The Fragile World

by Paula Treick DeBoard

  I glanced around and saw that we were alone. A few employees were rushing around, filling red-and-white bags for the drive-thru. My heart felt full. “Do you think anyone would mind if I’m slightly over the height regulation?”

  “Seriously? You do realize that daily sanitization is pure fiction?”

  I began unlacing my boots. “This is a new Olivia,” I told him. “And the new Olivia can handle a few million germs.” Still, I hesitated outside the ball bin, pushing away my fears about how often—probably never—each individual ball had been sanitized and how often—probably frequently—the balls ended up in someone’s mouth. “Wish me luck,” I told Dad bravely, and then I climbed the steps, crouched and executed a perfect swan dive off my knees.

  “Hey,” Dad said when I rose triumphantly, arms outstretched. “You’re spilling everywhere.”

  “Come on in,” I called to him. “The water’s warm.”

  Dad grinned. “I forgot my bathing cap.”

  I tossed a ball at his head. “Then, how ever will we practice our synchronized swimming?”

  Dad fiddled around with his phone and held it up to eye level.

  “What’s this? Photographic evidence of my immaturity?”

  “Something like that,” Dad said, tapping the screen to take one photo, then another. A thousand miles of scenery, including the salt flats and the Rocky Mountains, and all we would have to show for our trip were a few shots of me in a McDonald’s play area.

  I could feel someone watching us from inside the main restaurant area—a McDonald’s manager, red-and-white striped shirt, black bolero tie, black polyester pants. No doubt I was violating some kind of cardinal law for play areas. Feeling bold, I tossed a handful of plastic balls into the air and let them hit my stomach with soft thumping sounds.

  “Um, okay, Liv, get up now.” Dad was backing away, tucking his phone into his back pocket.

  I tossed another ball at him. He caught it and returned it, firmly, to the bin.

  “That’s enough. Come on, please.” He was almost begging.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I just got an idea of what this must look like.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Dad nodded over his shoulder in the direction of the store employees. A small clump of them had gathered behind the counter and were staring in our direction. “Old man, young girl, camera...”

  I laughed. “Okay, that’s kind of funny.”

  “No,” Dad said, “not at all funny. Come on, get out of there now. We’ve got to get back on the road....”

  I laughed again. Dad looked so nervous, and he had switched into this overprotective father mode, which I barely recognized. He had hardly ever needed to protect me, since I was so intent on protecting myself. I stood up in the middle of the bin, displacing more balls. They tipped over the plastic pen, hitting the tile in rapid succession with the sharp explosion of kernels popping in a microwave. “Hey!” I called, waving my hands over my head, until I had the attention of every single employee in the store.

  “Liv, no—” Dad said, reaching for me.

  It was a strange feeling, exhilarating, a full-on adrenaline rush. Everyone was staring—but they were strangers, people I would probably never see again. I would be a little footnote to their dinner conversations tonight: “And then this weird girl wouldn’t get out of the ball bin....” Maybe the girl-in-the-ball-bin incident would prompt a series of training exercises for McDonald’s employees: How to Handle Unruly Customers.

  I pulled away from Dad’s reach, shrieking with laughter. I wish Sam could be here, I thought, and Mom and Daniel, too. “Hey! Hello!” I called again. “Do you see this man? He’s my father, you creeps. So, get your minds out of the gutter for a change. And you know what? He’s a damn good father, too!”

  I was still laughing when we were back in the car. Dad had hustled me out in my socks, and it took me a while to wriggle my feet back into my combat boots while I was doubled over, wheezing. “Did you see—the looks—on their faces?” I gasped.

  Dad was chuckling, too, but it was the silent, hard kind of laughter where tears come out, instead of sound. Even a few minutes later, when my boots were on and my breathing had settled and I was sitting quietly myself, in full awe of what I’d just done, I saw that Dad was still wiping tears out of his eyes.

