Or did he? Is it possible? I pause to wonder, latching on to the wooden table for support. Nick had been off in those days before his death, jittery and jumpy and on edge. I asked him about it; I noticed. He blamed fatigue, as did I. As my belly swelled in those final weeks of my pregnancy with Felix, it became near impossible for either of us to sleep. The charley horses were relentless, waking us in the middle of the night, those stabbing leg pains that forced Nick to massage my calves at 1:00 and 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. Maisie, anxious of the new arrival we assumed, stopped sleeping well, too, consciously or unconsciously worried that the baby would soon steal the show, and our love for her would be divided in two. The fatigue was wearing heavily on us all, and with Felix’s arrival we were grateful for the pregnancy to be through.
In those days leading up to Felix’s birth, Nick was a bundle of nerves. Two times he snapped at me, which was unusual for Nick. He raised his voice, he yelled, and I yelled back, calling him a name that now I wish I could take back. Stop being an asshole, Nick, was what I said. You’re being an asshole. I wish more than anything that Nick was here, standing before me, and I could take it back. I want to reach out to him instead of the way I’d petulantly pulled away, wrenching my arms from his as he tried to hold me in vain. I could hold a grudge like no other.
And now I wonder: Was it me? Was it my fault? Did I send him into the arms of Melinda Grey?
It was so unlike Nick to lose his temper, but again, I blamed the exhaustion, the pressure of caring for two children instead of one. But what if it was more? There were mental health issues in his family, depression and schizophrenia; we’d discussed these when the decision to start a family was made.
But suicide? I think. No. Not Nick. Never. He had so much to live for, his practice, our family. He never would have taken his own life, not that way anyway, with Maisie in the car. But those with suicidal tendencies don’t always think straight, and they’re gripped with an overwhelming sense of desperation and despair, a frenzied need to make it all go away, to make it stop. I have this sudden vision of Nick, his foot pressing hard on the accelerator with that tree in sight, taking aim on it as he tore down Harvey Road with only one thing in mind: ending his own life. Tears spring to my eyes as I start to cry. Not Nick, I beg. Not Nick. But maybe he was plagued by guilt. Maybe he’d ended his affair with Melinda Grey and she threatened to tell me, and he could see no other way to remedy the situation other than by taking his life.
And then, the woman on the phone says, interrupting my thoughts, “Or homicide,” explaining, “sometimes in the case of homicide there’s a delay as the claims representative works with the police department to ensure the beneficiary isn’t suspected of the policyholder’s death.”
The tears stop, and I become immediately defensive. “I didn’t kill my husband,” I say.
“I didn’t say you did,” she says. She asks me for the policy number and I tell her. She’ll need to send me a claims package, which will detail everything they need from me to complete the request. And then, from the other end of the line comes silence, as this woman no doubt types the policy number in and waits for the computer to think. But it goes on for far too long—that dreaded spinning pinwheel on the computer screen—and then the woman asks for me to repeat the policy number again. She’s typed it in wrong, and the computer has doubtlessly told her as much. And so I repeat the policy number again, slower this time so she will type it in correctly, but again my words are followed with silence.
Far too much silence that I find myself growing quickly concerned.
“Is something wrong?” I ask.
“That policy has been canceled, ma’am,” she tells me, and I’m overcome with sudden and overwhelming dolor that makes it hard to breathe.
“What do you mean?” I ask. “That’s impossible,” I say, but I think that it’s not impossible, that the dental lender has beaten me to the punch and that they have taken everything, my share and theirs. They’ve repossessed their loan from the life insurance meant for me. How can that be? I’m ready to fight for what is mine, to hire a lawyer and sue, but then, from the other end of the telephone line, the woman explains to me that four weeks ago—at which she rattles off some random date back in May—Nick canceled the life insurance policy. Nick did this; not the dental lender. The funds have already been paid out.
“That can’t be,” I stammer, as I imagine Nick filching all that money he’d been squirreling away to protect the children and me should he die. “There must be some mistake,” I say, my heart beating quickly, realizing that now, just like that, Nick was dead, and Felix and Maisie and I had nothing. Absolutely nothing. A house—unpaid for and still owned by a bank that Nick sent checks to each month—a mediocre college savings fund and debt. More debt than I could ever imagine, and growing daily at a substantial rate.
I tell the poor woman on the other end of the line that she must be wrong, my voice shaking and quickly losing control. I say that certainly she’s made a truly asinine mistake. I say it three times, my voice getting angrier and more demanding each time. I ask to speak to someone else, to anyone else, to someone who’s in charge. And when that someone comes on the line, I tell them how stupid that first woman was, and how they need to help me find my husband’s life insurance funds now.
Now, I say it again just in case he misheard the first time. Now.
“The policy, ma’am,” this man states point-blank, his voice annoyingly composed and not bothering to apologize for the first woman’s incompetence, “has been canceled.”
“You’re wrong,” I say, but he assures me I’m not. “I’ll prove it,” I say to him self-righteously, as I pull up the account online to see for myself, so that I can snap a screenshot and send it to him somehow, an image that shows the available funds in Nick’s life insurance policy.
But instead I discover that the policy has indeed been canceled and the funds surrendered to Nick. My heart stops beating; my head spins. My hands become sweaty and clammy on the keyboard. I try hard, but I cannot breathe. Breathe, Clara, I tell myself. Breathe.
What did Nick do with the money, and why?
Nick has left me, and he has left me with nothing.
I hang up on the life insurance man.
I can’t focus on this now. There are questions, more questions. So many questions. I will find a job, I will ask my father for help, I will beg Nick’s parents for a loan. But why did he cancel the policy and squander the money away for himself? I have to know. Did it have something to do with Melinda Grey? I pull up a search engine and type her name in one more time, but this time, in addition to the social media sites I found earlier today while sitting in the front seat of my car, I scroll further down the hits and discover something I failed to see this afternoon. It’s Melinda Grey’s name there on the local police blotter, an entry dated many months ago. Melinda Grey, it reads, of the three hundred block of Parkshore Drive, was taken into custody by the Joliet Police Department on charges of possession of a controlled substance. And there is a mug shot, one quite unlike the imagined profile photo of the woman in the bikini and sarong, but rather one with thinning hair and blemished skin and depressed eyes, a woman older than Nick by a decade or two, with whom I couldn’t possibly imagine he’d be having an affair. She isn’t attractive in the least bit, and yet Connor told me as much. He told me Nick was having an affair.