Lisa Unger: Fragile

“I love you.”

“Me, too.”

He hung up the phone but didn’t rise from the bed. The sun was streaming in through the opening between the drapes, and he heard the voices and intermittent hammer bursts of the workers remodeling the old house across the street. Outside his window, he knew the air had grown cold and the branches of the trees were a line drawing against the sky. While he was lying there, he thought about Lily and how childish was the love he had for her, compared with what he was just starting to feel for Wanda. He thought about Charlene Murray, and wished for the hundredth time that he’d just called out to her that night; he might have saved her from a world of pain-or maybe not. He thought about the story he’d been following on the local news-another lost girl, killed years ago, the truth of her death finally revealed, far too late to do anyone any good. There was something there-a story. He could sense how all those individual souls were connected by the gossamer strands of love and history, secrets and regrets. He could sense the mingling of the past and the present, how one couldn’t exist without the other. He wanted to find his way there, to a place where he could understand it all, make sense of those connections that were too fragile to be easily defined. He knew of only one way. He got up from his bed, sat down at his computer, and started to write.

There were no news vans when Jones pulled into the driveway. It was the first time in days that there hadn’t been at least one reporter hoping for a statement, an ugly candid, maybe flinging insults to get a rise. It didn’t bother him as much as he would have predicted. He’d ignored them mostly, offering not even a glance in their general direction. As he put Maggie’s SUV in park and killed the engine, he thought that they’d missed out on a good day to be there, with the contents of his office in three boxes in the backseat. He hadn’t been fired from his job; he’d offered his resignation, which had been reluctantly accepted by the Hollows PD chief, Marion Butler, a woman he’d come up with from the academy.

“I don’t think this incident requires your resignation, Jones,” she’d said. She’d looked down at the blotter on her desk when she said it. She had eyes that could freeze you dead, and when she’d turned them back on him, he saw her sadness.

“We both know it does,” he’d said.

She’d run a thin hand through silver-gray curls. She’d been gray since the day he met her.

“The incident was an accident,” she’d said. She had sat down behind her desk and picked up the letter he’d handed her. “And you were just a kid. You know it’s likely that charges won’t be filed.”

He knew all this, and he was grateful that she still believed in him. But it didn’t matter.

“I was in a position of trust. And I kept a horrible secret from this town.”

She’d given a careful nod and pointed to the chair in front of her desk. He’d sat. Outside her glass-walled office, the floor had been quiet, as if everyone had frozen in their cubicles to listen to their conversation.

“You were vested in your pension last year.” Her tone had taken on the practical edge he so admired in her. Marion Butler was a straight line, no artifice, no veil.

“That’s a good thing. And, you know, maybe it’s time for a fresh start.”

“Are you sure about this? I’ll fight for your job, if it comes to that. So many years of faithful service to this town counts for a lot, you know.”

But, no. He was sure. In fact, he was sure that he should have quit years ago. He’d wanted to many times; the reasons he hadn’t were myriad. Now the future lay before him, an unwritten page.

He grabbed one of the boxes from the backseat and walked inside. He found Charlene sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a cup of coffee and reading People in her pajamas, like she lived there. Which, annoyingly, she did-for the time being.

“Hi, Mr. Cooper,” she said. She looked up from her magazine, seemed to register the expression on his face. “How did it go?”

“How do you think it went, Charlene?” he said.

“Um… bad?”

He poured a cup of coffee from the pot and came to sit across from her.

“How are your college applications coming?”

“Just taking a little break.”

With Melody awaiting charges in the death of her husband, Charlene had needed a place to stay. When Ricky and Maggie had approached him with the request to board her until Melody was released or, in the worst case, until Charlene went to school in September, he’d surprised himself by agreeing.

They were connected, all of them, weren’t they? The night that Sarah had died, and during everything that had followed, the separate passages of their lives had conjoined in ways none of them could have predicted, or even imagined. It had set even their unborn children on a collision course with each other. He felt like he owed it to all of them to take Charlene in, to right some of the things that had been wrong for so long.

Charlene had decent grades, respectable SAT scores, and a desire to get away from The Hollows for good. She’d finally figured out that an education was the way to do that. There was money left by Charlene’s father and the sale of Melody’s childhood home, which Melody had invested wisely in a trust for her daughter. The conditions of the trust were that the money was available to her only for school and after she had completed her degree, not to traipse around New York City trying to get a record deal. Jones felt a bit guilty for being glad that she had already decided to look at schools in New York City-Fordham, Hunter, and, in a long shot, NYU. Ricky would be going to Georgetown alone.

Ricky and Charlene both claimed that there was nothing more to their relationship now than friendship. But Jones saw the way his son still looked at Charlene. She was a pit of need into which Jones hoped fiercely that his son wouldn’t fall.

“How’s your mom doing?”

A little bit of the wild sadness he’d been seeing in Charlene’s face since the night he lifted her off the boat was fading. But mostly when he looked at her, he just saw this lost, small thing. And in a way he felt responsible for that.

“She’s okay. It was self-defense, you know. I saw him go for her, and she swung to defend herself.” She looked down at the magazine. “She didn’t mean to kill him. Her lawyer thinks the prosecution will be amenable to a deal, because, you know, of the things he did to me. Mitigating circumstances or whatever.”

Jones didn’t know what to say to this girl. So many awful things had happened to her, so many people had hurt and used her. He wanted to put a comforting hand on her, but he hesitated to touch her. She seemed skittish and delicate.

“I better get back to the computer,” said Charlene. “I’m going to school on Monday, and I want to have everything done by then.”

“Sounds like a plan, kid.”

“Hey, Mr. Cooper? Thanks for asking.” She didn’t wait around for him to answer.

He nodded to himself, looked out into the backyard. The pool had been covered for the winter that had closed in on them, and the maple trees had shed their leaves. He really had to get out there and clean up. Of course, now there was plenty of time.

No sooner had he settled into a silent zone of peace, preparing to contemplate his future, than he heard the shuffle-shuffle-thump that heralded the approach of his mother-in-law, another unwanted semi-permanent guest.

“Stripped of his badge and his gun, the retired cop has to contemplate what lies ahead,” she said, putting a pot on the stove.

“Hello, Elizabeth.”