The Fragile World (17 page)

olivia

As I saw it, once I stopped hyperventilating with my head between my knees, there was only one reason why my father might have bullets taped to the underside of his driver’s seat: he was planning to kill himself.

Wasn’t that what I’d been worried about all along—the real reason I’d stayed with him in California rather than gone with Mom to Nebraska? It hadn’t been about my fears for myself, but my fears for
him.
Hadn’t I watched him carefully these past few years, playing straight man to his jokes, finding excuse after excuse for why I couldn’t hang out with the Visigoths after school at the skate park, subconsciously devising some of my more elaborate fears as a way of keeping myself close to him, and keeping him close to me? I gulped in air greedily, remembering Dad on the roof. My airway felt no larger than a pinprick. Of course,
of course,
he’d been about to jump.

Sam was trying to calm me down, his knuckles zigzagging back and forth across my back. It was helping, because I could feel my lungs expanding, the frenzied pace of my breath slowing. “I’m probably wrong about the whole thing,” he said. “What do I know? Maybe the bullets weren’t even his.”

I couldn’t answer. They weren’t mine, that was for sure, and there was no way in the world they belonged to Mom, who hated guns. And before that, the only other person I could remember being in the Explorer was Daniel, who wouldn’t have had any need for bullets or guns, who would have looked at the bullet in Sam’s outstretched hand and been just as confused as I was.

Sam tried again. “Maybe they’ve been there for a long time, and your dad has forgotten all about them. See? It’s probably nothing.”

Gathering my breath, I told Sam, “My dad is a Democrat,” hoping that this would explain everything. He raised an eyebrow curiously, as if I’d named a rare type of parakeet. “My whole family—we’re Democrats. We don’t believe in guns. I’m serious. My parents would never in a million years have had a gun in our house. My mom, especially. She would have flipped out if...”

Sam glanced at me sideways, afraid to suggest it.

“No,” I said firmly. “That is
not
why she left. She wouldn’t have let me stay if she thought he had anything to do with a gun.”

He nodded slowly, probably thinking I was the biggest nutcase in the world, and probably relieved that he hadn’t actually kissed someone with such a screwed-up family. “Okay, then. Maybe the bullets came with the car?”

“You mean an added feature, like heated seats or a moonroof?”

Sam didn’t register the sarcasm in my voice. “Was it a used car?”

I thought back, remembered the four of us at the dealership, piling into the Explorer for a test drive, years and years ago now. “No. We bought it new.”

Sam considered, then held up his hands, as if to ward off an attack. “I’m just going to say this, because sometimes you never know. Is there a way your father is involved in something illegal, like a burglary ring?”

My laugh turned into a wheezing cough. “You mean, has he been robbing gas stations along I-80 to finance this glamorous trip?”

“Well. You’ve been together this whole time?”

“Yes, the entire time.” And then I remembered. “Except three nights ago.”

“What happened three nights ago?”

“He dropped me off at the hotel and went for a drive. That was in Winnemucca.”

Sam nodded soberly, considering the possibilities. “What was he like when he came back?”

“I don’t know. Fine. Normal. He brought me a slushie. We watched TV.”

Sam looked at me knowingly. “And where do slushies originate from?”

“Really? You think he filled up my giant slushie cup before or after he robbed the convenience store?”

“Okay,” Sam agreed. “That doesn’t make much sense.”

“Forget it. My dad couldn’t rob anything. He
wouldn’t
rob anything. He’s not some criminal, he’s my dad. He’s Mr. K. He’s a freaking teacher.”

“What kind of teacher?”

I glared at him, not answering. Even though I wasn’t hyperventilating anymore, I put my head back in my hands. Dad wasn’t a drug manufacturer, or an armed robber, or some kind of negligent chump who was unaware that five bullets had been taped to the underside of his driver’s seat. Those possibilities were each worth their own panic attack, but the possibility of Dad wanting to kill himself was infinitely worse.

“Well,” Sam said finally. “I think we should go to your motel room while we can.”

I raised my head slowly, giving him a sharp look. My world was crumbling around me, and he thought there was the possibility of sex in his future?

He sighed, reading my mind. “I’m only thinking that if there’s a gun, we should find it.”

Oh.
Right.

