The Fragile World (14 page)

curtis

Alone in the motel room, with the door locked and the shades pulled, I went right for the gun. I was going to confront Robert Saenz in a few days, so I needed to be ready. This was my first free moment without Olivia since buying the gun.

I’d watched a few how-to videos, although on the three-inch screen of my cell phone most of the details were too small to fully appreciate. Along with the lineup of prime time police dramas, this was the extent of my experience with guns. We’d never been gun people. Mention the NRA at a cocktail party, and Kathleen practically had to be restrained; it went without saying that there wasn’t a gun in our house.

Until that night at Zach Gaffaney’s trailer, the last time I’d touched a gun had been close to forty years ago, a one-time hunting excursion with my dad and a buddy of his, somewhere northwest of Chicago, and that had been a shotgun, of course. Dad had shown me how to hold it, how to sight along the barrel, but he’d been the one who fired. The rabbit had been bounding along, but then it stopped, ears alert, and a second later it was nothing more than a smear of blood and fur against the snow. Forty years later and the memory still made me sick.

But that rabbit had been innocent, and Robert Saenz was not.

My hands were shaking as I took the single bullet from my pocket. The Colt wasn’t a complicated piece of equipment, but I fumbled pulling back the latch and pushing the cylinder to the side, and my hands sweated as I inserted the bullet into the chamber and then popped the cylinder back into place. How did criminals do this? How were they so sure of their movements, their aim? I reversed the motions, tipping the bullet into my palm, then reloaded, unloaded.

I didn’t have a human silhouette as a target, but I picked a nail hole on the wall and dry fired, imagining Robert Saenz’s face as I’d seen it in his mug shot—the jowls, the bloodshot eyes looking at nothing. I moved closer, fired at what I figured would be his chest. It would be at close range. Robert Saenz would see me, would know who I was and what I was going to do. I could only fire six rounds with the Colt, but this wasn’t real yet, and in the silence of the motel room, I could take all the shots I wanted. Saenz wasn’t going to survive it. He didn’t deserve that chance.

When my arms began to ache, I wrapped the Colt in two shirts and tucked it into my suitcase, slipping the unloaded bullet back into my pocket. It couldn’t have been more than sixty-five degrees in our motel room, but I was sweating. At the sink, I splashed water on my face, refusing to meet my own eyes.

The digital alarm clocked read 8:17 p.m. in red block letters. Unless things went horribly wrong, Olivia wouldn’t be back for quite a while. It was maddening to be stuck in a motel room, waiting, while five states to the east Robert Saenz went calmly about his life.

Restless, I stepped outside into the parking lot of The Drift Inn. There was only one car in the lot, which probably belonged to the owner. “Betha Caldwell,” she’d introduced herself, with the sort of bone-crushing handshake that seemed appropriate in a Wild-West sort of way. A light was on in the office, and I could make out her silhouette in the ambient glow of a television screen. I imagined a laugh track unspooling, housewives who weren’t really housewives screaming at each other.

Close by, an engine accelerated and I startled, thinking of Olivia with Sam Ellis. But this truck was loaded down with rangy-looking teenagers, none of whom had been visible in Lyman during the day. I relaxed; they were just kids, doing the stuff kids did. Normal kids—not like Olivia, who had spent far too long not being a kid at all.

I hoped, fiercely, that she was having a good time with Sam Ellis, the best time in the world. Maybe this would be the start of something for her—not a relationship, necessarily, but a new phase of confidence. The Olivia Kaufman who had squealed with delight, not terror, on the Bonneville Salt Flats would do just fine in the world, would grow into a quirky, funny, intelligent woman, not held back by thousands of fears.

Robert Saenz’s death would set her free, too—I believed that with everything in me.

If nothing else, she would see that I was a father who took action, who loved his kids so much he would do anything for them. I owed this to her, and I owed it to Daniel. I owed it to Kathleen, even though she might never understand. I owed it to myself as a father, as the man who’d been there in the delivery room, watching their bodies pink with breath. I’d promised to protect them, although I hadn’t known this promise might mean
to the death.

