The Fragile World. Paula DeBoard Treick

       curtis

      The letter had come three days before. It was just by chance that I’d grabbed the mail that day instead of Olivia. I had spotted the return address—Elyria, Ohio—and immediately tucked the letter into my back pocket, letting my shirttail hang loose over it. I read it in the bathroom, and again in the bedroom, door locked; later I shredded the envelope. When Olivia went to bed, I taped the letter to the back of a framed art print in the living room, a place she would never look. I wanted to keep the letter in case I needed to remind myself of the details—but already I’d memorized every single word, beginning with It is my duty to inform you that...

      I didn’t tell Olivia about the letter, like I hadn’t told her about the parole hearing and the letter I’d written myself, on Daniel’s behalf.

      In the years since Kathleen left, I’d prided myself on my business-as-usual approach to our lives. The size of our family had been reduced by half, but Olivia and I hadn’t fallen apart. We had more or less maintained a normal life. We folded our laundry, although somewhat haphazardly; we did the dishes vigorously each Saturday, and let them pile up in the sink on the days between; we made a weekly trip to Target for toilet paper and Q-tips and the half-dozen other things we always, suddenly needed. If Kathleen had popped in unannounced, she might have been alarmed by the stack of unsorted mail by the front door, but she wouldn’t have found a complete disaster. Not that Kathleen would have popped in unannounced; she had scheduled visits for two weeks during each of the past two summers, and she’d begged Olivia to fly out for every holiday in between. “As if,” Olivia had said on each occasion, unmoved by statistics about air travel being safer than car travel and by my patient lessons on lift, weight, thrust and drag.

      Olivia and I had kept on going simply because that was what we had to do—but we’d had a sort of strange fun doing it. I’d thrown myself into the part wholeheartedly; I’d been proud that none of it, not even for a second, had felt like a chore.

      And then, on Tuesday, I’d received the letter. Pursuant to criminal law... regulations regarding prison overcrowding and mandates for prisoner behavior... Robert Saenz had somehow managed to behave himself in prison, completing a sobriety program and an anger-management course, and the state of Ohio was willing to take a chance on him.

      Since learning this, every movement I made required a conscious effort. I taught my classes, attended a science department meeting, made a not-bad ziti with Olivia and fell asleep each night with the television on, waking at random hours to the enthusiastic sales pitches of infomercials. I was now fully informed about revolutionary skin care products, microwave egg poachers and a new food chopper that promised to chop food faster than any other food chopper in the history of food choppers.

      You have to keep going, I ordered myself. Just put one foot in front of the other. Just keep moving.

      Since Kathleen left, I hadn’t allowed myself to wallow. There simply wasn’t time. Maybe if I’d been alone, eating TV dinners and repeating yesterday’s clothes. But Olivia and I had a life to navigate together. If she had a cold, I was the one who bought cough syrup and gathered her used Kleenex. If she had a quiz, I peppered her with review questions. If she had a panic attack—more and more rare, but still possible—I tried to talk her through it. If she wanted to watch long stretches of Hitchcock-fest on AMC, then that’s what we did, with Olivia writing things down in her Fear Journal as she went: birds, heights, dizziness, strangers on trains, trains....

      Days had passed without me thinking about Robert Saenz at all. When he was locked up, living in the hell of his own making, Saenz hadn’t deserved another minute of my time.

      But I woke up on Friday morning with a tight feeling in my chest. Not “call the ambulance” tight, but uncomforable enough that I had to steady myself against the bathroom counter for a long moment, until I could pull it together. Robert Saenz’s face swam in front of me, all fleshy chin and dead eyes. Dr. Fisher would have called what happened next a “break—” comfortable, padded-chair speak for going bat-shit crazy.

      “You all right?” Olivia had asked me on the way to school, gripping on to the door handle the way she always did, like our route was one of hairpin curves, rather than a fairly straight shot.

      “Of course.”

      “You don’t look all right.”

      I glanced at myself in the rearview mirror. “What do I look like?”

      “I don’t know. You look sort of gray.”

      I gave what I hoped was a convincing smile. “Like the Tin Man?”

      Olivia frowned. “Not exactly. More like you’ve got a case of rickets or something.”

      “I think you mean scurvy. That’s the Vitamin C deficiency. But I don’t know if it actually turns you gray.”

      “Great. Then you have some kind of undiagnosed illness that no one has been able to name yet. Thanks, Dad. Major consolation.” She dug in her backpack and came up with her journal.

      Ordinarily, I would have had another joke at the ready. Olivia and I had developed, in these past, lonely years, a sort of Abbott and Costello routine with each other, as if everything were a joke, as if our problems were basically just ways of trying out new material on each other. Some days I suggested we take our show on the road. But now I turned on the radio, raising the volume a few notches to drown out the words in my head: After serving sixty-three percent of his court-ordered sentence...

      First period physical science was a blur: take roll, collect papers, write key terms on board. Then my second period physics students arrived with noisy enthusiasm: it was Egg Drop Day, our annual competition to drop raw eggs in carefully constructed cages from the cafeteria roof to the ground fifteen feet below. Ordinarily, it was one of my favorite teaching days of the year. I had been known to greet my students in a white T-shirt with a smear of fresh yolk across the front. It was a new shirt every year, and I’d embellished it with a Sharpie: “Oops” one year, “Your Egg is My Breakfast” another. This year I’d forgotten.

      I pretended to marvel at my students’ creations: eggs in toothpick cages, eggs riding in Styrofoam canoes, eggs dressed as babies in cotton diapers. We walked en masse to the cafeteria and the class split into teams. I monitored the dropping of eggs from the roof while Alex, my Berkeley-bound T.A., judged their landing from the ground.

      The competition moved along on schedule: the preliminary rounds with the heartbreak of early elimination, the tense drops during the semifinals and at last, a face-off between my two best students that ended with a dramatic finish as one egg came free of its wrapping during descent and hit the ground with a sudden stain of yolk. With all the screaming and cheering and congratulatory crowd-surfing, it might have been the pep rally before the first football game.

      “All right—we clean up, and everyone heads back inside. Bell’s about to ring,” I called down, shielding my eyes from the bright, piercing blue