I sat up. The name came to me quickly, even though it had been years since Mom and Dad had argued in the kitchen about the plea deal, the reduced sentence. But there it was: Robert Saenz, as if I’d studied the name for a test and simply filed it away until needed.
“But that man—he went to jail,” I said, fighting the nausea that rose as I spoke. “Or prison, or whatever. He was punished.”
“Right, but your father fought for a longer sentence. There had been a previous DUI, another accident where someone died.”
It took a while for this to sink in. “How did I not know that?”
“You were only twelve. You had enough to worry about.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me. I can’t believe Dad didn’t tell me.” It felt as if something inside me had deflated. Not just a lung, because that was so typical, but maybe my liver, or my spleen or some other vital organ—withered up like one of those Shrinky Dinks Mom and I used to bake in the oven on rainy days. Now I wouldn’t have been surprised if my entire body just collapsed.
“Really, Liv, would it have mattered? Wouldn’t it have just made everything worse?”
I could only force a laugh. “Worse than what?”
To this, my mother had no response.
When I had allowed myself to think through the sequence of events, of what had happened to Daniel that night, I’d thought of it as an accident, a random, horrible thing—a speed limit sign falling over and my brother in its path. I had rarely thought about the man in the truck, the guy behind the wheel. He had been locked away, doing his time. Was it possible Dad had been thinking of nothing else?
I tried not to look at the speedometer as we hurtled through Indiana, on a collision course with our fate, whatever that was. For once in my life, my melodrama didn’t exactly seem melodramatic. It seemed a huge understatement.
Maybe Dad had reached his destination already and was trying at this exact moment to kill the man who had killed his son. I shivered. This was real fear, not the random worries that had plagued me over the years, not the endless list of things—scalding hot radiators and pendant lamps and infected paper cuts and the plantar wart that was surely awaiting me if I went barefoot in the girls’ locker room. This was real, genuine: What if Robert Saenz had a gun with actual bullets, and poor Dad was left helpless because of what Sam and I had done, as if he’d brought a knife to a gunfight? More helpless, even—a search of his luggage hadn’t revealed a knife. I wanted desperately to call Sam Ellis and dump the whole problem in his lap again, to see what new solution he had.
“I didn’t see it earlier,” Mom was saying, more to herself than me. “I thought he meant his father—I figured that had to be it.”
I felt my face go hot. “He told you something, didn’t he? And now you’re not telling me?”
Instead of answering, she reached into the back pocket of her jeans and handed me a folded sheet of paper, dense with writing. “After I found the other note, I went downstairs and just sat there for a while, thinking, And then I saw the box—the one with Daniel’s ashes, up on a high shelf. This letter was sitting on top of it. I didn’t want to show you—I’m sorry, I didn’t want you to be even more worried. It sounded like he was saying goodbye, and my first thought was that he was talking about his father. But he must be talking about that man—the one who hit that sign.”
I held the letter for a long moment in the darkness, before turning on the overhead light. Mom and I both winced, blinking at the sudden brightness. I read the letter once through quickly, then twice more, slowly. The words swam before me. All my rage was focused in one direction...it’s too late to convince myself of any other alternative.... If you had known what I was planning, you would have talked me out of it.
“But he’s in prison,” I repeated. “The man who killed Daniel is in prison. So, what exactly is Dad going to do?”
“I don’t know,” Mom said. “I’m trying to think. It hasn’t been long enough—his sentence shouldn’t be up already. Has your dad been talking to anyone lately? Maybe the D.A, or something?”
I shook my head. If he’d been talking to anyone, Dad had done a pretty decent job of keeping it under wraps. Life had been normal enough. But then again, there was the day he’d gone up on the roof of the cafeteria, when I’d recognized him first by his brown loafers, dangling down. I’d been so wrapped up in my own petty fears that I wouldn’t have known if there had been a phone call or a letter. Suddenly, I remembered the little zippered bag in Dad’s suitcase, the one Sam had opened, spilling the contents on the motel bed. We’d been looking for a gun, and once I knew for sure the bag didn’t contain any kind of weapon, I’d more or less forgotten about it. “Well,” I said. “I did find all these newspaper clippings....”
