“That policy has been canceled, ma’am,” she tells me, and I’m overcome with sudden and overwhelming dolor that makes it hard to breathe.
“What do you mean?” I ask. “That’s impossible,” I say, but I think that it’s not impossible, that the dental lender has beaten me to the punch and that they have taken everything, my share and theirs. They’ve repossessed their loan from the life insurance meant for me. How can that be? I’m ready to fight for what is mine, to hire a lawyer and sue, but then, from the other end of the telephone line, the woman explains to me that four weeks ago—at which she rattles off some random date back in May—Nick canceled the life insurance policy. Nick did this; not the dental lender. The funds have already been paid out.
“That can’t be,” I stammer, as I imagine Nick filching all that money he’d been squirreling away to protect the children and me should he die. “There must be some mistake,” I say, my heart beating quickly, realizing that now, just like that, Nick was dead, and Felix and Maisie and I had nothing. Absolutely nothing. A house—unpaid for and still owned by a bank that Nick sent checks to each month—a mediocre college savings fund and debt. More debt than I could ever imagine, and growing daily at a substantial rate.
I tell the poor woman on the other end of the line that she must be wrong, my voice shaking and quickly losing control. I say that certainly she’s made a truly asinine mistake. I say it three times, my voice getting angrier and more demanding each time. I ask to speak to someone else, to anyone else, to someone who’s in charge. And when that someone comes on the line, I tell them how stupid that first woman was, and how they need to help me find my husband’s life insurance funds now.
Now, I say it again just in case he misheard the first time.Now.
“The policy, ma’am,” this man states point-blank, his voice annoyingly composed and not bothering to apologize for the first woman’s incompetence, “has been canceled.”
“You’re wrong,” I say, but he assures me I’m not. “I’ll prove it,” I say to him self-righteously, as I pull up the account online to see for myself, so that I can snap a screenshot and send it to him somehow, an image that shows the available funds in Nick’s life insurance policy.
But instead I discover that the policy has indeed been canceled and the funds surrendered to Nick. My heart stops beating; my head spins. My hands become sweaty and clammy on the keyboard. I try hard, but I cannot breathe.Breathe, Clara, I tell myself.Breathe.
What did Nick do with the money, and why?
Nick has left me, and he has left me with nothing.
I hang up on the life insurance man.
I can’t focus on this now. There are questions, more questions. So many questions. I will find a job, I will ask my father for help, I will beg Nick’s parents for a loan. But why did he cancel the policy and squander the money away for himself? I have to know. Did it have something to do with Melinda Grey? I pull up a search engine and type her name in one more time, but this time, in addition to the social media sites I found earlier today while sitting in the front seat of my car, I scroll further down the hits and discover something I failed to see this afternoon. It’s Melinda Grey’s name there on the local police blotter, an entry dated many months ago.Melinda Grey, it reads,of the three hundred block of Parkshore Drive, was taken into custody by the Joliet Police Department on charges of possession of a controlled substance.And there is a mug shot, one quite unlike the imagined profile photo of the woman in the bikini and sarong, but rather one with thinning hair and blemished skin and depressed eyes, a woman older than Nick by a decade or two, with whom I couldn’t possibly imagine he’d be having an affair. She isn’t attractive in the least bit, and yet Connor told me as much. He told me Nick was having an affair.
But if Nick wasn’t having an affair with Ms. Grey, then who?
And if they weren’t having an affair, then why was he mixed up with this woman? Did it have something to do with drugs? Was Nick using?
In an instant it makes sense. Nick being out of sorts in the weeks leading up to Felix’s birth. His moodiness and despondency. The fact that he cashed in his life insurance funds for quick and easy money with which to purchase drugs.
Melinda Grey isn’t Nick’s lover, I decide. She’s his dealer.
Nick has been using drugs. Was he using drugs at the time of the crash? Was hehigh? Certainly the police would have tested for drugs or alcohol at the hospital after the crash, but maybe not. I have half a mind to ask Detective Kaufman about this, but then again, I don’t want to put any suspicion into his mind. He’s already convinced Nick is to blame.
I take a moment to gather myself and then scurry off to find the collection of personal effects that came to me from the morgue days ago—the car keys and his wallet, and Nick’s cell phone.
But there are other things mixed up with Nick’s personal effects, other things I didn’t notice at the time but now I do. There in the bottom of the plastic sack I find a lime-green cap from a bottle of soda and a molded green army man, no more than two inches tall. It isn’t the bottle cap but rather the army man that catches my eye, the kind of toy that is sold by the bucketful, each container filled with a hundred army men or more. I pluck the army man between my fingers and look the soldier in the eye. “Where’d you come from?” I ask, but the army man doesn’t reply.
I call to Maisie and, holding the figure out for her to see, ask if it’s hers. She crinkles her nose in disgust, and shakes her head an obdurate no, pulling away from the toy. “That’s for boys,” she says as if the toy might be tainted with cooties or worse. She goes back to watching TV.
