“Connor,” I say, and he steps inside, wrapping his arms around me and pulling me into a warm embrace, and it’s there, in his arms, that I close my eyes and press into him, allowing myself to believe for just one split second that I’m in Nick’s embrace, that it’s Nick’s arms that hold me tight.
“Clara,” he says.
I’ve known Connor for half a dozen years, Nick’s dental school friend turned employee. But Connor was never quite an employee to Nick but rather a partner, one he collaborated with about patient care as well as business expenditures and what to get the office ladies for the holidays. Before we had kids, Nick and I shared many double dates with Connor and whatever girl he was dating at the time, but after Maisie was born, that type of lifestyle—basement dance clubs and parties in rooftop bars—no longer fit the bill and Connor was left going stag. Connor doesn’t have children of his own; he doesn’t have a wife. He’s the perpetual bachelor, abounding with good looks and charm, but lacking in commitment. He was engaged to a college sweetheart once, a woman for whom he would have gone to the moon and back, as Nick has told me by way of Connor’s drunken admission. They planned the wedding, church, hall and all, and then she changed her mind, having met some other man the night of her bachelorette party, breaking Connor’s heart. Nick and I often reasoned that never again would he pop the question to anyone, no matter how in love he was. As the saying goes, once bitten, twice shy.
I draw away from him and watch as a handful of bugs let themselves in through the open front door, making a beeline for the chandelier that hangs above us, a Medusa type contraption with chrome light bulbs twisting out like the snakes of her hair. I close the door, and Connor follows me to the kitchen, ruffling the hair on Maisie’s head as we pass through the living room; she is so intent on her cartoons that she hardly notices, though from the corners of her sleepy mouth I detect a smile.
The lighting in the kitchen is dimmed. Dinner dishes remain in the kitchen sink, our uneaten meals evident as the food hardens and grows cold in the red glazed bowls, chicken soup warmed in the microwave from a can. It’s the best that I can do. Neither Maisie nor I could eat it.
“I should have come sooner,” Connor says, eyeing the leftover food, the guilt in his voice tangible as he leans against the kitchen sink, pressing his hands into the pockets of his jeans. But I shake my head and tell him no. The last thing I want is for Connor to feel any sort of guilt for not coming to see me sooner. He, too, has been grieving.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say, reaching into the refrigerator to snatch one of Nick’s old beers from the door, handing it to Connor though he never asks. I crave a glass of wine, just a few ounces of Chardonnay to help blur my sensibilities and make me indifferent and numb, but knowing the effects of alcohol on a breastfeeding infant, I make the decision to abstain.
“None for you?” Connor asks, but I shake my head and tell him no. He runs his hand through his hair, making the strands stand on end. He snaps open the beer with a bottle opener and drinks in a mouthful. “How have you been holding up?” he asks, though I don’t need to tell him. The bags beneath my eyes say enough, that and the swelling and redness, the fact that I haven’t slept for more than two hours at a time since before Felix was born, something that was only exacerbated by Nick’s death. I can no longer blame Felix for the lack of sleep. Now I blame Nick.
“I’ve been having trouble sleeping,” I confess, and Connor says, “Me, too,” and it’s only then that I see the dark circles beneath his eyes like mine. His skin looks sallow, jaundiced; he’s anxious and strung out. His eyes drift throughout the room from the stove top to the travertine tile, as if searching for Nick, finally settling on the beer in hand. He avoids my gaze.
“I remember the day I met Nick,” he says while picking at the wrapper on his beer, pulling it off in tatters, a pile of them gathering in his hand. His voice is quiet, subdued.
He goes on to tell me about the first time he and Nick met, crossing the campus to a shared class. It’s a story I’ve heard before, though only ever from Nick. They were in dental school, slowly chipping away on the many hours of labs, lectures and clinical practice before they’d be given a degree. They’d never spoken before, but the class was small, twenty students at best, and Connor had his eye on some girl, a brunette who also happened to be Nick’s lab partner. It was the reason for his introduction, the reason they became friends. Over some girl.
After graduation, Connor got a job working under an experienced dentist in town while Nick went into private practice. For a couple years it went on this way, until Connor’s ever-increasing dissatisfaction with his job got the best of him, and he quit to come work for Nick.
