The Fragile World (25 page)

But that day Dad was in rare form. Maybe he’d been planning his invectives from the time I’d called to inform Mom of our visit. I’d expected the slights directed toward me—shaming me was basically his pastime—but since I’d never dared to bring a friend to our house, I wasn’t prepared for the way he went after Kathleen. Poor Kathleen. So trusting, so eager to make a good impression, she was nothing more than a slab of meat in front of the jackal’s cage.

“You’re a student at the college, too?” my father had asked.
The college—
as if it didn’t have a name, or he didn’t know which college it was. Another slight.

Kathleen nodded. Maybe she didn’t want to encourage him in the conversation; maybe she hoped a nod would suffice.

“You study science, too?” The word came out with a sneer. I wasn’t sure what my dad knew about science, if maybe he had an image in his mind of my sixth grade project for the science fair, presented on a tri-fold piece of cardboard from a box that my mother had brought home from her job in the school cafeteria. No matter what was on the front—all the hours of research, the carefully stenciled letters—the back of the box had said Charmin. It was a toilet paper box. Dad had ridiculed it just as much as my classmates.

“No,” Kathleen said, hesitantly. “I’m an art history major.”

“What’s that?” My father looked genuinely confused, and I suppose it was possible he’d never heard the two words paired that way.
Art
he probably knew, and
history,
too—not that he’d had any use for the former, and the latter was a set of facts and figures that had benefited him in no way.

“Well...I mean, I’m studying the different movements of art....” Kathleen stammered.

I was an asshole for not jumping in at that moment. That’s what I should have done. I should have asked, “What are
you
working on these days, Dad?” and let him regale us with the stories of the sleaze of his last foreman, of so-and-so who had been chosen for a job that should have been his. Or maybe I could have asked about the Bears, which had long been the sole passion in my father’s life, along with alcohol. Da Bears and da bottle.

“The different movements of art,” my father echoed. He turned around to face my mother, the only audience member who had ever been fully on his side, no matter what the argument or issue. “Weehee! Did you hear that, Lorene? The movements of art!”

“It’s very nice,” my mother said, still smiling, still somewhat dazed. I wasn’t sure if she’d ever heard of art history, either, but I imagine there were things all the time that my mother heard that she simply filtered out, sorting them into a massive and growing pile of things she would never need to know or care about.

“It’s— I mean, like neoclassicism—” Kathleen stuttered, and I took her by the arm, guiding her slightly behind me.

“The movements of art!” My father hooted. “I guess I’m too uneducated to know anything about the movements of art! I’m more concerned with the movements of my bowels. That’s what I think about art, too, come to think of it!”

Kathleen made a little whimpering sound, and I told her over my shoulder, “We’re leaving, don’t worry.” To my father, I said, “Dad, that’s enough.”

My father did a strange little dance in front of us, dipping from one side to another, the arm with his glass extended as if he were leading an invisible partner. It was probably the most exercise he’d had in a while, the longest he’d stood without leaning against something. “This is who my son picks!” he whooped. “An aaaht history major!”

I nudged Kathleen and, with my hand at the small of her back, we retraced our steps through the stale air of the den into the hallway.

“Aww! Did I offend you?” my father jeered. “Are you too high and mighty to be in this house? My son, the scientist, and his girlfriend, the
artiste?
”

I ignored him. “We’ll never come here again,” I told Kathleen, even though I wasn’t sure there would be a “we” after this. But it was just as much a promise to myself: I couldn’t let myself go there again. It had never been
home,
and it wouldn’t ever be now.

My mother came huffing behind us, frazzled. “Do you have to go? I was hoping you would stay for dinner, so we could get to know your friend a little better.”

We were outside by then, Kathleen halfway down the sidewalk. I caught my mother by the shoulders and said, “I wish you could get to know Kathleen. She’s wonderful. You’d love her. But we can’t stay in this house another minute.”

It was as if my words had shaken free a sudden lucid moment. Her eyes widened. “If you’d come earlier,” my mother pleaded. “Next time come earlier in the day, when he’s just waking up. He’s better then.”

I’d said this to her a dozen times during my adolescence, testing the waters:
What if we left? Couldn’t we find somewhere else?
I tried it again, one last time. “Mom, you don’t need to stay here. Can’t I help you find a place to go?”

Before my eyes, she reverted to her dazed state, as if she couldn’t fathom what I was talking about, or why in the world I might suggest such a thing. Leave? Never. Why?

