The Fragile World (11 page)

curtis

The closer we got to our hotel in Winnemucca, the more jittery I felt, as if I were coming down from a major caffeine overdose. Even though reception had been spotty, I kept checking my phone obsessively for new messages. “In case Mom calls,” I said, when Olivia noticed.

“Since when does Mom call you?” she asked.

“Like I said, just in case.”

“Just in case what? That something goes wrong in Omaha and you have to change into your superhero costume and fly there at the speed of light?”

I stopped checking my phone, although it didn’t stop me from being nervous. Sometimes Olivia could be a bit of a pain.

The hotel was decent, part of a budget chain that wasn’t connected to a large casino, although there were two rows of slot machines in the lobby. A grizzled-looking woman was planted in front of one of the machines, pressing buttons repeatedly with her right hand and inhaling intermittently from a stubby cigar in her left. I caught Olivia’s raised eyebrow and asked the front desk attendant for a nonsmoking room.

After Olivia pronounced our room—with its double queen beds and bolted-down television—“do-able,” I stepped out with the ice bucket and took my time coming back from the lobby, wandering the perimeter of the property instead of cutting through the parking lot. In a few hours I would be meeting Zach Gaffaney; I would be buying a gun and crossing a boundary, and there would be no going back. I slowed further, wandering past the pool, a dinky rectangular hole with greenish water and a dozen SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK, NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY signs. The air was markedly cooler than it had been in Reno, and it definitely wasn’t swimsuit weather. I glanced at the license plates in the parking lot: Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona. Ours was the only California plate, which didn’t surprise me. Most of the Californians I knew didn’t venture beyond Disneyland or the San Diego Zoo or Las Vegas, unless they were on a plane. I figured this accounted for the weak grasp of geography among my students—they knew the states that bordered the Pacific Ocean, plus Texas, Florida and New York. If I had mentioned Nebraska, they would have had to Google it. No, Winnemucca, Nevada, was far off the radar of anyone I knew, save Zach Gaffaney.

“Dad?”

I whirled around, ice spilling out of the plastic bucket. Olivia was on the balcony above, barely visible since she was standing well back from the edge.

“What are you doing? You were just staring into space.”

“Just thinking, I guess.”

“Well, don’t think so hard. You freaked me out. Plus, the ice is melting.”

“We’ll get more later. You hungry?”

“For real food, you mean? Not a bacteria-laden buffet? Not candy and cookies?”

I started up the stairs. “Real food. Tell you what, kiddo. We’ll drive around and you’ll pick.”

“Breakfast for dinner?” This was Olivia’s favorite meal—maybe because the fantastic weekend breakfasts Kathleen had made, bacon and eggs and sausage, sometimes pancakes or waffles, too, had disappeared along with Kathleen. Most mornings, we were lucky if there was enough milk to cover our stale cereal.

When I reached Olivia, I gave her a little squeeze and then removed my arm carefully. Could she tell I was shaking?

It wasn’t hard to find a restaurant with a twenty-four-hour breakfast, probably because everything in Nevada seemed geared to a round-the-clock schedule. Olivia ordered the endless stack of pancakes, and I went for the French dip, taking only a few bites before setting the sandwich down.

“Must be all the sweets along the way,” I said.

“I didn’t know it was possible for your appetite to be ruined,” Olivia commented. She had taken on Kathleen’s role of monitoring what I ate, commenting when she found an empty container of ice cream in the trash can or a candy bar wrapper that had gone through the wash with my pants. “So, what is it? Are you nervous or something?”

I tried not to react. “About...?”

“Um, seeing Mom. Hello—your wife? My mother?”

I took a sip of water. “Aren’t you?”

“Was that a ‘yes’?”

“Sure, I suppose,” I said. Over Olivia’s head, I kept an eye on the clock, watching as the second hand raced around the digits.
Stop,
I thought, willing the universe to understand my wordless plea.
Just give me another minute to think.

After dinner, I pulled into a parking space at our hotel. Liv unlocked her door manually and let herself out, then looked back at me, realizing that I hadn’t turned off the engine. Her look lasted a long moment. “What.” Her voice was flat, as if she couldn’t bear to ask a question because I would have to answer, and the answer wouldn’t be what she wanted to hear. Or, more likely, it would be what she wanted to hear, but it wouldn’t be the truth.

