The Fragile World

by Paula Treick DeBoard

  “That’s good,” he said. “You can do right by him. You can do what I never did.”

  This time when he closed his eyes, he seemed to sink directly into sleep, his chest immediately, unevenly, rising and falling. I watched the machines by his bedside, their silent, blinking vigilance. Oxygen and fluids were pumped in, the unwanted fluids pumped out. My father would be dead soon. I couldn’t summon sadness, exactly, but his words were already echoing in my mind, like a fatherly blessing, a benediction. Do right by him.

  When Mom stepped around the curtain and into the hallway, I followed her and took her by the arm. “What will you do when he’s gone?”

  She didn’t seem fazed by the question. Her expression, as always, was impossible to read. Would his death be a relief, or a mere change of circumstances? “I have a friend who lost her husband. We’ll just live together when he goes.”

  I wondered about the friend, and wondered about the house or apartment where my mother would be living. In all respects, it had to be a better situation. I wished I could ask if she wanted to stay with us—but us was a family that no longer existed, in a place that no longer existed.

  “What’s the name of your friend?” I asked and then turned on my phone to record the information along with my contacts. My phone beeped frantically, alerting me to a dozen missed calls and a number of voice mail messages, a few from Kathleen, the rest from Olivia. I turned off the phone again.

  “Do you have to go?” she asked, and I looked at her closely. Was she asking me to stay?

  “There’s something I have to do,” I said carefully, but my mother’s eyes had wandered down the hallway again, looking at nothing. She’s done with me, I thought. I’ve been dismissed. She wasn’t the brute that my father had been, but she hadn’t been a loving mother, either. She wasn’t anything like Barbara had been with Kathleen, like Kathleen had been with Daniel and Olivia.

  I squeezed her hand, which was surprisingly strong. I thought of all those years of her standing behind a plastic dome in an elementary school cafeteria, her gloved hand reaching out with a scoop of cole slaw or a handful of chicken nuggets. “Mom,” I said, taking her other hand. I wanted to shake her, to make her focus, to see me right in front of her. I was gripping her too tightly; I only succeeded in sending a brief flash of pain across her face. She flinched, and I relaxed my grip. It was the last time we would see each other. “Mom, I just want to say that...” My throat constricted, and I stopped, because she was looking away again, over my shoulder.

  But then she turned to me, her eyes watery blue. “I love you, too, Curtis,” she said.

  olivia

  It was dark by the time we reached Chicago. At least, the massive highway billboards kept informing us that we were in the Chicago area, but we spent at least an hour in stop-and-go traffic on the rain-slick freeway, the sort of rush-hour mess that really shouldn’t exist at night, on a weekend.

  Mom took a random exit, and we went inside a Burger King to use the bathroom. There were two stalls, but only one had a working latch. Mom went first, and when I came out, my hands only half-dry from an ineffectual air dryer, Mom was sitting in a booth with her cell phone against one ear and her free hand jotting down an address on a napkin.

  When she hung up the phone, she said, “I was right. They haven’t moved. I mean, all those years, and they’re still in that run-down house. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard anything so depressing.” She folded the napkin neatly and stood. “Think I’ll grab a burger to go. You want something?”

  I shook my head. How could I eat with all this uncertainty?

  In the car, Mom plugged the address into her cell phone and passed the phone over to me so I could navigate while she took quick bites of her burger.

  “I knew it was somewhere around here,” she said, executing the turns as I called them out.

  “We’re not going to call first?” I asked.

  “We’ve been calling,” Mom pointed out. “It’s not like he’s dying to return our calls.”

  “Not Dad,” I protested. “I think that we should call them. Grandpa and Grandma, I mean.”

  She crumpled the wrapper from her burger and said, “Don’t do that. Don’t call them Grandpa and Grandma. They aren’t your real grandparents.”

  “That’s right, they’re my fake grandparents.”

