CLARA
What I discover is that she’s beautiful. Utterly stunning, in an exquisite, fine-china sort of way. The woman with the Seattle phone number who knows my name, sitting in a chiffon tank top and a pair of formfitting jeans beside a boy on a park bench, a boy whom she calls Gus. Gus looks to be eleven or twelve years old to me, stuck in that gap between childhood and adolescence, wearing a black polyester T and a pair of shorts. His legs are long and lanky, a set of earbuds plugged into his ears so he can mute the outside world. He holds two figures in his hands, two molded green army men who duke it out on his kneecap, punching each other in the face until one falls to the concrete below.
My breath catches; I try not to make more of this than there is.
There must be billions of little green army men in our town alone. This means nothing. These army men have nothing to do with the one I found in the plastic sack of Nick’s possessions, given to me from the morgue after he had died.
Or do they?
The woman looks to me like she stems from one of those countries that produce tall, light-haired, light-eyed people by the yard. Her hair is so blond it tends toward white; her eyes are blue like beach glass. She says to Gus, “Go play,” and he mopes, yanking the earbuds from his ears and abandoning them along with the army men on the park bench, rising lethargically and meandering to a swing. Maisie, on the other hand, takes off full tilt, headed toward a sandbox where she wiggles out of her hot-pink Crocs and gets down to work.
The woman says that her name is Kat; I say that my name is Clara. She has the most perfect posture, and though it isn’t intentional, her hair, her clothing, her eyes make me feel subordinate. I sit beside her and cross my feet at the ankles, feeling huge in the woman’s presence, my midsection still round and flabby. I try to ignore the charm of her adorable espadrilles and to avoid looking at my own bloated feet, the polish chipping quickly off the nails. The baby weight weighs heavily on me, my breasts engorged with milk. Just because I’ve begun feeding Felix formula doesn’t mean my body has adapted to the change. Not yet anyway, and so I fill to capacity with surplus milk, my breasts flattened beneath an old sports bra that only adds to my revulsion. I haul Felix from the stroller and feed him a baby bottle to satisfy his needs while my own stomach growls, a reminder that I’ve eaten nothing today, nearly nothing this week. I should eat, I tell myself, knowing I won’t eat.
Harriet lays herself in the shade beneath a tree.
“Who are you?” I ask the woman as we watch her boy, Gus, descend upon Maisie in the sandbox, asking indifferently if he, too, can play. I half expect Maisie to say no and throw a fuss that some newbie has infringed upon her sandbox, in an attempt to maraud the best, wet, packable sand, and I ready myself with the need to intervene, to explain to Maisie about sharing and playing nice, and how this sandbox isn’t all hers as she’s convinced herself it is.
And yet she doesn’t make a fuss but instead nods her head okay, and together she and Gus begin to build. Good girl, Maisie, I silently say.
“Nick and I were friends way back when,” Kat says to me as she picks at the flat-felled seam on a pair of vintage wash jeans. She doesn’t look at me, her eyes instead placed on the jeans. Her fingernails are freshly painted, a dark grape, freshly manicured.
But this is too ambiguous to me, too abstruse. Way back when. “When?” I ask, needing specifics, and Kat reluctantly tells me how she and Nick went to high school together.
“Where?” I ask.
“Seattle,” she tells me. “Bainbridge Island. We were close,” she says. “Good friends,” though I wager a guess from the tears that fill her eyes that they were more than good friends. I’m afflicted with a sudden pang of jealousy; were Kat and Nick better friends than Nick and me? But, no, I reassure myself, thinking of Nick and me lying together in bed, my head on his chest as he stroked my hair with those gentle, loving hands of his, the same hands that held our wrinkly baby boy all covered in vernix days later when he finally emerged from my womb after eighteen hours of painful labor.
He married me. We had a child together. Two children. He loved me, not her.
