Fragile (25 page)

When he was very young, Rick used to slip into bed with his father. His mother often slept elsewhere—on the couch or in the guest room across the hall from his room. He was too young to wonder why then. But when he heard her move softly down the stairs or quietly close the
door, he’d wait a bit, then pad down the hall and slide in beside his dad. His father’s breathing would be even and deep. Rick would try to match his breath to his father’s, but he could never quite do it.

“We found blood, Rick.”

“Blood?” Rick felt his hands start to tingle.

“Melody claims that she and Graham had a fight last night and that she hit him with a baseball bat in self-defense. She claims he left, saying he wouldn’t come back. Afterward, Charlene and she fought about that cell phone. Turns out Graham got her that phone. Melody says she found the bill; that’s why she and Graham fought.”

“I thought Mrs. Murray said last night that she didn’t know about the phone.”

“She lied.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Anyway, she claimed that she took the phone from Charlene. That’s why they fought. That’s why Charlene left. Melody claims she smashed it, threw it in the trash that was picked up this morning.”

“That’s why no one’s been able to reach Charlene,” said Rick.

His father nodded. “There’s something else.”

“What?”

“There’s a witness who saw Charlene—or someone matching her description—climb into what’s described as a big green muscle car last night and drive off.”

“Where?”

“Persimmon and Hydrangea, around eleven thirty.”

“It wasn’t me.”

His father kept hard eyes on him. “Ricky,” he said, finally. “I can’t help you unless you tell me the truth.”

“Dad. I was here, sleeping. You know that.”

His father shrugged. “I went to bed at nine; I was beat. I didn’t wake up until Melody came knocking.”

The strangeness in his father’s expression had deepened. He looked haunted and afraid. The look was contagious. Rick started to feel edgy,
guilty, as though his father was seeing something within him that he didn’t know was there.

“The car wakes you up when I come and go.”

“Not always.”

The grandfather clock marked the quarter hour, and Rick heard the refrigerator start to run, making ice cubes. He stared at the facets of the stained-glass lamp that hung over the dining room table. When he was a boy, he’d thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world, the way the colors glowed in the light. Lately, it just looked old and tacky.

“Dad. What are you asking me?”

“I need you to tell me what happened last night.”

“I did tell you. There’s nothing more to say.”

They both fell silent as the front door opened and closed. Rick felt nearly weak with relief to hear his mother’s voice.

“What’s going on?” she said. She came into the dining room, shed her coat, and draped it over a chair.

Jones told Maggie everything he’d told Rick. As his dad spoke, his mother sat in the chair beside him. Rick saw it, triumphantly, as a taking of sides. Normally, Jones would sit at the head of table with Maggie in the chair to his right and Rick in the chair to his left. Head of the table, man of the house, Rick would always think mockingly. But now his father sat across from them. His mom put her hand on Rick’s leg.

“There are a lot of cars like that around, Jones,” she said. “The boys around here like those old GTOs and Mustangs. I saw an old Chevy the other day. It’s a trend.”

“It’s quite a coincidence, though, don’t you think?”

There was that tone, that smug, condescending tone that Rick hated more than anything. The one that said:
I’m smarter than you. I’m better than you. I know more than you’ll ever know
.

His mom didn’t say anything for a moment, just looked down at the table. Then, “If you want to ask him something, why don’t you just ask him?”

His dad said, “Did you pick Charlene up on Persimmon last night?”

“No. I didn’t. I was here sleeping. I fell asleep trying to call her after
she stood me up. I have told you this a hundred times. Why don’t you believe me?”

But his father
didn’t
believe him. Rick could see it in the set of his mouth, in the narrowing of his eyes.

“I’m telling you the truth,” he said. He got up from the table, pushed the chair back with more force than he intended. It scraped loudly on the floor. The crystal glasses in the china cabinet sang.

“Ricky,” said his mother, grabbing hold of his hand.

