The Fragile World

From the author of stunning debut The Mourning Hours comes a powerful new novel that explores every parent’s worst nightmare…

The Kaufmans have always considered themselves a normal, happy family. Curtis is a physics teacher at a local high school. His wife, Kathleen, restores furniture for upscale boutiques. Daniel is away at college on a prestigious music scholarship, and twelve-year-old Olivia is a happy-go-lucky kid whose biggest concern is passing her next math test.

And then comes the middle-of-the-night phone call that changes everything. Daniel has been killed in what the police are calling a “freak” road accident, and the remaining Kaufmans are left to flounder in their grief.

The anguish of Daniel’s death is isolating, and it’s not long before this once-perfect family finds itself falling apart. As time passes and the wound refuses to heal, Curtis becomes obsessed with the idea of revenge, a growing mania that leads him to pack up his life and his anxious teenage daughter and set out on a collision course to right a wrong.

An emotionally charged novel, The Fragile World is a journey through America’s heartland and a family’s brightest and darkest moments, exploring the devastating pain of losing a child and the beauty of finding the way back to hope.

Praise for the novels of Paula Treick DeBoard

“Emotionally powerful from beginning to end, Paula Treick DeBoard’s novel The Fragile World chronicles the heartbreaking dissolution of a family after tragic loss. Exquisitely told, this bold and moving story is a study in grief and the transforming power of love. Absolutely unforgettable.” —Heather Gudenkauf, New York Times bestselling author of The Weight of Silence

“A heart-stopping series of events drives The Fragile World, as Paula Treick DeBoard skillfully alternates between a father and daughter dealing with tragic loss. The result is a gripping read, but one that delivers, by the book’s end, a beautiful reminder of the resilience of love.” —Karen Brown, author of The Longings of Wayward Girls

“A coming-of-age tale about a family in crisis expertly told by Ms. DeBoard. The Fragile World examines how profound loss changes all who are forced to come to terms with it. Touching and compelling, it will move you.” —Lesley Kagen, New York Times bestselling author of Whistling in the Dark and The Resurrection of Tess Blessing.

“Assured storytelling propels DeBoard’s first novel.… What most compels is the observant Kirsten’s account of how a small town and a family disintegrate under the weight of the tragedy.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Mourning Hours

“Rich and evocative…compelling.”

—RT Book Reviews on The Mourning Hours

The Fragile

World

Paula Treick DeBoard

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For my parents, who taught me that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single packed-to-the-gills station wagon.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Praise

Title Page

Dedication

prologue

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Acknowledgments

The Fragile World Readers Guide

Questions for Discussion

A Conversation with Paula Treick DeBoard

Extract

BPA

Copyright

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

—Franklin D. Roosevelt

Also, blenders.

—Olivia Kaufman

prologue

Olivia

In the beginning there was Daniel. He was the only child my parents ever needed, because he was perfect. His first word was magnet and, the story goes, he said it while looking at the refrigerator, where my mother had spelled out D-A-N-I-E-L in brightly colored letters. Other kids might have memorized the stories their parents read to them from the Little Golden Books, but my mother always swore that Daniel was actually reading, even though he wasn’t three years old yet. By the time he was five and still belted into a child seat in the back of Mom’s car, he was already reading every sign on the road: City Limit and Closing Sale and Fresh Donuts. His early teachers strongly suggested that he skip grades, and if my parents hadn’t worried about his size—smallish—and his sociability—shyish—he would probably have been one of those kids who make the news when they graduate from university at age twelve.

When he was six years old, Mom enrolled Daniel in piano lessons, since he had taken to singing road signs as they drove and later banging out the tunes on the kitchen table with his fork and spoon. Prompted by the sight of the golden arches, he would launch into “Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese...” and he could produce, on demand, the exact jingle that matched every car dealership in the greater Sacramento area. When I was born—and just for a moment, let’s pause to consider why, exactly, my parents would want another child when surely they had everything a parent could want in Daniel—he was already on his way to becoming a musical prodigy.

Physically, our lives revolved around Daniel and his music. Our funky, turn-of-the-last-century house near downtown Sacramento was crammed full with musical instruments—the upright piano in the living room, the drum set at the top of the stairs, his guitar propped against one wall or another. I was convinced that he was the only person on earth who could make a recorder look cool.

