The Year of Broken Glass Read online

  “No,” Fairwin’ says. “I’m sorry,” he almost stammers, and he actually seems for a moment to be embarrassed by his lack of empathy and manners—which is, from what I can tell, a cornerstone of his character. “We haven’t heard anything from Ferris. We were hoping you had. This is Arnault Vericombe. He’s a friend of Miriam Maynard’s, the woman Ferris is sailing with.” I shake this Arnault man’s hand. He’s got a limp, slippery handshake that makes me want to shriek him right off my porch and out onto the street. I can’t see his eyes, not really, through the thick haze of lens he wears over them, and it makes me uncomfortable.

  “I’m Anna,” I say, not offering him my last name, something I often do to people who creep me out when I first encounter them.

  “Monsieur Arnault Vericombe,” he says in a tense, nerdy voice. “A pleasure to meet you.” There’s nothing worse than a nerdy voice with a French accent. He’s wearing a casual suit, white slacks and shirt and a grey blazer. Obviously he’s very wealthy, or at least wanting others to think of him as such. If he is wealthy, it’s new money, and there is definitely nothing worse than a man with new money and old-world blood. It gets my hackles up.

  “What can I do for you?” I ask, trying (unsuccessfully, I think) not to descend to Fairwin’s level of gruffness and lack of decorum. “What do you want with Willow?” I address my questions to Fairwin’, who looks immediately to Vericombe.

  “It’s a bit complicated,” Vericombe answers. “Perhaps we could discuss it over tea or something of the sort?”

  I was looking for the short answer, hoping my pointedness might get them on their way and me back to my Camus. “Of course,” I say. “I’ll put some on. Or maybe you want something colder? I haven’t got much, just water and…”

  “Tea will be fine,” Vericombe interrupts me. “We’ll wait out here on the porch,” he says, seeming swiftly and suddenly exasperated—perhaps, I’m thinking, by my less-than-easy answer to their inquiry as to my son’s whereabouts.

  When I return to the porch with a pot of tea and two more mugs Vericombe is seated on the couch beside my rocker, alone. “Where’d he go?” I ask, not really interested in the answer. The only thing I want to know from these two is anything they might be able to tell me about Ferris. I set the mugs and tea down at Vericombe’s feet. He’s wearing classic leather deck shoes, dark blue. Asinine-looking, everything about him.

  “He said there’s a store a little further down the road. He’s gone for supplies.”

  “Unless supplies means magazines, pop or Twinkies, I don’t think he’ll find much. They’re still running pretty low on stuff.”

  “I’m not sure what he’s after,” Vericombe offers. “He is an odd man, isn’t he? I don’t pretend to understand what he’s up to. He tells me he’s a good friend of your husband Ferris though.” He says this as if it were a question, and I realize that this Vericombe man knows Fairwin’ perhaps even less than I do, so I ask.

  “You don’t know Fairwin’ very well, do you?”

  “We’ve only just met yesterday. He called me on my cellular three days ago. I was home in Seattle at the time. I arrived on Lasqueti last night and we came directly here this morning.” I offer him no response or encouragement, so he continues. “It is of the most urgent nature, the matter we’ve come to discuss with you. I’m not sure where to begin.” He looks at me closely in the eyes. Or so I think. His go so screwy it’s impossible to be certain of their direction. He’s like that idiot on that Trailer Park Boys show, only worse. I find it disconcerting, dizzying. To my relief he looks down at his mug and takes a sip, then continues. “Did Ferris tell you why, miss…?” He’s asking for my last name. He’s just the kind to do so.

  “Anna. Please call me Anna,” I say, spinning it politely back at him.

  “Anna, then. Did your husband tell you why the float he’d found was worth so much money?”

  “No. I mean, he said it was very rare. But something tells me there’s more to it than that.”