“Right now, I can help you, Rick,” his father said. He leaned forward across the table. There was an urgency in his voice that Rick didn’t understand. And for a moment, he thought he saw his father’s eyes fill. “If this thing goes any further, there’s nothing I can do.”

What did he mean by that? What did he think? Did he think Rick had done something to Charlene? He didn’t trust his voice to ask the questions, and a part of him didn’t want the answers. Instead, with his parents’ rising voices crashing behind him like a wave, he got up and left them.

By the time they reached the front door, he was in his car, backing out of the drive. As his father stood on the step, his mother looking small behind him, Rick drove off, not thinking about where he was headed or what he was going to do, just glad to be away from the person he saw reflected in his father’s eyes.

Maggie watched her son disappear down the road, guilt, fear, and anger a chemical brew in her stomach.

“You
don’t
think he’s capable of hurting Charlene,” she said when Jones came back inside and closed the door. He moved past her without saying anything and climbed the stairs. She followed him to Ricky’s room, where he flipped on the light, stood scanning the area.

“Answer me, Jones.” She felt the old, familiar anger. He forced her to side with Ricky. He always had. They’d battled about everything from nap time to curfew, from television viewing to phone privileges. Jones always felt like he had to take a hard line. And she had no choice but to soften the edges. Who else was here to defend Ricky against his own father?
Sometimes she really hated Jones for it, for putting her in this impossible place.

“Maggie,” he said, turning to her. “Anyone is capable of anything, given the right circumstances, the right motivations.”

She felt a rush of disbelief, an unsettling chill at his words. “You don’t mean that.”

“Don’t I?” he said. He sat down at Ricky’s desk and started going through his drawers. “Would you kill to protect Ricky? Of course you would.”

“That’s different.”

“Why?”

“Don’t be obtuse, Jones. To defend my son, yes, of course I would. What does that have to do with anything?”

“We’re talking about motivation. How do we really know what motivates people to do what they do? Why do people rape and kill? Why do people abduct young girls? Maybe they think their motivations are good and pure, like a mother defending her child.”

She tried to summon her patience. Something about the conversation reminded her of the helplessness she’d felt on the phone with Marshall earlier.

“The actions of a parent to defend her child are reactions to threats. Not a lack of impulse control or an appetite to be sated. Not the selfish actions of a sociopath or a psychopath. Are you saying that you think our son raped and killed Charlene? That he abducted her?” She could hear her own voice going shrill with anger and panic.

“The girl is
missing
. She’s gone. A witness says he saw her get into a green muscle car. But our son, who drives a car like that, claims to have no idea where Charlene is. I don’t know what to think. I really don’t.”

Maggie held his eyes, though she wanted to look away, wanted to
run
away from him and his craziness. She saw something working on his face, something she didn’t understand. She remembered the expression she’d seen at Britney’s house.

“What are we really talking about here, Jones?
What
is going on?”

He seemed to deflate in the chair. Then he put his head in his hands.

“When I got the call from Chuck about the witness who saw the car,” he said through his fingers, “I just felt sick.”

“What kind of car?” She had an awful thought, then.
What if Ricky was lying?
She knew he couldn’t hurt Charlene or anyone. But what if he did take her someplace? Helped her to run away?

“The guy didn’t know,” said Jones. “He claimed not to know much about cars.”

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. So we
can’t
assume that it’s Ricky. We can’t assume that, at best, he’s lying about knowing where she is or, at worst, he’s done something horrible. That’s way too big a leap. You know him, Jones. He’s our boy. Our
baby.”

She came to kneel beside him. She controlled the part of her that wanted to throttle him, to get in her car and go after Ricky.
You’re too hard, too unyielding
, she wanted to yell.
You drive him away. He was waiting for me to come home so that we could talk. What happens now is on your conscience
. But in the war between her husband and her son, she’d always tried not to take sides, to comfort and mediate instead. She tried, even though she almost always failed.

“I
don’t
know him,” Jones said, looking up from his hands but not at her, at something past her. “I look at him with that hair, that nose ring, that tattoo. I don’t know him.”

