*
That night I don’t bother going through the motions of climbing into bed, of closing my eyes, of fooling myself into believing that sleep is within reach. Sleep is not within reach. I tuck the children into bed and sit instead at the breakfast nook with a cup of tea. Beside me is Nick’s phone. I’ve never been one for snooping, and yet I press in his password and begin scouring all the information I can find on the device. I gaze through his calendar searching for dates with Kat; there are none. I check his call log, I read his emails for sappy notes to and from Kat. Again there are none. I check his internet browser, wondering what I might find among his most recent searches, and as I do, three windows load, one bearing basketball scores, and another for the Chinese restaurant where Nick would have eaten his final meal, the restaurant menu loaded onto the screen. But it’s the last one that knocks the breath from my lungs.
A search for suicide statistics among dental professionals. At this I gasp out loud, dropping the phone from my hand. Suicide statistics. Dental professionals. Nick.
It’s true then, I reason. Nick took his own life, and he did it with Maisie in the back seat. He risked our child’s life, and suddenly I’m not only sad but also completely incensed. He nearly killed my child. All other possibilities go scurrying from my mind: Maisie’s suggestion of foul play, the ridiculous idea that Nick gave in to the whims of a four-year-old child and sped recklessly at her suggestion. Of course that couldn’t possibly be true. Nick panders to Maisie, yes, and yet he’s far more commonsensical than that. Far more commonsensical, and yet also desperate. Desperate enough to kill himself. But why? It must have had something to do with Kat, I reason. He was stricken with guilt, or maybe she threatened to tell me about their love affair if he didn’t leave me. He tried to pay her off, perhaps, with the life insurance payout, but even that wasn’t enough for Kat. The only way out was suicide.
Kat admitted as much at the park. She said that there was more she had to tell me, but I said no, that I had an appointment, that I had to leave. She was going to tell me about their affair.
It’s clear to see now that there was never a bad man.
Nick was the bad man. Nick did this.
The tears fall freely from my eyes as I reach for my laptop in an effort to quell the thought, to not think about Nick intentionally plowing into a tree at the side of Harvey Road, to not imagine Maisie dead like Nick. I open my laptop and pull up my mother and father’s account on the bank website, to be sure they’re not in any sort of financial distress. My father is far too proud to tell me if he’s having money trouble, but after the missing check and the bounced check, I have to know if he needs help. With the sting of Nick’s betrayals, he’s all that I have left. I type in the log-in and the password and the account opens before my eyes. At seeing a balance of over a thousand dollars, my immediate reaction is relief. I exhale heavily, not aware until that moment how long I’d been holding my breath.
If I wasn’t facing a sleepless night, that might have been the end of it. But as it is, I have nothing better to do with my time than to sip tea and stare at the clock until morning finally comes, and so I start scouring the statements in reverse, taking note of weekly cash withdrawals, all for three hundred dollars. Some months the account shrinks to near nothing before the pension check arrives and the rent payment from Kyle and Dawn. My father is old-school, as many men of his generation are; he likes to carry cash. That much I know, but a weekly allowance of three hundred dollars seems like a lot of money to have on hand. What is he spending three hundred dollars on each week, twelve hundred a month, over fourteen thousand dollars a year?
But that’s not all.
Scrolling backward, I find a payment made to a local jewelry store in excess of four hundred dollars, nearly two months ago. Two months or eight weeks. I’m overcome with the strangest sensation of déjà vu, thinking only of the receipt to the very same jewelry store tucked away beneath Nick’s undershirts in the dresser drawer. The receipt for a four-hundred-dollar pendant necklace. In the moment I can’t be sure that the dates of purchase are the same, or that the value amount is identical down to the penny, and yet it seems far too analogous to be a coincidence. My mother doesn’t wear much jewelry, nothing other than her engagement ring or items with sentimental value, such as her mother’s wedding ring. My father tried giving her a string of pearls once when I was a teenage girl, Tahitian pearls that most certainly cost him a lot of money, but my mother was too penny-wise for such a thing and made him bring them back. I felt sorry for him, remembering for years to come the pained expression on his face when my mother scolded him for the gorgeous string of pearls, never once saying thanks or acknowledging the generous gift.
But now, knowing this, I find it impossible to believe that my father spent four hundred dollars at the jewelry store on my mother, fully aware of her antipathy toward it, and yet maybe he’s taken advantage of her dementia to spoil her rotten with flowers and jewelry, and other things she’d pooh-pooh were she still of sound body and mind.
But, no, I realize then. That can’t be. My father is far too practical of a man for this.
And that’s when the suggestion starts to gnaw at me, that Nick has somehow used my father’s credit card to purchase this necklace. Nick was in some sort of financial crisis, that much I now know. But was he in enough financial crisis that he had the nerve to steal my father’s credit card and buy a necklace for Kat with it? Had Nick been panhandling money from my father, or just outright stealing it? It’s the latter, to be sure. Nick was stealing from my aging parents. I fill to the brim with embarrassment and shame as well as anger. It reaches a boiling point and begins to overflow.
Not only has Nick wronged me, but he’s wronged my family, as well.
My father was right all along. Nick could only bring me down.
It’s nearing one in the morning when an inconspicuous knock comes on the kitchen window. At the sound of it, I leap from my skin, goose bumps forming on the flesh, the hairs of my arms standing on end.
The breakfast nook lines a bay window. It’s surrounded by glass on three sides. The noise is jarring like a shock of electricity jolting through my body. My first instinct is to blame my imagination for it, but then it comes again, far less inconspicuous and more pronounced this time, the heavy smite of knuckles on glass so that my heart picks up speed. Harriet’s heavy head rises from the floor, and her ears stand at attention. Harriet heard it, too.