CLARA
“What’s going on?” begs my father hours later as I step into the kitchen to see him standing before the stove, pouring a box of uncooked pasta into boiling water. I notice how loosely his pants fit, hanging on to near nothingness, merely skin and bones. He’s becoming too thin. His eyes look tired, his skin aging quickly, getting covered in liver spots and wrinkles. His hair thins with each visit, the fatigue weighing heavily on him. My mother no longer sleeps, which means my father no longer sleeps, and they’re both aging far more quickly than I’d like them to. I’ve told him before, Your health is important, too, but my father rejoined with, This is what people do when they love each other. Self-sacrifice, he said, telling me how there was nothing for my mother he wouldn’t do.
In the next room, Maisie watches TV. I’m not sure how, but somehow or other she’s no longer stashed under the guest bed. Now she’s out, her face radiated by synthetic light, and on her lips is a smile—not for me, but for the characters on TV. She clings to her scruffy teddy bear, one of its decrepit ears stuffed inside her mouth, wet with saliva. She doesn’t see me as I pass by. I pat her head; I say hello. On the floor, spread across a hand-knit blanket, Felix is asleep.
“What do you mean?” I ask my father now, standing in the kitchen, though I know exactly what he means. When my father arrived to take my place, taking on the task of wheedling Maisie out from under the guest bed, I didn’t tell him why she was there or what had triggered her meltdown. I simply said that she was under the bed and that she wouldn’t come out, and he arrived under the pretense that Maisie was being insubordinate rather than what she really was: scared.
“Are you in some kind of trouble that I don’t know about?” he asks as he sets the empty pasta box down on the countertop and looks me in the eye before I quickly avert my gaze. I can’t meet my father’s eye. Not now. “You can tell me, Clarabelle,” he says. “You can tell me anything,” and I wonder instantly what Maisie has said to my father to make him believe that I’m in trouble, that we’re in trouble. I reach into the cupboards and begin pulling bowls and plates from the inside, vessels for the pasta my father is cooking us for dinner. The cupboard is a refurbished thing, one that came to us from Nick’s grandparents. It was old when it arrived, but we stripped and sanded it and painted it brand-new. A second chance, a new lease on life.
“I’m not in trouble,” I mutter, but in truth I wonder if I am.
My father is staring at me, waiting for an answer, and I discover that my first response didn’t suffice. He needs more than a halfhearted no. In his hand is a wooden spoon, and he stirs the pasta sluggishly. “What did Maisie tell you?” I ask, and he confesses that Maisie didn’t tell him much, but her quiet twaddle did, as she sniveled beneath that bed, crying about a bad man, calling again and again for Nick. The only way she came out from under the bed was with the promise of popcorn and SpongeBob, and so Maisie crawled out, and my father and Maisie and Felix curled together on the living room chair and watched TV. She didn’t say a word more, and my father didn’t ask, certain that broaching the topic would only send her straight under the bed again.
“What bad man?” he asks me point-blank, and I force a smile and tell him there is no bad man. It’s only make-believe.
“You still haven’t told her about Nick?” he asks, and I shake my head and say no. “Oh, Clarabelle,” he says. “Why?”
I want to tell my father. I want to tell him all of it, about Maisie’s nightmares, and Detective Kaufman, and the implication that maybe Nick was being trailed, that he was killed, that his death was actually a murder. I want to tell him about Melinda Grey and Kat; I want to tell him about Connor. I want to tell my father all of this. To curl into a ball on his lap like I did when I was a child and confess to him that I’m sad and scared and confused. But I think of Emily backing away from my admission and the disbelieving gleam in her eye and know I can’t do it. I don’t know what it would do to me if my father repudiated me, too.
“You can tell me anything,” he says again, trying hard to convince me, but I shrug my shoulders and say that there’s nothing to tell.
“You know Maisie,” I say. “Such a flair for the dramatic,” and I force a smile so that maybe, just maybe, my father will believe.
I change the subject. “She remembered me,” I tell my father, and he asks, “Your mother?”
I nod wistfully, knowing it may never happen again. “She knew that I was Clara. She was sensible, clearheaded. She knew who I was,” and he says that he’s happy I got the chance to experience this moment with my mother. These days, he says, they’re few and far between.
“I’m sure it meant the world to her that you came,” he says, but as the lines of his forehead start to crease, I ask him what’s wrong. Something is bothering him. “These moments of lucidity,” he tells me, “they come and they go. One minute she knows me, the next she doesn’t. One minute Izzy is Izzy, and the next she’s not. Three times now your mother has tried to call the police on me because she thought I was a robber.
