Fragile

by Lisa Unger

  “So do you have a plan? Is someone expecting you?”

  “Oh, yeah. I’ve been seeing someone in the city.”

  “I thought you were with Ricky Cooper.”

  “We’re just friends. No strings.”

  He gave a sharp little laugh. “Does he know that?”

  Charlene felt her face flush. And that smell was starting to make her feel queasy. Sometimes, on a long ride, she’d get carsick, start to feel that gray wobble of nausea, that expanding unwellness. All she needed was to get sick in this guy’s car.

  “Can you pull over a minute?”

  “Why?”

  “I think I’m going to throw up.”

  He pulled over quickly, and she got out into the chill of the night. She walked off the shoulder to the grass and sat, put her head on her knees. She could hear the rush of traffic, people racing toward whatever next event of their lives. Just like her, moving on, moving forward. She willed herself to be solid, to not fall apart by the side of the road. But it was no use. She managed to keep it off her clothes by getting on all fours, but she vomited until she was retching. It seemed to go on forever. When it was over, she sat sobbing.

  “Are you all right?” he asked from behind her. She hadn’t heard him get out of the car, had forgotten about him altogether.

  “Do I look all right?” she snapped. Then she remembered that he had gone out of his way for her, was her ride. “Sorry,” she said more gently. “No. I guess I’m not.”

  She felt him just standing there, not saying anything. Finally, she got up and faced him. He was taller, bigger than she thought of him-when she thought of him at all. He opened the door for her, and she climbed back inside. The stink of the old car made her feel sick again almost immediately. She rolled down the window.

  “I know it’s cold, but I need some air,” she said as he started driving again.

  “It’s fine.” But he’d gone grim and sullen. Just like all men the minute you stopped being a sweet little flower. The second you ceased to please, they got shitty. Some of them, like Graham, got violent. She felt another wave of nausea at the thought of her stepfather, but she pushed the events of the evening away-a bad B horror movie she’d rented and turned off before the bloody conclusion. If she didn’t think about it, it wasn’t real. She could do that. Always had been able to. But her body was disloyal, puking by the side of the road, sobbing. Now her hands were shaking, adrenaline pumping for no good reason.

  “Sorry,” she said again. “I’m not having a good night.”

  But he didn’t say anything, just kept driving. Well, fine, fuck you, too, she thought. When the cold air got too much, she rolled up the window and leaned her head against the glass.

  “Should we put on some music?” she asked.

  “Radio’s broke.”

  Her mother insisted that there was no way Charlene could remember her father. He’d died when she was very young, in a car accident on his way home from work. But she did remember him-how it felt to hold his hand or ride on his shoulder. She knew his face, a lot like hers, from the photographs she had of him. But that was not how she remembered him. Nor were there particular events in her memory of him. It was an essence, a feeling-just a good, warm feeling, a safe, secure happiness. When she was younger, she could access that feeling simply by holding his picture to her chest and closing her eyes. But as she grew older, she couldn’t do that anymore. It became elusive, a shadow slipping around the corner while she gave chase. How could she ever get it? That wonderful feeling? The safety of being loved by someone who didn’t want to violate you in return, who didn’t want to take something that didn’t belong to him?

  She’d thought Graham was all right at first. She was nine when he and her mother married. There were fun times-a trip to Florida and Disney, a baseball game at Yankee Stadium. She couldn’t say she’d ever loved him; but she remembered feeling okay when he was around.

  But Charlene had gotten her period when she was ten and started developing early. By age eleven, she’d needed a bra. He’d started looking at her differently then, averting his eyes, shrinking from her embraces. She felt the sting of a rejection she didn’t really understand. Around the same time, his marriage to her mother started to go sour. The good times were over; there were only fights and tears and slamming doors.

  Then a few years later it happened. She awoke in the night and went to the kitchen in her underwear and a tank top to get a glass of orange juice. On the way down, she passed by the family room without even glancing inside. She might have done the same on the way back if he’d been quiet, but as she passed by the darkened room, she heard a low moan. The sofa bed was out, and Graham was on top of the sheets, wearing just a T-shirt, his bottom half exposed. He was masturbating. She stood staring, stunned. When she looked at his face, he was watching her. He didn’t try to cover himself. He just continued pumping his hand, watching her. She couldn’t read his expression-something between need and anger. She felt her face start to burn and her throat go dry. She backed away until she hit the wall behind her. It must have been seconds, but it felt like hours that she stood there, mouth gaping-disgusted, ashamed, and oddly fascinated.

  Finally, she broke into a run for the stairs and locked herself in her bedroom. All night she waited for him to try to turn the knob and get in, but he didn’t. She thought about telling her mother, but she couldn’t imagine the conversation, the words she would use to say what he had done. Her mother was so sad already, so unhappy. Charlene knew she remembered Dad, too. I shouldn’t have bothered trying to marry again. I was lucky to have love like that once. I didn’t deserve him in the first place, the things I’ve done.

  The next morning, Graham was sitting at the kitchen table with his paper and a mug she’d given him one Father’s Day-WORLD’S GREATEST DAD. She hadn’t even meant it when she bought it; she was just trying to be nice. Now she wanted to smash it across his stupid face.

