The Fragile World (21 page)

olivia

I woke up surrounded by white blankets, white pillows and a yellow bedspread, and couldn’t for the life of me remember where I was—what city, what hotel. Then I spotted the row of boxes with Mom’s handwriting and sat up, groggily.

I’d plugged in my cell phone last night and left it charging on the nightstand, but it took me a moment to realize why I was awake. There was an alert on the screen, a message from Sam.

So? Did you make it? Did you talk to your mom?

Sam.
Only a day ago we’d been standing in front of the automotive shop, kissing. I brushed my fingers over my lips, reviving the memory. It had been beautiful and sweet, but now it felt sad, like a long-ago dream, the details already fading. I wrote back:

Not yet. Today, I promise.

I cracked open the bedroom door. Maybe this was my best chance, while Dad was still in the basement, sleeping. The door to Grandpa and Grandma’s room—Mom’s room, now—was open, the bed already made. I paused on the stairs, listening to the sounds of my mother in the kitchen, achingly familiar. The refrigerator door opened and closed, something was whisked in a bowl. And she was humming. Funny how I’d forgotten that, as if the memory itself had climbed into her Volvo and left along with her physical body.

Mom had always hummed—when she was scrubbing the bathroom floors, sanding down a piece of furniture, staring into the open refrigerator while she planned our groceries for the week. It was a trait she had shared with Daniel, but now I wondered: Had her humming influenced him, or had his humming influenced her? Mom wasn’t necessarily on-key most of the time, and she would get stuck on one or two lines of a song, usually an advertisement or, between October and January, a Christmas song, and she would hum it until we went insane—
Santa baby, slip a sable under the tree, for me....
But sometimes she and Daniel would join forces in a humming duet. Once, I remembered, Daniel had been riding in the passenger seat and I’d been in the backseat, and the two of them together had hummed their way through
Yellow Submarine
, laughing and cracking each other up.

Standing there on the stairs, I tried very hard to remember Mom humming after Daniel died. There must have been some time, at least once, maybe when she was ferrying me from school to the therapist, or when she was reupholstering our old couch...or had that been one more thing that died, along with Daniel?

But when I rounded the corner and came into the kitchen, she was still humming, stirring something at the stove. “Hey!” She looked torn, as if she wanted to drop the spoon and give me a hug, but settled instead for a little air kiss as I passed. “How does a vegetable frittata sound?”

I eased into a chair at the table. “I should warn you that my body may not be capable of digesting anything that doesn’t contain vast amounts of sugar or salt.”

Mom glanced at me, concerned, and did some quick whisking in the bowl on the counter. “That bad?”

“No,” I said, feeling stupid for a joke that had fallen flat, and feeling defensive on Dad’s behalf. “Not that bad at all.”

“Well, anyway, your dad’s just gotten into the shower. He must be exhausted, driving all that way.”

“Hey! I drove part of the way.”

Mom glanced again in my direction, wounded. I wasn’t planning these little jabs, but maybe there was an unconscious part of me that wanted to hurt her, because they just kept coming.

“You didn’t tell me you had your license,” she said.

“I don’t. But remember, I told you that Dad let me drive in Utah, when we were on the salt flats.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Mom said. She flipped something in the pan with a spatula and stood staring down at it, as if without her attention it would burn. And maybe it would—that was a perfectly good reason for her not to look at me. But I couldn’t help feeling the awkwardness of the moment, the way nothing I said came out exactly right, the flash of disappointment on her face when I’d evaded her kiss.

This was the time, I realized. I just had to come out and tell her, find a way to get the conversation going. We would get into our rhythm, that mother-daughter patter we’d once had, that intimate, confessional space. The trouble was that I’d gotten so used to being just with Dad. He and I kept up a constant, running shtick of sarcasm and puns and double meanings. It was our defense mechanism: laugh at ourselves, joke about our failures, crack wise, and nothing in the world could hurt us. Now, with Mom, it was like we had to find our footing all over again.

“Want to pour us some juice?” Mom asked, and I slipped off the chair to comply. This should have been a simple task, but the refrigerator was one of those fancy ones designed to blend in with the cabinetry, and I first pulled open a cupboard and stared blankly at a row of canned food. Mom laughed, and I quipped, “Oh, you didn’t want me to make it from scratch?”

Finally, I poured orange juice into two tiny glasses. “So, Mom...”

