The Fragile World (30 page)

curtis

I stared at the batteries for a long time, letting them roll back and forth in my palm. Five of them. My first thought was of Zach Gaffaney and our quick exchange in the dark outside his trailer. But I’d
seen
the bullets—I’d looked in the cylinder, unloaded them, taped them beneath the seat myself. So there were only a few possibilities—the Ellis brothers, Sam, Olivia or even Kathleen.

If it had been Olivia...

Would she have thought one was meant for her, or Kathleen, or me? It was hard to argue, having driven cross-country with the sole purpose of killing Robert Saenz, that I wasn’t a danger to society. But I never meant to be a danger to my daughter; I couldn’t even conceive of the idea. Whoever had switched out the bullets had believed I was capable of something, had seen something in me that I could barely see in myself until now—until this moment.

There was no time to execute a Plan B, even if I had an alternative. Maybe I could have called Zach Gaffaney, although I’d promised to lose his number, to ask what he knew about gun laws in Ohio, about the best places to buy ammunition. I’d figured on having a loaded gun, on taking all the shots I needed.

And then I remembered.

I fished into the pocket of my pants. I’d been carrying one bullet with me since our breakdown outside Lyman; that just-in-case for a case I couldn’t imagine at the time.

One bullet, one shot—like Russian roulette.

But that should be all I needed. If I couldn’t kill Robert Saenz with one bullet, then I wasn’t worth anything.

The first light was breaking by the time I was back in Oberlin. I slowed to a crawl down Main Street. The streets were still quiet, but a diner was open; inside, a few patrons sipped coffee and read newspapers. An empty plastic bag blew past the spot where Daniel had died. I nearly jumped when a station wagon pulled out of the gas station. For a frightening moment, it looked like Kathleen behind the wheel. But that was just the sleeplessness at work—coupled with the understanding that I was about to become a cold-blooded murderer—because it was a newer model Volvo with an Ohio plate, and Kathleen was hundreds of miles away, unaware of what I was going to do.

I turned again onto Morgan Street, every sense alert. Down the street, one of Jerry Saenz’s neighbors walked from his front door to a spot halfway down the lawn. He glanced up as I passed, and in the rearview mirror I saw him bend to retrieve the paper. What constituted big news in Oberlin—an athletic championship for a local high school? A ribbon cutting at a new drugstore? A visiting lecturer? I could imagine the headline tomorrow, in a giant font: Murder in Oberlin. Maybe a subheading: Man Exacts Revenge on Son’s Killer. But it might not be that at all. It might be California Man, in Wake of Mental Breakdown, Kills Oberlin Resident.

It didn’t matter. Or it did—but only to me.

There was no sign of life at Jerry Saenz’s house. A glance revealed that the upstairs apartment was dark, the curtains still pulled. The sun was rising a clear and brilliant yellow on the horizon, but it was possible no one was awake inside the house yet.

I parked down the street, watching 1804 Morgan in my rearview mirror. I was definitely too far away to take a shot—to risk my single bullet—but even if I’d been a trained sniper, that wasn’t my plan.

I needed Robert Saenz to know exactly what had hit him and who had fired the shot. I suddenly remembered a slogan from a long-ago history class, maybe as far back as junior high school:
Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.
That was from the Revolutionary War, probably, but it applied here, too. I wanted Robert Saenz to see the whites of my eyes. When he had killed Daniel, it had been random—I knew that. It might have been any person walking down the street, but it just happened to be Daniel, my son, who was in that place at that exact time. When I killed Saenz, it was going to be deliberate in every way, and I wanted him to know it, to feel the difference.

I started as the front door opened, and a man came out, wearing jeans and a bulky winter coat. He had a baseball cap pulled low, the brim shielding his face. Curly dark hair stuck out like wings on either side of his head. I remembered Robert Saenz’s disheveled hair from his mug shot—curly on the sides, the top flattened. Hat hair.

My first instinct was to shrink lower in the seat, hiding from view—but this was pointless, because if he was far enough away that I couldn’t make out his facial features, then I was far enough away that he couldn’t make out mine. I reached for the Colt, held it without knowing exactly what I would do.

