Fragile

11

Jones Cooper had been a beautiful boy-lacrosse star, straight-A student, crown prince of Hollows High. And Maggie Monroe, though she’d never have admitted it, had spent her high school years admiring him from afar. His body was a study in perfect form. He was fast, agile, powerful-every inch of him exactly as it should be.

But this wasn’t why Maggie found herself daydreaming about him, watching him secretly from beneath the bleachers. It was because beneath all those golden layers, there was a place where the sun didn’t reach. There was a place within him that saw. He knew that there was a world beyond The Hollows, the town that stood in his thrall. And that it could be ugly and frightening. There was something dark about him, or maybe just something that acknowledged the darkness.

At least that’s what Maggie thought she saw when she watched him. She was the geek in black, with black fingernails and eyeliner, the brain, the poet, the freak. His eyes had never rested on Maggie in high school, though he claimed differently now. I always noticed you. I thought you were too smart for a stupid jock like me.

But Maggie remembered his gaze always drifting over her to the prettiest or most popular girls, girls who shone a bright reflection back at him. Maggie didn’t mind. He was a star in the sky; she never expected to touch him, only to gaze at him in admiration and wonder.

Anyway, she didn’t have time for boys. She needed to study, to do well, knowing that an education was her only ticket out of the town she hated. The Hollows, to her teenage mind, was a hell mouth, a social and cultural void populated by the petty and small-minded-those kings and queens of high school cum pizza parlor waitresses, gas station owners, and desperate housewives. The Hollows was only a hundred miles from New York City, but it might as well have been on another planet. Maggie always knew on an instinctive level that she would need to fight The Hollows’s powerful gravitational pull if she wanted to get away.

But ultimately it was Jones who drew her back. She’d never have believed it when she graduated high school and moved into the city to attend NYU. During college she never came home for more than a weekend. Even summers, she managed to find work or internships, places in the city where she could stay cheaply. She went straight on to graduate school, working toward her Ph.D. in psychology. With her demanding studies, work, then her residencies, sometimes a year would pass, with Maggie seeing only her parents when they came into the city to take her to dinner, visit a museum with her, maybe see a show.

“You never come home,” her mother complained over the phone one night. “People wonder about that.”

“I’m sorry, Mom.”

But the thought of that town, that old house, her parents’ low-grade, continual bickering, the headaches that always plagued her on her return, kept her away.

“Jones Cooper asks about you.”

“Really?” The name was pleasantly distant. Jones Cooper. Like a song she’d loved but one for which she couldn’t quite remember the tune. “Under what circumstances do you bump into him?”

“The town is changing. We’ve been having some problems at the school with drugs. One boy brought a gun last month. Jones Cooper has been in my office quite a few times.”

“Really?” It was hard to imagine guns and drugs at Hollows High. Kids had snuck cigarettes, got fake IDs to buy booze, maybe smoked some weed when Maggie was a kid.

“Yes, really,” Elizabeth snapped, annoyed. “Over the last two years, we’ve developed a meth problem. It’s a nationwide concern, especially in rural areas like this.”

Maggie knew this, of course. But she always, for some reason, had thought The Hollows was immune to such deterioration. She didn’t like to think of her mother, always a petite woman, then in her fifties and getting smaller every time Maggie saw her, walking among drug users and gun-wielding thugs. Sometimes tough talk wasn’t enough.

“Do you think about retiring, Mom?”

Elizabeth released a disdainful snort. “They’ll carry me out of here.”

Stubborn old woman, Maggie thought but didn’t say.

When Maggie was finishing her doctorate at Columbia University, her father was diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer. In the months that followed, she found herself back in The Hollows every spare moment, helping her mother to care for her father as he fought the disease admirably but deteriorated quickly, then died horribly.

In Maggie’s memory, the period was an awful blur of sadness and exhaustion. But it was also a time of fierce intimacy; she’d never spent so much time as an adult with her parents-helping, comforting, just being with them. Both Maggie and Elizabeth were changed by the violence of her father’s passing, but they were closer than they’d ever been.

