Not That I Could Tell: A Novel

by Jessica Strawser

  “Let’s hope so. But there’s no waiting when kids are involved. We’re treating this as critical, and we have to assume they’re in danger until we know for certain that they’re not.”

  “In danger with Kristin?” Clara shook her head. “That’s ridiculous. Never.”

  “We don’t know that they’re with Kristin.” He leveled his gaze at her. “We don’t know where any of them are. You hear from her at all, you call my number on that card, okay?”

  Clara nodded, and watched him go.

  4

  Maybe you’ve had this experience: waiting for someone who’s late coming home. Really late. You call and call their phone, and there’s no answer. Your mind starts to conjure stories of disaster. A patch of black ice. A jackknifed semitruck. A drunk driver. You look out the window every five minutes. You tell yourself you’re being silly. You recheck your phone to make sure you haven’t missed a call. You turn on the porch light as it grows dark, praying you won’t see a police cruiser pull up to deliver bad news. You stare at the TV, not seeing. You pour a glass of water, realizing your mouth has gone dry.

  There’s a simple explanation. They come home and tell you so. A dead cell phone battery. A traffic jam. Briefly, you wonder what caused it—maybe another person was in the accident that moments ago seemed such a certain possibility. But it doesn’t matter anymore, not really. It wasn’t your person. Your worry dissolves. It’s easily forgotten. By morning, you’re bickering again.

  I used to be that way. A real basket case. Drove my husband crazy when he’d walk through the door and I’d rush at him, all, “Where have you been and why didn’t you call and don’t you know how worried I was?” Then one day, I finally pulled myself together. I was too tired for neurotic, needless worry. I didn’t wait up.

  And he never came home.

  5

  I hear you’re the other one with a mountain bike chained outside. Want to hit the trails Saturday? Buddy system = good. Josh, Room 304

  —Note scribbled on the dry-erase board of Izzy’s dorm room door, freshman college year, second week

  Izzy could not possibly return her sister’s calls right now. She was far too busy incessantly peeking through the blinds, looking for any sign of change over at Paul and Kristin’s. The gleaming white Victorian stood defiant in the moonlight, every window lit as if to signal, in a luxury version of the old Motel 6 commercials: Please come home. The police had left awhile ago, and Paul had not emerged, but she knew he was in there, waiting. Hoping.

  What hell must he be going through?

  She’d fill Penny in later, and of course her sister would understand why she hadn’t called her back at a time like this. Never mind that Izzy didn’t actually know Kristin well enough to be truly fraught over her vanishing act, that she thought of herself as more of a curious spectator, even in the surreal moments of the detective’s interview earlier. And no matter that Penny had left messages on both her cell and landline, as well as a text and even an email: Call me? Miss you. Would love to come see the place again, now that you’re settled. It wasn’t the words that stung—it was the sight of Penny’s new name in her in-box. The surname was all wrong.

  One of these days, she’d get used to it. But the trouble with truly moving past things was that certain resentments had a stubborn way of sticking around. For instance, she couldn’t help being mildly irritated that Penny had suddenly decided to miss her now, when Izzy had been lying low ever since the wedding back in June. Of course, the impulsive purchase of her house and move to Yellow Springs offered convenient excuses for all involved. Izzy knew she had to do a better job of pretending. Penny and Josh certainly were. But she may have put too much stock in assuming it would be easier to pretend from a distance.

  In all those months of furtive wedding preparation, led by her mother as if she’d discovered her missed calling in life as an event coordinator, Izzy told herself that if she could just get through her maid of honor duties—the sickeningly sweet cake tastings, and the who-cares hubbub over the centerpieces, and the uncomfortable dress fittings, and the too-old-for-this bachelorette night—that once the big day had come and gone, things would be better. That would be that, till death do them part, and something in Izzy’s brain would send her a signal of closure, of it being time to find a way to move on.

  Instead, it got worse. The whole week following the ceremony, she dragged herself miserably through her workaday routine nauseated by the thought of Penny and Josh lying on a Bahamian beach, toasting their good fortune in finding each other. She’d reasoned that she just needed a vacation herself, but she had neither the gumption nor the funds to go it alone, and all her other friends seemed too attached to get away.

