“I think it does. I could tell. He seemed kind of nervous.”
“Was this while you were interviewing Izzy for this article?” Hallie nodded, and Clara narrowed her eyes. “Well, maybe he was nervous about you. And your notebook.” The girl looked away and shrugged. Clara had been so worried about Kristin, and Rebecca, and herself, that she realized she’d almost forgotten to worry about Hallie. In her mind she’d sort of left that to Natalie, but who knew, really, how Natalie was handling things—or not handling them. “Did you talk to him?” she asked more gently.
Hallie shook her head. “I tried to leave, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it politely.” Clara lifted an eyebrow. “What?” Hallie said defensively. “I’m precocious, but I’m still polite.” Clara stifled a laugh. Clearly she hadn’t conjured the word precocious on her own. Adults really did need to watch what they said in front of kids. Even if the kid was … well, Hallie.
“Grown-up boys and girls are different,” Clara said, trying to convince them both. “Just because they’re talking or doing something together doesn’t mean one likes the other. And Paul is worried about Kristin and the kids right now. I’m sure the last thing on his mind is—” Hallie rolled her eyes so dramatically Clara couldn’t even bring herself to finish the statement.
“You’re friends with Izzy, right?” Hallie asked, and Clara nodded. Hallie looked into her eyes with such intensity Clara was taken aback. “You need to get her away from him.”
Clara’s first instinct was to tell her she was being overdramatic, to brush it off, to correct her, but what was the point? Hallie got enough of that from everyone else. Besides, they both knew that if there was any truth to some sort of bond, however casual, budding between Izzy and Paul, Clara would feel the sense of alarm for her friend just as acutely as Hallie did.
Still, if that was Hallie’s aim with this story, yet again, she wanted no part of it.
“Hallie, I’m going to be firm with you: Take my name off the paper. And take out that line about Izzy.” She had a flash of inspiration to appeal to the girl’s journalistic sensibilities. “You don’t want to be seen as some gossipy tabloid.”
Hallie leaned closer, seemingly ignoring everything she’d just said. “I got the feeling Izzy hadn’t seen my paper.” That hardly seemed possible. Clara hadn’t heard about anything but the paper ever since this mess began. “She might not even know—”
“Hallie?” Clara looked up to see Natalie coming toward them and got quickly to her feet.
“Hallie just stopped to see the dog,” she called out reflexively.
Pup-Pup was running to greet Natalie, nuzzling her legs and then turning back toward Clara as if to say, See how neighborly I can be?
“Well, aren’t you cute,” Natalie said, bending to scratch his ears. Her demeanor softened, and Clara met the dog’s eyes with a conciliatory look of her own. Yes, we know, you’ve come along at a good time.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” Natalie said to Clara, without looking up at her. “Hallie, can you give us a second?”
The girl pouted. “You mean go home? Can’t I just play with Thomas and Maddie? And Pup-Pup?” Without waiting for a response, she hurled the tennis ball across the yard and took off after the dog’s bushy tail, Thomas yelling, “Wait for me!” and trailing behind.
“Up,” Maddie said at Clara’s feet, and she lifted her daughter and smoothed her hair.
“I’m sorry,” Clara said. “I didn’t expect Hallie to—”
Natalie waved her into silence. “Did Hallie tell you why she wanted to do this newspaper? The first time, I mean?”
Clara thought back. “Just that they’d been learning about journalism at school. She said it was ‘about the facts,’ I remember.”
Natalie nodded slowly, and when she spoke again, her voice was serious, low. “The facts of war reporting, evidently. I wish her teacher had given me a heads-up, but she didn’t know about our … situation.”
Their situation. Oh. Clara’s heart sank. “I had no idea—”
Natalie shook her head. “Turns out they talked in class about the role reporters have played in keeping governments honest, keeping soldiers safe, even bringing them home. She seems to have gotten it into her head—” Her eyes filled with tears. “Not that she thinks she’s directly doing that, of course. But she really believes that what she’s doing is noble.”
Clara hesitated, thinking of how one-sided public opinion on Kristin—and Paul, for that matter—might have been without that ill-advised edition. Not that public opinion as it was had swayed or affirmed anything, necessarily, but still. “Maybe in a way, it is.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, I can’t bring myself to discourage her. I tried, and she cried ‘censorship.’ What’s parenthood if not censorship at this age?” She threw up her hands. “Still, even when I know I’m being played, it’s the fact that in some backward way she’s doing this for her dad that gets me. So maybe if you did help her after all…”
Just like that, the door between them was reopened, and an odd combination of heartache and relief flooded Clara. It had been eating at her, this invisible rift with her neighbor. “I’m happy to help if she ever needs me,” she assured Natalie. “But for the most part, she seems to be doing fine on her own.”
Natalie shot her a look.
“This time, I mean!” Clara handed over the binder with a nervous laugh. “This one is good.”
Natalie paged through it, and when she looked up, the raw emotion was gone from her eyes, and something unreadable was in its place.
“This one is good,” she conceded. “For now. But I still don’t want her doing this alone. I tried to offer to help, but she doesn’t want me—she wants you. She seems to think it’s your name that is lending a legitimacy to this. That without it people will write it off as a kid project.”
Clara bit her lip. “Hardly anyone even knows I used to be an editor,” she said, but Natalie only shrugged.
Clara sighed. She knew Benny wouldn’t feel any better about her name staying on the masthead than she did. But it seemed crass to resort to the old my-husband-wouldn’t-like-it excuse to a wife and mother who was holding down the fort on her own.
Besides, maybe Hallie was right that it was better to move forward than back down. She nodded once, crisply, and Natalie seemed to relax a little.
“About Paul,” she said. “Did you talk to him? I put a note of apology in his mailbox but couldn’t bring myself to face him.”
Clara filled her in on the visit she and Benny had paid next door—minus the choice part where he’d invited her to look around—and the gist of the surprise cameo from Kristin’s sister, all the while clinging to Maddie, who busied herself playing tug-of-war with Clara’s necklace. When she finished, Natalie crossed her arms.
“I’m on my own with Hallie so much, it’s important that I feel our neighborhood is safe. I know I pooh-poohed this whole thing at first, but now … I don’t know. I don’t like feeling caught up in a real-life Dateline episode.”
“I don’t like it either.” What else was there to say?
Natalie nodded. “I can’t apologize,” she said, “for reacting the way I did the other day.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to.” And I can’t apologize for not telling you every last detail. It would only make you worry more.
Clara looked past Natalie at the patio, neglected since that last night with Kristin. Benny had worked so hard getting the bricks laid just right; they’d stood and admired it upon its completion, imagining the nights of camaraderie those chairs around the fire pit would hold. But they’d gotten only one before it took on an air of … not foreboding, exactly, but something like it.
Damn you, Paul, she thought. And what the hell do you want with Izzy, anyway?
“She liked coming here after school better than trailing me to class,” Natalie said, nodding almost sheepishly toward Hallie. Clara flashed back to herself curled in the corners of so many fitness studios.