Not That I Could Tell: A Novel

by Jessica Strawser

  “What do you think about out there?” Paul asked. “On your hikes, I mean. I don’t know how you spend so much time alone. I’m still getting used to it.” He coughed, and his cheeks colored. “That sounded insensitive. I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s okay.” Izzy wasn’t offended. He was right. She did spend a lot of time alone. And then she wandered into the woods in search of more solitude to top it off.

  Only now she was pining for those days when companionship—with her father, Josh, Penny—had been more or less a given. How audacious she’d been.

  “To tell you the truth, I think a lot about the fact that I think too much.”

  He burst out laughing, and she grinned sheepishly. Just as well. A normal person would have meant it as a joke.

  “I wish I could be more like that,” he said.

  “No, you don’t.” Her eyes were on the shadows quivering on the patches of water below, but she could feel him watching her and knew she shouldn’t have sounded so adamant.

  “I do,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think enough about the fact that I don’t think enough.” She dared to look at him then. His eyes had turned serious, but a faint smile still played on his lips. He must have run a hand through his sweat-dampened hair to undo the helmet’s flattening job; it stuck out in all directions, putting her in mind of a child watching morning cartoons in his pajamas.

  “I should try that,” she said. Of the two of them, by all rights Paul should have been the one having more trouble leaving his burdens behind. The fact that he was not might have said something about him—but instead she had the feeling it laid bare her own flawed tendencies.

  “Want to try it now?”

  He moved a lock of her hair away from her face, and she didn’t have time to think. His kiss was gentle but not tentative. She took a step back, surprised, but his face never left hers, and she let him follow. When was the last time anyone had followed her anywhere? The brush of his hands against her arms made them buzz with near-electric current. It had been so long since anyone at all had touched her this way—or, more to the point, touched her any way at all.

  But what were they doing? Where could this possibly go? What would anyone think—Clara or Rhoda or Randi, let alone the rest of the town?

  Then again, did it matter? Where had caring so much about what other people thought gotten her, other than alone and unhappy?

  With that final thought, she did try it. She let her mind go pleasantly blank and drank from the void.

  When the kiss ended, there was no seismic shift beneath their feet.

  “Ready to head back?” he asked softly. She nodded, and he smiled, and then it was almost as if it had never happened.

  Almost.

  Giving herself over to a moment was one thing. Avoiding deep thought in a more real sense would take some doing. And probably a lot of practice. And maybe, a nagging part of her brain was already whispering, rethinking—though that was contradictory to the point, obviously.

  She was still telling herself not to think about what had happened with Paul as he steered them back toward town, racing against the rain as the cloud cover thickened without warning. She was still telling herself not to think about it as they approached the final turn, his house majestic on the corner, and she found herself imagining what might transpire or how she might feel or what Paul would do if Kristin were to materialize just now at the front door, her hands disapprovingly on her hips, her twins at her side. She was still telling herself not to think about it as she caught sight of Clara—sidewalk chalk in her hand, children and that flopsy new dog at her feet, jaw dropped slightly—watching Izzy dismount the bike. And she was beseeching her mind to revert to that moment of blissful blank as she handed Paul his helmet, gave him a shy wave and a smile, her face burning, and lifted the waving arm higher to include Clara, who only stood expressionless until she finally looked away.

  28

  You sound so innocent, the way you say your kids weren’t “happy” in their rear-facing car seats anymore, like that’s actually justification for facing them forward a full six months before the recommended age of two. You’re literally risking their lives just so they can be “happier”?

  —Anonymous comment left on one of Kristin Kirkland’s posts to the school’s Circle of Parents blog, to which Clara anonymously replied, before Kristin had a chance, “Fuck off”

  “Izzy?” Clara’s voice was drowned out by the rumble of Paul’s motorcycle maneuvering up his driveway. Thank God her head was back to normal now. Only the bruise remained, and at least the bruise didn’t mind the racket. Izzy was fumbling with her keys, about to disappear through her front door. Clara called out again, not a question this time. “Izzy!” Her voice sounded disproportionately frantic, and when Izzy turned, her keys clattering to the concrete stoop, she looked taken aback.

