by Mary Kubica
“But you were in the car,” I insist. “You were driving the car that killed Nick.”
“No,” she tells me, “no. I was in the car gathering the information I needed to call the police and report the car stolen. That’s all, Clara. That’s all. I never even set the keys in the ignition.”
“But the car isn’t stolen,” I say, confused, as the heat starts to get to me, weighing heavily on me, wearing me down. “The car is here,” I insist, pointing to it as if Izzy can’t see it there beside her, the black Chevrolet that ended Nick’s life.
She laughs. It’s the laugh of a narcissist, a high-pitched laugh that rattles my every last nerve. I step toward Izzy again, consumed with a sudden desire to strike her hard. Not merely as a warning or a threat this time, but to shut her up. To make her stop laughing. “It isn’t stolen yet, Clara,” she corrects. “Not yet. Nick had to get in the way of my plan.”
“Nick knew? Nick knew you planned to steal the car?” I insist, putting the pieces together. Yes, that’s it, I think. I was right all along. Nick knew about Izzy’s plans to steal the car, and he confronted her on it and for this reason he’s now dead.
“Oh, Clara. Sweet Clara,” she says in this trivializing way, downgrading me to a raving lunatic. And that’s how I feel in the moment, like a lunatic, like all the answers are just out of reach, floating away like dust particles in the atmosphere. Like Izzy is speaking Japanese, and I have to take time to look her words up one by one, to translate them, to makes sense of what she means, but by the time I find the meaning of her words, they’ve changed course. “Nick got in the way because he died. Because he killed himself. The last thing I needed to do was draw any more attention to your folks with a missing car. I was waiting for all the hoopla to die down.”
“The hoopla? Meaning us mourning Nick’s death?” I ask, and she says yes. Nick’s death is hoopla, a singular term that reduces it to nothing. To an inconvenience. A hassle.
“And once the hoopla died down you were going to get rid of the car?” I ask, making a slow connection. “Then you were going to claim it stolen? For the insurance payout?” and she nods her head, clapping her hands at me, an applause. I’ve figured this out. Except I haven’t. Not yet anyway. It still makes no sense to me why Izzy has taken Nick’s life.
Or am I wrong about this still?
Was it not Izzy at all?
My thoughts revert to my mother, to Theo Hart, to Emily. Maybe it wasn’t Izzy after all.
“It seemed the quickest and easiest way to get my hands on some cash,” she says.
“But the money would have belonged to my father,” I say. “The check would have been made out to him,” I argue, knowing with certainty that when the insurance company did pay out for a pseudo-stolen vehicle, it was my father who would have received the three thousand dollars. Not Izzy. What did Izzy have to gain from getting rid of the black Chevy?
“You’re so naive, Clara. So naive. You and your father both,” she says, and I feel the blood in my veins begin to boil because Izzy can say anything she’d like about me, but she cannot disparage my father. The last thing my father is is naive. “As always, he’d endorse the check and leave it lying around to deposit. And when it went missing, as it no doubt would, we’d blame your mother. Poor Louisa who is forever losing things. Meanwhile I’d be at the bank cashing the damn thing.”
It’s a realization that settles over me slowly like the dawning sun, one faint glimmer of light after the other.
This has nothing to do with Nick.
And then I understand.
Izzy did all of this. Izzy stole the endorsed check, she made the regular cash withdrawals from my father’s account, she opened a credit card in my mother’s name. She bought herself jewelry, a bangle bracelet made of genuine jade, which glares at me now from the fleshy wrist, just inches away from my grandmother’s wedding ring, which she also stole. She’s been stealing from my parents all this time. My mother hasn’t been misplacing things. Izzy has taken them.
“That bracelet?” I ask, to be sure. “Where did you get that bracelet?” though again my thoughts are a jumble, not knowing what the jade bracelet has to do with the receipt for a pendant necklace I found in Nick’s drawer. They’re one in the same, aren’t they? Nick used my parents’ credit card to purchase the necklace, helping himself to hundreds of dollars of my father’s hard-earned money. To buy a necklace for Kat, I’d assumed. Because he was sleeping with her. Because he loved Kat more than me.
