Read The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D Online
Authors: Nichole Bernier
Kate stroked James’s hair until he finished drinking the water, and after he lay back on the pillow, she stayed until his breathing steadied and slowed. She waited until his eyes were closed before she stepped quietly to the doorway. When the children woke in the night, ill or flushed with bad dreams, she didn’t like them to see her leave the room.
March 13, 1996
I hosted playgroup this morning, all of us wedged into the all-purpose family room of our minuscule Cape. I pulled out all the stops—picked up hand towels and a little bonsai tree for the downstairs bathroom, bought some matching coffee mugs, and plenty of decaf. Proud of our little place, all dressed up for the prom.
“What does your husband do for work?” Brittain asked, looking around the hallway like she was trying to see the rest until she realized there was no rest. When I told them he was a pro golfer (but not one they’d heard of) they acted like it was the quaintest thing, a man pursuing his hobby, like he threw pottery in the basement and sold it on the corner.
Petra was the last to leave and helped me clean up the kitchen and playroom. She’s from Italy originally and we spoke a little Italian, so I guess my year in Florence is not entirely gone without a trace. We had another cup of coffee (“caffè normale, grazie a Dio”) while the babies sat in bouncy seats on the floor. I told her, I’m so tired I could fall facedown on the table. No one else in playgroup seems exhausted or unshowered, just deliriously happy.
Yeah, well, she said. Belle dal fuori. Good appearances. What are you gonna do?
I could have kissed her
.
April 6, 1996, 11:30 p.m.
The fire truck just pulled away, lights still spinning. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. So I’m sitting down with a glass of merlot doing a little of both. After I put down Jonah for the night I was straightening the changing table and dropped the thermometer, the old-school kind with mercury inside. It hit the wood floor and shattered. When I picked up the pieces I couldn’t see any mercury. Ah, good, I thought; it must be protected in some kind of inner chamber. No, I couldn’t see it because it was ROLLING ALL OVER THE FLOOR IN LITTLE SILVER BEADS.
I’d just read something about how some states were considering banning mercury thermometers, and then it struck me: If this is so toxic, what if it could be airborne? What if I’d released it like a virus, and tiny bits of mercury were right at that moment going into Jonah’s lungs? So I called 911. Don’t move or touch anything, he said, especially not the baby. They were sending in a squad, and was the front door unlocked?
Not three minutes later I heard the sirens, then saw the lights blazing through the window and across the nursery wall. Three knocks on the door, then “MRS. MARTIN, WE’RE COMING IN.” Heavy booted feet up the stairs, and three men in hooded yellow hazmat suits appeared in the doorway. I would have wet my pants laughing if I hadn’t been so scared, because they looked like they were responding to an outbreak of the Ebola virus, in bulky space suits and knee-high boots and helmets with plastic windows.
The first one lifted me with gloved hands from where I stood barefoot, then two of them moved into the room and stood over the spill like it was a Superfund site, debating The Cleanup. The third called Poison Control on his radio, and learned mercury can’t be absorbed by humans through touch, and can’t become airborne unless it’s at very high temperatures.
After that things settled down. Defcon #1 and Defcon #2 debated the best way to clean up, but the mercury kept splitting into tinier balls and rolling between the cracks of the wood floor. They started to sweat, took off their helmets, then stripped off their elbow-length gloves, scratched their heads. What about Scotch tape? I said, half joking.
So that’s how we cleaned up the toxic spill that commanded the entire hazmat squad of Southbrook, Connecticut. With Scotch tape, like lifting lint from a suit. They were there for two hours, and Jonah slept the whole time
.
Wednesday, April 10, 1996
Told playgroup this morning about the mercury thermometer incident. Mostly expecting to get a good laugh, but also hoping they’d reassure me that Jonah isn’t going to grow up neurologically stunted, unable to say his own name. But after I told the story they were silent. Literally, no one said a word. Five seconds passed. Then Leslie said, “Oh my God.” And Regan said, “Did you take him to the pediatrician?” (No.) Then another silence, and Petra said, “I’d never keep a mercury thermometer in the house. It’s just not worth the risk.” And everyone murmured yes, yes.