  “Indeed there is. I see you are a reader Anna,” he says, dropping his screwy gaze to my ratty Camus. “Albert, one of our greatest treasures. Ultimately a bit of an ass, but brilliant nonetheless in his time. Are you familiar with the work of James Churchward? No? I’ll give you the much-abridged version, Anna. The float your husband found is intricately connected to the sinking of the continent of Mu some twenty thousand years ago, and to the deterioration of the oceans today. This is not something widely known, obviously, nor is it something well understood by those who do know of it, but it is clear that your husband is now a part of it, of its unfolding, and we think he might be in the gravest of danger as a result.” I start laughing. I can’t help it. He lost me at the sinking continent bit, his little pencilly moustache wriggling away above his upper lip.

  “Listen. I know it sounds ridiculous to you. I won’t try to convince you to think otherwise. But consider this. Your husband sailed to Hawaii to deliver his float to a man for the sum of $150,000. The man he delivered it to was an employee of mine. This man, who has worked for me in a loose affiliation for over seven years, has since gone missing. His helicopter departed from my compound outside of Hilo and never landed in Maui. We don’t know what has become of him, but we suspect the worst. So we are charged with three things now. To find him, to find the float, and to find Miriam and your husband.”

  I’ve reined in my laughter and I’m listening now. “Who’s we?” I ask, realizing that, as goofy as this man and his story are, this involves Ferris, so I’d better get a grasp on it.

  “We’re a loose network of followers of Churchward and his ideas. We call ourselves the Children of Mu. I assume you’ve never heard of us before, either?”

  “I can’t say I have,” I reply matter-of-factly. “But that’s irrelevant. Where’s my husband, Mr. Vericombe?”

  “We’re not certain. That’s what I wish to find out. There are others in our organization who are seeing to the whereabouts of my employee and the float, but it is up to me to try and locate your husband. We suspect, we hope, he left Hilo Bay heading north on Mrs. Maynard’s boat a couple days ago. Other than that, it’s a big ocean, if in fact they’re even upon it.”

  “Well I haven’t heard anything from him since he left. So what do you propose to do now?”

  “I have a boat. It’s fast, safe and equipped specifically for this expedition, with all the tools and equipment needed to find your husband. We would like you and your son to come with us to Hawaii to do just that. Today. There’s not a moment to spare.”

  I can’t help but to laugh again at this. As if in a million years I would do such a thing. “Not a chance,” I tell him, letting my irritation show through in my tone. “There’s no way I’m getting on a boat with you and fucking Fairwinner, and there’s definitely no way my son is.”

  “I understand your concern Anna. But be assured you are safer with us than you are here alone. Please hear me out for a moment. The people we suspect have taken both my employee and the float are likely operating under the same assumptions as we are. Those assumptions are as follows. First of all, the glass float your husband found must be shattered and thrown into the conduit of the Mauna Kea in order to halt the snowballing extinction of marine species worldwide. Secondly, your husband, being the one who found it, may be the distant but direct descendent of the Naacal fisherman who made it. And thirdly…” he pauses here for a moment. “Tell me,” he diverges. “Is your husband’s grandfather or great-grandfather still alive?”

  “No,” I answer.

  “Good. Fairwin’ has already informed me that Ferris’s father passed away when he was young and that he has no brothers,” he says, before I get a chance to ask what relevance his question has. “Thirdly, being the living direct descendents, it will be only by your husband’s and your son’s simultaneous efforts that the float will be broken. These are things we have learned through our deciphering of many ancient tablets found in both the Marquesas and the Yucatan. Our understanding that
breaking the float falls to all those living in the patriarchal line of the man who finds it is one that we have done our best to keep secret for as many years as we have known of it. My employee in Hilo was set up under the alias of Mr. Sunimoto and we’ve worked to create a mystique around him, disseminating a false myth that suggests our Mr. Sunimoto is the ancient fisherman himself, cursed to live until his task of finding the float and destroying it is completed. In this way, the Children of Mu have bought and destroyed every float known to be found of the type your husband possessed, looking always for that one that will not be broken so we might teach the one who finds it what must be done with its shards. It was me your husband was to meet in Vancouver. When the earthquake hit I tried desperately to reach Miriam, who had set up the meeting between us—though she did not know it was me whom she had arranged for your husband to meet. But her home was destroyed in the ensuing tsunami. I had no way of finding her, or your husband, or even knowing if either had survived, until Fairwin’ called.”