The man—Robert? Jerry?—crossed the sidewalk to the driveway and unlocked the door to the truck. He stepped up, started the ignition. I squinted hard, trying to decide who it was. The truck, leaking gray puffs of exhaust, reversed in the driveway and backed onto Morgan. While I pretended to be reaching for something on the passenger seat, it passed me.

I straightened, watched as the Saenz & Co. truck slowed at the end of the street, turned left and accelerated, heading out of town. He was getting away.

I tucked the Colt into the console and followed.

olivia

We stopped for gas just past Toledo. It was freezing outside and not much warmer in the bathroom, where my reflection in the mirror was clouded by a long exhale. That girl looked like me, moved like me, and somehow didn’t seem to be me at all.

At the pump, Mom was listening to the slow, steady
glug, glug
of gasoline.

“How much longer?”

“Maybe another hour, especially if I can keep going eighty.”

I leaned up against the side of the Volvo and watched the numbers roll, the dollars increasing much faster than the gallons. This was getting to be quite the expensive trip my family was taking, I thought—especially when you factored in a new transmission and all the unseen costs of whatever my dad was about to do.

Mom leaned back next to me, both of us ignoring the mud splattered against the side of the car. She looked exhausted, like an older, less healthy version of the person who had been standing in her driveway to greet me just two days ago. I wondered who we would be by the end of this trip, if either of us would even resemble ourselves.

“You want me to drive?” I asked.

Mom snorted.

“Don’t say I didn’t offer,” I told her, relieved.

She put an arm around me. I held back at first, then rolled my head to the side so I could rest against her. Somewhere in this state, my dad was driving around with a gun, looking for the man who’d killed my brother. For just a moment I thought I would be okay if we stayed right here, at a gas station off the Ohio Turnpike with Mom’s arm around my shoulders.

“I missed you,” she said.

“I missed you, too.”

“Just the little things, you know? Even the stupid stuff, the day-to-day things. I miss seeing you every day. Hearing your funny observations. Laughing at your jokes.”

“I tell very few jokes,” I said shakily. I was in a fragile place. Instead of a flesh and blood heart pounding away in my chest, it felt as if I had nothing more substantial than one of those construction paper hearts that kids make on Valentine’s Day. One false move, and my little red heart might rip right down the middle.

Mom laughed an in-spite-of-herself laugh. Like,
nothing is really funny right now, but I’m going to cling to this one tiny moment.

I tried to make my voice sound normal, although I was on the verge of crazy blubbering. “But when you think about it, we probably talked more than most mothers and daughters who live in the same house. If I had a joke to tell, you probably heard it.”

“I know. And I loved our talks. I loved hearing your voice, your wit...but of course, it wasn’t enough. And I always felt like we were holding back, like you weren’t telling me all the bad things, and I wasn’t telling you how lonely I was, because we both wanted the other person to be happy.”

I didn’t say anything, because she was absolutely right. I’d babbled on every week about dumb stuff, about what Dad and I had made for dinner, about having to study for a test, about the competition on one reality show or another. I basically spent the week gathering these little scraps of information so I would have something to fill the silence, the void that was created by all the things we wouldn’t say. Somehow, in the middle of all that talking, I never told her about losing friendships and being lonely, about failing P.E., about how awful it was to lose my virginity to a stranger on someone’s bathroom floor.

“Now, no crying,” Mom told me, using the sleeve of her fleece sweatshirt to dab at my eyes. And then she dabbed at her own, which were sparkly with tears. We smiled at each other madly for a moment, and then Mom replaced the gas pump with a clunk, and we got back into the car.

When this nightmare with Dad was over, I promised myself, I would tell her everything I’d left out, every single thing.

And then maybe,
maybe,
things would be all right.

curtis

The road was still slick; at the left turn, my tires did a half-second spin.

Calm down. You can’t blow it all so close to the end.

I followed the Saenz & Co. truck at what would have been a safe distance in Sacramento, with a few hundred other cars on the road. On this flat horizon, against the open Midwest sky, the Explorer was way too obvious. If Robert Saenz—or could it be his brother, Jerry?—looked in his rearview mirror, he would have seen me a quarter mile behind, leaning forward in my seat as if I were about to burst through the windshield. I kept the same pace, wishing I had some kind of GPS display on the dashboard; where exactly were we headed?