Without trying to seem defensive, I offered that my pediatrician had told me that mercury thermometers were the most accurate. And then Brittain started talking about how she’d chosen her pediatrician and checked out his credentials, making sure there’d never been a malpractice suit against him, etc.
Cyanide tablets in the coffee. Blow darts tipped in anthrax. These were the things I wished I had at my disposal.
I smiled, and I’m going to keep smiling. I am not going to deprive Jonah of little playmates to roll around on the floor with, dress up in baby costumes with on Halloween. But it’s going to take a real effort not to give them mercury thermometers in the trick-or-treat bags
.
Friday, April 12, 1996
The boss lady said the agency wouldn’t agree to part-time. I can’t believe it. I really thought they would. So we’re setting up a freelance
contract, and I’ll work part-time from home. Trust me, Victoria said. I’ll make it work.
Dave finished in the upper 30 percent. He’s never been so high on the leaderboard before. Saw him interviewed on ESPN, a good balance of enthusiastic and professional and modest, but the smile of a six-year-old sneaked in there too. He can’t help it
.
Friday, April 19, 1996
I’m interviewing part-time nannies on Monday. We finally put an ad in the paper after I talked Dave into feeling okay about three afternoons a week, especially since I’ll be working right upstairs. Victoria has been great about feeding me work, as much as I can handle. It’s crazy, but I’m enjoying it more than I ever have. She tossed me a client that no one else is very excited about, a Japanese sake manufacturer, and last night I absolutely lost track of time working up ideas for the label. Came up with a cutout silhouette-style concept that looks like kirigami, wispy fronds of rice blowing in a field. Finally stopped at 2:30 a.m. when Jonah woke up for a feeding. Of course I’m cursing myself today, can hardly see straight I’m so tired.
It’s pathetic how much it means to me, but it feels like it’s something all my own, a part of me that isn’t given over to nursing or laundry or checking ESPN all the time to see how Dave’s doing. It’s the one tiny vestige of myself in a day where everything feels like it’s about someone else. Having that time away, I enjoy the time with Jonah more. But I’m learning that sneaking an hour here or there when he’s napping is beyond frustrating. Getting a rhythm, then being interrupted just when I’m thoroughly engrossed, is worse than not starting at all. I need to get a regular sitter. That will make all the difference
.
Elizabeth and Dave didn’t like any of the sitters they interviewed. No spark, no twinkle in the eye of a single one of them that suggested a genuine enjoyment of babies, merely bland competence. Elizabeth was discouraged, but suspected Dave was relieved.
How much work do you really have to do? he asked. It’s not like we’re desperate for
it or anything. “It” being money
. She decided to carve out work time around the edges of Jonah’s naps, plus some nights and weekends, to fulfill her freelance contract.
Kate put down the notebook and looked at the windowsill, the smiling photograph of Elizabeth framed by darkness. It was painful to imagine her friend with this intensity Kate had never seen. It was as if in addition to the woman she’d known, there had been a second lost friend, and she was hit with fresh grief.
Beside her on the chaise, her cell phone rang. Out of Area appeared in the caller ID window. She took a breath, wiped at her eyes.
“Hello?”
“Hey, hon, oh good, I finally got a connection. The cell service here is the worst.”
“Chris.” She breathed his name like a statement. “Where are you?”
“Jakarta. I just got to the airport and I’m getting a decent signal for just a second.”
“Are you just getting to Jakarta, or leaving there?” Leaving. Let him say leaving.
“Just getting here. I think it’s just a one-night thing, and then a quickie to Bali. You wouldn’t believe these hotels for sale. They’re crazy, all this insane luxury falling apart. Some are beyond help, but I think we can do something with at least one other. Especially if it means getting the Angkor Wat one. It’s a gem.”
She struggled to put herself in the mind-set of Indonesian real estate. “So it’s working out? You’re going to buy them?”
“Looks that way, if we can get a decent price. This would be a total coup for us, Kate. I know this is a pain for me to be off-island for so long, but this is a once-in-a-lifetime deal.” The word
coup
rang in her ears. “How are the kids?”
“Fine. Great. We’re doing all the regular stuff. They miss you though.”
