From the author of stunning debut The Mourning Hours comes a powerful new novel that explores every parent’s worst nightmare…

The Kaufmans have always considered themselves a normal, happy family. Curtis is a physics teacher at a local high school. His wife, Kathleen, restores furniture for upscale boutiques. Daniel is away at college on a prestigious music scholarship, and twelve-year-old Olivia is a happy-go-lucky kid whose biggest concern is passing her next math test.

And then comes the middle-of-the-night phone call that changes everything. Daniel has been killed in what the police are calling a “freak” road accident, and the remaining Kaufmans are left to flounder in their grief.

The anguish of Daniel’s death is isolating, and it’s not long before this once-perfect family finds itself falling apart. As time passes and the wound refuses to heal, Curtis becomes obsessed with the idea of revenge, a growing mania that leads him to pack up his life and his anxious teenage daughter and set out on a collision course to right a wrong.

An emotionally charged novel, The Fragile World is a journey through America’s heartland and a family’s brightest and darkest moments, exploring the devastating pain of losing a child and the beauty of finding the way back to hope.

Praise for the novels of Paula Treick DeBoard

“Emotionally powerful from beginning to end, Paula Treick DeBoard’s novel The Fragile World chronicles the heartbreaking dissolution of a family after tragic loss. Exquisitely told, this bold and moving story is a study in grief and the transforming power of love. Absolutely unforgettable.” —Heather Gudenkauf, New York Times bestselling author of The Weight of Silence

“A heart-stopping series of events drives The Fragile World, as Paula Treick DeBoard skillfully alternates between a father and daughter dealing with tragic loss. The result is a gripping read, but one that delivers, by the book’s end, a beautiful reminder of the resilience of love.” —Karen Brown, author of The Longings of Wayward Girls

“A coming-of-age tale about a family in crisis expertly told by Ms. DeBoard. The Fragile World examines how profound loss changes all who are forced to come to terms with it. Touching and compelling, it will move you.” —Lesley Kagen, New York Times bestselling author of Whistling in the Dark and The Resurrection of Tess Blessing.

“Assured storytelling propels DeBoard’s first novel.… What most compels is the observant Kirsten’s account of how a small town and a family disintegrate under the weight of the tragedy.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Mourning Hours

“Rich and evocative…compelling.”

—RT Book Reviews on The Mourning Hours

The Fragile

World

Paula Treick DeBoard

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For my parents, who taught me that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single packed-to-the-gills station wagon.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Praise

Title Page

Dedication

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Acknowledgments

The Fragile World Readers Guide

Questions for Discussion

A Conversation with Paula Treick DeBoard

Extract

BPA

Copyright

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

—Franklin D. Roosevelt

Also, blenders.

—Olivia Kaufman

prologue

Olivia

In the beginning there was Daniel. He was the only child my parents ever needed, because he was perfect. His first word was magnet and, the story goes, he said it while looking at the refrigerator, where my mother had spelled out D-A-N-I-E-L in brightly colored letters. Other kids might have memorized the stories their parents read to them from the Little Golden Books, but my mother always swore that Daniel was actually reading, even though he wasn’t three years old yet. By the time he was five and still belted into a child seat in the back of Mom’s car, he was already reading every sign on the road: City Limit and Closing Sale and Fresh Donuts. His early teachers strongly suggested that he skip grades, and if my parents hadn’t worried about his size—smallish—and his sociability—shyish—he would probably have been one of those kids who make the news when they graduate from university at age twelve.

When he was six years old, Mom enrolled Daniel in piano lessons, since he had taken to singing road signs as they drove and later banging out the tunes on the kitchen table with his fork and spoon. Prompted by the sight of the golden arches, he would launch into “Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese...” and he could produce, on demand, the exact jingle that matched every car dealership in the greater Sacramento area. When I was born—and just for a moment, let’s pause to consider why, exactly, my parents would want another child when surely they had everything a parent could want in Daniel—he was already on his way to becoming a musical prodigy.

Physically, our lives revolved around Daniel and his music. Our funky, turn-of-the-last-century house near downtown Sacramento was crammed full with musical instruments—the upright piano in the living room, the drum set at the top of the stairs, his guitar propped against one wall or another. I was convinced that he was the only person on earth who could make a recorder look cool.

When Daniel was in the seventh grade, Mom picked me up from kindergarten one afternoon and drove me across town to his middle school auditorium for the annual talent show. The other kids were truly kids—they performed bright, cheery dance routines in spangly costumes, they lip-synced to pop songs, they executed strange karate routines that involved a lot of posturing and choppy air kicks. Daniel was the last one to take the stage, no doubt because the organizers knew he was the best. He announced that he was playing “Flight of the Bumblebee” by Rimsky-Korsakov and the entire gym went quiet with the opening notes. His fingers flew confidently over the keys; if he was intimidated in any way by hundreds of eyes on him, it didn’t show. Mom had tried to convince him earlier that day to bring the sheet music as a backup, but Daniel had only tapped his head with one finger, meaning It’s all up here. It was the first time I realized that Daniel was really great, something special.

What a disappointment I must have been, must still be. I took three years of piano lessons and barely advanced beyond the “early learner books.” I remember one song, played with my right thumb on middle C and my right index finger on D. See the bear, on two feet, begging for a bite to eat. All I had to do was toggle my fingers between the two keys, and yet somehow I couldn’t help but hit adjacent keys or lose the simple beat, giving up in a frustrated squash of all my fingers against the keys at once. Inside, a voice was saying, regular as a metronome: Don’t mess up. Get it right. Play the notes. It didn’t seem hard—but somehow I couldn’t do it.

On the day of what would be my last lesson, Mom arrived at my teacher’s house as I was fumbling my way through a simple scale I’d spent hours practicing. I’d been biting my lip in deep concentration, but when I saw her listening in the doorway, I burst into tears.

“It’s okay,” she said as we drove home, my tears finally drying against my cheeks. “You know, I’m not a musical person, and your father isn’t, either. We’re all talented in different ways. I don’t want you to feel bad about this, all right?”

But I did feel bad. Not because I had any illusions about my musical ability—even as a third grader, I understood that the awkward clunking sounds I made at the piano were never going to evolve into the effortless music Daniel made. It hurt me, though, to think that my mother had given up on me so early, that she had accepted my lack of talent so easily. I might have resented the hell out of her for it later on, but at that moment, I wanted her to fight for me—or at least give the slightest acknowledgment that I was worth fighting for, even if it was a lie. Something like: “Olivia, you have hidden potential....”

But no. I was an eight-year-old failure.

As he got older, Daniel seemed to float through our lives on his way from one practice or event to another—concert band, musical ensemble, pep band, a steel drum band that met before school, a band that jammed for hours in our garage after school. He was a member of the youth symphony orchestra; he played piano for the spring musical his junior and senior years. Colleges fell over themselves with scholarship offers—on top of everything else, Daniel had maintained a 4.3 grade point average throughout high school. Basically, he was that one-in-a-million kid, the one who participated in everything and volunteered for everything and did a fan-freaking-tastic job at everything. His face—pale beneath a shock of dark hair—appeared dozens of times in his high school yearbooks, the margins crammed with notes from friends and phone numbers from hopeful admirers.

Sometimes I thought his success would have been easier to take if Daniel had been an asshole, some mean-spirited genius who could only look down his nose at everyone else. But the thing was—he was so damn nice. He was the best big brother you could have. He never once told me to go away because I was bothering him. He never once told me that I sucked at the piano or worse, showered me with pity. He made up silly songs for me every year as a birthday present, and when he got his license, he once spent an entire Saturday afternoon driving me around Sacramento in search of the best sno-cone. When he went away to Oberlin, he sent emails that were just for me, separate from the ones he sent to Dad and Mom, filled with jokes and links to funny things he’d found online, like penguins bowling and dogs chasing their tails. He liked to set cat videos to his own music, little things he composed for a joke and that I thought were genius.

