by Lisa Unger
“We could get someone in to clean, Mom.”
“No,” Elizabeth said sharply. Maggie could see that she was embarrassed. “I can’t have that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s… frivolous.” She spat the word, as if she couldn’t stand the taste of it on her tongue.
“Oh, heaven forbid,” Maggie said, raising her palms in a gesture of mock horror.
“Maggie, please.”
“Sit down. I’ll pour the tea.”
For once, Elizabeth obeyed without a wisecrack or protest. As Elizabeth moved into the dining room, Maggie noticed for the first time that evening how stiff her mother’s movements were, how carefully she lowered herself into the chair.
“Mom, did you fall again?”
“No,” Elizabeth said too quickly.
Maggie poured the tea and carried the cups over. They both drank it without cream or sugar. She sat across from her mother at the table where she’d shared dinner with her parents most evenings of her growing up. The old oak piece, which nearly spanned the length of the long dining room and comfortably sat ten, had belonged to her grandmother. It had been stripped and refinished only twice in its life, had been so lovingly cared for that its surface still gleamed in the light. It felt as solid and permanent as a mountain, as if it could never be moved from the place where it stood, where it had stood as long as Maggie could remember.
“Tell me,” Maggie said. She watched her mother and thought how delicate she seemed suddenly. This titan, this woman full of confidence and attitude, was getting old. Maggie felt a little shock of fear. The child in her still thought of Elizabeth as immortal.
Elizabeth took a sip of her tea.
“It was nothing,” she said. She put down the cup, touched the rim. “I just, you know, lost my balance when I was trying to load that damn dishwasher. I should have washed the dishes by hand-like I always do-but Jones made such a damn fuss the last time he was here about how expensive it was and how much time and trouble it would save me.” She paused to take a breath. “Anyway, I’m fine. Just sore. Too sore to stand and do the dishes, or to sweep.”
“You have to tell me these things,” Maggie said. She felt a rush of sympathy and sadness for her mother. “We’ll go see the doctor tomorrow, have an X-ray.”
“Look, if I’m still sore tomorrow, I’ll let you know. You have enough on your plate, Maggie. Too much.”
“Mom-”
Elizabeth lifted a hand to indicate the end of the discussion. “I promise, I was going to call tomorrow anyway if it still hurt. I swear.”
Maggie knew the impossibility of arguing with her mother, so she just got up, went into the small bathroom down the hall, and got some Advil. She noticed that the bathroom was so clean it made her own seem like something you’d find in a youth hostel. So she figured Elizabeth was being honest about the timing, that she’d felt bad for only a couple of days. Her mother scrubbed the bathrooms religiously once a week; it was a chore Maggie had always dreaded in childhood. But now she did the same at her own house.
Maggie brought a glass of water and the Advil to her mother. Elizabeth took the pills and downed them with the water, gave her daughter a smile.
“I promise,” she said, reading Maggie’s worried frown. “See? I feel better already.”
Maggie rested her hand on her mother’s; it felt tiny and fragile until Elizabeth turned her hand to squeeze Maggie’s, and then she felt her mother’s strength. Maggie smiled back.
“Ah,” said Elizabeth suddenly, looking up at the ceiling. “There they are! Do you hear it?”
“What? No, I don’t hear anything.”
“Listen!”
Maggie listened and heard only the silence of the old house.
“They stopped,” Elizabeth said, looking disappointed. “You didn’t hear?”
“No,” said Maggie. “I’m sorry. I didn’t.” She felt a slight tingle of worry for her mother.
Elizabeth glanced over the table at Maggie, then down at her fingernails. “Well,” she said, draining her cup and standing up. “That boy is supposed to come back and check his traps again tomorrow. Never mind.”
Her mother moved stiffly back to the kitchen sink, and Maggie wondered when Jones had come by and why he had given her mother a hard time about the dishwasher, but she stayed focused on the matter at hand. “If they’re a nuisance,” she said casually, “why don’t you come sleep at our place?”