  “Sorry!” Clara yelled good-naturedly, taking a few steps toward the curb. “Loud!” She gestured toward Paul’s house just as the engine went silent, and Izzy nodded.

  “I just wondered if you wanted to come for dinner. Benny’s going to fire up the grill.”

  Izzy looked up at the cold front whizzing by overhead, and Clara’s eyes followed hers. The thick clouds were moving with such determination they almost looked like time-lapsed freeze-frames of a sky. “Looks like rain,” Izzy called.

  “Oh, Benny doesn’t mind,” Clara said easily. “Actually, he has no choice. He does this every fall, buying out Tom’s Market when he thinks it’s nice enough for one last barbecue. I won’t tell you how many ‘one last’ barbecues we had last year.”

  “Well,” Izzy said, “if there’s one season worth being nostalgic for, summer’s it.”

  It seemed to Clara that Izzy was capable of being nostalgic for just about anything, but she wouldn’t have said so. “That’s why you should come!”

  Izzy glanced at Paul’s house, then away. Clara was banking on the fact that she didn’t have plans tonight, or any way in such close proximity to pretend that she did. Because when she’d caught sight of Izzy a moment before, on the back of Paul’s bike, her head turned into the cranny between his shoulder blades, what she’d felt wasn’t nagging worry or niggling concern.

  It was fear. A jolt of fear that made her fingertips go numb.

  And as she’d watched her friend wave halfheartedly, and watched Paul purposefully not look in her own direction, and watched Izzy turn and head up the walk, the frozen grip that held her under its siege had hissed into her ear, Don’t just stand there, do something.

  She might have hurled a warning at the retreating form of Paul’s poseur leather jacket. She might have run across the street to seize Izzy by the wrists and ask, “What could you possibly be thinking?” But instead, she had opened her mouth, uncertain of what to say, and out had come a polite dinner invitation.

  “Twist my arm,” Izzy said with a weak smile. “What time?”

  * * *

  Benny caught his wife’s elbow gently at the top of the stairs, steering her back into the dark hallway that ran the length of the old farmhouse’s second floor. She could hear the kids giggling from Thomas’s room, where they were awaiting one of Daddy’s famous stories—no book required. It wasn’t that Benny made them up; rather, he stole plotlines from movies they were too young to watch and adapted them to suit his audience. Clara always protested that the kids were going to grow up and realize their childhood had been full of spoilers without the alerts—that he’d ruined key scenes from Rudy, Star Wars, even Forrest Gump. Benny argued that kids would grow up to find out that all their youthful fairy tales were not what they’d once seemed.

  Fatalism was where they differed.

  “I really don’t think you should mention it to her,” Benny said. Downstairs, Izzy was awaiting Clara’s return, a fresh bottle of wine open on the counter, the soft sounds of Southern blues floating up the stairs. Once they’d cleaned up dinner—the rain held out long enough for a spread of veggie kabobs, barbecued chi
cken, Amish-made sausage, even perfectly charred corn on the cob—Benny volunteered to handle bedtime so Clara and her friend could chat.

  “Mention what?” Clara asked, trying to remain stone-faced.

  “You know what. It’s none of our business.”

  Clara narrowed her eyes. “It is. It’s our business because we live here, and it’s our business because I’m her friend.”

  “Let me rephrase. It’s not your responsibility, Clara.”

  This was not a new argument between them. Because there was a universal question at the root of it: What responsibility does anyone really have to someone else, aside from family? It wasn’t just that Kristin’s disappearance had left everyone who’d known her wondering what, if anything, they should have sensed was going on behind closed doors, or what, if anything, they might have done to prevent her from vanishing. And it wasn’t just that her persistent failure to reappear with the twins had thickened and stagnated in the air of their old house, though that was true enough too. This was a question that had taken hold of them years before and never quite let go, because there was no answer they could agree upon.

