CLARA
“I’ve been wondering where I left that,” a voice says. Izzy, whose necklace lies splayed across my hand, her tone icy as I spin around and see her standing behind me, in the doorway that separates the garage from the inside of my parents’ home. The temperature inside the garage begins an upsurge as beneath my clothing I begin to sweat.
The realization settles in slowly, an awakening, as I stare at the word Izzy now spread across the palm of my hand in curling silver. Izzy’s charm somehow disengaged from the chain. She wears the chain, thumbing at it now, though it’s only a chain, a silver chain without its charm, the jump ring that holds them together now missing.
“I’ve been looking everywhere for it,” she says. “Thank you so much for finding it, Clara,” and she reaches out a hand, waiting to reclaim the charm, thinking I’m just going to waltz right over and hand it to her. “My mother gave that to me, you know?” she asks, though of course this is something I don’t know. “When I was just a girl. I couldn’t stand the thought of losing it,” she adds, and the realization settles on me then with striking clarity. It was Izzy all along. Izzy who killed Nick. Not my mother. Not Theo Hart. Izzy.
“You did it,” I say to her, clutching that charm in my grasp, squeezing tightly, feeling the silver dig deep into my skin, drawing blood. I wait for silly and contrived excuses, but they never come. She doesn’t blame my mother, my father for her necklace being inside the car. She doesn’t hold up her hands and say, I didn’t do it, or, It wasn’t me. I found the proof, evidence that nearly puts Izzy at the scene of the crime, and now the onus is on her to refute it. I wait in vain, but the rebuttal doesn’t come.
“What are you talking about?” she asks as she steps fully into the garage, letting the door slam shut behind her so that I flinch from the force of the noise, the impact making the tools that line the wall on a wooden pegboard shake—a screwdriver, a hammer, hand rivets and hex wrenches.
“I knew all along that it wasn’t an accident,” I say brusquely, sure to keep one eye on Izzy all the time. I don’t know what she’s capable of. “I just didn’t know who, but now I do.
“Why?” I implore, speaking louder now, my words angry and aggressive. “What did Nick ever do to you?” I can’t make sense of it, why Izzy, of all people, would want Nick dead. Nick was always so pleasant to her, always so kind. He paid more attention to her than the rest of us ever did. Sweat begins to pool beneath my arms, my shirt sticking to me in odd places, making it hard to move. I pluck the shirt from my skin, fighting for oxygen in the stifling air. I can’t imagine why Izzy would have any sort of acrimony toward Nick, any discord. It couldn’t have been about money because there was no money. Nick and I have no money; we verge on broke. But maybe it was the impression of money—Nick’s private practice and our ample home. Maybe this is the reason why Izzy decided to take his life. My mind then springs in a dozen different directions—an unrequited romantic gesture, hush money, ransom, unfulfilled promises of giving her our firstborn child and more—but none of them make sense. It’s all so farcical; there could be no sound reason why Izzy would want Nick dead.
“Why did you kill Nick?” I demand. “Why, Izzy, why? What did he ever do to you?” The expression on her face shifts, and suddenly she looks confused. She’s a good actress, I’ll give her that, but also a murderer. “How did you do it?” I ask. “Did you trail him to ballet? Follow him home? That’s premeditated murder,” I tell her, and I’m crying now, though I don’t want to be crying, but there are tears snaking down my cheeks as I speak, imagining a run-in between Nick and Izzy, some blowup outside the ballet studio for reasons I don’t know. Did Maisie see? Did she catch sight of Nick and Izzy in a tiff? Or maybe it was something that happened during class, and Maisie, tucked safely away with Miss Becca, didn’t see? I think back to our last conversation, Nick and me on the phone, talking about dinner. Just an ordinary, mundane conversation, like any of the other thousands of conversations we’ve had. He didn’t know he was going to die. Whatever transpired between him and Izzy that day hadn’t yet begun. It happened later, I tell myself, after he left ballet. There was never a bad man. It was a bad woman. Izzy was the bad woman, but thanks to the sun in her eyes, Maisie couldn’t see.
“What are you talking about, Clara?” Izzy asks. “I didn’t kill Nick,” she says. “Nick killed Nick. We all know that.”
“No, Izzy,” I snap. “You killed Nick. You. In this car,” I say as I thrust a hand toward my mother’s Chevrolet. “I have proof,” I spit, telling her Betty Maurer spotted a black Chevrolet leaving the scene of the crime, and how the silver Izzy charm puts her inside the car. The murder weapon.
