“You look like your father,” she said, and I realized that while I was scrutinizing her, she’d been scrutinizing me, too. I was worried that I was making a bad impression for a first-meeting-of-the-grandmother. Never in my life had I felt so out of place for wearing all black. In this house, the land that time forgot, there was no such thing as a pair of skinny jeans, and combat boots were to be worn only in actual combat.
“I do?” I blurted. I’d honestly never been told this. It was Daniel who looked more like Dad, or really, like a blend of Mom and Dad, if you took their very best qualities and melded them together. Once Daniel had told me that I fell off a truck at the farmer’s market and had been rescued by my well-meaning “parents.” He’d apologized for it later, but when I looked at myself next to the rest of my family, it had made a sort of sense.
My grandmother nodded and continued, “Yes, when he was a boy.”
Oh. This was either a strange compliment or an outright insult. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, not even something witty or ironic or at least marginally funny, so I settled for, “I’m Olivia.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Olivia.” Her smile was empty, the action of a robot programmed to give automatic responses.
Mom shot me a look that said, Shut up and let me do the talking. She cut right to the point. “We’re looking for Curtis.”
“Well, you just missed him. He left a few hours ago.”
“He was here?” I blurted again, like the kid in class who wasn’t paying attention and needed everything repeated. Yes, I was that kid. But I had to hand it to Mom. I’d figured we were on the wild-goose chase to end all wild-goose chases, and she’d been right all along. It turned out I did have a secret set of grandparents, and it turned out that my father had indeed come to visit them.
“Yes.” For the first time, a real emotion—surprise, puzzlement—passed across my grandmother’s face. “He was here earlier, to bring me to the hospital.”
“To bring you to the...?”
Mom looked at me again, and I let the rest of my question drift away, although this took a tremendous effort on my part.
“Well, I thought you would know, because I sent the letter. My husband has been in the hospital, and Curtis took me to see him.”
Mom absorbed this information silently, although it must have made about zero sense to her, too. What letter? What was he in the hospital for?
“I did think it was strange that he came alone,” my grandmother said. It sounded like an insult to me, but Mom let it pass.
“We’re supposed to meet up with him,” Mom explained. “But somewhere along the way, our plans got mixed up. Did he say he was staying in town tonight?”
My grandmother looked back and forth between the two of us, her gaze suddenly more focused. I tried to keep my face as neutral as possible, although I felt like screaming. It was bad that Dad had dumped me in Omaha, and it was bad that he had come here, but it was much, much worse that he hadn’t stayed here. There was a long pause while my grandmother considered us, as if we might not be family at all, but some kind of secret agents or saboteurs who were out to destroy her son.
Mom said, “Please, Lorene,” her voice tender, as if she were talking to a small child.
Lorene Kaufman, I repeated to myself, trying to give the words meaning. My grandmother.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. “He said he had to go, and he hugged me real tight.”
Mom swallowed. “But he didn’t say anything in particular...?”
It looked like there was nothing else for us to learn, and Lorene Kaufman was ready to usher us back into the Chicago night, but still we waited. I glanced at a clock on the wall, the hands marking time behind a plate of cracked glass. Finally my grandmother said, as if she were just remembering, “He said there was something he had to do.”
“Something he had to do,” Mom echoed.
My grandmother nodded and pushed herself to a standing position, a hand on the armrest of the couch for support. There was no mistaking the message: We’re done here.
curtis
The closer I got, the more I itched to pull over, take the Colt out of the spare wheel well, load it with the cartridges I’d taped under the driver’s seat and ride with the gun on the seat next to me, where I could see it, where it would keep being real. It wouldn’t be long now.
Oberlin was still the same sleepy town with the blinking traffic lights, the towering trees with limbs that arched over the road. On my previous visits it had been snowing, and now a light, stinging rain hit with little pings against the windshield. Maybe the weather was always bad in Oberlin, like a dark cloud hovered directly over its city limits. The streets were quiet, the town hunkered down for the night.
On my phone, I’d looked up the address of Jerry Saenz, Robert’s brother, and used satellite imaging to zoom in on 1804 Morgan Street—a white house with turquoise shutters, a gravel driveway and a detached garage. Jerry had taken in his brother after the incident in North Carolina; he’d even assigned him a route for his trucking company. I was banking on the fact that Jerry had taken him in again, that Robert Saenz was right now sleeping under his roof. If not, I’d keep going until I found him.
The possibility that he could be so close—only a few blocks from where he’d killed Daniel—sickened me. He’d killed my son and gone to prison, and in the logic of the justice system, he got to go right back to where he’d come from, as if he were simply completing a loop, closing a circle.
Morgan Street was something people in Sacramento couldn’t imagine—no sidewalks, quarter-acre front lawns, no fences clearly delineating the neighbor’s space from your own. If you had a kid, this would be the place to throw a ball after dinner, with a few other kids from the block joining you, baseball gloves at the ready. It would be criminal, I decided, to live here and not throw a ball with your kid on summer evenings. I would have done this with Daniel every single night if I could have torn him away from the piano. I noted the mailboxes along the road—some of them cutesy, with hand-painted vines snaking up the posts, and little flowers and butterflies and frogs painted on the mailboxes themselves. Happiness lives here! they screamed. I read the names as my headlights illuminated them: The Severins. The Omgards. I slowed in the 1800 block, although I had no intention of stopping yet.
