The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (14 page)

“You coming to bed?” Chris called up the stairs.

Kate looked down at the book, skimmed the next entry.
Sold
the house today. Signed the papers, left my mother’s keys on the counter, and pulled the door shut behind me
.

“In a minute.”

She heard him stand at the foot of the ladder a moment more, as if there were something else he wanted to say. Then after a bit, the creak of bedsprings. Kate waited, reconsidered joining him. Then she turned the page.

Elizabeth moved into her own place in Stamford, a one-bedroom apartment in a subdivided Victorian house. It was not well cared for but it had a certain charm, and offered an independence she’d never had before. For the first time, her life felt centralized.
There are no pieces of me scattered anywhere else anymore. I’ve herded in all the sheep. Anything that had been at my father’s he gave back before he moved to L.A. I brought the rest of my paintings from my mother’s basement and they’re squeezed here behind the television. Took her antique trunk, and am going to use it for my journals. It’s probably the nicest thing I own
.

At night Elizabeth would go running, mile after mile through the streets of Stamford, and afterward, eat take-out dinners in front of the television. Her work colleagues were the only friends she mentioned, but she didn’t seem to see them much outside the office. She reflected on her mother’s accusation that she was neither receptive nor inviting, and suspected she was right. Even as a child she’d been told to smile, but didn’t know how to begin without it appearing forced. She knew she had to make a change.
I don’t join groups, I don’t form bonds beyond a few people here and there, haven’t belonged to anything resembling a community since the art collective. I could rot here and no one would notice
.

Kate paused at this. Elizabeth had been the heart of the playgroup, had quickly become integral to everything they planned. In all the time Kate had known her, a smile had appeared to be her
resting expression. If being part of a group had not come naturally she must have had a lot of practice somewhere along the line, or had hidden it very well. Then Kate checked herself. A person did not pretend among friends.

When Elizabeth announced to her work friends that she had sold her mother’s house, Jody and Peg from her department suggested they celebrate with a weekend away. They planned a four-day weekend around deadlines for a client’s golf tournament, and booked a flight to a folk festival in Colorado.
Hiking and spa stuff. Girlfriendy stuff. Dancing to some band with cups of beer. I’m afraid I am going to disappoint them, not light and chatty enough about things women get light and chatty about. But I’m glad they suggested it
.

The trip went well and they talked about doing more together socially. But within the year Jody got married, and not long afterward, so did Peg.

Elizabeth spent most weekends renting movies.
This is not where I want to be in ten years. Alone in the living room with Thai takeout, taking care of Anna’s old fish tank
.

The temperature in the loft dropped ten degrees. Kate wrapped her arms around herself and curled into the chair. Elizabeth had chosen the flight that she did only because it left an hour later. That was the single reason. She’d joked about it in an e-mail:
I’m paying $50 extra to sleep in
. As arbitrary as it gets.

For most of the past year, Kate had stepped out the door of their house wondering when it would happen. Somewhere the next thing was gathering steam, some episode of destruction that would either echo what had come before or, inconceivably, top it. A suspicious backpack left on the Mall. A potent tablet tossed into the McMillan Reservoir, a whole jar of them. The chemical would wend its way through the Washington Aqueduct, trickling toxins into her family’s kitchen if she turned on the tap before the poisoned water made news. There were accidents of chance, like Elizabeth’s crash, and there were accidents of malice. But the end result was the same, all of it arbitrary.

T
HE HOUSE PHONE RANG
in the bungalow kitchen, tinny and old-fashioned. Kate had given the number to only a few people as an alternative to her unreliable cell phone, unreceptive one day and uncharged the next. So few calls came in on the house line that they forgot it existed, and its urgency broke the morning quiet like a siren.

She paused in the yard, garden hose in one hand over the wading pool, and listened for Chris to answer. The phone stopped midway through the third ring. She heard his murmured small talk inside the house, then silence.

My father, she thought. Something happened to my father. Working late at the university, he sometimes skipped his heart medication.

Chris walked out onto the porch and glanced at her with an expression she couldn’t read.

“Is it my parents?”

“No, it’s Dave.” She raised her eyebrows, and he shrugged. She let the hose drop in the pool, and it writhed in the shallows like a freed snake.

She had not expected to hear from him while they were here, and in truth, would not have been surprised if he did not initiate
contact again.
Take care
was all he’d said after he’d packed the trunks in her car, his tone final as a send-off.

She picked up the receiver from where it lay on the kitchen counter. “Hey, Dave, how are you?”

“Oh, we’re fine—it’s hotter’n hell here though. How’s summer treating you islanders out there?” His voice was light and jocular in a way she had not heard much in the past year.