“You’ve kept in touch all these years?” I ask, wondering why Nick never mentioned Kat before. I think hard, trying to decide whether he did tell me about Kat and I wasn’t listening. It’s not like me not to listen, and yet I’d been so consumed in recent months with the pregnancy, with my own expanding body, with my mother’s ever-failing mind. Maybe he mentioned a Kat, and somehow or other I didn’t hear.
But she tells me no. “My husband and I, Steve,” she says, “Steve and Gus and I just moved here, to town. He’s in accounting, my husband. Steve,” and her words come out unmethodically, a series of ramblings that I must put together, like puzzle pieces. Her voice shakes. She is nervous, sad and scared. Why is she scared? Does she have a reason to be scared? Or maybe it is only the nerves masked in fear.
“He was transferred?” I infer, and she says yes. “When?” I ask.
“We’ve been here nearly eight weeks,” she says. “Two months,” and in my bitterness I want to tell her that I know that, that eight weeks is two months, that I can add, that I’m not an idiot. The words nearly snap out of me as the anger in me begins to rise, all but reaching a boiling point. Kat has done nothing to harm me, nothing that I know of for certain, and yet my dislike for her builds and builds. I’m tired and hungry, I rationalize in my head, and my husband is dead. I have every right in the world to be grouchy, angry, to snap at people I hardly know.
“And you and Nick…” my voice trails off as I search for the word I need. “You reconnected?” I ask, reading between the lines. The question comes out more pointedly than I’d intended—an inquisition—sharp like a scalpel. I envision some chance encounter at the tire and auto repair shop, which I only imagine because I remember Nick running over a mislaid nail on the interstate one day, eight weeks or two months ago, and coming home with a flattened tire. Or maybe it was at the post office, the Saturday afternoon he mailed a package to his father, an autographed glossy photograph of Dave Krieg he found at a sports memorabilia store on the highway toward Joliet. Maybe she was there browsing through boxes of NFL trading cards, finding one to give to Gus, Nick staring through tempered glass at expensive items on display. A chance meeting. Kismet.
“Yes,” she says, nodding her head. “In a way. We ran into each other at his dental practice, of all places,” she says, smiling cannily without realizing it, as she says to me, “He hadn’t changed a bit. Nick was still Nick.”
“You’ve seen him many times since you’ve moved to town?” I ask, trying hard to curtain my jealousy and distrust. Why didn’t Nick tell me about Kat, Nick who told me everything? No secrets, he always said. None. But now I’m beginning to believe there were secrets indeed. Many secrets. Had he been lying to me for the last eight weeks, the last two months, or for many years? All these women in Nick’s life about whom I knew nothing, Melinda and Kat.
Were there more? What else don’t I know?
“Yes,” she says, and then, “no,” settling finally on, “a few.” She and Nick had seen each other a few times since she moved to town. She, Steve and Gus, Kat goes on to tell me, are living in a suburb that lies adjacent to ours, one with home prices that soar upward of a million dollars and property taxes that are heinous, ones that fund the superlative public school system in town, the best one around. She doesn’t say this to me, but I know. Nor does she describe her home to me, but still, I picture it, some palatial home in one of those newer, gated subdivisions, the ones making a grand show of their upscale homes and onsite amenities, the tennis courts and heated pools and the elitist clubhouses flanked in glass and stone.
When I ask Kat about her last phone call with Nick the day of the crash, she describes it for me, the sounds she heard that day over the phone: the shrill screaming and the wreckage of the car as it slammed against the tree, “like refuse in a garbage truck,” she tells me, “being compacted beneath the force of the metal pusher plate, times infinity. That but worse,” she says decisively, her eyes set on Gus and Maisie in the sandbox and not me.
Much worse.
She doesn’t apologize for her candor, but says it like she means to leave this horrid visual in my mind, Nick’s broken body whisked together with leftovers and rubbish and trash, being compressed inside a garbage truck’s hopper with a bounty of hydraulic power, until there was nothing left of him at all. Flat Nick, is what I imagine, like the well-traveled children’s book character, Flat Stanley, and I envision my Nick as a card-stock clone that I can carry around in my purse and pose for photos with beside the Golden Gate Bridge, Rockefeller Center and Soldier Field.