Izzy thumbs at the bracelet. “Your father bought this for me,” she says with a wink as my grip on the baseball bat again constricts, a boa constrictor squeezing its prey. I’m feeling dizzy, nauseous from the heat of the garage. I’m losing control, wondering again what Izzy’s thievery has to do with Nick’s death? Are they one and the same? Are they connected somehow? Did Nick know?
Or are they disjointed facts, and my imagination is to blame for fusing them together?
But if not Izzy, then who?
Who? I want to scream, or maybe I do scream it aloud for Izzy just stares at me with eyes gaping wide, listening to my breathless scream. Who? Who? Who?
“You,” I say, pointing a finger at her, thinking how worried I’d been about my parents’ finances and my father’s state of mind. “You.” And at that I raise the bat to strike her in the chest, or maybe the head, and Izzy pushes me in return, her face turning florid, a frightening contrast to the white of her bleached hair. I stumble awkwardly into the hand tools that line the garage wall and at once a wheal begins to form on my shoulder, fiercely red and rising from the surface of the skin. I stare at Izzy in dismay; this can’t possibly be the same woman who trails on the heels of my mother, predicting her every move. Gently, lovingly catering to her. Caring for her.
“Why would you tell me this? Why in the world did you confess?” I ask, though of course I know why she confessed. She confessed because I left her no choice. Because I threatened to beat the life out of her if she didn’t confess, and now I’ll do it regardless, confession or not.
“Because stealing, Clara, is a far cry from murder. I might be a thief, but I’m no murderer. I never killed Nick,” she says defensively this time, and for once I can’t tell if she’s lying or not. “You have to believe me,” she begs, her voice suddenly desperate and pleading, and I find that in that moment I don’t know what to believe, for it’s happening so fast and I’m so confused, certain that Melinda was to blame, then my mother, then Theo and Emily and Izzy.
If Izzy didn’t kill Nick, then who?
“Why would I believe you?” I ask.
“You said it yourself, Clara,” she says, confusing me. “I had no reason to kill Nick. Nick, who was always so kind to me. I’m just as sad about Nick’s passing as you are,” she claims as a puddle of phony tears fills the basins of her eyes and she begins to cry. It exasperates me, the bogus tears at my dead husband’s expense. It makes me lose control. How vain to think that she is as saddened by Nick’s death as me. He was my husband. He loved me the most.
And that’s when I lose it.
I brace myself to strike. I’m feeling off-kilter, finding it hard to stand, much less think, as I raise the bat up above my head. I haven’t slept in weeks, and the delirium and confusion and sadness chip quickly away at me, a wood carver with chisel, rendering me a skeleton of myself. I come at Izzy with all of my might, flinching as if it hurts me more than it does her.
I’m stricken by a sudden and visceral irascibility, and it hits me then: this is just as she did to Nick, though in my heart of hearts I know it isn’t necessarily true, but I need someone, anyone, to take the blame for Nick’s death. It’s a means to an end, that’s all. Killing Izzy because I so desperately need someone to blame so this can be over and done with. I need closure. Acceptance.
Self-defense, I’ll later allege, though I’m not thinking about that right now.
Right now I’m only thinking that I need for this to be through.
NICK
BEFORE
We pick up the Chinese food first and then head home. As expected, traffic is a nightmare, stir-crazed drivers at the helm, ready to be home. They accelerate quickly and then slam on the brake, going nowhere. The sun is bright this evening, the day still hot. The thermometer on my car’s dashboard reads eighty-three degrees. As the sun sinks lower and lower into the evening sky, its glaring light lands in that cavity just beneath the visor’s edge so that there’s nothing there to dull the light. It disorients me as I drive on, having forgotten my sunglasses at home. I find that it’s hard to see. I use the rear tires of the car before me as a guide. I can’t see anything up above—not the houses or the trees—because the sun is there, turning the world into a sea of flames.
