Fragile

28

Sometimes Chuck Ferrigno didn’t like his job. His parents had tried to talk him out of it. They’d wanted him to be an accountant, use the talent he had for math in some way. But numbers bored him. He didn’t see the poetry or the music in math equations that some did. To him it was all so dry, so predictable. Not like life. Life was messy and imprecise, decided by the variables of humanity rather than by the constants. That’s what intrigued him, motivated him. Besides, when he was a younger man, all he wanted to do was run and chase. He wanted to deliver justice and help people in need. He wanted to race into burning buildings and rescue children. He wanted to carry a gun.

But that wasn’t the job most of the time, of course. Every once in a while, there was a moment that lived up to the dream. But generally the job was more like it was now, standing in a rest stop parking lot, looking at a rotting corpse in a pickup truck, wondering about the implications, dreading the mountain of paperwork.

Graham Olstead, husband of Melody Murray, had been dead for a while by the looks of him. In the cab, his hunting rifle hung on its mount, and there was a box of provisions that would have lasted him a few days; beside him was a knapsack of clothes.

Melody Murray had said he was going hunting, and it looked like he’d planned to do just that. But, for whatever reason, he’d pulled over into this rest stop and died here. Chuck had a feeling he knew why. He’d seen it before.

“Subdural hematoma.” Katie sounded like she was talking to herself. He hadn’t seen her flinch at the body, or even shrink from the smell. She turned to him, and when he looked at her, he saw the same creamy skin, unblemished, unlined, that he saw on the faces of his own children. She was too young to be doing this job. He understood now why his parents hadn’t wanted him to be a cop. Maybe later he’d try to talk this sweet, small-town girl into being a kindergarten teacher or something.

The wind was picking up, and on the highway beyond the stand of trees, the sound of an air horn was mournful and heavy in the night air. The moon was hidden behind cloud cover, the sky an eerie silver-black.

“If he took a blow to the head with the baseball bat, there might have been a period of lucidity, as Melody Murray claimed, when he could walk and talk.” Katie pointed to the items in the cab. “He’d be able to get ready for the trip, drive off. But if the blood from the broken vessels didn’t clot properly? And maybe if he took a Motrin for the pain, it wouldn’t have. Then, a few hours later…” She let the sentence trail, lifting a slender palm toward the corpse. She moved in closer, and Chuck followed.

Katie pointed to a purple, flowering bruise by Graham’s temple, an ugly contrast to the grayish white of the skin beneath it.

“We won’t know until the autopsy,” she said. “It’s just a theory. Coroner’s on the way.”

When he still didn’t say anything, she said, “I’ll get my camera.”

Chuck didn’t like to arrest women, but he was going to have to get a warrant and bring Melody Murray in. He wished Jones were around to do it. He had the feeling Jones wouldn’t mind at all. He wondered, not for the first time, what their history was; he knew there was one. Everyone in this town seemed connected to everyone else somehow.

Coming from New York City, Chuck found this strange. He was used to distance, to the anonymity of the crowd. But his wife loved The Hollows. Loved that she went to the store for milk and saw three people she knew, that she’d get a call from a neighbor up the way to say the kids were playing off the cul-de-sac where they were supposed to stay with their bikes. But he found it oppressive, the way people knew your business, stopped by with baked goods, commented on your kid’s performance at a soccer game you hadn’t been able to attend. He wondered what it would be like to grow up in one place and stay there all your life, to forever be defined by your childhood relationships, to never know if you got to be the person you wanted to be, to always be the person you were when you were young.

When he looked over at Katie, she was staring at the body. For the first time since she’d arrived, she looked unsettled, brow furrowed, her professional veneer slipping.

“I think my mother used to date him,” she said. “A long time ago, in high school.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “It’s a small town.”

“She said he drank too much. That he was kind of a jerk.”

Chuck looked back at the dead man, a stranger to him, someone he’d never met in life. He wondered if it was true, what Katie said. If just saying something made it true, in a way. There was a story Chuck’s father used to tell about the boy who spread a rumor against a good doctor in the town where he lived. When the boy went to make amends, the doctor asked him to cut open a feather pillow and let the wind take the feathers away, then to come back the next day. When the boy returned, the doctor asked him to collect all the feathers and put them back in the pillowcase. Of course, it could never be done. Those feathers had been carried far, alighted in places where they couldn’t be seen or found but stayed there just the same.

“But you didn’t know him?”

“I just saw him around The Hollows. Like everyone.”

Something about the way she said it made him look at her.

“Didn’t you go to John Jay?” he asked.

“I did.”

“Why did you come back home?”

She shook her head, still staring at the body. “I don’t know. I missed my sister and her kids. The world out there, the city, it seemed so big. And I always felt small.”

The wind picked up again, making the trees bend farther and whisper louder. The air smelled like rain suddenly, and Chuck felt a sinus headache coming on. This place was hell on his allergies.

