“Why?” I implore, speaking louder now, my words angry and aggressive. “What did Nick ever do to you?” I can’t make sense of it, why Izzy, of all people, would want Nick dead. Nick was always so pleasant to her, always so kind. He paid more attention to her than the rest of us ever did. Sweat begins to pool beneath my arms, my shirt sticking to me in odd places, making it hard to move. I pluck the shirt from my skin, fighting for oxygen in the stifling air. I can’t imagine why Izzy would have any sort of acrimony toward Nick, any discord. It couldn’t have been about money because there was no money. Nick and I have no money; we verge on broke. But maybe it was the impression of money—Nick’s private practice and our ample home. Maybe this is the reason why Izzy decided to take his life. My mind then springs in a dozen different directions—an unrequited romantic gesture, hush money, ransom, unfulfilled promises of giving her our firstborn child and more—but none of them make sense. It’s all so farcical; there could be no sound reason why Izzy would want Nick dead.
“Why did you kill Nick?” I demand. “Why, Izzy, why? What did he ever do to you?” The expression on her face shifts, and suddenly she looks confused. She’s a good actress, I’ll give her that, but also a murderer. “How did you do it?” I ask. “Did you trail him to ballet? Follow him home? That’s premeditated murder,” I tell her, and I’m crying now, though I don’t want to be crying, but there are tears snaking down my cheeks as I speak, imagining a run-in between Nick and Izzy, some blowup outside the ballet studio for reasons I don’t know. Did Maisie see? Did she catch sight of Nick and Izzy in a tiff? Or maybe it was something that happened during class, and Maisie, tucked safely away with Miss Becca, didn’t see? I think back to our last conversation, Nick and me on the phone, talking about dinner. Just an ordinary, mundane conversation, like any of the other thousands of conversations we’ve had. He didn’t know he was going to die. Whatever transpired between him and Izzy that day hadn’t yet begun. It happened later, I tell myself, after he left ballet. There was never a bad man. It was a bad woman. Izzy was the bad woman, but thanks to the sun in her eyes, Maisie couldn’t see.
“What are you talking about, Clara?” Izzy asks. “I didn’t kill Nick,” she says. “Nick killed Nick. We all know that.”
“No, Izzy,” I snap. “You killed Nick. You. In this car,” I say as I thrust a hand toward my mother’s Chevrolet. “I have proof,” I spit, telling her Betty Maurer spotted a black Chevrolet leaving the scene of the crime, and how the silver Izzy charm puts her inside the car. The murder weapon.
“Oh, Clara,” she says, this odd combination of indignation and pity. “You’re just as crazy as your mother,” she says, and I take great insult at this, not for my sake but for my mother’s. This is the woman who is supposed to love my mother, to care for her better than my father and I can. “Everyone knows Nick was a lousy driver. He killed himself,” she says, but of course she’s wrong. I can’t let her sidetrack me, as she reminds me how Nick and Maisie were all alone at the time of the accident, how, as Detective Kaufman has already told me more times than I can count, it was Nick’s reckless driving that caused the car to hurl off the side of the road and into the tree. Nick is the only one to blame. “You’re imagining things, Clara,” she tells me. “You’re in denial. You have to accept the facts, Clara, and not let these fantasies mess with your head. Nick killed Nick,” she says. “He’s the only one to blame.”
But, no, I tell myself. It was Izzy. She killed Nick. It’s so utterly obvious. Of course she did. I’ve connected her to the murder weapon. It has to be.
“No, Izzy,” I snap. “You did it. You,” and then I interrogate her, demanding to know why she was in my mother’s car if what she says is true, and why her charm was under the seat. “Why?” I shout, starting to lose all sense of self-control. I reach for a baseball bat leaning against the garage wall, and think of coming at Izzy with it until she confesses, of swooping the bat at her again and again, trying hard to take her down like a group of black-capped chickadees mobbing a hawk.
But then I think of the kids, of Maisie and Felix, trapped inside the stifling car. How long have they been there? Ten minutes? Thirty? An hour? It wasn’t meant to be this long. How long does it take for children to die in cars? I made sure to leave the windows down, but the eighty-or ninety-degree air outside is no better than that which is in the car. I’ve lost track of time, and now I envision them, sweating, dehydrated, convulsing, their breathing slow and shallow as their body temperatures soar to 105 or 106 degrees, and I begin to panic, knowing the wretched death that comes from heatstroke.
Izzy doesn’t answer my questions but instead she screams at me, “You’re such a fool, Clara. Such a fucking fool,” as that sweet, obliging composure starts to wane. “You don’t know anything,” she insists.
“Then tell me,” I insist, stepping toward her with that bat in hand. I don’t mean to do it, but the bat rises suddenly and sharply in my hands, the arch of the bat’s swing now aimed at Izzy. She flinches, though I stop there, never swinging. Merely holding the bat in my hands. A threat. “Tell me,” I say again, and when she doesn’t, I say, “See? You’re a liar. You were in the car because you killed Nick.”
“You couldn’t be any more wrong,” she snaps, and there’s this holier-than-thou expression on her face that I despise. A smug, arrogant mien that I want to displace. “You wouldn’t hit me,” she haughtily assumes, and so I do. I clip her with the bat, that’s all. A mere graze, though from the look on her face you’d think I hit her with all my might. It swells there at the point of impact, on her arm, that’s all, and she grabs for it, mouth agog, saying, “You hit me. You hit me, Clara,” and I nod knowingly, because of course I know that I did.
And like that the smugness of her expression is gone.
“I did,” I tell her, “and I’ll do it again,” as I wind up for another swing. She flinches this time before I even have a chance to think about striking, telling me to stop. Telling me she’ll scream. Telling me she’ll call the police.
“You’re going to call the police and turn yourself in?” I ask, laughing, though it’s not funny at all. There’s nothing funny about it, and yet, I’m laughing. “Please, do,” I say as again the bat descends through the air, meeting Izzy this time in the hip. There’s a noise when Izzy and the bat connect. The hollow clapping of wood on wood, of Izzy screaming in pain.
I’ve hit bone.
“What are you doing?” she squawks, her voice desperate and shrill as her legs nearly give from the force of the hit. She reaches out blindly for something, anything to hang on to, to hold her upright, but finds nothing, her hand writhing through the air. “Go away, Clara. Go away,” she says, voice catching on the last words of her plea so that if I didn’t know better I’d think she might cry.
She’s a good actress, indeed.