  Then there was the whole business of her parents downsizing to a condo, turning Izzy’s childhood home over to Penny and Josh for a steal—a token price, really, which irked Izzy, as no one had asked her if she, their older child, might also be interested (she wasn’t, but still, must everything be determined by a race to the altar?)—and her mother filling the void the wedding planning had left in her days by dropping hints about grandbabies.

  That much, at least, was futile. Neither Penny nor Josh had ever wanted kids—it was the only thing about Josh that did make him more perfect for Penny than for Izzy, really. Sometimes, Izzy would be watching Thomas and Maddie playing outside with Abby and Aaron and catch herself caught up in a certain wistfulness. “You’re out of order,” she’d chastise her biological clock, chagrined that it was evidently real. “You need to pair up before you can procreate.”

  She didn’t know when Penny planned to break it to their mother that she was in for a disappointment, but she hoped it was soon, before she started preemptively knitting booties. In the meantime, Izzy was starting to find her parents as insufferable as she found Penny and Josh. She wrestled with instant regret every time she dodged one of their check-in calls or cut a conversation short, but she needed a little more time to regroup.

  In her restlessness now, she turned on the TV and landed on a prime-time special spotlighting victims of Saturday’s shooting and the killer’s troubled past. She forced herself not to look away from the blood-spattered band members, the sobbing cheerleaders, the shaking spectators. These were people who couldn’t have done anything to prevent their misfortune, aside from arbitrarily choosing to be somewhere else that night. These were people who were allowed to be sad.

  Not her.

  The most twisted thing about the comparison was that it could be a comfort. See, what you’re dealing with is nothing. Witness real tragedy and be properly ashamed.

  You didn’t even have to look far to find it. Now it was right across the street.

  She poked a finger between slats in the blinds and peered out again at the dark form of Paul’s car, silent in Kristin’s driveway. She’d been waiting for other cars to join his there—family, friends, colleagues. It puzzled her that there were none. Nothing about this made sense. She desperately wished she had a clearer memory of Kristin’s role in the conversation around the fire Saturday night. She didn’t know that anything important had been said, but she didn’t know that it hadn’t been, either.

  A flash of movement caught her attention, and here came Clara, hugging an oversized hooded sweatshirt to her body, down the wide front porch steps of her old farmhouse, past the massive oak tree shading her front yard, its solitary swing moving gently in the breeze, and—with a furtive look over her shoulder at Kristin’s—across the street toward Izzy’s.

  She’d only started getting to know the other neighbors, but she had really come to like Clara, who was often outside with her kids when Izzy got home from her bizarrely early workdays. They’d taken to chatting in those hours when it seemed as if they had the neighborhood to themselves. Unlike her friends back in Springfield, Clara didn’t ask what had possessed Izzy to buy a house by herself, or make her feel like a special case. And unlike other moms Izzy knew, Clara didn’t reassure her not to worry, that one day she’d
find a man or have kids of her own. Nor did she apologize for her own happiness, falling all over herself to tell Izzy how annoying husbands and children can be.

  When Izzy mentioned that her banana bread always stuck to the bottom of the pan, Clara didn’t remark woefully that she remembered the days she had time to bake things from scratch, before kids. Instead, she lent her these amazing nonstick loaf pans that make everything turn out perfectly. When Izzy told her about her “new,” last-to-the-party infatuation with Cary Grant, Clara didn’t comment that it must be nice to have time to sit around and watch old movies. Instead, she disappeared into her house and came out with a special edition DVD of The Talk of the Town, which became Izzy’s favorite. When Izzy admitted one night that she was feeling lonely, Clara didn’t suggest that she set up an online dating profile. Instead, she asked Benny to handle the kids’ bedtime and came over with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and a bottle of vodka. Clara was one of those rare people who didn’t make Izzy feel like she was in the wrong place in her life.

  Even though she probably was.

