“Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t,” says the detective, “but that was up to a judge to decide,” explaining to me that in three days’ time Nick and this accuser were to attend a hearing to decide whether or not the emergency order had any merit or if it was a frivolous claim.
“I suppose we’ll never know now,” he says, though in my mind I’ve already decided.
Nick would never hurt a fly.
“Who did this to Nick?” I ask, needing to know. When I think of restraining orders, I imagine maniac men with violent tendencies threatening their wives and children. I envision battered women in shelters, and scared kids who cling to their mother’s gaunt legs, crying. I don’t see Nick. My mind is reeling as I ask again, more preemptory this time, less polite, “Who did this to Nick?”
It isn’t a question this time. I demand to know.
The order is public record. I could go to the courthouse and request a copy of the filing if I wanted to, which is maybe the only reason why Detective Kaufman gives me the name. It’s one I’ve never heard before, a woman who I soon plan to know anything and everything about. At the mention of her name, I feel a stabbing sensation in my chest because it is a woman. My mind recalls the receipt for the pendant necklace. Was the necklace for this woman?
Was Nick having an affair?
All the air suddenly leaves the room, and I find it hard to breathe.
I gather Felix and begin to leave, but not before the detective stops me one last time. “There’s something else,” he says, and I pause with my hand on the doorknob and turn. “It’s standard protocol to check the cell phone records in the case of a vehicle collision. See if the driver was on the phone at the time of a crash. Browsing the internet. Texting. Illinois is now a hands-free state, which I’m sure you know,” he says, and I know what he’s getting at well before he says it.
“Your husband was on the phone at the time of the crash,” and though I want to quibble with him and claim that it’s not possible, I see the expression on the detective’s face and know that he’s telling the truth. Nick, who never speaks on the phone while driving, was on the phone. And he wasn’t speaking to me because before he left the ballet studio, we’d already spoken.
I’ll pick up something for dinner. Chinese or Mexican?
Chinese.
Who was Nick speaking to at the time of the crash? I wonder. I ask the detective about this. “He was on the phone,” I say, “with who?”
The detective stares at me for an extended minute or two before shrugging his shoulders and saying, “I believe you were given Mr. Solberg’s personal effects already. The items we were able to gather from the car. His phone should be there,” though already I’m telling myself that whoever it is, was simply a wrong number. It was a wrong number, and Nick, ever obliging and gracious, took the time to answer the call, to tell the caller politely that he or she had misdialed. And for this he died.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Detective Kaufman says prosaically, rising from the table and collecting my abandoned Styrofoam cup in his hand as I leave, bound and determined to figure this paradox out. Who was Nick speaking to at the time of the crash? Who filed an Order of Protection against him and, perhaps more important, why?
What secrets has Nick been keeping from me for all this time?
NICK
BEFORE
Most nights I go home with the best intentions of telling Clara exactly what’s going on. It isn’t that I’m purposefully trying to keep it from her. There aren’t secrets in our marriage; that’s a promise we made when we saidI do, and one I plan to stick to.
It’s more of an omission.
I think to myself as I drive home,Tonight’s the night I’m going to tell her, but then I come in through the door to find Clara with a belly swollen three times its size and feet so inflated she can barely walk, setting the table for dinner. Maisie is sitting before the TV, surrounded by glue sticks and crayons, evidence that she didn’t watch TV all day, but rather spent the day creating, and when I come in she runs to me, and I hoist her into my arms and tickle her as she laughs. She wears her leotard still, this pastel-pink thing with fluttery sleeves. Wrapped around her waist is a dainty pink skirt, with flouncy edges that remind me of lettuce leaves. Today is Tuesday, the day Maisie takes ballet. “Where were you?” Maisie asks as I bring her back down to earth, the same question she asks every day though she knows good and well where I was.
“At work, silly,” I say, and she asks why.
“Taking care of my patients,” I tell her, and again she asks why. This is what kids do when they’re four. But I’m smarter than a four-year-old, or so I like to think that I am, and so I ask Maisie where she was all day, and she says, “Here, silly,” and she tells me about the spider she found in her bedroom, a big, black and hairy spider—“Maybe even a tarantula!” she exclaims—as big as a truck. She holds her hands out so that I can see the size of the spider, two kid hands spread a good eight inches apart so that it might have been a bunny or a squirrel or a hedgehog that she saw there in her bedroom, or it might have been nothing. “This big, Daddy,” she tells me. “The spider was this big.”
“There was no spider,” says Clara, coming into the living room in a pair of leggings and a stretchy white T-shirt that is stretched as far as it can go, so that I can see her belly button pressing through. Her hands are laced together, on the small of the back where it constantly hurts, and her eyes are full of fatigue. She’s tired, physically and mentally, but still, she looks at me and smiles, and as she does, I liquefy completely and dissolve. Her hair is flat, and eye makeup is smeared beneath a single eye; evidence of a nap, of Clara sleeping while Maisie also slept. There is something yellowish smeared across the front of her white shirt and bread crumbs on her forehead, and still, there’s no woman in the world as beautiful to me as Clara. “It was lint,” she adds with a tired but amused smile. “Not a spider,” she says, meeting Maisie in the eye this time, “but lint.”
“It was a spider,” replies Maisie, also with a smile, and whether she’s mistaken or lying, I don’t know.
I squat down to Maisie’s height and stare her in the eye. It’s strange seeing the world from three and a half feet high. Maisie’s eyes are green, like Clara’s, a mossy green that stands out on the fair skin. In fact, she’s all Clara, from her hair to her eyes, to her strong-willed demeanor. Pigheaded and stubborn in a way I adore. Neither Clara nor Maisie is ever wrong, or so they believe.
“Sometimes we see something that scares us a little,” I explain, “and we make believe it’s something that it’s really not. Once, when I was a little boy,” I tell her, making this up as I go, “I thought I saw a coyote in the backyard. I was playing all alone outside, and I was sure I saw a coyote pass through the yard. I screamed for my mom, and she came running to see why I was upset. I told her about the coyote. She looked all around, but sure enough, there wasn’t a coyote there. There wasn’t a coyote anywhere. It was only the neighbor’s cat.”
“What did Grandma do?” she asks, her eyes wide with curiosity as her tiny little hands disappear in mine. “Did she get mad?” she asks, but I tell her no, of course not, “Grandma didn’t get mad, but she did remind me of the story ofThe Boy Who Cried Wolf.”
“What’s that?” asks Maisie. She’s never heard the fable before, and as I hover there, squatting to kid height, she climbs on my bent knee.
“It’s a fable,” I say. “A story that’s supposed to teach us something,” and with that I relay the story to my girl as Clara watches on, clearly pleased. The story of the little boy who lied so many times that when he finally told the truth, nobody believed him. I don’t lecture or scold, and I make sure to leave out the part where the boy gets eaten by the wolf. But Maisie listens and commits the story to memory, so that maybe, when the opportunity arises again, she’ll think twice before telling a lie.
