The Fragile World

by Paula Treick DeBoard

  And then: I can’t let Dad die here, too.

  “He’s not here. We’re never going to find him,” I moaned.

  “We haven’t been up and down every street yet.”

  “Maybe he’s not even here, because maybe Robert Saenz isn’t even here.”

  Mom brushed this aside. It was still too early to contact anyone on the phone, to learn anything about a release from prison, terms of parole. “Plan B,” she said, pulling into a gas station. Before I could protest, she left me in the car, the engine running. Madness—it was all madness. Maybe I could slide across the center console, plunk myself in the driver’s seat and leave my parents and all this lunacy behind. Angling my neck out the window, I saw Mom inside the store, gesturing with one hand to the clerk behind the counter.

  A few seconds later, she was back, clutching a scrap of paper with a few crudely drawn lines. “His brother lives here in town.” She tossed the map into my lap, and I picked it up, trying to determine the orientation.

  “You don’t need the map,” Mom said. “Just look for Morgan Street.”

  curtis

  “Uncle Bobby?” the voice repeated uncertainly.

  I turned slowly, the gun still tucked in my waistband. The voice belonged to a girl in jeans and sneakers and an oversize Oberlin High School sweatshirt that dwarfed her body. She had one foot on the first step, one hand on the unsteady railing. She was young—fifteen? Sixteen? Olivia’s age. I forced the thought away.

  “Tell her everything’s okay,” I ordered, my voice low.

  “Everything’s okay, Katie,” Robert Saenz called. “Why don’t you go back inside?” He was cool, much cooler than I would have been if the roles were reversed, if it were Olivia standing at the foot of the stairs.

  “Who are you?” Katie asked, not moving. “Do we know you?”

  I looked again at Robert, who called down, “Don’t worry, Katie. Everything’s okay. Don’t you need to leave for school soon?”

  She squinted up at us, assessing the situation. “I’m coming up there.”

  “Don’t come up here, Katie,” Robert said.

  “You don’t need to come up here,” I repeated. It was my Mr. K voice, coming from deep within me. It was the tone I used with my students—friendly but firm. “I’m just here to talk to your uncle.”

  “Then I’m going to talk to him, too,” she said, reminding me more and more of Olivia with each second. She took a few steps and stopped again, watching me. Closer, I could see that her hair was still wet from a morning shower, combed flat but with the ends beginning to curl up as they dried. The sunlight glinted off some metal in her mouth: braces, the colored bands alternating purple and blue.

  I couldn’t let this girl be involved. In all the thousands of times I’d played this scene in my mind, it hadn’t included anyone other than him and me.

  That was how it had to be now.

  I surprised Robert Saenz with a one-handed shove against his chest, and he took a staggering step back into the apartment. All I needed was to get him inside, the door locked behind us. There would be only a few minutes. Oberlin was a small town, after all. I remembered the police sergeant telling me that a paramedic from Lorain County had been on the scene of Daniel’s accident in less than three minutes.

  But then, two things happened.

  Katie, frozen on the step below, screamed.

  And in the driveway, a car screeched to a sudden stop. I only vaguely registered this out of the corner of my eye; Robert Saenz had regained his footing and was launching himself in my direction.

  “Say his name, Saenz,” I sputtered. “Say his name before you die.”

  But then a car door slammed, and someone yelled, “Dad! No!”

  olivia

  The Explorer was in the driveway, and Dad was standing at the top of a flight steps over a garage, his eyes wild.

  There was no time to be afraid. Even though I was shaking and bawling and breathing through my own snot, I pushed fear away and bolted out of the car.

  Mom was right behind me, her car door slamming. “Curtis! No! Get down here!”

  At the bottom of the steps a girl was screaming. She stepped back to let us pass, probably believing we had control over Dad, as if he was a psych patient on the lam and we had been charged with bringing him back.

