The Fragile World

Safely inside now, Heidi butted her head against Kathleen’s legs affectionately. Kathleen reached out a hand to me and said, “We have to keep our heads, Curtis. We have to be strong.”

I stared at her, feeling dizzy and unbalanced. It was puzzling that she was here, like seeing a familiar face in the middle of a nightmare. It wouldn’t have been hard to take her hand, to fall into her embrace, to wrap my arms around her waist while she wrapped hers around my neck. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t move forward, couldn’t take the one step and then another that it would require of me.

Behind us I heard sniffling and turned around. Olivia stood in the doorway to the living room, impossibly tiny, hugging a blanket around her body.

“I’m supposed to call him back,” I said. “The sergeant. After I talked to you, he said I should....” And I stepped past them, leaving them there in the living room like two lost little planets, out of orbit, out of sync.

My fingers, thick and unfamiliar, fumbled with the phone. In those awful moments while I waited for the call to be answered, the dial tone buzzing in my ears, I allowed myself to hope that maybe, somehow, it was all a mistake.

But the voice on the other end was the same I’d heard not fifteen minutes earlier. “Sergeant Springer,” he said.

I cleared my throat. “Curtis Kaufman.”

He laid bare the facts, based on an investigation that was several hours old at this point—hours during which I’d watched David Letterman with Kathleen, and then we’d made love with the particular quiet that comes from having a twelve-year-old asleep down the hall. Impossible. Meanwhile Daniel had been motionless on the pavement. Someone from the pizza parlor had come outside, hearing the crash, and glimpsed the truck as it drove away. It hadn’t been hard to identify—a commercial truck, a small town. The suspect had been asleep already by the time he was apprehended.

“Asleep?” I demanded. “Was he drunk?”

He’d passed a breathalyzer; a blood draw had been taken later at the station. There were no other details at this time, Sergeant Springer said, but he would be in touch. He gave me his direct line, his personal assurance that—

“Wait.” I couldn’t let him hang up. I reached for a yellow legal pad, turned to a fresh page. There was something I needed to know. “Tell me his name. I want to know his name.”

The sergeant hesitated. “At this stage in the investigation...”

“His name,” I repeated. The voice that came out of me was surprisingly low, almost a growl. It didn’t sound anything like me. I was the soft-spoken voice in the back of the room at faculty meetings; I wasn’t a teacher who yelled or threatened. I was the calmer parent on the rare occasions when Daniel or Olivia needed discipline. But this new voice had authority; it was intimidating. It reminded me, in an alarming way, of my father.

The sergeant gave a small sigh, a gesture of hopelessness or maybe regret. “Robert Saenz. That’s his name.”

“Spell that for me,” I ordered. In the middle of a clean page I wrote ROBERT SAENZ, and then I drew a box around it, digging the pen deeper and deeper, a trench of dark lines and grooves, until the ink bled through the page.

olivia

I wanted to know everything.

Dad had spent most of the night in his office making phone calls. When he finally joined Mom and me in the living room, he was carrying a yellow legal pad full of notes that he refused to show me. Dad had a scientific mind-set, and I wondered if he had been trying to add things up, to find the flaw in the logic, so that somehow Daniel wouldn’t be dead.

“I’m practically a teenager,” I told him from the window where I had been looking out at our street. The neighbors were still sleeping; none of them knew yet. It was almost morning by then, although not according to my standards. Our cuckoo clock had clucked four-thirty, and the sky outside was beginning a slow shift from black to purple. I’d been twelve for less than a month, but that was too old to be shooed away from adult conversations. “Dad,” I said, so sharply that he looked directly at me, then down again at his legal pad. “I’m not a child.”

He slumped onto the couch like a deadweight, hair still flattened on one side from his pillow. Mom, perched on a chair across from him, was out of tears for the moment. She asked, “What did you find out?”

Dad looked at me for a long beat, and I stared him down.

“All right,” he said softly. While he talked, he kept his gaze on the carpet, as if it were suddenly the most interesting carpet he’d ever seen. And even though I’d wanted to hear it all, I found that the only way I could handle the details was to leave the window and sit on Mom’s lap with her arms wrapped around my waist—exactly like a child.

