CLARA
“He’s losing weight,” the pediatrician says to me. Her name is Dr. Paul, and I can’t help but wonder if some male ancestor ever had the misfortune of being named Paul. Paul Paul. The room is happy, and there is a panorama of farm life painted on the otherwise white walls: a horse, a pig, a spotted cow.
“Mrs. Solberg,” she says to me, and I force my thoughts to the baby on the baby scale, Felix, who cries from the sudden coldness of the hard plastic tray on which he lies.
“He’s losing weight.”
Dr. Paul asks how the nursing has been going, and I lie and say fine. Just fine. I’ve nursed a baby before. I’m an old pro. And yet I’ve never been a widow before. This is wherein the fault lies, the reason why Felix is not eating well, why he is losing weight. Widowhood is all new to me, and it’s here that I struggle, though I don’t tell the doctor this, but I don’t need to because everyone in the whole entire world now knows that I am a widow, that my husband is the one who took the turn out on Harvey Road too fast, that he crashed the car into a tree, that he did it with our four-year-old daughter in the back seat, that he’s dead.
“Some weight loss after birth is normal,” she tells me, “but Felix has continued to lose weight since we visited him in the hospital. He’s lost over fourteen ounces since he was born. This is of concern,” she says, though her eyes lack judgment. I’m not being criticized. Dr. Paul is simply concerned. She lays a hand on my arm and asks again, “How has the nursing been going?” and this time I tell her.
I’m decidedly opposed to roadside memorials. It seems a silly way to honor a beloved family member who’s now dead. And yet I find myself purchasing a white wooden cross at the local craft store, and a spray of flowers, burgundy and pink, because it’s premade and on display at the florist shop. I don’t have time to special order; I want it now. The cross itself seems glib. It’s not as if we go to church, not often, though we had Maisie baptized because Nick’s mother said Maisie was bound for perdition if we didn’t. The only times we’ve been to church since are when Mrs. Solberg is in town, when we dress up in our Sunday best and slide into the spartan pew, pretending this is something we do.
But still, I buy the cross to go along with the floral bouquet. It seems the thing to do.
I drive to the scene of the accident, where a red-winged blackbird sits on a thin telephone wire watching me, like a tightrope walker, its gnarled black claws clinging tightly to the cord. Its black feathers shimmer in the late-morning sun, a single patch of red and yellow blazoned upon its side. It sings a brassy, emphatic song, and from somewhere in the distance, perched in the cattails of a roadside ditch, a female returns its call, quieter and less emphatic than the male. They parley back and forth, back and forth again, making plans to meet, and as I stand there on the side of the road, the sun bearing down on me and making me sweat, the car parked less than ten feet away, Felix inside with the window rolled down, the male red-winged blackbird leaves his perch and swoops down into the cattails to find his mate.
The houses in the area reside in one of those green housing developments with their energy-efficient designs, a neighborhood composting program, a community garden. The homes are all faux farmhouses, too clean and modern to be real farmhouses. There are horses in their enormous backyards, beautiful light bay and dapple gray horses enclosed in pointed picket fences, their snouts rising from the grass to see what it is that I’m doing as I return to the car and retrieve a small treasure from the trunk: the spray of funeral flowers, the white wooden cross.
I’m opposed to roadside memorials, but without it, I’d have no reason to be here, to see if what Maisie says is true, that there was another car on the road with her and Nick, one that made them crash.
I lay the flowers on the roadside; I dig away at the earth to make room for the cross. Cars pass by and wonder what it is that I’m doing, but then they see the cross, the flowers, and they know. They drive slower, more thoughtfully. They take the turn with deliberation. They stay in their lane, never allowing their cars’ tires to crisscross the double yellow line and into mine. This roadside memorial serves as a reminder and also a warning: this is what happens if you don’t slow down. You die like Nick has died, losing control of the car along that hairpin curve and slamming into the tree at breakneck speed.
But what if this is not the way it happened? What if what Maisie says is true, that there was another car on the road that fateful afternoon? Everyone loved Nick. He had no enemies, none at all. Whatever transpired on this street had to be the worst kind of luck, a simple act of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. A case of road rage, a drunken driver.
There’s no way that someone set out to intentionally harm Nick.
The tree itself shows signs of abuse. I kneel before the tree, pressing the pointed edge of the white wooden cross into the ground. This isn’t an easy thing to do. The earth is arid and shows no signs of giving in. It’s stubborn like me, as I step on the crossbar with the sole of a shoe and force it into the ground. Another car comes soaring down the road too quickly, sees me, and steps on the brakes so that tiny pebbles come skittering across the street toward my feet.
