As it was, I had an undergrad in business administration plus a DMD. It seemed the logical next step for me. I was in the know, a businessman with a doctor of dental medicine degree. And Clara, with full decorating authority and a liberal budget, agreed. In time. My credit was good enough, and so even though we had a house and cars to pay for, my hefty student loans, securing a loan wasn’t a big deal, even one in excess of four hundred grand, though I had to get life and disability insurance to go with it, money set aside to cover my debt should I die. It was a formidable proposition, and yet, at twenty-six, death wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon. I also put our house on the line as collateral. Though the medical and dental industries weren’t hit by the same recession that hampered other businesses at the time, I had to prove to the lender I wasn’t going to default on the loan.
The space Clara and I picked out for the practice was close to home, less than nine miles, so that my commute was a mere thirteen minutes each way. We paid more to find space on a four-lane highway, on one of the main arteries in town, so that the thousands of cars that drove past each day would see us, Solberg & Associates Family Dental, and that we weren’t tucked off on some country road that no one ever used. Clara agreed. Not right away, no, but in time she agreed, and eventually set to work ordering furniture to fill the waiting room, a wide-screen TV and expensive diversions for the kids: a sand maze and a play cube and a top-of-the-line roller-coaster table, because at the time she was newly pregnant with Maisie and could think of nothing but catering to kids. She subscribed to magazines and got a wire wall rack to hold them all. She insisted we line the floor with hardwood or tile, and I readily agreed, knowing that winter in Chicagoland is replete with slush and snow, and hardwood would be easier to keep clean. Of course it cost more than carpeting, but at a time when we were putting so much into the practice, it seemed so easy just to throw a little more in. And a little more, and a little more. Clara and I were both consumed with this false sense of free money, forgetting somehow that sooner or later we’d need to pay it all back, convincing ourselves that defrayment would come in the form of small payments, and by then business would be booming anyway and money wouldn’t be a concern at all.
Clearly we were wrong.
And now, as I walk into the office and watch Nancy at the front desk, Nancy the receptionist, reprinting a receipt because she’s managed to drip her cocoa on it so that blotches of brown sully the words on the receipt, I wonder how much the additional sheet of paper is costing me, how much for the toner and the electricity that keeps the printer functional, how much I pay Nancy, kind, affable Nancy whom every patient likes, to sip her cocoa and answer the phones and spill her drink on the receipts.
There was a time when I didn’t think about any of it, but now I can’t help but think of it all, every last penny I no longer have to my name. The truth of the matter is, I’m in dire straits and I don’t want Clara to know. I’ve tried to think of ways to turn a quick and easy profit before having to admit to her that the practice is crumbling, our life savings nearly gone. I’ve looked into everything I can think of to make extra cash: dog walking on my lunch break, taking a second job in the evenings and telling Clara that I’ve expanded my hours again, selling my own plasma, selling my sperm. Selling drugs. I could get my hands on all sorts of pharmaceuticals—the perks of being a dentist—and then sell them on the street to middle-class moms. Heck, I have even considered heading to Vegas and betting everything I have on roulette, but the cost of a hotel and an airplane ticket quickly sapped that idea, as well as the need to explain to Clara where I’d been.
And then, in these moments of total desperation, when my self-pity gets the best of me and I can barely see beyond the past due notices to think logically, my mind drifts to the notion of Russian roulette—one round in the chamber of a revolver—wondering if Clara might be better off without me around. It is morbid, which really isn’t me. I like to think of myself as a glass-half-full kind of guy. And yet it is natural, human nature, when the stress gets the best of me, to think to myself, I wish I was dead.
CLARA
“He’s losing weight,” the pediatrician says to me. Her name is Dr. Paul, and I can’t help but wonder if some male ancestor ever had the misfortune of being named Paul. Paul Paul. The room is happy, and there is a panorama of farm life painted on the otherwise white walls: a horse, a pig, a spotted cow.
“Mrs. Solberg,” she says to me, and I force my thoughts to the baby on the baby scale, Felix, who cries from the sudden coldness of the hard plastic tray on which he lies.
“He’s losing weight.”