Basically, I worshipped him. And as bad as I felt for disappointing Dad and Mom, I never once felt that I had disappointed Daniel. You just couldn’t feel bad about yourself around him, because he didn’t have that effect on people.

In the beginning, there was Daniel.

Until one day, there wasn’t.

The obituary in The Sacramento Bee, written by Aunt Judy when neither of my parents was up to the task, left out everything interesting and reduced my brother to the barest of facts: Daniel Owen Kaufman was predeceased by both his paternal and maternal grandparents. He is survived by his immediate family, parents Curtis and Kathleen Kaufman and sister Olivia. He is also survived by an uncle and aunt, Jeff and Judy Eberle, cousin, Chelsey, and friends throughout the Sacramento and Oberlin, Ohio, areas.

Survived, when you think about it, is a funny term. Survived implies that we were there on the sinking ship, that somehow we got on the lifeboat, but Daniel didn’t. Survived suggests that we were pulled from the wreckage of the collapsed building, but Daniel wasn’t. Survived also means we kept on living—and I’m not sure that’s true.

Oh, we were still alive in the biological sense of hearts beating and lungs inflating. Dad kept on showing up at Rio Americano High, where he had taught physics for so long that he was almost an institution unto himself. Mom, who had been a buyer for an antiques dealer before branching into her own furniture restoration business, threw herself into her work with a passion that bordered on mania. And me—I guess you could say that I kept going, too. I was still living and breathing and getting decent scores on my homework. I still basically looked like a normal kid. But nothing ever felt right.

Somehow, as the years passed, Daniel was still there. Not in some weird, spiritual way, as if his ghost were haunting our upstairs hallway or his profile had appeared on a moldy tortilla, but in the hold that he had over me—every memory of my childhood had Daniel in it, hovering at the edges like an orb sneaking into the background of a photo. Moving forward—moving past the incident, as our family therapist had said in her nice-nice way, as if everything bad could be covered over with a euphemism—was like stepping into a vacuum, a World Without Daniel, a blank space, an empty room. Some people, I heard, kept phone messages from their dead loved ones, replaying them for a dose of comfort, a reassurance of immortality. Mom’s way of keeping Daniel alive was to say his name as much as possible, to bring him into conversations like that old saying I’d learned about Jesus, the silent guest at every meal. Seeing a notice in the paper about a soloist in a holiday concert, she’d say “That name sounds familiar. I wonder if that’s the younger sister of what’s-her-name, the one who used to play clarinet with Daniel?” Cleaning out our junk drawer: “This must be the missing piece to Daniel’s little gadget, that little thingamajig that he used to spin around on the patio....” For no reason at all: “Remember when we rode the cable cars to the wharf and Daniel...”

Yes, Mom. I remember. We know.

Dad and I, by tacit consent, mentioned his name less and less, until we stopped saying it at all. The space Daniel had occupied was now a silent void, a sort of musical black hole that we tried to fill with the television, with random chitchat about things that didn’t matter at all. It was as if Daniel had taken with him all the arias and sonatas and symphonies, all the pianissimos and fortes, all the beauty and improvisation.

Dad and I kept our silence because it was too hard—it was shitty, frankly—to acknowledge that Daniel had ever existed, because then we had to remind ourselves that he didn’t exist anymore, that he was, and would always be, dead.

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October 29, 2008

When the phone rings after midnight, it’s never good news.

The sound was startling, echoing off our wood floors and banging around in the hallway, but in the strange way that sounds penetrate sleep, it seemed as if the ringing came from deep underwater. Or maybe I was the one underwater, swimming to the top of my dream, and suddenly bursting through. I jerked upward, head foggy, propping myself up on my elbows.

Dad had picked up the phone, and from down the hall I could hear him repeating, “What? What...? What?” as if he were talking to a foreign telemarketer, someone trying to sell an upgraded something or other—except he wasn’t cursing and hanging up, which was Dad’s standard fare for unsolicited phone calls.

Then I heard Mom’s voice demanding, “Who is it, Curtis? Who is it?” Her voice, although sleep-tinged, was panicky.

Dad was still on the line, now whispering, “I don’t understand....” and I figured we could safely rule out both telemarketers and drunken prank calls from Dad’s physics students. My room was just across the hall, and by this time I was fully awake, struggling out of a tangle of sheets and comforter. This was made more difficult by the presence of Heidi, our ancient basset hound, who was upside down next to me, her legs splayed open, her mammoth chest rising and falling with sleep. Heidi had never been the most diligent watchdog, it was true—the mailman held no interest for her, although she could hear a crumb drop in the kitchen from anywhere in the house—but she had recently passed into the stage of life where even an earsplitting telephone ring and raised voices were not cause for concern. “Move, Heidi,” I ordered, nudging against the resisting bulk of her body.

A small amount of time had passed—ten seconds? Fifteen? Thirty? But between the first ring of the phone and the time I stood in the doorway of my parents’ bedroom, I had the sense that my life had already changed.

One minute I had been in dreamland, my only worry the pre-algebra test I had the next day in fifth period with Mr. Heinman, who was notorious for asking questions that had nothing to do with our notes or assignments. In the back of my mind, I was also thinking about the Halloween dance on Friday—the first dance of my seventh-grade year. Simple stuff. The kind of thing you have the luxury to think about when the rest of life is going well, when your life isn’t hinging on a middle-of-the-night phone call.

Mom had switched her bedside light on, and both of my parents were sitting up, looking rumpled and older than they did during the daytime. Dad’s hair was sticking up in strange tufts, and his glasses, which always rested on his nightstand within arm’s reach, had been perched lopsidedly on his face. “But how?” he was saying now. “I don’t understand how. I mean, how?”

Mom was holding a throw pillow and was either kneading or throttling it in her hands. “It’s not, it’s not, it’s not,” she kept saying. When I was younger, I used to thank God for the food I was about to eat and say Now I lay me down to sleep at night, but this might have been the closest thing to a prayer I’d ever heard from my mom. She just wasn’t the sort of person who prayed, at least not on a regular or official basis. I figured she didn’t want to bother God with it unless the situation was really hopeless.

“Curtis,” Mom pleaded, and he swallowed hard, trying to say something. But he didn’t seem to be able to get the words out, so instead he nodded. Just once.

Mom moaned. I slipped onto the bed next to her and buried my face in her hair. She smelled of wood shavings and varnish, a smell that was as reassuring to me as the smell of flour and sugar probably was to other kids.

Then Dad asked, his voice thin and drifting, like a helium balloon that had slipped away, “What do we do now? I mean, what do people do?” He was speaking just as much to the person on the other end of the receiver as to us, or, it seemed, to the universe as a whole.

Mom was squeezing me as though she was holding on to me for dear life. Mine or hers, I couldn’t have said.

Then Dad said, “Okay, I will,” and hung up the phone.

The three of us sat very still for a long moment. Whatever was said next, I knew, would change everything. It was the last semi-normal moment of my life, and then we would all live miserably ever after.

Mom asked, “What happened to Daniel?” Her eyes gleamed wetly in the glow of Dad’s bedside lamp.

I wished she hadn’t asked that, because once my brother’s name was out there, it was no longer possible that it could be someone else. If she had mentioned another name, I was sure, then maybe this late-night call could be about some other person, someone else’s brother.

But of all the people in the world—billions of them, more people than any one single person could ever meet even if that was a person’s life goal; of all the people in big cities and small towns, in countries where it was too hot or too cold year-round; of all the men, women and children, even those who were so old that the Guinness Book of World Records had them on some kind of short-list, and even the tiniest of infants in neonatal units, hooked up to tubes and complicated computer systems—out of all these people, it was my brother, Daniel, who was dead.

curtis

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

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

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.