“I haven’t even begun to think how I’m going to support myself,” I admit to Connor. Since Nick’s death, I haven’t yet sorted through the mail, too terrified to see what awaits me there. The envelopes I pull every few days from the mailbox get tossed to a pile on the floor just inside the front door. Bereavement cards, mostly, those bearing their With heartfelt sympathy and May you find peace and solace sentiments, but also bills. Estimates of Benefits from the insurance company already telling me which of Nick’s hospital expenses they will and will not pay. A notice from the library of fourteen picture books that are a week overdue, each costing me five cents a day so that every day I tally up another seventy cents for the library, and still I can’t get myself to return the books. I haven’t the energy for it. Bills, bills and more bills. Catalogs for items I can no longer buy.
I had a savings account once, nothing extravagant, but an adequate savings account, money set aside for a rainy day, but we ended up putting each and every penny into Nick’s practice. We’d see the money back, he said, and promised me it was worth it. Had I told my father this he would have said no, but I took Nick’s word and invested every cent. The practice was Nick’s dream. Who could refuse a man his dream? Not I, said the fly. And so I said okay, and handed over all my money so that Nick could fulfill his dream while I set mine aside. My own photography studio. That was my dream.
Even our home is a money pit, constantly in need of repairs or renovation. The only thing left I have of value is the dental practice.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I confess to Connor, “about the bills. The mortgage. The hospital payments. Car payments. Saving for college, Maisie’s wedding. How will I afford health insurance?” I ask, thinking of Felix and his well-baby checks every two months, all running over with pricey vaccines. Without waiting for an answer, I say to him, “I can look for a job, but if I work, who will watch Maisie and Felix? How will I ever afford child care?” knowing my father is out of the question. He’s too busy caring for my mom, and an in-home nanny or a day care would cost me nearly five hundred dollars a week. “The dental practice,” I say to Connor, “it’s the only thing I have left.” But a dental practice is nothing without a dentist. Without Nick here, the practice is meaningless.
A look of confusion crosses Connor’s face. “You don’t know?” he asks, and I implore, “Know what?”
But he doesn’t answer right away. He drinks his beer, three long, slow swigs while I wait for him to reply. “Know what?” I ask again as he sets his finished beer on the countertop, and I reach into the refrigerator for another one.
“There have been some layoffs,” he says in a tight-lipped way, as if he doesn’t want to say the words aloud, as if he wants to sugarcoat them like he’s speaking to a child. “Nick had to let some people go.”
But I shake my head and tell him that I didn’t know. “Who?” I ask and, “When? Why?”
“A month ago, maybe more,” he says and my heart sinks. It slides from my chest and plummets somewhere down to my stomach, where for a single moment I think that I will be sick. I grip the countertop, my knuckles turning white. Why didn’t Nick tell me about the layoffs? I imagine the ladies who work at the front desk, Nancy, with her predilection for hot cocoa with mini marshmallows, and Stacy, a math wiz, matter-of-fact and thorough; she’s a crackerjack with the bills. Are they gone? Have they been fired? And what about the hygienist, Jan?
“Financial trouble,” he tells me, and I sharply inhale, my fears overwhelming me as I wonder desperately about all the things I don’t know. Nick paid the bills; he handled the finances. I handed them over willingly and without question when we were married and turned a blind eye to all fiscal matters. I could barely compute simple math; I wasn’t good with numbers. The last thing we needed was me paying the bills.
“Why wouldn’t Nick tell me?” I wonder aloud, and Connor shrugs his shoulders and says that he doesn’t know. He thought for sure Nick would have told me. And now, standing in the weak glow of the kitchen’s dimmed recessed lighting, I wonder: If Nick could keep this secret from me—if he could go weeks without alluding to financial trouble, if he could lay off employees and not mention it to me—then what else wasn’t he telling me?
What else don’t I know?
* * *
That night Maisie asks to sleep with me. She treads lightly into my bedroom as I tuck Felix into the bassinet, seven and a half minutes after tucking Maisie into her own chambray sheets and pulling the quilt up clear to her neck that way that Daddy does it. Snug as a bug in a rug.
