by Mary Kubica
I try Maisie instead. “What did your grandfather say to you inside?” I ask.
Her leafy-green eyes peer up to mine. “When?” she asks—either naively or defiantly, I don’t know.
“When he leaned down and whispered in your ear. Just thirty seconds ago,” I tell her, and she’s quiet for a minute, but then she smiles and says, “Boppy said that secrets aren’t for sharing,” and focuses her attention out the window, already at the age of four, learning to tune out the sound of my voice.
“Look there,” she says. “An airplane’s in the sky.”
Both Clara and I look, but we see nothing.
CLARA
I set the dinner table for three.
Maisie comes bounding to the table, declaring jubilantly, “Daddy’s home! Daddy’s home!” and it’s only then that I realize my mistake.
There are too many plates and forks and spoons for Maisie and me.
“Oh, no, honey,” I say, “Daddy won’t be home tonight,” as I grievously remove Nick’s plate from the head of the dining room table with shaking hands. With just Maisie’s and my plates set it looks sad, and so I lift those, too, and bring them to the breakfast nook, which is narrow and more compact, the vacant space not so obvious without the extra room. I make baked macaroni and cheese for dinner. Maisie’s favorite. I haven’t made dinner since Nick has been gone, but tonight I’m trying as a way to offset my stunt at Melinda Grey’s this afternoon. I pluck a treat for Harriet from the kitchen cabinet, an apology for scolding her as I scrubbed dry urine from the living room floor.
“Daddy won’t be home for dinner tonight,” I say, followed by, “He has to work,” as always feeling thankful when Maisie doesn’t press me, wondering when Daddy will be done with work.
“Daddy always works,” she says, and I sense an ire settling in, an annoyance with Daddy’s relentless work schedule. But Maisie doesn’t ask more of me, demanding to know just when exactly Daddy will be home.
While dinner cooks, I pull up the Chase website one more time, deciding to have another go at accessing my father’s account. If he’s in financial distress, I need to know. The first password I attempt is denied. The password guidelines are bewildering, requiring numbers and letters, special characters, no consecutive or repetitive digits. It’s not a simple birth date or name. When my second attempt is rejected, I give up, again not wanting my father to be notified that three unsuccessful attempts have been made to gain access to the system. He’d be insulted if he knew I was checking up on him, doubting his mental capacity and financial standing. My father has done so much for me. He’s nearly all I have left. I can’t lose him now.
Neither Maisie nor I eat much, and Harriet is entrusted with the leftovers, too. I send Maisie to the next room to turn on the TV, feeling somehow more at ease with the daffy voice of SpongeBob and his friend Patrick joining us in the room. It’s not often that I let Maisie watch SpongeBob, but tonight she deserves this special treat. I let Harriet outside, allowing her to roam within the pickets of a red cedar fence before the wind ushers in a summer storm, and then return inside to move the dishes from the table and set them in the sink. All day long, the weathermen have been telling us about this imminent storm to come. The day itself has been bipolar, sun and then clouds, sun and then clouds, as if it couldn’t quite make up its mind. An electrical storm has been forewarned, with a bounty of thunder and lightning, the possibility of flash floods and hail. It isn’t here quite yet, but it’s on its way.
I find my phone and my laptop again and get down to work.
The first phone call I make is to the life insurance company.
I don’t know how it works. Do I call them or do they call me in the case of a policyholder’s death? Does a claim need to be filed, or do they simply know that Nick is dead? Do they read the obituaries? I wonder, knowing how daft that sounds, and yet I wonder it nonetheless. When Maisie was born, Nick took out a whole-life policy for himself, leaving me as the primary beneficiary and my father as the secondary one. My father was also to be given our children should Nick and I both die. Nick took out the life insurance because he wanted to be sure I was okay if something ever happened to him, a policy that was secondary to the one the dental lender required of him. They were two different policies, so that there would be no red tape should I ever need to access the funds.
