Fragile

by Lisa Unger

  “Once, a long time ago, your mother sat where you’re sitting now. She didn’t believe Tommy Delano killed Sarah Meyer.”

  Maggie issued a surprised little laugh. “No,” she said. “I’m sorry. No offense, but I just can’t see my mother visiting a psychic.”

  Eloise smiled. “She came here to ask me why I’d said what I did. She accused me of being a fraud.”

  “Are you? Are you a fraud?”

  Maggie was surprised at herself for asking the question. It was disrespectful, crass, and unlike her. It was more like Elizabeth.

  But Eloise just shook her head slowly. “I wish I were. I wish this were all just a scam I came up with to make money. I wish I didn’t spend half my life seeing things no one would ever want to see.”

  There was no anger or bitterness in her tone, just the level of sadness of someone resigned to her condition. Maggie noticed a battalion of prescription bottles by the sink, all lined up.

  “What did you tell my mother?” The refrigerator started to hum, and Maggie heard some cubes drop from the ice maker in the freezer.

  “I pick up frequencies, images. The best way I can describe it is to say that there’s something inside me like a scanner. I see things with varying degrees of lucidity. Some things make sense; some things don’t. Sometimes I’m connected, like I was to Sarah’s family. Sometimes the things I see are a world away. There’s no pattern.”

  Eloise caressed the edge of the table with her fingertips, seemed to have finished what she was saying.

  “Did Tommy Delano kill Sarah?” Maggie asked.

  “I used to think so, though I knew there was much more to the story than I could see. I knew he had a terrible rage inside him, something that had lived in him since he was a small boy. It didn’t belong to him; his spirit was cursed with it. It was something inherited, that he couldn’t exorcise, didn’t know how. I knew that he had a hunger for her, that he’d been watching her, following her for a long time. He kept that demon caged for so long, but it was thrashing inside him. I saw him touching her, cutting her.”

  Eloise’s eyes had taken on a shine; she was staring beyond Maggie as though she was no longer there. But her voice was as steady and unemotional as if she were talking about something she’d seen on television.

  “And that’s all I told them. Because that’s what I saw. He later confessed.”

  “And now what do you think?”

  Eloise lifted a finger, got up, and left the room. When she returned a moment later, she held an envelope in her hand.

  “A few days after Tommy Delano died in prison, I received this in the mail. He hanged himself, maybe you remember. It hanged him. That terrible anger.”

  Maggie felt a cold shiver, an urge to get up and run. But she stayed rooted in her seat. Outside, the sun had set and it was dark. She felt like they were the only two people in the world.

  “This is his suicide note. He sent it to me.”

  “Why? Why would he send it to you?”

  “He wanted someone to know the truth, to know who he was, what he’d done. He claimed he could feel me inside his head. I don’t know if that was true or not. I doubt it, but I’ve learned not to judge. There are too many things we don’t understand.”

  Eloise handed Maggie the letter. As Maggie reached to take it from her, Eloise held on to her hand. Her grip was gentle but firm. Maggie looked up to meet the older woman’s eyes and saw only kindness there.

  “I knew you’d come here and want answers one day,” Eloise said. “I knew it the day your mother came to see me.”

  Something about her words or her tone brought tears to Maggie’s eyes again. “How could you know that?”

  Eloise sat back down and wrapped her arms around herself. “Because I told your mother to stop looking for answers. I told her to accept things the way they were, and let Sarah and Tommy Delano go. I told her that if she didn’t, she’d lose you. I didn’t know the specifics, how or why. I just knew that it was not her place to keep looking, and if she did, she’d pay an awful price.”

  The information landed hard and dead center. Maggie remembered what her mother had said to her in the car when she’d asked Elizabeth if Tommy Delano hadn’t killed Sarah, then who had. She’d said, Now, the answer to that might just be what kept me from asking the question in the first place.

