NICK
BEFORE
Most nights I go home with the best intentions of telling Clara exactly what’s going on. It isn’t that I’m purposefully trying to keep it from her. There aren’t secrets in our marriage; that’s a promise we made when we said I do, and one I plan to stick to.
It’s more of an omission.
I think to myself as I drive home, Tonight’s the night I’m going to tell her, but then I come in through the door to find Clara with a belly swollen three times its size and feet so inflated she can barely walk, setting the table for dinner. Maisie is sitting before the TV, surrounded by glue sticks and crayons, evidence that she didn’t watch TV all day, but rather spent the day creating, and when I come in she runs to me, and I hoist her into my arms and tickle her as she laughs. She wears her leotard still, this pastel-pink thing with fluttery sleeves. Wrapped around her waist is a dainty pink skirt, with flouncy edges that remind me of lettuce leaves. Today is Tuesday, the day Maisie takes ballet. “Where were you?” Maisie asks as I bring her back down to earth, the same question she asks every day though she knows good and well where I was.
“At work, silly,” I say, and she asks why.
“Taking care of my patients,” I tell her, and again she asks why. This is what kids do when they’re four. But I’m smarter than a four-year-old, or so I like to think that I am, and so I ask Maisie where she was all day, and she says, “Here, silly,” and she tells me about the spider she found in her bedroom, a big, black and hairy spider—“Maybe even a tarantula!” she exclaims—as big as a truck. She holds her hands out so that I can see the size of the spider, two kid hands spread a good eight inches apart so that it might have been a bunny or a squirrel or a hedgehog that she saw there in her bedroom, or it might have been nothing. “This big, Daddy,” she tells me. “The spider was this big.”
“There was no spider,” says Clara, coming into the living room in a pair of leggings and a stretchy white T-shirt that is stretched as far as it can go, so that I can see her belly button pressing through. Her hands are laced together, on the small of the back where it constantly hurts, and her eyes are full of fatigue. She’s tired, physically and mentally, but still, she looks at me and smiles, and as she does, I liquefy completely and dissolve. Her hair is flat, and eye makeup is smeared beneath a single eye; evidence of a nap, of Clara sleeping while Maisie also slept. There is something yellowish smeared across the front of her white shirt and bread crumbs on her forehead, and still, there’s no woman in the world as beautiful to me as Clara. “It was lint,” she adds with a tired but amused smile. “Not a spider,” she says, meeting Maisie in the eye this time, “but lint.”
“It was a spider,” replies Maisie, also with a smile, and whether she’s mistaken or lying, I don’t know.
I squat down to Maisie’s height and stare her in the eye. It’s strange seeing the world from three and a half feet high. Maisie’s eyes are green, like Clara’s, a mossy green that stands out on the fair skin. In fact, she’s all Clara, from her hair to her eyes, to her strong-willed demeanor. Pigheaded and stubborn in a way I adore. Neither Clara nor Maisie is ever wrong, or so they believe.
“Sometimes we see something that scares us a little,” I explain, “and we make believe it’s something that it’s really not. Once, when I was a little boy,” I tell her, making this up as I go, “I thought I saw a coyote in the backyard. I was playing all alone outside, and I was sure I saw a coyote pass through the yard. I screamed for my mom, and she came running to see why I was upset. I told her about the coyote. She looked all around, but sure enough, there wasn’t a coyote there. There wasn’t a coyote anywhere. It was only the neighbor’s cat.”
“What did Grandma do?” she asks, her eyes wide with curiosity as her tiny little hands disappear in mine. “Did she get mad?” she asks, but I tell her no, of course not, “Grandma didn’t get mad, but she did remind me of the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”
“What’s that?” asks Maisie. She’s never heard the fable before, and as I hover there, squatting to kid height, she climbs on my bent knee.
“It’s a fable,” I say. “A story that’s supposed to teach us something,” and with that I relay the story to my girl as Clara watches on, clearly pleased. The story of the little boy who lied so many times that when he finally told the truth, nobody believed him. I don’t lecture or scold, and I make sure to leave out the part where the boy gets eaten by the wolf. But Maisie listens and commits the story to memory, so that maybe, when the opportunity arises again, she’ll think twice before telling a lie.
The contour of a passing car catches Clara’s attention, the window’s beveled edges tainting the view. With bare feet, she glides to the glass and peers outside, hands cupped around her eyes like a pair of binoculars. Across the street, beside a silver sports car that sparkles like diamonds in the sun, is Theo Hart, stepping out from the car. “What’s it this time?” Clara asks, as I lean into her from behind, chin resting on her shoulder, hands cupped beneath our baby boy.
I let out a long, low whistle. “A Maserati,” I say, trying hard to contain my jealousy. “Those go for over a hundred grand a pop. You don’t see that around here every day.”
