Fragile (21 page)

She looks around and tries to find something to tell her why it happened, where. She has only a hazy vision of what must have taken place, formed mainly from her own recollections, images blazoned upon her heart from moments in her own childhood, long ago. The old woman's things, in the daily disarray of a life arrested in mid motion here in my home, here she is again, the one who touched my body and would not let me enter. Here she moves about and motions in my home, she moves about and steps within it. She comes to look at me and now at my things, my home. She comes to touch. But I will not let her. If she would not let me go into my body, I will not let her enter my home. I will push her away, and more than that. I will put my hands on her neck and strangle her. I will grab her by her face and push her out the door. All the ones I wanted to come back never did come back to her with all the feelings that can get locked up in things. What is it she wants to find here? She has a prickling of the skin at the back of her neck, crawling up from her shoulders, a feeling that someone else is with her. A brief puff of air brushes against her cheek, as if someone has expelled a silent, malevolent syllable towards her ear. Holly
glances over her shoulder and turns around to see that no one is here. The room is quiet and still as ever. The fine blond hair on her forearms stands on end, gooseflesh rising on her legs. But she has the fragment of porcelain in her hand, and she knows now what to do with it.

She steps across the room and sees a mark on the wall above the sofa, a chip in the wainscotting. And beneath the mark, on the shoulder of the couch, are chips of porcelain, white dust that shows her this is where it happened, where the pitcher broke.

The porcelain stained with her own blood is cool in her hand. She grips it tightly for a moment, holding on to it like a child that clutches a coin, then lets go, allowing it to fall to the floor. She turns and strides toward the door, grasping the doorknob. But even as she's pushing her way out of the house, an object catches her eye, a brightly colored pamphlet on the tottering oval table next to the recliner:

H
ORACE
M
ANN
H
IGH
S
CHOOL

C
LASS OF
1957

R
EUNION

Holly remembers now—this is why the old woman wanted to have her hair done, for the reunion. This is not a pamphlet, it looks like pages printed out from a computer, stapled together. And at the bottom of the first page, she sees something scrawled in pencil, in the old lady's spidery script, a name and a phone number:

Tris 415-555-3462

Maybe someone she knew. Holly smiles to think of it—even an overweight, lonely old woman like that primping and having her hair done as if she were a teenager going to the prom. To think of someone with skin as fine and parchmentlike as that old woman's wanting to see a man, some old codger she knew a hundred years ago, in another life. She wants to hurry out of the house; that puff of breath on her cheek, like death itself brushing against her. But she has let go of one thing and along comes another, the pull of another person always approaching with the promise of acceptance and a place on this earth she can safely call her own. As she shuts the door behind her, she fishes for the cell phone in her purse and dials the number on the paper, an area code she doesn't know, and reaches out for another connection to the earth and all its wonders is too strong in me, all the parts of me I cling to as a consolation are here and with me still, but just beyond my reach. I am in my house but not a part of it. I can see my body, but I am no longer in it. I can see these people, the woman who touched me and Louise, but I cannot even talk to them. I reach out to touch and they do not feel or hear or see. And here the darkness creeps across the floor, a dusk that settles like a layer of silt on the furniture and dims each edge and corner. Darkness is a lack, and I have found that even a lack is something too, an absence of anything or any one that can grow until it overwhelms all other things. Darkness is the absence of light, a lack that grows and grows.

Here all places are as one and all times. The clock that juts from the corner of the department store is stuck, its hands are
frozen at 9:27, and no one can say whether this is morning or evening, or when the hands decided suddenly to stop. The people glance up at it, but not to check the time. They love to see the green filligree of the arm that extends from the cornice of the building, the copper scrollwork along the top. Their eyes look at me, but do not see. Their mouths move, but no words come out. And always I am waiting. Here I am and always shall be. He said to meet him here at half past two and we will see the matinee; they still charge the early prices for this show. I watch for him to come along in the crowds of shoppers, his face isolated from the rest simply because it is his, well known and loved. But he never does come. He never did love me and never will.

