The Fragile World (28 page)

curtis

By the time I delivered my mother back to her house, it was after eight o’clock. I was exhausted, but too pumped full of adrenaline to stop now. I couldn’t imagine stopping at a hotel room, pacing anxiously within four walls. No, sitting in a hotel room wasn’t going to cut it. I couldn’t stop—I needed to keep going, to drive as fast as the Explorer would take me, straight through the night, even if I arrived in Oberlin hours before daylight.

I’d forgotten how long it took to get around Chicago. More than once traffic came to a complete stop, and I banged my fists against the steering wheel in frustration. I was driving toward Robert Saenz and away from my father at the same time. I was fulfilling my childhood fantasy, the one where I packed my troubles in an old backpack with a broken zipper and never, never came home again. I’d managed to make that escape as an eighteen-year-old and stay away for more than half of my life. My father was dying, and that should have made me happy. How many times, in how many ways, had I imagined the moment? Take your pick: falling off a bar stool and hitting his head. Picking a fight with the wrong person, someone who could actually fight back. Drinking himself to death, plain and simple. I had prayed for acts of God, like tornados or lightning strikes. I would have been happy with a beam falling at a construction site, and my father being squashed like a little bug beneath its weight. Ironically enough, I’d prayed for a car accident, something quick and simple and final. If the world had any fairness at all, it would have been my father and not my son who was killed by Robert Saenz, by the truck clipping the sign, and the sign bearing down upon him.

But the world wasn’t fair. Daniel was long dead, and my father was still all too much alive, living out his last few days—hours?—with a small staff catering to his needs, with my mother worrying over the position of his bed pillows. My father had the luxury of making final pronouncements, of handing down advice and apology, of saying goodbye. Daniel, who deserved that and more, had never had a chance.

You can do right by him.

What the hell did he know? What right did he have?

I released my hold on the steering wheel, suddenly aware that I was gripping it with a painful intensity.
Relax,
I ordered myself. The traffic thinned, Chicago was finally behind me, and I still had another five hours to go.

It was small consolation that there would be few people on the road other than the tired, possibly drugged truckers pushing against time to make it to their destination for the night. Robert Saenz had been one of these men on his way home that night, too tired and doped up to know that he’d killed someone.

I kept myself busy by flipping through stations, catching a song or two before the music buzzed into static. In Sacramento, our house was cluttered with CDs. Daniel’s room held hundreds, and I’d burned myself copies over the years, labeling them with a Sharpie. Why hadn’t I brought more of them with me? God knew there was room.

I got gas near Gary, Indiana, and gave in to my need for caffeine—although it meant I would be stopping more often en route. The girl at the register, her hair a series of gelled spikes, was absorbed in a magazine and jumped, startled, as I entered.

“Is it pretty cold out there?” she asked, taking the two dollars I slid across the counter.

“I don’t know,” I admitted, and she glanced at me quickly, then down to the cash register, fingering my change.

Was it cold? Hot? Wet? Dry? Did it matter? In my mind I was miles away, already lacing my way through Oberlin, past the conservatories and the brick buildings on campus, past front porches and picket fences. I was only dimly aware of what was actually happening around me.

“Okay, then, you have a good night,” the girl said, depositing the change in my open palm. I fingered it idly, as if I’d lost the ability to count, to name things.

“You have a good night, too,” I mumbled.

Outside, the sky was made even darker by the absence of stars, obscured by a low gray haze of cloud cover. Even the stars have gone, I thought, senselessly—and realized I was barely hanging on to sanity. I wasn’t the father of Daniel and Olivia anymore. I was no longer Mr. K, the goofy teacher who posed for his yearbook photo in a white lab coat, holding a beaker of green liquid. I wasn’t the young man who had fallen in love with Kathleen. I was now a desperate man, or his shadow. Suddenly I remembered a hand-painted sign that Kathleen’s father had hung in his garage:
When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.
I was at the end of the rope. I had tied a knot. I only had to hang on a little longer.

