I type in Nick’s password—proof, I tell myself as I do, that there were no secrets in our marriage, though my mind is starting to doubt this—and click on the call log to see who he was speaking to at the time of the crash. It’s a 206 area code, one that doesn’t strike a chord with me, and so I open a search engine and type in the number. I picture Nick on the phone, his large, capable hands pressing it to his ear, whispering to Maisie in the back seat reading her book to be quiet, Daddy is on the phone. Hello? I see him ask, and then a moment of confusion passes across his handsome face as the caller on the other end asks for Amy or Natalie or Renata. You have the wrong number, he says, as suddenly that brewing bend in the road is before him and he doesn’t have time to react, but rather takes the turn at a whirlwind fifty miles per hour, spiraling off the side of the road. This person on the phone must have heard him, I think; he or she must have heard the very last words my husband ever said, something irreverent, I’m sure, something profane, though Nick wasn’t one to be profane. But I’m thinking that’s exactly what he would have done as he lost control of the car and went soaring off the side of the road, said something like Jesus Christ or holy shit because that’s exactly what I would have done. That’s what I have to find out; that’s what suddenly I have to know. What are the last words Nick ever said, and did he or she—this person with the 206 phone number—hear over the phone the sound of the car striking the tree; Nick’s head impacting the tempered glass, making it smash; the metal of the car collapsing; Maisie calling out to her father, her desperate falsetto voice begging him to make the bad man go away?
Seattle, I discover, is home to area code 206. So, too, is Bainbridge Island, the city where Nick was born and raised. I’ve heard the stories about the humble little home not far from Puget Sound, less than a block from the harbor, so if he angled his head just right, he’d catch a glimpse of sailboat masts floating above sea. Until they retired, Nick’s mother served as a docent at one of the museums, and his father was an anesthesiologist who took the ferry over to Seattle nearly every day, spending his entire life on call. That’s what Nick has told me. But Nick left Seattle for college when he was eighteen and never returned. It wasn’t that he didn’t like it, but rather that by the time he’d received his dental degree and made the decision to launch his own practice, his parents were gone, retired to a humble little home in Cape Coral, not so unlike the one they left behind save for, of course, the winters and the rain. Their visits with us are limited and always brief, and now, with Nick gone, I’d dare say that the time between visits will continue to expand until they one day dwindle to nothing. Not that I mind. His mother always had someone else in mind for Nick’s wife; no one in particular, just someone other than me. She’s made that much clear.
I have two theories, then, two hypotheses: either the caller was a telemarketer, or someone who misdialed the phone. Nick doesn’t have family in Seattle anymore. Just a coincidence, I tell myself, thinking how Nick hasn’t uttered a word about Seattle in half a dozen years or more. I know nothing about Seattle, other than some tired fact about how it rains nine months out of the year. I fetch the phone and dial the number, waiting warily for someone to answer the call.
“Hello?” a woman says, and for whatever reason I’m discomfited by this, not quite sure what to say. Her voice is soft, delicate, ladylike. I should have prepared something ahead of time. I should have jotted down an idea on a scrap of paper so that I’d know what to say, if nothing other than my opening line. But as it is I can’t speak, so that the woman on the other end of the line must say it again, louder this time in case I’m hard of hearing or downright deaf. “Hello there?”
I clear my voice and try again, and this time words do emerge, but they are halting and inarticulate. “Hello. You don’t know me,” I say too quickly, so it all comes out as one concurrent thought. “I was given your phone number. By the police,” but the words are too quiet, too tremulous, so that she asks me to repeat what I’ve already said. I say it again, louder this time, trying hard to flatten my words and pronounce each syllable at a time. I hear the voice of SpongeBob penetrating the walls of our home, the remote likely in Maisie’s hand and Maisie pushing buttons at random so that SpongeBob and his pals now scream. I hear her giggle, nearly muted by the sound of the TV. It’s been a while since I’ve heard Maisie laugh. “I was given your phone number by the police,” I say again.
“By the police?” she asks abruptly, her voice riddled with confusion. And I say, “Yes,” though it isn’t exactly true.
“Do I know you?” the woman asks, and I can hear her voice transmitted through radio frequencies to me, where I sit at the breakfast nook, a single leg thrumming against the kitchen floor. There’s a sudden reservation to her tone, an immediate doubt. Why would the police possibly have given me her phone number? Who am I and why have I called? She’s nervous and filled with dread. Her mind scans through the people in her life, wondering whether or not everyone is okay. Have I called bearing bad news? Am I the personification of death, the Grim Reaper, coming to steal loved ones from her life?
“No,” I say. “You don’t know me. My husband, you see,” I tell her, my words emerging briskly, “he was in a car crash. An accident, they say. A car accident. But I don’t think it was. A crash, yes, but not an accident.” And then I find that I simply can’t stop myself, and that I’m muttering quickly, telling some woman on the other end of the phone about Nick and Maisie and Detective Kaufman and some black car trailing them down the bendy road, a bad man, or quite possibly a bad woman. I tell her about the horse properties and the white oak tree, somehow or other winding my words back to Detective Kaufman and how the detective told me Nick was on the phone at the time of the accident, at which I shake my head and say it again, less sure this time whether or not it was a crash or an accident.
And at this, she breathes in sharply and lets out a long, slow exhale before saying to me, “Clara,” and I feel the Earth’s axis shift as I lose balance, clinging to the edges of the breakfast nook so that I don’t fall.
She knows me.
Outside, thunder grumbles through the sky, the day’s dank air rising upward to collide with colder temperatures that hover in the atmosphere above. As expected, the rain starts coming down in sheets. The grass needs it, as do the trees, but for a little girl already traumatized by something, of which even she doesn’t know, it’s the last thing in the world she needs. Maisie, from the next room, cries out at the sound of thunder, abandoning SpongeBob to run to me, her hands pressed to her ears to muffle the harsh noise. A dog barks, and it takes some time for me to realize that it is poor Harriet, who I’ve sent outside, now getting pelted by hail and rain.
“I’m sorry,” I say into the phone as Maisie cries, putting my arms around Maisie and holding her tight. “There’s thunder. She’s scared.”
“They say it’s going to be quite a storm,” this woman says into the phone, and as she remarks on the muggy weather and the lack of rainfall, I come to realize that this woman isn’t in Seattle as I’d imagined her to be, watching the orcas swim out on the briny waters of Puget Sound, but rather somewhere close, watching the sun pass from sight as the rain comes down in sheets. Like me.
Again Harriet barks, and this time I rise from the nook as Maisie clings to my hand, begging, “Please, Mommy. Don’t go,” and together Maisie and I step toward the back door, letting a sopping wet Harriet inside. The wind shoves the door into me, and I nearly fall, pressing hard against the weight of it to get the door to close. I turn the dead bolt and follow the dog’s wet footprints inside where she stands before us, shaking her body dry, drenching Maisie and me at the same time.