The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (31 page)

Kate put the book down and covered her face, palms cool against her cheekbones, and drew long slow breaths through the crack between her hands. She sat that way a long while, and was unaware when her dream state segued into actual dreams.

She was on a transatlantic flight. Something to do with visiting Chris, an emergency rescue. She clutched an awkward carry-on bag in her lap, tools of escape, and buzzed a flight attendant for help securing it in an overhead bin. Moments passed, and no one came. She looked toward the front galley, then peered around her seat toward the rear. But the flight attendants lounging in back against aluminum drawers were giant rabbits, noses long and leering like rats under jaunty caps. In each row fanning back, every seat was filled with rabbits, gray with limp greasy whiskers, some with red eyes, teeth protruding like stalactites from thin lips. Kate recoiled and dropped her pack, and it began to convulse. She reached inside to
safeguard her tools and pulled out instead a handful of tiny baby rabbits, bald and mewling, their eyes yet unopened.
They are all your children
, came a voice over the PA system. She cupped them in her hands but they grew smaller and more difficult to hold, slipping between her fingers and falling to the floor one after another with a grotesque wooden thud.

Kate awoke to a thud, a sound from the house that had crossed over to her dreams. She sat up in the chaise, instantly awake and trained on the sound. Footfall on the patio. A scrape of wood, and the sound of chafed lifting. A window opening.

She fell over the edge of the chaise and fumbled toward the loft’s trapdoor. In a rush she envisioned weapons and rope burns and monetary demands, a search for valuables that was certain to disappoint, followed by the rage of entitlement unsatisfied. The locksmith had warned her of break-ins. Her heartbeat pulsed in her ears and her children were downstairs and her progress to the ladder was endless. The stairs accordioned out below, long and lengthening.

She’d let down her guard. She’d let something slip by. For all her planning, her fire extinguishers and water coolers and supplies in the spare-tire well, she didn’t have a plan for intruders. Finally, this is how it would be. Should she volunteer the fact of her sleeping children and plead for mercy, or did that make it worse? What had Elizabeth—how had Elizabeth—

She scrambled down the ladder, missing steps, and fell down the bottom few.

“Kate, it’s me,” came a voice from the family room. “You locked the door. I didn’t want to wake everyone.”

She stopped at the bottom of the ladder and crouched, steadying her breathing. Then she stood and walked out of the bedroom, wiping the clamminess from her palms.

Chris climbed the rest of the way in through the window looking every bit the part of a transatlantic flier, dark suit slept in, tie loose and off-center. His rust-colored hair fell in clusters suggesting
the last shower had happened many time zones ago. The sight of him home, the knowledge that he was no longer traipsing in and out of prime tourist locations, gave her relief as potent as desire.

He looked up and saw her in the doorway, took in the languid posture in her old black camisole. Chris left his garment bag on the other side of the window and crossed the room.

“Welcome home,” she said as he kissed her on the forehead.

“It’s nice to be back.” He ran his hand along her waist in the sliver of bare skin, hooked his index finger under the waistband of her shorts.

“Have you eaten? There’s pizza.”

“Not hungry,” he said. “Not that kind of hungry.”

She smiled, though her heart still pounded. “Sounds like someone had one of those special first-class movie options.” She pulled back in his arms and looked him in the eye searching for anything else. He met her look, tired, but direct. If there was a brown leg on his conscience, and she had no reason to think that there was, it did not show.

She unthreaded his tie from his collar, then unbuttoned his creased jacket and wrinkled button-down shirt. She let the jacket drop to the floor. He smiled, amused at the return of the wife she hadn’t been for months, and she continued with the confidence of someone who had faced down poor odds. He was back. He’d gone into the land of bad headlines and tempted all that was arbitrary and possible, but none of those things had come to pass, and he was back.

