Fragile (10 page)

Tom is silent now, always good, letting her rest. But his eyes are still on her, she knows. He is watching her and, what she cannot bear, adoring her in his eager way, like a parent who has come to check on a slumbering child. During the few weeks they were seeing each other earlier in the summer, he would appear in the dim vestibule of her apartment building clutching some small gift he had brought her—roses from a roadside stand or a CD he wanted her to have of one of his favorite bands. And this would set the tone for the evening, starting them off out of balance, him giving more than she could—or would; setting up a scaffolding of external pressure that made the conversation feel forced and tense. One thing about Tom: he has money. And that added to the imbalance.

He would take her to the best restaurants—not trendy places like Midtown Grill, but really upscale fine-dining restaurants where she felt totally out of her depth. These were the big downtown places where he and the other lawyers and power brokers from the Statehouse did their deals, where they gave her too many forks to keep track of and her clothes were never quite dressy enough. These restaurants were always too quiet—she felt as if the waiters were watching her and listening in on what she had to say. And afterwards he would take her to a concert or sporting event with front row seats and they never had a bad time, she always at the end of the night had to admit she enjoyed it, but still there was the sense of owing him something, of a debt to be paid, and, finally, what made her nearly always turn him away with little more than a kiss: the off-putting feeling that he was simply trying too hard.

Holly doesn't want to open her eyes, but the lids flutter and white light pours in. The eyelids flicker again and remain open.

Tom looks at her and smiles. Then, always trying to anticipate her needs, he pours water into a styrofoam cup and offers it to her.

She takes it and drinks, feeling the liquid slip into her like another one of Tom's unrequited gifts, getting his grip on her again. She closes her eyes and tries to drift into those expanding, dark circles that were pulling her down, but Tom is in her head again. She rejected him so cruelly a few weeks ago that she believed he would never come back, in spite of Jenny asking after him. The girl must have sensed in Tom what repelled Holly: his stability, his bland goodness, his caring responsibility. Even after Holly broke off their brief and never fully consummated relationship, she has had the sense that he has been lurking out there, waiting for something like this to happen, a chance for him to swoop in and prove his worth to her and the girls.

Another person has entered the room, a nurse taking notes concerning the machine above her head, writing down numbers and data Holly's body has generated. The nurse's hair is bleached blond and bedraggled, hanging in limp loose strands she has to keep tossing back from her eyes as she checks the bag of fluid suspended from a pole and connected to Holly's forearm by a plastic tube. She could use a good cut, more of her natural color. The blond doesn't go with her skin; it makes her face look pasty and white. She goes about her business intently, as if Holly isn't lying half naked on the bed watching what she
does. Tom watches her too, his lawyer's mind cataloging the facts on this case, taking its own notes.

Abruptly, the nurse looks up at Tom, never catching Holly's eye, and makes an announcement.

“The doctor will be in to see you.” But she doesn't say when. She turns on her heels and slouches out of the room.

Tom has drafted a critique of her performance. Lining up pieces of evidence that could be used in a case. “She didn't check your wound. Are the bandages comfortable?”

Holly has been afraid to look. She doesn't want to think of what she did to herself as a wound, an injury that must heal. It was more of a pathway, an opening that would take her someplace else. Away from this. A wrap of tight gauze clings to the place where the cut was made, a bracelet of white cloth with a thick pad turned brown as rust where the blood once flowed.

“It's fine,” she says, not giving him the satisfaction of having something to lobby for with the nurse or the doctor. Tom. Standing there watching her beyond the bars at the side of the bed as if she holds something precious within her. He would tell her how beautiful she was, trying always to find just the right word to give her, as if he were holding up a mirror to her face, her body, trying to make them look better than they really were. Despite all his efforts, it's a case he could never win. She wanted to tell him that holding her up on a pedestal was the wrong approach. She needed someone to debase her, to confirm her worst notions of her self, someone who would slam her head into a porcelain basin and break her. Tom circles around to the other side of the bed and inspects the bag of fluid
dripping into her, reading the small blue print as if he might deduce something about her treatment from it. Though it's a Saturday, he looks as if he could have come straight from a business meeting. His button-down blue dress shirt puffing out from the waist where it is tucked into khaki pants with pleats that make his hips look wide and womanly. His cell phone strapped onto his belt to the right of his fly, ready for action, like a stubby metallic prick. She remembers telling him one night on a date that wearing the phone on his belt made him look ridiculous and insecure, but he refused to remove it, an attachment he couldn't do without.