It’s a tall tree, a firm tree, one with much girth. But still, there is a wound. Bits of bark hang loosely from the tree trunk, the innards of the tree exposed. I run my hands along the rugged bark, feeling suddenly sorry for the tree. Will the tree die?
Behind the tree there is nothing, only cattails and open fields and grass. Wildflowers line the gravel of the street. There is only one tree and the absence of a guardrail where a guardrail should be. The only thing around for Nick to hit was the tree. What are the odds of this?
The homes with their horses stand over a hundred feet away or more, their inhabitants likely not seeing a thing until the ambulance arrived, and then the fire trucks and police cruisers to lug Nick and Maisie from the shattered car. It was only then that the noise and the chaos lured them from their homes to see what the fuss was about. The police didn’t bother speaking to the residents because there were no open-ended questions that needed clarification. Nick was speeding; he took the turn too quickly and died.
But what if that’s not the way it happened? What if Nick was killed?
It’s deserted around here, and though there are homes nearby, I feel strangely alone. Or not alone, but rather like I’m being watched. I turn quickly, but there is no one there. Not that I can see. My eyes rove the surroundings on the other side of Harvey Road, the haggard trees, the mounds of grass. But I see nothing. And yet I can’t shake the feeling, as if I’m the target on the other end of a sniper scope.
Is somebody here?
Was someone here, watching Nick as he crashed?
A slow trepidation creeps under my skin, and suddenly I’m scared. I move quicker now through my tasks. Like an archaeologist searching for artifacts in sand, I examine the concrete of Harvey Road for signs: tire prints in the dirt; black skid marks along the surface of the road; remnants of broken car parts. Something to tell me that what Maisie says is true, that there was another car on this road with her and Nick that made them crash. But there are none. The evidence has been washed away by the daily flow of traffic up and down Harvey Road.
But this I know for sure: the mangled car that was removed from the tree only showed damage at the site it impacted the tree, on the driver’s side. If the car had collided with another car, there would have been evidence of this on the car and on Maisie. Maisie would have sustained much more than a small laceration that has already healed. But Maisie was fine, as was the passenger’s side of the car.
I decide: Maisie must be wrong. I push aside those thoughts of being watched. I’m being silly; I’m not thinking clearly. I’ve let my imagination get the best of me.
Nick was driving too fast. He took the turn too quickly.
It’s Nick’s fault that he’s dead.
On the way home, my cell phone rings. “Hello?” I ask, pressing the device to my ear as I drive down the highway in an older, run-down part of town, past the cheap motels and adult stores, where I know that one day soon ever-inquisitive Maisie will point to them and ask what they are and what they sell.
“Is this Clara Solberg?” asks the silvery voice on the other end of the line, and I say that it is. “Mrs. Solberg, I’m calling from Dr. Barros’s office, your mother’s internist. You’re listed as an emergency contact,” she says, and at once my breath leaves me, and I ask, “Is everything all right?” envisioning my mother and father with Maisie at the office of Dr. Barros. My mother has fallen again and hurt herself, maybe, or she’s mixed up her pills and has taken too many of the wrong ones.
“Everything’s fine,” the woman assures me. “I’m calling from billing. Just a question on an unpaid bill,” she says, going on to tell me how my father’s check for their last visit with Dr. Barros bounced. “We’ve been trying to contact him before sending the bill to collections. That can be such a headache,” she says. “We left messages at home, but he hasn’t returned our calls.”
It’s so unlike my father, and yet I’m struck with an instant pang of guilt, knowing my father has brushed aside his own obligations to care for mine, keeping me company, making my meals, doing my laundry, watching my children, when he should be caring for my mother and himself.
Money has never been a problem for my father. Between my father’s pension, the rental property and more, he should be making a sufficient income. It will be a few years still until he can dip into social security, but he has been planning for retirement since he was twenty-five. He’s prepared for this.
“It must be a mix-up with the bank,” I tell this woman. “How much was the bill for?” I ask, and she tells me, confirming an address for payment, which I scribble onto a sheet of scratch paper while parked at a stoplight, waiting for the light to turn green.