Mom looked at me sharply, and the Volvo drifted slightly off the road. She jerked the wheel, bringing us back. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t read through everything. But he had this collection of stuff—” a memorial, I remembered thinking, trying not to show Sam how wounded I was “—and it was all about Daniel. Like, newspaper clippings and pictures and things.” At least, that’s how it had seemed to me at the time, but Robert Saenz’s name had been there, too. Driver Under the Influence, Police Say and Man Who Killed Sacramento Prodigy Sentenced. I swallowed hard. The tidy stack of photos and clippings wasn’t just a tribute to my dead brother but an obsession with the man who had killed him.
Dad had been obsessed with bringing Daniel’s killer to justice.
One way or another, he must have found his chance.
curtis
I stared at the batteries for a long time, letting them roll back and forth in my palm. Five of them. My first thought was of Zach Gaffaney and our quick exchange in the dark outside his trailer. But I’d seen the bullets—I’d looked in the cylinder, unloaded them, taped them beneath the seat myself. So there were only a few possibilities—the Ellis brothers, Sam, Olivia or even Kathleen.
If it had been Olivia...
Would she have thought one was meant for her, or Kathleen, or me? It was hard to argue, having driven cross-country with the sole purpose of killing Robert Saenz, that I wasn’t a danger to society. But I never meant to be a danger to my daughter; I couldn’t even conceive of the idea. Whoever had switched out the bullets had believed I was capable of something, had seen something in me that I could barely see in myself until now—until this moment.
There was no time to execute a Plan B, even if I had an alternative. Maybe I could have called Zach Gaffaney, although I’d promised to lose his number, to ask what he knew about gun laws in Ohio, about the best places to buy ammunition. I’d figured on having a loaded gun, on taking all the shots I needed.
And then I remembered.
I fished into the pocket of my pants. I’d been carrying one bullet with me since our breakdown outside Lyman; that just-in-case for a case I couldn’t imagine at the time.
One bullet, one shot—like Russian roulette.
But that should be all I needed. If I couldn’t kill Robert Saenz with one bullet, then I wasn’t worth anything.
The first light was breaking by the time I was back in Oberlin. I slowed to a crawl down Main Street. The streets were still quiet, but a diner was open; inside, a few patrons sipped coffee and read newspapers. An empty plastic bag blew past the spot where Daniel had died. I nearly jumped when a station wagon pulled out of the gas station. For a frightening moment, it looked like Kathleen behind the wheel. But that was just the sleeplessness at work—coupled with the understanding that I was about to become a cold-blooded murderer—because it was a newer model Volvo with an Ohio plate, and Kathleen was hundreds of miles away, unaware of what I was going to do.
I turned again onto Morgan Street, every sense alert. Down the street, one of Jerry Saenz’s neighbors walked from his front door to a s
pot halfway down the lawn. He glanced up as I passed, and in the rearview mirror I saw him bend to retrieve the paper. What constituted big news in Oberlin—an athletic championship for a local high school? A ribbon cutting at a new drugstore? A visiting lecturer? I could imagine the headline tomorrow, in a giant font: Murder in Oberlin. Maybe a subheading: Man Exacts Revenge on Son’s Killer. But it might not be that at all. It might be California Man, in Wake of Mental Breakdown, Kills Oberlin Resident.
It didn’t matter. Or it did—but only to me.
There was no sign of life at Jerry Saenz’s house. A glance revealed that the upstairs apartment was dark, the curtains still pulled. The sun was rising a clear and brilliant yellow on the horizon, but it was possible no one was awake inside the house yet.
I parked down the street, watching 1804 Morgan in my rearview mirror. I was definitely too far away to take a shot—to risk my single bullet—but even if I’d been a trained sniper, that wasn’t my plan.
