The Fragile World

Dad had said that he might as well put me into a padded room, and I know he said this out of frustration, to show me how ridiculous I was being, but I pounced on the idea.

“You could get me padded walls for my next birthday,” I’d suggested. “But soft padding, like a couch cushion. Nothing hard like a gymnastics mat.”

The memory of this conversation brought a smile to my lips, and I was just about to relax because clearly I’d imagined the page from the office, when the voice came over the intercom again, more insistent this time: “Olivia Kaufman, to the office, please.”

I tucked my notebook into my backpack and slowly did the zipper. The jig was up. Ms. Ryan had reported me, and the entire office staff—and maybe even my father—was likely waiting to ambush me in some kind of intervention. My repeated P.E. failures were probably being discussed right now. I took a deep breath and hoisted myself from the floor to a standing position.

The last thing I wanted was to face a hallway crowded with students. If there had been a tunnel from the D-wing girls’ bathroom to the outside world, I would have taken it—even if that would be the sum of all my fears: a dark, tight-fitting, possibly rat-infested and ultimately unknown place. But there was no tunnel, no secret hatch.

Right then the exterior bathroom door swung open and big, clumping footsteps approached. I instinctively shrunk back, closer to the toilet seat than I preferred to stand. Underneath the stall door, I caught a glimpse of a pair of black Doc Martens with pink skull-and-crossbones laces. They belonged to a senior named Kara, one of the Visigoths, the group I loosely associated with when I associated at all. Despite what the name implied, the Visigoths weren’t a nomadic tribe of warriors, but more of a group that wore all black and scorned our Abercrombie & Fitch-clad classmates. I wouldn’t have called Kara a friend—after Daniel died and Mom left, I’d basically stopped being friends with everyone, especially people who had two-parent homes and happy, well-adjusted siblings. But Kara was decent.

“Olivia?” she whispered. “Are you in there?”

“Yeah,” I admitted, coming out of the corner. I slid the lock on the stall door and opened it about an inch, as if to peer at a stranger standing on my doorstep. “What’s going on?”

Kara bit her lip and brushed a spiky black piece of hair out of her eyes. “Umm, Olivia...it’s your dad.”

curtis

The letter had come three days before. It was just by chance that I’d grabbed the mail that day instead of Olivia. I had spotted the return address—Elyria, Ohio—and immediately tucked the letter into my back pocket, letting my shirttail hang loose over it. I read it in the bathroom, and again in the bedroom, door locked; later I shredded the envelope. When Olivia went to bed, I taped the letter to the back of a framed art print in the living room, a place she would never look. I wanted to keep the letter in case I needed to remind myself of the details—but already I’d memorized every single word, beginning with It is my duty to inform you that...

I didn’t tell Olivia about the letter, like I hadn’t told her about the parole hearing and the letter I’d written myself, on Daniel’s behalf.

In the years since Kathleen left, I’d prided myself on my business-as-usual approach to our lives. The size of our family had been reduced by half, but Olivia and I hadn’t fallen apart. We had more or less maintained a normal life. We folded our laundry, although somewhat haphazardly; we did the dishes vigorously each Saturday, and let them pile up in the sink on the days between; we made a weekly trip to Target for toilet paper and Q-tips and the half-dozen other things we always, suddenly needed. If Kathleen had popped in unannounced, she might have been alarmed by the stack of unsorted mail by the front door, but she wouldn’t have found a complete disaster. Not that Kathleen would have popped in unannounced; she had scheduled visits for two weeks during each of the past two summers, and she’d begged Olivia to fly out for every holiday in between. “As if,” Olivia had said on each occasion, unmoved by statistics about air travel being safer than car travel and by my patient lessons on lift, weight, thrust and drag.

Olivia and I had kept on going simply because that was what we had to do—but we’d had a sort of strange fun doing it. I’d thrown myself into the part wholeheartedly; I’d been proud that none of it, not even for a second, had felt like a chore.

And then, on Tuesday, I’d received the letter. Pursuant to criminal law... regulations regarding prison overcrowding and mandates for prisoner behavior... Robert Saenz had somehow managed to behave himself in prison, completing a sobriety program and an anger-management course, and the state of Ohio was willing to take a chance on him.

