Benny stared up at her, his face filled with questions he would not ask until they were safely home. She licked her lips and held out the book cover toward Paul.
“Just this.” She tried to hold her voice steady.
He took it from her hands, turned it over, and made a small noise, a grunt, really. “Looks like trash to me,” he said, looking up at her. “Did I miss something?”
Clara wasn’t surprised. Only everything, she thought.
17
No one ever likes to admit that they’re desperate. It feels too much like calling yourself pathetic. That’s not really a fair comparison, though. The word pathetic has only one real meaning—a sad one. But there are lots of types of desperation.
Test me sometime. I can list them all.
18
If you felt overwhelmed when you learned that you were carrying multiples, rest assured you are not alone. Your partner can be an invaluable sounding board at this time, as he likely shares much of the complicated mixture of emotions you may be feeling. Opening up to him will strengthen your bond emotionally as well as better prepare you for what lies ahead.
—“Twins, Triplets & Beyond” brochure from Dr. Kirkland’s waiting room
Detective Bryant had warned her against going, Benny had encouraged her to reconsider, and Thomas had trusted her, in the way that young children implicitly trust their mothers, to do what was best—but nothing had prepared Clara for the onslaught that awaited her at preschool Thursday morning. Though the public police statement had retracted Clara’s involvement in The Color-Blind Gazette and beseeched everyone to “respectfully disregard this child’s project and leave the families in peace,” it had done little to satisfy the news teams. They may have grudgingly complied with Detective Marks’s request that they not camp out at the curb, but two days later their vans were still circling Clara’s block. Her doorbell rang every few hours like clockwork; she had to leave the landline off the hook.
If they only knew, she thought. The memory of the I Can Do It! cover tormented her. She wanted—desperately—to tell the police what she’d found, but what good would it do? It was, at face value, an item that had simply not been packed. An oversight. And not, even if it was in itself suspicious, one that was likely to lead to some other clue. They could easily postulate that Kristin had just forgotten it, and they could easily be right. What’s more, if they did confront Paul with questions about the cover, then what? Then he knew that his neighbor—the very one who had just been associated with a gazette smearing his name all over the neighborhood—was actively reporting unfounded suspicions about him to the police.
When she’d come home that night, she’d shut the back door behind Benny in the darkness of their kitchen, leaned against it, and cried. Benny had held her while she talked herself, on the brink of hysteria, through all these scenarios and more. You have to calm down, he’d said. It’s been a long day, he’d said. In the morning, this won’t seem so dire. Seeing how weary he was, how unconvinced, she’d agreed to his gentle but firm affirmation that nothing good could come of saying anything—to anyone.
And he was right. She knew he was right. Yet she’d spent every hour since then convincing herself all over again. It wasn’t just the media she was dodging. She didn’t trust herself to hold back around Randi, Rhoda, Izzy, even Natalie. So she hunkered down at home to wait it all out—the news vans, the questions, the anxiety, the speculation, the answers.
This morning the family had finally enjoyed a quiet breakfast. At last, the guilt and the tension had eased its grip, and she’d left the house feeling cautiously optimistic that the worst was behind them.
She’d had the good sense, at least, to forgo the walk and drive Thomas to preschool today. She was idling outside the Circle of Learning, waiting with a scowl for an impossibly huge black Chevy Tahoe to back into a prime parking spot marked FUEL-EFFICIENT VEHICLES ONLY, when a rap came on the passenger-side window. She pushed the button to lower the glass, and Miss Sally, one of the classroom aides, poked her head through.
“Clara,” she said. “My God. You’d better park around back.” Miss Sally was a retired elementary school teacher who’d once told Clara she couldn’t imagine not spending her days surrounded by children at least part-time, and Clara had instantly taken to the woman, finding her a nice respite from the revolving door of younger aides from Antioch.
