“We have money,” she asserts. “It’s not like we don’t have money.” And then, “I thought we weren’t drinking caffeine,” she says, standing before me in her nightgown, her belly as fully extended as it can possibly get. She looks tired, hand pressed to the small of her back as if she can carry this baby weight no longer. Across the taut nightgown I spy ripples of movement, our baby reaching his hands and toes to get out, alien-like. He’s ready. I look down at the bag of coffee grounds in my hand. Dark roast, it says; not the decaf. “Have you been drinking caffeine all this time?” she asks, and I almost laugh at the inanity of it, how I have an illegitimate son, my practice is in shambles, I’m being sued and I almost plowed down a neighborhood kid, but what Clara is concerned about is my caffeine intake. But I haven’t even been drinking caffeine. Of all the things I’ve done wrong, this is the one thing I’ve done right. I stayed true to our vow. I didn’t drink caffeine.
And then I do laugh, this odd, manic laugh that doesn’t sound like me, tossing the coffee to the floor so that the bag cracks open and grounds spill out everywhere. “What has gotten into you?” Clara asks, her face shrouded in worry and disgust.
“Into me?” I demand. “Into me? What has gotten intoyou?” I ask, using some sort of defensive tactic of spinning the conversation in my favor. “I told you I was going to paint the bedroom. Why in the hell would you hire someone else to do what I can clearly do?” I grab a dustpan and broom from the pantry wall. I drop down onto all fours to clean the mess.
“Stop being an asshole, Nick,” Clara growls, holding Harriet back as she tries to get at the coffee grounds, to lick them up off the floor as she licks everything up off the floor.
“Oh, I’m being an asshole?” I ask. “I’m the one being an asshole?”
“Yes, Nick. You’re being an asshole,” Clara asserts before she gathers Harriet and leaves the room.
I try to follow her, to reach for her, but instead feel the cotton of her nightgown slip through my hands as she disappears.
CLARA
“What’s going on?” begs my father hours later as I step into the kitchen to see him standing before the stove, pouring a box of uncooked pasta into boiling water. I notice how loosely his pants fit, hanging on to near nothingness, merely skin and bones. He’s becoming too thin. His eyes look tired, his skin aging quickly, getting covered in liver spots and wrinkles. His hair thins with each visit, the fatigue weighing heavily on him. My mother no longer sleeps, which means my father no longer sleeps, and they’re both aging far more quickly than I’d like them to. I’ve told him before,Your health is important, too, but my father rejoined with,This is what people do when they love each other. Self-sacrifice, he said, telling me how there was nothing for my mother he wouldn’t do.
In the next room, Maisie watches TV. I’m not sure how, but somehow or other she’s no longer stashed under the guest bed. Now she’s out, her face radiated by synthetic light, and on her lips is a smile—not for me, but for the characters on TV. She clings to her scruffy teddy bear, one of its decrepit ears stuffed inside her mouth, wet with saliva. She doesn’t see me as I pass by. I pat her head; I say hello. On the floor, spread across a hand-knit blanket, Felix is asleep.
“What do you mean?” I ask my father now, standing in the kitchen, though I know exactly what he means. When my father arrived to take my place, taking on the task of wheedling Maisie out from under the guest bed, I didn’t tell him why she was there or what had triggered her meltdown. I simply said that she was under the bed and that she wouldn’t come out, and he arrived under the pretense that Maisie was being insubordinate rather than what she really was: scared.
“Are you in some kind of trouble that I don’t know about?” he asks as he sets the empty pasta box down on the countertop and looks me in the eye before I quickly avert my gaze. I can’t meet my father’s eye. Not now. “You can tell me, Clarabelle,” he says. “You can tell me anything,” and I wonder instantly what Maisie has said to my father to make him believe that I’m in trouble, that we’re in trouble. I reach into the cupboards and begin pulling bowls and plates from the inside, vessels for the pasta my father is cooking us for dinner. The cupboard is a refurbished thing, one that came to us from Nick’s grandparents. It was old when it arrived, but we stripped and sanded it and painted it brand-new. A second chance, a new lease on life.
“I’m not in trouble,” I mutter, but in truth I wonder if I am.