  When I reached the middle of the stairs, I had a clearer view of Dad, who had stepped inside the apartment. The gun that Sam and I hadn’t been able to find was in his hands. It wasn’t a large thing, but somehow that made it even more terrifying. He held the gun out before him, aiming into the dark, gaping hole of the apartment. For a split second he shifted his gaze down the steps, to where I stood.

  I flinched, as if he’d shot me with that look. I wanted to know, to believe deep down, that my dad couldn’t kill anyone. He wouldn’t, I was absolutely sure, kill me.

  “Curtis,” Mom called, her voice oddly calm, as if she were negotiating a hostage release. “Why don’t you come down here, so we can talk?”

  Dad didn’t say anything, but I’d lived with him long enough to know that his silence was itself an answer. Aiming a gun at the man who killed his son might not have been right, but I could see that it was his only answer at that moment, and he believed it was right.

  I wiped my sleeves over my eyes to get rid of the tears. “Dad! Please. You have to come with us now.”

  “Get them away from here, Kathleen,” Dad called, gesturing with his free hand.

  “What’s going on?” the girl at the bottom of the steps called, her voice strained with panic.

  Mom turned. “Call 9-1-1! Right now!”

  The girl hesitated, then dashed off in the direction of the house, looking back over her shoulder.

  “Curtis,” Mom tried again.

  “Dad! Please! Put the gun down!”

  Dad looked down at us, like for just a moment he was considering it. And then another man was visible, hooking an arm around Dad’s neck.

  In that split second between seeing and reacting, between realizing what was happening and being able to voice a scream, the man dragged Dad into the apartment.

  “It’s not loaded!” I screamed, although I wasn’t sure this was true. It had seemed such a simple thing at the time, such a clever solution: switch the bullets for batteries. Attention, America: We have solved the issue of gun control. Now, I knew that Dad could have bought more ammunition, and that a police officer charging up these stairs wouldn’t care if the gun was loaded or not. Sam and I hadn’t solved anything.

  Mom was right behind me as we raced up the steps. The screams coming from my own mouth were unintelligible, like speaking in tongues with the spirit inside you. Except that what was inside me was my whole life, spilling out in an animal’s yell. The staircase rocked beneath our feet—death by falling off a wobbly staircase—but I figured that the collapse of the stairs might even be a blessing right then. It was the least of our worries.

  I reached the top first, elbowing my mom out of the way, a feat that surprised me as much as it would have surprised my P.E. teacher in my former life. It was dark inside the apartment, and there were heaps of clothes and shoes and food wrappers on the floor. Dad and the man who must have been Robert Saenz had fallen to the ground, where they writhed on the carpet like a two-headed, eight-limbed beast. Dad still had hold of the gun and was ramming it against Robert’s ribs, but it seemed like a shaky hold at best.

  “Don’t! Don’t—” I screamed, but Dad pulled the trigger. The gun clicked, but nothing happened.

  Robert freed his hands and got them both around Dad’s neck in a choke hold.

  “It’s not loaded!” I screamed again, this time at Robert. “Let him go! He was just trying to scare you!” More than anything, I wanted this to be true. I believed it. I lunged for that thi
ck arm, trying to pull it off Dad’s neck. The hold was way too tight, and I couldn’t budge his grip even slightly. Dad’s face was turning a violent reddish color, his eyes bulging. If I didn’t know who he was, I wouldn’t have known him at all.

  Mom was on top of Robert’s legs, trying to pin him into place. Her hands were struggling to get the gun from Dad’s grasp, and all of a sudden the gun was pointed directly at her.

  I heard myself scream OhmyGodohmyGodohmyGod, screaming and screaming because I could see how this was going to end, with the gun loaded and discharging, the way guns did, and the bullet entering my mother’s chest, splintering through skin and bone to organs, to the spongy insides that make us everything we are.

  But as it turned out, that’s not what happened.

  Mom wrestled the gun away, and she leaned back on her haunches and aimed at Robert Saenz, who was still choking my dad, and said, “Let him go. Let him go, and we’ll put an end to all of this.”