And so I find the paperwork, and the toll-free number embedded on the documents—desperately in need of that life insurance money to cover the accruing bills, replace the inoperable air conditioner and more—and place a call to the insurance company. A woman answers, and I tell her how my husband has died, and I need access to his life insurance funds. It sounds so cold as I say it, and I immediately know why spouses are the first to be questioned for murder when life insurance is involved. How easy it would be to kill one’s other half and then cash in for the rewards. I’m sure I sound like a money-grubber to this woman on the phone. I wish to tell her about the air conditioner and how it’s not working, the interest that’s quickly accruing on my credit card for Nick’s funeral expenses. I want to tell her about my family, my children, four-year-old Maisie and Felix, the newborn, so that she’ll see I’m not as avaricious as I sound over the phone. I have children, I want to tell her, a family to support.
But I’m guessing she doesn’t care.
“You need to file a death claim and submit a certified copy of the death certificate,” she tells me, her words mechanical and unemotional. She doesn’t say she’s sorry for my loss; she doesn’t offer an ounce of sympathy, and so I ask, “How long until I get the money?” and she tells me the insurance company has thirty days to review the claim, and then, if all checks out, they’ll issue a check.
“What do you mean if all checks out?” I ask. Do individuals submit paperwork of someone who isn’t dead in the hopes of a great cash reward?
“Assuming there isn’t any reason to deny the claim,” she says to me.
“Such as?” I ask. Why in the world would they ever deny a beneficiary their due funds? Seems a ruthless and cruel thing to do to someone who’s just lost a loved one.
“Suicide, for example,” she explains. “Our policies have a suicide clause where we’ll deny payment if the policyholder commits suicide in the first two years of coverage,” she says, but I tell her Nick has had the policy for more than two years, which is neither here nor there because there’s no way in the world Nick intentionally drove the car into a tree with our child strapped in the back seat.
Or did he? Is it possible? I pause to wonder, latching on to the wooden table for support. Nick had been off in those days before his death, jittery and jumpy and on edge. I asked him about it; I noticed. He blamed fatigue, as did I. As my belly swelled in those final weeks of my pregnancy with Felix, it became near impossible for either of us to sleep. The charley horses were relentless, waking us in the middle of the night, those stabbing leg pains that forced Nick to massage my calves at 1:00 and 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. Maisie, anxious of the new arrival we assumed, stopped sleeping well, too, consciously or unconsciously worried that the baby would soon steal the show, and our love for her would be divided in two. The fatigue was wearing heavily on us all, and with Felix’s arrival we were grateful for the pregnancy to be through.
In those days leading up to Felix’s birth, Nick was a bundle of nerves. Two times he snapped at me, which was unusual for Nick. He raised his voice, he yelled, and I yelled back, calling him a name that now I wish I could take back. Stop being an asshole, Nick, was what I said. You’re being an asshole. I wish more than anything that Nick was here, standing before me, and I could take it back. I want to reach out to him instead of the way I’d petulantly pulled away, wrenching my arms from his as he tried to hold me in vain. I could hold a grudge like no other.
And now I wonder: Was it me? Was it my fault? Did I send him into the arms of Melinda Grey?
It was so unlike Nick to lose his temper, but again, I blamed the exhaustion, the pressure of caring for two chil
dren instead of one. But what if it was more? There were mental health issues in his family, depression and schizophrenia; we’d discussed these when the decision to start a family was made.
But suicide? I think. No. Not Nick. Never. He had so much to live for, his practice, our family. He never would have taken his own life, not that way anyway, with Maisie in the car. But those with suicidal tendencies don’t always think straight, and they’re gripped with an overwhelming sense of desperation and despair, a frenzied need to make it all go away, to make it stop. I have this sudden vision of Nick, his foot pressing hard on the accelerator with that tree in sight, taking aim on it as he tore down Harvey Road with only one thing in mind: ending his own life. Tears spring to my eyes as I start to cry. Not Nick, I beg. Not Nick. But maybe he was plagued by guilt. Maybe he’d ended his affair with Melinda Grey and she threatened to tell me, and he could see no other way to remedy the situation other than by taking his life.
