The Fragile World

by Paula Treick DeBoard

  She would be another one, I thought. She would see my mug shot in the paper and ask her husband, “Wasn’t that the man who was driving so strangely? Weren’t those California plates?”

  I took the first right turn I could, then swung around in a wide arc and retraced the route to Oberlin. Jerry Saenz had seen me, but he wouldn’t understand the significance until later. The encounter would mean nothing to him now, would be only a tiny odd blip in an otherwise normal day.

  I was back on track. Robert Saenz would be alone now, waking up in his room above the garage. I said his name, like a chant, all the way back to town.

  olivia

  As we drove, the sun came out. Most of the clouds from yesterday were gone, and the day was more beautiful than a day had any right to be. Maybe even that was some kind of omen—a beautiful day for the last day of life as we knew it.

  “So, how are we going to find Dad, if we don’t know where to look?”

  Mom said, “Oberlin’s tiny, Liv. I mean, tiny. If he’s there, we’re going to find him. And as soon as businesses are open, I’m calling the D.A. and the police department. They’ll know for sure what’s going on with Robert Saenz, if he’s been paroled, or what.”

  I had a vision of us stopping pedestrians in Oberlin and asking if they had seen a white man, six-one, late forties, probably two hundred pounds after all the junk food we’d eaten on the trip. But most of the men I’d seen in the Midwest fit this description, at least roughly.

  Out the window was farmland, white houses and big red barns, trailers cropping up here and there out of nowhere, the occasional cow or horse behind a barbed wire fence. It was all so peaceful and so wrong. If a genie appeared right now with the promise of three wishes, I would ask to go back in time. Not just to the day that Dad went up on the cafeteria roof, but to the night when Daniel died. I’d insert myself in the scene, intervene in some way—which was just the sort of thing that never worked out in time travel movies. It was like stepping on a butterfly in the past; the reverberations could be huge. Maybe I’d even find myself in a different sort of crazy situation, a new nightmare for which I was solely responsible.

  Besides, not everything that happened after Daniel died had been bad. For some reason, I remembered Dad and me eating our TV dinners in front of old reruns. Dad could do a voice that was a dead ringer for Mr. Ed’s: I wish that guy would just leave me alone. It’s not natural for a man to be so attached to a horse. If I could keep some of those moments and still have Daniel alive and Mom with us, I’d climb into a time machine in a second.

  We both jumped when we saw the first sign for Oberlin, and Mom gave the gas pedal another steady push. When we met up with Dad—if we met up with Dad—I would have all kinds of questions for him. But I had to take advantage of this moment with Mom. I pinched my eyes shut, as if I were making a wish, and said, “Tell me about your road trip with Dad, the one you took to California.”

  Mom looked startled. “Where did that come from?”

  “I just want to know. Before we get there, and before it’s too late and I never have a chance again.”

  Mom considered this. I was grateful that she didn’t say Of course you’ll have another chance to ask me anything you want! For once, we were on even footing. “But what’s there to say?”

  “Nope, that’s not good enough. Dad tried to buy me off with that.”

  “It was just so long ago. I can’t imagine it’s interesting. Are you sure you want to hear this?”

  “Mom, come on.”

  “Well, okay.” She paused for a few seconds, probably calling it all back. “We had our trunk loaded with all this junk from college, and then all these wedding gifts we’d unpacked from their boxes to make more room, and we’d rolled the breakable things in our clothes. It was pretty tricky to unpack when we got to Sacramento, because when we picked up a flannel shirt, a drinking glass would come rolling out of it.” She smiled a little. “See? I tried to warn you, not interesting.”

  “No, it is. It’s fascinating. Keep going.”

  Mom sighed. “We didn’t have much money, so we only stayed twice in hotel rooms, and we spent the other night in the car. That was somewhere in Utah outside Salt Lake City, and your father woke up with a massive crick in his neck, so we stopped and bought a bag of frozen corn for him to hold against his neck, and then we threw away the corn at a rest stop somewhere in Nevada.” She was smiling faintly. “I haven’t thought about that in a long time.”

  “And you were happy,” I said.

  “And we were happy,” she confirmed. “I don’t think I’d ever been so happy.”

  “And then Daniel was born,” I prompted, continuing the story.

  “Well...I mean, years later. Five years, almost exactly.”

  “And you were happy,” I said again.

  Mom’s smile was broader now, her face relaxing, although her hands were still clenched on the steering wheel. “We were so happy. I wish you could have known your brother then, Liv. He was such a serious little kid. The second he could speak, he had a million questions about everything, and he was always very skeptical about our answers. Sometimes I heard him asking your father the same things he’d just asked me, like he was checking to make sure we had our stories straight. This was before he started piano, of course—after that, he had a one-track mind.”

  “And then you moved,” I prompted.

  “Then we bought that crazy old little house. I fell in love with it the second I saw it, but I really had to work on your father to convince him. Where I saw potential, he saw serious amounts of hard work.” She had a faraway look, as if she were chasing the memory.

  “And then you had me.”

  “And then we had you.”

  “And you were happy?”

  “Of course!”

  I looked out the window.

