THIS IS WHAT appears to Declan Steeple out of the darkness of sleep: a river of molten glass. It seeps from the cracks and crevices of his imagination. Eerily glowing, gathering speed, the river surges toward a clifftop where it spills like rainbow-coloured syrup, plunging to the sea below. Then, suddenly, it freezes in midair. It hangs there, shimmering before his mind’s eye like ice, but not ice, because ice doesn’t have a pulse, does it?
Something is throbbing at the heart of all that glass. It starts to expand, inflate, as though an invisible glassblower — Dec himself — is filling that glittering mass with air, shaping it, making rooms inside it.
It is a glass house by an ocean, glowing in the setting sun. But even as he admires his handiwork, he senses trouble, knows that such beauty cannot last. And he is right. In the space of a heart-beat, it explodes.
Dec awoke, sweating, breathing hard. It was difficult work filling a house with air. He rubbed his eyes and propped him self up. Three A.M. He struggled out from under his duvet and sat groggy and lightheaded on the edge of his bed.
What had happened?
There had been a noise. He looked towards the window. It was open a crack. Even though it was April and chilly, he loved to hear the peepers down in the swamp, the sound of spring coming.
He looked across the lawn. The lights were on in his father’s workshop. His eyes strayed to the looming hill beyond the shop, to the woods made alive with wind, high up on the hill. There was just a fingernail of moon snagged in the skeletal branches of a maple.
He found his sketchbook and pencil case on the floor beside the bed and cleared a space on his desk. The dream image of the glass house had shattered, but the idea of it was still alive inside him. Could he draw it? He squinted at the dazzling emptiness of the page until his eyes hurt. Nothing. He tried to summon back the dream. The cliff was all he got. It was still there, solid, imperturbable. He had seen it before and now he remembered where.
There was a nightlight on in the hallway. Noiselessly, he made his way to the stairs. With an act of will he carried the splintered remnants of the wonderful glass house through this most ordinary of houses.
Camelot: a split-level done up to look like a Tudor manor. An English country house plunked southwest of nowhere in the rough-and-tumble countryside of eastern Ontario.
Camelot. That was the name of the model in the House & Garden magazine, which was where Birdie found it. She had seen it there and pointed at it and said, “This one, honey.” And so his father built it for her. She wasn’t going to live up on the hill, she said. She wasn’t going to live in a drafty museum filled with memories that were not her own. She wanted a House & Garden Camelot. And Bernard Steeple wanted his Birdie to have her nest.
Dec made his way to the bookcase in the living room. He turned on a lamp and pulled out an issue of National Geographic. He knew most of them by heart. There had been an article about Highway One, the legendary coastal road that wound its way like a serpent along the whole length of California. Here it was. And here was the very cliff he was looking for, the one in his dream.
He stared at the picture — the sweep of mountain, the swath of orange poppies, the dun-coloured cliff, the pounding surf. Beautiful and empty. The perfect setting for a dream house.
The contest in Architectural Record magazine was for “students only.” It didn’t specify architecture students. It didn’t specify an age. “The Shape of Things to Come” — that was the title of the challenge.
His thoughts drifted. He laid aside the magazine and reached for another, Vol. 191, No. 6. Heiata was on the cover — the most beautiful woman in the world, with tropical flowers woven into her raven hair and a strand of black pearls around her neck. Someday he would build a house for Heiata. Being from Tahiti, she would want to live by the sea.
He yawned. Birdie would be getting him up for the school bus in less than three hours. Birdie — her morning voice like Chewbakka — at his bedroom door. “Hit the deck, Dec.” The same tired joke, day in and day out. He hugged the open magazine to his chest and closed his eyes.
Then Sunny started to cry.
He heard footsteps and turned. It was the Wookie herself, Birdie, clumping down the stairs in her quilted nightgown, her arms wrapped around herself under her substantial bosom.
She saw him and frowned.
“What is going on in this mad house?” she said.
“I heard something,” said Dec.
She looked at the volume in his lap. “You heard a magazine?”
“I got to thinking,” he said.
She made a face, as if thinking was something that should be confined to reasonable hours if indulged in at all.
“Don’t go asking for the day off,” she said, then ran her hands through her great mane of hair and headed into the kitchen.
He closed the book on his dreams. As if he’d ever missed a day of school. School was how you got out of here.
He turned off the light and followed Birdie into the kitchen. She was standing in the dark, outlined by the light from the hall. Her head drooped as she leaned against the counter. In the lighted window of the microwave, a Minnie Mouse cup went around and around.
“Ear bothering her again?” asked Dec.
She nodded. “Lemon and honey for Little Miss Sunshine,” she said.
The timer dinged.
Dec looked out the window. “Dad left the lights on.”
Birdie shook her head, yawning as she stirred a pouch of cold remedy into the heated water. “He’s still out there,” she said.
Dec remembered thinking that a noise had woken him. He looked again towards the shop, wondering if something had happened to his father. Then he saw him walk past a window. He was all right. Of course. Nothing much ever happened to his father.
“Had to get the war started,” said Birdie.
“What war is it this time?”
She held up two fingers.
“The Second World War?”
She nodded.
“All of it?”
Birdie glanced at him wearily. “Just D-Day.” She tasted Sunny’s drink. Too hot. She poured some into the sink and topped up Minnie with cold water.
“My ear hurts.” It was Sunny’s voice, all wobbly, drifting down from her room.
“As if D-Day weren’t enough,” said Birdie. She joined Dec at the window. “It’s three in the morning, and your father is out there in his shop happily building some beach in Normandy. Go figure.”
She sounded kind of proud, as if only a special kind of guy stayed up late playing with model armies.
“D-Day,” said Dec. “That’s a long way from the Greeks taking out the Persians at Marathon.”
“I thought you’d be pleased,” she said.
“Why?”
“Your old man finally joins the twentieth century. You’re always grousing about him being stuck in the past.”
Dec was just about to remind her it was now the twenty-first century when Sunny called out again. “Mommy?”
“Coming,” said Birdie.
And Dec bit his lip the way he always did when he heard his sister call Birdie Mommy. Even after so long.
Alone in the dark of the kitchen he looked towards his father’s workshop.
“Bernard Steeple arrives in the twentieth century,” he murmured. “Alert the press.”
Just then, as if his father had heard him, the lights in the shed went off. And in the new darkness Dec thought he saw, far up on the very top of the hill, another light. He stared. Must have been a shard of moonlight shining on a window in the big house. Where they used to live when his real mother was still around.