Fragile (8 page)

“Oh …” she says, with her eyes still closed. “Thank you Jenny.”

She could drift off into sleep again in the quiet. The girls she hears as soft rustling sounds, getting up from the floor, moving closer.

“It was me,” Zoe says, letting her know she's a helper too.

Holly's eyes open slightly, revealing harsh trapezoids of sunlight slanting in past the floor-to-ceiling vertical blinds that shield the sliding doors to the balcony. Now the girls have nothing to do. Jenny sits on the floor, staring at the TV screen as if it still emits some form of entertainment for her. Maybe she's waiting for her mother to fall asleep again so she can turn it back on. Zoe walks past the couch towards the small dining
area and the galley kitchen—getting a snack. When they're not watching TV, Holly thinks, they eat.

“Why don't you go outside,” Holly says, “and play. It's nice out.”

“Play what?” Jenny says. She's reached the age where all her answers assume the form of a challenge, an impertinent dig at Holly's authority. Holly can think of any number of things to play, games she used to play with kids in the neighborhood when she was young, running loose for hours, but her head is throbbing so much that the words cannot form, the names of those simple games seem to elude her, and even if she could remember, they don't live in the same kind of neighborhood she did, the residents of the apartment complex are transient, mostly young singles or older retired couples on fixed incomes. There is a small playground in the courtyard behind their building, but the few kids who are around tend to stay inside, their parents wary of letting them go out on their own. As Zoe goes by, Holly notices something in her hand, the thing she was fiddling with on the floor.

“What's that?” she says, raising her arm weakly from under the blanket to gesture at it.

Zoe keeps going to the kitchen but answers after a moment, her voice difficult to hear from behind the door of the cabinet where the snacks are kept. “Nothing,” she says, which means nothing important. “Something I found. At the old lady's house.”

Zoe comes back to the living room with a box of crackers, the kind that are shaped like fish.

“Let me see,” Holly says, and she reaches her hand out to show her she wants it. Zoe stops and looks at Jenny, as if she's asking for her sister's permission. At times it seems as if Zoe has two mothers, as if Jenny has assumed the role of a second parent, filling the void, looking out for Zoe and doling out discipline in Holly's absence, relishing the role of being the oldest. Jenny keeps staring at the screen, ignoring them both.

Reluctantly, Zoe's hand extends the object to her mother, drops it in Holly's open palm.

It hits her ring—the ring on her right hand—with a dull plink. It looks like a piece of broken of pottery, a white curved shard of ceramic slightly larger than Holly's palm. She brings it close to her face and examines it, rotating it to view the jagged edges. It is roughly the shape of a triangle, curved, concave, the sunlight glancing off the shiny face of it. She brushes the ball of her thumb along one of the edges to feel the grainy texture, chalky almost, as opposed to the smooth milk-white face of it. One vertex of the triangle is particularly acute, a point so sharp it could cut.

“Where did you get this?”

Zoe hovers close, eager to retrieve her treasure. “I found it,” she says again. “At the old lady's house.”

Yes, Holly thinks. I know that. She remembers now that Zoe already told her.

“Looks like something broke.”

Zoe glances over at Jenny again, and Jenny is staring at the fragment of porcelain now, watching intently.

“Go on,” Holly says. “Tell me. Did you break something there?” Holly can see that something happened, something the girls don't want her to know about. Then, an image flashes in her head and she knows exactly where this came from. She presses the issue.

“I know what this is—I saw it when I was there. The vase from the dining room. The pitcher.”

Jenny stands up now, rising to her sister's defense, or ready to plead her case. But Zoe speaks first.

“I did it,” she says, her voice tightening in anticipation of a punishment. “I was throwing a ball and it hit the pitcher and broke it.” Jenny is watching her closely, as if they have discussed this already, what they would say if their mother found out. “I was throwing the ball to Jenny and she missed and it hit the wall and broke it.”

Jenny leans back a little and says, “The old lady was mad. We were surprised she didn't tell you.”

“No, she didn't. It was very late.”

“She was very mad at Grandpa Steve,” Zoe says. She looks at Jenny and realizes she has said too much.

