The Fragile World (27 page)

curtis

Looking at my father in his hospital bed, I realized how connected they were in my mind—my father, my son. They had always been linked. Because of the horror that had been my childhood, I’d tried to love Daniel even more—with a love tainted by all the ways my father hadn’t loved me. Everything I’d done right over the years had been a stab at him.
Look what I can do without you. Look what I can do better than you.

Still, my father seemed convinced that I had come to see him in his final moments, as if I’d simply been waiting in the wings for the right opportunity to appear. The effort of communicating with me exhausted him; he sank into an instant, deep sleep and then woke a few minutes later, demanding to know who I was. A minute later he was asleep again, his chest rising and falling irregularly.

He was dying—a nurse confirmed this for me in the hallway. He was in the final stages of liver disease, and would soon be moved to a hospice facility. One day soon, I realized, my mother would come to visit him, and the bed would be empty.

“I understand you’re his son,” the nurse said, patting my arm sympathetically.

I recoiled, unable to accept that fact even now. I’d never changed my name, after all—it seemed more trouble than it was worth. But a name was all I was willing to share with him, as if we were two John Smiths, linked by a random label. To the nurse I said only, “I thought he had quit drinking.”

Again the sympathetic smile. “The trouble is, once the damage is done, it’s done.”

This made sense. The part of me that was still a teacher—that should have been preparing lessons for Monday, like it was any ordinary weekend—stored this in my mind for a future lesson, like a public service announcement.
The drinking you do today causes harm you can’t undo tomorrow.

“Will you be back in the morning, Mr. Kaufman? You could meet with his doctor, and there are some papers that need to be signed....”

I shook my head, absolving myself of all responsibility. “No, I can’t sign anything. I don’t know my dad’s wishes. His wife—my mother—knows about all of that.”

The nurse stepped back, a look of faint disgust on her face. What kind of son won’t help his father in his final moments?

I’m not really the son,
I wanted to say. I was an imposter, a fraud, an apparition that had appeared out of a Chicago mist and would disappear into it again. As a child, I’d wished I’d been adopted, chosen by some loving couple or other, instead of born as a mistake into a family that had never wanted me. He hadn’t been a father, so I wasn’t really his son. I was free to simply walk away on my own.

Mom was there suddenly, her mass filling the doorway. “He’s asking for you,” she said simply.

I looked at my watch, making the calculations. The stop in Chicago had put me hours off course. I’d be arriving in Ohio too early on Monday, when Robert Saenz was dreaming his sweet just-released-from-prison dreams. I had planned on daylight. I had planned on seeing the look on his face.

I stepped again into my father’s hospital room, maneuvering around the curtain and the cart at his bedside. He was propped into a sitting position, still wheezing from the effort of movement. His abdomen was oddly extended, as if a tumor or pregnancy lurked beneath the thin pajamas.

I had a sudden flashback of Kathleen in the hospital for Daniel’s birth. It had been a twelve-hour labor, culminating in screams and spasms that ripped through her body, as if we were on the set of a horror film. Where she’d gripped my arm, raised red welts had appeared. Later, when the doctor was attending to Kathleen, when Daniel had been cleaned and weighed and measured, the nurse handed him to me. I’d looked at his tiny body, bundled in a blue blanket, and thought:
my son.
The next thought had been of my father, who hadn’t crossed my mind in years. What had he been like at my birth? Had there been even a single moment of fatherly pride when he glanced at me, his heart expanding like a balloon slowly inflating inside him? Had he promised to be the best father he could be, to give his son a good life? Or had he been in a bar across the street, bitching about hospital bills and the cost of diapers and all the ways my birth was going to set him back?

He looked so helpless in the hospital bed now, exhausted as if he’d been running for miles, but the specter of my father as the strong man, the villain, had loomed large over the years of my own parenthood. When Daniel had spilled a tumbler of milk at dinner, I ordered myself:
Don’t react like your father would.
Instead, I righted the glass, swabbed up the mess with a wad of napkins and set a new cup of milk in front of him. When Olivia screamed as a baby—which she did almost constantly, with the lungs of a trained opera singer—I didn’t scream back at her, or leave her to cry. I’d bundled her up and brought her to the car for long drives in and around Sacramento, trying out one CD after another to lull her into silence. Her hands-down favorite was
Crosby, Stills & Nash,
but she didn’t always fall asleep; sometimes, when I looked in the mirror, she had seemed to be
listening
to the music.