“I don’t think—”
Miss Sally cut her off with a firm headshake. “There are a few faculty spots back there, past the Dumpsters. AD Evelyn is on vacation—you can park in hers.” AD Evelyn had the initials of her assistant director title firmly implanted in front of her name to distinguish her from Baby Room Evelyn and Kindergarten Evelyn. None of the Evelyns were among the most well liked at the school, and Kristin had once muttered to her, upon seeing them all walking in together one morning, “You know how they say bad luck comes in threes?” Clara had gotten a case of the giggles and had to pretend she’d forgotten something in her car to collect herself.
“Is that really necessary?”
“The only thing more gossipy than a small town is a small-town school,” Miss Sally said. Clara should have known last week’s respectful hesitation to gossip couldn’t last. “The back door will be locked, but I’ll let you in.” You could always tell the best teachers by their ability to render even a capable adult obedient and eager to please. The Tahoe finally out of her path, Clara steered around the side of the building, even though the precaution felt like overkill. She couldn’t imagine another parent actually approaching her about The Color-Blind Gazette fiasco. For Clara and Thomas, the school was a voluntary, leisurely foray into early education, but for many others it was a full-time day care, and morning drop-offs, though streamlined into the simple steps of hugs, promises of what fun the day would hold, and affectionate but firm good-byes, were privately a complicated emotional time for all involved. If you bought into the Circle school’s New Age insistence that everyone had a detectable aura, from a lone parent on any given day one might glean hues of guilt, relief, love, worry, exasperation, pride, and conflicting urges to flee and to stay.
For this reason Clara did not find the school a particularly social place, nor did she attempt to make it so. Only at playdates, outings, and birthday parties did you maybe get a chance to connect with another parent. Here, it was the kids who were focused, the parents whose attention wandered in countless directions. Was it any wonder Kristin had been the only one she’d talked to much?
“Mommy?” Thomas, who thrived on routine on school days especially, was watching her suspiciously as she swung the car into the spot with ASST DIRECTOR painted on the asphalt.
“This is an adventure,” she told him quickly. “Today we get to use a special entrance as a special treat.”
“What’s an entrance?”
“It’s how you get into a place.”
“We get into this place through the front.”
“A place can have more than one entrance.”
“I saw Kai go in the front with his mommy. I want to say hi to Kai.”
“We’ll see Kai inside, sweets.” She snapped off the car and reached back to unhook his car seat harness. “You can sit at the steering wheel while I get Maddie out, okay?”
“Yeah!” It was ridiculous how much of successful parenting was about knowing how to head off an argument before it started. Distraction was almost always the key.
Come to think of it, it worked pretty well for adults too. Usually.
By the time they were all out of the car, Sally was waving them through a utilitarian steel door in the brick wall. Inside, they found themselves in the back hallway connecting the pre-K and preschool rooms.
“Neat entrance!” Thomas yelled, trying out the word loud enough to turn a few heads.
“Clara?” Kai’s mother—Clara floundered to conjure her name—was beelining toward her, grabbing at the sleeve of Clara’s coat as if they were in the habit of speaking intimately rather than merely waving in pas
sing. Maddie clung to Clara’s other shoulder, startled, and Clara felt a foolish rush of pride that her daughter’s instincts were good. “How is everything? Are you okay? Any news on Kristin?”
She shook her head no. “I mean, yes, I’m okay. No, no news.”
“Is it true you supported that article because you suspected domestic violence all along?”
Clara stepped back, shaking her sleeve free of the woman’s hand more roughly than she’d intended.
“Where did you hear that?”
“Just a theory among some of the moms. We know you knew her best, and being right next door—”
“I didn’t support the article,” she said sharply. “The police released a statement saying my implied involvement was a misunderstanding.”
“Come on. We weren’t born yesterday, as my mother used to say.”
Clara harbored a dislike for people who preceded or followed statements with “as my mother used to say.” Their mothers, she was quite sure, had been insufferable.
“Do you honestly think I’d help a child break the law by recording and sharing private police conversations?” Clara bristled. “I told her not to, in fact.”
