Fragile Read online

  That girl is sleeping with our son, he said to her one night as they sipped wine by the pool.

  I know, she said, not without a twinge of something angry or jealous or sad. She’d seen Charlene with her hand on Ricky’s crotch just the day before. Somehow it made her remember changing his diapers and giving him a bath. She’d felt another lash of grief. Sometimes it seemed like that was all it was, motherhood-grief and guilt and fear. You said good-bye a little every day-from the minute they left your body until they left your home. But no, that wasn’t all. There was that love, that wrenching, impossible love. It was all so hard sometimes, hard enough with two careers that they hadn’t wanted another. But it was over so fast.

  There’s something not right about that girl.

  I know it, she said.

  Jones cast her a surprised glance over the table. I thought you liked her.

  She gave a slow shrug. I care about her because I care about Ricky. And he loves her.

  With a sharp exhale: What does he know about love?

  Not enough. That’s why it’s so dangerous.

  • • •

  “I’ll pay for the tux and the limo,” she said now. Was she begging?

  “Come on, Mom.”

  “Just think about it. Ask Charlene. Even a girl as hip as Char might harbor secret fantasies about dances and party dresses.” She tried for a smile but suspected she might just seem desperate.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll ask her.”

  He was humoring her, but she felt a little jolt of excitement just the same. She never thought of herself as that kind of mother. But there she was, pushing her kid to go to the stupid winter formal so she could have the pictures, join in with the other moms as they talked excitedly about gowns and flowers, limo services. It was embarrassing.

  She went back to gazing through the catalog in order to appear nonchalant-a sensor alarm for the pool, a ceramic frog that hid a key in his belly, a floating cooler. She felt like buying something. Anything. She noticed her nails. She needed a manicure.

  The screen door slammed again. When she looked up, her son was gone; her husband had taken his place, sorting through the mail. If they knew how alike they were in every way, they’d both burst into flames.

  “Where’s Johnny Rotten?” asked Jones without heat.

  “He was here a minute ago.” She closed the catalog and threw it in the trash.

  “Heard me coming,” he said. He opened the phone bill, glanced at it, and put it on the counter.

  “Probably,” she said. Then, “No more fighting today, okay?”

  “What’s to fight about, Maggie? The war is lost. Nothing left to do but surrender.”

  She felt her throat constrict. “It’s not a battle. There aren’t supposed to be winners and losers. He’s our son.”

  “Tell that to him.”

  She looked over at him, but he was a locked box, staring down at the rest of the mail-more junk. She didn’t know how to comfort him anymore, how to soften him. The years, the job, had made him harder. Not all the time. But his anger used to be hot. He’d yell and storm. Now he folded into himself, shut everyone else out. You didn’t have to be a shrink to know this wasn’t a good thing.

  He glanced over at her. A quick up and down. “You look nice. Do something to your hair?”

  “I had it trimmed a couple of days ago.”

  She tossed her copper curls at him, blinked her eyes in a teasing come-hither.

  He moved over to her and wrapped her up in his big arms. She leaned into him, feeling his broad chest through the softness of his denim shirt, then looked into his beloved face.

  “I can still drown in those blue eyes, Maggie,” he said with a smile.

  The years, parenthood, money worries, all kinds of stresses, had not robbed her of her love for him-though there were times when she feared they had. She still loved the sight of him, the smell of him, the feel of him. But sometimes she felt like they didn’t always look at each other anymore. Like the gold watch his uncle left him, or the diamond earrings in a box that had been her grandmother’s-precious things in the landscape of a life, cherished but barely noticed. Trotted out for special occasions, maybe, but most often taken for granted.

  There were worse things. She’d seen her friends’ marriages implode and dissolve, leaving massive emotional wreckage or just disappearing at sea, second marriages no better. She didn’t always like Jones. Sometimes she ached to punch him in the jaw really hard, so hard she could split her own knuckles with the force of it. But she loved him no less totally than she did her own son. It was that complete, that much a part of her. He was half of her, for better or for worse.

