The Fragile World (26 page)

curtis

“Oh!” my mother said when she opened the door. She looked the same as she had twenty-nine years ago, because twenty-nine years ago she had been a prematurely old woman—with wide, cushiony hips and flabby arms, a limp, frowzy perm and deep pouches of sleeplessness under her eyes. She peered over my shoulder, as if a small army might be lurking on her sidewalk. “Well, come in, then,” she said, leaving me to close the door behind myself. “Let me just get my coat.”

“Mom,” I called, causing her retreating figure to halt in the middle of the narrow hallway. It was literally narrower than when I had lived here—the walls had grown inward. I wasn’t imagining this; as my eyes adjusted to the gloomy interior, I noticed boxes stacked against the wall, almost floor to ceiling. They were, predictably enough, liquor boxes—sturdy, small, with two holes for handles, labeled with the names of vodka manufacturers. “Wait a minute. What’s going on?”

She turned, facing me. Her face was relatively unlined, any creases filled by excess fat. It was a recognizable face, of course, but I was relieved not to see any trace of Daniel or Olivia there. “You got my note, then,” she said.

“No, I don’t think so. What note?”

“I sent you a letter last week. To California.”

I shook my head. “I haven’t been in California. I’ve been traveling with Li—with my...” I let that thought trail off, unfinished. “What was the letter about? Are you moving or something?”

She stared at me. “If you didn’t get it, how did you know to come?”

My mouth felt dry, my lips cracked. I wanted to push past her to the kitchen, to take a long drink of water from one of the chipped tumblers in the cupboard next to the sink. On the other hand, I wanted to leave while I could, before I got sucked in any further. I’d had this sense of inevitability during my childhood, that I was in the grip of forces I couldn’t control—Dad’s drinking, Mom’s apathy, the amount of food in the refrigerator, the fact that I’d grown too tall for my pants, or that I would need ten dollars for one field trip or another at school, and it would take a movement of heaven and earth for me to come up with it. Now I felt that vise again, like Dad’s warm grip on my neck, steering me toward something I didn’t want to do. I’d given my mother our Sacramento address years ago, careful to stress that it was
for emergencies only
. Apparently, there had never been any emergencies—until now.

“Where’s Dad?”

“I was just going to see him,” she said, and at the table at the end of the hall, I saw that she had her purse and a brown overcoat ready.

I felt the long ago, familiar relaxation, the tension seeping out of my body. He wasn’t here, then. Maybe I should have known; the house was dark and stale-smelling, but quiet, not possessed by the raving evil spirit that was my father.

“It’s good you came,” my mother continued, struggling into her coat. She had a bit of trouble getting her second arm into the hole, and I stepped forward to help her. It was a surprising sentiment for her to express—it hadn’t occurred to me that she would think it was good to see me. Then, as if to clarify, she added, “This way I don’t have to take the bus.”

My mother didn’t seem the slightest bit disturbed by the state of my car, where the wrappers and empty plastic bottles from my day on the road layered the floorboard. Buckling herself into her seat, she simply rested her steady, orthopedic shoes on top of the mess and stared straight ahead, purse clutched on her lap.

I started the car, then waited, idling, for her to speak. It had been a strange fact of my childhood that my mother was omnipresent and yet not truly there, an empty shell of a person whose personality was marked by placidity. “Oh, no,” she’d said, when my father inevitably threw something against a wall, and then rushed to pick up the shards. “That’s a good boy,” she’d said, when I announced my scholarship to Northwestern, as if she had observed me picking a piece of trash out of the gutter.

Now, in the same mild tone, she said, “Your father is at Mercy.”

“Mercy Hospital?” I echoed.

“Yes, fourth floor,” she said, as if this explained everything.

The rain had settled to a light mist, but the roads were wet enough to send up gray splashes that further blurred visibility. I was grateful for the swishing of the windshield wipers, which somehow covered the need for conversation. We nearly reached the hospital before I got the story, word by painful word, out of my mother. She seemed annoyed to have to tell any of it to me—repeating, several times, that it was all in the letter. The only logical solution, clearly, was to drop her off at Mercy, drive back to California, read the letter and return only when I was able to join the conversation.

My father, it turned out, had quit drinking cold turkey six months before. His liver had held out a surprisingly long time. When I’d thought of him, only very occasionally through the years—fighting back the urge to share good news, to rub success in his face—I’d imagine him wasting away, his days becoming rapidly numbered. One way or another, I figured a tragedy was headed his way—a drunk driving arrest, cirrhosis, a cancer eating its way through his body. The only surprise was that it had taken so long.

Even though he’d stopped drinking, the damage had been done, and Dad had begun to go into “septic,” Mom said—which I took to mean septic shock,
sepsis—
an infection that meant his organs could shut down, that death was a very real possibility. It went without saying that he was not a candidate for a liver transplant—but Mom revealed this with a sharp huff of breath. Did she think this was an injustice, as my father himself probably did?
If I’da been a rich guy, you can bet they woulda sliced me open right then. They woulda cut it out of me right there.