She had a fleeting thought of the things that had not happened—a self-detonating martyr, Chris’s burned wallet returned to her by the embassy—and wondered if things would ever be simple again, a trip just a trip, a sound on the porch just a sound. Nothing had slipped by, no visit from destiny, not this time. Whatever accident of chance or malice awaited her, she did not yet know how it would be.

She sank to the bed and rested her forehead on his bare stomach. He reached down and put his hands through her overgrown hair, pushed long bangs off her forehead as a parent might soothe a
fever, or maybe just to better see her face, then climbed past her and onto the bed. She closed her eyes and inhaled the familiar smell of him. He smelled of other things, too, things she vaguely placed in streets blowing with the unfiltered emissions of cars and strong cigarettes, smells she associated with the stained red lips of betel chewers and marketplace baskets of cardamom, clove, and camphor. He had been gone. But he was back.

For a moment in the dark she saw the face of Dave Martin, thought of his year of long nights alone, then imagined him standing in the kitchen alongside his energetic young nanny. She would be wearing a tank top in the summer’s heat, her bra strap slipping from beneath the ribbed shoulder of her tank, and though he’d have a fleeting impulse to push it up for her, he probably would not.

Kate put her hand to Chris’s chest, traced a thumb along the muscle. He slid a camisole strap off one of her shoulders and put his lips where it had been, long and slow, as if she had been gone too.

T
HE MORNING
sun on the porch was nearly tropical. Kate sat in a weathered Adirondack chair and rested her coffee mug on its wide splintered arm. At the patio table, the kids were at work on Asian coloring books Chris had left out for them the night before.

“I need the purple.” Piper reached across the table to the pile of crayons in front of James. “For Jasmine’s dress.”

“She’s not Jasmine. She’s some other lady.”

“She is Jasmine. Look at her eyes.”

James sighed with the patience of someone who’s traveled the whole world over. “Other people in the world have eyes like that, Piper.”

Kate slipped her hoodie off her bare shoulders. She closed her eyes and let her head tilt back against the wood slats of the chair. She’d had little sleep last night, and did not mind. They’d needed this.

There was a sound behind them. “Dad!” James called. Chris came onto the porch with a tired grin and terrible hair, and the kids ran to him, speaking over and through one another vying for his attention. He put his hand on Kate’s shoulder and rubbed the back of her neck with his thumb. She reached up and stroked his knuckles, then got up to refill her coffee.

As she poured, she watched them through the window. Piper was leaning forward, chin jutting with the effort of describing her first underwater swim in the ocean. Kate watched Chris follow the retelling, saw the smile lines crease his eyes when Piper described crabs on the ocean floor. If the tables were turned, if Kate were the one who’d been away so long, she knew the sense of what she’d missed would be as strong as the pleasure of hearing. They were wired differently, she and Chris.

As she poured a cup for him as well, her cell phone rang on the counter. She glanced at the caller ID window and saw an unfamiliar number with the Washington, D.C., area code. “Hello?”

“Kate, it’s Anthony. You still on vacation?”

She shouldn’t have picked it up. She wasn’t prepared to talk about the restaurant job. “Hey there. Yes, we have about a week left.”

“How’s it going?”

“Great. We come out every year. We love it here.”

“Good. So, have you talked to the restaurant owners?”

“No,” she said. “They haven’t called.”

He paused. “You were supposed to call them, remember?”

Through the window she saw James pantomime a golf putt, then jump up and down with both fists in the air. Chris gave him a double high five.

“I was? I thought they were going to call me. Oops.”

“ ‘Oops’?” Anthony sighed. “You gotta call them, Kate. In the next few weeks they’re going to get serious about lining up a pastry chef and you’ll lose your jump on it. We need you. We need your crème brûlée.”

Need
. That had to be one of the most abused words in the language. She liked Anthony. But the minute she said no—if she said no—he’d have some other colleague on the line and would need that person’s chocolate soufflé.

“Has the opening date been set yet?”

“No. They’re still rehabbing the space. But I think they already have the maître d’ and sommelier on board.”

