In order to bet, I need money I can bet with. Clara’s savings account has already been drained. My money market, too, has been liquidated and poured into this dental practice. What we have in our combined checking account is barely enough to pay the mortgage and electricity and the rising cost of groceries. I leave it alone, knowing we need to eat. The last thing in the world I want is for Clara to go to the grocery store and have the clerk tell her that the credit or debit card has been denied. She’ll fill with shame and embarrassment long before she fills with anger or dread. I see her there, my beautiful wife with Maisie by her side—Maisie already fussing because of how much she hates to grocery shop—and Clara’s fair cheeks flaming red because everyone is staring at her for the denied payment. I hear her words, the shaky rhythm of her voice as she says to the clerk,There must be some mistake, and asks the clerk to run it again, only to go through the same shame a second time around. I won’t do that to Clara.
The way I see it I have two options: Maisie’s 529-college savings fund, and my life insurance plan. My first thought is to go for the life insurance, to surrender the policy for its cash value. It’s not like I intend to die anytime soon. It’s a whole-life insurance policy, like life insurance and a savings account rolled into one, or at least that’s the way I explained it to Clara years ago when I sought coverage. Instead of a policy for a fixed time—say until our children turn eighteen and become financially independent—I opted for the whole-life policy, a decision that is paramount now. The cash is far more valuable in my hands than sitting squandered away, tied up in a life insurance policy I may never need.
I fill out the necessary paperwork to surrender the policy, though it will take time for the insurance company to pay out. In the meantime, I start slowly with Maisie’s college education fund; the loss is less than withdrawing from my own retirement fund, and so it seems like a smart choice, the lesser of two evils.
By the end of the day I’ve made about seventy-five dollars, which somehow feels like a million bucks. It’s a good day, I tell myself, until an hour or so later when Clara calls, scared out of her mind, saying her mother got ahold of the car keys again and took the car out for a ride.
“I thought your father did away with the car keys,” I say, and she rejoins with, “That’s what I thought, too.”
Turns out Tom forgot to hide the keys.
“They found her,” she assures me, but still she’s scared stiff. “One of these times she’s going to get hurt. Really hurt.”
“Or hurt someone else,” I nearly say, though I don’t want to be the Negative Nelly and remind Clara of this. She and her father both know how much is at stake every time Louisa somehow or other manages to find herself in the driver’s seat of a car.
“Where’d she go this time?” I ask, and Clara reluctantly tells me that her mother was navigating the country roads out to the rental property that Tom still owns, telling a passerby when he found her pulled off to the side of the road, completely lost and disoriented, trying to find directions on the back of an old CD case as if it was a street map, that she was attempting to get home.
Where’s home, ma’am?the passerby had asked, spotting the Medic Alert bracelet that Louisa wears and calling the toll-free number for help, but Louisa had only shaken her head and said she didn’t know. She didn’t have the slightest clue where home was, though she described it, the big, old farmhouse just a mile or so from my favorite shortcut through town, a forgotten, winding road that managed to circumvent nearly all of the town’s traffic.
But Tom and Louisa didn’t live there anymore; they hadn’t lived there in many years.
But as with everything else in life, that was something Louisa couldn’t remember.
CLARA
I wake to a knocking sound rapping on a wooden pane and, moving sleepily down the wooden steps, greet the flower delivery driver at the front door. It’s the third time this week that he’s come, his arrival always just shy of 8:00 a.m. Too early. He must sit outside in his car, waiting for what he deems an appropriate time to knock. Nobody wants flowers when a loved one has died, but still they come, these flowers, awakening me this time from sleep. I thank the deliveryman, quite certain he’s grown tired of seeing me in my pajamas again and again, hair a mess, sleep in my eyes, mouth repugnant with morning breath. I close the door, staring out the window at the evidence of last night’s storm.
It’s everywhere.
Tree limbs have been wrenched from the arms of trees and tossed capriciously across the earth; a half block down the street, a power line is down, lying recumbent on the road. I reach for the chandelier’s light switch and turn it on; the electricity is out. It will take hours for the electric company to remedy the situation, hours while Felix and Maisie and I have no access to light, to coffee, to TV. Important things. Across our lawn, the remains of an overturned garbage bin are strewn: a box, a fast-food bag, an empty container of cat litter; shingles are missing from the roof of a neighbor’s home. There are puddles on the street, which little perching birds bathe in, splishing and splashing their wings in the turbid rainwater and then, like Harriet the dog, shaking them out to dry. The sun is out, trying unavailingly to dry the earth. It will take time. A red-winged blackbird sits beside the puddle, watching me through glass.
I take a peek out the back door, beneath the pergola, to see if the man’s muddy footprints are still there. They’re not there. They’ve been rinsed away by the storm, as I convince myself that theywerethere, that it wasn’t only a dream. Nick’s muddy shoes beside the front door are proof of this, as is his rain jacket looped over a door handle. I didn’t make it up.
There is evidence of the storm inside the house, as well. Harriet, terrified of thunder, has defecated on the rug. She’s taken to chewing the arm of the sofa, too, and Nick’s forgotten gym shoe so that pieces of fabric upholstery and synthetic fibers litter the room like the garbage on the lawn. Harriet’s muddy paw prints are trekked across the foyer floor.