“Oh, we’re fine. Beach and ice cream, beach and ice cream,” she said. “Though none of it keeps the kids from fighting.”

“Jonah pulls the I-wish-I-had-brothers-instead-of-sisters business.”

“That’s when you bring out the preschool line, ‘You get what you get and you don’t get upset,’ ” she said.

“That was Elizabeth’s mantra.”

In the yard, James and Piper screeched as Chris turned the hose on them, thumbing the nozzle into a pelting spray. They ran, backs arched, out of the range of the water, and immediately ran back for more.

“Sounds like the kids are having fun,” he said. Through the phone she could hear the thin pitch of Emily’s whine, so close she could imagine the toddler needy against his shins.

“Okay, Em, you need a clean diaper,” he said. “Well, Kate, I just wanted to check in and see how y’all are doing, and make sure the trunk made it out there with you in one piece.”

“Absolutely. Tucked it away in a safe place. What a great little antique.” She heard her own chirpy tone and was disgusted with the transparency of her nervousness.

“Elizabeth got it from her mother or aunt or something.” His voice was flat. He was not interested in talking about the antique. “Well, all right. I was just wondering if it was all going fine, the caretaking thing, whatever you’re doing with the notebooks. But I’m sure you’ve got it under control.”

He was curious. The ramifications of this sizzled to life, disconcerting. She looked toward the whitewashed beams of the ceiling,
thought about anything bland that could be said about the journals. “Well, reading the notebooks is a longer process than I would have thought. I’m just now getting to her after-college years.”

He paused, either surprised or wanting to make her feel as if he were. “So you decided to read them?”

“I think that was the point, don’t you?”

He sighed as if it were one more burden for him to bear. When he spoke the buoyancy was gone from his voice. “I thought you might just be storing them.”

Kate pushed at crumbs on the kitchen counter. “If she was just looking for a storage facility, she could have gotten a safe-deposit box. She didn’t need me.”

“I don’t rightly know. It’s hard to say.” His diction had become excruciatingly slow. “Sometimes folks don’t know exactly what they want, and things just need time to set.”

Kate twisted the coils of the phone’s antiquated cord. Its rubber was grayed with decades of agitated fingers and was cowlicked in several wrong directions, tying her to the counter on a short lead. She could mention the directive in the note from lawyer.
Start at the beginning
. But it seemed too callous a reminder that Elizabeth hadn’t chosen him. Peanut butter, bread, and jelly lay spread out around her where Chris had been making sandwiches for lunch at the beach. She could excuse herself, volunteer that she had to go help.

“There are a lot of books,” she finally said, as if the sheer volume of them spoke somehow to the need to be read. “I guess writing was a good outlet for her when she was a kid.” She let it hang there, the suggestion that Elizabeth might have been most prolific in her youth, that maybe there would not be too much sensitive information about her adult life. Ridiculous, because the most sensitive thing was already out there, Elizabeth on a blanket with a man named Michael.

“She didn’t have the happiest childhood,” he said.

“It seems that way.”

They fell quiet again. Kate’s kids ran inside in their wet
swimsuits, wanting something. She shook her head and turned sideways.

“She didn’t talk much about the past,” Dave said. “I didn’t meet her until well after her mother passed, but even then, she just didn’t like to bring it up.”

“Cancer must be a terrible thing up close.”
Morphine eyes, hands like straw
. Kate wondered how much Elizabeth had told him about her year spent taking care of her mother, if he could understand how bad it gets.

“Did you read the end of her books yet?” he asked. “About last summer.” This, then, was the reason for his call. His voice was tense with the effort to sound casual.

“I didn’t get that far yet.” Kate wasn’t prepared for this directness. “I started at the beginning, like she asked.” He was silent. “In the lawyer’s note,” she added. He might as well know.

At the mention of the lawyer’s note, he brought the conversation to a close. “Well, Lord knows from the stink of this kitchen I got myself a diaper to change. I should get to it. I’m glad you guys are having a nice time out there.”

She exhaled. “You know, you all could come out any time. We don’t have much in the way of sleeping space, but we’re happy to double up.”

“Well maybe we’ll think about that.” His tone was polite, but she knew he would not.

It was clear and windy at North Beach. At the entrance, where the narrow path through the dunes first opened onto the sand, it was a parking lot of towels. Kate and Chris walked a quarter mile with the kids before James found a location that satisfied him for a sand castle.

Chris got them started by digging a round ditch that Piper said needed water, lots and lots of water, to be a proper moat. Damp
sand created a corral of stanchions, and Piper carried buckets of water from the shoreline. But the moat would not hold; the rut absorbed every kelpy load poured in. Back and forth to the waterline she went, Sisyphus with ponytails, each bucketful soaked in before she returned with another that would do the same.