Since learning this, every movement I made required a conscious effort. I taught my classes, attended a science department meeting, made a not-bad ziti with Olivia and fell asleep each night with the television on, waking at random hours to the enthusiastic sales pitches of infomercials. I was now fully informed about revolutionary skin care products, microwave egg poachers and a new food chopper that promised to chop food faster than any other food chopper in the history of food choppers.

You have to keep going, I ordered myself. Just put one foot in front of the other. Just keep moving.

Since Kathleen left, I hadn’t allowed myself to wallow. There simply wasn’t time. Maybe if I’d been alone, eating TV dinners and repeating yesterday’s clothes. But Olivia and I had a life to navigate together. If she had a cold, I was the one who bought cough syrup and gathered her used Kleenex. If she had a quiz, I peppered her with review questions. If she had a panic attack—more and more rare, but still possible—I tried to talk her through it. If she wanted to watch long stretches of Hitchcock-fest on AMC, then that’s what we did, with Olivia writing things down in her Fear Journal as she went: birds, heights, dizziness, strangers on trains, trains....

Days had passed without me thinking about Robert Saenz at all. When he was locked up, living in the hell of his own making, Saenz hadn’t deserved another minute of my time.

But I woke up on Friday morning with a tight feeling in my chest. Not “call the ambulance” tight, but uncomforable enough that I had to steady myself against the bathroom counter for a long moment, until I could pull it together. Robert Saenz’s face swam in front of me, all fleshy chin and dead eyes. Dr. Fisher would have called what happened next a “break—” comfortable, padded-chair speak for going bat-shit crazy.

“You all right?” Olivia had asked me on the way to school, gripping on to the door handle the way she always did, like our route was one of hairpin curves, rather than a fairly straight shot.

“Of course.”

“You don’t look all right.”

I glanced at myself in the rearview mirror. “What do I look like?”

“I don’t know. You look sort of gray.”

I gave what I hoped was a convincing smile. “Like the Tin Man?”

Olivia frowned. “Not exactly. More like you’ve got a case of rickets or something.”

“I think you mean scurvy. That’s the Vitamin C deficiency. But I don’t know if it actually turns you gray.”

“Great. Then you have some kind of undiagnosed illness that no one has been able to name yet. Thanks, Dad. Major consolation.” She dug in her backpack and came up with her journal.

Ordinarily, I would have had another joke at the ready. Olivia and I had developed, in these past, lonely years, a sort of Abbott and Costello routine with each other, as if everything were a joke, as if our problems were basically just ways of trying out new material on each other. Some days I suggested we take our show on the road. But now I turned on the radio, raising the volume a few notches to drown out the words in my head: After serving sixty-three percent of his court-ordered sentence...

First period physical science was a blur: take roll, collect papers, write key terms on board. Then my second period physics students arrived with noisy enthusiasm: it was Egg Drop Day, our annual competition to drop raw eggs in carefully constructed cages from the cafeteria roof to the ground fifteen feet below. Ordinarily, it was one of my favorite teaching days of the year. I had been known to greet my students in a white T-shirt with a smear of fresh yolk across the front. It was a new shirt every year, and I’d embellished it with a Sharpie: “Oops” one year, “Your Egg is My Breakfast” another. This year I’d forgotten.

I pretended to marvel at my students’ creations: eggs in toothpick cages, eggs riding in Styrofoam canoes, eggs dressed as babies in cotton diapers. We walked en masse to the cafeteria and the class split into teams. I monitored the dropping of eggs from the roof while Alex, my Berkeley-bound T.A., judged their landing from the ground.

The competition moved along on schedule: the preliminary rounds with the heartbreak of early elimination, the tense drops during the semifinals and at last, a face-off between my two best students that ended with a dramatic finish as one egg came free of its wrapping during descent and hit the ground with a sudden stain of yolk. With all the screaming and cheering and congratulatory crowd-surfing, it might have been the pep rally before the first football game.

