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 knuc
kles 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?”