  But the weird thing was, he didn’t seem to be laughing at all.

  curtis

  Olivia called Kathleen to report on our progress while I listened like a guilty eavesdropper, a third wheel to their conversation. I was already on my way out, already seeing Olivia and Kathleen as their own unit, a mother-daughter twosome that didn’t include me and couldn’t, shouldn’t.

  They will be fine, I promised myself. Olivia will be fine. It was easy to believe that, listening to her narration of our McDonald’s adventure, her voice happy and light. A week ago, Olivia had been a girl who ate lunch alone and skipped P.E., who recorded her fears in her tiny, cribbed handwriting. Now she had driven a car, kissed a boy and had a public display of—whatever that had been—in a roomful of strangers. Now I was the one who was afraid.

  “Mom wants us to call when we get closer,” she said, dropping the phone into her lap.

  “Okay.”

  “I think you should be the one to call her, though.”

  I glanced at her and back at the road. “Why? Is something wrong?”

  “Not with me. With you two. You’re going to be seeing her tonight. We’re all going to be staying in the same house together. It would be nice if you could figure out a way to actually talk without using me as a middleman.”

  “We have talked,” I pointed out, although of course, we hadn’t, really. Our conversations had been rare, delivered in a just-the-facts-ma’am way, business transactions rather than heart-to-hearts. “And we have seen each other. We were all together last summer, remember?”

  Olivia shot me a look. “For two weeks, and the whole time you kept finding excuses to not be in the same room. Anyway, I’m just letting you know I’m not going to do it anymore. And you should know, I’ve been a pretty shitty middleman.”

  “Olivia,” I said seriously, “you’re shitty at nothing.”

  “Ha! Only a thousand things.”

  “But you’re right. We will talk, your mom and me, and we won’t use you as a middleman.”

  “You mean it?”

  “What part?” I asked. She gave me a light punch on the shoulder. “Yes, I mean it.” Kathleen and I would talk; we had to. There were things to be settled.

  Olivia seemed satisfied with my answer. She looked out the window again, tapping her finger against the glass, drawing little heart shapes in the film of dust that coated the interior. “Dad,” she said finally, earnestly, as if she’d been thinking about it for a long time, “tell me when you and Mom fell in love.”

  I groaned. “Liv, do we have to?”

  “Yes,” she said. “We absolutely have to.”

  “In college. You’ve heard everything already. Freshman year at Northwestern. We were in the same philosophy class together, blah blah blah.”

  “What do you mean, blah blah blah? It’s not obvious that one thing follows from the other. ‘We were in the same philosophy class, so we fell in love.’ For one thing, there were probably a few dozen other people in that class, and presumably you didn’t fall in love with any or all of them, and neither did she. And—” Olivia was working herself into a verbal deluge “—did you fall in love in class? Was philosophy the basis of your love? Were you reading Kierkegaard and then suddenly, bam!”

  I sighed. “Okay, let me try again. We were in the same philosophy class. I missed a class and borrowed her notes. And then later that semester, we just kept bumping into each other, in the cafeteria and that sort of thing, and we started talking.
”

  “So you fell in love over a plate of hamburger casserole.”

  “It’s not like there’s one moment, Olivia. It’s just something that happens over a period of time. You know, you spend time together, your lives become more or less intertwined, and then I think you just realize you’re in love.” I was talking too generally; it hadn’t been that way at all with Kathleen and me. It was simply a version of our life that felt less painful to relate, rather than the small details of her laugh, her wild head of hair, the touch of her hand on my arm, my hand on the small of her back. I was grateful that Kathleen wasn’t here to contradict this version of events. If Olivia asked her the same question, would she point to a specific moment in time, one certain glance, one walk across campus?

  “Like Sam and me, then,” Olivia said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “A joke, Dad. A joke.” She was quiet again, staring out the window. The sun was slipping lower in the sky, an orange ball about to bump into the distant horizon. We were approaching Cheyenne and Nebraska soon after, but it was a long haul across the state to Omaha.

