The Fragile World (15 page)

At my annual checkup about a month after the party, while Dad waited in the lobby, I received a pelvic exam, a blood test and a stern lecture. My primary care doctor, who was sworn to the silence of her profession, was stiff-lipped when she pushed a sample pack of birth control pills into my hand. I hid them in my backpack and later threw the pack into the trash can of a neighbor down the block. The sex certainly hadn’t been spectacular; it wasn’t like I was planning to do it again.

That year, I started hanging out with the Visigoths, the kids who wore all black and regularly professed that they didn’t care about
anything
—which was perfect for me. I did my work and got As and Bs in everything except P.E., but I basically stopped participating. I became the kid teachers hate, the one who has the answers but refuses to raise her hand or join a group or speak at all, unless absolutely necessary. I saved all my talk for home, where I could impress Dad with my opinions about Ho Hos over Ding Dongs because of the creme-to-cake ratio; I could explain perfectly to Dad why I preferred
The Grapes of Wrath
to any other Steinbeck; I could play Mom and Dad’s old ’80s version of Trivial Pursuit and rattle off things about Boris Becker or Margaret Thatcher or apartheid—things that none of my fellow students at Rio knew, I was fairly certain.

Maybe the worst part about what I’d done at that party—the absolute worst in an episode of worsts—was that I’d kept it all inside me. “You’re the first person I’ve told,” I said to Sam, who was still holding my hand. I had the feeling I could have told him I was secretly an ax murderer and he would have withheld all judgment. Even if I lived to be a hundred years old—which would make Dad a very unlikely one-hundred thirty-three—I would never breathe a bit of it to him. I probably couldn’t conceive of all the ways he would be hurt, but for starters there was the fact that I had lied to him. Plus, he would have felt responsible for what had happened, the way he somehow did for Daniel’s death—as if he could have protected either of us from all the dangers of the world. In a way, I was protecting Dad, because he would have killed Mike Russi if he knew—maybe even literally. That was his name, Mike—which I only learned later, when I saw him at school. He was a senior who played baseball and didn’t seem particularly intelligent. It was a ridiculous relief that he never recognized me—I was just one girl, one party, one time.

And of course, I hadn’t told Mom, either. The pain of her leaving was still too fresh, and she would have blamed herself for not being there for me, and felt justified in believing that Dad was a bad parent, and that I was going to grow up all kinds of wrong for being in Sacramento with him instead of in Omaha with her. She might have flown back to Sacramento, packed my bags and forced me, kicking and screaming and hyperventilating, onto a plane. It would have been the lecture from my doctor times a thousand, plus the broken trust, the sad-eyed looks, the awkward conversations. Besides, even if I could have trusted her to respond in a rational way, how could such a thing be revealed
over the phone?
How would that conversation go, exactly? “Mom, I had sex at a party”? Or maybe I’d open with, “I thought you should know that I lost my virginity”?

The really crazy thing was that I told this all to Sam Ellis, but somehow I’d known he would understand. Maybe it was because he was able to take major tragedies and reduce them to a small scale, or maybe it was the whole under-the-stars thing: even the biggest, stupidest things I had done felt pretty insignificant with the universe bearing down on us.

And Sam didn’t judge. After a while, he sat up and reached into the cooler, handing me a bologna sandwich in a Ziploc bag. I ate it, even though I don’t think I’d had a bologna sandwich since I was a kid, and the ingredients of bologna, not to mention the bologna-making process, were enough to give even a very rational person pause. Then he opened a lukewarm two-liter of Coke and we passed the bottle back and forth between us, taking swigs.

When we’d finished the sandwiches, Sam and I lay down, side by side, not saying a thing. I wrapped one of the extra blankets around us, and after a while, Sam reached over into the space between us, curling one of his pinky fingers around my own.

It was the best night ever.

curtis

I nudged Olivia awake at nine o’clock.

“It is not nine o’clock,” she answered from beneath the covers.

“Yeah, it is. And breakfast is only available until ten.”

“Really?” Olivia heaved herself to a sitting position. Her hair was matted flat on one side of her head and sticking straight up on the other. “How can it be that late? I told Sam I’d meet him by ten.” She hopped out of bed and grabbed a few things from her suitcase, which was sprawled open on top of the room’s only table.

“You...what?”

“It’s not like you and I have any plans for the day.” She turned, studying me. “Do we?”

“I don’t think—”

“So, what should I do? Hang around the motel all day? I figured I might as well head into town and help him out at his booth.”

“Liv,” I began, worried. She gave me a kiss that reeked of stale breath and dashed past me into the bathroom. Kathleen would be handling this better, I knew. She would be able to point out in a friendly, helpful way that there was really no point in Olivia getting close to someone she might never see again. Kathleen would have pried until Olivia told her everything about her date last night, while I’d gotten only a happy sort of shrug and one-word responses like “picnic” and “sandwiches.” Of course, Kathleen wouldn’t have let her sixteen-year-old daughter go on a date with a complete stranger in the first place.

