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.
FOUR
CARS 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.
Kate and Chris had met in New York ten years before, when she was twenty-eight and he was thirty-two. She was a pastry chef at a boutique hotel on the Upper East Side, and he was part of a small team of hotel developers finalizing plans for a new location. Talks were held over dinner in the small private nook in the back of the kitchen itself. This was the hotel’s most exclusive location for special events, a table for eight set in the corner beneath a collection of vintage copper pots. It bloomed with a stratospheric centerpiece by Marcel, the renowned florist who did the arrangements for the couture wedding shop across the street, and was laid with the hotel’s best signature china. Never mind that it wasn’t out of grease-splattering range, a finer point that once went to litigation over a ruined Hermès suit. The table drew some of the biggest heads of commerce, and was known simply as The Kitchen Table in a pretentious attempt to be unpretentious.
But the real selling point of The Kitchen Table was the interaction with the chefs. Just a few feet from the guests, the chef de cuisine elevated meal preparation to performance art along with line cooks that included Kate. It was an exalted position for someone her age, and confirmed for Kate’s parents and older sister that everyone just needed to find their thing.
The early nineties marked the beginning of the dinner-as-theater trend, when chefs were achieving the status of minor celebrities, and The Kitchen Table staff would demonstrate techniques and answer questions if guests were truly interested, which they rarely were. But Chris had been, as well as drop-the-whisk handsome. When Kate stood at the range stirring butter and flour and saw him watching her, she had nearly ruined a pâte à choux. His rusty blond hair was long for investment circles, and the creases around his eyes—age, sun, or sm
ile lines, she couldn’t tell which—looked as if they belonged on someone older. For his part, he would later say that her face—pale against a black bob, with dramatic straight-cut bangs, framed in the opening between the stainless-steel stovetop and the ventilation hood—made him think of 1940s Parisian cabaret.
She’d noticed him throughout dinner, or more accurately noticed him for what he was not: pompous, loud, or demanding, which was the norm among the egos that came into the kitchen. He thanked the staff when they brought each course. He didn’t treat the waitresses as if they worked at a gentlemen’s club. He did not laugh at the crude jokes made by a red-faced colleague. And he was the only one who hadn’t lit up a cigar in violation of kitchen rules—ironic, since she later learned that he was a smoker, and when she pressed him to quit before they got married, it was not easily done.
So when he offered Kate his business card and asked if he might call for cooking tips (he was having a dinner party that weekend, and what was a choux anyway), she’d consented. It was a transparent excuse, particularly flimsy given that in all the years she’d known him, the closest he’d come to cooking was stirring onion soup mix into sour cream. But that hadn’t mattered to Kate, drawn to a kindred directness and a suspicion that he followed his own lead.
Marrying Chris was easier than Kate ever thought a life-altering decision could be. Certainly there was attraction and romance, as there had been with others. But never before had someone listened so intently with no expectation of what she could give him—a laugh, an entwining of limbs at the end of the night—except her own strongest self. They lived in Manhattan for three years before James was born. As Chris rose in the ranks of the hotel investment firm, they traveled to places where his group had brokered deals on small independent properties: Belize, Siena, Phuket, Goa. She left the hotel restaurant and became a partner in a bakery-café in the West Village, and hosted a small cooking show on local cable television. Her shtick was tough-love remedial cooking for homemakers who thought they were too busy to bother.
“You show me three small holes in your schedule, I’ll show you a great meal by the end of the day,” had been her trademark challenge. “If you want it enough, you can make it happen.”
A few viewers had taken issue with her message. How about showing me three minutes of peace and quiet and an easy three-ingredient meal, someone had written in. And another, Give her a few toddlers underfoot and see if she can “make it happen” then. Not everything is as simple as it seems. She usually threw away her mail after reading it. But this second note she brought home and tucked in her top drawer like a report card. The show enjoyed high ratings and ran for three years, reinforcing her belief that most things could be made possible through the sheer force of will.
Next week would be their ninth anniversary. She could still say in all honesty that Chris was her best friend, and she was certain he’d say the same of her. On business trips he always packed his favorite photograph of her, charmingly, a still shot from the cooking show at the moment she’d dropped a soufflé on-air. He said her hilarity at her own expense, so genuine, so unselfconscious, made it the most beautiful picture he’d seen.
Since having children, their relationship had changed. Their us-against-the-world bond had come to feel like a corporate partnership, each of them running autonomous divisions. He helped with the kids when he was around, but he often wasn’t. If she had to put a finger on when she first felt the shift, it was shortly after James was born, the early months when love is commingled with obligation, intimacy with isolation. Within a few months Kate had decided not to return to work for the time being—the maternity leave was so short, and the long chaotic hours, very early or very late, seemed incompatible with bonding with a baby. The passionate attachment was unlike anything she’d experienced; she never thought it possible to have such strong feeling for something that could reciprocate with nothing but its presence, need, and eventually, a smile. Soon afterward they’d moved to the suburbs. The isolation was also unlike anything she’d known. Whole days would pass when her only conversations consisted of la-la-la and arguments with the cable company. She’d felt compelled to join a playgroup through the town newcomers’ organization just to get out of the house and have adult conversation.