  “Olivia. Look, tomorrow or whenever this is all over, you can ask me questions or yell at me, or whatever you want. Tonight, let’s just get to your dad and make sure everything’s okay.”

  “That’s why I thought we should call. To make sure everything’s okay.”

  Mom slowed for a turn. According to the directions on her phone, we were 1.3 miles from our destination. “I’m not hoping for a friendly chat.”

  My heart was hammering around in my chest cavity as Mom made a final left turn. We were on a residential street, with houses close together on small lots and cars parked along the curb on both sides of the street. “This place has really changed,” Mom mused, straining to see in the dark.

  “Changed good or changed bad?”

  “Oh, changed for the good. It used to be a lot of falling-down houses and chain-link fences.”

  There were still a few of those around, I noted, but the cars parked in driveways were decent-looking minivans that could fit a whole soccer troop in their backseats, next to the occasional sporty hybrid. Mom was scanning for the house number on one side of the street, but I was craning my neck for a glimpse of our teal-green Explorer, without any luck.

  “There it is!” Mom pointed to a house that was basically falling in on itself. She slowed directly in front of it, and since no one was behind us, we stopped to stare. A bare bulb over the porch illuminated, but barely, a rusty screen door, sagging porch steps, a concrete walkway from the curb that was so cracked and uneven it was an invitation for a stubbed toe, or worse. A lone shutter hung from a small window, and I wondered if its mate had fallen into the shrubs below, where it was even now rotting away into nothing.

  I fought back a lump of vomit that was lurking at the back of my throat. Someone I knew—my father—had lived in this house? Suddenly, this all seemed like a very bad idea, another wrong turn on this crazy road trip. If I clicked my heels together three times, would I end up back where we’d started? Dad wasn’t here. Maybe we’d read this whole situation wrong, and Dad hadn’t been here and wasn’t going to be here, and yet, we were here. Unannounced, uninvited, unexplained, about to barge in to the most unwelcoming house I could have imagined.

  “Let’s go,” I whispered frantically, and Mom, misunderstanding, said, “Geez, Liv. We can’t just leave the car in the middle of the street. Let me find a place to park.”

  We had to drive for a few blocks before we could find a spot that could accommodate a Volvo station wagon, and then we hiked back down the street, with Mom urging me forward. How was she so fearless? If Dad really was in their house with a gun—even if it was unloaded—I was more and more convinced with each step that it wasn’t the place for me. But Mom was determined, clutching her purse strap with one hand and me with the other. Soon we were back in front of the broken-down house, standing on the cracked concrete at the curb.

  “I don’t think anyone’s home,” I said, trying not to whimper. Right then my mind was flooded with about a billion things I wanted to write in my Fear Journal, like dark spaces and roofs caving in, not to mention the sudden memory of my ninth grade English teacher reading from The Fall of the House of Usher.

  “There’s a light on inside,” Mom pointed out.

  “But it’s late. They’re probably asleep. Maybe we should come back in the morning.” Or never.

  “This will be the first time I’ve interrupted their lives in almost thirty years,” Mom said. “I guess they’ll just have to live with that.” She led the way up the walkway, paused at the scr
een door hanging slightly open and reached around to rap, hard, on the front door.

  Nothing. I felt relief wash over me. In maybe twenty minutes we could be at a decent hotel, tucked into clean white sheets, watching House Hunters. We would call Dad again, and I would leave a longer message repeating how sorry I was for saying that I hated him, and maybe telling him a joke or two so he would know everything was okay. Or I would just say “Love” and wait for him to call back with “Elephantine.”

  Mom knocked again, harder.

  There were footsteps inside the house.

  “I’m going to throw up,” I whimpered, but there was no time. The door swung inward, and the woman standing there, looking lumpy in a few layers of cardigans, smiled as if she were used to strangers appearing on her doorstep on a rainy night.