  Izzy rose to meet her friend at the door, slipping her feet into the hand-knit alpaca moccasins she’d bought last week at Randi and Rhoda’s boutique. She’d only been trying to be nice—the price tag seemed a bit steep for slippers—but they were wonderfully soft and warm, a surprisingly worthwhile splurge, and it was nice to have some small luxury to revel in.

  She whisked open the door just as Clara had raised her hand to knock, and Izzy laughed at the startled look on her face. “Sorry! I’m a bit of a nosy neighbor tonight,” Izzy said, glancing again at Kristin’s. “Come in and save me from my stalkerish tendencies.”

  “Not a chance. I’m here to join you. I can’t see anything from my own living room. Guess you didn’t get my texts?”

  Izzy felt her face color at the memory of how she’d silenced her sister’s ringtone and shoved the phone deep into her purse, out of sight. The problem with dodging someone was that sometimes you ended up dodging everyone. “I must not have heard it,” she said quickly. “I’m glad you’re here, though. I’ve been dying to know what you make of this Kristin thing.”

  Clara caught sight of the TV as she shut the door behind her. “Oh, no. You can’t watch this stuff. It’s what these shooters want. Attention.”

  “I know you’re right,” Izzy said. “But, in my defense, this channel has the earliest local news, at ten. And it’s suddenly gotten really local.”

  Clara crossed to the remote lying on the coffee table and pressed it with a purposeful index finger, muting the television. “‘They will always be / more beautiful / than you / the people you are killing,’” she recited.

  Izzy stared at her, momentarily stunned by both her conviction and her words.

  “Alice Walker,” Clara said. “She blogs poetry now. In a world where political tweets have taken over the Internet, there’s still hope.”

  They both laughed. As a stay-at-home mom, sometimes Clara struck her as … well, underutilized was the word that came to mind, though Izzy knew that was ridiculous. What more important job was there than raising children? Especially children who would grow up with a mother who could quote Alice Walker? Moms didn’t get much respect when they dedicated themselves full-time to doing it well, but if anything went wrong—even twenty-five, fifty years later—they were always the first ones blamed. Sometimes by the kids themselves.

  “I’m clearly reading the wrong blogs,” Izzy said. “Glass of wine?”

  “Randi, Rhoda, and Natalie are all right behind me. We’re ambushing you. Better make it a bottle.”

  On cue, the doorbell chimed, and Izzy chided her heart for lifting at the sound. Their neighbor and her children were unaccounted for. This was serious stuff, not a social occasion.

  But it was so nice not to be alone.

  Izzy swung open the door and Rhoda stepped in, looking, as she always did, like a walking advertisement for her boutique—earthily beautiful with her hair twisted back in elaborate braids and her shoulders wrapped in a willowy pashmina. Behind her, Randi appeared cloaked in a long patchwork pullover, a finger pressed to her lips as the opposite arm flexed around the handle of an infant car seat with baby Adele asleep inside.

  “She dozed off on the way home—we don’t usually close up shop so late,” she said apologetically. “Police kind of threw us off schedule…”

  “Do you want to put her upstairs? Or down here in a quiet corner?”

  “Maybe just in the upstairs hallway, so I can hear if she cries?”

  “No problem.” Izzy was about to reach for the handle, but Randi breezed past her and up the stairs, as if they were old friends and this wasn’t her first time setting foot inside.

  “Is Natalie going to be able to leave Hallie?” Rhoda asked.

  Clara nodded. “Her text said she’d be over once Hallie is asleep. I know Natalie’s cautious about parenting on her own, but twelve is that borderline age of almost being allowed to stay home alone anyway—”

  “And then she can babysit,” Rhoda said. “It’s going to be glorious.” Her smile didn’t reach her eyes the way it usually did, though, and Clara reached out to touch her arm softly.

  “I take it you—”

  A soft knock on the door cut her off, and Izzy moved to answer it as Randi padded down the stairs behind her. Natalie looked the way she always did: tired but tough, even as she smiled a greeting. “I can’t stay long,” she announced loudly. “I have a test tomorrow. I’m telling all of you this so you do not under any circumstances let me stay past my bedtime.”