“So,” Mom said soberly, as if I’d said something profound.

“I wanted to tell you that—” I froze, hearing a door open and footsteps approaching on the wood floor.

“Oh, your dad’s out of the shower. You want to get him a glass, too?”

I stood again, numbly. I’d blown it. The thing to do was to blurt it all out in one fell swoop.
Dad was on the roof of the cafeteria and maybe going to kill himself and there were bullets in our car.
Why was that so hard?

“What were you going to say?” Mom asked as Dad entered the kitchen, holding a bundle of dirty clothes. He was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved polo, his typical off-work uniform.

“Good morning,” he said, and just stood there awkwardly, as if he were waiting to be invited any farther into the room. But at least he was
here,
not avoiding us entirely like he had done when Mom visited in Sacramento. I took pity on him and handed him the glass of juice.

“I just wanted to know the agenda,” I said. It took my parents a moment to react, as if I had communicated with them in Morse code, and they were counting out the dots and dashes. “For today. I wanted to know what we’re doing today.”

Dad looked at Mom.

“Well!” she said, bustling back into motion. “Breakfast, obviously. And then I figured I’d show you around Omaha, if you wanted to see the shop....”

Dad and I took seats at the table, and Mom fussed around, delivering hot slabs of frittata onto our plates. I looked at Dad, waiting to follow his lead. This trip had been his idea, after all.

“Of course,” Dad gushed, and I almost laughed, his enthusiasm felt so fake.
Of course! We absolutely want to see the place where you spend all your time when you aren’t spending it with us.

“Liv?” Mom was waiting for me.

“Um, yeah,” I said.

“Great. I told Stella I would be taking today off and maybe tomorrow, and then we’ll see from there, I guess. We can take a little drive around Omaha, find a spot for lunch and then tonight Uncle Jeff and Aunt Judy want to have us over for dinner. Sound good?”

“Sure,” I said.

“And if there’s anything else you want to see, in particular...I mean, if you need anything, we can go shopping, or I could take you by the high school. It’s only a mile or so away.”

“Why would I want to see the high school?”

Mom shrugged. “It’s where I went to school.”

I looked at Dad again, but he had set down his clothes on an empty chair and was digging into his breakfast as if he hadn’t eaten in a week. When I thought about it, he really hadn’t eaten much on our trip. He’d picked at all of our meals and then snacked in between on the odd handful of chips, washed down by giant-sized cups of whatever he’d found inside gas stations.

Still, I thought it was strange that he wouldn’t even glance at me, even as I kept my eyes on his face. We were both hiding our secrets, but I had the feeling that Dad’s were darker than mine, and more monumental than I could begin to imagine. I felt a little shiver, like a pinch on the back of the neck. A part of me was scared for him, wrestling with that dark thing I couldn’t even begin to name. And a part of me was scared for myself, too.

curtis

For our grand tour of Omaha, Olivia rode shotgun and I sat in the backseat like a banished toddler. The sky was a lazy blue with intermittent clouds that lay low on the horizon. As she drove, Kathleen pointed out items of interest—the historic buildings, the parks with walking trails, a new yarn store that offered weeknight knitting lessons, a café with seventeen blends of espresso, a Whole Foods.

“Mmm-hmm,” Olivia said, stifling a yawn. She glanced into the side-view mirror, which was angled so she had a perfect shot of me. I gave her a sloppy grin, and she returned it uncertainly.

Look around, Olivia,
I willed her
. See how happy you could be here.

We were nearing the Old Market district of Omaha, an artsy area with galleries and museums and cobblestone streets. Kathleen rambled on, with the hyper-enthusiastic voice of an HGTV host, “And this building used to be an old grain mill of some sort, but now it’s being converted into condos. I have a client who just bought in to the building, so I got a peek inside. It’s the most amazing space—a little cavernous, maybe....”

I had seen pictures of Kathleen’s store on the website, which I’d browsed every so often, marveling at what she’d accomplished. She’d borrowed some money from her brother up front to be a co-owner in the business, a buyer and creative partner who sometimes worked on special pieces for commission. The store exhibited the old-meets-new style that represented her journey as a designer. When we’d first moved to California, the ink on her art history degree still drying, Kathleen had started as a clerk in an antiques store and worked her way up to being a sought-after buyer for a number of dealers around the Sacramento area. It had always amazed me, when I’d accompanied her on a Saturday driving from one estate sale to another, how Kathleen could home in on one particular vase on a cluttered folding table and know something about it—the country of origin, the year, the maker, the materials, the sort of glaze, the technique. “This is an example of Japanese cloisonné, early nineteenth century,” she would murmur. Barely able to restrain herself, she would pull me to the side, out of earshot from the seller, “Those are Windsor chairs, James Chapman Tuttle, late 1700s....” Although I could never distinguish between the finer details she noticed, I found something incredibly sexy about her brain—the sheer amount of data she had accumulated, her mind a glossary of names and dates and pictures.

