The Fragile World

by Paula Treick DeBoard

  Mom was holding a throw pillow and was either kneading or throttling it in her hands. “It’s not, it’s not, it’s not,” she kept saying. When I was younger, I used to thank God for the food I was about to eat and say Now I lay me down to sleep at night, but this might have been the closest thing to a prayer I’d ever heard from my mom. She just wasn’t the sort of person who prayed, at least not on a regular or official basis. I figured she didn’t want to bother God with it unless the situation was really hopeless.

  “Curtis,” Mom pleaded, and he swallowed hard, trying to say something. But he didn’t seem to be able to get the words out, so instead he nodded. Just once.

  Mom moaned. I slipped onto the bed next to her and buried my face in her hair. She smelled of wood shavings and varnish, a smell that was as reassuring to me as the smell of flour and sugar probably was to other kids.

  Then Dad asked, his voice thin and drifting, like a helium balloon that had slipped away, “What do we do now? I mean, what do people do?” He was speaking just as much to the person on the other end of the receiver as to us, or, it seemed, to the universe as a whole.

  Mom was squeezing me as though she was holding on to me for dear life. Mine or hers, I couldn’t have said.

  Then Dad said, “Okay, I will,” and hung up the phone.

  The three of us sat very still for a long moment. Whatever was said next, I knew, would change everything. It was the last semi-normal moment of my life, and then we would all live miserably ever after.

  Mom asked, “What happened to Daniel?” Her eyes gleamed wetly in the glow of Dad’s bedside lamp.

  I wished she hadn’t asked that, because once my brother’s name was out there, it was no longer possible that it could be someone else. If she had mentioned another name, I was sure, then maybe this late-night call could be about some other person, someone else’s brother.

  But of all the people in the world—billions of them, more people than any one single person could ever meet even if that was a person’s life goal; of all the people in big cities and small towns, in countries where it was too hot or too cold year-round; of all the men, women and children, even those who were so old that the Guinness Book of World Records had them on some kind of short-list, and even the tiniest of infants in neonatal units, hooked up to tubes and complicated computer systems—out of all these people, it was my brother, Daniel, who was dead.

  curtis

  After the phone call, Kathleen stayed in bed with Olivia. I could hear them there, crying, comforting each other. I should have been there with them—I know that now, I knew that then. But I couldn’t. I needed, in the fiercest way, to be alone. Not just in our house, but in the world. I needed the whole world to just stop—moving, thinking, talking.

  I paced between the living room and the kitchen, picking things up and putting them down, staring at them stupidly as though they were foreign objects, things that didn’t belong in my home. A picture of our family—from a time that already seemed distant, back when there had been four of us, all alive and healthy—in a silver frame that said Family Forever in a fancy script. A booklet of fabric swatches from one of Kathleen’s projects. The swatches were in shades of blue, and each was labeled with a different name: Ocean, Marina, Infinity, Reflection, Tidal Pool. I thumbed through them, thinking how pointless and trivial it was that someone had given names to these different shades of blue, that something so irrelevant could possibly matter in a world where my son was dead. Everything was pointless, I thought. Everything was nonsensical and ludicrous.

  Suddenly my legs felt insubstantial, not quite up to the task of supporting my body. I reached for the door frame for balance, nearly tripping over Heidi, our two-ton basset. She looked up at me, confused, expectant.

  “Not yet,” I told her. “It’s not time.” The sky beyond our front porch light was a deep, middle-of-the-night black.

  She thumped her thick tail and cocked her head, as if she were trying to understand.

  “Go back to sleep,” I ordered, nudging her with my shoe.

  When she didn’t budge, I snapped, “Fine, then,” and opened the front door, ushering Heidi into the night. She stepped onto the porch and turned, watching me. “This is what you wanted,” I told her, and closed the door too hard.

  Kathleen came in a moment later, red-eyed, hair sleep-tousled. Her face was shiny from tears and snot that had been wiped haphazardly from her nose. “Was that the door? Did you go outside?”

