The Fragile World

by Paula Treick DeBoard

  * * *

  In the end, Kathleen was charged with possession of an illegal firearm and pled guilty, avoiding a trial. She was sentenced to three years, including time served, and with the possibility of early release for good behavior. It worked somewhat in her favor that, after firing the single round from the Colt, she had been the one to rip off her sweater and fashion Robert Saenz a makeshift tourniquet out of her sweatshirt. She had handed over the weapon willingly, had offered up a full—though admittedly false—confession.

  This time the Kaufmans had managed to get the attention of the Lorain County District Attorney himself, not an assistant. We had one meeting after Kathleen’s sentencing, and Harold Emsinger looked me straight in the eye and pronounced his verdict: “This was a gift.”

  He was flanked by an American flag on one side and shelves lined with thick legal books on the other. He had the weight of law and order, of precedent and justice, behind him. But what he said next was more along the lines of mercy. “The question, Mr. Kaufman, is what is your family going to do with this gift?”

  It wasn’t as if I could talk man-to-man with Robert Saenz afterward, to discuss the various decisions we’d made in our lives, and how we’d both ended up in his upstairs apartment, tussling over a gun loaded with a single bullet. If he’d succeeded in getting the gun away from me, I have no doubt he would have used it—and as far as I could see, that made us equals. After he completed his physical therapy, Robert Saenz would have limited use of his right hand, which had been patched together with pins and screws. His muscles would be too weak to form a solid fist.

  I didn’t search for him online, or make any phone calls, or return to Oberlin again—but news filtered down from her attorney to Kathleen and from Kathleen to me that Robert Saenz was in rehab, battling his addiction. There wasn’t much time to think about him now, which was strange, since I’d essentially spent five years of my life doing nothing but thinking about him.

  A single gunshot fired in an upstairs room had changed that. It had changed everything.

  * * *

  We weren’t allowed to visit Kathleen for the first few months of her term, and she mostly used her phone calls for legal matters or business arrangements. She’d had to give up—at least for the time being—her interest in the Omaha store. Olivia wrote her long letters, and Kathleen responded immediately, as if they were keeping up a continual conversation—a private one.

  In the first letter I wrote to Kathleen, I said: “If I were you, I wouldn’t ever forgive me.”

  Her response came back: “I haven’t.”

  Then I wrote every day, letting her hear every thought in my head, even the smallest bit of minutiae. I always said I was sorry. I always promised I would make it up to her.

  When I could finally see her, on the first day she had visitation rights, she looked almost the same—her hair a duller version of itself, her skin so translucent that I could see the little blue vein on her forehead. “Prison pallor,” she said, shrugging it off. She also claimed to have gained ten pounds, because her choices were “starches or starvation.”

  Olivia and I took turns in the room with her, giving each other privacy. When I was with Kathleen, I could tell she was wary of me, her eyes regarding me with a deep intensity. “You can trust me,” I told her. “I’ll spend the rest of my life proving it to you.”

  When it was Olivia’s turn, I waited in the hallway, queuing with a sad collection of relatives visiting other prisoners. I wanted to know their stories; I wanted them to know ours. Olivia always brought Kathleen something—a pencil sketch, a poem, a handwritten copy of lyrics, letters that were sealed and dated, so Kathleen would have something to open at regular intervals.

  I had nothing to offer except myself and my endless gratitude.

  * * *

  I didn’t go back into the classroom, but I found a job developing curriculum for online courses, and when things settled down with Olivia, I started studying up on antiques. When Kathleen got out, I was going to be her partner in business—a good partner, an enthusiastic one.

  We had to list the house in Sacramento as a short sale and sell the cars, and I had to pull out a little money from my retirement fund to tide us over, but if we spent wisely, we could make it. I borrowed some books from the library, and Kathleen made me lists of what to look for, and when I could, I scoured the Ohio countryside for estate sales in our new-to-us twenty-year-old Toyota. Olivia, when she could, came with me.

