Fragile

30

It was only his second day as a full-time writer and Charlie was already sure he had made a mistake. Wanda had helped him fix up his apartment, clean and organize, so that the second bedroom could become his office. She’d helped him buy a desk and pick out a new computer.

“You’re still young, Charlie. You have some money saved. Stop wasting your time killing rodents and give this a chance. Finish your novel and try to sell it. What have you got to lose? It’s not like you’re on a career fast track.”

“I don’t know, Wanda.”

“You’ll regret it if you don’t. It’s one thing to try and fail. It’s another thing to never try at all. That’s the stuff that eats you alive.”

What was it about that woman? Everything she said sounded like gospel to him. But now that he was alone with the blank page, the glowingly empty screen of his brand-new computer, the silence of his apartment, he felt desperate, inadequate in the extreme. He wasn’t a writer. It was just a fantasy he had about himself. On reading the novel he’d been writing for the better part of ten years, he couldn’t believe how terrible it was. How could he have ever thought he was any good? He called his mother.

“So how’s the writing life?” she asked.

“Miserable.”

She gave an indulgent chuckle. “Oh, my tortured artist.”

“Maybe they’ll give me my job back.”

“Day two and already you’re hanging it up?” She made a tsking sound with her tongue.

“Mom?”

“What is it, honey?”

“What do you remember about her?”

There was a pause on the line, and then he heard her release a breath.

“Lily? It was a long time ago. I guess I remember that she always looked so sad. She was a tiny thing, so delicate, with such a soft voice. But that sadness inside her, it was angry, powerful.”

He had forgotten what she looked like, in a strange way. Her essence was still with him-he could smell the scent of her skin, remember the way she said his name. But in the few pictures he had of her, she didn’t look like he remembered her. In the pictures, she looked like any suburban girl with a cheap haircut and a knit sweater, just a kid. In his mind, she was a luminous beauty who stopped his heart with only a certain kind of look she had.

“Did you ever doubt me? Did you ever think I could have hurt her?”

“Never. Not for a minute. I know my boy. Your love is good and sweet, Charlie. You don’t have an unkind bone in your body.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Is that what you’re writing about?”

He flopped down on his bed and laid his head on top of one of the new pillows Wanda had picked out. It was a silvery gray with thin embroidered stripes, an accent to the navy comforter and matching drapes. She’d made him take all his old books from their boxes and stack them on shelves and in artful piles around the apartment. A writer’s home should be full of books. For inspiration.

“In a way, I am. But all that stuff that happened here, that girl who was abducted, the one I saw on the street? That has kind of captured my imagination, too.”

“Another missing girl. I see a theme.”

He told her about the rest of the story, how Charlene’s mother, and the father of the boy who’d abducted Charlene as well as a Hollows detective, had confessed to events that had led to the accidental death of a girl back in the late eighties. How another man had been convicted of her murder and then committed suicide in prison.

“What led them to confess, so many years later? That poor girl’s parents. How awful to have it resurrected like that.”

“I think everyone associated with the victim is dead.”

“That’s terrible.”

In the background, Charlie could hear the sound of the television. He could visualize his mother in the kitchen, still living in the house where he grew up. There would be a paperback novel spine up on the kitchen table, a half-finished cup of coffee beside that. Everything would be neat, in its place, the kitchen sink wiped clean, pot holders clean and hanging on little plastic hooks by the stove. In her retirement, his mother was a much better housekeeper than she’d once been.

“Where’s Dad?” As if he had to ask.

“Playing golf with Frank.” He wondered how she stood it. If Charlie’s father had ever paid half as much attention to them as he had that stupid game… Well, Charlie didn’t know what. He hadn’t. And that was that.

“Did you tell him that I quit my job to finish my novel?” He hated the way he felt a kind of inner cowering, a dread at his father’s disapproval, even though when it came to the old man he knew little else.

“No, Charlie. Of course not. Anyway, it wouldn’t kill you to call when you knew he was here. You could make an effort.”

“What would we talk about? I don’t play golf.”

She let a moment pass; he heard her filing her nails. “You know, once upon a time your father used to write. Poetry. Short stories. He was pretty good. Over the years, he just sort of stopped.”

Now, that was new information. “Really? Wow.”

“You should ask him about it sometime.”

“Maybe I will.” Then, “I better get back to the writing.”

“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.