Not That I Could Tell: A Novel

by Jessica Strawser

  “Was this while you were interviewing Izzy for this article?” Hallie nodded, and Clara narrowed her eyes. “Well, maybe he was nervous about you. And your notebook.” The girl looked away and shrugged. Clara had been so worried about Kristin, and Rebecca, and herself, that she realized she’d almost forgotten to worry about Hallie. In her mind she’d sort of left that to Natalie, but who knew, really, how Natalie was handling things—or not handling them. “Did you talk to him?” she asked more gently.

  Hallie shook her head. “I tried to leave, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it politely.” Clara lifted an eyebrow. “What?” Hallie said defensively. “I’m precocious, but I’m still polite.” Clara stifled a laugh. Clearly she hadn’t conjured the word precocious on her own. Adults really did need to watch what they said in front of kids. Even if the kid was … well, Hallie.

  “Grown-up boys and girls are different,” Clara said, trying to convince them both. “Just because they’re talking or doing something together doesn’t mean one likes the other. And Paul is worried about Kristin and the kids right now. I’m sure the last thing on his mind is—” Hallie rolled her eyes so dramatically Clara couldn’t even bring herself to finish the statement.

  “You’re friends with Izzy, right?” Hallie asked, and Clara nodded. Hallie looked into her eyes with such intensity Clara was taken aback. “You need to get her away from him.”

  Clara’s first instinct was to tell her she was being overdramatic, to brush it off, to correct her, but what was the point? Hallie got enough of that from everyone else. Besides, they both knew that if there was any truth to some sort of bond, however casual, budding between Izzy and Paul, Clara would feel the sense of alarm for her friend just as acutely as Hallie did.

  Still, if that was Hallie’s aim with this story, yet again, she wanted no part of it.

  “Hallie, I’m going to be firm with you: Take my name off the paper. And take out that line about Izzy.” She had a flash of inspiration to appeal to the girl’s journalistic sensibilities. “You don’t want to be seen as some gossipy tabloid.”

  Hallie leaned closer, seemingly ignoring everything she’d just said. “I got the feeling Izzy hadn’t seen my paper.” That hardly seemed possible. Clara hadn’t heard about anything but the paper ever since this mess began. “She might not even know—”

  “Hallie?” Clara looked up to see Natalie coming toward them and got quickly to her feet.

  “Hallie just stopped to see the dog,” she called out reflexively.

  Pup-Pup was running to greet Natalie, nuzzling her legs and then turning back toward Clara as if to say, See how neighborly I can be?

  “Well, aren’t you cute,” Natalie said, bending to scratch his ears. Her demeanor softened, and Clara met the dog’s eyes with a conciliatory look of her own. Yes, we know, you’ve come along at a good time.

  “I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” Natalie said to Clara, without looking up at her. “Hallie, can you give us a second?”

  The girl pouted. “You mean go home? Can’t I just play with Thomas and Maddie? And Pup-Pup?” Without waiting for a response, she hurled the tennis ball across the yard and took off after the dog’s bushy tail, Thomas yelling, “Wait for me!” and trailing behind.

  “Up,” Maddie said at Clara’s feet, and she lifted her daughter and smoothed her hair.

  “I’m sorry,” Clara said. “I didn’t expect Hallie to—”

  Natalie waved her into silence. “Did Hallie tell you why she wanted to do this newspaper? The first time, I mean?”

  Clara thought back. “Just that they’d been learning about journalism at school. She said it was ‘about the facts,’ I remember.”

  Natalie nodded slowly, and when she spoke again, her voice was serious, low. “The facts of war reporting, evidently. I wish her teacher had given me a heads-up, but she didn’t know about our … situation.”

  Their situation. Oh. Clara’s heart sank. “I had no idea—”

  Natalie shook her head. “Turns out they talked in class about the role reporters have played in keeping governments honest, keeping soldiers safe, even bringing them home. She seems to have gotten it into her head—” Her eyes filled with tears. “Not that she thinks she’s directly doing that, of course. But she really believes that what she’s doing is noble.”