The Drift Inn was completely deserted, a closed sign flipped in the office window. “Tell the truth,” I whispered to Sam as we left his truck and crossed the empty parking lot. “Doesn’t this place remind you of Bates Motel?”

“You watch a lot of television,” Sam commented, and I bit back the urge to say that actually I was referring to a
movie,
a classic, spawn of many a late-night fear. For an intense moment, I wanted to be back in my life in Sacramento, even sitting in the far stall of the D-wing girls’ bathroom, where there were no bullets beneath car seats and no strange boy accompanying me into a desolate motel room. When I pulled the key from my back pocket, I was surprised to find that my hand was shaking.

“We have to be fast,” I said, pushing open the door. The room had been cleaned, and a fresh set of towels was sitting on the end of each bed. My suitcase was still heaped on top of the table, contents spilling out. Dad’s bag was on the floor next to the vanity, neatly zipped. Nothing was wrong, exactly, but I felt wheezy and light-headed, anyway.

“Are you okay?” Sam asked, and I shook my head.

Sam nodded sympathetically. It occurred to me that he was the best possible person to be around in a crisis. He didn’t get upset—or show emotion at all, really—didn’t yell, didn’t panic, didn’t judge. Instead, he began to tackle the task in front of him, which involved systematically lifting each corner of Dad’s mattress and neatly retucking the sheets.

“Nothing?” I asked.

Sam shrugged. Flat on his back, he poked his head into the narrow space between the bed and the wall and came up a few seconds later, coughing. He checked behind my bed the same way, while I felt around beneath the pillows and blankets. We worked our way silently around the room, moving and replacing the items in the center nightstand, then turning our attention to the dresser. Sam pulled out the bottom drawers, running his hand into the dark space at the bottom of the dresser. He yanked his hand out, grimacing, and wiped a dusty smear across his jeans. Apparently deep cleaning was not a high priority at the Drift Inn.

I entered the bathroom in a state of dread, considering how many
Godfather
marathons Dad and I had watched together. But there weren’t too many hiding places, and each was empty—the cabinet beneath the sink, the single drawer on the vanity, and the inside of the toilet tank. I scrubbed my hands fiercely after repositioning the lid, and when I came out of the bathroom, Sam had unzipped my dad’s suitcase.

“Um,” I said.

“What?”

“It’s just that...I mean, those are private things.”

Sam looked offended. “Do you want my help or not?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but kept patting his way through the suitcase—Dad’s boxers, a few pairs of jeans and khakis, T-shirts. He held up a roll of gray duct tape, raising his eyebrows significantly.

“Doesn’t prove anything,” I said, although my heart was clamoring around in my chest loud enough to be heard. “My dad likes to be prepared for things. Once he fixed a hole in his shoes with duct tape.”

“But still. It’s the same color.”

“I mean, what are you going to do, some kind of forensic fiber analysis to see if the threads from that duct tape match the threads of the duct tape you found in our car?”

Sam frowned at me. “It’s called putting two-and-two together.”

“And getting five,” I muttered. “A lot of people have duct tape, and it doesn’t mean anything.” I suddenly wanted to be done with the whole mess. We were being ridiculous. Dad didn’t have a gun. Or Dad did have a gun, and there was nothing we could do about it.

“Fair enough,” Sam said evenly, although he sounded unconvinced. Moving Dad’s jacket, he uncovered a small cardboard box, and my mouth went dry. It was a good thing I was sitting down, because I felt a bit dizzy with déjà vu.

“Heavy,” he commented.

I held out a hand, not able to speak. Sam handed me the box, and I sat on my bed, feeling the weight of it in my lap. I didn’t need to pull back the flaps to know what was inside. Over the years, I’d looked a few times, curious at first, and then wanting to reassure myself that Daniel’s ashes were still there—that Mom hadn’t taken them to Omaha, that Dad hadn’t scattered them somewhere without telling me.

“Aren’t you going to open that?”

I shook my head. “I know what this is. It’s not a gun.”

Sam considered this for a moment but didn’t protest. He knelt again in front of Dad’s suitcase. “What’s this?” He held up a bulging zippered case.

“I don’t know. His shaving kit, maybe?”

Sam pointed to the dresser, where Dad’s shaving kit was open, a travel-sized bottle of mouthwash poking out.