“After that there was only silence,” she says, her hands trembling and her eyes turning red as a merciful breeze blows through the stagnant air. “The silence,” she says, voice quivering, “was somehow or other even worse than the noise. I called to him over the phone,” she tells me, but there was nothing, no crying; no screaming; no strained breaths or gasping for air; no staticky noise from the car’s radio.
No Nick.
And then she is quiet, watching the children play.
There are questions I want to ask but don’t. They aren’t questions about the crash but rather: Are she and Nick really just friends, and how does her husband feel about this friendship, or does he even know about Nick? I’m struck with sudden pangs of jealousy, wondering if she and Nick were only friends in high school as she’s said, or if there was more to it than that, sweethearts, homecoming king and queen or teenage lovers who made out in the back seat of a parked car on some bluff overlooking Puget Sound? I have to know as my mind invents details, picturing it then and finding that I can’t get that image out of my mind: Nick’s hungry, naked body raised above Kat, the rhythmical movements, the earthy and untamed moans that scream suddenly and uninvited into my ear. Eighteen-year-old Nick, wide-eyed and gung ho, full of potential, twelve years ago or so, a gamely boy slipping his hands up under the cotton of a burnout T to graze the slender, curved bones of Kat’s young rib cage, moving eagerly upslope toward her chest.
This is what I’m envisioning as my eyes rise up and greet Maisie’s eyes there in the sandbox, as I grab Harriet by the leash and call for Maisie to come, needing more than anything to get away from this woman, knowing for certain that she is the one with whom Nick was having an affair. Not Melinda Grey as I initially assumed, but Kat.
A flush creeps up my neck and into the connective tissues of the lobes of my ears, making them redden and burn, prickle and sting. “Come on, Maisie,” I call for a second time, my voice quivering, feeling this woman’s eyes on me, needing desperately to get away, to get out of here. To seek solace in the only unfailing arms I know.
My father’s arms. They will protect me.
“Please, don’t go,” begs Kat, rising to her feet, saying, “There’s more.” But I hold up a hand. I can’t bear to hear more. What would she possibly say to me? Tell me where and when they committed their acts of adultery, and how Nick was going to leave me for her. How Nick loved her more than he did me? Is that what she plans to say? I can’t stand to hear it, her confession.
“I have an appointment,” I claim, finding it hard to speak and even harder to breathe, the oxygen keeping me at an arm’s reach. “I really must go,” I gasp, hurrying to the sandbox to draw Maisie away by the hand, letting her walk barefoot through the park, carrying her shoes in her hand. “I’ll call you,” I lie. “We’ll meet for coffee,” I claim, praying I never have to lay eyes on this woman again. I get into my car, racing in the direction of my mother and father’s home.
I won’t tell my father about Kat and Nick. I can’t. But he’ll see the sadness in my eyes, and he’ll hold me tight, and for one brief moment I won’t feel so alone.
It’s nearing one o’clock as we drive through town, and it isn’t until I arrive at my parents’ home and see the driveway vacant that I remember my mother’s haircut appointment. They won’t be home. Izzy and my father have taken my mother to the salon. I pause in the drive, breathing hard, trying to remove the lewd images of Nick and Kat from my mind as I take in the small, one-story home—no stairs down which to fall—adorned in vinyl siding and fake brick. My parents moved here five or six years ago, when their previous home became too big for them, too much work. They no longer needed twenty-five hundred square feet for just the two of them and decided to downsize to a ranch in an active adult community, the kind that offered exercise classes, bingo night and craft workshops, none of which my parents attended.
“Boppy!” Maisie screams, recognizing the home, but I tell her that Boppy isn’t here right now it seems, and I’m about to pull away when suddenly, amidst Kat’s unspoken words, which muffle all rational thoughts in my mind—the unsaid admission of adultery, the blow-by-blow of her intimate moments spent with Nick—I remember the scrap of paper that bears the password to my father’s bank account in a desk drawer, and it’s a great reprieve when I do, a way to divert the unwanted thoughts that fill my mind. I didn’t go to their home planning to seek out the password, but rather for the comfort of my father’s arms.