Dad was still yelling when we got into the Datsun, something unintelligible and angry, a final goodbye. I didn’t look at Kathleen, who was bent over, sobbing in her seat. We drove for a few blocks, past the run-down homes, the cars up on blocks in driveways, the battered strollers abandoned on front stoops. Before our freeway exit, I pulled into a restaurant parking lot and cut the engine. Kathleen was still sobbing, her face hidden by her curls.

“I’m sorry,” I said, finally. It had been stupid to bring her, cruel to force my father on her. I wasn’t apologizing for my father’s behavior so much as for my entire life, for not growing up in a decent neighborhood with decent parents who held down decent jobs. But most of all, I was sorry because I had lost Kathleen—hadn’t I? She wasn’t looking at me; her gaze was fixed on a metal trash bin, as if it were the most interesting thing in the world.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, daring to put a hand on her thigh, just above her knee. “Kathleen, I never should have brought you—”

She whirled, her face puffy, black smudges of mascara like animal tracks around her eyes. “Why did you?”

I shook my head, bracing myself for the impact of her words.

“Was it to get back at me or something?”

“To get back at you?”

“For having the family I have. You’ve been saying that all along, only I didn’t really understand what you were getting at. How my parents are wonderful, my brother wonderful, our house wonderful, our life
wonderful
. And all along you were just making fun of them, you were just resenting me for it!”

“Kathleen, I wasn’t making fun of you. And I love your family.”

“But you could have told me! You knew what this would be like! How could you let me walk in there, thinking I was going to have some normal kind of meet-the-parents moment, when you knew? You knew!”

“You’re right,” I told her, fingering the keys in the ignition. “I knew what would happen. Well, that’s not exactly true. I knew it would be awful, but it’s always a different form of awful. Something new sets him off.... But it’s always the same, too—he’s always drunk, there’s always some kind of score to settle, he wants to get the last word in, he wants to win, and she makes excuses for him.”

Kathleen looked at me, wiping away tears. “How long...?”

“Has he been a bully? Been an alcoholic? Let’s see...how old am I now?”

She softened, pity creeping into her voice. “You mean, you grew up like that? All alone in that house with them?”

“I wasn’t always there. I had school nine months out of the year, and I worked, and I figured out how to leave.” I didn’t tell her that I arrived to school before anyone but the janitor, and stayed late for homework help even though I didn’t need it. On Saturdays I sat at the library until it closed, and when I was home, I stayed locked in my room as much as possible. Summers—until I was fourteen and old enough for my first job—had been endless. I had already removed myself from that scared boy who had shut himself in the closet with a flashlight, reading, sometimes humming to himself to drown out the sound of his father’s voice. It had been three years since I’d slept in that house, although sometimes I still woke in the middle of the night, the noise of a door slamming somewhere in the dorm bringing me to consciousness in a cold sweat.

My hand was still on her lap, and Kathleen curled her fingers around mine. “You don’t have to apologize. I should. You tried to tell me, but I didn’t understand.”

“But I could have tried harder. I just wanted you to really know what you were getting into. With me. If we were...” Red-faced, I backtracked from the word
married.
“If we were together down the road, it would just be me. There wouldn’t be any family on my side, no one to support us in any way if we needed it.” This thought had been occurring to me more often lately, the more serious Kathleen and I became, the more entangled our lives and future plans. I hadn’t just been deprived of a childhood, but any children I had would be deprived of grandparents, of cozy family meals, of presents at Christmas, of Grandparents’ Day at school.

She nodded slowly, then said, “I don’t want to go back there.”

“We won’t.”

“I mean, ever.”

“Ever,” I agreed.

“I don’t want them to be a part of our lives.”

I grasped this like a life preserver and let it pull me to the surface.
Our lives.
“They won’t be.”

Kathleen dabbed at her eyes, smearing her mascara further. “Or our kids. I don’t want him talking to our kids, not ever. Not even on birthdays and Christmas. No phone calls. No letters.”

There was a strange tug in my chest, as if something long anchored had broken free inside me. “Kathleen,” I pressed my thumb and forefinger to her chin, angled it gently so we were facing. “We don’t have kids.”

She laughed, a bubbly sound that meant she was still on the verge of tears. “I meant, when.
When
we have kids. Or if. Maybe I meant
if.
”

“I like when,” I said and kissed her.