It was hard to look at her. “I think I’m going to drive around for a few minutes, clear my head.”

“We’ve been driving all day, clearing our heads,” Olivia pointed out. She was standing in the gap of the open passenger door, probably considering whether she should hop back into the car. But I couldn’t let her, of course.

“Twenty minutes,” I told her. “Half an hour, tops.”

She laughed. “Is this some kind of test?”

“Test?”

“You know, throw the girl who’s afraid to swim into the middle of the deep end and see if she can make her way out?”

“Liv. No.”

She folded her arms across her chest. “Dad, what’s going on? Are you trying to ditch me here or something? I mean—” she spoke through my protests “—it would make a great headline and a nice chapter in my memoirs and all, but I’d just as soon not be the girl who has to make her own way in the world after being left at a second-rate hotel in Winnemucca, Nevada.”

I put my hand over my heart, offended. “You think this hotel is second-rate?”

It was the best flippant comment I could come up with on short notice, but it must have worked. Liv shook her head at me and fumbled in her pocket for her room swipe-key. “All right, Mr. I Don’t Want to Spend the Evening in the Company of my Eccentric Sixteen-Year-Old Daughter. If you’re gone for more than half an hour, I’m alerting police and local authorities and Mom. We’ll put out a—what do you call it?—elder alert.”

“Deal.” Even though my entire body was on edge, and the few bites of French dip were threatening to make a reappearance, I grinned at her.
Everything’s fine. Why wouldn’t it be?
“Hey, I’m going to make sure you get in okay. Why don’t you get into the room, look around and wave to me from the balcony. And I’ll have my phone on, just in case.”

She nodded slowly, then shut the door and walked away, her hands balled into fists, her fists crammed in her pockets. I tracked her all the way up the outside staircase and watched her use the swipe-key at the door. The interior light flicked on. A few seconds later she stepped back into the doorway. Instead of a wave, she gave me a military-style salute, turned on her heel and closed the door behind her.

It wasn’t too late to back out of this. The words played like a broken record, stuck on the needle of my conscience. I could dial Zach Gaffaney’s number and feed him some excuse about government surveillance and wiretapping. It wasn’t too late to slide the gearshift into Park and head upstairs with the doggy bag of French dip I was never going to finish. Olivia and I could settle into our beds and watch some mindless TV together, like a dancing competition or a celebrity cook-off, things that were high stakes for other people, but not for us.

I could try again to forget Robert Saenz.

I’d almost managed to do it before, during his short prison tenure. And maybe I would succeed again, at least for a while.

But I knew he would always be there, in the wrinkles of my brain, waiting. As long as he was alive, I would think of him, the man responsible for the death of my son and the wide swath of destruction in its wake.

So long as he was alive.

What’s your purpose in life?
Bill Meyers had asked. And in my mind I’d answered,
To make things right. To kill Robert Saenz.

I pulled over a block from the hotel and dialed Zach’s number. The phone rang once, twice. Maybe he wouldn’t be home, and I would have to call it off.

“Yeah?” It was the same suspicious voice, wary. What had happened to Zach Gaffaney that living in a trailer with all his guns was the life that made the most sense? Was he wondering what had gone wrong with me, for me to be making this call?

“It’s...Curtis.”

“You got the money?”

“Yes.” My right hand went to my wallet, instinctively. It was fatter than normal, stuffed with twenties.

“Cash?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re alone?”

“I’m alone,” I confirmed.

He gave me directions to his place on the outskirts of town, and as I drove, I wiped my clammy palms on my jeans. The night was clear, every branch and mailbox standing out in relief under a garish moon. The whole world was trying to get my attention:
This is real, this is no joke.
I glanced in my mirrors, half expecting lights behind me. Or maybe judgment would come from above—a single bolt of lightning out of a clear sky.

Zach was waiting for me, peeking out of his trailer to make sure I was alone. He took a half step onto a metal fold-down stair, looking twitchy and restless. I might not have recognized him—when he’d been with Marcia he had been more or less clean-shaven, even if he had preferred concert T-shirts and jeans with ragged hems. Now he wore camouflage pants and a stained wife beater, and his hair hung long down his back.