Holly sits up on the couch, raising her head too fast. She closes her eyes and lets the surge of pain crawl up the back of her skull from her neck. And riding along with the pain, flooding her head with the pain, is the smell of him, smell of fish and wet hay, followed by a rapid succession of images—scenes she must blot out—tactile sensations, tastes, a fullness inside her, all things she must twist and turn away. And other things. Her stepfather riding up to her on horseback on the three-acre farm
where she spent her late childhood; beaming with pride as he rode towards the house on the colt he had just bought. It must have been only a few days after they arrived at the house in the country: She loved exploring the barn, watching the cats that came with the place sneak around hunting mice. And another thing that fills her aching head: her first father, her real father, arriving home from work at the plant, tired, his hair matted with sweat, head down, but still happy to see her, his oldest daughter—maybe five or six—who had waited at the top of the stairs of their city apartment for him to come home. All tangled up together. Why didn't the old lady tell her anything, not going to now either, not going to call her on the phone. How could I now—do you know what that man did to your daughter? And if you knew about him before why didn't you tell me about him? I have shut off my life to others in the years since you left, Tris. I have narrowed my self down to a winnowing old maid, sifting out any others who could harm me. I keep them all at arm's length, and even this woman I tried to help I have hurt. I don't know enough about the world and its ways to not end up hurt by another or hurting another. I am a barren seed going about my business, blown by the wind, but never doing any good any more.

The sidewalk marches on my feet beneath me, and here are the steps to the old library. We used to be afraid of the statues of boys with hats on crouched above the doors as you enter, as if they hold up the roof of the building with books in their hands, smiling down like gargoyles. We had to get past them up
the stairs. This is one place that has not changed all that much since you were here, the garden and my house and the library are just as you would remember, the same warm oaky feeling, smell of warm sun on the pale wooden floor and books slightly musty. The only difference is they took out a lot of books to make way for the computers, but all of the machines are being used by young black boys not reading or looking for books, they're all playing games with very quiet muffled sounds, shooting space creatures or racing cars. They shouldn't let them use the computers for that. One of them says, “This game is stupid, I'm finding me another one.”

The boy pushes back from the screen, and quickly I go over and claim his chair. He looks at me as if he didn't want to give it up after all—or give it up to an old white woman like me, but pay him no mind. Once I plant myself in the chair still warm from his young body, the machine is mine for as long as I need. For as long as I needed you, and still you never came, you never came back. Was it really so bad what Louise said about us, what Father said about us. Was it really so bad that you had to fall from the uppermost edge of the hammock, fall from the edge of the bed in the front room, fall from the top of the tower. We both jumped up and grabbed on as high as we could.

The keys are shadowed with dirt, the beige plastic rimmed by the built-up remnants of many peoples' fingertips typing their messages, sending them into the air. I unfold the paper with the address to type. I can still type seventy words a minute, arthritis or not, the fingers never forget the positions of the keys, the relationships between them. The pictures on the
screen change in an instant and the new page comes up, the one I need.
Horace Mann High School Class of 1957 Reunion, Saturday August 12 2007. We were the lucky ones. We saw the old, yet are living long enough to see the new. Please join us at the Lyceum Theater for dinner, dancing, and a night of memories of dear Horace Mann.

The screen flickers a bit, difficult to read without glasses, but I'm not bringing them today. You will see me with my hair looking good in its new cut and no glasses, looking as good as a lonely old woman like me possibly can. I have to see if you are coming. One more time I want to see you, at least I think I do.

In
Guest List,
all the names of the people we knew, the ones we admired and the ones we despised, arranged by alphabet. Here it is, like a magic spell, your name on the screen, a pair of words that will always go together and weave a twisting, teasing torment over me:
Tristan Holloway,
with an address and phone number,
5792 Brookshire Lane, Walnut Creek, California.
I always knew you were headed for big things, living in a California desert place with a pool in the back. You must have made your fortune as an artist or an architect, you must have done so well, but it's impossible to tell much more. Is there any way to tell if you are married? Nothing more than a name, an address, and a number to call. And in the line for RSVP, it says
No Response.

