The first door I come to belongs to a picturesque farmhouse with a detached garage, lemon chiffon in color with trim the color of rust. The trees in the yard are enormous, and the driveway is long and wide. My troop meanders to the front door, and I turn to Maisie in the stroller, lugging her small frame from beneath the lap belt, and telling her to take my phone under a tree to play. I point to it off in the distance, thirty feet away or more, a tree with scaly brown bark and tiny clusters of flowers, most of which have been knocked to the earth in the storm.
“There’s more shade. You’ll be able to see the screen,” I say, before my eyes trail Maisie to the dogwood tree, watching as she sits down, soaking the seat of her shorts. And then I knock on the door gently, feeling my stomach turn as before me the door opens, and a man appears, middle-aged with a rotund face and thinning hair. It’s gray, as are his eyes. He appraises me, confused.
“Hello?” he asks, and I answer his next question before he has a chance to ask it. “You don’t know me,” I say, as a woman, too, appears at the door, her eyes also furrowed in question. “My name is Clara,” I say to them both. “My husband was killed down the street from here. Just a few days ago. A car crash,” I explain, though from the looks in their eyes, I need not say more. They know who I am.
As I peer off into the distance, I see that bend in the road glaring back and, beside it, the fated oak tree. From where I stand, I’ve got the perfect vantage point. A person could be sitting here on this porch, conceivably sipping from a glass of iced tea in the hanging swing and watching the wreck play out before them like a sporting event, a car or maybe two, hurling down the street at breakneck speed, the unforgiving impact, the air filled with debris; they might have heard the sound of the crash.
“We heard,” the woman says, stepping outside onto the porch beside me. I feel my heart hasten—she heard!—only to be let down again with these words, “We heard what happened, dear. Such sad news. We weren’t home when it happened, but saw it on the news. We couldn’t believe it. Right down the street. Such a shame,” she says.
“What was it you were looking for?” the woman asks me, and I confess, “I was hoping you saw something. That you might have seen what happened,” I say.
She sets her hand on my elbow. It’s warm and kind but also strange, an unfamiliar touch. “The newspaper said reckless driving was to blame,” she says sparingly, and I nod an inappreciable nod and whisper that it’s quite possible the newspaper was wrong. In her eyes there is only pity and doubt. She doesn’t believe me. She believes that I am wrong. “Sometimes seeing is believing,” she says abstractly, and I pull away as she tells me she’s so sorry for my loss, but somewhere deep inside I wonder if she really is.
I collect Maisie from beneath the tree and again we leave, Harriet this time taking the lead.
No one is home at the second home, and though there seems to be activity in the house after that, no one comes to the door. The garage door is open, a child’s bike lying sideways on the lawn. From an upstairs window comes the sound of a guitar. I ring the doorbell, and then knock twice, listening for footsteps to come scurrying to answer my call. And yet they don’t come.
I move on and on. Each yard in the neighborhood must be one or two acres wide. It takes time to walk from one house to the next, on the street because there are no sidewalks here. But that doesn’t matter, because there are also so few cars that travel along this path. The owner of the next home, a thirtysomething woman already outside, stands feeding her Clydesdale a handful of hay, the same Clydesdale we eyed from a distance. She greets me with a smile, and I tell her who I am. “Clara,” I say, “Clara Solberg.” And then I whisper to her about my husband who is dead.
“Can I pet the horsey?” begs Maisie as she pushes herself out of the stroller and takes large strides toward the chestnut-colored horse, hand already extended.
“Maisie,” I say, stopping her advance, but the woman tells me it’s fine. Maisie knows better than to pet a strange animal without asking first. But she did ask, I remind myself. She just didn’t wait for a reply. Typical Maisie, always antsy, always in a hurry, can’t be bothered to slow down and wait. It’s so hard for children to be asked to wait.
“Lady is gentle. She loves kids,” says the woman, finding a carrot for Maisie to feed the Clydesdale, while Harriet forces herself between my legs to hide. I find myself trying to make sense of Harriet’s fears on occasion, her angst over loud voices, thunderstorms, creatures bigger than she, trying to put together the puzzle pieces of her life before Nick found her hiding in the back of a kennel, incapacitated, her legs unable to move. She was terrified, trapped inside one of those high-kill shelters with startlingly high euthanasia rates, where cats and dogs sat awaiting their time. Death row. It was only a matter of time before someone injected her with a heavy dose of sodium pentobarbital, or would have had Nick not found her in time. I rub my hand gingerly over her head; she was Nick’s dog, not mine.
