Fragile (9 page)

He hesitates to answer the call. Why would the Middlesborough Public Library be calling? The sensation of having committed some long-ago transgression that's only now coming back to haunt him sends a flush of heat to his forehead. Overdue
library books. Something he never returned when he was an irresponsible teenager, now years, decades overdue, the fine compounded to an astronomical amount.

The phone keeps chiming. As Tris is about to press TALK, the flight attendant places his hand firmly on Tris's shoulder.

“Excuse me, sir,” he says, his voice dragging on the ‘sir.' “All electronic devices must be turned off at this time. And all cell phones must remain off for the duration of the flight.”

Tris glances at M
IDDLESBOROUGH
P
UBLIC
L
IBRARY
on the screen, then complies with the man. He flicks the button at the top of the phone and the screen shows him the word the phone's resident female voice is saying:

G
OODBYE

Whoever it is, they will have to leave him a message, and I'll get back to you as soon as possible.” His voice, after all these years, hearing it again tight and faraway, sharp and distant. I hold the receiver closer to my face, his voice saying leave him a message and now I can't, I can't say a thing. The words won't come. I'm afraid to say anything, and I don't know what to say, I didn't practice it beforehand. I always thought I would just know, it would always be so simple and effortless between us, but that was long ago. It seems like someone else was talking on the other end of the line, a machine's voice answering. I have to put the phone down, lay it on the cradle and then he is gone, outside maybe, perhaps they did go out to play, in the interval in which she laid her head down again and let herself be carried
off by sleep. Perhaps they have wandered towards that murky retaining pond they call a lake in the name of the apartment complex: Lake Hamilton Village. She always reminds them not to go near the water, but children forget and do whatever pops into their heads. The vertical blinds cast long bars of shadow across the room, shrouding the couch in darkness. Late, she thinks. A whole day wasted. She sits up and folds her legs underneath her, the blanket still bunched around her knees and waist. Her throat is parched; she imagines it as a road dipping down a steep hill that has been paved with fresh tar.

Holly leaves the couch for the first time in hours. Her legs are stiff. The ball-shaped joint where her big toe articulates with her foot pops, as does her ankle, remnants of old horseback riding injuries. As she turns towards the kitchen, the room begins to spin, slowly, as if the apartment has been transformed into a carnival ride that has lurched into motion. The couch rotates towards the wall, which is rotating towards the cabinet that holds the TV, which rotates towards the front door, which rotates towards the blue armchair on the other side of the room, and she has to reach down and grab the moving arm of the couch to steady herself.

This is more than a hangover—there is something wrong. A dull presence has established itself at the base of her skull, a throbbing soreness that expands and contracts with each beat of her heart. She waits a moment, then puts her hands to the back of her head and rubs there, just behind the ears. She explores with her fingers the contours beneath the flesh of her scalp. There are two round lumps there—they should be
there—they are merely part of her skull where it dips in and sits on the top of her spine. But the places where her head hit the sink, twin centers of pain at the tender base of the skull, are sore to the touch. This is where the dull ache is coming from.

At least now she knows. For a while there, she thought she had given herself the worst hangover in the long history of her avid and ever-present drinking habit. Now she understands that it's simply the bruises from pounding her head on that damned sink. Now that she knows what the problem is, she can get on with her day and maybe do something with it, maybe take the kids to a movie and some dinner later on.

She enters the galley kitchen. Her stomach is a constricted knot of hunger, but maybe just a glass of water and back to the couch to lie down. She turns to the stove and sees a carton of ice cream sitting out on the counter. Ice cream would be good—cold, smooth, soothing to her throat. She opens the sweating lid of the carton and finds that the ice cream is melted, the whole thing reduced to a frothy white soup with chunks of chocolate floating in it. One of the girls must have left it out, probably Zoe.