“Oh, Clara,” she says, this odd combination of indignation and pity. “You’re just as crazy as your mother,” she says, and I take great insult at this, not for my sake but for my mother’s. This is the woman who is supposed to love my mother, to care for her better than my father and I can. “Everyone knows Nick was a lousy driver. He killed himself,” she says, but of course she’s wrong. I can’t let her sidetrack me, as she reminds me how Nick and Maisie were all alone at the time of the accident, how, as Detective Kaufman has already told me more times than I can count, it was Nick’s reckless driving that caused the car to hurl off the side of the road and into the tree. Nick is the only one to blame. “You’re imagining things, Clara,” she tells me. “You’re in denial. You have to accept the facts, Clara, and not let these fantasies mess with your head. Nick killed Nick,” she says. “He’s the only one to blame.”
But, no, I tell myself. It was Izzy. She killed Nick. It’s so utterly obvious. Of course she did. I’ve connected her to the murder weapon. It has to be.
“No, Izzy,” I snap. “You did it. You,” and then I interrogate her, demanding to know why she was in my mother’s car if what she says is true, and why her charm was under the seat. “Why?” I shout, starting to lose all sense of self-control. I reach for a baseball bat leaning against the garage wall, and think of coming at Izzy with it until she confesses, of swooping the bat at her again and again, trying hard to take her down like a group of black-capped chickadees mobbing a hawk.
But then I think of the kids, of Maisie and Felix, trapped inside the stifling car. How long have they been there? Ten minutes? Thirty? An hour? It wasn’t meant to be this long. How long does it take for children to die in cars? I made sure to leave the windows down, but the eighty- or ninety-degree air outside is no better than that which is in the car. I’ve lost track of time, and now I envision them, sweating, dehydrated, convulsing, their breathing slow and shallow as their body temperatures soar to 105 or 106 degrees, and I begin to panic, knowing the wretched death that comes from heatstroke.
Izzy doesn’t answer my questions but instead she screams at me, “You’re such a fool, Clara. Such a fucking fool,” as that sweet, obliging composure starts to wane. “You don’t know anything,” she insists.
“Then tell me,” I insist, stepping toward her with that bat in hand. I don’t mean to do it, but the bat rises suddenly and sharply in my hands, the arch of the bat’s swing now aimed at Izzy. She flinches, though I stop there, never swinging. Merely holding the bat in my hands. A threat. “Tell me,” I say again, and when she doesn’t, I say, “See? You’re a liar. You were in the car because you killed Nick.”
“You couldn’t be any more wrong,” she snaps, and there’s this holier-than-thou expression on her face that I despise. A smug, arrogant mien that I want to displace. “You wouldn’t hit me,” she haughtily assumes, and so I do. I clip her with the bat, that’s all. A mere graze, though from the look on her face you’d think I hit her with all my might. It swells there at the point of impact, on her arm, that’s all, and she grabs for it, mouth agog, saying, “You hit me. You hit me, Clara,” and I nod knowingly, because of course I know that I did.
And like that the smugness of her expression is gone.
“I did,” I tell her, “and I’ll do it again,” as I wind up for another swing. She flinches this time before I even have a chance to think about striking, telling me to stop. Telling me she’ll scream. Telling me she’ll call the police.
“You’re going to call the police and turn yourself in?” I ask, laughing, though it’s not funny at all. There’s nothing funny about it, and yet, I’m laughing. “Please, do,” I say as again the bat descends through the air, meeting Izzy this time in the hip. There’s a noise when Izzy and the bat connect. The hollow clapping of wood on wood, of Izzy screaming in pain.
I’ve hit bone.
“What are you doing?” she squawks, her voice desperate and shrill as her legs nearly give from the force of the hit. She reaches out blindly for something, anything to hang on to, to hold her upright, but finds nothing, her hand writhing through the air. “Go away, Clara. Go away,” she says, voice catching on the last words of her plea so that if I didn’t know better I’d think she might cry.
She’s a good actress, indeed.
I stop laughing. “Why were you in the car, Izzy?” I ask a final time, and this time she calls out, voice quivering, any sign of condescension gone, “Mine wouldn’t start,” she claims, “I couldn’t get the damn thing to start, and Louisa had an appointment. Your father wasn’t home because, Clara, he was with you. You. I had to get Louisa to the doctor. We took her car,” she states, though I know a liar when I see one, and Izzy is a liar. Her nostrils flare, she bites her lip, clutching her hip, no longer standing upright but now hunched to the side, suddenly unable to meet my eye.
“You’re lying,” I scream. “You’re a goddamn liar. Tell me the truth,” I demand. “Tell me why you were in the car. Tell me why you killed Nick,” as I toss the baseball bat on my shoulder, a batter ready and waiting for the perfect pitch. And then it comes, apparently, a curveball from the pitcher’s mound, and I strike, getting Izzy in the thigh. She emits a savage sound, something tameless and brute. Unhuman. An animal dying.