  “Good morning, Charlene,” he said. His expression, when he peered at her over the paper, was a dare.

  “Want some eggs, baby?” her mother asked. A cigarette burned in the ashtray, the coffeepot gurgled, and morning show hosts bantered on the television. Outside, there was a depressing drizzle.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said. “I may never eat again.”

  Graham held her eyes.

  “Oh, stop it,” her mother said. “You’re a skinny minny. Toast?”

  “Sure, fine. Toast. Thanks.”

  Her mother popped the bread in and then went upstairs to get ready for work. For a few minutes, they sat there. Graham pretended to read; Charlene listened to the television but stared at the wallpaper.

  “I was thinking on the way home tonight I’d pick up a DVD player, get rid of that old VCR.”

  She’d been begging him for one for months. You could only get VCR tapes from the library. It was embarrassing not to have a DVD player.

  He put the paper neatly on the table in front of him and folded his hands over it. His hair was still wet from the shower. The denim shirt he wore brought out the blue of his eyes. She shrank back from him when he leaned toward her slightly. She saw remorse on his face, something sad.

  “What do you think about that, Charlene?”

  What was he offering her? Was it an apology? A bribe? She was nearly fourteen at the time; she knew what he’d done was wrong. Her mother would leave him. He could go to jail. She was old enough, smart enough, to know these things. You learned about it in school, what was okay, what wasn’t. So why did she feel dirty and small inside? Why did she feel ashamed and afraid? She kept thinking of him lying there, that hungry look on his face. But if she told her mother, the whole world would come crashing down around them. It wasn’t as if he’d touched her.

  She turned her eyes to his and held his gaze, even though the act made her stomach cramp with nerves.

  “That would be great, Graham,” she said. “But we really need a new television, too.”

  Now the road stretched b
efore them, and Charlene watched it disappear under the hood of the car. She found it hypnotic, the way the car filled with orange light when they passed beneath the tall highway lamps, then went dark again for a time. After a while, adrenaline abandoned her, leaving her weak and exhausted.

  She dozed once, nodded awake with a start, feeling suddenly, deeply afraid. But she willed herself to be calm. He’s waiting for me, she thought. He got my message and he’ll be waiting. Everything is going to be fine. She thought of Kat Von D from LA Ink, who’d left home at fourteen and now was on TV, a famous tattoo artist. Everything had turned out all right for her. With those thoughts, she started to drift again.

  A bump in the road brought her back. It was dark, except for the glow of the dashboard lights. It took a few seconds before she realized that they’d left the highway, were driving along a deserted rural road. Not a streetlamp, not a house in sight. Just the black shadows of trees against the sky. She felt a thump of fear.

  “Hey,” she said. She tried to sound casual. “Where are we? Where are we going?”

  The old analog clock on the dash, lit in a dirty yellow light, read 12:32 A.M.

  11

  Jones Cooper had been a beautiful boy-lacrosse star, straight-A student, crown prince of Hollows High. And Maggie Monroe, though she’d never have admitted it, had spent her high school years admiring him from afar. His body was a study in perfect form. He was fast, agile, powerful-every inch of him exactly as it should be.

  But this wasn’t why Maggie found herself daydreaming about him, watching him secretly from beneath the bleachers. It was because beneath all those golden layers, there was a place where the sun didn’t reach. There was a place within him that saw. He knew that there was a world beyond The Hollows, the town that stood in his thrall. And that it could be ugly and frightening. There was something dark about him, or maybe just something that acknowledged the darkness.

  At least that’s what Maggie thought she saw when she watched him. She was the geek in black, with black fingernails and eyeliner, the brain, the poet, the freak. His eyes had never rested on Maggie in high school, though he claimed differently now. I always noticed you. I thought you were too smart for a stupid jock like me.

  But Maggie remembered his gaze always drifting over her to the prettiest or most popular girls, girls who shone a bright reflection back at him. Maggie didn’t mind. He was a star in the sky; she never expected to touch him, only to gaze at him in admiration and wonder.

  Anyway, she didn’t have time for boys. She needed to study, to do well, knowing that an education was her only ticket out of the town she hated. The Hollows, to her teenage mind, was a hell mouth, a social and cultural void populated by the petty and small-minded-those kings and queens of high school cum pizza parlor waitresses, gas station owners, and desperate housewives. The Hollows was only a hundred miles from New York City, but it might as well have been on another planet. Maggie always knew on an instinctive level that she would need to fight The Hollows’s powerful gravitational pull if she wanted to get away.

  But ultimately it was Jones who drew her back. She’d never have believed it when she graduated high school and moved into the city to attend NYU. During college she never came home for more than a weekend. Even summers, she managed to find work or internships, places in the city where she could stay cheaply. She went straight on to graduate school, working toward her Ph.D. in psychology. With her demanding studies, work, then her residencies, sometimes a year would pass, with Maggie seeing only her parents when they came into the city to take her to dinner, visit a museum with her, maybe see a show.