But if a promise had contingencies—if it had caveats and stipulations, if it was only applicable under a certain set of circumstances, like a complicated math problem where the variable applied
if and only if—
then what good was the promise? What good was it to only do the easy things, the tasks that required no effort at all? Love wasn’t easy; it was, to paraphrase a Bible verse Kathleen’s mother had cross-stitched and framed for us, tenacious and assertive and protective, and it never failed.

I wasn’t going to fail them again.

olivia

Sam Ellis and I stayed that way for a long time, side by side, listening to the quiet. I was trying to remember if there had ever been a time in my life when I hadn’t been able to hear cars on a road, or any kind of human-related noise. If I concentrated really hard, I could hear only my breath and Sam’s.

“Why did you bring a notebook?” he asked suddenly.

“Oh.” I was caught off guard. It was too late to say
What notebook?
because he must have seen it when I took the sweatshirt out of my backpack. “It’s just for things I’m thinking about.”

“Like a diary, you mean?”

“Sort of.”

“What did you write in it today?”

I thought back to all the things I’d written about being kidnapped on I-80 and killed in some horrible way and left to rot in the Wyoming wilderness. And then before Sam had picked me up at the motel, I’d added all the ways our evening could go wrong or he could turn out to be psychotic. “Just...things.”

“Could you read something to me?”

I was glad it was dark so he couldn’t see my face. I remembered reading somewhere the writer’s prayer:
If I should die before I wake, please throw my journal in the lake.
“It’s not really happy stuff,” I confessed to him finally. “I mean, I write about things that are worrying me. You know, things that can go wrong.”

“That’s cool,” he said. “I get it. I totally get it. That’s what I do with my art. I mean, the world has enough pictures of rainbows and kittens, you know?”

I did know. I knew exactly. But still, sometimes I wished all the other stuff could go away, so there would be no need for anything except rainbows and kittens.

He continued, “I mean, when I’m getting an idea for a new design, I’m thinking of things that already exist but shouldn’t necessarily exist. The things our world doesn’t think about, because we’re too busy thinking about everything else.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Makes sense.” I remembered the tiny, horrific detail of his snow globes, the figures fallen on the ground—the forced famine in Ukraine.

“The truth is,” he said, “the world is full of horrible things. I mean, everywhere you look, it’s horrible. The worst things you can imagine are happening somewhere, right now.”

“I know,” I said sincerely, propping myself up on my elbows. Even when I started to think,
Everything’s going to be okay now,
I would see something on the news, about an earthquake that had buried a village or a school shooting or a homeless person whose body had been discovered beneath a bridge, and I would realize there were still horrible things I hadn’t even bothered to consider.

“You want to know my worst horrible thing?”

I shifted nervously. “Um...okay.” This didn’t seem like the typical information that was shared on a first date—not that there was anything typical about Sam Ellis, or about me, either.

He settled in a little closer to me, so that our shoulders and our arms were touching, and he said, “This is the story of my real dad.”

“Not the guy I met earlier?”

“Right. Jerrod Ellis is not my real dad, biologically speaking. He happens to be my stepfather, but in every way that counts, he’s my real father,” Sam explained patiently. “My real dad was this pawnbroker...”

He was right: it was the worst horrible thing. His real dad had suffered from mental illness when Sam and his brother were younger, and one day before opening the store, he’d taken everything that was breakable out of the display cases, and he’d smashed the items against the wall in the back of the store. Sam didn’t know why he’d done it, exactly, but he remembered being there that day, trying to calm his brother and dodge flying shards of glass and pottery and even jewelry. And then his father had picked up a sharp chunk of broken metal and carved a huge gash down his own face. Sam had grabbed his brother, and they’d waited in a locked office for the police to come. All the while, his dad had been hammering at the office door with his fists, and Sam had been so scared that he’d wet himself while he was waiting.

“When I think about it now, that was the worst part, that I stunk like piss when the police finally got to us.” He said this calmly, as if it had been so long ago that it wasn’t a part of him anymore. As if it were a small thing that could be put in a box, and the box could be packed away, and it never had to be opened again.

In the quiet after he finished, I leaned my head against his shoulder. “That is a really awful thing.”

“Thank you.”

“What happened to your father?”

