by Mary Kubica
As I stand and watch the ballet class, I feel the week start to weigh heavily on me. I’m tired, and yet I have no good reason to complain. Clara is the one who has tackled all those late night feedings while I’ve tried to keep her company—tried and failed. But still, I’m tired. I find a couple of quarters in the pocket of my jeans and step toward a vending machine, pressing in the code for a Mountain Dew. I’m not one to drink soda—I know exactly what all those sugar byproducts do to the teeth—but right now, a jolt of caffeine is just what I need. I watch as the plastic bottle falls down into the chute, twist the cap off and quaff half the bottle in a single gulp, sliding the cap into my pocket beside Gus’s abandoned green army man that I picked up the other day. There’s also a couple Halcion pills stuffed in there, which I plan to flush just as soon as I get home. That’s something I no longer want or need.
I wonder when I will find out if Gus is my son.
It’s a sinking feeling, knowing that if he is I’ll have to confess to Clara about it. I’ll have to come clean. I didn’t do anything wrong—I didn’t even know Clara twelve years ago—and yet this little boy will change the future of our marriage together. There will always be a reminder that before Clara, I’d been with another woman. Clara wasn’t the only one.
For the last five minutes of ballet, we’re allowed inside the classroom so we can watch the kids perform. The mothers and I line up against a mirrored wall as our children begin to twirl gracelessly to the sound of a Disney soundtrack. I can’t take my eyes off Maisie, the awkward and yet adorable way her spindly arms rise up above her head, the way her knees buckle as she bends down to plié, the torn knee of her tights reminding me of Theo, though I try to push his face from my mind and to focus on Maisie and only Maisie. She smiles at me, feeling like a princess, like all eyes are on her and none of the other children. It’s spellbinding; I’m hypnotized by my little girl as she peers behind me to see her own reflection in the studio mirror. She waves, and the little figure in the mirror waves back. The other mothers take notice and smile. I pull my phone from my pocket and take a video, thinking how I will show this to Clara when I get home, and then I silently thank Felix for his fussiness this afternoon, knowing that if it hadn’t been for Felix and his ravenous appetite, I would have missed out on this moment of my life. Watching Maisie dance.
Back in the lobby, I tell Maisie to sit so I can help her with her shoes. “Miss Becca says we’re going to have a recital,” she’s telling me as I remove the slippers and force her foot into the pink sandal. “She says we get to dance on a big, big stage and wear a pretty dress.”
“Oh, yeah?” I ask, and Maisie says, “Yeah.” I ask when, but all she does is shrug. She says she’s hoping for a pink dress. Pink or purple or bright blue. With sequins and a fluffy tutu.
My stomach grumbles, and Maisie’s stomach grumbles, and I realize then that it’s nearly five o’clock. Traffic will be a mess on the way home. “I’m hungry, Daddy,” says Maisie, and I say to her, “Me, too.”
I call Clara for a quick check-in before Maisie and I leave. She answers on the second ring.
“Hey,” I say to her, and she replies, “Hey yourself,” though the words are hushed and hard to hear, a forced whisper, and I know right away that Felix is sleeping.
“How’s everything going?” I ask, picturing her and Felix at home, on the sofa, watching TV, Felix in her arms or on the floor, maybe, swaddled in a baby blanket.
“Just fine,” she says, and I hear that overwhelming fatigue in her voice, so tangible, like she could close her eyes right now and drift off to sleep.
“Is Felix asleep?”
“Yup,” Clara says, and I do the math in my head, easily suspecting that if Felix is asleep now, he’ll be up half the night, and therefore Clara will be, too.
“Maybe you should wake him,” I suggest, as twin ballerinas wave goodbye to Maisie and drift through the glass door. The room is loud and crowded, so many mothers trying hard to force shoes onto their ballerinas’ feet, nobody wanting to go.
“And how should I do that?” Clara asks.
Her words are snappy, and yet I know she doesn’t mean for them to be. I don’t take it personally. Clara is tired. In the last four days, she’s barely slept, and she’s still recovering from the pain and ordeal of childbirth. I don’t have the first clue what that must feel like.
“I don’t know,” I concede, as I force the second of Maisie’s sandals onto her feet, and whisper to her, “Let’s go potty before we leave.”