“I’ll take care of it,” I assure her, begging, “Please, don’t send the bill to collections. I’ll speak to my father,” though I won’t. What I’ll do instead is send a check to the office of Dr. Barros because, after everything my father has done for me, this is the least that I can do. The last thing I want is to make him feel stupid for the oversight, or to make him embarrassed.
Dementia isn’t contagious, I remind myself as I have so many times before, though the first indicators of my mother’s dementia were slight. Could these be the warning signs? Bounced checks. Not returning phone calls.
No, I tell myself. My father is simply preoccupied with my life.
I end the call and instantly the phone rings again. “Yes?” I say this time, fully expecting to hear the same voice on the other end of the line. The receptionist from Dr. Barros’s office calling already to tell me that the check has been found. But it’s not the receptionist this time.
“Did I catch you at a bad time?” The voice is apologetic, and at once I say, “No,” feeling myself soften and relax at the sound of Nick’s best friend, Connor, on the other end of the line, the anguish in his voice as palpable as that in mine. Connor is the only one in the world who loved Nick as much as I did, though in a different way, of course.
“There aren’t any good times anymore,” I confess, and we sit in silence on the phone until Connor breaks the stillness by saying to me, “We don’t have to do this alone, you know?” and I remember then what they say about misery loving company.
When I get home that afternoon, Maisie is crying. My father has his feeble hands on her shoulders trying to console her, but Maisie won’t be consoled. She turns her back to him, taking two tiny steps away from where he sits. The tears roll unfettered from her eyes and down her freckled skin as she and my father linger in her bedroom, an odd-shaped room with sloped ceilings, a bedroom that is all pink. Hot pink, carnation pink, pink pink. On her bed lies that poor, pathetic bear with its ear all but chewed off. The bed is as Maisie left it last night before she plodded into my room, blaming insomnia for the reason she couldn’t stay in her own bed. Her walls flaunt pricey, custom-made art: a princess in a pink tutu, a giraffe with a rose tucked behind its ear. Her bed is thin and narrow, a spindly Jenny Lind bed, which sags under even the meager weight of my father; it’s draped by a pretty pink tulle canopy, which hides the guilt of his earnest eyes.
He has told her about Nick. At this I fill with anger. He never liked Nick; Nick was never good enough for his little girl, and then years later when she finally arrived, for Maisie. Nick was unemployed when we met, a student hard at work on a dental degree. He was eager and goal-oriented and a hard worker to boot; that’s the way I saw it. But my father only envisioned the ever-growing debt of a doctoral degree, and the complete lack of income while I supported Nick as he achieved his dreams. When Nick decided to go into private practice, and we dipped into money I’d earned doing event and portraiture work—spending my weekends with a camera at the weddings of people I didn’t like or know—to rent a space and purchase dental equipment, my father could hardly contain his disappointment and dismay. That man, he told me of Nick, over four years ago as we cut the ribbon of Nick’s new space, one that would flourish over the next few years, expanding to include a partner and more clients than I could count, will only bring you down, he’d said. And now, standing before him, feeling like the rug has been pulled out from under my feet, I wonder if he was right.
“Daddy,” I say, stepping quickly into the room, towing Felix by the handle of his infant seat, a contraption that must weigh thirty pounds. “What’s going on in here?” I ask, setting the weight of Felix and the baby seat gently to the floor.
But before my father can reply, Maisie cries out with doleful eyes, staring at me in despair, “He’s dead. He’s dead.” And I feel my heart begin to ache, the tears spring to my eyes. My father, too, has eyes that are red-rimmed, though I want to point an accusatory finger at him and say that this is his fault; he is to blame. He had no business telling Maisie about Nick.
Maisie scurries to my side and wraps her arms around my lower limbs quickly and without warning, so that I lose my balance and nearly fall. “It’s okay,” I say mechanically as I stroke her hair while glaring at my father inches above her head. “Everything will be okay.” My words, my motions, are robotic, perfunctory, lifeless.
This isn’t the way Nick would do it. He would drop down to Maisie’s level and gather her in his tender arms; he would say something, anything, other than these mendacities. It is not okay. Everything will not be okay. I’m lying to Maisie; I’m a liar.
“Clara,” my father bleats, an attempt at an apology, but I hold my hand up to him—I don’t want to hear it. This news, this information wasn’t his to share. It was mine.
It’s my father’s fault that Maisie is clinging to my legs and crying.
