The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (4 page)
Read The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D Online
Authors: Nichole Bernier
July 22, 2001
Kate came this weekend with her family, passing through, heading out on vacation. Went walking on the beach, a beautiful morning but I felt ready to explode, so on edge and exhausted. I can’t believe it’s possible to walk around feeling this way and no one can see.
We talked about art and college, and man, more than anyone in this place, she gets me. But I didn’t give in to the temptation to tell her all about the trip, just gave the party line. Confiding in people rarely makes you feel any better; just feeds them information that they don’t know how to respond to and changes the way they see you. But mostly I don’t want it
out there, don’t want any chance of this affecting the kids. It’s worked so far and warped as this sounds, it’s one of my proudest accomplishments
.
Kate raised shaking fingers to her brow. She didn’t know if she was ready for this. Not just the possibility that Elizabeth was having an affair, but seeing what her friend had really thought of her, the small impressions and judgments we all hold privately.
August 6, 2001
Printed out directions to Joshua Tree, reservations reconfirmed, and took out the last of the money I’ll need from the ATM. I can’t help thinking Dave noticed the withdrawals this month, and sometimes I worry that I should lock away this book too.
Three days until I leave. Never anticipated anything so much or expected this much
.
August 9, 2001, 6 a.m.
The sun is up but the children aren’t, not quite yet. The baby fell back asleep after her feeding and I have a few minutes before showering. I can’t wait but can’t stand it, leaving her so little.
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. Even in the middle of this my mind sticks on the little things: Will Dave hear Emily when she cries in the middle of the night and get Jonah to the bus stop on time and remember that Anna gags on apple skin? All that could go wrong if I leave, vs. all that could go right. So selfish.
Depends on how you define selfish, Michael says.
I can’t think about it or I will be unable to get down the driveway when they’re blowing kisses and singing See ya later alligator, in a while, crocodile
.
Kate closed the cover and rested her head against the stiff motel armchair that stank of some past guest’s cigarettes. She scratched at worn
fibers of seat cushion, ripped bits of brown and green in a hybrid of linen and plastic. Chris’s breathing snagged on each inhale.
She saw Elizabeth at an ATM kiosk making withdrawals she hoped would go unnoticed, telling the older two children to hold the sides of the stroller. Pulling bills from the metal slot, a furtive look over her shoulder through loose strands of hair, the only gesture suggesting the cash would not go for gas and groceries. Kate tried to imagine her cross-legged on a blanket with a man who was not Dave, imagine sun and an electric touch, but could not. She tried to imagine feeling really known.
Chris was snoring heavily now, and in the adjacent kids’ room there was silence. She pulled the car keys from beneath the T-shirt on the bureau, uncovering the photo of bin Laden and those eyes that followed her like a painting possessed, and clicked off the lamp. At the door she paused, remembering the motel key-card and the antique key to Elizabeth’s trunk.
The light from the outdoor walkway flooded the room, but no one stirred. She closed the door behind her softly and headed to the parking lot, barely lit and surrounded by trees. Cars passed regularly on the highway just beyond.
Kate unlocked the car’s rear door and then the trunk, putting the plain notebook back on the top of the stack and digging for the one that would have come before it. She flipped open the covers, saw dates through the 1980s and 1990s, and then finally, one bearing dates from 2000 and 2001. The notebook was covered in a photograph of Elizabeth with Jonah and Anna, all three laughing in the sun. Elizabeth’s smile and posture were free and unrestrained in a way they had not been often. It was a stunning image, bittersweet in the way an occasion can be nostalgic for its loss even as it unfolds.
Kate opened the book. She meant to bring it inside but couldn’t resist skimming by the dim light of the car’s interior dome, eager and miserable to learn how this Michael came to be holding hands with the world’s most earnest woman—a mother who had embraced
each day as parenting magazines advised because the children would be grown before you knew it.
She felt as if someone were nearby, watching. Gooseflesh rose on her arms. She turned fast but saw no one in the lot, empty but for a few other cars. Only a thin fringe of trees separated the motel from the highway, and the asphalt under her feet vibrated when a semi rumbled past. She turned back to the car and the notebook, but the sensation of eyes on her remained, eyes halfway from cornflower to sapphire.
Ask that she start at the beginning
.
Slowly, as if for someone else’s benefit, she replaced the photo-covered journal in the trunk—on top, where she could always come back to it—and reached for the book at the bottom of the far left stack. She looked at the dates from several until she found a black-and-white composition-style notebook. The cover was brightened with stickers, the sort found in greeting-card aisles: tulips, smiley faces, kittens. The date on the first page was 1976, which by Kate’s reckoning put Elizabeth, who’d been a year older than she, at about twelve. She pulled it out and held it briefly—
see, I am beginning here
. Then she opened it and began to read.
April 12, 1976
Dear Diary
,
Dr. Trinker says I should start keeping a diary to write my thoughts, and do it like I’m writing letters to my best friend or to myself, and that it will help me “process” and “move on.” For the record I think this is a stupid idea, writing to make yourself feel better. But when I rode my bike today past the sub sandwich place where I took Anna for her birthday in February, I couldn’t breathe and actually had to get off and put my head between my knees like an asthma attack. So I will give it a try. She was so proud of turning eight and really psyched to be biking into town, and I thought she’d explode when we went to the pet store and I told her I was getting her a fish for her present. She made me get one too so it would have a friend in the tank to keep it company. Hers died last week. Figures
.
When you write a letter to your diary are you supposed to sign it?
