The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (33 page)

She had been irritated, but hadn’t argued. Their intimacy since his return had been sweet and genuine, and she didn’t want to ruin it with defensiveness. So she bumped against him shoulder to shoulder, an agreeable gesture, and smiled sadly.

But now she froze in their bedroom listening as he showered. Would he have? Just to get it out of their way for the remainder of their vacation? Inside the bathroom there was the bump of falling soap. She eased open his top drawer and ran fingers through his socks and underwear, careful to put them back in the neat lines he favored. Then she felt around in the second drawer under his stack of polo shirts. In the closet was his suitcase, empty but for a few biographies and a travel magazine he’d never unpacked.

A squeaky crank, and the sound of water stopped. She ran her hand quickly under the mattress on his side of the bed, even knowing while she did that she wouldn’t find anything. It would be so unlike him, taking something of hers.

Taking things.

Kate paused, her hand between the box spring and mattress. She thought of Dave sauntering into the house to take a shower after he’d said he wanted her to return the journals. She knew her response had been unsatisfying to him, and recalled his request to use the inside shower instead of the one on the side of the house, usually an island treat to their visitors. Then she thought about his breezy, almost self-satisfied departure that evening. He hadn’t seemed angry; he hadn’t seemed resigned, either. Just pragmatic, perhaps like a man who had taken matters into his own hands.

As she stood in the bedroom, the idea that he might have taken the missing journal advanced from possibility to inevitability. She saw him planning the trip out to the island after he’d realized she was such an unreliable caretaker that she’d lost the trunk key. She imagined him walking through the house and into the bedroom closet, pushing aside her basket of dirty laundry, and climbing the ladder. Sitting on the chaise in the loft, looking at the broken-lidded trunk.

She grabbed her cell phone in the kitchen and walked out onto the porch. As she flipped open the phone she registered the hour but did not hesitate.

Dave answered on the third ring with a hook of anxiety in his voice. It was the hello of someone who knew a call at after 10 p.m. must be worth answering, because he had answered unwelcome calls.

“You took it. You just couldn’t stand it so you took it, didn’t you?”

“Kate.” No confusion or denial, only a flat greeting.

“You didn’t have the right to just take it, Dave. It’s wrong.”

“You want to tell me what you’re talking about?” He had his southern voice on. He wasn’t outraged or defensive. He sounded amused.

“You know what I’m talking about. You went up to the loft and you took that notebook.” He was silent on the other end. “You took it when you were in showering.”

He took his time answering, and his voice was very slow. “Let me get this straight. So you’re missing a book and you don’t know how. And you automatically think me, and you’re calling to tell me that I have no right to my wife’s things. Even though you can’t seem to value them enough to keep track of them. First the key, now one of the books. I’d say that’s grounds for being fired as a trustee, dahhlin’.”

She felt the flush in her cheeks, the tips of her ears, the sensitive place on her neck. “So you’re riding in and taking over. What I want to know is, did you come out here planning all along to steal it, or
did you just think of it over dinner?” She spoke in a rush, relieved finally to speak openly. “Was your whole little speech about how I should share it with you just a show, because you already knew you’d take it if I didn’t agree? Or did you get pissed off and that’s when you decided to take it?”

The southern charm disappeared entirely. “I’m not gonna dignify that with a response because I don’t trust what I might say to you, Kate. I know you were a special friend of Elizabeth’s but you’re a real piece of work if you actually think I have
no right
to them—if you think you have some entitlement that goes above mine.”

“ ‘Entitlement’? Who said anything about entitlement? Jesus, I didn’t ask for this responsibility, and all this time you’ve been acting like I’ve wronged you somehow when all I’ve done is what
your
wife asked me to do. And it’s giving me hives and keeping me from sleeping, trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do with—”

“I’m not finished.”
His voice was controlled and explosive at the same time. “If you’re throwing around accusations about stealing when what you really did is lose one, then letting you have Elizabeth’s books was even worse than I thought in the first place.”

