Not That I Could Tell: A Novel

by Jessica Strawser

  The dancers began to widen their circle around the fire, and she closed her eyes and joined in, letting go of her questions, her worries, her doubts. She’d almost forgotten how good it felt to simply allow herself to be pulled along.

  20

  If you want to know why I’m resigning, ask my husband. Maybe he can explain it to us both.

  —One of several unfinished and unsent letters, dated over a two-year period, from Kristin Kirkland to her supervisor, found in the trash folder of her office computer

  Had the woman arrived even a day earlier, Clara never would have answered the door. She had to admit Pam hadn’t been quite as off base as she’d thought; the attention was relentless. At the grocery store, she’d been accosted in the dairy aisle by a fellow shopper who seemed out for Paul’s blood, and then lectured by her cashier, who was quick to tsk “the parents who are supposed to be responsible for that Hallie girl.” At the library, she’d grown sure she wasn’t imagining the curious stares, and especially not the accusatory ones. At Benny’s office, his appointment calendar filled with “free initial consultations” that turned out to have little to do with accounting. Some people were just being nosy; others wanted the Tiffins’ take on how concerned they should be about Kristin; and a shameless few were stringers from Dayton media.

  The weight on Benny bothered her most. Clara knew it was her fault just as sure as she knew that no amount of perfectly layered lasagna could make it up to her husband. By last night, she’d given up and canceled on Randi and Rhoda for the Harvest Moon Celebration, much as she’d have welcomed the friendlier company. She’d filled them in as briefly as possible on what had really happened with the Gazette, and the subsequent visit with Paul—leaving out the bit about the book cover—and was relieved when their response was only sympathy, not judgment. Maybe if she stayed out of sight for a while, the rest of Yellow Springs would put her out of mind.

  When morning came and Benny left to put in some Saturday hours to catch up on the real work he’d been kept from, she answered the knock at the door without thinking, a reflex, and froze when she saw a stranger standing there, holding The Color-Blind Gazette.

  “Please,” Clara pleaded. “Leave us alone.” She had the door halfway shut when the woman put out a hand to stop it.

  “I’m Kristin’s sister,” the woman said simply. “Rebecca.”

  Clara hesitated. What tactics might the media try to get her to talk? But then she caught sight of the two children at the end of the porch, kneeling to examine Thomas’s dump truck with a reverence common to young boys coming upon construction equipment.

  “Sorry,” the woman said. “My husband is away for the weekend, and I work during the week, and … well, I had to bring them.” Clara looked her over. Rebecca’s shoulder-length hair was lighter than Kristin’s, but it had a familiar unruly curl, and she held her petite stature in the same delicate way Kristin did. She was dressed simply but stylishly in a fitted corduroy blazer with a gauzy infinity scarf looped around her neck.

  “I probably shouldn’t have come,” Rebecca continued nervously, and Clara realized she was meant to have responded by now. “My husband didn’t think I should—‘If she didn’t want you in her life before, she doesn’t want you there now,’ he said. But…” She held up the paper. “Please, I’ve driven an hour, through construction. Can we talk?”

  Clara looked over at the boys again. Thomas would be glad to see them, having lost his playmates in phases these past weeks. The twins gone. The preschool on hiatus. He hadn’t even had his usual entertainment in Hallie. Natalie had gotten permission to bring her daughter along to her afternoon classes until this thing with the paper blew over, so Hallie was taking the school bus directly to Antioch now. Clara had received a terse voice mail to that effect, and she had no idea whether they’d eventually revert to their old routine. Even through the recording, it was clear Natalie’s anger toward Clara, whether misplaced or not, hadn’t faded.

  Rebecca’s boys were standing and staring at her now, and she smiled. “If you like trucks, you’re in luck,” she told them. “Would you like to see what else my son, Thomas, has inside?” They ran to duck under their mother’s arms and nodded up at Clara, wide-eyed. Rebecca placed a gentle hand on the head of the taller boy. “This is Shawn,” she said. “He’s seven. And Jeff. He’s six.”