“She got out again last night, Clara,” he says sadly. “I’d hid the car keys in a kitchen drawer, but she managed to find it there and start the car. In the middle of the night. She put it in Reverse, the sound of the engine revving the only thing that caught my attention. I got to her just before she pulled out of the drive. She could have really hurt herself, or someone else. And then there’s the credit card,” he says, voice trailing off.
“What credit card?” I ask, and he tells me how my mother opened a credit card all on her own, in her name. A Citi MasterCard. He never would have known about it until a notice of data breach arrived in the mail, made out to Louisa Friel. The credit card company was warning my mother that her account might have been compromised, and that she should closely monitor the statements for suspicious charges. Except that my mother wasn’t meant to have an account of her own. Just like stealing the car keys and trimming Maisie’s hair, it was something she did because she didn’t know any better.
“How did she possibly…?” I ask, voice trailing off because I know that with my mother the possibilities are endless. There’s no telling what she might do.
“A commercial on TV,” my father says. “A telemarketer, an ad in a magazine.” He shrugs. “I don’t know.” And I think then of all the personal information she’d need to relinquish to apply for a credit card, and begin to worry. I wonder what, if anything, she’s purchased with her new card, and what this has done to my parents’ credit.
“Oh, Daddy,” I say, setting my hand on his. “I’m so sorry, Daddy,” knowing how hard it is for him to confess these things to me when I have so many other things on my mind.
“I don’t want to burden you with this,” he says, but I tell him he’s not a burden, he’s never a burden.
“Let me help you,” I beg, but he assures me as he always does that he and my mother are fine, telling me he was looking into additional resources for my mother and came across some extra security devices, like alarms and tethers so he can better monitor her movement at night. “Is that necessary?” I ask, cringing at the suggestion of my mother in tethers, but he rubs at his forehead and says, “These days it seems to be.”
Before he leaves, my father mentions that he’d like to sell my mother’s car. It’s old, he says, and without it lying around, there’s less chance of my mother taking it for a ride. “We should have gotten rid of it years ago,” he says, tacking on, “We can use the money,” meaning me more than him; he wants to sell my mother’s car and give me the money.
“Oh, Daddy,” I say, “I can’t possibly…” but he holds up a hand in refusal and assures me I can. But he’ll need my help posting the car online; he asks if he can send me photos. I’m far from a technological savant, but I know my way around the internet far better than he, and he promises to email them to me just as soon as he gets home. “How much?” I ask.
“Five thousand,” he says. “It’s not much,” he adds, “but it’s something, at least until Nick’s life insurance pays out,” and at that I inhale sharply, wanting to confess to my father about the life insurance and how it’s been canceled, how it won’t ever pay out. But I don’t. I bite my tongue and say nothing, knowing what my father would say if he knew about Nick purchasing drugs from Melinda Grey, about him sleeping with Kat, about the canceled life insurance policy, about Nick’s duplicitous life. That man will only bring you down, he’d told me when I displayed my hand proudly before him nearly half a dozen years ago, one that flaunted a simple engagement ring, a timeless solitaire marquise diamond on fourteen karats of white gold. Don’t do this, Clarabelle. Don’t marry him. There are more fish in the sea, he had said, but I told him I didn’t want any more fish. I only wanted Nick.
My father hugs me and thanks me for doing him this favor, though we both know it’s him who is doing me a favor. In my arms, he feels rangy, as thin as a rake. My father used to be a marathoner, thin but robust. He could run for nearly forever without breaking a sweat. Now he’s just thin, and I want to ask if he’s eating okay, if he’s sleeping okay, if he’s paying enough attention to his own health or only to my mother and me. There are bags beneath his eyes, big, burlap potato sacks, and I wonder when is the last time he’s been to the doctor. I touch those few strands of hair upon his head, a maternal gesture. “It’s the least that I can do,” I say, “for all you’ve done for me,” and again we hug.
“I could do more,” he says, but I say no, he’s done enough, and with that he turns and leaves. Before he’s halfway to his own car parked at the end of the drive, he tells me that his HVAC guy will be here tomorrow at three, his treat, and it’s then that I notice the sleeves of his button-down shirt thrust clear to his elbows, the dewdrops of sweat that bind to his skin thanks to our un-air-conditioned home. The heat is suddenly stifling, and I find that it’s difficult to breathe. I never told my father that we were in financial crisis, and still he knows. He knows everything.
“I’d come,” he says, “to keep you company while they’re here. But I can’t this time, Clarabelle. Your mother also has an appointment at three. The neurologist,” he says, and I shake my head and tell him it’s no bother. I’m a big girl. I can handle this all by myself.