The Fragile World

“Yes, but why do you feel there’s a lack of communication, Curtis?” Dr. Fisher probed, and Mom sat back.

It took Dad a very long time to respond. “I couldn’t say, exactly.”

“Olivia,” Dr. Fisher said, turning to me after a beat. “Let’s hear from you.”

I know what I should have said—about my panic attacks, and how much I missed Daniel every time I passed the closed door to his bedroom. I should have said that I was miserable and I was afraid of making my parents miserable—but these were very real things, and too awful to say with my parents staring at me. Mom kept nodding her encouragement, looking so hopeful that I knew whatever I said would absolutely crush her. Dad seemed surprised to realize that I was in the room, too.

“I don’t know,” I whispered.

Mom’s laugh this time was painful and sharp, like glass breaking into jagged pieces. “I mean, you read stories about families that break up when a single bad thing happens to them, and you think, that will never be my family. But it’s getting to the point.... Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know.” She leaned forward, head in her hands.

Dad and I looked at Dr. Fisher, waiting.

“Well,” she said, smiling at us kindly. I wondered if she ever came right out and said to someone, There’s really no helping you. “This is a very normal reaction for families who have experienced a sudden loss. It can be terribly difficult to express feelings openly. What I’m going to suggest are some one-on-one appointments for the time being, so that I can help each of you articulate your feelings. And then we’ll meet again as a group. In the meantime, I’d like to suggest a few activities that you can do together.”

Mom looked up, brightening. This was just her thing—a to-do list. Give her a thousand tasks, and she would tackle them all.

For the rest of the summer, I visited Dr. Fisher every week, not having any other choice. Mom went to her sessions and reported on them over dinner, determined to model “good communication” for us. As far as I could tell, Dad went only twice on his own; whatever was said in his sessions stayed there. Or maybe he said nothing at all and only stared alternately at his shoes or his car in the parking lot. Mom worked her way through a family togetherness checklist, insisting that we plan meals, visit the Youth Symphony Orchestra to make a donation in Daniel’s memory and spend at least one weekend night together doing something new—even if it was just wandering through a Pier 1, where we immediately branched off on our own and gathered again at the cash register. The week before school began, we took a vacation to Coronado, which involved a long drive from Sacramento to San Diego, nights in hotels with dubious cleanliness, a tour of the island on rented bikes and a long drive home. Somehow when Mom coaxed me into the trip, she’d neglected to mention the word “island,” and I had a full-on panic attack on the bridge, with Mom holding on to my head while I breathed into a Subway bag that had contained, ten minutes earlier, Dad’s pastrami sandwich.

The morning we left the island, Mom crushed a pill and slipped it into my yogurt, so Dad basically had to carry me to the car, wedge me into my seat and wrangle with my seat belt. I hardly remembered anything about the trip, but the photographic evidence was stored on Mom’s camera—a dozen or so pictures where none of us was exactly smiling, even though Coronado was beautiful. Despite my worrying—or maybe because of it?—nothing horrible had happened, after all. The bridge didn’t collapse, the island didn’t suddenly sink into the Pacific and, although I’d seen a shocking special news report about how rarely hotel bedding was washed, we didn’t take home a single bedbug.

When we finally arrived home, Mom dumped the contents of our suitcases into the washing machine and announced that she was going to bed for the night and didn’t want to be disturbed. It was four-thirty in the afternoon.

After that, she stopped seeing Dr. Fisher herself, but kept dropping me off for my appointments. And Dr. Fisher was helping me—it was her idea for me to find a new “coping mechanism” since I’d been more or less refusing to take my anxiety pills since the Coronado debacle. “Why don’t we do this?” she suggested, although I was pretty sure there would be no we involved. “Why don’t we keep a record of these things you’re afraid of? If you write them down during the week, we can discuss each fear at our next session.”

This turned out to be a fabulous suggestion. In a week, I filled ten pages, single-spaced. Dr. Fisher’s eyes widened in surprise at first, but as she kept reading, I had the distinct feeling that she was trying very hard not to laugh.

“Hair dryers?” she asked, looking up.

“Because hair could get caught in the little vents,” I explained.

“Right. That could happen. Has it happened to you, with a hair dryer in your home?”

“Not yet.”