  I didn’t answer.

  She stepped past me and opened the door. Heidi was waiting on the porch, her jowls hanging. Kathleen turned to me, her face crumpled with grief and something else—doubt. In me.

  “What’s going on, Curtis? Do you want her to wander off or something?”

  “I wasn’t thinking,” I said—a lie. I was thinking that Daniel was dead, and nothing in the world mattered. Let the dog go. Forget the color swatches. Get rid of the smiling family portrait that sat on the edge of a painted side table, mocking me. And the piano. Jesus, the piano. It had taken a Herculean effort to get the piano up our porch steps, only to learn that our front doorway wasn’t wide enough to accommodate it. It had gone back down the steps, around the side of the house, up another set of stairs and through the French doors. So much careful effort. Now I thought: Burn it. Get it out of my sight.

  Safely inside now, Heidi butted her head against Kathleen’s legs affectionately. Kathleen reached out a hand to me and said, “We have to keep our heads, Curtis. We have to be strong.”

  I stared at her, feeling dizzy and unbalanced. It was puzzling that she was here, like seeing a familiar face in the middle of a nightmare. It wouldn’t have been hard to take her hand, to fall into her embrace, to wrap my arms around her waist while she wrapped hers around my neck. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t move forward, couldn’t take the one step and then another that it would require of me.

  Behind us I heard sniffling and turned around. Olivia stood in the doorway to the living room, impossibly tiny, hugging a blanket around her body.

  “I’m supposed to call him back,” I said. “The sergeant. After I talked to you, he said I should....” And I stepped past them, leaving them there in the living room like two lost little planets, out of orbit, out of sync.

  My fingers, thick and unfamiliar, fumbled with the phone. In those awful moments while I waited for the call to be answered, the dial tone buzzing in my ears, I allowed myself to hope that maybe, somehow, it was all a mistake.

  But the voice on the other end was the same I’d heard not fifteen minutes earlier. “Sergeant Springer,” he said.

  I cleared my throat. “Curtis Kaufman.”

  He laid bare the facts, based on an investigation that was several hours old at this point—hours during which I’d watched David Letterman with Kathleen, and then we’d made love with the particular quiet that comes from having a twelve-year-old asleep down the hall. Impossible. Meanwhile Daniel had been motionless on the pavement. Someone from the pizza parlor had come outside, hearing the crash, and glimpsed the truck as it drove away. It hadn’t been hard to identify—a commercial truck, a small town. The suspect had been asleep already by the time he was apprehended.

  “Asleep?” I demanded. “Was he drunk?”

  He’d passed a breathalyzer; a blood draw had been taken later at the station. There were no other details at this time, Sergeant Springer said, but he would be in touch. He gave me his direct line, his personal assurance that—

  “Wait.” I couldn’t let him hang up. I reached for a yellow legal pad, turned to a fresh page. There was something I needed to know. “Tell me his name. I want to know his name.”

  The sergeant hesitated. “At this stage in the investigation...”

  “His name,” I repeated. The voice that came out of me was surprisingly low, almost a growl. It didn’t sound anything li
ke me. I was the soft-spoken voice in the back of the room at faculty meetings; I wasn’t a teacher who yelled or threatened. I was the calmer parent on the rare occasions when Daniel or Olivia needed discipline. But this new voice had authority; it was intimidating. It reminded me, in an alarming way, of my father.

  The sergeant gave a small sigh, a gesture of hopelessness or maybe regret. “Robert Saenz. That’s his name.”

  “Spell that for me,” I ordered. In the middle of a clean page I wrote ROBERT SAENZ, and then I drew a box around it, digging the pen deeper and deeper, a trench of dark lines and grooves, until the ink bled through the page.

  olivia

  I wanted to know everything.