“No,” Elizabeth answered with a dismissive wave of her hand. “I’m not going to let critters run me from my home.”
“We’d love to have you, Mom. Just a visit until the problem is gone.”
When Elizabeth had hurt herself earlier in the year and Maggie had suggested that her mother move in with her, the old woman had coolly informed her that she would never consider that as an option. “I’ll have my own home until the day I die, Maggie,” she’d said. “Don’t imagine me any other way.”
Elizabeth’s harshness on the matter had hurt Maggie. She was annoyed by her mother’s lack of consideration for the rest of the family, not to mention her lack of foresight about the future. Elizabeth was unwilling to talk about alternatives to living alone in a gigantic old house that she might not be able to manage one day, the care of which would fall to Maggie and Jones. But Maggie was in no mood for a battle, so she backed off even on this small matter. The time for battles would come soon enough. She got up and took her cup to the sink, rinsed it, and put it in the rack.
“Okay, Mom. I’d better get back to Ricky. Do you need anything before I go?”
“I’m fine,” her mother said stiffly.
Why did she have to be like this? So brittle and uncompromising? This was a question Maggie had been asking about her mother for as long as she could remember. She was beginning to think that there wouldn’t be an answer in either of their lifetimes.
Even though he was only seventeen, Rick Cooper knew that love could exist even though it was starving and unrequited. It didn’t need love in return to survive. In fact, maybe he loved Charlene more, harder, because he knew she didn’t, couldn’t, love him back. Charlene could never love something that stood at her doorstep; she could only love something far away and hard to get, something that didn’t want her. Somehow he’d known this about her from the beginning, but it didn’t keep him from falling for her.
“We’re just friends,” she’d tell him as they lay in the backseat of his car together, as he kissed her neck and felt her body beneath his.
“Okay,” he’d say as she wrapped her arms around him, put her warm mouth to his.
“You’re not my boyfriend,” she’d tell him. “I don’t want that.” But she’d hold his hand and whisper in his ear that she loved him. And he knew she meant it, in a sweet way, in a true way. She’d touch him all over, make him feel things inside and out that gave him a fever. His hands had roamed her body, the soft swell of her breasts, her heart-shaped bottom. But still, she’d held herself from him. For all her sexy cool, she’d seemed childlike, innocent. He barely thought of anything else.
She wasn’t like the other girls, the girls his mother would like to see him dating. She wasn’t frivolous and bubbly, wearing pink bubble gum lip gloss and carrying Hello Kitty notebooks. She didn’t have the coyness of Britney, that look that said she knew a little about prettiness and power but not quite enough to wield it well. Charlene wasn’t the kind of girl who teased, then got scared of the reaction she invited. She wasn’t pampered or sheltered. She already knew the hard edges of the world, knew that life disappointed and that most people’s dreams never did come true.
She was hungry and melodramatic, impossible to predict or control. She did things that made people angry, like smashing Slash’s guitar at practice. It was wrong. It was silly. But it was in moments like those that he loved her the most, when he was almost crazy with the desire to shelter and protect her.
He pulled the car into the garage and sat, toying for a moment with the idea of closi
ng the door and sitting there with the engine running until he fell asleep. He imagined his father finding him, roaring with grief. He fantasized about Charlene hearing about his death. The dark romance of it would appeal to her. She’d use the pain to write a song about him.
Love survives
even when it’s wrong,
even when we’re strong.
It holds on to us with its teeth,
tears us down to the bone.
It won’t let go
until we give in
or bleed to death.
But it was just a moment, a childish indulgence. He wasn’t suicidal; if he were, he thought, Charlene would probably like him better. If anything, at the moment he was numb. He’d felt something that he imagined was close to grief last night, an aching hollow in his center, a trapped and quiet raging in his chest. Most of the day had been spent in a state of controlled panic, making phone calls, trying to connect with the people he knew in New York. After he learned that no one there had seen or heard from her-or so they were saying-something inside just powered down. His neck and shoulders ached. The new tattoo on his arm-Charlene’s idea-burned.
