The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (12 page)

Kate and James sat in the grass at the edge of the llama farm with their water bottles. She unwrapped a granola bar, split it in two, and passed him half. “You’re getting good on the bike. Does it feel very different to ride a two-wheeler on a bike path?”

“Not really, just more fun.”

Kate looked across the meadow at the llamas, moving with their distinctive fussy walk and leading with their lips, as if they had something they couldn’t wait to tell the others.

“Once a long time ago before I met your dad, I went to a country called Peru—”

“I know about Peru, Mom,” he said, impatient.

“Okay. Well, I heard about a farm where they made beautiful sweaters from the wool of their own llamas. There was a field like this full of them, and I drove around and around trying to find the farmhouse. But I got lost and the road only led to the top of a cliff, so I had to turn around and leave without ever finding the farm. It was the strangest thing, like the llamas lived all by themselves on a farm in the middle of Peru, taking care of themselves.”

He peeled back the paper and scrutinized the bite he was about to take, sizing up the bits of cranberry and sunflower seeds and considering whether they should be taken off, like vegetables from pizza.

“How does a mom get lost?”

“Get lost?” Kate paused, uncertain. Was he looking for truth, or reassurance that she wouldn’t?

“Well, just like anybody else. I need maps and stuff, and sometimes I take a wrong turn. But I’ve been on this trail lots of times.”

He fanned a fly trying to land on his snack bar. “That’s not what I mean. How did Mrs. Martin lose her mom?”

Ah, that kind of lost. Kate stopped chewing, tried to register what he knew and how he knew it. The journal on her bed the other night. Not the sitter, but James.

As far as she knew, he’d never even been up to the loft alone before. And though she’d told the kids about the trunk of notebooks in the most cursory way, he hadn’t seemed interested. It boggled the mind, thinking of her son as old enough to read someone’s journals and absorb even this much. Her baby who’d slept all day and fussed all night, missing the cues for night and day, now mulling hints of adult grief. How does a mom get lost. From now on, she would keep the trunk locked.

“Did you read about that in the notebook? Did you go up into my trunk, the one from the Martins’?”

“No,” he said, suddenly breezy. “It’s just something I thought up in my head.”

She’d spoken too quickly, and chased away whatever confidence might have been coming. “James.”

“Really. I was just wondering. About people getting lost.”

She paused. Getting information from a child was like feeding a skittish animal. “I’m not mad that you read it, even though you really shouldn’t have. I’m just surprised that you would have wanted to.”

He took another bite of his granola bar and bent to scratch a mosquito bite. She tried again.

“When I was a girl, I loved to hide away with things, just like you. Our house didn’t have a cool room up high like this one does, but my grandma had a big closet with a window inside it. I used to like to sit in the closet under her dresses and look at her old photo albums.”

She leaned back on her palms, and did not look at him. She looked instead at the nearest llama, walking toward them with small lilting movements of its head, chin high.

“It’s sort of like a tree house up there,” James said. “When Piper was coloring I asked the babysitter if I could bring my book up and read like you do.”

Kate continued to look at the llamas. “But then you saw all these notebooks with cool covers.” He nodded.

This was one of those opportunities that the school called a teachable moment, and Kate weighed which parenting path to take. The respecting-private-things route, or what-it-meant-to-lose-someone. Losing won.

“Do you know what those books are, James?”

“Yeah. They’re Mrs. Martin’s stories.”

“Sort of. She wrote about her life, for herself, the things that made her happy and sad.”

He considered it, then put it in the context of what he knew about books. Libraries, stories. Things written for other people. “Why did she write them?”

Kate had been wondering that herself. Maybe Elizabeth felt a need to synthesize things as they were happening, especially if she didn’t confide in others. Or maybe it was to leave an imprint behind, a record that these things had once happened, and had mattered.

“Some people like to write down the things that happen to them and the things they think about so they can remember them later, when they’re older.”

“Maybe they do it so other people can remember them when they’re gone.”

“Maybe.”

He folded the empty granola wrapper and scooped a ladybug from the grass. “Do you write books like that?” he asked.

“No.” She shook her head.

The ladybug plodded along the yellow logo toward his thumb, and she wondered whether he’d drop the wrapper when it touched him or let the bug crawl up his hand. Drop it, probably.