“You want to know why I was in the car?” she blubbers this time, eyes locked and steady, bracing her leg. “To get the VIN number. To find the insurance cards. Before I got rid of the car. That’s why, Clara,” she screams, and this time I know she’s not lying.
“To hide the evidence?” I demand, seeing now how Izzy planned to get rid of my mother’s car—to torch it maybe, or sink it to the bottom of a retention pond somewhere—so she could never be connected to Nick’s murder.
But Izzy only laughs at me, a nervous snicker. “What evidence?” she asks, eyes locked on the barrel of the baseball bat. “This car? This old car? I was doing your parents a favor by getting rid of it, something your father should have done long ago. This car is hardly evidence.”
“It’s the car that killed Nick,” I state, wanting to pluck the gravel and the leaf from my pocket and show her as proof that this is the car that killed Nick. “The evidence that puts you at the crime scene.”
“Oh, Clara. Poor Clara. There was no crime scene, don’t you understand? Don’t you get it?” The look in her eye is an odd combination of pity and loathing, hate and disbelief.
“No, Izzy, no,” I snap. “I don’t get it. So tell me,” I snarl. “Tell me, Izzy. Make me understand,” as my knuckles turn white on the handle of the bat, my grip ironclad.
At first she doesn’t tell me. She stands before me, thinking, staring. She isn’t going to tell me, I think. She isn’t going to confess.
I jerk the bat ever so slightly, wondering this time what I should hit: her head or her chest. Which one will hurt more, which one will elicit a confession?
“For the insurance payout, Clara,” she spits out, wincing at the small movement of the bat. “So I could get money. It’s the actual cash value at the time of the car’s disappearance, you know. Nearly three thousand dollars, I assume, which isn’t much, but it’s something. It’s more than I get from the agency for a month’s worth of work. Cooking for your folks, cleaning up after Louisa, wiping her ass, all the while being called an idiot. Don’t you think I deserve this?” she asks, though I can’t make sense of it, what that payout has to do with Nick’s death. Did Nick know she planned to claim the car stolen to take money from my parents? Did he confront her about it, and for this reason she drove him off the side of the road and into a tree?
“But you were in the car,” I insist. “You were driving the car that killed Nick.”
“No,” she tells me, “no. I was in the car gathering the information I needed to call the police and report the car stolen. That’s all, Clara. That’s all. I never even set the keys in the ignition.”
“But the car isn’t stolen,” I say, confused, as the heat starts to get to me, weighing heavily on me, wearing me down. “The car is here,” I insist, pointing to it as if Izzy can’t see it there beside her, the black Chevrolet that ended Nick’s life.
She laughs. It’s the laugh of a narcissist, a high-pitched laugh that rattles my every last nerve. I step toward Izzy again, consumed with a sudden desire to strike her hard. Not merely as a warning or a threat this time, but to shut her up. To make her stop laughing. “It isn’t stolen yet, Clara,” she corrects. “Not yet. Nick had to get in the way of my plan.”
“Nick knew? Nick knew you planned to steal the car?” I insist, putting the pieces together. Yes, that’s it, I think. I was right all along. Nick knew about Izzy’s plans to steal the car, and he confronted her on it and for this reason he’s now dead.
“Oh, Clara. Sweet Clara,” she says in this trivializing way, downgrading me to a raving lunatic. And that’s how I feel in the moment, like a lunatic, like all the answers are just out of reach, floating away like dust particles in the atmosphere. Like Izzy is speaking Japanese, and I have to take time to look her words up one by one, to translate them, to makes sense of what she means, but by the time I find the meaning of her words, they’ve changed course. “Nick got in the way because he died. Because he killed himself. The last thing I needed to do was draw any more attention to your folks with a missing car. I was waiting for all the hoopla to die down.”
“The hoopla? Meaning us mourning Nick’s death?” I ask, and she says yes. Nick’s death is hoopla, a singular term that reduces it to nothing. To an inconvenience. A hassle.
“And once the hoopla died down you were going to get rid of the car?” I ask, making a slow connection. “Then you were going to claim it stolen? For the insurance payout?” and she nods her head, clapping her hands at me, an applause. I’ve figured this out. Except I haven’t. Not yet anyway. It still makes no sense to me why Izzy has taken Nick’s life.
Or am I wrong about this still?
Was it not Izzy at all?
My thoughts revert to my mother, to Theo Hart, to Emily. Maybe it wasn’t Izzy after all.
“It seemed the quickest and easiest way to get my hands on some cash,” she says.
“But the money would have belonged to my father,” I say. “The check would have been made out to him,” I argue, knowing with certainty that when the insurance company did pay out for a pseudo-stolen vehicle, it was my father who would have received the three thousand dollars. Not Izzy. What did Izzy have to gain from getting rid of the black Chevy?