“All right—we clean up, and everyone heads back inside. Bell’s about to ring,” I called down, shielding my eyes from the bright, piercing blue of the sky. The few students who remained on the roof were vowing revenge, if life should ever allow them another Egg Drop Day. One by one they went down the staircase to the lower level of the cafeteria, past the hair-netted ladies wielding massive stainless steel serving spoons, and wandered in the general direction of my classroom. I should have been right behind them, picking up the last scraps of their trash, giving the losing team a gentle goading. That’s what I’d done every other time in the history of Egg Drop Day, but today I lingered on the roof, watching my students descend the staircase and emerge from the cafeteria into the asphalt parking lot below.

There was no reason in the world for me to stay on that roof one more minute, but I couldn’t make myself go. I tracked my students as they crossed the lot and rounded the administration building. My room was at the northern corner of the science wing. There, I imagined, they would wait, still joking around at first and then growing antsy as they waited for me to appear.

After a few minutes, Alex came around the corner of the administration building and started toward the cafeteria. Halfway there, he spotted me on the roof. Shielding his eyes with the flat of his hand, he called up to me, “You all right up there, Mr. K?”

“I’m fine, Alex,” I called down.

He came closer, considering this. “You need help with anything?”

“Not at all,” I said. I dug in my pocket and pulled out the massive wad of keys I’d been carrying around for my entire teaching career. “Hey. You want to let them into my room?”

“What? Really?”

I dangled the keys before me and then flung them over the side. They fell much less elegantly than my students’ eggs had fallen, just a straight shot down. Alex made a quick dive and retrieved them. He grinned, pleased with his catch, and stared up at me again, puzzled.

“Go on.” I waved him away. He smiled uncertainly but complied, stopping once to look back at me before disappearing out of sight.

I stayed at the edge of the roof, which was basically flat, with only the slightest peak in the center. In all my years of Egg Drop Day, I had never noticed how I could see the entire campus from this vantage. I’d spent most of my life— twenty-eight years now—teaching here. The campus had changed in that time, of course—a new gym had been constructed, and the football field had been upgraded with million-dollar artificial turf. Portable classroom buildings stretched into the horizon. The school had computer labs now, whiteboards and ceiling-mounted projectors, security cameras and automatic-flush toilets. The kids dressed differently, sure, but they were still kids—still teenagers with the same sorts of problems: love and dating and friendship and grades and finding themselves and hating their parents and figuring out their futures. Only now they all had cell phones, omnipresent as an extra limb. If I squinted my eyes and strained into the distance, I could see students on the soccer field. Olivia had P.E. this year, although I couldn’t remember her schedule. Was she the girl chasing down the ball, her dark ponytail bobbing? No—Olivia probably wasn’t the running type. But it was comforting to believe that she was out there somewhere, doing what the rest of her classmates were doing, being a normal kid.

It weighed on me that I wasn’t giving Olivia the same shot at a great life that I’d given Daniel. That we had given Daniel—because Kathleen had been part of that pact, too. Olivia had turned into this wise-beyond-her-years kid, funny and quirky and far too well-behaved to pass as a normal high school student. Sometimes it seemed that she was tiptoeing through life in order not to disturb me, in order to make up for the fact that Daniel had died. She deserved better, and when I was honest with myself, I knew it. She would have been better off going with Kathleen to Omaha, even if it had meant going kicking and screaming, or half-drugged on medication that wouldn’t have worn off until she got to the Rockies and there was no way back.

That could still happen, I realized.

Olivia could still go to Omaha. She could still get that shot at a better life.

I felt again the strange tightness in my chest and lowered myself to a sitting position, allowing my legs to hang weightlessly over the edge of the roof. It felt good to just sit down for a minute. There wasn’t a huge rush. My students would have packed up their things by now, and I could still stand up, head down the stairs, out the cafeteria door, and be back to my classroom before the tardy bell rang.

And then I remembered the letter, that itch I’d had to consciously remind myself not to scratch all week. Robert Edward Saenz has been paroled from this facility effective on this day, the 15th of April, 2013.

Distantly, I was aware of the bell ringing and students swarming out of classrooms. They looked not like ants, exactly, but like some type of laboratory experiment, their bodies squat and foreshortened. It was beautiful how they all blended together, this mass of color and energy. I squinted into the sunlight. Was Olivia, wearing her ubiquitous head-to-toe black, one of them?

