The Fragile World

For the rest of the day I sat in a molded plastic chair in the library, adding pages of new worries to my Fear Journal—things that had seemed highly unlikely that morning, but seemed incredibly likely now. I’m afraid of my dad cracking up. I’m afraid of my dad doing strange things. I’m afraid my dad doesn’t have enough to live for. I’m afraid I’m not enough.

And I thought about my mom. We talked every week, sometimes several times a week, mostly about little things that meant nothing at all—how I’d done on my stats quiz, what Dad and I had eaten for dinner, which of the self-absorbed borderline mental cases had been eliminated from one reality show or another that week. It was hard for me to tell her things that really mattered. It didn’t seem entirely fair that she should get an all-access pass to my life when she had made the decision to leave. Every single time we talked, she mentioned me coming to Omaha, like the constant mention would wear me down. “I’m fine here,” I insisted. “Dad and I are doing fine.” Then she would be quiet for a long time, and I could picture her in my grandparents’ old house, which Daniel and I had visited for Christmas when we were kids. Sometimes she didn’t seem to be that far away, after all. Other times, like now, Omaha might as well have been Mars.

I had my cell phone, so I could have called her right then. No matter how busy she was at the store or in her workshop, Mom would have dropped everything to be on the first flight out of Omaha. She would have been in Sacramento late tonight or early tomorrow morning, and then she could be in charge. She could ask Dad what the hell he’d been doing on that roof and why in the world he hadn’t come down. She could do the adult thing—take charge—and I could go back to being a self-absorbed sixteen-year-old.

But I didn’t call her. After everything Dad and I had been through, it didn’t seem right to throw him under the bus. I figured I owed him that much. He’d taken care of me. Taking care of him seemed like the least I could do.

curtis

It was almost like waking out of a dream, or rising out of the haze of anesthesia. One moment I’d been on the roof of the school cafeteria, trying to gather the momentum to make my way downstairs, and the next I was a passenger in my own SUV and Bill Meyers was behind the wheel.

Bill was an old-school principal, over sixty-five but so far not even hinting at retirement. I’d been a teacher on his interview panel ten years ago; since then, he’d been my evaluator and sometimes friend. We hadn’t always seen eye to eye, and more than once as the chair of the science department I’d been in his office, sitting across the heavy mahogany desk, with Bill in his fancy leather executive chair, the sort of chair that principals had and teachers didn’t.

Since Daniel died, our relationship had deteriorated—my fault, of course. He’d been at Daniel’s memorial service, a handshake in the long reception line afterward. Once or twice since then he’d mentioned Daniel’s name to me, and I’d recoiled, stung. At most we exchanged a few minutes of chitchat in the hall between classes, cordial rather than companionable. So it was surreal to show him into my home, to take a seat on the gold couch while he putzed around in the kitchen, opening and closing cupboards in search of a box of tea that I wasn’t sure existed. When he finally produced some Earl Grey, I was sure it was something Kathleen had purchased years ago and hadn’t been used since. Did tea have an expiration date? I wasn’t sure.

By this time I was feeling more myself, which is to say, incredibly embarrassed about the entire thing. Bill had already referred to it twice, gravely, as an “incident,” and I realized that the “Mr. K on the Cafeteria Roof” episode would be the stuff of school legend, like the time Janet Young, a ninety-pound English teacher, had separated two basketball players who suddenly realized they had the same girlfriend. It would be all over the school by now. For all I knew, one of my more enterprising students had captured the entire scene—such as it was—on a video that was even now making the rounds of the internet.

For the first time, I thought about Olivia and how pale she’d looked when I’d passed her. Oh, God. Liv.

“I’m feeling better already,” I told Bill, taking the too-warm mug of tea and shifting it awkwardly from hand to hand.

He lowered his lanky, six-three frame into a turquoise armchair, one of Kathleen’s “reclamations” that had been on the side of the road one day and reupholstered, refinished and situated in our house the next. Our entire house was a riot of Kathleen’s color choices that—it occurred to me only now, as Bill’s eyes roved over the decor—not everyone might appreciate. The Meyers house was probably done in complete neutrals, like sand and stone and khaki and beige.

“Curtis, we’ve known each other a long time now, haven’t we?”

