CLARA
The phone in Maisie’s hand rings as we drive to the park. It’s my father, Boppy, I tell Maisie, who squeals and claps her hands in delight, handing me the phone. Boppy, Boppy, Boppy! Maisie loves her boppy. Boppy is even better than Candy Crush to Maisie.
“How are you doing?” he asks me as I answer the phone, and I lie and tell him we’re doing fine.
“Running errands,” I say, also a lie as I steer the car in the direction of the park, speaking on the phone while driving, which I know I shouldn’t do. I hear the detective’s words, reminding me that Illinois is a hands-free state. I shouldn’t talk on the phone or text while behind the wheel of a moving car.
But I don’t care. The clock on the car’s dashboard nears eleven o’clock; we are due soon.
“I’m glad to hear you’re getting out and about,” says my father. “It’s good for you, Clarabelle. Keeping busy. It doesn’t help anyone to be home all day, reveling in misery.” He means well; I know this. My father always means well. He has my best interest in mind. And yet the words come out abrasively, like steel wool scrubbing at my heart. I can revel in misery if I so choose, I want to scream. My husband is dead. I can do whatever I want to do. But I don’t say this. I don’t say anything.
“Your mother,” he tells me, a filler for the silence that follows his opening line, “has been asking for you relentlessly. Your name has come up more times than you know.”
“I’m sure,” I say. This always seems to be the case until I actually appear, and then she doesn’t want a thing to do with me. Even with me standing right there, three feet before her eyes, she still begs for Clara, adamantly sure it’s not me.
“It would be nice if you could come by sometime. She would appreciate a visit,” he says, and at this I groan, reminding my father that my mother doesn’t know if I’m here, there or anywhere. When I’m in her presence she doesn’t speak to me; she only eyeballs me like I’m a stranger in the room, some amorphous shape standing in the way.
It wasn’t always this way. The first manifestations of her dementia were slight: driving straight past the gas station on the way to get gas; forgetting to show on the occasional days she and I planned to meet for lunch or coffee or tea. Sometimes she just plain forgot, but other times she couldn’t find her car keys, or she’d found the keys and was driving in circles around town, not able to remember where she was going or how to get there. Twice my father received a phone call from her on some busy street corner in downtown Chicago—and once from a shady area of Garfield Park—the haste of the city pervading the phone lines. She’d come to meet me for coffee in a little hipster coffee shop in the western suburbs, but got confused along the way, hopping blindly onto the expressway and soaring thirty miles in the wrong direction, caught up in the flow of traffic. By the time she found a phone and called, she couldn’t explain to him where she was or how she’d come to be there and a passerby had to get on the pay phone and explain to my father just exactly where she was so he could come lay claim to her and bring her back home.
“I’ll try my best,” I say, the third lie of many, and then my father’s voice softens, and he asks how we’re eating, sleeping, whether or not everything is really okay.
“Have you told Maisie?” he wants to know, and though I consider lying, I tell him no. I haven’t told Maisie about Nick. “When, Clarabelle?” he asks, and I say, “Soon.”
“She needs to know.”
“Soon,” I say, asking then how he and my mother are doing. My father shouldn’t be worrying so much for the kids and me; he has enough on his mind. Though I mailed a check to cover the debt to Dr. Barros, I’m still worried about my father’s financial state, as well as his cognitive one. Is he eating okay, is he sleeping okay, I ask, but don’t want to add insult to injury and mention the bounced check.
“Of course,” he says. “I’m fine, Clarabelle. Why do you ask?”
“I worry about you,” I say, “as much as you worry about me.”
“You don’t need to worry,” he tells me. “Your mother and I are fine. Just take care of yourself and the kids,” he says, telling me how he and Izzy will be taking my mother for a haircut this afternoon at one o’clock. They thought it would help lift her spirit. “She’s been feeling down lately. Depressed. I was going to take her myself,” says my father, “but I don’t know the first thing about hair. Izzy is the expert there,” he says, and I’m just the slightest bit piqued that my father didn’t ask me to come along, though I would have said no, thinking of some excuse as to why I couldn’t go. I envision Izzy’s hip bleach-blond pixie do, and know she was the better choice anyway. I see myself in the rearview mirror. I haven’t combed my hair today.
We end the call, and I give Maisie the phone, but it’s not in her possession for thirty seconds when it rings again, and this time, when I go to snatch it from her, she puts up a fight. “Give it to me, Maisie,” I demand. She clutches tightly to the phone so that I have to reach backward and wrench it from her hands. As I do, a fingernail grazes her hand by accident, and she grips tightly to that hand, crying that it hurts. She accuses me of scratching her. She screams.
