The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D

by Nichole Bernier

  Dave knew what she was capable of creating when she took the time. For Elizabeth’s thirty-sixth birthday, she’d made a three-tiered work of chocolate excess that had taken her all day. That night after the third bottle of wine the two couples had broken out Scrabble, but Kate and Elizabeth sabotaged the game with giddiness, stealing letters and rearranging words into obscenities. They’d picked at that chocolate cake until they had felt ill, and vowed to do the same thing each year.

  But Kate thought it best not to remind Dave. Last week, Elizabeth would have turned thirty-nine.

  Dusk came on with the chirping of crickets. Dave drained his second beer and got up to take the empty plates inside. Kate followed with bowls of picked-over salad and salsa. The kitchen looked much as it always had, only more cluttered. The counters were scattered with Tupperware, the shelves piled with kid art and old catalogs. The same two paintings hung on the wall: a portrait of a young girl eating ice cream, and an exterior view of two city brownstones. In one bright window a mother combed out a girl’s long wet hair, and in a window a few feet away, people attended a party in a dimly lit room, a women’s head thrown back in decadent laughter. Kate had never been fond of it. The juxtaposition of scenes was unnerving; even the oils seemed thick and angry.

  On the refrigerator, the same Martin family photos were held to the door with alphabet magnets. Shots from last summer’s vacation in the Hamptons, Elizabeth’s shoulder-length hair gone platinum in the sun. Photos of Anna’s birthday two years ago, and Christmas with Dave’s parents sometime before that. In the center was a photograph from Emily’s birth; Elizabeth cradled the puffy-eyed newborn against the breast of her hospital gown with a Mona Lisa smile, captured in the peak of a motherhood that would never go gray.

  Kate’s throat clenched with the effort to swallow emotion. The photo blurred, fading Elizabeth and her pale gown into the bland sheetscape of maternity ward bed. Kate blinked and exhaled, keeping her breath smooth. She opened the refrigerator and put away the milk, then slowly dumped the nachos and salsa in the garbage can, chip by chip, buying herself a moment to swipe at her eyes.

  Dave hadn’t seen. He stood with his back to her, scraping the plates at the sink and loading the dishwasher. Then he mumbled something over his shoulder, words half lost in the running water. She caught workshop.

  “Sorry?”

  “There’s something you should know about her painting workshop.” His voice was nonchalant, but the set of his shoulders was high and tight. He shut off the water and turned to face her, wiping his hands on a towel. “She was meeting some guy in L.A. You might as well know it right off.”

  She looked at him, trying to recall any previous thread of conversation, but there was none. She had to assume he was talking about Elizabeth. “What do you mean?”

  “She wrote in her journal just before she left about traveling with some guy named Michael. The workshop painter guy wasn’t named Michael.” He turned and began wiping dishes from the drying rack.

  His words and bearing were too casual. Kate did not know what to say—denial or sympathy seemed called for, but he seemed closed to either one. Instead, she fell back on the most mundane thing he’d said.

  “So you read them?”

  She knew it was wrong even as she said it. He looked up at her, his broad face inscrutable, none of his usual amiability there.

  “Not really. Just a little. It’s always been a given, you don’t touch the journals.” The way he drew out the word—jyouuu-nuls, with weight on the first syllable—gave it an emphasis that was quaint, even sarcastic. Sarcasm, from Dave Martin.

  He turned to the coffeemaker even though Chris and Kate had declined his offer and began to load scoop after scoop, far too much for one pot.

  “These past months it’s been there sitting in the nightstand drawer, this last one, plus a whole trunk of them locked in the closet. She was different last summer, wiped out from the baby, probably. But I just wanted to know whether she left the house feeling a little sad that she’d miss us, or if she was too damned glad to be getting away to care. I expected it was probably a little of both.” He closed the filter hatch on the coffeemaker and pressed the red button. “On the last page I saw something about her looking forward to seeing this Michael guy, and more about him a few pages before that. I just thought I’d mention it in case you opened the notebook and got all worked up.”

  Kate looked out the window. The sound of squabbling filtered through, kids who had reached the height of goodwill and were headed down the other side. The pot groaned as water struggled through impossibly dense grounds to make coffee no one wanted.

  “Dave,” she said. “This is Elizabeth.” The emphasis on her name conveyed the absurdity of anything inappropriate.

  He turned away from her to rinse out the pasta bowl. Huge amounts of leftovers went down the disposal, days of potential lunches. Then the rest of the green salad. From the counter, a freshly cut quarter of tomato, a wedge of red pepper. Elizabeth would have folded each into a neat ziplock bag, saving it for the next meal.

  “The little bit I read didn’t sound much like Elizabeth. Not that it was ever intended for my eyes, anyway.” He shoved a length of cucumber down the drain. The unsaid thing hung in the air: Or she would have left them to me.

  When Dave had called Kate to tell her about the addendum to the will, he had not offered her any direction as to what she was supposed to do with the journals. It’s not exactly something Elizabeth and I discussed, he’d said, voice flat. Then he’d fallen silent waiting for her to say something insightful, something that would show her to be this deserving of his wife’s trust. She could not imagine what might be in the journals, but very likely he could. Or, perhaps, the problem was that he could not.