By the time it was five o’clock in Sacramento and eight o’clock in Ohio, I was on the phone to the Oberlin switchboard, then passed upward in the chain until I was talking to a director of housing, a dean of student enrollment. I talked to a funeral home in Ohio, a funeral home in Sacramento. I called my school secretary at home, before she’d left for work. I called Olivia’s school, reporting her absence. I looked online for flights from Sacramento to Cleveland. I filled pages on the yellow legal pad with my notes. Money—there was an astounding amount involved—dates, times, names, phone numbers, confirmation numbers.

I was vaguely aware of Kathleen on her cell phone making the personal calls—to her brother and sister-in-law in Omaha, to our mutual friends, to the parents of Daniel’s friends and bandmates from one group or another. I was glad to have the impersonal tasks; I couldn’t bear to be the one to give this news.

At one point, I heard Kathleen running a bath. Beneath the sound of the water rushing in the old claw-foot tub, there was another sound—low, keening—that I realized was Olivia, crying.

I paced back and forth, four steps each way, the length of my office, a glorified closet beneath the stairs that I’d claimed as my own when we bought the house. I wished I could pace right out of my body, leaving it behind. Was this what madness felt like? I wanted to be there, right at that moment, with Daniel’s body. I wanted it to be last week, or last summer when we were all together, or two years from now when this hurt wasn’t new. I wanted it to be the moment before the truck took the corner too fast, hitting the speed limit sign. I wanted to grab Daniel’s arm and yank him back to safety.

Kathleen knocked once and opened the door, and we stared at each other.

“We have to figure out what to do...” I began, but she stopped me by stepping forward, falling into my arms before I was aware that I had reached out to hold her. I tried again. “About the arrangements...”

“Shh, shh. Just hold me. We can talk about that in a moment.”

I kissed the top of her head, my lips cool and dry, as if they’d been sculpted out of marble. From nowhere came the line from a poem in a humanities class I’d taken with Kathleen, so many years ago. Lips that would kiss form prayers to broken stone. Why had it stayed with me, dormant all these years, only to come back now?

After a few minutes, I let my arms go slack, slithered out of her embrace. “When you’re ready to think about it, I’ve got some information about plane tickets.”

She stared at me. “Plane tickets?”

“It makes more sense to take a mid-morning flight, since we’ll have to connect somewhere along the way, probably in Chicago.”

“Tickets?” she repeated.

“To get Daniel,” I said. “To bring home his...” I hated Kathleen for a sharp moment, for not filling in the blank, for making me say it. “His remains.”

“You were thinking we would all go?”

“Of course.”

Kathleen shook her head. “I don’t think... I mean, Olivia can’t possibly go.” She said this with such certainty, as if it were the sort of common sense thing every parent should know.

“I suppose she could stay with one of her friends. With Kendra, maybe,” I suggested.

Kathleen’s stare had turned incredulous. “Leave her alone, you mean? When her brother has just died?”

I rubbed my face, letting this sink in. Maybe because of grief and general sleeplessness, my skin had started to feel like a rubber mask, stiff hairs sprouting haphazardly in anticipation of a morning shave. Someone had to go to Oberlin, to attend to the dozens of things that seemed impossible, at that moment, to attend to. It was the worst possible trip in the world, and one I couldn’t imagine taking alone. But that, I realized, was exactly what was going to happen. “You won’t come with me, then?”

“Curtis, I can’t.”

It was just a small conversation, just a few words, but a fault line had opened up between us. I was on the side with Daniel, charged with protecting him, with bringing him home. I went back to my laptop to book a single flight, and Kathleen left the room, shutting the door behind her.

olivia

By noon, it seemed that everyone knew—our friends, our neighbors, even a reporter from The Sacramento Bee who wanted a “human element” to accompany her article. Daniel had been no stranger to the local news outlets, which had all printed pictures or run footage of him from one concert or another, receiving one award or another. Local hero...musical prodigy...

When I stepped onto the front porch that afternoon to get the mail, I found half a dozen cards tucked up underneath our doormat. Mom and I opened them together, read them silently and started a stack on the sofa table. Later that evening, she went outside and returned with a basket of corn bread and honey butter. Our house was under the surveillance of a small army of sympathizers and well-wishers, people who loved us but couldn’t bear to actually encounter us. And I didn’t blame them one bit.

That night Kendra, my best friend since fourth grade, called. I took the cordless extension into my bedroom and closed the door and sat cross-legged on the floor, feeling small and strange.

“I heard about your brother,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Thanks,” I said. We let the quiet between us stretch for minutes, and then I said, “I think I have to go.”

“I’m sorry,” she blurted again.

“I know.”

“Are you still going to go to the dance?”

It took me a long moment to figure out what she was talking about. And then I remembered: the Halloween dance, our matching costumes. Mom had made us our dresses, and Kendra’s mom had bought our matching wigs. We were going as the dead twins from The Shining.

“Um, no,” I said.

“Do you think that maybe I could borrow your costume for someone else? I was thinking maybe Jenna, from our homeroom? I mean if you’re sure you’re not going....”

“Whatever,” I said, my throat tight, and hung up.

It was the loneliest I’d ever felt in my life.

In the hallway, I paused outside my parents’ bedroom, listening to their voices. They weren’t arguing, exactly. Dad was packing—he’d be in Oberlin for two nights and back again on Sunday. Meanwhile, Mom was in charge of the arrangements for Daniel’s memorial service, which would be on Monday.

“I just can’t imagine that we won’t have a headstone for Daniel,” Mom was saying.

“We can have a headstone. Of course we can. We can have whatever you want.”

“But his body won’t be there!”

“No, it won’t.”

I braced myself with an arm against the door frame.

“I just never pictured...” Mom said, her voice trailing off.

“It’s the right thing to do, Kath. There’s an incredible expense associated with shipping a body—and besides, it’s not Daniel anymore. He’s gone.”

“It just doesn’t feel right. And how will we know? How will we absolutely know?”

“How will we know what?”

“When we get the—Daniel’s—remains, how will we know those are his remains? I mean, you read those things about funeral homes....”

“Kath,” Dad was trying to calm her.

“I mean it!” Mom’s voice had risen to a hysterical pitch, which I probably would have heard without eavesdropping. “I’ve been thinking all day, maybe they mixed something up. Maybe it wasn’t Daniel who died, after all. Do you know, I kept calling his phone and leaving messages? I was thinking maybe he would pick up and say it was some kind of stupid mistake—”

I remembered the times I’d seen Mom on the phone, dialing, listening and hanging up. I began to feel sick.

“They found his wallet in his pocket,” Dad pointed out.

“Right! And I could just imagine Daniel saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I lent my wallet to this guy from my dorm....’”

“Kathleen,” Dad said, “you’re being—”

“What? What am I being?”

They were quiet for a long moment, and then Mom said, “I know. I know exactly what I’m being. I don’t think I know how else to be right now.” She flung open their door and stepped into the hallway.

Startled, I stepped back, whispering, “I’m sorry.”

What else was there to be but sorry?

curtis

The trip to Oberlin was endless—the drive to the airport, the hassles of TSA screening, the agony of being wedged into a middle seat with nothing to do but think. Even when I closed my eyes, I saw Daniel—at six, at ten, at sixteen, at nineteen...at twenty-five, an age he would never be.

When I’d successfully forced Daniel from my thoughts for a few moments, I remembered again the name I’d written on my notepad: Robert Saenz. It was like swallowing a mouthful of dirt; thinking of him brought a lingering grit, a foul taste. He’d driven home while Daniel lay dying. “Careless, so careless,” Kathleen had bawled into my shoulder. But it seemed now that careless was the absolute wrong word. Careless was forgetting to throw the sheets in the dryer, or not picking up the promised gallon of milk on the way home from work. It wasn’t driving away with my son dying on the side of the road. I must have fallen asleep grinding my teeth, because I woke in Chicago with a sore jaw. My first thought was: Robert Saenz, you bastard.

