The Fragile World

by Paula Treick DeBoard

  Every night I had spent on the pull-out couch in that basement, I’d imagined sneaking up two flights of stairs to her bedroom, sliding beneath her sheets to where she was waiting. Out of respect for her parents, in her parents’ house, I had never done more than entertain the idea. At Northwestern, we’d tumbled in and out of each other’s beds, leaving notes for roommates or hanging scarves on our doorknobs, telltale, shameless signs. In Omaha, the waiting became unbearable. When we couldn’t stand it, we’d take my Datsun out on the pretext of shopping for one thing or another, complete the errand in warp speed and drive down to a spot Kathleen knew near the river, where my car was hidden from the road. Usually we made it out to the blanket I kept in my trunk, but sometimes we just slid into the backseat, all hands and elbows, half-clothed, laughing and fumbling. Once, we’d stopped at a McDonald’s afterward to cool off, and I ordered us soft-serve vanilla cones. Sitting across from each other in a booth, I’d asked her to marry me, and she’d said yes. There wouldn’t be a ring for another six months or so, and I’d be teased relentlessly for my lack of romance—In a McDonald’s, Curt? And she still said yes?—but I knew I couldn’t have lived with myself if I hadn’t asked her, and she hadn’t said yes, right at that moment.

  But once—only once, the summer of our impulsive engagement—we had made love inside the house. She had appeared at the bottom of the basement stairs, whispering, “Shhh, Curtis.” Until she pulled the nightgown over her head and stood in front of me naked, I’d thought I was in a dream. She straddled me, her body creamy-white and so beautiful I moaned into her throat. We were quiet, but we didn’t rush. Afterward, we lay side by side, smiling, our bodies coated with a sheen of sweat. It will always be like this, I had promised myself. This will be our forever.

  But it was even better this time, maybe because it had a final quality for both of us, maybe because we were both people who liked closure, who wanted to bring things full circle. The mattress on the pull-out bed was as bad as it had been back then, and creaky, too. I thought once of Olivia all the way up on the second floor, but we weren’t as quiet as we’d been when we were twenty.

  Kathleen was still beautiful, would always be. I ran my hands slowly over her, neck to toe, her body waiting and welcoming. We had changed in all the expected ways in thirty years, but we came together more gently, weighted down with everything that had happened between us. It was an underwater reverie, a fearless exploration. We fell asleep wrapped in each other’s limbs, Kathleen’s head on my chest. I dreamed that I was tangled in her hair and didn’t want to find my way out.

  When I woke, Kathleen was gone and the house was quiet. I fumbled for my cell phone. Four-thirty. Maybe she had wanted to sleep upstairs, to be close in case Olivia needed her, or maybe she was bound by that old sense of propriety, of what could and couldn’t be done under this roof. Or maybe it was something else entirely—she’d gone upstairs because we were done with each other, and that was the gentlest way to say so.

  From my suitcase, I removed the box of Daniel’s cremains and held it for a long moment. It was only right that he stay here—not alone in our house in Sacramento, not at the mercy of whatever happened to me in Oberlin. I looked around the basement for the right place, somewhere it wouldn’t be discovered right away. And then I took out the letter I’d written in Lyman and left that, too.

  I hadn’t really unpacked, so it was easy to zip my bag and carry it upstairs in a single trip. I winced at the sound of the engine starting in the driveway, but no lights came on upstairs from where Kathleen and Olivia were asleep, and there was no movement behind any curtains. Nevertheless, I waited for a long moment before raising my hand in a grateful goodbye.

  olivia

  Mom was at the kitchen table when I woke up, still wearing a pair of flannel pajamas. I could tell something was wrong—her hair looked particularly wild, as if she hadn’t even run a hand through it since waking. She stood when she saw me, retrieved a mug from the cupboard and poured me a cup of coffee.

  “Thanks,” I said, sitting down. “But I’m going to need a pound of sugar and a cup of half-and-half before I can drink this.”

  Mom didn’t say anything.

