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 something?”
“I wasn’t thinking,” I said—a lie. I was thinking that Daniel was dead, and nothing in the world mattered. Let the dog go. Forget the color swatches. Get rid of the smiling family portrait that sat on the edge of a painted side table, mocking me. And the piano. Jesus, the piano. It had taken a Herculean effort to get the piano up our porch steps, only to learn that our front doorway wasn’t wide enough to accommodate it. It had gone back down the steps, around the side of the house, up another set of stairs and through the French doors. So much careful effort. Now I thought: Burn it. Get it out of my sight.
Safely inside now, Heidi butted her head against Kathleen’s legs affectionately. Kathleen reached out a hand to me and said, “We have to keep our heads, Curtis. We have to be strong.”
I stared at her, feeling dizzy and unbalanced. It was puzzling that she was here, like seeing a familiar face in the middle of a nightmare. It wouldn’t have been hard to take her hand, to fall into her embrace, to wrap my arms around her waist while she wrapped hers around my neck. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t move forward, couldn’t take the one step and then another that it would require of me.
Behind us I heard sniffling and turned around. Olivia stood in the doorway to the living room, impossibly tiny, hugging a blanket around her body.
“I’m supposed to call him back,” I said. “The sergeant. After I talked to you, he said I should....” And I stepped past them, leaving them there in the living room like two lost little planets, out of orbit, out of sync.
My fingers, thick and unfamiliar, fumbled with the phone. In those awful moments while I waited for the call to be answered, the dial tone buzzing in my ears, I allowed myself to hope that maybe, somehow, it was all a mistake.
But the voice on the other end was the same I’d heard not fifteen minutes earlier. “Sergeant Springer,” he said.
I cleared my throat. “Curtis Kaufman.”
He laid bare the facts, based on an investigation that was several hours old at this point—hours during which I’d watched David Letterman with Kathleen, and then we’d made love with the particular quiet that comes from having a twelve-year-old asleep down the hall. Impossible. Meanwhile Daniel had been motionless on the pavement. Someone from the pizza parlor had come outside, hearing the crash, and glimpsed the truck as it drove away. It hadn’t been hard to identify—a commercial truck, a small town. The suspect had been asleep already by the time he was apprehended.
“Asleep?” I demanded. “Was he drunk?”
He’d passed a breathalyzer; a blood draw had been taken later at the station. There were no other details at this time, Sergeant Springer said, but he would be in touch. He gave me his direct line, his personal assurance that—
“Wait.” I couldn’t let him hang up. I reached for a yellow legal pad, turned to a fresh page. There was something I needed to know. “Tell me his name. I want to know his name.”
The sergeant hesitated. “At this stage in the investigation...”
“His name,” I repeated. The voice that came out of me was surprisingly low, almost a growl. It didn’t sound anything like me. I was the soft-spoken voice in the back of the room at faculty meetings; I wasn’t a teacher who yelled or threatened. I was the calmer parent on the rare occasions when Daniel or Olivia needed discipline. But this new voice had authority; it was intimidating. It reminded me, in an alarming way, of my father.
The sergeant gave a small sigh, a gesture of hopelessness or maybe regret. “Robert Saenz. That’s his name.”
“Spell that for me,” I ordered. In the middle of a clean page I wrote ROBERT SAENZ, and then I drew a box around it, digging the pen deeper and deeper, a trench of dark lines and grooves, until the ink bled through the page.
I wanted to know everything.
Dad had spent most of the night in his office making phone calls. When he finally joined Mom and me in the living room, he was carrying a yellow legal pad full of notes that he refused to show me. Dad had a scientific mind-set, and I wondered if he had been trying to add things up, to find the flaw in the logic, so that somehow Daniel wouldn’t be dead.
“I’m practically a teenager,” I told him from the window where I had been looking out at our street. The neighbors were still sleeping; none of them knew yet. It was almost morning by then, although not according to my standards. Our cuckoo clock had clucked four-thirty, and the sky outside was beginning a slow shift from black to purple. I’d been twelve for less than a month, but that was too old to be shooed away from adult conversations. “Dad,” I said, so sharply that he looked directly at me, then down again at his legal pad. “I’m not a child.”
He slumped onto the couch like a deadweight, hair still flattened on one side from his pillow. Mom, perched on a chair across from him, was out of tears for the moment. She asked, “What did you find out?”
Dad looked at me for a long beat, and I stared him down.
“All right,” he said softly. While he talked, he kept his gaze on the carpet, as if it were suddenly the most interesting carpet he’d ever seen. And even though I’d wanted to hear it all, I found that the only way I could handle the details was to leave the window and sit on Mom’s lap with her arms wrapped around my waist—exactly like a child.
As Dad spoke, I re-created the scene in my own mind. I was good at that—visualizing scenarios. Daniel had met friends for pizza after a late-night practice session. It was after one when he left the restaurant, with snow starting to fall. He would have been bundled up in the coat Mom bought him online after a fruitless search of California stores for appropriate Ohio winter wear. He would
