CLARA
I wake to a knocking sound rapping on a wooden pane and, moving sleepily down the wooden steps, greet the flower delivery driver at the front door. It’s the third time this week that he’s come, his arrival always just shy of 8:00 a.m. Too early. He must sit outside in his car, waiting for what he deems an appropriate time to knock. Nobody wants flowers when a loved one has died, but still they come, these flowers, awakening me this time from sleep. I thank the deliveryman, quite certain he’s grown tired of seeing me in my pajamas again and again, hair a mess, sleep in my eyes, mouth repugnant with morning breath. I close the door, staring out the window at the evidence of last night’s storm.
It’s everywhere.
Tree limbs have been wrenched from the arms of trees and tossed capriciously across the earth; a half block down the street, a power line is down, lying recumbent on the road. I reach for the chandelier’s light switch and turn it on; the electricity is out. It will take hours for the electric company to remedy the situation, hours while Felix and Maisie and I have no access to light, to coffee, to TV. Important things. Across our lawn, the remains of an overturned garbage bin are strewn: a box, a fast-food bag, an empty container of cat litter; shingles are missing from the roof of a neighbor’s home. There are puddles on the street, which little perching birds bathe in, splishing and splashing their wings in the turbid rainwater and then, like Harriet the dog, shaking them out to dry. The sun is out, trying unavailingly to dry the earth. It will take time. A red-winged blackbird sits beside the puddle, watching me through glass.
I take a peek out the back door, beneath the pergola, to see if the man’s muddy footprints are still there. They’re not there. They’ve been rinsed away by the storm, as I convince myself that they were there, that it wasn’t only a dream. Nick’s muddy shoes beside the front door are proof of this, as is his rain jacket looped over a door handle. I didn’t make it up.
There is evidence of the storm inside the house, as well. Harriet, terrified of thunder, has defecated on the rug. She’s taken to chewing the arm of the sofa, too, and Nick’s forgotten gym shoe so that pieces of fabric upholstery and synthetic fibers litter the room like the garbage on the lawn. Harriet’s muddy paw prints are trekked across the foyer floor.
In Nick and my bed upstairs, Maisie, up half the night cringing at the wind and the rain, still sleeps, the door to the bedroom now pulled to. In the middle of the night I heard her crying and the muted rustles of no, no, no, no, no as she kicked angrily and unconsciously at the sheet. With the air conditioner out of commission, and the windows closed to stave off the rain, the house has become unbearably hot. Throughout the sleepless night I watched the thermostat move up to eighty-four degrees, listening as fifty mile per hour wind gusts rattled the home. As we slept, the sweat collected between my legs, making them viscous like hands coated with a thick emollient, the thin sheet clinging to my legs until Maisie in her restlessness yanked it from my skin.
And then I lay in bed, still sleepless, trying to remember what it felt like when Nick lay beside me, the sound of his ever-so-soft snore and the impression of his body, pressed against me, arms, torso and legs parallel to mine.
But I found that I could no longer remember.
Our town doesn’t have the best track record for good weather. Twenty-some years ago, a tornado plundered our community, putting us on the map. Nobody had heard of our little town before the twister hit, an F5 that lifted houses right off their foundations and catapulted cars across town, killing dozens of people and injuring hundreds in its path. Now our town is synonymous with tornado just as New Orleans is with hurricane. I walk throughout the house picking up the mess left behind in Harriet’s terrified trail, feeling grateful it was just a thunderstorm and nothing more. It comes as no surprise to me that when she awakens, Maisie doesn’t want to leave the safe confines of our home. But with the electrical outage comes an advantage; without electricity there can be no microwave pancakes and no TV: no SpongeBob, no Max & Ruby. Instead, there is the promise of a glazed cruller from Krispy Kreme and a trip to the park. And so, reluctantly she comes, changing out of her pajamas and into a pair of soft cotton shorts and a sleeveless T, and the four of us settle into the car, Felix, Maisie, Harriet and me. To keep her content, I hand Maisie my phone.
It’s not yet ten in the morning, and so after we gather our donuts and coffee, I make the decision to drive out to Harvey Road. It isn’t a thought that comes to me in that moment, but rather something I’d been thinking about all night, tossing and turning as the summer storm raged outside. And now, it returns to me as I drive through town and toward the site of Nick’s crash, the familiar scene creeping slowly into view. The horse properties manifest themselves on the sides of the street, along the straightaway before that dreadful bend. They are large homes, renovated, or modern farmhouses with horse stalls, barns, fenced pastures and an assortment of other outbuildings I can’t identify, placed in an unincorporated part of town. It’s different here than it is elsewhere around town. There is a distinct lack of commercial structures: no stores, no gas stations, no water towers. Everywhere I look, I see only houses and trees, houses and trees, and of course, horses. There is a church, a singular Presbyterian church abutting a small cemetery, which appears oddly welcoming with its wrought-iron gates and its bushes and shrubbery. The streets are narrow and empty, and as I open my window and let it in, the air smells fresh and clean but tinged with the distinct metallic remains of last night’s rainfall.