  “What is it?” I asked. It struck me that the house was too quiet; there was no sound of another person waking up, moving around. Dad could still have been down in the basement, zonked out, mouth open—but somehow I knew he wasn’t. “Where’s Dad?”

  She passed me a piece of paper, something that had been ripped off a notepad. The note was in Dad’s handwriting, but I had to read it several times before I understood.

  Please understand that I had to take care of some things.

  You’ll hear from me soon.

  Love you both—Curtis (Dad)

  I stared at the note for a long time, turning the paper over to look for the rest of the text. It bothered me that he hadn’t even used a full sheet of paper, and he obviously hadn’t done a rough draft first and then a final draft, taking his time to make it neat and polished. His signature was mashed up against the edge of the page. Had he been that desperate to get away, that he couldn’t even be bothered to write a proper note? Obviously—otherwise, he would have bothered to say a real goodbye. I remembered his hug the night before, uncomfortably tight, and how I’d wriggled my way out of it. He’d known, of course. He’d been saying his real goodbye then.

  I set the note down on the table and looked at Mom. “Now what?”

  She blinked.

  “Oh, is this where you pretend you weren’t in on it from the beginning?”

  “I’m not sure—”

  “Really, Mom? I figured it out,” I said, putting air quotes around the words. “The Great Kiddie Transfer of 2013.”

  “Olivia!” She looked genuinely hurt, which hurt me, too—because I knew it must have been true.

  I gave the coffee cup a little shove of rejection, causing liquid to spill over the rim and onto the tablecloth The coffee was absorbed by the creamy fabric, fanning out in a murky, brownish stain. “So, what? He just called you and said, I’m sick of living with this kid, it’s your turn. Right? Did he tell you I’m so awful he just couldn’t take it anymore? Or did you two set some kind of date from the beginning, some kind of your-turn, my-turn agreement, an equal division of labor?”

  Mom put one hand on top of mine and then grabbed the other one, too, squeezing both of them tight. “Of course not! Don’t even say something like that. And you’re forgetting that I wanted you here from the beginning. We both wanted to be with you.”

  I looked up from the coffee stain and met Mom’s eyes. “You knew he was going to leave me here.”

  “No.”

  “Mom! I know you probably think you’re protecting me or something, but you’re not. I’m old enough to know what’s going on. This is my life, too.”

  Mom looked as if she were going to be sick. “I didn’t know anything. We had a long talk last night, and he said that he was just so overwhelmed—”

  Since Mom was still holding my hands, I wiped my nose on the shoulder of my sweatshirt. I hadn’t even realized I was crying, but the snot was flowing like a toddler’s, dripping dangerously close to my lip. I’d done this—I’d overwhelmed Dad, probably with all my stupid fears and my failing P.E. grade and the fact that I was always hanging around instead of giving him space. Why wouldn’t he want to be by himself?

  “Just a second,” Mom said, and left the room. I wondered if she was going to return with something Dad had left for me, maybe a box that held all the secrets of my childhood and would explain everything for me, the way it might happen on television. Your father wanted you to have this, she would say, and somehow everything would be okay. Instead, she came back with a new box of Kleenex, ripping off the strip of cardboard along the perforated edge. I took the tissue as permission to cry like an idiot, so I did.

  “I didn
’t want him to leave,” Mom said, wiping her own eyes with a tissue. “I told him you were both welcome to stay here as long as you wanted, even permanently.”

  “You did?”

  “Of course.”

  I’m not sure why, but this made me cry even harder—deep, ugly sobs that required a small stack of Kleenex. Finally, catching my breath, I asked, “Did he take all his stuff? I mean, is he really gone, and not just out for an oil change or something?”

  Mom nodded. “I saw the note when I came downstairs. I looked in the basement, and everything’s gone. His suitcase, his clothes. He even stripped the sheets off the hide-a-bed and put the couch back together.”

  “Where did he go?”

  Mom shook her head, and I saw what I hadn’t seen before. She looked unbearably sad.