He held out a hand, palm up, and I passed him the wad from my pocket. He counted it slowly out loud.

I glanced around, but the nearest residence, another trailer, was at least a quarter mile down the road. I had been prepared to say no if asked inside, but Zach seemed as uneasy about having me there as I was uneasy to be there. For all I knew, his entire property was rigged with homemade explosives, ready to be detonated at the first sign of trouble.

He reached back through the open door into the trailer and came out with a revolver—a Colt .38 special, as we’d agreed. “It’s loaded,” he said, and I took the gun carefully, remembering the golden rule I’d learned in my research: keep your finger off the trigger and the gun is completely harmless. Again, I felt the shakiness in my hands and tried to hide it by stowing the gun in my waistband.

When I looked up, Zach was studying me, more relaxed now that the money was wedged deep in his pocket. “So, you’re just passing through or what?”

“Yeah, passing through,” I confirmed.

He seemed to consider me, more focused now. I wasn’t sure if he remembered me from all those years before; he wasn’t the only one who had changed. “Well, you take care,” he said finally, and with a last look around, he vanished inside the trailer, the door slapping shut. He must have pressed a switch, because a second later the light outside his trailer was extinguished, and I had to stumble my way, half running, back to the Explorer.

It wasn’t until I was back in the hotel parking lot that I gave into my fear, realizing how wrong things could have gone. I might have walked into some kind of sting, for example, with an entire SWAT team waiting for me at the other end. Zach might have been waiting to rob me, the unsuspecting moron who had shown up at a secluded location with hundreds of dollars in cash. Any number of things could have happened, and then Olivia would have been left in our hotel room, waiting, her anxiety escalating to full-blown panic.

But somehow, it had worked. I almost felt like laughing—this was exactly the sort of nightmare that gun control advocates worried about, if even an idiot like me could get his hands on a weapon.

Now I just had to get to Omaha, drop Olivia off safely and finally, be on my way.

olivia

In the morning Dad was awake before I was, showered and dressed and sipping coffee from a paper cup by the time I opened my eyes.

“Ready for some fun?”

“Um, no,” I groaned, looking at the digital alarm clock on the nightstand. “It’s only 7:45.”

“Usually we’re at school by now,” he pointed out.

“But this is vacation. This is our grand
voyage.
”

Dad rolled his eyes. “Still. Bus leaves in half an hour.”

I struggled to a sitting position. “What bus?”

“It’s an expression.”

“I don’t think that’s an expression.”

He sighed. “Just hurry up, Liv. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

Grumbling, I dragged myself out of bed and began digging around in my suitcase, sorting my clothes into piles. I’d been living out of a suitcase for exactly one day, and already my whole world felt disorganized.

We were on the road by eight-thirty, an undigested, doughy cinnamon roll from the sorry-looking continental breakfast lodged awkwardly in my stomach. I dug in my backpack and came up with my Fear Journal, just so I could have it at the ready. I’d filled several pages last night, while Dad was “clearing his head,” but he’d been back within a half hour, as promised, bearing his and hers giant blue slushies. We’d fallen asleep in front of an episode of
Law and Order: SVU
and I’d woken with an electric-blue tongue.

And now this, whatever
this
was. We passed Battle Mountain and Elko, the towns resting flat on the horizon, their buildings as small as doll furniture. I squinted into the distance, trying to figure it out.
Surprise! I’m leaving you in the middle of Nevada.
Or
Surprise! We’re not going to Omaha at all. We’re going to drive all the way to the East Coast to get some really great lobster.
Whatever he was thinking, Dad seemed more relaxed than he had yesterday, but more focused, too—like a ship captain following the route that had been charted for him.

Eventually, we took an exit marked by a small sign: Bonneville Salt Flats. I took off my headphones and sat up straight, paying attention as we drove north, the freeway behind us.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

We went miles without passing another car. I looked at my cell phone: one single bar for reception. A mountain range was ahead of us; to the right was a vast, empty space that I realized must be the salt flats. The experience was freaky in an end-of-time sort of way, as if we were driving into a
Twilight Zone
version of our own world after it had been decimated by an asteroid or whatever it was that decimated entire worlds.

