Lisa Unger - Fragile

“It’s weird, but even after everything that happened,” Charlene said, “I feel bad for him. He seemed so sad. So lost. I think he really needs help.”

“There are people who care about him.” Even as Maggie said it, she wondered if it was true. “There’s a system in place.”

“That’s good,” Charlene said. She sounded young and uncertain.

“Let’s talk about why you left in the first place.”

Charlene leaned back on the couch. “I had a fight with my mom. About the phone.”

“The phone Graham got for you.”

“Right. It was stupid. Everyone has a phone. Even Graham knew that.”

“Your friends-Britney and Rick, in particular-said you were afraid of him. That he was inappropriate with you. Is that true?”

Charlene shrugged. Maggie noticed that her eyes started moving around the room, looking everywhere but at Maggie. “I don’t know. He’s all right, I guess. Stupid. He and my mom have a really bad relationship. They bring out the worst in each other.”

Maggie wondered what she was holding back. “Your mother told Jones that she hit Graham with a baseball bat.”

Charlene looked up, surprise lifting her eyebrows. “She told him that?”

“They found blood in the kitchen.”

She nodded, looked back down.

“That’s when I left. Last time they fought, I got in the middle and wound up with a black eye. I promised myself it wasn’t going to happen again.”

“How was he when you left?”

“He was on the floor, moaning and cursing at my mom. She was screaming at him. I don’t even think they noticed me pack and leave. I don’t know what happened then. There was blood. He didn’t look good.”

Charlene shook her head. “Mom said he left and said he wasn’t coming back. I don’t really blame him.”

She was quiet a minute. Then, “I didn’t know my real father. He died. I think she really loved him. She talks about him all the time, even now. She thinks things would have been different if he was still here.”

Maggie had a vague memory of the man Melody had married, someone she’d met at college. She found she couldn’t remember his name. Brian, maybe? Or Ryan? He’d died in a car wreck, killed on his way home from work by a drunk driver. Strange. Maggie hadn’t thought about it in years. Melody had experienced a lot of loss.

“It doesn’t do us much good to think that way, how things might be if this or that hadn’t happened. We have to deal with circumstances as they are and adjust.”

Charlene didn’t answer right away, picked at a thread on the hem of her pants.

“But you almost can’t help it, right, when things are bad, to wish they could be better?” she said finally. “It’s natural.”

“It is natural. But it’s more productive to look ahead than to look back. We can make that choice even when it seems to go against the natural tendencies.”

“That’s why I wanted to leave, go to New York.”

“To be with your boyfriend?”

Charlene looked down at her feet again. She put her thumb to her mouth and started chewing on the nail. Maggie remembered that Melody did the same thing.

“He wasn’t-isn’t-my boyfriend.” She gave a little laugh. “He was just some guy I met who said I could crash at his place. They all say that.” She looked at Maggie and rolled her eyes, offered a self-deprecating smile.

“He had a band that plays at a couple of bars in the East Village. He said he was about to be signed.” She took her thumb from her mouth and released a sigh. “But I think that was bullshit. Anyway, he never even returned my calls. I thought I loved him. I always think I’m in love at first. It feels all fiery, so life-changing. Then it’s just gone. That’s not love, right?”

Maggie couldn’t help but smile. She remembered being Charlene’s age, remembered when every feeling was so powerful that you couldn’t believe anyone had ever felt the same.

“Probably not,” Maggie said. “Love is not just initial intense feelings, not just about that early rush. There has to be more to it.”

“Like friendship.”

“That’s right.”

Charlene gazed out the window again. “I’m so tired,” she said. “I feel like I’m going to be tired and sad forever.”

“You won’t be,” Maggie said. “But you have a lot of healing to do. I’m going to recommend counseling for a while to help you process everything.”

Charlene glanced back from the window; she wore a worried frown. “Can’t you be my shrink?”

Maggie hesitated. “Let’s have a few sessions and see how it goes. I’m a little worried that we might be too close for me to be an effective therapist for you.”

Charlene uncrossed her legs and slipped into the shoes she’d worn there, a beat-up pair of Chinese slippers with embroidered roses.

“Okay,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” Maggie told her, keeping her voice light. “We’re going to get you through this.”

Another silent nod. But Charlene kept her eyes down.

“I was a virgin-before this.” She spoke the words softly; Maggie had to lean forward to hear her. “I just wanted you to know that I wasn’t some slut. I was always afraid you thought that about me, that I was sleeping with Rick.”

Maggie struggled to keep the surprise off her face. But it wouldn’t have mattered anyway; the girl didn’t look up to see the reaction her words had caused. She just folded over and started to cry again. Maggie came to sit beside her, put an arm around her back. Charlene shifted to lay her head on Maggie’s lap, and Maggie let her cry it out, rubbed her back while she did.

“I’m so sorry you had to go through this, Charlene,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

Maggie felt like she was saying that a lot these days, apologizing for how ugly the world was, how bad things could get, how unfair. She thought about her mother and Jones, about the terrible things she had discovered in the attic and what they meant for all of them. Out the window, the light was growing dim, and she felt a sudden urgency to face the things she was hiding from in this room, in the space where she helped others but often ran away from herself.

Everything looked different. She wouldn’t have been able to say how. But as she stepped out of Dr. Cooper’s office and into a misty rain, everything-the trees, the sky, the grass on the lawn, the wet driveway, even her mother’s car-seemed altered. She’d felt this way since she was first aware of herself again in the hospital. When she woke up in the semidark to see her mother sleeping in a chair by her bed, lights washing in from the half-open door, the edges of everything seemed indistinct, the colors not quite right, like in one of those old movies. There was an empty bed beside her, and her first thought was to wonder why her mother hadn’t stretched out there. She looked so uncomfortable in the hard chair. It was a strange thing to think under the circumstances, but that’s what she wondered first.

Then she’d been aware of how much she hurt. How her body ached-her wrists, her back, her neck. Even down there she felt pain, inside and out, a bruised tenderness. Then she’d been aware of a scratchy dryness in her throat, a dull pressure behind her eyes. Everything hurt, but just a little, like after she and her mother were in that fender-bender a couple of years back. She felt as if her whole body had been shaken once, really hard. She knew she would get up and walk out of there. And it seemed wrong, because what she felt inside was so black and cold and ugly that she wished she was in traction, wrapped in a full-body cast, on life support. Because that’s how she felt inside, damaged beyond repair. It wasn’t fair that people couldn’t see that.