Katie walked away and starting taking pictures as two more prowlers pulled into the lot, lights flashing but sirens quiet. He’d called some bodies in to help him secure the scene. He watched as they blocked off the entrance and exit to the rest stop.

Chuck pulled the phone from his pocket to call in an arrest warrant. He looked at Katie, but she was immersed in her task, their conversation forgotten. The busy night ahead loomed large.

Leila hated her father’s house. She’d gone there as little as her sense of duty and obligation would allow while he was alive. And even now, with her father dead, she couldn’t muster any affection for the place. As she walked the rooms, which were exactly as her mother had arranged them all those years ago, she felt nothing but a tingling numbness, a persistent disbelief that it had all come to this. She waited for grief, anger, sorrow, all the things she should have been feeling at the violent passing of her father. But all she felt was the low rumble of nausea, a deep inner quiet.

She sank onto the stiff couch and found herself staring at the empty crystal candy dish that sat atop a dusty lace doily on the old mahogany coffee table. It had borne witness to every misery her father and brother could offer within the walls of this house. It had sat there, looking pretty, doing nothing. Just like her mother. Leila loved her mother, missed her every day. But God help her, the woman was weak, stood by and observed every abuse from the petty to the criminal. And still she got up before dawn to cook the old man’s breakfast and see him off to work with a kiss and a smile.

Above and around her, Leila could hear the heavy footfalls of her husband and her sons. The old clock on top of the television set-a wooden monster standing on four legs that hadn’t worked in years-read almost nine. She’d lost her energy to clean and organize, to find her father’s important papers, some indication of his final wishes, and to make the arrangements she needed to make. It was getting late, too late to make any more calls; she couldn’t stand to look in any more old boxes, to see any more old photos. More than anything else she hated those photographs, which her mother had painstakingly arranged in albums, labeled in her looping hand with little captions. Leila hated to see them, some combination of the four of them stiff and fake, smiling for whoever was holding the camera. Every time she looked at one of those pictures, all she could remember was what happened before or after. She and Travis in matching pajamas on Christmas morning, smiling, surrounded by gifts and a drift of torn wrapping paper-what were they? Maybe six and eight? Her mother’s caption: “Our angels on Christmas morning!” Leila remembered her father sulking because he felt that her mother had spent too much on gifts. Then later, her father beat Travis because he’d broken a dish while helping to clear the table. She remembered her brother screaming, trying to run up the stairs away from her father, her father chasing and yelling. You stupid little shit.

Chief, please. It’s Christmas, her mother said. Even she called him Chief. At some point, it had become his name. There were pictures of him young-in uniform, at their wedding. He was handsome once, strong and virile with broad shoulders and narrow hips. He had a wide forehead and a wide, long nose that somehow looked right on his face. But those eyes. Those ice water eyes, they were always small and narrowed, as though he saw through your skin and flesh to every bad and rotten thing that even you didn’t know was there. She didn’t know what it was like to be loved by her father, to be held and comforted, to be adored like they say little girls should be. He’d never once told her he loved her, never hugged or kissed her except in the most awkward way. She’d given up wanting or hoping for that long ago. But the knowledge that his life had passed the way it had, leaving her with only an empty space inside where he should have been, slumped her thin shoulders, drained her of energy. Still no tears, no sadness at all.

“You grieved years ago,” her husband had said. “He’s been dead all your life, honey.” Mark was right. He was always right.

She saw her warped reflection in the picture tube, ran a hand through her dark hair, which had pulled away in strands from her ponytail. There was a smudge of dust under her right eye. She wiped it away.

“Mom?” It was Ryan. “You okay?”

He sat down heavily beside her, threw his feet onto the coffee table, making the candy dish rattle. She was about to scold him. But why? He could jump up and down on that table, reduce it to scrap, shatter that dish beneath his boots and what did she care? What did anyone care? It was all garbage. She wouldn’t keep a thing.

She looked at her son. She remembered when he was a tiny bundle in her arms. Now when she reprimanded him, she had to look up at him. Sometimes when she needed to get tough, she tried to do it from halfway up the staircase, to give herself more height. Ryan and Tim, clean up those rooms! You’re a half hour past curfew! You’re grounded!

But they were good boys. They listened to her. She’d managed to keep them away from Travis and her father, kept them closer to Mark’s family, where men treated their loved ones with affection and respect, not distance or violence. In marrying Mark, she’d broken the chain of misery and violence for her family. She was proud of that.

“Look what I found in the closet upstairs,” said Ryan. He still had sun on his skin from his summer job as a swim teacher and lifeguard at a local sleepaway camp. On his lap was a varsity jacket, HOLLOWS HIGH LACROSSE.

“Your uncle’s, I guess.”

Ryan shook his head and flipped it over. The embroidered name on the front was JONES COOPER. It looked new, the white leather arms still shiny, the navy blue wool body still stiff and pristine.

“Hmm,” she said. “That’s strange. How did that get here?”

Ryan offered a shrug, his communication of choice. “I bet he wants it.”