“Okay. What about this one—open-toed shoes?”

“Because toes can get caught in escalators.” Anticipating her next question, I added, “It didn’t happen to me, but I heard about it happening to someone else, a cousin of a girl who was in my homeroom last year.”

“Fairly rare, though, I would think,” Dr. Fisher said, closing my notebook. “And I notice you have escalators on the list, as well.”

I nodded.

“It would seem to me that the escalator is relatively benign, though—provided one is wearing close-toed shoes, of course,” Dr. Fisher qualified quickly. “But I would think, compared to elevators—”

I shuddered. “Elevators are in a class unto themselves. The sudden plummeting, the claustrophobia...”

“Whereas with an escalator, if it stops working, you simply walk the rest of the way.”

“In that case, you might as well just take the stairs,” I pointed out. “Or, better yet, just stay on the ground floor.”

Dr. Fisher smiled, the skin around her eyes crinkling. “Well! Okay. That’s definitely a good start, then, Olivia. I think the next step might be for us to begin sorting through these fears, putting them into categories.” I must have looked puzzled, because she explained, “You know—like things that have happened to you before, or are likely to happen, versus things that are not at all likely to happen—that kind of thing.”

I agreed to think about it, although I didn’t see the value in this. It didn’t particularly matter what category things were in—I was equally scared of everything. But I kept writing fears down, filling one notebook and starting another. During the day I carried it in my backpack, sealed in a jumbo-sized Ziploc bag so it wouldn’t fall victim to a leaking pen or a spilled water bottle. At night, I kept the notebook on the floor next to my bed, in case something new came to me while I should have been sleeping.

Dad began referring to the notebook as my Fear Journal.

Mom called it my security blanket.

And it did give me security—enough, at least, that I had stopped taking medication completely by the time I entered eighth grade. I kept a single pill with me, wrapped in a ball of cellophane at the bottom of my backpack for an emergency situation, like a shooter on campus or an unannounced field trip. The busier I was with my classes and the more obsessed I grew with writing things down, the less I saw Dr. Fisher, until one day it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen her in months.

It had been a good idea—family therapy. But my family had approached it like a ride on a merry-go-round in the world’s saddest theme park, until one by one, we’d all simply flung ourselves off.

curtis

I can’t say I didn’t see it coming. The trouble was that it had been coming for so long, it never seemed real—like a tsunami, where the waters recede and you watch them go, go, go, but remain unprepared for the reversal, for the sudden, gushing onslaught.

Kathleen had been talking to her brother in Omaha, making arrangements about the house where she’d grown up, which had been sitting vacant. She had reconnected with one of her best friends from high school, Stella something-or-other, who was divorced, living again in Omaha and hoping to open an upscale boutique furniture store. Kathleen had researched the local high schools for Olivia; she had found a family physician, a veterinarian.

I know this because she told me. I’d been coming to bed later and later at night, but still Kathleen was awake, stubbornly waiting for me, propped up by pillows, scribbling items on a to-do list. There was something triumphant about this, something smug: See—I’m doing the work. I’m putting in the effort.

I laughed at first. Back to Omaha?

“It makes sense,” she had insisted. “It’s exactly what we need.”

“It’s exactly what you need,” I countered, but there wasn’t much heat behind my words. I couldn’t summon the energy to be bitter. I’d been building up a wall between us, one giant rock upon another. Dr. Fisher had told me as much. “If you keep this up, you’ll get what you seem to want—to be alone,” she told me on our second counseling session, and I had agreed, thanked her and never returned.

“You’re right,” Kathleen admitted. “It is exactly what I need.”

“That’s it, then?” I asked, gesturing to her list, noticing that just about everything had been checked off.

“Curtis, listen to me. You can be part of this change. It’s not too late.”

Wasn’t it? I turned away, loosening the belt on my khakis. Everything felt too late. We’d heard the news, finally, more than a year after Daniel died. There would be no trial; Robert Saenz had agreed to seven years in exchange for his plea to involuntary manslaughter. I’d imagined myself addressing a judge, a jury, showing the world how wonderful Daniel had been, but I’d never had the chance. That too was gone.

“I can’t keep having this conversation with you,” Kathleen hissed. “Daniel is dead! Nothing you do is going to make him not be dead!”