“So you did know about it beforehand, though!”
Thomas and Kai were playing a game of peekaboo that was escalating in volume around them, each one giggling from behind a flap of his own mother’s coat, and as Thomas pulled her off balance, Clara fixed her eyes longingly on the safe portal of his classroom.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Miss Sally cut in, “but I was filling Clara in on our new Good Choices program. Perhaps she can catch up with you another time?” Without waiting for a response, she pulled Clara toward the portal, leaving Kai’s mother slack-jawed beneath the BIRDS OF A FEATHER banner stretched across the hallway. Clara had only a moment to fantasize about it coming loose and ensnaring the nosy woman before realizing she was no more sheltered inside the classroom. The three other mothers in the midst of drop-off were staring intently; the lead teacher, Miss Lizzie, was crossing to greet her.
“None of them can decide if you and that Hallie child are heroes or troublemakers,” she said, so only Clara could hear. While she’d learned early on to leave the other parents to their own devices, Clara never hesitated to socialize with the faculty. She wanted to know whom her son was spending his day with and for them to feel comfortable speaking with her in turn. Still, the relationship could be delicate, as you wanted to believe you knew your own child best but also had to acknowledge that teachers knew more about children in general.
“That’s—”
“I err on the side of hero myself. But I worry for you. Have you talked to Paul? Since the paper, I mean?” Clara was almost intimidated by the exuberance Miss Lizzie brought to every interaction, whether they were discussing the weather, the lunch menu, or an “incident report,” as the worst missives home were so diplomatically called (“Thomas was kicking a ball when he fell and scraped his knee; we washed the scrape, gave him TLC, and he returned to normal activity.” “Thomas was bitten by a friend who did not want to share; the friend understands that he made a bad choice and apologized.” “Thomas drew what he referred to as ‘a poop machine’ at the art station. We explained that while we value creativity, certain subjects are not appropriate, and worked together to turn it into a Tootsie Roll machine—see attached.”). Large gold hoops hung courageously from the teacher’s ears; Clara had given up anything that dangled after seeing a friend’s infant gleefully rip a teardrop stud straight through her mother’s lobe.
“I did talk with Paul briefly, just to apologize,” she said, then rushed to clarify. “For the misunderstanding.” Miss Sally gave her a reassuring touch on her shoulder before fading into the hallway, her charge turned over to another responsible party. Clara fought an irrational urge to call her new ally back.
“Is he angry with you?”
“He says not.”
Miss Lizzie looked at her meaningfully. “He’s never been a big fan of the school, that much is no secret.” Clara wanted to ask what she meant, but the other moms were inching closer, straining to hear.
“Did you tell the detectives that?” she asked, in spite of herself.
“Oh, yes. We’ve all spoken with them.”
“Good.” Clara nervously eyed the encroaching mothers, and Miss Lizzie finally seemed to notice.
“You’ll recall we have an open door policy,” the teacher said smoothly, “to allow parents to sit in whenever they’d like?” Clara nodded. “Why don’t you take advantage today?” She lowered her voice. “Until traffic clears.”
Clara wavered. She’d been planning to drag Maddie along to the store first thing—now that the kids had their appetites back, her poorly stocked fridge wasn’t going to cut it. And Thomas was prone to dissolving into good-bye tears whenever she stayed longer than normal. But anything was better than running a gauntlet back to her car.
“Maddie won’t be a problem?” She shifted her daughter’s weight to the other arm. Maddie was getting a bit big to hold comfortably for this long, not to mention that she was at this moment rhythmically yanking on two enthusiastic fistfuls of Clara’s hair. Miss Lizzie gently touched Maddie’s arms, and the baby stopped pulling, as if transfixed by her touch.
“Not today she won’t,” Miss Lizzie said, and Maddie burst into a jack-o’-lantern smile.
