The Fragile World Read online

  It was infinitely better to sit on a bacteria-laden public restroom floor.

  I shifted so I could dig into my backpack for my Fear Journal, the twentieth or so version of the book I’d used since Daniel died. The others, dense with my hasty scribbles, were stacked on a shelf in my bedroom. It was comforting to know that they were there, that my fears had been recorded and catalogued and preserved for posterity. I opened my latest notebook and wrote in black ink the new fear that had occurred to me that morning during American History: Getting hit in the head by a falling 80s-era ceiling tile. Underneath it I had scrawled this explanation: If I got hit in the head with a ceiling tile and passed out, someone would call my dad in his classroom, and he wouldn’t be able to take it, so he would probably have a heart attack. And then when I came to, I would be an orphan. (Or as good as.)

  I put a little asterisk by this fear, because it was way more terrifying to me than some of my other fears, such as bugs that look like sticks, and also way more likely to actually affect me, since there was a full month left of school, and I sat underneath those industrial ceiling tile rectangles for approximately six hours a day, and it only made sense that at some point, one of them would fall. This was the sort of fact I should bring up in my statistics class—which was both the most fascinating and horrifying class I had ever taken. But that would mean raising my hand and contributing, and this was something Olivia Kaufman simply did not do. The bug that looked like a stick was something I’d seen in a natural history museum during a forced field trip to the Bay Area, so it might not even live in Sacramento. But the ceiling tile...this was a very real worry. Maybe it could be mentioned in an anonymous note addressed to the school board?

  I was considering this—a private, philanthropic act that would be far more beneficial to my fellow students than, say, a new vending machine outside the cafeteria—when I heard my name over the intercom and froze, pen in hand.

  “Olivia Kaufman, please report to the office. Olivia Kaufman, to the office, please.”

  Shit. I looked around reflexively, as if I’d been spotted in a crowd. Had Ms. Ryan reported me? This was possible, but not part of what seemed to be the unwritten agreement that governed my life at Rio. Basically, the other teachers and staff members seemed to treat my dad and me with equal parts pity and protection—they pitied us because Daniel was dead; they became protective when my mother left almost three years ago. And recently, our dog had died—our beloved Heidi—and I’d written a poem about her for my English class, forever securing the sympathy of my teacher and her lunchroom buddies. Ms. Ryan had agreed not to talk to my dad about my failing grade in P.E. as long as I talked to my guidance counselor about my “options” for next year. And my dad, caught up in his own turmoil, seemed a much happier person for not being bothered with the truth of it all.

  I’d agreed to see the guidance counselor, but I’d never made the appointment. I knew exactly what Mr. Merrill would say when I took a seat in his office that was more or less the size of the bathroom stall I was currently wedged into. He would tap a few keys, pull up a file, frown at me and say “Are you really failing P.E. for the second time? You know that’s going to put you twenty credits behind, don’t you? You do realize that you’ll be spending your senior year in not one, but two P.E. classes, and that it’s going to be nearly impossible for you to fill out any college applications?”

  I knew what he would say, because I’d already had the conversation with myself a few hundred times. No—I wasn’t going to visit Mr. Merrill and talk about my “options” when there really weren’t any. And although I’d survived almost three years of scrutiny from teachers who had known and loved Daniel, I wasn’t in any hurry to have our differences made any more obvious. Daniel had applied for universities across the country, been accepted everywhere, had received a full-ride offer from Oberlin and a $1,000 scholarship from the teachers’ union. It was becoming glaringly obvious that I’d be lucky to graduate high school, much less go on to any kind of college. But, really—I was okay with that, too.

  How could I possibly move away from home and into some kind of dorm situation? College represented a host of new fears. I would have been scared to live on anything other than the first floor, since I was scared of both heights—specifically, falling from them—and depths—specifically, falling into them. Hundreds of reckless students holding knives in the cafeteria meant that violence was possible at every meal, and fires could be started by lit candles in dorm rooms. Besides, I would be absolutely alone without my dad—a very legitimate fear for someone who lost her brother and then, sort of, her mother, and then, finally, her dog.