I needed Robert Saenz to know exactly what had hit him and who had fired the shot. I suddenly remembered a slogan from a long-ago history class, maybe as far back as junior high school: Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes. That was from the Revolutionary War, probably, but it applied here, too. I wanted Robert Saenz to see the whites of my eyes. When he had killed Daniel, it had been random—I knew that. It might have been any person walking down the street, but it just happened to be Daniel, my son, who was in that place at that exact time. When I killed Saenz, it was going to be deliberate in every way, and I wanted him to know it, to feel the difference.
I started as the front door opened, and a man came out, wearing jeans and a bulky winter coat. He had a baseball cap pulled low, the brim shielding his face. Curly dark hair stuck out like wings on either side of his head. I remembered Robert Saenz’s disheveled hair from his mug shot—curly on the sides, the top flattened. Hat hair.
My first instinct was to shrink lower in the seat, hiding from view—but this was pointless, because if he was far enough away that I couldn’t make out his facial features, then I was far enough away that he couldn’t make out mine. I reached for the Colt, held it without knowing exactly what I would do.
The man—Robert? Jerry?—crossed the sidewalk to the driveway and unlocked the door to the truck. He stepped up, started the ignition. I squinted hard, trying to decide who it was. The truck, leaking gray puffs of exhaust, reversed in the driveway and backed onto Morgan. While I pretended to be reaching for something on the passenger seat, it passed me.
I straightened, watched as the Saenz & Co. truck slowed at the end of the street, turned left and accelerated, heading out of town. He was getting away.
I tucked the Colt into the console and followed.
olivia
We stopped for gas just past Toledo. It was freezing outside and not much warmer in the bathroom, where my reflection in the mirror was clouded by a long exhale. That girl looked like me, moved like me, and somehow didn’t seem to be me at all.
At the pump, Mom was listening to the slow, steady glug, glug of gasoline.
“How much longer?”
“Maybe another hour, especially if I can keep going eighty.”
I leaned up against the side of the Volvo and watched the numbers roll, the dollars increasing much faster than the gallons. This was getting to be quite the expensive trip my family was taking, I thought—especially when you factored in a new transmission and all the unseen costs of whatever my dad was about to do.
Mom leaned back next to me, both of us ignoring the mud splattered against the side of the car. She looked exhausted, like an older, less healthy version of the person who had been standing in her driveway to greet me just two days ago. I wondered who we would be by the end of this trip, if either of us would even resemble ourselves.
“You want me to drive?” I asked.
Mom snorted.
“Don’t say I didn’t offer,” I told her, relieved.
She put an arm around me. I held back at first, then rolled my head to the side so I could rest against her. Somewhere in this state, my dad was driving around with a gun, looking for the man who’d killed my brother. For just a moment I thought I would be okay if we stayed right here, at a gas station off the Ohio Turnpike with Mom’s arm around my shoulders.
“I missed you,” she said.
“I missed you, too.”
“Just the little things, you know? Even the stupid stuff, the day-to-day things. I miss seeing you every day. Hearing your funny observations. Laughing at your jokes.”
“I tell very few jokes,” I said shakily. I was in a fragile place. Instead of a flesh and blood heart pounding away in my chest, it felt as if I had nothing more substantial than one of those construction paper hearts that kids make on Valentine’s Day. One false move, and my little red heart might rip right down the middle.
Mom laughed an in-spite-of-herself laugh. Like, nothing is really funny right now, but I’m going to cling to this one tiny moment.
I tried to make my voice sound normal, although I was on the verge of crazy blubbering. “But when you think about it, we probably talked more than most mothers and daughters who live in the same house. If I had a joke to tell, you probably heard it.”
“I know. And I loved our talks. I loved hearing your voice, your wit...but of course, it wasn’t enough. And I always felt like we were holding back, like you weren’t telling me all the bad things, and I wasn’t telling you how lonely I was, because we both wanted the other person to be happy.”