Sam handed me the case. It seemed too flat to hold a gun. “You open it,” he said.

Carefully, I set the box with Daniel’s ashes to the side and worked the zipper, tipping the contents onto the bedspread.

“Whoa,” Sam said, as if we’d found a hidden stash of drugs.

I got that woozy feeling again, because I knew what I was looking at instantly. My dad’s stash, his most private possessions, didn’t include cocaine or bottles of prescription pills. What spilled out of the bag was the entire existence of my family, a collection of all things Kaufman.

The heaviest object was a three-by-five frame, holding a picture taken about eight years ago, during my frizzy ponytails phase. Dad looked younger, too—his hair fuller, darker where it was now peppered with gray. He had one arm around me and the other around Mom, and Mom was beaming, happy in a way that brought back a rush of long-ago memories. Daniel was on the far right, this big goofy smile on his face. It must have been just after he got his braces off, because his teeth were almost startlingly white.

Sam took the frame from me, holding it only inches from his face, studying each of us as if he might be required to pick us out of a lineup.

The rest of the stuff was mostly paper. I undid the rubber band on a bundle of wallet-sized photos—Daniel through the ages, kindergarten all the way up through high school, with his senior picture on the bottom of the stack. There were a few other snapshots of our family, including one I remembered from a trip to Yosemite. Dad had taken the photo, and Mom had an arm around both Daniel and me.

Sam felt in the bottom of the bag and pulled out a neat stack of newspaper clippings. As he spread them out on the bed, I saw that each one mentioned Daniel in some way—his piano recitals, chamber orchestra concerts, awards from musical competitions, scholarship announcements. Local-boy-makes-good kind of stories.

“Whoa,” Sam said again, reverently. “This is your brother?”

I didn’t correct him with the past tense. I was finding it difficult to speak, since Daniel’s face was looking up at me from just about every clipping. In some he was the smiling boy in the black tuxedo jacket; others were action shots with Daniel leaning over the keyboard, his fingers making magic.

“Oh,” Sam said, unfolding a page ripped from
The Sacramento Bee,
dated Friday, October 30, 2008. The headline read: Area music prodigy killed in Ohio car accident.

“Yeah,” I said, gulping in that funny way I did every time it came back to me. The 2:00 a.m. phone call, the end of everything.

The other clippings included Daniel’s obituary, an article from an Oberlin College publication and a blurb about a plea deal copped by the driver who’d killed Daniel. I sifted through the articles carefully, smoothing out the wrinkles, and returned them to the bottom of the zippered pouch.

Sam watched me quietly, and I was grateful for the way he didn’t need to say anything. There was no need to put an arm around me or ask how I was feeling, and no need to offer a shoulder to cry on if I wanted to spill the whole sad story of my life for the past four years.

Together, we repacked the photos and returned the case to the bottom of my dad’s suitcase. I replaced the box with Daniel’s remains beneath Dad’s jacket and carefully zipped the entire suitcase, so he would find it exactly as he had left it.

Sam sat next to me on the bed. “Well, we didn’t see any sign of a gun.”

That was true, but somehow it didn’t make me feel any better.

curtis

I dialed Olivia’s phone twice, getting her voice mail. “Olivia, I need you to call me back right away,” I barked. I tossed the pad of paper into a trash can and then, with the letter to Kathleen and Olivia folded in my back pocket, I took off in the direction of the motel at a breathless, clumsy run, one hand in the pocket of my sweatshirt to grip the Colt. What the hell had I been thinking? I didn’t need Kathleen here to tell me that I had managed to fuck this up, that my daughter and a near-stranger had gone completely off the grid.

“You’re in a hurry,” someone called, and I looked up to see Betha Caldwell grinning at me from beneath red, penciled-in eyebrows. She had pulled her truck to the curb and was inching along to keep pace with me.

“I’m trying to find Olivia. She’s with that Ellis boy—Sam.”

One fake eyebrow rose higher than the other. “I see.”

I leaned into the open window. “Could you— Are you going in the direction of the motel?”

“The motel is exactly where I’m going. Hop in.”

Betha waited until I fastened my seat belt, an episode made all the more difficult by my shaking hands. “She’s fine,” Betha pronounced, chuckling. “Are you always this protective?”

“She’s sixteen.” Didn’t this say everything?

