I have two theories, then, two hypotheses: either the caller was a telemarketer, or someone who misdialed the phone. Nick doesn’t have family in Seattle anymore. Just a coincidence, I tell myself, thinking how Nick hasn’t uttered a word about Seattle in half a dozen years or more. I know nothing about Seattle, other than some tired fact about how it rains nine months out of the year. I fetch the phone and dial the number, waiting warily for someone to answer the call.
“Hello?” a woman says, and for whatever reason I’m discomfited by this, not quite sure what to say. Her voice is soft, delicate, ladylike. I should have prepared something ahead of time. I should have jotted down an idea on a scrap of paper so that I’d know what to say, if nothing other than my opening line. But as it is I can’t speak, so that the woman on the other end of the line must say it again, louder this time in case I’m hard of hearing or downright deaf. “Hello there?”
I clear my voice and try again, and this time words do emerge, but they are halting and inarticulate. “Hello. You don’t know me,” I say too quickly, so it all comes out as one concurrent thought. “I was given your phone number. By the police,” but the words are too quiet, too tremulous, so that she asks me to repeat what I’ve already said. I say it again, louder this time, trying hard to flatten my words and pronounce each syllable at a time. I hear the voice of SpongeBob penetrating the walls of our home, the remote likely in Maisie’s hand and Maisie pushing buttons at random so that SpongeBob and his pals now scream. I hear her giggle, nearly muted by the sound of the TV. It’s been a while since I’ve heard Maisie laugh. “I was given your phone number by the police,” I say again.
“By the police?” she asks abruptly, her voice riddled with confusion. And I say, “Yes,” though it isn’t exactly true.
“Do I know you?” the woman asks, and I can hear her voice transmitted through radio frequencies to me, where I sit at the breakfast nook, a single leg thrumming against the kitchen floor. There’s a sudden reservation to her tone, an immediate doubt. Why would the police possibly have given me her phone number? Who am I and why have I called? She’s nervous and filled with dread. Her mind scans through the people in her life, wondering whether or not everyone is okay. Have I called bearing bad news? Am I the personification of death, the Grim Reaper, coming to steal loved ones from her life?
“No,” I say. “You don’t know me. My husband, you see,” I tell her, my words emerging briskly, “he was in a car crash. An accident, they say. A car accident. But I don’t think it was. A crash, yes, but not an accident.” And then I find that I simply can’t stop myself, and that I’m muttering quickly, telling some woman on the other end of the phone about Nick and Maisie and Detective Kaufman and some black car trailing them down the bendy road, a bad man, or quite possibly a bad woman. I tell her about the horse properties and the white oak tree, somehow or other winding my words back to Detective Kaufman and how the detective told me Nick was on the phone at the time of the accident, at which I shake my head and say it again, less sure this time whether or not it was a crash or an accident.
And at this, she breathes in sharply and lets out a long, slow exhale before saying to me, “Clara,” and I feel the Earth’s axis shift as I lose balance, clinging to the edges of the breakfast nook so that I don’t fall.
She knows me.
Outside, thunder grumbles through the sky, the day’s dank air rising upward to collide with colder temperatures that hover in the atmosphere above. As expected, the rain starts coming down in sheets. The grass needs it, as do the trees, but for a little girl already traumatized by something, of which even she doesn’t know, it’s the last thing in the world she needs. Maisie, from the next room, cries out at the sound of thunder, abandoningSpongeBobto run to me, her hands pressed to her ears to muffle the harsh noise. A dog barks, and it takes some time for me to realize that it is poor Harriet, who I’ve sent outside, now getting pelted by hail and rain.
“I’m sorry,” I say into the phone as Maisie cries, putting my arms around Maisie and holding her tight. “There’s thunder. She’s scared.”
“They say it’s going to be quite a storm,” this woman says into the phone, and as she remarks on the muggy weather and the lack of rainfall, I come to realize that this woman isn’t in Seattle as I’d imagined her to be, watching the orcas swim out on the briny waters of Puget Sound, but rather somewhere close, watching the sun pass from sight as the rain comes down in sheets. Like me.
Again Harriet barks, and this time I rise from the nook as Maisie clings to my hand, begging, “Please, Mommy. Don’t go,” and together Maisie and I step toward the back door, letting a sopping wet Harriet inside. The wind shoves the door into me, and I nearly fall, pressing hard against the weight of it to get the door to close. I turn the dead bolt and follow the dog’s wet footprints inside where she stands before us, shaking her body dry, drenching Maisie and me at the same time.
“Who are you?” I beg breathlessly into the phone, and Maisie imitates me saying, “Who, Mommy, who?” so that I must press a finger to my lips and whisper a silent,Shhh. I move to the kitchen window and lower the blinds, consumed again with that sense of being watched, the same sensation that preoccupied me out on Harvey Road. Is someone out there on my back lawn, standing in the rain, staring through the window at me?
The lights of the kitchen burn ablaze, a contrast to the darkness that is quickly falling outside. A stranger could see right in. They could see everything about this moment: me on the phone, Maisie clinging to my leg. Is this what they want, for us to be sad, confused, afraid? Is someone there, lurking in the backyard? I hesitate with the blinds only partly closed and scan the backyard quickly, fearing the trees. A dozen of them or more, big, tall oak and maple trees with much breadth, enough that a man or a woman could stand behind them and not be seen. The perfect hiding place.