  “Hello, Kathleen,” my grandmother said. “And this must be your daughter.”

  curtis

  By the time I delivered my mother back to her house, it was after eight o’clock. I was exhausted, but too pumped full of adrenaline to stop now. I couldn’t imagine stopping at a hotel room, pacing anxiously within four walls. No, sitting in a hotel room wasn’t going to cut it. I couldn’t stop—I needed to keep going, to drive as fast as the Explorer would take me, straight through the night, even if I arrived in Oberlin hours before daylight.

  I’d forgotten how long it took to get around Chicago. More than once traffic came to a complete stop, and I banged my fists against the steering wheel in frustration. I was driving toward Robert Saenz and away from my father at the same time. I was fulfilling my childhood fantasy, the one where I packed my troubles in an old backpack with a broken zipper and never, never came home again. I’d managed to make that escape as an eighteen-year-old and stay away for more than half of my life. My father was dying, and that should have made me happy. How many times, in how many ways, had I imagined the moment? Take your pick: falling off a bar stool and hitting his head. Picking a fight with the wrong person, someone who could actually fight back. Drinking himself to death, plain and simple. I had prayed for acts of God, like tornados or lightning strikes. I would have been happy with a beam falling at a construction site, and my father being squashed like a little bug beneath its weight. Ironically enough, I’d prayed for a car accident, something quick and simple and final. If the world had any fairness at all, it would have been my father and not my son who was killed by Robert Saenz, by the truck clipping the sign, and the sign bearing down upon him.

  But the world wasn’t fair. Daniel was long dead, and my father was still all too much alive, living out his last few days—hours?—with a small staff catering to his needs, with my mother worrying over the position of his bed pillows. My father had the luxury of making final pronouncements, of handing down advice and apology, of saying goodbye. Daniel, who deserved that and more, had never had a chance.

  You can do right by him.

  What the hell did he know? What right did he have?

  I released my hold on the steering wheel, suddenly aware that I was gripping it with a painful intensity. Relax, I ordered myself. The traffic thinned, Chicago was finally behind me, and I still had another five hours to go.

  It was small consolation that there would be few people on the road other than the tired, possibly drugged truckers pushing against time to make it to their destination for the night. Robert Saenz had been one of these men on his way home that night, too tired and doped up to know that he’d killed someone.

  I kept myself busy by flipping through stations, catching a song or two before the music buzzed into static. In Sacramento, our house was cluttered with CDs. Daniel’s room held hundreds, and I’d burned myself copies over the years, labeling them with a Sharpie. Why hadn’t I brought more of them with me? God knew there was room.

  I got gas near Gary, Indiana, and gave in to my need for caffeine—although it meant I would be stopping more often en route. The girl at the register, her hair a series of gelled spikes, was absorbed in a magazine and jumped, startled, as I entered.

  “Is it pretty cold out there?” she asked, taking the two dollars I slid across the counter.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted, and she glanced at me quickly, then down to the cash register, fingering my change.

  Was it cold? Hot? Wet? Dry? Did it matter? In my mind I was miles away, already lacing my way through Oberlin, past the conservatories and the brick buildings on campus, past front porches and picket fences. I was only dimly aware of what was actually happening around me.

  “Okay, then, you have a good night,” the girl said, depositing the change in my open palm. I fingered it idly, as if I’d lost the ability to count, to name things.

  “You have a good night, too,” I mumbled.

  Outside, the sky was made even darker by the absence of stars, obscured by a low gray haze of cloud cover. Even the stars have gone, I thought, senselessly—and realized I was barely hanging on to sanity. I wasn’t the father of Daniel and Olivia anymore. I was no longer Mr. K, the goofy teacher who posed for his yearbook photo in a white lab coat, holding a beaker of green liquid. I wasn’t the young man who had fallen in love with Kathleen. I was now a desperate man, or his shadow. Suddenly I remembered a hand-painted sign that Kathleen’s father had hung in his garage: When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on. I was at the end of the rope. I had tied a knot. I only had to hang on a little longer.

