Read The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D Online
Authors: Nichole Bernier
The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (27 page)
Tee box. The words
tee box
had actually come out of Kate’s mouth. She’d viewed golf as a bit of a caricature of a sport—the pretentious clothing, the affected claps—and none of it had seemed to fit with the Martins. It had been possible for Kate to forget Dave was a golfer during his tour days, because so little in the Martins’ child-centered household seemed defined by golf, except the father’s absence.
But the thought of someone giving up anything he felt passionately about couldn’t help but soften her toward that thing, and after what she’d read for the past five weeks, it didn’t seem as if Dave would give up golf without good reason.
Normalized hours
, Elizabeth and Dave had said of the Titleist job.
Predictable income
. Now Kate saw the circumstances under which Dave had left the tour, and how close it had actually been to the break-in.
Last night she’d gone to the loft intending to read further. But she was drawn back to rereading the same section repeatedly. Key words stood out, palpable as Braille.
Catch my baby. Rope and duct tape. So many things beyond my control
. And less dramatic but no less
disturbing,
She looked at me like I’d said Gary, Indiana
. Her head ached with them today like the residue of a bad dream, or a hangover.
Piper swung from the tee and missed her ball. The girl shuffled ahead with a sigh, as if the rigors of golf were too cruel for a four-year-old. Kate walked behind her aping her slouch and sigh, and James snorted with laughter. Piper turned and tried to scowl at her mother’s imitation of her, then giggled.
“Come on. Try again,” Kate said. Piper picked up her putter and swung sloppily, to no better effect. When she saw that she’d missed the ball again she pounded the putter into the turf, her club gripped like a weapon.
Kate had never known anyone who had been a victim of a serious crime before Elizabeth. The morning after the break-in, the telephone had blasted the dawn tranquillity of birds still quiet and babies not yet awake. When Kate answered, Elizabeth said simply, “I have a favor to ask.” Not
My house has been broken into
or
I was tied to a crib for hours
, but that she had a favor to ask. The police had left a short while before and she had to go to the hospital for fetal monitoring, then to the police station for more questions. Could Kate watch Jonah? Her calm had been chilling. When Kate arrived at the Martins’ doorstep moments later, her own nerves like exposed wires, she was prepared to … she didn’t know what. Offer comfort, make coffee, help catalog stolen items. But Elizabeth just accepted her hug with resignation and handed her Jonah. She’d be back in a few hours, she said, rope welts visible on her arms. Dave would be flying in later that morning.
Kate stepped up to the fifth hole. She stood at the tee and gave her yellow ball a middling tap. It began with barely enough gas to get over the bridge. But once it crested the middle it picked up momentum, then slowed crossing the divots of plastic grass and finally, achingly, came to rest at the lip of the cup. It sat there a moment—then butterfly wings beat in Peru, and it dropped into the hole.
“Whoa! Did you see that?” James gushed. “It was like magic! Mom got a hole in one! Mom NEVER gets a hole in one!”
Kate put her arms in the air like a prizefighter, and marched a slow victory lap around the tee box.
“Good shot, Mommy!” Piper said, throwing her arms around Kate’s waist and squeezing hard.
The first time Kate had gotten a full look at Elizabeth’s bruises beyond the hint of welts above her collar, she was struck dumb. Elizabeth had volunteered little about the attack—
so lucky, everything was replaceable
—and no one in playgroup had pressed. When they asked, Elizabeth replied emphatically that she was fine. And everyone always believed Elizabeth. Day after day Kate had done her Kate thing, rushed in with food and babysitting and other crisis fillers, but she hadn’t asked much of substance.
Were you terrified? Can you sleep at night? How can we get you past this?
Kate hadn’t wanted to pry, though it might be closer to the truth that she hadn’t wanted to hear. That was her way, actions instead of words, and she knew it was a crutch.
But on the day she saw the welts at the edges of Elizabeth’s shirt she surprised herself by reaching out, offering the physical comfort that always seemed to come more naturally to others. They were sitting in the playroom and she put her arms around Elizabeth’s shoulders, and they sat a moment in an embrace. Elizabeth seemed to tense and then soften, as if something tightly held were being released. The fan whirred on its pole. The little boys turned the pages of their books in sleepy anticipation of naps. After a moment, long enough to be an appropriate showing of sympathy, Kate pulled away.
The bungalow was quiet soon after the children fell into bed, and the waves were audible, lapping at the edge of the property. She sat in the chaise and picked up the notebook lying beside it. For the first time since they’d arrived, she wished for a blanket. She also wished, as she never had before on the island, that she weren’t in an
isolated house alone with her children. Kate went back downstairs and locked the door, something they never bothered to do.
After the break-in, the Martins moved. The new house was only a few streets away, still a part of the old neighborhood, but for Elizabeth it represented a clean break from the associations of the old one, her anger and fear and guilt.
Dave has not voiced regret, not even when the PGA year-end winnings were tallied and it was clear he would have had a banner year if he’d stayed with the tour. He says he loves the new job, really stays on message. I have to accept that I have no more idea of what happens in the solitary parts of his mind than he has of mine, and wonder if all couples are like this. In love and simpatico in many ways, but ultimately unknowing and unknowable
.
Elizabeth’s next pregnancy progressed uneventfully. As with the last she didn’t find out the gender, and by late February she was full term.