  “Nice to meet you, Shawn who’s seven and Jeff who’s six,” Clara said, opening the door wide for them to file inside. She led them to the family room, where Thomas and Maddie were constructing a tower of oversize Legos. It was only a matter of time before Maddie would knock it down and Thomas would burst into tears, but still, she loved these rare moments when they focused on something together, and hated that she was about to break the spell.

  The boys instantly teamed up on plans for a Lego fort while Maddie gummed a block, warily eyeing their guests. “Love that name, Maddie,” Rebecca said. “Short for Madison?”

  “Madeline.”

  “Even prettier.”

  Clara nodded toward the counter stools dividing the room from the kitchen. “Tea? Coffee?”

  “Coffee would be great.”

  “I don’t mean for this to hurt your feelings,” Clara said, moving to reheat the pot from earlier that morning, “but I had no idea Kristin had a sister, until that last night I saw her.”

  “Oh? And what did she say then?”

  Clara turned her back and stood on tiptoe to retrieve her best mugs, glad Rebecca couldn’t see her face. She said you were ‘shit,’ actually. Mind telling me why? Seems she could have used a sister around. “Just that she had one,” she said, careful to keep her voice even.

  Clara plunked cream and sugar onto the counter as she stole a glance at the kids. Seeing those little heads of curly hair bent so intently over the blocks next to her own blondies tugged at her heart. From this angle Thomas and Maddie might have been playing with Abby and Aaron.

  When Rebecca finally spoke, her voice was hesitant, shaky. “When Kristin was widowed, I felt so awful for her. Too awful. I was almost afraid of her grief, like it might be contagious.” She peered at Clara through eyes thick with years-old guilt. “I always had this irrational fear of something like that happening—that one day someone I loved would just never come home. As a teenager, I’d be babysitting Kristin—well, not really babysitting, but you know, I’m two years older, I was responsible—and thinking, What if Mom is in some horrible car wreck on the way home? Or, What if she gets mugged in an alley like Batman’s mom?” She laughed stiffly. “I even remember this one time, when my husband and I hadn’t been dating all that long, that he ran out for condoms. It was a short drive to the gas station, but he was gone for what seemed like forever. And as the minutes ticked by I was thinking, The cops are going to show up to inform his next of kin and find this girl who barely knows him naked in his bed!”

  She dropped her head into her hands. “That was wildly inappropriate. I have no idea why I’m off on this tangent. I’m sorry. I’m nervous for some reason.”

  Clara smiled and set a cup of coffee in front of her. “What took so long?”

  “What?”

  “To get the condoms.”

  “Oh!” Rebecca laughed again. “The gas station was out. I’d have come back empty-handed, but he wanted the goods bad enough to go to the drugstore.”

  “Ah, youth,” Clara said, still smiling.

  Rebecca frowned. “But then it happened for real. To Kristin. Ted went out on the lake with his parents, and he never came home. She said the worst of it was that she wasn’t up waiting for him. She usually did, but that night she fell asleep on the couch. The police knocked and woke her up, hours beyond the time she should have missed him.”

  Clara cradled the ceramic warmth of her coffee, imagining a day Benny failed to walk through the door, home safe. She couldn’t fathom how Kristin had been able to bear it.

  “I think she had some survivor’s guilt too,” she continued. “She would’ve gone along that da
y, but she wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t long before she found out that the reason she’d felt sick, and the reason she’d been unable to stay awake that evening, was that she was pregnant with the twins. Ted never even knew he was going to be a dad.”

  A wave of sadness washed over Clara. The twins hadn’t been babies when their dad died—they’d been babies in progress. The time line made more sense now. So, too, did the fact that Kristin had never mentioned Ted.

  “I don’t know if that makes it better or worse,” Clara said, shaking her head.

