The Fragile World Read online

  It weighed on me that I wasn’t giving Olivia the same shot at a great life that I’d given Daniel. That we had given Daniel—because Kathleen had been part of that pact, too. Olivia had turned into this wise-beyond-her-years kid, funny and quirky and far too well-behaved to pass as a normal high school student. Sometimes it seemed that she was tiptoeing through life in order not to disturb me, in order to make up for the fact that Daniel had died. She deserved better, and when I was honest with myself, I knew it. She would have been better off going with Kathleen to Omaha, even if it had meant going kicking and screaming, or half-drugged on medication that wouldn’t have worn off until she got to the Rockies and there was no way back.

  That could still happen, I realized.

  Olivia could still go to Omaha. She could still get that shot at a better life.

  I felt again the strange tightness in my chest and lowered myself to a sitting position, allowing my legs to hang weightlessly over the edge of the roof. It felt good to just sit down for a minute. There wasn’t a huge rush. My students would have packed up their things by now, and I could still stand up, head down the stairs, out the cafeteria door, and be back to my classroom before the tardy bell rang.

  And then I remembered the letter, that itch I’d had to consciously remind myself not to scratch all week. Robert Edward Saenz has been paroled from this facility effective on this day, the 15th of April, 2013.

  Distantly, I was aware of the bell ringing and students swarming out of classrooms. They looked not like ants, exactly, but like some type of laboratory experiment, their bodies squat and foreshortened. It was beautiful how they all blended together, this mass of color and energy. I squinted into the sunlight. Was Olivia, wearing her ubiquitous head-to-toe black, one of them?

  “Hey!” someone called, pointing up to the roof of the cafeteria, at me.

  A few students stopped to look.

  “It’s Mr. K!”

  “What are you doing up there, Mr. K?”

  “Is this for Egg Drop Day? Throw me an egg, Mr. K!”

  I gave them a polite wave but didn’t answer. Most of the students glanced at me and kept walking, but a small crowd had begun to gather below. I recognized Alex among them, my key ring in his right hand. He was such a conscientious kid; he’d probably fended off my incoming class at the door and locked up before returning to find me.

  “Mr. Kaufman!” someone called, and I focused in on Candace Silva, the principal’s secretary, waving her hands over her head in such an exaggerated way that she might have been signaling to an incoming aircraft. Everything about Candace Silva was exaggerated, from her very pink cardigans to her candy-themed office cubicle, which had always made me slightly dizzy, in an overindulged way.

  “You have class!” she called to me now. “Mr. Kaufman! Curtis! You need to come down now!”

  I will, I thought. I’ll come down in a minute.

  “Are you sick? Do you need me to call you a substitute?”

  “No,” I whispered, which of course she couldn’t hear. Everything seemed to be moving farther and farther away—the buildings on campus, the horizon, the distant hum of the freeway. On the ground below, one of the kids called my name, but all noise had dissolved into a drone. I saw Alex step forward uncertainly, handing my key ring to Candace.

  “Curtis? Do you hear me? You just stay right there! You don’t need to move a muscle! I’m going to take care of this!” I watched as she began walking back to the office rapidly, and then broke into a near-run after a few steps, her heels clattering. In all the years we’d known each other, I had never seen Candace Silva run.

  I was dimly aware that more time had passed and that what was happening was not normal, but I didn’t seem to be able to prevent it. Standing up was out of the question, an act of superhuman strength and resolve. I shielded my eyes and looked out farther, at the horizon, a distant place where sky met land. The whole world was so tiny, so fragile, just waiting to be crushed by a giant footstep.

  Over the intercom I heard Olivia’s name paged, and I thought distractedly, How nice. Everyone else must love Olivia, too.

  The campus security squad—two burly guys in their twenties who intimidated even the staff members—arrived and hustled the students below back to class. The only students who remained, I realized, were mine, the students who should have been sitting in my third-period class. I recognized a group of boys who perennially sat in the rear of the room, and smiled to see that they were kicking a hacky-sack in a circle, and not looking up at me at all. Then Candace was back, pointing and gesturing frantically to Bill Meyers, Rio’s principal for the last decade. Bill waved an arm at me, and I raised mine in a weak salute.

  I heard Olivia’s name being paged again, and I thought: Liv. I should get up now, just for Liv. I could feel the sun beating down on my head, where every day I combed fewer and fewer hairs. Olivia thought I had rickets, but maybe this was simply a case of sunstroke. Kathleen would take care of me. She would press a cold washcloth to my face and keep refilling a glass of ice water. I would be feeling better by the time Daniel and Olivia got home from school.

  “Curtis,” a voice behind me said, and I turned around to see Bill Meyers, holding out a hand to help me to my feet. “Let’s get out of here, okay?”

  So I stood, light-headed and unsteady. Bill took firm hold of me until we were well away from the edge of the roof. Then he held out his hand in a wide, strangely formal gesture and said, “After you.” I led the way across the roof, to the open door and down the stairs, past the serving ladies, the skin of their foreheads pinched tight by gray hairnets. They stared at me, bewildered.

