The Fragile World. Paula DeBoard Treick
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Dr. Kline, showed me to a sterile room where a body lay on a gurney, covered by a heavy piece of plastic. The scene was sickly surreal, like walking into a script of one of the thousands of crime dramas I’d watched over the years.
Dr. Kline looked at me, asking a wordless question. There was no way to be ready, not now or in a hundred years, but I nodded. He pulled back the tarp.
It wasn’t Daniel—it was an awful, horror movie caricature of who Daniel had been. It was a face I wouldn’t have known in a million years, his skull a concave thing, a grotesque mask. If it hadn’t been suggested to me that this was Daniel, I might not have come to the conclusion on my own. This was no more my son than it was a bad prop in a haunted house.
Kathleen should be here, I thought. She would have known Daniel’s shoulders and chest, despite the gaping Y of the autopsy incision, the thick stitches of the sort that had made Frankenstein’s monster so grotesque. Kathleen had marveled over our children’s bodies as they grew, thrilling that Olivia had the cutest buns in that bathing suit, that the moles on Daniel’s shoulder resembled a specific constellation, where I saw only a scattershot of stars.
It wasn’t until I saw the scar on the abdomen that I truly recognized Daniel’s body—a small sickle, pale pink beneath his navel. Daniel’s appendix had burst when he was nine years old, late on a Saturday night after a recital. He must have been in pain the entire day, the E.R. doctor told us, but it wasn’t until we were in the car afterward that he mentioned it, cautiously, as if testing the waters. I think something is wrong with my stomach. He’d gone into surgery just in time, ending up with an overnight stay in the hospital and a week’s worth of antibiotics rather than anything more serious.
“It’s him,” I choked, biting back the memory.
When I turned away, Dr. Kline replaced the plastic tarp and peeled off a pair of gloves, dropping them into a wastebasket. He disappeared for a moment and returned with a transparent garbage bag, the red handles tied together at the top. The bag was labeled with a simple tag: PERSONAL PROPERTY—DANIEL KAUFFMAN. I homed in on that extra F in our last name, feeling it like a slap in the face. Get the spelling right! I screamed inside my head. It matters.
As we walked to the door, the plastic bag knocking between us, Dr. Kline laid a hand on my shoulder. It was hard to pull away from this offer of human comfort.
I went to a café for lunch but left without ordering. Food had lost its appeal.
That afternoon I met the dean of students at Daniel’s dorm. Daniel’s roommate had separated the belongings for me, folding everything on top of the bare mattress—clothes, sheets, the tartan plaid comforter Kathleen had picked out for him. I held a flannel shirt to my nose, inhaled the faintest whiff of pot. It was surprising to see how meager the pile was—textbooks, coffee mugs, his laptop, toiletries, the black bow tie he’d worn for performances. Kathleen would have had a plan for everything. She would have talked about packing and shipping and receipts and reimbursements, so that somehow everything that had been Daniel’s could live forever. I didn’t have the stomach for it. In the end, I took what I could carry, and the dean promised to donate the rest to Goodwill.
On the way back to the hotel, a boy ran past me in a red cape, his underwear outside his jeans, and a girl followed in a pointy witch hat and thigh-high boots. Little orange buckets dangled from their wrists. Of course: Halloween. I looked around, noticing the small clusters of ghosts and goblins and cartoon characters on the sidewalks, the fake cobwebs spanning bushes, the jack-o-lanterns on front porches. This was what normal life was like, but there was no more normal life for the Kaufmans.
Back at the Oberlin Inn, I sat on the closed toilet seat and opened the bag from the coroner gingerly, setting its contents one by one on the tiled bathroom floor. Daniel’s black Converse—the exact style he’d worn and replaced and worn and replaced since junior high. I had a pair, too. Somewhere there was photographic evidence of Daniel and me in black T-shirts, blue jeans and matching shoes. I fished Daniel’s key ring out of the bag. Four keys—one to our house, marked by a drop of red nail polish, Kathleen’s doing. The other keys must have been to his dorm, his practice rooms, the places where he had lived his life without me.
I opened his wallet to the photo on his California driver’s license, taken when Daniel was sixteen. He looked so young, his shoulders impossibly narrow, hair closely cropped on the sides and spiky in the front. Then, Daniel’s Oberlin ID: a goofy half smile, hair grown almost to his shoulders. He hardly looked like the same kid, but I knew both versions of him, and many more. I pulled out the other cards, then returned each carefully to its spot. An electronic passkey. His Sacramento Public Library card, well worn. A punch card to a local sandwich shop with three holes.
In the pocket, I counted four wrinkled one-dollar bills and peeled apart a few stuck-together pictures. Daniel’s senior prom photo, his arm around a girl whose name was lost to me now. A years-old family snapshot we’d taken in Yosemite when Daniel was in junior high and Olivia was in elementary school, in her braided ponytail years. Kathleen was in the middle, an arm around each of them, her normally pale legs and shoulders pink from the sun. I had taken the picture—we were on the trail to Vernal Falls, far from another human who could have snapped the photo for us. Kathleen had sent out copies with our Christmas cards that year, along with a joke about me being camera-shy. I turned the photo over, suddenly aching to see Kathleen’s writing on the back, but it was Daniel’s scrawl I found: The Fam, 2004.
The Fam. Minus one.
Carefully, I slid that picture into my own wallet.
In the morning, I picked up the cardboard box with Daniel’s remains from the funeral home, thanking the manager for her rush. “Please sign for the cremains,” she said, prompting me to address a stack of forms. I blinked at her stupidly. This is my son we’re talking about. Don’t give me some made-up word I don’t even want to know.
During my return flights—Cleveland to Chicago, Chicago to Sacramento—I clutched the box to me as if I had been charged with the safekeeping of a carton of eggs. This was Daniel, I reminded myself, over and over, feeling the weight of his ashes, insubstantial, lighter than he’d been that first night in the hospital, wrapped in a receiving blanket. I wished the box could be a hundred pounds, a thousand. I wanted to feel the physical burden of his weight, as I had when I’d hoisted his two-year-old self onto my shoulders for an evening walk around the block.
The box accompanied me through security gates, where the funeral home paperwork was scrutinized by a half-dozen harried TSA personnel. It came with me into the restroom stall at O’Hare, into a newsstand where I purchased a box of Milk Duds and a Scientific American. Even when I was seated on the plane, I found I couldn’t release my grip. This was the last thing I could do for Daniel. I could make sure he made it home.
We made it through the memorial service—the tributes, the crying, the video slide show Mom had compiled to show the highlights of Daniel’s life. The whole time, I felt anxious and edgy, panic rising in me like puke at the back of my throat. Mom gave me the keys, and I escaped the weepy reception line to spend a half hour in the backseat of her Volvo, sick and warm in the afternoon sun. Daniel’s friends exited the funeral home in sad little clumps, and I couldn’t stop myself from thinking: Be careful. Watch where you walk. Drive safely.
Then Dad and Mom were there, discussing plans to drive Uncle Jeff and Aunt Judy to the airport in the morning. Mom turned her key in the ignition, the engine caught and the radio programming sprang to life in the middle of an announcer’s sentence.
And then it happened.
All of a sudden the world blurred in front of me, everything going too fast, all the colors running together—blueskygreengrassgraycement.
Dad adjusted the passenger-side visor, and Mom began to back out of the parking lot. Without even knowing what I was doing, much less why I was doing it, I reached over the seat and grabbed her arm as she maneuvered the gear shift.
“Holy—Liv!