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 children 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 little 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.
It must be a mistake; it has to be a mistake.
Drugs, restraining orders, affairs. This is not Nick.
I type in Nick’s password—proof, I tell myself as I do, that there were no secrets in our marriage, though my mind is starting to doubt this—and click on the call log to see who he was speaking to at the time of the crash. It’s a 206 area code, one that doesn’t strike a chord with me, and so I open a search engine and type in the number. I picture Nick on the phone, his large, capable hands pressing it to his ear, whispering to Maisie in the back seat reading her book to be quiet, Daddy is on the phone. Hello? I see him ask, and then a moment of confusion passes across his handsome face as the caller on the other end asks for Amy or Natalie or Renata. You have the wrong number, he says, as suddenly that brewing bend in the road is before him and he doesn’t have time to react, but rather takes the turn at a whirlwind fifty miles per hour, spiraling off the side of the road. This person on the phone must have heard him, I think; he or she must have heard the very last words my husband ever said, something irreverent, I’m sure, something profane, though Nick wasn’t one to be profane. But I’m thinking that’s exactly what he would have done as he lost control of the car and went soaring off the side of the road, said something like Jesus Christ or holy shit because that’s exactly what I would have done. That’s what I have to find out; that’s what suddenly I have to know. What are the last words Nick ever said, and did he or she—this person with the 206 phone number—hear over the phone the sound of the car striking the tree; Nick’s head impacting the tempered glass, making it smash; the metal of the car collapsing; Maisie calling out to her father, her desperate falsetto voice begging him to make the bad man go away?
Seattle, I discover, is home to area code 206. So, too, is Bainbridge Island, the city where Nick was born and raised. I’ve heard the stories about the humble little home not far from Puget Sound, less than a block from the harbor, so if he angled his head just right, he’d catch a glimpse of sailboat masts floating above sea. Until they retired, Nick’s mother served as a docent at one of the museums, and his father was an anesthesiologist who took the ferry over to Seattle nearly every day, spending his entire life on call. That’s what Nick has told me. But Nick left Seattle for college when he was eighteen and never returned. It wasn’t that he didn’t like it, but rather that by the time he’d received his dental degree and made the decision to launch his own practice, his parents were gone, retired to a humble little home in Cape Coral, not so unlike the one they left behind save for, of course, the winters and the rain. Their visits with us are limited and always brief, and now, with Nick gone, I’d dare say that the time between visits will continue to expand until they one day dwindle to nothing. Not that I mind. His mother always had someone else in mind for Nick’s wife; no one in particular, just someone other than me. She’s made that much clear.
I have two theories, then, two hypotheses: either the caller was a telemarketer, or someone who misdialed the phone. Nick doesn’t have family in Seattle anymore. Just a coincidence, I tell myself, thinking how Nick hasn’t uttered a word about Seattle in half a dozen years or more. I know nothing about Seattle, other than some tired fact about how it rains nine months out of the year. I fetch the phone and dial the number, waiting warily for someone to answer the call.
“Hello?” a woman says, and for whatever reason I’m discomfited by this, not quite sure what to say. Her voice is soft, delicate, ladylike. I should have prepared something ahead of time. I should have jotted down an idea on a scrap of paper so that I’d know what to say, if nothing other than my opening line. But as it is I can’t speak, so that the woman on the other end of the line must say it again, louder this time in case I’m hard of hearing or downright deaf. “Hello there?”
I clear my voice and try again, and this time words do emerge, but they are halting and inarticulate. “Hello. You don’t know me,” I say too quickly, so it all comes out as one concurrent thought. “I was given your phone number. By the police,” but the words are too quiet, too tremulous, so that she asks me to repeat what I’ve already said. I say it again, louder this time, trying hard to flatten my words and pronounce each syllable at a time. I hear the voice of SpongeBob penetrating the walls of our home, the remote likely in Maisie’s hand and Maisie pushing buttons at random so that SpongeBob and his pals now scream. I hear her giggle, nearly muted by the sound of the TV. It’s been a while since I’ve heard Maisie laugh. “I was given your phone number by the police,” I say again.
“By the police?” she asks abruptly, her voice riddled with confusion. And I say, “Yes,” though it isn’t exactly true.
“Do I know you?” the woman asks, and I can hear her voice transmitted through radio frequencies to me, where I sit at the breakfast nook, a single leg thrumming against the kitchen floor. There’s a sudden reservation to her tone, an immediate doubt. Why would the police possibly have given me her phone number? Who am I and why have I called? She’s nervous and filled with dread. Her mind scans through the people in her life, wondering whether or not everyone is okay. Have I called bearing bad news? Am I the personification of death, the Grim Reaper, coming to steal loved ones from her life?
