The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (37 page)

Life on the island was incompatible with concern over nerve-gas vials and water contamination. As she thought this, she came close to believing it. There was no contrary voice whispering imagined warnings—sinking ferries, toxic rabbits, tainted clouds wafting from Boston. That was the fallout of an overactive mind, a mind accustomed to being in control. And—here was the surprise, an unexpected gift of logic—perhaps life back in Washington, or anywhere, could be incompatible with such fears as well.

Chris reached the end of the long sandy access road and waited to merge into traffic. At the corner was a farmstand, a wooden lean-to with a few tables of produce and flowers. As Chris idled, Kate watched the woman at the farmstand, knitting. A small boy beside her drove toy cars around cardboard pints of mixed berries.

“So how did Max’s place appraise? Is he really going to sell that house?” Chris asked.

“I haven’t heard from him yet. But it sounds like he is.”

For sale among the woman’s vegetables lay handmade children’s sweaters and hats, and even from the car ten yards away Kate could appreciate the skill. Baby blankets spread across the table showed elaborate basket-weave patterns. A cabled cardigan was draped around the larger vegetables, an armhole slung over summer squash in a chummy embrace.

“You know, I was thinking about coming back out here in the fall, helping Max get ready to move,” Kate said. She could be of help packing boxes, running the bakery. He might appreciate the company, someone to talk to, or even just to keep a companionable silence. “Would you mind staying with the kids some weekend so I could come back out?”

Chris shrugged. “Sure, as long as I’m not traveling.”

The boy knocked over a cardboard pint and the woman put down her knitting to right it, fat blackberries and raspberries, small blueberries rolling every which way.

Kate needed to call Anthony. He deserved to know that she would not be putting her name in for the job. It had been tempting to imagine herself made whole by the things that used to provide such satisfaction, and to hope she might be capable of compartmentalizing now in a way she hadn’t then. It might well have been managed. That had been her automatic retort to Chris, though he really hadn’t offered provocation. Mostly she had been arguing with herself.

After Elizabeth died, the sound bites about her went like this: great mother, great wife, great friend. The moment a person is gone it becomes critical to define her, making a life into a thing memorialized. The complex and contradictory person she had been was slowly being reduced to its essence: she was dedicated, naturally maternal; she was all heart, the true center of her home; a devoted member of the community of moms, a galvanizer, a workhorse. To what extent these things were true was beside the point. In a reduction some attributes are exaggerated, and some evaporate.

As far as Kate knew, no one had ever said,
Elizabeth was a very creative person, a painter who produced interesting work that was sold here and there
, even though a few of her paintings might yet be hanging in someone’s home, picked up cheaply years ago in a little gallery on Avenue A, or in that island gallery, if that connection ever materialized. It was never said of her,
Her graphics appeared in this or that magazine advertisement
, or
She worked hard to carve out a fulfilling working
life in the late-night hours on the side of raising her family
. These weren’t her sound bites and were never to be her legacy. Maybe Elizabeth hadn’t trusted that others would understand the nuances of what she loved. Perhaps she thought that eventually she’d miss work and painting less. Or maybe it was simply that she had come to believe that at the end of the day, what matters is who you are, not what you do.

But sometimes, Kate thought, what you do is integral to who you are. And what Elizabeth might not have appreciated was that there were ways of putting elements of your life together wherever they fit, patiently, at different points in time—ways short of giving them up or denying they exist. She might have come to appreciate it if she’d had more time. Maybe she’d begun to.

Chris dropped her off at the house for a shower and went on with the kids to the fish market. She walked inside the bungalow, unlocked always, as was the island way, and thought how odd it would be to be back in the District in their alarmed, double-bolted house. And yet it wouldn’t. She knew they would slip back into their lifestyle as easily as they’d shrugged it off, as matter-of-factly as the child wore his gas-mask hood. People were resilient, people adjusted to all kinds of things. What was the alternative?

Kate turned on the shower and had pulled her tank top over her head when her cell phone rang in the kitchen. It would be Chris, asking if she wanted littlenecks or cherrystones, chicken lobsters or larger ones. She reached it just before the fourth ring.

“Hey,” she said, untying her bikini top. She could taste the clams already, small and meaty, slicked in butter. Littlenecks or small steamers, if they had them. That should be the last night’s send-off.

“Is this Kate Spenser?” A man’s voice, unfamiliar.

“Yes. And this is?”

“This is Michael from the Aura Institute.”

Kate stood rooted in the kitchen as her bikini loosed and fell. “Yes. Hello.”

“I understand you were inquiring after Elizabeth Martin.” His voice was so close and so personal, she wanted to draw back the phone and keep him at arm’s length. She wrapped her arms across her chest as she walked to the bathroom for a towel and turned off the shower.

“Yes. She was my friend.”

He sighed. “Normally we don’t discuss our guests, but I wanted to let you know I am sorry for your loss. That was a terrible shock. We knew she was on that plane. I hope the family received our condolences.”

Ordinarily, his professional sympathy would have made her roll her eyes, the soothing voice slipped on like Mr. Rogers’s sweater to deal with such circumstances.
Grieving friend
. But her humor, her cynicism, her wariness, all stalled after he said “our guests.” He’d known Elizabeth. This was Michael.

He cleared his throat to draw her back into conversation. “We sent flowers to the house following the memorial,” he said. “I hadn’t wanted to bother the family with a phone call. But we were so shocked and sad. I had been looking forward to working with Elizabeth.”

Working with
. Kate digested the phrase. “Yes. Everyone was shocked.”

“I imagine it has been a very difficult year for them.”

“It has been,” she said vaguely, buying herself time while she tried to make sense of what she was hearing. “But Elizabeth’s husband is holding things together.”