  A few of my students were still gathered on the sidewalk below, although it must have been well into third period by now. Why weren’t they in class? The hacky-sack guys stopped when they saw me, the sack hitting the ground with a soft, beanbag ploop. Candace Silva was still there, too, chewing on a lacquered fingernail. On the outskirts of the group, which was just about where I could always find her, stood Olivia, weighted down by her massive backpack. I waved at her as Bill Meyers and I passed, his hand on my elbow.

  “Everything’s okay!” he boomed heartily. “Back to class now.”

  “Dad?” Olivia’s eyes were huge, her face even paler than normal.

  I took a step in her direction, but Bill clamped a hand on my shoulder. “Curtis, maybe we should have a little talk first.”

  “Okay,” I agreed. “I’ll see you in a bit, Olivia.”

  She nodded slowly.

  I felt a sudden longing for the cot in the nurse’s office, but Bill steered me out to the parking lot, straight to my dusty green Explorer. From his pocket he produced the ring of keys I’d tossed from the roof.

  “Get in,” he said. There had been some warmth in his voice when we were on the roof, as if we were two friends who had bumped into each other at a coffee shop. Now he was coolly efficient. “Passenger side, Curtis. I’m driving.”

  olivia

  By fourth period, everyone knew. I took my seat in Spanish, feeling sick and anxious, and listened to the gossip of my classmates.

  “Did you see Mr. K just totally lose it?”

  “I was sure he was gonna jump or something.”

  “If he jumped, I bet we’d get a sub until the end of the year.”

  I gritted my teeth. They were just stupid things said by stupid kids who had never experienced a tragedy beyond what they’d seen on television. I checked my cell phone for the dozenth time since Dad had left campus with Mr. Meyers. Wasn’t he going to call me? Didn’t someone want to tell me what was going on?

  A guy in the back of the room said, “Seriously, the guy must be a total wacko. The school cafeteria? Couldn’t he find like, a bridge or something?” and I almost screamed at him. Shut up! Don’t you know that’s my dad? To be fair, maybe he didn’t. It wa
s a school of sixteen-hundred students, and I had perfected the art of being off the radar.

  But I didn’t have to listen to this. I shoved my Spanish notebook in my backpack and left class just as the bell was ringing, before my teacher had logged off whatever important email she was sending from her computer.

  On my way to the office, I passed the science wing. A cute blonde girl who must have been just out of college was Dad’s substitute. The lights had been dimmed in his room, and I recognized a Nova episode on the white projector screen.

  Mrs. Silva didn’t seem too surprised when I entered the office, although she clearly had no idea what she was supposed to do with me.

  “I just want my dad,” I said, fighting very hard not to cry. “He’s not answering his phone.”

  “I’m sure he’s fine, dear. Mr. Meyers is with him.”

  “But how am I supposed to get home?” We lived several miles away from campus—a trip I’d never made on foot.

  Mrs. Silva smiled at me patiently, like I was an idiot. “You know it’s still several hours before the end of the school day. Shouldn’t you be in fourth period now?”

  “Would you go back to class if everyone in the whole school was talking about how your father almost jumped from the roof of the cafeteria?”

  We stared at each other for a long moment over a jar of hard candy on the lip of Mrs. Silva’s cubicle.

  “I could call your mom,” she offered finally, her voice rising at the end in a subtle question mark. But of course, she knew my mom was in Omaha, and that wasn’t going to solve my immediate problem.

  “I would prefer to call her later,” I said icily.

  “Okay. Why don’t you just have a seat for a minute, and I’ll see what I can find out?”

  I plunked myself into one of the chairs outside Mr. Meyers’s empty office and listened while Mrs. Silva left several discreet voice mail messages. At one point I heard her say “I would really appreciate some guidance on what to do here once you’ve handled the situation.” Great. Dad was the situation. He was probably going to lose his job, which meant that we would lose our house and have to live on the streets with our heap of multicolored furniture. Or worse—we’d have to move to Omaha.

  I pulled out my journal and added this fear to today’s growing list. I could feel Mrs. Silva’s eyes on me and had the unnerving feeling that she could see what I was writing from ten feet away. I wrote that down, too.

  Every few minutes a staff member wandered through looking for one form or another. Some shot me sympathetic glances— Oh, you poor kid. I tried to communicate back to them telepathically—Help me out here. I need to find my dad. But they retrieved whatever they were looking for and moved on quickly, not wanting to get involved.

  Finally, after a hushed phone call that obviously concerned me and/or my dad, Mrs. Silva said sweetly, “Olivia, I think you can go ahead and wait in the library until the end of the day. Mr. Meyers is going to stay with your dad until then, and I’ll be bringing you home. Would that be okay?”

  No, it wasn’t okay. I wanted to see my dad right now, right this second. It was completely horrible to have no options, to be at the mercy of the school bell and an adult who was probably only pretending to care about me. But at least some plan was forming, my dad was apparently still alive, and he hadn’t completely forgotten about me. I bit back my sarcasm and whispered a grateful, “Okay.”