I take the back roads to avoid the gridlock of the highway, gliding down Douglas to Wolf Road. The car fills with the scent of ginger and soy sauce, and my stomach growls at the anticipation of food. Maisie sits in her car seat, kicking her little feet against the back of the passenger’s seat, asking, “When will we be home, Daddy?” and I tell her soon. “I want to be home now,” she pouts, and again I tell her, peering over my shoulder to look her in the eye, that we’ll be home soon. Her eyes are sad, pleading, desperate. “I’m hungry,” she complains, and I pat my stomach and say that I am hungry, too.
“I’m starving,” I tell Maisie. “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”
At this Maisie laughs, a high-pitched squeal, and comes back with, “I’m so hungry I could eat a sheep,” and we both laugh.
“I could eat a pig,” I say, and Maisie says, “I could eat a cow,” as the tires of the car in front of me come to a sudden halt, and I slam on the brakes, the car kicking up rocks as I swerve to the side of the road, missing the bumper by a mere three inches. I inwardly curse the logjam of evening traffic, this stop-and-go for no apparent reason at all. Car horns honk, and slowly, we begin to move.
And then my cell phone begins to ring. My first thought is that it’s Clara asking me to pick up milk on the way home, milk as well as Chinese, but when the Bluetooth display bears the name Kat, my heart skips a beat.
It’s Kat, calling finally to tell me if Gus is my son.
Just like that my hands begin to sweat, and I’m no longer thinking about evening traffic.
“Where are your books?” I ask Maisie before answering the call.
“Right here, Daddy,” she says, motioning to the basket of books by her side. Clara always keeps books inside her car for Maisie to read, something to keep her occupied so that Clara can drive. Maisie’s never-ending questions are often a distraction.
“Can you read your books?” I ask, and she says, “Okay, Daddy,” hoping that if she’s concentrating on the pages of her picture books, she won’t overhear the conversation that’s about to transpire between Kat and me, words like Gus and father and paternity breathed into the air. Maisie’s little hands reach clumsily into the basket, and she comes up with a red-and-green board book she’s had since she was Felix’s age. Goodnight Moon. She begins to read.
“Kat,” I say into the phone, answering it on the fourth ring. I disable the Bluetooth so I can speak to her through the phone, half the conversation muted so that Maisie can’t hear. “You’ve gotten the results,” I say. My voice is gasping, my heart beating fast.
This is the moment where everything changes.
“I got the results,” Kat begins, but Maisie is whining again from the back seat, claiming she’s so hungry, she’s starving, that she can eat a dog, a cat, a barn owl. She’s trying to sidetrack me, to start up a game that I’ve already put the kibosh on. Usually I’d give in, but not right now. Right now I need to speak to Kat, to find out if Gus is my son, and so I press a finger to my lips to quiet her down. I whisper in an aside, “Daddy’s on a work call,” hoping that it means something to her, whether or not it really is a work call. But no; Maisie continues to plead her case, clutching her stomach as if besieged by hunger pains. I relent only to quiet her down, digging deep into the bag of Chinese food for fortune cookies, and coming up with three in my hand. A bribe. I reach into the back seat and drop them all to her lap, and she smiles mischievously; she got her way.
“What is it, Kat?” I beg. “What did they say?”
She’s quiet.
“The results,” she says, her voice hard to hear as I roll through a stop sign. I think she’s crying.
“What is it, Kat?” I ask again, but before she can answer me, Maisie’s voice comes again, so that I have to tell Kat to hold on. Maisie is upset again, but this time it has nothing to do with hunger pains.
“Who’s that?” Maisie asks, her voice agitated as another car drifts past the median from behind, a little too close to my tail end for comfort, honking their horn and making a harebrained attempt to pass. What an idiot. He or she is going to get us all killed. It’s a no-passing zone, the solid yellow line I can clearly see even with the blinding sunlight. It’s not as if I’m driving slowly, but regardless I take the hint and pick up the pace, accelerating now down Harvey Road so that this jerk will get off my tail. But the car comes at me again, making a second attempt to pass, and this time Maisie is scared, truly freaked out, and she screams to me, “It’s the bad man, Daddy! The bad man is after us,” and I reach into the back seat and pat her kneecap, telling her everything will be fine. But I see it, too. I see exactly what Maisie sees as she says to me, “He’s going to get us, Daddy!” as a black vehicle soars around up from behind so that I have to tug on the steering wheel to get out of the car’s way, again hitting gravel. It’s Theo, Maisie thinks, but it’s not Theo. It’s just a black car. Just some driver in a hurry, trying like the rest of us to get home. I let up on the gas to let the driver pass, watching as he or she breezes by.