Mom insisted we could walk together, that she didn’t need to be dropped off at the door. I took her elbow as we made our way through the parking garage, feeling a proprietary sense of care for her. I did the math in my head and realized Mom was nearly eighty years old. She had a lumbering, uneasy gait, which may have been from her weight or any number of ailments—a bad hip, a bum knee? We took the elevator down from the parking garage, entered the hospital lobby, and made our way to another bank of elevators. Mom pushed 4 and stepped back.

I asked, “What about all the boxes?”

Mom was watching the lighted display over the doors, which indicated that we were moving from floor one to floor two. “What boxes?”

“At your house. In the hallway, there were all those boxes stacked up.”

We stopped on the second floor and a young woman in blue scrubs entered the elevator and pushed the 3 button.

“Those are all your things. I boxed them up for you.”

“My things?” I asked, as the elevator started again. “What do you mean, my things?”

Mom turned her gaze to me, as if I were the one who needed things explained slowly. “Some books, sheets from your bed, clothes you’d outgrown. Those things.”

I was floored, imagining that the boxes full of my outgrown, secondhand jeans and T-shirts had been sitting in my parents’ front hallway for close to thirty years, waiting for me to come back for them. “When did you...?”

The young woman in scrubs exited the elevator, and a trio of women around Mom’s age got on, sniffling and arguing. One of them pressed 1, and I said, “This elevator is going up to four,” which caused them to turn and noisily exit. Mom made a little clicking sound with her tongue, as if this were an unfortunate occurrence.

I tried again. “When did you pack up all of those things, Mom?”

“Oh, not that long ago. When I learned that he wasn’t coming home. I’ll have to move out soon.”

The doors opened onto the fourth floor and Mom took off ahead of me, rounding the nurses’ station, moving with an efficiency that belied her age and general health condition. The nurse behind the desk looked up, registering our entrance, and then back down at her computer monitor. After passing through a complicated maze of hallways, we arrived at 471-A. Mom stopped, seeming to brace herself. Written in dry erase marker on a whiteboard outside the room was the label KAUFMAN, C. followed by the names of his a.m. and p.m. nurse and the doctor in charge. I winced, seeing his name, my namesake.

“Don’t go surprising him, now,” Mom said, but I wasn’t sure what she meant by this. I wasn’t intending to pop around the curtain that separated us with my hands held out, like a performer at a child’s birthday party. Surely my presence itself would be a surprise—even if it hadn’t been for my mother. She entered before me, plopping her purse down in a chair next to the bed. I could see my father’s feet pointing up beneath a blue hospital blanket, and then his entire body shifted beneath the covers, registering Mom’s presence.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

His answer was a painful wheeze, as if it took a great amount of energy for this single word to exit his body. “Tired.” I’m not sure I would have picked his voice out of a lineup.

“I got a ride with Curtis,” Mom said, and after a long beat, while this information must have sunk in, my father rasped, “Curtis is here?” This time the voice was more familiar, with that hard edge my name always had in his mouth. How many times over the years had I thought about changing my name, becoming a person who didn’t resemble my father, even on paper?

I had been standing between the open doorway and the curtain, not wanting to go any farther. The full effect of this mistake was upon me. I should have been heading toward Oberlin, doing what I’d set out to do. This detour brought back all the misery of my childhood with the new complications of one sick parent and one about to be homeless. My father’s voice, even altered by age and illness, still sent a chill through me. As a child, I had found reasons to stay in the bathroom after dinner, even though I knew from experience that the cheap latch lock could be broken, and Dad could force his way inside. As a child, I’d suspected that my mother didn’t love me the way other mothers loved their children—the mothers of my classmates, the women who lived on our street and watched their children play from the front stoop. Those women would have protected their children from raised fists, from flat, stinging slaps with the palm of a hand. As an adult, watching Kathleen with Daniel and Olivia, I’d known this was true.

Now my mother gave the curtain a little jerk, revealing me where I was standing.

The man lying in the bed was definitely my father—the head of dark hair now reduced to thin gray wisps that stuck to his scalp. His eyes were a cloudy version of the same blue, his face more bloated. He’d had his nose broken a few times during my childhood in the occasional bar fight, and it looked misplaced on his face now, crooked, a large bump on the bridge, an oxygen tube forced up inside one nostril. This observation allowed me to note the rest of the tubes—an IV hooked to his arm via a needle in the back of his hand, a catheter bag strapped to the side of the bed, a series of wires disappearing beneath his thin pajama top that led to the electrodes attached to his chest. These might have been—unless I was reading too much into things now—the exact pajamas he’d owned during my childhood.

He squinted up at me. “Curtis?”

It hadn’t occurred to me until then how I’d changed, but of course I had. I wasn’t a boy anymore; I was a man, and a middle-aged one at that. The years since Daniel died hadn’t been kind—the grief, the stress, the anger. Not to mention I hadn’t showered that morning in my quest to leave quietly, and I was wearing a wrinkled shirt that hadn’t been washed since Sacramento.