“Dad,” Olivia called through the bathroom door. “You don’t need to worry. He’s totally normal. Not even a little bit psycho.” The shower started, water smacking hard against the plastic curtain.

When I was sure Olivia wasn’t going to dash out, I went to my suitcase, unwrapped the Colt from its layers of T-shirts and tucked it into my waistband. I studied the effect in the mirror over the dresser. I didn’t look as if I were packing a revolver; if anything, the bulk of my warmest—and largest—sweatshirt hanging down to the low hip area made me look as if I were packing a watermelon. Or not a watermelon, but one of those padded pregnancy simulators that strapped over the shoulders and clasped at the waist, like I’d worn in a Lamaze classes during Kathleen’s pregnancy with Daniel. The pants I’d worn yesterday were draped over a chair back, and I fished in the pockets for my loose change and the room key, transferring them to my jeans. The bullet from last night was there, too; in this context, it looked completely harmless, like one of the odds and ends from a junk drawer. Still, I should get rid of it, toss it into a trash can somewhere in Lyman. The last thing I needed was to freak Olivia out.

It didn’t take long for us to walk from the Drift Inn to J & E Automotive, to where Sam Ellis was waiting, his strange wares already set up for the day. What did he do during the winter, I wondered, when the town was all but closed by snow?

“I thought maybe you wouldn’t come,” Sam said as we approached.

Olivia shrugged. Was she blushing? “Well, here I am.”

I lifted a snow globe off the folding table and studied it. The scene inside was grim, all browns and grays, buildings with flat roofs surrounded by a tiny fence.

“Do you like that one, Mr. Kaufman? It’s a POW camp. Well, it’s not any camp in particular, so maybe I’ll just say it’s representative of all forced internment centers.”

Olivia beamed proudly. I gave the snow globe a little shake, and tiny flakes of silver and white glitter rose, then settled again, burying the compound until it looked peaceful, almost like one of those New England scenes on the old Currier and Ives tins.

“It’s impressive,” I told Sam, which wasn’t the right word. Strange, maybe, but interesting, too.

“So, do you, um...want me to get a chair for you, too?” Sam asked politely, and I set the snow globe down.

“No, that’s okay. I’m just going to...” I gestured around aimlessly. What would I do with myself all day?

Olivia pointed at my head, grinning. “I think you should get a haircut, Dad.”

Look who’s talking,
I almost said. Olivia’s riot of hair was a constant surprise, with strange curls springing out of the confines of her hoodie and big flyaway waves half shielding her face. Then I noticed that Olivia’s hair wasn’t hidden at all. Still damp, it was tousled and sprayed, and for just a moment, until she rolled her eyes at me, she looked again like a younger version of Kathleen—like Kathleen had looked when I first knew her.

Sam was giving me enthusiastic directions to a barbershop, ending with “...one of those stripy poles in the front and the whole bit.”

I thanked him and wandered inside J & E Automotive, where Jerrod Ellis sat reading a newspaper with his work boots propped up on the front counter. “Waiting for that part,” he said in greeting.

“But today, do you think?”

“Part should be in this afternoon. But with labor...better figure on tomorrow morning.”

I considered joining him there, in the lone padded chair that constituted the waiting area, maybe borrowing the sections of the paper he had discarded. According to the clock on the wall, an antique that read Drink Coca-Cola beneath a half inch of dust, it wasn’t ten-thirty. The day stretched long in front of me, lacking purpose. I wished I were in Oberlin already, driving past the towering campus structures and the stately older homes, finding my way to Robert Saenz. Leaving the J&E office, I brushed a hand against the Colt at my waistband for reassurance. It was still going to happen—just a day or two behind schedule. When I passed Olivia and Sam, they had their heads bent close together, and neither looked up.

I was overdue for a haircut, but really, it seemed like the least of my worries. What did a haircut matter in the grand scheme of things, which involved traveling cross-country to reunite my dear, funny, wise daughter with her mother and then proceed to hunt down the man who had killed my son? A little bit of shaggy hair didn’t matter at all—not that it had mattered much in my teaching life, either. One of the perks of being a science teacher with a life-sized Einstein poster on his wall was that an eccentricity such as perennially bad hair was not only accepted, but expected.

It wasn’t hard to locate the barbershop, which I’d seen yesterday on our way into town. The barber, a Hispanic man with a fantastic curling mustache, looked me up and down as I entered. He wore a white smock with the name “Eddie” embroidered in cursive letters on the pocket. “Haircut and shave?”

“Why not?” I replied. I’d had exactly one actual barbershop shave in my life, with Kathleen’s father, brother and male cousins on the morning of our wedding day. It was the closest I’d come to a bachelor party.

Eddie ushered me into a chair. “Would you like to take off your sweatshirt?”

“No,” I said quickly, and then felt the absurdity of the situation. Eddie probably had a gun stashed in his shop; I’d seen enough gun racks mounted to the backs of pickups with Wyoming plates to stop being shocked by them. The difference was that these gun owners probably weren’t criminals, and I was—or would be, soon.

