The Fragile World

by Paula Treick DeBoard

  I stared miserably out the window. As quickly as I’d inherited two more living relatives, my world had shrunk again, since these living relatives had turned out to be horrible and defective. Fascists, maybe. Child abusers.

  “And Dad was okay with that promise?” I asked finally. “I mean, he didn’t want to get in touch with his parents at any point? Not even to brag about how wonderful his kids were and all that?”

  Mom spoke more quietly now, and I had to strain to hear her over the sound of tires on asphalt and wind whipping past our windows. “That’s one of the things I was worried about, after Daniel died. I mean, your dad seemed like he was really losing it. And I thought—if he turns into the kind of guy his father was—if somehow he couldn’t fight off that grip of genetics...”

  “Dad’s no monster, though.”

  “No, but still—”

  I felt angry on his behalf. “There’s no but. Dad’s not a monster. He’s not even close to being a monster. He’s my dad. He’s wonderful. He’s just... Right now...”

  “Okay, Liv. I’m sorry. You’re right—he’s not a monster. He’s this wonderfully complicated man who’s just doing what he thinks is right.”

  I stared at her. It was the nicest thing I could remember her saying about Dad, if not exactly a confession of love. “Okay, then. But why do you think he’s going to Chicago? Why would he want to see his parents, if they were so horrible?”

  It took Mom a while to formulate an answer. “I guess...it just seems like unfinished business.”

  “Unfinished business? Like a score to settle?” I thought of the bullets under his seat, and the gun I’d never actually seen, but could picture now, real as the road in front of us.

  “No, I don’t think...no. Nothing like that.”

  “You could try to be more convincing, for my sake.”

  Mom’s smile was grim. “We’re just going to concentrate on getting there, okay? We’re going to make sure nothing awful happens.”

  Exactly how would we do that? To calm myself, I started reciting these new fears silently, so I could remember them for later, when and if I was ever reunited with my Fear Journal. At the same time, I was remembering the advice Dr. Fisher had given me, about sorting fears into categories—things that had happened, or were likely to, and things that were just plain ridiculous. I hoped all of this was ridiculous, an absurd and someday funny series of jumping to conclusions. But if any of this were true, we needed to stop him—it was as simple and complicated and horrible as that.

  And then, just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it began to rain.

  At first, it was just a few drops on the windshield, brushed away intermittently with gentle whisks of the wipers. Traffic slowed, wheels swishing against the asphalt in an almost peaceful way, like the sound of a miniature home water fountain.

  It’s not that I believe in omens, necessarily, but I don’t like to overlook possibilities. Every single day since Dad and I had left Sacramento, the weather had been the stuff of storybooks: blue skies, fluffy clouds—“cumulus,” Dad would say if he were here, but of course, he was not. The sky had been so intensely blue over parts of Nevada and Utah that it had looked fake, like a black-and-white film that had been colorized with an unrealistically strong palette.

  Just outside Des Moines, the rain got serious. Traffic slowed, headlights came on. When we passed trucks, or they passed us, giant whorls of water crested up against the Volvo.

  “We aren’t really going to drive in this,” I shouted, because the sound of the rain had drowned out the possibility of a normal speaking voice.

  “We’re going to be fine,” Mom called back. “You’ve been in California too long. People in the Midwest drive in rain like this all the time.”

  Maybe I had been spoiled without real rain—northern California had been in a “drought condition” for as long as I could remember—but this was ridiculous. It felt like a sign from the heavens—Stop this trip! Turn back immediately! “This is beyond rain, though! It’s a postapocalyptic downpour,” I protested.

  Mom shook her head. “Postapocalyptic? I forgot how funny you are.”

  Funny? I stared at her. Who could joke at a time like this?

  “Look at all the other cars on the road,” Mom said, as if this were reassuring, rather than cause for further alarm. Apparently, the other drivers were just as stupid and stubborn as we were, and they weren’t going to be deterred by a few tons of water.

