The Fragile World (9 page)

olivia

Dad talked to Mom before me—the first time they’d talked in months, I was pretty sure. Mostly, they used me as a middleman to relay only the most necessary information—reminders of property tax payments, my dental checkups—and left it up to me to decide what else was important. Mostly, I didn’t find it necessary to tell either of them
any
thing; they were adults, I figured, and they could start acting like it at any time.

Dad opened the door to his office, where he’d been talking in a low voice, and passed me the phone. “Your mom,” he said.

I took the phone into the kitchen, where I’d been trying to figure out what food might spoil before we got back. Mom was more puzzled than enthusiastic. I didn’t know what to say, especially with Dad pretending not to eavesdrop from the next room. How could I give her the news about Dad and the incident on the roof over the phone? She would freak out—summon a small army of Sacramento connections to pop in on us, maybe, or start driving from Omaha now and meet us somewhere in the middle.

It was easier to pretend to be hurt than to tell her the truth. “You don’t want to see me?”

“No, of course I want to see you. Haven’t I been begging you to fly out here for the summer? I just don’t think that now, while you’re still in school...” She didn’t mention Dad, who would obviously be arriving on her doorstep, too. Not once, in all her pestering about how much I would love Omaha had she suggested,
Why don’t you and Dad just hop in the car and drive out here?
His name hadn’t come up in connection with the idea, period.

“Mom, come on. You know I can’t get on a plane, right?”

“Liv, of course you can.” Mom sighed, but let it go. “Look, you understand. I’m just worried. I mean, what about school? It’s your junior year. Don’t you have a million projects and things to finish?”

“Yeah, but it’s okay. We’re basically done, and I can finish the rest on independent study.”

“Please, Liv,” Mom said, her voice low. She probably didn’t want any of her colleagues to overhear. “Tell me what’s really going on.”

But I didn’t have a name for what was going on. I was worried in general, but until Kara had found me in the girls’ bathroom, and until I’d seen Dad on the roof, looking vacant and dazed, I hadn’t focused my worries on anything specific. My fears had been as random as
nuclear attacks
one minute and
power tools
the next, things I’d dutifully listed in my Fear Journal.

Mom wasn’t stupid—even from a thousand miles away, she could probably sense the tightening in my throat, the strange breathing sounds that signaled I was about to start bawling uncontrollably. “Liv,” she pleaded.

I snorted back my tears and forced myself to sound normal. “We’ll be there soon, and then I’ll tell you everything.”

Now she was crying, or close to it. “I’m going to worry about you every second until you’re here.”

I was grateful for the chance to make her laugh, even if it didn’t do much to cheer me up. “You leave the worrying to me, Mom. That’s my job.”

Dad raised an eyebrow curiously when I returned his phone, but didn’t ask any questions. I stood in the doorway of his office and wondered if I had made a big mistake, or if the big mistake was still to come. He’d been organizing his desk, and his trash can was overflowing with papers. I looked closer and saw lesson plans, handouts and student tests, as if he’d just swept the whole mess into the can.

“You owe me,” I said.

“I know,” he replied, not meeting my eyes.

In a few days the remaining Kaufmans were going to be together again, but I couldn’t sort out exactly how I felt about that. When Mom visited every summer, it had been beyond strange to have her ring our doorbell and wait politely to be let in, like a guest, like a person who’d never lived in our house at all. Before she arrived, Dad and I spent some serious time cleaning. Without discussing it, we made sure to rearrange anything we’d moved while she was gone, so that it looked like the exact same house she’d left, the same stacks of magazines we didn’t read on the coffee table, the uncomfortable throw pillows back on the couch. It was as if we’d been preserving the house in her honor, just like we’d done with Daniel’s room, still intact behind his closed door. During her visit, Mom tiptoed around our lives, barely leaving a trace of her existence—no smear of toothpaste in the bathroom sink, no plate with crumbs on the kitchen counter. She and Dad had been polite with each other, like houseguests at a B and B. Dad slept on the couch while she was there, waking with strange fabric impressions on his skin and a sore back, but he cleared out during the day, always with an excuse that felt contrived, like he just
had
to go look for a new set of solar lights at that exact moment. After she left, no matter how good it had felt to just be with her, the whole house let out a sigh of relief. The couch inched its way closer to the TV, the mail stacked up and a pile of laundry grew in the middle of the upstairs hallway.