“Good. Hey, I’m having trouble hearing what—” There was crackling alternating with silence.
“Chris, you there? How are … things there? Does it feel safe?” Silence. “Chris?”
Their voices overlapped, and his disappeared. A small static of background noise came and went, the sound of connections made and broken.
“Chris?”
“I’m here. I just asked how the journals were coming. Any revelations?”
“Not really.”
She said it in part because it was the last thing she wanted to talk about on an international call with a poor connection, the unsettling mixture of empathy, irritation, and loss. But it wasn’t the only reason. When she and Chris had last discussed the journals that afternoon on the beach, she’d told him she was keeping an open mind about whether or not Elizabeth had been having an affair. But even as she spoke, she knew it wasn’t altogether true. She now read as if she were following bread crumbs, looking for wisdom about what makes two people fall out of sync and then imperceptibly apart, perhaps without one of them even knowing.
“Kate? I can hardly hear you,” he said. “I think I’m—I’ll call you from—tell the kids—” Suddenly the static was gone, and so was Chris.
Kate looked at the phone, and saw a sequence of the things that might cause it to suddenly disconnect. She clicked it shut, and placed it on the counter with a shaky hand.
T
HERE WAS AN ENTIRE SECTION
of pages torn out. Kate pulled the binding wide and saw there were fifteen, possibly twenty pages missing. The last entry was dated in April 1996. The next section of writing began in November 1996.
Kate ran her thumb across the ripped edges. She thought back to Elizabeth’s angry writing after her mother had destroyed an early journal, her reaction to having been censored. This time, it appeared she had done it to herself.
Monday, November 18, 1996
I’ve turned the corner. I no longer get out of bed in the morning counting the hours until I tuck him back in. The one thing I will give myself credit for is that throughout, I’ve been providing Jonah with a smiling face and a stable home. I will say this for myself: every decision I’ve made that’s led to this place, I made out of optimism. At each choice I did the gut check and decided I can do this, or that I wanted to be a person who could. Enough said. No one wants to hear a mother talk this way.
Thanksgiving is coming, and I’m hosting everyone: Dave’s whole family, including Zack and the kids, even my father, his third time
visiting me from L.A. Dave finished the tour season the highest he ever has, and will definitely be on tour again next year.…
The writing continued, a litany of plans for the holidays and Dave’s progress on tour. It read like training-wheels writing, someone moving shakily to acquire a new skill, or outlook. As Kate skimmed the workmanlike entries, her thoughts drifted to what might have been in the missing pages. Postpartum depression was her guess, but she wondered if there’d been something more, if this was where the man who invited Elizabeth to Joshua Tree had made his appearance.
Gradually, Elizabeth’s old voice returned. Whatever edginess that had been critical of others was now turned on herself. She became increasingly attentive to the playgroup and neighborhood.
Wednesday, December 11, 1996
There’s a new woman in playgroup, Kate. She just moved here from New York. She lives a few streets over, and I remember seeing her when she moved in, saw her telling off a cable guy outside. It was hilarious. “I’ll tell you what,” she was saying in the driveway with a baby on her hip. “How about we make a date for ME to come to YOUR house tomorrow afternoon. And you can sit there for four hours waiting for me even though you have a million other things to do, and then I’ll come two hours late and tell you, ‘Oops, I don’t have the right stuff, gotta come back tomorrow.’ How would that work for you?”
I was walking by with the stroller and laughed out loud. She turned to me, “Am I wrong?” It’ll be nice to have some fresh blood in the nabe
.
Moving to Southbrook should have felt like the most natural thing in the world once Kate decided not to return to work. If you are going to stay home with a baby, she’d reasoned, at least surround yourself with others who are doing the same thing and talk to one another across their driveways.
Except that no one came into their driveways. They pulled out of them in their large SUVs, straight out of the garages and then back into them, so that for the first week Kate knew what her neighbors’ bumpers looked like but not the neighbors themselves. She invented reasons to be outside several times a day—never mind that it was midwinter in Connecticut—and bundled newborn James in so many layers that only his eyes were exposed, peering from the stroller. But no matter how many times she went walking, no one stopped to talk. Until Elizabeth.