  “He’s okay,” she said, squeezing his middle. “He’s going to be okay.”

  Silence. Jones took a deep breath, which she felt in the rise of his chest against hers.

  Because that was what it was, wasn’t it? Not just anger. Not a need to control in the way we most often mean it. Not a lack of love or understanding for their boy. It was fear. Fear that, after all the years of protecting his health, his heart, his mind, setting bedtimes and boundaries, giving warnings about strangers and looking both ways before crossing the street, it wouldn’t be enough. Fear that, as he stood on the threshold of adulthood, forces beyond their control would take him down a path where they could no longer reach him. Fear that he’d be seduced by something ugly and would choose it. And that there would be nothing they could do but let him go. She believed they’d taught him well. Prayed they had. Why did her husband have so little faith?

  “I hope so,” he said flatly, like it might already be too late.

  She pulled back to look at him, to admonish him, but saw by the clock on the stainless-steel microwave behind him that she had just five minutes until her next session. She didn’t have time for a throw-down. She saw him notice her eyes drift, and then he moved away from her, unknowingly mimicking Ricky by opening the refrigerator and peering inside.

  “Off to save the world,” he said. “One desperate soul at a time. But what about her husband?”

  “What about him?” she said, pouring herself a cup of coffee before heading down the hallway that connected her house to the suite of rooms where she saw her patients. “Is he a desperate soul?”

  They were kidding around. Weren’t they? When she turned to look at him, he was still gazing into the refrigerator, looking odd-too tired around the eyes.

  “Jones?”

  He turned to grin at her. “Desperate for some lunch,” he said with a wink. Did it seem forced?

  “There’s leftover lasagna and a fresh salad I just made,” she said, feeling a pang of domestic guilt for having eaten quickly without him even though she’d suspected he would pop home for lunch. She quickly quashed it. I’m a wife, not a handmaiden. I’m a mother, not a waitress. How many times had she said those two sentences? Maybe one of these days she’d start to believe it herself.

  “My cholesterol?” he said, raising his eyebrows.

  “Low-fat cheese? Whole wheat pasta? Ground turkey?”

  “Ugh,” he said, finding and reaching for it. “When did we get so healthy?”

  “We’re not healthy, Jones. We’re old.”

  “Hmm.”

  She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and left to meet her patient.

  2

  She loved him. She knew what that meant, no matter what anyone said. It was impossible not to recognize love, wasn’t it? It was a dry brushfire, a shift of tectonic plates at the bottom of the ocean. It changed the topography of a life, destroyed and created. Her heart beat so fast and her throat was so dry before she saw him that it felt like panic. When would he get there? Would he ever get there? Did he really love her, too? Would he change his mind? That delicious worried waiting and then the meeting, flesh on flesh, the skin of his neck against her mouth, that deep exhale-passion like the relief you feel after releasing a breath you’ve held underwater. How could she not recognize love? She’d been with other boys, crush
es. It hadn’t felt like this.

  “A moment of pleasure can lead to a lifetime of pain,” her mother, Melody, had warned during one of her operatic lectures on action and consequence. Charlene felt sorry for her sometimes, wondered if her mother even remembered pleasure, if she remembered love. Or had she crossed so much time and distance that she’d forgotten the way, wouldn’t remember the language even if she found it again?

  There was an old photo album Charlene had found in her grandmother’s house, at the bottom of a box in a dusty guest room closet. In the album, filled with images of people she didn’t recognize, Charlene had unearthed a picture of Melody on her wedding day. Her mother was as slight as a reed, wearing a willowy vintage lace gown. She’d been just so pretty. But that wasn’t the reason Charlene had slipped the photo from its plastic sleeve and put it in her purse. It was the expression on her mother’s face as she looked at her new husband. She was lit up with bliss, a wide smile, glittering eyes. In all her life, Charlene had never seen her mother look like that. Never. The girl in the picture was a stranger, someone Charlene wished she knew. She looked funny and cool, like she’d make dirty jokes and drink too much.