I stared at her, remembering how the Lorain County A.D.A. had said the same thing to me, essentially. “I hope you can put this behind you, Mr. Kaufman, and begin to move forward.” In other words: We’re done. It’s over. It was done and over for Kathleen, but it wasn’t over for me.

Kathleen lowered her voice, softening with a visible effort. “This is it, Curtis. This is the moment where you have to make a decision. This is where you say ‘Yes, we’re going to stay together as a family,’ or ‘No, I’m going to go my own way.’”

The words were there, hanging in front of me like lines on a cue card: We’re married. We’re a family. We need to stay together. But I couldn’t say them. Whatever fight was in me had shrunk like a helium balloon three days after a party. If the roles had been reversed, how long would I have stuck it out? She was right; it would be better for Kathleen and Olivia in Omaha. It probably would have been better for them in Timbuktu.

Kathleen was done waiting for a response. She pulled her knees to her chest, looking small and far away. “I don’t know you anymore, Curtis. I don’t know who you are. You’re not the same person....”

“No,” I agreed. “I don’t think I am.”

Kathleen snapped off the light. In the dark she whispered, “I would give you all the time in the world if I believed it would change something.”

“I don’t blame you for leaving,” I told her. “I don’t blame you at all.”

That night I slept with my arm over her body, breathing in the woodsy scent of sawdust and a pungent, chemical smell I couldn’t place. Paint thinner? Varnish? She’d been on an almost manic streak, finishing projects for clients. Touching her was the closest I could come to saying I was sorry, and the best way I could manage to say goodbye.

We sat down with Olivia on the last Saturday of July, with the start of school looming only weeks away. Olivia must have known something was up; she sat in the turquoise armchair across from the gold patterned couch—when had we acquired these things?—and stared first at Kathleen, then at me.

“What is it?” Olivia demanded, her voice flat. We were coming off an eight-day heat wave, and it was already warm at ten o’clock. The windows were open, but one of us, Kathleen or me, would soon get up to close them when the air conditioner kicked on. It would be me, I realized. Kathleen had one foot out the door; she had all but packed her bags.

“Olivia,” Kathleen began, twisting the wedding ring on her finger, the tiny, paltry stone I’d been able to afford all those years ago. How much longer until she stopped wearing it? Would she slide off her ring the minute she pulled away from the curb? Would I slide off mine?

“Just say it,” Olivia hissed. Her hair was fastened around her head in a random arrangement of bobby pins, so that she looked like some long-necked, exotic bird. Her forehead was shiny with sweat.

Kathleen looked at me, and I nodded back to her. Go ahead. I knew I was being an asshole; I knew that if this were taped and later played back, I would not see myself as the sympathetic character. But I figured that the person who was leaving should be the person to explain, and the person who was being left could sit righteously silent—even if it were his fault.

Kathleen swallowed hard and began, “Your father and I have been talking, and we think that it would be best for now if we took a little break.”

“A little break,” Olivia echoed.

“You know that we’ve talked about making some changes, and some really great opportunities have opened up in Omaha. You know that friend I’ve been talking to, the one who is planning to open a store in the spring?” When no one said anything, she plunged bravely on. “It’s really sort of a dream situation for me, and I figure that once we’re settled in—”

“Wait. Who are you talking about? Who’s we?”

Kathleen bit her lip and said, “You and me, Liv. The two of us would go out there to begin with, and then your father, if he decides to, would join us.”

Olivia’s eyes shot to me. “Dad’s staying here?”

“I’m under contract to start the school year in a few weeks,” I explained, although of course this was no explanation at all, and Olivia was no dummy. There were teaching jobs in Omaha, and the school district wouldn’t have held my feet to the fire over my contract.

Olivia asked, “Is this really happening?”

“Honey.” Kathleen leaned forward, a curly lock of hair tumbling over her forehead. “I didn’t think this would be that big of a shock to you. We’ve talked about starting over.”

“You’ve talked. You said you wanted to start over.”

“We talked about us starting over,” Kathleen insisted, wounded. “And that includes your father. He just can’t come with us now.”

Olivia shook her head. “Mom, seriously. I’m not moving to Omaha. I’m starting high school in a few weeks. I can’t go somewhere where I don’t know anyone.”

