The Fragile World
“Pled down to a misdemeanor,” Sergeant Springer said. “Did a couple of years, paid a fine, had his license revoked. But that was five years ago, you understand. In North Carolina. Looks like he’s been in Oberlin for a year or so, driving for a company owned by his brother.”
“He did a couple of years,” I echoed numbly. He’d killed a woman, and he’d been set free to kill Daniel. I sat very still, thoughts swimming. Sergeant Springer continued, but I only half heard him: waiting on the results of the blood draw...charges will be brought...a bail hearing...
This was probably meant to be reassuring—there was a legal process, and it was in capable hands. But I heard something else: Robert Saenz, that low-life piece of shit, could go free again.
Sergeant Springer led me to the pathology lab, where Daniel’s body was waiting to be identified. Kathleen had been insistent on this point. We have to know for sure. How can we not know? The deputy coroner, Dr. Kline, showed me to a sterile room where a body lay on a gurney, covered by a heavy piece of plastic. The scene was sickly surreal, like walking into a script of one of the thousands of crime dramas I’d watched over the years.
Dr. Kline looked at me, asking a wordless question. There was no way to be ready, not now or in a hundred years, but I nodded. He pulled back the tarp.
It wasn’t Daniel—it was an awful, horror movie caricature of who Daniel had been. It was a face I wouldn’t have known in a million years, his skull a concave thing, a grotesque mask. If it hadn’t been suggested to me that this was Daniel, I might not have come to the conclusion on my own. This was no more my son than it was a bad prop in a haunted house.
Kathleen should be here, I thought. She would have known Daniel’s shoulders and chest, despite the gaping Y of the autopsy incision, the thick stitches of the sort that had made Frankenstein’s monster so grotesque. Kathleen had marveled over our children’s bodies as they grew, thrilling that Olivia had the cutest buns in that bathing suit, that the moles on Daniel’s shoulder resembled a specific constellation, where I saw only a scattershot of stars.
It wasn’t until I saw the scar on the abdomen that I truly recognized Daniel’s body—a small sickle, pale pink beneath his navel. Daniel’s appendix had burst when he was nine years old, late on a Saturday night after a recital. He must have been in pain the entire day, the E.R. doctor told us, but it wasn’t until we were in the car afterward that he mentioned it, cautiously, as if testing the waters. I think something is wrong with my stomach. He’d gone into surgery just in time, ending up with an overnight stay in the hospital and a week’s worth of antibiotics rather than anything more serious.
“It’s him,” I choked, biting back the memory.
When I turned away, Dr. Kline replaced the plastic tarp and peeled off a pair of gloves, dropping them into a wastebasket. He disappeared for a moment and returned with a transparent garbage bag, the red handles tied together at the top. The bag was labeled with a simple tag: PERSONAL PROPERTY—DANIEL KAUFFMAN. I homed in on that extra F in our last name, feeling it like a slap in the face. Get the spelling right! I screamed inside my head. It matters.
As we walked to the door, the plastic bag knocking between us, Dr. Kline laid a hand on my shoulder. It was hard to pull away from this offer of human comfort.
I went to a café for lunch but left without ordering. Food had lost its appeal.
That afternoon I met the dean of students at Daniel’s dorm. Daniel’s roommate had separated the belongings for me, folding everything on top of the bare mattress—clothes, sheets, the tartan plaid comforter Kathleen had picked out for him. I held a flannel shirt to my nose, inhaled the faintest whiff of pot. It was surprising to see how meager the pile was—textbooks, coffee mugs, his laptop, toiletries, the black bow tie he’d worn for performances. Kathleen would have had a plan for everything. She would have talked about packing and shipping and receipts and reimbursements, so that somehow everything that had been Daniel’s could live forever. I didn’t have the stomach for it. In the end, I took what I could carry, and the dean promised to donate the rest to Goodwill.
On the way back to the hotel, a boy ran past me in a red cape, his underwear outside his jeans, and a girl followed in a pointy witch hat and thigh-high boots. Little orange buckets dangled from their wrists. Of course: Halloween. I looked around, noticing the small clusters of ghosts and goblins and cartoon characters on the sidewalks, the fake cobwebs spanning bushes, the jack-o-lanterns on front porches. This was what normal life was like, but there was no more normal life for the Kaufmans.