And then, the woman on the phone says, interrupting my thoughts, “Or homicide,” explaining, “sometimes in the case of homicide there’s a delay as the claims representative works with the police department to ensure the beneficiary isn’t suspected of the policyholder’s death.”
The tears stop, and I become immediately defensive. “I didn’t kill my husband,” I say.
“I didn’t say you did,” she says. She asks me for the policy number and I tell her. She’ll need to send me a claims package, which will detail everything they need from me to complete the request. And then, from the other end of the line comes silence, as this woman no doubt types the policy number in and waits for the computer to think. But it goes on for far too long—that dreaded spinning pinwheel on the computer screen—and then the woman asks for me to repeat the policy number again. She’s typed it in wrong, and the computer has doubtlessly told her as much. And so I repeat the policy number again, slower this time so she will type it in correctly, but again my words are followed with silence.
Far too much silence that I find myself growing quickly concerned.
“Is something wrong?” I ask.
“That policy has been canceled, ma’am,” she tells me, and I’m overcome with sudden and overwhelming dolor that makes it hard to breathe.
“What do you mean?” I ask. “That’s impossible,” I say, but I think that it’s not impossible, that the dental lender has beaten me to the punch and that they have taken everything, my share and theirs. They’ve repossessed their loan from the life insurance meant for me. How can that be? I’m ready to fight for what is mine, to hire a lawyer and sue, but then, from the other end of the telephone line, the woman explains to me that four weeks ago—at which she rattles off some random date back in May—Nick canceled the life insurance policy. Nick did this; not the dental lender. The funds have already been paid out.
“That can’t be,” I stammer, as I imagine Nick filching all that money he’d been squirreling away to protect the children and me should he die. “There must be some mistake,” I say, my heart beating quickly, realizing that now, just like that, Nick was dead, and Felix and Maisie and I had nothing. Absolutely nothing. A house—unpaid for and still owned by a bank that Nick sent checks to each month—a mediocre college savings fund and debt. More debt than I could ever imagine, and growing daily at a substantial rate.
I tell the poor woman on the other end of the line that she must be wrong, my voice shaking and quickly losing control. I say that certainly she’s made a truly asinine mistake. I say it three times, my voice getting angrier and more demanding each time. I ask to speak to someone else, to anyone else, to someone who’s in charge. And when that someone comes on the line, I tell them how stupid that first woman was, and how they need to help me find my husband’s life insurance funds now.
Now, I say it again just in case he misheard the first time. Now.
“The policy, ma’am,” this man states point-blank, his voice annoyingly composed and not bothering to apologize for the first woman’s incompetence, “has been canceled.”
“You’re wrong,” I say, but he assures me I’m not. “I’ll prove it,” I say to him self-righteously, as I pull up the account online to see for myself, so that I can snap a screenshot and send it to him somehow, an image that shows the available funds in Nick’s life insurance policy.
But instead I discover that the policy has indeed been canceled and the funds surrendered to Nick. My heart stops beating; my head spins. My hands become sweaty and clammy on the keyboard. I try hard, but I cannot breathe. Breathe, Clara, I tell myself. Breathe.
What did Nick do with the money, and why?
Nick has left me, and he has left me with nothing.
I hang up on the life insurance man.
I can’t focus on this now. There are questions, more questions. So many questions. I will find a job, I will ask my father for help, I will beg Nick’s parents for a loan. But why did he cancel the policy and squander the money away for himself? I have to know. Did it have something to do with Melinda Grey? I pull up a search engine and type her name in one more time, but this time, in addition to the social media sites I found earlier today while sitting in the front seat of my car, I scroll further down the hits and discover something I failed to see this afternoon. It’s Melinda Grey’s name there on the local police blotter, an entry dated many months ago. Melinda Grey, it reads, of the three hundred block of Parkshore Drive, was taken into custody by the Joliet Police Department on charges of possession of a controlled substance. And there is a mug shot, one quite unlike the imagined profile photo of the woman in the bikini and sarong, but rather one with thinning hair and blemished skin and depressed eyes, a woman older than Nick by a decade or two, with whom I couldn’t possibly imagine he’d be having an affair. She isn’t attractive in the least bit, and yet Connor told me as much. He told me Nick was having an affair.
