A third party.
Had Josh told Penny he’d come here? She’d assumed not—assumed he wouldn’t want to implicate himself in that humiliation any more than her—but if she was wrong and he had … If he and Penny truly had no secrets between them … What might he have said, exactly? Could things be even worse than she’d feared?
“Well, I don’t think she was expecting not to feel well, dear. You know how these things can come on with pregnancy.” Her mother clasped her hands and looked past her at the spread in the garden. “But this is so lovely! We’ll enjoy it enough for everyone, just the three of us.”
Izzy swallowed hard against the betrayal. The useless effort of obsessing over how she’d smooth it all over, how she’d act, what she’d say, the foolishness of having put so much stock, so much hope of redemption, into a single event that could be blown off as easily as she’d skipped her sister’s own celebration last week. She had convinced herself she couldn’t face them that day because of a dream, of all things. When would she learn to stop giving so much credit to her subconscious?
Her dad wandered over to the table, hands in his pockets. Why had she gone and set all the places in advance? It looked like she’d been expecting a miniature banquet.
“Camilla, you should tell Penelope to call next time. Look at all this trouble she’s gone to.” The use of Penny’s full name was a telltale parental sign of displeasure. Izzy might have enjoyed it if not for the fact that he’d surely feel differently if he knew the whole truth. “I didn’t know this was a fancy brunch, Iz.” He looked down at his outfit apologetically.
Izzy set about gathering up the extra place settings as quickly as she could. “It’s not fancy. It was no trouble putting it out, and it’s no trouble to put it away.” She tried to balance the two spare yogurt parfaits in the crook of her arm while she restacked the plates, but one of them tumbled loose, showering her sleeve with yogurt and the pavers with a crash of broken crystal.
“Oh, what a gooey mess,” her mother said. “Let me get it. Just show me to your paper towels and a broom. Do you need help in the kitchen too? This’ll take but a second.”
Izzy turned her back so they couldn’t see the tears welling in her eyes. “I don’t need help,” she said, as much to herself as to them, but she didn’t argue when her mother showed herself to the pantry and headed outside armed with cleanup supplies.
She served up mimosas and coffee, pulling herself together in time to get the quiche out of the oven and set the singers and standards channel to stream through the wireless speakers she’d set outside. By the time they were settled at the table, all her preparation had lent itself seamlessly to this smaller-scale, lower-pressure Plan B. Her parents were happy, anyway, and seemed not to think anything at all about Penny and Josh’s absence.
“Their loss!” was her father’s only remark, as he went for his second bite of the quiche. “This is delicious, Iz.”
“It’s no wonder having your own house has turned you into such a cook. Space to come into your own. That’s what I tell my old-fashioned friends when they ask about it, anyway.”
“It’s the ingredients,” Izzy said, seizing the opportunity to steer the conversation off unsteady ground. “So much here is locally sourced. You pay for it, but it’s worth it.”
“Are you listening, Todd?” Her mother glowed with triumph. “That’s exactly what I keep telling you about our grocery bills.” She turned back to Izzy. “Tell us everything. Are you making friends?”
Izzy nodded. “I really like the neighbor across the street, Clara. And also these women who own a boutique—I bought Penny a gift there, actually, to celebrate her news. You can take it to her.”
“Oh, how nice. And what about that woman who’s disappeared?” Her face turned serious. “You don’t hear much on the news in Springfield anymore.”
Izzy tried to maintain a neutral front. “I don’t think there’s anything new to say. Though I’ve stopped following it myself. It makes me feel … I don’t know, nosy or something.” She thought of the detective’s brief appearance at the bonfire. Was he still trailing Kristin? Had he been doing it even then? Were there any new theories? Everyone knew that the more time ticked by, the less likely they were to be found. She’d been trying to demonstrate a certain respect by letting the questions go, by not prying, but now she felt willfully uninvolved, as if her parents might reasonably expect her to know more.
“I could understand that. Especially if you’ve met her husband. Or ex-husband, was it? Either way.”