Yours truly
,
Lizzie Drogan
Kate stopped reading at a sound, a rustling in the trees behind the car. The wooded fringe was a wall of shadows. She held her breath but there was only stillness, then the trembling ground of a truck beyond the trees. Her car’s rear hatch was still raised, and she realized she was fully backlit and visible to anyone coming off the interstate, anyone roaming at 2 a.m. near the rear entry of a motel.
Kate closed the car door, then pressed the lock button on her keychain, and the alarm chirped. Something darted from under the car by her feet. She gasped and jumped back, dropping the notebook. Low and dark, a small animal loped away toward the Dumpsters, its striped tail bobbing like the flag on a girl’s bike.
The motel room was dark and quiet when Kate let herself back in. She settled into the armchair and switched the table lamp back on, then sat considering the sticker-covered notebook in her hands. Kate had never seen a photograph of Elizabeth as a child, and the disaffected tone of the journal entry did little to evoke her spirit. Kate tried to imagine her biking into town at twelve, April spattering the back of her pants. Walking through the aisles of a stationery store, muttering
Stupid
under her breath, then riding home with her selection and later pressing kittens onto the cover in a small spasm of preteen cheer. In this way, under duress, she’d begun the journal-writing habit that would last her entire life.
April 15, 1976
Dear Diary,
Another day of no one talking to me on the bus. I stared out the window and tried to think of something else when we passed Taylor Street
and the little cross on the side of the road. I’ve never felt lonelier in my whole life. Everyone is so freaked out around me that for the last month it’s been like I’m poison. It’s like having a sister get killed is contagious and I’m glowing with it. I wish I could move away
.
Yours truly
,
Lizzie D
A sister. Kate felt the chair sink and the floor become unsteady under her feet. How was it possible Elizabeth could have had a sister and not told Kate? Not about the loss, or ever having had one at all. She’d mentioned being an only child, but had spoken so little about it that Kate assumed it had come about in the usual way: parents ambivalent about the demands of children found that one was quite enough, or perhaps were unable to have another, creating an emptiness that had fueled Elizabeth’s decision to have three of her own.
Maybe more
, she used to say.
Kate exhaled. She thought of how Piper curled into James as they slept in the car, head to head, their high symmetrical eyebrows like two parenthetical statements to Kate’s fulfillment as a professional, and then a wife. She thought of her own sister, Rachel. A sister was a companion and competitor, the person who best understood the crucible in which you were formed. One of the few capable of completing you, and if lost, of cleaving you cleanly in half.
But in the wash of sympathy, there was a sting that she hadn’t been told.
April 27, 1976
Dear Diary
,
I told Mom I was going to Sherry’s house after school. I’ve never been in a graveyard alone before. I passed a grave where people put stuffed animals and little toy cars by the headstone, and when I read the dates I saw that a really little kid had been buried there. I was afraid I’d
have another breathing fit but when I got to Anna’s I stopped crying. The grass hasn’t grown and there’s no stone yet. So I sat and looked at dirt
.
I don’t know what people do when they go to graveyards and I was probably supposed to pray or something, but I couldn’t stop thinking that she was right down there under the ground. Her actual body wearing her green school picture day dress like at the wake. But it didn’t look anything like her except for the charm bracelet and the hair, and even that was weird, all stiff like a doll’s. There was not a single thing that’s the way she really was, nothing about her goofy face and the way she always followed me that was so annoying but I couldn’t yell Quit it. Because what kind of person would be mean to a kid who only wants to be with you all the time?
That’s when I knew that she’s with God, because there was no Anna in that box at all. I didn’t feel it as much at the funeral, which is when I guess you’re supposed to. But when you look at a body and there’s not a bit of life in it that was anything like what the person really was, not even like someone sleeping and more frozen than a statue, then you just have to know there’s a God. Because something has to make that body more than a body, not just blood going around
.
April 29, 1976
The school guidance counselor set me up with Mother’s Helper work. She thought it would be good for me even though I don’t like babysitting and little kids kind of bug me. The mom smiled a lot and was always touching the little girl’s hair and giving her little hugs and squeezes, and I wondered if Mom was ever like that with me when I was little, before she started calling me Sourpuss and Grumplestiltskin. The mom was asking me questions about how I like school and about my family, so I guess the counselor didn’t tell her about Anna. Which was weird because even though she lives the next town over I think every other single person in the county knows, or at least it seems that way at the grocery store. When she asked if I had any
brothers or sisters I didn’t know what to say. What am I supposed to say now?
I asked Mom this while she was doing the dishes and she was quiet for a long time, and then she looked out the window behind the sink, and I couldn’t tell if she was going to get mad or cry. But she didn’t do either. She told me that it’s better to say that I don’t have any brothers or sisters because to explain to other people that I had a sister who just died would make them really uncomfortable, and people don’t like to be uncomfortable. There are things you say, and things that are better not to. And anyway, it’s the truth.
I wish Mom and Dad had more than just two kids. It doesn’t seem like a very smart thing to do if you’re a parent, when the good one can get killed and then you’re left with only one, the grumpy one
.
May 12, 1976
I went back to the graveyard today and brought Anna’s palomino pony. I had to sneak into her room to get it because Mom doesn’t like it when I go in. Everything’s the same, even her dirty clothes are still on the floor and the bed isn’t made.
I told Dr. Trinker about how I got in big trouble last week when Mom caught me sleeping in Anna’s bed. Dr. Trinker said she’d talk to her, but a few days later Mom said I wouldn’t be going to Dr. Trinker again. She said I didn’t need to go talk to a doctor anymore and that we were all doing just fine
.