The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (32 page)

“Well, I should at least hear them out,” she said.

He smiled, curious. “What do you need to hear from them that you don’t already know?”

“Some of the details. The opening date. The salary. The title.”

“ ‘The title’?” His eyes had that indulgent quizzical look he gave when he thought something was foolish.

“Well, exactly how large of a role it’d be. Maybe it could be a shared thing. A few people taking shifts doing desserts and some other stuff.”

It was unrealistic, and they both knew it. “That’s not really a traditional structure in restaurants, is it?”

It was a rhetorical question but he wanted to drive the point home and hear her admission. That it was too much right now, that they weren’t there yet in their lives, that there’d be other restaurants in a few years when their family was better positioned for her to go back to work. This was clearly what he thought, but he didn’t want to have to say it for her.

Kate knew they weren’t on opposite sides of this. They were not Elizabeth and Dave. Chris would be supportive, but he preferred knowing that while he was in Bali or Boston, she was home. She herself didn’t like the idea of having full-time help for the kids, and long and unusual restaurant hours would mean missed school activities,
relay-race meals, interrupted weekends. But it felt like
someone
should be making a case for the other side. Lots of mothers worked full-time jobs and jobs with nontraditional hours, because they either needed to or wanted to, or some combination of the two. Somewhere in this argument-that-wasn’t-an-argument there should be a third party laying out the case for finding a way to pursue what you love. But when she tried to imagine what this third party would say, it always sounded hollow. Except when it was written by Elizabeth.
It was the identity, the ownership, the 1 a.m. moment behind the idea and then bringing it to fruition that had nothing to do with Dave or the kids
.

Chris took the camera from her gently and turned back to the kids, focused the lens on James helping Piper unsnarl her line. She was watching him with a look of admiration and trust, faith in the older brother who could make things right when he wasn’t tromping on her world. Kate saw the sort of big brother he would become if surrounded by people who encouraged kindness and loyalty over the fish-in-a-barrel sport of belittling younger siblings.

Click
. Chris pulled back the camera to look at the digital window at what he’d gotten. Then he tapped on the backward button, scrolling back through the pictures Kate had just taken—bright kites against the sky, bright-faced kids looking upward—and sat down to continue looking at old vacation photos with his coffee. The conversation about the restaurant was over.

Kate turned from him and went inside for something to eat. The phone number for the restaurant owner lay on the counter. It could probably be handled quickly in a voice mail, at least for now.
Hello, this is Kate Spenser, Anthony Devilliers’s friend. I’m looking forward to talking to you about the position
. Or,
Hello, I’m Kate Spenser. I wanted to let you know I have to decline putting my name in
. She peeled back the foil lid on a container of yogurt, and took a spoon from the drawer. When she walked back out on the patio Chris was looking intently at the camera. She leaned in over his shoulder; she’d taken some good shots of the beach and the carousel. But he was looking at
photos of croquet, of Piper, tiny between Dave Martin’s long arms as he coached her in the swing of the mallet. Dave standing in their yard not long ago, sandy and shirtless, so at home in the tableaux of kids in the yard that he might have been there for days.

Chris looked up at her. “When was Dave Martin here?”

She realized she hadn’t yet mentioned it. Even as she opened her mouth she knew what she should have been saying was,
Yeah, can you believe he came? It slipped my mind last night
, and put an arm around his neck to remind him of why she’d been distracted. But what she did was laugh uncomfortably and say, “Oh yeah, I haven’t had a chance to tell you.”

He scrolled back to the previous shot and saw the kids scampering on the lawn in their pajamas, then one more, Dave in the kitchen eating pancakes.

“Did he stay over?”

“No. They came over early in the morning. It was just a day trip. They had burgers and left that night.”

“Oh.”

He held her eye a moment longer, his expression unreadable. Then he looked back down at the camera, where Dave Martin was leaning against their kitchen counter, rumpled, loose. At home.

A
FEW HOURS PAST
sunset, and a large sailboat was still hosting a party offshore. Its outline was lit with a string of bulbs, the mast and sails illuminated like a nautical Christmas tree. Music and laughter came in through the open windows of the loft.

There were only a few entries left to read in the journal covered with the photograph of Elizabeth, Jonah, and Anna. The trunk sat beside the chaise on the floor, its broken lid listing on its hinges. Tonight Kate would start the next and last journal, the one that would take her through the rest of Elizabeth’s last year—the birth of Emily, Elizabeth’s thirty-eighth birthday, and whatever events had steered her toward Michael. To her surprise, the thought of having come to the end was not a relief. Reading the journals had felt like a conversation, one that had never been held, and she did not want it to end. There was nothing, no one, to take her place.

Kate settled into the chair, a glass of iced tea beside her, and opened the last pages of the notebook.

In late fall of 2000, the tenor of Elizabeth’s writing had changed. Entries were more cheerful and revolved around humorous and
frustrating things the children had done, the minutiae of their well-being, plans for the holidays.
The kids are in the living room playing with the Nativity set, pretending that Mary and Joseph and the angel are a golf threesome. I think the angel just called “Fore!” They’re really getting into it this year, and after all those years of dreading Christmas I’m really getting into it too. Which Nadia says is as good a barometer of happiness as any
.