Today I don’t drive so far as the bend, though I see it up ahead and I wonder if Maisie, too, will see. Will she recognize this scene? My roadside memorial slopes in one direction, compliments of the wind and the rain. The flowers that I laid before the white wooden cross are scattered now across the roadside, but they’ve also multiplied in number, making it clear that someone else has also been here, leaving flowers at the place where my husband died. Many people, it seems, for the gifts and flowers are profuse. A soggy teddy bear, a cross manufactured from twigs. More flowers. A Chicago Bears cap sits positioned on the top of the white wooden cross, the blue-and-orange wishbone C staring back at me. Connor has been here, Connor who shares Chicago Bears season tickets with Nick, two seats on the thirty-yard line. They spend every other Sunday afternoon at Soldier Field together, August through December, eating hot dogs and drinking beer.
Instead of driving onward toward that bend, I pull into the neighborhood and, before one of the large homes, put the car in Park. Maisie looks up from over the top of my phone. “Where are we, Mommy?” she says, her eyes appraising the homes, seeing a horse off in the distance that catches her eye. A Clydesdale, chestnut in color with white feathering on the legs. I know a thing or two about horses, thanks to a childhood obsession with them. I collected figurines and buried myself in books.
“We’re just going for a walk,” I say now as I remove the double stroller from the trunk and get Felix first and then Maisie situated inside, and put Harriet on a leash.
If Detective Kaufman isn’t going to canvass the neighborhood, I’ve decided I might as well try. Tucked here so closely to the crime scene, I find it impossible to believe that nobody heard the crash or saw the debris lying across the street. Certainly somebody heard something; somebody saw something. I head out like a political candidate barnstorming a community to gather votes, with my dog and children serving as my campaign tactics.
Maisie doesn’t put up too much of a fuss this time—she likes going for walks far more than she does grocery shopping—and as long as she can hang on to my phone, gathering her bits of candy and swiping them from the screen, all is right and well in the world. Her eyes rise from the LCD screen to scan the street quickly, and I make believe I know what’s going on in that mind of hers as she regards the smattering of parked cars, looking for a black car as I’ve already done.
But there is no car here, not so far as I can see.
The morning is quiet and still. In the fenced pastures, horses roam, gnawing on the sodden grass. Harriet cowers; she isn’t brave. I pull on her leash and call for her to come.
The first door I come to belongs to a picturesque farmhouse with a detached garage, lemon chiffon in color with trim the color of rust. The trees in the yard are enormous, and the driveway is long and wide. My troop meanders to the front door, and I turn to Maisie in the stroller, lugging her small frame from beneath the lap belt, and telling her to take my phone under a tree to play. I point to it off in the distance, thirty feet away or more, a tree with scaly brown bark and tiny clusters of flowers, most of which have been knocked to the earth in the storm.
“There’s more shade. You’ll be able to see the screen,” I say, before my eyes trail Maisie to the dogwood tree, watching as she sits down, soaking the seat of her shorts. And then I knock on the door gently, feeling my stomach turn as before me the door opens, and a man appears, middle-aged with a rotund face and thinning hair. It’s gray, as are his eyes. He appraises me, confused.
“Hello?” he asks, and I answer his next question before he has a chance to ask it. “You don’t know me,” I say, as a woman, too, appears at the door, her eyes also furrowed in question. “My name is Clara,” I say to them both. “My husband was killed down the street from here. Just a few days ago. A car crash,” I explain, though from the looks in their eyes, I need not say more. They know who I am.
As I peer off into the distance, I see that bend in the road glaring back and, beside it, the fated oak tree. From where I stand, I’ve got the perfect vantage point. A person could be sitting here on this porch, conceivably sipping from a glass of iced tea in the hanging swing and watching the wreck play out before them like a sporting event, a car or maybe two, hurling down the street at breakneck speed, the unforgiving impact, the air filled with debris; they might have heard the sound of the crash.
“We heard,” the woman says, stepping outside onto the porch beside me. I feel my heart hasten—she heard!—only to be let down again with these words, “We heard what happened, dear. Such sad news. We weren’t home when it happened, but saw it on the news. We couldn’t believe it. Right down the street. Such a shame,” she says.
“What was it you were looking for?” the woman asks me, and I confess, “I was hoping you saw something. That you might have seen what happened,” I say.
