The Truth About Fragile Things (42 page)

“Surprise,” Charlotte said, approaching carefully as if she could see I frightened and ready to run. “Did we surprise you?”

Braden tried to step back. I could tell he felt the stares of my parents and Phillip’s protective glare. I grabbed his hand, clutched his glove with mine, not willing to let him leave me. “What’s happening?” I asked all of them.

“I know we already did a surprise party, and this isn’t a party,” Charlotte started to explain, “but I thought it would be special to surprise you.”

“Why? You’re the one with a birthday coming up,” I said to Charlotte. I stepped up to the group, my mouth faltering between smiling and accusation, not yet sure whether to be grateful or defensive.

“Yes, but there’s something I want to give you,” Charlotte said. “And I thought everyone would want to see it.”

My mother’s hand settled on the back of my neck. She gave me a small, confused smile and shrugged to tell me she wasn’t in on the secret. Her eyes kept cutting nervously to Melissa. I leaned into her, felt my father’s arm reach around her to me.

Charlotte pulled out a plastic page protector, the paper inside as familiar to me as the smell of my mother’s perfume clinging to her coat. “Bryon’s list,” I said, pulling away from everyone.

The wind lifted some of Charlotte’s hair and blew it across her eyes. She turned the paper toward to the light illuminating the bridge. “So we all added things. You wanted to add the cathedral and Phillip wants to make a half-court shot.”

I nodded mechanically as I moved closer, everyone else gathering in a crooked half-circle around us. “Why are we here?” I asked softly, my eyes still unable to cross the street. I wondered if the monkey man would be seated there if I dared to look.

“Because it started here,” Charlotte said.

I noticed her word choice and wanted to correct her. You mean it
ended
here. The sound of rushing cars shaved the quiet from the air and I flinched, certain that if I looked up there would still be blood. After fourteen years I was certain a piece of his life still lay in the street. I pulled back a step, not wanting to see what Charlotte wrote or hear what any of them had to say about ‘healing’ or ‘the past.’

“I think I can help you understand.” Melissa’s voice found me, spurred me to take courage. “It’s how I finally understood years ago. Look across the street.” My eyes flashed to her, begged her to make some other request. She smiled. “Just look.”

I obeyed, pointing my gaze away from the actual spot of the accident, shifting it several stores to the right. “Can you see yourself?” Melissa asked. “If you look close, can you see a little two-year-old Megan with pigtails in the road?”

“Did I have pigtails?” I asked my mother reflexively.

“Braids,” she told me.

“Just look until you can see her,” Melissa said.

I turned around to see Melissa’s face first. Her warm eyes melted through my confusion. I nodded once and looked back to the road. Just outside a ring of glowing light I imagined until I could see the shadow of a little girl. She turned her wide, serious eyes to me, utterly alone in the middle of the dark street. I’d never looked her in the face before. My wet eyes felt cold in the wind.

“What would you do if you saw a car about to hit her?” Melissa asked.

Headlights cut down the street, swept through the spot where I’d imagined her standing. I flinched. In my mind I curled around little Megan, made a cage of my body, felt her soft skin as her frightened whimper crawled inside my ear. The truth of it shocked me. Released me. “I’d save her,” I whispered. Two fat, heavy tears fell against my chin. I wished they would all look somewhere else. It was a moment too personal to put on display for an entire group. Henry crept closer, watching the pain in my face. I could tell it distressed him and I tried for a smile. It trembled.

“That’s why I wanted to show you what I added to my dad’s list,” Charlotte said. “I wanted everyone to see it, so I got Braden to bring you, and Lauren brought your parents so we could all do it together.”

I flashed my eyes to Braden, knowing he felt as exposed in this night huddle as me. Other shoppers passed our group, pretending not to wonder why we all looked so serious.

Charlotte waited until we were alone again. “He did the most important thing on the list already. He just never wrote it down. I wanted to write it down.” Charlotte pulled the precious, fragile paper from the safety of the plastic and held the flap where it had been folded over at the bottom. She unfolded it and held it out to me, her round hand writing added in the line below his.

My legs went as heavy and motionless as the stones I stood on. I cannot imagine the expression of my face. My mother moved closer to see what had paralyzed me. Charlotte passed the paper to her and I watched each person as they read in silence, the paper moving reverently from hand to hand. After it got to Phillip he looked up at me, his face stripped of all of its usual playfulness. He pulled Charlotte under the shelter of his arm. My father ducked his head and held onto Lauren for strength. My mother reached out to Melissa and clasped her hand. By the time the paper returned to me the words were spotted with warm tears.

Save someone’s life.

“A
m I forgiven?”
Braden asked me when we were alone in the car again. My father had treated everyone to dinner after Charlotte’s surprise so I was warm and full, my head aching from the emotions I hadn’t even realized I’d been battling until I escaped to the dark, quiet car.

“You put up with Phillip and my sister all night. I think you’ve paid your dues.” I closed my eyes, blocking out the flash of streetlights and headlights. The momentum of the car pulled me toward the peace of sleep.

“You’re tired,” he said, watching my head rest against the sling of the seatbelt. I just made a quiet concurring hum.

“It can wait,” he murmured, brushing a finger against the clock on the dashboard.

“What can wait?” Another surprise was the last thing I needed.