But now that I’m here, I can’t just leave without it.
I put the car in Park. I tell Maisie that Mommy just needs to run inside real quick and find something for Boppy.
“You stay here and keep an eye on Felix, okay, Maisie?” I ask as I step from the car, putting the windows down so the kids don’t overheat. “Can you do that?” I ask. “Can you be a good big sister and watch Felix?” Maisie smiles and nods her head, reaching over as far as she can to set a hand on Felix’s arm. He’s fast asleep.
I knock once on the door to be certain no one is home, and then scurry to the garage keypad and type the familiar pass code in. The door springs open. Once inside, I take the shortest route to my father’s office where there is a desk but also a twin-size bed, which is where my father sleeps these days, no longer able to sleep with my insomniac mother.
I don’t delay. I find the slip of paper in the top desk drawer, where my father keeps a listing of his passwords. I snap a picture of it with my smartphone, and, sliding it back into the desk drawer, I leave.
* * *
That night I don’t bother going through the motions of climbing into bed, of closing my eyes, of fooling myself into believing that sleep is within reach. Sleep is not within reach. I tuck the children into bed and sit instead at the breakfast nook with a cup of tea. Beside me is Nick’s phone. I’ve never been one for snooping, and yet I press in his password and begin scouring all the information I can find on the device. I gaze through his calendar searching for dates with Kat; there are none. I check his call log, I read his emails for sappy notes to and from Kat. Again there are none. I check his internet browser, wondering what I might find among his most recent searches, and as I do, three windows load, one bearing basketball scores, and another for the Chinese restaurant where Nick would have eaten his final meal, the restaurant menu loaded onto the screen. But it’s the last one that knocks the breath from my lungs.
A search for suicide statistics among dental professionals. At this I gasp out loud, dropping the phone from my hand. Suicide statistics. Dental professionals. Nick.
It’s true then, I reason. Nick took his own life, and he did it with Maisie in the back seat. He risked our child’s life, and suddenly I’m not only sad but also completely incensed. He nearly killed my child. All other possibilities go scurrying from my mind: Maisie’s suggestion of foul play, the ridiculous idea that Nick gave in to the whims of a four-year-old child and sped recklessly at her suggestion. Of course that couldn’t possibly be true. Nick panders to Maisie, yes, and yet he’s far more commonsensical than that. Far more commonsensical, and yet also desperate. Desperate enough to kill himself. But why? It must have had something to do with Kat, I reason. He was stricken with guilt, or maybe she threatened to tell me about their love affair if he didn’t leave me. He tried to pay her off, perhaps, with the life insurance payout, but even that wasn’t enough for Kat. The only way out was suicide.
Kat admitted as much at the park. She said that there was more she had to tell me, but I said no, that I had an appointment, that I had to leave. She was going to tell me about their affair.
It’s clear to see now that there was never a bad man.
Nick was the bad man. Nick did this.
The tears fall freely from my eyes as I reach for my laptop in an effort to quell the thought, to not think about Nick intentionally plowing into a tree at the side of Harvey Road, to not imagine Maisie dead like Nick. I open my laptop and pull up my mother and father’s account on the bank website, to be sure they’re not in any sort of financial distress. My father is far too proud to tell me if he’s having money trouble, but after the missing check and the bounced check, I have to know if he needs help. With the sting of Nick’s betrayals, he’s all that I have left. I type in the log-in and the password and the account opens before my eyes. At seeing a balance of over a thousand dollars, my immediate reaction is relief. I exhale heavily, not aware until that moment how long I’d been holding my breath.