“Letting me
have
them?!” The words came like buckshot. “As if I came knocking at your door
asking
? As if I even wanted this?”

“But whatever you do, Kate, don’t try to tell me what’s
my right
and what isn’t. I don’t have to justify anything to you. If I wanted to take one of those books, Goddamn it, it’s my right—”

“—and if you have a problem with it, then your problem is with your wife,” she said, over and through him. “Because this is not what she wanted, to have you go digging around in her books yourself.”

Chris came onto the porch, shaking wet hair with one hand. When he heard her, he stopped and raised his eyebrows.

“Don’t you dare talk to me about what my wife wanted,” Dave thundered in her ear. “You knew her about as well as a cardboard cutout. You used her for whatever you needed. You think I couldn’t
see that? Elizabeth might not have, but I sure did. It made you feel so clever and important to have her look up to you, and you treated her like a sidekick, or a babysitting service!”

Kate gripped the porch railing and sent out the dogs. “You don’t know what you’re talking about! We helped
each other
out—it was a two-way street. You weren’t even
around
most of the time!” Her momentum was unstoppable. “If you knew your wife so well and saw things so clearly, how is it she was going off to California with some other guy? Go ahead—
you
figure out what she was doing in Joshua Tree. Because I’ve had it. I’ve had it with both of you, putting me in the middle. I’m done with the whole thing.” She disconnected the call and pitched the phone into the grass.

Chris looked at her, wide-eyed. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

Kate walked a few steps down the patio trying to slow her breath and pulse, all out of sync, then leaned back hard against a railing post. “Dave took one of Elizabeth’s notebooks while he was here, the one that explains why she was flying to L.A. He just went in and took it right out of our loft.”

Chris put his hand behind his neck, and looked down at the floorboards in a
Lord-give-me-strength
way. When he looked back up at her it was with wonder.

“It was
his
wife’s journal, for Christ’s sake. If I were you I’d say good riddance and let him deal with where his wife was going. It’s been making you crazy all summer.”

“Don’t you get it? It was up to me to figure out what to do with them.” She stomped her bare foot on the floorboards. “She trusted me—this is all she wanted. And I didn’t do it.” Emotion clenched her throat and she didn’t trust herself to speak. She looked at him as if he were missing a most basic point of logic.

“Why do you care so much about protecting them from each other?” He craned forward for eye contact, and she looked away, eyes filling. He stepped closer and took her gently by the shoulders. “Give him the rest of the notebooks and be done with it. Why are you so fixated on making this your problem?”

Of course it was her problem. How could he not see that it was? Elizabeth had asked this of her and she owed her at least that, to make amends.

Amends.

Kate stopped thumping her heel and went still with the surprise of having her motivations so unexpectedly clear. The air was suffocating, even outdoors, and pressed in on her like a cloud of gnats. She leaned forward from the railing and began to walk down the porch. The lawn stretched toward the ocean in dark relief.

“I’m going to walk for a while.”

“Kate,” he said. “Come on. Let it go. Enough already.”

The grass under her bare feet was thick and damp as seaweed. She waited until she passed beyond the range of the porch lights and walked faster.

“Kate!”

Once she was past the pool of porch light she began to run. Darkness closed in as she put behind her Dave’s words
—cutout, sidekick
—and the trunk that in the end told her nothing except that Elizabeth was not as placid as she’d seemed, but might have acted that way because Kate had treated her as if she were. The soft cold grass grew coarse near the beach, but she didn’t slow as she hit the sand. She turned and kept running along the water, even as the stones dug at her insteps and dried eelgrass scraped her ankles.

The side of her foot struck a rock, stopping her short. The stabbing sensation shot from her little toe up her ankle. She inhaled sharply and doubled over, crouched with hands on her knees until the sparks of pain dulled. The water was a few yards away, dark as blanketing earth. She stayed bent until her breath returned.
Sidekick
. Then she pulled her sweatshirt over her head, stepped out of her pants, and walked step by step into the sea. The cold water numbed her toe and she went in without flinching. Gooseflesh rose above the place where the water met her shins, then her knees, then thighs. The hair stood along her legs and arms and across her scalp, electrifying. Stronger than the emptiness, more tangible than anxiety.