  “Oh, I see. Everyone else is doing it, so why can’t we?” I checked off the reasons on my fingers. “Diminished visibility, slick roads, windshield wipers breaking, the possibility of sliding off the highway into a ditch and not being discovered until tomorrow since it’s dark and no one would be able to see our overturned car or hear our weak cries for help.” The possibility of not getting to Dad in time. I had worked myself into a breathless frenzy. I tried to instruct myself as a therapist would a patient: Relax, breathe, think of happier things.

  “Well,” Mom said carefully. “Those things may be true. But still—your father is out there, and we need to get to him.”

  She was right, of course, and I was a scared, selfish brat. Dad was heading off to find his monster-parents, and we were just going to have to battle the Storm of the Century like good little soldiers. I fished my cell phone out of my backpack and called Dad’s number. I listened to his outgoing message and I hung up, not sure where to begin.

  “Let’s just get there, okay?” Mom said, gently. “I’ll be careful, but let’s just find him.”

  I bit down on the cuff of my sweatshirt. There was simply nowhere to look—out the window was like watching a bleak forecast on the Weather Channel, and closing my eyes didn’t make what was outside the window any less real.

  There was really nothing to do but pray—even if I wasn’t the sort of person who prayed, or at least not with any specific expectations. Saying a prayer was like writing another journal entry, or talking to a family therapist, or just letting out all my thoughts. I never could shake the general self-centeredness of it, that I was throwing all my troubles and problems onto God when there were way more important issues in the world like war and famine and clean sources of drinking water. As crappy as my life sometimes seemed—even right then, with the windshield wipers waving back and forth like spindly skeleton arms, and my father doing who-knew-what—there was always someone who had it worse, who needed prayers more than I did.

  Still, I prayed. I prayed about the rain and about Dad continuing solo on the trip we’d started together. I prayed about whatever it was that he thought he had to do and wherever it was that his journey would take him, a desperate, middle-aged pilgrim without a Mecca or a shrine to St. Thomas à Becket. I prayed about the all-too-real bullets that had been taped beneath his seat, and the all-too-possible gun that I had never found.

  While I prayed, a shiver ran down the length of my body, from my scalp to my toes, cold in the tips of my combat boots. I figured that wherever he was going, Dad’s trip was a lonely one, with a dark destination. But I prayed I was wrong about that, too.

  curtis

  “Oh!” my mother said when she opened the door. She looked the same as she had twenty-nine years ago, because twenty-nine years ago she had been a prematurely old woman—with wide, cushiony hips and flabby arms, a limp, frowzy perm and deep pouches of sleeplessness under her eyes. She peered over my shoulder, as if a small army might be lurking on her sidewalk. “Well, come in, then,” she said, leaving me to close the door behind myself. “Let me just get my coat.”

  “Mom,” I called, causing her retreating figure to halt in the middle of the narrow hallway. It was literally narrower than when I had lived here—the walls had grown inward. I wasn’t imagining this; as my eyes adjusted to the gloomy interior, I noticed boxes stacked against the wall, almost floor to ceiling. They were, predi
ctably enough, liquor boxes—sturdy, small, with two holes for handles, labeled with the names of vodka manufacturers. “Wait a minute. What’s going on?”

  She turned, facing me. Her face was relatively unlined, any creases filled by excess fat. It was a recognizable face, of course, but I was relieved not to see any trace of Daniel or Olivia there. “You got my note, then,” she said.

  “No, I don’t think so. What note?”

  “I sent you a letter last week. To California.”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t been in California. I’ve been traveling with Li—with my...” I let that thought trail off, unfinished. “What was the letter about? Are you moving or something?”

  She stared at me. “If you didn’t get it, how did you know to come?”