  On one of those spring days, almost a year after our trip from Sacramento, we followed signs along a winding path and ended up at an old farmhouse, wares spread across the lawn.

  The sky was the kind of blue that hurt your eyes. Daniel would love this, I thought—for the first time in a long time. He would; he had always loved spring, and the endless blue sky of a California summer. Remembering Daniel used to make me angry about his death and depressed because I had failed him. But as Olivia and I picked our way through the washboards and vases and bassinets, I remembered him with a smile. This was a happy, good moment—and there would be others, many happy, good moments to come.

  “What do you think about these chairs?” Olivia called.

  I ran my hands up and down the chair legs, studying their bones. “I think your mom would love these,” I said, trying to figure out how we would get both of them into the car at once.

  “She will,” Olivia promised me. “She absolutely will.”

  olivia

  As you can imagine, I had one hell of a college admissions essay.

  Or, I would have, if I’d actually earned my P.E. credits and graduated on time with the rest of my class back in Sacramento—which didn’t happen.

  After Mom’s sentencing, Dad and I drove back to California to pack up our house and load everything into a U-Haul, which we drove first to Nebraska, to drop off most of our things at Grandpa and Grandma’s old house for long-term storage. Then we continued on to Marysville, Ohio, where we rented a single-wide trailer not far from the grounds of the Ohio Reformatory for Women.

  Dad and I both went to counseling sessions, separately. My counselor, Dr. Munoz, was a tiny man who stood about even with my nose. He had glasses and a carefully trimmed beard, and he wore comfortable-looking orthopedic shoes, as if he had just come off a shift in the E.R.

  In the beginning, I told him, gearing up for the story, there was a boy named Daniel. But now he’s gone.

  “Daniel was your older brother,” Dr. Munoz prompted.

  “He was,” I agreed. I sat very still for a long time in my chair.

  Finally Dr. Munoz asked, “Did you want to tell me something about Daniel?”

  I smiled and said, “Only that I loved him. And that now, I’ve moved on.”

  He smiled back at me. “Then let’s not talk about Daniel. Let’s talk about Olivia.”

  I told him about the classes I was taking, and how I’d decided that maybe, somewhere deep within me, there was a writer. I told him about some friends I had made, and how on the weekends I’d been going to arts festivals and things like that. I told him that I didn’t wear black anymore, or at least, not head-to-toe. I told him about Sam Ellis, who had finally sent me one of his creations. I knew what it was, instantly, even before I’d freed the snow globe from its packaging. It was the great tragedy of my own life, two people in a car heading down a lonely road, our troubles buried beneath a light sprinkling of snow. I wrote him a long letter, thanking him, but I was smart enough to know that Sam wasn’t pining for me, and that I shouldn’t be pining for him, either.

  “And what’s that?” Dr. Munoz said, pointing to the notebook in my lap. It was the book Mom had bought me at the gas station somewhere between Omaha and Oberlin, when I’d realized that I’d left my Fear Journal behind.

  “Oh, it’s just a list I’ve been making,” I told him, blushing. The Ol
ivia Kaufman who had worn all black and obsessed about falling ceiling tiles wouldn’t even recognize the things in this book. “I’ve been writing down some good things—you know, all the things I have to be grateful for. It turns out there’s really a lot.”

  When Dr. Munoz smiled, the corners of his eyes wrinkled. “It sounds like you have a solid grip on things, Olivia,” he said.

  I ended up taking my GED, proving wrong the guidance counselor at Rio who had told me it was impossible to get past high school without passing two full years of P.E. It did prove impossible to attend community college in Columbus without getting my driver’s license, though. After everything else that had happened, I was hardly scared at all to get on the road in our little junker Toyota, giving the car some gas to speed past the tanker trailers in the slow lane.