Kathleen put a hand on Olivia’s arm, and Olivia pulled back, out of her reach.

“Sweetie,” Kathleen tried again. “I know this isn’t exactly what you hoped for, but I know you’re going to love it in Omaha. It really is the best thing for us right now.”

“No, Mom. I’m not going to Omaha.”

“Honey. Everything’s arranged.”

“And I’m not going to leave Dad behind, either. I’m not going to do it.”

I flinched. It was striking how adult Olivia sounded, unafraid and unwavering. And then it hit me—she sounded just like Daniel.

“Olivia, your father is choosing—”

“I don’t care, Mom. You’re choosing, too. And now I’m choosing. I’m staying here.” Her body was tense, trembling.

“Oh, Liv, come here,” Kathleen said, but Olivia took one step out of the turquoise armchair and tumbled right into my lap.

I felt this strange, triumphant rush go through me, like a powerful jolt of déjà vu—picking Daniel up in the hospital, freshly swaddled; lifting a crying Olivia out of her crib, watching in awe as her sobs settled, her breathing slowed, became even. I hadn’t wanted it to be this way, but Olivia was almost fourteen now, and maybe that was old enough to make a decision for herself.

Over Olivia’s shoulder, Kathleen glared at me. Say something.

That was all I had to do—say the words. Olivia, you can’t stay here with me. You need to go with your mother.

“Dad?” Olivia asked into my shoulder. “I can stay here with you, right? You want me to stay here, don’t you?”

Olivia would keep me sane, I thought. And I would keep her sane, get rid of her endless fears once and for all.

“Of course, honey,” I said, and next to me, Kathleen dropped her head into her hands.

I promised myself right then that I would try to put it behind me—if not for my sake, then for Olivia’s. I would let Daniel go. I would accept the fact that Robert Saenz was in prison, locked away, one orange jumpsuit among thousands of other orange jumpsuits. I could do this for Olivia. I had to.

A week later, Kathleen backed out of our driveway, her Volvo packed to the gills. I wasn’t absolutely sure until that very moment, watching the brake lights as she slowed for the yield sign at the end of our street, that she was serious.

From that moment on, it was just Olivia and me.

olivia

April 26, 2013

It was a fairly normal day at Rio Americano—at least, what had become normal for me. I’d gone through the motions of note-taking in my American History class, worked the problems in precalculus, and then ditched P.E. for the fourteenth time this semester to sit in the last stall of the D wing girls’ restroom and do absolutely nothing. The bathroom was public-industrial gross, with huge wheels of single-ply toilet paper bolted to the wall and graffiti etched into the stall doors—swearwords and gang signs and the names of girls who were sluts, courtesy of the girls whose boyfriends had been stolen. Every now and then someone would enter, and I heard a series of electronic beeps; public school bathrooms in this century seemed to be used solely as a quiet place for sending uninterrupted text messages. For the fourteenth time that semester, I was sitting cross-legged on top of my backpack, which sat on top of a floor that, even when freshly mopped, was as sanitary as a petri dish.

Still, it was a million times better than being in P.E., which had become my nemesis and the focal point of my fears: the rushed, awkward changing of clothes in the locker room, shivering in short sleeves while I did the world’s slowest jog around the turf, being picked last for a team and then ignored by my teammates, ducking when one sort of ball or other zoomed toward my head, trying to avoid Ms. Ryan, the whistle-tooting P.E. teacher who was determined to make an athlete out of me. “Kaufman!” She would boom in that teacher-projection voice from across the length of a football field, and I’d wish I could melt into a little puddle and evaporate, like the Wicked Witch of the West.

It was infinitely better to sit on a bacteria-laden public restroom floor.

I shifted so I could dig into my backpack for my Fear Journal, the twentieth or so version of the book I’d used since Daniel died. The others, dense with my hasty scribbles, were stacked on a shelf in my bedroom. It was comforting to know that they were there, that my fears had been recorded and catalogued and preserved for posterity. I opened my latest notebook and wrote in black ink the new fear that had occurred to me that morning during American History: Getting hit in the head by a falling 80s-era ceiling tile. Underneath it I had scrawled this explanation: If I got hit in the head with a ceiling tile and passed out, someone would call my dad in his classroom, and he wouldn’t be able to take it, so he would probably have a heart attack. And then when I came to, I would be an orphan. (Or as good as.)