  My mouth felt dry, my lips cracked. I wanted to push past her to the kitchen, to take a long drink of water from one of the chipped tumblers in the cupboard next to the sink. On the other hand, I wanted to leave while I could, before I got sucked in any further. I’d had this sense of inevitability during my childhood, that I was in the grip of forces I couldn’t control—Dad’s drinking, Mom’s apathy, the amount of food in the refrigerator, the fact that I’d grown too tall for my pants, or that I would need ten dollars for one field trip or another at school, and it would take a movement of heaven and earth for me to come up with it. Now I felt that vise again, like Dad’s warm grip on my neck, steering me toward something I didn’t want to do. I’d given my mother our Sacramento address years ago, careful to stress that it was for emergencies only. Apparently, there had never been any emergencies—until now.

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “I was just going to see him,” she said, and at the table at the end of the hall, I saw that she had her purse and a brown overcoat ready.

  I felt the long ago, familiar relaxation, the tension seeping out of my body. He wasn’t here, then. Maybe I should have known; the house was dark and stale-smelling, but quiet, not possessed by the raving evil spirit that was my father.

  “It’s good you came,” my mother continued, struggling into her coat. She had a bit of trouble getting her second arm into the hole, and I stepped forward to help her. It was a surprising sentiment for her to express—it hadn’t occurred to me that she would think it was good to see me. Then, as if to clarify, she added, “This way I don’t have to take the bus.”

  My mother didn’t seem the slightest bit disturbed by the state of my car, where the wrappers and empty plastic bottles from my day on the road layered the floorboard. Buckling herself into her seat, she simply rested her steady, orthopedic shoes on top of the mess and stared straight ahead, purse clutched on her lap.

  I started the car, then waited, idling, for her to speak. It had been a strange fact of my childhood that my mother was omnipresent and yet not truly there, an empty shell of a person whose personality was marked by placidity. “Oh, no,” she’d said, when my father inevitably threw something against a wall, and then rushed to pick up the shards. “That’s a good boy,” she’d said, when I announced my scholarship to Northwestern, as if she had observed me picking a piece of trash out of the gutter.

  Now, in the same mild tone, she said, “Your father is at Mercy.”

  “Mercy Hospital?” I echoed.

  “Yes, fourth floor,” she said, as if this explained everything.

  The rain had settled to a light mist, but the roads were wet enough to send up gray splashes that further blurred visibility. I was grateful for the swishing of the windshield wipers, which somehow covered the need for conversation. We nearly reached the hospital before I got the story, word by painful word, out of my mother. She seemed annoyed to have to tell any of it to me—repeating, several times, that it was all in the letter. The only logical solution, clearly, was to drop her off at Mercy, drive back to California, read the letter and return only when I was able to join the conversation.

  My father, it turned out, had quit drinking cold turkey six months before. His liver had held out a surprisingly long time. When I’d thought of him, only very occasionally through the years—fighting back the urge to share good news, to rub success in his face—I’d imagine him wasting away, his days becoming rapidly numbered. One way or another, I figured a tragedy was headed his way—a drunk driving arrest, cirrhosis, a cancer eating its way through his body. The only surprise was that it had taken so long.

  Even though he’d stopped drinking, the damage had been done, and Dad had begun to go into “septic,” Mom said—which I took to mean septic shock, sepsis—an infection that meant his organs could shut down, that death was a very real possibility. It went without saying that he was not a candidate for a liver transplant—but Mom revealed this with a sharp huff of breath. Did she think this was an injustice, as my father himself probably did? If I’da been a rich guy, you can bet they woulda sliced me open right then. They woulda cut it out of me right there.

  Mom insisted we could walk together, that she didn’t need to be dropped off at the door. I took her elbow as we made our way through the parking garage, feeling a proprietary sense of care for her. I did the math in my head and realized Mom was nearly eighty years old. She had a lumbering, uneasy gait, which may have been from her weight or any number of ailments—a bad hip, a bum knee? We took the elevator down from the parking garage, entered the hospital lobby, and made our way to another bank of elevators. Mom pushed 4 and stepped back.

  I asked, “What about all the boxes?”

  Mom was watching the lighted display over the doors, which indicated that we were moving from floor one to floor two. “What boxes?”

  “At your house. In the hallway, there were all those boxes stacked up.”