The scheduled two-hour layover in Chicago grew to four hours, thanks to a weather delay. I watched as a cargo train wobbled by in the gray slanting rain, and uniformed personnel hoisted luggage indiscriminately into the hold. I strained, trying to spot my bag, which was black and therefore indistinguishable from dozens of other black bags. I hadn’t been to Chicago in close to thirty years, but the airport version of the city wasn’t one I would have recognized, anyway— steel-beamed ceilings, black-and-white checked floor tiles, deep-dish pizza, a preponderance of Cubs and Bears paraphernalia. The Chicago of my childhood had been my father, the cramped house with the nicotine-stained walls, the accordion closet door that had been thin protection against his rages.

Daniel’s death had brought my father back to me as a real person, rather than an abstract part of my past, buried alive in a time I rarely revisited. I hadn’t called him twenty years ago, when Kathleen was pregnant, and I hadn’t called nineteen years ago when Daniel was born, or seven years later when Olivia came along. Why ruin our happiness with his condescension? Later, when Daniel performed at Carnegie Hall, when Oberlin called with a full-ride scholarship offer, I’d wanted to rub his face in it: Look what my son has done. Look how well I’ve done, away from you all these years. But there had been the promise to Kathleen, and I’d never picked up the phone.

I was tempted to call him now, to hurt him with Daniel’s loss. Impossible idea—my father couldn’t begin to feel the loss of the grandson he’d never known. It was yet another defeat for me—even my effort to deprive him of his grandchildren would spare my father pain, in the end. Escaping to the bathroom, I drove my fist once, hard, into the metal door.

It was dark by the time I checked into the Oberlin Inn, the only hotel in town. It might have been late in Ohio, but it was only seven o’clock Sacramento time, too early for sleep. I flicked idly through the channels, then grabbed my coat. On the sidewalk in front of the hotel, students passed in hurried clusters, their heads covered. I crossed North Main Street and circled Tappan Square, ending up before Oberlin’s monument to the Underground Railroad, a set of railroad tracks rising to the sky.

Daniel had first mentioned Oberlin at the beginning of his junior year, when college seemed impossibly distant. “It’s famous for its music conservatory,” he had gushed, producing one glossy brochure after another. That fall it had been Oberlin this, Oberlin that. In the spring he’d flown out for a college visit, and then there was the admissions process, the gathering of transcripts and letters of recommendation, the seventeen drafts of Daniel’s personal statement. I’d driven him to his audition in San Francisco and paced anxiously outside the conservatory. During the hour-and-a-half drive to his audition he’d been quietly nervous; on the return drive, he was exuberant. “I nailed it,” he’d said over and over, reliving every second for me. Finally, there was the acceptance letter, a scholarship offer and dozens of phone calls about housing. Oberlin had seemed to me to be larger than life—it was all of life, as far as Daniel was concerned.

It had been somewhat surprising to discover that the town of Oberlin was tiny. Kathleen and I, on our one visit, had rented a car and marked out the parameters of the town in just a few circles. The main streets bisected at the college, which loomed large and official—museum, concert halls, the conservatory with more than two hundred grand pianos, Daniel had informed us—next to the rest of the town, which had relatively few amenities. We had taken Daniel out for Chinese at a restaurant a block from campus. In our spin around town, he pointed out the bowling alley, an archaic-looking video rental store, the self-serve Laundromat and a used book store.

Now, my hat pulled low over my ears, I headed in the direction of the gas station and pizza parlor on the outskirts of town. It was here that Daniel Kaufman was walking down the sidewalk, hunched against the cold for the hike back to campus. It was here that Robert Saenz had taken a corner too quickly, clipping the 35 mph sign.

It wasn’t hard for me to find the exact spot. Less than two days after Daniel’s death, the area was still roped off with yellow police tape. I circled the perimeter, hands balled into fists in the pockets of my jeans. Two students walked past me, darting into the street to avoid the police tape, then stepping back onto the sidewalk. I waited for them to say something, to acknowledge that a person had died right here, a person they had possibly even taken a class or shared a pitcher with, but the only scrap of conversation I caught had to do with a party that weekend. I crossed over the police tape, half expecting someone from the pizza parlor to stop me. Snow had covered the sidewalk, but still I could see where the concrete had been disturbed, where a speed limit sign had been uprooted. I stood there until I had no feeling in my ears or cheeks, watching cars slip by on their way in and out of town. I wanted to yell at each driver to slow down, to acknowledge what they were passing: This is where my son died! Daniel Owen Kaufman died right here! He was my son, and he deserves your respect, you dirty sons of bitches. I was furious with them and disappointed in myself. This patch of cement didn’t feel like hallowed ground. Instead of a connection with Daniel, I felt only anger, slow and determined.

The next morning at the Oberlin P.D., I was shown into a room with green walls and a concrete floor, a table flanked by two chairs. An interrogation room? Had Robert Saenz sat in this very chair, still groggy from sleep? Sergeant Springer had a face to match his gravelly voice—deeply lined, ruddy in a way that suggested permanent sunburn—and a no-nonsense handshake. “I’ve done some digging,” he said, passing me a manila folder.

Inside was Robert Saenz—face-forward first, then in profile. In the way that a hard life can pack on years, he looked much older than forty-one, older even than me. I was reminded of my father, prematurely aged with the help of Jim Beam and Johnnie Walker, with Wild Turkey and bottles of blue wine that looked like antifreeze. Robert Saenz had dark curly hair that hit his collar, and bloodshot, slightly bulging eyes that looked out with a vacant stare. In profile he had a double chin, a layer of stubble. His eyes held nothing—not regret or anger or surprise. Nothing.

“Keep reading,” the sergeant said.

I set the picture aside and continued slowly, fanning out the pages as I went. In 2003, Robert Saenz had caused a fatal accident in North Carolina, when his truck had jackknifed on a freeway, and an oncoming car, unable to avoid him in time, had crashed. The driver—a thirty-two-year-old Mary Kay saleswoman—had been killed instantly. Her infant son, in the backseat, had both legs crushed on impact. Robert Saenz had been above the legal limit. I was gripping the edges of the folder so hard, my hands were beginning to cramp.

“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—”

“Yes, but why do you feel there’s a lack of communication, Curtis?” Dr. Fisher probed, and Mom sat back.

It took Dad a very long time to respond. “I couldn’t say, exactly.”

“Olivia,” Dr. Fisher said, turning to me after a beat. “Let’s hear from you.”

I know what I should have said—about my panic attacks, and how much I missed Daniel every time I passed the closed door to his bedroom. I should have said that I was miserable and I was afraid of making my parents miserable—but these were very real things, and too awful to say with my parents staring at me. Mom kept nodding her encouragement, looking so hopeful that I knew whatever I said would absolutely crush her. Dad seemed surprised to realize that I was in the room, too.

“I don’t know,” I whispered.

Mom’s laugh this time was painful and sharp, like glass breaking into jagged pieces. “I mean, you read stories about families that break up when a single bad thing happens to them, and you think, that will never be my family. But it’s getting to the point.... Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know.” She leaned forward, head in her hands.

Dad and I looked at Dr. Fisher, waiting.

“Well,” she said, smiling at us kindly. I wondered if she ever came right out and said to someone, There’s really no helping you. “This is a very normal reaction for families who have experienced a sudden loss. It can be terribly difficult to express feelings openly. What I’m going to suggest are some one-on-one appointments for the time being, so that I can help each of you articulate your feelings. And then we’ll meet again as a group. In the meantime, I’d like to suggest a few activities that you can do together.”

Mom looked up, brightening. This was just her thing—a to-do list. Give her a thousand tasks, and she would tackle them all.