  “You never come home,” her mother complained over the phone one night. “People wonder about that.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  But the thought of that town, that old house, her parents’ low-grade, continual bickering, the headaches that always plagued her on her return, kept her away.

  “Jones Cooper asks about you.”

  “Really?” The name was pleasantly distant. Jones Cooper. Like a song she’d loved but one for which she couldn’t quite remember the tune. “Under what circumstances do you bump into him?”

  “The town is changing. We’ve been having some problems at the school with drugs. One boy brought a gun last month. Jones Cooper has been in my office quite a few times.”

  “Really?” It was hard to imagine guns and drugs at Hollows High. Kids had snuck cigarettes, got fake IDs to buy booze, maybe smoked some weed when Maggie was a kid.

  “Yes, really,” Elizabeth snapped, annoyed. “Over the last two years, we’ve developed a meth problem. It’s a nationwide concern, especially in rural areas like this.”

  Maggie knew this, of course. But she always, for some reason, had thought The Hollows was immune to such deterioration. She didn’t like to think of her mother, always a petite woman, then in her fifties and getting smaller every time Maggie saw her, walking among drug users and gun-wielding thugs. Sometimes tough talk wasn’t enough.

  “Do you think about retiring, Mom?”

  Elizabeth released a disdainful snort. “They’ll carry me out of here.”

  Stubborn old woman, Maggie thought but didn’t say.

  When Maggie was finishing her doctorate at Columbia University, her father was diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer. In the months that followed, she found herself back in The Hollows every spare moment, helping her mother to care for her father as he fought the disease admirably but deteriorated quickly, then died horribly.

  In Maggie’s memory, the period was an awful blur of sadness and exhaustion. But it was also a time of fierce intimacy; she’d never spent so much time as an adult with her parents-helping, comforting, just being with them. Both Maggie and Elizabeth were changed by the violence of her father’s passing, but they were closer than they’d ever been.

  At the gathering that followed her father’s funeral, Maggie managed to separate from the crowd and stand alone on the back veranda, looking out at the expansive property, the weeping willows, the thick woods of beech and ash beyond. It was a gray, muggy day; a misty rain made everything glisten. She felt a hand on her shoulder.

  “I’m sorry about your father, Maggie. He was a good man.”

  She turned to see Jones Cooper. He was thicker than she remembered, premature fine lines around his eyes. His blond hair was a shade or two darker. None of it diminished his beauty. He was still washed in that same golden light. Still with that same shadow at the core.

  “Thank you,” she said. Heat rose to her face with the rush of chemical attraction.

  She found she didn’t feel awkward or uncomfortable around him at all. If he had spoken to her in high school, she would have burst into flames. That afternoon, they stood side by side and stared out into the yard in a comforting silence.

  Then Jones said, “You got out of here. Never came back.”

  There was something wistful in his voice that surprised her. She’d never thought of him as someone with a dream to leave The Hollows.

  She nodded, a knot of guilt in her center. She’d spent more time with her father as he lay dying than she had in the years since she’d graduated from high school. She might have known her father better as an adult if she hadn’t so persistently stayed away. For some reason, she found herself saying this to Jones, even though she was sure he’d just come to offer platitudes. But he listened, kept his eyes on her.

  When she was done, he said, “Your parents wanted you to have your own life. They raised you to be independent and move away from here. Your mother has said as much. He knew you loved him. You were here when they needed you. That’s a lot.”

  She was used to offering others solace and advice; it surprised her to receive it, to be grateful for it. She found herself crying. She put her hand to her eyes and then felt him wrap his arms around her. In a way, after that moment, she never left The Hollows again. The years grew over that embrace like a vine.

  Now they were fighting-again, which unfortunately was
their way in times of stress. Each was a safe place for the other to blow off steam. It had started when they’d stepped outside, Jones telling her to go home, he’d handle it from here.

  “Where’s Ricky?” she asked, glancing at Jones’s SUV, for some reason expecting to see their son sulking in the passenger seat.

  “At the house with Chuck.” Chuck Ferrigno, one of the other detectives on the squad.

  “What do you mean? You don’t mean to ask questions about Charlene?”

  A raised female voice inside caused them both to look at the door for a moment, then look back at each other.

  “Of course,” he said.

  “You left our minor child with a cop, no parent or attorney present, to be questioned about a missing girl?”

  “Come on. He’s a cop’s son. We’re not calling in an AMBER Alert here. This is a runaway situation. Not an abduction.”

  For some reason, she heard Melody’s plaintive question, How do you know?

  Everyone had thought Sarah had run away as well, after that fight on the phone with her mom. Trying to get even. Trying to make everyone worry. There were recriminations later that the police didn’t act quickly enough. But that was another girl, a lifetime ago.

  “What’s wrong with you, Jones?” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper. “Don’t you have an instinct to protect your son?”

  He drew back as if she’d slapped him. Before he had a chance to return fire, Melody burst out the door, rushing toward Jones. She looked harried, pursued by demons. When she spoke, it was a barely intelligible wail.

  “Are you going to find her, Jones? Are you going to do something besides stand around with that superior look on your fucking face and find my daughter?”