The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (41 page)

She thought of Elizabeth’s last journal.
I 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
. Well, maybe. You never really knew what effect you had, what version of yourself they saw and were left with. At what age, she wondered, do kids develop a barometer for truth and lies, and for that murky area where grown-ups act one way while feeling entirely another? Probably a lot earlier than most adults think they do.

Dave stretched out his legs, and put his hands up behind his head. Then he let out a long sigh. “She always did like talking to
you, Kate. She saw a realness in you that she didn’t get from a lot of people around here. That’s what she said when you guys came back from your beach walk last summer. ‘Kate gets it.’ ”

Kate turned her head to the side so he couldn’t see how it affected her. She swallowed and reached up to push at her bangs, wiping at her cheek as part of the gesture.

“You know, I think she would have told us both if she’d had more time,” he said. Kate was surprised by how calm he sounded. “But in the end it’s all just speculation, none of it makes a difference. It all came down to the wrong, wrong time to get on an airplane.”

At the word
time
she looked at her watch. It was 8:47. Her train would leave Stamford in nine minutes, too tight even if she were already in a cab.

“Oh no,” she said. “I missed it. The train.”

Dave looked over without lifting his head from his chair. He didn’t glance at his own watch or appear too concerned about when and if there was another train, about how her husband would be putting the kids to bed, then waiting, and wondering.

“You could stay here. I could take you to the first train in the morning on my way to work.” He was watching her with eyes tired and simple, not realizing or not caring that anything might be complicated or misconstrued. He was a man for whom things were no longer complicated and who didn’t especially care if they were misconstrued. If he knew this might create awkwardness with Chris, it didn’t trouble him. This was no longer the Dave that Elizabeth had known, a man who avoided things that might be awkward or cause pain or worried about his actions and their repercussions, because he’d already been through the worst and survived. Nothing else mattered much. Things simply were what they were at the moment, and at the moment they were fine. “Stay, hang out,” he said. “Have another beer.”

Part of her did want to delay what awaited her at home. She and Dave would sit as the sky darkened from dusky purple to deep night, and they would talk about what it meant for a person to conceal her
illness. Whether it was possible Elizabeth honestly thought she was protecting her family and whether it was the bravest thing to do, allowing them to continue with the impression that their daily lives were untouched by anything that could spoil their world, muddied water across all they’d made. Perhaps she’d believed she could handle it alone, get herself well quietly and not have to see the worry on their faces each time she returned from treatments. And maybe her deception hadn’t been about distrust, and she knew that his track record of dealing poorly with illness was something he had outgrown with years of marriage and caretaking. Dave and Kate would listen to the crickets and talk like old friends about the difference between what was noble and what was selfish: whether the act of making the decision for someone else, and not letting him have the chance to help you and, if necessary, even prepare to say good-bye, was the most or least generous thing a person could do. And when the bats darted out of the trees, one of them would notice the time and say, We should probably call it a night. They would head upstairs, her fingers trailing along a banister that had once grown bushes, and she would turn toward the guest room, adjacent to his. After undressing quietly so as not to awaken the kids, she would lie down and through the wall hear the bedsprings and breathing of yet another of his solitary nights. And in the morning, when the nanny arrived and found Kate clearing cereal bowls with hair and clothes that had already seen a full day, she might wonder the same things Kate had wondered about her, and wonder about the extent of a man’s loneliness.

“I think I remember a local train from Stamford to New York, and then a late one to D.C.,” Kate said. “I should check it out. Chris will be worried.”

He nodded, unsmiling. “I’ll call you a cab,” he said, and went inside. If it mattered to him one way or another, it was only momentary. Because he was on to the next moment, and this was fine too.

S
TAMFORD’S TRAIN STATION
at night was neither the best nor the worst place to be, well lit but without the criminal urgency to warrant constant police patrol. Drunks loitered unsteadily by the concessions. In a corner, a young man and woman were groping, fighting, or a little of both.

Kate bought a newspaper and stood near the departures and arrivals board. She had not read any national newspapers in months, and although she had not missed them on the island, she now pored over the sections like letters from distant friends. Even the news—alarming as it was—was oddly reassuring. A terror cell broken up in Detroit. The source of the anthrax letters, close to being discovered. Canada’s first fatality from mad cow disease had been tracked to Britain, which meant North American stock was not the source of contamination, not yet. There were answers in the air, precautions you could take. Most things were preventable, and if not, someone was working to ensure that they would be.

Kate flipped to the second page of the National section and paused at an article about the science of coincidence—the likelihood, say, that eleven of the world’s leading experts on bioterrorism had died recently, one after the other, simply by chance. Conspiracy theorists had it wrong, the article insisted. Statistically speaking,
the suspicious timing of their deaths was within the realm of mere coincidence.

Mere coincidence
. Kate had come to hate that phrase. She lowered the newspaper and looked down the hall at the couple, whose affections were becoming agitated. The young woman did not want to go with him, she said, she hated him when he was like this, get
off;
his arms around her looked more like a wrestler’s pose than an embrace. Kate tensed and glanced around for security.