One night, Chris came home announcing a two-week trip to Bhutan with a look of apology and guilt, knowing that’s what was called for. But under the look she’d seen something else. Anticipation. Excitement. Relief. Kate did believe he was sincere when he said he missed them while he traveled, but she also knew that he enjoyed his trips, loved the expansiveness he felt in a new environment just as she had when she’d traveled with him. More important, she recognized that something had changed; he could no longer admit the pleasure of being away. To mention it would have been small of her when, on the whole, he was a good husband and father, and worse, would make her appear needy. So tapping a small reservoir of restraint, she said nothing. As she was doing laundry not long after the Bhutan trip, she found in his pocket what she thought were crushed bits of tobacco. She didn’t mention that, either.
In all, they’d had nine pretty solid years and were in good standing, even as they’d watched friends bicker and cheat, carp and belittle, divorce. She’d never doubted his fidelity and she didn’t have any secrets herself, at least none of the magnitude of Elizabeth’s trip to Joshua Tree with Michael. If Kate’s thoughts were sometimes seditious, her actions only went so far as searching pockets, and even then only to make sure that, say, he hadn’t left money in his pants before she tossed them in the wash. Once she found a business card, his own, with a foreign telephone number written across it and “Michelle” scrawled underneath. She’d tossed it on his bureau with the collar stays and loose coins without a second thought.
Chris returned from the ferry cafeteria line with Piper and James beside him, each holding lemonade and ice cream.
“You just don’t like the word no, do you?” Kate said to him as they approached. “It’s not that hard. It actually feels good sometimes. Try it.”
Chris smiled, his face still creased from the motel sheets. He hadn’t had time to shower before the ferry, but it didn’t matter. He was one of those men whose looks improved as they aged, who had, though she’d never say this to him, a certain prettiness that becomes more masculine as they settled into their skin.
Her eyes fell to the shoes he was wearing, vented canvas sandals she hadn’t noticed before. Had he run out during lunch for a few vacation items, or picked them up during a free moment on a trip? In the early years he would have gone shopping with her, or would have shown them to her when he’d gotten home. What do you think of these, hon? he would have said. Too crunchy?
Minutiae, she told herself. It was natural that in a busy family, small things would begin to go unsaid.
FIVE
THE BUNGALOW WAS DOWN a dirt path so nondescript that it was more a pair of ruts than a road. Huckleberry, sheep laurel, and juniper grew thickly on the sides and scratched cars that listed too far left or right. About two hundred yards down, the path forked left into a small driveway. The shingled cottage was deceptively plain and shady.
Kate turned the key in the lock and gave a push, and the front door opened with the sucking sound of vacuum-packed juice. The kids raced past her into the house. Kate dropped two duffels of linens and assessed the familiar space, a single square footprint that was kitchen and family room in one. She yanked back heavy seasonal drapes the length of two walls, and the room grew spacious. Enormous windows opened onto a yard like a football field, and beyond it, the ocean.
The house was compact, with an economy of space that had never felt cramped. The interior’s whitewashed timber and plain cream-painted walls managed a sense of spare luxury without a single expensive accessory, except for an antique grandfather clock that undercut its own seriousness by chiming on whim.
As Chris unloaded the car, Kate stuck her head into each of the two bedrooms off a small hallway behind the family
room. The master was the same size as the other, but with its own tiny bathroom and French doors opening onto one end of the wraparound porch. She crossed the braided rug and opened a door in the corner. Inside the closet, behind the rod that would have held hanging clothes, a short ladder had been built into the wall. In the next room the children bickered over beds. She touched the smooth wood of the ladder, ran fingers over a worn rung while she debated going in to settle their argument. Then she climbed up hand over hand, and pushed open the trapdoor at the ceiling. It banged back flat against the attic floor.
This odd hybrid of cupola and loft was not technically part of the habitable house, added by the owners in the low, peaked space that would have been an attic. The boxy addition was less than seven feet high at its tallest point and angled down to about four feet at the corners, with three walls of windows facing the harbor. Kate climbed through the opening and took in the distant water views from tight quarters, a contradictory comfort of expanse amid restraint.
Rows of built-in shelves ran the length of the walls under the windows, and were filled with an eclectic mix of books. The sole piece of furniture in the loft was an upholstered chaise, pushed against the single windowless wall with light sconces built on either side. Kate clicked them on, and the bulbs glowed, flanking the couch at shoulder height.
The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D Page 4