The Fragile World. Paula Treick DeBoard

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       olivia

      October 29, 2008

      When the phone rings after midnight, it’s never good news.

      The sound was startling, echoing off our wood floors and banging around in the hallway, but in the strange way that sounds penetrate sleep, it seemed as if the ringing came from deep underwater. Or maybe I was the one underwater, swimming to the top of my dream, and suddenly bursting through. I jerked upward, head foggy, propping myself up on my elbows.

      Dad had picked up the phone, and from down the hall I could hear him repeating, “What? What...? What?” as if he were talking to a foreign telemarketer, someone trying to sell an upgraded something or other—except he wasn’t cursing and hanging up, which was Dad’s standard fare for unsolicited phone calls.

      Then I heard Mom’s voice demanding, “Who is it, Curtis? Who is it?” Her voice, although sleep-tinged, was panicky.

      Dad was still on the line, now whispering, “I don’t understand....” and I figured we could safely rule out both telemarketers and drunken prank calls from Dad’s physics students. My room was just across the hall, and by this time I was fully awake, struggling out of a tangle of sheets and comforter. This was made more difficult by the presence of Heidi, our ancient basset hound, who was upside down next to me, her legs splayed open, her mammoth chest rising and falling with sleep. Heidi had never been the most diligent watchdog, it was true—the mailman held no interest for her, although she could hear a crumb drop in the kitchen from anywhere in the house—but 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.