Again Kate tried to place anyone named Nadia, but could not.

In these months there were no longer signs of discontent; there were a few mentions of painting, and of exchanging tentative plans with the island gallery. She wrote about Dave more frequently than she had in years, and more warmly.

Dave got the Spider to run the other day and is on cloud nine. All the windows down in the middle of December, his hair windblown and showing the small thinning spot he doesn’t acknowledge and I certainly don’t let on I do. He came back with a million yards of garland and I wrapped it up the banister while Anna was napping. When she woke up she stood at the top of the stairs with her eyes bugging out. “Mommy! BUSHES GREW ON THE STAIRS!” Incredible to think that at this time next year, we’ll have a third
.

It sounded more like the Elizabeth Kate had known, a mother charmed by the idiosyncrasies of family life. There was enthusiasm for the pregnancy, every detail recorded, each ultrasound as if it were her first.
The wand zooms down a spinal column like a staircase, then up close on a face. The baby had one hand over its eyes like it was already tired of all of us and our constant peeping: ah, the paparazzi again
.

Right after Emily was born, Kate had traveled up from Washington and made it to the hospital before Elizabeth was discharged. She sat beside her on the bed looking down into the infant’s opaque eyes, unreadable and still as those of a large fish. They commented over the imperfections a mother is not supposed to see: an ear bent double, just like Jonah’s, which you hope will unfold; a whorl of hair between the shoulder blades—half angel, half gnome—you pray will molt.

Elizabeth could not hide her relief that it was another girl.
I’m so glad they’ll have each other
.

Kate had given a vague smile, thinking of the mixed bag that was her relationship with her sister, Rachel. But even as she thought it, she checked herself. A relationship was a constantly evolving thing; so long as both parties lived, there was the possibility of change. Instead she’d said to Elizabeth,
Well, sometimes the friendships you make can be just as good as a sister
.

At the time, Kate had thought it was true for each of them, for different reasons. To Kate’s mind, Elizabeth probably felt Kate could not imagine what it was like to be an only child, no peer to balance the eagerness of parents who loved you too much. No matter that Elizabeth had not in fact been an only child, and that there’d never been that smothering love. And Elizabeth, Kate had thought, would never understand what it was to feel second best. How little Kate had known.

There had been a long silence that was somehow both content and melancholy, and Kate had pulled out her camera and taken the photograph that had been on the Martins’ refrigerator ever since. Elizabeth, pale in her maternity gown, the baby a sliver of pink at her breast.

Kate lifted the lid from its broken lock and reached for the next book in the stack, but found only the plain one she’d already read after she left the Martins’ house in June. Underneath that notebook were the others she’d already read, and at the bottom of those, the faded striped lining of the old trunk. She rifled through the stack in the middle and those on the far left, but there was nothing new. Her breathing sped up.

Kate tipped the trunk on its side and pulled the books toward her like a dealer raking in chips. The Hallmark-stickered composition
book. The college cover painted in geometrics, and the pastel-chalked one, and many others she’d already read. She spread the pile looking for anything she might have missed but there was nothing unfamiliar. The one she’d just finished, wrapped in the photograph of a smiling Elizabeth, beamed from the top of the pile like a challenge to all she’d expected to find: first tedious details of a predictable life, then illicit ones revealing how Elizabeth had veered off and away, neither one true.

Kate tried to remember when—and if—she’d seen this missing journal but couldn’t remember what it had looked like, couldn’t in fact be certain she’d seen a journal for that time period at all. She thought she had flipped one open that night in the motel parking lot and seen a starting date around Emily’s birth, but she was not sure. Yet there had to be; several months of significant events unaccounted for in the life of an avid diarist.

She thought of James, but since his snooping episode, he hadn’t shown any interest in the journals. He wasn’t even a very good sneak; before, he’d left the book sitting out on her bed. It couldn’t be Piper. Not only could she not read, but she hated the stairs leading to the loft, even hated climbing steep steps at the playground.

Kate went down into the children’s bedroom. James’s breath snagged in rhythmic sawing. In the glow of the nightlight his profile was slack-jawed on the pillow. She looked under his bed but saw nothing but his stuffed dinosaur. Pulled open his dresser drawers and opened his closet, nudging his books with her toe. All small paperbacks, no spiral notebooks.

Kate headed back into her bedroom and paused outside the bathroom, where Chris was showering. He was out of the question. He’d lost interest in the journals almost immediately, caring more about the way they were distracting Kate than about their contents. Just yesterday, as they’d sat at the beach with the kids, she’d begun to talk about Elizabeth’s mixed feelings about motherhood. He’d stared at her as patiently as a therapist, then turned to watch the kids at the waterline.

“Chris? Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes,” he’d said. “Did
you
hear what you said?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that’s the most you’ve talked about anything since we’ve been out here.” He said it with a smile, pouring a fistful of sand over her shin. “I know you miss her. But doesn’t it strike you as a little odd to be dwelling on this so much? These are our last few days. Let it go.” He swatted at a fly buzzing near her leg.