The Fragile World

curtis (#ulink_25e61943-a42c-543f-abef-90e6990d3a68)

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.

Safely inside now, Heidi butted her head against Kathleen’s legs affectionately. Kathleen reached out a hand to me and said, “We have to keep our heads, Curtis. We have to be strong.”

I stared at her, feeling dizzy and unbalanced. It was puzzling that she was here, like seeing a familiar face in the middle of a nightmare. It wouldn’t have been hard to take her hand, to fall into her embrace, to wrap my arms around her waist while she wrapped hers around my neck. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t move forward, couldn’t take the one step and then another that it would require of me.

Behind us I heard sniffling and turned around. Olivia stood in the doorway to the living room, impossibly tiny, hugging a blanket around her body.

“I’m supposed to call him back,” I said. “The sergeant. After I talked to you, he said I should....” And I stepped past them, leaving them there in the living room like two lost little planets, out of orbit, out of sync.

My fingers, thick and unfamiliar, fumbled with the phone. In those awful moments while I waited for the call to be answered, the dial tone buzzing in my ears, I allowed myself to hope that maybe, somehow, it was all a mistake.

But the voice on the other end was the same I’d heard not fifteen minutes earlier. “Sergeant Springer,” he said.

I cleared my throat. “Curtis Kaufman.”

He laid bare the facts, based on an investigation that was several hours old at this point—hours during which I’d watched David Letterman with Kathleen, and then we’d made love with the particular quiet that comes from having a twelve-year-old asleep down the hall. Impossible. Meanwhile Daniel had been motionless on the pavement. Someone from the pizza parlor had come outside, hearing the crash, and glimpsed the truck as it drove away. It hadn’t been hard to identify—a commercial truck, a small town. The suspect had been asleep already by the time he was apprehended.

“Asleep?” I demanded. “Was he drunk?”

He’d passed a breathalyzer; a blood draw had been taken later at the station. There were no other details at this time, Sergeant Springer said, but he would be in touch. He gave me his direct line, his personal assurance that—

“Wait.” I couldn’t let him hang up. I reached for a yellow legal pad, turned to a fresh page. There was something I needed to know. “Tell me his name. I want to know his name.”

The sergeant hesitated. “At this stage in the investigation...”

“His name,” I repeated. The voice that came out of me was surprisingly low, almost a growl. It didn’t sound anything like me. I was the soft-spoken voice in the back of the room at faculty meetings; I wasn’t a teacher who yelled or threatened. I was the calmer parent on the rare occasions when Daniel or Olivia needed discipline. But this new voice had authority; it was intimidating. It reminded me, in an alarming way, of my father.

The sergeant gave a small sigh, a gesture of hopelessness or maybe regret. “Robert Saenz. That’s his name.”

“Spell that for me,” I ordered. In the middle of a clean page I wrote ROBERT SAENZ, and then I drew a box around it, digging the pen deeper and deeper, a trench of dark lines and grooves, until the ink bled through the page.

olivia (#ulink_0e99d53b-11ab-586f-a0f6-92ce93ed5f0b)

I wanted to know everything.

Dad had spent most of the night in his office making phone calls. When he finally joined Mom and me in the living room, he was carrying a yellow legal pad full of notes that he refused to show me. Dad had a scientific mind-set, and I wondered if he had been trying to add things up, to find the flaw in the logic, so that somehow Daniel wouldn’t be dead.

“I’m practically a teenager,” I told him from the window where I had been looking out at our street. The neighbors were still sleeping; none of them knew yet. It was almost morning by then, although not according to my standards. Our cuckoo clock had clucked four-thirty, and the sky outside was beginning a slow shift from black to purple. I’d been twelve for less than a month, but that was too old to be shooed away from adult conversations. “Dad,” I said, so sharply that he looked directly at me, then down again at his legal pad. “I’m not a child.”

He slumped onto the couch like a deadweight, hair still flattened on one side from his pillow. Mom, perched on a chair across from him, was out of tears for the moment. She asked, “What did you find out?”

Dad looked at me for a long beat, and I stared him down.

“All right,” he said softly. While he talked, he kept his gaze on the carpet, as if it were suddenly the most interesting carpet he’d ever seen. And even though I’d wanted to hear it all, I found that the only way I could handle the details was to leave the window and sit on Mom’s lap with her arms wrapped around my waist—exactly like a child.

As Dad spoke, I re-created the scene in my own mind. I was good at that—visualizing scenarios. Daniel had met friends for pizza after a late-night practice session. It was after one when he left the restaurant, with snow starting to fall. He would have been bundled up in the coat Mom bought him online after a fruitless search of California stores for appropriate Ohio winter wear. He would have been wearing a knitted hat, pulled low over his ears. Maybe with his ears covered and his head down, he didn’t hear the truck behind him, barreling down a side street and swerving, taking the corner too fast. Maybe he was replaying music in his head—an aria, a sonata. The truck hit a metal speed limit sign, uprooting it from its concrete base and sending it through the air, as unexpected and deadly as a meteor dropping from the sky. The sign came crashing down on an oblivious Daniel, and just like that, my brother had died. Dad enunciated carefully: a blunt force injury to the head.

“An accident,” Mom insisted, rubbing her knuckles back and forth, a little roughly, over the ridge of my vertebrae. “Just a freak thing.”

Dad looked at her for a long moment but said nothing.

A freak thing. I turned the phrase over in my mind, but couldn’t find comfort there. Was it any better that a random, horrible thing had killed my brother, rather than something orderly and prearranged?

“What about the driver?” I asked, my mind reeling, imagining that panic behind the wheel, the out-of-control moment that couldn’t be taken back.

Dad swallowed, loosening the words caught in his throat. “He left the scene, but he’s in police custody.”

“You mean...what? Like a hit-and-run?”

“Someone from the restaurant heard the crash and saw him driving off. It’s a small town, you know. Not that difficult to track him down.”

“He just left Daniel there?” I shuddered, closing my eyes as though that would block out the image that was forming in my mind: my brother, my only brother, my sweet and funny and talented brother, lying bloody and alone in the street, and the man who was responsible for it driving off as if nothing had happened. A thought occurred to me. “Was he drunk? The driver, I mean.”

Dad said, “I don’t know.” I thought his voice sounded strange, but I couldn’t have said how. Everything was strange right then. We were sitting in the living room, where we only sat when we had company, in the middle of the night, talking about how Daniel had died. There was no normal anymore.

“It was an accident,” Mom repeated, her voice dissolving into tears.

Dad flipped a page on his legal pad and then looked at his hand distractedly, as if he didn’t know where it had come from, or how it connected to the rest of his body. Then he stood and left the room. A moment later we heard his office door close.

Mom was sobbing now, her head pressed against my back. She tightened her arms around my waist and held on. I closed my eyes. An accident. A freak thing. A blunt force injury to the head. This time it had been Daniel in that wrong place at that wrong time, but it could have been anyone: my father, my mother, any one of the seven billion people in the world or even me.

curtis (#ulink_ef6dd07c-9afb-5e82-b632-372f4bc3e341)

The only way I could handle Daniel’s death was to work my way through the facts, to build a massive to-do list and check off the items one by one. And so, I became the detail man.