  “Noted,” Izzy said, standing aside to let her through. “I was just going to open some wine but I also have tea, coffee, decaf…”

  “It’s a math test, not a blood test,” Natalie said, grinning. “One glass won’t hurt.”

  The women burst out laughing. Izzy started toward the kitchen and motioned for them to follow.

  “Okay.” Clara leaned her elbows on the island as Izzy busied herself retrieving glasses and a corkscrew. “Does anyone have the slightest idea what has gone on here? Did anyone see this coming?”

  They all exchanged glances, shaking their heads.

  “This whole thing is surreal,” Izzy said, clunking the glasses down on the counter and going to work on the cork. “I keep waiting for some update that she’s been located, that there’s a simple explanation.”

  “The idea that we seem to have been the last people to see her is making me feel guilty,” Randi said. “Like we should know something. Or, you know, was it something we said?”

  “Did anything strike you guys as off?” Clara asked. “I keep racking my brain.” She accepted the glass Izzy offered her and stared intently into the wine.

  “We remember the whole night exactly the same,” Rhoda said, smiling affectionately at her wife. “Except for the foggy parts—which we fail to remember exactly the same.”

  “Seriously,” Natalie said. “Who put alcohol in the wine?”

  “I’m glad I’m not the only one,” Izzy said, handing over the last of the glasses. “It was kind of embarrassing talking to the detective.”

  “I know you’re still getting to know us, but you might have gathered we don’t get out much,” Rhoda told Izzy as the group returned to the living room. “I swear we’re not usually such lushes.”

  “At least you have the kid excuse,” Izzy said, taking a breath to steel herself as she claimed her spot on the couch. Clara sank down next to her, and Natalie perched on the opposite end. Now seemed as good a time as any to clear the air. “Me, I apparently just wait for opportunities to spill my innermost secrets to my new neighbors.” She still cringed to think of it. Hi, what’s your name again? Have I mentioned I’m in love with my brother-in-law?

  “No one thought anything of it,” Clara said, smiling sympathetically. “We’re Team Izzy.”

  “If anyone should be embarrassed, it’s me,” Randi said. She slid onto the oversized armchair next to her wife. “I am way more of a
lightweight than I realized. I’ve been trying to behave, nursing a newborn, and I guess—”

  “No one is judging you either, Ran,” Rhoda said. “You were fun! You were neighborly! You even offered to lend Izzy our tools.”

  Randi burrowed into her pullover as the women burst into laughter around her, and Izzy felt some of the tension in her shoulders subside. It had been one of the evening’s more memorable moments, when Izzy had worried aloud about being in over her head with the maintenance on her house and Randi had crowed, “Don’t worry, you have lesbian neighbors! We have all the tools a single woman could ever need! And I do mean all the tools!”

  “Oh, God, I was really far gone,” Randi groaned, her tone turning serious again. “I mean, I slept straight through until morning. Adele must have cried. She must have gotten hungry. She’s not even three months old! And I didn’t even hear.”

  “As I think I’ve mentioned once or twice or a thousand times, I didn’t hear her either,” Rhoda said. “Maybe she didn’t cry.”

  “But it’s not up to you to hear her cry! You’re not the one who’s moonlighting as a cow!”

  It was clear this discussion had been ongoing between the two since Sunday morning. Clara cleared her throat. “You know, when I was pregnant with Thomas, Benny and I had this take-charge older nurse as our childbirth class instructor. There was an entire session devoted to the never-shake-a-baby lecture, and I remember her talking about how if a baby won’t stop crying and you feel like you might lose your cool, you should just put the baby in the crib and go take a shower. ‘A baby never died from crying,’ she said.” She bent to pick up a pacifier that had fallen to the carpet and handed it back to Randi with a grin. “Yours does indeed seem to have survived.”

  “Thanks,” Randi said softly, tucking Adele’s Binky into her pocket. “That’s the first thing that’s made me feel better.”

  “Oh, sure. She says it and you feel better!” Rhoda rolled her eyes.