The Fragile World (32 page)

curtis

At first, I thought I was dead.

Someone was leaning over me, asking questions, but the questions didn’t make any sense. I didn’t know where I was, or who had a gun, or why someone was screaming. All I knew was that I was out of breath, my windpipe burning. Was it still Monday? Was it still morning? Were we still alive?

“He meant business, all right,” a paramedic said. “You’re going to have some pretty serious bruising there. Can you say something for me?”

I rasped, “Olivia.”

“Is that the girl who was here? We took her outside. She’s waiting by the ambulance.”

“Kathleen?” My throat ached like the mother of all sore throats. I tried to sit up and slumped back again, dizzy.

“Whoa, now. Is Kathleen the...? Uhh...” The paramedic turned, talking to someone else in the room, a person who was a blur to me. “Kathleen—your, ah...wife—has been taken into custody.”

Through my general fogginess, I realized that the screaming was coming not from me or Kathleen or Olivia, but from Robert Saenz. Another paramedic was kneeling over him, and his shirt was drenched in blood. His screams were awful, but he was alive. The paramedics were discussing the best way to transport us; their gurneys were too wide for the garage steps.

Seeing Robert Saenz on the floor, blood seeping through a tourniquet on his arm, his face white with pain, I felt it all leak out of me—the hatred, the anger I’d stored for months and years. All that energy spent, all that time lost. He was just a man, just a human. I tried to get a full breath through my bruised windpipe, felt a beautiful, painful rush of air pour into my lungs. I knew that Daniel was still dead and that was still horrible—but it was long-ago horrible, his loss receding in front of me like a mirage on a flat stretch of highway.

“I can walk,” I insisted, forcing myself again to sit up. I needed to see Olivia. I needed to see Kathleen.

Assisted by two paramedics, I made my way down the rickety staircase. Each breath seared my lungs, and the timing of my steps was off, as if my feet were getting the message long after my legs. During my long, stumbling descent and walk to the ambulance, I locked eyes with Olivia, who was wrapped in a navy blanket.

Forgive me, forgive me,
I begged her silently.

* * *

I was at the hospital for several hours, processed and observed and finally released into police custody. The consensus from the emergency room staff was that I was lucky—my bruises and a slight abrasion on my neck would fade to nothing in a week. There really wasn’t a way to measure the damage I’d caused.

Olivia held my hand while we waited; she answered my questions woodenly. While I had been passed out on the floor, Kathleen had fired at Robert Saenz, shattering his right wrist. He’d been reaching for the gun, trying to wrest it from her grasp. The single bullet had chambered, the shot hitting its mark.

When the police arrived, she’d set the gun at her feet and kicked it over to them. She’d told the police that it was her gun, that she’d learned that Robert Saenz had been paroled, that she’d driven all the way from Omaha with me in hot pursuit, that she deserved all the blame.

“Why?” I whispered to Olivia, who only shook her head.

It was the holiest kind of crime: a mother seeking revenge for her dead son. It would make the
Oberlin News Tribune,
the
Cleveland Plain Dealer,
the
Akron Beacon Journal.
It would show up on the CNN crawl.

But the Oberlin Police Department had plenty of questions for me.

It was the second time I’d sat across a table from Sergeant Springer, a manila folder open on the table between us. This time the name wasn’t SAENZ, ROBERT but KAUFMAN, KATHLEEN. In the time since I’d seen him, he’d been promoted, grown a beard. I had been demoted; I was no longer the righteous grieving father, but the son of a bitch involved in the disruption of an otherwise calm Monday morning.

I corroborated Kathleen’s story, as I’d heard it from Olivia in the emergency room. Poor Olivia, waiting in the lobby with the most wanted signs, no doubt cataloguing a host of new fears. Or maybe she was asleep in one of the uncomfortable vinyl chairs. We’d been transported from the hospital to the police station in the back of a patrol car, and she’d dozed off instantly. I’d been in the room when she was questioned, but she’d declined to do anything more than make a short statement—essentially the same statement Kathleen had made, and which I’d parroted, dazed.

Sergeant Springer’s stare bored into me, as invasive as a cavity search. “I gotta say, Kaufman, you gave me a bad feeling, all those years ago. Something just wasn’t right.”

I watched him, waiting. I wasn’t about to say anything that didn’t absolutely need to be said.

“Sure, you were this grieving father, and you had my complete sympathy. But something about you was just—off.”

I swallowed.

“And Robert Saenz, well, it’s not like he didn’t have his share of demons, you know?”

I knew. Apparently Saenz had refused to talk—his upstairs apartment had contained a pharmacy’s worth of painkillers, obtained on fraudulent prescriptions. The baggie of white stuff by his bed was likely meth.

“But for you to show up here again, all these years later...” He shook his head slowly.

There were a million things to say, but none of them would help. I fidgeted in my chair with the wobbly leg, thinking of Olivia, wanting to hold Kathleen.

“Maybe you can help me with this, Kaufman. We’ve got your wife’s statement that she shot Saenz, but something isn’t sitting right with me. Katie Saenz swears it was you and not your wife who arrived first, and Jerry Saenz says he saw a man matching your description this morning on his way out of town.”