There was nothing fancy about 1804 Morgan Street, which had grass from curb to porch, rather than expensive concrete or stone work. A commercial flatbed truck was parked in the driveway, Saenz & Co. Short Haul printed on its side in block letters. I felt a crushing hate, like a weight on my chest. Wouldn’t I be doing the world a public service if I prevented Robert Saenz from ever, ever getting behind the wheel again? Someone else should have done this years ago—his brother, a police officer, the district attorney, a relative of the woman who died in North Carolina. Jail time didn’t work—and who was there to monitor him, constantly, from getting behind the wheel? No one had stopped him from taking the corner too fast and clipping the speed limit sign that killed Daniel; I was the only one who would stop him from doing it again.
I looped into the countryside and back into town, slowing again as I passed 1804. The house itself was dark, except for a single light on the porch. I took a quick inventory: the same white siding that used to be sold on Sears infomercials; dark trim around the windows; an empty planter box; those bright, out-of-place shutters; plastic chairs stacked seat-to-seat on the front porch, out of commission until summer arrived. I allowed myself to look at the apartment over the garage, my heartbeats reverberating like a snare drum.
Robert Saenz was up there—I knew it. Of course he was—would anyone plunk their two-time murdering parolee brother in the main house? Above the garage, he was out of earshot and eyesight.
At the end of Morgan Street, I turned left, heading back through town. There were few other cars on the
road, although I passed students walking closer to campus, their collars up, wearing the sort of knitted hats that my students in California had worn to be cool, rather than to protect against the cold.
I realized with a jolt that I had passed the spot. It was unmarked, a stretch of sidewalk along a road like any other, where people walked every day, not thinking that someone—that Daniel Owen Kaufman—had died there.
I was flooded with déjà vu; it was this moment—or close to it—that I’d envisioned from the roof of the cafeteria, looking over the campus where I’d spent the better part of twenty years. I’d seen myself in Oberlin, making things right, making things final.
At the same time, it was as if I was reviewing my life in a selective editing mode. The phone call in the middle of the night. Skip. Daniel’s body at the morgue—that pale scar on his abdomen. Skip. The box with his cremains, so insubstantial. Skip. The night I’d followed the stranger in the parking lot and ended up in the bar. Skip. Kathleen packing her clothes, leaving not even a single pilled sweater or flattened pair of slippers behind, her message clear.
Skip.
The gun in my hand, Robert Saenz dead on the floor.
olivia
“Where are we going?” I panted. The second my grandmother had closed the door behind us, Mom had taken off at a sprint for our car. For a moment I thought she might have been worried about parking her Volvo on a public street in a not-so-fantastic part of town, but even when the car was in view and clearly fine—stereo, hubcaps and windows all intact—she hadn’t slowed her pace.
“Hurry up!” she called over her shoulder.
I would have liked to point out to her that my combat boots were not exactly ideal running shoes, mainly since each boot weighed approximately five pounds, and running down the street in them was a little like trying to swim with a block of cement on each foot. Why hadn’t I ever considered this before? It would be absolutely impossible for me to swim in these boots. If one of my million water-related fears ever came true, I would sink like a stone.
Mom started the engine while I was still a half-block away, and the second I slid into my seat, she was already pulling away from the curb.
“Whoa,” I said, yanking my door shut. “Um, hello, I don’t even have my seat belt fastened yet.”
“All right, Liv. Get out your phone. I can get us back to the freeway, I think, but I want to make sure we’re taking the shortest possible route.”
I stared at her, not understanding. “Home, you mean?” Even as I asked it, I realized I had no idea what home I might be referring to, or what exactly we were going to do when we got there. Omaha or the long haul back to California?
“Not home,” Mom said grimly. Her jaw was set, her hands on the steering wheel at ten and two, and she was leaning forward, as if the weight of her body alone could propel each turn. The Volvo stuttered along, accelerating too hard one moment, braking too suddenly the next.
I stopped myself from blurting out something about being tired, and wanting to stop at a hotel so I could shower and brush my teeth and pee without worrying about the million contaminants on the seat of a gas station toilet. I was hungry and overwhelmed. In less than a day, my dad had left with only the crappiest of explanations, I had discovered living grandparents who were less than outstanding and now Mom was going to get us killed in the dark on our way to who-knew-where.
But there was something in Mom’s voice that made me shut out the whiny, self-absorbed Olivia and give her all my attention. I groped around in the dark for my cell phone. The red warning light was on; I had less than twenty percent battery life, but at least it was something. “Okay,” I said, trying to keep my voice level and calm, like an air controller with a lost pilot. “Where to?”
“Ohio,” Mom said automatically. “Oberlin, Ohio.”
Oberlin? My hands were shaking so hard, I could hardly navigate the screen on my phone.