Kate dove in and when she surfaced fell into the rhythm of the swimmer she hadn’t been for years. She swam straight out from shore, turning for air every fourth stroke, toe throbbing with each kick until she ceased to notice. She swam with her eyes open but the stinging wash of salt did not flush the vision of Elizabeth’s face with its most common expression, one of bland inscrutable goodwill, watching and listening but offering little of herself. In the look there had been an unnerving collage of admiration, envy, and resentment, but underneath it all, need.
Stay
, it had said.
Let me have more of you
.

She swam with no sense of time, thinking only briefly of the harmful things that might be under and around her—rusted debris, infectious bacteria, sharks. There were few sounds. Wind over water. The clang of a ship’s rigging. Then music and laughter. She paused, lifting her head from the water, suspended.

The party boat she’d heard earlier was up ahead, close enough to hear the music clearly and to see the people standing on deck with their drinks. A woman in a black halter dress, a man whose shirt was open to his navel. She touched his arm in response to something he’d said, and threw back her head in showy laughter.

The scene felt a million miles from shore, from Kate’s bungalow and children and the daily grind to keep them happy and grounded and safe, and another million from where Dave was likely pacing his yard and cursing her. Kate thought then of the painting in the Martins’ kitchen, the two brownstones. A woman drinking wine with her head thrown back in manic laughter, while next door, a woman combed her daughter’s long wet hair.

Kate continued to tread water, imagining what Dave was doing at this moment. Swinging his driver in the darkness of his yard, or sitting in his Spider and drinking a beer with the radio on. Or he might be at this moment reading Elizabeth’s second-to-last journal, learning about her fascination with a man whose ability to accept her for who she was had roused her from a domestic coma. As Dave read her impressions of this man and her decision to travel with
him, he might look up and across the garage beyond his car to the far wall, where her easel was folded and gathering dust. He might put a hand through his hair, thick but for the spot Elizabeth had pretended not to see, and wonder where things had gone wrong, what had happened to bring them from a ring on an ice-cream sundae to
Three days until I leave. Never anticipated anything so much or expected this much
.

Kate began to tire, treading water. Her toe became inured to the cold and began to throb. She turned toward the bungalow, a few windows glowing at the end of the lawn. It was a cool night, good sleeping weather, and she would pull up the hand-knitted afghan that belonged to the homeowners—designed, no doubt, by someone with some story behind why it was made and for whom. Everything had a story. Every word, it seemed, every small gesture, was the result of something that had moved someone, or moved her to pretend as if it hadn’t.

Kate turned away from the boat and began slow strokes toward shore. Chris would be waiting for her back at the house, a little worried but not too much. He wasn’t the worrying type, but he would be on a night he’d seen his wife so unhinged. Maybe they would stay up and talk, and he would be understanding of her guilt and obligation even if he didn’t really understand.

Or maybe she would just return, and that would be good enough, and when he crawled under the covers she would go too. There was no longer anything left for her to stay up and read.

I
N THEIR LAST WEEK
they went to four of their favorite beaches, built entire cities in the sand. Kate taped up her toe and limped through the agricultural fair, flew down high sackcloth slides and clomped through the barns with 4-H exhibits, and watched enough log-chopping and frying-pan-throwing competitions to occupy a frontier town for a lifetime. They grilled a surf-and-turf dinner for the neighbors, and she made the kids cupcakes with animals piped in bright icing that stained their lips blue. She was the best mother in the world, the very best.

As much as she had sworn to Chris after her swim that she was putting the whole business behind her, she couldn’t. It was there at the beach, there when they played their last rounds of miniature golf, and when they walked around town with oversized waffle cones of ice cream. She hadn’t finished. There was supposed to have been a trajectory; she would read all summer and decide what to do with the books when everything became clear. But it never had.