I raised my eyebrows but said nothing.

Sergeant Springer sighed. “You’re a strange one, Kaufman. I wasn’t wrong about that.”

The stress of the past day—of the past week—was upon me, and I fought to keep my eyes open.

“Maybe this was just a case of things going horribly wrong,” he said finally. “Is that what you’re trying to say?”

It was.

* * *

Olivia and I spent that night in a junky motel outside of town. The Oberlin Inn—the best and only hotel in town—had seemed impossible, considering. I went into the bathroom to wash, and noticed the bruises on my neck, the raised welts of Robert Saenz’s fingers. He was a killer, but he was just a man, about as flawed as they came. And the same was true of me.

Olivia was already asleep, fully clothed on top of the covers, when I came out of the bathroom.

That night and for weeks afterward I woke up in a cold sweat, my sleep plagued with nightmares. It was always the same, up to a point. I was getting out of the Explorer, heading up the rickety staircase to Robert Saenz’s apartment over the garage. But what happened next was always a different, awful version of reality, and I was always powerless to stop it, until the moment I realized that Olivia was shaking me awake.

“Dad, you’re dreaming,” she said, and I reached out a hand to her, wanting reassurance that she was alive, my flesh-and-blood daughter and not a dream apparition.

* * *

In the end, Kathleen was charged with possession of an illegal firearm and pled guilty, avoiding a trial. She was sentenced to three years, including time served, and with the possibility of early release for good behavior. It worked somewhat in her favor that, after firing the single round from the Colt, she had been the one to rip off her sweater and fashion Robert Saenz a makeshift tourniquet out of her sweatshirt. She had handed over the weapon willingly, had offered up a full—though admittedly false—confession.

This time the Kaufmans had managed to get the attention of the Lorain County District Attorney himself, not an assistant. We had one meeting after Kathleen’s sentencing, and Harold Emsinger looked me straight in the eye and pronounced his verdict: “This was a gift.”

He was flanked by an American flag on one side and shelves lined with thick legal books on the other. He had the weight of law and order, of precedent and justice, behind him. But what he said next was more along the lines of mercy. “The question, Mr. Kaufman, is what is your family going to do with this gift?”

It wasn’t as if I could talk man-to-man with Robert Saenz afterward, to discuss the various decisions we’d made in our lives, and how we’d both ended up in his upstairs apartment, tussling over a gun loaded with a single bullet. If he’d succeeded in getting the gun away from me, I have no doubt he would have used it—and as far as I could see, that made us equals. After he completed his physical therapy, Robert Saenz would have limited use of his right hand, which had been patched together with pins and screws. His muscles would be too weak to form a solid fist.

I didn’t search for him online, or make any phone calls, or return to Oberlin again—but news filtered down from her attorney to Kathleen and from Kathleen to me that Robert Saenz was in rehab, battling his addiction. There wasn’t much time to think about him now, which was strange, since I’d essentially spent five years of my life doing nothing but thinking about him.

A single gunshot fired in an upstairs room had changed that. It had changed everything.

* * *

We weren’t allowed to visit Kathleen for the first few months of her term, and she mostly used her phone calls for legal matters or business arrangements. She’d had to give up—at least for the time being—her interest in the Omaha store. Olivia wrote her long letters, and Kathleen responded immediately, as if they were keeping up a continual conversation—a private one.

In the first letter I wrote to Kathleen, I said: “If I were you, I wouldn’t ever forgive me.”

Her response came back: “I haven’t.”

Then I wrote every day, letting her hear every thought in my head, even the smallest bit of minutiae. I always said I was sorry. I always promised I would make it up to her.

When I could finally see her, on the first day she had visitation rights, she looked almost the same—her hair a duller version of itself, her skin so translucent that I could see the little blue vein on her forehead. “Prison pallor,” she said, shrugging it off. She also claimed to have gained ten pounds, because her choices were “starches or starvation.”

Olivia and I took turns in the room with her, giving each other privacy. When I was with Kathleen, I could tell she was wary of me, her eyes regarding me with a deep intensity. “You can trust me,” I told her. “I’ll spend the rest of my life proving it to you.”

When it was Olivia’s turn, I waited in the hallway, queuing with a sad collection of relatives visiting other prisoners. I wanted to know their stories; I wanted them to know ours. Olivia always brought Kathleen something—a pencil sketch, a poem, a handwritten copy of lyrics, letters that were sealed and dated, so Kathleen would have something to open at regular intervals.

I had nothing to offer except myself and my endless gratitude.

* * *

I didn’t go back into the classroom, but I found a job developing curriculum for online courses, and when things settled down with Olivia, I started studying up on antiques. When Kathleen got out, I was going to be her partner in business—a good partner, an enthusiastic one.

We had to list the house in Sacramento as a short sale and sell the cars, and I had to pull out a little money from my retirement fund to tide us over, but if we spent wisely, we could make it. I borrowed some books from the library, and Kathleen made me lists of what to look for, and when I could, I scoured the Ohio countryside for estate sales in our new-to-us twenty-year-old Toyota. Olivia, when she could, came with me.

