll over her every night when she stepped forward during curtain call.”