It sounded like the opening line of a rehearsed speech. I nodded.

“I knew you before your son died. Before Kathleen left. Right?”

I nodded again, bristling. Rub it in, why don’t you?

“I remember a time when you were larger than life on that campus. You were involved, you know? You were department chair. You were excited about trying new things. Kids looked up to you, right? But it’s been a while since those days, hasn’t it?”

These seemed like rhetorical questions, so I took a sip of tea, and remembered why the box of Earl Grey had gone untouched since Kathleen left. I hated Earl Grey. Earl Grey was Kathleen’s tea, not mine.

“Now I see you walk around campus, and it’s like you’re not even there, except physically. Students call your name, and sometimes you don’t even react. You haven’t returned a single email all year, and sometimes when I pop in to see you after school, you’re just sitting behind your desk staring at nothing.”

I flinched at each of his statements. It was like getting a glimpse into my private file, seeing all the evidence that had been amassed against me.

“Now, I’m not trying to downplay in any way what you’ve been through, Curt. I can’t say I would handle this situation any better than you’ve done, but I think it’s time you faced certain realities. You’re not giving one hundred percent—” He raised a hand to cut off my protest. “It’s true. You’re not giving one hundred percent to your students, to yourself or to Olivia.”

I set the mug on the trunk that served as our coffee table. I must have set it down harder than I thought, because some tea splashed over the side, and Bill reached forward, dabbing at the spill with a napkin. It was an old steamer trunk, transportation stickers still affixed to the side. Olivia, her stocking feet on its surface, had once wondered out loud if it had belonged to someone from the Titanic, if somehow a trunk had survived but its owner had not. Impossible, I’d said. But it’s an old trunk, anyway, she had pointed out. The owner is probably dead, shipwreck or otherwise.

“Don’t bring Olivia into this,” I said now, a note of warning in my voice. Maybe he was right about things at school, but that didn’t mean he knew a thing about Olivia and me.

Bill raised his hand again, as if I were a dog who needed to heel. “It’s only because I like you and respect you that I can say this, Curt. But Olivia’s floundering, too.”

“What do you mean? She’s doing fine.”

“She’s failing P.E. I talked to Jessie Ryan only yesterday, and she says Olivia has missed at least a dozen classes since January.”

I shook my head. “She’s only been sick once this entire semester.”

“Well, she’s not sick. She’s skipping class, Curtis. Hanging out in the bathroom, the library... We all know she’s bright. We’re all rooting for her, and that’s why Jessie came to me, to figure out how we can help her. You must have seen it. She’s lonely. You never see her talking to another kid.”

“Wait,” I said. “You might be right about P.E. I don’t know. I’ll talk to her today and get to the bottom of things. But Olivia is not lonely. She has that group of friends.” I didn’t add, the ones who wear all black and call themselves the Visigoths, the ones who scare the hell out of me half the time.

“She eats her lunch in the library.”

“Sometimes,” I felt myself being too defensive, but couldn’t stop it. “She eats there sometimes.”

“Every day,” Bill countered.

I closed my eyes, fighting off a sudden stab of pain. Olivia, eating alone in the library, taking a listless bite of the egg salad sandwich she’d made the night before, peeling a mozzarella stick in tidy, industrious strokes. “I’ll talk to her,” I said. “And Monday, when I’m back at school—”

“Let’s talk about that, too,” Bill said. He leaned forward in the chair, a hand on each of his knees. Dress slacks, a button-down shirt, a sports coat with leather patches on the elbows—that was part of his style. No khakis and polo shirts for this man, ever.

Here it comes, I thought. Maybe I’d been waiting for it. Maybe I’d known since the moment Bill Meyers had appeared on the cafeteria roof. He was going to do it—he was going to release me, quickly and painlessly as pulling off a Band-Aid.

But instead, Bill laid out a rationale over the next hour or so, and everything he said made perfect sense. I was struggling. I wasn’t giving one hundred percent. The state testing—that grasping, insatiable god all public school teachers worshipped—was over, the year was winding down. It was nearly May, so I could limp through the last month of the school year, doing right by no one. I could keep going through the motions. But it wasn’t fair to my students. It wasn’t fair to my own sense of integrity. I stiffened again when he mentioned that it wasn’t fair to Olivia—but I was starting to see that he was right. What was Olivia doing at this very moment? Probably freaking out about what I’d done.