Why would Nick have a toy army guy? Maybe it’s a mistake, I reason. Maybe some other body at the morgue came equipped with a molded green army man in the pocket of his or her jeans, and an inept mortician only thought that it belonged to Nick.
Maybe somewhere out there, a little boy is missing both his father and his toy.
I put the toy back in the bag. But there’s more. Two blue oval pills in a pill package, each one less than a centimeter long. Not your typical ibuprofen or allergy medication, but something different. Nick didn’t take any prescription medication, none of which I was aware. But maybe he did. Maybe he did and he just didn’t tell me. Or maybe these are the drugs he was getting from Melinda Grey, prescription medication not meant for Nick to consume. I hold the pills to my eye and read the wording inscribed on each tablet,Halcion, and a dosage. A quick Google search informs me that Halcion is generally used to treat insomnia—which makes sense, we’d all stopped sleeping in those weeks before Felix was born—and yet the side effects are immense: aggressive behavior, depression, thoughts of suicide. My eyes linger on those words on the computer screen.Thoughts of suicide.Are these pills to blame for my husband’s death? I access Nick’s MyChart account, an online database where physicians keep medical records for patient use. The log-in is Nick’s email address, and when I click the button for a forgotten password, it emails it to Nick, which I access easily, knowing the password to Nick’s email account. I search his medical records and the listing of prescription medication. The last thing his doctor prescribed was amoxicillin to treat a sinus infection the previous winter. There’s no listing for Halcion anywhere.
The pills didn’t come from Nick’s doctor. They came from somewhere else.
I set the medication aside for the time being.
The battery to the cell phone is dead and the screen fractured beyond repair. I dig a charger out of the junk drawer. It takes time to charge the phone well enough to power back on, though from the sad state of the screen, I’m surprised it turns on at all. The lock screen appears, a photo of Nick and me together, the shattered lines of the LCD screen splintering our faces. But still, Nick is handsome as ever, a youthful face immune to age. In the photograph, his smile is sublime, and I remind myself that Nick would never hurt a fly. Never. Memories of the restraining order flood me then, as I stare into Nick’s kind, gentle eyes, knowing his hands never touched me in a way that wasn’t compassionate or warm, that his words were never cruel or mean.
It must be a mistake; it has to be a mistake.
Drugs, restraining orders, affairs. This is not Nick.
I type in Nick’s password—proof, I tell myself as I do, that there were no secrets in our marriage, though my mind is starting to doubt this—and click on the call log to see who he was speaking to at the time of the crash. It’s a 206 area code, one that doesn’t strike a chord with me, and so I open a search engine and type in the number. I picture Nick on the phone, his large, capable hands pressing it to his ear, whispering to Maisie in the back seat reading her book tobe quiet, Daddy is on the phone.Hello?I see him ask, and then a moment of confusion passes across his handsome face as the caller on the other end asks for Amy or Natalie or Renata.You have the wrong number, he says, as suddenly that brewing bend in the road is before him and he doesn’t have time to react, but rather takes the turn at a whirlwind fifty miles per hour, spiraling off the side of the road. This person on the phone must have heard him, I think; he or she must have heard the very last words my husband ever said, something irreverent, I’m sure, something profane, though Nick wasn’t one to be profane. But I’m thinking that’s exactly what he would have done as he lost control of the car and went soaring off the side of the road, said something likeJesus Christorholy shitbecause that’s exactly what I would have done. That’s what I have to find out; that’s what suddenly I have to know. What are the last words Nick ever said, and did he or she—this person with the 206 phone number—hear over the phone the sound of the car striking the tree; Nick’s head impacting the tempered glass, making it smash; the metal of the car collapsing; Maisie calling out to her father, her desperate falsetto voice begging him to make the bad man go away?
Seattle, I discover, is home to area code 206. So, too, is Bainbridge Island, the city where Nick was born and raised. I’ve heard the stories about the humble little home not far from Puget Sound, less than a block from the harbor, so if he angled his head just right, he’d catch a glimpse of sailboat masts floating above sea. Until they retired, Nick’s mother served as a docent at one of the museums, and his father was an anesthesiologist who took the ferry over to Seattle nearly every day, spending his entire life on call. That’s what Nick has told me. But Nick left Seattle for college when he was eighteen and never returned. It wasn’t that he didn’t like it, but rather that by the time he’d received his dental degree and made the decision to launch his own practice, his parents were gone, retired to a humble little home in Cape Coral, not so unlike the one they left behind save for, of course, the winters and the rain. Their visits with us are limited and always brief, and now, with Nick gone, I’d dare say that the time between visits will continue to expand until they one day dwindle to nothing. Not that I mind. His mother always had someone else in mind for Nick’s wife; no one in particular, just someone other than me. She’s made that much clear.