And then we turned right, down a skinny road that led to nowhere. The pavement stopped abruptly and all around us, as far as I could see, was a shimmering white sea of salt. Above us, the sky was so blue it made my eyes ache.

“What is this?”

Dad explained it to me: we were looking at the remnants of a massive salt lake, now a forty-mile stretch of land so desolate that it was used for setting land speed records. “That’s later in the year, though—August, mainly. Right now we’ve pretty much got the place to ourselves. What do you think?”

“It’s cool.” It was a bit of an understatement for how vast the space was, how shiny and strange.

Dad slid the Explorer into Park and took the keys out of the ignition.

“What are you doing? We’re getting out?”

He unbuckled his seat belt. “We’re switching places. You’re going to drive.”

“Um, no. I’m not.”

“Yeah, you are. Think about it, Olivia. There are no other cars out here, so you can’t possibly bump into anyone. There’s nothing for miles that you could crash into. You can go as slow or fast as you want. There are no lanes, no crappy drivers who don’t use their blinkers. It’s perfect.”

I could see that these were excellent points, but I was shaking too hard to concede. “I don’t know. I think I’m a better passenger than a driver.”

“Well, let’s find out.” He used the lever on the bottom of his seat carefully, inching the seat forward to accommodate my height.

“But I don’t have any training or anything.”

Dad walked around the Explorer and tugged the passenger door open. “Let’s go, Liv. The world is your salt flat.”

I bit my lip. “Is that supposed to be funny?”

“Definitely not.” He gestured over his shoulder to miles of glistening, empty white. “What could go wrong?”

“That’s the last question to ask
me,
” I said. “I’m the chief cataloguer of what can go wrong.”

Dad waited.

“It is pretty,” I conceded, stepping out of the car. Pea-sized pebbles of salt crunched beneath my feet like clumps of snow. I took a few steps, digging the toes of my combat boots into the salt, and then picked up speed, breaking into an almost-run, sending salt flying like gravel. “Dad!” I called over my shoulder, the words reverberating off the flats.

For just a moment, I felt like a kid—a happy kid, the one I’d almost forgotten about, who had lived in my body before Daniel died.

“Liv! Catch!” Dad called suddenly, and I turned in time to see his key ring hurtling through the air in my general direction. I sighed, snagging the keys before they hit the ground.

We climbed back in the Explorer, and Dad talked me through it—foot on the brake, shift to Drive, ease onto the gas. We left the paved road and glided onto the flats, the tires slipping at first, skidding slightly before finding their traction.

It was the coolest and the scariest thing I’d ever done.

“Okay,” Dad said, settling back for the ride. “Now don’t be afraid to go more than ten miles an hour.”

I felt his smile rather than saw it, since I didn’t dare to look anywhere other than straight ahead. The Explorer was parallel to the freeway, which was just a tiny gray line in the distance. I took a deep breath, pressed down on the gas and just
drove.
The sun glinted off the salt, the whole valley a vast mirage of diamonds. Dad rolled down the windows and the air hit us, briny and sharp, the way wet beach towels smelled on the drive back from the ocean. My skin felt tingly and alive. I was having way too much fun to remember how terrified I was.

“Let her loose,” Dad instructed, and I pushed down harder on the gas, squealing as the Explorer lost its footing and found it, digging eagerly into grooves of salt left by other drivers, releasing a reservoir of pent-up energy.

Tears gathered in the corner of my eyes, but I was laughing, too. I brought the speedometer up to eighty before I eased up on the gas and spun the car around in a wide, arcing turn. We lurched forward as the car came to a complete stop, but Dad was right—it didn’t matter. There was just about nothing I could screw up here. There was no speed limit to break and, as long as I stayed clear of the mountains, nothing to brake for, either. There wasn’t one single thing like a tree or a street sign that I could hit, not a single pedestrian in danger. And even though I was in the middle of nowhere, somehow it wasn’t lonely at all. It was almost as if the whole universe had taken me into its arms and given me a big, gentle squeeze.

Let it go, Olivia. Let it go.