My father is staring at me, waiting for an answer, and I discover that my first response didn’t suffice. He needs more than a halfheartedno. In his hand is a wooden spoon, and he stirs the pasta sluggishly. “What did Maisie tell you?” I ask, and he confesses that Maisie didn’t tell him much, but her quiet twaddle did, as she sniveled beneath that bed, crying about abad man, calling again and again for Nick. The only way she came out from under the bed was with the promise of popcorn andSpongeBob, and so Maisie crawled out, and my father and Maisie and Felix curled together on the living room chair and watched TV. She didn’t say a word more, and my father didn’t ask, certain that broaching the topic would only send her straight under the bed again.
“What bad man?” he asks me point-blank, and I force a smile and tell him there is no bad man. It’s only make-believe.
“You still haven’t told her about Nick?” he asks, and I shake my head and say no. “Oh, Clarabelle,” he says. “Why?”
I want to tell my father. I want to tell him all of it, about Maisie’s nightmares, and Detective Kaufman, and the implication that maybe Nick was being trailed, that he was killed, that his death was actually a murder. I want to tell him about Melinda Grey and Kat; I want to tell him about Connor. I want to tell my father all of this. To curl into a ball on his lap like I did when I was a child and confess to him that I’m sad and scared and confused. But I think of Emily backing away from my admission and the disbelieving gleam in her eye and know I can’t do it. I don’t know what it would do to me if my father repudiated me, too.
“You can tell me anything,” he says again, trying hard to convince me, but I shrug my shoulders and say that there’s nothing to tell.
“You know Maisie,” I say. “Such a flair for the dramatic,” and I force a smile so that maybe, just maybe, my father will believe.
I change the subject. “She remembered me,” I tell my father, and he asks, “Your mother?”
I nod wistfully, knowing it may never happen again. “She knew that I was Clara. She was sensible, clearheaded. She knew who I was,” and he says that he’s happy I got the chance to experience this moment with my mother. These days, he says, they’re few and far between.
“I’m sure it meant the world to her that you came,” he says, but as the lines of his forehead start to crease, I ask him what’s wrong. Something is bothering him. “These moments of lucidity,” he tells me, “they come and they go. One minute she knows me, the next she doesn’t. One minute Izzy is Izzy, and the next she’s not. Three times now your mother has tried to call the police on me because she thought I was a robber.
“She got out again last night, Clara,” he says sadly. “I’d hid the car keys in a kitchen drawer, but she managed to find it there and start the car. In the middle of the night. She put it in Reverse, the sound of the engine revving the only thing that caught my attention. I got to her just before she pulled out of the drive. She could have really hurt herself, or someone else. And then there’s the credit card,” he says, voice trailing off.
“What credit card?” I ask, and he tells me how my mother opened a credit card all on her own, in her name. A Citi MasterCard. He never would have known about it until a notice of data breach arrived in the mail, made out to Louisa Friel. The credit card company was warning my mother that her account might have been compromised, and that she should closely monitor the statements for suspicious charges. Except that my mother wasn’t meant to have an account of her own. Just like stealing the car keys and trimming Maisie’s hair, it was something she did because she didn’t know any better.
“How did she possibly…?” I ask, voice trailing off because I know that with my mother the possibilities are endless. There’s no telling what she might do.
“A commercial on TV,” my father says. “A telemarketer, an ad in a magazine.” He shrugs. “I don’t know.” And I think then of all the personal information she’d need to relinquish to apply for a credit card, and begin to worry. I wonder what, if anything, she’s purchased with her new card, and what this has done to my parents’ credit.
“Oh, Daddy,” I say, setting my hand on his. “I’m so sorry, Daddy,” knowing how hard it is for him to confess these things to me when I have so many other things on my mind.
“I don’t want to burden you with this,” he says, but I tell him he’s not a burden, he’s never a burden.
“Let me help you,” I beg, but he assures me as he always does that he and my mother are fine, telling me he was looking into additional resources for my mother and came across some extra security devices, like alarms and tethers so he can better monitor her movement at night. “Is that necessary?” I ask, cringing at the suggestion of my mother in tethers, but he rubs at his forehead and says, “These days it seems to be.”
Before he leaves, my father mentions that he’d like to sell my mother’s car. It’s old, he says, and without it lying around, there’s less chance of my mother taking it for a ride. “We should have gotten rid of it years ago,” he says, tacking on, “We can use the money,” meaning me more than him; he wants to sell my mother’s car and give me the money.