I put a little asterisk by this fear, because it was way more terrifying to me than some of my other fears, such as bugs that look like sticks, and also way more likely to actually affect me, since there was a full month left of school, and I sat underneath those industrial ceiling tile rectangles for approximately six hours a day, and it only made sense that at some point, one of them would fall. This was the sort of fact I should bring up in my statistics class—which was both the most fascinating and horrifying class I had ever taken. But that would mean raising my hand and contributing, and this was something Olivia Kaufman simply did not do. The bug that looked like a stick was something I’d seen in a natural history museum during a forced field trip to the Bay Area, so it might not even live in Sacramento. But the ceiling tile...this was a very real worry. Maybe it could be mentioned in an anonymous note addressed to the school board?

I was considering this—a private, philanthropic act that would be far more beneficial to my fellow students than, say, a new vending machine outside the cafeteria—when I heard my name over the intercom and froze, pen in hand.

“Olivia Kaufman, please report to the office. Olivia Kaufman, to the office, please.”

Shit. I looked around reflexively, as if I’d been spotted in a crowd. Had Ms. Ryan reported me? This was possible, but not part of what seemed to be the unwritten agreement that governed my life at Rio. Basically, the other teachers and staff members seemed to treat my dad and me with equal parts pity and protection—they pitied us because Daniel was dead; they became protective when my mother left almost three years ago. And recently, our dog had died—our beloved Heidi—and I’d written a poem about her for my English class, forever securing the sympathy of my teacher and her lunchroom buddies. Ms. Ryan had agreed not to talk to my dad about my failing grade in P.E. as long as I talked to my guidance counselor about my “options” for next year. And my dad, caught up in his own turmoil, seemed a much happier person for not being bothered with the truth of it all.

I’d agreed to see the guidance counselor, but I’d never made the appointment. I knew exactly what Mr. Merrill would say when I took a seat in his office that was more or less the size of the bathroom stall I was currently wedged into. He would tap a few keys, pull up a file, frown at me and say “Are you really failing P.E. for the second time? You know that’s going to put you twenty credits behind, don’t you? You do realize that you’ll be spending your senior year in not one, but two P.E. classes, and that it’s going to be nearly impossible for you to fill out any college applications?”

I knew what he would say, because I’d already had the conversation with myself a few hundred times. No—I wasn’t going to visit Mr. Merrill and talk about my “options” when there really weren’t any. And although I’d survived almost three years of scrutiny from teachers who had known and loved Daniel, I wasn’t in any hurry to have our differences made any more obvious. Daniel had applied for universities across the country, been accepted everywhere, had received a full-ride offer from Oberlin and a $1,000 scholarship from the teachers’ union. It was becoming glaringly obvious that I’d be lucky to graduate high school, much less go on to any kind of college. But, really—I was okay with that, too.

How could I possibly move away from home and into some kind of dorm situation? College represented a host of new fears. I would have been scared to live on anything other than the first floor, since I was scared of both heights—specifically, falling from them—and depths—specifically, falling into them. Hundreds of reckless students holding knives in the cafeteria meant that violence was possible at every meal, and fires could be started by lit candles in dorm rooms. Besides, I would be absolutely alone without my dad—a very legitimate fear for someone who lost her brother and then, sort of, her mother, and then, finally, her dog.

Even the thought of attending community college freaked me out. I’d have to drive myself there or depend on public transportation, either of which could go wrong in dozens of ways. I had accepted the necessity of riding shotgun in Dad’s Explorer to and from school, to and from the grocery store or Target or the pizza place on J Street, but I refused under any circumstances to ride in a bus. How in the world could a bus, with no seat belts and a rather loosely formed seating structure, be any kind of safe? And forget about driving myself anywhere. Dad had cajoled and tried to bribe me into a driver’s training course, but I professed profound disinterest in this particular rite of passage. “I’m not always going to drive you everywhere you want to go,” he’d said, which was kind of funny, because I didn’t particularly want to go anywhere. In response, I’d said, “I’ll walk. It’s healthier, anyway.” But no safer, I reminded myself bitterly. Daniel had been walking, after all.