But now she’s mine.
And now, with Maisie distracted, her hand moving gracelessly up and down this horse’s hair, making it stand oddly on end, I ask this woman whether or not she saw anything, whether or not she heard anything, whether or not she was home. What I want to ask specifically was whether or not she saw a black car, lying in wait perhaps to pounce on Nick from behind the trees or tucked away on a narrow drive, concealed by leaves. But this I don’t say.
“I was home,” the woman tells me, and, “I heard the crash. It was just—” and she pauses, closing her eyes, shaking her head, and says to me, “awful. That noise. But,” she says, “I didn’t see a thing,” and she leads us all to her backyard, where I can clearly see the red wood of a neighbor’s barn smack-dab in the way, obliterating the line of sight. “I looked, don’t get me wrong,” she says. “I wanted to know what had happened. I thought about getting in the car and driving around the block. I was curious,” she admits sheepishly, adding on, “and of course concerned—but then the sirens came, ambulances, fire trucks, you name it, and I knew I would only be in the way. Help was on the way.”
“Thank you so much for your time,” I say as I gather Maisie and we prepare to leave. I say my goodbyes; she says she’s sorry for my loss. Everyone is sorry. So very sorry. But they’re also relieved it’s happened to me and not them.
It goes on like this for three more homes—they were home, but nobody saw a thing—and at the fourth house, the house is quiet. The lights are off, the garage is down, a delivery sits there on the porch, sopping wet from last night’s squall.Janice Hale, the address label reads, a cardboard box bearing a Zappos logo. Janice Hale has ordered new shoes.
I move on, knocking on the door of the next home, though no one comes, and by now I’m so far away from Harvey Road, it feels futile anyway. I turn to leave, but before I’ve taken three steps away I hear a voice, a woman yodeling at me, “Yoo-hoo.”
I turn to see a window forced open, a face pressed to the fiberglass screen.
“Can I help you?” she asks as Maisie moves closer to my legs in fear. In the stroller, Felix sleeps, peaceful in the warm summer sun. Soon he will need to eat, though I’ve prepared for this, toting a diaper bag with bottles and formula and distilled water as the parenting websites told me to do.
“You’re looking for Tammy,” she assumes. “Tammy’s working,” this woman says, hacking into the palm of a hand. I don’t bother to ask who Tammy is. In the other hand, she wields a cigarette, the end burning an amber red. The smoke drifts out the window to Maisie and me, who also coughs, an exaggerated cough, but still a cough.
“Go play,” I tell Maisie, ruffling the hairs on her head and gently shooing her away.
“When will she be home?” I ask.
“Tomorrow sometime, I assume,” this lady tells me. “She’s on reserve, you know?” Though, of course, I don’t know. “Had to fly out to Arkansas a few days ago, or something like that. Alabama. I can’t say for sure. I never know where she is, if she’s up or down anymore, on the ground or in the sky.” And when I give her a confused look, she tells me how much this Tammy hates it, the unpredictable nature of the job and the repulsiveness of those ugly monkey suits, the double-breasted dresses and the uniform scarves, she says. “For as much as she hates it, you think she’d try to find something new.” And then, as if all one concurrent thought, Tammy’s job and me, “Something you need?” the woman asks of me, her voice gruff, manly.
“No,” I say, shaking my head, quite certain I won’t find what I’m looking for here. I can come back, I decide; I’ll come back in a day or two and ask to speak to Tammy. But then I change my mind, not wanting to let an opportunity pass by. As at the other homes, I step closer to the open window and tell this woman who I am and what I want, and leave it at that, waiting for her to fill in the gaps.
“I was at the store,” she tells me, “picking up a carton of smokes.”
And I think that that’s it, her answer is a clear no—she saw and heard nothing, she wasn’t even home—until she says, “I was driving home just after it happened. I called the cops, you know? Saw that car smashed to smithereens.”
At this my heart stops. I envision smithereens spread across the concrete street. Nick as smithereens, small pieces of him everywhere. I gasp. I press a hand to my face so that I won’t cry.
“Was there anything else? Anything else you saw?” I beg, my voice erratic, choking on words. I peer around for Maisie, to be sure that she can’t hear about her father smashed to smithereens. “Anyone else around?” I ask, and she thinks for a while before telling me that she passed a car on the way home, another car, a half or a quarter mile past the scene.
