Fragile

20

Something woke Elizabeth, suddenly and totally. She sat up quickly, her heart thumping, senses straining. What was it? The familiar shapes of the room revealed themselves in the dark, the mirror over her dresser, the posts of her bed, the rolltop desk in the corner, the wing chair and ottoman. She pushed back the covers and reached for the light. The cane she had balanced on the nightstand clattered to the floor.

With the light on, she saw the mirror’s reflection of a frightened old woman in a silly nightgown with frills at the cuffs and neck, little flowers everywhere. And she was about to have a chuckle at herself when the thumping began, startling her again.

“Hell’s bells.”

She tried to reach her cane from the bed, but it was just out of her grasp. So she lowered her feet to the cold wood floor and steadied herself on the night table, using it to push herself back upright, not without a considerable amount of pain. It took a moment, once she was standing, for the pain to pass. And after it was gone, she felt quite exhausted by it. Maggie was right. She’d been foolish not to let someone know about her fall. But she couldn’t stand the humiliation of it all-the prodding and poking at the doctor’s office, the pitying looks.

Again she heard the thumping. It was louder, more frantic than it had been, like something trapped, something panicked. She slid her feet into her slippers.

“That’s it,” she said. She knew she should call Maggie or Jones and have someone come get her. When Maggie had offered to bring her home earlier, she had wanted to say, Yes! I don’t want to be in this old house with all its memories and critters in the attic. But instead she’d been stubborn and even a little rude. Maggie had left angry with her, she knew.

When Elizabeth was a younger woman, she used to wish to grow older. She wished for the gravitas and respect she thought would be awarded naturally with age. She thought there would be a freedom in no longer worrying about pointless things like your figure or your hair-older people didn’t worry about those things, did they? Surely not. And it was true that she didn’t worry about those things anymore. When your hair was shocking white and your face looked like a raisin, only the most foolish and vain women still pretended that anything they wore or did to themselves would give them any sexual allure.

But what she hadn’t realized was that this imaginary respect she craved was only granted to older men. She hadn’t understood that when her body started to weaken and sag, when her beauty faded, she would become invisible. That people would treat her like a child again, without the kindness that is generally extended to children. Doctors, checkout clerks at the grocery, even some of her former students, even Jones and Maggie, sometimes spoke to her either loudly and slowly, as though she were hearing-impaired, or with a kind of brave patience, as if she were terribly tiresome or very slow to comprehend. The only one who didn’t occasionally treat her like a doddering old biddy was her grandson.

If she’d known how old age really was, she’d have appreciated her strong body and attractive features, the small amount of respect her job had afforded her, while it all lasted.

Thump. Thump. Thumpthumpthump. Thumpthump. Thump.

She walked out of her room and stood a moment beneath the attic access. She hadn’t been up there in years, sending Jones or Ricky up when she needed this or that-an old painting of her husband’s that she’d suddenly remembered and wanted to see again, some photo albums, a lace tablecloth her mother had made. She reached up with her cane and nabbed the loop with its crook. With a two-handed effort, she pulled down the door, the ladder unfolding easily and coming to the floor with a gentle thud.

Now the house was perfectly silent as the attic exhaled a breath of mold and mothballs, decades of abandoned and forgotten things. It might be nice to see some of the things up there-her wedding dress, some old records. What else? She didn’t even know. She stared at the yawning darkness above her and couldn’t help but think about her secret.

“I’ve had enough,” she announced to whatever had decided to make its home up there.

She stood her cane against the wall and climbed the ladder slowly. What did she intend to do once she was up there? she suddenly wondered. With that thought, about halfway up, the pain began, a rocket from her hip down the back of her thigh. It took her breath away, left her clinging to the ladder rungs.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

She looked up and half expected to see her visitors peering at her from the dark doorway, eyes gleaming at her stupidity. But no, there was nothing, just that gaping emptiness reaching into the past. She wasn’t more than a few feet off the ground, but she felt paralyzed, frozen-afraid of the pain, afraid of losing her grip and falling again. But already she was starting to shake with the effort of holding herself in place.

Thump. Thump.

When she finally lost her grip, she slid more than fell to the floor, where she lay for a moment before she started to cry. She thought of all the things Maggie had wanted-to bring Elizabeth to her house, to get Elizabeth a bracelet with a button to press if she fell. All things she’d refused, stubborn with her own pride. Now there wasn’t as much pain as regret.

The cane stood against the wall. If she could reach it, maybe she could pull herself up. But her limbs suddenly felt full of sand, so she just rested her head on her arm and let the tears come.

It seemed like a hundred years ago that Elizabeth had gone to see Tommy Delano, left work early to drive the hour and a half to the facility where he was being held until his sentencing hearing. She didn’t-couldn’t, really-tell anyone where she was going. The parents of her students wouldn’t have liked it. And even she had to admit that it would have been unseemly. He’d already been tried and convicted in the minds of all the citizens of The Hollows, thanks to Chief Crosby blabbing to everyone who’d listen about the boy’s gruesome and depraved confession. There was no room for compassion or sympathy where Tommy Delano was concerned. He was a confessed child killer. End of the worst story told in The Hollows.