  Dad had spent most of the night in his office making phone calls. When he finally joined Mom and me in the living room, he was carrying a yellow legal pad full of notes that he refused to show me. Dad had a scientific mind-set, and I wondered if he had been trying to add things up, to find the flaw in the logic, so that somehow Daniel wouldn’t be dead.

  “I’m practically a teenager,” I told him from the window where I had been looking out at our street. The neighbors were still sleeping; none of them knew yet. It was almost morning by then, although not according to my standards. Our cuckoo clock had clucked four-thirty, and the sky outside was beginning a slow shift from black to purple. I’d been twelve for less than a month, but that was too old to be shooed away from adult conversations. “Dad,” I said, so sharply that he looked directly at me, then down again at his legal pad. “I’m not a child.”

  He slumped onto the couch like a deadweight, hair still flattened on one side from his pillow. Mom, perched on a chair across from him, was out of tears for the moment. She asked, “What did you find out?”

  Dad looked at me for a long beat, and I stared him down.

  “All right,” he said softly. While he talked, he kept his gaze on the carpet, as if it were suddenly the most interesting carpet he’d ever seen. And even though I’d wanted to hear it all, I found that the only way I could handle the details was to leave the window and sit on Mom’s lap with her arms wrapped around my waist—exactly like a child.

  As Dad spoke, I re-created the scene in my own mind. I was good at that—visualizing scenarios. Daniel had met friends for pizza after a late-night practice session. It was after one when he left the restaurant, with snow starting to fall. He would have been bundled up in the coat Mom bought him online after a fruitless search of California stores for appropriate Ohio winter wear. He would have been wearing a knitted hat, pulled low over his ears. Maybe with his ears covered and his head down, he didn’t hear the truck behind him, barreling down a side street and swerving, taking the corner too fast. Maybe he was replaying music in his head—an aria, a sonata. The truck hit a metal speed limit sign, uprooting it from its concrete base and sending it through the air, as unexpected and deadly as a meteor dropping from the sky. The sign came crashing down on an oblivious Daniel, and just like that, my brother had died. Dad enunciated carefully: a blunt force injury to the head.

  “An accident,” Mom insisted, rubbing her knuckles back and forth, a little roughly, over the ridge of my vertebrae. “Just a freak thing.”

  Dad looked at her for a long moment but said nothing.

  A freak thing. I turned the phrase over in my mind, but couldn’t find comfort there. Was it any better that a random, horrible thing had killed my brother, rather than something orderly and prearranged?

  “What about the driver?” I asked, my mind reeling, imagining that panic behind the wheel, the out-of-control moment that couldn’t be taken back.

  Dad swallowed, loosening the words caught in his throat. “He left the scene, but he’s in police custody.”

  “You mean...what? Like a hit-and-run?”

  “Someone from the restaurant heard the crash and saw him driving off. It’s a small town, you know. Not that difficult to track him down.”

  “He just left Daniel there?” I shuddered, closing my eyes as though that would block out the image that was forming in my mind: my brother, my only brother, my sweet and funny and talented brother, lying bloody and alone in the street, and the man who was responsible for it driving off as if nothing had happened. A thought occurred to me. “Was he drunk? The driver, I mean.”

  Dad said, “I don’t know.” I thought his voice sounded strange, but I couldn’t have said how. Everything was strange right then. We were sitting in the living room, where we only sat when we had company, in the middle of the night, talking about how Daniel had died. There was no normal anymore.

  “It was an accident,” Mom repeated, her voice dissolving into tears.

  Dad flipped a page on his legal pad and then looked at his hand distractedly, as if he didn’t know where it had come from, or how it connected to the rest of his body. Then he stood and left the room. A moment later we heard his office door close.

  Mom was sobbing now, her head pressed against my back. She tightened her arms around my waist and held on. I closed my eyes. An accident. A freak thing. A blunt force injury to the head. This time it had been Daniel in that wrong place at that wrong time, but it could have been anyone: my father, my mother, any one of the seven billion people in the world or even me.

  curtis

  The only way I could handle Daniel’s death was to work my way through the facts, to build a massive to-do list and check off the items one by one. And so, I became the detail man.

