The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (40 page)

He leaned toward her, reaching for the baby monitor under the table. As he adjusted its volume, the warbling voice of Emily joined them on the porch, rhythmic syllables strung together like notes.
Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma ma
, up and down her own tuneless scale. Both of Kate’s own kids had said
Mama
before
Dada
too, and she wondered whether all babies had that word among their first, an ingrained verbal progression whether or not they had a mama in the house.

Dave pulled something out of his pocket and placed it next to
her on the table, a photograph. She put down her beer and pinched her fingers on her shirt to dry the condensation, then picked it up. It was a picture of Elizabeth reading a story to Anna in the playroom. Elizabeth looked pale and tired beside her tanned, smiling daughter. “When was this taken?”

“Last August, a few days before she left for her trip. She looks bad, doesn’t she.”

Kate held the photo but didn’t say anything. Elizabeth’s face was puffy, her hair was limp, and there were dark circles under her eyes. In truth, she didn’t look all that much different than she had in the months after Anna was born, but then Kate had misread her appearance. Even so, it was disconcerting to see how much Elizabeth had changed in the month since Kate had visited while passing through town last summer. They’d spoken on the phone several times in July and August—discussing preschools, kindergarten, and, as Kate recalled, her own rattling-on irritation over a new pediatrician. On and on, minutiae. Of course she’d had no idea. She looked away from the photo.

“She was sick,” he said. “That’s what you came over to tell me.” He wasn’t challenging her, or looking for confirmation. He already knew, and wanted her to know that he knew.

“I think so.”

He seemed surprised. “So she didn’t tell you, either.”

“No.”

He nodded, and turned back to the swingset. He stared at it as if he were waiting for it to do something, and she turned toward it too, just for something to look at other than him. She half expected the swings to start swaying from the force of their combined silent attention.

“I thought for sure you knew all along. I thought that was why she left you the books.”

“No.” Though it occurred to Kate that it might have been easier for him to think it: that Elizabeth was reluctant to show the truth about one thing in particular, rather than everything in general.

“How long have you known?” she asked. She was almost certain he hadn’t taken the missing journal, but she had to ask.

He stared into the yard. “Once I started paying attention, it wasn’t hard to find. She handled the bills and insurance paperwork, so that was all filed away. She put the oncologist stuff with the OB bills.”

The word
oncologist
didn’t seem to trip him up as it did her, the specificity of the title evoking appointments and treatments, and making real the notion that a person might handle that by herself. It was the very best of a person, or the very worst.

Dave was still fixed on the swingset as if it were holding him in place. Kate drew up her knees to her chest. “I can’t imagine keeping that kind of secret. The energy it would take.”

“Who could? Who would want to?” He took a drink, and put the bottle down on the table too forcefully. Suds rose up the neck and threatened to overflow. “I’ve known—I knew—” Dave worked to find the right tense. “Elizabeth and I were together a long time. I have an idea why she did it. But she should have known better after all these years.”

It hung there, the suggestion that Elizabeth should have forgiven him for mistakes made so many years ago. He wanted her to agree, and Kate knew she should say something like,
Yes, you would think
. But maybe in a situation like that it wouldn’t matter how many years had passed. It was no small thing to walk away from someone when she was sick, to convey to her,
No thanks, I didn’t sign on for that
. Maybe that was, in fact, the sort of thing someone could never get over.

“Well,” Kate said, “she just seemed not to want to talk about things. I think the privacy piece kind of outweighed everything.” It was a noncommittal observation, but she didn’t know whether he wanted her insights.
Don’t you dare talk to me about what my wife wanted
. “It seems like a habit with her, being so private. She had this way of presenting herself, a particular way she wanted to appear. I don’t think her secrecy was necessarily a reflection on how much she trusted the other person.”

This wasn’t altogether true. If Kate had been honest she would have said,
She only gives you one chance to let her down
. But she didn’t want to remind him of ways he’d lost his wife’s trust early on. He had the trunk now. He’d see for himself soon enough.

“Secrecy, well, that’s a strong way of putting it,” he said. “There was a lot of stuff she downplayed, I knew that. Like acting as if she didn’t care much about her work. If she wanted to play Mommy Pollyanna because it made her feel like a better person, that’s fine. I just wanted her to be happy. But keeping actual secrets? I don’t know about that. Not until this.” He gestured with his beer toward the photo. “This is a whole different ball game. No trust.”

So he knew how she’d felt about work. Kate put her head back against the lounger and wondered how much else he knew. Maybe Elizabeth’s journals wouldn’t be as surprising to him as she’d thought; maybe it wasn’t so much a matter of her keeping secrets as it was of calculated presentation, day after day. What to tell, how to do it and when; what to downplay or not tell at all. Not so different from what Kate had been doing herself.

“A trust issue, sure,” Kate said. “But mostly, it’s kind of a lack of trust in herself.”

“That’s an interesting spin.”

“Well, that’s what’s going on when a person doesn’t show what they’re all about, isn’t it? They’re not trusting that people will approve of the decisions they make, or like them as they are. And maybe they don’t so much either.”

He made a derisive
pffft
and looked off into the yard. It was a different kind of hurt, being on the short end of trust. Knowing that your partner doubted whether your love was broad enough to accommodate the reality of her and, even if fleetingly, whether you might not stay. He shook his head.

“Well,” Kate said, “at least you know she wasn’t involved with someone else.”

He looked at her blankly. She knew then that he did not know. All he knew was that Michael was a man who’d drawn his wife
away. No matter what he’d said at the bungalow about expecting her to share what she knew, his face told her that he never wanted to have this conversation, to learn about his wife from someone else.