As Dad spoke, I re-created the scene in my own mind. I was good at that—visualizing scenarios. Daniel had met friends for pizza after a late-night practice session. It was after one when he left the restaurant, with snow starting to fall. He would have been bundled up in the coat Mom bought him online after a fruitless search of California stores for appropriate Ohio winter wear. He would have been wearing a knitted hat, pulled low over his ears. Maybe with his ears covered and his head down, he didn’t hear the truck behind him, barreling down a side street and swerving, taking the corner too fast. Maybe he was replaying music in his head—an aria, a sonata. The truck hit a metal speed limit sign, uprooting it from its concrete base and sending it through the air, as unexpected and deadly as a meteor dropping from the sky. The sign came crashing down on an oblivious Daniel, and just like that, my brother had died. Dad enunciated carefully: a blunt force injury to the head.

“An accident,” Mom insisted, rubbing her knuckles back and forth, a little roughly, over the ridge of my vertebrae. “Just a freak thing.”

Dad looked at her for a long moment but said nothing.

A freak thing. I turned the phrase over in my mind, but couldn’t find comfort there. Was it any better that a random, horrible thing had killed my brother, rather than something orderly and prearranged?

“What about the driver?” I asked, my mind reeling, imagining that panic behind the wheel, the out-of-control moment that couldn’t be taken back.

Dad swallowed, loosening the words caught in his throat. “He left the scene, but he’s in police custody.”

“You mean...what? Like a hit-and-run?”

“Someone from the restaurant heard the crash and saw him driving off. It’s a small town, you know. Not that difficult to track him down.”

“He just left Daniel there?” I shuddered, closing my eyes as though that would block out the image that was forming in my mind: my brother, my only brother, my sweet and funny and talented brother, lying bloody and alone in the street, and the man who was responsible for it driving off as if nothing had happened. A thought occurred to me. “Was he drunk? The driver, I mean.”

Dad said, “I don’t know.” I thought his voice sounded strange, but I couldn’t have said how. Everything was strange right then. We were sitting in the living room, where we only sat when we had company, in the middle of the night, talking about how Daniel had died. There was no normal anymore.

“It was an accident,” Mom repeated, her voice dissolving into tears.

Dad flipped a page on his legal pad and then looked at his hand distractedly, as if he didn’t know where it had come from, or how it connected to the rest of his body. Then he stood and left the room. A moment later we heard his office door close.

Mom was sobbing now, her head pressed against my back. She tightened her arms around my waist and held on. I closed my eyes. An accident. A freak thing. A blunt force injury to the head. This time it had been Daniel in that wrong place at that wrong time, but it could have been anyone: my father, my mother, any one of the seven billion people in the world or even me.

curtis

The only way I could handle Daniel’s death was to work my way through the facts, to build a massive to-do list and check off the items one by one. And so, I became the detail man.

By the time it was five o’clock in Sacramento and eight o’clock in Ohio, I was on the phone to the Oberlin switchboard, then passed upward in the chain until I was talking to a director of housing, a dean of student enrollment. I talked to a funeral home in Ohio, a funeral home in Sacramento. I called my school secretary at home, before she’d left for work. I called Olivia’s school, reporting her absence. I looked online for flights from Sacramento to Cleveland. I filled pages on the yellow legal pad with my notes. Money—there was an astounding amount involved—dates, times, names, phone numbers, confirmation numbers.

I was vaguely aware of Kathleen on her cell phone making the personal calls—to her brother and sister-in-law in Omaha, to our mutual friends, to the parents of Daniel’s friends and bandmates from one group or another. I was glad to have the impersonal tasks; I couldn’t bear to be the one to give this news.

At one point, I heard Kathleen running a bath. Beneath the sound of the water rushing in the old claw-foot tub, there was another sound—low, keening—that I realized was Olivia, crying.

I paced back and forth, four steps each way, the length of my office, a glorified closet beneath the stairs that I’d claimed as my own when we bought the house. I wished I could pace right out of my body, leaving it behind. Was this what madness felt like? I wanted to be there, right at that moment, with Daniel’s body. I wanted it to be last week, or last summer when we were all together, or two years from now when this hurt wasn’t new. I wanted it to be the moment before the truck took the corner too fast, hitting the speed limit sign. I wanted to grab Daniel’s arm and yank him back to safety.