“Look, Mommy,” Maisie says then, drawing slowly away from my legs. She slips a sticky little hand inside my shaking one and draws me to her dresser, a long white bureau with a mirror. There are things on top of the dresser, many things that Maisie points to at random: a pair of princess underpants, a doll, the stethoscope from a toy doctor kit, a used tissue. There are photographs slipped into the frame of the mirror: Maisie and Nick; Maisie and me; Maisie forced to stand beside my mother, two and a half feet out of reach because she is scared of my mother, as I would be, too, if I were four; Maisie and her boppy, my father, who watches on now not saying a thing.
I step forward and follow the route of Maisie’s finger with my eyes. She points to a jar, one of my old mason jars with holes punctured in the top of the metal lid. I move closer, not knowing why the jar is here or how it’s come to be here.
Inside the jar is a twig, shorn from a tree. It’s a thin twig, a copper brown. There are leaves inside the jar—green leaves, a scrunched-up handful of leaves as if Maisie grabbed on to a tree and tugged—and sheaths of grass covering the bottom of the jar, a deathbed upon which lies a lightning bug spread out on its back, all six inert legs up in the air, its tail no longer sparkling. It doesn’t move.
“We forgot,” Maisie voices to me pathetically, the tears streaming down her eyes. “He’s dead.”
My eyes move to my father’s in silent apology. How this lightning bug has come to live and die in a mason jar inside Maisie’s bedroom, I don’t know, but this is what I know: my father has done nothing wrong.
“How did a lightning bug get inside your room?” I ask, but Maisie’s eyes become shrouded with guilt; her face flames red, and she shakes her head. She doesn’t say and I don’t pry. It seems trivial now, how this bug has come to be here. She still doesn’t know a thing about Nick. For all intents and purposes, Nick is fine. That’s all that matters.
“These things happen,” I say mechanically. “Everything will be okay.”
“When will Daddy be home?” Maisie pleads, wanting someone who can console her better than I can, and I turn away from Maisie’s beseeching eyes and say, “Soon.”
We bury the lightning bug. We dig a hole two inches by two inches in the ground with the end of a stick and lay the insect inside. Harriet stands in the yard behind us, keeping watch. My father has gone for the day with the promise that he’ll be back tomorrow. “Why, Mommy, why?” Maisie asks over and over again as I dig the hole and lay the bug inside. The bug has a name, or so it seems: Otis. I don’t ask how it’s come to have a name; truth be told, I don’t care. I sprinkle a handful of dirt over the lightning bug’s corpse, grateful that Maisie doesn’t make the easy connection between this grave and Nick’s. “Why are you doing that, Mommy?” Maisie asks as I drizzle the dirt and pat it gently back into the earth with my fingertips. I suggest she find a rock to serve as a marker for Otis’s grave, and again Maisie asks, “Why?” but she scampers off in search of a rock without waiting for my reply, Harriet following closely behind.
In the evening a knock comes at the door. It’s dark outside, far too late for Maisie to still be awake. And yet she is, sprawled on the couch in front of the TV, watching preschool cartoons because I haven’t the energy to put her to bed. I’m on my laptop in the kitchen, trying to pull up the Chase website in an attempt to access my father’s accounts. I’m thinking of the unpaid bill to the office of Dr. Barros, and wondering if my parents are in some sort of financial distress about which I should know. I try hard to call to mind my father’s password, an odd mix of letters and numbers that’s near impossible to memorize. I try only twice and then give up, worried that after too many unsuccessful attempts, the account will be locked and my father notified. I don’t want to ask him about it for fear of making him feel bad, and yet I have my concerns. What if my father has less money than I think? What if my father has less money than me?
At hearing the knock, I go to the door and unfasten the lock. I pull the door open a crack, peering outside, and there find Connor standing on my front stoop in a black T and vintage wash jeans. In his hands are a helmet and gloves; a motorcycle is parked in the drive. Connor isn’t a tall man, standing just a couple inches above my own five-eight height, with brown hair and eyes, the kind that make women swoon. His smile is sympathetic, a contorted smile that’s meant to be both a smile and a frown. His heart is heavy, as is mine, but the half smile proves that he’s trying.
“Connor,” I say, and he steps inside, wrapping his arms around me and pulling me into a warm embrace, and it’s there, in his arms, that I close my eyes and press into him, allowing myself to believe for just one split second that I’m in Nick’s embrace, that it’s Nick’s arms that hold me tight.
“Clara,” he says.