Every few miles—and I knew, because I was watching for the reflective mile markers with an almost religious fervor—I found myself thinking about Olivia, or about Kathleen, or about Olivia and Kathleen, the two of them finding my note. Olivia would be hurt and furious, although maybe not surprised. What had Kathleen known, what had she suspected? Only last night we’d made love as if it would be the last time, as if the world had ended and we were the only people left. Kathleen, Olivia—I had to force them out of my brain, like physically slamming a door.
Think about Robert Saenz,
I reminded myself. I remembered his mug shot—the disheveled hair, the dead eyes, the slight upward tilt of his chin: What the fuck are you going to do about it?
Remember how he killed Daniel and drove away.

If I could, I’d get a punch in first. I don’t think I’d ever thrown a punch in my life, although I’d been on the receiving end often enough as a kid. But I needed my fist to land squarely on Robert Saenz’s upraised chin.

“That’s for Daniel,” I imagined myself saying as Saenz fell backward, a twin to my childhood fantasy—my father falling backward, felled by my powerful blow.

Funnily enough, it was Dad’s voice that kept popping into my head:
Do right by him.

Yes, but I’ll do right by you, too, Dad.

Kill one, let the other die.

Indiana passed in a dark blur of asphalt and semis and road signs. I stopped once for coffee, stopped twice to piss against fences that seemed to border nothing. When I passed the giant sign welcoming me to Ohio, it felt as if a bell should have sounded, one loud enough to be heard by the whole world. I sat up straighter, drove faster, resented when I had to stop again for gas. A sprinkling of rain fell, spattering the windshield. I finally knew the answer to the cashier’s question back in Gary—it was cold outside and growing colder. Here and there the ditches were dotted with the crusty, stubborn remains of snow heaps that hadn’t received the message about spring.

I took the exit for state route 58 toward Amherst/Oberlin, forcing myself to keep to the speed limit; that was all I needed, a speeding ticket this close to my destination. I could imagine the conversation with the officer. What’s a guy from California doing out here after midnight? You have business in town, buddy?

I had moved beyond tired to a strange place where adrenaline kicked in, defying normal human powers. I’d heard stories of men who lifted cars off of trapped victims, who scaled impossibly high fences to escape a charging animal. I could feel a pulse thrumming in my fingertips, my neck, my thighs. Was he asleep already, passed out, dreaming his last dream?

I tapped the gas and eased up, tapped and eased, tapped and eased.

Soon, it would all be over.

olivia

Stepping into that house was like stepping into a television set from the 1970s, complete with wallpaper and shag carpeting and the widespread use of brown. It was hard to pin down the exact smell that assaulted my nostrils as we walked through a dark hallway—not pets exactly, not cigarettes only. The walls had a dingy, yellowish quality; if I bumped my shoulder against any wall, I might come away smudged. As we followed my grandmother—my
grandmother!
—through the house, it occurred to me that this was what life would smell like if nothing was ever washed and if no window was ever opened to let in a bit of fresh air.

“Would you like something to drink?” my grandmother asked as we came into the den.

Mom and I glanced around, taking in the bare walls, the ancient television console, a sagging plaid couch.

“No—thank you, though. I’m so sorry to barge in on you like this, and so late at night.” Mom’s smile was uncertain. Her eyes kept flitting around to the corners of the room, as if worried that something evil was lurking in a dark recess.

My grandmother settled her cushiony weight onto the couch, which sighed in mild protest. Mom was right, I realized—it was hard for my mind to form the phrase
my grandmother,
let alone the word
Grandma.
But what else could I call her—Mrs. Kaufman? If I’d passed her on the street, I wouldn’t have thought she was any relation of mine. Her face was broad, her features somewhat hidden by folds of extra skin and a thinning perm that framed her face like dandelion fluff. She stared at me vacantly. If I didn’t know better—and I didn’t—I would say my grandmother was pleasantly stoned.

