The Fragile World

by Paula Treick DeBoard

  A few more turns and we were out of downtown, heading toward a residential area. If western Nebraska was mainly flat, the interstate a long trench splitting distant bluffs and rock formations, Omaha was its opposite, a city built on rolling hills, with winding—labyrinthine—streets and towering trees. The homes were comfortable, spaced far apart in a way that didn’t happen in Sacramento, unless you lived in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods, locked behind a gate that could only be opened by a security code. Less had changed here, in an area of hundred-year-old homes; there was still the brickwork, the white siding, the front porches, the lampposts in front yards.

  I made the final turn, slowing to ten miles an hour. Olivia read the numbers off the mailboxes, like the countdown to a grand reveal. “Eleven-oh-four, eleven-oh-eight...”

  Here goes everything, I thought, as we crested a slight rise and came downward.

  “Eleven-twenty... Oh, my goodness! I see you!” Olivia shrieked into her phone. She was fumbling with her seat belt and out the door even before I came to a stop.

  Kathleen was standing in the driveway, a shawl pulled over her shoulders. She beamed, throwing open her arms and wrapping Olivia in a hug. Behind her was the house, a two-story white Colonial with black shutters and a red, inviting front door. At the north end of the property, a row of birch trees glowed, ghostlike.

  I cut the lights but stayed in the car for a long moment. Over Olivia’s shoulders, Kathleen and I locked eyes. Although she was smiling, a line of worry split her forehead.

  See, it’s the right thing, I told myself. Olivia belongs here. She deserved her mother, a big lawn, a clear change of seasons, a place where things like gangs and drive-by shootings probably didn’t even exist.

  Kathleen stepped back, tugging off Olivia’s hood to get a better look, to really see our daughter. She smoothed her fingers over Olivia’s hair and smiled. I knew she was close to tears, the way she’d been during those brief summer visits, when she’d been gone too long, and the time remaining was too short.

  “Dad!” Olivia called impatiently, waving me over.

  I took a deep breath, bracing myself, and then I stepped out of the car to join them.

  olivia

  Dad called that he would bring some things from the car, so Mom led me into the house, her right arm wrapped around my shoulders. “You’ll be upstairs in my old room,” she said, her squeeze tight and strange. My left arm hung awkwardly at her waist, not sure where to go.

  “Where will you sleep?” I asked.

  “I’ve been sleeping in your grandparents’ room, which I’ve finally got looking somewhat decent. You can use that bathroom in the morning—it’s got one of those rain forest shower heads.” Mom smiled at me, and I realized that she was nervous, maybe even as nervous as I was.

  Dad came through the door behind us, a suitcase in each hand.

  “What about Dad? Where’s he going to sleep?”

  Mom looked apologetically at Dad. “I’ve been using the guest room as a workshop, and I didn’t have time to clear out Jeff’s room. Somehow he hasn’t managed to reclaim any of his five dozen basketball trophies, even though I’ve asked him a hundred times. So I guess the best place would be...”

  “The basement,” Dad finished. “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  I followed the glance that went between them, the hesitant smile. They hadn’t hugged or kissed a hello; there hadn’t been so much as a handshake. I remembered the basement, where Daniel and I had snuck away to mess around with piles of old furniture and boxes of yellowed papers. It was a step or two above a dog crate in the garage, but that was it.

  “Let me grab a few more things,” Dad said, heading back outside.

  Mom turned to me again, smiling brightly. “Well! I know you must be tired, but I made a pizza earlier and popped it into the oven when you called....”

  “Great, I’m starving,” I said.

  Dad came back with the stack of textbooks I’d packed nearly a week ago and promptly forgotten about.

  “It’s not like I’m going to need those tonight,” I protested.

  “Well, I don’t know what you’re going to need when. I’m just grabbing everything while I’m at it.”

  “In that case, don’t forget the box of tampons in the glove box.”

  Dad and Mom rolled their eyes simultaneously, and Mom laughed. It was a nice moment, our puppet strings relaxed just for a second, to give us a little room to improvise.