I’ve known Connor for half a dozen years, Nick’s dental school friend turned employee. But Connor was never quite an employee to Nick but rather a partner, one he collaborated with about patient care as well as business expenditures and what to get the office ladies for the holidays. Before we had kids, Nick and I shared many double dates with Connor and whatever girl he was dating at the time, but after Maisie was born, that type of lifestyle—basement dance clubs and parties in rooftop bars—no longer fit the bill and Connor was left going stag. Connor doesn’t have children of his own; he doesn’t have a wife. He’s the perpetual bachelor, abounding with good looks and charm, but lacking in commitment. He was engaged to a college sweetheart once, a woman for whom he would have gone to the moon and back, as Nick has told me by way of Connor’s drunken admission. They planned the wedding, church, hall and all, and then she changed her mind, having met some other man the night of her bachelorette party, breaking Connor’s heart. Nick and I often reasoned that never again would he pop the question to anyone, no matter how in love he was. As the saying goes, once bitten, twice shy.
I draw away from him and watch as a handful of bugs let themselves in through the open front door, making a beeline for the chandelier that hangs above us, a Medusa type contraption with chrome light bulbs twisting out like the snakes of her hair. I close the door, and Connor follows me to the kitchen, ruffling the hair on Maisie’s head as we pass through the living room; she is so intent on her cartoons that she hardly notices, though from the corners of her sleepy mouth I detect a smile.
The lighting in the kitchen is dimmed. Dinner dishes remain in the kitchen sink, our uneaten meals evident as the food hardens and grows cold in the red glazed bowls, chicken soup warmed in the microwave from a can. It’s the best that I can do. Neither Maisie nor I could eat it.
“I should have come sooner,” Connor says, eyeing the leftover food, the guilt in his voice tangible as he leans against the kitchen sink, pressing his hands into the pockets of his jeans. But I shake my head and tell him no. The last thing I want is for Connor to feel any sort of guilt for not coming to see me sooner. He, too, has been grieving.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say, reaching into the refrigerator to snatch one of Nick’s old beers from the door, handing it to Connor though he never asks. I crave a glass of wine, just a few ounces of Chardonnay to help blur my sensibilities and make me indifferent and numb, but knowing the effects of alcohol on a breastfeeding infant, I make the decision to abstain.
“None for you?” Connor asks, but I shake my head and tell him no. He runs his hand through his hair, making the strands stand on end. He snaps open the beer with a bottle opener and drinks in a mouthful. “How have you been holding up?” he asks, though I don’t need to tell him. The bags beneath my eyes say enough, that and the swelling and redness, the fact that I haven’t slept for more than two hours at a time since before Felix was born, something that was only exacerbated by Nick’s death. I can no longer blame Felix for the lack of sleep. Now I blame Nick.
“I’ve been having trouble sleeping,” I confess, and Connor says, “Me, too,” and it’s only then that I see the dark circles beneath his eyes like mine. His skin looks sallow, jaundiced; he’s anxious and strung out. His eyes drift throughout the room from the stove top to the travertine tile, as if searching for Nick, finally settling on the beer in hand. He avoids my gaze.
“I remember the day I met Nick,” he says while picking at the wrapper on his beer, pulling it off in tatters, a pile of them gathering in his hand. His voice is quiet, subdued.
He goes on to tell me about the first time he and Nick met, crossing the campus to a shared class. It’s a story I’ve heard before, though only ever from Nick. They were in dental school, slowly chipping away on the many hours of labs, lectures and clinical practice before they’d be given a degree. They’d never spoken before, but the class was small, twenty students at best, and Connor had his eye on some girl, a brunette who also happened to be Nick’s lab partner. It was the reason for his introduction, the reason they became friends. Over some girl.
After graduation, Connor got a job working under an experienced dentist in town while Nick went into private practice. For a couple years it went on this way, until Connor’s ever-increasing dissatisfaction with his job got the best of him, and he quit to come work for Nick.
“I haven’t even begun to think how I’m going to support myself,” I admit to Connor. Since Nick’s death, I haven’t yet sorted through the mail, too terrified to see what awaits me there. The envelopes I pull every few days from the mailbox get tossed to a pile on the floor just inside the front door. Bereavement cards, mostly, those bearing their With heartfelt sympathy and May you find peace and solace sentiments, but also bills. Estimates of Benefits from the insurance company already telling me which of Nick’s hospital expenses they will and will not pay. A notice from the library of fourteen picture books that are a week overdue, each costing me five cents a day so that every day I tally up another seventy cents for the library, and still I can’t get myself to return the books. I haven’t the energy for it. Bills, bills and more bills. Catalogs for items I can no longer buy.