Dr. Paul asks how the nursing has been going, and I lie and say fine. Just fine. I’ve nursed a baby before. I’m an old pro. And yet I’ve never been a widow before. This is wherein the fault lies, the reason why Felix is not eating well, why he is losing weight. Widowhood is all new to me, and it’s here that I struggle, though I don’t tell the doctor this, but I don’t need to because everyone in the whole entire world now knows that I am a widow, that my husband is the one who took the turn out on Harvey Road too fast, that he crashed the car into a tree, that he did it with our four-year-old daughter in the back seat, that he’s dead.
“Some weight loss after birth is normal,” she tells me, “but Felix has continued to lose weight since we visited him in the hospital. He’s lost over fourteen ounces since he was born. This is of concern,” she says, though her eyes lack judgment. I’m not being criticized. Dr. Paul is simply concerned. She lays a hand on my arm and asks again, “How has the nursing been going?” and this time I tell her.
* * *
I’m decidedly opposed to roadside memorials. It seems a silly way to honor a beloved family member who’s now dead. And yet I find myself purchasing a white wooden cross at the local craft store, and a spray of flowers, burgundy and pink, because it’s premade and on display at the florist shop. I don’t have time to special order; I want it now. The cross itself seems glib. It’s not as if we go to church, not often, though we had Maisie baptized because Nick’s mother said Maisie was bound for perdition if we didn’t. The only times we’ve been to church since are when Mrs. Solberg is in town, when we dress up in our Sunday best and slide into the spartan pew, pretending this is something we do.
But still, I buy the cross to go along with the floral bouquet. It seems the thing to do.
I drive to the scene of the accident, where a red-winged blackbird sits on a thin telephone wire watching me, like a tightrope walker, its gnarled black claws clinging tightly to the cord. Its black feathers shimmer in the late-morning sun, a single patch of red and yellow blazoned upon its side. It sings a brassy, emphatic song, and from somewhere in the distance, perched in the cattails of a roadside ditch, a female returns its call, quieter and less emphatic than the male. They parley back and forth, back and forth again, making plans to meet, and as I stand there on the side of the road, the sun bearing down on me and making me sweat, the car parked less than ten feet away, Felix inside with the window rolled down, the male red-winged blackbird leaves his perch and swoops down into the cattails to find his mate.
The houses in the area reside in one of those green housing developments with their energy-efficient designs, a neighborhood composting program, a community garden. The homes are all faux farmhouses, too clean and modern to be real farmhouses. There are horses in their enormous backyards, beautiful light bay and dapple gray horses enclosed in pointed picket fences, their snouts rising from the grass to see what it is that I’m doing as I return to the car and retrieve a small treasure from the trunk: the spray of funeral flowers, the white wooden cross.
I’m opposed to roadside memorials, but without it, I’d have no reason to be here, to see if what Maisie says is true, that there was another car on the road with her and Nick, one that made them crash.
I lay the flowers on the roadside; I dig away at the earth to make room for the cross. Cars pass by and wonder what it is that I’m doing, but then they see the cross, the flowers, and they know. They drive slower, more thoughtfully. They take the turn with deliberation. They stay in their lane, never allowing their cars’ tires to crisscross the double yellow line and into mine. This roadside memorial serves as a reminder and also a warning: this is what happens if you don’t slow down. You die like Nick has died, losing control of the car along that hairpin curve and slamming into the tree at breakneck speed.
But what if this is not the way it happened? What if what Maisie says is true, that there was another car on the road that fateful afternoon? Everyone loved Nick. He had no enemies, none at all. Whatever transpired on this street had to be the worst kind of luck, a simple act of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. A case of road rage, a drunken driver.
There’s no way that someone set out to intentionally harm Nick.
The tree itself shows signs of abuse. I kneel before the tree, pressing the pointed edge of the white wooden cross into the ground. This isn’t an easy thing to do. The earth is arid and shows no signs of giving in. It’s stubborn like me, as I step on the crossbar with the sole of a shoe and force it into the ground. Another car comes soaring down the road too quickly, sees me, and steps on the brakes so that tiny pebbles come skittering across the street toward my feet.
It’s a tall tree, a firm tree, one with much girth. But still, there is a wound. Bits of bark hang loosely from the tree trunk, the innards of the tree exposed. I run my hands along the rugged bark, feeling suddenly sorry for the tree. Will the tree die?