“I can’t sleep,” she tells me, crossing the room where I’ve recently swept the broken picture frame glass, and I ask, “Did you try?” to which she nods her little head so vigorously that hair falls in her eyes. She clutches the teddy bear by a single leg, the deplorable thing hanging upside down. He’s nearly gone blind thanks to Maisie’s unending chewing, the plastic brown eyes about to fall from their place, hanging on now by a single brown thread. I pull back the sheets and welcome her in, grateful that someone is here and I don’t have to spend the night alone. Maisie happily obliges, rushing to the bed and hopping inside, right where Nick should be. She sets her head on his pillow, her body failing to fill the space where his body once lay, his warm arms wrapping me in a cocoon while I slept, a leg tossed across mine, growing heavier in time. The air is imbued with the fresh scent of Johnson & Johnson Baby Wash and the sweltering summer air that eases itself uninvited into the open window and again makes us sweat.
It’s the middle of the night when Maisie wakes up screaming.
“The bad man!” she yowls in a piercing voice, and then, straight on the heels of the first desperate declaration, “The bad man is after us!” she shrieks as my heart begins to dash. She’s crying beside me, sitting upright in bed, clutching the bed pillow as if she believes it is Nick. The tears fall from her eyes like the rushing water of Niagara Falls, urgent, the kind that can’t be slowed down.
I lay a shaking hand upon Maisie’s clammy one, and say to her, “Shhh,” but she pushes me away with so much might that I all but tumble from my side, latching on to Felix’s bassinet for support as it lurches precariously on its stand. Felix, rattled from sleep by the sudden shove, begins to cry, a cry that easily trumps Maisie’s and my own cries. Felix’s cry quickly escalates into a caterwaul as Maisie hides her head under the pillow to try to smother the noise or to hide from the bad man who trails her. I don’t know why it is that she hides, though I can imagine because I, too, want to climb under a pillow and hide.
“What bad man?” I ask loudly, over the sound of Felix, as I slip from bed and slide my hands under the weight of him, lifting him from the bassinet. “Shhh. Shhh,” I croon to Felix now, standing beside his bassinet and trying to sway him back to sleep. “What bad man, Maisie?”
“The bad man,” screams Maisie redundantly, her voice muffled by the pillow. As my eyes adjust to the darkness of night, I begin to see Maisie’s legs kicking persistently at the bed before she pulls them into herself and throws the sheets up over her tiny body. I scrabble around inside Felix’s bassinet for his abandoned pacifier, for something, anything, to silence the insistent sound. He’s upset, scared, maybe even a bit pissed off that Maisie and I woke him from sleep.
“What bad man, Maisie? What man? Tell me about the man,” I beg frenetically as I slide my arm from the spaghetti strap of a tank top and place Felix against my chest. It is not quite time for him to eat. By my count, Felix shouldn’t eat for another hour, and yet the pacifier is nowhere; there’s no other way to stop his screaming than to let him suck on me. As his gums latch down, my breasts begin to protest. The nipples are cracked, the skin dry, riddled with a bloody discharge; my breasts are hard and sore and unimaginably clogged. Like water held back by a beaver dam, the milk refuses to flow at the same pace Felix would like—a trickle rather than a surge, and so he slurps and slurps to little avail, making my chest crack and bleed. How has the nursing been going? Dr. Paul had asked in the exam room, and I’d lied, Just fine, before telling her the truth: the pain, the broken skin, the low milk supply. What I expected was a haranguing on breastfeeding, but what I was given instead was a way out. There are other ways, she told me before listing them for me: infant formula, a breast pump, donor milk.
Maisie won’t tell me about the man, and I want to tell her that she’s wrong, because I’ve spoken to the police and I’ve read the newspaper articles. I’ve been at the scene. They all seem to corroborate the same truth, that Nick’s speeding was the cause of the crash.
“Tell me about the man,” I say again, and when she won’t, I ask Maisie to tell me about the car. She’s told me already that the man was in a car, and I picture him racing after Nick on Harvey Road. “Was it a red car?” I suggest when Maisie says nothing. She shakes her head negligibly; it was not a red car. “Was it blue?” I ask, to which she replies with another shake of the head. “Was it a black car, Maisie?” I ask this time. “Was the car black?”