On the other hand, Bill pointed out—I did have plenty of sick leave accrued. I’d taken two weeks when Daniel died, and the odd day here and there during my annual bout with laryngitis, but I had more than enough days banked to take the whole rest of the year. I could start fresh in the fall, and my job would be waiting for me.

As for Olivia, Bill continued—something could probably be worked out if we wanted to take a little time off. Independent study packets, an incomplete that could be amended later, a summer class at a community college to fulfill the P.E. requirement. There were options; it just required a little creative thinking. “She’s a good kid,” he said. “She’s going to come through one way or another.”

Of course, I thought. Of course she’ll come through.

Then Bill said, “Forget about school,” with a little flick of his wrist as if school had no significance at all. “Forget about students and responsibilities to the job. For now, just forget about all of that. What you need is to figure out what you really want to happen in your life, Curt. What is it that Curtis Kaufman needs to do right now, more than anything else in the world? What’s going to be the best thing for Curtis Kaufman and his family?”

His question startled me, even though it was one I’d been considering in a subconscious way, all week.

My eyes flicked to the print on the wall. It was a vintage Jefferson Airplane poster, hand-lettered. Kathleen had found it at a store near Haight-Ashbury on a trip to San Francisco early in our marriage, then mounted and framed it. It had hung in our first apartment, and later in the two-bedroom house we’d rented until Olivia was born, when we’d offered our meager savings for the down payment on this house, which Kathleen had dubbed the “funky fixer-upper” and I’d fondly referred to as “the money pit.” I’d half expected Kathleen to take the frame off the wall when she went, but maybe it was more significant that she’d simply left it behind.

And maybe it was significant that behind that particular frame I’d taped the letter from the Lorain County D.A. Although we understand that such a notification is not welcome to families of victims...

“Curt? Are you listening? It’s important to rediscover your purpose. I know that must sound like a bunch of New Age bullshit, but—”

“No, you’re right,” I said. The tightness in my chest, which had been there all day, was releasing, like the loosening grip of a blood pressure cuff.

My purpose.

One single act could set everything right, reestablish the balance in our lives.

Deep down, of course, I had known this all along.

I needed to kill Robert Saenz.

olivia

At 3:15 p.m., Mrs. Silva and I got into her little red Volkswagen Beetle and navigated our way through Sacramento. I tried very hard not to grab on to the door handle every time we turned, and it seemed that she was trying very hard not to appear annoyed with the situation—angling the A/C vent directly toward me, turning the radio station to something fast and upbeat. It was a relief to see Dad’s SUV in the driveway, to feel for a second that everything might be normal. We parked on the street, and Mrs. Silva followed a few feet behind me. I was shaking as I let myself in the front door, not sure what I would find inside.

Mr. Meyers met me in the entryway, stooping to avoid our overhead light fixture. “Hey, Olivia. I think your dad is going to be fine, but just in case, I’m going to leave this with you, okay?” He passed me a slip of paper with a phone number and his name printed in block letters: BILL MEYERS—HOME.

I folded the paper and pushed it deep into a pocket. It was uncomfortable and strange enough to have my school principal in our home—I couldn’t imagine calling him at his.

“You’re all right now, Curt?” Mr. Meyers asked, and from the couch Dad said, “You bet, Bill.”

“Dad?” I let my backpack slide to the floor and studied him. He looked normal—not unfocused like he’d looked coming down from the cafeteria roof, and not grayish like he’d looked only this morning on our way to school. He actually looked good, healthy and smiling, as though he’d been home all afternoon doing shots of wheatgrass infused with extra vitamin C.

He patted the couch. “Come here, Liv.”

I sank down next to him, leaning my head automatically into his shoulder, something I hadn’t done in a long time. My head must have grown, because it wasn’t the comfortable fit I used to remember.

“Hey...hey. Don’t cry.”

I was about to protest that I wasn’t crying, that I was freaked out since my father had been sitting on the roof of the cafeteria, thank you very much, but I wasn’t going to cry about it. And then I realized that my shoulders were heaving, and my breath was coming out funny, and that Dad, as usual, was right.

