The Fragile World

by Paula Treick DeBoard

  “This is the time for you to say I told you so,” I prompted, but Olivia only shook her head. She wasn’t one to gloat, especially in the worst of circumstances. In fact, she looked more than slightly miserable, her face tucked deep into the recesses of her black hoodie.

  Raymond, finished with whatever SUV-wrangling needed to be done, hopped back into the cab and fastened his seat belt. “Next stop Lyman, Wyoming,” he announced, and the truck lurched forward.

  olivia

  Lyman, Wyoming, might be the last place on earth that anyone would want to get stranded. At least that’s what I was thinking—but as we passed the trailers on the outskirts of town and houses and businesses along the main drag, I realized that some people had chosen to be stranded here, and I ordered myself not to be such a snob.

  Dad had assumed a false, nervous cheerfulness, as if he were thrilled by this new experience. It was the same sort of fake cheerfulness I’d received from the school secretary when I started my period in the sixth grade, right in the middle of a math test. She’d been absurdly excited for me, producing an alarming array of feminine products from her bottom desk drawer, as if the arrival of my period were the best thing ever. Anyway, that’s how Dad was talking about Lyman, as if we’d stumbled on one of America’s best-kept secrets: the small town in the middle of nowhere.

  “Look, they’ve even got a bank,” Dad said, pointing out the window at a tiny storefront.

  “Last bank until you hit Green River,” Raymond acknowledged proudly.

  “And I’ve seen at least two restaurants,” Dad said.

  I’d seen them, too. A pizza parlor and a Taco Time, as well as a few other places boasting “Restaurant” and “Saloon” and “Diner”—no other explanation needed. We passed the fire department, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Uinta County Library.

  “Up ahead a bit’s another diner,” Raymond said. “Closed Sundays, though.”

  “Is today Sunday?” I asked, incredulous. Our trip had a timeless quality to it, as if we were driving and time was passing, but everything around us was standing still. Or maybe it was the opposite—we were standing still, but everything else was advancing into the future. Either way, the sync was definitely off.

  But then Dad said, “It’s Wednesday,” and I felt relieved.

  “There’s the hotel,” Raymond gestured, slowing for a turn.

  I blinked. He must have meant motel—The Drift Inn was a single-story structure, with its few rooms laid out in a short row. There were only three cars in the parking lot. It looked cheerful enough, with bright blue trim and white siding, but I had to fight down the urge to grab for my Fear Journal and scribble down Bates Motel knockoff. If I had gone insane and was going to store my dead mother somewhere indefinitely, this might be just the place. Our brightly lit, national chain lodgings in Winnemucca and Salt Lake City seemed like a distant dream.

  “I’m sure that will be fine,” Dad said, rather optimistically, I thought. It was as if he’d lost the use of advanced vocabulary and could no longer summon appropriate adjectives. Not fine, I thought. Not even adequate or sufficient or acceptable.

  We pulled into a gravel lot that faced a building with a faded sign: J & E Automotive. There were a few other cars in the lot, rusted-out and in various stages of disrepair. It was like car purgatory—where cars that had been less than perfect during their lives went when they died.

  Dad hopped out of the truck, and I slid out, and then Raymond Ellis maneuvered our Explorer into one of three empty garage bays. Stop being scared, I ordered myself, even though this was a strategy that never worked. It doesn’t matter that you’re in the literal middle of nowhere without any transportation—you’re going to be fine.

  Dad disappeared into the tiny front office of J & E Automotive, the glass door swinging shut behind him.

  “Fine! I’ll wait outside!” I called, to the listening ears of no one.

  The auto shop was just off Lyman’s main street, but I saw few signs of life. In one direction was a neat row of homes, each with a massive satellite dish in the front yard, or peeking out from the backyard, or mounted to the roof. Lyman took its TV-watching very seriously. It wasn’t even noon, but the whole place was Twilight-Zone quiet. I half expected a tumbleweed to come rolling down the road in a cloud of dust. Instead, a compact car drove by, slowing while its single occupant stared at me, and speeding up again to head out of town.