That was my parenting guide, then: whatever your father did, do the opposite. I didn’t spank—although Kathleen had, now and then. I encouraged them in school; when Daniel showed promise on the piano, I gave myself over to the thousands of hours of practices, recitals, the drives from one venue to another, the financial sacrifices. When Kathleen and I went out, I ordered a glass of wine with dinner and stopped there. Not that I didn’t trust myself—I had in my father the best possible deterrent from the life of an alcoholic—but I couldn’t take a sip without seeing my father and his omnipresent bottle of whiskey. It had been his hand at the end of my arm, holding the tumbler between finger and thumb.

“You came to see me,” my father whistled, a repeat of the conversation we had already had. I neither confirmed nor denied this, just stared down at him. His hand, the skin papery thin like the husk of an onion, rose and fell on his bed sheet. He might have been trying to reach for me, but I didn’t move closer. “I didn’t know if you would. I didn’t think I deserved that much.”

“I’m not sure you do,” I said, loud enough for him to hear, soft enough so that my voice wouldn’t travel to the hallway.

The man I had known all those years ago would have taken that statement as a challenge. He wouldn’t have hesitated to crack me across the face with a fist that was always ready to fly, that somehow did not require a big windup. He might have pulled me by my hair, even coming away with a small clump in his fist. But the man in the hospital bed made no move at all, except to give me the faintest of smiles.

“That’s my boy,” he whispered, and closed his eyes.

My mother was standing beside me, I realized, and had probably been standing there since I returned to the room. She reached out to adjust the bedding, pulling a sheet over my father’s chest, closer to his chin. There was something genuinely tender in her touch, not just efficient and practical. “I think it’s just too bad,” she murmured. “It’s too bad you never got to really know each other.”

My throat was too tight for words. I
had
really known my father, but I knew that he hadn’t ever known me. He hadn’t bothered. He’d never intended to be a father; I knew because he had said this, yelled it, sneered it, sighed it. He hadn’t wanted a child; over the years he’d accused my mother of tricking him into becoming a father. If abortion had been a legal option at the time, he would have insisted on it, I was sure. He would have driven my mother to the clinic and waited in the car, taking regular sips from a flask. He had probably made sure, one way or another, that it never happened again.

But there I was—the child he never wanted.

Although it grew harder to tell over the years, as my father’s body became more and more ravaged by alcohol and general bad health, I was clearly his son. I had the same brown hair, now growing thin; the same blue eyes, pale skin, cleft chins. We each topped six feet—although he looked shorter in the hospital bed, as if age had compressed his height.

Mom was wrong—I had known him, as much as a child can know a parent. I knew him in the clinical sense—as the person who had half carried, half dragged him, one of his arms draped over my shoulder, to bed at night. I had wiped up his vomit while Mom murmured that it was a shame he was so sick. I had known him as the man who fought and was thrown in jail and somehow bailed out, who came out of the precinct not even slightly chastened, claiming he had been the victim, it was a setup, and he was going to catch the son of a bitch.... I knew him as the man who didn’t bring me to school or pick me up, who never attended a single parent conference, who wasn’t there on senior scholarship night, who never once told me I was a good kid, that he was proud of me. A man who had let me graduate college and get married and live an entirely new life without ever expressing the smallest interest in who I had become.

As I’d seen it when I was in high school, I had two choices: to leave or to stay. To leave was to escape, to make my own way in life. To stay was to know that one of us would kill the other. He might go for me in a drunken rage, a lashing out spawned by nothing, or I might go for him, finally so disgusted by his very existence that one more second of life with him was intolerable. It wasn’t even a question; I left in the nick of time. I had started to dream about it, to fantasize about the details—my hands around his neck, my hands at his back, pushing him down the stairs.

It wasn’t too late, I told myself now. If my mother would leave the room, it could be done in only a few seconds—a pillow over his face, pressed down. Why not? By buying a gun, by taking this trip, I had crossed that line already, the one that divides right from wrong. I was planning to kill one man; what was one more? My father’s eyes were already closed, his eyelids a pale, babyish purple. He didn’t deserve it any less just because he was weak, just because he was close to that end without my help. But the fight must have gone out of me, or maybe I was just saving the fight for something else, for the cause that mattered more.