Kathleen knocked once and opened the door, and we stared at each other.

“We have to figure out what to do...” I began, but she stopped me by stepping forward, falling into my arms before I was aware that I had reached out to hold her. I tried again. “About the arrangements...”

“Shh, shh. Just hold me. We can talk about that in a moment.”

I kissed the top of her head, my lips cool and dry, as if they’d been sculpted out of marble. From nowhere came the line from a poem in a humanities class I’d taken with Kathleen, so many years ago. Lips that would kiss form prayers to broken stone. Why had it stayed with me, dormant all these years, only to come back now?

After a few minutes, I let my arms go slack, slithered out of her embrace. “When you’re ready to think about it, I’ve got some information about plane tickets.”

She stared at me. “Plane tickets?”

“It makes more sense to take a mid-morning flight, since we’ll have to connect somewhere along the way, probably in Chicago.”

“Tickets?” she repeated.

“To get Daniel,” I said. “To bring home his...” I hated Kathleen for a sharp moment, for not filling in the blank, for making me say it. “His remains.”

“You were thinking we would all go?”

“Of course.”

Kathleen shook her head. “I don’t think... I mean, Olivia can’t possibly go.” She said this with such certainty, as if it were the sort of common sense thing every parent should know.

“I suppose she could stay with one of her friends. With Kendra, maybe,” I suggested.

Kathleen’s stare had turned incredulous. “Leave her alone, you mean? When her brother has just died?”

I rubbed my face, letting this sink in. Maybe because of grief and general sleeplessness, my skin had started to feel like a rubber mask, stiff hairs sprouting haphazardly in anticipation of a morning shave. Someone had to go to Oberlin, to attend to the dozens of things that seemed impossible, at that moment, to attend to. It was the worst possible trip in the world, and one I couldn’t imagine taking alone. But that, I realized, was exactly what was going to happen. “You won’t come with me, then?”

“Curtis, I can’t.”

It was just a small conversation, just a few words, but a fault line had opened up between us. I was on the side with Daniel, charged with protecting him, with bringing him home. I went back to my laptop to book a single flight, and Kathleen left the room, shutting the door behind her.

olivia

By noon, it seemed that everyone knew—our friends, our neighbors, even a reporter from The Sacramento Bee who wanted a “human element” to accompany her article. Daniel had been no stranger to the local news outlets, which had all printed pictures or run footage of him from one concert or another, receiving one award or another. Local hero...musical prodigy...

When I stepped onto the front porch that afternoon to get the mail, I found half a dozen cards tucked up underneath our doormat. Mom and I opened them together, read them silently and started a stack on the sofa table. Later that evening, she went outside and returned with a basket of corn bread and honey butter. Our house was under the surveillance of a small army of sympathizers and well-wishers, people who loved us but couldn’t bear to actually encounter us. And I didn’t blame them one bit.

That night Kendra, my best friend since fourth grade, called. I took the cordless extension into my bedroom and closed the door and sat cross-legged on the floor, feeling small and strange.

“I heard about your brother,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Thanks,” I said. We let the quiet between us stretch for minutes, and then I said, “I think I have to go.”

“I’m sorry,” she blurted again.

“I know.”

“Are you still going to go to the dance?”

It took me a long moment to figure out what she was talking about. And then I remembered: the Halloween dance, our matching costumes. Mom had made us our dresses, and Kendra’s mom had bought our matching wigs. We were going as the dead twins from The Shining.

“Um, no,” I said.

“Do you think that maybe I could borrow your costume for someone else? I was thinking maybe Jenna, from our homeroom? I mean if you’re sure you’re not going....”

“Whatever,” I said, my throat tight, and hung up.

It was the loneliest I’d ever felt in my life.

In the hallway, I paused outside my parents’ bedroom, listening to their voices. They weren’t arguing, exactly. Dad was packing—he’d be in Oberlin for two nights and back again on Sunday. Meanwhile, Mom was in charge of the arrangements for Daniel’s memorial service, which would be on Monday.

“I just can’t imagine that we won’t have a headstone for Daniel,” Mom was saying.

“We can have a headstone. Of course we can. We can have whatever you want.”

“But his body won’t be there!”

“No, it won’t.”

I braced myself with an arm against the door frame.

“I just never pictured...” Mom said, her voice trailing off.