Clara shook her head. So Miss Lizzie was some kind of baby whisperer, in addition to wrangling dozens of preschoolers in a way that put their parents’ inability to corral just one to shame. Maybe Clara would pick up a few pointers while she stuck around. She knelt to Thomas’s level, and Maddie wriggled out of her arms and headed for a pile of oversized foam blocks.
“How about Mommy stays for circle time this morning?”
He threw his arms around her neck. “I will love you forever, Mommy,” he murmured in her ear, surprising her. She pulled back to look at him, expecting him to say something silly, but his eyes were gravely searching hers for a reply, and she found herself fighting tears. That was the thing about kids. Even when they didn’t really know what they were saying—Thomas had no concept of yesterday or next week, much less forever—they could melt you with it.
“Oh, sweetie. I will love you forever ever after.” She hugged him tight again, and then the moment was over, and he was bouncing in a circle yelling, “Can my mommy read the story? Can my mommy read the story? She reads the BEST stories! She does VOICES!”
And that is how Clara came to be midway through Desert Rose and the Contrary Coyote—throwing herself into a thick Texan accent and quite enjoying Rose’s exclamations of “Hold your horses!”—when Miss Lizzie’s intercom buzzed and a moment later the teacher was whispering to Clara that her presence was requested in the director’s office. Miss Lizzie smiled apologetically as she gently palmed the book and took over reading, and she even managed to pacify Thomas when he started to protest, though Clara could see the bravery in his bottom lip as he tried his hardest not to cry.
“Be right back,” she mouthed to him, holding up a finger as she swallowed her annoyance that this surely could have waited until Desert Rose got her fences mended. Just to show that her own priorities were straight, she took Maddie by the hand and let her mosey her way through the empty hallways to the lobby, where the director’s office was behind a glass wall.
Pam, a sterner variety of earth mother who did not like to be addressed with a “Miss” in front of her name the way the teachers did, stood when she caught sight of Clara and gestured to her visitors’ chairs, getting right to the point before Clara had even taken her seat. “You know how much we care about all our enrolled families here at Circle of Learning. It’s so nice to see that Thomas seems unaffected by all the distractions in his own circle right now.” She was wrapped in gauzy layers of scarves that gave her a sheen by comparison.
Clara thought back to Thomas’s tight arms around her neck, his out-of-the-blue proclamation. She knew he didn’t really grasp what was
going on, but she wasn’t entirely sure he was unaffected, either. Still, she didn’t like the way Pam said the word distractions, as if Clara herself had been throwing rowdy dance parties at bedtime or starting food fights with his snacks. “It is a little surreal having so much going on next door.” Clara said the last two words emphatically, hoping to punctuate the fact that the distractions were not in his “circle” exactly, but on the outer rim. “We’re just trying to stick to as much normalcy as possible.”
Pam frowned. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Normalcy is important for all children in our circle. But there’s no normalcy here with Thomas on-site. I’ve had moms holding up traffic in the parking lot, ringing my direct line off the hook…”
“Surely not off the hook. We’ve been here less than an hour.”
“That’s exactly my point. Five minutes is all it took. I simply can’t have these distractions.”
“Pam, the distractions you’re referring to are related to another family enrolled here. Not ours. We just happen to be their neighbors. Certainly you can’t hold us—”
“You didn’t have any problems associating yourself with them on paper.”
“I certainly did have a problem with that. And I didn’t associate myself with it. Someone else associated me. A twelve-year-old, I might add. Surely you of all people know that children have minds of their own.”
“Be that as it may, we require a calm and holistic environment for our learning approach to be put into practice.” Clara bit down on her tongue. The center had password-protected webcams where parents could watch the classrooms during the day, and she’d seen how very far from calm and holistic many days could be.
“You’re not asking me to remove Thomas from the school? He loves it here.”
“Certainly not. Merely to temporarily step away. Until the distractions subside.”
Clara bristled. “This is a small town. Moms are going to be gossiping in your parking lot about these distractions you’re referring to whether we’re here or not!”
Not That I Could Tell: A Novel Page 14