I’m about to send Maisie to other rooms of the house to help lower the blinds, but then the thunder comes again, immediate and out of the blue, and like pent-up steam about to escape from a hot teakettle, Maisie screams. I press a hand to Maisie’s mouth, asking again, beside myself now with a need to know who this woman is on the other end of the phone. “Who are you?”
My heart is beating quickly; like Maisie, I feel like I could scream. I whisper to Maisie,shhh, and tobe quiet, and slowly remove my hand. But before the woman on the other end of the phone can reply, an abrading sound like nails comes from the door, and I feel my blood run cold, my legs stiffen, as Maisie says softly, delicately, her little arms clenched tightly around my leg so that I can hardly walk, “There’s a man at the door, Mommy. A man.”
“A man?” I beg, knowing that from this distance Maisie could not see whether there was a man at the door. In the kitchen we’re out of sight, impossible to see from the beveled glass that lines the front door, but still, Maisie assures me with an inappreciable nod that there is a man at the front door, a man with a hat on his head and gloves on his hands. “A hat and gloves,” I implore, “in summer?” knowing it can’t possibly be true. Despite the storm, it’s much too hot outside, much too humid for a hat and gloves.
“Stay here,” I say to Maisie as I pry her fingers from my leg and move toward the front door, though what I want to do is climb under the breakfast nook and hide. But I can’t let Maisie see that I’m scared. I ask the woman on the phone to hold on. I move away from the kitchen, telling Maisie again to stay, slipping past a disabled home security system that has been unarmed now for three years, since Nick and I agreed it was silly to pay the rates to keep it activated for nothing, and stare through the glass at the world outside. I peer into the yard, trying to see whether or not someone is there, a man in a hat and gloves, as Maisie has said, one who pressed his face to the window while I was in the kitchen and peered in, making eyes at Maisie.
But so far as I can see, no one is there.
But then the noise comes again, a scraping noise right there at the door’s wooden panel, and I jump, crying out. From the kitchen, comes a whimper. I breathe in deeply and gather the courage to open the front door just a bit, my body weight behind the door so I can slam it closed if needed.
But I don’t need to.
I breathe a sigh of relief, grateful to discover that the noise is only the wind rattling a grapevine wreath so that it thumps again and again on the front door pane. No one is here, but then I think again of the wide-open expanse of our backyard, a man in a hat and gloves, and wonder if that’s true. Did Maisie see a man, or no? Was it a man on the TV, like Curious George’s dear friend, the Man with the Yellow Hat? Is that what Maisie means? I don’t know. Is someone here, skulking behind those trees, peering through binoculars at Maisie, Felix, Harriet and me? I find myself wishing and hoping that I could arm the home security system right now, feigning a false sense of security knowing our home is being monitored from someone afar.
“Who are you?” I beg again of the woman on the phone as a burst of thunder cracks. On the other end of the line is the distinct sound of something dropping and shattering glass. A gruff male voice interjects, startling me even from the distance. “Shit,” he says.
“Let me call you back,” the woman begs, but I say no. I say it more uproariously than I’d meant to, barking out the word so that even Harriet’s eyes rise up to mine, her tail getting lost somewhere in the confines of her rear legs in fear. “No!” Harriet’s ears tumble; she looks sad. She thinks that I’m yelling at her. Harriet is a rescue dog, the kind with a sketchy past, an easy startle reflex and a habit of always being underfoot lest we decide to ditch her. She was Nick’s dog before she was mine. Nick was the one who found her, suckered in by some sad ad on the TV for homeless and abandoned pets. He said he was running errands, and when he came home, at his feet was a dog, a sorry creature with patchy fur still healing from a mite infection and a ridge of bones that should have been hidden beneath fat and muscle but wasn’t. It appeared to me that this animal had been starved. I didn’t want to keep her. I said no. Chances were good that she wasn’t going to make it anyway. But it was winter and outside the weather was deplorable; snow had begun to fall fiercely from the sky.Tomorrow she goes back, I said, but by morning I’d changed my mind.
“Please,” I beg. “Please tell me who you are.”
“Tomorrow,” the woman replies, whispering quickly into the phone. The line crackles and I fear I’ll lose her, thanks to the storm. “Meet me,” she says. “There’s a park on 248th Street. Near 111th. Commissioners Park. I’ll be there.”
“I know the place,” I force out. I know it well. I’ve been there with Maisie many times before. To Maisie it is the hippo park. They’re all just nicknames to her, the hippo park, the whale park, depending on which structures catch her fancy. This one has a giant blue hippopotamus that children can climb through, in his backside and out the mouth. “What time?” I ask, saying it twice for good measure, “What time?” fearing she may not reply because quite possibly she’s already ended the call.
“Eleven o’clock,” she says and then, just like that, there’s silence on the other end until another thunderbolt thrashes the evening sky, making Harriet cower and Maisie scream.
I spend the first part of the night not sleeping, but rather staring through the window as the rain falls, scouring the backyard for a man in a hat and gloves. Certainly something triggered this sighting from Maisie. Or was it simply an illusion, a figment of a little girl’s imagination? I can’t say for sure, but as the night goes on and no man comes to call, I start to have doubts about the veracity of the words that emerge from Maisie’s mouth. I want to shake her as she sleeps, to shake her awake and demand to know if she really saw a man in a hat and gloves, or if that was only make-believe.
And then at two in the morning, after four restless hours in and out of bed, I decide that I can’t leave fate to chance. I have to know.