  Even the thought of attending community college freaked me out. I’d have to drive myself there or depend on public transportation, either of which could go wrong in dozens of ways. I had accepted the necessity of riding shotgun in Dad’s Explorer to and from school, to and from the grocery store or Target or the pizza place on J Street, but I refused under any circumstances to ride in a bus. How in the world could a bus, with no seat belts and a rather loosely formed seating structure, be any kind of safe? And forget about driving myself anywhere. Dad had cajoled and tried to bribe me into a driver’s training course, but I professed profound disinterest in this particular rite of passage. “I’m not always going to drive you everywhere you want to go,” he’d said, which was kind of funny, because I didn’t particularly want to go anywhere. In response, I’d said, “I’ll walk. It’s healthier, anyway.” But no safer, I reminded myself bitterly. Daniel had been walking, after all.

  Dad had said that he might as well put me into a padded room, and I know he said this out of frustration, to show me how ridiculous I was being, but I pounced on the idea.

  “You could get me padded walls for my next birthday,” I’d suggested. “But soft padding, like a couch cushion. Nothing hard like a gymnastics mat.”

  The memory of this conversation brought a smile to my lips, and I was just about to relax because clearly I’d imagined the page from the office, when the voice came over the intercom again, more insistent this time: “Olivia Kaufman, to the office, please.”

  I tucked my notebook into my backpack and slowly did the zipper. The jig was up. Ms. Ryan had reported me, and the entire office staff—and maybe even my father—was likely waiting to ambush me in some kind of intervention. My repeated P.E. failures were probably being discussed right now. I took a deep breath and hoisted myself from the floor to a standing position.

  The last thing I wanted was to face a hallway crowded with students. If there had been a tunnel from the D-wing girls’ bathroom to the outside world, I would have taken it—even if that would be the sum of all my fears: a dark, tight-fitting, possibly rat-infested and ultimately unknown place. But there was no tunnel, no secret hatch.

  Right then the exterior bathroom door swung open and big, clumping footsteps approached. I instinctively shrunk back, closer to the toilet seat than I preferred to stand. Underneath the stall door, I caught a glimpse of a pair of black Doc Martens with pink skull-and-crossbones laces. They belonged to a senior named Kara, one of the Visigoths, the group I loosely associated with when I associated at all. Despite what the name implied, the Visigoths weren’t a nomadic tribe of warriors, but more of a group that wore all black and scorned our Abercrombie & Fitch-clad classmates. I wouldn’t have called Kara a friend—after Daniel died and Mom left, I’d basically stopped being friends with everyone, especially people who had two-parent homes and happy, well-adjusted siblings. But Kara was decent.

  “Olivia?” she whispered. “Are you in there?”

  “Yeah,” I admitted, coming out of the corner. I slid the lock on the stall door and opened it about an inch, as if to peer at a stranger standing on my doorstep. “What’s going on?”

  Kara bit her lip and brushed a spiky black piece of hair out of her eyes. “Umm, Olivia...it’s your dad.”

  curtis


  The letter had come three days before. It was just by chance that I’d grabbed the mail that day instead of Olivia. I had spotted the return address—Elyria, Ohio—and immediately tucked the letter into my back pocket, letting my shirttail hang loose over it. I read it in the bathroom, and again in the bedroom, door locked; later I shredded the envelope. When Olivia went to bed, I taped the letter to the back of a framed art print in the living room, a place she would never look. I wanted to keep the letter in case I needed to remind myself of the details—but already I’d memorized every single word, beginning with It is my duty to inform you that...

  I didn’t tell Olivia about the letter, like I hadn’t told her about the parole hearing and the letter I’d written myself, on Daniel’s behalf.