For the rest of the summer, I visited Dr. Fisher every week, not having any other choice. Mom went to her sessions and reported on them over dinner, determined to model “good communication” for us. As far as I could tell, Dad went only twice on his own; whatever was said in his sessions stayed there. Or maybe he said nothing at all and only stared alternately at his shoes or his car in the parking lot. Mom worked her way through a family togetherness checklist, insisting that we plan meals, visit the Youth Symphony Orchestra to make a donation in Daniel’s memory and spend at least one weekend night together doing something new—even if it was just wandering through a Pier 1, where we immediately branched off on our own and gathered again at the cash register. The week before school began, we took a vacation to Coronado, which involved a long drive from Sacramento to San Diego, nights in hotels with dubious cleanliness, a tour of the island on rented bikes and a long drive home. Somehow when Mom coaxed me into the trip, she’d neglected to mention the word “island,” and I had a full-on panic attack on the bridge, with Mom holding on to my head while I breathed into a Subway bag that had contained, ten minutes earlier, Dad’s pastrami sandwich.

The morning we left the island, Mom crushed a pill and slipped it into my yogurt, so Dad basically had to carry me to the car, wedge me into my seat and wrangle with my seat belt. I hardly remembered anything about the trip, but the photographic evidence was stored on Mom’s camera—a dozen or so pictures where none of us was exactly smiling, even though Coronado was beautiful. Despite my worrying—or maybe because of it?—nothing horrible had happened, after all. The bridge didn’t collapse, the island didn’t suddenly sink into the Pacific and, although I’d seen a shocking special news report about how rarely hotel bedding was washed, we didn’t take home a single bedbug.

When we finally arrived home, Mom dumped the contents of our suitcases into the washing machine and announced that she was going to bed for the night and didn’t want to be disturbed. It was four-thirty in the afternoon.

After that, she stopped seeing Dr. Fisher herself, but kept dropping me off for my appointments. And Dr. Fisher was helping me—it was her idea for me to find a new “coping mechanism” since I’d been more or less refusing to take my anxiety pills since the Coronado debacle. “Why don’t we do this?” she suggested, although I was pretty sure there would be no we involved. “Why don’t we keep a record of these things you’re afraid of? If you write them down during the week, we can discuss each fear at our next session.”

This turned out to be a fabulous suggestion. In a week, I filled ten pages, single-spaced. Dr. Fisher’s eyes widened in surprise at first, but as she kept reading, I had the distinct feeling that she was trying very hard not to laugh.

“Hair dryers?” she asked, looking up.

“Because hair could get caught in the little vents,” I explained.

“Right. That could happen. Has it happened to you, with a hair dryer in your home?”

“Not yet.”

“Okay. What about this one—open-toed shoes?”

“Because toes can get caught in escalators.” Anticipating her next question, I added, “It didn’t happen to me, but I heard about it happening to someone else, a cousin of a girl who was in my homeroom last year.”

“Fairly rare, though, I would think,” Dr. Fisher said, closing my notebook. “And I notice you have escalators on the list, as well.”

I nodded.

“It would seem to me that the escalator is relatively benign, though—provided one is wearing close-toed shoes, of course,” Dr. Fisher qualified quickly. “But I would think, compared to elevators—”

I shuddered. “Elevators are in a class unto themselves. The sudden plummeting, the claustrophobia...”

“Whereas with an escalator, if it stops working, you simply walk the rest of the way.”

“In that case, you might as well just take the stairs,” I pointed out. “Or, better yet, just stay on the ground floor.”

Dr. Fisher smiled, the skin around her eyes crinkling. “Well! Okay. That’s definitely a good start, then, Olivia. I think the next step might be for us to begin sorting through these fears, putting them into categories.” I must have looked puzzled, because she explained, “You know—like things that have happened to you before, or are likely to happen, versus things that are not at all likely to happen—that kind of thing.”

I agreed to think about it, although I didn’t see the value in this. It didn’t particularly matter what category things were in—I was equally scared of everything. But I kept writing fears down, filling one notebook and starting another. During the day I carried it in my backpack, sealed in a jumbo-sized Ziploc bag so it wouldn’t fall victim to a leaking pen or a spilled water bottle. At night, I kept the notebook on the floor next to my bed, in case something new came to me while I should have been sleeping.

Dad began referring to the notebook as my Fear Journal.

Mom called it my security blanket.

And it did give me security—enough, at least, that I had stopped taking medication completely by the time I entered eighth grade. I kept a single pill with me, wrapped in a ball of cellophane at the bottom of my backpack for an emergency situation, like a shooter on campus or an unannounced field trip. The busier I was with my classes and the more obsessed I grew with writing things down, the less I saw Dr. Fisher, until one day it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen her in months.

It had been a good idea—family therapy. But my family had approached it like a ride on a merry-go-round in the world’s saddest theme park, until one by one, we’d all simply flung ourselves off.

curtis

I can’t say I didn’t see it coming. The trouble was that it had been coming for so long, it never seemed real—like a tsunami, where the waters recede and you watch them go, go, go, but remain unprepared for the reversal, for the sudden, gushing onslaught.

Kathleen had been talking to her brother in Omaha, making arrangements about the house where she’d grown up, which had been sitting vacant. She had reconnected with one of her best friends from high school, Stella something-or-other, who was divorced, living again in Omaha and hoping to open an upscale boutique furniture store. Kathleen had researched the local high schools for Olivia; she had found a family physician, a veterinarian.

I know this because she told me. I’d been coming to bed later and later at night, but still Kathleen was awake, stubbornly waiting for me, propped up by pillows, scribbling items on a to-do list. There was something triumphant about this, something smug: See—I’m doing the work. I’m putting in the effort.

I laughed at first. Back to Omaha?

“It makes sense,” she had insisted. “It’s exactly what we need.”

“It’s exactly what you need,” I countered, but there wasn’t much heat behind my words. I couldn’t summon the energy to be bitter. I’d been building up a wall between us, one giant rock upon another. Dr. Fisher had told me as much. “If you keep this up, you’ll get what you seem to want—to be alone,” she told me on our second counseling session, and I had agreed, thanked her and never returned.

“You’re right,” Kathleen admitted. “It is exactly what I need.”

“That’s it, then?” I asked, gesturing to her list, noticing that just about everything had been checked off.

“Curtis, listen to me. You can be part of this change. It’s not too late.”

Wasn’t it? I turned away, loosening the belt on my khakis. Everything felt too late. We’d heard the news, finally, more than a year after Daniel died. There would be no trial; Robert Saenz had agreed to seven years in exchange for his plea to involuntary manslaughter. I’d imagined myself addressing a judge, a jury, showing the world how wonderful Daniel had been, but I’d never had the chance. That too was gone.

“I can’t keep having this conversation with you,” Kathleen hissed. “Daniel is dead! Nothing you do is going to make him not be dead!”

I stared at her, remembering how the Lorain County A.D.A. had said the same thing to me, essentially. “I hope you can put this behind you, Mr. Kaufman, and begin to move forward.” In other words: We’re done. It’s over. It was done and over for Kathleen, but it wasn’t over for me.

Kathleen lowered her voice, softening with a visible effort. “This is it, Curtis. This is the moment where you have to make a decision. This is where you say ‘Yes, we’re going to stay together as a family,’ or ‘No, I’m going to go my own way.’”

The words were there, hanging in front of me like lines on a cue card: We’re married. We’re a family. We need to stay together. But I couldn’t say them. Whatever fight was in me had shrunk like a helium balloon three days after a party. If the roles had been reversed, how long would I have stuck it out? She was right; it would be better for Kathleen and Olivia in Omaha. It probably would have been better for them in Timbuktu.

Kathleen was done waiting for a response. She pulled her knees to her chest, looking small and far away. “I don’t know you anymore, Curtis. I don’t know who you are. You’re not the same person....”

“No,” I agreed. “I don’t think I am.”

Kathleen snapped off the light. In the dark she whispered, “I would give you all the time in the world if I believed it would change something.”