Behind the tree there is nothing, only cattails and open fields and grass. Wildflowers line the gravel of the street. There is only one tree and the absence of a guardrail where a guardrail should be. The only thing around for Nick to hit was the tree. What are the odds of this?
The homes with their horses stand over a hundred feet away or more, their inhabitants likely not seeing a thing until the ambulance arrived, and then the fire trucks and police cruisers to lug Nick and Maisie from the shattered car. It was only then that the noise and the chaos lured them from their homes to see what the fuss was about. The police didn’t bother speaking to the residents because there were no open-ended questions that needed clarification. Nick was speeding; he took the turn too quickly and died.
But what if that’s not the way it happened? What if Nick was killed?
It’s deserted around here, and though there are homes nearby, I feel strangely alone. Or not alone, but rather like I’m being watched. I turn quickly, but there is no one there. Not that I can see. My eyes rove the surroundings on the other side of Harvey Road, the haggard trees, the mounds of grass. But I see nothing. And yet I can’t shake the feeling, as if I’m the target on the other end of a sniper scope.
Is somebody here?
Was someone here, watching Nick as he crashed?
A slow trepidation creeps under my skin, and suddenly I’m scared. I move quicker now through my tasks. Like an archaeologist searching for artifacts in sand, I examine the concrete of Harvey Road for signs: tire prints in the dirt; black skid marks along the surface of the road; remnants of broken car parts. Something to tell me that what Maisie says is true, that there was another car on this road with her and Nick that made them crash. But there are none. The evidence has been washed away by the daily flow of traffic up and down Harvey Road.
But this I know for sure: the mangled car that was removed from the tree only showed damage at the site it impacted the tree, on the driver’s side. If the car had collided with another car, there would have been evidence of this on the car and on Maisie. Maisie would have sustained much more than a small laceration that has already healed. But Maisie was fine, as was the passenger’s side of the car.
I decide: Maisie must be wrong. I push aside those thoughts of being watched. I’m being silly; I’m not thinking clearly. I’ve let my imagination get the best of me.
Nick was driving too fast. He took the turn too quickly.
It’s Nick’s fault that he’s dead.
* * *
On the way home, my cell phone rings. “Hello?” I ask, pressing the device to my ear as I drive down the highway in an older, run-down part of town, past the cheap motels and adult stores, where I know that one day soon ever-inquisitive Maisie will point to them and ask what they are and what they sell.
“Is this Clara Solberg?” asks the silvery voice on the other end of the line, and I say that it is. “Mrs. Solberg, I’m calling from Dr. Barros’s office, your mother’s internist. You’re listed as an emergency contact,” she says, and at once my breath leaves me, and I ask, “Is everything all right?” envisioning my mother and father with Maisie at the office of Dr. Barros. My mother has fallen again and hurt herself, maybe, or she’s mixed up her pills and has taken too many of the wrong ones.
“Everything’s fine,” the woman assures me. “I’m calling from billing. Just a question on an unpaid bill,” she says, going on to tell me how my father’s check for their last visit with Dr. Barros bounced. “We’ve been trying to contact him before sending the bill to collections. That can be such a headache,” she says. “We left messages at home, but he hasn’t returned our calls.”
It’s so unlike my father, and yet I’m struck with an instant pang of guilt, knowing my father has brushed aside his own obligations to care for mine, keeping me company, making my meals, doing my laundry, watching my children, when he should be caring for my mother and himself.
Money has never been a problem for my father. Between my father’s pension, the rental property and more, he should be making a sufficient income. It will be a few years still until he can dip into social security, but he has been planning for retirement since he was twenty-five. He’s prepared for this.
“It must be a mix-up with the bank,” I tell this woman. “How much was the bill for?” I ask, and she tells me, confirming an address for payment, which I scribble onto a sheet of scratch paper while parked at a stoplight, waiting for the light to turn green.
“I’ll take care of it,” I assure her, begging, “Please, don’t send the bill to collections. I’ll speak to my father,” though I won’t. What I’ll do instead is send a check to the office of Dr. Barros because, after everything my father has done for me, this is the least that I can do. The last thing I want is to make him feel stupid for the oversight, or to make him embarrassed.