“You’re so naive, Clara. So naive. You and your father both,” she says, and I feel the blood in my veins begin to boil because Izzy can say anything she’d like about me, but she cannot disparage my father. The last thing my father is is naive. “As always, he’d endorse the check and leave it lying around to deposit. And when it went missing, as it no doubt would, we’d blame your mother. Poor Louisa who is forever losing things. Meanwhile I’d be at the bank cashing the damn thing.”
It’s a realization that settles over me slowly like the dawning sun, one faint glimmer of light after the other.
This has nothing to do with Nick.
And then I understand.
Izzy did all of this. Izzy stole the endorsed check, she made the regular cash withdrawals from my father’s account, she opened a credit card in my mother’s name. She bought herself jewelry, a bangle bracelet made of genuine jade, which glares at me now from the fleshy wrist, just inches away from my grandmother’s wedding ring, which she also stole. She’s been stealing from my parents all this time. My mother hasn’t been misplacing things. Izzy has taken them.
“That bracelet?” I ask, to be sure. “Where did you get that bracelet?” though again my thoughts are a jumble, not knowing what the jade bracelet has to do with the receipt for a pendant necklace I found in Nick’s drawer. They’re one in the same, aren’t they? Nick used my parents’ credit card to purchase the necklace, helping himself to hundreds of dollars of my father’s hard-earned money. To buy a necklace for Kat, I’d assumed. Because he was sleeping with her. Because he loved Kat more than me.
Izzy thumbs at the bracelet. “Your father bought this for me,” she says with a wink as my grip on the baseball bat again constricts, a boa constrictor squeezing its prey. I’m feeling dizzy, nauseous from the heat of the garage. I’m losing control, wondering again what Izzy’s thievery has to do with Nick’s death? Are they one and the same? Are they connected somehow? Did Nick know?
Or are they disjointed facts, and my imagination is to blame for fusing them together?
But if not Izzy, then who?
Who? I want to scream, or maybe I do scream it aloud for Izzy just stares at me with eyes gaping wide, listening to my breathless scream. Who? Who? Who?
“You,” I say, pointing a finger at her, thinking how worried I’d been about my parents’ finances and my father’s state of mind. “You.” And at that I raise the bat to strike her in the chest, or maybe the head, and Izzy pushes me in return, her face turning florid, a frightening contrast to the white of her bleached hair. I stumble awkwardly into the hand tools that line the garage wall and at once a wheal begins to form on my shoulder, fiercely red and rising from the surface of the skin. I stare at Izzy in dismay; this can’t possibly be the same woman who trails on the heels of my mother, predicting her every move. Gently, lovingly catering to her. Caring for her.
“Why would you tell me this? Why in the world did you confess?” I ask, though of course I know why she confessed. She confessed because I left her no choice. Because I threatened to beat the life out of her if she didn’t confess, and now I’ll do it regardless, confession or not.
“Because stealing, Clara, is a far cry from murder. I might be a thief, but I’m no murderer. I never killed Nick,” she says defensively this time, and for once I can’t tell if she’s lying or not. “You have to believe me,” she begs, her voice suddenly desperate and pleading, and I find that in that moment I don’t know what to believe, for it’s happening so fast and I’m so confused, certain that Melinda was to blame, then my mother, then Theo and Emily and Izzy.
If Izzy didn’t kill Nick, then who?
“Why would I believe you?” I ask.
“You said it yourself, Clara,” she says, confusing me. “I had no reason to kill Nick. Nick, who was always so kind to me. I’m just as sad about Nick’s passing as you are,” she claims as a puddle of phony tears fills the basins of her eyes and she begins to cry. It exasperates me, the bogus tears at my dead husband’s expense. It makes me lose control. How vain to think that she is as saddened by Nick’s death as me. He was my husband. He loved me the most.
And that’s when I lose it.
I brace myself to strike. I’m feeling off-kilter, finding it hard to stand, much less think, as I raise the bat up above my head. I haven’t slept in weeks, and the delirium and confusion and sadness chip quickly away at me, a wood carver with chisel, rendering me a skeleton of myself. I come at Izzy with all of my might, flinching as if it hurts me more than it does her.
I’m stricken by a sudden and visceral irascibility, and it hits me then: this is just as she did to Nick, though in my heart of hearts I know it isn’t necessarily true, but I need someone, anyone, to take the blame for Nick’s death. It’s a means to an end, that’s all. Killing Izzy because I so desperately need someone to blame so this can be over and done with. I need closure. Acceptance.
Self-defense, I’ll later allege, though I’m not thinking about that right now.
Right now I’m only thinking that I need for this to be through.