But the tantrum doesn’t have a thing to do with her injured hand. She and I both know that.
“Quiet, Maisie,” I say, and then press the phone to my ear. “Hello?” I ask, out of breath, Maisie in the background kicking her feet at the back of the passenger’s chair and moaning.
“You hurt me!” she cries as from the other end of the phone line comes a voice, the staid voice of Detective Kaufman asking me if everything is all right, and if I didn’t know any better I’d think he knew I was intentionally breaking the law, talking on the phone while driving.
“Yes,” I say, though clearly everything is not all right. “Just fine,” I say, hoping he doesn’t hear the car’s engine as we drive on toward the park.
The detective has called to tell me two things. First, the man with the black car, the one with the tribal tattoo and the Budweiser beers—he has an alibi, airtight, for the day that Nick died. He was with his audiologist in Hinsdale at the time of the crash, which Detective Kaufman has confirmed with the doctor’s office.
“Are you sure?” I ask, and he says, “I’m certain of it. You must be mistaken about this man’s vehicle,” at which I peer into the rearview mirror to see Maisie glaring back at me with resentment. She’s mad that I scratched her; she wants the phone back. She wants to play Candy Crush.
“There’s one more thing, Mrs. Solberg,” says the detective. “I was doing a little research, digging up some information. I took the liberty of speaking to a few of your neighbors. I hope you don’t mind. I’ve noticed that your husband has a history of speeding,” he says, and already I know where this conversation is going. Nick has a lead foot; I know. I’ve nagged him about it since the day we met. “Two speeding tickets in the last year, four over the last three years,” he tells me. “He was one more traffic violation away from having his license suspended.”
This was something I didn’t know.
Nick received a speeding ticket about six months ago. I was in the car with him at the time, begging him to slow down, but he didn’t. He was trying to outrun a train, to get through the crossing before the train inevitably stopped on the tracks. A cop had a speed trap set up on Route 59 and caught Nick going nearly sixty when he was meant to be going forty-five. But these other tickets and the threat of having his license revoked, these were things I didn’t know.
“You said you spoke to my neighbors,” I say. “Why?”
“We had two complaints on file. One from a Sharon Cadwallader and one from Theodore Hart.”
Theo. Emily’s husband.
Theo and Nick have never liked each other much, and yet it seems completely ludicrous that he called the police on Nick, and we didn’t know. Or maybe Nick did know, and only I didn’t know, I think, wondering why in the world Nick wouldn’t tell me if a neighbor had phoned in a complaint to the police about him. Maybe Nick felt guilty, maybe he was embarrassed. Nick was never one for gossip; he always tried to see the best in everyone, no matter what they’d done.
“What?” I ask, utterly surprised. “Complaints for what?”
“Complaints for speeding,” Detective Kaufman tells me, and I envision Nick driving the car too quickly down the curling streets of our neighborhood, eager to be home. Even I have nagged him about this, worried for the children playing baseball in the middle of the street.
Sharon Cadwallader I can certainly understand. Sharon Cadwallader, a high-ranking official on the neighborhood council, and the one who fought to have traffic calming measures installed around the community: speed humps or traffic circles, or those ridiculous speed display boards that flashed when one drove too fast. She purchased her own radar gun and sat on her front porch, vetting every car that drove by. I’m quite certain she called the police about everyone who breached the twenty-five mile per hour speed limit.
“Mrs. Cadwallader clocked your husband going forty-eight miles per hour on your street. That’s nearly double the legal limit,” the detective says to me. “And Mr. Hart says there was some run-in with his son. Just a few weeks ago. The boy’s rubber ball had rolled into the street, it seems, and when he went to fetch it, Nick came tearing around the bend.” He concludes with this, “It was a close call,” and an exaggerated sigh through the phone line. And I picture the speed of Nick’s passing car creating a breeze, eddying the brown hairs on Teddy’s head, his eyes wide with fear as he groped for the ball. Theo in the background, screaming, and Emily at a window, watching the commotion from afar. Did Theo and Nick exchange words in the middle of the street? Was there a blowup, name-calling, or were punches thrown? Did Emily know, and if so, why didn’t she tell me? I have a hard time picturing it. Nick is a pacifist. He avoids conflict at all costs, and is quick to apologize even when he’s done nothing wrong. Anything to avoid a fight. I have no doubt that he was speeding through the neighborhood, whizzing home at forty-eight miles per hour to see Maisie and Felix and me. This comes as no surprise to me.
But I also see him rushing out into the middle of the street to see if Teddy is all right; I envision him apologizing demonstratively about the near-miss with Teddy and the rubber ball. He would have apologized for it all; he would have atoned for the misdeed.
So why call the police?