“I came as soon as Jenny called. I hope you don't mind.”

Don't apologize, she thinks, looking at the pads of flesh that extend his cheeks beyond the wire rims of his glasses and break the smooth line of his jaw. It makes her want to swat him aside. The one man who should have apologized to her never did.

“You probably saved my life,” she says, keeping her voice flat, not giving him anything to latch onto. “Not that it matters.”

“What do you mean by that?” He comes closer now. He has earned the right to lean over the bars on the bed and put his chubby face near. “This cut …” He pauses and motions towards her arm, letting his gesture express a meaning he won't say. “The girls said it was an accident.”

She will not give him the satisfaction of knowing what this is about. He shouldn't be here injecting himself into her life again.

“Of course it was. I was looking at a piece of broken pottery Zoe brought back from the sitter and it cut me.”

His eyes try to lock onto hers, try to pin her down. Behind the thick lenses the brown irises are enlarged, the pupils distended.

“That's an unusual place to have something just cut you…”

“Don't interrogate me, Tom. If you want to start that shit, you can leave.”

She has never had any problem being a bitch. There has always been the need to deflect people away from her when they get too close. Especially someone like Tom who wants to tie her down. She imagines him strapping her arms and legs to this hospital bed like they do to the prisoners or crazy people who are sick. She has to go on the offensive with him.

“Where are the girls?”

“They got tired of waiting. Hospitals are boring places. I had the TV on for them, but for some reason you can only get three channels, so I suggested they go to the gift shop and get a snack.” He backs off, standing more upright beside the bed again. “They are very concerned about their mother. Zoe in particular. She's blaming herself for this.”

They must still be in the emergency ward, not a real hospital room, for taped to the wall behind Tom's big head is a poster that shows the back of a human torso with the skin removed to reveal the deftly woven baskets of muscle that knit the body together. The corners of the poster are torn where it had been taped to a different wall previously. Someone put it up here as a kind of grim decoration. There are cutaways revealing the more interior bony structures. And beside the full torso of muscle and bone, there is a side view of the notched bones of the spine,
interlocking like a chain, appearing in its elongated sinuous curve as nothing so much as the skeleton of a snake. Beneath it, the flat girdle of the bones of the pelvis are displayed, which makes Holly think for some reason with its spreading wings of a dried-out cow's skull. The poster is called T
HE
A
MAZING
B
ACK
. Something a doctor can use to point out what's wrong with you. Seeing these elaborate structures that conspire to give us form and function makes Holly curl up deeper within the pain at the back of her head, sink into her animal self. Closing her eyes again, she has a dim understanding that these mechanisms of flesh and bone must all work together perfectly to keep us alive.

Her mind forms a question that will divert him.

“How is your work going?” She knows that if she gets him started on this, he cannot help but talk about it.

“Oh, you know. Always the same partisan crap at the Statehouse. I've been working for eighteen months on the contracts for the new prison they want to build in Henderson, and it keeps getting stalled in committee. But they need it. The one they have now is filled to overflowing. Thirty-six percent above the legally allowable capacity, and the feds are taking away funding because of it. Every few weeks it seems some rapist or murderer they let out early to make room has killed someone again.” He starts pacing the floor as he talks about it. “It's a growth industry, building prisons. He looks at her and shrugs his beefy shoulders. “What do I care? Either way, I get paid.”