  “Neither. It’s the same amount of awful either way.” Rebecca sighed. “I tried to stay close to her those months. She didn’t live far from me in Dayton. I had a baby and a toddler of my own—they were all-consuming—but I really did think I was trying. I did a rotten job, though. I think about how I should have handled things differently after she met Paul, but really I had already failed her by then. Those months were when she needed me most, and I just … I was there, but I wasn’t there enough. Mom was already in the Alzheimer’s facility, hardly knew us, and I was struggling with that, and I—” Her voice broke. “I didn’t want to see my own perfect little family damaged the way Kristin’s had been. I was worried about them being affected if I spent too much time with her, or had her around too much in the state she was in, but I should have been far more worried about her. I was horrendously selfish.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true,” Clara said, though she knew what Rebecca meant about how people seemed to think grief might be catching. It had proved true enough back in Cincinnati, after the incident that, while a far less intimate loss, had devastated Clara in other ways. “How did she meet Paul?” she asked. Rebecca had seemed to be almost shrinking into herself, but she sat up straighter then and tossed her hair back.

  “He was her OB,” Rebecca said.

  Dots connected in Clara’s mind. How had she not drawn the lines sooner?

  “I think he felt sorry for her at first—took her under his wing, gave her his cell number to call any time, that sort of thing. She’d been so overwhelmed to discover that she was pregnant, and then that it was twins. I tried to tell her what a gift it was, to have these pieces of Ted now that he was gone, but it never outweighed her sense of overwhelm. Not that I blame her.” She looked over at her boys, then back at Clara, and lowered her voice, though the children didn’t seem to be listening. “It was ‘Dr. Kirkland says this’ and ‘Dr. Kirkland says that.’ No one but him seemed to be able to make her feel better about anything. She developed a sort of unhealthy attachment. I thought it was unhealthy, anyway. She thought it was romantic.”

  “Isn’t that in violation of some kind of patient-doctor code or something?”

  “Or something. He transferred her to another doctor before the birth. They were an item by then. He was promising that her twins would have a father, saying the things she wanted to hear.”

  Clara hesitated. “Didn’t that seem a little fast?”

  “It seemed a lot fast. I told her as much, but it was not a popular opinion. She used all the typical lines—you can’t control when love strikes, he was there when she needed him, how could she turn away this second chance at happiness, you name it.” Rebecca shook her head. “She’d been close to Ted’s family. They were high school sweethearts, had been together forever, and I think things would’ve been different if his parents or sister had been around to help her. But they were all gone, all on the boat that day. And Kristin—she’d always had Ted. It made sense that she was more afraid of being alone than she was of getting involved too soon. I’d like to think I wouldn’t have made the same mistake, but in her shoes, who knows?”

  Clara nodded. She knew better than to judge.

  “They got married quietly, soon after the twins were born.”

  “What was he like with the twins back then?”

  Rebecca frowned. “I remember thinking that for an OB, he didn’t seem all that enamored. But then I thought, Well, it’s not like he’s a pediatrician—he’s caring for the mothers. And that’s about how it was at home too. I wasn’t surprised to learn he never adopted the children, because he seemed to think of them as hers. He was helpful enough, but even when everyone else in the room was focused on the kids, he only had eyes for Kristin. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a sweet way. I saw less and less of her, which of course is understandable when someone has newborn twins. Only—” She stopped.

  “Only what?”

  She shrugged. “My husband thought I was being paranoid. But I had a feeling there was more to it. She stopped going to see Mom, and she’d always been better about that than I was. I mean, our mom raised us all by herself. We never knew our dad. When my kids were babies and my own visits started to taper off, Kristin was the one lecturing me: ‘After everything Mom sacrificed for us, you can sacrifice an hour and go see her.’ I would’ve thought she’d be taking the babies to see their grandmother every week, even once they moved to Yellow Springs—the twins were a year old then. It wasn’t that far. But nothing.”

  She sipped her coffee in silence and seemed to be steeling herself against whatever she was about to say next. “One day she showed up at my house unannounced, maybe a year after she’d moved—and I was kind of annoyed, honestly; it was one of those days I had so much to do I didn’t know where to start—and she alluded to feeling trapped in the marriage. I look back now and realize how much courage it must have taken for her to try to open up, after I’d basically criticized her for getting remarried too soon.”