  “Please, please,” I begged, grabbing on to Robert Saenz’s legs, as if I could distract him. He kicked me, his foot connecting with my shoulder, and I tried again. I knew only the barest of facts about Robert Saenz at that point, but I would learn more later, when the newspaper published a giant feature that was fascinating and horrible at the same time, spilling the guts of our family for the entire world to read if they wanted. Robert Saenz, the article would claim, had been the family’s bad seed, the one who always needed bailing out. He had fathered a child, a boy who was about my age, but never visited the kid or paid a cent of child support, so the term father could be used only as a technicality. He had taken drugs for more than half his life, beginning when he was younger than me.

  But I didn’t know any of that then.

  At that moment, he was the man who had killed my brother, the man who was going to kill my father. Asphyxiation, broken windpipe, broken neck. “Shoot him!” I cried. Would I have said this if I had time to think and plan and be rational?

  Maybe.

  His hands still on Dad’s neck, Robert Saenz turned to look at Mom.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her shaking, the gun in her hands wavering.

  I had wasted years of my life being scared of little things when I should have been saving all my energy for this moment. My screams felt like a prayer, like a reckoning with God— Don’t don’t don’t let Dad die.

  And then Dad’s head hit the floor with a sickening thud. He didn’t move. I could hear sirens now, and realized I had been hearing them for the past minute, only now they were closer, surrounding us.

  Robert Saenz was reaching for the gun when Mom pulled the trigger.

  And then the whole world went black.

  curtis

  At first, I thought I was dead.

  Someone was leaning over me, asking questions, but the questions didn’t make any sense. I didn’t know where I was, or who had a gun, or why someone was screaming. All I knew was that I was out of breath, my windpipe burning. Was it still Monday? Was it still morning? Were we still alive?

  “He meant business, all right,” a paramedic said. “You’re going to have some pretty serious bruising there. Can you say something for me?”

  I rasped, “Olivia.”

  “Is that the girl who was here? We took her outside. She’s waiting by the ambulance.”

  “Kathleen?” My throat ached like the mother of all sore throats. I tried to sit up and slumped back again, dizzy.

  “Whoa, now. Is Kathleen the...? Uhh...” The paramedic turned, talking to someone else in the room, a person who was a blur to me. “Kathleen—your, ah...wife—has been taken into custody.”

  Through my general fogginess, I realized that the screaming was coming not from me or Kathleen or Olivia, but from Robert Saenz. Another paramedic was kneeling over him, and his shirt was drenched in blood. His screams were awful, but he was alive. The paramedics were discussing the best way to transport us; their gurneys were too wide for the garage steps.

  Seeing Robert Saenz on the floor, blood seeping through a tourniquet on his arm, his face white with pain, I felt it all leak out of me—the hatred, the anger I’d stored for months and years. All that energy spent, all that time lost. He was just a man, just a human. I tried to get a full breath through my bruised windpipe, felt a beautiful, painful rush of air pour into my lungs. I knew that Daniel was still dead and that was still horrible—but it was long-ago horrible, his loss receding in front of me like a mirage on a flat stretch of highway.

  “I can walk,” I insisted, forcing myself again to sit up. I needed to see Olivia. I needed to see Kathleen.

  Assisted by two paramedics, I made my way down the rickety staircase. Each breath seared my lungs, and the timing of my steps was off, as if my feet were getting the message long after my legs. During my long, stumbling descent and walk to the ambulance, I locked eyes with Olivia, who was wrapped in a navy blanket.

  Forgive me, forgive me, I begged her silently.

  * * *

  I was at the hospital for several hours, processed and observed and finally released into police custody. The consensus from the emergency room staff was that I was lucky—my bruises and a slight abrasion on my neck would fade to nothing in a week. There really wasn’t a way to measure the damage I’d caused.

  Olivia held my hand while we waited; she answered my questions woodenly. While I had been passed out on the floor, Kathleen had fired at Robert Saenz, shattering his right wrist. He’d been reaching for the gun, trying to wrest it from her grasp. The single bullet had chambered, the shot hitting its mark.