“But, Daddy,” whines Maisie, as expected. Maisie never ever wants to use the bathroom, not until it’s an absolute emergency or she’s already had an accident. “I don’t have to go potty.”
“You need to try,” I say as I help her to her feet and watch as she disappears behind the ladies’ room door. “Should I pick up something for dinner?” I ask Clara as again my stomach rumbles. I could make something at home, hamburgers on the grill again, but with traffic, I’m guessing it will be six o’clock before I make it there, nearly seven o’clock before we eat. From the other end of the phone, there’s no response, and I envision Clara on the couch with Felix in her arms, eyes drifting off to sleep. “Clara,” I say, deciding for her, “I’ll pick up something for dinner. Maisie and I will be home soon. And then you can rest,” I say as Maisie arrives through the heavy bathroom door, and I grasp her by the hand to leave. Tonight, just as soon as I get home, I’ll take Felix from Clara’s arms and tell her to lie down for a while, to get some sleep. She won’t be able to keep up this pace much longer if she doesn’t get some sleep soon. “Chinese or Mexican?” I ask as Maisie and I head off, hand in hand, through the concourse of the old furniture factory.
Clara says Chinese.
CLARA
“I’ve been wondering where I left that,” a voice says. Izzy, whose necklace lies splayed across my hand, her tone icy as I spin around and see her standing behind me, in the doorway that separates the garage from the inside of my parents’ home. The temperature inside the garage begins an upsurge as beneath my clothing I begin to sweat.
The realization settles in slowly, an awakening, as I stare at the word Izzy now spread across the palm of my hand in curling silver. Izzy’s charm somehow disengaged from the chain. She wears the chain, thumbing at it now, though it’s only a chain, a silver chain without its charm, the jump ring that holds them together now missing.
“I’ve been looking everywhere for it,” she says. “Thank you so much for finding it, Clara,” and she reaches out a hand, waiting to reclaim the charm, thinking I’m just going to waltz right over and hand it to her. “My mother gave that to me, you know?” she asks, though of course this is something I don’t know. “When I was just a girl. I couldn’t stand the thought of losing it,” she adds, and the realization settles on me then with striking clarity. It was Izzy all along. Izzy who killed Nick. Not my mother. Not Theo Hart. Izzy.
“You did it,” I say to her, clutching that charm in my grasp, squeezing tightly, feeling the silver dig deep into my skin, drawing blood. I wait for silly and contrived excuses, but they never come. She doesn’t blame my mother, my father for her necklace being inside the car. She doesn’t hold up her hands and say, I didn’t do it, or, It wasn’t me. I found the proof, evidence that nearly puts Izzy at the scene of the crime, and now the onus is on her to refute it. I wait in vain, but the rebuttal doesn’t come.
“What are you talking about?” she asks as she steps fully into the garage, letting the door slam shut behind her so that I flinch from the force of the noise, the impact making the tools that line the wall on a wooden pegboard shake—a screwdriver, a hammer, hand rivets and hex wrenches.
“I knew all along that it wasn’t an accident,” I say brusquely, sure to keep one eye on Izzy all the time. I don’t know what she’s capable of. “I just didn’t know who, but now I do.
“Why?” I implore, speaking louder now, my words angry and aggressive. “What did Nick ever do to you?” I can’t ma
ke sense of it, why Izzy, of all people, would want Nick dead. Nick was always so pleasant to her, always so kind. He paid more attention to her than the rest of us ever did. Sweat begins to pool beneath my arms, my shirt sticking to me in odd places, making it hard to move. I pluck the shirt from my skin, fighting for oxygen in the stifling air. I can’t imagine why Izzy would have any sort of acrimony toward Nick, any discord. It couldn’t have been about money because there was no money. Nick and I have no money; we verge on broke. But maybe it was the impression of money—Nick’s private practice and our ample home. Maybe this is the reason why Izzy decided to take his life. My mind then springs in a dozen different directions—an unrequited romantic gesture, hush money, ransom, unfulfilled promises of giving her our firstborn child and more—but none of them make sense. It’s all so farcical; there could be no sound reason why Izzy would want Nick dead.