When we bought our downtown house, it had become the canvas for her mind and the spark that unleashed more genius within. Motivated at least at first by our meager budget, she switched her focus to “reclamation—” finding hidden beauty even in pieces that had been left curbside. An old chicken cage became a coffee table with compartments for the kids’ books; a massive headboard was split into four hinged sections and used as a divider between our kitchen and dining room. She’d sold a similar piece to an admiring friend, and then began to take special projects on commission, refurbishing a buffet for a downtown coffee shop, furnishing an upscale boutique near the convention center.

“I can’t wait for you to see this,” she said now, pulling her Volvo into a space behind the row of buildings. “We could enter through the back, but I really want you to see it from the front, to get the full effect.”

I followed as we made our way down the alley onto a side street, a strange trio. Kathleen was wearing cargo pants, short boots and a black cardigan, her hair upswept in a clip. Sunlight caught a few of her silver strands. Olivia, wearing her standard head-to-toe black, stumbled in her combat boots as she tried to keep up with Kathleen. In my least dirty pair of jeans, I trailed so far behind that outsiders wouldn’t have recognized me as part of the group. It’s just a mother-daughter outing, I thought. This is what they’ll do without me; this is what they’ll look like when I’m not around.

The words SEEDS & SUPPLIES were stenciled across the second floor of the brick building, the sort of retro throwback that Kathleen loved. A smaller sign hung over the double entrance doors:
Absolutely Interior.
Kathleen opened the door, ushering us in with a grand sweep.

“Mom—wow,” Olivia said. “I mean,
wow.
”

“It’s fabulous, Kathleen,” I agreed.

She beamed. “You like it?”

“It’s fantastic.” I touched her on the shoulder, tentative, more of a “well done” pat than anything else, but the familiarity of that shoulder sent a sad thrill through me. What were we, other than skin and sinew and bone?

“Wow,” Olivia said again. “Seriously, wow. It’s a good sign, isn’t it, that I’m speaking only in palindromes?”

It was a former industrial space, reclaimed itself, reinvented. The ceiling was at least thirty feet high with light fixtures dangling like stars from black cords. Although the space was vast, burgeoning with merchandise, the store didn’t feel crowded. Furniture was grouped in cozy arrangements, with startling displays of color and ingenuity—shining dark wood mixed with painted wood, creams and teals and chartreuses, burgundies and silvers and golds.

“We’ve actually been contacted about renting out the space for events, cocktail parties, that kind of thing.” Kathleen’s face was flushed with pride. “Not that it’s exactly easy to move everything out of the way for a large group. And the fear of a spilled glass of wine has kept us from fully entertaining the idea.”

Olivia’s eyes were slowly roving from piece to piece, trying to notice everything. “The whole world should be this beautiful,” she said.

It was the sort of occasion where a person should be able to quote a significant line of poetry—but I had nothing to give. “It’s just fabulous,” I repeated. “Well done.”

“Kathleen! Kathleen’s family!” A woman was striding toward us from the back of the store. I recognized Stella instantly from one of those long-ago Omaha summers—a little heavier, a little more brassily blonde, still Kathleen’s physical opposite. She wore a purple dress, knee-high boots and oversize gold jewelry that clanked when she moved.

“This is Stella,” Kathleen said. “Stella, this is my daughter, Olivia. And I know you met Curtis—”

“Years ago, more than twenty, but who’s counting?” Stella breezed in, extending her hand to Olivia, then me. “Kathleen is a genius, isn’t she?”

Kathleen laughed. “Don’t let Stella fool you. She has every bit as much creative genius, but she’s the more valuable partner because she can sell
anything.
”

Stella linked arms with Kathleen in a chummy way. “Speaking of which...I know you’re officially taking a few days off, but there is something I wanted you to look at, if you can spare a minute.”