  He licks and sucks at his lips, then smooths his fingers over his moustache, uncrosses his legs and leans in closer to me. “The float won’t break, Anna. According to Fairwin’ he watched it fall from his treehouse forty feet up, bounce off a rock, and continue on for some distance down a steep, rocky slope. When they found it, there wasn’t a scratch on it.”

  “Not a single scratch, Anna,” Fairwin’ adds. He’s standing in the doorway, having obviously come in through the back of the house from the lane. He’s holding a large tin of tomato juice and a pack of playing cards. “You’ve got to understand, I was skeptical, too, but if you had held that thing, felt how fragile it is, and then seen it hit that rock and bounce off it like a soccer ball… I was still skeptical, even after that…”

  “But when the Mauna Loa and the Mauna Kea erupted, he called me right away,” Vericombe interrupts. “See Anna, the tablets predict such disasters if the float does not reach its proper destiny in a timely manner once removed from the sea. It is the myth’s own self-corrective power. If the float is in danger of falling into the wrong hands, it triggers a natural disaster akin to that which sunk Mu. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Tsunamis.”

  “Miriam told us all this the night before she and Ferris left. I thought the whole thing to be a bit of a stretch at the time. But it all adds up Anna. There are too many coincidences to have no meaning, and what other meaning could there be?”

  I light myself a smoke while they both banter at me, their voices rising in volume and excitement as they feed off each other’s enthusiasm. Fairwin’ is almost frothing at the mouth, little spit bubbles forming at each corner. They’re both sweating. I take a hard drag. It’s too hot on top of the heat of the day and it triggers a coughing fit in me. When I finally recover myself, Fairwin’ has opened his new deck of cards and spread them out on the worn deckboards at my feet. “Pick three cards,” he says. “Any three.”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake,” I say to him, and cough again.

  “Please Anna. Choose three.” I look at him sideways, then I slide three from the floor as Vericombe looks on. “Now pick up the rest of the deck and shuffle them back in.” Why not? I play along, reshuffling the cards several times. “Now spread them out as they were before.” I do this, too. Fairwin’ reaches down and selects three cards, then turns them over. Ace of diamonds, jack of spades, two of hearts. The three cards I selected. “How did I do it Anna? Was it magic or sleight of hand?”

  There’s a presence in Fairwin’s eyes I’ve not seen before, a focus of thought, and it strikes me that I’ve perhaps written him off unduly because of his association with Lasqueti. Perhaps there’s more to this man than I’ve assumed. I lean back and take a lighter drag. “Of course it’s not magic,” I say, exhaling, with only the slightest of doubts as I speak. “Are you certain Anna? So certain you’d be willing to bet Ferris’s life on it? Ferris is somewhere out there Anna. And even if you don’t believe all this, there are people who do. Dangerous people.”

  “We’ve tried as much as possible to disguise the true identity of the one, or ones, as the case is, who must break the float. But your husband’s meeting with Sunimoto was ambushed, and though we’ve been given a detailed report of this, and we know, or think we know, that your husband and Miriam both escaped unharmed, we don’t know how the very secretive whereabouts of our location in Hilo was known to those who carried out the ambush. If they believe the false myth we’ve propagated, then our Sunimoto is already dead, and your husband and son are in no danger. But if they know the truth of who it is who must break the float, as I suspect they do, they are hunting your husband as we speak, if they have not already found him. And they will be coming here for your son, too.”

  •

  I’m running down the beach screaming for Willow. Where is he? Across the sand, over the rocky point, out onto the intertidal estuary. Barnacles, mussels and muck sucking and crunching underfoot. I scream out his name again, wheeling around on my heels. He’s not here. The waterfall! I run toward the mouth of the creek and start thrashing my way through the ferns and salmonberry bushes, over blowdown alder and erratic boulders. I find him tucked in behind the trickling little falls, caving. That’s what he calls it. Caving. He’s built a bed of twigs and moss up beneath the overhang and placed a little log above it which he’s using as a bench to sit upon while he picks pebbly stones from the cliff-face as though he were an archaeologist. He studied the Coast Salish peoples in his social studies component this past school year, and he’s spent these few weeks since the quake scanning the beach for smooth little stones with a hole bored through the centre, sinkers the Sechelt and Sliammon made to hold down their fishnets, or digging for arrowheads and other rare artifacts up here at the falls.