I had a savings account once, nothing extravagant, but an adequate savings account, money set aside for a rainy day, but we ended up putting each and every penny into Nick’s practice. We’d see the money back, he said, and promised me it was worth it. Had I told my father this he would have said no, but I took Nick’s word and invested every cent. The practice was Nick’s dream. Who could refuse a man his dream? Not I, said the fly. And so I said okay, and handed over all my money so that Nick could fulfill his dream while I set mine aside. My own photography studio. That was my dream.
Even our home is a money pit, constantly in need of repairs or renovation. The only thing left I have of value is the dental practice.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I confess to Connor, “about the bills. The mortgage. The hospital payments. Car payments. Saving for college, Maisie’s wedding. How will I afford health insurance?” I ask, thinking of Felix and his well-baby checks every two months, all running over with pricey vaccines. Without waiting for an answer, I say to him, “I can look for a job, but if I work, who will watch Maisie and Felix? How will I ever afford child care?” knowing my father is out of the question. He’s too busy caring for my mom, and an in-home nanny or a day care would cost me nearly five hundred dollars a week. “The dental practice,” I say to Connor, “it’s the only thing I have left.” But a dental practice is nothing without a dentist. Without Nick here, the practice is meaningless.
A look of confusion crosses Connor’s face. “You don’t know?” he asks, and I implore, “Know what?”
But he doesn’t answer right away. He drinks his beer, three long, slow swigs while I wait for him to reply. “Know what?” I ask again as he sets his finished beer on the countertop, and I reach into the refrigerator for another one.
“There have been some layoffs,” he says in a tight-lipped way, as if he doesn’t want to say the words aloud, as if he wants to sugarcoat them like he’s speaking to a child. “Nick had to let some people go.”
But I shake my head and tell him that I didn’t know. “Who?” I ask and, “When? Why?”
“A month ago, maybe more,” he says and my heart sinks. It slides from my chest and plummets somewhere down to my stomach, where for a single moment I think that I will be sick. I grip the countertop, my knuckles turning white. Why didn’t Nick tell me about the layoffs? I imagine the ladies who work at the front desk, Nancy, with her predilection for hot cocoa with mini marshmallows, and Stacy, a math wiz, matter-of-fact and thorough; she’s a crackerjack with the bills. Are they gone? Have they been fired? And what about the hygienist, Jan?
“Financial trouble,” he tells me, and I sharply inhale, my fears overwhelming me as I wonder desperately about all the things I don’t know. Nick paid the bills; he handled the finances. I handed them over willingly and without question when we were married and turned a blind eye to all fiscal matters. I could barely compute simple math; I wasn’t good with numbers. The last thing we needed was me paying the bills.
“Why wouldn’t Nick tell me?” I wonder aloud, and Connor shrugs his shoulders and says that he doesn’t know. He thought for sure Nick would have told me. And now, standing in the weak glow of the kitchen’s dimmed recessed lighting, I wonder: If Nick could keep this secret from me—if he could go weeks without alluding to financial trouble, if he could lay off employees and not mention it to me—then what else wasn’t he telling me?
What else don’t I know?
That night Maisie asks to sleep with me. She treads lightly into my bedroom as I tuck Felix into the bassinet, seven and a half minutes after tucking Maisie into her own chambray sheets and pulling the quilt up clear to her neck that way that Daddy does it. Snug as a bug in a rug.
“I can’t sleep,” she tells me, crossing the room where I’ve recently swept the broken picture frame glass, and I ask, “Did you try?” to which she nods her little head so vigorously that hair falls in her eyes. She clutches the teddy bear by a single leg, the deplorable thing hanging upside down. He’s nearly gone blind thanks to Maisie’s unending chewing, the plastic brown eyes about to fall from their place, hanging on now by a single brown thread. I pull back the sheets and welcome her in, grateful that someone is here and I don’t have to spend the night alone. Maisie happily obliges, rushing to the bed and hopping inside, right where Nick should be. She sets her head on his pillow, her body failing to fill the space where his body once lay, his warm arms wrapping me in a cocoon while I slept, a leg tossed across mine, growing heavier in time. The air is imbued with the fresh scent of Johnson & Johnson Baby Wash and the sweltering summer air that eases itself uninvited into the open window and again makes us sweat.
It’s the middle of the night when Maisie wakes up screaming.