Back at the Oberlin Inn, I sat on the closed toilet seat and opened the bag from the coroner gingerly, setting its contents one by one on the tiled bathroom floor. Daniel’s black Converse—the exact style he’d worn and replaced and worn and replaced since junior high. I had a pair, too. Somewhere there was photographic evidence of Daniel and me in black T-shirts, blue jeans and matching shoes. I fished Daniel’s key ring out of the bag. Four keys—one to our house, marked by a drop of red nail polish, Kathleen’s doing. The other keys must have been to his dorm, his practice rooms, the places where he had lived his life without me.
I opened his wallet to the photo on his California driver’s license, taken when Daniel was sixteen. He looked so young, his shoulders impossibly narrow, hair closely cropped on the sides and spiky in the front. Then, Daniel’s Oberlin ID: a goofy half smile, hair grown almost to his shoulders. He hardly looked like the same kid, but I knew both versions of him, and many more. I pulled out the other cards, then returned each carefully to its spot. An electronic passkey. His Sacramento Public Library card, well worn. A punch card to a local sandwich shop with three holes.
In the pocket, I counted four wrinkled one-dollar bills and peeled apart a few stuck-together pictures. Daniel’s senior prom photo, his arm around a girl whose name was lost to me now. A years-old family snapshot we’d taken in Yosemite when Daniel was in junior high and Olivia was in elementary school, in her braided ponytail years. Kathleen was in the middle, an arm around each of them, her normally pale legs and shoulders pink from the sun. I had taken the picture—we were on the trail to Vernal Falls, far from another human who could have snapped the photo for us. Kathleen had sent out copies with our Christmas cards that year, along with a joke about me being camera-shy. I turned the photo over, suddenly aching to see Kathleen’s writing on the back, but it was Daniel’s scrawl I found: The Fam, 2004.
The Fam. Minus one.
Carefully, I slid that picture into my own wallet.
In the morning, I picked up the cardboard box with Daniel’s remains from the funeral home, thanking the manager for her rush. “Please sign for the cremains,” she said, prompting me to address a stack of forms. I blinked at her stupidly. This is my son we’re talking about. Don’t give me some made-up word I don’t even want to know.
During my return flights—Cleveland to Chicago, Chicago to Sacramento—I clutched the box to me as if I had been charged with the safekeeping of a carton of eggs. This was Daniel, I reminded myself, over and over, feeling the weight of his ashes, insubstantial, lighter than he’d been that first night in the hospital, wrapped in a receiving blanket. I wished the box could be a hundred pounds, a thousand. I wanted to feel the physical burden of his weight, as I had when I’d hoisted his two-year-old self onto my shoulders for an evening walk around the block.
The box accompanied me through security gates, where the funeral home paperwork was scrutinized by a half-dozen harried TSA personnel. It came with me into the restroom stall at O’Hare, into a newsstand where I purchased a box of Milk Duds and a Scientific American. Even when I was seated on the plane, I found I couldn’t release my grip. This was the last thing I could do for Daniel. I could make sure he made it home.
olivia
We made it through the memorial service—the tributes, the crying, the video slide show Mom had compiled to show the highlights of Daniel’s life. The whole time, I felt anxious and edgy, panic rising in me like puke at the back of my throat. Mom gave me the keys, and I escaped the weepy reception line to spend a half hour in the backseat of her Volvo, sick and warm in the afternoon sun. Daniel’s friends exited the funeral home in sad little clumps, and I couldn’t stop myself from thinking: Be careful. Watch where you walk. Drive safely.
Then Dad and Mom were there, discussing plans to drive Uncle Jeff and Aunt Judy to the airport in the morning. Mom turned her key in the ignition, the engine caught and the radio programming sprang to life in the middle of an announcer’s sentence.
And then it happened.
All of a sudden the world blurred in front of me, everything going too fast, all the colors running together—blueskygreengrassgraycement.
Dad adjusted the passenger-side visor, and Mom began to back out of the parking lot. Without even knowing what I was doing, much less why I was doing it, I reached over the seat and grabbed her arm as she maneuvered the gear shift.
“Holy—Liv! What?” she demanded, slamming on her brakes, the car jolting forward at the sudden stop.
