“How are you doing?” he asks me as I answer the phone, and I lie and tell him we’re doing fine.
“Running errands,” I say, also a lie as I steer the car in the direction of the park, speaking on the phone while driving, which I know I shouldn’t do. I hear the detective’s words, reminding me that Illinois is a hands-free state. I shouldn’t talk on the phone or text while behind the wheel of a moving car.
But I don’t care. The clock on the car’s dashboard nears eleven o’clock; we are due soon.
“I’m glad to hear you’re getting out and about,” says my father. “It’s good for you, Clarabelle. Keeping busy. It doesn’t help anyone to be home all day, reveling in misery.” He means well; I know this. My father always means well. He has my best interest in mind. And yet the words come out abrasively, like steel wool scrubbing at my heart. I can revel in misery if I so choose, I want to scream. My husband is dead. I can do whatever I want to do. But I don’t say this. I don’t say anything.
“Your mother,” he tells me, a filler for the silence that follows his opening line, “has been asking for you relentlessly. Your name has come up more times than you know.”
“I’m sure,” I say. This always seems to be the case until I actually appear, and then she doesn’t want a thing to do with me. Even with me standing right there, three feet before her eyes, she still begs for Clara, adamantly sure it’s not me.
“It would be nice if you could come by sometime. She would appreciate a visit,” he says, and at this I groan, reminding my father that my mother doesn’t know if I’m here, there or anywhere. When I’m in her presence she doesn’t speak to me; she only eyeballs me like I’m a stranger in the room, some amorphous shape standing in the way.
It wasn’t always this way. The first manifestations of her dementia were slight: driving straight past the gas station on the way to get gas; forgetting to show on the occasional days she and I planned to meet for lunch or coffee or tea. Sometimes she just plain forgot, but other times she couldn’t find her car keys, or she’d found the keys and was driving in circles around town, not able to remember where she was going or how to get there. Twice my father received a phone call from her on some busy street corner in downtown Chicago—and once from a shady area of Garfield Park—the haste of the city pervading the phone lines. She’d come to meet me for coffee in a little hipster coffee shop in the western suburbs, but got confused along the way, hopping blindly onto the expressway and soaring thirty miles in the wrong direction, caught up in the flow of traffic. By the time she found a phone and called, she couldn’t explain to him where she was or how she’d come to be there and a passerby had to get on the pay phone and explain to my father just exactly where she was so he could come lay claim to her and bring her back home.
“I’ll try my best,” I say, the third lie of many, and then my father’s voice softens, and he asks how we’re eating, sleeping, whether or not everything is really okay.
“Have you told Maisie?” he wants to know, and though I consider lying, I tell him no. I haven’t told Maisie about Nick. “When, Clarabelle?” he asks, and I say, “Soon.”
“She needs to know.”
“Soon,” I say, asking then how he and my mother are doing. My father shouldn’t be worrying so much for the kids and me; he has enough on his mind. Though I mailed a check to cover the debt to Dr. Barros, I’m still worried about my father’s financial state, as well as his cognitive one. Is he eating okay, is he sleeping okay, I ask, but don’t want to add insult to injury and mention the bounced check.
“Of course,” he says. “I’m fine, Clarabelle. Why do you ask?”
“I worry about you,” I say, “as much as you worry about me.”
“You don’t need to worry,” he tells me. “Your mother and I are fine. Just take care of yourself and the kids,” he says, telling me how he and Izzy will be taking my mother for a haircut this afternoon at one o’clock. They thought it would help lift her spirit. “She’s been feeling down lately. Depressed. I was going to take her myself,” says my father, “but I don’t know the first thing about hair. Izzy is the expert there,” he says, and I’m just the slightest bit piqued that my father didn’t ask me to come along, though I would have said no, thinking of some excuse as to why I couldn’t go. I envision Izzy’s hip bleach-blond pixie do, and know she was the better choice anyway. I see myself in the rearview mirror. I haven’t combed my hair today.
We end the call, and I give Maisie the phone, but it’s not in her possession for thirty seconds when it rings again, and this time, when I go to snatch it from her, she puts up a fight. “Give it to me, Maisie,” I demand. She clutches tightly to the phone so that I have to reach backward and wrench it from her hands. As I do, a fingernail grazes her hand by accident, and she grips tightly to that hand, crying that it hurts. She accuses me of scratching her. She screams.
But the tantrum doesn’t have a thing to do with her injured hand. She and I both know that.
“Quiet, Maisie,” I say, and then press the phone to my ear. “Hello?” I ask, out of breath, Maisie in the background kicking her feet at the back of the passenger’s chair and moaning.
“You hurt me!” she cries as from the other end of the phone line comes a voice, the staid voice of Detective Kaufman asking me if everything is all right, and if I didn’t know any better I’d think he knew I was intentionally breaking the law, talking on the phone while driving.
“Yes,” I say, though clearly everything is not all right. “Just fine,” I say, hoping he doesn’t hear the car’s engine as we drive on toward the park.
The detective has called to tell me two things. First, the man with the black car, the one with the tribal tattoo and the Budweiser beers—he has an alibi, airtight, for the day that Nick died. He was with his audiologist in Hinsdale at the time of the crash, which Detective Kaufman has confirmed with the doctor’s office.
“Are you sure?” I ask, and he says, “I’m certain of it. You must be mistaken about this man’s vehicle,” at which I peer into the rearview mirror to see Maisie glaring back at me with resentment. She’s mad that I scratched her; she wants the phone back. She wants to play Candy Crush.
“There’s one more thing, Mrs. Solberg,” says the detective. “I was doing a little research, digging up some information. I took the liberty of speaking to a few of your neighbors. I hope you don’t mind. I’ve noticed that your husband has a history of speeding,” he says, and already I know where this conversation is going. Nick has a lead foot; I know. I’ve nagged him about it since the day we met. “Two speeding tickets in the last year, four over the last three years,” he tells me. “He was one more traffic violation away from having his license suspended.”