“How long are you going to stay?” Mom’s voice shook me from my dark reverie. It was easy to forget she was there, like forgetting the color of the wallpaper.

“Not much longer,” I said.

My father’s eyelids fluttered open again. He held my gaze, and I didn’t look away. Now was the chance—too late—for him to know me. I was a man now, and I’d become a man without his help. I was not only his equal, but his superior—the stronger man, not the boy who hid in the closet with a flashlight, who shut himself in the bathroom and prayed that the lock held. Without saying anything, my father seemed to acknowledge this. The look he gave me approached respect.

“You have a boy?” he croaked. It took me a moment to understand his question, and not only for the diminished quality of his voice. I nodded hesitantly, not correcting the present tense. What was the point?
My son—the grandson you never knew anything about—is dead.
It seemed like blasphemy to introduce Daniel that way, as a person who was no longer alive.

“That’s good,” he said. “You can do right by him. You can do what I never did.”

This time when he closed his eyes, he seemed to sink directly into sleep, his chest immediately, unevenly, rising and falling. I watched the machines by his bedside, their silent, blinking vigilance. Oxygen and fluids were pumped in, the unwanted fluids pumped out. My father would be dead soon. I couldn’t summon sadness, exactly, but his words were already echoing in my mind, like a fatherly blessing, a benediction.
Do right by him.

When Mom stepped around the curtain and into the hallway, I followed her and took her by the arm. “What will you do when he’s gone?”

She didn’t seem fazed by the question. Her expression, as always, was impossible to read. Would his death be a relief, or a mere change of circumstances? “I have a friend who lost her husband. We’ll just live together when he goes.”

I wondered about the friend, and wondered about the house or apartment where my mother would be living. In all respects, it had to be a better situation. I wished I could ask if she wanted to stay with
us
—but
us
was a family that no longer existed, in a place that no longer existed.

“What’s the name of your friend?” I asked and then turned on my phone to record the information along with my contacts. My phone beeped frantically, alerting me to a dozen missed calls and a number of voice mail messages, a few from Kathleen, the rest from Olivia. I turned off the phone again.

“Do you have to go?” she asked, and I looked at her closely. Was she asking me to stay?

“There’s something I have to do,” I said carefully, but my mother’s eyes had wandered down the hallway again, looking at nothing.
She’s done with me,
I thought. I’ve been dismissed. She wasn’t the brute that my father had been, but she hadn’t been a loving mother, either. She wasn’t anything like Barbara had been with Kathleen, like Kathleen had been with Daniel and Olivia.

I squeezed her hand, which was surprisingly strong. I thought of all those years of her standing behind a plastic dome in an elementary school cafeteria, her gloved hand reaching out with a scoop of cole slaw or a handful of chicken nuggets. “Mom,” I said, taking her other hand. I wanted to shake her, to make her focus, to see me right in front of her. I was gripping her too tightly; I only succeeded in sending a brief flash of pain across her face. She flinched, and I relaxed my grip. It was the last time we would see each other. “Mom, I just want to say that...” My throat constricted, and I stopped, because she was looking away again, over my shoulder.

But then she turned to me, her eyes watery blue. “I love you, too, Curtis,” she said.

olivia

It was dark by the time we reached Chicago. At least, the massive highway billboards kept informing us that we were in the Chicago area, but we spent at least an hour in stop-and-go traffic on the rain-slick freeway, the sort of rush-hour mess that really shouldn’t exist at night, on a weekend.

Mom took a random exit, and we went inside a Burger King to use the bathroom. There were two stalls, but only one had a working latch. Mom went first, and when I came out, my hands only half-dry from an ineffectual air dryer, Mom was sitting in a booth with her cell phone against one ear and her free hand jotting down an address on a napkin.

When she hung up the phone, she said, “I was right. They haven’t moved. I mean, all those years, and they’re still in that run-down house. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard anything so depressing.” She folded the napkin neatly and stood. “Think I’ll grab a burger to go. You want something?”

I shook my head. How could I eat with all this uncertainty?

In the car, Mom plugged the address into her cell phone and passed the phone over to me so I could navigate while she took quick bites of her burger.

“I knew it was somewhere around here,” she said, executing the turns as I called them out.