“What is it?” Dad asked, half turning.
I opened my mouth to say something, but I couldn’t. Everything inside me felt liquid all of a sudden, as if my organs and bones had disappeared and I had become a child’s squishy toy. I wanted to unlock the door and bolt from the car, but I couldn’t move.
Dad was staring at me curiously.
Mom put a hand on my forehead. “Are you sick?”
“I—don’t know,” I stammered, sinking back into my seat.
Mom slid the gearshift to Drive and maneuvered us into the parking space we had just vacated. “Do you need a bag or something?”
I took a deep breath, trying for calm. My body was turning solid again, but slowly. I didn’t trust it. I reached out a hand, surprised I could still move. My leg bone was connected to my thigh bone and so on—which meant my parts were still in working order.
“You okay now?” Dad asked, and I nodded numbly.
You’re not dying. You’re okay, I reassured myself. But it felt as if something were gripping me around my insides and squeezing.
“Better use a plastic bag in case,” Mom said, and Dad began digging around under his seat. He came up empty-handed.
“No, I’m okay,” I mumbled, although it must have been obvious that I wasn’t.
“Look, I’m just going to get us home.” Mom backed up again, slower this time.
“Talk to me, Olivia,” Dad said, unbuckling his seat belt to reach around. With one hand, he dug into the backseat pocket and came up, victorious, with a crumpled paper bag from Starbucks.
Mom exited the parking lot, took one turn and then another, merged onto a busy street. All the other cars seemed far too close to ours, mere feet away, hurtling along at unsafe speeds. What was keeping them in their own lanes, exactly? What was a lane except a painted line, a mere suggestion for social order?
I gripped the door handle more tightly, leaning into the turns. I was braced for it; I was ready. If Mom’s Volvo slid off the road, I was going to see it coming. And if Dad and Mom and I all died in a sudden, fiery crash, I was going to see that coming, too.
My breathing sounded funny, like the time I fell in soccer practice and had the wind knocked out of me. I picked up the Starbucks bag Dad had given me and blew into it weakly. It smelled like a pumpkin scone.
“What’s going on, Liv? Talk to me,” Mom demanded, looking at me again in the rearview mirror.
“Watch the road,” I croaked weakly, but my words were trapped in the paper bag.
Dad, who still hadn’t refastened his seat belt, turned again, examining me like a specimen pinned to the wall. Hadn’t he seen a gazillion public service announcements about buckling up? Didn’t he know that buckling up saved lives?
“You’re okay, Liv. We’re almost home,” Mom called.
“She’s not okay,” Dad said sharply. “She’s a mess back here.” He gripped my knee with his hand. “Just take it slowly, Olivia. Concentrate on taking a deep breath, holding it for a few seconds and then exhaling.”
I glanced out the window and saw the row of utility poles lining the street. My vision blurred, and my thoughts began racing again. How long had those poles been there? What was the average life expectancy of a city utility pole before, one day, it just crashed to the ground?
Breathe, I ordered myself. The bag inflated and deflated, fast at first and then more slowly. It helped if I closed my eyes, imagined myself safe in my room. By the time we arrived home, I was exhausted. It was hard work trying not to be terrified.
We sat in the driveway for a long moment. Dad and Mom exchanged a glance, and then I felt Mom’s eyes on me in the rearview mirror. Her irises were bright blue from crying, the whites of her eyes streaked a veiny red.
“I’m sorry,” I croaked, balling up the paper bag in my hand. I didn’t want to be a problem, especially since we were in the midst of other, bigger problems. As we walked into the house, my fears began to dissolve like magic, like a bit of dandelion fluff in a breeze. But somehow I knew they’d be waiting for me the moment I was expected to step outside again.
How stupid I’d been before, how naive I’d been to walk through my life unaware of the dangers that were everywhere, around every single corner. I would notice them now, I promised myself. For Daniel’s sake, I would always be on the alert.
curtis
Time passed, more slowly than I could have imagined, faster than I would have dreamed. Every time I walked through the living room I saw the little box on top of our fireplace mantel. Kathleen had mentioned buying an urn, and we’d each promised to look online, but hadn’t. Add Daniel’s cremains to the list of things we didn’t discuss.