“Well maybe you should,” he said, “so we can remember you when you’re gone, too.”

Kate’s chest constricted. In the past year there had been some questions about death—almost entirely from James, Piper was too young—but not as many as she’d expected, and she had kept the answers simple. Mrs. Martin was gone, her plane had crashed because of an accident. Sometimes terrible things like that happened, a sad accident. And sometimes bad people made bad things happen, like the other big crashes afterward, but not often at all, almost never. James seemed satisfied with this version of events, but occasionally asked for more. Whenever he cracked open that door she tried to show there was nothing too scary on the other side, or at least to make it seem that way.

“That’s probably not going to happen for a very long, long time,” she said. He was blowing on the ladybug. Kate had lost his interest. She put her hand on his leg and leaned forward. “It’s okay to feel sad about people dying, and it’s normal to sometimes think about losing the people that we love. But it really doesn’t happen very often, and usually not until people are very old.”
Liar
, she thought.

James continued to play with the wrapper, inverting it and watching the bug soldier on even as its world went upside down. “Is that what happened to her baby, too?”

“Whose baby?”

“Mrs. Martin’s baby, how it got lost.”

Kate sat a moment, confused. Lose a baby? That’s not how Elizabeth had written about the abortion. Then she rubbed her temples at the realization of what was to come. Oh, Elizabeth.

“I don’t know about that. But sometimes babies aren’t growing healthily when they’re inside their moms. Sometimes they aren’t growing well even after they’re born.”

He looked back at his bike, and could have been trying to make sense of the rules that applied to living and dying; sometimes you’re old, sometimes you’re sick, and sometimes you’re neither. Or he could have been thinking about the Lego robot he planned to build back at the house.

“That’s sad,” he said.

“Yes, it is.”

They sat together facing the herd, and bits of trivia came back to Kate from her knitting days, back when the kids were babies. Llamas have no upper teeth, but adult males grow large, sharp lower canines for fighting; humming is a common manner of communication among llamas, and they do it both when they’re feeling content and when they’re aggressive.

How hard to be a llama, she thought, when the same sound could mean happiness or danger.

K
ATE SAT IN THE
chaise in the loft, lit only by dim sconces on the wall. In the journals, Elizabeth was packing to leave Florence. She visited her favorite places one last time—the leather vendors at the San Lorenzo market, the food stalls at Mercato Centrale, the wild boar statue at Mercato del Porcellino, where like everyone following the superstition, she rubbed its nose for good luck. She didn’t know if she’d be returning. She did not know whether she was going home to help her mother recover, or to bear witness if she would not.

Kate wondered if Elizabeth had ever looked back, thought about the way her life might have gone if she’d remained in Italy. Though knowing Elizabeth, it wasn’t something she would have admitted aloud.

All through the second week on the island, Kate read about the year Elizabeth spent caring for Amelia. There was a constant rotation of three tasks: making sure her mother took her medicine, getting her to the doctor’s appointments, trying to make her eat. On better days they went driving; Elizabeth would fill a travel mug with peppermint tea and they’d pass through the historic district in town, winding among the elegantly restored Victorians. They’d always end at the beach, watching the gulls over the water, parking in the same place where Elizabeth used to park with Michael.

As the months passed, their relationship seemed to become more comfortable, though never intimate.
There are none of those emotional epiphanies that are supposed to come from so much caretaking. We are cordial to each other and sometimes there’s warmth, but that’s as far as it goes. I give her credit for becoming more normal these past few years, and there are some of the trappings of closeness. But I still don’t feel like I know a damn thing about her
.

Yes, Kate thought. I know exactly what you mean.

In March, Amelia and Elizabeth received a call about the mortgage. Their finances were not in good shape. Around the same time, the advertising agency where Amelia had worked part-time called to see whether she intended to return soon, or if they should look into a permanent replacement. On impulse, Elizabeth asked if she could take her place temporarily, and offered referrals from the gallery where she’d worked in SoHo sophomore year. She began working at the agency three days a week, driving to Stamford in her mother’s car, and within a few months transferred to administrative assistant for the design department. Elizabeth put in extra hours on the side helping with graphics, bluffing her way until she’d learned the computer programs. By the time there was an opening for an entry-level designer, no one asked about her credentials or degree.