  “He didn’t tell you where he was going? I mean, last night, when you had the heart-to-heart about dumping me off here, he didn’t happen to mention where he was going to go?”

  “Liv! When you say dumping you here, you have to know that hurts.”

  “Well, what did he do—just turn around and drive back to California?”

  “I don’t know where he went. He just needed some time alone, I think. That’s what he told me, that he was going to take some time to figure a few things out.”

  “So he could be going back to California. He could be going anywhere.” I had stopped crying and started to shiver, not because it was cold in the room, but because all of a sudden I felt cold from the inside out. What was Dad doing? What was his plan? “I’m going to call him. I have to talk to him.”

  Mom wiped her eyes with the heels of her palms and gave me a shaky smile. “I’ve already called him three times this morning. It goes right to voice mail, so his phone must be off. But look—it’ll be okay, honey. He said we would hear from him, so we’ll just have to wait.”

  It seemed like such an obvious thing to say, the kind of thing you might say to a child who needed to be pacified at the dentist’s office. Just wait and be a good girl, and I’ll give you a sucker later.

  “But aren’t you worried about him? I mean, he just went off alone, and no one in the world knows where he is. He’s basically unstable—” This last part just slipped out, not the way I’d been planning to mention it.

  Mom’s eyebrows shot up. “He’s unstable?” she parroted.

  I backpedaled. “Well, you know. Not unstable unstable, but...”

  “What does that mean?”

  I bit my lip. Suddenly, I had the very shitty feeling that I should have told her earlier—not just the first night when we’d arrived, and not from a phone call on the road. I should have called her when I was standing on the asphalt near the cafeteria entrance, squinting up to look at Dad on the roof. I wasn’t sure where to begin, now.

  “Olivia?” Mom was leaning so close, I noticed that she had tiny red lines in the whites of her eyes, either from crying or not sleeping, or both.

  I shrugged my shoulders, which felt unconvincing, so I also shook my head. If I protested again, I knew, it would just be a trifecta of foolishness. “I mean, I thought we had been doing fine, but he...” I trailed off.

  “Olivia? I’m not kidding. If there’s something you need to tell me...” Mom’s voice held a warning note. We hadn’t lived together in so long, and the time we’d lived together after Daniel died had been so strange, so I’d almost forgotten that it was Mom who was the taskmaster, the more demanding parent. Daniel and I used to be able to get away with things from time to time with Dad—not because he didn’t care but because he honestly didn’t seem to notice. Once I’d let Dad take the rap for a glass that Heidi had knocked down—a glass I’d left sitting on the edge of the coffee table without a coaster underneath it. Hearing the crash, Dad had simply said, “You know, I think that was the glass I was drinking out of after dinner.” While Mom went on about his carelessness, I’d done nothing more than listen, guiltily.

  Now she placed a hand on each of my shoulders and said, “You need to tell me what’s going on.”

  I took a deep breath, and I told her about that day at school—or at least, almost all about that day at school. I mentioned that I was in the bathroom at the time my name was paged over the intercom, but not that I was in the bathroom because I’d been cutting P.E. It seemed like the sort of detail that would get in the way of the real story, not to mention cast significant doubt on the narrator. I told her that Dad had come calmly down the cafeteria stairs with the principal, but didn’t mention that he’d walked right past me, looking dazed and disoriented at first, before giving me a big, sunny wave as if I were his first visitor at the mental institution.

  Even without these details, it was a frightening enough story, and Mom kept saying, “Oh, Liv” and “Honey.” She wrapped her arm around my shoulder, her hair tumbling against mine. I felt the tears on her cheeks mingle with the tears on mine. This was the way she’d held me when I was younger. This was how she’d held me the night Daniel died.

  I pulled back to look at her. “There’s more. But it might not be anything at all....”

  “What?” Mom demanded. When my eyes drifted downward, she put a hand on my chin and angled my face upward, so we were eye to eye. “What else?”

