Lisa Unger - Fragile

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 before 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.

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.