Outside, the kids were opening a bag from Chris and pulling out long packages. Colorful membranes unfurled in Piper’s hands. Chris gestured down the lawn, and the three of them headed off the porch.

“Hey, remind me,” Kate said. “Is the position full-time?”

“Full-time?” Anthony asked. “What do you mean?”

“Well, how many people are they lining up for the team? Is there any room for, you know, fewer days?”

He hesitated, confused. “You mean like job sharing?”

“Sort of. Like if there were enough people hired for desserts, then maybe everyone wouldn’t have to be there all the time.”

“What’s wrong with you?” he sputtered. “Of course it’s full-time. This isn’t some hot-dog stand.”

She put her hand through her hair. She shouldn’t have said anything. “No, I know. Calm down. I just knew someone who had a setup like that in Connecticut.”

“Well that’s
Connecticut
. These investors got a Beard Award for the last place they did. You don’t get that with a part-fucking-time pastry chef.” He sighed. Anthony was a sigher. “Katie, if you’re not serious about this you gotta let me know. It would be great to work together again, but I’m not putting my neck out so you can get all mommy-track on me.”

She nearly barked into the phone that of course she’d take it. It
was
a great opportunity. She could feel the smooth steel utensils in her hand, and feel that control that led to success, the ability to account for all the variables, which didn’t happen enough in other areas of life. An image of Jonah with a Winnie-the-Pooh lunchbox came to mind, three-year-old Jonah with wild curls on his first day of preschool, Elizabeth picking him up with the mixed pleasure of seeing him not want to come home.
So fast. It all passes so fast
.

“No, no, I’ll call him,” she said. “Give me that number again.” As she reached for a pen, she saw Chris helping Piper release a brightly colored kite into the air. It rose and was carried away by the
unpredictable wind and her hands froze in their outstretched position, wanting to hold on as much as she wanted to let go.

Kate walked into the yard holding two cups of coffee with the camera tucked under her arm. Chris and the kids were running down the length of the lawn trying to get the kites to stay airborne. The geometric forms were diving and bobbing about twenty feet off the ground, staying up as long as the runners kept moving.

Kate put down the coffee and took the lens cap off the camera. When she tightened the focus, their animated expressions filled the lens. James, skipping backward and looking up at his kite, hopeful.
Click
. Handing Piper the reel of string with an encouraging smile, while she looked up at him like he’d hung the moon.
Click
. Chris, with eyes and hair that belonged twelve hours ahead and a face all love.

One morning while they were dating, shortly before they’d gotten engaged, he’d surprised her in the hotel restaurant. She’d looked out over the room and there he’d been at one of the tables, just in from South America when he was supposed to have gone straight to the office for an urgent project. He had been bleary-eyed and had the hair of a deranged person, as he sipped coffee contentedly waiting to see her. That was Chris. He didn’t care what he looked like or where he was supposed to be when he cared about something else more. She’d felt a love then so fierce she knew she was stuck with it always. What she hadn’t known was that sometimes it would take work, living with it.

They ran back up the yard, and then Chris slowed to a walk and came to the patio for his coffee.

“Thanks.” He took a sip, either not noticing or not minding that it was lukewarm from sitting while she’d talked on the phone. He looked back at the kids, roughhousing with the kites. “I give it another ten seconds in the air.”

“I give it another ten minutes until it’s broken.”

“That’s a sucker bet.”

Piper’s kite had already fallen, but they were trying to work together to keep James’s up.

“Were you on the phone inside?” Chris asked.

“Yeah. It was Anthony. About the restaurant.”

He stood and sipped his coffee while he watched the kids, taking a step toward the lawn. “What did you tell him?” His body language said that this was a thirty-second conversation.

“I said I’d call the owners,” she said. “I was supposed to have already, but I thought they were calling me. So I’m supposed to get on it.”

He turned, surprised. “Oh.” He’d expected her to say she had turned it down.