At the gathering that followed her father’s funeral, Maggie managed to separate from the crowd and stand alone on the back veranda, looking out at the expansive property, the weeping willows, the thick woods of beech and ash beyond. It was a gray, muggy day; a misty rain made everything glisten. She felt a hand on her shoulder.

“I’m sorry about your father, Maggie. He was a good man.”

She turned to see Jones Cooper. He was thicker than she remembered, premature fine lines around his eyes. His blond hair was a shade or two darker. None of it diminished his beauty. He was still washed in that same golden light. Still with that same shadow at the core.

“Thank you,” she said. Heat rose to her face with the rush of chemical attraction.

She found she didn’t feel awkward or uncomfortable around him at all. If he had spoken to her in high school, she would have burst into flames. That afternoon, they stood side by side and stared out into the yard in a comforting silence.

Then Jones said, “You got out of here. Never came back.”

There was something wistful in his voice that surprised her. She’d never thought of him as someone with a dream to leave The Hollows.

She nodded, a knot of guilt in her center. She’d spent more time with her father as he lay dying than she had in the years since she’d graduated from high school. She might have known her father better as an adult if she hadn’t so persistently stayed away. For some reason, she found herself saying this to Jones, even though she was sure he’d just come to offer platitudes. But he listened, kept his eyes on her.

When she was done, he said, “Your parents wanted you to have your own life. They raised you to be independent and move away from here. Your mother has said as much. He knew you loved him. You were here when they needed you. That’s a lot.”

She was used to offering others solace and advice; it surprised her to receive it, to be grateful for it. She found herself crying. She put her hand to her eyes and then felt him wrap his arms around her. In a way, after that moment, she never left The Hollows again. The years grew over that embrace like a vine.

Now they were fighting-again, which unfortunately was their way in times of stress. Each was a safe place for the other to blow off steam. It had started when they’d stepped outside, Jones telling her to go home, he’d handle it from here.

“Where’s Ricky?” she asked, glancing at Jones’s SUV, for some reason expecting to see their son sulking in the passenger seat.

“At the house with Chuck.” Chuck Ferrigno, one of the other detectives on the squad.

“What do you mean? You don’t mean to ask questions about Charlene?”

A raised female voice inside caused them both to look at the door for a moment, then look back at each other.

“Of course,” he said.

“You left our minor child with a cop, no parent or attorney present, to be questioned about a missing girl?”

“Come on. He’s a cop’s son. We’re not calling in an AMBER Alert here. This is a runaway situation. Not an abduction.”

For some reason, she heard Melody’s plaintive question, How do you know?

Everyone had thought Sarah had run away as well, after that fight on the phone with her mom. Trying to get even. Trying to make everyone worry. There were recriminations later that the police didn’t act quickly enough. But that was another girl, a lifetime ago.

“What’s wrong with you, Jones?” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper. “Don’t you have an instinct to protect your son?”

He drew back as if she’d slapped him. Before he had a chance to return fire, Melody burst out the door, rushing toward Jones. She looked harried, pursued by demons. When she spoke, it was a barely intelligible wail.

“Are you going to find her, Jones? Are you going to do something besides stand around with that superior look on your fucking face and find my daughter?”

“Melody,” said Jones, his voice surprisingly calm and gentle. He placed a hand on each of her shoulders. “Calm down. We’ll find her.”

Melody started to weep again, her face morphing from a mask of rage into a caricature of misery; then she collapsed against Jones, who supported her weight and led her back into the house. A light blinked on in an upstairs window of a neighboring house. Maggie heard a door open. It wouldn’t be long before everyone knew what was happening.

Denise stood in the doorway, on her face an expression of pity battling disdain. The homecoming queen. Jones practically dragged Melody up the three steps to the front door. The jock and the burnout. The other cops, too, Tony Jackson and Mark Albright, bit players from the same every-East-Coast-high-school production-the science nerd, the fat kid. And finally Maggie, the goth who couldn’t wait to get away but wound up coming home. And yet they were all so much more than that, weren’t they?

The only one of them who was not allowed to be what she would become was Sarah. And she was there, on everyone’s mind. How could she not be? They all remembered her. She’d never left this place, either.