“The bad man!” she yowls in a piercing voice, and then, straight on the heels of the first desperate declaration, “The bad man is after us!” she shrieks as my heart begins to dash. She’s crying beside me, sitting upright in bed, clutching the bed pillow as if she believes it is Nick. The tears fall from her eyes like the rushing water of Niagara Falls, urgent, the kind that can’t be slowed down.
I lay a shaking hand upon Maisie’s clammy one, and say to her, “Shhh,” but she pushes me away with so much might that I all but tumble from my side, latching on to Felix’s bassinet for support as it lurches precariously on its stand. Felix, rattled from sleep by the sudden shove, begins to cry, a cry that easily trumps Maisie’s and my own cries. Felix’s cry quickly escalates into a caterwaul as Maisie hides her head under the pillow to try to smother the noise or to hide from the bad man who trails her. I don’t know why it is that she hides, though I can imagine because I, too, want to climb under a pillow and hide.
“What bad man?” I ask loudly, over the sound of Felix, as I slip from bed and slide my hands under the weight of him, lifting him from the bassinet. “Shhh. Shhh,” I croon to Felix now, standing beside his bassinet and trying to sway him back to sleep. “What bad man, Maisie?”
“The bad man,” screams Maisie redundantly, her voice muffled by the pillow. As my eyes adjust to the darkness of night, I begin to see Maisie’s legs kicking persistently at the bed before she pulls them into herself and throws the sheets up over her tiny body. I scrabble around inside Felix’s bassinet for his abandoned pacifier, for something, anything, to silence the insistent sound. He’s upset, scared, maybe even a bit pissed off that Maisie and I woke him from sleep.
“What bad man, Maisie? What man? Tell me about the man,” I beg frenetically as I slide my arm from the spaghetti strap of a tank top and place Felix against my chest. It is not quite time for him to eat. By my count, Felix shouldn’t eat for another hour, and yet the pacifier is nowhere; there’s no other way to stop his screaming than to let him suck on me. As his gums latch down, my breasts begin to protest. The nipples are cracked, the skin dry, riddled with a bloody discharge; my breasts are hard and sore and unimaginably clogged. Like water held back by a beaver dam, the milk refuses to flow at the same pace Felix would like—a trickle rather than a surge, and so he slurps and slurps to little avail, making my chest crack and bleed. How has the nursing been going? Dr. Paul had asked in the exam room, and I’d lied, Just fine, before telling her the truth: the pain, the broken skin, the low milk supply. What I expected was a haranguing on breastfeeding, but what I was given instead was a way out. There are other ways, she told me before listing them for me: infant formula, a breast pump, donor milk.
Maisie won’t tell me about the man, and I want to tell her that she’s wrong, because I’ve spoken to the police and I’ve read the newspaper articles. I’ve been at the scene. They all seem to corroborate the same truth, that Nick’s speeding was the cause of the crash.
“Tell me about the man,” I say again, and when she won’t, I ask Maisie to tell me about the car. She’s told me already that the man was in a car, and I picture him racing after Nick on Harvey Road. “Was it a red car?” I suggest when Maisie says nothing. She shakes her head negligibly; it was not a red car. “Was it blue?” I ask, to which she replies with another shake of the head. “Was it a black car, Maisie?” I ask this time. “Was the car black?”
This time she doesn’t shake her head. Her response instead is a long drawn-out cry, a wolf howling at the moon, as she runs from the bed and from the room, calling over and over again for Daddy. She flees the bedroom in search of some other room where she can hide, the bathroom door still removed from its place and lying on the wooden floorboards, which I trip over in an attempt to catch my four-year-old daughter before the click of a lock bisects Maisie and me. In my arms Felix is no longer pressed to my chest, but now trying to imbibe anything he can find: my nightshirt, his hand, my hair. With a handful of my hair in his mouth, he no longer has the ability to scream.
It was a black car. A man in a black car. If what Maisie says is true.
I drop to the floor before Nick’s office door and ask three times for Maisie to come out. “Please, come out.” On the other side of the wooden pane I hear her cry, and imagine Maisie’s tiny body splayed across Nick’s ikat rug, her tears getting absorbed by the weft threads, the frosty grays with the citron stripes. Or maybe she’s hurled herself over the arm of Nick’s club chair, hugging the tufted back, pretending that it’s Nick.
When she doesn’t come, I make my way out to the garage in search of a nail and a hammer.
I’m becoming an old pro at this.