This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Nichole Bernier
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Crown and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bernier, Nichole.
The unfinished work of Elizabeth D. : a novel / Nichole Bernier. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Female friendship—Fiction. 2. Diaries—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.E7623U54 2012
813′.6—dc23
2012009062
eISBN: 978-0-307-88781-8
Jacket design: Steve Attardo
Front jacket photographs: Henry Wolf (package), Arnt Haug (beach)
v3.1
To Tom,
so generous with works in progress,
and to all unfinished women,
gone too soon
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Somehow I should have been able to say how strong and resilient you were, what a patient and abiding and bonding force, the softness that proved in the long run stronger than what it seemed to yield to.… You are at once a lasting presence and an unhealed wound.
—Wallace Stegner, “Letter, Much Too Late”
ONE
June 2002
THE GEORGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE had never been anything but strong and beautiful, its arches monumental, cables thin and high. Kate watched them spindling like ribs past the car window as her husband drove eastbound across the span. It was a testimony to optimism, a suspension bridge, each far-fetched plate, truss, and girder an act of faith against gravity and good sense.
The sun was strong, glinting off the bridge and hitting the river like shattered glass. Drivers traveling in both directions were shielding their eyes, staring as she was down the length of Manhattan. She didn’t know what any of them expected to see. Mushroom clouds? Skywriting in Arabic? She wished for some visible sign of drama where the towers had once stood. Then she looked toward Queens, even though it was impossible to see the site from this distance. Few people were even looking anymore, though she always would.
The car reached the end of the bridge and she exhaled. Chris glanced over and she faced the window with what she hoped looked like ordinary interest, damp-palmed hands loose in her lap.
He angled the rearview mirror to check the backseat. The children were still asleep.
“Has Dave gone back to work yet?” His voice was grave, in the way someone speaks about a bad diagnosis.
She put her foot up on the dash. “A few months ago. His company let him take as much time as he needed.”
Chris nodded, satisfied. It was the right thing for the company to do, and he liked when the right thing was done with a minimum of drama. “What’s he doing with the kids? Did she have family close by?”
“No. There’s no one.” A trickle of cool air from the vent brought gooseflesh to her leg. “He found a nanny through an agency.”
“It’s strange to think of Elizabeth’s kids with a nanny.”
That was the first thing she had thought too, like Julia Child farming out the cooking to a housekeeper. “People do it all the time, Chris. Not everyone stays home with their kids.”
He looked over, gauging her. “You know that’s not what I meant, Kate.”
She turned back to the window and wiped the corner of her eye as if she were ridding it of an irritation. A nanny in Elizabeth Martin’s house. The obvious things weren’t what affected her most—the obituary, the service, even visiting the crash site, a charred hole in Queens that seemed inhospitable to anything ever being grown or built there again. The smaller details were the potent ones. Seeing the open can of infant formula on the Martins’ kitchen counter the first time she’d visited to help. Hearing that Jonah had lost his first tooth a few weeks ago, but Dave had forgotten to tell the tooth fairy. These were the things that gave certain days a dull ache she could not explain, or shake.
A sign ahead marked the turn toward Connecticut. If the parkway was less choked than the others there would be only an hour more. In the two years since they’d moved down to Washington, D.C., they had not found a good time of day or night to travel. Traffic on the Northeast Corridor was unrelenting. Tonight, they’d find some hotel around the Massachusetts border, and in the morning they would be on the first ferry to the island, seven weeks this summer instead of their usual two. If Chris had agreed because he knew how much Kate needed it, he hadn’t let on, and she wasn’t saying.
Dave had asked if they could stop for the trunk on the way through. She could not imagine having it on vacation with them, but Dave Martin now had that effect on people; they jumped, they put things on hold, they accommodated.
This would be the first time they would be getting together with the children but without Elizabeth. Kate and Chris hadn’t brought James and Piper when they came up for the funeral, a maudlin affair made worse by the baby in the front row drooling and pinwheeling her arms at the photo of her mother on an easel. Now the kids would be playing together like old times, but for the adults, all the roles would be unfamiliar. Dave would be host and hostess, Kate just a polite guest in the kitchen. He might jiggle the baby on one hip as he composed plates and poured small cups of milk, and Kate would offer help, trying not to sound as if she questioned his competence. She would have to be social glue for the men, who had only ever come together because of their wives, and someone would have to take the lead with the kids. We don’t throw sand at our friends, and It’s time to take turns with the backhoe. That had been Elizabeth’s job.
It had all been Elizabeth’s job.
As Chris turned the car from the interstate to the parkway, Kate pulled out the note the lawyer had forwarded to her in lieu of any other instructions. Its even script evoked the to-do lists always strewn across Elizabeth’s counter, the ticker tape of tasks to be done and groceries to be bought, looping in perfect penmanship. A small antique key was taped to the notecard. There’s something I’d like to add to the specific bequests section of the will. Please amend it so that Katherine Spenser gets my trunk of journals. I
n whatever legal language is appropriate, please indicate that I’m leaving them to her because she’s fair and sensitive and would know what should be done with them, and ask that she start at the beginning. I’ll come soon to drop off a letter for her that should go with it.