She sets her hand on my elbow. It’s warm and kind but also strange, an unfamiliar touch. “The newspaper said reckless driving was to blame,” she says sparingly, and I nod an inappreciable nod and whisper that it’s quite possible the newspaper was wrong. In her eyes there is only pity and doubt. She doesn’t believe me. She believes that I am wrong. “Sometimes seeing is believing,” she says abstractly, and I pull away as she tells me she’s so sorry for my loss, but somewhere deep inside I wonder if she really is.
I collect Maisie from beneath the tree and again we leave, Harriet this time taking the lead.
No one is home at the second home, and though there seems to be activity in the house after that, no one comes to the door. The garage door is open, a child’s bike lying sideways on the lawn. From an upstairs window comes the sound of a guitar. I ring the doorbell, and then knock twice, listening for footsteps to come scurrying to answer my call. And yet they don’t come.
I move on and on. Each yard in the neighborhood must be one or two acres wide. It takes time to walk from one house to the next, on the street because there are no sidewalks here. But that doesn’t matter, because there are also so few cars that travel along this path. The owner of the next home, a thirtysomething woman already outside, stands feeding her Clydesdale a handful of hay, the same Clydesdale we eyed from a distance. She greets me with a smile, and I tell her who I am. “Clara,” I say, “Clara Solberg.” And then I whisper to her about my husband who is dead.
“Can I pet the horsey?” begs Maisie as she pushes herself out of the stroller and takes large strides toward the chestnut-colored horse, hand already extended.
“Maisie,” I say, stopping her advance, but the woman tells me it’s fine. Maisie knows better than to pet a strange animal without asking first. But she did ask, I remind myself. She just didn’t wait for a reply. Typical Maisie, always antsy, always in a hurry, can’t be bothered to slow down and wait. It’s so hard for children to be asked to wait.
“Lady is gentle. She loves kids,” says the woman, finding a carrot for Maisie to feed the Clydesdale, while Harriet forces herself between my legs to hide. I find myself trying to make sense of Harriet’s fears on occasion, her angst over loud voices, thunderstorms, creatures bigger than she, trying to put together the puzzle pieces of her life before Nick found her hiding in the back of a kennel, incapacitated, her legs unable to move. She was terrified, trapped inside one of those high-kill shelters with startlingly high euthanasia rates, where cats and dogs sat awaiting their time. Death row. It was only a matter of time before someone injected her with a heavy dose of sodium pentobarbital, or would have had Nick not found her in time. I rub my hand gingerly over her head; she was Nick’s dog, not mine.
But now she’s mine.
And now, with Maisie distracted, her hand moving gracelessly up and down this horse’s hair, making it stand oddly on end, I ask this woman whether or not she saw anything, whether or not she heard anything, whether or not she was home. What I want to ask specifically was whether or not she saw a black car, lying in wait perhaps to pounce on Nick from behind the trees or tucked away on a narrow drive, concealed by leaves. But this I don’t say.
“I was home,” the woman tells me, and, “I heard the crash. It was just—” and she pauses, closing her eyes, shaking her head, and says to me, “awful. That noise. But,” she says, “I didn’t see a thing,” and she leads us all to her backyard, where I can clearly see the red wood of a neighbor’s barn smack-dab in the way, obliterating the line of sight. “I looked, don’t get me wrong,” she says. “I wanted to know what had happened. I thought about getting in the car and driving around the block. I was curious,” she admits sheepishly, adding on, “and of course concerned—but then the sirens came, ambulances, fire trucks, you name it, and I knew I would only be in the way. Help was on the way.”
“Thank you so much for your time,” I say as I gather Maisie and we prepare to leave. I say my goodbyes; she says she’s sorry for my loss. Everyone is sorry. So very sorry. But they’re also relieved it’s happened to me and not them.
It goes on like this for three more homes—they were home, but nobody saw a thing—and at the fourth house, the house is quiet. The lights are off, the garage is down, a delivery sits there on the porch, sopping wet from last night’s squall. Janice Hale, the address label reads, a cardboard box bearing a Zappos logo. Janice Hale has ordered new shoes.
I move on, knocking on the door of the next home, though no one comes, and by now I’m so far away from Harvey Road, it feels futile anyway. I turn to leave, but before I’ve taken three steps away I hear a voice, a woman yodeling at me, “Yoo-hoo.”
I turn to see a window forced open, a face pressed to the fiberglass screen.
“Can I help you?” she asks as Maisie moves closer to my legs in fear. In the stroller, Felix sleeps, peaceful in the warm summer sun. Soon he will need to eat, though I’ve prepared for this, toting a diaper bag with bottles and formula and distilled water as the parenting websites told me to do.
