The Fragile World. Paula Treick DeBoard

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       curtis

      Time passed, more slowly than I could have imagined, faster than I would have dreamed. Every time I walked through the living room I saw the little box on top of our fireplace mantel. Kathleen had mentioned buying an urn, and we’d each promised to look online, but hadn’t. Add Daniel’s cremains to the list of things we didn’t discuss.

      It was a relief to go back to work, to slide back into my regular school schedule—the bells ringing, students shuffling in and hurrying out, meetings before and after school, the emails and paperwork, the endless, reassuring cycle of lessons to be planned and papers to be graded.

      I began leaving for school earlier and earlier, while Kathleen and Olivia were still asleep. I was the second car in the lot, behind the janitor. Somehow it was easier to think there, when my classroom was quiet and there was work to be done. At home, I couldn’t escape the way things had changed. Olivia had panic attacks that could be brought on, seemingly, by nothing—the paperboy passing on his bike, the coffee grinder running in the kitchen. Kathleen, determined not to mope at home, was attempting to fill our lives with fun things. She actually used this word, as if Olivia and I were two-year-olds who had to be coaxed into a trip to the grocery store. “Come on, it will be fun!” She made big, elaborate meals, found movies for us to watch together, proposed a family night that fell flat when Olivia realized all of our board games required four players.

      At night when we lay in bed, staring at opposite sides of the room, she would dive into the pep talks that I’d begun to dread.

      “Please, try, Curtis.”

      And: “You need to do this for me. You need to make an effort.”

      Her concern soon changed to disappointment, and eventually, to disgust.

      “I can’t believe you won’t do this for me.”

      “I’m not there yet,” I admitted.

      We slept in the same bed, but it might as well have been split in two—her side, mine, like Lucy and Ricky Ricardo in their twin beds, a nightstand between them. The truth was that I wanted to reach for her, that night and the next and the next, but I couldn’t make myself cross the invisible barrier between us. The days and nights became a meaningless blur, as if some anesthesiologist had forgotten to let up on the ether, and, beneath its fog, we lay deadened and numb. We slept less than three feet apart, curled on our separate sides. I could hear her quiet breaths, the occasional sniffle, a stifled sob held back even in sleep. In my mind, I reached out a hand, touching her shoulder, her waist, the ridge of spine, the skin I knew better than my own. But in actuality, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bridge the gulf. I didn’t want to open up to her, or have her open up to me. Wouldn’t the doubling of misery have been more than we could bear, collectively?

      In my saner moments I realized we were running some kind of course, and Kathleen was way ahead, flying through those stages of grief. I heard her on the phone with her friends, referring to what had happened to Daniel as “the accident,” as if it were a completely random thing, a hard fact of life that she had accepted.

      But I couldn’t accept it. A lightning strike on a clear day—that was a random thing. In my mind there was a deliberateness to Daniel’s death, a reckless calculation in the act of getting behind the wheel, in taking a corner too fast, clipping a sign, driving away and crawling into bed as if nothing had happened. It didn’t feel random. It felt purposeful. It felt premeditated.

      Still, I couldn’t tell her: You’re wrong. I couldn’t say: This was no accident. I just couldn’t bring her down there with me, to the place where I nurtured a long-buried, simmering anger. If Kathleen could find comfort in randomness, in silly clichés offered by shallow people and greeting cards, then so be it. I would take comfort in what was real. I would take comfort in my anger.

      Eventually, the tox screen for Robert Saenz came back positive for amphetamines—an upper, speed. I’d learned this from the Oberlin P.D., after daily phone calls made from my classroom before school. He’d been denied bail; charges were being amended. What does this mean? I persisted. What kind of punishment would he get? Jail time? Prison? Could I do anything—write letters, testify?

      Eventually, Sergeant Springer passed me off to the D.A.’s office, to an A.D.A. named Derick Jones, who gave me information so sparingly, it might have been drops from a leaky faucet. He had probably been schooled—don’t СКАЧАТЬ