Fragile

2

She loved him. She knew what that meant, no matter what anyone said. It was impossible not to recognize love, wasn’t it? It was a dry brushfire, a shift of tectonic plates at the bottom of the ocean. It changed the topography of a life, destroyed and created. Her heart beat so fast and her throat was so dry before she saw him that it felt like panic. When would he get there? Would he ever get there? Did he really love her, too? Would he change his mind? That delicious worried waiting and then the meeting, flesh on flesh, the skin of his neck against her mouth, that deep exhale-passion like the relief you feel after releasing a breath you’ve held underwater. How could she not recognize love? She’d been with other boys, crushes. It hadn’t felt like this.

“A moment of pleasure can lead to a lifetime of pain,” her mother, Melody, had warned during one of her operatic lectures on action and consequence. Charlene felt sorry for her sometimes, wondered if her mother even remembered pleasure, if she remembered love. Or had she crossed so much time and distance that she’d forgotten the way, wouldn’t remember the language even if she found it again?

There was an old photo album Charlene had found in her grandmother’s house, at the bottom of a box in a dusty guest room closet. In the album, filled with images of people she didn’t recognize, Charlene had unearthed a picture of Melody on her wedding day. Her mother was as slight as a reed, wearing a willowy vintage lace gown. She’d been just so pretty. But that wasn’t the reason Charlene had slipped the photo from its plastic sleeve and put it in her purse. It was the expression on her mother’s face as she looked at her new husband. She was lit up with bliss, a wide smile, glittering eyes. In all her life, Charlene had never seen her mother look like that. Never. The girl in the picture was a stranger, someone Charlene wished she knew. She looked funny and cool, like she’d make dirty jokes and drink too much.

Charlene had found the picture after her grandmother passed. They were cleaning the house, getting it ready to sell. Charlene wanted to keep the house, move in and sell the dump they lived in.

“No way,” her mother said. “Do you have any idea how much work it is to live in an old place like this?”

But it was beautiful, three stories of lace curtains and hardwood floors, swirling banisters and rattling windows. Every stair had a unique song, every door stuck in the summer humidity. In the air, Charlene thought she could always smell her grandmother’s perfume, a light floral scent that, for some reason, set her to humming “Rock-a-bye Baby.”

But it was more than the work of living in an old house that had motivated her mother to sell; Charlene could see it on her face. It wasn’t even the money, though she knew that was a factor. Charlene didn’t know what it was, why her mother would want to sell her childhood home, let other people move in and “renovate”-strip the house of all its personality and history.

“You’re too young to understand. Sometimes you just want the past to go away; you don’t always want it lingering, tapping you on the shoulder, reminding you about things you’d rather forget.”

“Like what? What do you want to forget? I thought you loved this house.”

“I do, and I know she’d want us to stay.”

“Then why, Mom?”

“I’m just selling it, Charlene. We need the money. End of discussion.”

And there was something so sad and strange about her mother that, for once, Charlene did shut up when she was asked. She had been thirteen at the time, filled with a big, ugly anger and a crushing sadness about losing her grandmother and the house she loved. But there was no talking to Melody about it. Life is loss, Charlene. Get used to it. Was that true? Charlene wondered. Was that all it was?

She’d lost her father already. She’d been too young to grieve for him; but she knew other girls had something she’d never understand. She wrote a song about it all, “Selling Memories.”

The things you want to keep, go

The things you want to lose, stay

Sell your history

Sell your soul

You’re still bankrupt, tired and old.

And the memories how they linger,

Wrap around you when you’re cold.

The refrain was an angry scream, repeating the title over and over. It wasn’t bad. Certainly no worse than some of the crappy covers they played over and over. She’d tried to get Slash to help her write some music recently. But he wouldn’t.

Slash thought her lyrics, her poetry, tended toward the too flowery, overly ornate. As if someone who called himself Slash and wore black lipstick had any right to criticize anything. They fought about it, passionately and often. She disagreed. Her language was in line with her inner life. A drama queen, her mother called her. If pressed, she knew most of her friends-even Rick-would agree. She didn’t care what they thought. Better to live loud, cause a scene, feel too much, than die a brain-dead automaton in a suburban wasteland.