“He killed himself. Hung himself by his sheets in the hospital.”

“Oh, my God.” I swiveled around to look at him, amazed by the truly awful things a person could carry around inside himself and still go on living and breathing—and more than that, creating things and appreciating the simple beauty of a night sky.

“It’s better now, though,” Sam said. “If that hadn’t happened, my mom never would have met my stepdad. You see?”

“I guess.” Sam’s story made at least three-quarters of the things I’d written in my Fear Journal seem petty—all the more so because most of them were invented, could-happen things, and Sam’s terrible thing had actually happened.

“Is it weird that I told you that?” His voice was close to my ear. “Sometimes, I just feel like I need to put the worst thing out there, to get it all out in the open.”

“No, I understand.” I meant it. In a way, that’s what my Fear Journal was all about. If I wrote it down, it wasn’t some mysterious, nebulous concern floating around in the universe, but something I could own, something I could record and then release from my mind.

“I have a worst thing, too,” I whispered, surprising myself. If Dad or Mom had guessed, they would have expected me to say that the most awful thing that happened to me was Daniel dying. Of course, that was a horrible thing, and maybe even the actual worst thing, but instead, I took a deep breath and told Sam Ellis about something that
I
had done. Even though there were only a few insects around to hear, I told him the entire story, beginning to end, in a whisper.

Just a few days before I started high school, there was a party at the home of this junior boy named Shawn, whose parents were in Hawaii. A couple of other incoming freshmen were invited, too, including my friend Kendra, one of the few girls from my middle school who was going on to Rio with me. Although we had begun to drift apart after Daniel had died, we still saw each other every day, saved each other seats at lunch and partnered up on group projects. She knew everything that had happened with Daniel, and about some of the weirdness between my parents—although Mom’s leaving was so fresh, I hadn’t yet told Kendra it was a permanent thing. I’d made it seem like no big deal, as though Mom took trips by herself all the time and Dad and I were completely used to fending for ourselves.

The night of the party, I told Dad I would be at Kendra’s house, and Kendra told her parents she would be at mine, and as far as I knew, no parent was ever the wiser. We’d dressed up too fancy, the way freshman girls did at parties: black skirts made shorter by rolling over the waistbands, heels higher than we could comfortably walk in, so much perfume that we could smell each other even as we walked through the streets from Kendra’s house. We giggled, drunk on our newfound freedom. My laughter had been forced at first, like a parody of what real laughter should sound like. I was rusty, not having laughed in so long. As we walked, though, I was determined to put it all behind me. Daniel, the dead brother. Mom, the absent parent. Dad, the parent who was always there, although he seemed miles away, too. I was just going to be a regular girl, fun and silly and sociable. Before we went inside, Kendra snapped a photo of us with her phone.

Shawn’s house turned out to be one of those cookie-cutter mini-mansions plopped down next to a few dozen other mini-mansions on what used to be an almond ranch. It was the kind of house Mom would have hated. Everything was tastefully neutral, beige on blah. The house was packed, mostly with upperclassmen I didn’t know. Kendra recognized a group of girls in the kitchen, standing around the island with red plastic cups in their hands. “They’re all in the leadership class,” Kendra said, and I saw in them the same kind of crazy confidence Daniel had always had, a buoyancy that kept them floating above the rest of us mere mortals.

“Let’s see what’s going on outside,” I murmured to Kendra. Through the window I could see boys in trunks cannonballing into a pool. It was one of those fancy pools with a disappearing edge, so that it looked like all the water was going to spill right out and cascade down in a waterfall on the other side.

But Kendra shot me a look and dove right into the conversation. She’d been elected incoming freshman class secretary at the end of eighth grade, and I realized that these were her people, and I was just someone she knew, a friend from her past who would be shucked off like a pair of woolly boots at the beginning of spring. I tried not to be hurt, but as a few more girls crowded in, I found myself edged out of the circle, standing behind Kendra like a toddler afraid to leave her mother’s side. One of the girls was retelling a story loudly, the sort of story that was only funny if you were an insider. Kendra laughed too enthusiastically, as if she had never heard anything so funny. She might as well have announced that she was available as a loyal, adoring sidekick.

