The Fragile World (29 page)

olivia

“Where are we going?” I panted. The second my grandmother had closed the door behind us, Mom had taken off at a sprint for our car. For a moment I thought she might have been worried about parking her Volvo on a public street in a not-so-fantastic part of town, but even when the car was in view and clearly fine—stereo, hubcaps and windows all intact—she hadn’t slowed her pace.

“Hurry up!” she called over her shoulder.

I would have liked to point out to her that my combat boots were not exactly ideal running shoes, mainly since each boot weighed approximately five pounds, and running down the street in them was a little like trying to swim with a block of cement on each foot. Why hadn’t I ever considered this before? It would be absolutely impossible for me to swim in these boots. If one of my million water-related fears ever came true, I would sink like a stone.

Mom started the engine while I was still a half-block away, and the second I slid into my seat, she was already pulling away from the curb.

“Whoa,” I said, yanking my door shut. “Um, hello, I don’t even have my seat belt fastened yet.”

“All right, Liv. Get out your phone. I can get us back to the freeway, I think, but I want to make sure we’re taking the shortest possible route.”

I stared at her, not understanding. “Home, you mean?” Even as I asked it, I realized I had no idea what home I might be referring to, or what exactly we were going to do when we got there. Omaha or the long haul back to California?

“Not home,” Mom said grimly. Her jaw was set, her hands on the steering wheel at ten and two, and she was leaning forward, as if the weight of her body alone could propel each turn. The Volvo stuttered along, accelerating too hard one moment, braking too suddenly the next.

I stopped myself from blurting out something about being tired, and wanting to stop at a hotel so I could shower and brush my teeth and pee without worrying about the million contaminants on the seat of a gas station toilet. I was hungry and overwhelmed. In less than a day, my dad had left with only the crappiest of explanations, I had discovered living grandparents who were less than outstanding and now Mom was going to get us killed in the dark on our way to who-knew-where.

But there was something in Mom’s voice that made me shut out the whiny, self-absorbed Olivia and give her all my attention. I groped around in the dark for my cell phone. The red warning light was on; I had less than twenty percent battery life, but at least it was something. “Okay,” I said, trying to keep my voice level and calm, like an air controller with a lost pilot. “Where to?”

“Ohio,” Mom said automatically. “Oberlin, Ohio.”

Oberlin?
My hands were shaking so hard, I could hardly navigate the screen on my phone.

Even though I had worn only black for as long as I could remember and had spent serious time chronicling the ways a person could die or be dismembered, I wasn’t at all interested in visiting the place where Daniel had died. The fact that my brother had died in Oberlin meant it wasn’t even in the top million places I wanted to visit.

I waited for Mom to explain it to me—why we were headed to Oberlin, why she thought Dad might go there. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she and Dad were both off their meds—swinging without warning to the manic side of the pendulum. Her eyes looked wild, dancing in her sockets as if she were tracking something on the road in front of us, rather than following the road itself, which was long and dark and increasingly lonely the farther we got from Chicago. The night opened before us, shrouded in an inky, ghostly black.

Finally I whispered, “I don’t feel so good.”

Mom’s eyes flashed at me. “What, like you’re going to throw up?”

It had felt more like passing out than throwing up, but once she said the words, throwing up seemed like a very real possibility. Everything inside me was being turned upside down and inside out—like some strange disease where my internal organs suddenly began leaking through my skin. I pressed one hand against my stomach and the other against my mouth.

Mom reached around her seat with one arm and located an empty Walmart bag. I held it a few inches from my face, even more nauseated by the smell of the plastic.

“What is Dad going to do in Oberlin?” I asked, my words escaping into the bag. The initial wormy feeling of nausea had passed, but it was way too soon to say I was out of those woods.

Mom shook her head back and forth several times, as if it was too awful to say, or she was trying to shake the thought right out of her head.

Still, I needed to hear her say it. “Mom? What’s Dad going to do? What’s going to happen in Oberlin?”

Mom hesitated, choosing her words carefully. “Olivia, will you promise not to take this the wrong way?”

Well, shit.
Was Oberlin the home of some other long-lost relative, another person I may or may not want to know? I whimpered, “What?”

