“I want to help you make peace with this,” Clara said carefully. “But I’m not sure I can.”
“I took the paper down to Xenia, to the hospital,” she blurted out. Clara froze. “One of the nurses took pity on me, agreed to talk on her lunch break.”
“And?”
“She didn’t know anything about Kristin, never met her. But she said Paul is a favorite among the patients. Women get distraught if he isn’t on call when they go into labor.”
Clara frowned. It figured.
“She said something about his relationships with them struck her as oddly narcissistic, though. Almost as if he gets off on bringing babies into the world, acting out some kind of God complex. She said he was noticeably colder when their husbands were around.”
“Did she tell the police so?”
She shook her head. “She emphasized that hers was a minority opinion. And she values her job too much. But I told them what she told me, though I’m not sure that means anything.”
“Have you tried to talk to him?”
She shook her head. “I came to try to see Kristin last year. Paul turned me away. I asked him to promise to at least tell her I’d been there, and he only laughed. I have zero reason to think he’d be forthcoming with me now. And frankly I don’t want to see him.”
Clara hesitated, an idea suddenly occurring to her. Maybe some good could come of this visit after all.
“Don’t ask me why—I don’t actually know why—but Paul invited me to look around, to see if anything was amiss.”
“And?”
“There was this book. The cover of an old one, actually. I Can Do It! With a red fox on it?” Rebecca looked at her blankly. “It was something Abby used to take with her everywhere. It seemed odd that it had been left behind.”
“Have you told anyone?”
“You have to understand that I have children of my own and I live right next to that man,” Clara said, forcing conviction into her voice. I’m trying to pass the baton here, she wanted to scream. Kristin was Rebecca’s responsibility by blood. Surely blood trumped proximity.
“But it might help Kristin if—”
“Mom! She’s trying to knock down the walls!” Maddie let out a cry and came running, her little bare feet pounding the tile. Clara bent to scoop her up and hugged her daughter to her, shooting a warning look toward Thomas before turning back to Rebecca.
“If you can find a way to tell them without involving me, please do. That’s why I’m telling you.” She smoothed Maddie’s hair. “I’m just as concerned as you are. But I don’t know if anything we do or don’t do can actually help Kristin now.”
Rebecca stared at her, looking despondent. “Please don’t say, ‘We just have to hope she helped herself.’”
“Okay.” It was exactly what she’d been about to say.
Maddie placed her tiny hands on Clara’s cheeks and pulled her face up close. “Poop,” she said, blue eyed and earnest.
Rebecca laughed dryly. “My thoughts exactly.”
21
If I told you I felt trapped, you’d probably doubt me. Trapped by your own decisions, maybe, you might tell me. Take steps to change things. Ask for help if you need it. Speak up. Be a grown-up. “Use your God-given brain” was always a favorite admonition of my mother’s.
I’m not self-possessed enough to say you’d be wrong. I can take constructive criticism. I get a lot of it from myself, in fact.
There are all kinds of traps, for all sorts of purposes. Animals, people, even whole societies walk right in. In our defense, by the very nature of most traps you can’t tell you’re in one until it’s too late. So you really shouldn’t point fingers from the outside the way you do. It could be you, you know. And sometimes there really is no way out. At least, not by breaking through its ironclad engineering.
You have to outsmart the thing.
Most people who try, fail. At worst, they pay the consequences. At best, they’re simply out of options.
Either way, they’re out of luck.
22
While we do sympathize with buyer’s remorse, items showing any sign of wear and tear are not returnable, with or without tags and receipt.
—Sign behind the register in Moondance
The unseasonably warm late September sun on Izzy’s bare arms was a parting gift. Any day now, rains would blow in, a cold front would decide not to lift, and thus would arrive the chilly gray slog leading up to winter. She could never understand why so many Ohioans declared fall to be their favorite season. Fall weather itself was like a rare delicacy—it did live up to the hype when it came, but often it wasn’t on the menu. The past few years it had seemed as if Mother Earth decided not to bother with autumn at all, simply flicking a switch from summer to winter. Izzy didn’t blame her, mistreated as she was. When no one appreciated the careful preparation you’d put into a feast, eventually you were going to give up and order takeout. The leaves would change and drift to the ground, of course—a lone inevitability no matter the temperature—but nothing else need move so lazily from one phase of the calendar into the next. Izzy usually felt unsettled by these transitional weeks, in which she’d rediscover the futility of trying to plan for a hike or a camping trip, but this year the unpredictability of the shift fit her mood.
She tried to focus on the warmth of the sun rather than the hard-to-place nerves churning in her stomach as she headed up Paul’s walk. It was probably just that she’d never really liked asking for help—from anyone. But it might have been that she felt skittish about asking for help from Paul in particular. So far they’d run into each other only incidentally; she had yet to seek him out. She needed help, though, in a physical way she couldn’t Google her way out of. She’d come from Moondance earlier, so knew Randi and Rhoda weren’t home, and she’d seen Benny pull up in his work clothes awhile ago—not like him on a Saturday—and hated to interrupt his abbreviated family time. So here she was. She took a breath and knocked.