“No,” I say. “You don’t know me. My husband, you see,” I tell her, my words emerging briskly, “he was in a car crash. An accident, they say. A car accident. But I don’t think it was. A crash, yes, but not an accident.” And then I find that I simply can’t stop myself, and that I’m muttering quickly, telling some woman on the other end of the phone about Nick and Maisie and Detective Kaufman and some black car trailing them down the bendy road, a bad man, or quite possibly a bad woman. I tell her about the horse properties and the white oak tree, somehow or other winding my words back to Detective Kaufman and how the detective told me Nick was on the phone at the time of the accident, at which I shake my head and say it again, less sure this time whether or not it was a crash or an accident.
And at this, she breathes in sharply and lets out a long, slow exhale before saying to me, “Clara,” and I feel the Earth’s axis shift as I lose balance, clinging to the edges of the breakfast nook so that I don’t fall.
She knows me.
Outside, thunder grumbles through the sky, the day’s dank air rising upward to collide with colder temperatures that hover in the atmosphere above. As expected, the rain starts coming down in sheets. The grass needs it, as do the trees, but for a little girl already traumatized by something, of which even she doesn’t know, it’s the last thing in the world she needs. Maisie, from the next room, cries out at the sound of thunder, abandoning SpongeBob to run to me, her hands pressed to her ears to muffle the harsh noise. A dog barks, and it takes some time for me to realize that it is poor Harriet, who I’ve sent outside, now getting pelted by hail and rain.
“I’m sorry,” I say into the phone as Maisie cries, putting my arms around Maisie and holding her tight. “There’s thunder. She’s scared.”
“They say it’s going to be quite a storm,” this woman says into the phone, and as she remarks on the muggy weather and the lack of rainfall, I come to realize that this woman isn’t in Seattle as I’d imagined her to be, watching the orcas swim out on the briny waters of Puget Sound, but rather somewhere close, watching the sun pass from sight as the rain comes down in sheets. Like me.
Again Harriet barks, and this time I rise from the nook as Maisie clings to my hand, begging, “Please, Mommy. Don’t go,” and together Maisie and I step toward the back door, letting a sopping wet Harriet inside. The wind shoves the door into me, and I nearly fall, pressing hard against the weight of it to get the door to close. I turn the dead bolt and follow the dog’s wet footprints inside where she stands before us, shaking her body dry, drenching Maisie and me at the same time.
“Who are you?” I beg breathlessly into the phone, and Maisie imitates me saying, “Who, Mommy, who?” so that I must press a finger to my lips and whisper a silent, Shhh. I move to the kitchen window and lower the blinds, consumed again with that sense of being watched, the same sensation that preoccupied me out on Harvey Road. Is someone out there on my back lawn, standing in the rain, staring through the window at me?
The lights of the kitchen burn ablaze, a contrast to the darkness that is quickly falling outside. A stranger could see right in. They could see everything about this moment: me on the phone, Maisie clinging to my leg. Is this what they want, for us to be sad, confused, afraid? Is someone there, lurking in the backyard? I hesitate with the blinds only partly closed and scan the backyard quickly, fearing the trees. A dozen of them or more, big, tall oak and maple trees with much breadth, enough that a man or a woman could stand behind them and not be seen. The perfect hiding place.
I’m about to send Maisie to other rooms of the house to help lower the blinds, but then the thunder comes again, immediate and out of the blue, and like pent-up steam about to escape from a hot teakettle, Maisie screams. I press a hand to Maisie’s mouth, asking again, beside myself now with a need to know who this woman is on the other end of the phone. “Who are you?”
My heart is beating quickly; like Maisie, I feel like I could scream. I whisper to Maisie, shhh, and to be quiet, and slowly remove my hand. But before the woman on the other end of the phone can reply, an abrading sound like nails comes from the door, and I feel my blood run cold, my legs stiffen, as Maisie says softly, delicately, her little arms clenched tightly around my leg so that I can hardly walk, “There’s a man at the door, Mommy. A man.”
“A man?” I beg, knowing that from this distance Maisie could not see whether there was a man at the door. In the kitchen we’re out of sight, impossible to see from the beveled glass that lines the front door, but still, Maisie assures me with an inappreciable nod that there is a man at the front door, a man with a hat on his head and gloves on his hands. “A hat and gloves,” I implore, “in summer?” knowing it can’t possibly be true. Despite the storm, it’s much too hot outside, much too humid for a hat and gloves.
