The Fragile World Read online

  It wasn’t so bad. Four days, and the hard part would be over—at least until our return trip.

  And then, somewhere outside Auburn, I lost reception on my cell phone. I held it up to the window, toward the dash and against the roof of the car, trying to get more than a single bar.

  Dad laughed. “You might not be able to rely on that the entire way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well...there’s going to be some spotty service, plus if you drain your battery on the road, you’ll have to wait to charge it until we get to the hotel.”

  I grimaced. “Like the pioneers, then.”

  Dad chuckled. One of the coolest things about my dad was that he could be counted on to laugh, even if my joke wasn’t in the realm of funny.

  We lost one radio station after another as we entered the Sierra Nevadas, until the dial held nothing but a buzz of static. I played a few hollow-sounding songs through my phone and leaned against the window as the scenery became majestic—white-capped peaks, towering evergreens, stately redwoods. Our gray strip of I-80 was like a flimsy string threading over and in between and around the mountains, as if the path had been designed like one of those fun house mazes. I read each of the warning signs along the route to Dad, in case he missed them: Landslides! Avalanches! Danger black ice! Deer crossing! But it was a beautiful spring day, the air clear, the sky cloudless. The landslides, avalanches, black ice and deer must have been on some other road, interrupting someone else’s drive.

  I tried to take a few photos on my phone, but the results were indistinct blurs. “Why didn’t we ever do anything like this before, like take a road trip?”

  “Because we were so...” Dad’s voice trailed off. Maybe he was regretting, like I was all of a sudden, the cloistered, practical life we’d lived the past few years, like fugitives in our own home, only venturing out for the necessities. “I don’t know. We should have. I’m sorry, Liv. We absolutely should have.”

  His voice had this strange, almost weepy quality to it, and I blurted quickly, to change the subject, “Nah, forget it. Even if you’d suggested it, I would have been too scared. Like right now, these mountains are pretty terrifying.”

  “Because of their height?”

  “No, because they’re mountains.”

  Dad smiled. “Give me one good reason other than heights to be scared of mountains.”

  “I’ll give you five,” I said, counting them off on one hand. “Mountain goats, mountain lions, black bears, coyotes and...” I did a drumroll with both hands against the dashboard. “The Donner Party.”

  Dad shook his head, laughing. “Ah, a history lesson that has stayed with you. No doubt because it involved tests of human strength—”

  “And cannibalism.”

  “—an expansion of the Western frontier—”

  “And cannibalism.”

  “—and an extraordinary rescue effort.”

  “Don’t forget cannibalism.” I shuddered, studying my arm. “Can you imagine a world where your best option includes a bite of someone’s bicep?”

  “So, to clarify—essentially, mountain equals cannibalism.”

  “Right.”

  Dad threw back his head to laugh, the first real laugh I’d heard from him in what felt like a million years, an actual belly laugh. “The Donner Party,” he mused. “Now that was a road trip.”

  We stopped for gas and a bathroom break in Truckee, and that’s where it all went to hell.

  Actually, hell came at the exact moment when I realized my bladder was about to explode and my only option would be a public restroom. At school, I didn’t drink anything and still ended up crouching over a toilet once a day, but that was nothing compared to the horror of a gas station bathroom. I did some quick mental math: if I used the bathroom twice a day while we were on the road, and we were on the road for four days, this meant eight encounters with public restrooms—and that was being optimistic

  Inside the store, I glanced around, taking in the aisles of chips and candy, the nacho cheese dispenser, the hot dogs rotating slowly on a rotisserie. I tugged on Dad’s sleeve like a two-year-old. “I don’t see a bathroom.”

  The clerk behind the counter, with a Metallica shirt and greasy hair, held up a massive board with a single key attached. “It’s around the side of the building, toward the back.”

  “Um,” I said, still clutching Dad’s shirtsleeve. “This is how every episode of Criminal Minds starts, with someone heading into a bathroom at a deserted gas station.”