“We’re not going to call first?” I asked.

“We’ve been calling,” Mom pointed out. “It’s not like he’s dying to return our calls.”

“Not Dad,” I protested. “I think that we should call them. Grandpa and Grandma, I mean.”

She crumpled the wrapper from her burger and said, “Don’t do that. Don’t call them Grandpa and Grandma. They aren’t your real grandparents.”

“That’s right, they’re my fake grandparents.”

“Olivia. Look, tomorrow or whenever this is all over, you can ask me questions or yell at me, or whatever you want. Tonight, let’s just get to your dad and make sure everything’s okay.”

“That’s why I thought we should call. To make sure everything’s okay.”

Mom slowed for a turn. According to the directions on her phone, we were 1.3 miles from our destination. “I’m not hoping for a friendly chat.”

My heart was hammering around in my chest cavity as Mom made a final left turn. We were on a residential street, with houses close together on small lots and cars parked along the curb on both sides of the street. “This place has really changed,” Mom mused, straining to see in the dark.

“Changed good or changed bad?”

“Oh, changed for the good. It used to be a lot of falling-down houses and chain-link fences.”

There were still a few of those around, I noted, but the cars parked in driveways were decent-looking minivans that could fit a whole soccer troop in their backseats, next to the occasional sporty hybrid. Mom was scanning for the house number on one side of the street, but I was craning my neck for a glimpse of our teal-green Explorer, without any luck.

“There it is!” Mom pointed to a house that was basically falling in on itself. She slowed directly in front of it, and since no one was behind us, we stopped to stare. A bare bulb over the porch illuminated, but barely, a rusty screen door, sagging porch steps, a concrete walkway from the curb that was so cracked and uneven it was an invitation for a stubbed toe, or worse. A lone shutter hung from a small window, and I wondered if its mate had fallen into the shrubs below, where it was even now rotting away into nothing.

I fought back a lump of vomit that was lurking at the back of my throat. Someone I knew—my father—had lived in this house? Suddenly, this all seemed like a very bad idea, another wrong turn on this crazy road trip. If I clicked my heels together three times, would I end up back where we’d started? Dad wasn’t here. Maybe we’d read this whole situation wrong, and Dad hadn’t been here and wasn’t going to be here, and yet,
we
were here. Unannounced, uninvited, unexplained, about to barge in to the most unwelcoming house I could have imagined.

“Let’s go,” I whispered frantically, and Mom, misunderstanding, said, “Geez, Liv. We can’t just leave the car in the middle of the street. Let me find a place to park.”

We had to drive for a few blocks before we could find a spot that could accommodate a Volvo station wagon, and then we hiked back down the street, with Mom urging me forward. How was she so fearless? If Dad really was in their house with a gun—even if it was unloaded—I was more and more convinced with each step that it wasn’t the place for me. But Mom was determined, clutching her purse strap with one hand and me with the other. Soon we were back in front of the broken-down house, standing on the cracked concrete at the curb.

“I don’t think anyone’s home,” I said, trying not to whimper. Right then my mind was flooded with about a billion things I wanted to write in my Fear Journal, like
dark spaces
and
roofs caving in,
not to mention the sudden memory of my ninth grade English teacher reading from
The Fall of the House of Usher.

“There’s a light on inside,” Mom pointed out.

“But it’s late. They’re probably asleep. Maybe we should come back in the morning.”
Or never.

“This will be the first time I’ve interrupted their lives in almost thirty years,” Mom said. “I guess they’ll just have to live with that.” She led the way up the walkway, paused at the screen door hanging slightly open and reached around to rap, hard, on the front door.

Nothing. I felt relief wash over me. In maybe twenty minutes we could be at a decent hotel, tucked into clean white sheets, watching
House Hunters.
We would call Dad again, and I would leave a longer message repeating how sorry I was for saying that I hated him, and maybe telling him a joke or two so he would know everything was okay. Or I would just say “Love” and wait for him to call back with “Elephantine.”

Mom knocked again, harder.

There were footsteps inside the house.

“I’m going to throw up,” I whimpered, but there was no time. The door swung inward, and the woman standing there, looking lumpy in a few layers of cardigans, smiled as if she were used to strangers appearing on her doorstep on a rainy night.

“Hello, Kathleen,” my grandmother said. “And this must be your daughter.”