Still … Holly opens the drawer and pulls out a spoon. Not just a teaspoon, a big serving spoon she can use to dip into the soup, making sure to catch the chocolate chips as she drags the surface. She slurps the warm juice into her mouth, catching the nuggets of chocolate with her tongue and working them back to her molars to chew. This makes her think of that stomach medicine her mother used to give her, Milk of Magnesia, but it does taste good, creamy. She drinks another spoonful and another,
other, there is a large hole within her she must fill. It has always been there, as long as she can remember, and no matter what she does to fill it, it has never gone away. She dips the spoon into the liquid and as she's lifting it to her lips she remembers what Zoe said.

She was very mad at Grandpa Steve.

Holly puts the spoon down and goes to the living room, searching for the shard of porcelain, the fragment of pottery Zoe brought home. She looks on the low coffee table and on the floor in front of the television. She digs in the cracks between the cushions on the couch and she looks on the shelves of the cabinet where the kids keep their playthings. She goes to the girls' room, the bunk beds straight ahead and the desk they fight over when it's time to do their homework, the closet with the folding metal doors and the dresser where they keep their few clothes.

Of course. There it is, where Zoe keeps her special things, the rubber bouncy ball she found in the parking lot at the pizza place last week and the birthday card from her grandmother with the picture of the giraffe on it and the ribbon she won at field day for third place in the standing broad jump. There, in the nook between the headboard of the bottom bunk and the wall by the window.

Holly picks up the fragment of porcelain and holds it in both hands. It is like an artifact of an ancient civilization that carries with it through the centuries buried in dirt a significance that can only be grasped by an expert who has spent her entire life studying this culture. There is a hint, just a tip, of a light red
blossom on the convex outside face. Otherwise, both the inside and out are milky smooth and white. Holly flips it over and turns it to see the shadows move across the hollowed out opposite face. And she knows; now she knows.

An idea comes to mind, more than an idea—a sudden urge. She wields the shard in one hand like a crude weapon, thumb on one edge, four fingers on the other with the sharp vertex of the curving wedge pointing down. And she brings the point gently to the exposed soft skin of her wrist, where the small hump of a blue vein crosses the outline of a tendon. She drags the tip lightly across her skin and a faint white mark appears. Yes, it will do it. She lifts it away for a moment, then brings it down again. This time, with a little more pressure, a tendril of blood appears. Keep going, keep ripping. The skin yields quite easily, like a tear in a cheap curtain, and a bubble of red comes out at the end when she stops. She closes her eyes and when she opens them again, she sees a vivid crimson stain on the tip of the white porcelain, the price she has to pay for letting it happen to me all the time, things like this happen, a missed phone call or the bus that just went past, but this time there was no problem, the man who asked me whether the 8 had gone by knew it hadn't, he was just drunk and trying to talk to me before he got around to asking for spare change for the fare. But it's not spare change anymore, it takes five quarters for a single oneway ride downtown if you don't have a pass. And sure enough, he got it from me, didn't he, a dollar bill and a quarter. He sits down first and I go to the back past some young black men talking about
jobs they can get at Wilder Mission. I've seen them before, they know me. They would stop the drunk before he did anything to hurt me, and anyway I've seen worse on the bus coming home, men who look like they'd just as soon knife you as spit in your eye. Mother used to bring us downtown to shop on Saturday afternoons like this, holding our hands tight like holding those girls' hands going across the street, the clock above the department store jutting from the corner of the building, green, ornate and famous. We always said, “Meet me under the clock.” Now it tells the wrong time, frozen at nine twenty seven. The day Louise told them, you were supposed to meet me under the clock, but you never came to the back room first, the voice of her youngest extending through the mist of unconsciousness to bring her back from wherever it was she was headed, a depth of submerged underwater feeling, a place so cold she felt as if she were lying face down and naked in a hard empty bathtub with all the lights on, her face smashed against the tub, and when she first heard Zoe's voice scream, all she wanted to do was ask Zoe to bring her a blanket. If someone would just bring her a blanket, she could keep lying here and drift back into the depths of wherever she was headed, dim dark circles opening one after the other, wider and wider to float down into. But Zoe screamed again, and this time Holly felt someone grab her arm, a child's feverish hand, the warmth of it making Holly's eyes open.

