Shard of Glass | Page 2

Why don't you look, Leah, before I lose all my nerve?"
My stomach clenched, but I flipped through the pages. Somewhere in the center, I realized, part of the book had been hollowed out. Within a bed of cut-off words and ragged paper edges nestled the strangest piece of glass I had ever seen. Its beveled surface was pitch black--but unlike any other glass I had known, it didn't reflect light at all. In fact, it seemed to suck it in, so the page right beside the glass was so dark I could hardly read the print. The shard was shaped like an isosceles triangle with a chipped top--so lopsided it could only have been broken off from a larger piece. But someone had melted copper along the edges so they wouldn't cut. I looked at my mom, but she was staring doggedly at the road and wouldn't meet my gaze.
I picked up the glass and held it in front of my right eye.
"Ma!" I screamed, "Look out! You're going to hit her!"
The car swerved violently and my head knocked against the side window. Momentary pain lanced through my skull, exacerbated by screeching tires and a chorus of car horns. We pulled out of it seconds later. I looked frantically out the back window to see if she had managed to avoid hitting the woman sitting in the middle of the highway.
There was no one there.
I turned back to Mom. Her hands were trembling so badly she had dropped her cigarette, but she didn't seem angry with me. "Don't believe what you see through the glass," she said softly. "That's what he always said to me. I should have told you, but I never saw anything. . . . I didn't realize that you would."
"This is Dad's?" I asked.
"It's yours now, Leah, but . . . promise me you'll never show it to anyone else. It's our secret, okay?"
I stared at my mother. The worn copper on the outside of the shard was biting into my sweat-slicked palm. I didn't know what else to do but agree.
"I promise. Ma . . . are we going on the trip now?"
She nodded.
"When are we coming back?" I was almost too afraid to ask the question.
"I don't know. Not for a very long time."
Very carefully, I put the shard back inside the book and shut the cover.
"Where are we going?"
"I bought tickets to Rome this morning," she said, "but that was just to lead them off. Is there anywhere in the world you want to go, Leah?"
I thought about the geography presentation I would never have the chance to give. We were each supposed to??do it on a??different country. I didn't really know much about mine--I had only picked it because it was cute and small.
"Luxembourg," I said.
My mom just nodded. She never asked me where it was. To this day, I still don't know if she had ever heard of it, but she nodded just the same.
At the airport, she went into the bathroom alone. When she came out, she was no longer an anomaly, a black movie queen in a white woman's clothes. The woman who left that bathroom was not my mother--she was one of the invisible thousands, a black woman in gray, serviceable housekeeping clothes and a scuffed but sturdy pair of white tennis shoes. She had pulled her nappy hair back in a bun, washed her makeup off of her face. Now, her bloodshot eyes just looked like part of the uniform.
"Your dress . . ." I said, struggling to keep myself from panicking, breaking down. I had always known my mother used to be a housekeeper, but I had never understood what it meant until now. "Charles . . . gave it to you, didn't he? Where . . . ?"
My mom's eyes were hard, but I knew she wanted to cry too. "I threw it out," she said.
And when I followed behind her, carrying along the bit of luggage she had dared to bring, I was no longer the daughter of a woman who looked like a dark Lena Horne, I was just a nappy-headed brat of uncertain paternity, whose possessions had suddenly been reduced to three sets of clothing, a book, and a shard of glass.
I was twelve years old.
We were careless in Luxembourg--too obviously secretive or suspiciously casual. We hadn't yet learned that fundamental lesson of disappearing: it's not enough to just vanish, even to a place thousands of miles away; to truly disappear, you must blend in.
My mother cried each night and I knew she kept a picture of my father in her bag, but the face she turned to me every morning was as hard as my piece of glass. She never asked me if I wanted our fugitive existence, but the idea