“Seems your husband had quite a history with speeding,” Detective Kaufman says, and I hear the words he says but also those he doesn’t say: Nick’s frequent speeding is the cause of the crash out on Harvey Road. It’s Nick’s fault that he’s dead. Nick took the turn too quickly and lost control of the car. His speed is the reason he ran into that tree.
All roads lead to Nick.
I think of the woman I’ve just met, in the window, smoking her cigarette, and about the car she’d seen leaving the scene of the crash, veering into oncoming traffic. A black Chevrolet.
“I’ve taken the liberty, Detective Kaufman,” I say, echoing his own words, “of speaking to some of the residents who live off Harvey Road. Just to see if anyone saw or heard anything at the time of the crash.” His sigh is long and loud.
“And?” he asks, his words stultified. I’m boring him, it seems. I reach into the back seat to pat Maisie’s knee. Almost done, I mouth. Almost done, and then she can have the phone back. Almost done, and then I can ask about her injured hand.
“There was a woman,” I tell him, “driving home from the market at the time. She came upon the scene just seconds after the crash, passing a black car along the way. It was driving erratically down the road. A black Chevrolet,” I say, pushing from my mind the drug possession charges I spied online for Melinda Grey, wondering if it’s at all possible Nick was under the influence of something at the time of the crash. I won’t put this suggestion in the detective’s mind.
“Did she get a license?” he asks, but I tell him no, blaming the sun. It was so bright that day she could hardly see a thing. “Then how did she know it was a Chevy?” he asks sagely.
“Well, that she saw,” I say, knowing how foolish it sounds. “The emblem on the front of the car was easy to see. She remembers seeing the golden bow tie.”
“What is this woman’s name?” he asks, and I tell him. “Betty Maurer,” I say, and he promises that he’ll speak to her. “Many cars travel on that road every day,” he tells me. “It’s a shortcut, a nice alternative to highway congestion. Just because it was there, passing by around the time of the accident, doesn’t make it a crime,” he says, but I press again, asking if he’ll speak to Betty, and he says that he will. I thank the detective for his time. He says, “Just doing my job,” and we end the call.
As I pass the phone back into Maisie’s expectant hand, asking whether or not her scratch is okay, I’m floundering and confused. Did Nick die because he was driving too fast? He had a history of speeding, that much I know. But there’s so much more to consider, from the canceled life insurance funds to the agent’s suggestion that suicide or homicide are to blame. And then there is the restraining order, and the fact that some man in a hat and gloves has been skulking around my home.
Was Nick driving too fast because he was chasing someone, rather than the other way around?
Was he the pursuer and not the pursued?
And then Maisie’s words come to me again, about the bad man following her and Nick, the obvious fear imbuing her eyes. That can’t just be for show. Maisie saw something that terrified her.
I watch in the rearview mirror as Maisie—happy as a lark now, having forgotten all about the pilfered phone—points out the window and says to me with decision, with arrant conviction and delight, her voice decked out in a singsong cadence, canarying the words, “An elephant, Mommy. Look, Mommy, an elephant’s in those trees,” and God help me, I look, even though of course there isn’t an elephant in those trees. An elephant wandering around in suburban America? How absurd.
“You silly girl,” I say soberly, watching the way the day’s sunlight glints off the white of her eye. “Why would an elephant be here?” I ask, and as she chirps, “Just taking a walk, Mommy,” I’m filled suddenly with a sense of unease.
Did she tell Nick that there was a car following them? Did she make it all up, and for this he drove faster, manically, anything to get away from the phony car?
For the first time, I ask Maisie. I ask her about the car. My words come out guardedly, carefully chosen, cautious not to use the wrong ones. “Maisie, honey,” I say, my voice purring the words, “did you see the black car like you just saw that elephant in the trees? The car that was following you and Daddy?” but at the mention of a black car, she goes silent. She turns away from me and peers out the window, any sense of a smile washed clear from her face.
No, I tell myself. No. Of course not. Nick is much more commonsensical than this. He would never give in to the whims of a child.
But then I see them in the grocery store together, Maisie set in the basket of a shopping cart, begging, Faster, Daddy, faster, and I see Nick run like greased lightning up and down the aisles, not caring what other shoppers thought because all he cared about was his little girl in the shopping cart, happy, smiling, laughing.
This has happened. Many times this has happened.
And now, from the back seat comes Maisie’s crooning voice again as she spots the playground off in the distance, the one we’re en route to, the slides, the swings, the monkey bars mere specks on the horizon. “Faster, Mommy, faster,” she squeals, eager now for a day at the hippo park as my foot presses down on the gas pedal without intent, and the car casually picks up speed.