“Then don’t look at those things. Just look at his face.”

“I can’t even talk to him. Every time I try, we just end up fighting.”

She shook her head. “You might try to come in softer, with less anger and more love.”

“I
do
love him,” he said, finally meeting her eyes. “You know that.
He
knows that. Earlier you said that I had no instinct to protect my son. Maggie, nothing could be further from the truth.”

“Then believe him.”

Jones released a long breath, took her hands. “But what if he really has done something awful? Let’s just say he has. I can protect him now, if he’s honest with me.”

“How do you think you can protect him?”

He stood up, and she sank back to her heels as he walked over to
Ricky’s closet and opened the door, peered at the mass of clothes and shoes, boxes of books, games, towers of CDs.

“What are you doing?”

“I know how things happen,” he said. “I know how a moment can spiral out of control. How the consequences of one careless action can cost you everything.”

From where she sat on the floor, she watched Jones going through boxes on the floor of Ricky’s closet. Somewhere along the line they had stopped talking about Ricky and had started talking about Jones; she could see that, but she didn’t understand it all.

“What are we talking about, Jones? What’s going on?”

He gave a quick, dismissive shake of his head. “If there’s something here that incriminates Ricky, I need to find it now. You get that, right?” He turned around and looked at her again. “Because if someone else finds it, there’s nothing I can do.”

“And if you find something, then what? You’re planning on destroying evidence, covering up a crime?”

He didn’t answer her, moved over to the bed and lifted the mattress, peering underneath. He seemed disorganized, almost frantic.

“What
are you looking for?” Her voice sounded desperate and pleading. Once upon a time this room had been a nursery, with clouds painted on baby blue walls, stars on the ceiling, plush animals on clean white shelves. She’d sit in the room and nurse her son and think that when it came to her baby and the room she’d made for him, she’d done everything right. She hadn’t felt that way in a long, long time.

“I’m looking for the truth about our son, Maggie. You’d do well to help while you still can.”

“You’re not making any sense. I get it about the car. I understand why that worried you. But what does anything you learned at the Murray residence have to do with Ricky? What has you so frantic?”

He started pacing the room, finally sat down at the computer and booted it up.

“I don’t know,” he said to the screen. She could see his face reflected there. “I don’t know how it all adds up.”

“So why do you think he had something to do with all of this?”

“Call it an instinct,” he said, getting up again, seeming to forget the computer and continuing his search of the closet.

Like the instinct you had that he was using drugs when you found a pack of cigarettes in his backpack?
Maggie had been just barely able to prevent Jones from having Ricky secretly drug-tested by their family doctor.
Like the instinct you have that he’s a loser who will amount to nothing, in spite of good grades and excellent test scores?
She admired her husband and would be the first to admit that his instincts were, like her mother’s, rarely mistaken.

But when it came to his own son, he was usually dead wrong. He seemed eager to believe the worst, was blind to all the good. What did it say about him? In her work, she often found that people who couldn’t connect with their children had trouble connecting with themselves, had a core of self-loathing. Was this true of her husband? she wondered as he continued ransacking Ricky’s room and she watched, helpless, clueless as to what to do. And if it was true, why had it taken her so long to confront it?

19

W
anda was dozing on the couch, and Charlie’s eyes were starting to ache in the glow of her computer screen. He’d been scrolling through a classic car site for hours, and all the cars were beginning to look the same. He’d never been a guy who knew about cars, though he had always wanted to be. Wanda, it turned out,
was
one of those guys. And it didn’t seem to bother her much that he didn’t know a fin from a fender. He’d seen a few barely suppressed smiles, but then her attention had started to wander, and eventually she’d drifted over to the couch, commenting from there until she fell asleep.

At this point he was pretty sure that the car he’d seen was a Chevelle. Or maybe it was a Pontiac GTO. Or maybe it was a Mustang. The truth was, it had been dark, he’d been a little sleepy, a little high on Wanda.