I didn’t say anything, because she was absolutely right. I’d babbled on every week about dumb stuff, about what Dad and I had made for dinner, about having to study for a test, about the competition on one reality show or another. I basically spent the week gathering these little scraps of information so I would have something to fill the silence, the void that was created by all the things we wouldn’t say. Somehow, in the middle of all that talking, I never told her about losing friendships and being lonely, about failing P.E., about how awful it was to lose my virginity to a stranger on someone’s bathroom floor.
“Now, no crying,” Mom told me, using the sleeve of her fleece sweatshirt to dab at my eyes. And then she dabbed at her own, which were sparkly with tears. We smiled at each other madly for a moment, and then Mom replaced the gas pump with a clunk, and we got back into the car.
When this nightmare with Dad was over, I promised myself, I would tell her everything I’d left out, every single thing.
And then maybe, maybe, things would be all right.
curtis
The road was still slick; at the left turn, my tires did a half-second spin.
Calm down. You can’t blow it all so close to the end.
I followed the Saenz & Co. truck at what would have been a safe distance in Sacramento, with a few hundred other cars on the road. On this flat horizon, against the open Midwest sky, the Explorer was way too obvious. If Robert Saenz—or could it be his brother, Jerry?—looked in his rearview mirror, he would have seen me a quarter mile behind, leaning forward in my seat as if I were about to burst through the windshield. I kept the same pace, wishing I had some kind of GPS display on the dashboard; where exactly were we headed?
The calm resignation I’d felt leaving the truck stop had disappeared. That had been the calm before the storm. Now adrenaline was rushing through my veins, masking again my exhaustion. How many hours since I’d slept? Back in Omaha, a world away, Kathleen and Olivia were barely beginning their day, one more of many days without me.
The road widened into two lanes; apparently, we’d joined up with a state highway. I couldn’t afford to wait and see. For all I knew, Saenz & Co. was heading to Canton, to Akron, to whatever was farther south. I couldn’t hang back any longer, waiting to find out. I pulled into the left lane and accelerated, trying to d
raw even with the truck. This wasn’t an easy task, since it was traveling at a good speed, and the Explorer, rebuilt transmission or not, felt like a rattling ton of tin at anything over seventy. I had to be patient several times, holding back so that I could pass slower-moving vehicles on the road—the occasional town car, a few semis lumbering along with heavy loads. It was a difficult task to keep one eye on the road and one on the Saenz truck, a feat better suited to a movie scene with a stuntman driving, the eye of the cameraman from the backseat making all the necessary observations. All I could make out was the back of the driver’s head, the dark rim of hair.
Robert Saenz’s head, Robert Saenz’s hair.
What was my whole life now if not a chance?
I said his name out loud, letting the words fill the Explorer’s airspace. It was strange to say the name—to have the freedom to voice my thoughts when the syllables had been inside me for so long, pounding like a heartbeat, pulsing like a deep wound.
I drew up on the left, trying to match the Explorer’s pace with his, nose to nose. The driver was looking down, then straight ahead, then—as my whole body tensed—he turned his head.
It wasn’t Robert Saenz.
This must have been Jerry, a younger version of the man from the mug shot, with a face that was thinner, healthier, a mouth that settled naturally into a smile, even as he shot me a surprised glance.
I eased back immediately, foot off the gas. Jerry Saenz turned, looking repeatedly over his left shoulder and back to the road. He tossed up an arm in an angry gesture, but I had fallen back. My grievance wasn’t with Jerry. He’d taken in his killer brother and essentially provided the weapon that had killed my son, but I didn’t want to hurt him—not directly, anyway. If I had only one shot, I was going for the killer himself.
A car honked behind me—the Buick I’d passed earlier, catching up. I slid back into the right lane, heart pounding. An older woman in the passenger seat swiveled to fix me with concerned blue eyes.
The Fragile World Page 31