  Benny was the sort of person who could leave an unanswerable question unanswered.

  Clara was not.

  “If it’s not my responsibility,” she said coolly, “then whose is it, Ben?”

  He frowned. He hated to be called Ben. That the short form of Benjamin was too much formality for Benny was one of thousands of things she’d loved about him from the start. She rarely pushed this particular button, and when she did, it wasn’t to goad him.

  It was a warning.

  Benny sighed as a louder peal of giggles erupted from Thomas’s open door, and they both instinctively moved to peer through, as such spontaneous laughter was more often these days soon followed by a cry of protest or pain. Clara and Benny watched from the hall as Thomas handed a bright orange stuffed lion to Maddie, who tossed it over his bedrail to the floor with such gusto that both kids burst into laughter. He then patted her sweetly on the head and handed her a blue elephant to launch. Their assembly line had already relocated half the contents of his bed, always a plush jungle, to a pile on the floor.

  Benny and Clara exchanged a smile in spite of themselves. In truth, Clara would have preferred to follow Benny back in to cuddle the kids, listen to his stories and sing them song after song until they drifted off. It never ceased to amaze her that even when she’d had Thomas and Maddie to herself for most of the day—or for too much of it, with them driving her to the brink of sanity with their competing demands—it still stung her to miss bedtime, for any reason.

  It wasn’t that Clara would rather talk to Izzy. It was that she had to.

  “I could go down and tell her the kids wanted only you tonight,” Benny said softly. “Make your apologies. Tell her you’ll see her tomorrow. Buy you time to sleep on it.”

  She shook her head. “I won’t sleep otherwise,” she said. “That’s the problem.”

  “You don’t even know that anything is going on between her and Paul.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “But I’m going to find out.”

  She backed quietly away from Thomas’s door and headed downstairs before Benny could stop her. She felt his eyes on her back, willing her to turn and give him one last chance at exchanging the kind of meaningful look that might change her mind. And so she didn’t look back. She and Benny had done enough test runs on this argument—in more theoretical and less pressing scenarios—to know they could agree to disagree.

  Never mind that in the ambient tension that was becoming their new norm, nothing seemed sure anymore. While she wasn’t still mad about what he’d suggested the other night, she wasn’t not mad, either—nor was she completely convinced he’d dropped the matter for good. But she also wasn’t about to walk on eggshells around her own husband.

  She found Izzy and Pup-Pup standing side by side in the area that joined the kitchen and the family room, staring through the window toward the dark patio, where the circle of chairs remained, untouched, around the fire pit from that early September night. Izzy had been a hit with the kids at dinner, challenging Thomas to a corn on the cob eating contest and clinking her cup to Maddie’s sippy with a “cheers!” roughly every thirty seconds, indulging the baby’s favorite new mealtime trick. And she’d been an even bigger hit with Pup-Pup afterward, playing an endless game of tug-the-rope while Clara and Benny brushed off her offers to help clean up. Now, in the dim track lighting, she looked relaxed, if a little sad, swaying slowly with the music. Hearing Clara’s approach, she turned and smiled, her eyes already turning glassy from the second—or was this her third?—glass of wine. It was impossible not to think of that last night with Kristin, around the fire. Of how at home they’d all seemed in their neighborhood then. Of how it hadn’t felt the same since.

  Izzy gestured at the fire pit. “I was going to suggest we light one, but it’s starting to sprinkle.” A beat of silence passed between them, and Izzy gave an almost apologetic smile. “Might be weird, anyway,” she said softly.

  “It’s not as if I’m never going to use the patio again…” Clara began. For some reason, the idea of taking their seats around the circle with Kristin gone still made her shiver. “But yeah.”

  It was silly. Kristin would likely never know, much less care, whether Clara and her other neighbors removed her chair and tightened their circle around the fire. It wasn’t all that different from the way Izzy punished her stubborn heartbreak by drowning it in morbid headlines, and Clara turned away from those same stories on the principle of not giving the bad guys the satisfaction. She supposed the joke was on both of them that none of it mattered. Neither the perpetrators nor the victims knew if you watched their footage all day or feigned ignorance. All they knew was that the headlines were there, and for many of them that was enough.