  But Elizabeth was not a superstitious woman, not one to bow to the prophecy of a psychic. Maggie said as much to Eloise, who offered a deferential nod of her head. Maggie realized that Eloise was a woman accustomed to being disbelieved. It didn’t faze her in the least. The longer Maggie spent with Eloise, the more credible she seemed. Maybe Elizabeth had come to feel the same way.

  Maggie held the letter in her hand for a moment, then slipped the page from its envelope. Tommy’s message was written in a looping, childish hand.

  Dear Miss Montgomery,

  I believe you’re the only person alive who knows me. I can feel your eyes on me and I know you can see who I am, but you don’t judge me. There are things I need to say, things I need you to understand. You see a lot, but you don’t see everything.

  I will tell you that I did not kill Sarah Meyer that night. But I’d killed her a hundred times already in as many different ways. I want to tell you that I loved her and that I thought about her all of the time. A lot of times, like you told the police, I followed her. I was nearby when she died. It was an accident. She was with some boys, I won’t say who, and there was a fight. She ran from one of them. And then she fell, hit her head on a rock. They left her there, alone in the dark. So I took her. She belonged to me. I wanted her warm and screaming. But I took her as I found her, so cold and so quiet.

  You know what I did to her. You were there. I felt you even though I didn’t understand it at the time. I won’t write those things here. They are nightmares. I hate who I am. I always, always have.

  There was pressure to confess. They were at me for hours and hours. But that’s not why I said I killed her. I said I did it because I would have one day. And if not her, then someone else. I couldn’t keep the animal in his cage much longer, especially not after he’d tasted blood. It’s better that I’m here, caged with the other animals. Don’t feel bad that you got it wrong. You were right in all the ways that count.

  This is the last anyone will hear from me. And I know no one will miss me. Everyone thinks I’m a monster. I am. I hope my mom is waiting for me. But I doubt it. I remember how she looked before I pushed her down the stairs. I know she loved me. But when she looked at me she was so sad.

  Sincerely,

  Tommy Delano

  Sorrow seemed to leak from the page into her fingers. Maggie found herself thinking of Marshall, another damaged boy turning into a dangerous, unstable man. She thought of Sarah’s violin in her mother’s attic, Charlene weeping on her couch, her mother and husband lying in their hospital beds. She thought of Ricky going off to college, and she was glad that he was going to be far, far away from this place, even though she knew the loss of him was going to lay her low. There was something about The Hollows that held on tight, kept you here though you’d intended to leave, or brought you back when you weren’t paying attention. It made promises that it didn’t keep-safety, peace of mind, tranquillity-until one day you were too tired to even want to find another place to live.

  “Did my mother know about this letter? She must have.”

  Eloise nodded. “I shared it with her after some time had passed. Even now, I’m not sure why. It only caused her more pain. But I tend to follow my compulsions; I’ve found that there’s usually a reason, even if I never understand it myself.”

  Maggie thought of her mother, her will so powerful, her sense of right and wrong so clear. How could she have lived with this?

  “Eloise,” Maggie said. “Do you know who killed Sarah?”

  Eloise looked out the window over the metal kitchen sink, then back at Maggie.

  “No, I don’t. I’m sorry.”

  Maggie bel
ieved her.

  27

  Henry Ivy rarely locked his doors. When he was a kid, the doors were always open. And even though The Hollows had changed a lot since then, he rarely thought to do it, couldn’t remember the last time he’d used his key to get in. But standing on his porch, he noticed the door was ajar. He wouldn’t have left it that way. It was an old door that stuck, especially on a night like tonight, when yesterday it had been cool and today it was humid. He had to pull the door closed and push it open hard.

  He briefly considered leaving, turning around and getting back in his car, using his cell phone to call the police. But then if there was no one in there, he’d look foolish. And while everyone in The Hollows liked and respected him, thought he did his job well, no one thought of Henry Ivy as a tough guy. He wasn’t the guy you called when you needed a hero. In The Hollows, that guy was Jones Cooper. If he called the cops and there was no one in his house, everyone would be very polite about it, but there’d be lots of laughing at the bar after the shift had ended. The story would circulate to wives and girlfriends. Two days later Margie, the receptionist, would be looking at him with a sympathetic smile he didn’t understand.