  Mom glanced at me. “Why did you say it like that? Was there any question we were happy?”

  Because after Daniel, you didn’t need me. Because I’ve never heard anyone say a single bad thing about Daniel, ever, and it stands to reason that there’s no point in improving on perfection. I bit my lip, holding this back. Because when Daniel died, I should have somehow taken his place and become the wonderful daughter to replace the wonderful son—and I didn’t. I became the messed-up kid who was afraid of her own shadow and who had failed P.E., twice.

  “Of course we were happy,” Mom repeated, stung. “You had a very happy childhood.”

  “I don’t remember,” I whispered, which was mostly true. It was as if the world of after, with all its awfulness and emptiness, had somehow obliterated the good of before.

  “Well, I do. By the time you came along, Daniel was already in school, so you and I were home a lot during the day. That’s before I had my little studio, so sometimes I propped you up in your car seat in the garage, and you watched me paint things.”

  “And inhaled the fumes...” I murmured.

  “You remember!” Mom looked less frazzled than she had before, her face open and happy. “When you were a little older, we’d finger-paint out there. Once for your dad’s birthday, we made him a giant card on a canvas tarp that had to be twelve-by-twelve. You stamped hundreds of wet handprints all over it, and it was so runny with paint that it took days to dry.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “It’s probably still out there, all rolled up in a corner. It turned out not to be very practical for long-term display.”

  “What else did we do?”

  “Well, you used to come with me to estate sales way out in the boonies, all over northern California. We’d just pop in some music and sing along until we got there. This is when I discovered that you loved Peter, Paul and Mary.”

  I laughed now, grudgingly. “Did I have a choice?”

  Mom sang, slightly off-key,
“‘Puff the magic dragon, lived by the sea...’”

  I picked up the next line, giggling. “‘...and frolicked in the autumn mist...’”

  “‘In a land called Honah Lee,’” Mom finished.

  “I can’t believe you let me sing such druggie songs when I was just a little kid.”

  “Oh, please. Druggie songs. I still maintain that it was a song about a magical dragon in a kingdom by the sea.” She continued humming a verse or two, and I tried to figure out if I actually remembered these trips, or if I only did because Mom was re-creating them for me.

  “What about Dad?” I asked.

  “What about him?” My question had startled her.

  “Back then, was Dad happy, too?”

  “Of course he was. We had this perfect little family, like we’d always wanted. You should have seen how proud he was of you, how much he loved having a daughter. I used to worry that you weren’t ever going to learn to walk, since he insisted on carrying you everywhere, hoisting you onto his shoulders or swinging you so that your feet didn’t even touch the ground.”

  I didn’t remember him carrying me, but I remember sitting on his lap in front of the TV, the evening news on low. He always smelled vaguely of chalk dust and the chemicals used in the science labs. At some point I had become too old for sitting on his lap, and too old to want that, either. At some point I’d pulled away from his kisses and rolled my eyes when he said, “I love you.”

  “But I wasn’t good enough.” I couldn’t stop myself from saying it.

  “What are you talking about?”

  It felt as if I had something stuck in my throat, or maybe my throat was closing all on its own, like the onset of anaphylactic shock, apropos of nothing. I’d learned about that years ago and dutifully recorded it in my Fear Journal. I forced the words out: “If I were enough, then we wouldn’t be here.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I took a deep breath. “If I were enough, we wouldn’t be here right now. Dad wouldn’t be in Oberlin, living out some stupid-ass revenge plot. If I were enough, you two would have stayed together for my sake. If I were enough, the world wouldn’t have stopped the second Daniel died. If I were enough...” I couldn’t finish, I was crying so hard.

  “No,” Mom said, crying, too. “No, no, no...”

  She wanted to pull to the side of the road, but I wouldn’t let her. I’d been following the little red dot on my GPS that showed our car moving closer and closer to our destination. It was like watching a horror movie, and not any one horror movie in particular, but all horror movies, where you knew something bad was going to happen, but you just couldn’t look away.

  And then the battery in my phone died.

  We counted off the miles using Mom’s odometer, our dread mounting: eighteen miles. Sixteen.

  Mom said, “He probably just wants to scare him.”

  And I said, “Right!” because it was the only thing to say.

  The man who bought a massive container of chicken noodle soup from Costco when I was sick, and then brought a bowl to my bedside—he wouldn’t kill another person. The man who had given me all those piggyback rides—he wasn’t a killer. The man who had been Mr. K, who had stayed after school almost every day to help his students understand their homework—he couldn’t hurt anyone.

  Fourteen miles, eleven. I needed to throw up. No, I needed to use the bathroom again. No, I needed to call Sam, to call anyone, to get some advice.

  I looked out the window at the neat Midwest grids of land—a farmhouse here, a barn there, a truck traveling along a frontage road there. It was all so isolated. You could scream here, and no one in the world would hear it. You could fire a gun, and—

  “Why are you slowing down?” I gasped. “Go faster!”

  “This is our exit,” Mom said, pointing to a sign I’d missed. “Didn’t you say Highway 58?”

  I was about to burst out of my skin, like a piece of overripe fruit.

  And then we saw the sign: Oberlin Welcomes You.

  curtis

  Suddenly, I knew exactly what I was going to do.