  “Hey,” someone called, the voice too nearby for comfort.

  I whirled around, trying to remember my self-defense training—the single useful thing that came out of my two botched attempts at P.E. SING—Solar plexus, Instep, Nose, Groin. It was a very useful acronym, although I’d forgotten how to put it into practice. What was a solar plexus again?

  “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.” The guy who was suddenly standing next to me was about my height—which is to say, sort of short for a guy—with shaggy blond hair that covered most of his face. He was wearing an oversize black T-shirt with a picture of a bone and the words “I Found This Humerus.”

  “Where did you come from?” I demanded. I looked toward the office of J & E Automotive, wondering if my dad was watching me. He should be, I thought. He should be watching right now, ready to charge toward me if this guy made so much as a single move. But of course, he wouldn’t be. He would be facing the other direction entirely, talking to someone behind a counter or signing a form in triplicate. It was amazing how oblivious he was to obvious dangers.

  “Over there,” the guy said, pointing. Just beyond the parking lot, I spotted a tiny roadside stand, which was basically a couple of folding tables and a metal chair beneath a faded beach umbrella.

  “Oh,” I said, glancing back to the office of J & E Automotive.

  He tossed his hair away from his face. “You want to see what I’m selling?”

  I looked at him just long enough to notice that his eyes were a greenish-blue, like seawater. “Sorry, I don’t have any money.” That was a lie, though—I had the change from our last convenience-store purchase in my jeans pocket, and it burned there like a shameful secret.

  “You don’t have to buy anything. I just wanted to show you.”

  “Well, thanks,” I said, “but I’m waiting for my dad. He’s probably going to come out any second now.”

  “I doubt that.” He laughed. “That’s my stepdad’s shop. He likes to get all the facts about the cars he works on, kind of like a medical history.”

  I hesitated.

  “It’s like, literally, fifty feet away,” he said.

  “Um...” I felt like telling him that I hate it when people say literally. They never actually mean literally. In this case, it was at least a hundred feet away, so literally not fifty feet away, and out of view of the office entirely.

  “I don’t bite,” he said, sounding hurt.

  I gave a last glance in the direction of my absentee father and surrendered with a shrug. We walked side by side, falling into the same pace, the way you can with someone who is exactly your height.

  “So you’re from California,” he said, and I looked up, alarmed.

  “How do you know that?”

  “It’s on your license plate. Shit. Are you always so jumpy?”

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  “What do you think I’m going to do to you?”

  I had a thousand smart-ass answers running through my mind, the vocabulary of someone who knows that bad things can happen at any moment, at any time, to any person. Thank you, Daniel, for this, the most important lesson of my childhood. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about you,” I said finally.

  “Well, I’m Sam, for starters. Sam Ellis.” He was grinning, and I let myself relax a bit. It seemed unlikely that his grin—part sheepish, part amused—was going to precede any overt violence.<
br />
  “So, what are you selling?” I asked, even though we were standing right in front of the folding tables at this point, and the answer should have been obvious. One table was strewn with a hodgepodge of secondhand objects, your typical garage-sale fare: paperbacks with cracked spines, mismatched glassware, a VHS copy of The Breakfast Club, a sparkly evening clutch that was missing a number of beads. I picked up one of the books—The Jungle by Upton Sinclair—flipped through a few pages, and set it down, feeling very glad that I’d lied about having any money.

  “Oh, this and that. These are just things I’ve found,” he said, proudly emphasizing the word. “Things that still have some use in them, but people have just thrown out. It’s amazing the things people throw out. You wouldn’t believe.”

  I ran a finger over the beaded evening clutch. I could imagine someone throwing it out, actually, since it seemed beyond repair. Worse, it was too brittle—another bead rolled away when it came in contact with my finger. The next table held a dozen or so snow globes, the kind that usually made an appearance in department stores around Christmas, with happy little scenes of European villages or little towns in Vermont under a gentle snowfall. I leaned down for a closer look. “What are these?”