“I’ll bet he does. Put it in the car. I’ll bring it over to their house tomorrow.”

As Ryan crashed off-what was it with those boys, why did their very existence create so much noise?-she thought guiltily of her last conversation with Maggie Cooper. Leila had hung up on a good doctor who was trying to help her nephew. She wondered if Maggie understood why she’d had to do that. She’d taken a big risk by reaching out to Marshall, by exposing the boys to a disaster Travis had created. She only did it because she knew they were all strong enough to help Marshall-as long as Travis was out of the picture.

Was she in some way responsible for what had happened-the abducted girl, the murder of her father? Now her brother was missing, probably still on the property somewhere. She walked onto the porch and heard the rotting wood groan; one of them could step right through some of those old boards if they weren’t careful. She leaned against the railing and looked out into the thick stand of trees. The sky above was clear and riven with stars, the moon waning. It was a pretty watercolor night in a place where she’d never found beauty or love or comfort. And the sight of the black trees left her cold and angry. She’d have this place on the market as fast as she possibly could. They’d make a fortune on the land alone. And she’d use some of that money to help her nephew. She wouldn’t leave him to the system. Lord knew Marshall’s mother, Angie, wasn’t going to be of much help.

Leila heard the calling of a barred owl, eight sad notes on the air. Who mourns for you? Who mourns for you? She thought about yelling Travis’s name into the night. But she knew, even if he could hear her, he wouldn’t come. There was no connection there, their sibling relationship strained and confused by their father’s abuse, their mother’s failures. They didn’t know how to be family for each other; they’d never been taught. Angie, for all her many shortcomings, had called it years ago. You two aren’t even speaking the same language. The old man never hit you, never humiliated you. You might be brother and sister, but you didn’t grow up with the pressure of being the chief’s only son.

In her pocket, Leila’s cell phone started to vibrate, startling her. She pulled it from her jeans and looked at the screen: Hollows General Hospital. She answered quickly.

“Aunt Leila?” A young voice on the line, sounding faint and afraid.

“Marshall.”

She was surprised by the wave of relief she felt at the sound of his voice. His voice always sounded sweet to her ears. Even now, with the knowledge of all that he had done and all that he had become as Travis’s child, she could still remember when he was born. She could remember when they were all born-Marshall, Ryan, and Tim-how it was in their wide eyes and round cheeks that sweet innocence resided. Sometimes, especially when they slept, she could still see the light of childhood on Ryan’s and Tim’s resting faces. Her boys had been sheltered, adored, blessed with good looks and charming personalities. Because of this, they were younger than their years. They slept on their backs, arms slung wide open, faces slack and peaceful. Marshall slept curled up in a ball, a frown on his face, blankets wrapped around him like a protective cover.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. He sounded dull, was probably heavily medicated. “I didn’t mean any of it. I hurt my mom, Charlene. Even though I loved them, I still hurt them. It feels like a curse.”

It is a curse, she thought. Violence is a curse; it curdles the blood, damages the DNA. From father to son, to son, to son, stretching backward and forward until someone says, No more.

“I know, Marshall. I understand.” She was gripping the phone with both hands.

“He was raping her,” he said. His voice cracked with emotion. He started a frantic ramble that Leila struggled to follow. “My father, even though he knew I loved her. I just started shooting. I couldn’t believe how loud it was. And I was so angry, so afraid. I never would have hurt her. I just wanted someone to talk to. I thought she’d understand. She’s a poet. And then I was firing that gun that I got from my mother’s house.”

He paused and took a shuddering breath. “I wanted to kill my father, Aunt Leila. I thought if he was gone, I’d stop hearing his voice in my head. But instead I killed Grandpa. I didn’t mean it.”

“Oh, God, Marshall.” Finally then, the tears came. A great river of them that flowed from a time before she was even born. And the tears washed in a red tide of anger and grief so powerful it almost took her away.

“I know I’ve done bad things, Aunt Leila. But I don’t think I’m a bad person. I mean, I think I can do better. Dr. Cooper says that we’re more than what we do. That there’s more to us than our mistakes. Do you believe that?”

She took in a sharp inhale. She wasn’t sure she’d ever heard him say so much. He was a reticent boy, seemed to struggle to put words together so that it was almost painful to talk with him. You wanted to help him finish his sentences.

“I do believe that, Marshall. I do.”

“I know I don’t have a right to ask you. But can you help me, Aunt Leila?”

Part of her didn’t want to. Part of her wanted to end the call and shut him out-him, her brother, her father, all these damaged men who left so much wreckage in their paths. This part of her knew that the best thing was to get as far away, as fast as possible. Just hearing him now, she understood for the first time how sick, how unstable, he was. She didn’t know if the damage could be undone, or even managed. But another part of her, the mother in her, the part of her that wanted to believe that with enough love anyone and anything could change, held on tight.

“I will, Marshall. I will help you. I’ll do anything I can.”