  He pushed the door open and walked into the foyer, stood listening. The air felt different. There was an odd scent, something unpleasant. He walked into the living room to the right of the foyer and saw Travis Crosby sitting in the wing chair by the fireplace.

  The room was exactly as Henry’s mother had decorated it decades ago. When his parents had sold him the house and moved to Florida, they’d wanted all new things down there. Henry always thought he’d sell the furniture he’d been lying around on since childhood, gut the house and redo everything. But he never had. Not for any reason other than a kind of inertia that had settled over his life. Everything was fine. It had always been fine. That was what he told himself.

  “What are you doing here, Crosby?”

  He didn’t feel particularly alarmed to see this wanted man in his living room. In a way, Henry felt as though he’d been waiting for Travis, like they had some unfinished business they’d never gotten around to settling.

  “I used to go to AA meetings. On the job, they like you to do that. Promise they’ll treat your addiction like a disease, give you your shield back when you’re cured. But that’s not the way it works. They’ll put you back on the payroll but not on the street. You run the desk or the equipment room, maybe the evidence locker if you’re lucky.”

  Henry noticed a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a bag of chips by Travis’s feet. He’d obviously been there awhile, helped himself to things in Henry’s kitchen and liquor cabinet.

  “I didn’t become a cop to file paperwork.”

  “No,” Henry said. “You became a cop so that you could continue to bully people and get paid for it.”

  Travis issued an annoyed little laugh, rubbed nervously at the sweat on his brow. “You never did know when to keep your mouth shut, Ivy.”

  Henry noticed the gun in Travis’s hand then, a flat, black menace. Still, Henry didn’t feel any fear, just a kind of tingling awareness. He felt that same thing rear up in him that had caused him to beat Travis at homecoming. It was something ugly and raw, but not unwelcome.

  “What do you want, Crosby?”

  “I still think about that day, you know? When you beat me in front of the whole school?”

  “So do I.”

  “I feel like everything went bad for me starting there. That nothing good ever happened again after that.”

  Travis stared at Henry with watery eyes, his face flushed, leg pumping. He looked bloated and filthy, with some kind of dark stain on his shirt and pants. Henry still remembered the lean, terrifying boy he’d been. He’d been all the more menacing for his beauty and charm. The man before him was a ruin.

  “You’re kidding, right? You tortured me for years. I finally stood up to you. And now you’re going to blame me for ruining your life. That’s classic.”

  Logic dictated that Henry should be talking Travis down, mindful of the gun in his hand. But Henry was tired of being quiet, of doing the right thing, the logical thing. That was what he’d been doing all his life. What had it gotten him, actually? What did he have to show for all that right action? If he thought about it, beating the crap out of Travis Crosby was the only honest thing he’d ever done.

  “In rehab, they tell you that you have to make amends, to say you’re sorry to all the people you hurt with your addiction. But I kept thinking, What about all the people who hurt me, who fucked me over? My father, you, my ex-wife. When do they start to make amends?”

  “Seems like you might have missed the point, Crosby.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Travis got to his feet quickly, and Henry took an unconscious step back. He saw a predator’s satisfied smile turn up the corners of Travis’s mouth.

  “And what really gets me?” Travis said. “What really kills me? My son talks about you all the time, like you’re some kind of oracle. Mr. Ivy says. Mr. Ivy says.” His voice turned into a nasty mimic. “You! The faggot I wiped the floor with for years. He looks up to you.”

  Henry saw it then, that all the sadness, fear, and self-loathing that lived in Marshall had lived in Travis first. It had probably lived in the chief before that. And for the first time in his life, Henry felt compassion for Travis.