But before I can tell Maisie not to worry, Kat speaks.
“They were negative, Nick. Gus is not your son,” Kat says, and as she begins to sob on the other end of the line, I’m speechless. Gus is not my son.
I’m wondering what I should say to Kat. This wasn’t what I was expecting, a negative result. I thought for sure that Gus was my son. I’d convinced myself he was mine.
What I feel is an overwhelming sense of relief, the weight of the world lifted from my shoulders—again. A sense that for once in my life, I’m the luckiest man alive. The tide has turned. Good things are happening to me.
He is not my son.
“Are you sure?” I ask, and Kat gathers herself for a moment and says that she’s sure, but then she sobs through the phone, telling me how much she’d hoped it was true. How much she needed it to be true, and I placate her by saying, “Me, too,” though that’s the last thing in the world I was hoping for. If he was mine, I would have manned up and done the right thing. I would have told Clara, and she and I would have welcomed Gus into our lives. But without Gus around, life is much less complicated, less complex.
I press down on the gas pedal, suddenly excited to be home. To hold Clara in my arms and know for the first time in a long time that everything will be all right.
This is good news, I tell myself, smiling broadly as the car skids off the side of the road, hitting gravel, and I right it quickly, forcing both hands on the steering wheel. I tell myself to focus, to drive in a straight line. To slow down a bit.
Clara will still be there whether I get there in five minutes or ten.
I picture Clara holding Felix in her arms, both of them half asleep, waiting for Maisie and me.
I try hard to put Kat and Gus out of my mind, though it’s near impossible with Kat on the other end of the line crying.
“It’s going to be okay,” I say drily. “You and Steve,” I say, “you’ll be okay,” though what I’m thinking is how I will come clean to Clara about my meetings with Kat. Tonight. How I will wipe the slate clean with a confession, and then remove Kat forever from my life. There will no longer be secrets between Clara and me. It’s one of the cardinal rules of a happy marriage. No secrets. A promise I made to Clara long ago
, and one I plan to keep.
All I can think about in that moment is getting home. Of being home. Of being with Clara and Maisie and Felix. The loves of my life. Of sitting on the sofa with the three of them and Harriet by our feet. Of telling Clara everything, every last secret I’ve been keeping from her, every last lie. And even though Clara won’t be happy about it, she’ll understand. Because that is Clara. Indulgent and understanding.
And in that moment I’m hardly able to contain my excitement, wanting nothing more in that split second than to be in Clara’s arms.
CLARA
In the end it’s Maisie who stops me. My Maisie standing in the stifling garage, watching as I hoist the baseball hat over my head for the sixth or seventh time, while Izzy cowers in the corner of the wood-framed walls, hands to her head to protect it from my blows. There is blood. A steady stream of it that snakes from her nose. Bright red blood, red like red currants, that drips to the concrete floor.
“Mommy,” says Maisie, that simple word knocking me in the gut. Mommy.
In her hand, my cell phone. “Mommy,” she whispers to me again, extending the phone, though her eyes travel from Izzy to me and back again, scared, so that I can see the way the phone shakes in her hand, and I know it isn’t Izzy she’s scared of.
It’s me.
Her eyes are wide and terrified. They fill with tears. She stands in a princess dress because it was what she insisted on wearing today and I didn’t care enough to object. It’s a beautiful dress made of organza, a Halloween costume that Maisie considers appropriate for daily wear, with glittery rosettes stitched to the bodice and light-up, high-heeled shoes. On her head is a tiara. Lilac in color with feather trim and colored jewels. Perched askew on the top of her head, threatening to fall.