The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (34 page)

Kate didn’t doubt that there had been another journal, but she was no longer certain of whether Dave had taken it. She replayed his visit and departure—how long he’d been inside showering, whether he’d been carrying a bag that could have concealed a notebook. Of one thing she was certain: When he’d said good-bye in
the driveway, his defeated bearing was gone. He walked away with an ease that seemed to her evidence he’d seized an opportunity.

Yet as days passed, her doubt grew. Three days after she’d called him, while she was going through the early tasks of closing up the house, she recalled a passage from the final journal, a phrase she’d breezed over at the beginning of the summer. She’d stopped cleaning the refrigerator and gone up to the loft.

The air was stale with the windows closed, and the notebooks were still scattered on the floor. It was there in the last journal, the one she’d read after leaving the Martins’ house.
Now I have to get myself together and say good-bye to the kids and remember to make a fuss over packing the painting supplies they bought, jam them in somehow with all that awful writing
. It was possible Elizabeth had taken this missing journal with her on the plane. Kate couldn’t imagine why she’d bring that older one, instead of the new book she’d begun before her trip, but if she had, then the angry exchange with Dave had been unjustified. And even worse, Kate realized with a drop in her stomach, she would never understand what had drawn Elizabeth to Joshua Tree.

Memories of what she’d read were like a hangover that faded and returned. Kate would be cooking dinner and remember an episode from her Southbrook years, then find herself recasting it with this new version of Elizabeth. When the playgroup women had overstayed at her house, evenings they’d been invited for pizza and left the family room in shambles, Elizabeth had always told them not to bother straightening up. She had her own way of organizing things; it would only take a minute for her to do later. Now Kate could imagine Elizabeth sighing with relief when they left, then working on design projects that would keep her up until 2 a.m. because she loved the work even if this was the only way she could manage it. And never telling them, as if the desperation for something of her own would undercut her credentials as a dedicated mother, and set her off from her friends. Kate tried to recall the number of times she’d asked Elizabeth to babysit while she worked intermittently in
restaurant consulting. She had always thought she had reciprocated as often as she’d asked. But maybe she’d just wanted to think she had.

Had they taken advantage of Elizabeth? Like most things in life, it was more complicated than that. Elizabeth hadn’t volunteered much, and Kate hadn’t asked. How much could a person be expected to see when someone else showed so little? Elizabeth had felt herself to be alone, but she had also felt herself to be unique, that her experience was both unusual and unshareable, when in truth it was not.

But she had opened herself to Michael.

How did you recognize that potential understanding in a person, Kate wondered; how did you recognize whether it existed in your own spouse, untested? If she could find this Michael, she felt she would know.

There had been three high schools in Elizabeth’s town, each with graduating classes of over a thousand. Three days before they were to leave the island, Kate spent the evening on Internet searches. She clicked through town board-of-education sites and people-finder databases, the alumni sites posted in banner advertisements.

The next day she called school administrators, and though they turned her down, citing alumni privacy, class lists were traced online easily enough. In Elizabeth’s class there had been seven Michaels. But there had been only one Claire. With a few keystrokes she emerged, Elizabeth’s closest high school friend, married and living in New Jersey.

Claire answered on the third ring. After exchanging pleasantries and then sympathy, Kate came to the reason for her call.
I’m trying to find the guy she dated in high school
, she said.
Michael
.

There was a confused silence. A small child cried in the background.

Elizabeth never really dated anyone
, Claire said as she tried to soothe
the agitated child. Then she reconsidered.
Well, she could have without telling anyone. Elizabeth was funny that way
.

The screen door opened on resistant hinges and Kate entered the bakery. The front was empty, no customers, no Max. The pastry case was filled with what remained of the morning offerings. From the back there was singing.

“You fill up my se-e-e-nses …”

She looked through the curtains. Max was cleaning pans with his back to her. The music played faintly from the stereo in the corner, but it was his voice, an octave above its natural range, that filled the room.

She set her large cardboard box on the pastry case and stepped through the curtains, crooning back. “Coooome let me looooove you … you adorable maaan-chiiild.”

Max shook a soapy whisk over his shoulder in her direction and continued singing softly.

“John
Denver
?” she said, brushing suds from her T-shirt. “This is what you sing when you’re alone? You’re a closet John Denver fan?”

“There is not one closeted thing about me and you know it,” he said. “I can only imagine what you sing in the shower.
Someone—left the cake out—in the rain
 …”

“Donna Summer is a very underappreciated artist.”

“Mmm, yes. Years before her time.” He fished a knife too quickly from the sudsy water and winced. “I thought we weren’t meeting the realtor until two,” he said, considering the pad of his thumb.

“I thought I’d come a little early. I wanted to bring you these.” She went back through the curtains to the front of the bakery and carried in the cardboard flat with three potted plants. “Something to help your house show better. Not that it needs it.”

“Well aren’t you sweet.” He touched the wide, flat petals of the
white phalaenopsis as gently as one would the cheek of a newborn. “Love orchids. So much better than cut bouquets.”

She took a piece of rugelach from the case. “So this realtor. Is she going to be your buyer’s broker on a new place too?”

“Not sure. I might rent. I’ll get the full picture of what I’m dealing with in the fall.”

His house was not extravagant, but it had been designed to his tastes—heavy on kitchen, dining room, and library, light on space appropriate for large-screen televisions or bulky children’s toys, the types of rooms most sought after in real estate these days. It would not be easily dispensed with, or replaced.

“The full picture of what you’re dealing with from investigators, or from your accountant?”

