CLARA
At eight in the morning the doorbell rings, and of course I’m expecting flowers, the poor deliveryman waiting with his idle van parked outside, about to greet me in my pajamas for the forth time this week.
But it’s not a delivery of flowers.
Standing outside on my front porch is Emily, dressed in black running shorts and a fleece half-zip hoodie that is certainly too thick for a day like today. On her feet is a pair of pricey running shoes, and she jogs in place, warming up for a run, her hair pulled back into a loose ponytail, strands escaping here and there and falling into her face. It’s only 8:00 a.m., and already the heat and humidity rush in to greet me, fusing together with the inside air, which is already hot. Maisie bounds down the stairs at the sound of knocking—a hungry Harriet hot on her heels—her sweaty hair stuck to her forehead. “Why don’t you go turn on the TV?” I tell her, and she nods her head a sleepy okay, as Emily and I step outside and I gently pull the door closed. The sun is brilliant this morning, dazzlingly bright, and I curse it for having the audacity to show its face after everything it has done. It’s the sun’s fault that Nick is dead.
Or maybe not.
The first thing I see are the red marks singed into Emily’s skin, reaching from the edges of the fleece hoodie, which is doing a piss-poor job of concealing them. That is its purpose after all, not to keep Emily warm on this hot day, but rather to hide the red marks, as she tugs indiscreetly at the zipper to make certain it’s up as high as it will go, which, as luck would have it, isn’t high enough. There are bruises there, small but visible to the naked eye, discolored skin from bleeding beneath the surface where her husband’s fingers pressed on the windpipe, paring down the oxygen supply, making her gasp for air. She tugs again at the hoodie, trying hard to shroud the bruises, but she cannot undo what has been done. It’s too late; I’ve already seen. The fleece is two inches too short, and we’ve had this conversation before, Emily and me, her wine-induced disclosures of how during intercourse Theo would throttle her from time to time until she felt a tingling sensation throughout her body and an overwhelming sense of vertigo, coupled with the all-consuming fear that she was about to die. And then he’d release her. It was meant for pleasure, hers and his, but only one of them thought it was fun.
She confessed this to me long ago, a year or more, one afternoon while Theo was traveling—Cincinnati that time—as she and I sat together in her backyard watching the kids play a game of chase. Teddy was It, and he sprinted quickly and clumsily after Maisie, who clung to a nearby tree that they’d deemed to be base. Emily and I were drinking that day, a day not so different than this one—hot and sunny—some kind of cooler she’d concocted with peach juice and pineapple juice, but also a long pour of Moscato wine. I’d confessed something trite about Nick—how he left his gym shoes lying around, how he mislaid used articles of clothing here and there, somehow or other unable to locate the hamper in our master bath—and Emily countered with this: how Theo had a fetish for asphyxiaphilia, a word she had to explain to me because I couldn’t imagine such a thing would ever exist. It sounded primeval to me, violent and heathen, something ancient Vikings might do when they weren’t pillaging others’ homelands. It was the stuff of high school house parties when parents weren’t home—reprobate teenagers without a clue about the fragility or the sanctity of life, getting blitzed and taking part in madcap sex games as if they were immortal—and not what middle-class suburbanites did while their children slept soundly in the room next door.
That day, I took in the coral-colored bruises left behind by Theo’s aroused hands, and I could see in Emily’s eyes that she was scared. After I’d left, I spent days trying to imagine it, Theo near killing her and then bringing her back from the dead. Again and again. For pleasure and fun, as well as something else, I assumed. Dominion and control.
“I thought Theo was traveling?” I say now, standing outside on the front stoop beside Emily. “Massachusetts for an auto show.”
She nods her head and says, “He is. He was. He came home last night, early. He wasn’t due until tomorrow afternoon. It isn’t what you think,” she says quickly then, one concurrent thought, as her hands move to her neck and she feigns excuses: she lost her balance, took a nosedive down the basement stairs, Theo tried to break the fall. She knows how I feel about this custom of theirs, this strange tradition. You should leave him if he scares you, I’d told Emily once, twice, three times, and every time she looked at me despairingly and said how she’d never be able to support herself without Theo around, how Theo would take Teddy from her. Emily had worked for years as a pediatric nurse, a position she left upon marrying Theo, and in the subsequent years her nursing license expired. She was no longer able to practice as an RN.