“It’s the right thing to do, Kath. There’s an incredible expense associated with shipping a body—and besides, it’s not Daniel anymore. He’s gone.”

“It just doesn’t feel right. And how will we know? How will we absolutely know?”

“How will we know what?”

“When we get the—Daniel’s—remains, how will we know those are his remains? I mean, you read those things about funeral homes....”

“Kath,” Dad was trying to calm her.

“I mean it!” Mom’s voice had risen to a hysterical pitch, which I probably would have heard without eavesdropping. “I’ve been thinking all day, maybe they mixed something up. Maybe it wasn’t Daniel who died, after all. Do you know, I kept calling his phone and leaving messages? I was thinking maybe he would pick up and say it was some kind of stupid mistake—”

I remembered the times I’d seen Mom on the phone, dialing, listening and hanging up. I began to feel sick.

“They found his wallet in his pocket,” Dad pointed out.

“Right! And I could just imagine Daniel saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I lent my wallet to this guy from my dorm....’”

“Kathleen,” Dad said, “you’re being—”

“What? What am I being?”

They were quiet for a long moment, and then Mom said, “I know. I know exactly what I’m being. I don’t think I know how else to be right now.” She flung open their door and stepped into the hallway.

Startled, I stepped back, whispering, “I’m sorry.”

What else was there to be but sorry?

curtis

The trip to Oberlin was endless—the drive to the airport, the hassles of TSA screening, the agony of being wedged into a middle seat with nothing to do but think. Even when I closed my eyes, I saw Daniel—at six, at ten, at sixteen, at nineteen...at twenty-five, an age he would never be.

When I’d successfully forced Daniel from my thoughts for a few moments, I remembered again the name I’d written on my notepad: Robert Saenz. It was like swallowing a mouthful of dirt; thinking of him brought a lingering grit, a foul taste. He’d driven home while Daniel lay dying. “Careless, so careless,” Kathleen had bawled into my shoulder. But it seemed now that careless was the absolute wrong word. Careless was forgetting to throw the sheets in the dryer, or not picking up the promised gallon of milk on the way home from work. It wasn’t driving away with my son dying on the side of the road. I must have fallen asleep grinding my teeth, because I woke in Chicago with a sore jaw. My first thought was: Robert Saenz, you bastard.

The scheduled two-hour layover in Chicago grew to four hours, thanks to a weather delay. I watched as a cargo train wobbled by in the gray slanting rain, and uniformed personnel hoisted luggage indiscriminately into the hold. I strained, trying to spot my bag, which was black and therefore indistinguishable from dozens of other black bags. I hadn’t been to Chicago in close to thirty years, but the airport version of the city wasn’t one I would have recognized, anyway— steel-beamed ceilings, black-and-white checked floor tiles, deep-dish pizza, a preponderance of Cubs and Bears paraphernalia. The Chicago of my childhood had been my father, the cramped house with the nicotine-stained walls, the accordion closet door that had been thin protection against his rages.

Daniel’s death had brought my father back to me as a real person, rather than an abstract part of my past, buried alive in a time I rarely revisited. I hadn’t called him twenty years ago, when Kathleen was pregnant, and I hadn’t called nineteen years ago when Daniel was born, or seven years later when Olivia came along. Why ruin our happiness with his condescension? Later, when Daniel performed at Carnegie Hall, when Oberlin called with a full-ride scholarship offer, I’d wanted to rub his face in it: Look what my son has done. Look how well I’ve done, away from you all these years. But there had been the promise to Kathleen, and I’d never picked up the phone.

I was tempted to call him now, to hurt him with Daniel’s loss. Impossible idea—my father couldn’t begin to feel the loss of the grandson he’d never known. It was yet another defeat for me—even my effort to deprive him of his grandchildren would spare my father pain, in the end. Escaping to the bathroom, I drove my fist once, hard, into the metal door.

It was dark by the time I checked into the Oberlin Inn, the only hotel in town. It might have been late in Ohio, but it was only seven o’clock Sacramento time, too early for sleep. I flicked idly through the channels, then grabbed my coat. On the sidewalk in front of the hotel, students passed in hurried clusters, their heads covered. I crossed North Main Street and circled Tappan Square, ending up before Oberlin’s monument to the Underground Railroad, a set of railroad tracks rising to the sky.