By the end of the summer, we were engaged. I kept my promise, not sending an invitation to our wedding, not sending the announcements of Daniel’s birth or Olivia’s. But I had called my mother a few times a year, to find out if she was alive, to tell her I was alive, too.

It was painful to remember that last visit, in a strangely physical way, as if I’d directly defied doctor’s orders and overexerted myself, opening the old wound again. It was best to keep going, to start the car and drive away, to continue on the way to Robert Saenz. There was no expiration date on the promise I’d made Kathleen.

And then, although there was still plenty of daylight left, the light over the front porch came on—a bare bulb, the way it had always been; no fancy fixtures for us Kaufmans, no needless expense on decoration, when that money was better spent on a bottle of Wild Turkey. The light wasn’t on a timer, because nothing in that house was automated. Someone inside had flipped a switch.

There was no other way to see it, except as a summons.

olivia

For the second poorly planned road trip of my life, I was basically already packed, since I hadn’t bothered to unpack when we’d arrived in Omaha. It was nearly nine by the time we were on the road, but so cold that Mom had to blast the heat in her Volvo until my teeth stopped chattering. It was basically summer in California, but just over forty degrees here. The sky was an ominous gray, the sun completely hidden behind wispy clouds.

Mom spent the first twenty minutes of the drive on the phone to Stella, saying vague things like, “Maybe a few more days...” and outright lies like, “it’s just so good for us all to be together.”

When she finally hung up, I turned to her, peeking out from beneath my hoodie. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on, or am I supposed to be picking up clues?”

Mom inhaled sharply and exhaled, the air coming in a quick burst through her nostrils. “This is not how I imagined we would have this conversation. Actually—I didn’t ever imagine we would have this conversation. Your father promised me...”

“You’re killing me here. Is there a plain English version I can listen to, rather than this cryptic parent-speak?”

“Okay. Look, this is going to be strange for you, so you’ll need to hear me out. I’m talking about your grandparents.”

I watched my mother watching the road and tried to decide what was worse—that Dad had cracked up, or that Mom was well on her way to Crazyville and taking me with her. Either that, or I had sustained a serious head injury and was stuck in a nightmare loop in the middle of my coma. Funny how that seemed like the best option.

“Mom,” I said carefully. “Are we talking about dead people?” Grandpa and Grandma Eberle’s funerals had been years ago, although not so long ago that I didn’t remember them. And I’d never even met Dad’s parents, who had died long before Daniel was born, although the details had always been spotty in my mind—cancer for him, heart disease for her, or the other way around? Either way, I had exactly zero grandparents to call me on my birthday and spoil me rotten with silly little gifts on Valentine’s Day and Easter.

The look on Mom’s face suggested that whatever she’d eaten for breakfast hadn’t agreed with her. “Olivia, listen to me. Your grandparents—your dad’s parents—aren’t dead. They live outside Chicago.”

I pressed my hands to my temples.

“Liv, I’m sorry. There’s a very good reason why we didn’t tell you this sooner. In fact, if you want to blame someone, blame me. I made your father promise.... Aren’t you going to say something?”

“I’m pretty sure that sooner or later I’m just going to wake up, and I’m not going to waste energy trying to figure out this nightmare.”

“Liv, really—”

“You’ve been hiding my grandparents from me?”

“Believe me, it’s been for your own good. Look, I’m going to tell you something...”

I stared out the window, trying to listen, although my mind kept getting hung up on one simple fact. Somehow, I had grandparents who were alive, who lived near Chicago. My living family, which, as far as I had known, included only my parents, an aunt and uncle and a cousin, had just grown by two.

“For your own good,” Mom was saying, and I realized that she’d mentioned this several times already. Apparently, I didn’t just have living grandparents—I had living grandparents who were so awful, they were more monster than human, more tyrants than grandparents. Mom used the words
alcoholic
and
abusive
and
passive-aggressive
and
better to believe they were dead than to ever have even the slightest contact with them.

“But they’re alive?”

“As far as I know, yes,” Mom said. “That’s what I’m figuring. Your dad must know more.”

“He’s never mentioned anything to
me.
” Of course not—they were supposed to be dead. Maybe this was where I’d taken my cue about Daniel:
we don’t talk about dead people in this family.

“No, he wouldn’t have. Your father spent a long time trying to get away from them, to make a better life. It was one of the things we agreed on from the beginning, that they wouldn’t have any contact with you kids.”