  Charlene had found the picture after her grandmother passed. They were cleaning the house, getting it ready to sell. Charlene wanted to keep the house, move in and sell the dump they lived in.

  “No way,” her mother said. “Do you have any idea how much work it is to live in an old place like this?”

  But it was beautiful, three stories of lace curtains and hardwood floors, swirling banisters and rattling windows. Every stair had a unique song, every door stuck in the summer humidity. In the air, Charlene thought she could always smell her grandmother’s perfume, a light floral scent that, for some reason, set her to humming “Rock-a-bye Baby.”

  But it was more than the work of living in an old house that had motivated her mother to sell; Charlene could see it on her face. It wasn’t even the money, though she knew that was a factor. Charlene didn’t know what it was, why her mother would want to sell her childhood home, let other people move in and “renovate”-strip the house of all its personality and history.

  “You’re too young to understand. Sometimes you just want the past to go away; you don’t always want it lingering, tapping you on the shoulder, reminding you about things you’d rather forget.”

  “Like what? What do you want to forget? I thought you loved this house.”

  “I do, and I know she’d want us to stay.”

  “Then why, Mom?”

  “I’m just selling it, Charlene. We need the money. End of discussion.”

  And there was something so sad and strange about her mother that, for once, Charlene did shut up when she was asked. She had been thirteen at the time, filled with a big, ugly anger and a crushing sadness about losing her grandmother and the house she loved. But there was no talking to Melody about it. Life is loss, Charlene. Get used to it. Was that true? Charlene wondered. Was that all it was?

  She’d lost her father already. She’d been too young to grieve for him; but she knew other girls had something she’d never understand. She wrote a song about it all, “Selling Memories.”

  The things you want to keep, go

  The things you want to lose, stay

  Sell your history

  Sell your soul

  You’re still bankrupt, tired and old.

  And the memories how they linger,

  Wrap around you when you’re cold.

  The refrain was an angry scream, repeating the title over and over. It wasn’t bad. Certainly no worse than some of the crappy covers they played over and over. She’d tried to get Slash to help her write some music recently. But he wouldn’t.

  Slash thought her lyrics, her poetry, tended toward the too flowery, overly ornate. As if someone who called himself Slash and wore black lipstick had any right to criticize anything. They fought about it, passionately and often. She disagreed. Her language was in line with her inner life. A drama queen, her mother called her. If pressed, she knew most of her friends-even Rick-would agree. She didn’t care what they thought. Better to live loud, cause a scene, feel too much, than die a brain-dead automaton in a suburban wasteland.

  If it weren’t for Rick, she’d have left their stupid garage band ages ago. She was sick of singing covers at parties-other people’s lyrics, other people’s thoughts, badly imitated. Slash didn’t have an original thought in his head. He could read music, mimic guitar players he liked, but he couldn’t write an original chord to save his life. She hadn’t meant to ruin his guitar when she grabbed it from him, but it had slipped from her hands and smacked against the wall, hit hard and in just the right way. She’d thought he might cry the way he looked at it. He just picked it up, its neck broken and dangling, the strings slack, and carried it out like a child in his arms.

  “Nice, Char,” Rick had chastised.

  “I didn’t mean it,” she’d said, looking after him helplessly. She still felt bad about it, wondered how much it would cost to buy him a new guitar. This happened to her a lot. She acted out of passion, sometimes hurting people, and then felt horrible about it later. But she never seemed able to make things right again. She had a gift for creating damage that couldn’t be undone.

  She sat in her ticky-tack room, in her ticky-tack house, painting her nails iridescent green. She hated the tract house with all its perfectly square rooms and thin walls, identical to every third house in their development. It was like living in the box of someone else’s limited imagination. How could someone reach the height of her creativity in a drywall cage? She couldn’t. And she wouldn’t. She would be eighteen in six months. After graduation, she was so out of here. College? Another four years of indentured servitude, living by someone else’s arbitrary rules? No way.