Not like me—the no-fun friend.

Suddenly, one of the seniors announced that she had gotten a tattoo for her birthday, and the entire group charged from the kitchen en masse, through the dining room and up the back staircase. I followed a few feet behind, taking the steps slowly in my wobbly heels. I was sick of them already, but most of all I was sick of myself, for being the way I was. It could not possibly be normal that I was an almost-fourteen-year-old girl who wanted nothing more than to go home, throw on a three-sizes-too-big T-shirt and watch a classic movie with my dad, something like
Platoon
or
Escape from Alcatraz,
for the twentieth time.

At the top of the stairs, the girls pushed into a bedroom, locking the door behind them. It was a private tattoo-viewing party, and I had fallen too far behind or else been deliberately excluded. It didn’t really matter—I would have felt shitty either way. Kendra was on the inside, and I was out in the hall, holding a cup of warm beer that I had no intention of drinking. I wanted to head right back down the stairs and walk home, although I knew I’d have to stop somewhere to change into the shorts and T-shirt in my backpack.

“I almost did it, too,” I told Sam, still whispering, as if whispering could make it less real and less horrible. “I was
this
close to walking away.”

“But you didn’t,” Sam said, squeezing my hand.

But I didn’t.

I was just standing there in the middle of a hallway, looking at a series of framed studio portraits of Shawn’s family, when someone stumbled up the stairs, tripped over the top step and fell down at my feet, cursing. He was older; I didn’t know his name. I set my cup down on the ledge of one of the portraits, and with an entire photogenic family of strangers staring at us, I let him plant a big, beery kiss on my mouth.

I can’t say it was pleasant—his tongue was a little too meaty and rough—but it wasn’t completely unpleasant, either. It was my first real, non-parent and non-relative kiss, although he was probably too drunk to notice my inexperience. The best part of it was that I instantly felt better for not being included in the tattoo-viewing that was happening behind the locked door down the hall.
I don’t need to be with those stupid girls,
I told myself, and I kissed him harder.

Here’s how I envisioned having sex would be: on a blanket in a field of wildflowers, under a blue sky. Or in a big, beautiful bed with crisp white sheets, with candlelight and roses and music. I didn’t have a clear vision of
him,
exactly—only that he was someone handsome, someone funny, someone who loved me. Also, I pictured myself older, with a body that didn’t resemble a twelve-year-old boy’s no matter how much I dressed it up—at a distant point in my life where I appreciated things like manicured fingernails and waxed eyebrows.

But I guess no one thinks: I’m going to have sex on a bathroom floor with someone I met three minutes before, with one of my knees knocking against the vanity and my head butted up against the toilet. No one envisions: I’ll still be mostly clothed, with my short skirt pushed up around my stomach and my completely uncool underwear pushed down, hanging off one ankle. No one wishes for the stab of pain, for the smear of blood. Maybe the worst of it was that he was drunk and wouldn’t remember a bit of it, and I was sober and would remember every second. Or maybe the worst of it was that when he’d said, “Wanna do it? Wanna go somewhere private?” in my ear, it hadn’t taken me long to consider. Why not? My life absolutely sucked in every way. Mom wasn’t around to find out, and Dad wouldn’t notice, anyway. At least for a few minutes, I could feel special.

Kendra found out what happened—one of the other girls had seen me coming out of the bathroom after him, my skirt twisted—and wrote me a long message on Facebook in which she said I was a “slut” and “desperate to be liked” and even “a bad influence” and not the kind of person she wanted to be associated with. And then she unfriended me—there and in real life. When we started school, she completely avoided me. In the one class we had together, Honors English, she never even looked in my direction. She got her wish and became one of those cool leadership girls, and her life was all Homecoming and rallies and making posters after school and delivering the daily announcements—a fear that popped up regularly in my journal.

But I couldn’t blame Kendra, not at all. I agreed with everything she said; I
was
disgusting. When I remembered that night, and how I’d gone from standing in the hallway one minute to lying down next to a bathroom vanity the next, it was like it had happened to someone who wasn’t even me but some weak, stupid girl who didn’t have any self-respect or dignity or hope for whatever might come next in her life.