The calm resignation I’d felt leaving the truck stop had disappeared. That had been the calm before the storm. Now adrenaline was rushing through my veins, masking again my exhaustion. How many hours since I’d slept? Back in Omaha, a world away, Kathleen and Olivia were barely beginning their day, one more of many days without me.

The road widened into two lanes; apparently, we’d joined up with a state highway. I couldn’t afford to wait and see. For all I knew, Saenz & Co. was heading to Canton, to Akron, to whatever was farther south. I couldn’t hang back any longer, waiting to find out. I pulled into the left lane and accelerated, trying to draw even with the truck. This wasn’t an easy task, since it was traveling at a good speed, and the Explorer, rebuilt transmission or not, felt like a rattling ton of tin at anything over seventy. I had to be patient several times, holding back so that I could pass slower-moving vehicles on the road—the occasional town car, a few semis lumbering along with heavy loads. It was a difficult task to keep one eye on the road and one on the Saenz truck, a feat better suited to a movie scene with a stuntman driving, the eye of the cameraman from the backseat making all the necessary observations. All I could make out was the back of the driver’s head, the dark rim of hair.

Robert Saenz’s head, Robert Saenz’s hair.

What was my whole life now if not a chance?

I said his name out loud, letting the words fill the Explorer’s airspace. It was strange to
say
the name—to have the freedom to voice my thoughts when the syllables had been inside me for so long, pounding like a heartbeat, pulsing like a deep wound.

I drew up on the left, trying to match the Explorer’s pace with his, nose to nose. The driver was looking down, then straight ahead, then—as my whole body tensed—he turned his head.

It wasn’t Robert Saenz.

This must have been Jerry, a younger version of the man from the mug shot, with a face that was thinner, healthier, a mouth that settled naturally into a smile, even as he shot me a surprised glance.

I eased back immediately, foot off the gas. Jerry Saenz turned, looking repeatedly over his left shoulder and back to the road. He tossed up an arm in an angry gesture, but I had fallen back. My grievance wasn’t with Jerry. He’d taken in his killer brother and essentially provided the weapon that had killed my son, but I didn’t want to hurt him—not directly, anyway. If I had only one shot, I was going for the killer himself.

A car honked behind me—the Buick I’d passed earlier, catching up. I slid back into the right lane, heart pounding. An older woman in the passenger seat swiveled to fix me with concerned blue eyes.

She would be another one, I thought. She would see my mug shot in the paper and ask her husband, “Wasn’t that the man who was driving so strangely? Weren’t those California plates?”

I took the first right turn I could, then swung around in a wide arc and retraced the route to Oberlin. Jerry Saenz had seen me, but he wouldn’t understand the significance until later. The encounter would mean nothing to him now, would be only a tiny odd blip in an otherwise normal day.

I was back on track. Robert Saenz would be alone now, waking up in his room above the garage. I said his name, like a chant, all the way back to town.

olivia

As we drove, the sun came out. Most of the clouds from yesterday were gone, and the day was more beautiful than a day had any right to be. Maybe even that was some kind of omen—a beautiful day for the last day of life as we knew it.

“So, how are we going to find Dad, if we don’t know where to look?”

Mom said, “Oberlin’s tiny, Liv. I mean,
tiny.
If he’s there, we’re going to find him. And as soon as businesses are open, I’m calling the D.A. and the police department. They’ll know for sure what’s going on with Robert Saenz, if he’s been paroled, or what.”

I had a vision of us stopping pedestrians in Oberlin and asking if they had seen a white man, six-one, late forties, probably two hundred pounds after all the junk food we’d eaten on the trip. But most of the men I’d seen in the Midwest fit this description, at least roughly.

Out the window was farmland, white houses and big red barns, trailers cropping up here and there out of nowhere, the occasional cow or horse behind a barbed wire fence. It was all so peaceful and so wrong. If a genie appeared right now with the promise of three wishes, I would ask to go back in time. Not just to the day that Dad went up on the cafeteria roof, but to the night when Daniel died. I’d insert myself in the scene, intervene in some way—which was just the sort of thing that never worked out in time travel movies. It was like stepping on a butterfly in the past; the reverberations could be huge. Maybe I’d even find myself in a different sort of crazy situation, a new nightmare for which I was solely responsible.