The darkness grows, darkness and cold of night. The sidewalk grows dim and opens onto a broad expanse of space, as broad as the open gulf of sky that used to spread beyond my window when I was a girl and couldn't go to sleep, and watched for shooting stars to fly. But there are no stars here. This is an open field, brown and barren and cold, devoid of trees. The sky is black and the earth crunches under my feet. As I walk, one place becomes another. The downtown street transforms itself into this marshy landscape that stretches in all directions. Each step I take is a step away from the solid, comfortable spaces that contained my past. I reach my arm out and feel currents in the air; perhaps there is another person nearby. I have come to a place it seems where people move together through the gloom, together but apart. And now a voice, disembodied in the blackness, whispers my name:

“Amelia.”

Whispered, but calling out distinctly, calling for me to come. I want to turn away from it, but there is only one way to go here—the direction that leads me to the voice and always circles back into myself.

Time is a vapor here. My day is over now and here is my night, unending, everlasting night. I have only just arrived, but I feel as if I have been here forever.

I keep moving forward and hear, in the distance, a child's voice cry out. A presence hovers near, I can feel it; perhaps it is the voice that called me. As one sense goes away, the others become stronger, so I can hear many things more clearly than ever before. The sound of scuffling feet and the grinding of a machine, the wooden, rusty creaking of a mill that takes in something and crushes it. The sounds come to me in pools, like spots of cold stillness in a stream, and I can hear the cry of a child that is pierced through with pain. The child releases another cry all you want, we are going to this funeral.”

Jenny takes over where her younger sister left off. She sees that the little girl tactic of throwing a fit is not working, so she turns to the overbearing logic of the teenager expressing her independence. “Why are you making us
go
?” She takes another stab at it, more forceful, demanding her rightful place in the world, trying a mixture of guilt and sheer stubborn determination. “You can't make us go to this. That old lady was creepy, in her smelly old house. She didn't even really watch us.”

Holly hears the unstated message from Jenny: now I may use whatever happened there with Steve against you.

“We're going because I said so, and I'm the parent.”

“But she's dead, Mom. Who cares? I didn't want to see her before, and I sure don't want to see her now.”

With the mention of the fact that the woman is dead, Zoe lets out another cry, a slobbering snuffling noise designed to so irritate and distract Holly that she will give up the fight.

“It's good to see that everything is back to normal.” Tom smiles and adjusts the tautness of his suspenders. Only a lawyer who pulls down as much cash as Tom would take this as an opportunity to wear something as ostentatious as this. But he is right. The fact that they are arguing with her is proof enough that Holly's stay in the hospital has not been a major trauma for her daughters, at least on the surface. They are too preoccupied with their own lives. This feels like any of the other workaday mornings when she has to drag the girls away from the television to feed them breakfast and get them ready for school.

“That lady asked me to be there.”

“How could she do that? She's dead.” For some reason, Jenny likes saying that she's dead. Probably to see if she can scare her sister.

“She did it in her will.” This is stretching the truth, but it may reach into the realm of adult legal affairs that are just enough beyond the girl's understanding that she drops her all-knowing teenage attitude. “In her will,” Holly says, “she asked me to do her hair when she died, and that means I also have to go to the funeral, to make sure everything looks okay.” Holly
has to cinch the waist of the dress Tom bought her last night, so she would have something decent to wear to this. Though Tom insisted, she did not want to go back to the apartment, in case Rick were still there. Even so, she did have a feeling that Rick might have already left. “She needs us. Everybody needs people to be with them when they die.”

The unexpected ring of truth in Holly's last statement resonates through the two-story entryway of Tom's house and halts, at least for the moment, the unbecoming protests of her girls. She remembers now another way in which she can enforce her will as parent, the action that demonstrates “because I said so” vividly and without question: She turns and leaves the room. End of discussion.

