Paula DeBoard - The Fragile World

“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 of the sky. The few students who remained on the roof were vowing revenge, if life should ever allow them another Egg Drop Day. One by one they went down the staircase to the lower level of the cafeteria, past the hair-netted ladies wielding massive stainless steel serving spoons, and wandered in the general direction of my classroom. I should have been right behind them, picking up the last scraps of their trash, giving the losing team a gentle goading. That’s what I’d done every other time in the history of Egg Drop Day, but today I lingered on the roof, watching my students descend the staircase and emerge from the cafeteria into the asphalt parking lot below.

There was no reason in the world for me to stay on that roof one more minute, but I couldn’t make myself go. I tracked my students as they crossed the lot and rounded the administration building. My room was at the northern corner of the science wing. There, I imagined, they would wait, still joking around at first and then growing antsy as they waited for me to appear.

After a few minutes, Alex came around the corner of the administration building and started toward the cafeteria. Halfway there, he spotted me on the roof. Shielding his eyes with the flat of his hand, he called up to me, “You all right up there, Mr. K?”

“I’m fine, Alex,” I called down.

He came closer, considering this. “You need help with anything?”

“Not at all,” I said. I dug in my pocket and pulled out the massive wad of keys I’d been carrying around for my entire teaching career. “Hey. You want to let them into my room?”

“What? Really?”

I dangled the keys before me and then flung them over the side. They fell much less elegantly than my students’ eggs had fallen, just a straight shot down. Alex made a quick dive and retrieved them. He grinned, pleased with his catch, and stared up at me again, puzzled.

“Go on.” I waved him away. He smiled uncertainly but complied, stopping once to look back at me before disappearing out of sight.

I stayed at the edge of the roof, which was basically flat, with only the slightest peak in the center. In all my years of Egg Drop Day, I had never noticed how I could see the entire campus from this vantage. I’d spent most of my life— twenty-eight years now—teaching here. The campus had changed in that time, of course—a new gym had been constructed, and the football field had been upgraded with million-dollar artificial turf. Portable classroom buildings stretched into the horizon. The school had computer labs now, whiteboards and ceiling-mounted projectors, security cameras and automatic-flush toilets. The kids dressed differently, sure, but they were still kids—still teenagers with the same sorts of problems: love and dating and friendship and grades and finding themselves and hating their parents and figuring out their futures. Only now they all had cell phones, omnipresent as an extra limb. If I squinted my eyes and strained into the distance, I could see students on the soccer field. Olivia had P.E. this year, although I couldn’t remember her schedule. Was she the girl chasing down the ball, her dark ponytail bobbing? No—Olivia probably wasn’t the running type. But it was comforting to believe that she was out there somewhere, doing what the rest of her classmates were doing, being a normal kid.

It weighed on me that I wasn’t giving Olivia the same shot at a great life that I’d given Daniel. That we had given Daniel—because Kathleen had been part of that pact, too. Olivia had turned into this wise-beyond-her-years kid, funny and quirky and far too well-behaved to pass as a normal high school student. Sometimes it seemed that she was tiptoeing through life in order not to disturb me, in order to make up for the fact that Daniel had died. She deserved better, and when I was honest with myself, I knew it. She would have been better off going with Kathleen to Omaha, even if it had meant going kicking and screaming, or half-drugged on medication that wouldn’t have worn off until she got to the Rockies and there was no way back.

That could still happen, I realized.

Olivia could still go to Omaha. She could still get that shot at a better life.

I felt again the strange tightness in my chest and lowered myself to a sitting position, allowing my legs to hang weightlessly over the edge of the roof. It felt good to just sit down for a minute. There wasn’t a huge rush. My students would have packed up their things by now, and I could still stand up, head down the stairs, out the cafeteria door, and be back to my classroom before the tardy bell rang.

And then I remembered the letter, that itch I’d had to consciously remind myself not to scratch all week. Robert Edward Saenz has been paroled from this facility effective on this day, the 15th of April, 2013.

Distantly, I was aware of the bell ringing and students swarming out of classrooms. They looked not like ants, exactly, but like some type of laboratory experiment, their bodies squat and foreshortened. It was beautiful how they all blended together, this mass of color and energy. I squinted into the sunlight. Was Olivia, wearing her ubiquitous head-to-toe black, one of them?