The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (2 page)

That was the last time she’d seen Elizabeth. Her plane never made it past Queens. Officials called it a freak accident, a confluence of bad things—bad wind, bad rudder, a bad call by the pilot. Any deeper consideration of the flight, or the arbitrariness of Elizabeth’s having been on it, was quickly overshadowed by all that came in September.

J
UNE, AND THE
M
ARTINS
’ front door was still decorated with sun-bleached Valentine paper hearts drained to gray. Dave pulled it open as Kate walked up the steps, followed by Chris and the kids.

“My darlin’, if you aren’t more gorgeous every time I see you. Washington must be doing something right by you. Come here and give me a hug.”

The sweep of his arms was wide and athletic, more like a quarterback than a middling golfer who had dropped off the tour. He had never quite made the northern parts of the leaderboard, and his standard line had always been that to be a great golfer you had to really be in your head, the last place on himself that he wanted to spend time. Each time he said it she could hear the triple beat of a comedian’s backup drum.

Kate pulled out of his hug, touching his back to convey support without having to say the clichéd things. He gave a small nod of appreciation. Her eyes fell to Jonah.

“Look at how tall you are! This is what finishing kindergarten does to you?” She stood aside to allow Chris and the children to join her on the step. “Kids, you guys remember Jonah, right? We gave him your goldfish when we moved?”

They stared. It had been a year since their last visit and nearly two since they’d moved, an eternity for six- and four-year-old memories.

“Hey man,” said Chris, reaching out to give Jonah a high five. When his hand remained stranded in the air, he dropped it and ruffled the boy’s hair instead. “We haven’t seen you guys in a long time. How’s it going?”

“Good.” Jonah squinted up at him in the late-afternoon light. The emptiness where his front teeth had been bore the serrated edges of new growth. “Did you know my mom is dead?”

Chris’s hand went still on the boy’s head, and Dave looked down at the floor. Kate waited for Dave to say something soothing to his son, or something to them to indicate that this was not uncommon, just part of the process. He continued to study the wooden threshold, curling his bare toes on the floorboards.

Chris bent until he was eye level with the boy and squatted with his forearms on his thighs. “I know, buddy. I’m really sorry about that. My mom’s dead too. It’s hard, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Jonah said. “She’s in heaven now, taking care of Dad’s dog. And I wish—”

In the kitchen there was an electronic noise, an instrument or a video game, and he looked back, sizing up which of his sisters might be playing with which of his toys. “Um, I just wish …”

Kate and Chris waited with tight smiles. There were a number of things he might wish, none of them easily addressed. The boy pulled his arm in and out of the sleeve of his shirt, and either lost his train of thought or let it drift away. “Dad said we’re going to Disney for my birthday. Right, Dad?”

Dave lifted his head like someone waking. “Sure, bud. We surely are.” He put his hand on his son’s shoulder and gave a strained smile. “Come on now, let’s get our friends inside and offer them something to eat instead of talking their ears off in the doorway.”

In the summertime, the Martins’ house had been the address for late-afternoon playdates and margaritas overlooking the sandbox. Their backyard was ideal, children contained and safe, but so subtly fenced they didn’t feel restricted. The simple swingset was not so extravagant that parents had to be vigilant, but was so well designed that kids believed they were pushing the envelope on their own safety, emboldened to small acts of rebellion. Parents never turned down an invitation to a Martin picnic because it was one of the rare places where grown-ups talked and children played in coexistent peaceful worlds. They even seemed to have fewer mosquitoes than the neighbors. It was a charmed setting and had added to the sense that God smiled on the Martins.

Chris stood quietly at the grill scraping burger residue with a steel-bristled brush, his back radiating to Kate that after a few hours of small talk, this was hers to wrap up. Dave sat with his feet up on a deck chair, beer in hand, calling directions to the children playing hide-and-seek. When a child came close—a Martin or a Spenser, it didn’t matter which—he’d reel the runner in by an arm or a leg. If his tickling was a bit more exuberant than necessary, the children were either unaware or did not mind. Kate sat quietly on the deck amid the noise. The sense of the missing member of the party was a fog low over the patio, changing the look and feel of everything.

She surveyed the familiar yard. The patch of weeds where tomatoes used to grow. The rose trellis against the house, indifferent to its missing gardener. The wrought-iron bench—chipping, from its first season left out through the winter—where they’d been sitting when Elizabeth told her she was expecting again. Kate had felt a surge of happiness as if she herself were gaining a life. Now thirteen months old, Emily was no longer quite a baby but not yet a toddler. Kate held her on her lap, the small sturdy body warm and close, hair soft against Kate’s cheek.

It was fascinating the way children grew, features morphing in and out of their parents’ likenesses in genetic peekaboo. The girl had her father’s full mouth like her four-year-old sister, Anna, but
her eyes were all Elizabeth, an arresting blue halfway between cornflower and sapphire. All three children had inherited Dave’s thick dark hair, and their mother had been loath to cut it on any of them, even Jonah. So far Dave had left it alone, and the boy with collar-length curls looked more like a soulful Giovanni than a Connecticut WASP. Elizabeth had loved comparing their features, exhibiting the fascination of an only child when it came to the similarities and differences among her own children. Giving them siblings, she’d said, had been the best thing she could ever do for them. Kate lowered her nose to Emily’s head and breathed in Johnson’s baby shampoo, a hormonal cocktail that among women who have children not long out of diapers drew the Pavlovian,
Another
.