If I wasn’t facing a sleepless night, that might have been the end of it. But as it is, I have nothing better to do with my time than to sip tea and stare at the clock until morning finally comes, and so I start scouring the statements in reverse, taking note of weekly cash withdrawals, all for three hundred dollars. Some months the account shrinks to near nothing before the pension check arrives and the rent payment from Kyle and Dawn. My father is old-school, as many men of his generation are; he likes to carry cash. That much I know, but a weekly allowance of three hundred dollars seems like a lot of money to have on hand. What is he spending three hundred dollars on each week, twelve hundred a month, over fourteen thousand dollars a year?
But that’s not all.
Scrolling backward, I find a payment made to a local jewelry store in excess of four hundred dollars, nearly two months ago. Two months or eight weeks. I’m overcome with the strangest sensation of déjà vu, thinking only of the receipt to the very same jewelry store tucked away beneath Nick’s undershirts in the dresser drawer. The receipt for a four-hundred-dollar pendant necklace. In the moment I can’t be sure that the dates of purchase are the same, or that the value amount is identical down to the penny, and yet it seems far too analogous to be a coincidence. My mother doesn’t wear much jewelry, nothing other than her engagement ring or items with sentimental value, such as her mother’s wedding ring. My father tried giving her a string of pearls once when I was a teenage girl, Tahitian pearls that most certainly cost him a lot of money, but my mother was too penny-wise for such a thing and made him bring them back. I felt sorry for him, remembering for years to come the pained expression on his face when my mother scolded him for the gorgeous string of pearls, never once saying thanks or acknowledging the generous gift.
But now, knowing this, I find it impossible to believe that my father spent four hundred dollars at the jewelry store on my mother, fully aware of her antipathy toward it, and yet maybe he’s taken advantage of her dementia to spoil her rotten with flowers and jewelry, and other things she’d pooh-pooh were she still of sound body and mind.
But, no, I realize then. That can’t be. My father is far too practical of a man for this.
And that’s when the suggestion starts to gnaw at me, that Nick has somehow used my father’s credit card to purchase this necklace. Nick was in some sort of financial crisis, that much I now know. But was he in enough financial crisis that he had the nerve to steal my father’s credit card and buy a necklace for Kat with it? Had Nick been panhandling money from my father, or just outright stealing it? It’s the latter, to be sure. Nick was stealing from my aging parents. I fill to the brim with embarrassment and shame as well as anger. It reaches a boiling point and begins to overflow.
Not only has Nick wronged me, but he’s wronged my family, as well.
My father was right all along. Nick could only bring me down.
It’s nearing one in the morning when an inconspicuous knock comes on the kitchen window. At the sound of it, I leap from my skin, goose bumps forming on the flesh, the hairs of my arms standing on end.
The breakfast nook lines a bay window. It’s surrounded by glass on three sides. The noise is jarring like a shock of electricity jolting through my body. My first instinct is to blame my imagination for it, but then it comes again, far less inconspicuous and more pronounced this time, the heavy smite of knuckles on glass so that my heart picks up speed. Harriet’s heavy head rises from the floor, and her ears stand at attention. Harriet heard it, too.
Someone is here.
I turn apprehensively from the laptop and peer outside. My eyesight is diminished by the lights of the LED screen so that I can hardly see, my vision hindered by spots and blotches. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust, but as they do, I make out a light on in the Jorgensens’ home behind us, though the Jorgensen home is likely a hundred feet away and with windows closed to repel the heat, there’s no chance they’d hear me if I screamed.
And that’s when I make out a nebulous shape standing just outside, eight inches away or less, and at seeing it, I press my hand to my mouth and gasp.
Instinctively my hand reaches for the phone, thumb hovering above the nine until my eyes make out the shape, the brown eyes and the brown hair, the indulgent smile as the contour of a hand rises up to wave hello.
Connor.
