The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (5 page)

Kate came up out of sleep aware of two things: a child to her left, and a kink in her neck that kept her from turning that way.

“Mom, why are you sleeping there?” Tinker Bell was at eye level, silk-screened on a polyester nightgown. “Are you sick? Can we still go to the ferry?”

Kate stretched her arms over her head and felt the tug of knots in her neck and shoulders. She should not have slept in the chair.

“Nope, not sick. We’re definitely going to the ferry today. Is James up?”

“He’s reading in bed,” Piper said.

James had started reading young. In the beginning he’d read aloud to her, but stopped once he’d realized that grown-ups read silently. Now he would read anything—older chapter books, newspapers and magazines, even Kate’s e-mail if her computer was left open. She didn’t know how much he understood, but she’d begun to feel she should edit the media left around the house. Current events these days were no Dick and Jane.

Kate rubbed her daughter’s back as she stood. “Okay, let’s get dressed so we can make it on time.”

Chris still lay in bed, one leg thrown out sideways from beneath
the sheet. She walked to the bed, stretching her neck side to side. “It’s seven forty-five. We should get going if we’re going to make the nine.”

He mumbled, but there was no movement under the sheet.

“I’m getting in the shower. Make sure the kids get dressed, okay?”

She walked into the motel bathroom, pulled off her yoga pants and tank top, and twisted the water dial as hot as it would go. Let other women have their baths; a solid driving shower relaxed her more than a massage, woke her better than coffee. She stepped under the spray with her head bowed, letting the heat drum on her tight neck and shoulders. Many of her best ideas came to her in the shower. Years ago when she worked in Manhattan restaurants, she would step out of her apartment’s tiny stall with new dessert concepts, sometimes literal—lavender soap, lavender-scented Bundt cake—and sometimes abstract, ice cream tiled with pale diamonds of caramelized sugar, patterned after the geometry of her bathroom wall.

Water pulsed through the motel’s old showerhead and echoed in the small tiled room. She thought of the things that needed to be done after they arrived at the rental house. They’d promised the owners they would fill the propane tank, clean the outdoor furniture, check the basement for rodents and the perimeter of the patio for rabbits. And she should book the restaurant soon for their anniversary dinner; it had become so popular. But amid the practical tasks her thoughts kept hitching on young Elizabeth. A small serious face pressed to the window at Taylor Street, a girl called Sourpuss trying to figure out whether she met the definition of an only child. Twenty-five years later, Sourpuss had sat cross-legged on a blanket holding hands with a man who was not her husband. And had taken steps to ensure that when she died, her husband would not be the one to receive her journals.

Kate usually resisted making assumptions, passing judgment; it was impossible to know what was happening in someone else’s world, what possessed a person to do the things he or she did. It was the closest thing she had to a governing principle.
Fair and sensitive
, Elizabeth called it.

Their closeness had not been automatic five years before. In the beginning, playgroup was just playgroup. Kate’s long-standing friends, the ones from culinary school, were now scattered around the country and cooking throughout the world. When she got together with them, everything was fast and ironic—even the humor felt hungry—and she felt at home in a way she hadn’t when she was younger in the quiet, cerebral confines of her parents’ house. Among her peers, she finally felt measured by what she could say and do rather than by what she could not. The one conscious omission was family life; few of the women with whom she’d graduated now had children, and the men who did rarely mentioned them. Kate made a concerted effort not to drift into mommy terrain when she was with them, though she sometimes slipped and saw their eyes glaze over, like her older sister’s would.

Elizabeth was the opposite of fast and ironic. She didn’t say anything she didn’t mean, and she didn’t forget anything you said. She remembered birthdays and old stories, called to check in after your wisdom teeth were removed. It was true that with her you couldn’t go to that place of unsentimental candor, giving air to the ugly pissed-off things, like how you could love your family but hate your life sometimes. But over time, that seemed less important. You could vent your frustration over a child—the dinners not eaten and the tantrums thrown, omitting the part that you had to step outside gasping like a beached fish so you wouldn’t say or do something you’d regret—and she would listen and pretend not to see the tears you pushed away, knowing you didn’t want them seen. It was easy for Elizabeth to become the person you saw more than anyone else, the comfortable T-shirt you reached for mornings when there was no need to impress anyone. Even after Kate moved away, Elizabeth was always there, checking in with a phone call at regular intervals, reliable as the tide. And then, one day, she wasn’t.

Kate turned off the shower, and the squeak of the dial reverberated in the tiled room. She squeezed the excess water from her hair and toweled the ends dry, remembering, with a catch in her throat,
how Elizabeth would do that to all the playgroup children after they’d run through the sprinkler. Walk among them like she owned a little piece of them all, rubbing the small heads of the world a little drier.