  By the time Mom was out, I planned to have my general ed courses completed, and after her year of parole, we would be moving back to Omaha. Uncle Jeff and Aunt Judy had been “unfailingly decent”—Dad’s words—in keeping the house for us. I was going to apply to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as my first choice, casting a wider net around the Midwest as backups.

  Sometimes I entertained the idea of applying to Oberlin, too—if only to give someone in the admissions office a shock: Not that Kaufman, surely.

  Dad found hundreds of ways to show me he was sorry. He helped me study for my political science quizzes, he scouted sources for my English research papers, he drove around Columbus with me, helping me find interesting buildings to sketch for my art class. And he said it, too—about a million sorries before I told him that it was enough, that saying it over and over again wouldn’t change what had happened.

  Sometimes at night, when we were sitting in front of our ten-inch TV that got three channels, it almost seemed like the old days again, when it had been just the two of us in Sacramento. We made biting comments about poorly written sitcoms, and sometimes we even cracked jokes.

  Once, he slipped and said “Love,” and I said, as if I’d had the word ready for a long time, “Eventually.”

  And that’s how it would be—eventually.

  * * * * *

  Keep reading for a gripping excerpt from Paula Treick DeBoard’s first novel,

  THE MOURNING HOURS.

  Available now from Harlequin MIRA.

  Acknowledgments

  The first thanks goes to my families, the Treicks and DeBoards, and their extensions—the Battses and Cervanteses and Kranzes and Wills, the Visses and Boons and Cefres, and the Davenports and Ayalas and Youngs—for their love and support. Special shout-outs to John DeBoard, my biggest fan, Beth Boon and Sara Viss for reading early drafts, Beth Slattery for the give-and-take critique every writer needs, and Kelly Jones for reading late into the night and then meeting me for an emergency lunch. (I so needed that.) Love and thanks to the extended Stonecoast/University of Southern Maine community of faculty and writers, especially Paige Levin. (We’re only “eight away,” you know!)

  Every writer needs a group like the English Girls—Mary Swier, Cameron Burton, Alisha Vasche, Jenna Valponi, Amie Carter and Michelle Charpentier—and I’m so blessed to have these women as friends. I’m also grateful to others who listened to my ramblings, especially when they had little choice in the matter: my Wexford’s trivia buddies, my comp students, and the members of the Writer’s Guild at San Joaquin-Delta Community College.

  The team at Harlequin MIRA was amazing—Erika Imranyi championed this book from its inception, and Michelle Meade helped me to see through to the heart of the story and make the book in every way better. I loved that Michelle seemed to feel the same way about the Kaufmans that I did: that they were real people we just needed to understand a bit better. Much appreciation also to my agent Melissa Flashman at Trident Media Group, who has proven to be both a sounding board for my scattered ideas and an invaluable resource for my panicked questions. Alanna Ramirez Garcia—good thoughts are still coming your way.

  Since The Mourning Hours was published, I’ve heard from readers across North America (especially—oh, my goodness!—readers in Wisconsin). Thank you for allowing my little book into your lives. To the booksellers and bloggers and librarians who eat, sleep and breathe books—I’m proud to be your kindred spirit.

  As I was researching this book, Craig Macho gave me a much-needed, slightly terrifying, after-hours crash course on firearms. Any errors in that regard are solely mine. Other research was conducted along I-80 in a madcap version of Curtis and Olivia’s road trip—from Oberlin, Ohio, back to California with a few interesting detours en route. Will and I were thrilled to connect with Dawn Cordes, Jim and Nancy Kwasteniet, Joel Hood, and Sean and Laurie Covington along the way. I like to think my parents were there in spirit (rather than at home in California) as we crossed the plains and crested the Rockies—my dad grumbling at the frequency of the bathroom stops, my mom insisting we brake for every brown historical marker.

  On that note, much love and gratitude is owed to my forever road-trip companion and coconspirator, Will DeBoard. There are crazy ideas I haven’t even had yet that I already know you’ll agree to, take on and stand behind. This book—like all our adventures—wouldn’t be possible without you.