  “Not every episode,” Dad corrected. “Also, it’s not deserted. I’m right here.”

  The clerk was staring at us as if we were both out of our minds. “You want the key or not?”

  I squeezed Dad on the shoulder. “You’re coming with me.”

  The clerk rolled his eyes.

  Dad laughed. It worried me that he had such a hard time separating my jokes from my cries for help, but he bought a cup of coffee and followed me around the side of the building.

  I hugged him at the door. “If I’m not out in exactly thirty seconds, please call 9-1-1.”

  Back in the car, I gave Dad the play-by-play: my boots had stuck to the floor; there was a puddle of mystery moisture next to an overflowing trash can; the mirror was cloudy; the toilet had so many rings it seemed to be measuring either age, like a tree, or despair; and instead of a hand dryer there was a crusty loop of fabric carrying at least twenty types of bacteria whose names we would probably never know.

  Dad was unconcerned. “Yeah, but you still washed your hands, right?”

  What I wanted was to wash my whole body, clothes included.

  “Life’s about the journey, not the destination,” Dad reminded me. “Isn’t there a famous quote about that?”

  I rolled my eyes. “There are a thousand quotes about that. And each one is a cliché.”

  But Dad had gone quiet, retreating to that place inside himself where he’d been for the past week, thinking about things I didn’t know and might not understand if I did. I figured we would be lucky if this trip was nothing more than a cliché, just a few days on the open road and a happy reunion waiting for us at the end.

  But none of that, of course, was guaranteed.

  curtis

  It was one o’clock by the time we reached Reno, and between the two of us we had devoured a half-pound bag of gummy bears to stave off our growing hunger. I’d been to Reno a few times for conferences, the sort supported by California school districts but held in Nevada for the cheap casino stays and the obvious entertainment options. Still, we spent twenty minutes circling before we decided to take our chances on a $4.99 all-you-can-eat casino buffet.

  “When was your food last rotated?” Olivia asked the cashier as I paid.

  “It’s always fresh!” the cashier replied, tossing a very full head of blond hair.

  Olivia ended up picking skeptically at a salad. “Fast food might have been a better option,” she said, frowning at my plate of chicken fingers and mac and cheese.

  I shrugged. “Got to keep my strength up for the journey.” Even if the possibilities for bacteria were high, I had to admit the food tasted good—or maybe I was just hungry for the first time in a long time. If life as I knew it was going to end in a week, I was going to eat all the junk that a middle-aged man with a definite belly shouldn’t eat. On the other hand, this was probably the exact sort of food that was served in prison cafeterias, and therefore was awaiting me for the next twenty-five years, minimum.

  Rather than eat, my ninety-eight-pound daughter tried not to stare openly at some of our fellow diners, like the man who was pushing eighty in a corner booth, wearing dark sunglasses and a frosty, much younger blonde on each arm, or the woman in a skintight leopard-print dress and matching five-inch leopard-print heels.

>   When I returned from the buffet with a towering bowl of soft-serve ice cream, Olivia grinned at me. “Do me a favor?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Can you please go out into the casino for ten minutes and then come back sobbing, with your hair all disheveled and announce that you’ve lost the farm? Please. It could be an early birthday present for me. I’ll film the whole thing.”

  “How about instead I give you a few bucks for a round of blackjack and see if they kick you out?”

  “What makes you think they would kick me out? I could pass for twenty-one.”

  “Sure you could.” I laughed and Olivia took an indignant bite of her salad.

  I didn’t press the point. Olivia was sixteen-and-a-half and looked fourteen. She basically wore the same skinny jeans and oversize combat boots every day, a combination that made her look comically childlike. Any curves she did have were hidden beneath her ubiquitous black hoodie, sized more appropriately for a linebacker. When she’d started hanging around with the Visigoths a few years ago, she’d begun wearing light face powder and dark eyeliner. I’m not sure what the desired effect was, but I thought it made her look like a kid dressing as a teenager for Halloween. Not that this was the sort of thing a single dad could mention to his daughter. When it was just the two of us at home, or when Kathleen visited during the summer, Olivia toned it down, as if only her family could be trusted to view her actual face—a face so small and lovely and so much like Kathleen’s, at times I could hardly bear to see it.