The roadside clutter thinned near the Connecticut line, old tires and abandoned appliances giving way to birches, azaleas, roadkill. Trees lined the median like suburban sentries. The sun hadn’t let up and Kate’s sunglasses weren’t doing much to cut the glare, reviving the headache she’d had on and off all day, and yesterday too. A two-day headache. Brain tumor, she thought. Ocular cancer. Aneurysm.
She lowered the window a few inches. A warm wind cleared the recirculated air and the smell of old peanut butter sandwiches.
Several things struck her each time she read Elizabeth’s note, one thing more than the rest. It wasn’t that Elizabeth had kept journals, though there was that, or the wonderment of what such an uncomplicated person could have written. Today I got Jonah and Anna to agree to turkey sandwiches in their lunchboxes. Or the realization that Elizabeth had been so phobic about flying; Kate knew she’d been a bit of a nervous flier, but enough to make a summer addendum to her will before she traveled? And it wasn’t the contradiction that she had been meticulous enough to name a trustee for her journals, but had never followed through with the letter expressing her intentions. What struck Kate most was a single word choice—sensitive. Not a word people used often to describe her. Even with Elizabeth, her most frequent contact in the dailiness of mothering, sensitivity wasn’t something Kate wore on her sleeve. But Elizabeth had seen it. Each time Kate thought of it, she felt the loss of something she hadn’t known she’d had, an unscratched lottery ticket found years too late, a winner.
When Kate first heard about Elizabeth’s trip out west, it was last July. The Spensers stopped for an overnight in Connecticut on their way to the previous summer’s vacation, and the two women had gone walking on the beach, as they did when Kate came back to visit. Elizabeth mentioned her birthday gift from Dave, a long weekend away for a painting workshop. There was an opportunity with a Mexican painter famous for abstract landscapes, she’d said, a workshop guru who almost never left Oaxaca. She spoke in a gush with agitated movements, working a chain of dried seaweed between her fingers like rosary beads.
It had been strange, such fidgeting from a person usually calm as tranquilizers. Elizabeth called the trip a fortieth birthday present two years early, one she’d requested herself from Dave. She’d found a cheap flight from JFK to Los Angeles on August 9; Joshua Tree was about 120 miles east, and she was even looking forward to the drive alone. A getaway to recharge her batteries, she’d said, as the seaweed strand snapped in her hands.
At the time Kate had been surprised. Elizabeth hardly ever traveled, rarely expressed an interest in it. Kate knew Elizabeth used to paint before she and Dave were married and still dabbled here and there, but nothing Kate would have thought worth taking a trip across the country without a baby so young.
That was the last time she’d seen Elizabeth. Her plane never made it past Queens. Officials called it a freak accident, a confluence of bad things—bad wind, bad rudder, a bad call by the pilot. Any deeper consideration of the flight, or the arbitrariness of Elizabeth’s having been on it, was quickly overshadowed by all that came in September.
TWO
JUNE, AND THE MARTINS’ front door was still decorated with sun-bleached Valentine paper hearts drained to gray. Dave pulled it open as Kate walked up the steps, followed by Chris and the kids.
“My darlin’, if you aren’t more gorgeous every time I see you. Washington must be doing something right by you. Come here and give me a hug.”
The sweep of his arms was wide and athletic, more like a quarterback than a middling golfer who had dropped off the tour. He had never quite made the northern parts of the leaderboard, and his standard line had always been that to be a great golfer you had to really be in your head, the last place on himself that he wanted to spend time. Each time he said it she could hear the triple beat of a comedian’s backup drum.
Kate pulled out of his hug, touching his back to convey support without having to say the clichéd things. He gave a small nod of appreciation. Her eyes fell to Jonah.
“Look at how tall you are! This is what finishing kindergarten does to you?” She stood aside to allow Chris and the children to join her on the step. “Kids, you guys remember Jonah, right? We gave him your goldfish when we moved?”
They stared. It had been a year since their last visit and nearly two since they’d moved, an eternity for six- and four-year-old memories.
“Hey man,” said Chris, reaching out to give Jonah a high five. When his hand remained stranded in the air, he dropped it and ruffled the boy’s hair instead. “We haven’t seen you guys in a long time. How’s it going?”
“Good.” Jonah squinted up at him in the late-afternoon light. The emptiness where his front teeth had been bore the serrated edges of new growth. “Did you know my mom is dead?”
Chris’s hand went still on the boy’s head, and Dave looked down at the floor. Kate waited for Dave to say something soothing to his son, or something to them to indicate that this was not uncommon, just part of the process. He continued to study the wooden threshold, curling his bare toes on the floorboards.
