The Fragile World (7 page)

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.”

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.