But if Nick wasn’t having an affair with Ms. Grey, then who?
And if they weren’t having an affair, then why was he mixed up with this woman? Did it have something to do with drugs? Was Nick using?
In an instant it makes sense. Nick being out of sorts in the weeks leading up to Felix’s birth. His moodiness and despondency. The fact that he cashed in his life insurance funds for quick and easy money with which to purchase drugs.
Melinda Grey isn’t Nick’s lover, I decide. She’s his dealer.
Nick has been using drugs. Was he using drugs at the time of the crash? Was he high? Certainly the police would have tested for drugs or alcohol at the hospital after the crash, but maybe not. I have half a mind to ask Detective Kaufman about this, but then again, I don’t want to put any suspicion into his mind. He’s already convinced Nick is to blame.
I take a moment to gather myself and then scurry off to find the collection of personal effects that came to me from the morgue days ago—the car keys and his wallet, and Nick’s cell phone.
But there are other things mixed up with Nick’s personal effects, other things I didn’t notice at the time but now I do. There in the bottom of the plastic sack I find a lime-green cap from a bottle of soda and a molded green army man, no more than two inches tall. It isn’t the bottle cap but rather the army man that catches my eye, the kind of toy that is sold by the bucketful, each container filled with a hundred army men or more. I pluck the army man between my fingers and look the soldier in the eye. “Where’d you come from?” I ask, but the army man doesn’t reply.
I call to Maisie and, holding the figure out for her to see, ask if it’s hers. She crinkles her nose in disgust, and shakes her head an obdurate no, pulling away from the toy. “That’s for boys,” she says as if the toy might be tainted with cooties or worse. She goes back to watching TV.
Why would Nick have a toy army guy? Maybe it’s a mistake, I reason. Maybe some other body at the morgue came equipped with a molded green army man in the pocket of his or her jeans, and an inept mortician only thought that it belonged to Nick.
Maybe somewhere out there, a litt
le boy is missing both his father and his toy.
I put the toy back in the bag. But there’s more. Two blue oval pills in a pill package, each one less than a centimeter long. Not your typical ibuprofen or allergy medication, but something different. Nick didn’t take any prescription medication, none of which I was aware. But maybe he did. Maybe he did and he just didn’t tell me. Or maybe these are the drugs he was getting from Melinda Grey, prescription medication not meant for Nick to consume. I hold the pills to my eye and read the wording inscribed on each tablet, Halcion, and a dosage. A quick Google search informs me that Halcion is generally used to treat insomnia—which makes sense, we’d all stopped sleeping in those weeks before Felix was born—and yet the side effects are immense: aggressive behavior, depression, thoughts of suicide. My eyes linger on those words on the computer screen. Thoughts of suicide. Are these pills to blame for my husband’s death? I access Nick’s MyChart account, an online database where physicians keep medical records for patient use. The log-in is Nick’s email address, and when I click the button for a forgotten password, it emails it to Nick, which I access easily, knowing the password to Nick’s email account. I search his medical records and the listing of prescription medication. The last thing his doctor prescribed was amoxicillin to treat a sinus infection the previous winter. There’s no listing for Halcion anywhere.
The pills didn’t come from Nick’s doctor. They came from somewhere else.
I set the medication aside for the time being.
The battery to the cell phone is dead and the screen fractured beyond repair. I dig a charger out of the junk drawer. It takes time to charge the phone well enough to power back on, though from the sad state of the screen, I’m surprised it turns on at all. The lock screen appears, a photo of Nick and me together, the shattered lines of the LCD screen splintering our faces. But still, Nick is handsome as ever, a youthful face immune to age. In the photograph, his smile is sublime, and I remind myself that Nick would never hurt a fly. Never. Memories of the restraining order flood me then, as I stare into Nick’s kind, gentle eyes, knowing his hands never touched me in a way that wasn’t compassionate or warm, that his words were never cruel or mean.