Dementia isn’t contagious, I remind myself as I have so many times before, though the first indicators of my mother’s dementia were slight. Could these be the warning signs? Bounced checks. Not returning phone calls.
No, I tell myself. My father is simply preoccupied with my life.
I end the call and instantly the phone rings again. “Yes?” I say this time, fully expecting to hear the same voice on the other end of the line. The receptionist from Dr. Barros’s office calling already to tell me that the check has been found. But it’s not the receptionist this time.
“Did I catch you at a bad time?” The voice is apologetic, and at once I say, “No,” feeling myself soften and relax at the sound of Nick’s best friend, Connor, on the other end of the line, the anguish in his voice as palpable as that in mine. Connor is the only one in the world who loved Nick as much as I did, though in a different way, of course.
“There aren’t any good times anymore,” I confess, and we sit in silence on the phone until Connor breaks the stillness by saying to me, “We don’t have to do this alone, you know?” and I remember then what they say about misery loving company.
* * *
When I get home that afternoon, Maisie is crying. My father has his feeble hands on her shoulders trying to console her, but Maisie won’t be consoled. She turns her back to him, taking two tiny steps away from where he sits. The tears roll unfettered from her eyes and down her freckled skin as she and my father linger in her bedroom, an odd-shaped room with sloped ceilings, a bedroom that is all pink. Hot pink, carnation pink, pink pink. On her bed lies that poor, pathetic bear with its ear all but chewed off. The bed is as Maisie left it last night before she plodded into my room, blaming insomnia for the reason she couldn’t stay in her own bed. Her walls flaunt pricey, custom-made art: a princess in a pink tutu, a giraffe with a rose tucked behind its ear. Her bed is thin and narrow, a spindly Jenny Lind bed, which sags under even the meager weight of my father; it’s draped by a pretty pink tulle canopy, which hides the guilt of his earnest eyes.
He has told her about Nick. At this I fill with anger. He never liked Nick; Nick was never good enough for his little girl, and then years later when she finally arrived, for Maisie. Nick was unemployed when we met, a student hard at work on a dental degree. He was eager and goal-oriented and a hard worker to boot; that’s the way I saw it. But my father only envisioned the ever-growing debt of a doctoral degree, and the complete lack of income while I supported Nick as he achieved his dreams. When Nick decided to go into private practice, and we dipped into money I’d earned doing event and portraiture work—spending my weekends with a camera at the weddings of people I didn’t like or know—to rent a space and purchase dental equipment, my father could hardly contain his disappointment and dismay. That man, he told me of Nick, over four years ago as we cut the ribbon of Nick’s new space, one that would flourish over the next few years, expanding to include a partner and more clients than I could count, will only bring you down, he’d said. And now, standing before him, feeling like the rug has been pulled out from under my feet, I wonder if he was right.
“Daddy,” I say, stepping quickly into the room, towing Felix by the handle of his infant seat, a contraption that must weigh thirty pounds. “What’s going on in here?” I ask, setting the weight of Felix and the baby seat gently to the floor.
But before my father can reply, Maisie cries out with doleful eyes, staring at me in despair, “He’s dead. He’s dead.” And I feel my heart begin to ache, the tears spring to my eyes. My father, too, has eyes that are red-rimmed, though I want to point an accusatory finger at him and say that this is his fault; he is to blame. He had no business telling Maisie about Nick.
Maisie scurries to my side and wraps her arms around my lower limbs quickly and without warning, so that I lose my balance and nearly fall. “It’s okay,” I say mechanically as I stroke her hair while glaring at my father inches above her head. “Everything will be okay.” My words, my motions, are robotic, perfunctory, lifeless.
This isn’t the way Nick would do it. He would drop down to Maisie’s level and gather her in his tender arms; he would say something, anything, other than these mendacities. It is not okay. Everything will not be okay. I’m lying to Maisie; I’m a liar.
“Clara,” my father bleats, an attempt at an apology, but I hold my hand up to him—I don’t want to hear it. This news, this information wasn’t his to share. It was mine.
It’s my father’s fault that Maisie is clinging to my legs and crying.