The only thing he knew for sure right now was that Charlene hadn’t written those status updates on Facebook. But what it meant, he didn’t know. Maybe someone had her against her will, was using the updates to keep people thinking she’d run away. Or maybe it was her new boyfriend, this guy Steve everyone was talking about. He could see her doing that, giving him her password, letting him write whatever he wanted, knowing that Rick alone would know it wasn’t her. Just rubbing it in. There was the anger, too. It lived beneath the surface of all the other emotions, pacing its cage. She uses people. She used you. It was true, what Britney had said. He knew that.
He shut the engine and walked into the house, through the laundry room and straight to the refrigerator. His early acceptance letters stared at him. That he’d applied to colleges at all had been the final nail in the coffin with Charlene. “You’re a good boy. You’ll go to school and be a doctor like your mom, help people. That’s you. You should be proud of that.”
But he wasn’t proud. He wanted to be bad, like whoever it was she’d gone off into the city to be with, if that was what she’d done. He took a carton of orange juice from the refrigerator, drank from it, and put it back, slamming the door. The letters and the magnets that held them fell to the floor with a clatter.
“Are you even going to go?”
Rick jumped with a jolt of fear that felt like an electric shock. His father was sitting in the dark dining room, a looming black shadow at the table.
“Go where?” he managed. “Christ, Dad. You scared the crap out of me.”
“To college.”
Great, the old college conversation. Perfect time to discuss it. “I don’t know,” he said.
He expected some sarcastic comment or light insult. But instead his father said, “You have to go, Rick. Don’t stay in this town your whole life like me.”
Rick snorted his disdain. “I wouldn’t.” He hadn’t meant it as an insult to his father, but that was what it was. He felt like he should say something to soften it, but then he didn’t, he just leaned over and picked up the letters and magnets, placed them on the counter by the phone. His father didn’t say anything, either. Rick walked into the dining room and turned on the light. He sat down at the table.
“What’s happening with Charlene? Where did you go during the meeting?”
“We’re searching the residence,” his father said. “I got a call.”
“What did you find?” Rick felt a lump of dread in his belly. His father looked strange-tired, sad around the eyes. He wanted to say, Are you okay, Dad? But there was, as ever, a glass wall between them through which nothing soft or tender could pass. Only angry or loud words, heavy things thrown with force, could shatter it.
When he was very young, Rick used to slip into bed with his father. His mother often slept elsewhere-on the couch or in the guest room across the hall from his room. He was too young to wonder why then. But when he heard her move softly down the stairs or quietly close the door, he’d wait a bit, then pad down the hall and slide in beside his dad. His father’s breathing would be even and deep. Rick would try to match his breath to his father’s, but he could never quite do it.
“We found blood, Rick.”
“Blood?” Rick felt his hands start to tingle.
“Melody claims that she and Graham had a fight last night and that she hit him with a baseball bat in self-defense. She claims he left, saying he wouldn’t come back. Afterward, Charlene and she fought about that cell phone. Turns out Graham got her that phone. Melody says she found the bill; that’s why she and Graham fought.”
“I thought Mrs. Murray said last night that she didn’t know about the phone.”
“She lied.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Anyway, she claimed that she took the phone from Charlene. That’s why they fought. That’s why Charlene left. Melody claims she smashed it, threw it in the trash that was picked up this morning.”
“That’s why no one’s been able to reach Charlene,” said Rick.
His father nodded. “There’s something else.”
“What?”
“There’s a witness who saw Charlene-or someone matching her description-climb into what’s described as a big green muscle car last night and drive off.”
“Where?”
“Persimmon and Hydrangea, around eleven thirty.”
“It wasn’t me.”