This time she doesn’t shake her head. Her response instead is a long drawn-out cry, a wolf howling at the moon, as she runs from the bed and from the room, calling over and over again for Daddy. She flees the bedroom in search of some other room where she can hide, the bathroom door still removed from its place and lying on the wooden floorboards, which I trip over in an attempt to catch my four-year-old daughter before the click of a lock bisects Maisie and me. In my arms Felix is no longer pressed to my chest, but now trying to imbibe anything he can find: my nightshirt, his hand, my hair. With a handful of my hair in his mouth, he no longer has the ability to scream.
It was a black car. A man in a black car. If what Maisie says is true.
I drop to the floor before Nick’s office door and ask three times for Maisie to come out. “Please, come out.” On the other side of the wooden pane I hear her cry, and imagine Maisie’s tiny body splayed across Nick’s ikat rug, her tears getting absorbed by the weft threads, the frosty grays with the citron stripes. Or maybe she’s hurled herself over the arm of Nick’s club chair, hugging the tufted back, pretending that it’s Nick.
When she doesn’t come, I make my way out to the garage in search of a nail and a hammer.
I’m becoming an old pro at this.
NICK
BEFORE
Her name was Melinda Grey, and I should have known right away, when she walked into my office some six months ago, that she was a problem patient. We’d talked about them in dental school somewhere in between local anesthesia and oral pathology. Problem patients. You wouldn’t have known it to look at her, for her small size seemed to contradict the barracuda she was. She was a pleasant-looking woman, approaching middle age, with soft brown hair and benign eyes, the kind that made great contact when she talked.
Ms. Grey presented as a phobic patient. She blamed it on an extensive dental history complete with emergency everything—root canals, abscesses, a fractured tooth—and a habit of choosing dentists with a lousy bedside manner because they tended to be cheaper, their appointment openings more readily available than someone like me, who had a calendar full of patients, until I met Ms. Grey, at least, and then suddenly I had time in my day to spare.
Her dental insurance was lousy, which she admitted to me, another red flag. I should have ended our appointment there and had Stacy look into coverage before I did any work, but Ms. Grey was the last appointment of the day, an emergency walk-in, and she was in a great deal of pain. The tooth was decayed; that I could clearly see. It would most likely need to come out. I offered a root canal as an alternative to extraction—a root canal, which would cost her three grand or more with the crown—but she shook her head and said that was more than she could afford. The tooth was a molar anyway, and she didn’t care to save it. By comparison, an extraction wouldn’t surpass a couple hundred dollars at best, and, seeing as Ms. Grey had no plans for an implant and intended to leave a hole in the back of her mouth that no one would see, the procedure would be relatively cheap.
It was a simple extraction. The tooth was completely above the gum line and required only a local anesthetic. I used nitrous oxide to help calm Ms. Grey’s rattled nerves. I lifted and pulled the tooth with my elevator and forceps; I packed the wound. I sent her home with pain relievers, though I made the decision not to prescribe antibiotics because, in my professional opinion, they were overprescribed, a problem that led to antibiotic resistance and a whole host of other bad things. I was strictly opposed to the use of blanket antibiotics. Ms. Grey was forty years old and completely healthy. She didn’t need antibiotics. Still, as always, I told her to keep an eye out for signs of infection: puss or other discharge, the formation of an abscess, fever or excessive pain. I said it out loud, maintaining eye contact so I was sure she heard. “There’s always some degree of pain following a tooth extraction,” I remember saying, perched there beside Melinda Grey on my burgundy stool, unpinning the bib clip from around her neck, wiping the last of the bloody saliva from her lip with a napkin. “What you want to keep an eye out for is excessive pain. Severe pain or swelling in two or three days from now. If you feel like something’s not quite right or if you have any questions—any at all—please, don’t hesitate to call.” And she nodded her head as if she heard.
I told the hygienist to make sure Ms. Grey had my business card before she left, one that listed the office number as well as my cell phone, which I always gave out so that I could be available to my patients twenty-four hours a day. It seemed like the ethical thing to do. I never wanted my patients to feel they were lacking for care. I also told my hygienist to schedule a follow-up appointment for Ms. Grey in one week, so I could be sure the wound was healing as it should be.
Ms. Grey never called. She never returned for her follow-up appointment.
What I failed to realize was that one of my hygienists was out for the day, home sick with a strep throat infection that had already blitzed half our staff, and the other was up to her neck in patients, taking on the workload of two. In the middle of all that chaos she had apparently forgotten to have Ms. Grey give informed consent, signing a simple form that indicated she knew the risks associated with the procedure.