“Why did you kill Nick?” I demand. “Why, Izzy, why? What did he ever do to you?” The expression on her face shifts, and suddenly she looks confused. She’s a good actress, I’ll give her that, but also a murderer. “How did you do it?” I ask. “Did you trail him to ballet? Follow him home? That’s premeditated murder,” I tell her, and I’m crying now, though I don’t want to be crying, but there are tears snaking down my cheeks as I speak, imagining a run-in between Nick and Izzy, some blowup outside the ballet studio for reasons I don’t know. Did Maisie see? Did she catch sight of Nick and Izzy in a tiff? Or maybe it was something that happened during class, and Maisie, tucked safely away with Miss Becca, didn’t see? I think back to our last conversation, Nick and me on the phone, talking about dinner. Just an ordinary, mundane conversation, like any of the other thousands of conversations we’ve had. He didn’t know he was going to die. Whatever transpired between him and Izzy that day hadn’t yet begun. It happened later, I tell myself, after he left ballet. There was never a bad man. It was a bad woman. Izzy was the bad woman, but thanks to the sun in her eyes, Maisie couldn’t see.
“What are you talking about, Clara?” Izzy asks. “I didn’t kill Nick,” she says. “Nick killed Nick. We all know that.”
“No, Izzy,” I snap. “You killed Nick. You. In this car,” I say as I thrust a hand toward my mother’s Chevrolet. “I have proof,” I spit, telling her Betty Maurer spotted a black Chevrolet leaving the scene of the crime, and how the silver Izzy charm puts her inside the car. The murder weapon.
“Oh, Clara,” she says, this odd combination of indignation and pity. “You’re just as crazy as your mother,” she says, and I take great insult at this, not for my sake but for my mother’s. This is the woman who is supposed to love my mother, to care for her better than my father and I can. “Everyone knows Nick was a lousy driver. He killed himself,” she says, but of course she’s wrong. I can’t let her sidetrack me, as she reminds me how Nick and Maisie were all alone at the time of the accident, how, as Detective Kaufman has already told me more times than I can count, it was Nick’s reckless driving that caused the car to hurl off the side of the road and into the tree. Nick is the only one to blame. “You’re imagining things, Clara,” she tells me. “You’re in denial. You have to accept the facts, Clara, and not let these fantasies mess with your head. Nick killed Nick,” she says. “He’s the only one to blame.”
But, no, I tell myself. It was Izzy. She killed Nick. It’s so utterly obvious. Of course she did. I’ve connected her to the murder weapon. It has to be.
“No, Izzy,” I snap. “You did it. You,” and then I interrogate her, demanding to know why she was in my mother’s car if what she says is true, and why her charm was under the seat. “Why?” I shout, starting to lose all sense of self-control. I reach for a baseball bat leaning against the garage wall, and think of coming at Izzy with it until she confesses, of swooping the bat at her again and again, trying hard to take her down like a group of black-capped chickadees mobbing a hawk.
But then I think of the kids, of Maisie and Felix, trapped inside the stifling car. How long have they been there? Ten minutes? Thirty? An hour? It wasn’t meant to be this long. How long does it take for children to die in cars? I made sure to leave the windows down, but the eighty- or ninety-degree air outside is no better than that which is in the car. I’ve lost track of time, and now I envision them, sweating, dehydrated, convulsing, their breathing slow and shallow as their body temperatures soar to 105 or 106 degrees, and I begin to panic, knowing the wretched death that comes from heatstroke.
Izzy doesn’t answer my questions but instead she screams at me, “You’re such a fool, Clara. Such a fucking fool,” as that sweet, obliging composure starts to wane. “You don’t know anything,” she insists.
“Then tell me,” I insist, stepping toward her with that bat in hand. I don’t mean to do it, but the bat rises suddenly and sharply in my hands, the arch of the bat’s swing now aimed at Izzy. She flinches, though I stop there, never swinging. Merely holding the bat in my hands. A threat. “Tell me,” I say again, and when she doesn’t, I say, “See? You’re a liar. You were in the car because you killed Nick.”
“You couldn’t be any more wrong,” she snaps, and there’s this holier-than-thou expression on her face that I despise. A smug, arrogant mien that I want to displace. “You wouldn’t hit me,” she haughtily assumes, and so I do. I clip her with the bat, that’s all. A mere graze, though from the look on her face you’d think I hit her with all my might. It swells there at the point of impact, on her arm, that’s all, and she grabs for it, mouth agog, saying, “You hit me. You hit me, Clara,” and I nod knowingly, because of course I know that I did.
