Lisa Unger - Fragile

But what she hadn’t realized was that this imaginary respect she craved was only granted to older men . She hadn’t understood that when her body started to weaken and sag, when her beauty faded, she would become invisible. That people would treat her like a child again, without the kindness that is generally extended to children. Doctors, checkout clerks at the grocery, even some of her former students, even Jones and Maggie, sometimes spoke to her either loudly and slowly, as though she were hearing-impaired, or with a kind of brave patience, as if she were terribly tiresome or very slow to comprehend. The only one who didn’t occasionally treat her like a doddering old biddy was her grandson.

If she’d known how old age really was, she’d have appreciated her strong body and attractive features, the small amount of respect her job had afforded her, while it all lasted.

Thump. Thump. Thumpthumpthump. Thumpthump. Thump .

She walked out of her room and stood a moment beneath the attic access. She hadn’t been up there in years, sending Jones or Ricky up when she needed this or that-an old painting of her husband’s that she’d suddenly remembered and wanted to see again, some photo albums, a lace tablecloth her mother had made. She reached up with her cane and nabbed the loop with its crook. With a two-handed effort, she pulled down the door, the ladder unfolding easily and coming to the floor with a gentle thud .

Now the house was perfectly silent as the attic exhaled a breath of mold and mothballs, decades of abandoned and forgotten things. It might be nice to see some of the things up there-her wedding dress, some old records. What else? She didn’t even know. She stared at the yawning darkness above her and couldn’t help but think about her secret.

“I’ve had enough,” she announced to whatever had decided to make its home up there.

She stood her cane against the wall and climbed the ladder slowly. What did she intend to do once she was up there? she suddenly wondered. With that thought, about halfway up, the pain began, a rocket from her hip down the back of her thigh. It took her breath away, left her clinging to the ladder rungs.

Thump. Thump. Thump .

She looked up and half expected to see her visitors peering at her from the dark doorway, eyes gleaming at her stupidity. But no, there was nothing, just that gaping emptiness reaching into the past. She wasn’t more than a few feet off the ground, but she felt paralyzed, frozen-afraid of the pain, afraid of losing her grip and falling again. But already she was starting to shake with the effort of holding herself in place.

Thump. Thump .

When she finally lost her grip, she slid more than fell to the floor, where she lay for a moment before she started to cry. She thought of all the things Maggie had wanted-to bring Elizabeth to her house, to get Elizabeth a bracelet with a button to press if she fell. All things she’d refused, stubborn with her own pride. Now there wasn’t as much pain as regret.

The cane stood against the wall. If she could reach it, maybe she could pull herself up. But her limbs suddenly felt full of sand, so she just rested her head on her arm and let the tears come.

It seemed like a hundred years ago that Elizabeth had gone to see Tommy Delano, left work early to drive the hour and a half to the facility where he was being held until his sentencing hearing. She didn’t-couldn’t, really-tell anyone where she was going. The parents of her students wouldn’t have liked it. And even she had to admit that it would have been unseemly. He’d already been tried and convicted in the minds of all the citizens of The Hollows, thanks to Chief Crosby blabbing to everyone who’d listen about the boy’s gruesome and depraved confession. There was no room for compassion or sympathy where Tommy Delano was concerned. He was a confessed child killer. End of the worst story told in The Hollows.

But it wasn’t some grand capacity for sympathy or compassion that compelled her to drive out of town, to take the highway four exits and cover the desolate miles to a squat gray building in the middle of nowhere surrounded by razor wire, its perimeter guarded by armed men in turrets.

The thing was that she’d always really liked Tom, which was not something she could say about all of her students. He was a skinny kid, with a drawn face and watery brown eyes. His clothes, always the wrong size, cuffs ending at his forearms or hems dragging on the floor, were never quite clean. He was a straight-C student, though Elizabeth suspected he could do better. He wasn’t funny or charming. But he had a sweet smile, spoke in soft, respectful tones. When she looked at him, she saw kindness, something purely good, even a quiet, twinkling sense of humor.

Once, many years before Sarah’s murder, when Tommy had been a student at Hollows High, she’d driven him home. So terrified had he been of the bullies on his bus, that he’d lingered until the bus was gone.

“Dad,” she’d overheard him say from the pay phone in the school office. “I had detention and missed the late bus.” She knew he hadn’t had detention.

“Okay. I’ll wait in the library. I’m sorry, Dad. Yes. I’m sorry.”

She just couldn’t reconcile the boy who’d rather tell his father he had detention than ride the bus with bullies with the image of Sarah’s killer, the knowledge of what had been done to her.

“I’ll speak to those boys,” she’d told him as she drove him that late afternoon to save his father the trip. It was right on her way.

“No,” he’d said quickly. “Please, Mrs. Monroe. You’ll just make it worse.”

She’d stared at the road ahead, not knowing what to say to that.

“Thanks, Mrs. Monroe. But there’s really nothing you can do. It’s just the way it is.”

Of course, that was years before Sarah’s murder. A lot can happen to a person in a decade. Maybe a lifetime of torment and misery, the festering wounds left by his mother’s death, could transform a timid, quiet person into a killer. But she just couldn’t see it. Could she have been that wrong about him?

At the prison, she’d waited alone in a gray, cold room before Tommy appeared behind the glass in an orange jumpsuit with his hands cuffed. When he sat, the guard who’d escorted him removed his handcuffs. Tommy looked at her with a sad, confused frown.

“Fifteen minutes,” the guard said.

Each picked up a receiver.

“Mrs. Monroe, what are you doing here?”

What was she doing here? Coming had been a foolish thing to do. Had she come to ask him if he’d really killed Sarah? Had she come to prove herself right about him? To prove that she really did recognize the difference between good and bad? She found herself at a loss for words, stared down at her wedding ring and twisted it for a second.

“I wanted to see you, Tommy,” she said finally. “I just can’t believe you killed Sarah.”

His body seemed to sag. He turned his face from her and rubbed at his neck as if it was itching. When he looked back at her, there was something blank, something cold on his face.

“Well, you’re the only one in The Hollows who doesn’t believe that,” he said. His tone was at once bitter and resigned. His voice had gone much deeper in adulthood, a bit gravelly from smoking. She realized that even though he was in the office regularly, she hadn’t really spoken to him in years-maybe just a quick hello or good-bye. She still saw him as a boy, a student at her school. She hadn’t updated the picture in her mind’s eye. She fixated on his hands. They were cleaner than she’d ever seen them. Usually they were black at the nails, grease caked into his calluses. She tried to imagine those hands, those dirty, hardworking hands, doing terrible things, dipped in blood. She couldn’t.