Or when I had a moment where I thought he might have been about to kiss me.
“Have you?” she asked. Izzy stared at her blankly. “Met her husband, that is.”
She nodded. “He moved back into the house when they left.”
“Well. That raises the issue of boundaries, doesn’t it? I remember when—”
“Camilla.” Her father’s voice was firm. “She said it made her feel nosy. Which you are now being.”
Oh, how Izzy had missed her father. If Izzy had yet to find her kindred spirit in this world, it was partly because no one could measure up to their born-in solidarity. He never dug into her personal life the way her mother did, nor was he purposefully aloof like so many of her friends’ dads. Rather, he’d taught her about life simply by showing it to her: striding through the woods, or floating downriver, or even huddled in a tent during a rainstorm. Penny had been a far less willing participant in these little demonstrations, and thus Izzy had doubled her own enthusiasm to compensate, and gladly.
“Now, Iz,” her mother was saying, “you’ve got to visit soon. Remember Samantha Greene from down the road? She bought the old Gingham Café, and it’s amazing what she’s done with the place. I stopped her just the other day to say…”
Izzy reveled in the normalcy of her mother’s running commentary. Now that the mimosa had taken the edge off her annoyance, she could appreciate that Penny and Josh had given her a reprieve from the tense morning she’d been anticipating. Though granted, this did nothing to make amends with her sister. Or Josh. A part of her had needed to get their next meeting out of the way, to override the taste left by the last one.
As she relaxed a bit more with every bite, she hardly even minded that her mother was now going on about the baby. Izzy’s niece or nephew, who would be half Penny, half Josh—combining in essence some of her own DNA with Josh’s. Not that she and Penny looked alike, though they did have the same almond shape to their eyes. If the baby had those eyes too, set in a face like Josh’s—
No. She couldn’t think that far ahead.
She wasn’t ready yet.
And then her mother was excusing herself to “powder her nose”—a too-polite expression she habitually used even at home—and her father’s eyes were on her, and they were not comfortable or familiar anymore. They were stern.
“Isabel.” He leaned forward. “Your mother seems content to fret happily away in her own oblivious world, so I’m going to make this quick.”
She pulled her cardigan around her futilely as the cold wave of his words sent goose bumps racing across her skin.
“Whatever it is between you and your sister—and Josh—the triangle of you, or the line of you, or whatever shape it is, it’s going to stop.”
Her mouth went dry. “I don’t know what you mean…”
“You might well not. You might not know how to put your finger on what’s gone wrong, but it’s still up to you to fix it. Because I’ll tell you this: Penny can’t take responsibility for anything she didn’t knowingly do now that it’s too late to undo it. Can she?”
Izzy sat stricken. To have her father call her out this way on anything was unprecedented. To have him call her out this way on this particular thing was unthinkable. Worse, even, than Josh showing up at her door. She managed what she thought might be a shake of her head.
“She’s hurting, and I think Josh is too, though I don’t care so much about that. He might have it coming, for all I know.
And I don’t want to know,” he added quickly, his hand in the air, his head shaking vehemently. “But Penny does not have it coming. And I’m not going to see her hurt. Not anymore, and especially not now.”
A noise came from inside, and they both turned to look at the door, which remained closed. “I love you like none other, Iz. I’m imploring you—out of your mother’s earshot—to find a way to fix it. It’s the best thing for everyone, most of all you.”
Her eyes filled with tears. No one had ever asked how she felt about Penny and Josh getting together, though she, not Penny, had been the one dragging him to family outings for years. She wouldn’t have told them if they’d asked, but she’d always been a bit hurt that they hadn’t.
Now it seemed that perhaps her father had guessed, at some of it, anyway. And this would be the beginning and the end of the discussion. A swift shutting down of feelings she had no right to give voice to and yet wanted to scream at being denied.
He tapped the top of her hand with a fingertip. “I don’t want to see you hurting either. And that’s why I know we won’t have to speak of this again.”