  He beamed. “That’s what I wanted you to see. This is what I do. This is my art.”

  I bent down, getting a closer look. “You made these?”

  “Yep. I’m working on another one right now. Well, the idea for it, I mean. That’s half the trouble, getting the concept right.”

  My nose about level with the table, I could see that each of the snow globes held delicate figures, tiny people and buildings and plant life, each intricately assembled out of minuscule scraps of wood, fabric and leaves. I picked one up, holding it closer to my eye.

  He toggled back and forth from one foot to another, like a nervous toddler. “Can you guess what that one is?”

  “What do you mean, what it is?”

  “Well, what do you see?”

  I looked closely. Tiny blue-clad figures, about a quarter of an inch tall, were facing a large rock castle. A red flag waved from the battlement. “I’m not sure.”

  He looked disappointed. “It’s the storming of the Bastille. You know, the French Revolution?”

  “Oh, sure. Now that you say it...” I tilted the snow globe, letting a few flakes tumble, then tipped it all the way over, so that a light, glittery dusting of snow fell over the French Revolution. It was strangely beautiful. “This is really great,” I told him, honestly. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  He pointed down the row of snow globes, identifying them for me. “These are the historical ones—I have the bombing of Hiroshima, the Valentine’s Day Massacre, the Christmas Day tsunami...”

  I shivered. His designs were beautiful, but awful, too, full of the kinds of things I saw on the History Channel and then wrote down in my Fear Journal, things that were almost too horrible to name, let alone visualize. I squinted at another globe, which had some tiny figures lying on the ground next to empty half-bushels. “What’s this?”

  “Forced famine in Ukraine.”

  “Oh.” I felt a bit sick. “Do you sell a lot of these?”

  “Well, I’ve only sold one so far, although I’ve had a few people interested. The trouble is, sometimes people want to buy one, and all of a sudden I realize that I can’t possibly sell it. I start to worry that, like, it won’t go to a good home, to someone who would really appreciate it. You know?”

  “Sure.” Even considering the limited population that could appreciate a miniature tableau of an unspeakable tragedy, the purchase would be problematic. Where exactly could it be displayed—on a mantel or a nightstand, on top of a media console, next to the flat-screen TV? “Maybe they’re more like museum pieces,” I offered. “I mean, isn’t Guernica one of the most famous paintings in the world? But not many people would want it in their homes.”

  “I see your point. I do see your point.” Sam was nodding seriously, as if my opinion held incredible value. Then he brightened. “But if there was something you wanted, something not so bleak maybe, I could make it for you. I could do that on a special request.”

  I smiled, trying to diffuse his eagerness gently. “I don’t think I’m going to be here very long, though.”

  As if on cue, I heard my dad holler, “Olivia!”

  “That’s my dad.” I gestured back toward the storefront. “I’d better go. Um, thanks for showing me...”

  “That’s your name? Olivia?”

  “Yeah.”

  He smiled, hair flopping again in front of his eyes. “Olivia. I like that.”

  I turned away, but I could feel him watching me. It was an uncomfortable feeling, but not necessarily uncomfortable in a bad way.

  “And I’m Sam,” he called after me. “In case you forgot. I’m Sam Ellis.”

  curtis

  “So?” Olivia asked, coming toward me.

  I nodded at the boy beneath the beach umbrella who was openly staring at us. “I see you made a friend.”

  “I’m fine, by the way,” Olivia snapped, ignoring my comment. “No one managed to snatch me off the side of the road while you were gone.”

  I looked down the road, which showed few signs of life. “Liv, of course you’re fine.”

  “What’s going on with the car?”

  I repeated what Jerrod Ellis, brother of Raymond and sole proprietor of J & E Automotive, had told me, with all the gravity of a surgeon notifying the family. “It’s the transmission.”

  Olivia said, “That’s bad, right? The transmission?”