Besides, not
everything
that happened after Daniel died had been bad. For some reason, I remembered Dad and me eating our TV dinners in front of old reruns. Dad could do a voice that was a dead ringer for Mr. Ed’s:
I wish that guy would just leave me alone. It’s not natural for a man to be so attached to a horse.
If I could keep some of those moments and still have Daniel alive and Mom with us, I’d climb into a time machine in a second.

We both jumped when we saw the first sign for Oberlin, and Mom gave the gas pedal another steady push. When we met up with Dad—
if
we met up with Dad—I would have all kinds of questions for him. But I had to take advantage of this moment with Mom. I pinched my eyes shut, as if I were making a wish, and said, “Tell me about your road trip with Dad, the one you took to California.”

Mom looked startled. “Where did that come from?”

“I just want to know. Before we get there, and before it’s too late and I never have a chance again.”

Mom considered this. I was grateful that she didn’t say
Of course you’ll have another chance to ask me anything you want!
For once, we were on even footing. “But what’s there to say?”

“Nope, that’s not good enough. Dad tried to buy me off with that.”

“It was just so long ago. I can’t imagine it’s interesting. Are you sure you want to hear this?”

“Mom, come on.”

“Well, okay.” She paused for a few seconds, probably calling it all back. “We had our trunk loaded with all this junk from college, and then all these wedding gifts we’d unpacked from their boxes to make more room, and we’d rolled the breakable things in our clothes. It was pretty tricky to unpack when we got to Sacramento, because when we picked up a flannel shirt, a drinking glass would come rolling out of it.” She smiled a little. “See? I tried to warn you, not interesting.”

“No, it is. It’s fascinating. Keep going.”

Mom sighed. “We didn’t have much money, so we only stayed twice in hotel rooms, and we spent the other night in the car. That was somewhere in Utah outside Salt Lake City, and your father woke up with a massive crick in his neck, so we stopped and bought a bag of frozen corn for him to hold against his neck, and then we threw away the corn at a rest stop somewhere in Nevada.” She was smiling faintly. “I haven’t thought about that in a long time.”

“And you were happy,” I said.

“And we were happy,” she confirmed. “I don’t think I’d ever been so happy.”

“And then Daniel was born,” I prompted, continuing the story.

“Well...I mean, years later. Five years, almost exactly.”

“And you were happy,” I said again.

Mom’s smile was broader now, her face relaxing, although her hands were still clenched on the steering wheel. “We were so happy. I wish you could have known your brother then, Liv. He was such a serious little kid. The second he could speak, he had a million questions about everything, and he was always very skeptical about our answers. Sometimes I heard him asking your father the same things he’d just asked me, like he was checking to make sure we had our stories straight. This was before he started piano, of course—after that, he had a one-track mind.”

“And then you moved,” I prompted.

“Then we bought that crazy old little house. I fell in love with it the second I saw it, but I really had to work on your father to convince him. Where I saw potential, he saw serious amounts of hard work.” She had a faraway look, as if she were chasing the memory.

“And then you had me.”

“And then we had you.”

“And you were happy?”

“Of course!”

I looked out the window.

Mom glanced at me. “Why did you say it like that? Was there any question we were happy?”

Because after Daniel, you didn’t need me. Because I’ve never heard anyone say a single bad thing about Daniel, ever, and it stands to reason that there’s no point in improving on perfection.
I bit my lip, holding this back.
Because when Daniel died, I should have somehow taken his place and become the wonderful daughter to replace the wonderful son—and I didn’t. I became the messed-up kid who was afraid of her own shadow and who had failed P.E., twice.

“Of course we were happy,” Mom repeated, stung. “You had a very happy childhood.”

“I don’t remember,” I whispered, which was mostly true. It was as if the world of after, with all its awfulness and emptiness, had somehow obliterated the good of before.

“Well,
I
do. By the time you came along, Daniel was already in school, so you and I were home a lot during the day. That’s before I had my little studio, so sometimes I propped you up in your car seat in the garage, and you watched me paint things.”

“And inhaled the fumes...” I murmured.

