At seeing this, my breath leaves me. Though I try, I can’t avert my eyes. I’m lost in a state of hypnosis, no longer feeling the chair beneath my frame. I’ve gone numb, paralyzed, frozen in time. The room pulls away from me so that it’s only me and the video, the video and me, as I’m teleported to the side of Harvey Road on the afternoon that my husband died.
“Shall we continue?” the detective asks, his words muddied as if I’m swimming in water, overpowered by violent ocean waves, drowning. His hand reaches out to pause the video, and it’s a gut reaction when I swat it away, my hand chafing his.
“Yes,” I say with conviction, my voice staid. “Let it play.”
This is the moment I find everything out. This is the moment I will know who killed Nick.
Beside me Detective Kaufman leans back in his chair and folds his hands in his lap. He watches me, though I’m unable to meet his eyes, finding myself transfixed by the green grass and the concrete, a scrap of refuse that quivers in the humid breeze.
And then a vehicle enters the scene.
It’s black, and my mind thinks of Maisie and her fear of black cars. It comes hobbling down the road quite slowly, and Detective Kaufman explains to me that they took the liberty of slowing down the clip so that it was easier to see. “That car,” he says as he points to the black vehicle now taking center stage, “was likely speeding,” though as the car approaches the bend, red lights illuminate on the tail end as the driver steps on the brakes to slow, rounding the corner and disappearing from the lower corner of the screen.
My eyes bound back toward the opposite corner, waiting for Nick and Maisie to appear, followed closely by the person who killed Nick. I envision my mother at the helm of her black Chevrolet Malibu, hunched white-knuckled over the steering wheel, feet likely barefoot or forced into the pair of suede slipper clogs, right leg depressed on the gas, trying desperately to get home.
I exhale long and slow, unaware of how long I’ve been holding my breath until I start to feel light-headed, carbon dioxide collecting in my blood thanks to a shortage of oxygen. My breathing is labored, but Detective Kaufman doesn’t notice. I am the only one who knows.
A sliver of red appears at the edge of the video, and I gasp. My car, which Nick took that day to ballet. “We can take a break if you need,” the detective offers, but I say no.
“Let it play,” I say.
The car moves at a snail’s pace along Harvey Road. At least that’s the way it seems to me, though again, the video has been slowed, and Detective Kaufman tells me that already Nick was likely driving fifty miles per hour or more. “He was trying to get away,” I say, but the detective doesn’t say yes or no. The dimensions of the video are wide, encapsulating nearly forty feet before the bend. Breathlessly, I wait for my mother to appear as Nick and Maisie roll into full view. Nick is there, just a silhouette of him blurred by the low quality surveillance video. I lean forward in my seat. I reach out a hand to graze my husband’s profile one last time before he dies.
In this moment, did he know he was about to die?
Nick is there. Maisie, too. And there is the oak tree, tall and portentous at the corner of the bend. There are signs of warning, noting the hairpin turn up ahead. Bright signs, a blatant yellow, impossible to miss, set beside an advisory turn speed sign that the detective points out for me, explaining that this sign dictates a twenty mile per hour speed limit around the curve. The angle of the turn is tight, easily exceeding ninety degrees.
But where is my mother? Where is the black Malibu? She should be here, hot on their heels well before Nick ever reaches the tree. My eyes scan the video, but there is no Malibu. My mother isn’t here. “Where is she?” I ask the detective.
“Where is who?” he asks.
“My mother,” I say, but he only stares questioningly, saying nothing.
The black car has come and gone. All that’s left are Maisie and Nick as the car dips into a pothole and then comes rocketing back out, the performance tires straddling that solid yellow line that’s not meant to be crossed.
As the car descends upon the turn, it slides sideways, leaving behind black markings on the concrete, the tires’ tread imprinted at once across the street. There is no one behind Nick, no one beside him forcing him from the road.
It’s only Nick.
Nick with his history of driving too fast.
There’s a last-ditch effort made to slow the car, a burst of red brake lights, like an iridium flare in the nighttime sky, that comes and goes as the car lifts off from the earth and strikes the tree with so much force the tree itself staggers, losing leaves, bark getting shorn from its trunk.
And then all is quiet. All is still.
“I don’t understand,” I utter. I click at keys at random on the laptop screen, certain I’ve missed something. I need to see it again. “This is the wrong video,” I say. There’s been a grievous mistake, and this car on the computer screen is the wrong car, another red car that also ran into the same oak tree, another driver who suffered a most gruesome death at the hands of that tree. “There should be another car,” I insist, demanding to know. “Where is the other car? Where is the car that pushed Nick from the road?” I urge, telling him how this is wrong, all wrong. How he’s made a truly awful mistake.
But there are close-up snapshots, it seems. Snapshots pulled from the video feed and enlarged so that I can see. The license plate on the rear of the car. My license plate.
An image of Nick, face obscured by glass.
Detective Kaufman plays the video again, but this time it isn’t in slow motion. This time it’s at full speed. The red car comes tearing down the road all alone, losing traction as it skids around that sinuous turn, going airborne, flying into the tree. There is no other car around, no one following him, no one pushing him from the road. No bad man.
The detective’s words come to me.
“It’s as I’ve said all along, Mrs. Solberg. Your husband was driving too fast. He took the turn too quickly. I’m so sorry for your loss,” he says, gathering his things to leave. But before he goes, he says to me, “There are grief counselors. Bereavement counselors. Someone who can help you find the closure you need,” as if he can read my thoughts, as if he knows exactly what I need. And then, with a pat to my shoulder, he’s gone, and it occurs to me that Detective Kaufman was right all along. He told me long ago what happened to Nick, and I chose not to believe him, but rather to spin a different narrative myself based on lies and other fallacies.
This was never about Nick. It was about me.
EPILOGUE
CLARA
Morning rises. A new day.