  I nodded.

  “I mean, expensive,” she clarified.

  “It’s not your job to worry about that.”

  “I worry about everything, remember?”

  “Not this,” I told her. “This one is solely my territory.”

  A new transmission, Jerrod Ellis had informed me, wiping his hands against his work pants, would cost a thousand at the least. A rebuilt transmission was cheaper, but would take longer—it would be a day before he could get the parts from Rawlins. It was our only real option, save for abandoning the trip entirely and settling down in Lyman—which may have been the fate of the drivers of the rusted-out cars at the front of the property. When I leaned against the counter to sign the triplicate form, the handle of the Colt had dug into my paunch. If it wasn’t for Olivia, I would have been on the next bus out of Lyman, Oberlin in my sights.

  “So.” Olivia dug in the dirt with the toe of her combat boot. “Now what?”

  “Now we settle in. We’re going to be here for a couple days, at least.”

  “Days?” Olivia echoed doubtfully, casting a glance down the street. I could see what she was thinking—a couple of days here?

  “It’s okay. We’re not in any hurry.” Saying this, I almost convinced myself. What were a few more days, after I’d been waiting four years? Robert Saenz had a few more days of life, liberty, and the pursuit of whatever happiness he could find at the bottom of a pill bottle.

  “I guess.” She looked down at the small mountain of dirt she had displaced. It was kind of her not to point out that our options were extremely limited.

  While Olivia unloaded her belongings from the trunk, I sat in the driver’s seat, pretending to gather a few bits of trash. I ran a hand beneath the seat to where I’d stashed the six bullets, and one came loose, dropping into the palm of my hand. I froze.

  “We’ll need the laundry bag, right?” Olivia called.

  “Right.”

  There was no time to retape the cartridge, so I slid it into the pocket of my jeans, where it made a small clink against my loose change. I looked up to see Olivia balancing her pillow on top of her suitcase. The boy she had been talking to earlier was still staring at us from hi
s seat behind a rickety folding table. I nodded to him.

  “You need a ride?” he called. “I could take you to the motel. That’s my truck.”

  Olivia looked at me.

  “We’d appreciate it,” I called, and he ambled over to help us with our bags.

  “I’m Sam Ellis,” he said, shaking my hand. “That’s my dad you were talking to, Jerrod. Well, stepdad.” Even if there wasn’t a biological connection, Sam had the same confident handshake. He loaded our bags into the back of his pickup in two fluid movements. Since he barely came up to my shoulder, I realized I’d probably mistaken him for being younger than he actually was. Up close, he looked more like twenty than Olivia’s age.

  “You’re just going to leave everything out there?” Olivia asked, indicating the card tables.

  Sam shrugged. “Not a lot of theft around here. And not too many suspects, either.”

  Olivia pressed up against me as she had in the tow truck, her knees angled to avoid the gearshift and, I suspected, Sam Ellis. She braced herself against me as we made the few turns and I flinched, hoping she hadn’t noticed the hard body of the Colt.

  What the hell was I doing, riding around with my daughter, a young man and a gun in the middle of nowhere? With every moment that passed, what I had long suspected was becoming incontrovertibly true: there were two kinds of people in the world, and I was the kind that didn’t like guns. I was no Zach Gaffaney, comfortably at home amid dozens of loaded weapons. With Olivia’s body bumping up against mine, the gun felt like a huge mistake. Only a giant red Bozo wig or one of those flowing black capes worn by some of Olivia’s friends, the Visigoths, would have made me feel more conspicuous right then. Yes, I’d determined that in order to do what I was going to do, I needed a gun—but actually having one made me feel less, not more, safe. I might as well have had sticks of dynamite strapped to my chest.

  “So, you’re going to be in town for a few days, then?” Sam asked, startling us out of our silence. I’d been staring out the window, noticing again the restaurants I’d spotted earlier, a small convenience store, window displays in need of some updating. The question, I knew, wasn’t directed toward me.