And though I should feel many things—relief among others—it’s unease that I feel. Anxiety. What is Connor doing here at one in the morning? Butterflies pulsate in my stomach as I rise from the nook and move to the back door, pulling it to. There he stands on the back porch plucking the motorcycle gloves from his hands one finger at a time, and as I ask, “What are you doing here?” I see that his eyes have a drowsy look to them, glossed over. As he welcomes himself inside my home, he stumbles a bit, grabbing the door frame for support. Not much, for Connor is no stranger to drinking and his tolerance is high, but enough that I know he’s had a drink or two before he came here.
He steps from his shoes and into the kitchen. “Do you know what time it is?” I ask, and, “Why didn’t you call?”
“I saw a light on,” he whispers to me, his breath laced with the bitter smell of beer, which leads me to believe that Connor drove past the house for the sole purpose of seeing if I was awake, leaving his motorcycle in the drive and tiptoeing around the side of the house to see my silhouette through the kitchen window.
How long was he watching me?
He pulls me into him, an awkward hug, and instinctively I draw away. “You okay?” he asks, sensing the way I tense up at his touch, but I shake it off and tell him I’m fine, as good as to be expected anyway. Unable to maintain eye contact, my eyes drop to his shoes.
A pair of classic Dickies, the color of wheat. Heavy-duty work boots with a lug sole. Instantly my mind goes to the muddy footprints beneath the pergola the night of the storm. I think of Connor’s motorcycle helmet, his black leather gloves. A man in a hat and gloves, as Maisie had said. It was Connor, standing in the rain, watching me through the window, and at once I want to know why, though there’s a part of me too put off, too confused to ask. I feel my cheeks redden at the thought, Connor staring through the window, watching me.
“I wanted to see if you were okay,” he says as he leads the way unhesitatingly to the refrigerator, where he pulls on the door’s handle to help himself to one of Nick’s Labatt Blues. Thanks to Connor, they’re dwindling in number. Only four remain, and those will soon be gone, too. And then what will I do? Purchase another case to mislead myself into believing that Nick is still here?
I find a bottle of Chardonnay on the wine rack and pour myself a glass. Felix is no longer nursing, and so there’s no longer a need to abstain. I press the glass to my lips and sip, letting the anesthetic fill my veins, trying hard to forget the events of the day, from the discovery of the black Chevrolet, to meeting Kat, to Nick’s many indiscretions. It’s all too much to handle—my mind bounding back and forth at all the possibilities, confusing me, making me feel crazed—and at seeing tears fill my eyes, Connor asks, “What is it, Clara?” while setting his beer on the countertop and again pulling me into his arms, his hands locked around the small of my back. There’s an awkwardness in the way he latches his hands together behind me, so that for a brief moment I think I couldn’t get away if I wanted to, and I feel instantly suffocated. Smothered. It’s too much. He holds too tightly and for too long, and my first instinct is to blame the alcohol. He’s had too much to drink. His hands stroke the small of my back in a way that’s far too close, far too intimate for me.
Memories return to me then. We’ve done this before, Connor and me.
“He was having an affair,” I say, and this time Connor nods his head and affirms that it’s true.
“I saw them together,” he says as I draw away to look him in the eye. “At the office. I don’t know for certain, but it looked suspect to me.”
“He was going to leave me?” I ask.
Connor shrugs his shoulders. “Maybe,” he says, and my mind leaps instantly to the notion of divorce lawyers and divorce proceedings, alimony, child custody, irreconcilable differences. Nick and I didn’t fight, hardly ever. Our differences were slim, irreconcilable or not. We were never truly at odds, and yet, in the final days and weeks of my pregnancy with Felix, as I pushed a nearly nine-pound baby from my body, were these the thoughts that occupied my husband’s mind? Leaving me so he could be with another woman? The word dissolution flits around in my mind, a marriage dissolving like instant coffee.
He comes for me again, trying to wrap his arms around me, to comfort and console me, but I step away, out of his reach, and his hands come up with nothing but air. “What is it?” he asks, this time meaning my avoidance, and as my eyes move again to his shoes, I say that it’s been a long day. There’s only so much one person can take.