  Still facing away from me, Olivia asked, “Was it like that when you fell out of love, then? Was it so gradual that you didn’t notice it happening, rather than all of a sudden, because you’d dropped one of the kitchen plates and she’d forgotten to thaw the chicken for dinner, or because one day you just looked at her and thought, not this person again—”

  I hit the brakes on the Explorer suddenly, the car jerking, swerving, straightening out. Our suitcases in the trunk slid forward, smacked against the row of seats and shifted backward just as abruptly. I eased up on the brake, and we drifted to the side of the road before coming to a complete stop. I jerked the gearshift into Park a little too forcefully.

  Olivia was bracing herself with an arm on the door ledge and a foot against the central divider, her eyes wide. “What the heck, Dad?”

  “Listen to me. It wasn’t anything like that, and not for any dumb reason like you’re suggesting. Maybe you have a right to be angry with us, but we don’t deserve to be talked about that way. Especially your mom. She tried, over and over.” It was me. I deserved it, and more. Kathleen had left physically, but I hadn’t given her much of a choice.

  “All right,” Liv said evenly. “But you owe it to me to tell me what happened.”

  “Olivia.” I felt about ready to snap, from the exhaustion of it, the stress of being two people. The Caring Dad. The Vengeful Man. A normal guy. The man with the gun. Cars passed us on I-80, approaching quickly in the side view, whizzing past, and leaving us behind. A double-load truck thundered close by, shaking the Explorer in a private earthquake. Olivia flinched as if we’d been hit. “Look, I’m not going to tell you that it’s none of your business, because that’s not exactly true. But I will say that some things are so private they really shouldn’t be shared.”

  Olivia folded her arms across her chest, her chin set, fuming hard through her nose.

  “You should be glad, actually, that I’m not telling you all the details. You should be glad your mom hasn’t told you. Believe me, plenty of divorced—or separated, or whatever—parents do that to their kids. One parent blabs all this bad junk about the other, and vice versa, and the poor kid doesn’t know who or what to believe and ends up resenting or even hating them, and nobody wins there. No one.” I stared ahead as I said this. It was true in a general way—as a teacher, I’d more than once stumbled into the middle of a custody arrangement gone bad, parents who refused to talk to each other, a textbook left at one parent’s house that couldn’t be retrieved until the following weekend.

  Olivia bent suddenly, fiddling in her backpack, and then sat up, an oversize pair of white-framed sunglasses jammed onto her face to hide her tears.

  I pressed on, more gently. “We tried to be adults about it, and that was the best we could do. We just—after Daniel died—we couldn’t make it work, but we tried to keep you from the worst of it. I mean I hate to say it, but it’s something you couldn’t possibly understand at this point in your life.”

  She swiveled to face me, shoulders squared. “Here’s the part in the script where you tell me I’m too young to grasp the big picture, right? Or that I’ll never understand because I’m not a man, not a husband and a father, right? Because I never lost a child, and I should come back to you when I do, and then you can tell me, I told you so?” Tears leaked out the bottom of her sunglasses, leaving a shiny trail down her cheeks. With her hoodie pulled up on her head again, she looked like some tiny, tragic Hollywood star, going incognito on her way home from rehab or her latest police stint. I thought this—then immediately rebuked myself. What an awful thing to think. Olivia was worth a million times that.

  “It’s a stupid script,” I acknowledged, reaching over to wipe away her tears with my thumb. “But it’s the only one I’ve got.”

  Her face half-hidden by the sunglasses, Olivia slept her way across most of Nebraska, which was four hundred fifty-five miles wide along I-80, long enough for me to consume one Big Gulp and two extra-large Styrofoam cups of coffee, long enough to listen to the same CD eight times and long enough to have serious doubts about everything that had, for a while, seemed completely clear to me.