Her mother reappeared, grinning naïvely, just as her father moved to help himself to another croissant from the basket she’d so carefully warmed earlier. She didn’t need to touch it to know that it had gone cold.
25
Here’s what I know about waiting: It starts as agony, as anxiety. When will the proverbial second shoe drop? It keeps you up nights. But then it gets easier. Because outside of the worry churning in your brain, life is happening. You can’t only wait. So the waiting fades to the back burner, and you can leave it there, moving it to the front occasionally for a stir and then putting it back where you hope it belongs.
Until one day, when something wakes you up from your perch at the stove, and you realize that the wait won’t be much longer. The drop is no longer a distant possibility, it’s a likely outcome. And that’s when you face the facts you’ve been avoiding: That even at the lowest setting, the burners are too hot to stay on forever. You’ll either slowly scorch, or burst into flames—and either way, it won’t be pretty.
That’s when you know deep down that you have to run.
26
Your dog seems stressed. Have you gotten insights from an animal communicator?
—Question called out in the glen from a fellow hiker, at which Clara, exhausted from the baby pack on her back and her own many stresses, laughed too hard before realizing it was serious
Clara didn’t need to see the other mother’s face to feel her fear. She sprang into action, leaving Maddie half unstrapped from the stroller—because Maddie, at least, was a mere foot or two off the ground. This child, not much older, had scrambled out of reach at the top of the playground’s highest ladder before his mother had registered the danger—the perilous open sides of the small rectangular platform—and was headed in determined caveman steps toward the alluring sliding board tunnel at the far end.
“Wait for Mommy! Wait for Mommy!” the woman was crying, lunging to grab one of his limbs, coming up empty, and Clara watched her body jerk in indecision between running along the ground beneath the edge and climbing up after him. She herself had long cursed whatever clueless engineer had designed this breed of playground. The fireman’s pole, rope ladder, and stepping pads were great fun for older kids, but the vertical drops surrounding them were a nightmare for any parent trying to keep hold of one of the younger, eager-to-follow set.
“Need a hand?” Clara called, and without waiting for an answer took off running toward the opposite end of the platform, arms outstretched as if she were a seasoned pro at catching free-falling children, something she had no idea if she could actually do.
The boy was mere inches from the edge now, oblivious of the danger. Catching sight of the fireman’s pole, he reached out a curious hand, tottering.
My God. She wasn’t going to make it in time. He was really going to fall.
Clara lunged. There was a clank, a collision of bone on metal, an underwater popping in her ears, a spear of pain. She stumbled back, her hands flying to her forehead, a moan escaping her clenched jaw.
“Holy hell, are you okay?”
Clara blinked in confusion, registering the horizontal monkey bar she hadn’t seen, perfect for practicing chin-ups, or hanging upside down from, or head-butting at full speed.
With some effort, she lifted her gaze upward—and into the eyes of Detective Marks, whose arms were now wrapped tightly around the child, safe on the platform. And who looked curiously unsurprised to see that it was Clara who’d just rattled the structure to its core.
“Way to be a hero,” the detective said, a smile in her voice. Out of the harsh bun, her hair was wavy and full, and along with her street clothes had transformed her like a chameleon into an ordinary mother. Or an undercover one.
“Next time, he’s on his own,” Clara groaned, blinking back tears, trying to regain her composure. A brief but intense ringing filled her ears as she pulled her hands away from her forehead, and she willed it to stop. This wasn’t the time to not be clearheaded.
“Oh, shit.” The detective’s smile was gone. “I didn’t realize you’re really hurt.” Clara looked down at her fingertips and saw blood. “We should get you looked at. You might have a concussion.”
Clara squeezed her eyes shut again—everything seemed so bright. She was fine. She didn’t have time for this. She had her own kids to look after.
Her own kids. Clara’s eyes flew open, and she turned to see Thomas yanking Maddie through her stroller harness in a sort of bear hug as Pup-Pup strained against his leash, which Clara had looped around the handle. The dog was pulling the wheels out from under them as Maddie kicked, half in and half out of her seat.