“I just need to be alone,” I tell him, wanting more than anything for Connor to leave. The discomfort is overwhelming, a feeling in the pit of my stomach that something isn’t right. And it’s not just the alcohol this time. It’s something more. The closeness of Connor to me, the presumption of his hands. Knowing it was Connor who watched me through the window, staring, saying nothing. What did he see?
Connor doesn’t take to this well. He shakes his head; he tells me no. “You can’t be alone now, Clara,” he says. “You and me, we’re all we have left. We have to stick together,” he says, reaching out again to clamp my hand, squeezing tightly so that I can’t let go. “We shouldn’t be alone at a time like this,” and as he runs a hand along my hair, he whispers, “You were always too good for him anyway,” and though it’s meant to appease me—comfort me in the wake of Nick’s affair—it strikes me as an odd comment to make. Connor is Nick’s best friend. We don’t say bad things about our best friends, least of all when they’re dead.
The thought that comes to me then is that summer when I was expectant with Maisie, in those early days when only Nick and I knew, too terrified still to share the news and jinx it. It was early in the pregnancy, though the merciless morning sickness had finally relented as I crossed that viaduct between trimesters one and two. I was feeling good for the first time in a long time, no longer bilious and green, and yet consumed with fears that I had yet to share with Nick. I’d become pregnant sooner than expected; Nick and I planned to wait until after our thirtieth birthdays to conceive. And yet here we were, in our early and midtwenties with a baby on the way. To call Maisie a mistake seems cruel, and yet that’s what she was, a miscalculation of dates, a forgotten birth control pill, a romantic night with an expensive bottle of red wine. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to be a mother, though I never told this to Nick, who was so excited to be a father he could practically burst with pride.
Instead I told Connor one summer evening at an outdoor gathering at the home of a mutual friend, a garden party where I was the only one who hadn’t been drinking, and Connor stumbled upon me in the kitchen, drinking tap water and trying not to cry. I confessed to him about the pregnancy, that I was terrified to be a mother, that I was consumed with all the things that likely could and would go wrong. Being responsible for another human life was a formidable task. I wasn’t sure I could do it.
But Connor’s words were rational. Nobody knows what they’re doing the first time around, he said. You’re a smart woman, Clara. You’ll figure it out. And then he held me while I cried. He stroked my hair and comforted me. He told me I would be the best mother, that there wasn’t anything in the world I couldn’t do.
Until that moment, our relationship was purely platonic. We were merely friends.
But as Connor held me there in the kitchen with everyone else safely outside beneath a set of string lights, he nearly kissed me. Not quite but almost. His eyes drifted closed, his inhibitions lowered by the excessive alcohol consumption, leaning into me, though I pressed a gentle hand against his chest and whispered, “Connor, please, don’t.” His only reply was to clutch me by the waistline and pull me closer, to attempt to draw his lips to mine. Connor was the kind of man who was used to getting what he wanted. Women didn’t tell him no. He was drunk, I reasoned at the time, and come morning, he wouldn’t remember. But I would.
I can’t tell you how long I’ve wanted to do this, he breathed deliriously that night as if he didn’t hear my rejection at all, as if he couldn’t feel the palm of my hand against his chest. His eyes stayed closed until a noise jolted them open again, Sarah, the owner of the home, stepping in through the sliding glass door with an armful of wobbly plates balanced on her inner arms, threatening to fall. There was a tower of them, eight plates or more, stacked precariously on top of each other. Connor stepped away from me, moving quickly to Sarah’s side to rescue the plates, though she was so blitzed she didn’t even notice, just as she didn’t notice the near-kiss.
We never spoke of it. It never happened again.
I didn’t think twice about brushing it under the rug. We all do stupid things when we’ve had too much to drink, don’t we? In time, I forgot it happened. I never told Nick, and Connor became like a brother to me, the brother I never had.