  “You want to walk around for a bit?” I offered, when Olivia couldn’t be persuaded to eat another bite. “We have another half hour of parking.”

  “Okay.”

  We wandered a bit off the main drag, the weekday crowd thinning as we went. Olivia pointed at an old-fashioned costume shop, and I waved her in alone. She had inherited Kathleen’s love of the antiquated and interesting. Kathleen couldn’t pass a piece of furniture without running her hand over the grain, or pulling the piece away from the wall to get a better look at its construction. Daniel had once called her “The Chair Whisperer”—a name she’d pretended to hate. Watching Olivia pick her way through this secondhand store, fingering a fur coat, holding a tiny glass egg up to the light—it was déjà vu; throw out the all-black clothes, and I could have been looking at a young Kathleen.

  My stomach clenched. What was I doing? The vision that had suddenly become clear to me last Friday, with the world as I knew it spread out before me like a road map, wavered.

  I can’t. I can’t do this.

  I switched my attention from Olivia, who was now pawing through a collection of old postcards, to the man staring back at me from the hazy surface of the shop window—a mad artist’s caricature of the person I used to be. A sad person, an angry man, a failed father who had let his son die and his wife leave and his daughter surrender to her fear of everything.

  I knew the answer, but begged the question: Where did it all go? How did it all get away from me? How had we gone from four to three to two, reducing ourselves to insignificance? And how could I do what I was about to do, and reduce the number to one?

  I can’t.

  Then Olivia was in front of me, tapping on the glass to get my attention. She was wearing a top hat and carrying a cane, and while I watched, she did a strange little tap dance in her combat boots, ending with a two-arm flourish. I clapped, not caring about the glances from a couple who passed me on the sidewalk.

  Olivia grinned and took a deep bow at the waist.

  My throat almost squeezed closed, the love I felt for her gathered into a solid lump. I didn’t know if all parents felt this way from time to time, but right then I didn’t see just the tap-dancing teenage Olivia, but all the versions of her melded together: the chubby infant, the sturdy-limbed toddler, the gymnastics tumbler, the thrower of noisy, sugar-fueled slumber parties, the thin, quiet girl in her eighth grade graduation robe, the skin-and-bones teenager hiding behind her Visigoth garb.

  I have to do this, I thought, as if I could communicate the thought to her telepathically, straight from my mind to hers.

  It’s because I love you that I’m going to do this.

  olivia

  Nevada, as it turned out, was a pretty desolate place. Once we’d left the lights of Reno—The Biggest Little City in the World, as about a thousand signs had reminded us—the road became flat, open, dusty and dry, the ground a bleached white. There seemed to be more cows than people, lone dots on the landscape, miles from anything. What would it be like to live out here, under a massive blue sky, your nearest neighbor the three cows in a sprawling fenced area, where you could see a car coming from miles away, kicking up a miniature dust swarm?

  Dad broke through my reverie, saying, “See that? That’s the first one.”

  “The first what?” I scanned the road and saw that he was pointing to little collections of black stones.

  “Along the side of the road—see? They’re names, messages, that kind of thing.”

  I stared, fascinated, as we passed dozens—hundreds—of these piles of black stones. They were like shrines, little monuments to the moment.

  Johnny + Stacy.

  Bill 2013.

  I was here.

  The messages seemed prehistoric, almost—as basic a form of written communication as a cave drawing, a million times more permanent than a text message. It was sort of beautiful, in a way that would make no sense if I tried to explain it.

  “So,” Dad was saying. “I figured we’d go for Winnemucca.”

  “What? You’re talking gibberish. Do I need to feel your forehead?”