In Omaha, Dad and I would be the guests. It would be our turn to tiptoe around Mom’s life, around her creations, her wood shavings and cans of paint and varnish. She was living in the house she’d grown up in, renovating it room by room in whatever spare time she had when she wasn’t at the store. In Omaha, she would have the advantage; we would be the ones afraid to leave a mess lying around.

Or maybe it would be different. Maybe I could open up to her the way I hadn’t done on her visits or in our dozens of phone conversations. I’d have to tell her what happened with Dad, but there were secrets of my own I’d been keeping, too.

The few people at school who knew about my mom leaving couldn’t understand how I didn’t absolutely hate her.
You mean you still talk to her? Even after she walked out of your life? That’s messed up!

No, I didn’t hate her—but at the same time, I did. I’d never really been able to sort out my feelings for Mom. I’d been shocked when she actually left, and felt guilty as hell that I hadn’t left with her. I really, honestly hoped she was happier where she was, but I was afraid of that, too—it proved that she didn’t need Dad or me.

That whole weekend—one of the longest weekends of my life, it seemed—I packed and unpacked and repacked and watched Dad do the same. I scribbled frantically in my journal. I watched Dad as if he were a two-year-old playing with matches. When he ran out to pick up dinner, I sorted through the papers on his desk, not sure what I was looking for.

And I realized I couldn’t wait for us all to be together—good, bad or ugly.

Four more days.

curtis

On Monday, I gave up the pretense of sleep at four, switched on the light, and took inventory. This would be the last time I was ever in this bed, the last time I walked past Daniel’s bedroom door, stopping to peek inside in case...in case. My last shower in our quirky claw-footed tub with its complicated system of curtains; my last cup of coffee in the kitchen, sipped while staring out the window.

Olivia and I had each packed a single suitcase, but in the end we started tossing other things into the backseat. Pillows, winter coats, CDs, random snacks from the pantry.

“You want to check all the windows?” I asked. As soon as I heard Olivia’s feet on the stairs, I took the box from the top of the mantel and carried it to the car. Daniel’s
cremains.
It didn’t feel right to shove the box into my suitcase, where it bulged like a rectangular tumor, but it didn’t feel right to leave him behind, either.

Olivia was waiting on the porch, scribbling in her Fear Journal.

I could stop this right now,
I thought. We could unpack the car and go back to our lives—a staycation in our own home. Or we could head south, find a sandy beach. Or north, to the sort of tall trees that made a person realize he was really nothing, just a speck in the world.

But I wouldn’t stop it now. I couldn’t. Robert Saenz was out there. He was a free man who didn’t deserve his freedom, and it was my duty—my right—to take that away from him.

Olivia stood, tucking a pen into her journal. “Let’s take a picture,” she said, pulling out her cell phone. “You know, photographic evidence of our journey.”

We leaned against the Explorer, and I rested my arm on Olivia’s bony shoulders. She angled her phone and tapped the screen. “You blinked,” she accused, snapping a second shot. I tried to smile, but I was remembering our other family pictures, back when there were four of us. Or the picture Daniel had been carrying in his wallet:
The Fam.

It was hard to look at our house as we pulled out of the driveway. This was our life, I thought.
Was.

Now I was eager to leave it behind.