“It’s not like it’s his,” Clara spits, and then we stand and stare as behind us Maisie spins like a whirlybird around the room, arms extended in the air. A helicopter’s rotor blade. Look at me, Daddy. I can fly, I can fly. Theo circles the car three times, a pair of Ray-Bans in his hand, eyeing his latest prize. “He’s such a scumbag,” she grumbles, and though he is, that’s about the least offensive label I can think up. There are far worse names I can think up for Theo Hart.
“I wish she would leave him,” Clara says as I tell Maisie to be careful so she doesn’t fall.
“Emily?” I ask.
“Yes,” Clara says. “I saw them again,” she remarks, words muzzled so that Maisie can’t hear. “The bruises. His handprints. On her neck. She wore a turtleneck this time so that I wouldn’t see. But I saw his hands, there on her neck. I wish that she would leave him.” She turns and presses herself into me, so that now Maisie begins to chant something she must have picked up at the playground where the big kids play, kids too old for the playground. Mommy and Daddy, she begins, forgetting altogether the line about the tree, and leaping straight to K-I-S-S-I-N-G. Clara grins now, pushing Theo and Emily out of her mind as, to Maisie’s delight, she presses her soft lips to mine, whispering into my ear, “I’m so lucky I have you.”
We sit down to dinner, though by now I’ve forgotten everything I planned to tell Clara when I got home, about the potential of a malpractice suit, the loss of clients. The lease payment I’m going to have trouble paying when the first of the month comes. It isn’t a lie; it’s an oversight. A memory lapse.
Instead we discuss baby names. We make no progress, but instead force eliminations. Enoch and Finch are out; so, too, are Edward and Tom. Clara is losing patience and starting to worry. “What if we never find a name for the baby?” she asks, and I see the stress settle upon her in fine lines around the mouth and eyes. “I don’t want to be one of those couples that go a week or two weeks without naming their child, as if they didn’t already have nine months to decide.” She lays her hand on her stomach, and looks to me pleadingly, her eyes so sad I almost give in to Finch. Finch Solberg. Almost. “I want to be able to call him something,” she entreats, “something other than him,” and I try to talk myself into that name, Finch Solberg, just to indulge Clara, to make her happy, but I can’t do it. A finch is a bird, and I won’t name my child after a bird.
“We’ll think of something,” I promise her, “we will. We’ll think of something soon,” and my eyes travel to Maisie’s, which are also staring at me, listening to the entire conversation. “Put your thinking cap on, ladies,” I say. “It’s Operation Baby Name,” and at this Maisie giggles, but Clara doesn’t seem so sure. Having a name for the baby would make the experience more real, would bring the unborn child to life.
That night as I tuck Maisie into bed, going through my standard snug as a bug in a rug routine, slipping the edges of the sheet beneath her torso and legs, she sits upright at once, undoing what I’ve just done. “Maisie,” I groan as the sheet gets pulled from under her limbs and kicked to the end of the bed, not realizing yet that her eyes are locked out the bedroom window where the sun is in the slow, painful process of setting. This time of year it’s harder and harder to get Maisie to go to bed because, as she likes to point out, it’s not dark outside, even if the digital clock beside her head reads 7:53 p.m. Lights-out is 7:30. She’s already spent twenty-three minutes procrastinating, and it seems she’s not yet through.
“Daddy!” Maisie yelps, but before I can scold her I see that she looks scared. I rise from the edge of the bed and follow her gaze out the open window, eyes scanning up and down the street, seeing nothing. Nothing important at least. A boy playing basketball two doors down. The Thompsons walking their dog. A squirrel on the bird feeder.
“What is it, Maisie?” I ask as I turn the handle on the blinds and draw the curtains closed. “What did you see?”
“The scumbag, Daddy,” she grumbles. “The scumbag’s outside,” and though there’s a part of me that wants to laugh, there’s a part of me that fills with shame. The scumbag. Theo Hart. Maisie heard Clara and me when we were talking about Theo after work. We have to be far more careful about what we say in front of Maisie. She’s listening. All the time, she’s listening even when spinning dizzy circles around the room, pretending she can’t hear.
I draw the blinds open one more time and look outside. Theo isn’t there. The blinds are closed throughout the Hart home; the house is dark. I turn back to Maisie. First I tell her that she shouldn’t use words like scumbag, and neither should Mommy or me. They’re not nice.
But then I look her in the eye and say sternly, “Secondly, Maisie, you know better than to lie. We just talked about this tonight. Remember the story of the boy who cried wolf?” I ask, and she nods her head, mouth open, ready to argue. I see the words forming in her mind: But he was there, she thinks, though I press a finger to her lips and whisper, “Shhh,” before she can say them aloud. He’s not there now. He wasn’t there before.
And even if he was, he lives there. Theo Hart outside is nothing out of the ordinary, unfortunately. Maisie just wanted to try the word scumbag on for size. She wanted to delay bedtime, to get a reaction.
And so I put my poker face on and say that it’s time for bed.
Knowing she has a tendency for dramatics when she’s four, Clara and I better be at the top of our game by the time she turns sixteen, or we’re going to be in trouble.