Though she has left the front hallway, Holly is still in the same large cathedral-like space as Tom and the children. The clicking of her heels on the floor echoes as she walks. Tom's house is a vast series of open areas, one leading to another, living room, dining room, great room, kitchen, foyer, and mud room, separated only by varying types of furniture and architectural details such as faux Doric columns, a fireplace, or a line where the plush carpeting ends and a wood or tile floor begins. A soaring staircase leads to the upper floor, which is open to most of the lower level and overlooks it from an elegant white and blonde wood railing. Holly is always amazed by the kitchen. It alone could contain her entire apartment. The pantry is larger than the bedroom where the girls sleep, and has two doors. She examines the extravagant display of pots and pans and utensils, glimmering silver and gold as they hang from hooks in the ceiling
high above. It is all shiny and clean, every appliance sparkling, immaculate. She can't imagine him using any of this, it looks as artificial as a Hollywood movie set. It is as if he has prepared this house for a wife, it is ready and waiting for her—whoever she may be. She lets her mind wander here: Perhaps it is meant to be me. She feels the small muscles in her back untense with the thought of settling in to the safety of Tom's money.

“We should go.” Tom has come up behind her and placed his hand discreetly on her shoulder. He would not touch her anywhere else. The girls have followed him and sullenly trudge past to the back hallway that leads to the garage. They know their way around here. Holly can tell that they have not minded staying with Tom these past few days. When she arrived here from the old lady's house, she felt as if she were an outsider, an unexpected visitor intruding on the makeshift family Tom had fashioned for himself. And she saw in the eyes of Jenny and Zoe something broader, less fearful.

There are three cars in the four-car garage, but Tom's bloodstained BMW is not one of them.

“Let's take the Jeep.”

The girls open the back door and scramble in to the olive-colored car with the open top defined by a cage of tubular black roll bars. It is a challenge to hoist herself three feet up into the vehicle without catching her dress on her heels, but once she is inside, it is as comfortable as any other car she has been in, with leather seats and a console full of dials and buttons. Tom turns the ignition and backs out of the garage.

“You got rid of the Beamer?”

Tom's eyes roll up and to the right, as he checks the mirror to turn the car around in the driveway. “I wanted something a little more … rugged. I looked at the new Land Rovers, but they felt like I was driving a Cadillac on stilts.” And as if to convince himself further that he has made the right decision, he adds, “The girls love it.”

“We went for a ride in the country.” Zoe's voice still holds the excitement of a child who can be entertained by something more than television shows, pop music, or video games. “We drove over a field with big rocks in it, and the car didn't even tip.”

Holly glances at Tom, for an instant questioning his judgment over the past few days as a surrogate father for her girls. She studies his hand as he shifts the car out of reverse. Hairless, smooth, accustomed to manipulating gadgets such as computer keyboards and cell phones and steering wheels with small, precise movements. She remembers something he told her in the hospital as if it might have been a dream, a half-forgotten image from a world far removed and long ago: “Listen Holly, I want to marry you.” Not a proposal exactly, more like an opening statement in the kind of lengthy discourse he is accustomed to. The span of time since that moment feels like forever; perhaps he never really said it.

Tom's skin is the color of autumn. She has always thought of him that way. His cheeks are ruddy and flushed, as if he has just come inside from picking apples on a windswept afternoon. Maybe he was out of season when she met him, earlier in the
summer. He is comfort and consolation. He is all the things she has fled over the years: thoughtfulness and logic, care and consideration. Having all the things he has—the house, the cars—is only another type of contract with the world, a legal covenant with one person, one place. And perhaps, if it happened, she would become merely another one of his possessions in this house—the final accessory to complement the shiny bright counter tops and appliances in his well-appointed kitchen. As they wind down the driveway towards the road into town, she can see yet another indication of the kind of place this is: Astride the black asphalt, two berms, each of which has been landscaped with a low wall of butter-colored stone and banks of golden flowers that receive the flattering glow of the late morning light. And between the two walls, obstructing the drive, a black wrought-iron gate, no higher than the shoulder of a child.