Outside, a car started; Mrs. Silva and Mr. Meyers had left. This made me a little worried, and then it worried me that I was worried—because being with Dad should have been the least worrisome thing in the world.

I pulled away and looked at him. “What happened?”

“Really, it was nothing. I just felt like I needed to take a little break.” There was something I didn’t trust about his face. It was exactly the way I’d look if someone had a gun to my back and was telling me to smile or else.

“In the middle of the school day. On the cafeteria roof.”

Dad pulled me close again. “Everything’s fine now, Liv. There’s something I want to tell you.”

I groaned. Whatever followed this statement wasn’t going to be good. Cue Daniel telling me he was going to college halfway across the country, but we would talk every week. Cue Dad announcing that the guy responsible for Daniel’s death had worked out a plea bargain. Cue Mom telling me she had something to talk about, and then moving to Omaha. I braced myself as if I were preparing for a slap to the face or a punch to the gut. Maybe it was worse than I thought—maybe Dad had had a stroke or been diagnosed with brain cancer or any one of the awful diseases you could find on medical websites.

But what he said was, “Love.”

It took me a minute, and then I realized he was playing this game we’d made up when I was just a kid and had trouble falling asleep at night. It went like this: The first person said the word “love,” and the second person said a word that started with “e” like “elephant,” and the first person said a word that started with “t”, and so on and so on, with the last letter of one word spawning the first letter of the next. It used to make me feel happy and silly, and then somehow in the middle of thinking of the next word, I’d fall asleep. Now it seemed ridiculous. Shouldn’t we be doing something other than playing games?

“Come on, Liv,” Dad prompted. “Love.”

I shook my head. “Empty.”

He gave me a hesitant smile. “Yield.”

“I really don’t feel like playing a game, Dad.”

“One more. Yield.”

I sighed. “Danger.”

“Real,” he said, touching his chest and then holding his hand out to me, as if we were practicing sign language together.

“Dad,” I groaned. “What’s going on?”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, I know this is all a little weird. But I’m completely serious. What would you say to taking a little trip with your old man?”

I blinked. Earlier I thought he was about to take a header from the cafeteria roof. Now he wanted to take me on a trip. I chose my words carefully. “First, I would say that the phrase old man has always disturbed me for reasons I don’t fully understand. Then I would say that we’re almost out of milk, and if this little trip includes a stop at a grocery store, I’m all for it.”

Dad chuckled. “No, not to the grocery store. I mean a real trip. A voyage.”

Well, this was new. A voyage? “Does this involve a boat?” I demanded, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. I was going to have to call Mom for sure. There were probably five hundred water-related entries in my Fear Journals. “You know I’m afraid of boats and sharks and currents and rogue waves and—”

“No boats, I promise. Voyage is the wrong word, then. I’m talking about a road trip. You, me and the open road.” He paced to the windows, whirled around, paced back. It surprised me how young he looked, how goofy. Like his old self, I thought, and then out of nowhere: Like when Daniel was alive. But he looked a bit manic, too.

“A road trip? Dad, are you sure you’re okay? I’m serious. Do you need me to, um, be a supportive passenger while you drive yourself to the doctor or something?”

He laughed a bigger-than-genuine laugh that was not at all reassuring.

I can’t take this, I thought. One member of my family was gone forever, another lived a few thousand miles away and now my last remaining family member was cracking up—on the cafeteria roof one minute, on the couch talking about a voyage the next. I had to call Mom. This was definitely more than I could handle by myself.

“Don’t you want to know where we’re going?”

I wasn’t sure we should be going anywhere, unless maybe it was to some kind of “hospital” for a little “rest.” But they would have to take me, too, because I wasn’t going to survive for a second on my own. “Okay,” I said, slowly, preparing to hear him suggest the wilds of Alaska or a hot spring in Arizona, the sort of place that couldn’t be found on a map. “Where are we going?”

His grin was so big it threatened to split his face in two. “We’re going to Reno, to Salt Lake City, to Cheyenne...and, drumroll, please...to Omaha.”