And like that the smugness of her expression is gone.
“I did,” I tell her, “and I’ll do it again,” as I wind up for another swing. She flinches this time before I even have a chance to think about striking, telling me to stop. Telling me she’ll scream. Telling me she’ll call the police.
“You’re going to call the police and turn yourself in?” I ask, laughing, though it’s not funny at all. There’s nothing funny about it, and yet, I’m laughing. “Please, do,” I say as again the bat descends through the air, meeting Izzy this time in the hip. There’s a noise when Izzy and the bat connect. The hollow clapping of wood on wood, of Izzy screaming in pain.
I’ve hit bone.
“What are you doing?” she squawks, her voice desperate and shrill as her legs nearly give from the force of the hit. She reaches out blindly for something, anything to hang on to, to hold her upright, but finds nothing, her hand writhing through the air. “Go away, Clara. Go away,” she says, voice catching on the last words of her plea so that if I didn’t know better I’d think she might cry.
She’s a good actress, indeed.
I stop laughing. “Why were you in the car, Izzy?” I ask a final time, and this time she calls out, voice quivering, any sign of condescension gone, “Mine wouldn’t start,” she claims, “I couldn’t get the damn thing to start, and Louisa had an appointment. Your father wasn’t home because, Clara, he was with you. You. I had to get Louisa to the doctor. We took her car,” she states, though I know a liar when I see one, and Izzy is a liar. Her nostrils flare, she bites her lip, clutching her hip, no longer standing upright but now hunched to the side, suddenly unable to meet my eye.
“You’re lying,” I scream. “You’re a goddamn liar. Tell me the truth,” I demand. “Tell me why you were in the car. Tell me why you killed Nick,” as I toss the baseball bat on my shoulder, a batter ready and waiting for the perfect pitch. And then it comes, apparently, a curveball from the pitcher’s mound, and I strike, getting Izzy in the thigh. She emits a savage sound, something tameless and brute. Unhuman. An animal dying.
“You want to know why I was in the car?” she blubbers this time, eyes locked and steady, bracing her leg. “To get the VIN number. To find the insurance cards. Before I got rid of the car. That’s why, Clara,” she screams, and this time I know she’s not lying.
“To hide the evidence?” I demand, seeing now how Izzy pla
nned to get rid of my mother’s car—to torch it maybe, or sink it to the bottom of a retention pond somewhere—so she could never be connected to Nick’s murder.
But Izzy only laughs at me, a nervous snicker. “What evidence?” she asks, eyes locked on the barrel of the baseball bat. “This car? This old car? I was doing your parents a favor by getting rid of it, something your father should have done long ago. This car is hardly evidence.”
“It’s the car that killed Nick,” I state, wanting to pluck the gravel and the leaf from my pocket and show her as proof that this is the car that killed Nick. “The evidence that puts you at the crime scene.”
“Oh, Clara. Poor Clara. There was no crime scene, don’t you understand? Don’t you get it?” The look in her eye is an odd combination of pity and loathing, hate and disbelief.
“No, Izzy, no,” I snap. “I don’t get it. So tell me,” I snarl. “Tell me, Izzy. Make me understand,” as my knuckles turn white on the handle of the bat, my grip ironclad.
At first she doesn’t tell me. She stands before me, thinking, staring. She isn’t going to tell me, I think. She isn’t going to confess.
I jerk the bat ever so slightly, wondering this time what I should hit: her head or her chest. Which one will hurt more, which one will elicit a confession?
“For the insurance payout, Clara,” she spits out, wincing at the small movement of the bat. “So I could get money. It’s the actual cash value at the time of the car’s disappearance, you know. Nearly three thousand dollars, I assume, which isn’t much, but it’s something. It’s more than I get from the agency for a month’s worth of work. Cooking for your folks, cleaning up after Louisa, wiping her ass, all the while being called an idiot. Don’t you think I deserve this?” she asks, though I can’t make sense of it, what that payout has to do with Nick’s death. Did Nick know she planned to claim the car stolen to take money from my parents? Did he confront her about it, and for this reason she drove him off the side of the road and into a tree?