  Every few miles—and I knew, because I was watching for the reflective mile markers with an almost religious fervor—I found myself thinking about Olivia, or about Kathleen, or about Olivia and Kathleen, the two of them finding my note. Olivia would be hurt and furious, although maybe not surprised. What had Kathleen known, what had she suspected? Only last night we’d made love as if it would be the last time, as if the world had ended and we were the only people left. Kathleen, Olivia—I had to force them out of my brain, like physically slamming a door. Think about Robert Saenz, I reminded myself. I remembered his mug shot—the disheveled hair, the dead eyes, the slight upward tilt of his chin: What the fuck are you going to do about it? Remember how he killed Daniel and drove away.

  If I could, I’d get a punch in first. I don’t think I’d ever thrown a punch in my life, although I’d been on the receiving end often enough as a kid. But I needed my fist to land squarely on Robert Saenz’s upraised chin.

  “That’s for Daniel,” I imagined myself saying as Saenz fell backward, a twin to my childhood fantasy—my father falling backward, felled by my powerful blow.

  Funnily enough, it was Dad’s voice that kept popping into my head: Do right by him.

  Yes, but I’ll do right by you, too, Dad.

  Kill one, let the other die.

  Indiana passed in a dark blur of asphalt and semis and road signs. I stopped once for coffee, stopped twice to piss against fences that seemed to border nothing. When I passed the giant sign welcoming me to Ohio, it felt as if a bell should have sounded, one loud enough to be heard by the whole world. I sat up straighter, drove faster, resented when I had to stop again for gas. A sprinkling of rain fell, spattering the windshield. I finally knew the answer to the cashier’s question back in Gary—it was cold outside and growing colder. Here and there the ditches were dotted with the crusty, stubborn remains of snow heaps that hadn’t received the message about spring.

  I took the exit for state route 58 toward Amherst/Oberlin, forcing myself to keep to the speed limit; that was all I needed, a speeding ticket this close to my destination. I could imagine the conversation with the officer. What’s a guy from California doing out here after midnight? You have business in town, buddy?

  I had moved beyond tired to a strange place where adrenaline kicked in, defying normal human powers. I’d heard stories of men who lifted cars off of trapped victims, who scaled impossibly high fences to escape a charging animal. I could feel a pulse thrumming in m
y fingertips, my neck, my thighs. Was he asleep already, passed out, dreaming his last dream?

  I tapped the gas and eased up, tapped and eased, tapped and eased.

  Soon, it would all be over.

  olivia

  Stepping into that house was like stepping into a television set from the 1970s, complete with wallpaper and shag carpeting and the widespread use of brown. It was hard to pin down the exact smell that assaulted my nostrils as we walked through a dark hallway—not pets exactly, not cigarettes only. The walls had a dingy, yellowish quality; if I bumped my shoulder against any wall, I might come away smudged. As we followed my grandmother—my grandmother!—through the house, it occurred to me that this was what life would smell like if nothing was ever washed and if no window was ever opened to let in a bit of fresh air.

  “Would you like something to drink?” my grandmother asked as we came into the den.

  Mom and I glanced around, taking in the bare walls, the ancient television console, a sagging plaid couch.

  “No—thank you, though. I’m so sorry to barge in on you like this, and so late at night.” Mom’s smile was uncertain. Her eyes kept flitting around to the corners of the room, as if worried that something evil was lurking in a dark recess.

  My grandmother settled her cushiony weight onto the couch, which sighed in mild protest. Mom was right, I realized—it was hard for my mind to form the phrase my grandmother, let alone the word Grandma. But what else could I call her—Mrs. Kaufman? If I’d passed her on the street, I wouldn’t have thought she was any relation of mine. Her face was broad, her features somewhat hidden by folds of extra skin and a thinning perm that framed her face like dandelion fluff. She stared at me vacantly. If I didn’t know better—and I didn’t—I would say my grandmother was pleasantly stoned.