The Year of Broken Glass by Joe Denham Read Free Book Online

lovemaking that proves only to reaffirm and widen the chasm between us, so we lie naked and darkened afterward, turning away from each other, each to our own arms.
    Jin Su and I lie entwined now on her grey leather couch, her light body on top of mine, her head on my chest and her hand up behind my neck twirling my hair with her small fingers. She stares toward the door and finally asks, “What’s in the box?”
    I’d set it to the floor as she’d leapt at me, then slid it into the room with my foot as I closed the door and carried her to the couch. “It’s a surprise,” I reply, just as Emily starts to stir, then sputters a cry from the bedroom.
    Jin Su lifts herself off me, slips into her kimono, and wrinkles her nose. “She’s fussy,” she says. “Cutting her first teeth I think.” Then a scream like a battle cry issues from the bedroom and Jin Su springs away to tend to our daughter.
    Emily was born ablaze, a roaring inferno from the first breath. She’s all fire, from the birthmark spreading perfectly from the midline across the left side of her face to her tuft of light red hair standing up static on top of her head, despite her mother’s dominant Chinese gene and my own head of dark brown curls. She has a wiry body, a rambunctious disposition, and a ferocious, though often playful, howl. She is, frankly, foreign to me, as is Jin Su, having come swiftly like a fresh wind into my life. Though it’s a wind that feels hospitable, carrying an undercurrent of settling and the unexpected scent of home.
    I gaze around Jin Su’s apartment. There are some baby toys by the window, a small collection of rattles and stuffed animals and little musical instruments, a tambourine and a bean shaker, a drum and sticks. There are painted wooden blocks and a couple of old Chinese dolls, a baby boy and girl, from Jin Su’s childhood, all ordered neatly on the polished floor. She’s arranged a collection of photographs of her large family back home on top of the piano and another on the wall space between the dining room table and the floor-to-ceiling window. There’s a tiny alcove kitchen beyond the table, and though I can’t see it from here, above the stove is a picture of me in rain gear on the deck of the Prevailer sorting a trap loaded with crab. Jin Su took it soon after we first met, the one and only time she’s been out on the water with me.
    Taped to the stainless steel fridge is another picture taken at our request by a stranger on Granville Island one sunny Saturday in early February. We’re all three bundled up in winter clothes and smiling from beneath our toques and hoods, happy together in the mid-winter sunlight. I can hear Emily suckling in the other room, contented, and I’m amazed that I am here, that this is my life, in stark contrast to the one I share with Anna and Willow. Somehow it seems there’s more of me here in this relatively tidy, relatively empty apartment than there is or ever has been in that other rental home with its half-acre yard littered with my spare traps, motors, haulers and crab crates, my heaps of clutter and scrap.
    Having failed at her attempts to nurse her back down, Jin Su brings Emily from the bedroom and plops her down on my stomach. Then she retrieves the tote from the entryway, sets it on the floor beside me, and sits down at my feet on the couch. Emily pounds my chest like a drum, a wily grin splayed across her face. “Take it out,” I say, sliding the tote toward Jin Su, and I can tell she thinks it’s some kind of present I’ve brought for her, which in a way it is, though it’s evident she’s both disappointed and intrigued by what she finds as she unpacks the glass float. “Careful,” I can’t help but caution her as she lifts it to her lap.
    â€œOh, it’s quite beautiful isn’t it?” she says, after turning it around in her hands. Emily