bitterly. Daniel had been walking, after all.
Dad had said that he might as well put me into a padded room, and I know he said this out of frustration, to show me how ridiculous I was being, but I pounced on the idea.
“You could get me padded walls for my next birthday,” I’d suggested. “But soft padding, like a couch cushion. Nothing hard like a gymnastics mat.”
The memory of this conversation brought a smile to my lips, and I was just about to relax because clearly I’d imagined the page from the office, when the voice came over the intercom again, more insistent this time: “Olivia Kaufman, to the office, please.”
I tucked my notebook into my backpack and slowly did the zipper. The jig was up. Ms. Ryan had reported me, and the entire office staff—and maybe even my father—was likely waiting to ambush me in some kind of intervention. My repeated P.E. failures were probably being discussed right now. I took a deep breath and hoisted myself from the floor to a standing position.
The last thing I wanted was to face a hallway crowded with students. If there had been a tunnel from the D-wing girls’ bathroom to the outside world, I would have taken it—even if that would be the sum of all my fears: a dark, tight-fitting, possibly rat-infested and ultimately unknown place. But there was no tunnel, no secret hatch.
Right then the exterior bathroom door swung open and big, clumping footsteps approached. I instinctively shrunk back, closer to the toilet seat than I preferred to stand. Underneath the stall door, I caught a glimpse of a pair of black Doc Martens with pink skull-and-crossbones laces. They belonged to a senior named Kara, one of the Visigoths, the group I loosely associated with when I associated at all. Despite what the name implied, the Visigoths weren’t a nomadic tribe of warriors, but more of a group that wore all black and scorned our Abercrombie & Fitch-clad classmates. I wouldn’t have called Kara a friend—after Daniel died and Mom left, I’d basically stopped being friends with everyone, especially people who had two-parent homes and happy, well-adjusted siblings. But Kara was decent.
“Olivia?” she whispered. “Are you in there?”
“Yeah,” I admitted, coming out of the corner. I slid the lock on the stall door and opened it about an inch, as if to peer at a stranger standing on my doorstep. “What’s going on?”
Kara bit her lip and brushed a spiky black piece of hair out of her eyes. “Umm, Olivia...it’s your dad.”
The letter had come three days before. It was just by chance that I’d grabbed the mail that day instead of Olivia. I had spotted the return address—Elyria, Ohio—and immediately tucked the letter into my back pocket, letting my shirttail hang loose over it. I read it in the bathroom, and again in the bedroom, door locked; later I shredded the envelope. When Olivia went to bed, I taped the letter to the back of a framed art print in the living room, a place she would never look. I wanted to keep the letter in case I needed to remind myself of the details—but already I’d memorized every single word, beginning with It is my duty to inform you that...
I didn’t tell Olivia about the letter, like I hadn’t told her about the parole hearing and the letter I’d written myself, on Daniel’s behalf.
In the years since Kathleen left, I’d prided myself on my business-as-usual approach to our lives. The size of our family had been reduced by half, but Olivia and I hadn’t fallen apart. We had more or less maintained a normal life. We folded our laundry, although somewhat haphazardly; we did the dishes vigorously each Saturday, and let them pile up in the sink on the days between; we made a weekly trip to Target for toilet paper and Q-tips and the half-dozen other things we always, suddenly needed. If Kathleen had popped in unannounced, she might have been alarmed by the stack of unsorted mail by the front door, but she wouldn’t have found a complete disaster. Not that Kathleen would have popped in unannounced; she had scheduled visits for two weeks during each of the past two summers, and she’d begged Olivia to fly out for every holiday in between. “As if,” Olivia had said on each occasion, unmoved by statistics about air travel being safer than car travel and by my patient lessons on lift, weight, thrust and drag.
Olivia and I had kept on going simply because that was what we had to do—but we’d had a sort of strange fun doing it. I’d thrown myself into the part wholeheartedly; I’d been proud that none of it, not even for a second, had felt like a chore.
And then, on Tuesday, I’d received the letter. Pursuant to criminal law... regulations regarding prison overcrowding and mandates for prisoner behavior... Robert Saenz had somehow managed to behave himself in prison, completing a sobriety program and an anger-management course, and the state of Ohio was willing to take a chance on him.
Since learning this, every movement I made required a conscious effort. I taught my classes, attended a science department meeting, made a not-bad ziti with Olivia and fell asleep each night with the television on, waking at random hours to the enthusiastic sales pitches of infomercials. I was now fully informed about revolutionary skin care products, microwave egg poachers and a new food chopper that promised to chop food faster than any other food chopper in the history of food choppers.
You have to keep going, I ordered myself. Just put one foot in front of the other. Just keep moving.
Since Kathleen left, I hadn’t allowed myself to wallow. There simply wasn’t time. Maybe if I’d been alone, eating TV dinners and repeating yesterday’s clothes. But Olivia and I had a life to navigate together. If she had a cold, I was the one who bought cough syrup and gathered her used Kleenex. If she had a quiz, I peppered her with review questions. If she had a panic attack—more and more rare, but still possible—I tried to talk her through it. If she wanted to watch long stretches of Hitchcock-fest on AMC, then that’s what we did, with Olivia writing things down in her Fear Journal as she went: birds, heights, dizziness, strangers on trains, trains....
Days had passed without me thinking about Robert Saenz at all. When he was locked up, living in the hell of his own making, Saenz hadn’t deserved another minute of my time.
But I woke up on Friday morning with a tight feeling in my chest. Not “call the ambulance” tight, but uncomforable enough that I had to steady myself against the bathroom counter for a long moment, until I could pull it together. Robert Saenz’s face swam in front of me, all fleshy chin and dead eyes. Dr. Fisher would have called what happened next a “break—” comfortable, padded-chair speak for going bat-shit crazy.
“You all right?” Olivia had asked me on the way to school, gripping on to the door handle the way she always did, like our route was one of hairpin curves, rather than a fairly straight shot.
“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,