March 3, 1998
It’s a girl. Eight pounds three ounces—a full pound heavier than Jonah—and a head of Dave’s dark hair, coils stuck to her head and springing out if you pull and fluff them. People always talk about how tiny babies are. But I marvel not at how small they are but how something so big and vital fit so compactly inside.
I dreamed about my sister so much this pregnancy, mostly the same dream I’ve had for years: leaving the pet store, holding the bags of goldfish, she’s riding ahead and my bags are falling, the fish flopping and dying and evaporating into the air. But she keeps pedaling away and never turns back and I can’t keep up with her. I rode the wave of hormones and frustration right there in the hospital bed discussing names with Dave, and when it seemed he really wouldn’t go with Anna, I fell apart.
Dave was honestly perplexed when I told him. Anna had been riding
behind me on her bike, like a kid should be able to do in small-town Vermont on a tiny street with virtually no traffic. She was eight and cute and persistent. I was twelve and wanted to be left alone. I told him how I went on ahead, acting for the first time on the urge to ditch her, weaving and teasing in the street so she couldn’t follow easily. He assured me that I hadn’t done anything wrong. But I didn’t tell him that I hid on a side street and let her ride past, or that I saw the car swerve and go by, or that after the crash I heard her call for me before I could get to her. She was gone before she could finish saying my name, so her last words were unfinished like everything about her. She was the best thing about our family, and without her we failed one another in a million small ways
.
Kate choked back a sound, then put her hand to her mouth and shook quietly. It was so awful, so inconceivably awful, and Elizabeth had lived with the memory as a dark secret stain her whole life.
When I finished telling him he looked so confused. Why hadn’t I ever told him this before? How could he not know his wife had had a sister?
What is there to say? It’s not a logical thing but also not the most illogical, never to have found the moment or words to describe the worst thing you’ve ever done. He was gentle and concerned of course, but I didn’t feel any relief in telling. I couldn’t share the worst of it, the emptiness all the time of missing the person I imagine she would have become, the one person I might really have been able to talk to, and the shame of knowing it should have been her who had the chance to grow up and have children, and the certainty that she’d have been better at it. He would have said God, Elizabeth, in that same voice after I wondered too much about the miscarriage. In the end I go back to that same feeling I’ve always had about confidences. The other person rarely has anything useful to offer and usually you leave feeling no better, sometimes worse.
Anna Danielle Martin is on the bed beside me as I write, curled between my left arm and hip, a wisp of a girl and a girl in every way,
long eyelashes and puffy mouth, Dave’s full lips thank God instead of the thin slash of mine.
I really thought I was having another boy. I am not a giddy person but I’m light-headed with the possibilities, all the mother-daughterisms I always envied. Write this in blood right now: I swear she—they—will always feel unconditionally loved, and the house will be a normal place of happiness and comfort
.
Kate put down the book and went downstairs, then walked outside and stood on the lawn. The porch lights were not turned on and she was enveloped in darkness. She looked up at the clear night sky, stars like pinlights hung low in mesh netting. She wondered if Elizabeth had looked skyward and thought of her sister. She did not even know whether Elizabeth had believed in God.
Kate sat in the grass, then lay down flat on her back the way she had as a child. She thought of the little girl eating ice cream in the painting that hung in the Martins’ kitchen, and all the years she’d looked at the picture with no idea what it represented. Now it would only ever represent all Elizabeth had never confided, and the ways she imagined Kate would judge her. Kate wondered what Dave had thought hearing for the first time that his wife had had a sister. How could his mind not go to the moments she might have told him, but hadn’t; the times his own sister had come up in conversation, and the times she’d deflected questions about being an only child. Perhaps he’d wondered, and maybe not for the first time, whether he really knew Elizabeth at all.
There was only one thing Kate had ever purposely withheld from Chris. Shortly after they’d married, a new chef had been hired at her restaurant, a man with whom she’d interned during culinary school and had a brief relationship. Guy Giradeaux was the most gifted chef with whom she’d ever worked, and arrogant; his inability to admit a mistake was noteworthy, as rare as anyone’s ability to remember his having made one. Kate chose not to tell Chris that she’d once had a fling with the man who’d just become her new
boss. It had been brief and insignificant, and the fact that she’d now be working with him daily, late into the night, would only create tension in their new, untested marriage.
One night at the restaurant Kate was last to leave the kitchen, cleaning up excess flour and struggling with a fifty-pound sack, and Guy came down from the upstairs office. He stood beside her and began helping without a word. She struggled to make small talk but he smirked and said nothing, just stood close performing a task so below the realm of his job as to be inappropriate. His silence was suggestive and ridiculous. Then he dumped too much flour too quickly, and puffs of white dust rose from the bin, frosting his eyebrows and the front of his black hair. Kate laughed and he turned toward her, sizing her up with eyes deeply, icily blue. He didn’t care that she was now married. He was standing so near she could see the dark stubble fade to gray around his chin. He leaned closer. She stepped backward but tried to appear jaunty, as if getting a better angle to swat flour from his jacket; then she collected her things to leave. His faint smile twisted into a sneer as he realized she would not lean toward him, mesmerized by his eyes and his power, and he stalked back to his office shaking flour from his hair.