  It was nearly one-thirty by the time I slid beneath the covers in Mom’s old room, exhausted even though I’d slept through most of our long drive. It was a relief to have our clumsy reunion out of the way. Mom had tried to kiss me good-night, which would have been fine, but it took me so completely off guard that she ended up brushing my shoulder with her lips instead. She’d mentioned school a few times, too, and Dad and I, by mutual consent, had changed the subject. Mom could find out about my failing P.E. grade later—or, hopefully, never.

  Her room was the same as I remembered it from our previous visits, and probably the same as it had been when she was a girl. It was a relief to turn out the overhead light, blocking out the explosion of pale yellow and white, the curtains with eyelet trim, the ruffled bed skirt, the vanity with the attached curved mirror and a fancy three-piece comb set, better suited to girls in fairy tales who wanted to know who was the fairest of them all. “Ignore all that junk,” Mom had said, indicating a stack of boxes along one wall, each labeled in her block handwriting: BOOKS, DOLLS, GAMES, CLOTHES.

  I leaned against the headboard, the bedside lamp on, my journal open in my lap. We’d made it, we’d somehow survived the whole crazy trip despite approximately seven million things that could have gone wrong, and here we were. Why did it feel so anticlimactic? Had I expected my parents to take one look at each other and fall into each other’s arms with declarations of love? Did I think the romance would be instantly rekindled when they had spent the past three years not even speaking to each other? No—I hadn’t expected it, but I’d allowed myself to hope. Stupid, stupid girl. They had been about as passionate as two acquaintances bumping into each other at a Costco. Oh, hello. Didn’t we used to know each other?

  And then Dad, lugging in every single thing from the Explorer as if he couldn’t sleep easy with my empty Sprite can in the console. While I devoured half the pizza and listened to Mom ramble on about all the changes she’d made to the house—the old wallpaper steamed off, the new chair rail in the dining room, the repainted cabinets, the butcher block countertops—Dad had wandered back and forth, carting my suitcase upstairs and his downstairs. Sit down! Talk to us! I wanted to command him, but he seemed restless, like he couldn’t find a comfortable place to relax. After the twelve hours of driving he’d done that day, I felt a little guilty relegating him to the basement on that ancient pull-out couch with the flimsy mattress.

  I’d left them sitting at the kitchen table with the few remaining slices of pizza. With any luck, Dad would come clean all on his own about his rooftop crack-up, and I’d be spared the task of telling anything to Mom.

  If not, I’d have to get her alone tomorrow for a serious talk, the one I’d refused to have over the phone. I had to tell her about Dad on the roof of the Rio cafeteria, and how I’d seen my whole life flash before my eyes—or if not my life, then his. I would tell her how scared I’d been, how scared I still was, and how she needed to fix things, because it was completely out of my control, and I was sick of doing the worrying for all of us.

  And of course, I’d have to tell her about the bullets, too.

  Tomorrow, I promised myself. Tomorrow everything would get figured out.

  curtis

  Kathleen had done some work on the basement, but otherwise, it was exactly the room I remembered. The steps to the basement had been recarpeted, and the handrail, always a ricke
ty metal affair, had been replaced with mahogany so polished and smooth it was almost slippery. At some point, she must have lugged away the foosball table, which through one enthusiastic tournament or another had accumulated a number of players on the injured list. But the couch was still there, covered in the type of scratchy plaid upholstery that made it unpleasant to sit on with any bare limbs. I recognized the end table and the antique lamp that worked by inserting a small key into a hole on its thick trunk.

  Kathleen had left a set of sheets on the couch, and I set about the task of piling up the cushions on one end of the room, pulling out the hideaway and making up the bed. I was almost faint with déjà vu, the scene both natural and bizarre at once.