A vast landscape of light beige bumps extends in all directions with a large hand—her own hand, it must be—directly in
front of her. In the far distance she can see one leg of the bunk bed and the beige bumps clarify themselves into the nap of the wall-to-wall carpet they have in this apartment. They will have to replace it. Holly sees that there will be a terrible stain, right next to the girls' beds, a reminder to them all each night when she tucks them in to sleep. The beige bumps in the immediate foreground near her wrist are coated with a slick expanse of crimson liquid.

Now another voice joins Zoe's screaming. High, tight, pierced with shrillness.

“Get
away
from her, you idiot.” Jenny, always bossing.

“What happened?” Zoe asks, her voice shaken between the intake of breath and a sob.

“Look, that broken piece you brought back. It must have cut her.”

Holly's eyes close, before she can lift her head to answer. Maybe better to go now, back to those circles expanding wider and wider, deep as they were into a darkness that grows and grows.

“We gotta call 9-1-1.”

“No,” Jenny's voice says, firmly, taking charge. “Call Tom. I'll call him. He'll be here faster.”

Tom, oh no not Tom. Her eyes open but her mouth doesn't, even though she wants to speak. Cold. A shudder of draining bloodlessness overtakes her body. Don't call Tom, she wants to say. She doesn't want him to see her this way, doesn't want to see him at all. Don't
call him ever again, why should I have expected anything to come of this escapade, this outrageous lie I've been living now for years upon years, this semblance of him built up inside me, a beckoning bronze statue of an ancient hero with his arm thrust out, he calls to me across the years, his voice, his smile. It can't be the same, but it is ever the same inside me. It lives and grows and still I want him to my self inside. I am still me, and he is still Tris, and we are still together. We want each other just the same, we never quarreled, never parted, and even then it wasn't really a quarrel but a grand misunderstanding. There was no reason why we should not have been together, though the others saw it differently, and he let himself be swayed by them, by my father and Louise, her petty jealousies always wedging herself between us, though she never wanted him and never could. She couldn't bear to see us happy, and look at her now, her whole side of the family a wreck. What did they matter, none of them mattered as much to me as Tris, I see him now as if he is a portrait forever painted inside my head, his dark hair gleaming and his silver blue eyes glancing at me when they weren't supposed to, and that portrait of him has never left, ingrained within a part of me that shall never die or end up here. A door slams in the corridor beyond the curtain that partially conceals the bed Holly is lying in. These people are noisy. Hospitals are supposed to be quiet places. When she was a young child and lived in an apartment in the city, the large general hospital serving the indigent of Middlesborough was only a few blocks away, and each night the mournful wailing of the
ambulance sirens making their desperate runs would wake her and frighten her, as if the sirens were coming to take her. Yet there was a sign at the end of her street admonishing those who drove past:

H
OSPITAL

Q
UIET

She closes her eyes again and slumps her head back. A slow, steady ticking noise dribbles down from directly above her, a machine measuring something, marking time or perhaps the beating of her heart. Make it stop, she thinks. If this ticking is me, then please make it stop.

“Holly,” a voice says, from the other side of the bed. “You're awake.” Waiting and hoping for her to rise. That would be Tom, he never could leave well enough alone. They must have called him. The girls, of course they did. Jenny always wanting her to see Tom, likes him more than she does, sees him as the father she never has had, but might. Sweet, suffocating Tom.

Always trying too hard, he will never leave her alone. And now here he is, back again.

“Holly, it's me,” he says, as if she doesn't know. “Tom.”

His voice is soothing soft, like a pillow someone is smothering her with. She keeps her eyes closed and pretends to be sleeping still. A great weariness adheres to the pressure she feels from Tom's voice, the subtle expectation of his wanting her to be something more than she ever will be. And beyond this weariness is the realization that the cool dark hole she had been drifting into has vanished.