Lisa Unger - Fragile

But when it came to his own son, he was usually dead wrong. He seemed eager to believe the worst, was blind to all the good. What did it say about him? In her work, she often found that people who couldn’t connect with their children had trouble connecting with themselves, had a core of self-loathing. Was this true of her husband? she wondered as he continued ransacking Ricky’s room and she watched, helpless, clueless as to what to do. And if it was true, why had it taken her so long to confront it?

Wanda was dozing on the couch, and Charlie’s eyes were starting to ache in the glow of her computer screen. He’d been scrolling through a classic car site for hours, and all the cars were beginning to look the same. He’d never been a guy who knew about cars, though he had always wanted to be. Wanda, it turned out, was one of those guys. And it didn’t seem to bother her much that he didn’t know a fin from a fender. He’d seen a few barely suppressed smiles, but then her attention had started to wander, and eventually she’d drifted over to the couch, commenting from there until she fell asleep.

At this point he was pretty sure that the car he’d seen was a Chevelle. Or maybe it was a Pontiac GTO. Or maybe it was a Mustang. The truth was, it had been dark, he’d been a little sleepy, a little high on Wanda.

He stood and leaned back, listened to a series of cracks from his spine. The flowers he’d bought her earlier sat proud and purple in the vase at the center of the table. He didn’t know any more about flowers than he did about cars.

“Lilies!” Wanda had exclaimed. “They’re my favorite, Charlie. How did you know?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But when I looked at them, I thought of you.” It wasn’t a lie or a line. He’d never been good at that. It was the truth. He was rewarded with a tight embrace.

After dinner, he’d helped her clean the dishes. Not the kind of half-assed help his father used to offer his mother, that kind of befuddled, mystified carrying of a few dishes from the table to the kitchen only to quickly retire to the couch to watch football or the news. He’d helped her load the dishwasher, and then to wipe the table, put the place mats and cloth napkins in the laundry room.

Then, over a glass of wine, he’d told her. About the girl he saw last night. About Lily. When he mentioned her name, he saw Wanda’s eyes drift over to the flowers. He found himself reading her thoughts. Maybe that was why, on some subconscious level, he’d chosen them. But she didn’t say anything about it. Just listened and then offered the advice that had brought them to the station.

He looked at Wanda, who turned over in her sleep, putting her back to him. He moved to her, took the cozy throw blanket from the couch, and draped it over her slim body, admiring the rise of her hips, the dip of her ankle. She sighed in her deepening slumber.

He stepped out onto the porch. The light snow had stopped and not accumulated at all. The air was still and cold, the wind chimes silent. Empty planters hung, bereft until spring. There was an old ceramic cat by the door. On impulse, he lifted it and found a key. Without thinking, he pocketed it. He’d give it to her later and tell her he didn’t think it was safe, even in a safe town, to leave a key outside the door.

He looked out toward the street. Had it just been last night? He imagined the scene, watching her standing there with her punk hair and uncertain expression. Because that was what he saw on her face. It wasn’t fear, exactly, just uncertainty, as if she were doing something against her better judgment. Except this time, he called out to her, Hey, do you need any help? Maybe she would have said no, or flipped him the bird. But maybe she would have said yes. Maybe just that one sentence from him would have been enough to keep her from getting in the car.

He stepped onto the sidewalk. In the bay window of the red house across the street, the blue light of a television flickered. There was a heavy bass thump of music being played too loud somewhere. On the wire above him, a mourning dove cooed, low and inconsolable.

He walked across the street and stood approximately where the girl had stood and looked back at Wanda’s house. From where she’d been standing, she wouldn’t have been able to see him through the trees in Wanda’s yard. Across the street, an upstairs light glowed. Somewhere a car coughed to life, then roared off. The way the sound carried, he expected the car to approach and pass, but it never did.

What was she thinking as she stood here? Where is she now? He remembered asking himself those questions about Lily, standing like this in the place she was last seen. But it was the second question that hurt the most. Where is she now? His imaginings on the subject were grim and wild. Every year or so, he’d drop Lily’s mother an e-mail, ask how she was doing, really just wondering if there was any news of Lily. Even her skeletal remains would have offered some kind of relief after nearly two decades of dark wondering. She hadn’t answered his last message.

“She’s sick,” his mother had told him. “Cancer.”

“Cancer? That’s awful.”

“Is it any wonder?” she’d said, her voice nearly a whisper. “Grief like that can kill you, Charlie. A missing child? It’s an unimaginable horror.”

In the street, he noticed a slick, gleaming puddle. The fluid had a rainbow sheen to it. He felt a little jolt of excitement. The car he’d seen had idled there, and it had definitely not sounded healthy. He put his toe to the edge. The liquid was sticky, nearly dry. It was possible, wasn’t it, that it had leaked from the car he’d seen? Even though maybe a hundred cars had passed that way since last night. But it could be something. Was it enough to call that cop?

“Charlie?”

Wanda had come out after him. Just the way she looked beneath the amber glow of the streetlamp, so pretty even disheveled from sleep, even with a little worried frown on her forehead, made him think he was going to ask her to marry him.

“What are you doing out here?” she asked him.

“Look,” he said. He pointed to the liquid in the road.

“Hmm,” she answered. She bent down to squint at it. “Transmission fluid.”

“The engine of that car sounded pretty bad.”

“And to leak that much fluid in one spot, it would have had to idle here awhile. Not just any passing car would dump that much. The stop sign on Hydrangea is a good twenty feet away.”

“So what does it mean, when a car is leaking that much transmission fluid?”

“Well,” she said. She put a hand to her chin. “It means that it didn’t get very far.”

“We should call that cop,” he said. He kept his eyes on the stain on the road. “Do you think we should?”

“Definitely,” she said with a nod. “Yes.”

“It’s kind of late.” He glanced at his watch, a cheap Timex with a black leather band and roman numerals he’d bought at a drugstore nearly ten years ago. If some future version of himself (an out-of-shape pest control technician, no less) had appeared the day he bought it and told him that he’d still be wearing it almost a decade later, he’d have laughed in his own face.

When he looked back at Wanda, she said, “I don’t think people are getting much sleep when a girl is missing.”

He’d be embarrassed if he called that cop and then he said something like, “That could have come from any car in the last twenty-four hours.” He’d look like one of those buffs, guys who watched so much crime television that they thought they knew as much as detectives. Or worse, he’d look like someone guilty, someone who was trying to insert himself as a helpful person into the investigation in order to exert some control. He knew how it felt to be under suspicion.