  Clara hesitated, thinking of how one-sided public opinion on Kristin—and Paul, for that matter—might have been without that ill-advised edition. Not that public opinion as it was had swayed or affirmed anything, necessarily, but still. “Maybe in a way, it is.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, I can’t bring myself to discourage her. I tried, and she cried ‘censorship.’ What’s parenthood if not censorship at this age?” She threw up her hands. “Still, even when I know I’m being played, it’s the fact that in some backward way she’s doing this for her dad that gets me. So maybe if you did help her after all…”

  Just like that, the door between them was reopened, and an odd combination of heartache and relief flooded Clara. It had been eating at her, this invisible rift with her neighbor. “I’m happy to help if she ever needs me,” she assured Natalie. “But for the most part, she seems to be doing fine on her own.”

  Natalie shot her a look.

  “This time, I mean!” Clara handed over the binder with a nervous laugh. “This one is good.”

  Natalie paged through it, and when she looked up, the raw emotion was gone from her eyes, and something unreadable was in its place.

  “This one is good,” she conceded. “For now. But I still don’t want her doing this alone. I tried to offer to help, but she doesn’t want me—she wants you. She seems to think it’s your name that is lending a legitimacy to this. That without it people will write it off as a kid project.”

  Clara bit her lip. “Hardly anyone even knows I used to be an editor,” she said, but Natalie only shrugged.

  Clara sighed. She knew Benny wouldn’t feel any better about her name staying on the masthead than she did. But it seemed crass to resort to the old my-husband-wouldn’t-like-it excuse to a wife and mother who was holding down the fort on her own.

  Besides, maybe Hallie was right that it was better to move forward than back down. She nodded once, crisply, and Natalie seemed to relax a little.

  “About Paul,” she said. “Did you talk to him? I put a note of apology in his mailbox but couldn’t bring myself to face him.”

  Clara filled her in on the visit she and Benny had paid next door—minus the choice part where he’d invited her to look around—and the gist of the surprise cameo from Kristin’s sister, all the while clinging to Maddie, who busied herself playing tug-of-war with Clara’s necklace. When she finished, Natalie crossed her arms.

  “I’m on my own with Hallie so much, it’s important that I feel our neighborhood is safe. I know I pooh-poohed this whole thing at first, but now … I don’t know. I don’t like feeling caught up in a real-life Dateline episode.”

  “I don’t like it either.” What else was there to say?

  Natalie nodded. “I can’t apologize,” she said, “for reacting the way I did the other day.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to.” And I can’t apologize for not telling you every last detail. It would only make you worry more.

  Clara looked past Natalie at the patio, neglected since that last night with Kristin. Benny had worked so hard getting the bricks laid just right; they’d stood and admired it upon its completion, imagining the nights of camaraderie those chairs around the fire pit would hold. But they’d gotten only one before it took on an air of … not foreboding, exactly, but something like it.

  Damn you, Paul, she thought. And what the hell do you want with Izzy, anyway?

  “She liked coming here after school better than trailing me to class,” Natalie said, nodding almost sheepishly toward Hallie. Clara flashed back to herself curled in the corners of so many fitness studios.

  “She doesn’t have to stop unless you want her to.”r />
  Natalie nodded again and, their unsteady truce established, called for her daughter, who obediently came running. So Hallie did occasionally have a sense of when she was pressing her luck. Natalie raised a hand in a silent wave as they turned toward home. “Keep me posted,” Natalie said. “Assuming you continue to lie low so unsuccessfully.” She smiled weakly.

  Hallie twisted to look over her shoulder at Clara. “If you decide not to keep the dog, maybe you should see if Izzy wants him,” she called, her eyes intent.

  Just as they both knew she was keeping the dog, they both knew Hallie was using him as a stand-in for what someone should really talk with Izzy about.

  “Maybe I will,” she answered quietly. But Hallie was far enough away that she wasn’t sure the girl could hear.