If it weren’t for Rick, she’d have left their stupid garage band ages ago. She was sick of singing covers at parties-other people’s lyrics, other people’s thoughts, badly imitated. Slash didn’t have an original thought in his head. He could read music, mimic guitar players he liked, but he couldn’t write an original chord to save his life. She hadn’t meant to ruin his guitar when she grabbed it from him, but it had slipped from her hands and smacked against the wall, hit hard and in just the right way. She’d thought he might cry the way he looked at it. He just picked it up, its neck broken and dangling, the strings slack, and carried it out like a child in his arms.

“Nice, Char,” Rick had chastised.

“I didn’t mean it,” she’d said, looking after him helplessly. She still felt bad about it, wondered how much it would cost to buy him a new guitar. This happened to her a lot. She acted out of passion, sometimes hurting people, and then felt horrible about it later. But she never seemed able to make things right again. She had a gift for creating damage that couldn’t be undone.

She sat in her ticky-tack room, in her ticky-tack house, painting her nails iridescent green. She hated the tract house with all its perfectly square rooms and thin walls, identical to every third house in their development. It was like living in the box of someone else’s limited imagination. How could someone reach the height of her creativity in a drywall cage? She couldn’t. And she wouldn’t. She would be eighteen in six months. After graduation, she was so out of here. College? Another four years of indentured servitude, living by someone else’s arbitrary rules? No way.

Where do you think you’ll go? her mother wanted to know. You think you’ll survive on minimum wage in New York City? Because without an education you’ll be working at McDonald’s. But Charlene had an escape plan; it was already under way.

You can always stay here with me, Charlene, when you’re ready. He’d promised her this the last time she’d seen him. You can stay as long as you want.

She was smiling to herself when she heard the slow rise of voices downstairs. She stopped what she was doing, poised the tiny, glistening green brush over her big toe and listened. Sometimes she could tell by the early decibels and pitch whether there would be a quick explosion of sound that ended with a slamming door and the angry rev of an engine, or whether it was going to be a slow movement, picking up speed and volume, moving from room to room until it reached a crescendo and someone got hurt. Might be her mother, might be her stepfather, Graham-might even be Charlene if she chose to get involved. Which she wouldn’t today; after the last time, she’d promised herself never again. She’d had to cake makeup and black eyeliner over her eye for a week. She’d let them kill each other first. And it sounded like a bad one.

She couldn’t make out the words, just that near hysterical pitch to her mother’s voice. Charlene reached for her iPod, tucked the buds in her ears, and turned up the volume. The Killers.

She tried to sing along, to reach a place of blissful indifference. But her heart was thumping, and she could feel that dry suck at the base of her throat. She finished painting her nails with a hand that had started to tremble a little, then capped the bottle and put it down hard on the bedside table. She hated the mutinous actions of her body. Her mind was tough, not afraid of anything. But her body was a little girl shaking in the dark.

Charlene reached over and paused the music, listened to the air around her. She exhaled. Silence. For a moment, she was almost relieved. But the silence didn’t sound quite right. It wasn’t empty, void of energy. It was alive, hiding something. She got up from her bed, walked with her toes flexed and separated, mindful of the slime green polish. She listened at the cheap, thin door with its flaking gold knob. Nothing. Not even the television, which her mother had on perpetually-morning shows, game shows, on to soap operas, then the afternoon talk shows-Oprah, Dr. Phil. How could the woman even hear herself think?

Charlene found herself feeling the door, like they teach you to do if there’s fire. If the door is hot, don’t open it-they drill this stuff into you. Stop, drop, and roll. Endlessly, your entire school career, they sent you out single file with bells ringing. But the petty suburban abuses, a terrible marriage polluting the air you breathe, a stepfather’s inappropriate glances and crude offhand remarks making you feel small and dirty, a selfish, silly mother who couldn’t seem to decide between the roles of harsh disciplinarian and best girlfriend, leaving you wary and confused. Nobody tells you what to do about those things. Nobody rescues you with a big red truck, sirens blaring. You’re supposed to live with it. But it hurts, damages, like a toxin in the water you can’t smell or taste. It’s only later that its pathology takes hold. You wind up on some shrink’s couch for the rest of your life.

She was thinking this as she pushed the door open and walked down the hall toward the unfamiliar silence, wet nails forgotten now, leaving a smudge of green on the carpet with each step. At the top of the stairs, she stopped.

“Mom?” she called. There was no answer, but she heard something now. Something soft and shuddering, irregular in pitch and rhythm. Weeping. Someone was weeping. She moved slowly down the stairs.

“Mom?”