“I don’t blame you for leaving,” I told her. “I don’t blame you at all.”

That night I slept with my arm over her body, breathing in the woodsy scent of sawdust and a pungent, chemical smell I couldn’t place. Paint thinner? Varnish? She’d been on an almost manic streak, finishing projects for clients. Touching her was the closest I could come to saying I was sorry, and the best way I could manage to say goodbye.

We sat down with Olivia on the last Saturday of July, with the start of school looming only weeks away. Olivia must have known something was up; she sat in the turquoise armchair across from the gold patterned couch—when had we acquired these things?—and stared first at Kathleen, then at me.

“What is it?” Olivia demanded, her voice flat. We were coming off an eight-day heat wave, and it was already warm at ten o’clock. The windows were open, but one of us, Kathleen or me, would soon get up to close them when the air conditioner kicked on. It would be me, I realized. Kathleen had one foot out the door; she had all but packed her bags.

“Olivia,” Kathleen began, twisting the wedding ring on her finger, the tiny, paltry stone I’d been able to afford all those years ago. How much longer until she stopped wearing it? Would she slide off her ring the minute she pulled away from the curb? Would I slide off mine?

“Just say it,” Olivia hissed. Her hair was fastened around her head in a random arrangement of bobby pins, so that she looked like some long-necked, exotic bird. Her forehead was shiny with sweat.

Kathleen looked at me, and I nodded back to her. Go ahead. I knew I was being an asshole; I knew that if this were taped and later played back, I would not see myself as the sympathetic character. But I figured that the person who was leaving should be the person to explain, and the person who was being left could sit righteously silent—even if it were his fault.

Kathleen swallowed hard and began, “Your father and I have been talking, and we think that it would be best for now if we took a little break.”

“A little break,” Olivia echoed.

“You know that we’ve talked about making some changes, and some really great opportunities have opened up in Omaha. You know that friend I’ve been talking to, the one who is planning to open a store in the spring?” When no one said anything, she plunged bravely on. “It’s really sort of a dream situation for me, and I figure that once we’re settled in—”

“Wait. Who are you talking about? Who’s we?”

Kathleen bit her lip and said, “You and me, Liv. The two of us would go out there to begin with, and then your father, if he decides to, would join us.”

Olivia’s eyes shot to me. “Dad’s staying here?”

“I’m under contract to start the school year in a few weeks,” I explained, although of course this was no explanation at all, and Olivia was no dummy. There were teaching jobs in Omaha, and the school district wouldn’t have held my feet to the fire over my contract.

Olivia asked, “Is this really happening?”

“Honey.” Kathleen leaned forward, a curly lock of hair tumbling over her forehead. “I didn’t think this would be that big of a shock to you. We’ve talked about starting over.”

“You’ve talked. You said you wanted to start over.”

“We talked about us starting over,” Kathleen insisted, wounded. “And that includes your father. He just can’t come with us now.”

Olivia shook her head. “Mom, seriously. I’m not moving to Omaha. I’m starting high school in a few weeks. I can’t go somewhere where I don’t know anyone.”

Kathleen put a hand on Olivia’s arm, and Olivia pulled back, out of her reach.

“Sweetie,” Kathleen tried again. “I know this isn’t exactly what you hoped for, but I know you’re going to love it in Omaha. It really is the best thing for us right now.”

“No, Mom. I’m not going to Omaha.”

“Honey. Everything’s arranged.”

“And I’m not going to leave Dad behind, either. I’m not going to do it.”

I flinched. It was striking how adult Olivia sounded, unafraid and unwavering. And then it hit me—she sounded just like Daniel.

“Olivia, your father is choosing—”

“I don’t care, Mom. You’re choosing, too. And now I’m choosing. I’m staying here.” Her body was tense, trembling.

“Oh, Liv, come here,” Kathleen said, but Olivia took one step out of the turquoise armchair and tumbled right into my lap.

I felt this strange, triumphant rush go through me, like a powerful jolt of déjà vu—picking Daniel up in the hospital, freshly swaddled; lifting a crying Olivia out of her crib, watching in awe as her sobs settled, her breathing slowed, became even. I hadn’t wanted it to be this way, but Olivia was almost fourteen now, and maybe that was old enough to make a decision for herself.

Over Olivia’s shoulder, Kathleen glared at me. Say something.

That was all I had to do—say the words. Olivia, you can’t stay here with me. You need to go with your mother.

“Dad?” Olivia asked into my shoulder. “I can stay here with you, right? You want me to stay here, don’t you?”

Olivia would keep me sane, I thought. And I would keep her sane, get rid of her endless fears once and for all.

“Of course, honey,” I said, and next to me, Kathleen dropped her head into her hands.

I promised myself right then that I would try to put it behind me—if not for my sake, then for Olivia’s. I would let Daniel go. I would accept the fact that Robert Saenz was in prison, locked away, one orange jumpsuit among thousands of other orange jumpsuits. I could do this for Olivia. I had to.

A week later, Kathleen backed out of our driveway, her Volvo packed to the gills. I wasn’t absolutely sure until that very moment, watching the brake lights as she slowed for the yield sign at the end of our street, that she was serious.

From that moment on, it was just Olivia and me.

olivia

April 26, 2013

It was a fairly normal day at Rio Americano—at least, what had become normal for me. I’d gone through the motions of note-taking in my American History class, worked the problems in precalculus, and then ditched P.E. for the fourteenth time this semester to sit in the last stall of the D wing girls’ restroom and do absolutely nothing. The bathroom was public-industrial gross, with huge wheels of single-ply toilet paper bolted to the wall and graffiti etched into the stall doors—swearwords and gang signs and the names of girls who were sluts, courtesy of the girls whose boyfriends had been stolen. Every now and then someone would enter, and I heard a series of electronic beeps; public school bathrooms in this century seemed to be used solely as a quiet place for sending uninterrupted text messages. For the fourteenth time that semester, I was sitting cross-legged on top of my backpack, which sat on top of a floor that, even when freshly mopped, was as sanitary as a petri dish.

Still, it was a million times better than being in P.E., which had become my nemesis and the focal point of my fears: the rushed, awkward changing of clothes in the locker room, shivering in short sleeves while I did the world’s slowest jog around the turf, being picked last for a team and then ignored by my teammates, ducking when one sort of ball or other zoomed toward my head, trying to avoid Ms. Ryan, the whistle-tooting P.E. teacher who was determined to make an athlete out of me. “Kaufman!” She would boom in that teacher-projection voice from across the length of a football field, and I’d wish I could melt into a little puddle and evaporate, like the Wicked Witch of the West.

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.

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 was 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.

“Now, I’m not trying to downplay in any way what you’ve been through, Curt. I can’t say I would handle this situation any better than you’ve done, but I think it’s time you faced certain realities. You’re not giving one hundred percent—” He raised a hand to cut off my protest. “It’s true. You’re not giving one hundred percent to your students, to yourself or to Olivia.”

I set the mug on the trunk that served as our coffee table. I must have set it down harder than I thought, because some tea splashed over the side, and Bill reached forward, dabbing at the spill with a napkin. It was an old steamer trunk, transportation stickers still affixed to the side. Olivia, her stocking feet on its surface, had once wondered out loud if it had belonged to someone from the Titanic, if somehow a trunk had survived but its owner had not. Impossible, I’d said. But it’s an old trunk, anyway, she had pointed out. The owner is probably dead, shipwreck or otherwise.

“Don’t bring Olivia into this,” I said now, a note of warning in my voice. Maybe he was right about things at school, but that didn’t mean he knew a thing about Olivia and me.

Bill raised his hand again, as if I were a dog who needed to heel. “It’s only because I like you and respect you that I can say this, Curt. But Olivia’s floundering, too.”

“What do you mean? She’s doing fine.”