  We stopped on the second floor and a young woman in blue scrubs entered the elevator and pushed the 3 button.

  “Those are all your things. I boxed them up for you.”

  “My things?” I asked, as the elevator started again. “What do you mean, my things?”

  Mom turned her gaze to me, as if I were the one who needed things explained slowly. “Some books, sheets from your bed, clothes you’d outgrown. Those things.”

  I was floored, imagining that the boxes full of my outgrown, secondhand jeans and T-shirts had been sitting in my parents’ front hallway for close to thirty years, waiting for me to come back for them. “When did you...?”

  The young woman in scrubs exited the elevator, and a trio of women around Mom’s age got on, sniffling and arguing. One of them pressed 1, and I said, “This elevator is going up to four,” which caused them to turn and noisily exit. Mom made a little clicking sound with her tongue, as if this were an unfortunate occurrence.

  I tried again. “When did you pack up all of those things, Mom?”

  “Oh, not that long ago. When I learned that he wasn’t coming home. I’ll have to move out soon.”

  The doors opened onto the fourth floor and Mom took off ahead of me, rounding the nurses’ station, moving with an efficiency that belied her age and general health condition. The nurse behind the desk looked up, registering our entrance, and then back down at her computer monitor. After passing through a complicated maze of hallways, we arrived at 471-A. Mom stopped, seeming to brace herself. Written in dry erase marker on a whiteboard outside the room was the label KAUFMAN, C. followed by the names of his a.m. and p.m. nurse and the doctor in charge. I winced, seeing his name, my namesake.

  “Don’t go surprising him, now,” Mom said, but I wasn’t sure what she meant by this. I wasn’t intending to pop around the curtain that separated us with my hands held out, like a performer at a child’s birthday party. Surely my presence itself would be a surprise—even if it hadn’t been for my mother. She entered before me, plopping her purse down in a chair next to the bed. I could see my father’s feet pointing up beneath a blue hospital blanket, and then his entire body shifted beneath the covers, register
ing Mom’s presence.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  His answer was a painful wheeze, as if it took a great amount of energy for this single word to exit his body. “Tired.” I’m not sure I would have picked his voice out of a lineup.

  “I got a ride with Curtis,” Mom said, and after a long beat, while this information must have sunk in, my father rasped, “Curtis is here?” This time the voice was more familiar, with that hard edge my name always had in his mouth. How many times over the years had I thought about changing my name, becoming a person who didn’t resemble my father, even on paper?

  I had been standing between the open doorway and the curtain, not wanting to go any farther. The full effect of this mistake was upon me. I should have been heading toward Oberlin, doing what I’d set out to do. This detour brought back all the misery of my childhood with the new complications of one sick parent and one about to be homeless. My father’s voice, even altered by age and illness, still sent a chill through me. As a child, I had found reasons to stay in the bathroom after dinner, even though I knew from experience that the cheap latch lock could be broken, and Dad could force his way inside. As a child, I’d suspected that my mother didn’t love me the way other mothers loved their children—the mothers of my classmates, the women who lived on our street and watched their children play from the front stoop. Those women would have protected their children from raised fists, from flat, stinging slaps with the palm of a hand. As an adult, watching Kathleen with Daniel and Olivia, I’d known this was true.

  Now my mother gave the curtain a little jerk, revealing me where I was standing.

  The man lying in the bed was definitely my father—the head of dark hair now reduced to thin gray wisps that stuck to his scalp. His eyes were a cloudy version of the same blue, his face more bloated. He’d had his nose broken a few times during my childhood in the occasional bar fight, and it looked misplaced on his face now, crooked, a large bump on the bridge, an oxygen tube forced up inside one nostril. This observation allowed me to note the rest of the tubes—an IV hooked to his arm via a needle in the back of his hand, a catheter bag strapped to the side of the bed, a series of wires disappearing beneath his thin pajama top that led to the electrodes attached to his chest. These might have been—unless I was reading too much into things now—the exact pajamas he’d owned during my childhood.