“Izzy.” Paul smiled and swung the door open wider. He looked dressed for the office too—button-down, pleated pants.
“Sorry,” she said automatically. “Are you on your way to work? I was just hoping for a second set of hands, but I can—”
“I’m home early. Had some cancellations.” A frown flickered across his lips, then disappeared. “My hands are available. What do you need?”
She laughed self-consciously. “I’m afraid you’re going to make fun of me. The latch on my gate is broken, and I’ve bought this ridiculously girlie replacement. Rhoda warned me it was hard to install, but I was blinded by its cuteness.”
In retrospect, Izzy should have known the boutique didn’t carry ordinary hardware. Like something out of The Secret Garden, the oversized gate lock was itself shaped like a tiny arched door and came complete with large weathered brass keys, the kind with loops at the end so you might string them on a rope or hang them on a nail. Whimsical but functional, it looked meant for someone who lived alone and liked it that way. Which was precisely why she’d chosen it.
“Happens to the best of us.” The corners of his mouth twitched in amusement. She briefly wondered if he looked too put together for someone whose wife and children were unaccounted for, then dismissed it. It had been nearly two weeks now, and nothing. What could he do but go through the motions, and hope, and wait?
“It’s too heavy for me to hold steady one-handed. I think it’s a two-person job.”
“Then I’m your number two. Do you need a drill? Tools?”
His attention was so focused on her. For no reason at all, Izzy blushed. “I think I just need brute strength.”
“Hmm. Would a doctor’s precision do?”
“Even better.”
“Just let me change—be over in five?”
Slow down, she scolded her heart rate as she headed home. It was pulsing the way it had when she was a teenager on the few occasions she’d gotten up the nerve to talk to a cute boy at his locker. Not that anything but
high blood pressure had ever come from those conversations. She ran her fingertips over the pleats in her braid. It didn’t feel like it looked bad. Looking down at her embroidered purple tank and flowy black gauchos, she gave herself a B. Not bad for working in the yard, and it wasn’t as if she could change now anyway—he’d already seen her.
But wait. What was she thinking? If his current breed of crisis didn’t render someone emotionally unavailable, she didn’t know what would. Plus … She’d be crazy not to be wary of Paul. For Kristin to have run off that way—who knew what that might say about him? It wasn’t fair to assume, but you couldn’t deny the red flag.
It was just nice to know that someone, anyone other than Josh, could still give her butterflies—even meaningless ones. The very thought of it was like finding out a fun old toy wasn’t broken after all, only out of batteries.
She was stirring a preemptive pitcher of neighborly thank-you lemonade in the kitchen when a knock came at the front door. “Come on in!” she called, bending to retrieve an ice tray from the freezer. “I’m making some—” She stopped short. The figure in the doorway was not Paul. “Oh! Hallie, you startled me.”
The girl took a step back. “You said to come in…”
“That I did.” Izzy was good with her friends’ very many very small kids, but she hadn’t spent much time with this older species and was never sure how to speak to them. “What can I do for you?” She emptied the ice into the pitcher and refilled the tray at the sink.
“I’m working on this newspaper project—my second edition. You might have seen the first one?”
Izzy shook her head. “Don’t think so.” Was that relief on Hallie’s face?
“Well … The idea is for me to report on good news. And I heard you work for that radio show, where people go on a second date?”
Good news. While Izzy was spending her days getting paid to sift through the bad in search of the meaningless, here was someone—a child, no less—pushing for something better, something more.
“Cool,” she said, trying to sound like a peer without being too ridiculous about it. “I take it you’re as bothered by the endless stream of bad news as I am?”
Hallie looked annoyed. “Of course I’m bothered by it. My dad is in Afghanistan.”
Izzy blanched. How had she become so self-absorbed that even a kid could make her feel like a dolt? Unlike her, Hallie didn’t need to seek out perspective checks to put her life up against real tragedy—she lived with the knowledge that she was always a breath away from one.
“An-y-way,” Hallie said, singing each syllable. “The dating show?”
She nodded, for once glad of the change of subject to her least favorite one. “Second Date Update. But more often, they don’t go on a second date.” She slipped the tray in the freezer. “I agree that we could all use more good news, but I’m not sure you’re likely to find it on Second Date Update.”
Hallie’s face fell, but she recovered quickly. “Well, could I ask you a few questions about it anyway? Our teacher says that often the real story is the one people don’t set out to cover.”
Izzy stole a glance out the window into the yard. No sign of Paul yet. “I’m working outside; let’s talk in the garden for a few. Would you like some lemonade?”
Hallie nodded. Izzy loaded the pitcher and a stack of plastic cups onto a tray and motioned for her to follow, out the back door. The patio table she’d just bought was in pieces on the ground, its six chairs stacked with the tags still on. “Sorry for the mess,” she said. “I’m still setting up back here.” The tray was just small enough to fit on the little mosaic stand between her chaise lounges, and she set it there and poured Hallie a glass. The girl perched awkwardly on the edge of a lounge and took a pad and pen out of her pocket.
“What’s your favorite part of working at Second Date Update?” she asked, chewing the pen’s lid earnestly. Izzy grabbed a pair of scissors from her toolbox and started cutting the tags off the chair legs.
