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The Fragile World - Softcover

DeBoard, Paula Treick

 
9780778316763: The Fragile World
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0778316769 ISBN 13: 9780778316763
Verlag: MIRA, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

From the author of stunning debut The Mourning Hours comes a powerful new novel that explores every parent's worst nightmare… 

The Kaufmans have always considered themselves a normal, happy family. Curtis is a physics teacher at a local high school. His wife, Kathleen, restores furniture for upscale boutiques. Daniel is away at college on a prestigious music scholarship, and twelve-year-old Olivia is a happy-go-lucky kid whose biggest concern is passing her next math test. 

And then comes the middle-of-the-night phone call that changes everything. Daniel has been killed in what the police are calling a "freak" road accident, and the remaining Kaufmans are left to flounder in their grief. 

The anguish of Daniel's death is isolating, and it's not long before this once-perfect family finds itself falling apart. As time passes and the wound refuses to heal, Curtis becomes obsessed with the idea of revenge, a growing mania that leads him to pack up his life and his anxious teenage daughter and set out on a collision course to right a wrong. 

An emotionally charged novel, The Fragile World is a journey through America's heartland and a family's brightest and darkest moments, exploring the devastating pain of losing a child and the beauty of finding the way back to hope. 

"Heart-stopping. A gripping read that delivers a beautiful reminder of the resilience of love." —Karen Brown, author of The Longings of Wayward Girls

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Paula Treick DeBoard is the author of The Mourning Hours, The Fragile World and The Drowning Girls. She divides her time between reading, writing, teaching composition at the University of California, Merced, and enjoying the antics of her husband Will and their four-legged brood. She is a resident of northern California.

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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 prealgebra 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. curtis After the phone call, Kathleen stayed in bed with Olivia. I could hear them there, crying, comforting each other. I should have been there with them—I know that now, I knew that then. But I couldn't. I needed, in the fiercest way, to be alone. Not just in our house, but in the world. I needed the whole world to just stop—moving, thinking, talking.

I paced between the living room and the kitchen, picking things up and putting them down, staring at them stupidly as though they were foreign objects, things that didn't belong in my home. A picture of our family—from a time that already seemed distant, back when there had been four of us, all alive and healthy—in a silver frame that said Family Forever in a fancy script. A booklet of fabric swatches from one of Kathleen's projects. The swatches were in shades of blue, and each was labeled with a different name: Ocean, Marina, Infinity, Reflection, Tidal Pool. I thumbed through them, thinking how pointless and trivial it was that someone had given names to these different shades of blue, that something so irrelevant could possibly matter in a world where my son was dead. Everything was pointless, I thought. Everything was nonsensical and ludicrous.

Suddenly my legs felt insubstantial, not quite up to the task of supporting my body. I reached for the door frame for balance, nearly tripping over Heidi, our two-ton basset. She looked up at me, confused, expectant.

"Not yet," I told her. "It's not time." The sky beyond our front porch light was a deep, middle-of-the-night black.

She thumped her thick tail and cocked her head, as if she were trying to understand.

"Go back to sleep," I ordered, nudging her with my shoe.

When she didn't budge, I snapped, "Fine, then," and opened the front door, ushering Heidi into the night. She stepped onto the porch and turned, watching me. "This is what you wanted," I told her, and closed the door too hard.

Kathleen came in a moment later, red-eyed, hair sleep-tousled. Her face was shiny from tears and snot that had been wiped haphazardly from her nose. "Was that the door? Did you go outside?"

I didn't answer.

She stepped past me and opened the door. Heidi was waiting on the porch, her jowls hanging. Kathleen turned to me, her face crumpled with grief and something else—doubt. In me.

"What's going on, Curtis? Do you want her to wander off or...

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Verlag
MIRA
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0778316769
ISBN 13 
9780778316763
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
432
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