When Daniel was in the seventh grade, Mom picked me up from kindergarten one afternoon and drove me across town to his middle school auditorium for the annual talent show. The other kids were truly kids—they performed bright, cheery dance routines in spangly costumes, they lip-synced to pop songs, they executed strange karate routines that involved a lot of posturing and choppy air kicks. Daniel was the last one to take the stage, no doubt because the organizers knew he was the best. He announced that he was playing “Flight of the Bumblebee” by Rimsky-Korsakov and the entire gym went quiet with the opening notes. His fingers flew confidently over the keys; if he was intimidated in any way by hundreds of eyes on him, it didn’t show. Mom had tried to convince him earlier that day to bring the sheet music as a backup, but Daniel had only tapped his head with one finger, meaning It’s all up here. It was the first time I realized that Daniel was really great, something special.

What a disappointment I must have been, must still be. I took three years of piano lessons and barely advanced beyond the “early learner books.” I remember one song, played with my right thumb on middle C and my right index finger on D. See the bear, on two feet, begging for a bite to eat. All I had to do was toggle my fingers between the two keys, and yet somehow I couldn’t help but hit adjacent keys or lose the simple beat, giving up in a frustrated squash of all my fingers against the keys at once. Inside, a voice was saying, regular as a metronome: Don’t mess up. Get it right. Play the notes. It didn’t seem hard—but somehow I couldn’t do it.

On the day of what would be my last lesson, Mom arrived at my teacher’s house as I was fumbling my way through a simple scale I’d spent hours practicing. I’d been biting my lip in deep concentration, but when I saw her listening in the doorway, I burst into tears.

“It’s okay,” she said as we drove home, my tears finally drying against my cheeks. “You know, I’m not a musical person, and your father isn’t, either. We’re all talented in different ways. I don’t want you to feel bad about this, all right?”

But I did feel bad. Not because I had any illusions about my musical ability—even as a third grader, I understood that the awkward clunking sounds I made at the piano were never going to evolve into the effortless music Daniel made. It hurt me, though, to think that my mother had given up on me so early, that she had accepted my lack of talent so easily. I might have resented the hell out of her for it later on, but at that moment, I wanted her to fight for me—or at least give the slightest acknowledgment that I was worth fighting for, even if it was a lie. Something like: “Olivia, you have hidden potential....”

But no. I was an eight-year-old failure.

As he got older, Daniel seemed to float through our lives on his way from one practice or event to another—concert band, musical ensemble, pep band, a steel drum band that met before school, a band that jammed for hours in our garage after school. He was a member of the youth symphony orchestra; he played piano for the spring musical his junior and senior years. Colleges fell over themselves with scholarship offers—on top of everything else, Daniel had maintained a 4.3 grade point average throughout high school. Basically, he was that one-in-a-million kid, the one who participated in everything and volunteered for everything and did a fan-freaking-tastic job at everything. His face—pale beneath a shock of dark hair—appeared dozens of times in his high school yearbooks, the margins crammed with notes from friends and phone numbers from hopeful admirers.

Sometimes I thought his success would have been easier to take if Daniel had been an asshole, some mean-spirited genius who could only look down his nose at everyone else. But the thing was—he was so damn nice. He was the best big brother you could have. He never once told me to go away because I was bothering him. He never once told me that I sucked at the piano or worse, showered me with pity. He made up silly songs for me every year as a birthday present, and when he got his license, he once spent an entire Saturday afternoon driving me around Sacramento in search of the best sno-cone. When he went away to Oberlin, he sent emails that were just for me, separate from the ones he sent to Dad and Mom, filled with jokes and links to funny things he’d found online, like penguins bowling and dogs chasing their tails. He liked to set cat videos to his own music, little things he composed for a joke and that I thought were genius.

Basically, I worshipped him. And as bad as I felt for disappointing Dad and Mom, I never once felt that I had disappointed Daniel. You just couldn’t feel bad about yourself around him, because he didn’t have that effect on people.

In the beginning, there was Daniel.

Until one day, there wasn’t.

The obituary in The Sacramento Bee, written by Aunt Judy when neither of my parents was up to the task, left out everything interesting and reduced my brother to the barest of facts: Daniel Owen Kaufman was predeceased by both his paternal and maternal grandparents. He is survived by his immediate family, parents Curtis and Kathleen Kaufman and sister Olivia. He is also survived by an uncle and aunt, Jeff and Judy Eberle, cousin, Chelsey, and friends throughout the Sacramento and Oberlin, Ohio, areas.

Survived, when you think about it, is a funny term. Survived implies that we were there on the sinking ship, that somehow we got on the lifeboat, but Daniel didn’t. Survived suggests that we were pulled from the wreckage of the collapsed building, but Daniel wasn’t. Survived also means we kept on living—and I’m not sure that’s true.