“Well, I don’t actually work at ‘Second Date Update,’” she said, stalling. “It’s part of a morning show called Freshly Squeezed.”
“You don’t like it, do you?” Hallie asked pointedly, and Izzy laughed.
“You’re going to make a great reporter. No, not really. But you probably shouldn’t print that. Sometimes part of being a grown-up is doing things you don’t want to do.”
“And pretending you like it?”
She laughed again. “Yes, sometimes that’s the most important part. Although this expression you might have heard: ‘Fake it ’til you make it’? Sometimes that kind of works.”
To her amusement, Hallie was writing it down. “Um, you probably shouldn’t print that either,” she said.
“All right!” a voice called over the fence. “I have to say, I’m dying to see what a ‘girlie’ gate latch looks like.” Paul appeared in the open gate, wearing a polo shirt and nice dark jeans, and Izzy raised an eyebrow. Did the man not own a T-shirt or a pair of gym pants? He stopped short when he saw Hallie. “Hi there,” he said, his smile frozen in place.
Hallie didn’t answer.
“Hallie, you know Paul … er, Dr. Kirkland? Abby and Aaron’s daddy?” The girl looked at her wide-eyed, seeming to shrink back into her chair. Was she shy? She’d certainly had no problem marching in here, even though Izzy had talked to her only a few times before.
“I can come back later,” Hallie blurted out.
Maybe she was one of those children who are bashful among men—which would be natural, with her father away so much. “Let’s just pause the questions for a quick sec, okay? He’s going to help me with this latch.” Paul picked up the package from where she’d left it on the ground and scanned the back.
“You might be better off with bigger hands rather than with extra hands,” he called over. “Go ahead with whatever you two are doing. I’ll let you know if I need help.”
Izzy smiled her thanks and began unstacking the chairs. “Okay, Hallie, next question,” she said, trying to sound more patient than she felt.
“Um…” She rustled the paper of her notebook, her eyes darting anxiously to Paul and then back to Izzy. “Maybe you can just tell me about something nice or good on Second Date Update recently?”
Izzy frowned, thinking, then brightened. “Well, there was one call this week that had a sort of happy ending…”
Hallie lifted her pen.
“The story starts out pretty bad. This couple hits it off on a dating Web site, decides to go out to dinner, has a great time, the check comes, and the guy lays down his credit card and goes to use the restroom. When he gets back, she’s gone. Won’t answer her phone, and he can’t even guess at a reason.”
Hallie rolled her eyes. “Was the good news that she didn’t take his credit card with her?”
Izzy laughed. So the kid was street savvy too. “Close. It turned out she’d looked at his card and saw his last name—they’d exchanged only first names—and—”
“I know the last name of every single person in my class.”
In a universe where dating was a thing among children, they’d probably be better at it than adults were. “That’s great,” she said weakly. “It would’ve been especially helpful here, because it turned out they had the same last name.
“They were related?”
“Probably not—it was a common name. But the possibility of it creeped her out.”
Hallie looked skeptical. “Why didn’t she just tell him?”
Izzy averted her eyes. “You’ll find there are a lot of things in life that could be cleared up with a simple explanation, but never are.”
“Why?”
“Let me know if you find anyone who can answer that one.”
Paul had pulled the gate shut so he was hidden from view, but she noticed that Hallie stiffened at the sound of his muffled chuckle. She felt self-conscious too, knowing he was listening in.
“But you said it was a common name. Maybe they weren’t related
. Maybe they could have dated.”
“She just didn’t think they could be sure. And even if they could, she didn’t like the idea of getting teased about the name thing through their whole relationship. She figured the best thing would be to find someone else to date.”
“Did he change her mind on the air?”
Izzy shook her head.
“But I thought you said this story was good news.”
“By Second Date Update standards, it was.”
“Why?”
“Because the reason she didn’t want to date him had nothing to do with him. He hadn’t done anything wrong.” Hallie was looking at her blankly. “Imagine bracing yourself to hear someone say, with thousands of strangers listening, what they think is wrong with you, and then hearing instead that you’re great, you just happen to have the wrong name. He seemed pretty relieved, just laughed it off.”
“He wasn’t disappointed because he still liked her?”
“Well, a little.”
Hallie looked as if she might launch the notebook across the yard. “So if it’s public, being friend-zoned against your will counts as a happy ending?”
Put that way, the call was swiftly downgraded to Izzy’s all-time least favorite, but she was in too deep now to back out.
“I think the good news angle from my perspective is that it’s rewarding to help people clear up such a simple misunderstanding. Much better than serving as a mouthpiece for the more mean-spirited stuff we hear.” Izzy forced a smile.
Hallie got to her feet. “Well, thanks anyway.”
Izzy felt as if she’d let her down. “If you’d like to come to the station with me sometime, I’m sure the Freshly Squeezed DJs would be happy to answer your questions. Sonny and Day are their names, and they’re much better at talking about this stuff than I am. I leave for work super early, though. Before the sun comes up.”
Not That I Could Tell: A Novel Page 17