It was a relief to go back to work, to slide back into my regular school schedule—the bells ringing, students shuffling in and hurrying out, meetings before and after school, the emails and paperwork, the endless, reassuring cycle of lessons to be planned and papers to be graded.
I began leaving for school earlier and earlier, while Kathleen and Olivia were still asleep. I was the second car in the lot, behind the janitor. Somehow it was easier to think there, when my classroom was quiet and there was work to be done. At home, I couldn’t escape the way things had changed. Olivia had panic attacks that could be brought on, seemingly, by nothing—the paperboy passing on his bike, the coffee grinder running in the kitchen. Kathleen, determined not to mope at home, was attempting to fill our lives with fun things. She actually used this word, as if Olivia and I were two-year-olds who had to be coaxed into a trip to the grocery store. “Come on, it will be fun!” She made big, elaborate meals, found movies for us to watch together, proposed a family night that fell flat when Olivia realized all of our board games required four players.
At night when we lay in bed, staring at opposite sides of the room, she would dive into the pep talks that I’d begun to dread.
“Please, try, Curtis.”
And: “You need to do this for me. You need to make an effort.”
Her concern soon changed to disappointment, and eventually, to disgust.
“I can’t believe you won’t do this for me.”
“I’m not there yet,” I admitted.
We slept in the same bed, but it might as well have been split in two—her side, mine, like Lucy and Ricky Ricardo in their twin beds, a nightstand between them. The truth was that I wanted to reach for her, that night and the next and the next, but I couldn’t make myself cross the invisible barrier between us. The days and nights became a meaningless blur, as if some anesthesiologist had forgotten to let up on the ether, and, beneath its fog, we lay deadened and numb. We slept less than three feet apart, curled on our separate sides. I could hear her quiet breaths, the occasional sniffle, a stifled sob held back even in sleep. In my mind, I reached out a hand, touching her shoulder, her waist, the ridge of spine, the skin I knew better than my own. But in actuality, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bridge the gulf. I didn’t want to open up to her, or have her open up to me. Wouldn’t the doubling of misery have been more than we could bear, collectively?
In my saner moments I realized we were running some kind of course, and Kathleen was way ahead, flying through those stages of grief. I heard her on the phone with her friends, referring to what had happened to Daniel as “the accident,” as if it were a completely random thing, a hard fact of life that she had accepted.
But I couldn’t accept it. A lightning strike on a clear day—that was a random thing. In my mind there was a deliberateness to Daniel’s death, a reckless calculation in the act of getting behind the wheel, in taking a corner too fast, clipping a sign, driving away and crawling into bed as if nothing had happened. It didn’t feel random. It felt purposeful. It felt premeditated.
Still, I couldn’t tell her: You’re wrong. I couldn’t say: This was no accident. I just couldn’t bring her down there with me, to the place where I nurtured a long-buried, simmering anger. If Kathleen could find comfort in randomness, in silly clichés offered by shallow people and greeting cards, then so be it. I would take comfort in what was real. I would take comfort in my anger.
Eventually, the tox screen for Robert Saenz came back positive for amphetamines—an upper, speed. I’d learned this from the Oberlin P.D., after daily phone calls made from my classroom before school. He’d been denied bail; charges were being amended. What does this mean? I persisted. What kind of punishment would he get? Jail time? Prison? Could I do anything—write letters, testify?
Eventually, Sergeant Springer passed me off to the D.A.’s office, to an A.D.A. named Derick Jones, who gave me information so sparingly, it might have been drops from a leaky faucet. He had probably been schooled—don’t make any promises. He talked about “precedent” and the possibility of a plea bargain, a reduced sentence. Robert Saenz might get anywhere from ten to fifteen years; it might be reduced to seven if he pled down.
Seven years? Seven fucking years? It was a joke. It was a nightmare.
And then that February, as I was leaving Arden Fair Mall where I’d been picking out a new pair of work shoes, I saw him. I recognized him immediately as he cut in front of me, hands shoved into his pockets. I noted the same curly hair, the flabby jowls, and walked faster, looking for the dead, blank expression in his eyes. I was just going to see. I was just going to get a closer look. With each step, I felt a pressure building up in my ears, my head like the volcano Olivia and I had worked on for her sixth-grade science project.