Betha gave the truck a little gas, and we rolled along the main drag at an infuriatingly slow pace. I had the feeling that I could have done better on the outside, jogging along one-handedly. She reached over to pat me on the leg. “Around here, sixteen is a full-fledged adult. Hell, I was married by the time I was seventeen, had my oldest only a year later.”

“I don’t mean to sound rude, but that is exactly what I’m worried about,” I told her. “Plus, Sam is nineteen.”

Betha threw back her head and laughed. “That boy is not exactly what I’d call sophisticated.”

I didn’t wait for her truck to come to a complete stop before I started running toward our motel room. Betha parked and followed behind me, curious, as I fumbled with the room key. The door swung inward, and I saw Olivia and Sam on her bed, sitting side by side, not touching.

“Liv?” I demanded. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing.” Her voice was too defensive. Something was going on, even if it wasn’t the something I’d feared. She was still dressed in her black jeans, black boots and black hoodie—the Olivia uniform—and Sam was fully dressed, as well. But both of them looked guilty as hell.

I came closer. “Nothing?”

“Nothing,
sir,
” Sam added helpfully.

I glared at him, the hand in my pocket bumping up against the now-familiar bulge of the handgun at my waist. Thank God I hadn’t left it in the room, where one or the other of them could have stumbled across it. If not sex, what were they doing in the motel room? Drugs? I stared at Olivia, my crazy-smart, scared-of-everything, too-old-for-her-age daughter, and we both spoke at the same time.

“Olivia, I think we need—”

“Dad, I just wanted to—”

I took a deep breath. “You first.”

“I wasn’t feeling good,” Olivia said. “I thought I was going to throw up, and I wanted to come back here. Sam didn’t want to leave me alone until you got back.”

I considered this, anger seeping out of me. “You could have called, though. You should have. In fact, I called you twice, and you didn’t answer.”

“I forgot to charge my phone last night.”

I stared at her for a long moment until she blinked, looking away.

Sam cleared his throat and stood, patting Olivia on the shoulder like a younger sister. “Guess I’ll get back to it, then,” he said. He nodded at me sheepishly, and a minute later we heard the clunk-whirr of the transmission as he reversed, then accelerated out of the parking lot.

Betha Caldwell, listening from the door, asked if Olivia wanted some chicken soup.

Olivia smiled weakly. “Maybe just a few crackers?”

“A few crackers it is. Be right back,” Betha called cheerfully.

I closed the door and walked over to my bed, plopping down on it. Olivia half turned and we stared at each other again.

“I was worried,” I told her. “You said you would be right there.”

“I know. But I told you what happened.”

“Liv—”

“Your hair looks nice,” she said, giving me a little smile.

I ran a hand over the top of my head distractedly. “So, what do we do now?”

Olivia shrugged. “Maybe we can watch some crap TV for a bit, just the two of us.”

“Sounds good.” I leaned over to give her a kiss on the forehead, and she tried to wrap me in a hug that I sidestepped at the last moment. Having the Colt in my waistband was like walking around with a ticking bomb strapped to my chest. I dreaded Olivia bumping against the handle, asking,
What’s that?

“I don’t need whatever bug you’ve got,” I explained, settling back onto my bed. Olivia was watching me from beneath her hoodie, her expression unreadable.

We spent the afternoon in our side-by-side beds, the top sheets tucked in too tightly, the pillows slightly too hard. Betha knocked, bringing a sleeve of Saltine crackers and a plate of breakfast leftovers: muffins, scones, little butter and jelly packets.

Olivia ran through a dismal channel selection before settling on reruns of
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

“I can’t believe this show is still rerunning,” I commented, two episodes in, brushing crumbs off my sheets. “Your brother used to watch this every morning during the summer, but that was years ago now.”

Olivia shifted in bed, a complicated undertaking, considered that she was buried beneath several layers. “He did? Daniel used to watch this?”

I started, hearing his name. How long since we had mentioned him so casually, this ghost who flitted around our lives? “Sure,” I told her. “You don’t remember?”

On the screen, Will Smith was trying to impress a cashier with his over-the-top cockiness. The laugh track cackled. Everyone thought he was funny except for the cashier.

“No,” she said. “I barely remember anything.”

