Paula DeBoard - The Fragile World

“I would prefer to call her later,” I said icily.

“Okay. Why don’t you just have a seat for a minute, and I’ll see what I can find out?”

I plunked myself into one of the chairs outside Mr. Meyers’s empty office and listened while Mrs. Silva left several discreet voice mail messages. At one point I heard her say “I would really appreciate some guidance on what to do here once you’ve handled the situation.” Great. Dad was the situation. He was probably going to lose his job, which meant that we would lose our house and have to live on the streets with our heap of multicolored furniture. Or worse—we’d have to move to Omaha.

I pulled out my journal and added this fear to today’s growing list. I could feel Mrs. Silva’s eyes on me and had the unnerving feeling that she could see what I was writing from ten feet away. I wrote that down, too.

Every few minutes a staff member wandered through looking for one form or another. Some shot me sympathetic glances— Oh, you poor kid. I tried to communicate back to them telepathically—Help me out here. I need to find my dad. But they retrieved whatever they were looking for and moved on quickly, not wanting to get involved.

Finally, after a hushed phone call that obviously concerned me and/or my dad, Mrs. Silva said sweetly, “Olivia, I think you can go ahead and wait in the library until the end of the day. Mr. Meyers is going to stay with your dad until then, and I’ll be bringing you home. Would that be okay?”

No, it wasn’t okay. I wanted to see my dad right now, right this second. It was completely horrible to have no options, to be at the mercy of the school bell and an adult who was probably only pretending to care about me. But at least some plan was forming, my dad was apparently still alive, and he hadn’t completely forgotten about me. I bit back my sarcasm and whispered a grateful, “Okay.”

For the rest of the day I sat in a molded plastic chair in the library, adding pages of new worries to my Fear Journal—things that had seemed highly unlikely that morning, but seemed incredibly likely now. I’m afraid of my dad cracking up. I’m afraid of my dad doing strange things. I’m afraid my dad doesn’t have enough to live for. I’m afraid I’m not enough.

And I thought about my mom. We talked every week, sometimes several times a week, mostly about little things that meant nothing at all—how I’d done on my stats quiz, what Dad and I had eaten for dinner, which of the self-absorbed borderline mental cases had been eliminated from one reality show or another that week. It was hard for me to tell her things that really mattered. It didn’t seem entirely fair that she should get an all-access pass to my life when she had made the decision to leave. Every single time we talked, she mentioned me coming to Omaha, like the constant mention would wear me down. “I’m fine here,” I insisted. “Dad and I are doing fine.” Then she would be quiet for a long time, and I could picture her in my grandparents’ old house, which Daniel and I had visited for Christmas when we were kids. Sometimes she didn’t seem to be that far away, after all. Other times, like now, Omaha might as well have been Mars.

I had my cell phone, so I could have called her right then. No matter how busy she was at the store or in her workshop, Mom would have dropped everything to be on the first flight out of Omaha. She would have been in Sacramento late tonight or early tomorrow morning, and then she could be in charge. She could ask Dad what the hell he’d been doing on that roof and why in the world he hadn’t come down. She could do the adult thing—take charge—and I could go back to being a self-absorbed sixteen-year-old.

But I didn’t call her. After everything Dad and I had been through, it didn’t seem right to throw him under the bus. I figured I owed him that much. He’d taken care of me. Taking care of him seemed like the least I could do.

curtis

It was almost like waking out of a dream, or rising out of the haze of anesthesia. One moment I’d been on the roof of the school cafeteria, trying to gather the momentum to make my way downstairs, and the next I was a passenger in my own SUV and Bill Meyers was behind the wheel.

Bill was an old-school principal, over sixty-five but so far not even hinting at retirement. I’d been a teacher on his interview panel ten years ago; since then, he’d been my evaluator and sometimes friend. We hadn’t always seen eye to eye, and more than once as the chair of the science department I’d been in his office, sitting across the heavy mahogany desk, with Bill in his fancy leather executive chair, the sort of chair that principals had and teachers didn’t.

Since Daniel died, our relationship had deteriorated—my fault, of course. He’d been at Daniel’s memorial service, a handshake in the long reception line afterward. Once or twice since then he’d mentioned Daniel’s name to me, and I’d recoiled, stung. At most we exchanged a few minutes of chitchat in the hall between classes, cordial rather than companionable. So it was surreal to show him into my home, to take a seat on the gold couch while he putzed around in the kitchen, opening and closing cupboards in search of a box of tea that I wasn’t sure existed. When he finally produced some Earl Grey, I was sure it was something Kathleen had purchased years ago and hadn’t been used since. Did tea have an expiration date? I wasn’t sure.

By this time I was feeling more myself, which is to say, incredibly embarrassed about the entire thing. Bill had already referred to it twice, gravely, as an “incident,” and I realized that the “Mr. K on the Cafeteria Roof” episode would be the stuff of school legend, like the time Janet Young, a ninety-pound English teacher, had separated two basketball players who suddenly realized they had the same girlfriend. It would be all over the school by now. For all I knew, one of my more enterprising students had captured the entire scene—such as it was—on a video that was even now making the rounds of the internet.

For the first time, I thought about Olivia and how pale she’d looked when I’d passed her. Oh, God. Liv.

“I’m feeling better already,” I told Bill, taking the too-warm mug of tea and shifting it awkwardly from hand to hand.

He lowered his lanky, six-three frame into a turquoise armchair, one of Kathleen’s “reclamations” that had been on the side of the road one day and reupholstered, refinished and situated in our house the next. Our entire house was a riot of Kathleen’s color choices that—it occurred to me only now, as Bill’s eyes roved over the decor—not everyone might appreciate. The Meyers house was probably done in complete neutrals, like sand and stone and khaki and beige.

“Curtis, we’ve known each other a long time now, haven’t we?”

It sounded like the opening line of a rehearsed speech. I nodded.

“I knew you before your son died. Before Kathleen left. Right?”

I nodded again, bristling. Rub it in, why don’t you?

“I remember a time when you were larger than life on that campus. You were involved, you know? You were department chair. You were excited about trying new things. Kids looked up to you, right? But it’s been a while since those days, hasn’t it?”

These seemed like rhetorical questions, so I took a sip of tea, and remembered why the box of Earl Grey had gone untouched since Kathleen left. I hated Earl Grey. Earl Grey was Kathleen’s tea, not mine.

“Now I see you walk around campus, and it’s like you’re not even there, except physically. Students call your name, and sometimes you don’t even react. You haven’t returned a single email all year, and sometimes when I pop in to see you after school, you’re just sitting behind your desk staring at nothing.”