Fragile

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.