He waved his hand, a summary gesture that included the all of it. “The fall, the fall,” he repeated, with the rhythm of a poet wrapping up a reading. “Everything will be clearer in the fall.”

She dropped into the worn wooden chair beside the butcher-block island and watched him wash dishes at the sink. So ugly, the whole business. William had been flaky, certainly, but she’d never imagined anything on the scale of this. Max rarely wanted to talk about it, and she was never certain how much to press. She leaned low over her legs, releasing the tension in her hamstrings.

“I won’t mind having fall come, myself. School, fresh starts, and all that.”

He stacked baking pans in the drying rack. “Already? All year long, you’re counting the days to summer.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“You still reading your friend’s books?”

“More or less.” She dropped a sandal and rested her bare foot on a rung of the stool. “There are a lot of them. I can’t imagine putting yourself out there like that on paper.”

Max pulled a spatula from the water and scrutinized its edge. “It’s not the most uncommon thing in the world. I keep a journal, you know.”

Kate looked up. “You do? I never knew that.”

“For years and years.”

He moved another stack of muffin tins to the sink. She watched as he cleaned one, scraping crust from its edges.

“Why? If you don’t mind my asking,” she said. He paused in his scrubbing. “I mean, are you going to do anything with them? Do you love writing?”

He looked over his shoulder at her. “It’s not a matter of loving writing. It’s something I need to do. It helps me vent and figure things out. I don’t have to think about anyone else’s feelings or judgments. It’s the one place I really get to have my say.”

“Why not just call a friend?”

He gave her a wry smile that suggested she’d missed the point in some important way. “ ‘The unexamined life’ and all that, m’dear.” They sat in silence while he drained the sink. “Besides. Who wants to hear all that? Really.”

She watched as he picked up the utensils in the drying rack and began to put them away.

It occurred to her that there could be in most relationships two distinct tracks of conversation taking place at any given time: what people actually discussed about their lives, and what people did not discuss but was very much on their minds.
In the end I come back to that same feeling I’ve always had about confidences. They rarely give anything back, you rarely leave feeling any better, and you can get more out of just writing to yourself
.

Max’s conclusion could have as easily come from Elizabeth.
Who wants to hear all that?
he’d said.

She was not certain she had ever conveyed that she would be available to him in that way. But never before had it occurred to her that she should; if people wanted to talk, she figured, they’d talk. There was a fine line between expressing concern and violating privacy. But another thought pricked. Perhaps laziness was a point on that spectrum too. She had not extended herself as she ought to have with a friend. She walked over to the sink to help put away the dishes.

“So these journals of your friend’s,” he said. “Explain to me again how you came to have them?”

“She put a line in her will. If anything happened to her she wanted me to decide what should be done with them.”

“So she designated a trustee. Interesting.” He reached to a high cabinet and put away a stack of bowls. “Did you ever break into that trunk?”

“Yes.” She shifted in her chair, pictured the lid hanging brokenly on its hinges.

“And?” he said. “Did the perfect mother make a cuckold of her loyal husband?” His mouth curved in an unpleasant way.

Kate frowned. “Don’t be flip, Max. It’s a big deal. Some of what she wrote could really shake up her family and change what they think of her.”

He was quiet while he puzzled together the pieces of the industrial-sized mixer, slid the bowl onto its fitting. Neither of them spoke for a moment.

“You know, I don’t want to sound insensitive, but that’s life, Kate,” Max said, wiping the side of the appliance. “If it roughs up what they think of her and they have to do some mental adjusting about what their family was all about—well, that’s life.” He banged the mixer bowl back into place a little too forcefully. “You don’t really want to get in the middle of that, do you? Choosing what gets known, what doesn’t. Why would you?”

It was a fair question. Elizabeth’s story where it intersected with Dave’s was his as well. If it made him a little more bitter, a little less trusting—well, that is what his story consisted of. But the thing that continued to give her pause was what Elizabeth’s story would consist of, going forward.

“It’s a powerful thing, Max, reading through the way someone has felt all her life. She started off like one kind of person, and ended up making herself into this almost overkill mother that she thought she should be. And whether or not we agree with the gymnastics of it all, I can’t help feeling that she won’t get credit for it.
She’ll be judged for some of the things she thought and did, and the great mom she really was will get lost.”

“How’s that really different from any of us?” Max turned to her and leaned against the sink. “You’re a great mother too, but I’ll bet you didn’t start off that way. Everybody changes. You grow into what you have to do. Don’t you think her husband knows her well enough to be able to see that?”

Did he? She honestly had no idea. “I don’t know. I hope so.”

“Well, maybe you could help him see that.” He lifted the last mixing bowl from the drying rack, and gave her a long look down his nose. “Hmmm? You’re pretty good at giving people the benefit of the doubt, all your ‘you never know’ business. Maybe that’s why your friend left the books to
you
.”

He picked up a broom and began sweeping around the island, making a small pile of flour and dried bits of dough. It made sense, the idea that Elizabeth had wanted to have her say. She wouldn’t have wanted the books destroyed or hidden. She would have wanted them understood.

The easiest thing would be to give the writing back to Dave, or nearly all of it. With the rip of a few pages, the Elizabeth looking for an exit strategy—clothes in a garbage bag, her mind on the open road—would never have existed. Omit a few more pages, and after the jagged thread of paper had been pulled from the metal spirals, there would be no mother with unmotherly feelings. But to edit her books would be just another way of not accepting Elizabeth for who she was, and of falling back on old stereotypes of what was motherly and unmotherly.