  “I didn’t want to worry you,” I said, and it was true. Maybe there was no good way to deliver bad news, or even potentially bad news. How was this any better than a phone call in the middle of the night, like the one that had disrupted our lives? Here, Mom. Your life has been going pretty great, and now I’m going to hand you this live grenade, and see how that changes things.

  But what choice did I have? Was there really any other option, at all?

  I tried to keep my voice steady. Once the words were out, I knew, I couldn’t take them back. “Mom,” I told her. “I think Dad might be planning to kill himself.”

  curtis

  The streets had a cinematic quiet to them, or maybe I was attaching cinematic importance to my own actions—the lone warrior, heading into battle. I had threaded my way back to the freeway before dawn, feeling a touch of envy for them, those sleeping Omahans, secure in their single-family homes.

  There was no should or should not, there was no choice to be made. If there had been a moment to make a decision, it had been that night when the phone rang, startling me awake. I’d been sleepwalking since then, haunting my own dreams. I was awake now, blood thrumming through my veins with purpose.

  By tonight I could be in Oberlin, knocking on the door, the Colt in my hand, my finger on the trigger. Would Robert Saenz know me? Would there be a flash of recognition when I announced my name, before the flash of the revolver?

  When Robert Saenz had pled out, he’d taken away my day in court. There had been no judge behind the bench, no American flag on one side, no Ohio flag on the other, no bailiff keeping a stern eye on the crowd. I hadn’t had the pleasure of seeing Saenz in an orange jumpsuit, his wrists handcuffed, his legs shackled, his movements reduced to an awkward step-shuffle. There had been no witnesses, no medical reports, no police testimony. I hadn’t taken the stand or looked Robert Saenz in the eye; I hadn’t told him who it was that he’d killed. In my mind, I wanted to spill before him a thousand pictures and plaques and trophies and certificates, a million words, nineteen years of memories. “This is Daniel,” I had wanted to say, daring him to look away.

  Would there be time to tell him these things, or would I have to shoot before I could get the words out? I had the element of surprise on my side, because Robert Saenz would have no idea I was coming. He’d never apologized, never owned up to anything more than causing a traffic accident, never expressed remorse that a human being had been killed because of him. There had been no statement read at his sentencing, no letter tearfully penned from prison. Would he tell me, surprised, “I did my time,” because he considered the matter of Daniel Owe
n Kaufman to be closed? Or maybe, “I done my time”—why credit him with the proper use of grammar?

  Afterward, I didn’t plan to run. I was no hardened criminal, determined to hole up in one-star motel rooms until my money and options ran out. It would be a pleasure to offer myself up to the Oberlin Police Department, arms raised above my head in surrender. “I’m your man,” I would say.

  Twelve hours—if I could stay awake, if the weather held—until I could say “I took out that dirty son of a bitch for you. You’re welcome.”

  olivia

  I had been hoping that Mom had some kind of crazy explanation for the bullets beneath the driver’s seat, or that she would think the story of Sam switching the bullets with batteries was hysterical, and we could have a good laugh together. There was only the slimmest of possibilities at this point that everything had a clear, logical explanation—but I clung to it, until I saw Mom’s face go white and drained, as if all her blood had decided at that moment to pool elsewhere.

  “Mom? Say something.”

  “I need to think about this, Liv. Why don’t you leave me for a minute, let me figure this out.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked, but Mom’s posture was rigid, her spine frozen into place. I backed away from the kitchen, went upstairs and took out my Fear Journal. I sat on the bed with my legs tucked under the comforter, willing all my thoughts to spill out. But it’s hard to write clearly when you’re shaking or crying, and I was doing both. What the hell was Dad up to? What had he done, in the hours he’d been gone? What was he going to do?

  It was nice to believe that the past was the past and we had moved on, but if I didn’t know it already, I knew it for sure now: that was a big fat lie. Everything in our lives came back to one event, one night. No matter what else happened in our lives, we’d lost Daniel. All we’d lost was him, and the rest of us had crumbled. There was probably a physics rule to explain it—topple one domino, and the rest went, too.