  24

  Earth calling Iz … paging Iz … Rumor has it you’ve fallen off the face of the planet, but I’m calling anyway because we miss you at our girls’ nights. Any chance you might orbit back toward Springfield for the next one? Tell us when you can make it, and that’s when we’ll do it!

  —Three-week-old voice mail from a cousin who was also in Penny’s wedding, undeleted but unreturned

  Friday night, while her Freshly Squeezed colleagues attended the grand opening of a new comedy club in Dayton, and her neighbors filled the crisp windows-open-weather air with the clinks and clangs of dishes being done and the jangles of laughter being shared and the bangs and screeches of movies being streamed, strangers the world over were aching with yearning, and Izzy, frozen in front of her laptop when she should have been in the kitchen prepping for tomorrow’s brunch, ached and yearned along with them. She grieved with the family of a kindergartner who’d been caught under the wheels of his school bus, tears welling in her eyes as she flipped through the slide show of his five short years. She shook her head at the growing list of those who’d been claimed by a massive earthquake in Nepal, curling tighter in her chair as she watched footage of childless couples awaiting word on the fate of their unborn babies—the agency housing for their surrogate mothers reduced to rubble in the frame behind them. She prayed, though she was less and less sure if her idea of God matched anyone else’s, for hostages in a hotel overtaken by men wearing explosives in the name of a higher power.

  Hours under all that heartbreak and strife left her properly put in her place. She had a home with a garden she’d made beautiful, ready to host a feast that, though decadent, was comfortably less than she could afford. She had neighbors who looked out for one another through those open windows of their living rooms and kitchens, even while inside they faced problems of their own. She had a good job with upbeat coworkers who many people less cynical than she would love to spend their mornings with. If she couldn’t face Penny, or Josh, or most of all her parents tomorrow with a genuine smile on her face, she would prove only that she was undeserving of their love.

  Josh’s words from their last encounter had been on repeat in her mind, playing over unbidden at moments she least expected them. She heard him while driving to work with the glow of the dawn on the horizon, pounding her pedals down the bike trail with her breath heavy in her lungs, shampooing her hair in the white noise of her empty house: I didn’t think I’d be losing a friend. I thought I’d be gaining a sister.

  The words were not just a picture of what might have been between them; they were an honest and befuddled encapsulation of what should have been. Worse, there was no real explanation for the fact that it had not been except for the truth—the one explanation that Izzy could not give and that, in the absence of any other plausible stand-in, Josh could very likely guess. She’d narrowly escaped their encounter with her ability to go on pretending intact. But she was going to have to do a better job, starting now.

  Saturday morning she woke early to handle the preparations she should have done the night before. She had the new recipe she’d chosen all but memorized, having spent the week stocking the highest-quality ingredients she could find. While the oven preheated and she busied her hands whisking eggs and dicing vegetables, her mind rehearsed things she might say over the meal. She’d make them laugh, set them at ease. She’d talk about work. Just this week on Second Date Update they’d had a run of callers denied another chance for a host of left-field reasons: the man who’d booed a quarterback he didn’t know was his date’s favorite; the college student whose date had failed the good taste test by wanting to make out in a cemetery. “Deal breakers” was their shorthand for these calls at the station, as in these cases, it mattered not how hot the chemistry, how fluid the conversation, or how persuasive the disc jockeys. These daters evoked a strict one-strike rule that unnerved Izzy, if she was being honest, at her own prospects.

  Maybe dating wasn’t such a good topic to bring up at brunch after all.

  She could stick to local gossip, she supposed, but felt unsavory doing so. Her mother had called Izzy in a flurry after recognizing her street on the news, but Izzy quickly rebuked her questions, brushing the incident aside as a nasty divorce blown out of proportion. She didn’t want her parents to worry, to think anything about her new living situation unstable or unsafe.

  She popped the quiche into the oven and raced upstairs to don her sundress, which she layered over leggings and topped with a cardigan. It seemed a very Yellow Springs sort of outfit, one she hoped would exude a bohemian independence, and she pulled her hair back in a loose ponytail that was nothing if not nonchalant. Looking in the mirror, she almost convinced herself that she was entirely at home in her new lifestyle. Even as the host, she’d somehow come to feel like the guest among the rest of her family, but she knew the fault was her own. Today would be different.