“Look, Mommy,” Maisie says then, drawing slowly away from my legs. She slips a sticky little hand inside my shaking one and draws me to her dresser, a long white bureau with a mirror. There are things on top of the dresser, many things that Maisie points to at random: a pair of princess underpants, a doll, the stethoscope from a toy doctor kit, a used tissue. There are photographs slipped into the frame of the mirror: Maisie and Nick; Maisie and me; Maisie forced to stand beside my mother, two and a half feet out of reach because she is scared of my mother, as I would be, too, if I were four; Maisie and her boppy, my father, who watches on now not saying a thing.
I step forward and follow the route of Maisie’s finger with my eyes. She points to a jar, one of my old mason jars with holes punctured in the top of the metal lid. I move closer, not knowing why the jar is here or how it’s come to be here.
Inside the jar is a twig, shorn from a tree. It’s a thin twig, a copper brown. There are leaves inside the jar—green leaves, a scrunched-up handful of leaves as if Maisie grabbed on to a tree and tugged—and sheaths of grass covering the bottom of the jar, a deathbed upon which lies a lightning bug spread out on its back, all six inert legs up in the air, its tail no longer sparkling. It doesn’t move.
“We forgot,” Maisie voices to me pathetically, the tears streaming down her eyes. “He’s dead.”
My eyes move to my father’s in silent apology. How this lightning bug has come to live and die in a mason jar inside Maisie’s bedroom, I don’t know, but this is what I know: my father has done nothing wrong.
“How did a lightning bug get inside your room?” I ask, but Maisie’s eyes become shrouded with guilt; her face flames red, and she shakes her head. She doesn’t say and I don’t pry. It seems trivial now, how this bug has come to be here. She still doesn’t know a thing about Nick. For all intents and purposes, Nick is fine. That’s all that matters.
“These things happen,” I say mechanically. “Everything will be okay.”
“When will Daddy be home?” Maisie pleads, wanting someone who can console her better than I can, and I turn away from Maisie’s beseeching eyes and say, “Soon.”
* * *
We bury the lightning bug. We dig a hole two inches by two inches in the ground with the end of a stick and lay the insect inside. Harriet stands in the yard behind us, keeping watch. My father has gone for the day with the promise that he’ll be back tomorrow. “Why, Mommy, why?” Maisie asks over and over again as I dig the hole and lay the bug inside. The bug has a name, or so it seems: Otis. I don’t ask how it’s come to have a name; truth be told, I don’t care. I sprinkle a handful of dirt over the lightning bug’s corpse, grateful that Maisie doesn’t make the easy connection between this grave and Nick’s. “Why are you doing that, Mommy?” Maisie asks as I drizzle the dirt and pat it gently back into the earth with my fingertips. I suggest she find a rock to serve as a marker for Otis’s grave, and again Maisie asks, “Why?” but she scampers off in search of a rock without waiting for my reply, Harriet following closely behind.
* * *
In the evening a knock comes at the door. It’s dark outside, far too late for Maisie to still be awake. And yet she is, sprawled on the couch in front of the TV, watching preschool cartoons because I haven’t the energy to put her to bed. I’m on my laptop in the kitchen, trying to pull up the Chase website in an attempt to access my father’s accounts. I’m thinking of the unpaid bill to the office of Dr. Barros, and wondering if my parents are in some sort of financial distress about which I should know. I try hard to call to mind my father’s password, an odd mix of letters and numbers that’s near impossible to memorize. I try only twice and then give up, worried that after too many unsuccessful attempts, the account will be locked and my father notified. I don’t want to ask him about it for fear of making him feel bad, and yet I have my concerns. What if my father has less money than I think? What if my father has less money than me?
At hearing the knock, I go to the door and unfasten the lock. I pull the door open a crack, peering outside, and there find Connor standing on my front stoop in a black T and vintage wash jeans. In his hands are a helmet and gloves; a motorcycle is parked in the drive. Connor isn’t a tall man, standing just a couple inches above my own five-eight height, with brown hair and eyes, the kind that make women swoon. His smile is sympathetic, a contorted smile that’s meant to be both a smile and a frown. His heart is heavy, as is mine, but the half smile proves that he’s trying.