“You’re looking for Tammy,” she assumes. “Tammy’s working,” this woman says, hacking into the palm of a hand. I don’t bother to ask who Tammy is. In the other hand, she wields a cigarette, the end burning an amber red. The smoke drifts out the window to Maisie and me, who also coughs, an exaggerated cough, but still a cough.
“Go play,” I tell Maisie, ruffling the hairs on her head and gently shooing her away.
“When will she be home?” I ask.
“Tomorrow sometime, I assume,” this lady tells me. “She’s on reserve, you know?” Though, of course, I don’t know. “Had to fly out to Arkansas a few days ago, or something like that. Alabama. I can’t say for sure. I never know where she is, if she’s up or down anymore, on the ground or in the sky.” And when I give her a confused look, she tells me how much this Tammy hates it, the unpredictable nature of the job and the repulsiveness of those ugly monkey suits, the double-breasted dresses and the uniform scarves, she says. “For as much as she hates it, you think she’d try to find something new.” And then, as if all one concurrent thought, Tammy’s job and me, “Something you need?” the woman asks of me, her voice gruff, manly.
“No,” I say, shaking my head, quite certain I won’t find what I’m looking for here. I can come back, I decide; I’ll come back in a day or two and ask to speak to Tammy. But then I change my mind, not wanting to let an opportunity pass by. As at the other homes, I step closer to the open window and tell this woman who I am and what I want, and leave it at that, waiting for her to fill in the gaps.
“I was at the store,” she tells me, “picking up a carton of smokes.”
And I think that that’s it, her answer is a clear no—she saw and heard nothing, she wasn’t even home—until she says, “I was driving home just after it happened. I called the cops, you know? Saw that car smashed to smithereens.”
At this my heart stops. I envision smithereens spread across the concrete street. Nick as smithereens, small pieces of him everywhere. I gasp. I press a hand to my face so that I won’t cry.
“Was there anything else? Anything else you saw?” I beg, my voice erratic, choking on words. I peer around for Maisie, to be sure that she can’t hear about her father smashed to smithereens. “Anyone else around?” I ask, and she thinks for a while before telling me that she passed a car on the way home, another car, a half or a quarter mile past the scene.
“Normally, it wouldn’t have caught my eye,” she says, and yet it was the way the car swerved into her lane unmindfully, the way she had to veer into the gravel on the side of the road to keep from being hit. “Son of a bitch was driving too fast,” she says. “Probably on their phone, you know? Texting.”
She blew her horn and flipped the driver the bird, she says, and continued on. It wasn’t three minutes later before she came to the bend where Nick was killed.
“Did you see the driver?” I ask, but to this she says no, that the sun was so dang bright that day, she hardly saw a thing.
“What about the car?” I ask. “Can you tell me anything about the car?”
“It was dark,” she says, trying hard to remember. “Something dark.”
I nod my head. “Was it black?” I ask, yearning for an emphatic yes. I need her to tell me this car was black. I need proof, someone other than Maisie telling me what they saw, that this black car is real and not only a figment of a little girl’s active imagination.
And that’s just what she does.
She nods her heads and says yes, it was black. She thinks. Maybe.
“I think it might’ve been,” she says, taking a long drag on that cigarette and blowing it through the screen at me. “I think it might’ve been black,” she says, and I decide good enough. That’s good enough for me. For now it will do.
“Sorry I couldn’t be of more help,” the woman says, but I assure her she’s been more help than she knows.
“Thanks so much for your time,” I say.
“There’s something else,” she says as I gather my troop and we start to leave. “Something else I just remembered,” she says, tapping her temple with the point of an index finger. “The sun was so damn bright I couldn’t see much of the car. Had to look down, you know, at the street, so that the sun wouldn’t blind me. But there’s something I remember about that car. It was one of them cars with the gold cross on the front.”
“A gold cross?” I ask, and she says, “Yeah. A gold cross. Like the logo or whatever you call it. The emblem. A gold cross,” and I beckon for my smartphone from Maisie’s hand and type in those exact words, car with a gold cross logo, and instantly it appears on my screen, dozens of images bearing just that: Chevrolet’s famous emblem, a golden bow tie. “Like this?” I ask, thrusting my phone to the window so that she can see.
She smiles, revealing a row of bent teeth, yellowing quickly from the nicotine and tar. “That’s the one,” she says.
A black Chevrolet. That’s what I’m looking for.
“Thank you again for your time, ma’am,” I tell the woman, tacking on, “I didn’t get your name,” and at this she says that it’s Betty. Betty Maurer.
“Thank you for your time, Betty,” I say, and this time we leave.