Lisa Unger - Fragile

“What did you call me?” His voice was white-hot.

Jones saw her turn back to look at him, to say it again. Travis’s back was to Jones, so he didn’t know what she saw on Travis’s face that made her own expression go slack with fear, her eyes widen.

“Okay,” said Jones, “that’s enough.”

But then Sarah was running, casting Jones’s varsity jacket to the ground. Did she start to run and he gave chase? Or did he move toward her, causing her to bolt? Jones couldn’t tell. But Travis was after her. She disappeared into the dark of the path, her footfalls loud and echoing, with Travis on her heels. Melody and Jones exchanged a look, and then they followed.

“Leave her alone, Travis,” Melody yelled.

When they caught up with Travis and Sarah, the two were in a standoff. Sarah had picked up a heavy branch and stood with her back to a long pathway that led into the river valley below.

“Stay away from me,” she said, crying, lifting the branch like a baseball bat. “Get away.”

Behind her yawned the steep and twisting path down, the individual steps just stones lined in the earth, jagged gray teeth in mossy gums.

Jones grabbed Travis by the shoulder. “Let’s go. This is finished.”

But Travis turned and swung on Jones, catching him hard in the jaw. Jones fell back with the shock and pain of it, a warm gush of blood traveling from his nose over his lips onto his shirt. He didn’t see what happened next; Melody and Travis always said different things. Travis said that Sarah came after him with the branch and he fended her off. Melody said Travis turned from the swing on Jones to go after Sarah. Whatever happened, the end result was that Sarah fell. And her head hit a sharp stone jutting from the ground. That was the next sound Jones remembered hearing. And then there was absolute silence. Everything in the forest around them-the wind in the leaves, the singing of spring frogs and crickets-seemed to stop. Jones got to his feet and saw her lying there between Melody and Travis. Melody dropped to her knees beside Sarah, who was so still.

“Sarah,” she whispered, as though trying to rouse her from sleep. “Sarah?”

Then she looked up at them, her face a mask of sorrow and fear. Her words were just an exhaled breath. “She’s-she’s not breathing.”

“No,” said Jones. “That’s not-No.”

He went to kneel beside Sarah as well and saw the unnatural angle of her neck, the strange stillness, the odd cast to her skin.

“Oh, my God.” He felt the first grip of true fear he had ever known.

“I never touched her.”

They both turned to look at Travis, who started to back away, his lips parted, head shaking. Then Travis took off in a sprint, disappeared up the path to the main road.

It was that night that Jones realized your body was a thing that could be broken on impact through careless action, broken like a branch left in the road. She was wrecked before him, ruined, ended. There was just one moment between her life and death, just one breath drawn and not released. He thought about the sound it made… that final, soft noise of flesh on stone, the crackle of breaking bone. It was so quiet.

Then, years later, there was a dawning, a slow and terrible dawning that he, too, would die. Even he would one day draw a breath and not release it, or release a breath and not draw another. He would cease to exist, cease to draw the world in through his senses, though it would go on without him. A grim dread, accompanied by a petulant rage, settled on him. It was all so damn fragile. It shouldn’t be. Something so important should be stronger. How were we all supposed to bear it? he wondered. How could anyone really live, knowing that they were going to die? What was the point?

That night, and every awful thing that followed, was there between them in the Explorer as they drove to find Marshall. It was always there, wasn’t it? But the years had buried it all deep, covered it with the fallen debris of ordinary days. Jones wanted to say, Is it still with you? Do you still dream about it? But he didn’t. He knew the answer, could see it in the shattered expression Travis had worn that night and how that face, hollowed with fear and regret, was just beneath the surface of every other face he wore. That’s what Jones saw when he looked at Travis, not the fearsome bully everyone else seemed to see.

Travis lit another cigarette without asking, rolled down the window, letting the cold air sweep in. Jones drove from The Acres and took the main road through the center of town, passed the coffee shop and the independent bookstore, Pop’s Pizza and the Om Yoga Studio. A sharp right after the last light put them on Old Farmers Road, which started as a paved road but devolved into little more than a rocky path, completely impassable after a heavy snowfall.

Chief Crosby (everyone still called him that, thought of him that way, though he’d retired long ago) owned the surrounding hundred acres, thick with hemlock and pine. Rumor had it that he’d had offers from developers-huge offers-that he’d summarily turned down. Every winter Jones fully expected to have to find a way to haul the chief’s giant corpse out of there. But every spring he emerged in his big red pickup truck, looking a bit slimmer, like a bear emerging from hibernation.

“My old man is never going to sell this land, not even a sliver of it,” said Travis. “It’s worth a fortune.”

“He won’t live forever,” said Jones.

“We’ll see,” said Travis, flicking his cigarette out the window.

As they turned onto the drive, Jones saw Marshall’s car parked on an angle beneath the glow of a spotlight that shone from the garage. There was a low crescent moon, and a field of stars he didn’t usually get to see in the brighter light of town. The Crosby house was built from field-stone, a massive chimney reaching up through the red and white pine; it was still and dark, sure of itself to the point of being contemptuous, like the old man himself.

Off down to their right, a stone carriage house tilted in the landscape, its boards splintered and gray, its roof caving in. Jones exited the vehicle and approached the Chevelle, got stiffly to his knees, joints and lower back protesting, and spotted the dark puddle on the ground beneath it.

When he stood up again, he was surprised to see Travis directly behind him. He hadn’t heard the door open and close, had assumed the other man was still sitting in the warmth of the vehicle.

“What are you doing, Crosby?” said Jones, taking a step back. He felt the urge to rest his hand on the gun he carried in a shoulder holster. He knew, though, that a move like that, slipping your hand inside your jacket, was one of antagonism for another cop. He didn’t want to overreact, but the sight of Travis unnerved him. Shadows had settled on the hollows of Travis’s face, in the valleys under his eyes, in the deep lines around his mouth.

“Do you ever think we should have just owned up to what happened that night?” Travis said.

Jones drew and released a deep breath. Here it was, clawing its way up from the dirt beneath their feet. “Why are we talking about this now?”

Travis turned up the corners of his mouth in a mirthless grin. “Come on, Cooper. We all died that night. We’re just ghosts in our lives, aren’t we? Everything is rotten, decayed.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“It was an accident. I didn’t mean to hurt her. Not… kill her.” His voice shattered on the last words.

“I know that. I do.”

“I just keep thinking that if it had just stopped there, if I’d just had the courage to own it…,” Travis said. He let the sentence trail and his eyes drift over to the old house, the place where he’d grown up. “The thing is, I wanted to be a better man than my father, a better father than he was. I just never knew how. You can’t build a house without the right tools, you know.”