It was too much to process. “But I share genes with these people?”

Mom flinched. Did she have any idea of the host of new fears she’d dumped in my lap? I reached down to my backpack.

“I made him promise,” Mom continued, her hands clenched on the wheel. All of Iowa was whizzing by—cornfields and tractors parked beside barns and little towns and American-made cars—and we were on our way to Chicago, to pursue my probably crazy father who might be visiting my previously dead grandparents with a potential gun.

“What are you doing?” Mom asked, because I was starting to get really panicky now. I dumped out the contents of my backpack on the floorboard. Pens, some lose pieces of gum, a novel I’d brought along but hadn’t opened, a half-eaten and most likely now stale candy bar, but no Fear Journal.

“Where...?” I closed my eyes, remembering. That morning, I’d gone downstairs, read Dad’s note and come back upstairs to write everything down in my Fear Journal. Except I couldn’t; the words wouldn’t actually come. And then I’d thrown everything in my suitcase and zipped up my backpack, leaving the Fear Journal on my bed, beneath the comforter. It might as well have been on the moon for all the good it could do me now. From the woozy, unsteady place that was my mind, I thought,
This is what it’s like to operate without a safety net.
I managed to squeak out, “My Fear Journal.”

“Are you sure? It must be there somewhere.”

“Of course I’m sure!”

“We can buy another one, maybe when we stop for gas again,” Mom offered.

It wasn’t that simple, of course, but I couldn’t expect her to understand. The comfort was in the ritual of the book, in the fact that I could look back over my old fears and see how, one way or another, I’d avoided or survived them, and know that the same thing was probably going to happen with whatever new fear I was about to record. It wasn’t the notebook itself that was special—
that
could be replaced. It was everything else. “I don’t know if I can do this,” I whispered, soft enough so that Mom might not have heard me even if she wasn’t in the middle of a complicated litany.

Her hands were clenched on the wheel, knuckles white. “I told him he couldn’t ever see them again, not if he loved me. I didn’t want them to know anything about our lives together, or about you and Daniel.”

“So my monster grandparents don’t even know I exist?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What about Daniel? Did they know about him?” This had to be one of the most awful things I could imagine. Even a monster would have loved Daniel.

Mom shook her head. “Olivia, I can’t even tell you how awful they were...I mean, you couldn’t even imagine.”

“Maybe I could,” I said. “I watch HBO.”

“Since when do you have HBO?”

“That’s the worry here? That Dad and I have a subscription to HBO?”

“Never mind,” Mom said. “You’re right. But if these people had been involved in our lives, in your life, in any capacity...no, I can’t even imagine it.”

I stared miserably out the window. As quickly as I’d inherited two more living relatives, my world had shrunk again, since these living relatives had turned out to be horrible and defective. Fascists, maybe. Child abusers.

“And Dad was okay with that promise?” I asked finally. “I mean, he didn’t want to get in touch with his parents at any point? Not even to brag about how wonderful his kids were and all that?”

Mom spoke more quietly now, and I had to strain to hear her over the sound of tires on asphalt and wind whipping past our windows. “That’s one of the things I was worried about, after Daniel died. I mean, your dad seemed like he was really losing it. And I thought—if he turns into the kind of guy his father was—if somehow he couldn’t fight off that grip of genetics...”

“Dad’s no monster, though.”

“No, but still—”

I felt angry on his behalf. “There’s no
but.
Dad’s not a monster. He’s not even close to being a monster. He’s my dad. He’s wonderful. He’s just... Right now...”

“Okay, Liv. I’m sorry. You’re right—he’s not a monster. He’s this wonderfully complicated man who’s just doing what he thinks is right.”

I stared at her. It was the nicest thing I could remember her saying about Dad, if not exactly a confession of love. “Okay, then. But why do you think he’s going to Chicago? Why would he want to see his parents, if they were so horrible?”

It took Mom a while to formulate an answer. “I guess...it just seems like unfinished business.”

“Unfinished business? Like a score to settle?” I thought of the bullets under his seat, and the gun I’d never actually seen, but could picture now, real as the road in front of us.

“No, I don’t think...no. Nothing like that.”

“You could try to be more convincing, for my sake.”

Mom’s smile was grim. “We’re just going to concentrate on getting there, okay? We’re going to make sure nothing awful happens.”