  In the years since Kathleen left, I’d prided myself on my business-as-usual approach to our lives. The size of our family had been reduced by half, but Olivia and I hadn’t fallen apart. We had more or less maintained a normal life. We folded our laundry, although somewhat haphazardly; we did the dishes vigorously each Saturday, and let them pile up in the sink on the days between; we made a weekly trip to Target for toilet paper and Q-tips and the half-dozen other things we always, suddenly needed. If Kathleen had popped in unannounced, she might have been alarmed by the stack of unsorted mail by the front door, but she wouldn’t have found a complete disaster. Not that Kathleen would have popped in unannounced; she had scheduled visits for two weeks during each of the past two summers, and she’d begged Olivia to fly out for every holiday in between. “As if,” Olivia had said on each occasion, unmoved by statistics about air travel being safer than car travel and by my patient lessons on lift, weight, thrust and drag.

  Olivia and I had kept on going simply because that was what we had to do—but we’d had a sort of strange fun doing it. I’d thrown myself into the part wholeheartedly; I’d been proud that none of it, not even for a second, had felt like a chore.

  And then, on Tuesday, I’d received the letter. Pursuant to criminal law... regulations regarding prison overcrowding and mandates for prisoner behavior... Robert Saenz had somehow managed to behave himself in prison, completing a sobriety program and an anger-management course, and the state of Ohio was willing to take a chance on him.

  Since learning this, every movement I made required a conscious effort. I taught my classes, attended a science department meeting, made a not-bad ziti with Olivia and fell asleep each night with the television on, waking at random hours to the enthusiastic sales pitches of infomercials. I was now fully informed about revolutionary skin care products, microwave egg poachers and a new food chopper that promised to chop food faster than any other food chopper in the history of food choppers.

  You have to keep going, I ordered myself. Just put one foot in front of the other. Just keep moving.

  Since Kathleen left, I hadn’t allowed myself to wallow. There simply wasn’t time. Maybe if I’d been alone, eating TV dinners and repeating yesterday’s clothes. But Olivia and I had a life to navigate together. If she had a cold, I was the one who bought cough syrup and gathered her used Kleenex. If she had a quiz, I peppered her with review questions. If she had a panic attack—more and more rare, but still possible—I tried to talk her through it. If she wanted to watch long stretches of Hitchcock-fest on AMC, then that’s what we did, with Olivia writing things down in her Fear Journal as she went: birds, heights, dizziness, strangers on trains, trains....

  Days had passed without me thinking about Robert Saenz at all. When he was locked up, living in the hell of his own making, Saenz hadn’t deserved another minute of my time.

  But I woke up on Friday morning with a tight feeling in my chest. Not “call the ambulance” tight, but uncomforable enough that I had to steady myself against the bathroom counter for a long moment, until I could pull it together. Robert Saenz’s face swam in front of me, all fleshy chin and dead eyes. Dr. Fisher would have called what happened next a “break—” comfortable, padded-chair speak for going bat-shit crazy.

  “You all right?” Olivia had asked me on the way to school, gripping on to the door handle the way she always did, like our route was one of hairpin curves, rather than a fairly straight shot.

  “Of course.”

  “You don’t look all right.”

  I glanced at myself in the rearview mirror. “What do I look like?”

  “I don’t know. You look sort of gray.”

  I gave what I hoped was a convincing smile. “Like the Tin Man?”

  Olivia frowned. “Not exactly. More like you’ve got a case of rickets or something.”

  “I think you mean scurvy. That’s the Vitamin C deficiency. But I don’t know if it actually turns you gray.”

  “Great. Then you have some kind of undiagnosed illness that no one has been able to name yet. Thanks, Dad. Major consolation.” She dug in her backpack and came up with her journal.

  Ordinarily, I would have had another joke at the ready. Olivia and I had developed, in these past, lonely years, a sort of Abbott and Costello routine with each other, as if everything were a joke, as if our problems were basically just ways of trying out new material on each other. Some days I suggested we take our show on the road. But now I turned on the radio, raising the volume a few notches to drown out the words in my head: After serving sixty-three percent of his court-ordered sentence...

