Today I don’t drive so far as the bend, though I see it up ahead and I wonder if Maisie, too, will see. Will she recognize this scene? My roadside memorial slopes in one direction, compliments of the wind and the rain. The flowers that I laid before the white wooden cross are scattered now across the roadside, but they’ve also multiplied in number, making it clear that someone else has also been here, leaving flowers at the place where my husband died. Many people, it seems, for the gifts and flowers are profuse. A soggy teddy bear, a cross manufactured from twigs. More flowers. A Chicago Bears cap sits positioned on the top of the white wooden cross, the blue-and-orange wishbone C staring back at me. Connor has been here, Connor who shares Chicago Bears season tickets with Nick, two seats on the thirty-yard line. They spend every other Sunday afternoon at Soldier Field together, August through December, eating hot dogs and drinking beer.
Instead of driving onward toward that bend, I pull into the neighborhood and, before one of the large homes, put the car in Park. Maisie looks up from over the top of my phone. “Where are we, Mommy?” she says, her eyes appraising the homes, seeing a horse off in the distance that catches her eye. A Clydesdale, chestnut in color with white feathering on the legs. I know a thing or two about horses, thanks to a childhood obsession with them. I collected figurines and buried myself in books.
“We’re just going for a walk,” I say now as I remove the double stroller from the trunk and get Felix first and then Maisie situated inside, and put Harriet on a leash.
If Detective Kaufman isn’t going to canvass the neighborhood, I’ve decided I might as well try. Tucked here so closely to the crime scene, I find it impossible to believe that nobody heard the crash or saw the debris lying across the street. Certainly somebody heard something; somebody saw something. I head out like a political candidate barnstorming a community to gather votes, with my dog and children serving as my campaign tactics.
Maisie doesn’t put up too much of a fuss this time—she likes going for walks far more than she does grocery shopping—and as long as she can hang on to my phone, gathering her bits of candy and swiping them from the screen, all is right and well in the world. Her eyes rise from the LCD screen to scan the street quickly, and I make believe I know what’s going on in that mind of hers as she regards the smattering of parked cars, looking for a black car as I’ve already done.
But there is no car here, not so far as I can see.
The morning is quiet and still. In the fenced pastures, horses roam, gnawing on the sodden grass. Harriet cowers; she isn’t brave. I pull on her leash and call for her to come.
The first door I come to belongs to a picturesque farmhouse with a detached garage, lemon chiffon in color with trim the color of rust. The trees in the yard are enormous, and the driveway is long and wide. My troop meanders to the front door, and I turn to Maisie in the stroller, lugging her small frame from beneath the lap belt, and telling her to take my phone under a tree to play. I point to it off in the distance, thirty feet away or more, a tree with scaly brown bark and tiny clusters of flowers, most of which have been knocked to the earth in the storm.
“There’s more shade. You’ll be able to see the screen,” I say, before my eyes trail Maisie to the dogwood tree, watching as she sits down, soaking the seat of her shorts. And then I knock on the door gently, feeling my stomach turn as before me the door opens, and a man appears, middle-aged with a rotund face and thinning hair. It’s gray, as are his eyes. He appraises me, confused.
“Hello?” he asks, and I answer his next question before he has a chance to ask it. “You don’t know me,” I say, as a woman, too, appears at the door, her eyes also furrowed in question. “My name is Clara,” I say to them both. “My husband was killed down the street from here. Just a few days ago. A car crash,” I explain, though from the looks in their eyes, I need not say more. They know who I am.
As I peer off into the distance, I see that bend in the road glaring back and, beside it, the fated oak tree. From where I stand, I’ve got the perfect vantage point. A person could be sitting here on this porch, conceivably sipping from a glass of iced tea in the hanging swing and watching the wreck play out before them like a sporting event, a car or maybe two, hurling down the street at breakneck speed, the unforgiving impact, the air filled with debris; they might have heard the sound of the crash.
“We heard,” the woman says, stepping outside onto the porch beside me. I feel my heart hasten—she heard!—only to be let down again with these words, “We heard what happened, dear. Such sad news. We weren’t home when it happened, but saw it on the news. We couldn’t believe it. Right down the street. Such a shame,” she says.
“What was it you were looking for?” the woman asks me, and I confess, “I was hoping you saw something. That you might have seen what happened,” I say.
She sets her hand on my elbow. It’s warm and kind but also strange, an unfamiliar touch. “The newspaper said reckless driving was to blame,” she says sparingly, and I nod an inappreciable nod and whisper that it’s quite possible the newspaper was wrong. In her eyes there is only pity and doubt. She doesn’t believe me. She believes that I am wrong. “Sometimes seeing is believing,” she says abstractly, and I pull away as she tells me she’s so sorry for my loss, but somewhere deep inside I wonder if she really is.
I collect Maisie from beneath the tree and again we leave, Harriet this time taking the lead.
No one is home at the second home, and though there seems to be activity in the house after that, no one comes to the door. The garage door is open, a child’s bike lying sideways on the lawn. From an upstairs window comes the sound of a guitar. I ring the doorbell, and then knock twice, listening for footsteps to come scurrying to answer my call. And yet they don’t come.
I move on and on. Each yard in the neighborhood must be one or two acres wide. It takes time to walk from one house to the next, on the street because there are no sidewalks here. But that doesn’t matter, because there are also so few cars that travel along this path. The owner of the next home, a thirtysomething woman already outside, stands feeding her Clydesdale a handful of hay, the same Clydesdale we eyed from a distance. She greets me with a smile, and I tell her who I am. “Clara,” I say, “Clara Solberg.” And then I whisper to her about my husband who is dead.
“Can I pet the horsey?” begs Maisie as she pushes herself out of the stroller and takes large strides toward the chestnut-colored horse, hand already extended.
“Maisie,” I say, stopping her advance, but the woman tells me it’s fine. Maisie knows better than to pet a strange animal without asking first. But she did ask, I remind myself. She just didn’t wait for a reply. Typical Maisie, always antsy, always in a hurry, can’t be bothered to slow down and wait. It’s so hard for children to be asked to wait.