“You look like your father,” she said, and I realized that while I was scrutinizing her, she’d been scrutinizing me, too. I was worried that I was making a bad impression for a first-meeting-of-the-grandmother. Never in my life had I felt so out of place for wearing all black. In this house, the land that time forgot, there was no such thing as a pair of skinny jeans, and combat boots were to be worn only in actual combat.

“I do?” I blurted. I’d honestly never been told this. It was Daniel who looked more like Dad, or really, like a blend of Mom and Dad, if you took their very best qualities and melded them together. Once Daniel had told me that I fell off a truck at the farmer’s market and had been rescued by my well-meaning “parents.” He’d apologized for it later, but when I looked at myself next to the rest of my family, it had made a sort of sense.

My grandmother nodded and continued, “Yes, when he was a boy.”

Oh. This was either a strange compliment or an outright insult. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, not even something witty or ironic or at least marginally funny, so I settled for, “I’m Olivia.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Olivia.” Her smile was empty, the action of a robot programmed to give automatic responses.

Mom shot me a look that said,
Shut up and let me do the talking
. She cut right to the point. “We’re looking for Curtis.”

“Well, you just missed him. He left a few hours ago.”

“He was
here?
” I blurted again, like the kid in class who wasn’t paying attention and needed everything repeated. Yes, I was that kid. But I had to hand it to Mom. I’d figured we were on the wild-goose chase to end all wild-goose chases, and she’d been right all along. It turned out I did have a secret set of grandparents, and it turned out that my father had indeed come to visit them.

“Yes.” For the first time, a real emotion—surprise, puzzlement—passed across my grandmother’s face. “He was here earlier, to bring me to the hospital.”

“To bring you to the...?”

Mom looked at me again, and I let the rest of my question drift away, although this took a tremendous effort on my part.

“Well, I thought you would know, because I sent the letter. My husband has been in the hospital, and Curtis took me to see him.”

Mom absorbed this information silently, although it must have made about zero sense to her, too. What letter? What was he in the hospital for?

“I did think it was strange that he came alone,” my grandmother said. It sounded like an insult to me, but Mom let it pass.

“We’re supposed to meet up with him,” Mom explained. “But somewhere along the way, our plans got mixed up. Did he say he was staying in town tonight?”

My grandmother looked back and forth between the two of us, her gaze suddenly more focused. I tried to keep my face as neutral as possible, although I felt like screaming. It was bad that Dad had dumped me in Omaha, and it was bad that he had come here, but it was much, much worse that he hadn’t stayed here. There was a long pause while my grandmother considered us, as if we might not be family at all, but some kind of secret agents or saboteurs who were out to destroy her son.

Mom said, “Please, Lorene,” her voice tender, as if she were talking to a small child.

Lorene Kaufman,
I repeated to myself, trying to give the words meaning. My grandmother.

“I don’t know,” she said finally. “He said he had to go, and he hugged me real tight.”

Mom swallowed. “But he didn’t say anything in particular...?”

It looked like there was nothing else for us to learn, and Lorene Kaufman was ready to usher us back into the Chicago night, but still we waited. I glanced at a clock on the wall, the hands marking time behind a plate of cracked glass. Finally my grandmother said, as if she were just remembering, “He said there was something he had to do.”

“Something he had to do,” Mom echoed.

My grandmother nodded and pushed herself to a standing position, a hand on the armrest of the couch for support. There was no mistaking the message:
We’re done here.

curtis

The closer I got, the more I itched to pull over, take the Colt out of the spare wheel well, load it with the cartridges I’d taped under the driver’s seat and ride with the gun on the seat next to me, where I could see it, where it would keep being real. It wouldn’t be long now.

Oberlin was still the same sleepy town with the blinking traffic lights, the towering trees with limbs that arched over the road. On my previous visits it had been snowing, and now a light, stinging rain hit with little pings against the windshield. Maybe the weather was always bad in Oberlin, like a dark cloud hovered directly over its city limits. The streets were quiet, the town hunkered down for the night.