“Careful!” Clara screeched, stumbling toward them. After a few uncertain steps the pain dulled and she found her land legs again. Thomas looked nonplussed as she untangled Maddie and deposited her on the pavement.
“I was helping.” Seeing her face, his defiance switched to wide-eyed alarm. “Mommy, you need a Band-Aid.”
“I’ll get one once we’re home,” she said as breezily as she could. If she acted as if everything were fine, then everything would be—just as soon as this pounding in her head subsided. “Go ahead, go play!”
She ushered him toward the swings, got hold of the dog’s leash, and took Maddie by the hand. Her daughter smiled adoringly up at her as if she was not at all the incompetent mother she felt, and Clara focused on the grounding feeling of the little hand in hers as they made their way back toward the playset.
Detective Marks emerged at the bottom of the corkscrew slide, her son on her lap. “Thank you for trying to help,” she said. “I feel like a dolt for that hero comment.”
“I feel ridiculous,” Clara said. “I’m just glad he didn’t fall.”
“I don’t know why I always think it’s going to be this relaxing little outing to stop by the playground when I get off work.”
“I don’t know why I think any outing will be relaxing. Or little,” Clara added, then remembered who she was talking to. “Although if anyone needs relief from the craziness of her workday, I’m guessing it’s you.”
“I’d take a felon over a cranky toddler,” the detective said. She had out a pocket pack of tissues, and Clara took one gratefully, holding it to her forehead. Thomas was pumping his legs rhythmically on a creaky swing now, and Clara steeled herself against the grating noise.
Detective Marks had her phone out, typing out a harried text. “It’s just a goose egg with some broken skin,” she said, “but you should get it looked at, to be safe.” The boy slid out of her lap and began digging through the mulch with his fingers.
“That’s not necessary,” she said automatically. What mom had time to get looked at when she was most likely fine? “I know the concussion symptoms—I’ll monitor myself.”
The detective looked up, considering her. “You do seem to have pretty good instincts,” s
he said, sounding suspiciously like a cop again.
Clara peered at her through her daze, wondering whether the words were as deliberate as they seemed. A thousand questions she didn’t dare ask spun through her head. It had been over two weeks since The Color-Blind Gazette incident, and she’d heard little from the police since, aside from a few “routine” check-in calls from Detective Bryant. She’d felt too sheepish to ask anything in return, and he never volunteered information. Kristin was more than three weeks gone now, and she couldn’t help but wonder how hard they were still looking. Or how long they might try. Or whether they had any new clues as to where she might be, or why.
“Anything interesting going on in the neighborhood these days?” the detective asked casually. Her son was seated in the mulch now, coming up with handfuls of wood shards and watching them fall to the ground, and Maddie stood monitoring his behavior with fascination.
Clara thought with longing of the abandoned I Can Do It! book cover. But she’d made her decision. Having not mentioned it before, she certainly couldn’t bring it up now. She shrugged. “I was trying not to ask you the same thing.”
“Why not ask?”
She was surprised by the question. Because she wasn’t sure if she was allowed? Because she desperately wanted to but was afraid to know the answers?
“Has the good doctor been around more?” The levity in the detective’s voice did not match the question. “Have you noticed him directing any anger toward you, or anyone else?”
Clara shook her head, wincing as a fresh jolt of pain cascaded through her temple.
Detective Marks nodded. “No cause for alarm. But since I bumped into you, I’ll casually mention that Dr. Kirkland’s partners have not reacted kindly to Hallie’s little bulletin. They asked him to hang back, let them cover his appointments until it blows over.”
Clara’s eyes widened. She could guess at his reaction.
“Seems he has a knack for bargaining. They landed on a compromise where his patients can opt for an easy switch if they feel uncomfortable or have reservations. But he’s still none too happy.”
Not That I Could Tell: A Novel Page 20
