The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (36 page)

In the distance, a tall man stepped from behind a cactus. He wore khakis that melted into the desert, and a blue shirt the same hue as the cloudless sky.

“What is your burden?”

He stood at a distance from the camera, but the words came through the computer speakers like a soft wind.

“Are you in pain? Are you suffering an illness? Are you depressed?” His voice was the voice of radio, sonorous and soothing. “Have you been told by doctors that your path back to health will be very difficult, or even impossible? That the journey to healing will require
a regimen that will nearly kill you, and you are afraid you are not strong enough? And does a small voice inside you say
It isn’t true—
that there must be something you can do to be strong enough to combat this sickness in your body or your mind?”

The camera moved off the man and rose up the side of a mesa striated in red and brown. The visual drama and musical crescendo conveyed a surmounting of obstacles, the achieving of great heights.

“There is.”

The camera left the mesa and returned to a close shot of the man, his face and shoulders tight against the robin’s-egg sky. His eyes were arresting, contrasting bands of hazel and gray, made even more distinctive by his large, smooth head. Tanned and powerful, it seemed to radiate sun from within.

“My name is Michael, and I’d like to help you meet your challenge. Come to Joshua Tree.”

C
HRIS SPOONED SUGAR INTO
his coffee. “You were quite the restless sleeper last night.”

Kate leaned against the kitchen counter and flipped the pages of the travel magazine. Next to it was the scrap of paper with the number she’d written down for the Aura Institute.

“My toe hurt. I got up to take a pill, and watched TV for a while.”

She knew better than to tell him what she’d found. There’d be the look.
The notebooks, again?
  “We should go fishing. We’ve hardly done any fishing.” Across the room, James was trying to bring his sister around to his version of the day, the very best way to spend their last full day on the island. She wanted to swim at the biggest beach.

“You’re just afraid of hooks, and fish mouths,” he taunted, mimicking the gaping lips and wide eyes.

“Don’t fight,” Chris said. “We could do both.” He inclined his chin toward Kate. “We could drive out on the peninsula and catch something for dinner. Give the kids pizza early, and we’ll have a last dinner on the porch after they go to bed. Pick up some steamers too.”

They could afford a leisurely night. The house had been straightened, and they were mostly packed. The ferry was tomorrow at
noon, and they had until late morning to strip the beds and load the car before the cleaning crew arrived. She nodded. “Sounds good.”

While the children went with Chris to the bait shop, Kate stayed behind to get dressed and finish her coffee. The forecast was hot even for early August, and she went out to water the pansies in their patio troughs. The cut-glass pitcher caught the sun as she moved down the line deadheading shriveled blooms. Violet and yellow, fuchsia and white. Some mottled with a dark core, centered as an unblinking eye. She went into the house to refill the pitcher, and as she held it under the faucet, she glanced at the slip of paper on the counter.

The phone rang three times before she was connected to an answering machine.

“Namaste. It’s a beautiful day in Joshua Tree. Thank you for calling the Aura Institute.” The woman’s voice had an unplaceable accent, mellifluous as a chant. “We are very interested in your inner strength and well-being, but are unable to take your call at the moment. Please leave a message and we will call you back as soon as possible to begin your journey of healing.”

Kate clicked her phone shut abruptly and slipped it into her pocket. It was just shy of nine o’clock, too early for a receptionist to be picking up calls on the West Coast. Then again, the toll-free number didn’t have to be operated in Joshua Tree. It could be ringing anywhere: a glassy headquarters office in Manhattan, a strip mall in New Jersey, a call center in Bangalore. Michael himself could be sitting in front of a rotary phone in a trailer park, playing solitaire and buffing his head. He might be nothing more than a cheap freelance actor who spent off-hours slinging eggs in a diner between tryouts for summer stock.

Kate clicked on one of the television morning programs as she changed into fishing clothes, choosing cargo shorts with pockets large enough for a few of Piper’s dolls.

How her choices had changed. In her twenties, maintaining professionalism—right down to the uniform and accessories—had
seemed so critical; self-esteem was tied to building on her achievements and the respect she’d worked so hard to earn, and brought true joy. Each imperfect plating felt like an indictment of the best that she could do, and anything that got in the way of her work seemed irresponsible, a misplaced priority. Now those words had new meaning—
responsibility
and
priority, esteem
and
joy
—and their significance was all the deeper because she appreciated them from both sides of the work-family divide. Hopefully, that was how Elizabeth had come to feel too by the time she’d made bushes grow on the banister.

The morning show went to its top-of-the-hour news roundup. Kate hadn’t watched much television news for weeks, but paused in front of the screen now. The world was a mess. There was footage of burning streets in Kabul, and desert sand hills steaming from missile strikes. Airport security lines were stretched out the doors, and municipal water facilities couldn’t conduct contamination tests fast enough to keep up with the threats. U.S. cities were spinning their terror-alert status so frequently, yellow to orange to red and back, that it seemed television stations should spin color wheels. This morning’s news anchor appeared grave as she delivered an update on the vial of nerve gas missing from a government facility out west; an unsubstantiated report claimed it had been found in one of Washington’s Metro stations.

The Metro, which Kate rode almost daily with the kids. To Chris’s office, to the museums. Which she’d take to reach Anthony’s new restaurant, if she accepted the job. She turned off the television.