  “Did she say she felt trapped?”

  “Not exactly. But she said she might have made a mistake. And she looked trapped. Her eyes—” She shuddered.

  “So what happened?”

  “I basically said, ‘I told you so.’ Not very sisterly of me. By then I was resenting all the extra time I was putting in at the nursing home. There was a barrage of calls at all hours of the night: Mom was being disruptive, refusing medication … Alzheimer’s doesn’t just affect your memory, you know; it’s your whole personality. Awful disease. They always said there was no answer when they called Kristin, and she always had some excuse when I’d ask her about it—as if she were the only one with kids. She’d say it was a longer drive for her, and I’d point out that she’d chosen to move away, and she’d say that Paul didn’t have the same opportunity to fill a real need in Dayton, and off we’d go on this circular argument. Once she actually said, ‘It’s not like she knows who I am, Rebecca. It’s not like she even knows if I’m there or not!’”

  Rebecca bore the weariness of someone who had lost her sister long before her sister had disappeared.

  “I should have put all that aside that day. She was reaching out, and I shut it down,” she said, tears welling in her eyes. “Like it was more important to be right. I never imagined that would be the last time I’d see her, but it was. Complete silent treatment. They call it ‘ghosting’ someone now, to go cold like that. Can you believe there’s a term for it? It shouldn’t exist at all!” Clara handed her a napkin, and Rebecca dabbed at her eyes. It came away black with mascara.

  “A couple years go by, and next thing I know, the Yellow Springs police are at my door. And the local media is having some field day about her dodging a divorce settlement, uprooting her kids. And none of it sounds like Kristin. Then I heard about this.” She tapped her finger on The Color-Blind Gazette she’d laid on the counter. “This is the first thing I’ve read that makes any sense, and that terrifies me. I’ve been pleading with the police to look more closely at Paul, and I can’t tell whether they think I’m a quack, or what. They keep coming back at me with questions that have nothing to do with him. Did she ever discuss having tried to find our real father? No, but I sure wish she had. Did I know anything about her visiting our mother, unannounced, the day before she disappeared? No, but I sure wish I did. I feel like a dolt.”

  Clara wasn’t sure she agreed that the questions had nothing to do with Paul, nor did she like this fleeting g
limpse into the investigation’s direction—or lack thereof. “I just wanted to talk to someone who really knows my sister,” Rebecca continued. “I just wanted to talk to someone who would make me feel like I’m not crazy.”

  “You’re not crazy,” Clara said. Her coffee had gone lukewarm, though she hadn’t really wanted it anyway. “But there’s not much else I can tell you. Kristin and I were friends—we talked a lot, our kids played, we swapped books and recipes—but in hindsight, I’m not sure I really knew her.” Clara had had plenty of time to reconsider the terms of their friendship. “She was like a master of friendliness through nondisclosure—always asking about your holiday plans, or what you thought about the new school policy, or how you were feeling after that flu took out the whole block. She was funny, she was warm, she was great to be around, she was a devoted mom, and ninety-five percent of the conversations we ever had were completely superficial. She was just so good at it that they didn’t feel that way.”

  “What about the divorce?”

  “It seemed to roll off her back. Although that part … I’m not sure that part was an act.”

  “She was happy to be escaping.”

  “I never thought of it as ‘escaping’ until—” Clara caught herself. “Until recently. But yes, I suppose so.”

  “It’s classic behavior, in a violent or controlling relationship, to isolate someone from her friends and family.”

  “I know.” Clara did know. But had Paul isolated Kristin from Rebecca, or had a wedge simply come between them in those difficult years? Either seemed possible.

  “He couldn’t isolate her from you—you were right next door. Maybe that’s why they seem to think you knew her best. But now I’m here, and you tell me you didn’t know her at all.” Rebecca looked as if she might cry again. Clara wished she could comfort her. But she also couldn’t help but feel that Rebecca should have had this out with Kristin long ago. And that now, yes, maybe it was too late. She wondered uneasily how Kristin would feel about the women sitting here having this conversation.