There was a pause while each waited to hear the other’s agenda.

“I understand you’re working with her estate,” he prompted. “As I said, normally we don’t talk about our guests. I hope you understand, but it’s part of our confidentiality charter. I wish I could be of help in some way.”

“Yes. I do see, and I do appreciate that,” Kate said, adopting the receptionist’s syntax. She strained to think of a line of conversation to keep him talking, making an effort not to say, for once, the most direct thing.
So why was she coming out to visit you people?
  “It has been a tough time, and there have been many details …” She paused, grasping for nouns that might be appropriate to the situation. “Debts and credits, accounting sorts of things that the family should not have to deal with alone. I’m serving as a trustee.” This wasn’t untrue. Here she found her foothold. “And there were certain sums paid in advance.”

“Ah,” he said. “And your interest is in the fact that she paid in full even though she never participated in her stay.”

His cautious diction reminded her of Dave, or at least the way he’d begun to sound this summer. But the telegenic warmth was still there, and Michael’s intimate tone that spoke knowledge, as if he knew her mind, and understood.

That’s what he does, she reminded herself. He wins confidence, eases minds.

“Yes. I am looking into these kinds of matters on the family’s behalf.”

“Well, Ms.… Spenser? At the risk of sounding businesslike and lacking in empathy, I have to remind you of her contract. I’m sure you’re aware from the paperwork she left behind that her visit is considered nonrefundable. Arrangements are made in advance, rooms reserved, and she did receive our pretrip counseling.”

“I see,” Kate said.

“This is a difficult thing, I know. We are sensitive people. But the nature of our business is the business of life, and life is so arbitrary.” That word again. “With the nature of our retreat, some of the people who seek us out are quite ill and … well, there are no guarantees.”

She paused, her own heartbeat drumming in her ears. “And she wasn’t doing well.” She made her voice flat and factual, a statement
rather than a question. As she heard herself say the words, it became less difficult to believe.

“That’s not entirely true. And at any rate, our role is not to assess physical conditions, or replace traditional medical therapies. This is no Place of Last Hope.”

“Mmm,” Kate answered. But her mind was already withdrawing from the conversation, imagining a sickly Elizabeth painting in the desert, trying to transform depression and rage into renewed health.

“I hope you understand,” Michael said. “Some would call it a tragic random happening, but in our institute we don’t believe in the tragic or the random, or in the notion of waste. Elizabeth was on her path, and this was part of it. She had in fact already gotten a great deal from her short time preparing, and I believe her writing probably reflects that. She had plans for working things through, and sketches she’d made in her notebook after her diagnosis.”

The word echoed ugly on the line. Kate thought of the missing notebook, and how much more must have been included in those few months following Emily’s birth.
All that awful writing
. “And so she was bringing some of her writing with her.” She was careful not to raise her voice in a question.

“Working with one’s own writing was part of the process for some, and we encourage that, especially in people who are as prolific as she was, working with both words and painting. But we don’t really talk about the process with nonguests. I hope you understand.”

When Kate did not reply, he continued. “She was more at peace already by the time she left for California, less angry. Shedding that resentment toward the curse of genetics, toward a lot of things. Well, you were her friend. You know.”

She didn’t. But she did know there was a strong genetic link to the disease that had taken down Elizabeth’s mother and aunt. And she knew there was a decent chance that a woman burned once by
a partner who had not stood by her during a medical crisis would not allow herself to trust again, or might again handle things in her own quiet way, as her mother had.

A rustling of papers and something in his tone suggested a summary, and she knew the conversation had neared its end. “I hope the family will take comfort in that, at least.”

Kate hesitated. “I think they are beginning to.”

T
HE TRAFFIC WAS ALWAYS
heaviest Sundays in August. Traffic was part of summer travel, as inevitable as the thin musty pillows in rentals. Since they’d left the ferry they had moved along roads dense with the migrating herd, crossing the Massachusetts line and traveling south along the Connecticut coast, passing and passed by the same cars all afternoon. The kids had fallen asleep, but although Kate had reclined her seat and closed her eyes, she could not. She pushed back her hair and pointed the air vent toward her face.

“What time did you tell Dave you were coming?” Chris asked, voice cool.

“I didn’t call.”

He glanced over, then away. “What if he’s not there?”

“He will be.” She looked out the window.

The truth was that she hadn’t wanted to give Dave notice that she was coming. She had no idea what she would have said on the phone, something sure to sound irritatingly cryptic.
I have to talk to you about something
, or more blunt,
I know why Elizabeth was flying to Los Angeles
. He might have become angry if she hadn’t wanted to discuss it then, or felt he had no need for her if he had actually taken the journal.
Don’t bother
, and that would be that. She didn’t
know any more about his inclination to hold a grudge than about his capacity to forgive. But if their rapport had been derailed by her accusation that he’d taken a journal, it wasn’t going to be put back on track over the phone.

“How long are you planning to stay?” His casual tone was belied by the precise way he held the steering wheel, hands at ten and two o’clock, the way tense teens were taught in driver’s ed. No more elbow out the window, one hand at the top of the wheel, captain of his own ship.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Probably a few hours.”

He kept his eyes on the road.

The night before, after the kids had gone to bed, they’d had a late dinner on the porch. They sat at the round table with a citronella candle in the middle—the arrival of dense night insects always signaled the end of summer—and she wondered, not for the first time, why they didn’t do this at home. It wasn’t as if they didn’t have a grill, or that Washington didn’t have great seafood. Saving cook-outs for their time on the island was what made vacation special, she told herself, and that was part of it, but not all. The truth was that they became too caught up in daily obligations to welcome the interruption.