Fragile by Lisa Unger

adult. We have to save ourselves sometimes, Maggie. You should know that.”
    “A boy like Marshall might not have the tools to save himself.”
    “I’m sorry,” Leila said. Maggie felt as much as she heard Leila hang up the phone.
    After that, Maggie called Marshall’s mother and got her voice mail. She left a message, thinking that she heard doors closing, windows latching all around Marshall. This was what happened. Abused boys became dangerous men. Those around them with a self-preservation instinct—even the people who loved them—started to move away.
    •    •    •
    Maggie was thinking about all of this, staring at but not seeing or hearing the television, when the front door opened and then shut hard. She heard heavy footfalls on the staircase. By the time she got to the foyer, she saw only her son’s feet at the top, turning the corner to his room.
    “I ordered pizza,” she called.
    “Not hungry,” he yelled back and slammed his door.
    A moment later angry waves of thrash metal washed down the stairs—high-speed riffing and aggressive bass beats. Sometimes Maggie felt separated from her son by a wave of noise, harsh, ugly music she didn’t like and couldn’t understand. Even when he was down in the basement, pounding on his drum set, the sound kept her at bay. She remembered the music she used to listen to when she was his age, finding herself—The Smiths, The Cure, Joy Division—characterized by the typical angst and yearning, maybe even a bit of anger. Ricky’s music seemed so full of rage; she wondered what that said about him, if there was a whole universe inside him that she just couldn’t visit.
    Jones had been an angry young man—furious at a father who’d neglected and eventually abandoned him, resentful of a mother who smothered and clung to him in the absence of her husband. Maggie remembered bar fights and road rage, a few on-the-job complaints, one even making it as far as civilian review. But he’d mellowed over time, even though she could still see that younger man when Jones and Ricky went at it. Maybe it was hereditary, anger. Maybe it lay dormant in boyhood, the disease taking hold in late adolescence. Then it either burned out before any damage was done, or took control.
    She walked up the stairs, stood at the door, and put her hand on the wall, feeling the textured sunshine yellow paint with her fingertips. The wall vibrated with the sound coming from inside her son’s room. She offered a tentative knock on his door. No response. She knocked louder.
    “What?” he called from inside.
    “Want to talk about it?”
    “No. I don’t.”
    The volume of the music increased. She could push inside or walkaway. She could force a conversation, which might turn into a fight. Or just let him come to her when he was ready. She hesitated a moment, conflicted. Then she opted for the latter, moving quietly down the stairs, feeling that strange loneliness again. Uselessness, she thought, was the permanent condition of parenthood. In her office, with her patients, she always knew what do to, what to say. Why, then, with her own family did she so often feel at a complete loss?
    For a while, she’d held on to some illusion of control. And then, right about the time Ricky gave up his afternoon nap, she finally understood that for all the schedules and consistency, the rewards and reprimands, ultimately it’s the child who chooses how to behave. It’s the parent’s responsibility to provide the safe environment, the predictable rules, the loving discipline, and the healthy meals, but ultimately the child has to be the one to put the broccoli in his mouth, chew, and swallow. Jones still labored under the delusion that he could bend Ricky to his way of thinking, that with anger, hard words, and harsh punishment he could force their son to do and be what he wanted—in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
    When Maggie reached the foyer, the twin beam of headlights swept across the