“She’s failing P.E. I talked to Jessie Ryan only yesterday, and she says Olivia has missed at least a dozen classes since January.”

I shook my head. “She’s only been sick once this entire semester.”

“Well, she’s not sick. She’s skipping class, Curtis. Hanging out in the bathroom, the library... We all know she’s bright. We’re all rooting for her, and that’s why Jessie came to me, to figure out how we can help her. You must have seen it. She’s lonely. You never see her talking to another kid.”

“Wait,” I said. “You might be right about P.E. I don’t know. I’ll talk to her today and get to the bottom of things. But Olivia is not lonely. She has that group of friends.” I didn’t add, the ones who wear all black and call themselves the Visigoths, the ones who scare the hell out of me half the time.

“She eats her lunch in the library.”

“Sometimes,” I felt myself being too defensive, but couldn’t stop it. “She eats there sometimes.”

“Every day,” Bill countered.

I closed my eyes, fighting off a sudden stab of pain. Olivia, eating alone in the library, taking a listless bite of the egg salad sandwich she’d made the night before, peeling a mozzarella stick in tidy, industrious strokes. “I’ll talk to her,” I said. “And Monday, when I’m back at school—”

“Let’s talk about that, too,” Bill said. He leaned forward in the chair, a hand on each of his knees. Dress slacks, a button-down shirt, a sports coat with leather patches on the elbows—that was part of his style. No khakis and polo shirts for this man, ever.

Here it comes, I thought. Maybe I’d been waiting for it. Maybe I’d known since the moment Bill Meyers had appeared on the cafeteria roof. He was going to do it—he was going to release me, quickly and painlessly as pulling off a Band-Aid.

But instead, Bill laid out a rationale over the next hour or so, and everything he said made perfect sense. I was struggling. I wasn’t giving one hundred percent. The state testing—that grasping, insatiable god all public school teachers worshipped—was over, the year was winding down. It was nearly May, so I could limp through the last month of the school year, doing right by no one. I could keep going through the motions. But it wasn’t fair to my students. It wasn’t fair to my own sense of integrity. I stiffened again when he mentioned that it wasn’t fair to Olivia—but I was starting to see that he was right. What was Olivia doing at this very moment? Probably freaking out about what I’d done.

On the other hand, Bill pointed out—I did have plenty of sick leave accrued. I’d taken two weeks when Daniel died, and the odd day here and there during my annual bout with laryngitis, but I had more than enough days banked to take the whole rest of the year. I could start fresh in the fall, and my job would be waiting for me.

As for Olivia, Bill continued—something could probably be worked out if we wanted to take a little time off. Independent study packets, an incomplete that could be amended later, a summer class at a community college to fulfill the P.E. requirement. There were options; it just required a little creative thinking. “She’s a good kid,” he said. “She’s going to come through one way or another.”

Of course, I thought. Of course she’ll come through.

Then Bill said, “Forget about school,” with a little flick of his wrist as if school had no significance at all. “Forget about students and responsibilities to the job. For now, just forget about all of that. What you need is to figure out what you really want to happen in your life, Curt. What is it that Curtis Kaufman needs to do right now, more than anything else in the world? What’s going to be the best thing for Curtis Kaufman and his family?”

His question startled me, even though it was one I’d been considering in a subconscious way, all week.

My eyes flicked to the print on the wall. It was a vintage Jefferson Airplane poster, hand-lettered. Kathleen had found it at a store near Haight-Ashbury on a trip to San Francisco early in our marriage, then mounted and framed it. It had hung in our first apartment, and later in the two-bedroom house we’d rented until Olivia was born, when we’d offered our meager savings for the down payment on this house, which Kathleen had dubbed the “funky fixer-upper” and I’d fondly referred to as “the money pit.” I’d half expected Kathleen to take the frame off the wall when she went, but maybe it was more significant that she’d simply left it behind.

And maybe it was significant that behind that particular frame I’d taped the letter from the Lorain County D.A. Although we understand that such a notification is not welcome to families of victims...

“Curt? Are you listening? It’s important to rediscover your purpose. I know that must sound like a bunch of New Age bullshit, but—”

“No, you’re right,” I said. The tightness in my chest, which had been there all day, was releasing, like the loosening grip of a blood pressure cuff.

My purpose.

One single act could set everything right, reestablish the balance in our lives.

Deep down, of course, I had known this all along.

I needed to kill Robert Saenz.

olivia

At 3:15 p.m., Mrs. Silva and I got into her little red Volkswagen Beetle and navigated our way through Sacramento. I tried very hard not to grab on to the door handle every time we turned, and it seemed that she was trying very hard not to appear annoyed with the situation—angling the A/C vent directly toward me, turning the radio station to something fast and upbeat. It was a relief to see Dad’s SUV in the driveway, to feel for a second that everything might be normal. We parked on the street, and Mrs. Silva followed a few feet behind me. I was shaking as I let myself in the front door, not sure what I would find inside.

Mr. Meyers met me in the entryway, stooping to avoid our overhead light fixture. “Hey, Olivia. I think your dad is going to be fine, but just in case, I’m going to leave this with you, okay?” He passed me a slip of paper with a phone number and his name printed in block letters: BILL MEYERS—HOME.

I folded the paper and pushed it deep into a pocket. It was uncomfortable and strange enough to have my school principal in our home—I couldn’t imagine calling him at his.

“You’re all right now, Curt?” Mr. Meyers asked, and from the couch Dad said, “You bet, Bill.”

“Dad?” I let my backpack slide to the floor and studied him. He looked normal—not unfocused like he’d looked coming down from the cafeteria roof, and not grayish like he’d looked only this morning on our way to school. He actually looked good, healthy and smiling, as though he’d been home all afternoon doing shots of wheatgrass infused with extra vitamin C.

He patted the couch. “Come here, Liv.”

I sank down next to him, leaning my head automatically into his shoulder, something I hadn’t done in a long time. My head must have grown, because it wasn’t the comfortable fit I used to remember.

“Hey...hey. Don’t cry.”

I was about to protest that I wasn’t crying, that I was freaked out since my father had been sitting on the roof of the cafeteria, thank you very much, but I wasn’t going to cry about it. And then I realized that my shoulders were heaving, and my breath was coming out funny, and that Dad, as usual, was right.

Outside, a car started; Mrs. Silva and Mr. Meyers had left. This made me a little worried, and then it worried me that I was worried—because being with Dad should have been the least worrisome thing in the world.

I pulled away and looked at him. “What happened?”

“Really, it was nothing. I just felt like I needed to take a little break.” There was something I didn’t trust about his face. It was exactly the way I’d look if someone had a gun to my back and was telling me to smile or else.

“In the middle of the school day. On the cafeteria roof.”

Dad pulled me close again. “Everything’s fine now, Liv. There’s something I want to tell you.”

I groaned. Whatever followed this statement wasn’t going to be good. Cue Daniel telling me he was going to college halfway across the country, but we would talk every week. Cue Dad announcing that the guy responsible for Daniel’s death had worked out a plea bargain. Cue Mom telling me she had something to talk about, and then moving to Omaha. I braced myself as if I were preparing for a slap to the face or a punch to the gut. Maybe it was worse than I thought—maybe Dad had had a stroke or been diagnosed with brain cancer or any one of the awful diseases you could find on medical websites.

But what he said was, “Love.”

It took me a minute, and then I realized he was playing this game we’d made up when I was just a kid and had trouble falling asleep at night. It went like this: The first person said the word “love,” and the second person said a word that started with “e” like “elephant,” and the first person said a word that started with “t”, and so on and so on, with the last letter of one word spawning the first letter of the next. It used to make me feel happy and silly, and then somehow in the middle of thinking of the next word, I’d fall asleep. Now it seemed ridiculous. Shouldn’t we be doing something other than playing games?

“Come on, Liv,” Dad prompted. “Love.”

I shook my head. “Empty.”