  That first summer when Kathleen had brought me home from Northwestern, we’d given her parents only a day’s notice. Better to surprise them, Kathleen had said; Owen and Barbara Eberle were the sort of people who handled unexpected visitors well. They had been immediately welcoming, making the subtle rearrangements to their lives that were required for the accommodation of an entirely new person for an extended period of time. Barbara offered to reorganize her guest room, which had doubled as a sewing and hobby room, but I’d insisted that the basement was fine. I could almost hear the sigh of relief—it would be much easier to keep an eye on me if I were sleeping two floors below Kathleen.

  We’d kept this same arrangement three summers in a row. Kathleen’s brother, Jeff, recently graduated from college, was working for Owen, and we’d developed an easy friendship. If the family had been initially wary of me—the boy from Chicago with parents neither they nor Kathleen had ever met and whom I never referred to—this was forgotten soon enough. I was Kathleen’s boyfriend, sure, but they treated me almost like a prodigal son, as if I had been away for far too long between visits. Owen took me to the lake in his boat on Saturdays, and we caught next to nothing, smoked too many cigars—which I can only remember guiltily in retrospect, since it was lung cancer that would kill him—and returned home sunburned and sated. Jeff had gotten me the roofing job, and most weekdays I woke to the alarm at four-thirty, rolling off the hideaway bed, climbing the stairs quietly to shower on the main floor without disturbing anyone. By the time I was dressed, though, Barbara had breakfast going; when my ride pulled up curbside, she handed me a mug of coffee, a Coleman jug filled to the brim with ice water and a paper sack packed for my lunch. It was easy to think of them as my parents, too—the long-lost parents I never had, the type of parents I would have wished for as a child, if I could have believed they existed.

  Over the years, Kathleen and I hadn’t been back as often as we’d promised that day we’d pulled our packed-to-the-gills Datsun out of the driveway and left for California. I remembered the way they’d stood on the porch, waving goodbyes—Owen puffing away on his signature cigar, Barbara wiping tears on the sleeve of her sweater. Each time we’d returned, it was to signs of their gradual decline. Owen’s breathing grew wheezy first, then was aided by a pull-along oxygen machine. He’d refused chemotherapy and radiation, insisting that he would go how he wanted to go—which was only six weeks from the date of his diagnosis. Barbara’s quaint forgetfulness rapidly became more than absentmindedness, and she died a year later in an Alzheimer’s ward. So young, both of them, so seemingly healthy and vibrant and productive. Their deaths had been devastating for both of us, but I was, in a way, relieved that they hadn’t outlived Daniel, hadn’t lived to see what a mess we’d made of things.

  I was sitting on the bed, remembering this, when Kathleen came down the stairs. “I moved some of the old things into the garage,” she explained, as if we’d been in the middle of a conversation. “I’d like to save as many things as I can, refinish them one by one, but between that and all the work at the store...”

  “You want to sit?” I asked, gesturing to the end of the bed. I’d heaped my suitcase on the old armchair with the matching scratchy fabric.

  She shook her head, leaning back against the wall. Had it been strange for her to come back here, to live in her childhood home? She’d exchanged one house of ghosts for another. But she’d thrown herself enthusiastically into the renovations, a seemingly never-ending project.

  She continued, talking fast to fill the silence. “I’m thinking of renovating the whole basement, maybe making it a separate apartment for some income. But I’d have to figure out the access. There’s that old door off the laundry room, obviously, but it’s just about impossible to reach from the driveway, so not such a grand entrance. I’d like to knock down a few walls, put in a little kitchenette and one of those stackable washers and dryers....”

  “That’s a good idea,” I said.

  “You think so?”

  But I hadn’t really heard her. I was amazed by how she was handling her life, baffled and envious, not angry like I’d been in the immediate wake of Daniel’s death. Kathleen could move on. She was strong; she was resilient. She didn’t know that Robert Saenz was out, walking free in the world—but would she have acted any differently if she did?

  “Curtis?”

  “Yeah,” I said faintly, trying to focus on her words. I was noticing that she’d let her hair grow long, that there were a few gray hairs at her temples. She looked trim, healthy. I let my gaze drift across her face—skin so pale it was almost translucent, that slight bluish vein visible on her forehead. I was aware of how rumpled I looked after a day on the road, the soda stain that bloomed on one cuff.