  Dave ran the disposal for a long minute, its whine rising through the produce and letting Kate off the hook even if she’d known what to say.

  Chris walked into the kitchen holding two pairs of pajamas. “I’m going to get the kids changed before we go. It’ll be easier once we get to the motel if they fall asleep on the drive.” He looked from Kate to Dave, taking in their proximity and silence.

  Kate put a hand through her hair and willed him not to ask. “If they’re changing upstairs, tell them to say hi to their old goldfish.”

  “Goldfish?”

  She rubbed her eyes, weary. “Remember? We left them here with the kids instead of trying to move them to D.C.” Chris raised his eyebrows but she didn’t say more, and he left to change the children.

  She looked to the wall, to the girl with ice cream, the tense discordant brownstones. Dave broke the silence.

  “It’s funny, Elizabeth couldn’t stand goldfish. They gave her the creeps. But she took care of yours like it was her mission, and Jonah’s kept it up pretty well.”

  The night before the Spensers had moved to Washington, D.C., Kate had shuttled between the broom-swept emptiness of her own house and the Martins’, pawning off things that wouldn’t travel well: some houseplants and a propane tank, food from the freezer, the goldfish. After the last load, Elizabeth stood under the porch light holding a desiccated jade. The plant’s fat teardrop leaves were molting and the aquarium smelled like sewage, but Elizabeth had taken them with the gravity of precious offerings.

  There were finally small signs of normalcy for the Martins. The older two kids were sleeping through the night again, Dave said. People had finally stopped bringing lasagna. Now this, the journals and whatever they contained, agitating the healing. Kate tried to muster some argument, some bolstering thought, but came up with nothing.

  “You know, I never heard her say the slightest thing about being unhappy. God, she loved you guys more than anything.” It was the best she could do under the circumstances.

  He wiped his hands on the dish towel and looked at her with an odd smile, pained with the effort not to be wry. He was too polite for that.

  “Come on now,” he said. “Let’s get your car loaded up with that beautiful fami
ly of yours.”

  Kate stood in the driveway looking into the tightly packed car through the open rear hatch door. On top of the suitcases, linens, and beach toys, there had been just enough room for the small antique trunk. Dave was inside corralling his kids to say good-bye. She pulled out the key from the lawyer and slipped it into the brass lock. The aged hardware turned with the solid tumble of fine luggage, and she lifted the lid to find three stacks of thick books, maybe a dozen or more. The spiral-bound notebooks had decorated covers, painted, some of them, or laminated with photos. As she reached in to touch one textured with thick paint, Dave appeared beside her. He glanced inside and then away, as if from something uncouth. She closed the lid, regretting her impatience. To free the key she had to relock the trunk, an excluding click that felt a further insult to him. Then she placed the key in the zippered compartment of her wallet.

  He held a manila notebook with an undecorated cover, and handed it to her without meeting her eye. “Here. It was the one in the nightstand.” She took the plain book and rushed it into her tote like pornography.

  As the car backed out of the driveway, Kate gave one last wave to the four Martins in a row, looking much the same as they had in so many vacation pictures with Elizabeth behind the camera. Dave was still holding the piece of paper she’d given him with their telephone number at the rental house. In case you need anything, or can come out for a visit, she’d said. My cell never works well out there. He’d made an agreeable sound, but she knew she wouldn’t hear from him. After he’d handed her the last journal, his farewell had had the brisk tone of a person glad to have finished a task and brushing off his hands afterward.

  Chris turned left, up the ramp and onto the interstate. “What was that all about? There in the kitchen.”

  Kate glanced at the children in the rearview mirror. The kids stared back at her reflected eyes, curious. “I’ll tell you after they fall asleep.”

  He clicked the radio on to his favorite news station, and an announcer’s voice filled the car with words—terrorists, threat levels—that she did not want the children to hear. She turned off the rear speakers wishing she could turn it off altogether. All her life she’d been a news junkie, but now the flood of information was unwelcome. She fingered the metal spirals of the journal on her lap, then looked back in the mirror to the trunk wedged on top of the air mattress. It was a miniature steamer with a bowed lid, solid and heavily shellacked and who knew how old, perhaps a hundred years or more. The kind of trunk that would outlive all of them. It had already begun to.

  Chris drove north on I-95 parallel to the ocean, past a small inlet of the Long Island Sound rimmed with sea grass. The water at dusk looked solid as blacktop, the homes around it a dark cul-de-sac. She flipped through the pages of the notebook. Only the first few had writing. The cover was fresh and undecorated.

  No matter how Kate had tried over the past month to imagine what Elizabeth might have expected of her in leaving her the books, she came up with the same few options. She could put the journals in a safe-deposit box for the kids. She could designate them for the children’s children, people for whom the uncertainty of a painting workshop would hold interest only as a footnote to family history. She could give them to Dave, even though Elizabeth had not done so herself. Or there could be the mother of all memorial bonfires.