  “Winnemucca. It’s a city in Nevada. Look it up.” Dad tapped the road atlas wedged between my seat and the console, and I sighed, obliging. It was funny the way I-80 snaked across Nevada, not in any kind of straight line, but jutting north and humping back south. There weren’t many cities on I-80 in Nevada, period: Reno, Sparks, Fernley, Lovelock, Winnemucca, Battle Mountain, Elko, Wendover.

  “We’re using the term city pretty loosely,” I commented. “According to this, Winnemucca has 7,000 residents.”

  Dad laughed. “And a somewhat inflated ego. But from what I remember, it has hotels, restaurants, everything we need tonight. Besides, the next decent place is another couple hours east.”

  I fiddled with my seat belt, loosening it so I could turn to face my father more directly. “Wait—what do you mean, from what you remember? You’ve done this before?”

  “Your mom and I...when we were...” He stopped, changing tracks. “You’re right, there might be more places along the way. What does it say in the atlas?”

  “Sure. There are probably entire bustling metropolises that have sprouted along eastern Nevada. I’m sure I’ll lose count of all the Starbucks and IKEAs we pass. But don’t change the subject. You and Mom did this? You took a road trip?”

  Dad smiled, shaking his head. “You crack me up, kiddo.”

  “I’m waiting.”

  “Liv, it’s not the romantic odyssey you’re imagining. It was twenty-some years ago, and we were driving in a little yellow Datsun packed to the gills with books and clothes and junk.”

  “Actually, that does sound like a romantic odyssey. When was this—when you moved to California?”

  “Yeah. We were just married, and I had the job offer in Sacramento. We had about two hundred dollars in cash plus a credit card to last until my first paycheck.”

  “Why am I only hearing this now?” I demanded.

  “I didn’t think you’d find it interesting.”

  “Well, I do. It’s part of my history, too.”

  “You weren’t born yet. Daniel wasn’t even born yet.”

  “But...still,” I huffed. Sometimes completely ordinary, everyday things blew me away. Like the fact that my parents had ever liv
ed without me, or that they had done exotic things like drive across the United States in a yellow Datsun.

  “How old were you guys? What were you like then? What was Mom like?”

  Dad ran a hand slowly over his face and then returned it to the wheel.

  “Never mind.” I had asked the wrong questions. Out the window, Nevada kept zipping past. It wasn’t even summer yet, but everything was dry dry, the earth cracked, each fissure opening up like a gaping, parched mouth. “You can tell me the rest of the story later.”

  “There’s not a rest of the story,” Dad insisted. “It’s a very simple story, really. I think you have the gist of it.”

  “Like ‘See Dick. See Dick and Jane. See Dick and Jane drive. See Dick and Jane arrive at destination.’”

  “Almost,” Dad said, his voice strangely distant again, miles ahead of me on the road. I had this weird feeling that if I knocked on his chest right then, I would only be able to hear the echoey sounds of my own knuckles.

  I let it go and instead dug out my Fear Journal. There were plenty of things to be afraid about on the road right in front of me, but I wrote first: All the things I’ll never know about the past. At that moment I wanted badly to fall into the past, even into one of our old family photo albums.

  After Daniel had died, I’d gone through all those albums, trying to memorize every detail. When she was in college, Mom had driven an orange VW Rabbit and worn her hair long and feathered back from her face, like a Charlie’s Angel. When Daniel was young, Dad had worn his shorts shorter than any straight man would dream of wearing them today. Daniel as a baby had been bald except for a single patch of hair on his crown; he had looked unfocused and dreamy, as if listening to a melody only he could hear. I saw Daniel in red-footed pajamas, playing a plastic xylophone, and Dad, Mom and Daniel on a green corduroy couch I didn’t recognize. It had hurt me then, and it hurt now, remembering—my family had made all these memories without me, had lived in a different house, even. This—my parents’ westbound road trip—was just one more thing I had missed.