Emily reached fat fingers toward the pastries on Kate’s plate, a slice of fruit tart and colorful petit fours. Kate had stopped to buy dessert at her favorite bakery in town though she knew the teasing it would bring from Dave. It was an endless source of amusement, the pastry chef who barely cooked.

“Kate, I swear,” he’d said in his accent of peaches and bourbon as she’d placed the cardboard box on the counter. “You are the only one of us with a professional skill worth a damn and you’re the one who uses it the least.”

“You mean, the one who has the skill
you’d
most like to enjoy,” she replied, nudging him with her elbow.

It was true that she cooked less ambitiously since having children. Cooking took time, even with skills that had become second nature since culinary school. (
Such a good career fit
, her parents and older sister always said—the subtext being,
for someone who’s not the academic type
.) Soufflé and flambé weren’t exactly in high demand in a family of young children, and these days she channeled her efforts into more practical recipes. Chicken pot pies for dinner and sugar cookies with the children, using her elaborate collection of shaped cutters. Crepes on weekends, flipped from the pan with more bravado than she’d ever dare among colleagues, for the entertainment of the kids. Every so often she’d get a call to cover for a
pastry chef who’d quit or been fired, and they’d always request that crème brûlée that got her nominated for the James Beard Award. From time to time there’d be a promising job offer, like the one currently on the table. Each time the call came she’d pause before saying
No thanks, not yet
. But with this latest one, she hadn’t yet made the call to decline.

Dave knew what she was capable of creating when she took the time. For Elizabeth’s thirty-sixth birthday, she’d made a three-tiered work of chocolate excess that had taken her all day. That night after the third bottle of wine the two couples had broken out Scrabble, but Kate and Elizabeth sabotaged the game with giddiness, stealing letters and rearranging words into obscenities. They’d picked at that chocolate cake until they had felt ill, and vowed to do the same thing each year.

But Kate thought it best not to remind Dave. Last week, Elizabeth would have turned thirty-nine.

Dusk came on with the chirping of crickets. Dave drained his second beer and got up to take the empty plates inside. Kate followed with bowls of picked-over salad and salsa. The kitchen looked much as it always had, only more cluttered. The counters were scattered with Tupperware, the shelves piled with kid art and old catalogs. The same two paintings hung on the wall: a portrait of a young girl eating ice cream, and an exterior view of two city brownstones. In one bright window a mother combed out a girl’s long wet hair, and in a window a few feet away, people attended a party in a dimly lit room, a women’s head thrown back in decadent laughter. Kate had never been fond of it. The juxtaposition of scenes was unnerving; even the oils seemed thick and angry.

On the refrigerator, the same Martin family photos were held to the door with alphabet magnets. Shots from last summer’s vacation in the Hamptons, Elizabeth’s shoulder-length hair gone platinum
in the sun. Photos of Anna’s birthday two years ago, and Christmas with Dave’s parents sometime before that. In the center was a photograph from Emily’s birth; Elizabeth cradled the puffy-eyed newborn against the breast of her hospital gown with a Mona Lisa smile, captured in the peak of a motherhood that would never go gray.

Kate’s throat clenched with the effort to swallow emotion. The photo blurred, fading Elizabeth and her pale gown into the bland sheetscape of maternity ward bed. Kate blinked and exhaled, keeping her breath smooth. She opened the refrigerator and put away the milk, then slowly dumped the nachos and salsa in the garbage can, chip by chip, buying herself a moment to swipe at her eyes.

Dave hadn’t seen. He stood with his back to her, scraping the plates at the sink and loading the dishwasher. Then he mumbled something over his shoulder, words half lost in the running water. She caught
workshop
.

“Sorry?”

“There’s something you should know about her painting workshop.” His voice was nonchalant, but the set of his shoulders was high and tight. He shut off the water and turned to face her, wiping his hands on a towel. “She was meeting some guy in L.A. You might as well know it right off.”

She looked at him, trying to recall any previous thread of conversation, but there was none. She had to assume he was talking about Elizabeth. “What do you mean?”

“She wrote in her journal just before she left about traveling with some guy named Michael. The workshop painter guy wasn’t named Michael.” He turned and began wiping dishes from the drying rack.

His words and bearing were too casual. Kate did not know what to say—denial or sympathy seemed called for, but he seemed closed to either one. Instead, she fell back on the most mundane thing he’d said.

“So you read them?”

She knew it was wrong even as she said it. He looked up at her, his broad face inscrutable, none of his usual amiability there.

“Not really. Just a little. It’s always been a given, you don’t touch the journals.” The way he drew out the word
—jyouuu-nuls
, with weight on the first syllable—gave it an emphasis that was quaint, even sarcastic. Sarcasm, from Dave Martin.

He turned to the coffeemaker even though Chris and Kate had declined his offer and began to load scoop after scoop, far too much for one pot.

“These past months it’s been there sitting in the nightstand drawer, this last one, plus a whole trunk of them locked in the closet. She was different last summer, wiped out from the baby, probably. But I just wanted to know whether she left the house feeling a little sad that she’d miss us, or if she was too damned glad to be getting away to care. I expected it was probably a little of both.” He closed the filter hatch on the coffeemaker and pressed the red button. “On the last page I saw something about her looking forward to seeing this Michael guy, and more about him a few pages before that. I just thought I’d mention it in case you opened the notebook and got all worked up.”