Oh, we were still alive in the biological sense of hearts beating and lungs inflating. Dad kept on showing up at Rio Americano High, where he had taught physics for so long that he was almost an institution unto himself. Mom, who had been a buyer for an antiques dealer before branching into her own furniture restoration business, threw herself into her work with a passion that bordered on mania. And me—I guess you could say that I kept going, too. I was still living and breathing and getting decent scores on my homework. I still basically looked like a normal kid. But nothing ever felt right.

Somehow, as the years passed, Daniel was still there. Not in some weird, spiritual way, as if his ghost were haunting our upstairs hallway or his profile had appeared on a moldy tortilla, but in the hold that he had over me—every memory of my childhood had Daniel in it, hovering at the edges like an orb sneaking into the background of a photo. Moving forward—moving past the incident, as our family therapist had said in her nice-nice way, as if everything bad could be covered over with a euphemism—was like stepping into a vacuum, a World Without Daniel, a blank space, an empty room. Some people, I heard, kept phone messages from their dead loved ones, replaying them for a dose of comfort, a reassurance of immortality. Mom’s way of keeping Daniel alive was to say his name as much as possible, to bring him into conversations like that old saying I’d learned about Jesus, the silent guest at every meal. Seeing a notice in the paper about a soloist in a holiday concert, she’d say “That name sounds familiar. I wonder if that’s the younger sister of what’s-her-name, the one who used to play clarinet with Daniel?” Cleaning out our junk drawer: “This must be the missing piece to Daniel’s little gadget, that little thingamajig that he used to spin around on the patio....” For no reason at all: “Remember when we rode the cable cars to the wharf and Daniel...”

Yes, Mom. I remember. We know.

Dad and I, by tacit consent, mentioned his name less and less, until we stopped saying it at all. The space Daniel had occupied was now a silent void, a sort of musical black hole that we tried to fill with the television, with random chitchat about things that didn’t matter at all. It was as if Daniel had taken with him all the arias and sonatas and symphonies, all the pianissimos and fortes, all the beauty and improvisation.

Dad and I kept our silence because it was too hard—it was shitty, frankly—to acknowledge that Daniel had ever existed, because then we had to remind ourselves that he didn’t exist anymore, that he was, and would always be, dead.

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October 29, 2008

When the phone rings after midnight, it’s never good news.

The sound was startling, echoing off our wood floors and banging around in the hallway, but in the strange way that sounds penetrate sleep, it seemed as if the ringing came from deep underwater. Or maybe I was the one underwater, swimming to the top of my dream, and suddenly bursting through. I jerked upward, head foggy, propping myself up on my elbows.

Dad had picked up the phone, and from down the hall I could hear him repeating, “What? What...? What?” as if he were talking to a foreign telemarketer, someone trying to sell an upgraded something or other—except he wasn’t cursing and hanging up, which was Dad’s standard fare for unsolicited phone calls.

Then I heard Mom’s voice demanding, “Who is it, Curtis? Who is it?” Her voice, although sleep-tinged, was panicky.

Dad was still on the line, now whispering, “I don’t understand....” and I figured we could safely rule out both telemarketers and drunken prank calls from Dad’s physics students. My room was just across the hall, and by this time I was fully awake, struggling out of a tangle of sheets and comforter. This was made more difficult by the presence of Heidi, our ancient basset hound, who was upside down next to me, her legs splayed open, her mammoth chest rising and falling with sleep. Heidi had never been the most diligent watchdog, it was true—the mailman held no interest for her, although she could hear a crumb drop in the kitchen from anywhere in the house—but she had recently passed into the stage of life where even an earsplitting telephone ring and raised voices were not cause for concern. “Move, Heidi,” I ordered, nudging against the resisting bulk of her body.

A small amount of time had passed—ten seconds? Fifteen? Thirty? But between the first ring of the phone and the time I stood in the doorway of my parents’ bedroom, I had the sense that my life had already changed.

One minute I had been in dreamland, my only worry the pre-algebra test I had the next day in fifth period with Mr. Heinman, who was notorious for asking questions that had nothing to do with our notes or assignments. In the back of my mind, I was also thinking about the Halloween dance on Friday—the first dance of my seventh-grade year. Simple stuff. The kind of thing you have the luxury to think about when the rest of life is going well, when your life isn’t hinging on a middle-of-the-night phone call.

Mom had switched her bedside light on, and both of my parents were sitting up, looking rumpled and older than they did during the daytime. Dad’s hair was sticking up in strange tufts, and his glasses, which always rested on his nightstand within arm’s reach, had been perched lopsidedly on his face. “But how?” he was saying now. “I don’t understand how. I mean, how?”