Since the night Daniel died, it was as if I’d been in a fog, one of those thick Central Valley fogs that descended without warning, making it difficult to see the house across the street, or the stop sign on the corner. By the time we left the congestion of Sacramento, easing our way onto I-80, mountain-bound, I felt the fog lifting. I kept this thought to myself; Olivia loved to mock clichés, and surely she would have seen that statement as sentiment, as a maxim for something so conventional it might not even be true.

But that’s what I felt, giving the Explorer a bit more gas. In the foothills, the road opened up, the trees became taller and more closely, naturally spaced. With the fog lifted, I was Curtis Kaufman again.

There had been mistakes, but I had a chance to set things right.

That night, after we checked into the hotel in Winnemucca, I would be meeting Zach Gaffaney. In a few days, I would be leaving Olivia in Omaha. By next weekend, I would be in Oberlin.

And soon after that, Robert Saenz would be dead.

olivia

Once we were actually on the road, I could hardly sit still. I’d never looked so carefully at my own city before—the city I was born in and had lived in my entire life. I craned my neck as we passed through town, the skyline in the distance, the businesses and buildings and billboards and street signs, the leafy trees wavering in a slight breeze. When we passed homes, I wondered who lived there and what they were doing right at this very second. Probably they were at work or school, doing the normal things that normal people did. I dared myself not to close my eyes as we passed over one of the smaller tributaries of the Sacramento River.

Goodbye, river. Goodbye, city.

Dad asked, “You’re not going to fidget around like that for two thousand miles, are you?”

“That’s how far it is?”

“Sacramento to Omaha is one thousand, five hundred eighty-two miles.”

“So, barely nothing.”

Dad grinned, flipped the dial on the radio and found Aerosmith, a band that proved strangely generation-bending. “How are you doing so far? Everything’s okay?”

I rolled my eyes. “Sure. What in the world do I have to be afraid of?”

Only everything.

But as the traffic thinned and I sat with my Fear Journal open on my lap, I found that I wasn’t that afraid, after all. Sure, the road through the foothills was curvy, with long climbs and sudden descents, lined with the sort of trees that looked as if they could take out a small village when they finally went, and I couldn’t see myself through to our destination—but somehow, what we were doing was liberating. Instead of sitting through the daily tedium of American History/Statistics/PE/Spanish/Chemistry/English, I was doing something brave and unexpected. I might have been a character in a movie, minus the expansive “open road” music that usually accompanied such scenes. Maybe my lack of fear was related to our spontaneous (poor) planning—if I didn’t know what was ahead of us, I could only form very general fears: large stretches of uninhabited spaces, winding roads, mountains.

It wasn’t so bad. Four days, and the hard part would be over—at least until our return trip.

And then, somewhere outside Auburn, I lost reception on my cell phone. I held it up to the window, toward the dash and against the roof of the car, trying to get more than a single bar.

Dad laughed. “You might not be able to rely on that the entire way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well...there’s going to be some spotty service, plus if you drain your battery on the road, you’ll have to wait to charge it until we get to the hotel.”

I grimaced. “Like the pioneers, then.”

Dad chuckled. One of the coolest things about my dad was that he could be counted on to laugh, even if my joke wasn’t in the realm of funny.

We lost one radio station after another as we entered the Sierra Nevadas, until the dial held nothing but a buzz of static. I played a few hollow-sounding songs through my phone and leaned against the window as the scenery became majestic—white-capped peaks, towering evergreens, stately redwoods. Our gray strip of I-80 was like a flimsy string threading over and in between and around the mountains, as if the path had been designed like one of those fun house mazes. I read each of the warning signs along the route to Dad, in case he missed them:
Landslides! Avalanches! Danger black ice! Deer crossing!
But it was a beautiful spring day, the air clear, the sky cloudless. The landslides, avalanches, black ice and deer must have been on some other road, interrupting someone else’s drive.

I tried to take a few photos on my phone, but the results were indistinct blurs. “Why didn’t we ever do anything like this before, like take a road trip?”