  When the police arrived, she’d set the gun at her feet and kicked it over to them. She’d told the police that it was her gun, that she’d learned that Robert Saenz had been paroled, that she’d driven all the way from Omaha with me in hot pursuit, that she deserved all the blame.

  “Why?” I whispered to Olivia, who only shook her head.

  It was the holiest kind of crime: a mother seeking revenge for her dead son. It would make the Oberlin News Tribune, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Akron Beacon Journal. It would show up on the CNN crawl.

  But the Oberlin Police Department had plenty of questions for me.

  It was the second time I’d sat across a table from Sergeant Springer, a manila folder open on the table between us. This time the name wasn’t SAENZ, ROBERT but KAUFMAN, KATHLEEN. In the time since I’d seen him, he’d been promoted, grown a beard. I had been demoted; I was no longer the righteous grieving father, but the son of a bitch involved in the disruption of an otherwise calm Monday morning.

  I corroborated Kathleen’s story, as I’d heard it from Olivia in the emergency room. Poor Olivia, waiting in the lobby with the most wanted signs, no doubt cataloguing a host of new fears. Or maybe she was asleep in one of the uncomfortable vinyl chairs. We’d been transported from the hospital to the police station in the back of a patrol car, and she’d dozed off instantly. I’d been in the room when she was questioned, but she’d declined to do anything more than make a short statement—essentially the same statement Kathleen had made, and which I’d parroted, dazed.

  Sergeant Springer’s stare bored into me, as invasive as a cavity search. “I gotta say, Kaufman, you gave me a bad feeling, all those years ago. Something just wasn’t right.”

  I watched him, waiting. I wasn’t about to say anything that didn’t absolutely need to be said.

  “Sure, you were this grieving father, and you had my complete sympathy. But something about you was just—off.”

  I swallowed.

  “And Robert Saenz, well, it’s not like he didn’t have his share of demons, you know?”

  I knew. Apparently Saenz had refused to talk—his upstairs apartment had contained a pharmacy’s worth of painkillers, obtained on fraudulent prescriptions. The baggie of white stuff by his bed was l
ikely meth.

  “But for you to show up here again, all these years later...” He shook his head slowly.

  There were a million things to say, but none of them would help. I fidgeted in my chair with the wobbly leg, thinking of Olivia, wanting to hold Kathleen.

  “Maybe you can help me with this, Kaufman. We’ve got your wife’s statement that she shot Saenz, but something isn’t sitting right with me. Katie Saenz swears it was you and not your wife who arrived first, and Jerry Saenz says he saw a man matching your description this morning on his way out of town.”

  I raised my eyebrows but said nothing.

  Sergeant Springer sighed. “You’re a strange one, Kaufman. I wasn’t wrong about that.”

  The stress of the past day—of the past week—was upon me, and I fought to keep my eyes open.

  “Maybe this was just a case of things going horribly wrong,” he said finally. “Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  It was.

  * * *

  Olivia and I spent that night in a junky motel outside of town. The Oberlin Inn—the best and only hotel in town—had seemed impossible, considering. I went into the bathroom to wash, and noticed the bruises on my neck, the raised welts of Robert Saenz’s fingers. He was a killer, but he was just a man, about as flawed as they came. And the same was true of me.

  Olivia was already asleep, fully clothed on top of the covers, when I came out of the bathroom.

  That night and for weeks afterward I woke up in a cold sweat, my sleep plagued with nightmares. It was always the same, up to a point. I was getting out of the Explorer, heading up the rickety staircase to Robert Saenz’s apartment over the garage. But what happened next was always a different, awful version of reality, and I was always powerless to stop it, until the moment I realized that Olivia was shaking me awake.

  “Dad, you’re dreaming,” she said, and I reached out a hand to her, wanting reassurance that she was alive, my flesh-and-blood daughter and not a dream apparition.