  For the rest of the day I sat in a molded plastic chair in the library, adding pages of new worries to my Fear Journal—things that had seemed highly unlikely that morning, but seemed incredibly likely now. I’m afraid of my dad cracking up. I’m afraid of my dad doing strange things. I’m afraid my dad doesn’t have enough to live for. I’m afraid I’m not enough.

  And I thought about my mom. We talked every week, sometimes several times a week, mostly about little things that meant nothing at all—how I’d done on my stats quiz, what Dad and I had eaten for dinner, which of the self-absorbed borderline mental cases had been eliminated from one reality show or another that week. It was hard for me to tell her things that really mattered. It didn’t seem entirely fair that she should get an all-access pass to my life when she had made the decision to leave. Every single time we talked, she mentioned me coming to Omaha, like the constant mention would wear me down. “I’m fine here,” I insisted. “Dad and I are doing fine.” Then she would be quiet for a long time, and I could picture her in my grandparents’ old house, which Daniel and I had visited for Christmas when we were kids. Sometimes she didn’t seem to be that far away, after all. Other times, like now, Omaha might as well have been Mars.

  I had my cell phone, so I could have called her right then. No matter how busy she was at the store or in her workshop, Mom would have dropped everything to be on the first flight out of Omaha. She would have been in Sacramento late tonight or early tomorrow morning, and then she could be in charge. She could ask Dad what the hell he’d been doing on that roof and why in the world he hadn’t come down. She could do the adult thing—take charge—and I could go back to being a self-absorbed sixteen-year-old.

  But I didn’t call her. After everything Dad and I had been through, it didn’t seem right to throw him under the bus. I figured I owed him that much. He’d taken care of me. Taking care of him seemed like the least I could do.

  curtis

  It was almost like waking out of a dream, or rising out of the haze of anesthesia. One moment I’d been on the roof of the school cafeteria, trying to gather the momentum to make my way downstairs, and the next I was a passenger in my own SUV and Bill Meyers was behind the wheel.

  Bill was an old-school principal, over sixty-five but so far not even hinting at retirement. I’d been a teacher on his interview panel ten years ago; since then, he’d been my evaluator and sometimes friend. We hadn’t always seen eye to eye, and more than once as the chair of the science department I’d been in his office, sitting across the heavy mahogany desk, with Bill in his fancy leather executive chair, the sort of chair that principals had and teachers didn’t.

  Since Daniel died, our relationship had deteriorated—my fault, of course. He’d been at Daniel’s memorial service, a handshake in the long reception line afterward. Once or twice since then he’d mentioned Daniel’s name to me, and I’d recoiled, stung. At most we exchanged a few minutes of chitchat in the hall between classes, cordial rather than companionable. So it was surreal to show him into my home, to take a seat on the gold couch while he putzed around in the kitchen, opening and closing cupboards in search of a box of tea that I wasn’t sure existed. When he finally produced some Earl Grey, I was sure it was something Kathleen had purchased years ago and hadn’t been used since. Did tea have an expiration date? I wasn’t sure.

  By this time I was feeling more myself, which is to say, incredibly embarrassed about the entire thing. Bill had already referred to it twice, gravely, as an “incident,” and I realized that the “Mr. K on the Cafeteria Roof” episode would be the stuff of school legend, like the time Janet Young, a ninety-pound English teacher, had separated two basketball players who suddenly realized they had the same girlfriend. It would be all over the school by now. For all I knew, one of my more enterprising students had captured the entire scene—such as it was—on a video that was even now making the rounds of the internet.

  For the first time, I thought about Olivia and how pale she’d looked when I’d passed her. Oh, God. Liv.

  “I’m feeling better already,” I told Bill, taking the too-warm mug of tea and shifting it awkwardly from hand to hand.

  He lowered his lanky, six-three frame into a turquoise armchair, one of Kathleen’s “reclamations” that had been on the side of the road one day and reupholstered, refinished and situated in our house the next. Our entire house was a riot of Kathleen’s color choices that—it occurred to me only now, as Bill’s eyes roved over the decor—not
everyone might appreciate. The Meyers house was probably done in complete neutrals, like sand and stone and khaki and beige.

  “Curtis, we’ve known each other a long time now, haven’t we?”

  It sounded like the opening line of a rehearsed speech. I nodded.

  “I knew you before your son died. Before Kathleen left. Right?”

  I nodded again, bristling. Rub it in, why don’t you?

  “I remember a time when you were larger than life on that campus. You were involved, you know? You were department chair. You were excited about trying new things. Kids looked up to you, right? But it’s been a while since those days, hasn’t it?”

  These seemed like rhetorical questions, so I took a sip of tea, and remembered why the box of Earl Grey had gone untouched since Kathleen left. I hated Earl Grey. Earl Grey was Kathleen’s tea, not mine.

  “Now I see you walk around campus, and it’s like you’re not even there, except physically. Students call your name, and sometimes you don’t even react. You haven’t returned a single email all year, and sometimes when I pop in to see you after school, you’re just sitting behind your desk staring at nothing.”

  I flinched at each of his statements. It was like getting a glimpse into my private file, seeing all the evidence that had been amassed against me.