“Stay here,” I say to Maisie as I pry her fingers from my leg and move toward the front door, though what I want to do is climb under the breakfast nook and hide. But I can’t let Maisie see that I’m scared. I ask the woman on the phone to hold on. I move away from the kitchen, telling Maisie again to stay, slipping past a disabled home security system that has been unarmed now for three years, since Nick and I agreed it was silly to pay the rates to keep it activated for nothing, and stare through the glass at the world outside. I peer into the yard, trying to see whether or not someone is there, a man in a hat and gloves, as Maisie has said, one who pressed his face to the window while I was in the kitchen and peered in, making eyes at Maisie.
But so far as I can see, no one is there.
But then the noise comes again, a scraping noise right there at the door’s wooden panel, and I jump, crying out. From the kitchen, comes a whimper. I breathe in deeply and gather the courage to open the front door just a bit, my body weight behind the door so I can slam it closed if needed.
But I don’t need to.
I breathe a sigh of relief, grateful to discover that the noise is only the wind rattling a grapevine wreath so that it thumps again and again on the front door pane. No one is here, but then I think again of the wide-open expanse of our backyard, a man in a hat and gloves, and wonder if that’s true. Did Maisie see a man, or no? Was it a man on the TV, like Curious George’s dear friend, the Man with the Yellow Hat? Is that what Maisie means? I don’t know. Is someone here, skulking behind those trees, peering through binoculars at Maisie, Felix, Harriet and me? I find myself wishing and hoping that I could arm the home security system right now, feigning a false sense of security knowing our home is being monitored from someone afar.
“Who are you?” I beg again of the woman on the phone as a burst of thunder cracks. On the other end of the line is the distinct sound of something dropping and shattering glass. A gruff male voice interjects, startling me even from the distance. “Shit,” he says.
“Let me call you back,” the woman begs, but I say no. I say it more uproariously than I’d meant to, barking out the word so that even Harriet’s eyes rise up to mine, her tail getting lost somewhere in the confines of her rear legs in fear. “No!” Harriet’s ears tumble; she looks sad. She thinks that I’m yelling at her. Harriet is a rescue dog, the kind with a sketchy past, an easy startle reflex and a habit of always being underfoot lest we decide to ditch her. She was Nick’s dog before she was mine. Nick was the one who found her, suckered in by some sad ad on the TV for homeless and abandoned pets. He said he was running errands, and when he came home, at his feet was a dog, a sorry creature with patchy fur still healing from a mite infection and a ridge of bones that should have been hidden beneath fat and muscle but wasn’t. It appeared to me that this animal had been starved. I didn’t want to keep her. I said no. Chances were good that she wasn’t going to make it anyway. But it was winter and outside the weather was deplorable; snow had begun to fall fiercely from the sky. Tomorrow she goes back, I said, but by morning I’d changed my mind.
“Please,” I beg. “Please tell me who you are.”
“Tomorrow,” the woman replies, whispering quickly into the phone. The line crackles and I fear I’ll lose her, thanks to the storm. “Meet me,” she says. “There’s a park on 248th Street. Near 111th. Commissioners Park. I’ll be there.”
“I know the place,” I force out. I know it well. I’ve been there with Maisie many times before. To Maisie it is the hippo park. They’re all just nicknames to her, the hippo park, the whale park, depending on which structures catch her fancy. This one has a giant blue hippopotamus that children can climb through, in his backside and out the mouth. “What time?” I ask, saying it twice for good measure, “What time?” fearing she may not reply because quite possibly she’s already ended the call.
“Eleven o’clock,” she says and then, just like that, there’s silence on the other end until another thunderbolt thrashes the evening sky, making Harriet cower and Maisie scream.
I spend the first part of the night not sleeping, but rather staring through the window as the rain falls, scouring the backyard for a man in a hat and gloves. Certainly something triggered this sighting from Maisie. Or was it simply an illusion, a figment of a little girl’s imagination? I can’t say for sure, but as the night goes on and no man comes to call, I start to have doubts about the veracity of the words that emerge from Maisie’s mouth. I want to shake her as she sleeps, to shake her awake and demand to know if she really saw a man in a hat and gloves, or if that was only make-believe.
And then at two in the morning, after four restless hours in and out of bed, I decide that I can’t leave fate to chance. I have to know.
I make sure the kids are asleep. I slip down the stairs, ease my feet into a pair of Nick’s old work shoes and my arms into his coat, find a flashlight and step outside into the storm.
I have to know.