I took a step closer. “Hello.” I braced myself, because surely the barrage was coming:
Where the hell have you been?
And
What have you done with your life?
And
Why are you here alone?
Did she leave you, that artsy-fartsy girlfriend you brought to meet us?
Surely he had years of pent-up anger waiting to be released on me, like air from a ruptured tire.

Instead, he propped himself up on one elbow, breathing hard, and said in a funny whistle that sounded as if it came from his nostril, rather than his throat, “My son.”

olivia

We stopped for gas, and for the millionth time that week, I used a public restroom stall that failed to meet cleanliness standards for anyone, anywhere. But somehow, it hardly bothered me now.
Clumps of toilet paper on the floor? Wadded up towels in the sink? Strange smear along one wall? Bring it on, world. I’ve got bigger problems.

Mom handed me a spiral notebook and a two-pack of pens when I came out of the bathroom. “You probably won’t need this at all,” she said, almost shyly. “It’s just in case....”

Just in case all hell broke loose and I had time to write it all down? But I took the notebook gratefully, and once we were back on the road, I separated the plastic front from the cardboard backing to free the pens. I would be ready, just in case.

The closer we got to Chicago, the more ridiculous this whole plan seemed to me. I’d called Dad’s cell phone a dozen more times and each time it went right to voice mail, but for all we knew, his battery was dead and he had spent the day driving around Omaha and was even now back at the house, wondering where the hell we were. Mom seemed so certain, though, so determined to press on, despite torrential rain and all sorts of other odds stacked against us.

“Do you think maybe we should call the police or something?” I asked finally, after turning the words over in my mind.

Mom looked horrified. “And say what, exactly?”

“I don’t know...at least, they could put out some kind of APB for a white man in a green Explorer with California plates, who may or may not have a gun and may or may not decide to use it when he sees his monsterlike parents....” It sounded stupid even to me, and I was used to my own stupidity. Was Dad even in the Chicago area? Was I right about him having a gun?

Mom was quiet, probably because she was becoming used to my stupidity, too.

“Let’s say we don’t find Dad,” I continued, after a few more miles had ticked by. The rain had slowed considerably, but the roads were still wet, and the sky had changed from rain-darkness to regular evening-darkness. “What happens to me?”

“What do you mean? As far as...?”

“As far as my life goes.” It seemed like a fair question for an unfair situation. How could all of this be happening now, when I was only a year away from graduating high school—once I made up those two years of P.E., anyway—and starting my own life? I had no idea what that life might entail, and it was certainly not as prearranged and deliberate as Daniel’s post-high school life had been, but there must be
some
thing waiting for me. I thought about Sam Ellis in Lyman, who had probably packed up his display table for the day. Even his vague and not too promising plans were better than what I had.

“We don’t need to make any decisions right now. We’ve got at least until the end of the summer, and then...”

“What decisions? I mean, if something happens with Dad, there’s not really a decision to be made, is there?”

Mom was quiet, and I thought she might let the question just hang there, but finally she said, “I’m not going to force you to do anything you don’t want.”

I laughed. “Like pick one parent over the other, you mean? I think I already had to do that.”

Mom drove on, her lips pinched into a tight line. “I wish it could have been different,” she conceded finally.

I must have been feeling particularly hurtful or especially honest, because I didn’t let this go. “Well, it could have been different. If you’d stayed, that is.” My heart was thudding; where was all this sincerity coming from?

“It would have been different, but it would have been worse,” Mom said, obviously choosing her words. “We would have become the kind of parents who couldn’t even tolerate each other’s presence. We would have yelled at each other and smashed things. I would have become a person I couldn’t stand to see in the mirror. I pushed as hard as I thought I could, and if I had pushed harder, your dad would have hated me and probably himself. So, yes, I could have stayed, Olivia. But I hope you understand when I say that I just couldn’t, either.”

With my tongue, I caught a tear that had squeezed out of the corner of one eye and slithered down my cheek. “But we needed you,” I told her, my voice cracking. “We still need you, Dad and me. It’s not like we have anyone else in the world. I mean, you have everyone in Omaha who knows you! And plus, Dad’s a
man—
he considers other teachers his friends because he happens to see them outside of work once or twice a year. If I hadn’t stayed with him, he wouldn’t have had anyone.”

Mom reached into the door well and pulled out a pocket-sized pouch of Kleenex. It really was amazing how prepared she was for a spontaneous multistate road trip, even without a few days to prepare. She worked two tissues free and handed one to me.

“Liv, I really believed that if I left—if
we
left—it would force your dad to do something, to make some kind of change in his life. He was just stuck. I thought if I wasn’t there, he could finally move on.”

Not for the first time, I felt like the frayed rope used for a game of tug of war—Mom pulling from one side and Dad pulling from the other. “Well, that didn’t happen,” I said, knowing I was twisting the knife a little harder. “You gave him almost three years, and now, look.”

Mom blew her nose loudly and reached for another tissue. She said something that sounded like “damn,” but it couldn’t have been—because the apocalypse would really have to be upon us for my mother to swear.

“What did you say?”

Through her tears, I detected just the tiniest hint of a smile in Mom’s voice. “I said, damn it. Damn it, Liv. We’re going to find your father and set this all straight.”