“That’s not true,” I said reflexively, although of course it might have been. I felt defensive on her behalf. Didn’t she remember? All our day trips around California, our family dinners, Daniel’s endless piano practicing, our lazy Saturday mornings... Was this another thing Robert Saenz had taken from us, our ability to remember happiness?

Then Olivia blurted, as if she’d been holding it all in for a long time, and the only way to let it out was in a fast gush, “I wish I knew more about Daniel. He had all these years of life when I wasn’t around, or when I was around, but too young to remember. Or when I was old enough to remember, but too self-absorbed to think it was anything important that I should pay attention to.”

“Oh, Liv.”

“I would have paid attention,” she said. “If I had known what was going to happen, I would have memorized everything, or written it down, or shot a vid—”

She stopped abruptly, and when I glanced over, she was crying. I reached for the remote and muted the television. Will Smith was still there—in his uncle’s home now, in the mansion in Bel-Air, talking to the family butler. Minus the sound, everything seemed like elaborate pantomime, the gestures too big, the facial expressions too exaggerated. Olivia’s sobs, hidden against her pillow, were tiny and pitiful as a kitten’s.

“Do you want to talk about it? We should.” I took a deep breath. “We should talk about Daniel.”

“There’s too much to say.”

“We’ve got time.”

Olivia wasn’t looking at me anymore; she was squinting at the screen, trying to puzzle out the words we couldn’t hear.

“The thing is—” I stopped, forcing down the hatred I felt right that moment, sharp and strong as a paring knife, for Robert Saenz. It was amazing how he could be free as a bird in Ohio and be here, too—a vision in my mind, sharp as a make-believe target on the wall of our motel room. But Olivia didn’t need to share these feelings; she needed something else—a long overdue apology. “I know we didn’t handle it well. Me, especially. I guess when you become a parent, you worry about all these little things—a cough, a skinned knee—but you never actually expect that any harm will come to your own child. There are parenting manuals that cover every happy moment, like first words and first steps, but there’s no manual that tells you how to handle the awful things, too.”

“No one would buy that manual,” Olivia protested, sniffling. “That would be the worst baby shower present ever.”

I chuckled despite myself.

Olivia, her voice so soft that it might have been coming from the parking lot, said, “If I were you, I would think to myself, why did it happen to the super-talented kid? Why did I get left with this one?”

“You don’t believe that, do you? I’ve never thought that for a second.” My voice came out thick with grief.

“Mom, maybe.”

I felt a rush of vehemence on Kathleen’s behalf. “Not at all, not ever.”

“Not even a little bit?”

“Liv, so many things went through my mind when Daniel died. How I should have been there, how I should have insisted that he go somewhere close, like UC Davis or Sac State, where I could keep an eye on him. How I should have gone to more of his concerts—every single one, instead of begging off to finish grading—how I should have set aside my schoolwork to just spend more time with him on weeknights, how I never ever should have asked him to stop practicing when I had a headache or just needed a moment to myself. That and a million other things, all the ways I’d failed him as a father over the years. But I never, ever felt that it should have been you. And your mom felt the same.” I let the tears balance in the corners of my eyes, not wanting Olivia to see them.

She clicked the mute button again so that sound—a commercial for a shampoo that would
revolutionize
hair care—came flooding back into the room again, and I realized that she was crying, too, hiding her sobs underneath the announcer’s voice.

“It’s all going to be okay, Olivia,” I promised, and I could only believe it myself because I was looking past now, past the near future, past the horrible news that would come to her one way or another, to a world where Daniel’s life had meant something. “Not today, and probably not tomorrow, and maybe not for months and months, but I promise you that one day, it will be okay.”

She sniffled wetly, her nostrils clogged with gunk, and propped herself onto one elbow to look directly at me. “Dad, if anything happened to you or Mom, to either of you or both of you—I couldn’t handle it. You have to know that.”

“I know.”

Olivia turned back to the television, surrendering to the glow and comfort of a situational comedy—the canned laughter, the lessons learned, the happy resolution at the end of each half hour. She blew her nose into a napkin, then crunched a few more Saltines. When her breath became regular, I turned off the television and stared into the semidarkness of the room, lit only by weak shafts of light through the vertical blinds.

It was hard not to think that I was the worst person in the world, maybe even worse than Robert Saenz himself.