The pencil in my hand is trembling and the numbers on the screen are flickering, they dance and blur. My old eyes are watery. I have to squint to see clearly, but I have it now on the printout, the number that will reach you. You must have built many buildings, I can feel it, but not a tall tower. Instead, something broad and vast and modern, bristling with activity. I can
call from the main desk, I know the man there, and he will let me, after one last look at your name on the flickering screen on the back of the seat in front of him is showing an animated demonstration of a passenger reaching over his head and strapping an oxygen mask over his face. The flight attendants never do the pre-flight instructions now, they realized that no one ever listens anyway, so someone at the headquarters of the airline, some accountant or human efficiency expert, calculated that they would save a certain amount each year if they invested in making this animated video instead of training hundreds of flight attendants what to say and how to say it.

With a hasty flash of whiteness, the screen blinks off, followed by the swooshing logo of the airline, which is then replaced by a cable news network that offers a summary of the day's top stories. The anchor woman on the screen is beautiful, so appealing it is almost painful to look at her. Tris wonders what it must be like for someone to be this attractive, to know that everyone who looks at you is thinking the same thing, is knocked off their feet by your looks. Her auburn hair is swept to one side of her face, a lock of it that's lighter in color just grazing the edge of her eyebrow and framing her astonishing green eyes—and she is not entirely young; that's what really gets him. She must be at least thirty-five. There is a trace of a laugh line—just a trace—at one corner of her lips as she talks, this barely evident imperfection only serving to intensify the marvel of her beauty.

The news happens fast on this network—they have to cover everything in half an hour. As the beautiful green-eyed woman speaks, a grainy videoclip overtakes the screen: A mountainous region in Asia somewhere, loose groups of people standing in the open air swaddled in ragged robes and towel-like headdress, men and women alike. They appear to be wandering aimlessly, and in the background Tris can see that their simple houses have been reduced to rubble. The woman is back for an instant, her dress a shade of green to match her eyes, describing the devastation wrought by the massive earthquake. Then, quickly, a short cut of a child's bloodied body lying in the ruins. And Tris notices for the first time that there is a black rectangle at the bottom of the screen filled with white letters—the closed captioning they provide now for deaf people to receive the bad news too.

Thankfully, the screen returns to the anchor woman, and Tris sees that she is so lovely that she can't help but speak with the trace of a smile on her lips, even as she recites the full dimensions of the catastrophe and outlines the impending aftermath of displacement and disease. The letters in the black box beneath her march on, but the words must be in some sort of foreign language—they don't match what the woman is saying.
WEASLDK FNADUK AWAC VOVSIL S SADUF EPPOM
F
A
F
DULKA AOOIN
Tris tries to follow it, to make something out of it—perhaps it is the language of the nation struck by disaster.
XOVIPSAP POM KADAK KULKIJWOO MMOI SUYX ILJAF SECVUT
After a moment, he decides this isn't a language at all. Whatever software provides the captioning has gone haywire; there is
some glitch in the program that's turning the beautiful woman's words into gibberish—like a secret code generated by her voice.

Tris wants to keep watching the woman's green eyes and her flawed mouth and the stream of nonsense letters going past her, but the cloying melody of his cell phone chimes in his pocket. With some difficulty, he leans over and pulls the phone out, flipping it open all in one motion to see who's on the tiny screen before answering. Hopefully not Hal Pope. A number scrolls across, followed by an unexpected caller:

317-635-8800 M
IDDLESBOROUGH
P
UBLIC
L
IBRARY

Tris recognizes the number immediately as the old exchange from his childhood: The area code is that of his home town, the medium-sized city with the circle at its heart that he tried to start drawing last night in his hotel room. And 635 is the exchange of the first phone number he ever stored in his fading memory—his own home number. Tris can still picture the number printed in that matter-of-fact fifties typeface on the celluloid circle in the middle of the orbit of numbers on the phone: MEL
ROSE
2214. In those more poetic days, he lived within an exchange that the phone company named, and the entire broad expanse of his youth, the vast landscape where that singular someone named Tristan Holloway was shaped and formed, existed within the limits of the Melrose exchange, an area of some forty square blocks on the east side of the city.