What She Really Wants to Know
flash fiction by Claire Polders
Ten days after she read about the robbery in the local newspaper and one week after Bart’s arrest, Irma unlocks his front door with the key the attorney sent her by mail. Her throat feels pinched. Although they’re neighbors, Irma and Bart weren’t close. They never even exchanged keys in case of emergency.
His small row house looks utterly normal in the cloudy morning light, not drawing attention to itself. She records this as suspicious, intentional: It’s easy to hide in such a gray place, easy to stay invisible. Her white-washed house sticks out by comparison; two potted pink geraniums flank the entrance like witnesses in disguise.
“Why did you offer to pick up his stuff?” her faraway daughter and only child asked on the phone. “He’s so creepy.”
Is he? Or only so in retrospect? Bart never invited Irma in, not once in fifteen years, and neither did she. But she had liked his smile and had introduced herself in an email to his attorney as a friend. As far as she knows, Bart has no girlfriend, no children, no male friends hanging out with him for Saturday BBQs in the back yard.
The hallway smells musty like a cellar. She gathers the flyers and mail from the mat, scans the envelopes for something of interest. Not finding any, she abandons the paper stack on the stairs to the second floor.
Takeout coffee cups from her favorite neighborhood roastery clutter the kitchen counter. Are they his or from the officers who combed his place? She recalls running into Bart once at the roastery during the hazy period after Hank’s death, talking more over coffee than they usually did in the afternoon shade of their shared full moon maple. If he caught her in tennis gear, he would ask whether she had won the match, and if she carried groceries, he would want to know what was for dinner. At the roastery, however, Bart questioned her about loneliness.
“How do you fight it? How do you resist? It’s what life is about—am I right?”
Irma found him emotionally immature, his thinking narrowed by clichés and oppositions, but she welcomed any distractive dialogue in that period of grief. He enticed her in a way she couldn’t grasp.
The first item on Bart’s list hangs framed on the wall above the larger than average television. On the sepia portrait, his mother seems to be in her mid-fifties, about the age he must be now, a decade younger than Irma. His mother has the same bashful look Bart often gave Irma, a look that made her curious, as though he had not wanted to come across her again on the street, had not remembered at what hour she usually arrived home. Or as though he had waited for her and regretted his transparency, his being caught.
The red maple leaves outside the bay window paint his stained beige carpet pink. How many times did he draw her attention to the budding or vanishing leaves, the fragrant blossoms or snow crystals? Not once in their thirty-year marriage had Hank pointed his finger at a branch. Without Bart, Irma might not have noticed that their lane carries each season high on its branches like a crown.
She finds the suitcase he wants on the second floor, packs his cracked leather toiletry bag, and searches his dresser drawers. Ostensibly for pajamas and socks, in reality for clues. He confessed the day he was charged with the robbery, so what does she hope to find? When she was young and began dating unsuccessfully, her father told her she was a terrible judge of character.
The spare bedroom lacks a bed and looks like a storage space. Boxes are heaped on top of one another in slanting piles of paper, sheets, and clothes. Did he hold on to all of his mother’s belongings after she died a few years ago? The shelves sag under binders and books. Bart possesses little fiction and no poetry. She lowers the titles he requested into the suitcase with a sense of unease. In prison, he apparently hopes to improve his knowledge on extinguished species and Mayan sacrifices. It’s as though Bart has accepted her offer to pick up his stuff only to bait her: He wants her to discover something about him she failed to notice as his neighbor.
Irma doesn’t leave after collecting the items on the list. Bart’s presence lingers in the house, and she forces him into her mind. A clock ticks in the awkward silence. She has neglected him all these years. To not get to know a man you meet every day must be a crime.
From his easy chair, she stares at the white rectangle above the television where his mother’s portrait used to hang. Did loneliness drive him to robbery? Financial need? Elder abuse is rampant these days. An internet crook could have defrauded Bart, taking all his retirement savings. He only wanted back what he believed was rightfully his.
But that doesn’t explain the violence.
The violence, though, could have come from circumstance, from unexpected threats.
But you don’t bring a butcher’s knife into a 24-hour convenience store unless you’re prepared to cause damage.
Should she have known about his troubles whatever they might have been? Could she have prevented the drama? Why was she so willfully ignorant of his life?
But it’s not what she really wants to know.
What she really wants to know, what this visit to his house doesn’t tell her, what she (against her daughter’s urgent advice) goes to the prison for to find out, what she, however, when looking into Bart’s disheartened face through the protective plexiglass cannot get herself to ask, is whether a few years back he stood in his underwear next to the oval mirror in her bedroom during that hot summer in which she slept with the windows wide open each night, or whether this were a recurrent dream she is too embarrassed to accept.
Claire Polders is the author of four novels in Dutch and co-author of one novel for younger readers in English, A Whale in Paris (Simon & Schuster). Her short prose has been published in Prairie Schooner, Tin House, TriQuarterly, and Fiction International. Themes in her writing are identity, feminism, social justice, art, grief, and death. Born in the Netherlands, she now roams the world. You can find her on Substack at
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