Chris bent until he was eye level with the boy and squatted with his forearms on his thighs. “I know, buddy. I’m really sorry about that. My mom’s dead too. It’s hard, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Jonah said. “She’s in heaven now, taking care of Dad’s dog. And I wish—”
In the kitchen there was an electronic noise, an instrument or a video game, and he looked back, sizing up which of his sisters might be playing with which of his toys. “Um, I just wish …”
Kate and Chris waited with tight smiles. There were a number of things he might wish, none of them easily addressed. The boy pulled his arm in and out of the sleeve of his shirt, and either lost his train of thought or let it drift away. “Dad said we’re going to Disney for my birthday. Right, Dad?”
Dave lifted his head like someone waking. “Sure, bud. We surely are.” He put his hand on his son’s shoulder and gave a strained smile. “Come on now, let’s get our friends inside and offer them something to eat instead of talking their ears off in the doorway.”
In the summertime, the Martins’ house had been the address for late-afternoon playdates and margaritas overlooking the sandbox. Their backyard was ideal, children contained and safe, but so subtly fenced they didn’t feel restricted. The simple swingset was not so extravagant that parents had to be vigilant, but was so well designed that kids believed they were pushing the envelope on their own safety, emboldened to small acts of rebellion. Parents never turned down an invitation to a Martin picnic because it was one of the rare places where grown-ups talked and children played in coexistent peaceful worlds. They even seemed to have fewer mosquitoes than the neighbors. It was a charmed setting and had added to the sense that God smiled on the Martins.
Chris stood quietly at the grill scraping burger residue with a steel-bristled brush, his back radiating to Kate that after a few hours of small talk, this was hers to wrap up. Dave sat with his feet up on a deck chair, beer in hand, calling directions to the children playing hide-and-seek. When a child came close—a Martin or a Spenser, it didn’t matter which—he’d reel the runner in by an arm or a leg. If his tickling was a bit more exuberant than necessary, the children were either unaware or did not mind. Kate sat quietly on the deck amid the noise. The sense of the missing member of the party was a fog low over the patio, changing the look and feel of everything.
She surveyed the familiar yard. The patch of weeds where tomatoes used to grow. The rose trellis against the house, indifferent to its missing gardener. The wrought-iron bench—chipping, from its first season left out through the winter—where they’d been sitting when Elizabeth told her she was expecting again. Kate ha
d felt a surge of happiness as if she herself were gaining a life. Now thirteen months old, Emily was no longer quite a baby but not yet a toddler. Kate held her on her lap, the small sturdy body warm and close, hair soft against Kate’s cheek.
It was fascinating the way children grew, features morphing in and out of their parents’ likenesses in genetic peekaboo. The girl had her father’s full mouth like her four-year-old sister, Anna, but her eyes were all Elizabeth, an arresting blue halfway between cornflower and sapphire. All three children had inherited Dave’s thick dark hair, and their mother had been loath to cut it on any of them, even Jonah. So far Dave had left it alone, and the boy with collar-length curls looked more like a soulful Giovanni than a Connecticut WASP. Elizabeth had loved comparing their features, exhibiting the fascination of an only child when it came to the similarities and differences among her own children. Giving them siblings, she’d said, had been the best thing she could ever do for them. Kate lowered her nose to Emily’s head and breathed in Johnson’s baby shampoo, a hormonal cocktail that among women who have children not long out of diapers drew the Pavlovian, Another.
Emily reached fat fingers toward the pastries on Kate’s plate, a slice of fruit tart and colorful petit fours. Kate had stopped to buy dessert at her favorite bakery in town though she knew the teasing it would bring from Dave. It was an endless source of amusement, the pastry chef who barely cooked.
“Kate, I swear,” he’d said in his accent of peaches and bourbon as she’d placed the cardboard box on the counter. “You are the only one of us with a professional skill worth a damn and you’re the one who uses it the least.”
“You mean, the one who has the skill you’d most like to enjoy,” she replied, nudging him with her elbow.
It was true that she cooked less ambitiously since having children. Cooking took time, even with skills that had become second nature since culinary school. (Such a good career fit, her parents and older sister always said—the subtext being, for someone who’s not the academic type.) Soufflé and flambé weren’t exactly in high demand in a family of young children, and these days she channeled her efforts into more practical recipes. Chicken pot pies for dinner and sugar cookies with the children, using her elaborate collection of shaped cutters. Crepes on weekends, flipped from the pan with more bravado than she’d ever dare among colleagues, for the entertainment of the kids. Every so often she’d get a call to cover for a pastry chef who’d quit or been fired, and they’d always request that crème brûlée that got her nominated for the James Beard Award. From time to time there’d be a promising job offer, like the one currently on the table. Each time the call came she’d pause before saying No thanks, not yet. But with this latest one, she hadn’t yet made the call to decline.
The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D Page 1