Lisa Unger - Fragile

Chuck nodded slowly. He was a heavyset guy, with a thinning head of dark brown hair, a round, sweet face. He always had a slightly disheveled look about him, even more so now, as he’d clearly been roused from sleep, the shadow of stubble on his jaw, the back of his head matted. He had a demeanor that seemed to encourage people not to take him too seriously. But Maggie knew it was a mistake not to.

“What else doesn’t her mother know?” Chuck asked.

“That’s enough, Chuck,” Maggie said. “Are you interrogating him? Do we need a lawyer?”

“Come on, Maggie. There’s a girl gone missing.”

“And Rick says he doesn’t know anything.” She didn’t like the pitch of defensiveness she heard in her own voice.

“Well,” Chuck said. He glanced over at her son, who seemed to be sinking deeper into the couch. “I think he does.”

In the silence that fell between them, Maggie heard the ticking of that old grandfather clock. She and Chuck locked eyes. He hadn’t grown up in The Hollows. He was a beat cop from New York City who’d moved to town after his second son was born. His wife didn’t want to wait up nights for him, worried sick, wondering when two of his buddies would come to the door with the bad news. He drove patrol in The Hollows for two years, was promoted to detective last year after scoring high on his exam.

“She broke up with me, okay?” Ricky said. His voice was faint in that way it always was right before he was about to cry. “She stood me up, and then I got a message on Facebook.”

Maggie turned to look at her son. The blank outer shell had dissolved; he looked the way he had when his best friend in kindergarten had moved away, or when Patches, their dog, had been hit by a car and died in his arms. The profound, unapologetic sadness of youth pushed down the corners of his mouth, sloped his shoulders; it crushed Maggie to see it on his face. It also ignited a flash of anger at Charlene-a silly, selfish girl who had caused all this drama, all this pain, because she had a fight with her mother.

“What did her message say?” asked Chuck gently. “Let’s take a look at it.”

They followed Ricky upstairs to his computer. Jones hadn’t wanted Ricky to have a computer in his room. Jones had wanted it left in a common area so that they could monitor Ricky’s online activity, keep him safe from the Internet predators, prevent him from downloading porn. But when he’d turned sixteen, they’d decided to give him his privacy, considered him trustworthy and smart enough to be granted that small privilege.

In the mess of his room, rock posters covered every inch of wall space. A shelf held a slew of soccer trophies he’d won in middle school before he fell in love with the drums. A hamper overflowed with dirty clothes. A cup sat filled with some congealed liquid. The room held the scent of sweat and old food. Onions , Maggie thought. It smells like onions in here .

Ricky sat in front of his computer and showed them the screen; her message was already open, as if he’d been reading it over and over. Maggie looked over his shoulder, just as she had done with Britney earlier. Chuck stood behind her.

I’m sorry I didn’t meet you. Something happened at home. I can’t go back there tonight. Maybe never. It’s better if we say good-bye anyway, Rick. I’ve got to go my own way. You’ve got to go yours. Go to college and be a good boy. Maybe our paths will cross again someday. I do love you. I’m sorry.

Love,

Char

“Where would she go?” asked Chuck, backing up to let Ricky pass as the boy stood up from the chair.

Ricky sank onto the bed and put his head in his hands. “I don’t know. She always said she was going to the city. She said she had friends who could get her into the music business. But I don’t know who.”

“You never went to the city with her?” said Chuck. “You never met any of these friends?”

Ricky looked at his mother. “We’ve been to the city to see bands and stuff. But I never met anyone she supposedly knew. Honestly, I thought she was making it up. She makes stuff up, you know, to make herself feel better.”

“She lies, you mean?” said Chuck.

“Yeah, but just, like, stories. You know, dreams. She hates it here, hates her stepfather. I always thought of them as kind of escape fantasies.”

“Britney said Charlene was afraid of Graham,” Maggie said. She sat beside her son and draped an arm around his shoulders. She was surprised when he moved in closer to her, didn’t squirm away from her embrace. Chuck stood, dominating the doorway now. He was a very big man, with a protruding belly and a barrel for a chest. Intimidating now that he was frowning.

“ Was she afraid?” Chuck asked.

“She wasn’t afraid , exactly. I would say she distrusted him. She said he was inappropriate with her. That’s the word Charlene used. He’d hit her mom, but she’d hit him a bunch of times, too. It’s a violent relationship.”

Chuck issued a sigh, bent his head and rubbed the crown. A chime coming from somewhere on his person caused him to reach for his phone in the pocket of his jeans, pull it out, and glance at the screen.

“Okay, Son,” he said, distracted, still looking at the device in his hand. “When you hear from her-and I think you will-you need to let someone know. Try to get her to come home. A girl can get herself into a world of trouble out there.”

“I will,” said Ricky.

Maggie felt a flutter of panic now for Charlene, her anger dissipating, and she followed Chuck as he descended the staircase.

“So what now?” she asked him at the door.

“Everyone’s looking for her. The whole department will be putting in hours tonight knocking on the doors of neighbors and friends. We’ll find her.”

“She could already be on a train to New York, if that’s where she’s headed.”

“We’ll put out a tristate runaway bulletin, enter her name into NCIC and DCJS.” Maggie knew these were information databases, but she couldn’t remember what the initials stood for. “We’ll contact the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, get a picture up there. You know the stats, Maggie: seventy-seven percent of runaways come home within the week.”

She knew the statistics, of course. But numbers didn’t mean anything when you were talking about a girl you knew, someone you cared about. There were people-predators-waiting out there for someone like Charlene, a girl with big dreams, not sure if anyone really cared about her, afraid of her stepfather, fighting with her mother. The anger Maggie had felt toward Charlene had passed. Left in its wake was something like fear. The worst happened, even here.

When she closed the door on Chuck and turned to go back to her son, to comfort him, the grandfather clock read 1:05 A.M. She hadn’t heard the hour chime.

The day would come. He’d known that it would, of course. That it had to come. Because even then, when he was young and clueless, he knew you couldn’t bury that much wrong and make it right. And though there was no real reason to suspect that today was the day, he knew it was. It was Melody’s face, that terrible contortion of rage and misery. Her face, her voice-it brought him back. You shouldn’t have to bear witness twice. He should have left The Hollows long ago, gone away to college like Maggie but never come back. But he didn’t.

He had a laundry list of excuses-a bad knee had derailed his hopes of a scholarship, the old cliché; his mother was sick, couldn’t be on her own; he’d always dreamed of being a cop in the town where he grew up, of giving back. All of these things, all noble, with kernels of truth at their centers, were lies. The reality was that he hadn’t needed a scholarship; there was money. Anyway, he’d never been as good as all that; he’d just been better than his below-average teammates. His mother was sick, mentally ill, unstable-it shouldn’t have been his job to watch over her and then to watch her die. But he’d taken it on, even though other family members had offered a hand. He did like the idea of policing The Hollows, a way of atonement, he supposed. But it wouldn’t have been enough to keep him here. No, the truth was that he was afraid to leave. He was a coward.