  THE

  FRAGILE

  WORLD

  PAULA TREICK DEBOARD

  Reader’s Guide

  Questions for Discussion

  Was it surprising that Kathleen was able to move on with her life while Curtis couldn’t seem to move past his anger? What causes parents to react differently to tragedies in their family?

  Would you be able to forgive a person who caused serious injury or death to a loved one—even if that act was unintentional?

  Robert Saenz, although a fictional character, could be all too real. Curtis believes the judicial system has failed where Robert Saenz is concerned. What might be an appropriate punishment for an action—however unintentional—that has such deadly consequences?

  Curtis doesn’t seem to believe he could ever cause harm to Olivia or Kathleen, although of course, his actions could have a devastating effect on their lives, as well. Does this lack of awareness come from a callousness or insensitivity to others, or is he simply blind to everything but his desire for revenge?

  Consider Olivia’s many fears throughout the book. Do these fears seem like a natural reaction to her circumstances, or a sign of a more serious issue? In what ways can fear affect a person?

  Why does Kathleen take more responsibility than she deserves for what happens at the end of the book? Why doesn’t Curtis intervene and publicly take responsibility?

  When Curtis and Olivia say “Love… Eventually” at the end of the book, do you believe them? Can things work out for the Kaufmans, moving forward?

  A Conversation with Paula Treick DeBoard

  The Fragile World is as much a story about loss and grief as it is about love and the strength of family. What was the inspiration for this story and the characters in the books?

  The Fragile World wasn’t inspired by any one event, but my heart goes out to families who have experienced a heartbreaking tragedy or loss. In this story Curtis needs to hold someone accountable for his son’s death; it’s the only way he can make sense of his new world. It’s a dark but very human impulse, and I wanted to follow him down that path to see what this would mean for the rest of the family. Ultimately, people do deal with tragedy in different ways, but I always want to believe that healing is possible.

  Your previous novel, The Mourning Hours, is told from the point of view of a young girl named Kirsten. In this novel, sixteen-year-old Olivia is one of the two main perspectives. What draws you to writing from the eyes of a younger narrator?

  I can’t say that this decision was a conscious choice from the beginning, but after I had the idea for the book, I tried to just let the charact
ers speak to me. I found Olivia’s voice to be an interesting contrast to her father’s and really enjoyed writing her scenes. Between my time as a student and my time as a teacher, I’ve spent twelve years in high school, so I feel oddly comfortable entering the mind of a young person.

  Also, I suspect that at heart I am very immature. :-)

  A big part of The Fragile World takes place on the road. Did the confined setting present a challenge as you wrote or was it helpful?

  I come by my love of road trips honestly—my parents carted my sisters and me around the country every summer of my childhood. I made my peace with that feeling of confinement and used it as a springboard for creativity. Plus, the world outside the window always amazes me—there’s a stark beauty in even the most unvaried setting. In a practical sense, Curtis and Olivia’s road trip brought them away from the world they knew into a new realm of possibilities. Unfortunately, they didn’t get to do all the really cool things along I-80, like visit the world’s largest stuffed polar bear in Elko, Nevada, or the landlocked lighthouse in Gretna, Nebraska.

  Curtis, Kathleen and Olivia go through an extremely emotional journey throughout the course of the novel. While experiencing moments of utter despair, there are also beautiful moments of joy and acceptance. By the end of the story, they’ve all grown immensely, yet there seems to be a lot of healing left to do. What do you hope readers will take away from watching the evolution of these characters?

  Deep down, I’m skeptical of fairy-tale endings and happily-ever-afters. What I’m more interested in is how people move on after tragedies—how they go about their everyday lives, and how they continue to love each other, even in the midst of a complicated situation. The Kaufmans are working through a devastating loss in their various ways, but I hope readers see a family that still cares deeply for each other.

  Do you read other fiction while you’re doing your own writing or do you find it distracting?