I told her once that if she didn’t leave him I would call the police.
Emily called my bluff.
“I’m lucky I didn’t break anything,” Emily says now, and I give in to this myth of hers about the fall and the basement stairs.
“Quite fortunate indeed,” I say, and then there is silence.
But Emily didn’t come to speak about Theo. She came to see if I was okay, for the last time she saw me I was standing in the doorway to her home, sobbing while Maisie and Teddy watched on in their magician costumes. “I hated for you to leave like that,” she says, and it comes rushing back to me then and there, in that one single moment, the fact that Nick is dead, that I’m a widow, that Maisie and Felix are one parent away from being orphaned.
Maisie’s nightmares fill my mind, the image of a mysterious bad man, the suggestion that Nick didn’t die but that he was killed, purposefully, intentionally and with malice. But now I’ve begun to think that Maisie is wrong, that Nick himself was the bad man: abusing drugs, cheating on me, stealing from my father. Contemplating suicide. As the police have said, Nick is to blame for his own death, though even they don’t know the reasons why. In my mind I hear Detective Kaufman’s words over and over again, goading and tormenting me, You know what I think happened? he asks. I think your husband was driving too fast and took the turn too quickly… I’m so sorry for your loss, he says, sitting across the room from me, laughing a heinous laugh, so that I’m no longer certain what’s real and what’s not real, what has happened and what has not happened. I haven’t slept in nearly two weeks, this much I know, and I’m hampered by sadness, insomnia, an overwhelming sense of fatigue. My body hurts, physically, mentally, emotionally, and the only thing in the world I want to do is crawl between the sheets of my bed and die.
And suddenly I begin to cry.
“What is it, Clara?” asks Emily. “What’s wrong?” She sets her hands on my hands, and though part of me wants to pull away and sequester myself back inside my house all alone, I don’t. I lean into Emily and confess to her what I know about the accident, how maybe—just maybe—it wasn’t an accident at all. I tell her about Maisie’s dreams, and the black car, the Chevrolet. I tell her about my meeting with Detective Kaufman, confessing to Emily that I never went to the grocery store in search of bananas the other day, but rather the police department. It’s a relief saying the words aloud to someone who will listen, like purging oneself of too much food. It feels good, absolving, cleansing and purifying, so that maybe after this grand confession I’ll be able to get into those skinny jeans again, and accept the reality that has become my life. I tell her about Connor, I tell her about Kat. Except I don’t confess to Emily about the drugs, the suicide or the stealing because of the way I stand here, staring disdainfully at the bruises Theo has left behind on her skin with his hands.
Emily would find me to be sanctimonious. A hypocrite. Nick has turned me into a hypocrite.
What I’m expecting is for Emily to cascade with empathy, and tell me how awful this is, how she’s so sorry this is happening to me. It isn’t pity I’m looking for, not at all, but rather someone who will listen, someone greater than four years old to share this secret with me. Someone who will look at me with sensitivity and compassion rather than the way the detective looks at me, with my pie-in-the-sky idea that Nick was murdered. I want Emily to help catalog the clues for me. I need for her to tell me that I’m wrong about Kat, that there was nothing unchaste about her relationship with Nick, that they were merely friends as Emily and I are friends. I want her, Emily who stands before me with big, disbelieving eyes, her husband’s hands impressed across her neckline, to assure me that Nick loves me the most. Not Kat.
But Emily only releases my hands. “You know that can’t be true,” she says to me defensively, as if she herself is the one who killed Nick. Her voice shakes as her eyes dither between her home and me, so that I think if I blink she might just flee. In the distance, her house is quiet, a Queen Anne Victorian with all the curtains pulled to. At 8:00 a.m., I imagine Teddy may still be asleep, cocooned in bed beneath his sheets as Theo prepares for work.
“Well, why not?” I ask, wondering why it can’t possibly be true. Of course it can be true. My voice shakes, too, but this time with irritation.