Kate went to her laptop sitting open on the kitchen counter and typed in a brief search. There were things she could do to protect her family. The stash of food in the spare-tire well and the fire extinguisher weren’t enough anymore. Web sites sold protective air hoods for civilian use, protection that could be kept under the bed, even portable ones designed to fit in a purse. And the drinking water; there was a water-cooler delivery service she’d meant to call before they’d left on vacation. What a relief to have fresh bottled
water from some remote mountain spring, someplace safe, flowing right into her kitchen. That would help. Every bit would help, until they could leave the District.

She’d suspected it would come to this. It was idiotic, living right in the capital of the country. It was as if there were a giant bull’s-eye over Washington; she sensed it, actually felt at times the crawling of her scalp, as if she were being watched through crosshairs. Maybe Chris’s company would agree to let him work somewhere other than the headquarters. Vermont, Maine. Maybe they could even live here on the island, year-round. Kate sat on the edge of the couch, laptop balanced on her knees, and scratched absently at the spot growing warm on her neck.

How would Elizabeth have responded to how crazed the world had become? A mother today had to have her antennae going in all directions, always. The people with whom your children came in contact; the people to whom you opened the door. The pesticides and growth hormones, the contaminated-food recalls, the chemicals and toxins in everyday objects. Kate did not believe in fate, though she often wished she did. How much easier to give a karmic shrug and believe an outcome was meant to be, trust that what we clung to or resisted so desperately was the edge of some grand unknowable plan. The constant vigilance was exhausting. Think about it too much, and it could paralyze you.

Paralyze you. She’d heard that phrase somewhere before.

Kate put the laptop aside and went up to the loft. She skimmed the notebooks containing Elizabeth’s years in Florence, then the time she spent caring for her mother. She found the passage in the Manhattan years, the night after the attack on the Central Park Jogger.

Elizabeth had been more resilient than she. That, at its core, was the truth. Here was Kate, unhinged by vague threats—bombs that may or may not menace her city, disease spreading among cattle an ocean away—while Elizabeth had moved beyond setbacks and fear with methodical attention to what was required of her. Kate might be the brassy one on the outside, but Elizabeth was tougher. Whatever happened, somehow she’d moved forward.

Back in the kitchen, Kate closed the laptop on the photos of parents and children in escape hoods and picked up her cell phone. On the second ring, a receptionist answered.

“Aura Institute. It’s a beautiful day in Joshua Tree. How may we help you?”

Kate hesitated, surprised to hear a live person. She was silent a moment wondering how, exactly, she did expect them to help.

“Is Michael in, please?”

“May I ask who is calling?”

“My name is Kate Spenser. Michael knew a friend of mine, Elizabeth Martin, who was supposed to have come to Joshua Tree last year. I have to talk to him about her.”

There was no harm in assuming. If she was wrong, the worst they could do was not return her call.

“I see. I’m sorry, but we have a policy of not discussing clients.”

“Actually, she was … she is deceased, and I’m working with the family”—here Kate paused, having no idea where to go with this line of inquiry—“to settle her affairs.”

“I do see and I do appreciate that. And I am sorry for your loss,” the woman said again. Kate could imagine the employee mantra.
Acknowledge the situation. Hear the conflict. Affirm the sadness
. “But he is
not available. May I have one of our spiritual coaches return your call?”

Kate left her name and number, knowing she wouldn’t hear from anyone. Cult freaks, she thought, and hung up the phone.

Rarely were beach conditions just right at the height of the season. Crowds were usually too heavy or the music was too loud, too many greenhead flies were biting or conversations were too close, someone was too vocal about how a screenplay had been optioned. But on this last day fishing conditions were ideal, and there was solitude on the peninsula. Chris had chosen this location for surf casting, hoping for striped bass, bonito, false albacore. They drove out past the sunbathers and ballplayers to the tip of the peninsula, the car prepared with an oversand permit and half-deflated tires, where they had almost complete privacy.

After the first half hour the kids became bored with their rods, and after an hour of clamming in the low tidal pools their rakes and trowels had been lost, broken, or abandoned. But the dunes were empty and the wind was mild. The car had already been packed with necessities for the day, so they set camp, convincing Piper that this was as fine a place to swim as her favorite beach.

Chris had pored over tidal charts for the various parts of the island, and when conditions were optimal, he stood and waited with the determination of Ahab. The waterline inched upward; beach plums appeared to grow full and ripen in the hours that passed. Still there were no bites. He offered examples of past successes, the time he’d caught a forty-pound striper in just this spot by casting with live eel, same as he was today. Still nothing, right up until their departure. But Chris being Chris, he shrugged it off.

“I thought I’d get one today,” he said lightly as he steered the car off the sand where it reached the turnoff from the peninsula. “I felt the fishing karma.”

“Fishing karma rarely comes to those who are accompanied by loud six- and four-year-olds,” she said. Bayberry bushes and wind-twisted juniper lined the access road, and she inhaled the scents of summer as the car brushed by.

“You never believed I’d get one anyway.” He said it as if he were wounded. He was sunburned and crusted in salt, and his left elbow hung out the window casually. He smiled, sad and flirtatious. “No faith.”

Kate grinned. “You, my dear, are the one who suggested lobster and steamers. You’re the one with no faith I’d come along unless you bribed me with a clambake.” She thrummed her fingers on the sill of the car door, sun warm on her arm.