In Nick and my bed upstairs, Maisie, up half the night cringing at the wind and the rain, still sleeps, the door to the bedroom now pulled to. In the middle of the night I heard her crying and the muted rustles ofno, no, no, no, noas she kicked angrily and unconsciously at the sheet. With the air conditioner out of commission, and the windows closed to stave off the rain, the house has become unbearably hot. Throughout the sleepless night I watched the thermostat move up to eighty-four degrees, listening as fifty mile per hour wind gusts rattled the home. As we slept, the sweat collected between my legs, making them viscous like hands coated with a thick emollient, the thin sheet clinging to my legs until Maisie in her restlessness yanked it from my skin.
And then I lay in bed, still sleepless, trying to remember what it felt like when Nick lay beside me, the sound of his ever-so-soft snore and the impression of his body, pressed against me, arms, torso and legs parallel to mine.
But I found that I could no longer remember.
Our town doesn’t have the best track record for good weather. Twenty-some years ago, a tornado plundered our community, putting us on the map. Nobody had heard of our little town before the twister hit, an F5 that lifted houses right off their foundations and catapulted cars across town, killing dozens of people and injuring hundreds in its path. Now our town is synonymous with tornado just as New Orleans is with hurricane. I walk throughout the house picking up the mess left behind in Harriet’s terrified trail, feeling grateful it was just a thunderstorm and nothing more. It comes as no surprise to me that when she awakens, Maisie doesn’t want to leave the safe confines of our home. But with the electrical outage comes an advantage; without electricity there can be no microwave pancakes and no TV: noSpongeBob, noMax & Ruby. Instead, there is the promise of a glazed cruller from Krispy Kreme and a trip to the park. And so, reluctantly she comes, changing out of her pajamas and into a pair of soft cotton shorts and a sleeveless T, and the four of us settle into the car, Felix, Maisie, Harriet and me. To keep her content, I hand Maisie my phone.
It’s not yet ten in the morning, and so after we gather our donuts and coffee, I make the decision to drive out to Harvey Road. It isn’t a thought that comes to me in that moment, but rather something I’d been thinking about all night, tossing and turning as the summer storm raged outside. And now, it returns to me as I drive through town and toward the site of Nick’s crash, the familiar scene creeping slowly into view. The horse properties manifest themselves on the sides of the street, along the straightaway before that dreadful bend. They are large homes, renovated, or modern farmhouses with horse stalls, barns, fenced pastures and an assortment of other outbuildings I can’t identify, placed in an unincorporated part of town. It’s different here than it is elsewhere around town. There is a distinct lack of commercial structures: no stores, no gas stations, no water towers. Everywhere I look, I see only houses and trees, houses and trees, and of course, horses. There is a church, a singular Presbyterian church abutting a small cemetery, which appears oddly welcoming with its wrought-iron gates and its bushes and shrubbery. The streets are narrow and empty, and as I open my window and let it in, the air smells fresh and clean but tinged with the distinct metallic remains of last night’s rainfall.
Today I don’t drive so far as the bend, though I see it up ahead and I wonder if Maisie, too, will see. Will she recognize this scene? My roadside memorial slopes in one direction, compliments of the wind and the rain. The flowers that I laid before the white wooden cross are scattered now across the roadside, but they’ve also multiplied in number, making it clear that someone else has also been here, leaving flowers at the place where my husband died. Many people, it seems, for the gifts and flowers are profuse. A soggy teddy bear, a cross manufactured from twigs. More flowers. A Chicago Bears cap sits positioned on the top of the white wooden cross, the blue-and-orange wishbone C staring back at me. Connor has been here, Connor who shares Chicago Bears season tickets with Nick, two seats on the thirty-yard line. They spend every other Sunday afternoon at Soldier Field together, August through December, eating hot dogs and drinking beer.
Instead of driving onward toward that bend, I pull into the neighborhood and, before one of the large homes, put the car in Park. Maisie looks up from over the top of my phone. “Where are we, Mommy?” she says, her eyes appraising the homes, seeing a horse off in the distance that catches her eye. A Clydesdale, chestnut in color with white feathering on the legs. I know a thing or two about horses, thanks to a childhood obsession with them. I collected figurines and buried myself in books.
“We’re just going for a walk,” I say now as I remove the double stroller from the trunk and get Felix first and then Maisie situated inside, and put Harriet on a leash.
If Detective Kaufman isn’t going to canvass the neighborhood, I’ve decided I might as well try. Tucked here so closely to the crime scene, I find it impossible to believe that nobody heard the crash or saw the debris lying across the street. Certainly somebody heard something; somebody saw something. I head out like a political candidate barnstorming a community to gather votes, with my dog and children serving as my campaign tactics.
Maisie doesn’t put up too much of a fuss this time—she likes going for walks far more than she does grocery shopping—and as long as she can hang on to my phone, gathering her bits of candy and swiping them from the screen, all is right and well in the world. Her eyes rise from the LCD screen to scan the street quickly, and I make believe I know what’s going on in that mind of hers as she regards the smattering of parked cars, looking for a black car as I’ve already done.
But there is no car here, not so far as I can see.
The morning is quiet and still. In the fenced pastures, horses roam, gnawing on the sodden grass. Harriet cowers; she isn’t brave. I pull on her leash and call for her to come.