On one of those spring days, almost a year after our trip from Sacramento, we followed signs along a winding path and ended up at an old farmhouse, wares spread across the lawn.

The sky was the kind of blue that hurt your eyes.
Daniel would love this,
I thought—for the first time in a long time. He would; he had always loved spring, and the endless blue sky of a California summer. Remembering Daniel used to make me angry about his death and depressed because I had failed him. But as Olivia and I picked our way through the washboards and vases and bassinets, I remembered him with a smile. This was a happy, good moment—and there would be others, many happy, good moments to come.

“What do you think about these chairs?” Olivia called.

I ran my hands up and down the chair legs, studying their bones. “I think your mom would love these,” I said, trying to figure out how we would get both of them into the car at once.

“She will,” Olivia promised me. “She absolutely will.”

olivia

As you can imagine, I had one hell of a college admissions essay.

Or, I would have, if I’d actually earned my P.E. credits and graduated on time with the rest of my class back in Sacramento—which didn’t happen.

After Mom’s sentencing, Dad and I drove back to California to pack up our house and load everything into a U-Haul, which we drove first to Nebraska, to drop off most of our things at Grandpa and Grandma’s old house for long-term storage. Then we continued on to Marysville, Ohio, where we rented a single-wide trailer not far from the grounds of the Ohio Reformatory for Women.

Dad and I both went to counseling sessions, separately. My counselor, Dr. Munoz, was a tiny man who stood about even with my nose. He had glasses and a carefully trimmed beard, and he wore comfortable-looking orthopedic shoes, as if he had just come off a shift in the E.R.

In the beginning,
I told him, gearing up for the story,
there was a boy named Daniel. But now he’s gone.

“Daniel was your older brother,” Dr. Munoz prompted.

“He was,” I agreed. I sat very still for a long time in my chair.

Finally Dr. Munoz asked, “Did you want to tell me something about Daniel?”

I smiled and said, “Only that I loved him. And that now, I’ve moved on.”

He smiled back at me. “Then let’s not talk about Daniel. Let’s talk about Olivia.”

I told him about the classes I was taking, and how I’d decided that maybe, somewhere deep within me, there was a writer. I told him about some friends I had made, and how on the weekends I’d been going to arts festivals and things like that. I told him that I didn’t wear black anymore, or at least, not head-to-toe. I told him about Sam Ellis, who had finally sent me one of his creations. I knew what it was, instantly, even before I’d freed the snow globe from its packaging. It was the great tragedy of my own life, two people in a car heading down a lonely road, our troubles buried beneath a light sprinkling of snow. I wrote him a long letter, thanking him, but I was smart enough to know that Sam wasn’t pining for me, and that I shouldn’t be pining for him, either.

“And what’s that?” Dr. Munoz said, pointing to the notebook in my lap. It was the book Mom had bought me at the gas station somewhere between Omaha and Oberlin, when I’d realized that I’d left my Fear Journal behind.

“Oh, it’s just a list I’ve been making,” I told him, blushing. The Olivia Kaufman who had worn all black and obsessed about falling ceiling tiles wouldn’t even recognize the things in this book. “I’ve been writing down some good things—you know, all the things I have to be grateful for. It turns out there’s really a lot.”

When Dr. Munoz smiled, the corners of his eyes wrinkled. “It sounds like you have a solid grip on things, Olivia,” he said.

I ended up taking my GED, proving wrong the guidance counselor at Rio who had told me it was impossible to get past high school without passing two full years of P.E. It did prove impossible to attend community college in Columbus without getting my driver’s license, though. After everything else that had happened, I was hardly scared at all to get on the road in our little junker Toyota, giving the car some gas to speed past the tanker trailers in the slow lane.

By the time Mom was out, I planned to have my general ed courses completed, and after her year of parole, we would be moving back to Omaha. Uncle Jeff and Aunt Judy had been “unfailingly decent”—Dad’s words—in keeping the house for us. I was going to apply to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as my first choice, casting a wider net around the Midwest as backups.

Sometimes I entertained the idea of applying to Oberlin, too—if only to give someone in the admissions office a shock: Not
that
Kaufman, surely.

Dad found hundreds of ways to show me he was sorry. He helped me study for my political science quizzes, he scouted sources for my English research papers, he drove around Columbus with me, helping me find interesting buildings to sketch for my art class. And he said it, too—about a million sorries before I told him that it was enough, that saying it over and over again wouldn’t change what had happened.

Sometimes at night, when we were sitting in front of our ten-inch TV that got three channels, it almost seemed like the old days again, when it had been just the two of us in Sacramento. We made biting comments about poorly written sitcoms, and sometimes we even cracked jokes.

Once, he slipped and said “Love,” and I said, as if I’d had the word ready for a long time, “Eventually.”

And that’s how it would be—eventually.

* * * * *

Keep reading for a gripping excerpt from Paula Treick DeBoard’s first novel,
THE MOURNING HOURS.
Available now from Harlequin MIRA.