  By the time it was five o’clock in Sacramento and eight o’clock in Ohio, I was on the phone to the Oberlin switchboard, then passed upward in the chain until I was talking to a director of housing, a dean of student enrollment. I talked to a funeral home in Ohio, a funeral home in Sacramento. I called my school secretary at home, before she’d left for work. I called Olivia’s school, reporting her absence. I looked online for flights from Sacramento to Cleveland. I filled pages on the yellow legal pad with my notes. Money—there was an astounding amount involved—dates, times, names, phone numbers, confirmation numbers.

  I was vaguely aware of Kathleen on her cell phone making the personal calls—to her brother and sister-in-law in Omaha, to our mutual friends, to the parents of Daniel’s friends and bandmates from one group or another. I was glad to have the impersonal tasks; I couldn’t bear to be the one to give this news.

  At one point, I heard Kathleen running a bath. Beneath the sound of the water rushing in the old claw-foot tub, there was another sound—low, keening—that I realized was Olivia, crying.

  I paced back and forth, four steps each way, the length of my office, a glorified closet beneath the stairs that I’d claimed as my own when we bought the house. I wished I could pace right out of my body, leaving it behind. Was this what madness felt like? I wanted to be there, right at that moment, with Daniel’s body. I wanted it to be last week, or last summer when we were all together, or two years from now when this hurt wasn’t new. I wanted it to be the moment before the truck took the corner too fast, hitting the speed limit sign. I wanted to grab Daniel’s arm and yank him back to safety.

  Kathleen knocked once and opened the door, and we stared at each other.

  “We have to figure out what to do...” I began, but she stopped me by stepping forward, falling into my arms before I was aware that I had reached out to hold her. I tried again. “About the arrangements...”

  “Shh, shh. Just hold me. We can talk about that in a moment.”

  I kissed the top of her head, my lips cool and dry, as if they’d been sculpted out of marble. From nowhere came the line from a poem in a humanities class I’d taken with Kathleen, so many years ago. Lips that would kiss form prayers to broken stone. Why had it stayed with me, dormant all these years, only to come back now?

  After a few minutes, I let my arms go slack, slithered out of her embrace. “When you’re ready to think about it, I’ve go
t some information about plane tickets.”

  She stared at me. “Plane tickets?”

  “It makes more sense to take a mid-morning flight, since we’ll have to connect somewhere along the way, probably in Chicago.”

  “Tickets?” she repeated.

  “To get Daniel,” I said. “To bring home his...” I hated Kathleen for a sharp moment, for not filling in the blank, for making me say it. “His remains.”

  “You were thinking we would all go?”

  “Of course.”

  Kathleen shook her head. “I don’t think... I mean, Olivia can’t possibly go.” She said this with such certainty, as if it were the sort of common sense thing every parent should know.

  “I suppose she could stay with one of her friends. With Kendra, maybe,” I suggested.

  Kathleen’s stare had turned incredulous. “Leave her alone, you mean? When her brother has just died?”

  I rubbed my face, letting this sink in. Maybe because of grief and general sleeplessness, my skin had started to feel like a rubber mask, stiff hairs sprouting haphazardly in anticipation of a morning shave. Someone had to go to Oberlin, to attend to the dozens of things that seemed impossible, at that moment, to attend to. It was the worst possible trip in the world, and one I couldn’t imagine taking alone. But that, I realized, was exactly what was going to happen. “You won’t come with me, then?”

  “Curtis, I can’t.”

  It was just a small conversation, just a few words, but a fault line had opened up between us. I was on the side with Daniel, charged with protecting him, with bringing him home. I went back to my laptop to book a single flight, and Kathleen left the room, shutting the door behind her.

  olivia