“Lady is gentle. She loves kids,” says the woman, finding a carrot for Maisie to feed the Clydesdale, while Harriet forces herself between my legs to hide. I find myself trying to make sense of Harriet’s fears on occasion, her angst over loud voices, thunderstorms, creatures bigger than she, trying to put together the puzzle pieces of her life before Nick found her hiding in the back of a kennel, incapacitated, her legs unable to move. She was terrified, trapped inside one of those high-kill shelters with startlingly high euthanasia rates, where cats and dogs sat awaiting their time. Death row. It was only a matter of time before someone injected her with a heavy dose of sodium pentobarbital, or would have had Nick not found her in time. I rub my hand gingerly over her head; she was Nick’s dog, not mine.
But now she’s mine.
And now, with Maisie distracted, her hand moving gracelessly up and down this horse’s hair, making it stand oddly on end, I ask this woman whether or not she saw anything, whether or not she heard anything, whether or not she was home. What I want to ask specifically was whether or not she saw a black car, lying in wait perhaps to pounce on Nick from behind the trees or tucked away on a narrow drive, concealed by leaves. But this I don’t say.
“I was home,” the woman tells me, and, “I heard the crash. It was just—” and she pauses, closing her eyes, shaking her head, and says to me, “awful. That noise. But,” she says, “I didn’t see a thing,” and she leads us all to her backyard, where I can clearly see the red wood of a neighbor’s barn smack-dab in the way, obliterating the line of sight. “I looked, don’t get me wrong,” she says. “I wanted to know what had happened. I thought about getting in the car and driving around the block. I was curious,” she admits sheepishly, adding on, “and of course concerned—but then the sirens came, ambulances, fire trucks, you name it, and I knew I would only be in the way. Help was on the way.”
“Thank you so much for your time,” I say as I gather Maisie and we prepare to leave. I say my goodbyes; she says she’s sorry for my loss. Everyone is sorry. So very sorry. But they’re also relieved it’s happened to me and not them.
It goes on like this for three more homes—they were home, but nobody saw a thing—and at the fourth house, the house is quiet. The lights are off, the garage is down, a delivery sits there on the porch, sopping wet from last night’s squall. Janice Hale, the address label reads, a cardboard box bearing a Zappos logo. Janice Hale has ordered new shoes.
I move on, knocking on the door of the next home, though no one comes, and by now I’m so far away from Harvey Road, it feels futile anyway. I turn to leave, but before I’ve taken three steps away I hear a voice, a woman yodeling at me, “Yoo-hoo.”
I turn to see a window forced open, a face pressed to the fiberglass screen.
“Can I help you?” she asks as Maisie moves closer to my legs in fear. In the stroller, Felix sleeps, peaceful in the warm summer sun. Soon he will need to eat, though I’ve prepared for this, toting a diaper bag with bottles and formula and distilled water as the parenting websites told me to do.
“You’re looking for Tammy,” she assumes. “Tammy’s working,” this woman says, hacking into the palm of a hand. I don’t bother to ask who Tammy is. In the other hand, she wields a cigarette, the end burning an amber red. The smoke drifts out the window to Maisie and me, who also coughs, an exaggerated cough, but still a cough.
“Go play,” I tell Maisie, ruffling the hairs on her head and gently shooing her away.
“When will she be home?” I ask.
“Tomorrow sometime, I assume,” this lady tells me. “She’s on reserve, you know?” Though, of course, I don’t know. “Had to fly out to Arkansas a few days ago, or something like that. Alabama. I can’t say for sure. I never know where she is, if she’s up or down anymore, on the ground or in the sky.” And when I give her a confused look, she tells me how much this Tammy hates it, the unpredictable nature of the job and the repulsiveness of those ugly monkey suits, the double-breasted dresses and the uniform scarves, she says. “For as much as she hates it, you think she’d try to find something new.” And then, as if all one concurrent thought, Tammy’s job and me, “Something you need?” the woman asks of me, her voice gruff, manly.
“No,” I say, shaking my head, quite certain I won’t find what I’m looking for here. I can come back, I decide; I’ll come back in a day or two and ask to speak to Tammy. But then I change my mind, not wanting to let an opportunity pass by. As at the other homes, I step closer to the open window and tell this woman who I am and what I want, and leave it at that, waiting for her to fill in the gaps.
“I was at the store,” she tells me, “picking up a carton of smokes.”
And I think that that’s it, her answer is a clear no—she saw and heard nothing, she wasn’t even home—until she says, “I was driving home just after it happened. I called the cops, you know? Saw that car smashed to smithereens.”
At this my heart stops. I envision smithereens spread across the concrete street. Nick as smithereens, small pieces of him everywhere. I gasp. I press a hand to my face so that I won’t cry.
“Was there anything else? Anything else you saw?” I beg, my voice erratic, choking on words. I peer around for Maisie, to be sure that she can’t hear about her father smashed to smithereens. “Anyone else around?” I ask, and she thinks for a while before telling me that she passed a car on the way home, another car, a half or a quarter mile past the scene.
“Normally, it wouldn’t have caught my eye,” she says, and yet it was the way the car swerved into her lane unmindfully, the way she had to veer into the gravel on the side of the road to keep from being hit. “Son of a bitch was driving too fast,” she says. “Probably on their phone, you know? Texting.”
She blew her horn and flipped the driver the bird, she says, and continued on. It wasn’t three minutes later before she came to the bend where Nick was killed.
“Did you see the driver?” I ask, but to this she says no, that the sun was so dang bright that day, she hardly saw a thing.
“What about the car?” I ask. “Can you tell me anything about the car?”
“It was dark,” she says, trying hard to remember. “Something dark.”
I nod my head. “Was it black?” I ask, yearning for an emphatic yes. I need her to tell me this car was black. I need proof, someone other than Maisie telling me what they saw, that this black car is real and not only a figment of a little girl’s active imagination.
And that’s just what she does.
She nods her heads and says yes, it was black. She thinks. Maybe.
“I think it might’ve been,” she says, taking a long drag on that cigarette and blowing it through the screen at me. “I think it might’ve been black,” she says, and I decide good enough. That’s good enough for me. For now it will do.
“Sorry I couldn’t be of more help,” the woman says, but I assure her she’s been more help than she knows.
“Thanks so much for your time,” I say.