Even though I had worn only black for as long as I could remember and had spent serious time chronicling the ways a person could die or be dismembered, I wasn’t at all interested in visiting the place where Daniel had died. The fact that my brother had died in Oberlin meant it wasn’t even in the top million places I wanted to visit.
I waited for Mom to explain it to me—why we were headed to Oberlin, why she thought Dad might go there. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she and Dad were both off their meds—swinging without warning to the manic side of the pendulum. Her eyes looked wild, dancing in her sockets as if she were tracking something on the road in front of us, rather than following the road itself, which was long and dark and increasingly lonely the farther we got from Chicago. The night opened before us, shrouded in an inky, ghostly black.
Finally I whispered, “I don’t feel so good.”
Mom’s eyes flashed at me. “What, like you’re going to throw up?”
It had felt more like passing out than throwing up, but once she said the words, throwing up seemed like a very real possibility. Everything inside me was being turned upside down and inside out—like some strange disease where my internal organs suddenly began leaking through my skin. I pressed one hand against my stomach and the other against my mouth.
Mom reached around her seat with one arm and located an empty Walmart bag. I held it a few inches from my face, even more nauseated by the smell of the plastic.
“What is Dad going to do in Oberlin?” I asked, my words escaping into the bag. The initial wormy feeling of nausea had passed, but it was way too soon to say I was out of those woods.
Mom shook her head back and forth several times, as if it was too awful to say, or she was trying to shake the thought right out of her head.
Still, I needed to hear her say it. “Mom? What’s Dad going to do? What’s going to happen in Oberlin?”
Mom hesitated, choosing her words carefully. “Olivia, will you promise not to take this the wrong way?”
Well, shit. Was Oberlin the home of some other long-lost relative, another person I may or may not want to know? I whimpered, “What?”
“I need you to shut up, okay? I need you to just shut up.”
So I did.
And we drove.
curtis
I left Oberlin, circling the countryside while I waited for daybreak. A few miles out of town, I followed signs to a twenty-four-hour truck stop. The face in the bathroom mirror looked familiar, like I was seeing a distant cousin, someone from my childhood. I forced down a fried egg sandwich and a cup of coffee, all the while giving myself these little internal pep talks, my mind a coach on the sidelines, calling plays to my body. Sure you’re tired, but you can’t stop now! You’ve got the target in sight!
There were two other cars in the parking lot when I emerged, and I figured they belonged to the waitress and the cook, the only other humans around. Still, I kept an eye out as I popped the trunk of the Explorer and fished around until I located the Colt in its wad of T-shirts. From my suitcase, I removed the little pouch, the bag where I’d stowed the press clippings about Daniel’s recitals, his death and his killer. Since there was time to kill—a joke, Curtis, a fucking hysterical joke!—I spread out the clippings one by one on the passenger seat and studied them in the dim glow from a nearby light pole.
All the before pictures, where Daniel was alive and well, smacked of happiness. I couldn’t feel that anymore, though. Now each smile was a sting, a slap in the face. The last one had been taken on Daniel’s summer home from college, when he’d been teeming with confidence, eager to tell us everything he’d learned. Kathleen had snapped the picture when he was playing the piano, a new piece, something he’d composed. His eyes were half-closed, dreamy. He would always be that way now—twenty, dreamlike, an angel.
I hoped he couldn’t see what I was about to do, but still I wanted him to know I’d done it.
It w
as strange how a man like me, who was not powerful at all, and certainly not powerful enough to keep my son from dying, could feel formidable with a gun in his hand. That was the attraction of a gun, the allure. If the waitress from the truck stop came outside at that moment and saw me with the Colt, she would only need a glance—not even a shot fired—to regard me in a way she hadn’t before. She would fear me.
Some men wanted this kind of respect, I figured. I just wanted to kill Robert Saenz, that son of a bitch.
In order to reach the bullets, I had to bend over awkwardly, my head butting against the steering wheel. I was proud of myself for thinking of this hiding place, almost a MacGyver move, a place where Olivia would never have looked. I seized a corner of the duct tape between my thumb and forefinger and gave it a little yank—too hard, apparently, because the bullets popped free and hit the floorboard, scattering. Damn. I forced the seat back, giving myself enough room to bend forward, my hand feeling along the dark floorboard. I lifted one of the cartridges, then snapped on the overhead light and bent down for a closer look.
I held the bullet to the light, understanding coming slowly, thickly, like breaking through a dense northern California fog.
What I held in my hand wasn’t a bullet at all.
It was a battery.
olivia
I kept quiet for a long time, watching the road before us. Mom was thinking, her lips set in a flat, grim line. I could have kept pestering her out of pure selfishness, just to have her say something, even if it wasn’t true at all.
I don’t know how long we stayed that way, alternating between long stretches of darkness and brief bursts of civilization. Right then I would have preferred to be on the scariest roller coaster in the world, with the biggest drop, the fastest turns, than where we actually were.
The road had almost lulled me to sleep when Mom said, “He never accepted that it was an accident. He just couldn’t let it alone. He was obsessed with it—with that guy.”
The Fragile World Page 30