“I was going to show you something. But we can do it another night.” He stopped at a packed intersection, the glare of colored lights bouncing off the white statue in the median.

“Is it quiet?” I asked him, frustrated I didn’t have any headache medicine in my purse.

“Very quiet,” he promised. “And close. A block away.”

I looked at the way his shadowed profile glowed around the edges in the light of oncoming cars. It reminded me of his face while we ate dinner, lit by a dim pendant light, hesitant as Phillip flipped through all of my old, embarrassing stories as if to tell Braden,
You don’t know her. You’ll never know her like I do
. Braden had taken it all with a subdued expression; his fingers gripped his straw throughout the meal, pushing the ice in his glass in circles. He’d been trying so hard to find a way through Phillip’s protective shell that he hadn’t even noticed when my father pulled out his phone and checked the time conspicuously. “Let’s not leave yet,” he said setting the bill down. “Let’s wait until it’s exactly eight thirty.” Lauren choked on her drink, sending most of her water into her napkin and my mother bent her head over to hide her laughter. I’d shaken my head in disappointment with only one thought in my head.
Et tu, Mother
? After this evening Braden probably had his own headache. “If you’re up for it, I can be,” I told him.

“We have to be quick. They’re not open much longer.” When he stopped two minutes later at the top of a steep hill next to the art museum I opened my mouth, but he rushed from the car before I could ask anything. “We have to skip everything else and just go to the right spot.” He tugged me to the staircase that climbed the green hillside, over the cobbles of the courtyard and up to the massive, brass doors at the back of the museum. I was surprised by the number of people milling in the low lit corridor on a Friday night. I breathed in the smells of the café, the odor of bread and wine and time mingled with the cold damp of the night. “It’s this way,” he took my hand and led me past an Egyptian sarcophagus and a shrunken, brittle mummy, through a room filled with statues of Indian gods, their hands placating and vengeful and plentiful. He hurried past martyrs and shrines and fragile lockets and suits of armor and I followed him; the rooms seemed to grow increasingly dim and quiet.

He finally slowed down, paused outside a doorway, holding me back so I couldn’t see the next exhibit. “It isn’t the whole thing. You definitely need to cross the Atlantic someday, but this might do for now.” He closed my fingers in his warm hand and took me into the next room where ancient columns surrounded two graves, all reconstructed to look like some sort of medieval courtyard.

“It’s all authentic,” he said, as we stepped under one of the graceful arches where two ornate boxes stood alone in the center, funerary reliefs carved in dark brass atop them.

“No one’s really buried here, are they?” I asked.

A docent moved conspicuously to the doorway, watching Braden and me since we were the only ones in the room.

“No, they just brought over the tops of the tombs and reconstructed what it looked like originally. This is all from a French cloister built in the fourteenth century.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked, carefully approaching the replicated grave sites.
        Braden grinned and flicked his finger against the brown, plastic plaque beside him. “You can’t touch the funerary reliefs, but you can touch the columns,” he told me. “They don’t mind.”

“Is it all right?” I asked the docent, my fingers hesitating in front of the weathered stone. He nodded and apparently decided we looked trustworthy because he melted back into the next room.

My fingertip pressed to the dimpled rock, feeling the pockmarks left by centuries of wear. “It feels like they’re still here,” I whispered, the air heavy with the slow thud of my heart. “I feel like I can almost feel their fingers—whoever made these.” I grazed the column with my touch, wondering how many hands had done the same thing. Wondering how many sorrows those hands held.

“I told you it feels important,” Braden said, hovering close enough to share the moment, but far enough to let me spend a moment alone with the shadows of the past.

“You said holy,” I corrected him. The word reminded me of the reason I wanted to go to a cathedral in the first place. I couldn’t even bring myself to tell Braden I wanted to pray, let alone do it in front of him in an art museum. I stepped up to the monuments and studied the face of the woman carved on top of the tomb. Her hands were folded on top of her stiff dress, like a secret she would never tell. Braden must have sensed my need for privacy because he turned his back and studied the keyhole pattern at the top of an archway, his head tilted up as if he intended to stare for a long while.

I moved to the opposite corner and leaned against a column, feeling the coolness of it through my sleeve. I turned to the wall so anyone who walked in would think I was peering at some of the details of the carvings.
Dear God
, I thought quietly before I realized I was out of words. I paused, pressing my finger to the column like life’s answers had traveled across the ocean with these artifacts. I thought I felt the touch of an ancient nun through my trembling fingers, saw a dark-eyed child standing in the middle of the road, heard the mundane hiss of cars whipping past a bridge and the rustle of the paper in Charlotte’s hand. Behind me I felt Braden, all his thoughts filling the room without oppressing me. I wanted to hear everything he was thinking as soon as I finished my current conversation.

I closed my eyes, the soft blackness a relief.
I didn’t mean to
.

When I was ready, I turned around and found Braden waiting, as patient as the stone arch curved above him. He opened the door behind him and instead of entering another room full of displays it spilled us into the large, indoor courtyard café. The fountain sprayed high under the soaring ceiling and the song of it rang over the echo of conversations.

“I’ve always loved this room,” I breathed. White lights glittered in the potted trees and people drank cucumber and lemon water from wine glasses.