Yes, he does get paid, very well. The bald fact of his money has always hung there between them, like his stubby cell phone,
an electromagnetic device that can both repel and attract. Tom's thoughts have been directed into the orbit of his work for the moment, and in his distraction he falls into the old habits of his technical curiosity, stepping carefully around to the other side of the bed to scrutinize the elaborate device that is recording the stream of data being produced by Holly's body. He rests his hand on the bar at the side of Holly's bed, and Holly observes it with the same technical dispassion. A curled star, hairless and well manicured, accustomed to working with papers and documents. Unbidden, the hand that turned the pages in that red book enters her head. Hands can do so many things, for better and for worse. She rolls her eyes away and sees the rippling mountains of Tom's shirt, a landscape bulging with contours that shift and distort as he reaches up to touch the display screen above her head. His body was never unattractive to her; that was not the reason she never gave herself to him. All bodies have their own attractions. She often wondered what it would be like to have sex with him, a body padded and upholstered with flesh like a comfortable old couch. There is a curiosity about everyone new that is in fact perhaps the chief source of her seeking, the reason she is afraid of being tied down to a single man. The shock of having a new body exposed to her, like the raw, glossy photos on the pages of that book—the mind thrilled by a fresh set of sensations. Hard to imagine that Tom's heavy broad back is underwoven with the same basket of muscles depicted on the poster taped to the wall, but even the most decrepit human bodies are a miracle in their finely tuned functioning, a treasure, as the poster baldly states: Amazing.

Another door slams in the corridor beyond. There is a sense of hurry here—these patients must be seen and cured and moved along. Another batch of injured and ill will be coming in soon.

“Tom,” she says, trying his name again, feeling it come out awkward and clipped. “I wanted to thank you. For coming when the girls called.”

He doesn't turn around immediately—he senses an opening, what he has been waiting for. Then, the full force of his brown eyes is upon her.

“It was nothing. Jenny said I make a pretty good ambulance driver. We laid you in the back seat and Jenny crouched down in the floor well and watched over you, and I kept Zoe in front with me. She seemed to be the most upset by it.” He tries to soften. “They loved it when I laid on the horn, honking all the way through the red lights.” And then, to let her know he wasn't taking unnecessary risks with the girls in the car. “You were bleeding pretty bad. Blood everywhere.”

“In your nice car? My God, it must be ruined.”

“Don't worry, I can take it to the dealer to be cleaned. And if not, it's about time for a new one anyway. I'm thinking more along the lines of a Range Rover, something a little more rugged. I don't like the styling of the new Beamers.”

The squeak of many sneakers on the floor announces the girls to them. Zoe comes first, rushing her round face close to the metal bar that separates the realm of the bed from the rest of the room.

“Mommy!” she cries, her curly hair wavering, her cheeks red with the heat of conflicting emotions. She presses up on her tippy-toes to get her face over the bar, and Holly leans over to meet her there, accepting the energetic kiss she plants near the corner of her mouth. When the face is withdrawn, Holly can see that it is still draped with a cloud of fear as she furtively glances down the bedrail towards the bandage that encircles her mother's wrist.

“It's okay sweet,” Holly says. She lifts the arm above the railing to show her that the arm is still usable, still functioning in spite of the wound. “Just a silly cut. They patched me up and I'm going to be fine.” Jenny has been observing from afar, hanging back by the wall where the poster of the skinned torso maintains its sentinel station. And despite Holly's tepid demonstration, she sees that Zoe's face is still clouded by fear or guilt—probably both. Something more is needed.

“Zoe, this isn't your fault. I was looking for that piece of pottery and when I found it I was clumsy. You know how clumsy I can be …” Holly sends a smile with these words, trying to lift her girls out of the gloom she has created. Of course she should not leave them. That cool dark place that was calling her, with her girls standing near it seems a fragment of a dream that has settled into a night gone by. “Remember the time I sliced my finger open cutting the apple? That was an accident too.” And she has to thank Jenny, who has been growing more distant every day, her budding young teenager.