  And why had she been wasting time worrying over the conversation, anyway? The rest of them had far more interesting things to contribute. She’d pepper them with questions; she’d be so engaged in the baby and her parents’ new condo and anything else they deemed of import that they wouldn’t even notice she hadn’t said a thing about her own life. She’d taken note of this technique watching the most popular girl in her high school, back when she’d longed to be one. Ask everyone around you about themselves, and they’ll love you for it, no matter that they don’t learn a thing about you in return.

  Come to think of it, Kristin had reminded her a lot of that girl.

  Out in the garden, Izzy put up the umbrella to shade the full morning sun and felt a rush of pleasure as she carried out her new place mats and votives. The five of them would fit comfortably around the circle, and her arrangement of the table came together with a refined, simple beauty that, for once, was just as she’d imagined. She was topping the yogurt parfaits with berries and fresh granola when the doorbell sounded. She glanced at her watch. Her parents were five minutes early, which for them was right on time.

  “Oh, Izzy, look at all this! Your house looks just as pretty as you are.”

  Izzy stood at the open door and looked around the front yard in search of what “all this” might be. “Thanks, Mom, but I haven’t changed anything out front since you moved me in.”

  At least her mother hadn’t noticed the banged-up car, which Izzy had taken to backing tight up to the garage. If her mother had caught sight of even one small scrape, she’d have come to the door “all fretted up,” as her father liked to say. She was the type who was so good at fussing over things that she almost seemed to enjoy it—and thus didn’t bother to adjust her intensity for big problems or minuscule ones, or for those within her control or well outside it.

  “Well, it’s always been pretty. And so have you. I keep telling people what a waste it is that you’re on the radio. You should be on television.”

  “Mom. I’m not even on the radio! Just behind the scenes.”

  “Every time I hear the smart parts, I know it was you.” Pride was radiating from her mother, as usual, and Izzy had to laugh. There were exactly zero “smart parts” on Freshly Squeezed, which she knew for a fact her mother did not listen to. Much as she loved to b
oast to her friends about Izzy’s role, Izzy knew she found Sonny and Day just as grating as Izzy did. Her mother might dote on her two daughters unconditionally, but outside of her relationship with her children she lacked neither judgment nor good taste.

  As her mother patted her arm and stepped through the open door, Izzy turned her attention to her father. While she’d been dodging everyone else’s calls, she’d been fighting the urge to dial him directly and demand the details of this so-called health scare. A part of her was waiting to see if they were really going to not tell her, while another part insisted that if he was fine, as Penny had assured her, then there was nothing to tell. “I’ve missed you, Dad.” She breathed him in as his hug wrapped her in warmth. He was just as she’d left him in Springfield: solid, quiet, reassuring, and dressed for a hike.

  “Come see the garden,” Izzy said, leading the way. Her parents shuffled along behind her, and she tried not to think about how old they were getting. They qualified for senior discounts now. “Josh and Penny drove separately, then?” She purposely said his name first, as if to prove to herself that she could.

  She heard her mother tsk behind her. “Oh, they’re not coming, dear. Penny has been having some difficulty in the mornings, you know. They send their love.”

  Izzy had the back door open now and turned to squint at her mother. “Not coming?”

  From the counter, the perfectly wrapped slippers she’d meant as a peace offering mocked her, and she recognized herself as a hypocrite even as she said the words. Of course Penny wasn’t coming. And certainly not Josh. Nothing was ever that easy. Why had she deluded herself into believing otherwise?

  “She could have given me a heads-up,” she said, sounding more curt than she’d intended, trying to maintain her balance. Even as she recognized that she was choking down the bitter taste of her own medicine, it still seemed a valid point. At least Izzy had had the decency to text Penny when she’d bailed out of her get-together rather than sending a message through a third party.