“Was it in the journals?”

“Not spelled out.”

“Tell me.”

The neighborhood children had gone inside by the time she finished. She wanted to belittle the Aura Institute. Small word choices or a lift of the eyebrow would do it, put her and Dave in the same camp, a cynical response to the place Elizabeth had chosen over both of them. But as she explained, she resisted.

He didn’t respond immediately. There was the chittering of insects and the murmuring of neighbors, content on their patio, but little other sound.

“You’re telling me she was going to California to some crazy-ass healing retreat.”

“I guess so. I talked to him myself, and he actually didn’t sound all that crazy. He knew all about her, and about your family—”

“He doesn’t know a damn thing about my family.”

She could have agreed with him. But if she had, there would have been no one to lay out the case for the truth about Joshua Tree. That was the fact of it. Elizabeth had paid money, had withdrawn funds slowly from the ATM, and intended to go.

Dave took a long drink from his beer. The light was growing dim and the only thing visible through the brush was the twinkle of a candle. From next door came a light feminine laugh. He tapped the bottle twice on the table, rocked it from side to side on its base, then got up and walked inside.

Two minutes passed, then five. It grew darker. A small animal rustled in the ruins of the rosebushes neglected below the porch.
Kate began to wonder uncomfortably what she would do if Dave didn’t come back outside. Should she go in to him? They had both loved her, after all. Or should she respect his privacy, collect her bag, and let herself out the front door? The neighbors blew out the candle and went indoors, and the yard fell silent.

If after ten minutes he hadn’t returned, she’d call herself a cab. She would close the door quietly behind her, head back to Chris and the children and the city bearing an invisible bull’s-eye with which she would make her peace, and the last she’d see of the Martins would be the trunk in the hall.

These thoughts had become a contingency plan when Dave walked back outside holding two fresh beer bottles. He sat in the lounge chair and rested his on his thigh, cupped in his hand.

“Her mother went someplace like that when Elizabeth was in high school, some New Agey thing in the desert.” His voice was thick, and he cleared his throat. “Liz never knew exactly what it was and she made considerable fun of it, but I think she gives it credit for getting her mother on the wagon.”

Kate noted his use of the past and the present tense both, and realized that’s just how love was, something that would always exist between the tenses.

In the distance a siren rose and a dog bayed, then went quiet. The crickets started up, tremulous above the mundane insects that had failed to camouflage their awkward silence earlier, and to Kate at that moment it was the most peaceful sound in the world. It was partly having the indecision and responsibility of the trunk lifted, and partly the relief of being able to talk about its contents. Probably partly the beer, too. A sandal dropped from one of her feet and she let the other drop as well, then flexed her ankles.

She saw Dave look over at her feet. Presentable, nothing manicured but not too neglected, an island of chipped polish in the middle of each nail. They were the feet of a mother who kept herself up passingly well, the feet a Southbrook man would see daily on his wife padding around the house, if he had a wife.

“So how much did you hate me for having the journals?” She said it lightly, but there was discomfort in the question, even if the question was about a different kind of resentment.
Sidekick. Babysitting service
. Things blurted out under those circumstances were always the truth.

“Nah, maybe just a little in the beginning. And then at the end.” His tone was light with teasing, hints of the old charm. She glanced up to see if his expression had softened but his face was still haggard, cheekbones sharper and hollowed beneath. She wondered if this was just the way he would look now, if grief and disillusionment could change the geometry of a face.

“This isn’t something I wanted, you know. It was making me sick all summer.”

“You just got a little carried away.”

She bristled, but knew it was partly true. “I’m sorry I accused you of taking a notebook.”

He looked over and frowned. “So you did lose it.”

“No. I’m pretty sure she had it with her on the plane.”

At the mention of the plane, he turned his face in the other direction. He didn’t want to take the conversation this way. Frankly, neither did she.

“When did you start to want to know?” she asked.

“Hmmm?”

“When did you start to want the books? At the beginning of the summer it seemed like you didn’t even want them. You could have read them when you had the chance before you gave them to me. There had to be a spare key somewhere, or you could have bashed the trunk open.”

He paused to take a drink, and put his head back against the lounger while he swallowed. “Some mornings I wake up, and I think she’s in the shower or waking the kids. It takes me a few minutes to remember she’s not here. When someone is still so real it feels downright evil to do something you know they wouldn’t want you to
do. But honestly, I didn’t really want to know, either.” Small Emily sounds came through the monitor and he turned it up a notch. Soft groans threatened to become cries, but then faded. “After I read enough to know something else was going on and then gave them to you, something changed. Of course they’re hers, but she’s gone, and at some point it stopped being about keeping everything frozen. I might sound like a cold sonofabitch and don’t get me wrong, I miss her like anything. She was the soul of this house.”

She noted that his language had switched to past tense. Back and forth, closer and further from his wife.

“But she had her own agenda and a lot of the time it didn’t have a hell of a lot to do with me,” he said. “Nothing’s any good until I figure out where all that came from, because I don’t want to have that kind of happy horseshit going on with my kids. I want them to feel like they can really talk to me.”

“You mean being up front about what they’re thinking.”

Of course there was irony in this, but she hadn’t intended it. He looked at her sharply. “You don’t know the all of it, Kate.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. I’m agreeing with you. It’s important to be able to talk openly with your kids. You never know what they’re picking up on but just feel like they shouldn’t say.” Kate picked at the fiber of the chair. “That was definitely true about Elizabeth as a kid.”