I also didn’t realize it was the beginning of the end for me.
CLARA
A new air-conditioning unit costs upward of five thousand dollars, installed. To have the existing unit repaired—assuming repair is even possible—would cost in the vicinity of one hundred to nine hundred dollars, depending on what needs to be fixed.
“How old’s the unit?” asks the HVAC guy on the other end of my phone line, and I say that I don’t know. He walks me through a number of estimates before I thank him for his time and set the phone down, tallying up the prices in my mind, though not those for the air conditioner. Nick’s wooden casket cost two thousand dollars; embalming, which oddly enough wasn’t required by law, was an additional eight hundred. These are the figures I add up in my mind. The funeral home charged us for near everything, from the preparations of the body—combing through Nick’s blood-tinged hair, dressing him in his Sunday best, a refrigeration fee of fifty dollars a day and more—to a service fee for the funeral director, who was quickly making a killing off my loss. I sprang for the prayer cards, forty bucks for a hundred, with Nick’s handsome face printed on the front in black and white. I thought it looked classy, stately, but Nick’s mother said I should have used color; the black and white made them dated, she said; they made Nick look old, though Nick would never grow old.
The cemetery, too, charged an arm and a leg for the cost of the plot, the cost to dig the plot, the cost of a headstone and the graveside service, for all of us to stand around the uncovered hole and cry. But that wasn’t all. There was still the cost of a hearse to carry Nick’s body from the morgue to the funeral home to the cemetery, the cost of flowers that I didn’t want or need, but were tradition, as the funeral director told me, and so I ordered those, too, sprays of white that filled the church.
The credit card has been maxed out.
I can’t afford to fix the air conditioner or have it replaced. For now we will have to sweat. My father wants to help, he’s told me, with the funeral fees. “Please, no,” I said, laying a hand on his arm. My parents aren’t lacking for money, and yet retirement put them on a fixed income, which my mother’s never-ending medical expenses chip quickly away at. It will be years still until social security and Medicare kick in. But there is money, my father has said, though I’ve told him no. “Please, no,” I said, wanting him to save that money for his and my mother’s needs, remembering the bounced check from my mother’s internist and trying to decide if it was for lack of money, or a simple mix-up with the bank.
Nick’s mother and father have money, but never once have they offered to help.
* * *
In the afternoon Maisie, Felix and I drive to the store. It took great cajoling for Maisie to climb in the car. There were many things she wanted to do apart from grocery shop. A new episode of Max & Ruby was about to begin, she was thirsty, Maisie—who never likes to pee—needed to pee. Three times. And then once inside the car, coaxing her into the car seat and beneath the smothering straps of a five-point harness was another matter, a feat only accomplished after handing over my smartphone with its Candy Crush app. Oh, how Maisie loves her Candy Crush, matching her pieces of candy and swiping them from the screen. With the phone in hand, she almost forgot she was confined to a chair, in the type of contraption that only days ago collapsed under the burliness of a white oak tree.
But for me, the fear was still there.
Maisie’s hand goes to the harness, and I snap at her, “Don’t touch it. Leave it be,” hoping she won’t see the swelling or redness of my eyes. Undoing her own harness has become Maisie’s latest pursuit. She’s discovered that pressing the buttons will undo the whole darn thing and set her free, though her fingers are too small, her fine motor skills too gauche to do it herself. And yet she tries, quite an undertaking for a four-year-old, but something she’ll figure out soon enough. “Play your game, Maisie,” I say so that her mind will go elsewhere and forget about the car seat straps. And it does.
We drive. As we make our way down our street of older historic houses, past the park and the small shops of an upscale suburban downtown and through newer, cookie-cutter homes, the momentum of the car lulls Felix to sleep. Known as one of Chicago’s five collar counties, ours flanks the city to the south and west, one of the fastest-growing counties, an area that added almost two hundred thousand people over the course of just ten years. A Cooper’s hawk sits perched at the top of a utility pole, eyes appraising the fields for its next meal. Maisie sees this and points a finger out the window. “Birdie, Mommy,” she tells me, and then to Felix, who’s sound asleep. “See the birdie, Felix?” I tell her that I see. Felix says nothing.