But it wasn’t some grand capacity for sympathy or compassion that compelled her to drive out of town, to take the highway four exits and cover the desolate miles to a squat gray building in the middle of nowhere surrounded by razor wire, its perimeter guarded by armed men in turrets.

The thing was that she’d always really liked Tom, which was not something she could say about all of her students. He was a skinny kid, with a drawn face and watery brown eyes. His clothes, always the wrong size, cuffs ending at his forearms or hems dragging on the floor, were never quite clean. He was a straight-C student, though Elizabeth suspected he could do better. He wasn’t funny or charming. But he had a sweet smile, spoke in soft, respectful tones. When she looked at him, she saw kindness, something purely good, even a quiet, twinkling sense of humor.

Once, many years before Sarah’s murder, when Tommy had been a student at Hollows High, she’d driven him home. So terrified had he been of the bullies on his bus, that he’d lingered until the bus was gone.

“Dad,” she’d overheard him say from the pay phone in the school office. “I had detention and missed the late bus.” She knew he hadn’t had detention.

“Okay. I’ll wait in the library. I’m sorry, Dad. Yes. I’m sorry.”

She just couldn’t reconcile the boy who’d rather tell his father he had detention than ride the bus with bullies with the image of Sarah’s killer, the knowledge of what had been done to her.

“I’ll speak to those boys,” she’d told him as she drove him that late afternoon to save his father the trip. It was right on her way.

“No,” he’d said quickly. “Please, Mrs. Monroe. You’ll just make it worse.”

She’d stared at the road ahead, not knowing what to say to that.

“Thanks, Mrs. Monroe. But there’s really nothing you can do. It’s just the way it is.”

Of course, that was years before Sarah’s murder. A lot can happen to a person in a decade. Maybe a lifetime of torment and misery, the festering wounds left by his mother’s death, could transform a timid, quiet person into a killer. But she just couldn’t see it. Could she have been that wrong about him?

At the prison, she’d waited alone in a gray, cold room before Tommy appeared behind the glass in an orange jumpsuit with his hands cuffed. When he sat, the guard who’d escorted him removed his handcuffs. Tommy looked at her with a sad, confused frown.

“Fifteen minutes,” the guard said.

Each picked up a receiver.

“Mrs. Monroe, what are you doing here?”

What was she doing here? Coming had been a foolish thing to do. Had she come to ask him if he’d really killed Sarah? Had she come to prove herself right about him? To prove that she really did recognize the difference between good and bad? She found herself at a loss for words, stared down at her wedding ring and twisted it for a second.

“I wanted to see you, Tommy,” she said finally. “I just can’t believe you killed Sarah.”

His body seemed to sag. He turned his face from her and rubbed at his neck as if it was itching. When he looked back at her, there was something blank, something cold on his face.

“Well, you’re the only one in The Hollows who doesn’t believe that,” he said. His tone was at once bitter and resigned. His voice had gone much deeper in adulthood, a bit gravelly from smoking. She realized that even though he was in the office regularly, she hadn’t really spoken to him in years-maybe just a quick hello or good-bye. She still saw him as a boy, a student at her school. She hadn’t updated the picture in her mind’s eye. She fixated on his hands. They were cleaner than she’d ever seen them. Usually they were black at the nails, grease caked into his calluses. She tried to imagine those hands, those dirty, hardworking hands, doing terrible things, dipped in blood. She couldn’t.

“You confessed,” she said.

“Yes.” She was a little surprised to hear it. Maybe she had expected him to tell her that he hadn’t confessed, that it was a mistake or a lie.

“And you confessed because you did-,” she said, stumbling over the phrasing. “Because you killed her.”

“Because I-,” he started, then didn’t finish. He just stood up and hung up the phone. He called for the guard. When the handcuffs were around his wrists, he raised them to her-in a gesture of resignation or farewell, she never did find out.

She hadn’t known what to say when he left her so abruptly. She’d had the urge to call after him, to press him. In the end, she’d just watched him go and then left as well, feeling selfish and wrong about the visit. But she’d also left convinced that she’d been right about him, that he didn’t have it in him to torture, mutilate, rape, and kill a young girl. And she’d vowed to do something about it, though she didn’t know what.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

She’d drifted off on the floor; she didn’t know for how long. Now that the door to the attic was open, she wasn’t even sure the sound was coming from up there. It seemed to come from the air all around her, inside her own head. She wondered how long she’d have to lie here like this before someone found her. She thought she’d try for the cane again when she felt less tired. But for now, she found herself content to wander through the attic of her life. She wanted, no needed, to visit those dark places and examine all the things she’d done and hadn’t done, and to make amends where she could-before she lost what fragile hold she still had on it all.