Fatalism was where they differed.
“I really don’t think you should mention it to her,” Benny said. Downstairs, Izzy was awaiting Clara’s return, a fresh bottle of wine open on the counter, the soft sounds of Southern blues floating up the stairs. Once they’d cleaned up dinner—the rain held out long enough for a spread of veggie kabobs, barbecued chicken, Amish-made sausage, even perfectly charred corn on the cob—Benny volunteered to handle bedtime so Clara and her friend could chat.
“Mention what?” Clara asked, trying to remain stone-faced.
“You know what. It’s none of our business.”
Clara narrowed her eyes. “It is. It’s our business because we live here, and it’s our business because I’m her friend.”
“Let me rephrase. It’s not your responsibility, Clara.”
This was not a new argument between them. Because there was a universal question at the root of it: What responsibility does anyone really have to someone else, aside from family? It wasn’t just that Kristin’s disappearance had left everyone who’d known her wondering what, if anything, they should have sensed was going on behind closed doors, or what, if anything, they might have done to prevent her from vanishing. And it wasn’t just that her persistent failure to reappear with the twins had thickened and stagnated in the air of their old house, though that was true enough too. This was a question that had taken hold of them years before and never quite let go, because there was no answer they could agree upon.
Benny was the sort of person who could leave an unanswerable question unanswered.
Clara was not.
“If it’s not my responsibility,” she said coolly, “then whose is it, Ben?”
He frowned. He hated to be called Ben. That the short form of Benjamin was too much formality for Benny was one of thousands of things she’d loved about him from the start. She rarely pushed this particular button, and when she did, it wasn’t to goad him.
It was a warning.
Benny sighed as a louder peal of giggles erupted from Thomas’s open door, and they both instinctively moved to peer through, as such spontaneous laughter was more often these days soon followed by a cry of protest or pain. Clara and Benny watched from the hall as Thomas handed a bright orange stuffed lion to Maddie, who tossed it over his bedrail to the floor with such gusto that both kids burst into laughter. He then patted her sweetly on the head and handed her a blue elephant to launch. Their assembly line had already relocated half the contents of his bed, always a plush jungle, to a pile on the floor.
Benny and Clara exchanged a smile in spite of themselves. In truth, Clara would have preferred to follow Benny back in to cuddle the kids, listen to his stories and sing them song after song until they drifted off. It never ceased to amaze her that even when she’d had Thomas and Maddie to herself for most of the day—or for too much of it, with them driving her to the brink of sanity with their competing demands—it still stung her to miss bedtime, for any reason.
It wasn’t that Clara would rather talk to Izzy. It was that she had to.
“I could go down and tell her the kids wanted only you tonight,” Benny said softly. “Make your apologies. Tell her you’ll see her tomorrow. Buy you time to sleep on it.”
She shook her head. “I won’t sleep otherwise,” she said. “That’s the problem.”
“You don’t even know that anything is going on between her and Paul.”
“Exactly,” she said. “But I’m going to find out.”
She backed quietly away from Thomas’s door and headed downstairs before Benny could stop her. She felt his eyes on her back, willing her to turn and give him one last chance at exchanging the kind of meaningful look that might change her mind. And so she didn’t look back. She and Benny had done enough test runs on this argument—in more theoretical and less pressing scenarios—to know they could agree to disagree.
Never mind that in the ambient tension that was becoming their new norm, nothing seemed sure anymore. While she wasn’t still mad about what he’d suggested the other night, she wasn’t not mad, either—nor was she completely convinced he’d dropped the matter for good. But she also wasn’t about to walk on eggshells around her own husband.
She found Izzy and Pup-Pup standing side by side in the area that joined the kitchen and the family room, staring through the window toward the dark patio, where the circle of chairs remained, untouched, around the fire pit from that early September night. Izzy had been a hit with the kids at dinner, challenging Thomas to a corn on the cob eating contest and clinking her cup to Maddie’s sippy with a “cheers!” roughly every thirty seconds, indulging the baby’s favorite new mealtime trick. And she’d been an even bigger hit with Pup-Pup afterward, playing an endless game of tug-the-rope while Clara and Benny brushed off her offers to help clean up. Now, in the dim track lighting, she looked relaxed, if a little sad, swaying slowly with the music. Hearing Clara’s approach, she turned and smiled, her eyes already turning glassy from the second—or was this her third?—glass of wine. It was impossible not to think of that last night with Kristin, around the fire. Of how at home they’d all seemed in their neighborhood then. Of how it hadn’t felt the same since.
Izzy gestured at the fire pit. “I was going to suggest we light one, but it’s starting to sprinkle.” A beat of silence passed between them, and Izzy gave an almost apologetic smile. “Might be weird, anyway,” she said softly.
“It’s not as if I’m never going to use the patio again…” Clara began. For some reason, the idea of taking their seats around the circle with Kristin gone still made her shiver. “But yeah.”
It was silly. Kristin would likely never know, much less care, whether Clara and her other neighbors removed her chair and tightened their circle around the fire. It wasn’t all that different from the way Izzy punished her stubborn heartbreak by drowning it in morbid headlines, and Clara turned away from those same stories on the principle of not giving the bad guys the satisfaction. She supposed the joke was on both of them that none of it mattered. Neither the perpetrators nor the victims knew if you watched their footage all day or feigned ignorance. All they knew was that the headlines were there, and for many of them that was enough.
So when Clara took the obvious segue, she tried to sound nonchalant. “Making friends with Dr. Paul isn’t weird, though?”
“Oh, that was Parallel Universe Paul,” Izzy said quickly, and she almost succeeded at sounding dismissive. Almost.
Clara wrinkled her forehead. “A universe where Paul and Kristin never happened?”
“No. I mean, yes.” She laughed uneasily. “I didn’t mean anything that deep. Just one where he wears leather and drives a motorcycle.”
“Would that make him more your type?” Clara moved to pour herself a glass of wine at the island behind them.
“In what way?” Izzy wouldn’t look at her.
“Oh, you know,” Clara said. “Benny always said he was ‘more of an indoor guy.’”
Izzy gave a little laugh. “Truer words,” she said. Her eyes met Clara’s then. “Still. I thought handsome doctors were supposed to be everyone’s type.”
“Men with missing wives, though…”
Clara couldn’t believe she’d said it aloud. She held her breath.
“Ex. Soon to be ex.” Izzy’s voice had an edge to it, which Clara had expected. What she hadn’t anticipated was that the part Izzy took issue with was the word wife, not missing. She checked herself, deciding to back up.
“You’ve been spending time with him, though?”