“Hey!” someone called, pointing up to the roof of the cafeteria, at me.

A few students stopped to look.

“It’s Mr. K!”

“What are you doing up there, Mr. K?”

“Is this for Egg Drop Day? Throw me an egg, Mr. K!”

I gave them a polite wave but didn’t answer. Most of the students glanced at me and kept walking, but a small crowd had begun to gather below. I recognized Alex among them, my key ring in his right hand. He was such a conscientious kid; he’d probably fended off my incoming class at the door and locked up before returning to find me.

“Mr. Kaufman!” someone called, and I focused in on Candace Silva, the principal’s secretary, waving her hands over her head in such an exaggerated way that she might have been signaling to an incoming aircraft. Everything about Candace Silva was exaggerated, from her very pink cardigans to her candy-themed office cubicle, which had always made me slightly dizzy, in an overindulged way.

“You have class!” she called to me now. “Mr. Kaufman! Curtis! You need to come down now!”

I will, I thought. I’ll come down in a minute.

“Are you sick? Do you need me to call you a substitute?”

“No,” I whispered, which of course she couldn’t hear. Everything seemed to be moving farther and farther away—the buildings on campus, the horizon, the distant hum of the freeway. On the ground below, one of the kids called my name, but all noise had dissolved into a drone. I saw Alex step forward uncertainly, handing my key ring to Candace.

“Curtis? Do you hear me? You just stay right there! You don’t need to move a muscle! I’m going to take care of this!” I watched as she began walking back to the office rapidly, and then broke into a near-run after a few steps, her heels clattering. In all the years we’d known each other, I had never seen Candace Silva run.

I was dimly aware that more time had passed and that what was happening was not normal, but I didn’t seem to be able to prevent it. Standing up was out of the question, an act of superhuman strength and resolve. I shielded my eyes and looked out farther, at the horizon, a distant place where sky met land. The whole world was so tiny, so fragile, just waiting to be crushed by a giant footstep.

Over the intercom I heard Olivia’s name paged, and I thought distractedly, How nice. Everyone else must love Olivia, too.

The campus security squad—two burly guys in their twenties who intimidated even the staff members—arrived and hustled the students below back to class. The only students who remained, I realized, were mine, the students who should have been sitting in my third-period class. I recognized a group of boys who perennially sat in the rear of the room, and smiled to see that they were kicking a hacky-sack in a circle, and not looking up at me at all. Then Candace was back, pointing and gesturing frantically to Bill Meyers, Rio’s principal for the last decade. Bill waved an arm at me, and I raised mine in a weak salute.

I heard Olivia’s name being paged again, and I thought: Liv. I should get up now, just for Liv. I could feel the sun beating down on my head, where every day I combed fewer and fewer hairs. Olivia thought I had rickets, but maybe this was simply a case of sunstroke. Kathleen would take care of me. She would press a cold washcloth to my face and keep refilling a glass of ice water. I would be feeling better by the time Daniel and Olivia got home from school.

“Curtis,” a voice behind me said, and I turned around to see Bill Meyers, holding out a hand to help me to my feet. “Let’s get out of here, okay?”

So I stood, light-headed and unsteady. Bill took firm hold of me until we were well away from the edge of the roof. Then he held out his hand in a wide, strangely formal gesture and said, “After you.” I led the way across the roof, to the open door and down the stairs, past the serving ladies, the skin of their foreheads pinched tight by gray hairnets. They stared at me, bewildered.

A few of my students were still gathered on the sidewalk below, although it must have been well into third period by now. Why weren’t they in class? The hacky-sack guys stopped when they saw me, the sack hitting the ground with a soft, beanbag ploop. Candace Silva was still there, too, chewing on a lacquered fingernail. On the outskirts of the group, which was just about where I could always find her, stood Olivia, weighted down by her massive backpack. I waved at her as Bill Meyers and I passed, his hand on my elbow.

“Everything’s okay!” he boomed heartily. “Back to class now.”

“Dad?” Olivia’s eyes were huge, her face even paler than normal.

I took a step in her direction, but Bill clamped a hand on my shoulder. “Curtis, maybe we should have a little talk first.”

“Okay,” I agreed. “I’ll see you in a bit, Olivia.”