“You shouldn’t say that,” I tell him now, slipping my hand from his, though he steps forward as I slowly retreat. “He was your best friend,” I condemn, and though Nick has hurt me, a thousand times over he has hurt me, there isn’t a thing for Nick I wouldn’t still do. I avert my eyes from his, looking anywhere so I don’t see the way he stares at me, making me feel uncomfortable. I want to ask him to leave. I stare out the window, at the clock, at Connor’s abandoned gloves. I stare at Harriet sound asleep.
“Nick was many things,” he says. “But he wasn’t my friend,” and at this I turn to ice, wondering just what exactly Connor means by this. Of course he was Nick’s friend.
“Of course he was,” I say, but Connor responds with, “I thought he was, too. Turns out we were both wrong,” and before I can press him on this, before I can demand to know just what he means by these words, his hands fall to my hips, and he pulls me into him with so much impetus I gasp, his lips moving toward mine. The yeasty smell of alcohol on his breath is nauseating; he’s had far too much to drink. His lips press me in a way that is sloppy and shapeless, his lips wet with beer. I push him away, and as I do he breathes into my ear, “I’ve envied Nick many things, but most of all was you,” and it’s then that I know why Connor was standing at my window the other night, watching as I argued on the phone with the life insurance man. Watching as I called Kat. Watching as I comforted Maisie in the heat of the storm.
It’s because of me.
Connor is in love with me.
And at once I feel many things, from guilt to sadness to despair. Have I done something to deserve this? Have I led Connor on in some way? Is this my fault? I see the pleading in his eyes, the unspoken words. Let me be your Nick, he silently begs.
And then suddenly the words are spoken, as Connor says to me, a forced whisper so that I feel the breath of his words against my skin, “Let me take care of you, Clara. You and the kids. I’ll take such good care of you,” and I know he would. That’s the hardest part. I know that in the wake of Nick’s transgressions that Connor would take the very best care of the children and me, but I can’t bear to imagine myself in another man’s arms, in another man’s bed.
There’s so much hope in his eyes, hope and desperation, a toxic combination, it seems—so much to gain, so much to lose.
And I know that when I deny him, I’ll lose Connor, too. My words get lost in my throat. I can’t speak because when I do, I’ll break both of our hearts.
After tonight, Connor and I can no longer be friends.
And then I hear a noise. My saving grace.
It’s a meager noise like the scritch-scratch of a house mouse trying to worm its way into a bag of birdseed. Connor hears it, too, a noise that makes his hands suddenly stop their digressions so that he can pause to hear. His ears perk up; he listens, and it comes again, the scraping sound of paws on the hardwood floors. Harriet, I think, but no, Harriet is here, on the kitchen floor fast asleep. Not paws, then, but feet. Human feet. Tiny human feet, and then a voice, a quiet, unobtrusive voice as if not wanting to interrupt, not wanting be a bother. “Mommy,” says the voice, and I realize then, as I stand there in the kitchen, holding my breath, that it is Maisie. Maisie is here.
She appears in the doorway, hair in shambles, clutching her derelict bear, and says to me, “Mommy, I can’t sleep.” She catches sight of Connor and grins, and though I want to run to her, to gather her in my arms, to thank her for her timing, for saving me from this awkward fate, my voice remains staid.
“Did you try?” I ask, and Maisie nods her head, saying that she did. She tried. I run my hand the length of her hair, staring at her gratefully as her eyes become hopeful and she begs of me, “Mommy, you go to sleep, too?”
I nod my head. There is nothing in the world I would rather do.
With shaking hands I turn to Connor, and I tell him how I really must go, how Maisie needs me, thankful he doesn’t object, though his face falls flat and there’s a great letdown at this. Connor doesn’t want me to leave, to attend to Maisie. He wants me to stay. I appease him by saying, “I’ll call you tomorrow,” knowing I won’t call.
“Of course,” he says, nodding his head and drawing away, and I grip Maisie by the hand—wanting to tuck myself between my children and slip into oblivion, a restless sleep no doubt, if sleep even comes—as we watch him slide his feet back into the muddy work boots and leave the same way out in which he came.
I close the blinds so that no one will watch as we sleep.