  None of these choices must have been certain to Elizabeth, or she would have written them into her will. Perhaps she hadn’t known what she wanted; maybe all she’d known was that she wanted her books in the hands of someone with a bit of objectivity, distance. Maybe she’d planned to decide later, only there had never been a later.

  The July sun had been shining on the beach that last time they went walking. The chain of seaweed twisted between Elizabeth’s tense fingers. The chance to do a program with him in the U.S. is rare, she’d said. Kate remembered the conversation well. The instructor was famous for nature paintings. He was Mexican. And his name hadn’t been Michael. It was Jesús.

  Kate looked down at the notebook in her lap. Memories of her time in Southbrook had been shelved, simple years with a circle of earnest new moms behaving in predictable ways. Reading these books, she suspected, would not contribute to the peace and stability she was hoping to gain from the summer.

  THREE

  IN KATE’S MIDNIGHT MIND, the crash went like this. The plane dipping severely after takeoff. Mild gasps of surprise. An unnatural twist and an overkill correction, views of the borough rising at surreal angles. Overhead bins falling open like startled mouths as the plane swung from side to side, then the scream of machinery failing somewhere below. In the middle of the cries and terror, the laptops and purses streaking down the aisle, there had been a pale, still Elizabeth, frozen in her seat with the realization she would not see her children again.

  If she’d had long enough, she would have seen a parade of nevers: all the birthdays, graduations, weddings. The way her children’s faces would look as adults at ages when they would barely remember hers, no longer certain of what was a memory and what was a photograph posing as one.

  If there had been only a few seconds of awareness, it went more like this: Elizabeth grasping the armrest, perhaps the hand of the person beside her. Fragments of prayer, a desperate reflex. Calling out her children’s names and calling for Dave, but in the end calling last for her own mother, as we’re all said to do. Sudden pain, or more likely, suddenly none.

  These thoughts always led to the same place: Kate’s vision of her own children alone with Chris after something had happened to her. Disease, collision—it didn’t matter how it would have come about. Loss would hang on James and Piper like poorly fitting clothes as they moved through town, people touching their hair and saying hello more attentively than they ever had, some even offering small gifts, which would cause the children to confuse death with a holiday. The kids would walk to school with their father, his vacant eyes an open door to a corridor of endless tomorrows. As they moved down the hall the crowd would subtly part. Preschool staff and parents would greet them a little too warmly, and if the children remained affectless, the adults would move on, taking consolation in the fact that they had tried. The Spensers would move in a bubble of grief and everyone they passed would be briefly enveloped, but it would stay with the Spensers wherever they went. She knew this because she’d seen it with the Martins. The public grief, the children so ill at ease and still confused by the never-coming-back part. Kate shook her head in a reflexive shudder to rid the image.

  She rolled onto her back and wiped her face with the motel sheet. Then she creased it double across her chest and laid her hands over the top, a position of tranquillity that sometimes worked. The window was outlined in light around poorly fitting shades, and a wide band glowed under the door. The smoke detector was an unblinking eye on the ceiling. Chris’s exhale of coffee through toothpaste was too close at her ear, damp and rancid.

  She eased out of bed, one leg at a time from the cheap sheets, and crossed the room. The small table lamp beside the armchair would not wake Chris.

  Two newsweekly magazines lay on the bureau beside the car keys and his wallet. One featured a story about anthrax, and the other, al-Qaeda. Kate cringed at Chris’s idea of beach reading. A hollow-eyed bin Laden glared from the cover. A T-shirt lay at her feet and she threw it over the magazines, then sat on the edge of the armchair.

  Passing trucks on the highway were loud through inadequately soundproofed windows. The table lamp gave off the buzz of electronic white noise. In the bathroom, a faucet dripped.

  Next to the bureau, metal spirals gleamed between the twill handles of her tote bag.

  She reached in and pulled out the manila-covered notebook with only a few entries, Elizabeth’s last.

  July 9, 2001

  Saw Michael again in the city today. We met in Central Park and sat cross-legged on the ratty old blanket I use at Tiny Tot Soccer. We talked for a long time, probably more than he had to spare, and I felt even more co
mfortable. He held both my hands and told me he felt my pain, which was somehow not hokey. I think he’s incapable of irony.

  He asked me to come to Joshua Tree, told me all about the house and land, the horses, the miles of trails, the desert at night. When he touches my arm, it’s electric. The sun radiates from his smooth head instead of just shining on it. The way he looks in my eyes makes me feel thoroughly known for once in my life and yes, makes me want to follow him anywhere.

  July 22, 2001

  Kate came this weekend with her family, passing through, heading out on vacation. Went walking on the beach, a beautiful morning but I felt ready to explode, so on edge and exhausted. I can’t believe it’s possible to walk around feeling this way and no one can see.

  We talked about art and college, and man, more than anyone in this place, she gets me. But I didn’t give in to the temptation to tell her all about the trip, just gave the party line. Confiding in people rarely makes you feel any better; just feeds them information that they don’t know how to respond to and changes the way they see you. But mostly I don’t want it out there, 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.