Eddie tucked a smock into the neck of my sweatshirt and wetted down my hair.

“Not too much off the top,” I said, meaning it as a joke, since there wasn’t much left on the top to begin with.

The bell over the door tinkled lightly, and a girl who looked about Olivia’s age entered, coddling a fat baby in her arms. “You busy, Eddie? I can come back.”

“Half an hour,” he called, not looking away from my head. His scissors moved deftly, and small clumps of hair fell to the floor. Olivia had given me my past few haircuts, since I hadn’t seen the need to bother with a professional. But she’d been tentative, taking only the smallest of snips, then backing up five feet to examine me from the long view.

Eddie whisked the hair off my neck, and I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, more spruced up than I’d been in a long time.
At least I’ll look good for my mug shot,
I thought darkly and almost laughed out loud. I had the brief thought of sharing the joke with Olivia, who would have found it funny if it hadn’t been about me.

Then I relaxed as my chair was angled backward and my face was covered with a steaming towel.

“First, we let the pores open,” Eddie explained, the same as he probably did for every person who walked through the door, for generations of Lymanians.

I kept my eyes closed beneath the dark tent of the towel, flinching as it was removed and a cool lotion was slapped onto my skin. It felt like a gift to have someone else in control, even a stranger. Why hadn’t I ever done this with Daniel? Just two men out on the town, hitting a barbershop.

Next was the hot lather, the scraping movements of the straight razor up my throat. If Olivia were here, she would have known offhand the number of people who were killed each year by straight razors. It was the sort of odd fact she collected and catalogued, no matter that the chances of her receiving a barbershop shave were nonexistent.

“Hold still, now,” Eddie ordered, and I relaxed, compliant. If I could have stilled my mind, I would have fallen into an immediate sleep. Instead, I thought of Olivia, wondering if I should have let her out of my sight. There was something strange about Sam Ellis, even if it might turn out to be a good strange. On the other hand, it was a thrill to see Olivia
happy.
I remembered what Bill Meyers had told me, while I had sat on my own couch, completely oblivious to my own life. Olivia doesn’t have any friends, he’d said. She eats her lunch alone in the library. Even if it was only for a single day, didn’t Olivia deserve this little bit of happiness?

Distantly, I heard Eddie say “Now we prepare to go against the grain” and again my face was buried with a steaming towel. Heaven was like this, I thought—quiet and warm.

Tomorrow night, with any luck, we’d be in Omaha. This part of my plan had been vaguely formed. Of course, I couldn’t just drop Olivia off, tossing her belongings onto the curb. I would have to have a real talk with Kathleen—something I’d managed to avoid for years. She’d never understood my anger at Robert Saenz, or how I felt I’d failed Daniel by not managing to do the one thing a father should do for his child—see him through to a happy, long life. And I’d be confronted with the physical evidence of how she’d moved on—the house she was renovating, the home furnishing shop where she served as part-owner and creative visionary. But that was fine. She could have that. She deserved that much and more. Hadn’t I always wanted that for her, the best things she could wish for herself?

I was hit by a sudden, dizzying barrage of memories, a funnel cloud full of the debris of my own life. And the clearest memory was of Kathleen herself.

Kathleen at Northwestern—the girl with that spectacular laugh, so big and open and genuine that I told myself I would go anywhere, do anything, just to be with her. How often had I followed that blue-black head of hair, the springy curls she hadn’t been able to tame with a ponytail or a braid without wild wisps escaping? That hair had made her instantly recognizable in any crowd, coming down the bleacher steps at Liv’s soccer games, wandering through the various church fellowship halls and concert venues of Daniel’s piano recitals, pushing a cart in Costco a half acre away.

Kathleen at work—curls tied back in a complicated knot with a scarf, her forehead creased with deep concentration, her hands—the fingertips rough, like coarse-grade sandpaper—moving deftly, surely, lovingly across a wooden surface. She had
loved
her work in a way that made me jealous; she had cared for each piece of furniture in her studio, she had known each piece down to its smallest detail, the grooves and hinges, the dents and scratches. She had made everything beautiful—things and people, too.

It was all so long ago.

But of course, everything I’d loved about Kathleen then was still there now, although I’d packed it away on a high shelf in my mind, out of reach. All those months after Daniel had died, I couldn’t bear to be in the same room with her. That was
our
son—that perfect union of the two of us, that perfect representation of our love, and he was gone. He’d had Kathleen’s pale skin that pinked up so quickly on a single summer afternoon; he’d even had a mole along his jawline like Kathleen had, a mole I had loved to bend down to kiss while she prepared dinner, while she brushed her hair.

I heard someone moan nearby and was aware, suddenly, that it was me. The towel on my face was cool now, and my cheeks stung with a minty aftershave lotion. “I’m so sorry,” I said, getting to my feet, reaching carefully into my back pocket for the wallet, the handle of the Colt surprising me again. “I think I must have dozed off there.”

“It happens,” Eddie said, giving my face a final pat down with the towel. “Sometimes the whole body just needs to breathe, you know?”

I did know.