“The police decided,” she says, as if the police are some all-knowing deity, as if the police never ever make mistakes. “They said it was an accident.”
“They don’t know,” I assure her.
“So you’d believe a four-year-old over the police department?” she counters, and at this I want to rage, for many reasons but mostly because it’s so unlike Emily to take a stance on much of anything, wishy-washy Emily who never wants to muddy the water, who always wants to appease people and make them happy. But this makes me very unhappy, the way she stands before me and questions my credibility and Maisie’s credibility all in one fell swoop while lying to my face about the bruises on her neck.
I have a feeling in my bones. A hunch. Something isn’t right here.
Emily is covering for herself or for someone else, and at once my mind races back to Maisie’s mention of a bad man. Maybe Nick didn’t commit suicide, but maybe he was indeed killed. The words ricochet back and forth in my mind—murder, suicide, murder, suicide—like a tennis ball alternating over a net, and each time I think I’ve got it figured out, someone swats it with a backhand stroke, making my thoughts, and with it, my sanity, bounce back.
Emily sees my anger; it’s transparent. Her face softens, and she takes a step closer to me. “Clara,” she says, her voice calm as she reaches a hand back out to mine. “I just don’t want you to mislead yourself,” she placates softly, and then the stages of grief are mentioned as Emily speculates out loud that I’m stuck somewhere in between one and two: denial and anger. “It’s a defense mechanism,” she says. “It’s okay, Clara, it’s perfectly normal,” she assures me, though I pull my hand back with haste—I don’t want to be analyzed. “I’m worried about you, that’s all,” she tells me, her words attempting to sound apologetic, and maybe they are, but still, I don’t want to be placated. I want to be listened to. “Have you told Maisie yet?” she asks me. “About Nick,” and she means have I told Maisie yet that her father is dead. I don’t reply, not right away, because I know that my answer would only substantiate her theory that I’m in denial, spinning yarns to abate my loss.
It doesn’t matter.
Across the street and two doors down, Emily’s garage door opens and Theo appears behind the back fender of a fancy sports car, something red, though what it is specifically, I can hardly see. He has a work bag strapped over a shoulder, a pair of leather driving gloves in his hands. For better grip, Nick told me once when I asked why in the world the man always wore gloves to drive. But me, I was pretty sure Theo just wore the driving gloves because he had an ill-conceived notion they made him look cool. As a writer for some automobile magazine—Car & Driver, Road & Track or something of the sort—Theo schleps home a new car on loan nearly every week, so that he can draft a review. When they met, Emily has told me, he was working as a car salesman, a writer trying to hone his skills. He had a degree in journalism, and an uncanny ability to talk a buyer into near anything they didn’t want or need, a used Caddy when they wanted a minivan, or a minivan when they wanted a sedan, doing it all sans charisma and charm but rather with scare tactics and coercion, quite in the same way he convinced Emily to marry him, I’m sure. He’s handsome, of course, and has a smile that could move mountains, but my guess is that it wasn’t the smile that made Emily say I do. Theo’s own car is tired, a wannabe sports car, which he keeps hidden in the three-car garage while he drives whatever car he’s been entrusted with that week.
The sun glints off the cherry-red door of the car as he opens it, his line of sight aimed at Emily and me. He hollers for Emily, slipping a newsboy cap on his head, and she runs. I can’t help but stare as he reprimands her there at the end of the driveway, she in her wasted workout getup, and he in a hat and gloves. A hat and gloves. Is it possible, I wonder, and can it be? Was Theo the man in the hat and gloves watching Maisie and me through the window of our home? Was it Theo and not Connor? Have I gotten this all wrong?
Emily winces as Theo quietly degrades her—it’s far too early in the morning to yell. If Nick were here he would want to intervene. Nick who hated Theo just as much as Theo hated Nick. But Nick is not here, and so I can only watch on, feet frozen to concrete, unmoving.
I watch then as Theo kisses Emily coldly on the cheek before climbing into the fancy red car and driving away, leaving her alone on the driveway. As he passes me, eyes glaring at me like a hungry hawk, I speculate on what kind of cars Theo has driven in the last few weeks.
What are the odds that one was a black Chevrolet?