Daniel had first mentioned Oberlin at the beginning of his junior year, when college seemed impossibly distant. “It’s famous for its music conservatory,” he had gushed, producing one glossy brochure after another. That fall it had been Oberlin this, Oberlin that. In the spring he’d flown out for a college visit, and then there was the admissions process, the gathering of transcripts and letters of recommendation, the seventeen drafts of Daniel’s personal statement. I’d driven him to his audition in San Francisco and paced anxiously outside the conservatory. During the hour-and-a-half drive to his audition he’d been quietly nervous; on the return drive, he was exuberant. “I nailed it,” he’d said over and over, reliving every second for me. Finally, there was the acceptance letter, a scholarship offer and dozens of phone calls about housing. Oberlin had seemed to me to be larger than life—it was all of life, as far as Daniel was concerned.

It had been somewhat surprising to discover that the town of Oberlin was tiny. Kathleen and I, on our one visit, had rented a car and marked out the parameters of the town in just a few circles. The main streets bisected at the college, which loomed large and official—museum, concert halls, the conservatory with more than two hundred grand pianos, Daniel had informed us—next to the rest of the town, which had relatively few amenities. We had taken Daniel out for Chinese at a restaurant a block from campus. In our spin around town, he pointed out the bowling alley, an archaic-looking video rental store, the self-serve Laundromat and a used book store.

Now, my hat pulled low over my ears, I headed in the direction of the gas station and pizza parlor on the outskirts of town. It was here that Daniel Kaufman was walking down the sidewalk, hunched against the cold for the hike back to campus. It was here that Robert Saenz had taken a corner too quickly, clipping the 35 mph sign.

It wasn’t hard for me to find the exact spot. Less than two days after Daniel’s death, the area was still roped off with yellow police tape. I circled the perimeter, hands balled into fists in the pockets of my jeans. Two students walked past me, darting into the street to avoid the police tape, then stepping back onto the sidewalk. I waited for them to say something, to acknowledge that a person had died right here, a person they had possibly even taken a class or shared a pitcher with, but the only scrap of conversation I caught had to do with a party that weekend. I crossed over the police tape, half expecting someone from the pizza parlor to stop me. Snow had covered the sidewalk, but still I could see where the concrete had been disturbed, where a speed limit sign had been uprooted. I stood there until I had no feeling in my ears or cheeks, watching cars slip by on their way in and out of town. I wanted to yell at each driver to slow down, to acknowledge what they were passing: This is where my son died! Daniel Owen Kaufman died right here! He was my son, and he deserves your respect, you dirty sons of bitches. I was furious with them and disappointed in myself. This patch of cement didn’t feel like hallowed ground. Instead of a connection with Daniel, I felt only anger, slow and determined.

The next morning at the Oberlin P.D., I was shown into a room with green walls and a concrete floor, a table flanked by two chairs. An interrogation room? Had Robert Saenz sat in this very chair, still groggy from sleep? Sergeant Springer had a face to match his gravelly voice—deeply lined, ruddy in a way that suggested permanent sunburn—and a no-nonsense handshake. “I’ve done some digging,” he said, passing me a manila folder.

Inside was Robert Saenz—face-forward first, then in profile. In the way that a hard life can pack on years, he looked much older than forty-one, older even than me. I was reminded of my father, prematurely aged with the help of Jim Beam and Johnnie Walker, with Wild Turkey and bottles of blue wine that looked like antifreeze. Robert Saenz had dark curly hair that hit his collar, and bloodshot, slightly bulging eyes that looked out with a vacant stare. In profile he had a double chin, a layer of stubble. His eyes held nothing—not regret or anger or surprise. Nothing.

“Keep reading,” the sergeant said.

I set the picture aside and continued slowly, fanning out the pages as I went. In 2003, Robert Saenz had caused a fatal accident in North Carolina, when his truck had jackknifed on a freeway, and an oncoming car, unable to avoid him in time, had crashed. The driver—a thirty-two-year-old Mary Kay saleswoman—had been killed instantly. Her infant son, in the backseat, had both legs crushed on impact. Robert Saenz had been above the legal limit. I was gripping the edges of the folder so hard, my hands were beginning to cramp.