“I need you to shut up, okay? I need you to just shut up.”

So I did.

And we drove.

curtis

I left Oberlin, circling the countryside while I waited for daybreak. A few miles out of town, I followed signs to a twenty-four-hour truck stop. The face in the bathroom mirror looked familiar, like I was seeing a distant cousin, someone from my childhood. I forced down a fried egg sandwich and a cup of coffee, all the while giving myself these little internal pep talks, my mind a coach on the sidelines, calling plays to my body.
Sure you’re tired, but you can’t stop now! You’ve got the target in sight!

There were two other cars in the parking lot when I emerged, and I figured they belonged to the waitress and the cook, the only other humans around. Still, I kept an eye out as I popped the trunk of the Explorer and fished around until I located the Colt in its wad of T-shirts. From my suitcase, I removed the little pouch, the bag where I’d stowed the press clippings about Daniel’s recitals, his death and his killer. Since there was time to kill—
a joke, Curtis, a fucking hysterical joke!—
I spread out the clippings one by one on the passenger seat and studied them in the dim glow from a nearby light pole.

All the before pictures, where Daniel was alive and well, smacked of happiness. I couldn’t feel that anymore, though. Now each smile was a sting, a slap in the face. The last one had been taken on Daniel’s summer home from college, when he’d been teeming with confidence, eager to tell us everything he’d learned. Kathleen had snapped the picture when he was playing the piano, a new piece, something he’d composed. His eyes were half-closed, dreamy. He would always be that way now—twenty, dreamlike, an angel.

I hoped he couldn’t see what I was about to do, but still I wanted him to know I’d done it.

It was strange how a man like me, who was not powerful at all, and certainly not powerful enough to keep my son from dying, could feel formidable with a gun in his hand. That was the attraction of a gun, the allure. If the waitress from the truck stop came outside at that moment and saw me with the Colt, she would only need a glance—not even a shot fired—to regard me in a way she hadn’t before. She would fear me.

Some men wanted this kind of respect, I figured. I just wanted to kill Robert Saenz, that son of a bitch.

In order to reach the bullets, I had to bend over awkwardly, my head butting against the steering wheel. I was proud of myself for thinking of this hiding place, almost a
MacGyver
move, a place where Olivia would never have looked. I seized a corner of the duct tape between my thumb and forefinger and gave it a little yank—too hard, apparently, because the bullets popped free and hit the floorboard, scattering.
Damn.
I forced the seat back, giving myself enough room to bend forward, my hand feeling along the dark floorboard. I lifted one of the cartridges, then snapped on the overhead light and bent down for a closer look.

I held the bullet to the light, understanding coming slowly, thickly, like breaking through a dense northern California fog.

What I held in my hand wasn’t a bullet at all.

It was a battery.

olivia

I kept quiet for a long time, watching the road before us. Mom was thinking, her lips set in a flat, grim line. I could have kept pestering her out of pure selfishness, just to have her say something, even if it wasn’t true at all.

I don’t know how long we stayed that way, alternating between long stretches of darkness and brief bursts of civilization. Right then I would have preferred to be on the scariest roller coaster in the world, with the biggest drop, the fastest turns, than where we actually were.

The road had almost lulled me to sleep when Mom said, “He never accepted that it was an accident. He just couldn’t let it alone. He was obsessed with it—with that guy.”

I sat up. The name came to me quickly, even though it had been years since Mom and Dad had argued in the kitchen about the plea deal, the reduced sentence. But there it was: Robert Saenz, as if I’d studied the name for a test and simply filed it away until needed.

“But that man—he went to jail,” I said, fighting the nausea that rose as I spoke. “Or prison, or whatever. He was punished.”

“Right, but your father fought for a longer sentence. There had been a previous DUI, another accident where someone died.”

It took a while for this to sink in. “How did I not know that?”

“You were only twelve. You had enough to worry about.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me. I can’t believe Dad didn’t tell me.” It felt as if something inside me had deflated. Not just a lung, because that was so typical, but maybe my liver, or my spleen or some other vital organ—withered up like one of those Shrinky Dinks Mom and I used to bake in the oven on rainy days. Now I wouldn’t have been surprised if my entire body just collapsed.