He gave me a hesitant smile. “Yield.”

“I really don’t feel like playing a game, Dad.”

“One more. Yield.”

I sighed. “Danger.”

“Real,” he said, touching his chest and then holding his hand out to me, as if we were practicing sign language together.

“Dad,” I groaned. “What’s going on?”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, I know this is all a little weird. But I’m completely serious. What would you say to taking a little trip with your old man?”

I blinked. Earlier I thought he was about to take a header from the cafeteria roof. Now he wanted to take me on a trip. I chose my words carefully. “First, I would say that the phrase old man has always disturbed me for reasons I don’t fully understand. Then I would say that we’re almost out of milk, and if this little trip includes a stop at a grocery store, I’m all for it.”

Dad chuckled. “No, not to the grocery store. I mean a real trip. A voyage.”

Well, this was new. A voyage? “Does this involve a boat?” I demanded, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. I was going to have to call Mom for sure. There were probably five hundred water-related entries in my Fear Journals. “You know I’m afraid of boats and sharks and currents and rogue waves and—”

“No boats, I promise. Voyage is the wrong word, then. I’m talking about a road trip. You, me and the open road.” He paced to the windows, whirled around, paced back. It surprised me how young he looked, how goofy. Like his old self, I thought, and then out of nowhere: Like when Daniel was alive. But he looked a bit manic, too.

“A road trip? Dad, are you sure you’re okay? I’m serious. Do you need me to, um, be a supportive passenger while you drive yourself to the doctor or something?”

He laughed a bigger-than-genuine laugh that was not at all reassuring.

I can’t take this, I thought. One member of my family was gone forever, another lived a few thousand miles away and now my last remaining family member was cracking up—on the cafeteria roof one minute, on the couch talking about a voyage the next. I had to call Mom. This was definitely more than I could handle by myself.

“Don’t you want to know where we’re going?”

I wasn’t sure we should be going anywhere, unless maybe it was to some kind of “hospital” for a little “rest.” But they would have to take me, too, because I wasn’t going to survive for a second on my own. “Okay,” I said, slowly, preparing to hear him suggest the wilds of Alaska or a hot spring in Arizona, the sort of place that couldn’t be found on a map. “Where are we going?”

His grin was so big it threatened to split his face in two. “We’re going to Reno, to Salt Lake City, to Cheyenne...and, drumroll, please...to Omaha.”

“Omaha? You mean, to Mom?” I tried to say it neutrally, to keep the emotion out of my voice. This was a surprise, and not an unwelcome one. Maybe Dad had come to the conclusion himself that he was cracking up. Maybe Mom and I could get him some professional help.

“Aren’t you excited?”

“Dad, talk to me. Did you just get fired?”

“Fired? No. Of course not.”

“So what were you and Mr. Meyers doing all afternoon?”

“Just talking, Liv. He helped me figure something out.”

“He helped you figure out that you need to go to Omaha,” I clarified.

“I know, it’s sudden. But look—I have an entire plan worked out. We’ll take a few days to get things situated around here, and then we’ll hit the road.”

I groaned. “Dad, seriously. We have another month of school.”

“That’s what Mr. Meyers and I figured out. I can take some sick leave—I’ve got more than enough to spare. And we’ll talk to your counselor about independent study for you, just to the end of the semester. Don’t worry.” Leaning down, he put a hand on my shoulder, and I felt his warmth burning through my sweatshirt.

And then I froze, imagining that conversation with Mr. Merrill. “Dad, there’s something—”

He stopped me. “I know all about your P.E. class, and it’s okay. We’ll get it all figured out.”

I sat back on the couch, about to cry for the zillionth time today. What in the world was going on? I was failing P.E. for the second time, and I wasn’t even going to get yelled at? “Dad, come on. Why are we going to Omaha?”

“Olivia, I just—I feel like it’s time.”

“Time for what? For us to be together again, you and me and Mom?”

“Of course.” He didn’t even blink.

He’s lying, I knew instantly. Fantastic. My father was lying to me.

“Does Mom know about this?”

“Well. Not yet.”

I groaned. “And how long...?”

“Oh, four or five days, and then we’ll be there.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

But Dad was pretending not to hear me. When I stood and tried to move past him, he caught me in a big, spin-in-a-circle hug that felt phony, too. He felt like a different version of my dad than the one I’d been living with for the past few years, as if a stranger had bought a mask of Dad’s face and borrowed one of his polo shirts. When he put me down, he was red with excitement. “This is the right thing,” he whispered. “I know it.”

I didn’t believe that for a second.

But I would have been the shittiest daughter in the world to say so.

curtis

Olivia was sharp; I could feel her watching me that weekend, waiting for me to slip up, or trying to catch me off guard with her questions. But I’d made up my mind. This was the right thing, the best, the only thing. Kathleen and Olivia would be together, Saenz would be dead,and I would finally, finally have done right by Daniel.

“So, we’re seriously doing this?” Olivia asked me the next morning, after I called The Sacramento Bee to put our newspaper on hold.

“You’re not backing out, are you?” I asked.

She glared at me. “I don’t really see that as an option.”

I hauled down two suitcases from a shelf in the garage, where they had aged disgracefully since our disastrous trip to Coronado, acquiring a layer of dust and more than a few spiderwebs. It took a half hour of cleaning with damp cloths before Olivia would consider either suitcase as a viable option. Then she stood before her open closet doors, hands on her skinny hips.

I sighed. “What’s wrong now?”

“It’s impossible to pack without knowing exactly how long I’m going to be gone,” she announced.

I laughed. “Are you kidding me? I know exactly what you’re going to pack. Black pants, black shirts, black sweatshirts, black socks and black boots. Can’t be that difficult.” It was basically her uniform, as much as khaki pants and polo shirts were mine. I wasn’t sure when it had started, exactly, or where all the clothes had come from—but one morning at breakfast a couple of years ago, I realized that I was the parent of a teenage daughter who wore only black.

She glared at me. “But how many black shirts, exactly?”

“What does it matter? It’s not like there are no washing machines in Omaha.” It was better, I figured, to be vague than to tell an outright lie. Telling the truth was out of the question.

There were dozens of small details to figure out, and several major ones. It was almost thrilling to have a plan, to have a specific goal that was further than a day or two ahead, the way we’d been existing since Kathleen left. I had installed a massive whiteboard in the front entryway, and each night Olivia and I had crossed off our completed chores and added new ones. Buy cereal, take the trash out, pay phone and cable, run sprinkler in backyard. Now I was thinking beyond today, beyond this week.

I didn’t find a chance to break away until Sunday night. Olivia had insisted on coming along on all the errands I devised—an oil change, a trip to Target for a few travel necessities, a stop at the ATM. This wasn’t that unusual—Olivia didn’t typically like to be left at home, where she was convinced that all sorts of things could go wrong, like a burglar who assumed the house was empty if there wasn’t a car in the driveway, or a carbon monoxide leak that she couldn’t smell. So I had to wait until she started a load of laundry to say “Why don’t I just grab dinner?”

“Can’t you wait a bit? Twenty minutes?”

“Well, I was thinking In-and-Out. You know how that drive-thru line always takes forever.”

Olivia frowned. “I could stop the washer.”

“Don’t bother,” I said, grabbing my keys before she could jump into action. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

I did go to In-and-Out, and the line was wrapped around the restaurant and through the parking lot, so at least that wasn’t a lie. But while I waited, I made the phone call Olivia absolutely couldn’t overhear. “Pick up, pick up,” I pleaded. It was a long shot; it was Plan A, but there wasn’t a Plan B yet.

“Yeah?” The voice on the other end was suspicious. One of those conspiracy nuts, Kathleen had always said, back when we’d known him, back when Zach Gaffaney had lived a few blocks away and been married to Marcia, half of a couple we bumped into regularly over the years. Privately, I’d suspected that Kathleen was right.

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