The Fragile World. Paula DeBoard Treick
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she had recently passed into the stage of life where even an earsplitting telephone ring and raised voices were not cause for concern. “Move, Heidi,” I ordered, nudging against the resisting bulk of her body.
A small amount of time had passed—ten seconds? Fifteen? Thirty? But between the first ring of the phone and the time I stood in the doorway of my parents’ bedroom, I had the sense that my life had already changed.
One minute I had been in dreamland, my only worry the pre-algebra test I had the next day in fifth period with Mr. Heinman, who was notorious for asking questions that had nothing to do with our notes or assignments. In the back of my mind, I was also thinking about the Halloween dance on Friday—the first dance of my seventh-grade year. Simple stuff. The kind of thing you have the luxury to think about when the rest of life is going well, when your life isn’t hinging on a middle-of-the-night phone call.
Mom had switched her bedside light on, and both of my parents were sitting up, looking rumpled and older than they did during the daytime. Dad’s hair was sticking up in strange tufts, and his glasses, which always rested on his nightstand within arm’s reach, had been perched lopsidedly on his face. “But how?” he was saying now. “I don’t understand how. I mean, how?”
Mom was holding a throw pillow and was either kneading or throttling it in her hands. “It’s not, it’s not, it’s not,” she kept saying. When I was younger, I used to thank God for the food I was about to eat and say Now I lay me down to sleep at night, but this might have been the closest thing to a prayer I’d ever heard from my mom. She just wasn’t the sort of person who prayed, at least not on a regular or official basis. I figured she didn’t want to bother God with it unless the situation was really hopeless.
“Curtis,” Mom pleaded, and he swallowed hard, trying to say something. But he didn’t seem to be able to get the words out, so instead he nodded. Just once.
Mom moaned. I slipped onto the bed next to her and buried my face in her hair. She smelled of wood shavings and varnish, a smell that was as reassuring to me as the smell of flour and sugar probably was to other kids.
Then Dad asked, his voice thin and drifting, like a helium balloon that had slipped away, “What do we do now? I mean, what do people do?” He was speaking just as much to the person on the other end of the receiver as to us, or, it seemed, to the universe as a whole.
Mom was squeezing me as though she was holding on to me for dear life. Mine or hers, I couldn’t have said.
Then Dad said, “Okay, I will,” and hung up the phone.
The three of us sat very still for a long moment. Whatever was said next, I knew, would change everything. It was the last semi-normal moment of my life, and then we would all live miserably ever after.
Mom asked, “What happened to Daniel?” Her eyes gleamed wetly in the glow of Dad’s bedside lamp.
I wished she hadn’t asked that, because once my brother’s name was out there, it was no longer possible that it could be someone else. If she had mentioned another name, I was sure, then maybe this late-night call could be about some other person, someone else’s brother.
But of all the people in the world—billions of them, more people than any one single person could ever meet even if that was a person’s life goal; of all the people in big cities and small towns, in countries where it was too hot or too cold year-round; of all the men, women and children, even those who were so old that the Guinness Book of World Records had them on some kind of short-list, and even the tiniest of infants in neonatal units, hooked up to tubes and complicated computer systems—out of all these people, it was my brother, Daniel, who was dead.
After the phone call, Kathleen stayed in bed with Olivia. I could hear them there, crying, comforting each other. I should have been there with them—I know that now, I knew that then. But I couldn’t. I needed, in the fiercest way, to be alone. Not just in our house, but in the world. I needed the whole world to just stop—moving, thinking, talking.
I paced between the living room and the kitchen, picking things up and putting them down, staring at them stupidly as though they were foreign objects, things that didn’t belong in my home. A picture of our family—from a time that already seemed distant, back when there had been four of us, all alive and healthy—in a silver frame that said Family Forever in a fancy script. A booklet of fabric swatches from one of Kathleen’s projects. The swatches were in shades of blue, and each was labeled with a different name: Ocean, Marina, Infinity, Reflection, Tidal Pool. I thumbed through them, thinking how pointless and trivial it was that someone had given names to these different shades of blue, that something so irrelevant could possibly matter in a world where my son was dead. Everything was pointless, I thought. Everything was nonsensical and ludicrous.
Suddenly my legs felt insubstantial, not quite up to the task of supporting my body. I reached for the door frame for balance, nearly tripping over Heidi, our two-ton basset. She looked up at me, confused, expectant.
“Not yet,” I told her. “It’s not time.” The sky beyond our front porch light was a deep, middle-of-the-night black.
She thumped her thick tail and cocked her head, as if she were trying to understand.
“Go back to sleep,” I ordered, nudging her with my shoe.
When she didn’t budge, I snapped, “Fine, then,” and opened the front door, ushering Heidi into the night. She stepped onto the porch and turned, watching me. “This is what you wanted,” I told her, and closed the door too hard.
Kathleen came in a moment later, red-eyed, hair sleep-tousled. Her face was shiny from tears and snot that had been wiped haphazardly from her nose. “Was that the door? Did you go outside?”
I didn’t answer.
She stepped past me and opened the door. Heidi was waiting on the porch, her jowls hanging. Kathleen turned to me, her face crumpled with grief and something else—doubt. In me.
“What’s going on, Curtis? Do you want her to wander off or something?”
“I wasn’t thinking,” I said—a lie. I was thinking that Daniel was dead, and nothing in the world mattered. Let the dog go. Forget the color swatches. Get rid of the smiling family portrait that sat on the edge of a painted side table, mocking me. And the piano. Jesus, the piano. It had taken a Herculean effort to get the piano up our porch steps, only to learn that our front doorway wasn’t wide enough to accommodate it. It had gone back down the steps, around the side of the house, up another set of stairs and through the French doors. So much careful effort. Now I thought: Burn it. Get it out of my sight.
Safely inside now, Heidi butted her head against Kathleen’s legs affectionately. Kathleen reached out a hand to me and said, “We have to keep our heads, Curtis. We have to be strong.”
I stared at her, feeling dizzy and unbalanced. It was puzzling that she was here, like seeing a familiar face in the middle of a nightmare. It wouldn’t have been hard to take her hand, to fall into her embrace, to wrap my arms around her waist while she wrapped hers around my neck. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t move forward, couldn’t take the one step and then another that it would require of me.
Behind us I heard sniffling and turned around. Olivia stood in the doorway to the living room, impossibly tiny, hugging a blanket around her body.
“I’m supposed to call him back,” I said. “The sergeant. After I talked to you, he said I should....” And I stepped past them, leaving them there in the living room like two lost little planets, out of orbit, out of sync.
My fingers, thick and unfamiliar, fumbled with the phone. In those awful moments while I waited for the call to be answered, the dial tone buzzing in my ears, I allowed myself to hope that maybe, somehow, it was all a mistake.
But the voice on the other end was the same I’d heard not fifteen minutes