  Only hours away now—six, five, four, the mile markers decreasing slowly, steadily—Kathleen was waiting for us, walking from one room to another in her parents’ house, tidying furniture, setting out stacks of guest towels. I could see her doing this—I could picture her small frame, her hair tied back, the radio on, humming under her breath in her determinedly cheerful way. She would be preparing for the best but expecting the worst, the same way she had approached each day after Daniel died—planning things, making arrangements, trying to pull us out of our gloom, but knowing she was already defeated, that the plans and arrangements would come to nothing and we would have the same miserable day all over again.

  I hadn’t been able to see it clearly, not until that day on the roof when the world was spread out before me, a giant’s playground, and my own place in it had felt so devastatingly small. But I would admit to Kathleen that I hadn’t tried, hadn’t even begun to make the necessary effort. I’d been content to run circles around my grief, like a hamster on a giant wheel. I would talk to her, like I’d promised Olivia—really talk, something I hadn’t done since before Daniel died. We’d known each other for thirty-two years and been married for twenty-nine, but a three-year separation had somehow erased much of that time, leaving behind only smudges and smears, no clear impressions.

  When Kathleen had left for Omaha, I’d expected her to mention divorce, to send a thick packet of papers in the mail, awaiting only my signature to put an end to things. I know others—people we knew in Sacramento and Omaha—must have speculated, but there hadn’t been anyone else in the middle of our marriage. No fetching neighbors, no enticing coworkers, no alluring stranger at a bar—no one. What went wrong with our marriage had been me, and Kathleen deserved to hear me admit it. I would tell her she had made the right decision, returning to Omaha. I would have left myself behind, too, if it were possible.

  This would most likely be the last time I saw Kathleen—my constant, my rock, even when she was thousands of miles away. She was the link between who I had been and who I became, the one person in my life who knew where Curtis Kaufman had come from, and the only person who could possibly understand, someday, where he had gone.

  While Olivia slept and I drove on, the sky grew dark, the night split by twin beams of headlights. Memories of Kathleen flooded back to me, almost tangible—as if she were floating out in the darkness, just out of reach. Suddenly, I was filled with a desperate longing to go back to the last normal day of our lives, the day before Daniel died.

  Kathleen’s alarm had gone off at six, and I’d listened, half-awake, as she pulled on her sweats and tennis shoes. Cracking open one eye, I had peeked at her as she dress
ed. Even without makeup, even with her hair in a messy ponytail, Kathleen was striking. If I could go back, I would drink it all in, give her my full, waking attention. I should have—and would have, if I’d known what was to come—rolled out of bed and joined her. But I’d only smiled, closing my eyes, listening to her footsteps recede as she walked down the hall. Heidi had shaken herself awake and followed Kathleen, her toenails clicking on the hardwood. I’d listened as Kathleen leashed Heidi by the front door, which was no small task. Oh, the excitement! The frantic circling! The panting! The amused reassurances! Then the door clicked closed behind them, and the house was silent.

  Less than twenty-four hours later, the world would come to an end.

  If I could do it again, I would say “Don’t go yet,” pulling Kathleen back into bed with me, so that we could spend that last normal morning making love, sweet and slow, the world at bay.

  It was just past midnight, and Olivia was awake again when we exited the freeway, the sunglasses tucked into her backpack. Even with the moon blocked by clouds, I knew exactly where to go. I’d spent three college summers in Omaha, sleeping on a basement pull-out couch, and several holidays here with Kathleen and the kids, so the city had that familiar-but-different feel, as if it had given up waiting for me to return and had begun, ever so slightly, to change. Straining, I looked for the all-you-can-eat pizza buffet where Kathleen and I had gone on summer weekends, staying too long in our cushioned booth, holding hands across the table.

  Even though I had talked to Kathleen at our last stop for gas, Olivia called her again as we approached through darkened streets, giving her the play-by-play: “We’re on 99th Street...we’re passing a giant Walmart sign...we’re turning right...”

  I slowed for a turn, noticing that the pizza parlor was now a Payless Shoes, with towering rows of sandals and loafers disappearing out of sight. Someone honked behind me, and Olivia said, “Dad!” to me, and then to Kathleen, “Oh, nothing. Dad’s just spazzing out again.”