She nodded slowly.

I felt a sudden longing for the cot in the nurse’s office, but Bill steered me out to the parking lot, straight to my dusty green Explorer. From his pocket he produced the ring of keys I’d tossed from the roof.

“Get in,” he said. There had been some warmth in his voice when we were on the roof, as if we were two friends who had bumped into each other at a coffee shop. Now he was coolly efficient. “Passenger side, Curtis. I’m driving.”

olivia

By fourth period, everyone knew. I took my seat in Spanish, feeling sick and anxious, and listened to the gossip of my classmates.

“Did you see Mr. K just totally lose it?”

“I was sure he was gonna jump or something.”

“If he jumped, I bet we’d get a sub until the end of the year.”

I gritted my teeth. They were just stupid things said by stupid kids who had never experienced a tragedy beyond what they’d seen on television. I checked my cell phone for the dozenth time since Dad had left campus with Mr. Meyers. Wasn’t he going to call me? Didn’t someone want to tell me what was going on?

A guy in the back of the room said, “Seriously, the guy must be a total wacko. The school cafeteria? Couldn’t he find like, a bridge or something?” and I almost screamed at him. Shut up! Don’t you know that’s my dad? To be fair, maybe he didn’t. It was a school of sixteen-hundred students, and I had perfected the art of being off the radar.

But I didn’t have to listen to this. I shoved my Spanish notebook in my backpack and left class just as the bell was ringing, before my teacher had logged off whatever important email she was sending from her computer.

On my way to the office, I passed the science wing. A cute blonde girl who must have been just out of college was Dad’s substitute. The lights had been dimmed in his room, and I recognized a Nova episode on the white projector screen.

Mrs. Silva didn’t seem too surprised when I entered the office, although she clearly had no idea what she was supposed to do with me.

“I just want my dad,” I said, fighting very hard not to cry. “He’s not answering his phone.”

“I’m sure he’s fine, dear. Mr. Meyers is with him.”

“But how am I supposed to get home?” We lived several miles away from campus—a trip I’d never made on foot.

Mrs. Silva smiled at me patiently, like I was an idiot. “You know it’s still several hours before the end of the school day. Shouldn’t you be in fourth period now?”

“Would you go back to class if everyone in the whole school was talking about how your father almost jumped from the roof of the cafeteria?”

We stared at each other for a long moment over a jar of hard candy on the lip of Mrs. Silva’s cubicle.

“I could call your mom,” she offered finally, her voice rising at the end in a subtle question mark. But of course, she knew my mom was in Omaha, and that wasn’t going to solve my immediate problem.

“I would prefer to call her later,” I said icily.

“Okay. Why don’t you just have a seat for a minute, and I’ll see what I can find out?”

I plunked myself into one of the chairs outside Mr. Meyers’s empty office and listened while Mrs. Silva left several discreet voice mail messages. At one point I heard her say “I would really appreciate some guidance on what to do here once you’ve handled the situation.” Great. Dad was the situation. He was probably going to lose his job, which meant that we would lose our house and have to live on the streets with our heap of multicolored furniture. Or worse—we’d have to move to Omaha.

I pulled out my journal and added this fear to today’s growing list. I could feel Mrs. Silva’s eyes on me and had the unnerving feeling that she could see what I was writing from ten feet away. I wrote that down, too.

Every few minutes a staff member wandered through looking for one form or another. Some shot me sympathetic glances— Oh, you poor kid. I tried to communicate back to them telepathically—Help me out here. I need to find my dad. But they retrieved whatever they were looking for and moved on quickly, not wanting to get involved.

Finally, after a hushed phone call that obviously concerned me and/or my dad, Mrs. Silva said sweetly, “Olivia, I think you can go ahead and wait in the library until the end of the day. Mr. Meyers is going to stay with your dad until then, and I’ll be bringing you home. Would that be okay?”

No, it wasn’t okay. I wanted to see my dad right now, right this second. It was completely horrible to have no options, to be at the mercy of the school bell and an adult who was probably only pretending to care about me. But at least some plan was forming, my dad was apparently still alive, and he hadn’t completely forgotten about me. I bit back my sarcasm and whispered a grateful, “Okay.”