I stop laughing. “Why were you in the car, Izzy?” I ask a final time, and this time she calls out, voice quivering, any sign of condescension gone, “Mine wouldn’t start,” she claims, “I couldn’t get the damn thing to start, and Louisa had an appointment. Your father wasn’t home because, Clara, he was with you. You. I had to get Louisa to the doctor. We took her car,” she states, though I know a liar when I see one, and Izzy is a liar. Her nostrils flare, she bites her lip, clutching her hip, no longer standing upright but now hunched to the side, suddenly unable to meet my eye.
“You’re lying,” I scream. “You’re a goddamn liar. Tell me the truth,” I demand. “Tell me why you were in the car. Tell me why you killed Nick,” as I toss the baseball bat on my shoulder, a batter ready and waiting for the perfect pitch. And then it comes, apparently, a curveball from the pitcher’s mound, and I strike, getting Izzy in the thigh. She emits a savage sound, something tameless and brute. Unhuman. An animal dying.
“You want to know why I was in the car?” she blubbers this time, eyes locked and steady, bracing her leg. “To get the VIN number. To find the insurance cards. Before I got rid of the car. That’s why, Clara,” she screams, and this time I know she’s not lying.
“To hide the evidence?” I demand, seeing now how Izzy planned to get rid of my mother’s car—to torch it maybe, or sink it to the bottom of a retention pond somewhere—so she could never be connected to Nick’s murder.
But Izzy only laughs at me, a nervous snicker. “What evidence?” she asks, eyes locked on the barrel of the baseball bat. “This car? This old car? I was doing your parents a favor by getting rid of it, something your father should have done long ago. This car is hardly evidence.”
“It’s the car that killed Nick,” I state, wanting to pluck the gravel and the leaf from my pocket and show her as proof that this is the car that killed Nick. “The evidence that puts you at the crime scene.”
“Oh, Clara. Poor Clara. There was no crime scene, don’t you understand? Don’t you get it?” The look in her eye is an odd combination of pity and loathing, hate and disbelief.
“No, Izzy, no,” I snap. “I don’t get it. So tell me,” I snarl. “Tell me, Izzy. Make me understand,” as my knuckles turn white on the handle of the bat, my grip ironclad.
At first she doesn’t tell me. She stands before me, thinking, staring. She isn’t going to tell me, I think. She isn’t going to confess.
I jerk the bat ever so slightly, wondering this time what I should hit: her head or her chest. Which one will hurt more, which one will elicit a confession?
“For the insurance payout, Clara,” she spits out, wincing at the small movement of the bat. “So I could get money. It’s the actual cash value at the time of the car’s disappearance, you know. Nearly three thousand dollars, I assume, which isn’t much, but it’s something. It’s more than I get from the agency for a month’s worth of work. Cooking for your folks, cleaning up after Louisa, wiping her ass, all the while being called an idiot. Don’t you think I deserve this?” she asks, though I can’t make sense of it, what that payout has to do with Nick’s death. Did Nick know she planned to claim the car stolen to take money from my parents? Did he confront her about it, and for this reason she drove him off the side of the road and into a tree?
“But you were in the car,” I insist. “You were driving the car that killed Nick.”
“No,” she tells me, “no. I was in the car gathering the information I needed to call the police and report the car stolen. That’s all, Clara. That’s all. I never even set the keys in the ignition.”
“But the car isn’t stolen,” I say, confused, as the heat starts to get to me, weighing heavily on me, wearing me down. “The car is here,” I insist, pointing to it as if Izzy can’t see it there beside her, the black Chevrolet that ended Nick’s life.
She laughs. It’s the laugh of a narcissist, a high-pitched laugh that rattles my every last nerve. I step toward Izzy again, consumed with a sudden desire to strike her hard. Not merely as a warning or a threat this time, but to shut her up. To make her stop laughing. “It isn’t stolen yet, Clara,” she corrects. “Not yet. Nick had to get in the way of my plan.”
“Nick knew? Nick knew you planned to steal the car?” I insist, putting the pieces together. Yes, that’s it, I think. I was right all along. Nick knew about Izzy’s plans to steal the car, and he confronted her on it and for this reason he’s now dead.
“Oh, Clara. Sweet Clara,” she says in this trivializing way, downgrading me to a raving lunatic. And that’s how I feel in the moment, like a lunatic, like all the answers are just out of reach, floating away like dust particles in the atmosphere. Like Izzy is speaking Japanese, and I have to take time to look her words up one by one, to translate them, to makes sense of what she means, but by the time I find the meaning of her words, they’ve changed course. “Nick got in the way because he died. Because he killed himself. The last thing I needed to do was draw any more attention to your folks with a missing car. I was waiting for all the hoopla to die down.”
“The hoopla? Meaning us mourning Nick’s death?” I ask, and she says yes. Nick’s death is hoopla, a singular term that reduces it to nothing. To an inconvenience. A hassle.
“And once the hoopla died down you were going to get rid of the car?” I ask, making a slow connection. “Then you were going to claim it stolen? For the insurance payout?” and she nods her head, clapping her hands at me, an applause. I’ve figured this out. Except I haven’t. Not yet anyway. It still makes no sense to me why Izzy has taken Nick’s life.
Or am I wrong about this still?
Was it not Izzy at all?
My thoughts revert to my mother, to Theo Hart, to Emily. Maybe it wasn’t Izzy after all.
“It seemed the quickest and easiest way to get my hands on some cash,” she says.
“But the money would have belonged to my father,” I say. “The check would have been made out to him,” I argue, knowing with certainty that when the insurance company did pay out for a pseudo-stolen vehicle, it was my father who would have received the three thousand dollars. Not Izzy. What did Izzy have to gain from getting rid of the black Chevy?
“You’re so naive, Clara. So naive. You and your father both,” she says, and I feel the blood in my veins begin to boil because Izzy can say anything she’d like about me, but she cannot disparage my father. The last thing my father is is naive. “As always, he’d endorse the check and leave it lying around to deposit. And when it went missing, as it no doubt would, we’d blame your mother. Poor Louisa who is forever losing things. Meanwhile I’d be at the bank cashing the damn thing.”
It’s a realization that settles over me slowly like the dawning sun, one faint glimmer of light after the other.
This has nothing to do with Nick.
And then I understand.