“Because we were so...” Dad’s voice trailed off. Maybe he was regretting, like I was all of a sudden, the cloistered, practical life we’d lived the past few years, like fugitives in our own home, only venturing out for the necessities. “I don’t know. We should have. I’m sorry, Liv. We absolutely should have.”

His voice had this strange, almost weepy quality to it, and I blurted quickly, to change the subject, “Nah, forget it. Even if you’d suggested it, I would have been too scared. Like right now, these mountains are pretty terrifying.”

“Because of their height?”

“No, because they’re mountains.”

Dad smiled. “Give me one good reason other than heights to be scared of mountains.”

“I’ll give you five,” I said, counting them off on one hand. “Mountain goats, mountain lions, black bears, coyotes and...” I did a drumroll with both hands against the dashboard. “The Donner Party.”

Dad shook his head, laughing. “Ah, a history lesson that has stayed with you. No doubt because it involved tests of human strength—”

“And cannibalism.”

“—an expansion of the Western frontier—”

“And cannibalism.”

“—and an extraordinary rescue effort.”

“Don’t forget cannibalism.” I shuddered, studying my arm. “Can you imagine a world where your best option includes a bite of someone’s bicep?”

“So, to clarify—essentially, mountain equals cannibalism.”

“Right.”

Dad threw back his head to laugh, the first real laugh I’d heard from him in what felt like a million years, an actual belly laugh. “The Donner Party,” he mused. “Now
that
was a road trip.”

We stopped for gas and a bathroom break in Truckee, and that’s where it all went to hell.

Actually, hell came at the exact moment when I realized my bladder was about to explode and my only option would be a public restroom. At school, I didn’t drink anything and still ended up crouching over a toilet once a day, but that was nothing compared to the horror of a gas station bathroom. I did some quick mental math: if I used the bathroom twice a day while we were on the road, and we were on the road for four days, this meant eight encounters with public restrooms—and that was being optimistic

Inside the store, I glanced around, taking in the aisles of chips and candy, the nacho cheese dispenser, the hot dogs rotating slowly on a rotisserie. I tugged on Dad’s sleeve like a two-year-old. “I don’t see a bathroom.”

The clerk behind the counter, with a Metallica shirt and greasy hair, held up a massive board with a single key attached. “It’s around the side of the building, toward the back.”

“Um,” I said, still clutching Dad’s shirtsleeve. “This is how every episode of
Criminal Minds
starts, with someone heading into a bathroom at a deserted gas station.”

“Not every episode,” Dad corrected. “Also, it’s not deserted. I’m right here.”

The clerk was staring at us as if we were both out of our minds. “You want the key or not?”

I squeezed Dad on the shoulder. “You’re coming with me.”

The clerk rolled his eyes.

Dad laughed. It worried me that he had such a hard time separating my jokes from my cries for help, but he bought a cup of coffee and followed me around the side of the building.

I hugged him at the door. “If I’m not out in exactly thirty seconds, please call 9-1-1.”

Back in the car, I gave Dad the play-by-play: my boots had stuck to the floor; there was a puddle of mystery moisture next to an overflowing trash can; the mirror was cloudy; the toilet had so many rings it seemed to be measuring either age, like a tree, or despair; and instead of a hand dryer there was a crusty loop of fabric carrying at least twenty types of bacteria whose names we would probably never know.

Dad was unconcerned. “Yeah, but you still washed your hands, right?”

What I wanted was to wash my whole body, clothes included.

“Life’s about the journey, not the destination,” Dad reminded me. “Isn’t there a famous quote about that?”

I rolled my eyes. “There are a thousand quotes about that. And each one is a cliché.”

But Dad had gone quiet, retreating to that place inside himself where he’d been for the past week, thinking about things I didn’t know and might not understand if I did. I figured we would be lucky if this trip was nothing more than a cliché, just a few days on the open road and a happy reunion waiting for us at the end.

But none of that, of course, was guaranteed.