  “He loves you, Travis,” Henry said. “He loves you so much, more than you know.”

  But Travis didn’t seem to be listening. He was lost in whatever hurricane was raging inside him.

  “Sometimes I think if it hadn’t been for that homecoming game, I wouldn’t have gotten so angry. I wouldn’t have chased her. She wouldn’t have fallen.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “It doesn’t matter now. It’s too late for her. It’s too late for me.”

  Henry drew in a deep breath, keeping his eyes anywhere but on the gun in Travis’s hand. It was just surreal to see him in his parents’ living room, so broken and defeated, still intending Henry harm, even though a lifetime had passed. Henry found himself wondering why people held on to anger and sadness, gripped it tight, let it dictate the course of their lives, but found it so hard to find and keep love. He noticed that Travis was shaking.

  “Look, Travis,” he said. “I’m sorry I hurt you that day.”

  He wasn’t just trying to placate an angry man holding a gun. He truly was sorry. He was sorry he had let Travis bring him so low. He’d never forgotten how much it hurt to hurt someone else, no matter how much he deserved it.

  Henry saw Travis soften a bit; his shoulders dropped from the tense hunch they were in.

  “Christ, Ivy, even now, you’re such a fucking faggot.”

  Henry felt nothing but pity as Travis raised the gun and put it to his own head. Henry backed away and closed his eyes as Travis pulled the trigger. But there was no concussive boom. Just a soft click-then silence.

  Henry opened his eyes to see the look of shocked disappointment on Crosby’s face. It might have been comical if it weren’t so hideous. Travis collapsed in the chair, howling in pain, tears streaming down his cheeks.

  Henry bent down and easily took the gun from the other man’s hand. He checked the barrel. It had fired on an empty chamber, but the gun still had three bullets. For an elastic moment, he thought about how easy it would be to shoot Travis. He could easily claim self-defense. Given the circumstances, their individual reputations, no one would doubt him for a moment.

  But it was just a fantasy. He thought about Marshall, who’d lost so much. And he thought about himself, how he knew the folly of retaliation, what a hollow victory it was. But most of all, he thought about Travis Crosby, about how his life as it was and would be was a more exquisite justice than anything he could hope to dispense.

  Henry turned from the weeping man and called the police.

  Maggie stood in the doorway of the darkened hospital room and watched her husband. H
e didn’t look big and powerful, as he always had. He looked fragile, deflated. It was long past visiting hours, but the nurses all knew her and no one moved to stop her as she walked past their station.

  When she got to his room, though, she didn’t know how to step inside. What was she going to say? How was she going to ask the questions she had? What would he tell her? And who would they be after all was said and done?

  No one but Jones could have put those things in her mother’s attic. She knew that. Elizabeth hadn’t been up there in years, couldn’t even make it up the ladder when she’d wanted to. And beyond that, Elizabeth might have been guilty of not asking the hard questions, might have bowed for whatever reason to the fearful predictions of Eloise Montgomery, but she would never have concealed evidence that proved someone else’s involvement in the murder of a young girl. She could never have lived knowing those things were in her attic.

  “Mags? Where have you been? We were really worried. Your cell went straight to voice mail.”

  She came into the room, pulled up a chair to sit beside her husband. In the low light, he looked like his younger self, The Hollows’s heartthrob, the boy she had loved from a distance. She wondered how he had carried this load for so long, never even hinting at how painful, how heavy, it must have been.

  “Jones,” she said. She put a hand on his arm.

  “What is it, Maggie? Ricky okay?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “Because I’ve been thinking about him. I’ve made a lot of mistakes with that kid. I can do better.” He released a heavy sigh. “It’s not too late, is it?”

  Something about this, in spite of everything that lay before them, washed her with relief. Because it mattered how well they loved one another, how well they treated one another as a family-that was the root, that was the trunk of life. All the rest was just leaves that grew and fell, were raked away and grew again.