  There was an unsettling disconnect between my mind and my body; my body kept moving forward as if preprogrammed, and my mind was watching the whole thing from a distance, where it could safely call the shots.

  I sped through the streets. It was past seven now; my detour through the Ohio countryside and back had cost me precious time. The day had fully arrived, ushered in with a golden sunlight that glinted off the asphalt.

  I said it, hummed it, sang the three syllables: Rob-ert Saenz.

  The Explorer fishtailed for a wild moment as I took a hard turn onto Morgan. It didn’t matter who saw me, what anyone said or thought. Saenz was in my sights, and everything else had disappeared. For all I knew, the rest of the world had fallen into a sinkhole, and this little plot of land was the only thing left standing.

  This time I didn’t circle the block and park at a distance, or slow down to stare out the window and consider my options. Instead, I swung the Explorer into the driveway and jerked to a stop in the space that had recently been vacated by Jerry Saenz in the Saenz & Co truck. I waited a moment, watching. There was no movement inside the house, no face peering at me from behind a curtain. I fixed my eyes on the apartment above the garage. He was there, hungover, still in bed—I was sure. I heard the words in my head, as if I’d actually spoken them: Do you know who I am? Does the name Daniel Kaufman ring any bells?

  I stepped out of the car, the Colt tucked into my waistband. Maybe even the sight of it would give Robert Saenz a massive coronary. That was fine, too. It was when, not if. It was when, not how.

  My shoes crunched against the gravel where the driveway ended and a stone pathway began. The area around the bottom of the steps was filthy with cigarette butts, smoked to nubs. Add this to Robert Saenz’s list of crimes—littering, abuse of the environment. The stairs leading along the side of the garage up to the unit seemed to be an afterthought and not entirely up to code. Saenz & Co. was in the hauling business, not in construction. The entire staircase creaked under my weight, and the railing was less than stable. Left alone, Robert Saenz might just take a header down these stairs one night, without any help from me—but I wasn’t going to wait for that.

  The time to consider my actions had been before. Minutes before, driving back into town. An hour before, loading a single bullet in the parking lot of the truck stop. Two days ago, when I was in Omaha with Kathleen and Olivia, when I could have taken one last stab at making things right. Almost a month before, when I’d received the letter, and things had started to spiral out of control. Years ago, when I’d made the decision—consciously? unconsciously?—that what had happened to Daniel was going to define my life.

  Now there was nothing to do but raise my fist and pound on the door, a sound so loud against the crisp quiet of the morning that it might have been a gunshot itself. I was about to try the handle, then force myself in if needed, shoulder to the door, when the doorknob turned, and the door opened inward.

  Robert Saenz, wearing a stained white T-shirt and a pair of gray sweats, was standing in front of me. He ran a hand over his face roughly, as if he were rubbing himself awake. It was the same face I’d seen in the Oberlin newspaper, the same face on the booking jacket that the police officer had pushed across the conference table at me. It was hard to see him in real life and not remember that mug shot—his face bloated and large in the foreground, a height chart climbing the wall behind him. Now he was older, hair shorter and graying around the temples, his eyes bloodshot. His stomach was a hard ledge beneath his T-shirt.

  I said his name—not a question, just a recitation of his name out loud as I’d been reciting it inwardly.

  What surprised me more than anything was the expression on his face. This man had killed
two people, I had to remind myself. He had done time in prison—scenes from an episode of Lock-Up! flashed in my mind—but he didn’t look hard-bitten or criminalized. He didn’t reach out and push me down the stairs—which he could have done without much difficulty—or slam the door in my face or reach out to throttle me with his bare hands. Instead, he looked resigned. He looked horribly tired.

  I said, “You don’t know me, but I know you. I’ve been waiting for this moment.”

  He took a step backward and raised a hand, chest-high, as if to stop me. “Okay. Now hold on.”

  “Daniel Kaufman was my son,” I said, my voice breaking on his name.

  Saenz ran a tongue over cracked lips, his dead eyes sparking with life. “What do you want from me?”

  All the language had been sucked out of my brain. Where words had been, carefully rehearsed, was only a raw jumble of feeling. My hand went to my waistband, to the Colt, and his eyes tracked my movement.

  “I want you to say his name.”

  “Look, I don’t know—”

  “His name was Daniel Owen Kaufman.”

  “Okay. So I’ll say his name, and then you’ll leave?”

  This was the moment—my one shot. I tugged at my sweatshirt, bringing the Colt into view. “I’m here to make things right,” I said.

  Robert Saenz’s eyes locked on the handle of the gun, but then his gaze shifted ever so subtly to something over my shoulder.

  Behind me, at the foot of the rickety stairs, someone said, “Uncle Bobby? What’s going on?”

  olivia

  We sped through Oberlin, craning our necks out open windows, scanning the horizon frantically for a green Ford Explorer with California plates, for any sign of Dad. We passed brick buildings, open green spaces with towering pieces of public art and signs for pizza and twenty-four-hour Laundromats.

  Daniel lived here, I reminded myself. As much as I fought it, I couldn’t stop the next thought: Daniel died here.