Mom was holding a throw pillow and was either kneading or throttling it in her hands. “It’s not, it’s not, it’s not,” she kept saying. When I was younger, I used to thank God for the food I was about to eat and say Now I lay me down to sleep at night, but this might have been the closest thing to a prayer I’d ever heard from my mom. She just wasn’t the sort of person who prayed, at least not on a regular or official basis. I figured she didn’t want to bother God with it unless the situation was really hopeless.

“Curtis,” Mom pleaded, and he swallowed hard, trying to say something. But he didn’t seem to be able to get the words out, so instead he nodded. Just once.

Mom moaned. I slipped onto the bed next to her and buried my face in her hair. She smelled of wood shavings and varnish, a smell that was as reassuring to me as the smell of flour and sugar probably was to other kids.

Then Dad asked, his voice thin and drifting, like a helium balloon that had slipped away, “What do we do now? I mean, what do people do?” He was speaking just as much to the person on the other end of the receiver as to us, or, it seemed, to the universe as a whole.

Mom was squeezing me as though she was holding on to me for dear life. Mine or hers, I couldn’t have said.

Then Dad said, “Okay, I will,” and hung up the phone.

The three of us sat very still for a long moment. Whatever was said next, I knew, would change everything. It was the last semi-normal moment of my life, and then we would all live miserably ever after.

Mom asked, “What happened to Daniel?” Her eyes gleamed wetly in the glow of Dad’s bedside lamp.

I wished she hadn’t asked that, because once my brother’s name was out there, it was no longer possible that it could be someone else. If she had mentioned another name, I was sure, then maybe this late-night call could be about some other person, someone else’s brother.

But of all the people in the world—billions of them, more people than any one single person could ever meet even if that was a person’s life goal; of all the people in big cities and small towns, in countries where it was too hot or too cold year-round; of all the men, women and children, even those who were so old that the Guinness Book of World Records had them on some kind of short-list, and even the tiniest of infants in neonatal units, hooked up to tubes and complicated computer systems—out of all these people, it was my brother, Daniel, who was dead.

curtis

After the phone call, Kathleen stayed in bed with Olivia. I could hear them there, crying, comforting each other. I should have been there with them—I know that now, I knew that then. But I couldn’t. I needed, in the fiercest way, to be alone. Not just in our house, but in the world. I needed the whole world to just stop—moving, thinking, talking.

I paced between the living room and the kitchen, picking things up and putting them down, staring at them stupidly as though they were foreign objects, things that didn’t belong in my home. A picture of our family—from a time that already seemed distant, back when there had been four of us, all alive and healthy—in a silver frame that said Family Forever in a fancy script. A booklet of fabric swatches from one of Kathleen’s projects. The swatches were in shades of blue, and each was labeled with a different name: Ocean, Marina, Infinity, Reflection, Tidal Pool. I thumbed through them, thinking how pointless and trivial it was that someone had given names to these different shades of blue, that something so irrelevant could possibly matter in a world where my son was dead. Everything was pointless, I thought. Everything was nonsensical and ludicrous.

Suddenly my legs felt insubstantial, not quite up to the task of supporting my body. I reached for the door frame for balance, nearly tripping over Heidi, our two-ton basset. She looked up at me, confused, expectant.

“Not yet,” I told her. “It’s not time.” The sky beyond our front porch light was a deep, middle-of-the-night black.

She thumped her thick tail and cocked her head, as if she were trying to understand.

“Go back to sleep,” I ordered, nudging her with my shoe.

When she didn’t budge, I snapped, “Fine, then,” and opened the front door, ushering Heidi into the night. She stepped onto the porch and turned, watching me. “This is what you wanted,” I told her, and closed the door too hard.

Kathleen came in a moment later, red-eyed, hair sleep-tousled. Her face was shiny from tears and snot that had been wiped haphazardly from her nose. “Was that the door? Did you go outside?”

I didn’t answer.

She stepped past me and opened the door. Heidi was waiting on the porch, her jowls hanging. Kathleen turned to me, her face crumpled with grief and something else—doubt. In me.

“What’s going on, Curtis? Do you want her to wander off or something?”

“I wasn’t thinking,” I said—a lie. I was thinking that Daniel was dead, and nothing in the world mattered. Let the dog go. Forget the color swatches. Get rid of the smiling family portrait that sat on the edge of a painted side table, mocking me. And the piano. Jesus, the piano. It had taken a Herculean effort to get the piano up our porch steps, only to learn that our front doorway wasn’t wide enough to accommodate it. It had gone back down the steps, around the side of the house, up another set of stairs and through the French doors. So much careful effort. Now I thought: Burn it. Get it out of my sight.