“Omaha? You mean, to Mom?” I tried to say it neutrally, to keep the emotion out of my voice. This was a surprise, and not an unwelcome one. Maybe Dad had come to the conclusion himself that he was cracking up. Maybe Mom and I could get him some professional help.

“Aren’t you excited?”

“Dad, talk to me. Did you just get fired?”

“Fired? No. Of course not.”

“So what were you and Mr. Meyers doing all afternoon?”

“Just talking, Liv. He helped me figure something out.”

“He helped you figure out that you need to go to Omaha,” I clarified.

“I know, it’s sudden. But look—I have an entire plan worked out. We’ll take a few days to get things situated around here, and then we’ll hit the road.”

I groaned. “Dad, seriously. We have another month of school.”

“That’s what Mr. Meyers and I figured out. I can take some sick leave—I’ve got more than enough to spare. And we’ll talk to your counselor about independent study for you, just to the end of the semester. Don’t worry.” Leaning down, he put a hand on my shoulder, and I felt his warmth burning through my sweatshirt.

And then I froze, imagining that conversation with Mr. Merrill. “Dad, there’s something—”

He stopped me. “I know all about your P.E. class, and it’s okay. We’ll get it all figured out.”

I sat back on the couch, about to cry for the zillionth time today. What in the world was going on? I was failing P.E. for the second time, and I wasn’t even going to get yelled at? “Dad, come on. Why are we going to Omaha?”

“Olivia, I just—I feel like it’s time.”

“Time for what? For us to be together again, you and me and Mom?”

“Of course.” He didn’t even blink.

He’s lying, I knew instantly. Fantastic. My father was lying to me.

“Does Mom know about this?”

“Well. Not yet.”

I groaned. “And how long...?”

“Oh, four or five days, and then we’ll be there.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

But Dad was pretending not to hear me. When I stood and tried to move past him, he caught me in a big, spin-in-a-circle hug that felt phony, too. He felt like a different version of my dad than the one I’d been living with for the past few years, as if a stranger had bought a mask of Dad’s face and borrowed one of his polo shirts. When he put me down, he was red with excitement. “This is the right thing,” he whispered. “I know it.”

I didn’t believe that for a second.

But I would have been the shittiest daughter in the world to say so.

curtis

Olivia was sharp; I could feel her watching me that weekend, waiting for me to slip up, or trying to catch me off guard with her questions. But I’d made up my mind. This was the right thing, the best, the only thing. Kathleen and Olivia would be together, Saenz would be dead,and I would finally, finally have done right by Daniel.

“So, we’re seriously doing this?” Olivia asked me the next morning, after I called The Sacramento Bee to put our newspaper on hold.

“You’re not backing out, are you?” I asked.

She glared at me. “I don’t really see that as an option.”

I hauled down two suitcases from a shelf in the garage, where they had aged disgracefully since our disastrous trip to Coronado, acquiring a layer of dust and more than a few spiderwebs. It took a half hour of cleaning with damp cloths before Olivia would consider either suitcase as a viable option. Then she stood before her open closet doors, hands on her skinny hips.

I sighed. “What’s wrong now?”

“It’s impossible to pack without knowing exactly how long I’m going to be gone,” she announced.

I laughed. “Are you kidding me? I know exactly what you’re going to pack. Black pants, black shirts, black sweatshirts, black socks and black boots. Can’t be that difficult.” It was basically her uniform, as much as khaki pants and polo shirts were mine. I wasn’t sure when it had started, exactly, or where all the clothes had come from—but one morning at breakfast a couple of years ago, I realized that I was the parent of a teenage daughter who wore only black.

She glared at me. “But how many black shirts, exactly?”

“What does it matter? It’s not like there are no washing machines in Omaha.” It was better, I figured, to be vague than to tell an outright lie. Telling the truth was out of the question.

There were dozens of small details to figure out, and several major ones. It was almost thrilling to have a plan, to have a specific goal that was further than a day or two ahead, the way we’d been existing since Kathleen left. I had installed a massive whiteboard in the front entryway, and each night Olivia and I had crossed off our completed chores and added new ones. Buy cereal, take the trash out, pay phone and cable, run sprinkler in backyard. Now I was thinking beyond today, beyond this week.