  Where do you think you’ll go? her mother wanted to know. You think you’ll survive on minimum wage in New York City? Because without an education you’ll be working at McDonald’s. But Charlene had an escape plan; it was already under way.

  You can always stay here with me, Charlene, when you’re ready. He’d promised her this the last time she’d seen him. You can stay as long as you want.

  She was smiling to herself when she heard the slow rise of voices downstairs. She stopped what she was doing, poised the tiny, glistening green brush over her big toe and listened. Sometimes she could tell by the early decibels and pitch whether there would be a quick explosion of sound that ended with a slamming door and the angry rev of an engine, or whether it was going to be a slow movement, picking up speed and volume, moving from room to room until it reached a crescendo and someone got hurt. Might be her mother, might be her stepfather, Graham-might even be Charlene if she chose to get involved. Which she wouldn’t today; after the last time, she’d promised herself never again. She’d had to cake makeup and black eyeliner over her eye for a week. She’d let them kill each other first. And it sounded like a bad one.

  She couldn’t make out the words, just that near hysterical pitch to her mother’s voice. Charlene reached for her iPod, tucked the buds in her ears, and turned up the volume. The Killers.

  She tried to sing along, to reach a place of blissful indifference. But her heart was thumping, and she could feel that dry suck at the base of her throat. She finished painting her nails with a hand that had started to tremble a little, then capped the bottle and put it down hard on the bedside table. She hated the mutinous actions of her body. Her mind was tough, not afraid of anything. But her body was a little girl shaking in the dark.

  Charlene reached over and paused the music, listened to the air around her. She exhaled. Silence. For a moment, she was almost relieved. But the silence didn’t sound quite right. It wasn’t empty, void of energy. It was alive, hiding something. She got up from her bed, walked with her toes flexed and separated, mindful of the slime green polish. She listened at the cheap, thin door with its flaking gold knob. Nothing. Not even the television, which her mother had on perpetually-
morning shows, game shows, on to soap operas, then the afternoon talk shows-Oprah, Dr. Phil. How could the woman even hear herself think?

  Charlene found herself feeling the door, like they teach you to do if there’s fire. If the door is hot, don’t open it-they drill this stuff into you. Stop, drop, and roll. Endlessly, your entire school career, they sent you out single file with bells ringing. But the petty suburban abuses, a terrible marriage polluting the air you breathe, a stepfather’s inappropriate glances and crude offhand remarks making you feel small and dirty, a selfish, silly mother who couldn’t seem to decide between the roles of harsh disciplinarian and best girlfriend, leaving you wary and confused. Nobody tells you what to do about those things. Nobody rescues you with a big red truck, sirens blaring. You’re supposed to live with it. But it hurts, damages, like a toxin in the water you can’t smell or taste. It’s only later that its pathology takes hold. You wind up on some shrink’s couch for the rest of your life.

  She was thinking this as she pushed the door open and walked down the hall toward the unfamiliar silence, wet nails forgotten now, leaving a smudge of green on the carpet with each step. At the top of the stairs, she stopped.

  “Mom?” she called. There was no answer, but she heard something now. Something soft and shuddering, irregular in pitch and rhythm. Weeping. Someone was weeping. She moved slowly down the stairs.

  “Mom?”

  3

  Marshall Crosby was sinking into depression again. Maggie could clearly see that. All the physical cues were there. His hair hung limp and unwashed over his thick glasses. It was one of the first things she’d noticed about him when he began his sessions with her, that he rarely bothered to brush the hair from his eyes. Instead he peered out from beneath it with a variety of expressions-disdain, defiance, shyness, or, like today, a kind of morose sadness. Something invested in itself. His bony shoulders slouched inside a threadbare navy hooded jacket; his knees were spread wide, hands dug deep into the pockets of his jeans. He had the purple shiners of fatigue under each eye.