  “Willow,” I call out, but he’s so engrossed in what he’s doing that he doesn’t hear me. When I get closer I can hear he’s singing a little song to himself, not one I recognize. Most likely one he’s made up while sitting here picking at the earth. I duck under the dank overhang and put my hand on his shoulder. He turns to me. “Mom. What’s the matter?” I’m out of breath, and I’ve got leaves and twigs clinging to my clothes and tangled in my hair.

  “I couldn’t find you at the beach. I was worried.” He’s perplexed. I’m usually pretty lax about his whereabouts. As I said before, I trust him. He’s a careful child.

  “But you know I’m always here if I’m not at the beach,” he says, picking an alder leaf from my hair. “I know Bub. I know.” I’m still trying to catch my breath as I talk. “I want you to come to the house, okay?”

  He lifts a stone from his bench and holds it up. “Look what I found,” he says excitedly, beaming up at me. I take the stone from his hand and inspect it. It’s flat, palm-sized, roughly triangular. It could easily be mistaken, in a child’s wishful eyes, for an arrowhead. I haven’t the heart or the time to burst his bubble. “You found an arrowhead!” I exclaim. “Finally.”

  “Yeah. And I bet there’s more here too. I knew I’d find artifacts here Anna. This is a midden.”

  “That’s great Bub.” I hand him back his arrowhead. “Why don’t you come home for lunch now, sweetie. There are some friends of Ferris’s here I want you to meet.” Distress washes over his face when I say this.

  “Is he okay? Is Dad okay?” Willow only refers to Ferris as Dad or to me as Mom when he’s frightened.

  I give him a big hug, holding him tightly to me. “He’s fine,” I say, still holding him tight so I don’t have to look him in the eyes as I lie. Then I release him, holding him in front of me at the shoulders. “But he’s broken down out on the water and these friends of his have a nice big boat for going to get him. And they want us to come with them. So you’ve got to come. They need us to leave with them right now.”

  •

  I’ve had second thoughts ever since we kicked off the dock. Both of these Frenchmen are nutty and now I’ve put my life and my son’s life in their hands. But what else could I do? All the asinine my
th stuff aside, if any of what they’ve told me is true, about people hunting Ferris and Willow, then I need to help find Ferris and I need to keep Willow safe—though I’m not sure being on this boat with captain coke-bottles qualifies. The boat’s huge, though, and seems sound enough. She’s probably over one hundred feet long. Some kind of small freighter. Naacal Warrior. For the love of God! There’s a little blue helicopter strapped down tight to the front deck with Churchward’s Angel painted on its tail, and beside it a big, high-powered inflatable skiff with Sohqui emblazoned across its bow. Whatever that means. I imagine there’s a good quantity of rust beneath the fresh blue, green and white paint Vericombe’s had the ship’s hull and cabin coated in, but the engines seem to be purring along nicely, and the engineer, a stout and stocky man introduced to us as Figgs, seems serious and capable. Willow’s taken a shining to him since he took us down into the engine room to show us around. Still I’m uneasy.

  I put Willow to sleep in the second-storey stateroom we were assigned aft of the cabin—the boat’s three storeys high: galley, head, first-aid and storage on the main, bunks above, and the wheelhouse deck above that—but I couldn’t sleep, so now I’m up playing rummy with Fairwin’, who also can’t sleep, though not on account of any uneasiness or anxiety, but because of the engine noise. “There was a time I wouldn’t have batted an eye. When I worked the lighthouses that diesel sound was always there, day and night. But I’ve been living in the forest so long now,” he explained to me when I first wandered into the galley. He was playing some kind of solitaire when I came in. Now he’s got me roped in with a cup of herbal tea and his insistence I sit down for a game of cards. I want to know what Fairwin’ really thinks of all this; of Vericombe, and this glass float mythology that’s claimed my husband and child as its unwitting heroes. So I’ve taken his tea and he’s presently walloping me at rummy. “Vericombe tells me you haven’t known him long,” I say, laying down a low run of spades.