I was even with him when he turned his head, startled at my proximity—and up close, he looked nothing at all like Robert Saenz, who was, of course, locked up awaiting trial. “Sorry,” I mumbled, head down, hurrying past the man.
I sat for a while in the Explorer, my hands shaking on the steering wheel. What was I thinking? Of course it wasn’t him. And what would I have done if it was? I was armed only with my key ring and my rage. Would I have gone after him with my fists, throwing the not insignificant weight of my body on him, kicking him, getting my hands around his neck? I felt sick with the possibilities.
I’d promised to be home by eight, but I was too worked up to face Kathleen and Olivia. Instead, I found a restaurant near the mall, and I made my way straight for the bar. After the first few overpriced drinks, I didn’t even think about them. The display on my cell phone lit up with Kathleen’s number four times, but I didn’t pick up. I rolled the highball glass between my hands, wondering how far I would have gone and how much I would have to drink to forget what I might have done. Was that why my father drank, to forget his daily faults? To dull the pain from the things he had done?
At ten-thirty, the bartender cut me off. I wasn’t used to the hard stuff. Kathleen and I never had more than a bottle of wine in the cabinet above our refrigerator; a single glass at dinner had always been my limit. Now I staggered coming off the bar stool. “Want me to call you a cab?” the bartender asked, not meeting my eye. He was just a kid—or not a kid, but not all that much older than Daniel would have been.
Kathleen picked me up. She was tight-lipped on the way home, her body tense with anger. When she did speak, it was in fuming bursts. “This is what you do? This is your answer to our problems? Do you think drinking worked out well for your father?”
I couldn’t answer; it was taking all my concentration not to vomit. A light rain was falling, and I focused on the slight swishing of the tires on the damp streets.
“Just tell me,” Kathleen said when she pulled into our driveway. “Is this the way it’s going to be?”
“I don’t know how it’s going to be,” I said, not looking at her. It was the most honest I’d been with her in a long time.
I spent most of that night in the bathroom, sleeping on the bath mat, a towel under my head so I could be close to the toilet. In the morning I called for a substitute. Kathleen moved around the house, ignoring me, making coffee, talking cheerfully to Olivia, hurrying her out to the car without saying goodbye.
I stayed in bed for most of the day, long after the effects of the alcohol had worn off. I wouldn’t tell Kathleen what I’d really been thinking, I couldn’t. I’d gone too far on my own. I didn’t want to scare her with the vision of the monster I’d become for those few minutes. Worse, if it had been Saenz in that parking lot, I knew that I would have killed him, one way or another—and I couldn’t find a way to feel bad about that.
olivia
At the beginning of spring, when Daniel had been dead for six months, Mom announced that we were going to see a family therapist. She looked desperately tired, as if she hadn’t slept in weeks—which maybe she hadn’t. It must have been exhausting, doing nice things for Dad and me and then having to point out that she’d done them, since we never noticed on our own. I made that Alfredo sauce you love.... I replaced the button on that shirt cuff. We thanked her, and five minutes later we had forgotten all about it and were back to our ungrateful selves.
We let her drag us into the meeting with the family therapist, Dr. Fisher, although we attended only once as an actual family—what was left of it, anyway, now that we were down to only three. Dr. Fisher had a sunny office that overlooked a small courtyard, and although the furniture was basically industrial gray, there were little pops of color everywhere—yellow throw pillows, a vase practically choked with pink and purple hydrangeas, an orange sunset on one wall.
It went just about how I figured it would go: Dr. Fisher asked some questions, and Mom answered them. Dad looked at his hands, and I looked out the window at the courtyard, trying to assess the level of danger present in two gingko trees and a shallow fountain. Dr. Fisher could have been anyone’s grandma; she was pleasantly white-haired, wore a floaty skirt and long cardigan, and had the patience of the world’s best kindergarten teacher.
Mom had commandeered the session, rambling on and on about communication and how she feared we would turn out if we simply couldn’t start talking again.
“And, Curtis? What would you like to say?” Dr. Fisher asked when Mom paused for a breath.
“Well, I—I would have to say that I agree,” Dad blurted, caught off guard. I noticed that his shirttail had come untucked, that there was a small streak of mustard on his pants.
I glanced at Mom and caught her at the end of an eye roll. She gave a forced laugh. “You see, this is what I’m—”