Exactly how would we do that? To calm myself, I started reciting these new fears silently, so I could remember them for later, when and if I was ever reunited with my Fear Journal. At the same time, I was remembering the advice Dr. Fisher had given me, about sorting fears into categories—things that had happened, or were likely to, and things that were just plain ridiculous. I hoped all of this was ridiculous, an absurd and someday funny series of jumping to conclusions. But if any of this were true, we needed to stop him—it was as simple and complicated and horrible as that.

And then, just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it began to rain.

At first, it was just a few drops on the windshield, brushed away intermittently with gentle whisks of the wipers. Traffic slowed, wheels swishing against the asphalt in an almost peaceful way, like the sound of a miniature home water fountain.

It’s not that I believe in omens, necessarily, but I don’t like to overlook possibilities. Every single day since Dad and I had left Sacramento, the weather had been the stuff of storybooks: blue skies, fluffy clouds—“cumulus,” Dad would say if he were here, but of course, he was not. The sky had been so intensely blue over parts of Nevada and Utah that it had looked fake, like a black-and-white film that had been colorized with an unrealistically strong palette.

Just outside Des Moines, the rain got serious. Traffic slowed, headlights came on. When we passed trucks, or they passed us, giant whorls of water crested up against the Volvo.

“We aren’t really going to drive in this,” I shouted, because the sound of the rain had drowned out the possibility of a normal speaking voice.

“We’re going to be fine,” Mom called back. “You’ve been in California too long. People in the Midwest drive in rain like this all the time.”

Maybe I had been spoiled without
real
rain—northern California had been in a “drought condition” for as long as I could remember—but this was ridiculous. It felt like a sign from the heavens—
Stop this trip!
Turn back immediately!
“This is beyond rain, though! It’s a postapocalyptic downpour,” I protested.

Mom shook her head. “Postapocalyptic? I forgot how funny you are.”

Funny? I stared at her. Who could joke at a time like this?

“Look at all the other cars on the road,” Mom said, as if this were reassuring, rather than cause for further alarm. Apparently, the other drivers were just as stupid and stubborn as we were, and they weren’t going to be deterred by a few tons of water.

“Oh, I see. Everyone else is doing it, so why can’t we?” I checked off the reasons on my fingers. “Diminished visibility, slick roads, windshield wipers breaking, the possibility of sliding off the highway into a ditch and not being discovered until tomorrow since it’s dark and no one would be able to see our overturned car or hear our weak cries for help.”
The possibility of not getting to Dad in time.
I had worked myself into a breathless frenzy. I tried to instruct myself as a therapist would a patient:
Relax, breathe, think of happier things.

“Well,” Mom said carefully. “Those things may be true. But still—your father is out there, and we need to get to him.”

She was right, of course, and I was a scared, selfish brat. Dad was heading off to find his monster-parents, and we were just going to have to battle the Storm of the Century like good little soldiers. I fished my cell phone out of my backpack and called Dad’s number. I listened to his outgoing message and I hung up, not sure where to begin.

“Let’s just get there, okay?” Mom said, gently. “I’ll be careful, but let’s just find him.”

I bit down on the cuff of my sweatshirt. There was simply nowhere to look—out the window was like watching a bleak forecast on the Weather Channel, and closing my eyes didn’t make what was outside the window any less real.

There was really nothing to do but pray—even if I wasn’t the sort of person who prayed, or at least not with any specific expectations. Saying a prayer was like writing another journal entry, or talking to a family therapist, or just letting out all my thoughts. I never could shake the general self-centeredness of it, that I was throwing all my troubles and problems onto God when there were way more important issues in the world like war and famine and clean sources of drinking water. As crappy as my life sometimes seemed—even right then, with the windshield wipers waving back and forth like spindly skeleton arms, and my father doing who-knew-what—there was always someone who had it worse, who needed prayers more than I did.

Still, I prayed. I prayed about the rain and about Dad continuing solo on the trip we’d started together. I prayed about whatever it was that he thought he had to do and wherever it was that his journey would take him, a desperate, middle-aged pilgrim without a Mecca or a shrine to St. Thomas à Becket. I prayed about the all-too-real bullets that had been taped beneath his seat, and the all-too-possible gun that I had never found.

While I prayed, a shiver ran down the length of my body, from my scalp to my toes, cold in the tips of my combat boots. I figured that wherever he was going, Dad’s trip was a lonely one, with a dark destination. But I prayed I was wrong about that, too.