On my phone, I’d looked up the address of Jerry Saenz, Robert’s brother, and used satellite imaging to zoom in on 1804 Morgan Street—a white house with turquoise shutters, a gravel driveway and a detached garage. Jerry had taken in his brother after the incident in North Carolina; he’d even assigned him a route for his trucking company. I was banking on the fact that Jerry had taken him in again, that Robert Saenz was right now sleeping under his roof. If not, I’d keep going until I found him.

The possibility that he could be so close—only a few blocks from where he’d killed Daniel—sickened me. He’d killed my son and gone to prison, and in the logic of the justice system, he got to go right back to where he’d come from, as if he were simply completing a loop, closing a circle.

Morgan Street was something people in Sacramento couldn’t imagine—no sidewalks, quarter-acre front lawns, no fences clearly delineating the neighbor’s space from your own. If you had a kid, this would be the place to throw a ball after dinner, with a few other kids from the block joining you, baseball gloves at the ready. It would be criminal, I decided, to live here and not throw a ball with your kid on summer evenings. I would have done this with Daniel every single night if I could have torn him away from the piano. I noted the mailboxes along the road—some of them cutesy, with hand-painted vines snaking up the posts, and little flowers and butterflies and frogs painted on the mailboxes themselves.
Happiness lives here!
they screamed. I read the names as my headlights illuminated them: The Severins. The Omgards. I slowed in the 1800 block, although I had no intention of stopping yet.

There was nothing fancy about 1804 Morgan Street, which had grass from curb to porch, rather than expensive concrete or stone work. A commercial flatbed truck was parked in the driveway, Saenz & Co. Short Haul printed on its side in block letters. I felt a crushing hate, like a weight on my chest. Wouldn’t I be doing the world a public service if I prevented Robert Saenz from ever, ever getting behind the wheel again? Someone else should have done this years ago—his brother, a police officer, the district attorney, a relative of the woman who died in North Carolina. Jail time didn’t work—and who was there to monitor him, constantly, from getting behind the wheel? No one had stopped him from taking the corner too fast and clipping the speed limit sign that killed Daniel; I was the only one who would stop him from doing it again.

I looped into the countryside and back into town, slowing again as I passed 1804. The house itself was dark, except for a single light on the porch. I took a quick inventory: the same white siding that used to be sold on Sears infomercials; dark trim around the windows; an empty planter box; those bright, out-of-place shutters; plastic chairs stacked seat-to-seat on the front porch, out of commission until summer arrived. I allowed myself to look at the apartment over the garage, my heartbeats reverberating like a snare drum.

Robert Saenz was up there—I knew it. Of course he was—would anyone plunk their two-time murdering parolee brother in the main house? Above the garage, he was out of earshot and eyesight.

At the end of Morgan Street, I turned left, heading back through town. There were few other cars on the road, although I passed students walking closer to campus, their collars up, wearing the sort of knitted hats that my students in California had worn to be cool, rather than to protect against the cold.

I realized with a jolt that I had passed the spot. It was unmarked, a stretch of sidewalk along a road like any other, where people walked every day, not thinking that someone—that Daniel Owen Kaufman—had died there.

I was flooded with déjà vu; it was this moment—or close to it—that I’d envisioned from the roof of the cafeteria, looking over the campus where I’d spent the better part of twenty years. I’d seen myself in Oberlin, making things right, making things final.

At the same time, it was as if I was reviewing my life in a selective editing mode. The phone call in the middle of the night. Skip. Daniel’s body at the morgue—that pale scar on his abdomen. Skip. The box with his
cremains,
so insubstantial. Skip. The night I’d followed the stranger in the parking lot and ended up in the bar. Skip. Kathleen packing her clothes, leaving not even a single pilled sweater or flattened pair of slippers behind, her message clear.

Skip.

The gun in my hand, Robert Saenz dead on the floor.