Not That I Could Tell: A Novel
Jessica Strawser
For Skuk, and all the other strong women who have touched my life
1
Ever wonder what your friends really think of you?
I take a lot of care in my appearance, for instance. I’m a small-town doctor’s wife, so I need to look the part—even if I don’t feel the part. And I have twins enrolled in pre-K at a charter school so obsessed with freethinking it will shove free thoughts down your throat. So I make sure it’s obvious to everyone there what happy, healthy, cherished little people my kids are. I never forget to dress them in their pajamas for pajama day. I always sign up to bring the most elaborate snacks to the class parties. I help other moms in the parking lot when their pumpkin seats jam or their strollers collapse. I make a point of knowing all their names.
You probably think I care a lot about what my friends think.
I don’t.
None of this charade is for them.
It’s no great accomplishment to get someone to believe a lie. It’s not that hard, really. Look at me: doctor’s wife, working mom, good neighbor. You’ve already summed me up, haven’t you? You’re already filling in the blanks.
But whatever you’re writing there, it’s not the truth. And that’s fine by me. It’s easier, knowing you don’t know me at all. Because as long as you believe that what you see is what you get, I get to stay this way. Poised. Devoted. Alive.
2
Everyone’s Favorite Place!
—Tagline of the Yellow Springs Chamber of Commerce
Izzy awoke to a deafening downpour beating on the roof of her little Cape Cod. It reached through the dense fog of heavy sleep, through the punishing pain of the previous night’s overindulgence, and tugged at the corner of her conscious mind just enough to pull it aside and reveal the too-familiar memory of Josh hovering there. In an instant, she regretted it all—the last glasses of wine that had brought on this ache and this haze, the humiliation of having told her new neighbors all they never needed to know about Josh, even the purchase of this house that placed the pounding rain just on the other side of the ceiling that sloped down to meet her bed.
How bad had it been? She squinted into the gray morning light, trying to remember exactly what she’d told them. The details of the later hours of the night were murky. She wasn’t sure she even recalled the short walk home, come to think of it—alarming, though it was just across the street, and Yellow Springs was about as safe as small Ohio towns came. Funny how the brain could hold on to emotions—the warmth of shared laughter and the happy reckless sense of oh, what the hell, why not were still clear to her now—so much more tightly than the precise words or actions behind them. She usually wasn’t one to overdo it on alcohol. But the other women, all moms with young kids, had been so ecstatic to have a night free, even though it was just a gathering around a backyard fire pit, baby monitors in hand—their enthusiasm had been contagious. She remembered Clara, the gracious hostess, leaning forward to refill her glass every time it fell below the halfway point. She must have lost track of how much she was having.
Coffee. She needed coffee. If only there were someone to bring her some.
She pulled a pillow over her head, trying to muffle the rain. It might as well have been pounding directly on her skull.
Normally, she would have chastised herself for wasting a day with a hangover of this caliber, but the downpour ruined her plans anyway. In a phase of her life that had somehow become defined by putting on a good face, Sunday mornings were reserved for slipping away. Her weekly hike was no ordinary trek. She’d discovered the most miraculous convergence of nature and faith in a nearby ravine, and it drew her like a magnet—the need to find peace. But in rain like this, the steep inclines of the trail would be too muddy, too hazardous. One wrong step, and she could be in the river. And no one would know she’d been swept away.
She could think of absolutely no reason to get out of bed.
Residual sadness—that’s all this was. Up until last night’s unfortunate slip, she’d been doing much better about not thinking of Josh. Really. She had. She was here, wasn’t she? Starting over, on her own.
She would allow herself a day—one day only—to recover, in the physical sense and the emotional. Given the ruined-before-they-started plans and the should-have-known-better remnants of last night churning in her stomach, she would consider the rain lucky.
She would make some coffee and climb back under the covers and nurse the throbbing in her head and revel in the luxury of doing it alone. No—undisturbed. That sounded more appealing.
And under no circumstances would she allow herself to imagine how her sister might be spending her own rainy Sunday back home, a twenty-minute drive away in Springfield. How Penny and Josh would awaken lazily in their bed, with the quiet confidence of newlyweds, in the master bedroom of the house where Izzy and Penny had spent their childhoods. How the heavy rain would pool on the back porch, beneath the gutter that was always clogged, and leak in through the cracked weather stripping of the kitchen door. Whether Josh would think of Izzy even once as he tiptoed past her old room, down the worn carpet of the stairs, over the puddle on the linoleum, and to the stove to make breakfast. Whether he was the sort of husband who’d call Penny down to eat, or whether, on second thought, he’d take a tray up to her—and keep her occupied in bed for as much of the day as she’d let him.
She would think of anything but that.
*
“How ’bout that rain yesterday?” Sonny called through Izzy’s open office door by way of greeting. “I almost built an ark, but then I realized I’d be trapped in an even smaller space with my kids climbing the walls. Then I’d really need God on my side to survive the flood!” He laughed at his own joke, and she heard Day join in with one of her signature giggles. They must have walked in together.
“But you only need two of everything for the ark, right?” Day said. “Maybe you could have left one behind!” They laughed again.
Izzy adjusted her face to hide her distaste. As the producer of the station’s morning radio show, she was always in the office a solid hour before the rest of the crew. Usually she relished the quiet prep time, even if she did have to wake at 4 A.M. to get it. But today being Monday, she’d found her in-box buried in an avalanche of email—mostly wire service alerts about yet another shooting on a college campus, this one at Saturday night’s football game between division rivals in Indiana. She and her neighbors had been chatting under the stars on Clara’s new stone patio blissfully unaware of the tragedy befalling dozens of perfect strangers just across the state line. Worse, she’d spent yesterday moping around like the personification of a first-world-problems hashtag, as if her own tragedy even counted as one.
That her job was to sift through all that misery in search of less real news that might be more suitable for group discussion led by chipper pop radio DJs had filled her cup of self-loathing to overflowing. And now here was the on-air talent, complaining about the rain.