  So when Clara took the obvious segue, she tried to sound nonchalant. “Making friends with Dr. Paul isn’t weird, though?”

  “Oh, that was Parallel Universe Paul,” Izzy said quickly, and she almost succeeded at sounding dismissive. Almost.

  Clara wrinkled her forehead. “A universe where Paul and Kristin never happened?”

  “No. I mean, yes.” She laughed uneasily. “I didn’t mean anything that deep. Just one where he wears leather and drives a motorcycle.”

  “Would that make him more your type?” Clara moved to pour herself a glass of wine at the island behind them.

  “In what way?” Izzy wouldn’t look at her.

  “Oh, you know,” Clara said. “Benny always said he was ‘more of an indoor guy.’”

  Izzy gave a little laugh. “Truer words,” she said. Her eyes met Clara’s then. “Still. I thought handsome doctors were supposed to be everyone’s type.”

  “Men with missing wives, though…”

  Clara couldn’t believe she’d said it aloud. She held her breath.

  “Ex. Soon to be ex.” Izzy’s voice had an edge to it, which Clara had expected. What she hadn’t anticipated was that the part Izzy took issue with was the word wife, not missing. She checked herself, deciding to back up.

  “You’ve been spending time with him, though?”

  “Here and there. We run into each other.” Pup-Pup abruptly turned and left the room, and Clara heard his tags jiggling up the stairs, as if he’d already heard enough. Somehow, in spite of the fact that Clara was the one home all day, he seemed to have designated Benny as the alpha. They’d go for long walks in the dark before bed and Pup-Pup would come home panting with glee.

  She took a breath. “I have to say, Iz, I’m not sure it’s the best idea.”

  “It’s just neighborly stuff,” Izzy said. “I can’t see how that would be a bad idea.”

  “I didn’t say bad. I said not the best.” Clara’s lips had gone dry, and she licked them nervously. “How much time together are we talking about, just out of curiosity?”

  A small smile played on Izzy’s lips, then disappeared.
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br />   “Not enough to warrant an intervention,” Izzy said, trying to laugh it off. “Let’s not blow it out of proportion.”

  “Am I?” Clara bit her lip. “Forget what I think, or what I’m worried about. Think about how it might look. It’s not as if no one’s paying attention to what Paul’s up to these days.”

  A light in Izzy’s eyes was going dim, clouded out in a way that reminded her of a movie line Thomas liked to quote. It had to do with being between sad and mad. Sad mad. “You think I don’t worry about how I look to other people? The also-ran who left town after her sister got the guy, who resigned herself to spinsterhood with a mortgage. The stick-in-the-mud behind a happy radio show. The loner on an early-bird schedule. I’m tired of it. I thought you were different. I thought we were friends.”

  Clara blinked at her. “We are friends,” she said firmly. “I’ve never thought any of those things about you. And if anyone does, screw them.”

  “Who are they to judge, right?” Izzy said pointedly.

  “Iz, you’re taking this the wrong way. It’s just that … for starters, Kristin’s sister came to see me. She had some choice commentary on Dr. Paul.”

  “Of course she did. Her sister was divorcing him.”

  “But they were estranged. It’s not as if Kristin colored her perceptions.”

  “I’m not one to be throwing stones where sisters are concerned. Or putting too much stock in one’s opinion on the other, frankly.”

  “But Izzy. You saw Hallie’s newspaper. I mean, I wasn’t at all on board with distributing it, but what she wrote was true…”

  “Hallie, the kid? What newspaper?”

  “The Color-Blind Gazette.”

  Izzy shrugged and shook her head.

  How was it possible she’d really never seen it, never even heard about it? Hallie had suspected as much, and Clara had dismissed the idea. She felt almost relieved. All she had to do was explain—

  “Wait a second. She did interview me for something…”