“You don’t mind, do you?” Kathleen asked. “Why don’t you look around? Maybe you could pick out something for your birthday, Liv.”

“My birthday isn’t until September,” Olivia objected, but Stella was already leading Kathleen away.

“Let’s wander,” I said. We did so carefully, Olivia’s fingers tracing picture frames, a gold-and-black world globe, the print on a tufted floor cushion. There were probably twenty customers in the store and a few employees in simple black dresses and flats. At the stainless steel counter in the middle of the store, someone was choosing fabric swatches; another employee was wrapping a large box in brown butcher paper. I’d glimpsed this world on the website, but the effect in person was more impressive. It was almost mind-boggling what Kathleen had achieved in three years. I’d filled my days with teaching, with Olivia, with the nagging back-burner thoughts of Robert Saenz, and in that time Kathleen had been creating this entire world out of nothing.

Although I wasn’t sure we were supposed to occupy the merchandise, Olivia and I settled onto a bright yellow sofa. I wondered if Kathleen had worked on this piece, or been involved in its selection. This was a color she loved, the yellow lemony and rich; I could imagine her hand-picking the paisley buttons between the tufts of fabric. Years ago she had taken apart a secondhand sofa on the back patio, just to see how the upholstery worked. Olivia had been seven or eight then, old enough to be bribed with a few dollars to help with the task, to collect and sort the disassembled parts.

Without thinking, I said to Olivia, “Maybe you could get a job here, some kind of summer sales associate, that kind of thing.”

“What am I going to do, telecommute?” she asked sharply.

“It’s just an idea,” I said, backpedaling. “I think you would be really good—”

“Is that what this is all about?”

“This isn’t all about anything.”

We stared at each other, Olivia’s eyes narrowed into icy slits. “You’re lying to me.”

My throat felt tight, as if its walls were closing in. “How am I lying to you?”

“It’s a lie of omission, then.”

I didn’t say anything. My list of omissions was massive and growing longer every second.

“This is about me moving here permanently, isn’t it? That’s why you brought Daniel’s remains with you, because we’re not going home again.”

“You went through my suitcase?” My mind reeled, thinking of the gun. But no—it had been with me the whole time. “I really don’t think you had any right to—”

“Really? After everything you’ve put me through, I’m getting a lecture?”

I took a deep breath, calming myself. Of course she was right. I leaned in closer, but she shifted away to the very end of the sofa. “Olivia...”

“You know what’s going to happen,” she accused. “You’ve been holding all the cards. This is some stupid plan you’ve had all along.”

I didn’t stop her. I couldn’t say
There’s no plan.
I looked around, willing Kathleen to appear, needing her brightness, her optimism, her eternal belief that somehow things could be better.

Olivia wiped at her eyes angrily. “I can’t believe that you’re doing this to me.”

I tried to say “All I wanted...” but she drowned me out, saying what she’d never said before, even though it was the line teenagers all over the world had said to their parents. Daniel had said it to me, and I’d said it to my father. I’d heard my students throw it around when they couldn’t go out on the weekend, when they didn’t get the phone they wanted, when things were in some vague and indefinable way “unfair.” But not Olivia, no matter how much I’d deserved it, no matter how the circumstances had called for it.

“I hate you,” she said, her breath ragged, her words coming out in gasps. “I hate you for this. I hate you for everything.”

Maybe I’d been waiting for it, all this time. Maybe, in a way, it was a blessing. She could let me go. I reached for her again, and she didn’t pull away. She let her gaze drift down to my hand on her leg, as if it were an alien thing, the hand of a stranger, a pervert. I pulled back just as Kathleen approached, her smile fading instantly. She looked at me, indicting without the facts—although if she’d had them, it would have been an indictment all the same.

“What is it?” she asked, the words dangling like a lifeline neither of us could catch.

The store hummed around us. Olivia wiped her eyes carefully on her sleeves, but a smudge of black mascara left a dark shadow on one cheek.

“You know what I want, Mom? You know what I think would be really great?” she asked, her voice rising dangerously.

Kathleen’s eyes darted between us nervously, as if she were afraid to ask.

Olivia was undeterred. She had a brilliant, bogus smile on her face, and I felt my heart clench as if it were caught in a vise. Whatever she said, it would be something I deserved. But I didn’t expect what she said next, when she turned that horrible smile on me, her eyes bright with tears.

“I think the only thing missing from this happy reunion is a trip to the zoo.”