  First period physical science was a blur: take roll, collect papers, write key terms on board. Then my second period physics students arrived with noisy enthusiasm: it was Egg Drop Day, our annual competition to drop raw eggs in carefully constructed cages from the cafeteria roof to the ground fifteen feet below. Ordinarily, it was one of my favorite teaching days of the year. I had been known to greet my students in a white T-shirt with a smear of fresh yolk across the front. It was a new shirt every year, and I’d embellished it with a Sharpie: “Oops” one year, “Your Egg is My Breakfast” another. This year I’d forgotten.

  I pretended to marvel at my students’ creations: eggs in toothpick cages, eggs riding in Styrofoam canoes, eggs dressed as babies in cotton diapers. We walked en masse to the cafeteria and the class split into teams. I monitored the dropping of eggs from the roof while Alex, my Berkeley-bound T.A., judged their landing from the ground.

  The competition moved along on schedule: the preliminary rounds with the heartbreak of early elimination, the tense drops during the semifinals and at last, a face-off between my two best students that ended with a dramatic finish as one egg came free of its wrapping during descent and hit the ground with a sudden stain of yolk. With all the screaming and cheering and congratulatory crowd-surfing, it might have been the pep rally before the first football game.

  “All right—we clean up, and everyone heads back inside. Bell’s about to ring,” I called down, shielding my eyes from the bright, piercing blue of the sky. The few students who remained on the roof were vowing revenge, if life should ever allow them another Egg Drop Day. One by one they went down the staircase to the lower level of the cafeteria, past the hair-netted ladies wielding massive stainless steel serving spoons, and wandered in the general direction of my classroom. I should have been right behind them, picking up the last scraps of their trash, giving the losing team a gentle goading. That’s what I’d done every other time in the history of Egg Drop Day, but today I lingered on the roof, watching my students descend the staircase and emerge from the cafeteria into the asphalt parking lot below.

  There was no reason in the world for me to stay on that roof one more minute, but I couldn’t make myself go. I tracked my students as they crossed the lot and rounded the administration building. My room was at the northern corner of the science wing. There, I imagined, they would wait, still joking around at first and then growing antsy as they waited for me to appear.

  After a few minutes, Alex came around the corner of the administration building and started toward the
cafeteria. Halfway there, he spotted me on the roof. Shielding his eyes with the flat of his hand, he called up to me, “You all right up there, Mr. K?”

  “I’m fine, Alex,” I called down.

  He came closer, considering this. “You need help with anything?”

  “Not at all,” I said. I dug in my pocket and pulled out the massive wad of keys I’d been carrying around for my entire teaching career. “Hey. You want to let them into my room?”

  “What? Really?”

  I dangled the keys before me and then flung them over the side. They fell much less elegantly than my students’ eggs had fallen, just a straight shot down. Alex made a quick dive and retrieved them. He grinned, pleased with his catch, and stared up at me again, puzzled.

  “Go on.” I waved him away. He smiled uncertainly but complied, stopping once to look back at me before disappearing out of sight.

  I stayed at the edge of the roof, which was basically flat, with only the slightest peak in the center. In all my years of Egg Drop Day, I had never noticed how I could see the entire campus from this vantage. I’d spent most of my life— twenty-eight years now—teaching here. The campus had changed in that time, of course—a new gym had been constructed, and the football field had been upgraded with million-dollar artificial turf. Portable classroom buildings stretched into the horizon. The school had computer labs now, whiteboards and ceiling-mounted projectors, security cameras and automatic-flush toilets. The kids dressed differently, sure, but they were still kids—still teenagers with the same sorts of problems: love and dating and friendship and grades and finding themselves and hating their parents and figuring out their futures. Only now they all had cell phones, omnipresent as an extra limb. If I squinted my eyes and strained into the distance, I could see students on the soccer field. Olivia had P.E. this year, although I couldn’t remember her schedule. Was she the girl chasing down the ball, her dark ponytail bobbing? No—Olivia probably wasn’t the running type. But it was comforting to believe that she was out there somewhere, doing what the rest of her classmates were doing, being a normal kid.