At first, Elizabeth’s death had been a terrible shock, and with it, so much grim activity: endless lists of people Kate needed to call, and details she’d volunteered to arrange. But it hadn’t felt like something that nearly a year later would continue to knock the air from her lungs like a swift jab of grief to the solar plexus. Their close friendship had not been a typical one. They didn’t have the shared history of work and old boyfriends. Elizabeth had never taken the bait to talk about marital chafe or admit there might be a thing or two you wished you were doing in addition to, or even instead of, diapers. She wasn’t even a neighbor any longer, someone with whom you could pass a slow afternoon at the playground.

But that’s the funny thing about people who don’t fit into a box. They grow to infiltrate everything, and when they suddenly go missing, they are missing everywhere.

C
ARS IDLED BEHIND A
rusty chain on the road leading to the ferry terminal. Shortly before 9 a.m., vehicles drove up the ramp one by one and into the potbellied lot of the largest ferry that served Great Rock Island. Cargo trucks eased in, scraping through the doorway and inching forward until they stood bumper to bumper, swaying with the ship’s movement like zoo animals sedated for transport.

The number of cargo vehicles on the ferries seemed to increase every year. When Kate first started coming to the island twenty years earlier—as a high-school babysitter accompanying a family on its annual monthlong vacation—there had been only two ferries a day, and no trucks. Back then, very little could be gotten on-island that wasn’t grown there. Sweet corn came from one of several nameless farm stands, and everyone bought pies from the front-yard gazebo of a woman who didn’t keep a menu or a schedule of hours. Lines formed daily for seafood on the southwestern docks, fresh fish, lobster, and clams nearly every afternoon.

The history of the docks was the dominant history of Great Rock, though for years that was forgotten, until it became profitable to remember. Whaling had been the community’s livelihood in the nineteenth century, when most of the residents were either involved
in the chase for oil from sperm whales or consumed with the well-being of others who were. In many ways, the harborfront village still felt like a whaling town. Sea captains’ mansions claimed the prime harborfront real estate, and the old whaling church was still the centerpiece of the village, its narrow bell tower peaking in most postcards and paintings.

In the second half of the twentieth century, after large fishing conglomerates had run smaller boats out of the water, the fishing history of the island slipped into irrelevance. The mansions sat empty and crumbling, many subdivided into condominiums and sublet. Petty crime grew, and shops that remained shuttered in the winter were visited by vandals or squatters. Even the whaling church fell victim to weather, graffiti, and neglect, and by 1980 it was used less for prayers for the fishermen than for various support groups for year-round residents, groups like Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, and the Off-Season Artists’ Association, which derived most of its membership from the other two.

It had been decades since local fishermen were able to make a decent living. But as Great Rock’s popularity grew as a tourist destination, a reverence for whaling returned. Nostalgia became marketable, and local businesses doted on the whaling memory like grandchildren of a wealthy ailing matriarch. Shops and restaurants were named with every possible pun. There was the clock shop named Whale of a Time, the hair accessories store, Thar She Bows, and the tavern, Blubbering Idiots. Each year Kate visited, it felt more as if the care and feeding of tourists had become the prime industry. Visitors were now the bread and butter of the island, and the island worked hard to satisfy their appetites.

But the appetites had become voracious, and the change in town was palpable. Where once there had been a needlepoint shop run by the crafts guild stood a boutique with artfully displayed $400 shoes. The village diner served Coke in Simon Pearce goblets. The harborfront captains’ homes had been renovated back to single-family mansions, popular as rentals among studio executives.
The whaling church had been restored and was in demand for weddings ever since its gleaming banisters had been photographed for the
New York Times
’ wedding pages. All of it kept the preservationists very busy, forever backward-looking and perpetually defensive against the new.

Which was not to say the island had been ruined. If you kept to the north shore, the sleepy agricultural side, and ventured into town just for ice cream and the occasional dinner, it was still possible to have a timeless island vacation. Which was more or less what Kate and Chris did. Before they married, they had discovered an unadvertised waterfront rental, simple and spare with a sliver of beach. They had been quiet about their find. Each September, they sent the homeowners three things: a thank-you card with pictures of the children playing in the yard, a box of Kate’s homemade madeleines, and a deposit check for the same two weeks the following summer. This year the owners were experiencing some sort of hardship and had consented to seven, cheaply, in exchange for caretaking. Chris had negotiated with his firm and would be working from there.

When the ferry was well away from shore, the children asked to go inside the cafeteria to play cards. Kate slid into a booth while Chris walked them through the line for orange juice and bagels. Large windows overlooked the Atlantic on three sides. The color of the sky matched the water, today more oyster than leaden. It had been overcast on almost every one of the ferry trips she’d ever taken, and she’d come to associate gray with vacationing as people do navy with sailing or pink with baby girls. Gray was the shingled house they rented and the darkly opaque waves outside its windows. It was the sweatshirts the kids threw on over their bathing suits, and the steamers she ate several times a week dipped in dun-colored broth. Gray represented freedom from ordinary time, and gray was the
uniform of the cavalry riding in, the child-care cavalry, since Chris was with them most of the time.