His father kept hard eyes on him. “Ricky,” he said, finally. “I can’t help you unless you tell me the truth.”
“Dad. I was here, sleeping. You know that.”
His father shrugged. “I went to bed at nine; I was beat. I didn’t wake up until Melody came knocking.”
The strangeness in his father’s expression had deepened. He looked haunted and afraid. The look was contagious. Rick started to feel edgy, guilty, as though his father was seeing something within him that he didn’t know was there.
“The car wakes you up when I come and go.”
“Not always.”
The grandfather clock marked the quarter hour, and Rick heard the refrigerator start to run, making ice cubes. He stared at the facets of the stained-glass lamp that hung over the dining room table. When he was a boy, he’d thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world, the way the colors glowed in the light. Lately, it just looked old and tacky.
“Dad. What are you asking me?”
“I need you to tell me what happened last night.”
“I did tell you. There’s nothing more to say.”
They both fell silent as the front door opened and closed. Rick felt nearly weak with relief to hear his mother’s voice.
“What’s going on?” she said. She came into the dining room, shed her coat, and draped it over a chair.
Jones told Maggie everything he’d told Rick. As his dad spoke, his mother sat in the chair beside him. Rick saw it, triumphantly, as a taking of sides. Normally, Jones would sit at the head of table with Maggie in the chair to his right and Rick in the chair to his left. Head of the table, man of the house, Rick would always think mockingly. But now his father sat across from them. His mom put her hand on Rick’s leg.
“There are a lot of cars like that around, Jones,” she said. “The boys around here like those old GTOs and Mustangs. I saw an old Chevy the other day. It’s a trend.”
“It’s quite a coincidence, though, don’t you think?”
There was that tone, that smug, condescending tone that Rick hated more than anything. The one that said: I’m smarter than you. I’m better than you. I know more than you’ll ever know.
His mom didn’t say anything for a moment, just looked down at the table. Then, “If you want to ask him something, why don’t you just ask him?”
His dad said, “Did you pick Charlene up on Persimmon last night?”
“No. I didn
’t. I was here sleeping. I fell asleep trying to call her after she stood me up. I have told you this a hundred times. Why don’t you believe me?”
But his father didn’t believe him. Rick could see it in the set of his mouth, in the narrowing of his eyes.
“I’m telling you the truth,” he said. He got up from the table, pushed the chair back with more force than he intended. It scraped loudly on the floor. The crystal glasses in the china cabinet sang.
“Ricky,” said his mother, grabbing hold of his hand.
“Right now, I can help you, Rick,” his father said. He leaned forward across the table. There was an urgency in his voice that Rick didn’t understand. And for a moment, he thought he saw his father’s eyes fill. “If this thing goes any further, there’s nothing I can do.”
What did he mean by that? What did he think? Did he think Rick had done something to Charlene? He didn’t trust his voice to ask the questions, and a part of him didn’t want the answers. Instead, with his parents’ rising voices crashing behind him like a wave, he got up and left them.
By the time they reached the front door, he was in his car, backing out of the drive. As his father stood on the step, his mother looking small behind him, Rick drove off, not thinking about where he was headed or what he was going to do, just glad to be away from the person he saw reflected in his father’s eyes.
Maggie watched her son disappear down the road, guilt, fear, and anger a chemical brew in her stomach.
“You don’t think he’s capable of hurting Charlene,” she said when Jones came back inside and closed the door. He moved past her without saying anything and climbed the stairs. She followed him to Ricky’s room, where he flipped on the light, stood scanning the area.
“Answer me, Jones.” She felt the old, familiar anger. He forced her to side with Ricky. He always had. They’d battled about everything from nap time to curfew, from television viewing to phone privileges. Jones always felt like he had to take a hard line. And she had no choice but to soften the edges. Who else was here to defend Ricky against his own father? Sometimes she really hated Jones for it, for putting her in this impossible place.