“You remember!” Mom looked less frazzled than she had before, her face open and happy. “When you were a little older, we’d finger-paint out there. Once for your dad’s birthday, we made him a giant card on a canvas tarp that had to be twelve-by-twelve. You stamped hundreds of wet handprints all over it, and it was so runny with paint that it took days to dry.”

“What happened to it?”

“It’s probably still out there, all rolled up in a corner. It turned out not to be very practical for long-term display.”

“What else did we do?”

“Well, you used to come with me to estate sales way out in the boonies, all over northern California. We’d just pop in some music and sing along until we got there. This is when I discovered that you loved Peter, Paul and Mary.”

I laughed now, grudgingly. “Did I have a choice?”

Mom sang, slightly off-key, “‘Puff the magic dragon, lived by the sea...’”

I picked up the next line, giggling. “‘...and frolicked in the autumn mist...’”

“‘In a land called Honah Lee,’” Mom finished.

“I can’t believe you let me sing such druggie songs when I was just a little kid.”

“Oh, please. Druggie songs. I still maintain that it was a song about a magical dragon in a kingdom by the sea.” She continued humming a verse or two, and I tried to figure out if I actually remembered these trips, or if I only did because Mom was re-creating them for me.

“What about Dad?” I asked.

“What about him?” My question had startled her.

“Back then, was Dad happy, too?”

“Of course he was. We had this perfect little family, like we’d always wanted. You should have seen how proud he was of you, how much he loved having a daughter. I used to worry that you weren’t ever going to learn to walk, since he insisted on carrying you everywhere, hoisting you onto his shoulders or swinging you so that your feet didn’t even touch the ground.”

I didn’t remember him carrying me, but I remember sitting on his lap in front of the TV, the evening news on low. He always smelled vaguely of chalk dust and the chemicals used in the science labs. At some point I had become too old for sitting on his lap, and too old to want that, either. At some point I’d pulled away from his kisses and rolled my eyes when he said, “I love you.”

“But I wasn’t good enough.” I couldn’t stop myself from saying it.

“What are you talking about?”

It felt as if I had something stuck in my throat, or maybe my throat was closing all on its own, like the onset of anaphylactic shock, apropos of nothing. I’d learned about that years ago and dutifully recorded it in my Fear Journal. I forced the words out: “If I were enough, then we wouldn’t be here.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I took a deep breath. “If I were enough, we wouldn’t be here right now. Dad wouldn’t be in Oberlin, living out some stupid-ass revenge plot. If I were enough, you two would have stayed together for my sake. If I were enough, the world wouldn’t have stopped the second Daniel died. If I were enough...” I couldn’t finish, I was crying so hard.

“No,” Mom said, crying, too. “No, no, no...”

She wanted to pull to the side of the road, but I wouldn’t let her. I’d been following the little red dot on my GPS that showed our car moving closer and closer to our destination. It was like watching a horror movie, and not any one horror movie in particular, but
all
horror movies, where you knew something bad was going to happen, but you just couldn’t look away.

And then the battery in my phone died.

We counted off the miles using Mom’s odometer, our dread mounting: eighteen miles. Sixteen.

Mom said, “He probably just wants to scare him.”

And I said, “Right!” because it was the only thing to say.

The man who bought a massive container of chicken noodle soup from Costco when I was sick, and then brought a bowl to my bedside—he wouldn’t kill another person. The man who had given me all those piggyback rides—he wasn’t a killer. The man who had been Mr. K, who had stayed after school almost every day to help his students understand their homework—he couldn’t hurt anyone.

Fourteen miles, eleven. I needed to throw up. No, I needed to use the bathroom again. No, I needed to call Sam, to call anyone, to get some advice.

I looked out the window at the neat Midwest grids of land—a farmhouse here, a barn there, a truck traveling along a frontage road there. It was all so isolated. You could scream here, and no one in the world would hear it. You could fire a gun, and—

“Why are you slowing down?” I gasped. “Go faster!”

“This is our exit,” Mom said, pointing to a sign I’d missed. “Didn’t you say Highway 58?”

I was about to burst out of my skin, like a piece of overripe fruit.

And then we saw the sign: Oberlin Welcomes You.