There was nothing mere about coincidence. Every day millions of people were done in by arbitrary events, random events, and freak occurrences of nature through no fault of their own. Fault was better: bike accident with no helmet, lung cancer in a smoker, some kind of cause-and-effect pattern to hold back the chaos. There was aggressive risk, like walking across the lobby to interrupt that couple, and there was calculated risk, like renting a bungalow during a tularemia outbreak, and perhaps even like her choice to ride this train that would get her home after 2 a.m. And then there was what people called mere coincidence. Elizabeth, who rarely traveled, being on that flight—with bad wind, a faulty rudder, and an inexperienced pilot. A little girl speeding on her bike after her older sister, whose moment of teasing coincided with the arrival of a reckless driver.

The months after Elizabeth died had been a shock to Kate, the realization that the world was a truly unpredictable place, and that life didn’t follow a benign trajectory just because you ate organic fruits and vegetables and flossed daily. She knew her shock was naïve even as it left her alternately terrified and numb, and kept it to herself. At Elizabeth’s memorial service she had been somber like everyone else, and if in the months afterward she became quieter—well, by then, the whole country was reeling. No one noticed that she spent more time alone, and wondering, with growing fixation, which of her kids’ schools she would race toward first if Washington was targeted.

But Kate couldn’t access the shock any longer, and the shock itself
now seemed sophomoric. You could become paralyzed with worry about what might happen to your family, or if you hadn’t yet had children you could decide not to, as a sort of proactive damage control. Either way, you would be derailing your life voluntarily out of fear that it might become ruined by chance. Or you could pick up and move on. Those were the only choices.

Back in her cable-show days she’d believed most things could be made to happen or not happen by sheer force of will. But she saw that now as vanity. Most things in life, the best and the worst of things, were not controllable. Those who understood that simply marched ahead; that was the thinking of a survivor, someone who resurfaced. The irony was not lost on her that she was beginning to learn this from someone who had not.

The arguing pair were speaking in hushed tones; the girlfriend stood against the wall and he leaned over her, palms against the wall on either side of her head. They were next to the concession window, and Kate walked by casually, as if she were not assessing the woman’s safety. Their voices were now tender; the young man sounded as if he might cry.

“Large coffee,” she said to the clerk.

As he filled her cup from an industrial urn, Kate looked around the counter area. There were coin jars for tips and for various childhood diseases. Taped to one side by the condiments and milk thermoses, a poster advertised an art exhibition at NYU.

She hadn’t known Elizabeth went to NYU until their walk on the beach last summer, or maybe she’d known but hadn’t remembered. When Elizabeth told Kate about the painting trip to Joshua Tree, she’d seen her surprise.
I studied art in college
, Elizabeth explained.

Kate knew too little about art, and usually hid her ignorance with stock references to Degas ballerinas or Pollock splotches.
I never really was liberal arts material
, she admitted, poking a stick in the sand. She imagined Elizabeth thinking of the things lacking in her cultural education because she’d gone to culinary school.

I never did finish college
, Elizabeth said.

Well how about that, Kate had thought. She nearly made a joke, but noticed the tension in Elizabeth’s voice.

Yeah, well
, she said.
Finishing things the regular way is overrated
. And Elizabeth had looked up and smiled.

Kate took a window seat on the left side of the train, the side that afforded better views if you were traveling in daylight and able to appreciate the passing shore. She did not know whether Chris would have gone to bed or would be waiting up for her. He was a night person, but even he had limits. He was angry and disappointed and something else, something that might make him more likely to end the long day, his back turned to her side of the bed. It wasn’t envy, because he wasn’t someone who envied others, but it was close. What he hadn’t had today or recently was a strong connection with his wife, or an understanding of what had distracted her all summer. And Dave did.

When Kate had stood in the Martins’ front hall two hours before, her cab idling at the curb, she’d hesitated before saying good-bye. Dave leaned against the door frame in the dark, one shoulder against the edge of the open door and the other arm slack at his side. She could smell the soap he’d used in the shower, musky, because this was not a man who had to share soap with a woman any longer. The faded Valentine hearts were still taped to the door, hopelessly out of season.

The trunk sat on the floor beside the door. “So there they are,” she said.

“Back home where they belong.”

She could not think of an appropriate reply. Certainly not
Enjoy them
, or
Call me if you want to talk about them
, because they weren’t hers to offer in that way. The trunk’s lid was as improperly aligned as a bite in need of orthodonture.

“Sorry about the lock.”

He shrugged. “I never did come across a spare key anyway.”

She could have walked through the door then with a peck to his cheek and a light touch on the shoulder as she passed, and moved down the lawn back toward her own misaligned life. But there was one more thing.

“You know, her journals, in the earlier years … The way she talks about marriage and children. She was a different person back then.” In the dark she could not see his expression. “I think she worked very hard to become the mother she was, and maybe she dealt with some depression. But just because she didn’t start off that way doesn’t make it any less real. I think it shows how committed she was to getting there.”

Dave looked down and shook his head. “Well, now,” he said, in the honeyed voice of a parent soothing down an emotional child.

He might have had no idea what she was talking about or he might have known exactly what she meant, but it was not for her to know. Outside, the cabbie turned on his inside dome light and looked toward the house. Dave put his hand on the door handle. There wouldn’t be any further talk of who Elizabeth had been.

She crossed in front of him and leaned in for a quick embrace, and he rested his hand on her lower back. They stood that way a moment, then she pulled away. He pushed open the screen door.