Lisa Unger - Fragile

Maggie knew she should be dreading having two patients in the house, neither of them easy even when well, but all she could muster was gratitude. She was sure a few days of playing nursemaid would put an end to that. But at the moment, still shaken by the idea that she could have lost two of the most important people in her life in one night, she was glad everyone would be under one roof for a while.

The lightest scratching of a tree branch against her mother’s bedroom window sent Maggie jumping out of her skin. She understood finally, in a small way, the concept of shell shock, of being so inundated by noise and chaos and stress that the brain shut down, refusing to process any additional stimuli. She felt like a twitching mess. Hollows General Hospital was a hive of reporters from all over the country, camping out in the parking lot. Law enforcement from the state and federal levels swarmed the cafeteria. There was a manhunt for Travis Crosby, who was still missing. And Maggie, like most everyone, still couldn’t quite believe what had happened.

She could hear Ricky downstairs; he was gathering Elizabeth’s books, her knitting, and a few of her photo albums-all things her mother had requested. Maggie had asked him to clean out the refrigerator, too. And he, also unnaturally quiet, altered in a way by everything that had happened, complied without complaint. They hadn’t talked much about his feelings or how he was dealing with the knowledge of what had happened to Charlene. He’d tried to see her, but Melody hadn’t allowed it, said Charlene wasn’t ready to face her friends. Maggie’s questions about how he was handling things were met with slow shrugs and monosyllables.

Maggie picked up her mother’s watch from the silver tray on her dresser. Elizabeth had worn that watch, a wedding gift from Maggie’s father, every day for as long as Maggie could remember. A thin strand of diamonds and gold, a small mother-of-pearl face with roman numerals, it looked fragile, felt light in her hand. As a child, she had coveted it, wanted to wear it when she played dress up. And even though her mother cherished it, she’d always let Maggie wear it for a little while.

“Someday it will be yours anyway,” she’d say.

“When?” Maggie remembered asking. She’d felt a tingle of excitement, laced with dread, though she couldn’t have said why. She was far too young to know what her mother meant.

“Someday.”

But not today. Elizabeth, laid up at Hollows General Hospital with a fractured hip-likely broken days before her fall from the ladder-was out of sorts and embarrassed, making herself impossible to everyone trying to minister to her. Yet somehow she remained popular with the nurses and especially the doctor, who had once been a star pupil at Hollows High. Elizabeth wanted her watch. Maggie put it on her own wrist to carry it safely to her mother but shivered when she closed the clasp. She took it off and put it in the pocket of her pants.

Jones was equally unhappy, recovering from a flesh wound. The bullet delivered by Travis Crosby had lodged in the flesh of his abdomen and was removed in surgery.

“It’s a good thing you’re so fat, Jones,” his doctor said in recovery. It was a bit insensitive, Maggie thought.

“I thought the same thing,” Jones said to him. “If I’d dropped that twenty-five you’ve been bitching about, I’d be dead right now. Some doctor.”

But she could see his fear in cheeks that had no color, in eyes that lacked their shine. Jones told her that he had been certain he was having the heart attack he’d been dreading for a decade. I thought I was going to die out there, Mags . But his heart and arteries were strong and healthy. The chest pains, the shortness of breath? Panic attacks, his doctor told him, could be as painful and frightening as any cardiac episode.

Looking at herself in the mirror, Maggie felt the urge she’d been quashing swell to the point of bursting. Her hair was wild; there was still blood on her jacket. The skin on her face looked pasty and soft. A heaving sob sat in her center, waiting-waiting for Elizabeth and Jones to be okay, waiting for Rick to be strong enough to deal with what had happened to Charlene. It would wait until she was alone. The sounds from downstairs reminded her that she couldn’t afford to break down now. Rick was stoic, but the depths were volcanic; she feared the eruption wasn’t far off.

“I demand that you go home and get some rest right now,” Elizabeth had said. “You look like a woman on the verge. You’ve been up all night. You need to take care of yourself, too, Maggie. You never did learn that.”

Maggie had left, more out of annoyance with her mother than anything else. But Elizabeth was right about her. Jones, too. They both saw something in her that frightened them. And they were right to be afraid. She didn’t know how to, didn’t always want to, stop at the edge when others were going over. She’d keep just enough weight on solid ground to pull herself back before it was too late. One day, she might misjudge and tumble over; that’s what Jones and Elizabeth feared. Looking into Marshall’s eyes last night, that unsettling green, she thought someone could drown there, in that pit of need and despair. She understood why Marshall’s aunt Leila had pulled back from him and taken her family with her. And why she had to do the same.

“How do you know if you’re a good person or a bad person?”

Marshall was stuck on this point, had been since she and Henry found him in the woods surrounding the Crosby house. Was still stuck when she stopped by to see him before she left the hospital. She couldn’t get him to move on from the mental loop. It was not a straightforward question under the circumstances. There were so many different ways to answer.

Charlene was going home to her mother today, after being in the hospital overnight for a battery of tests, for evidence collection, and to replenish her fluids. She was badly dehydrated, which was the most dangerous of her physical conditions. She had a concussion, lacerations, and bruises. She’d been repeatedly raped, not by Marshall, according to reports, but by Travis Crosby. The physical injuries would heal. What concerned Maggie were the less obvious injuries. Charlene’s most significant wounds were psychic. In a few weeks, she’d been physically well. But the trauma to her spirit, to her psyche, would take much, much longer to heal. According to what Maggie had heard, Charlene claimed not to remember what had happened at home to precipitate her running away. She remembered only that she’d contacted Marshall for a ride to New York, that he’d brought her to the Crosby boathouse and kept her there against her will. Melody wouldn’t let anyone near her, and the details Maggie was picking up about Charlene’s captivity through reports given to Jones were grim.

On her way out of the hospital, Maggie found Melody in the smoking lounge. The stink of the room was almost unbearable to Maggie, but she pushed inside.

“Melody?”

“Maggie,” she said, startled from her thoughts.

“How is she?”

Melody shook her head. “Broken. Maggie, she’s broken.” The other woman started to weep then, and Maggie came to sit beside her, took the cigarette from her hand and extinguished it. Melody leaned against her, and Maggie rocked her slowly.

“What he did to her-he’s a monster. God, he always has been. I wish Henry Ivy had killed him that day. I really do. You have no idea how much better the world would be without a Travis Crosby in it.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“You don’t know, Maggie. You don’t know the things he’s done.”

She held on tight to Melody.

“I want you to bring Charlene to me, as soon as she’s ready. No charge, of course. I want to help her, Melody. I want to help her get through this, if I can. Talking is so important for her now.”