Harriet follows reluctantly, and for this reason I don’t feel quite so scared or alone. I close the front door and lock it, sliding the keys into the pocket of my coat. I stand by the door and listen for the faint sounds of a baby’s cry, but there are none. I pull the coat’s hood over my head, and immediately the wind rips it right back off again, the air whizzing past my head. As I step from the covered front porch, the rain pelts me from all directions. It doesn’t take more than a minute or two until I am soaking wet and cold.
I use the flashlight as a guide. Harriet follows closely behind, and I don’t know who’s more nervous, her or me.
With every step, I plunge deeply into the mud, the mire getting stuck to the soles of my shoes, making it hard to move. I sink as if it’s quicksand, my eyes sweeping the property for any signs of a man with a hat and gloves. Is he here? Was he here?
I don’t know what I’m looking for. I tremble inside and out, cold and wet and scared, praying I find nothing, that at the end of this expedition I can chalk the man in a hat and gloves up to Maisie’s imagination and not let it obsess me. No one is here, I try hard to convince myself, wishing I had stayed in bed, that I was tucked beside Maisie and Felix, that I was safely inside and dry. But instead I’m outside as the thunder grumbles through the sky and an explosion of lightning lights up the night, and I cry out in fright, certain an evergreen arborvitae is him, the bad man, taking a minute to realize that it is only a tree, tall and thin like a man, motionless, watching me.
It’s not him, I tell myself.
No one is there.
The rain taps on rooftops, a marching band’s drum line. The water comes pouring out the gutter’s downspout, creating a flood in the flower beds, into which I sink, getting soaked halfway up my calf.
My heart throbs quickly as a noise from behind sends me spinning in a complete three-sixty, flashlight and eyes scanning my sight line, finding nothing.
“Is someone there?” I call anxiously over the sound of the wind and the rain, and then immediately after, “Who’s there?” finding myself scared stiff. Beside me, Harriet whines. She’s drenched like me, wondering why she followed me outside. The fur of her legs and the pads of her feet get coated in mud. She wonders what we’re doing. Even I don’t know for sure what we’re doing, but I have to know if someone has been here watching Maisie, Felix and me. For the children’s sake, I have to know.
For my safety and for the sake of my sanity, I have to know.
“Who’s there?” I call again, but no one replies. From across town, I hear the sound of the train’s wheels bustling down the tracks, oblivious to the wind and the rain that all but brings me to a standstill.
I walk the periphery of the house, staying close. I use the flashlight’s dull glow to examine the yard, Maisie’s play set, the trembling trees. I round the second corner of the home and, opening the fence, let myself into the backyard where the rain turns to penny-sized hail and I can hardly see, thanks to the precipitation in my eyes, my unrestrained hair, which thrashes around my head like a leather whip.
I’m starting to feel certain that I’ll find nothing, and this will all be for naught. It comes with great relief, knowing with certainty that there is no one here, that there was no one here, that Maisie was wrong. Maisie was being silly, I reason. She was confused. She saw something on TV, and her imagination is to blame for this, for bringing the man with the hat and gloves to life. My heartbeat decelerates. I stop shaking. I smile.
There is no man with a hat and gloves. No one has been here watching us.
And that’s when I catch sight of the mud.
I freeze in place, my legs going numb.
There sit three glops of mud, trampled across the back patio, three large footprints of mud imprinted on the brick pavers beneath the pergola where the slats of wood have deflected the rain. Not in the yard as they should be, but pressed up closely to our home, coming to a dead stop beside the kitchen’s bay window, where only hours ago I stood with Maisie, listening to the rain. The footprints are squashy around the edges, losing shape. By morning they will be gone, trace evidence of our visitor washed away by the storm. I could call Detective Kaufman and have him come in the morning, first thing to see, but what are the odds that by the time he arrives the footprints would still be here? He wouldn’t believe me. Detective Kaufman would stare at me with those somber eyes of his and tell me again that I am wrong. There is no case, he would say. You know what I think happened? I think your husband was driving too fast and took the turn too quickly. And then he would apologize for my loss.
I shine the flashlight on the footprints and force myself to step closer to examine them closely. It’s a lug sole, like you might find on a hiking boot or a heavy-duty work shoe. The three steps are spread wide, farther than my own legs can span. I set my foot beside the print, measuring the length, easily reasoning that they belong to a man, for the size bears a striking resemblance to Nick’s shoes on my own feet.
In my hand, the flashlight battery dies, and my world turns to black. I peer around, utterly blind. “Is someone there?” I call out, but no one replies. But someone was here. That I know for sure as I call for Harriet, and the two of us hurry back to the front door and inside.
Someone was here. But who?