“Really, Liv, would it have mattered? Wouldn’t it have just made everything worse?”

I could only force a laugh. “Worse than what?”

To this, my mother had no response.

When I had allowed myself to think through the sequence of events, of what had happened to Daniel that night, I’d thought of it as an accident, a random, horrible thing—a speed limit sign falling over and my brother in its path. I had rarely thought about the man in the truck, the guy behind the wheel. He had been locked away, doing his time. Was it possible Dad had been thinking of nothing else?

I tried not to look at the speedometer as we hurtled through Indiana, on a collision course with our fate, whatever that was. For once in my life, my melodrama didn’t exactly seem melodramatic. It seemed a huge understatement.

Maybe Dad had reached his destination already and was trying at this exact moment to kill the man who had killed his son. I shivered. This was
real
fear, not the random worries that had plagued me over the years, not the endless list of things—scalding hot radiators and pendant lamps and infected paper cuts and the plantar wart that was surely awaiting me if I went barefoot in the girls’ locker room. This was real,
genuine:
What if Robert Saenz had a gun with actual bullets, and poor Dad was left helpless because of what Sam and I had done, as if he’d brought a knife to a gunfight? More helpless, even—a search of his luggage hadn’t revealed a knife. I wanted desperately to call Sam Ellis and dump the whole problem in his lap again, to see what new solution he had.

“I didn’t see it earlier,” Mom was saying, more to herself than me. “I thought he meant his father—I figured that had to be it.”

I felt my face go hot. “He told you something, didn’t he? And now you’re not telling me?”

Instead of answering, she reached into the back pocket of her jeans and handed me a folded sheet of paper, dense with writing. “After I found the other note, I went downstairs and just sat there for a while, thinking, And then I saw the box—the one with Daniel’s ashes, up on a high shelf. This letter was sitting on top of it. I didn’t want to show you—I’m sorry, I didn’t want you to be even more worried. It sounded like he was saying goodbye, and my first thought was that he was talking about his father. But he must be talking about that man—the one who hit that sign.”

I held the letter for a long moment in the darkness, before turning on the overhead light. Mom and I both winced, blinking at the sudden brightness. I read the letter once through quickly, then twice more, slowly. The words swam before me.
All my rage was focused in one direction...it’s too late to convince myself of any other alternative.... If you had known what I was planning, you would have talked me out of it.

“But he’s in prison,” I repeated. “The man who killed Daniel is in prison. So, what exactly is Dad going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Mom said. “I’m trying to think. It hasn’t been long enough—his sentence shouldn’t be up already. Has your dad been talking to anyone lately? Maybe the D.A, or something?”

I shook my head. If he’d been talking to anyone, Dad had done a pretty decent job of keeping it under wraps. Life had been normal enough. But then again, there was the day he’d gone up on the roof of the cafeteria, when I’d recognized him first by his brown loafers, dangling down. I’d been so wrapped up in my own petty fears that I wouldn’t have known if there had been a phone call or a letter. Suddenly, I remembered the little zippered bag in Dad’s suitcase, the one Sam had opened, spilling the contents on the motel bed. We’d been looking for a gun, and once I knew for sure the bag didn’t contain any kind of weapon, I’d more or less forgotten about it. “Well,” I said. “I did find all these newspaper clippings....”

Mom looked at me sharply, and the Volvo drifted slightly off the road. She jerked the wheel, bringing us back. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t read through everything. But he had this collection of stuff—” a
memorial,
I remembered thinking, trying not to show Sam how wounded I was “—and it was all about Daniel. Like, newspaper clippings and pictures and things.” At least, that’s how it had seemed to me at the time, but Robert Saenz’s name had been there, too.
Driver Under the Influence, Police Say
and
Man Who Killed Sacramento Prodigy Sentenced.
I swallowed hard. The tidy stack of photos and clippings wasn’t just a tribute to my dead brother but an obsession with the man who had killed him.

Dad had been obsessed with bringing Daniel’s killer to justice.

One way or another, he must have found his chance.