  “Of course, Jeff says most of the house should be gutted. But he doesn’t have an understanding of the bones of the house, of the architecture. You should see where he lives—you will see it, if...” she trailed off. “How long are you planning to stay, exactly?”

  I cleared my throat. “There are some things...” But I couldn’t go any further. The full weight of the day descended on me, like a heavy cloak of X-ray armor.

  Kathleen stared at me. “What is this about, Curtis?”

  I couldn’t answer. Despite days of rehearsing the words in my head, I couldn’t actually say them.

  “I’m glad you’re here, and Olivia,” she said, when it was clear I wasn’t going to contribute. “But I can’t have it like it was, where you refuse to talk to me. That was killing me. I can’t do it. I can’t put in all the effort.”

  “No,” I said, my voice thick. “I don’t want you to. You won’t have to. I’ll—” I stopped, as if I were trying to find my place in the script.

  Kathleen waited, her posture uncomfortably straight, chin slightly forward, bracing herself for the bad news.

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “I’m hardly thinking right. Maybe we could have this conversation tomorrow.”

  She nodded, tucking a loose curl behind her ears. “Tomorrow, then.”

  “Tomorrow, then,” I said, and she nodded.

  That was all I had—one more day.

  olivia

  I woke up surrounded by white blankets, white pillows and a yellow bedspread, and couldn’t for the life of me remember where I was—what city, what hotel. Then I spotted the row of boxes with Mom’s handwriting and sat up, groggily.

  I’d plugged in my cell phone last night and left it charging on the nightstand, but it took me a moment to realize why I was awake. There was an alert on the screen, a message from Sam.

  So? Did you make it? Did you talk to your mom?

  Sam. Only a day ago we’d been standing in front of the automotive shop, kissing. I brushed my fingers over my lips, reviving the memory. It had been beautiful and sweet, but now it felt sad, like a long-ago dream, the details already fading. I wrote back:

  Not yet. Today, I promise.

  I cracked open the bedroom door. Maybe this was my best chance, while Dad was still in the basement, sleeping. The door to Grandpa and Grandma’s room—Mom’s room, now—was open, the bed already made. I paused on the stairs, listening to the sounds of my mo
ther in the kitchen, achingly familiar. The refrigerator door opened and closed, something was whisked in a bowl. And she was humming. Funny how I’d forgotten that, as if the memory itself had climbed into her Volvo and left along with her physical body.

  Mom had always hummed—when she was scrubbing the bathroom floors, sanding down a piece of furniture, staring into the open refrigerator while she planned our groceries for the week. It was a trait she had shared with Daniel, but now I wondered: Had her humming influenced him, or had his humming influenced her? Mom wasn’t necessarily on-key most of the time, and she would get stuck on one or two lines of a song, usually an advertisement or, between October and January, a Christmas song, and she would hum it until we went insane—Santa baby, slip a sable under the tree, for me.... But sometimes she and Daniel would join forces in a humming duet. Once, I remembered, Daniel had been riding in the passenger seat and I’d been in the backseat, and the two of them together had hummed their way through Yellow Submarine, laughing and cracking each other up.

  Standing there on the stairs, I tried very hard to remember Mom humming after Daniel died. There must have been some time, at least once, maybe when she was ferrying me from school to the therapist, or when she was reupholstering our old couch...or had that been one more thing that died, along with Daniel?

  But when I rounded the corner and came into the kitchen, she was still humming, stirring something at the stove. “Hey!” She looked torn, as if she wanted to drop the spoon and give me a hug, but settled instead for a little air kiss as I passed. “How does a vegetable frittata sound?”

  I eased into a chair at the table. “I should warn you that my body may not be capable of digesting anything that doesn’t contain vast amounts of sugar or salt.”

  Mom glanced at me, concerned, and did some quick whisking in the bowl on the counter. “That bad?”

  “No,” I said, feeling stupid for a joke that had fallen flat, and feeling defensive on Dad’s behalf. “Not that bad at all.”