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.
February 1, 1989
First night in the new digs: I’m a New Yorker again! I may get mugged five times before I pay next month’s rent, and it’s a hellhole of a third-floor walk-up, but I love it here. I am so, so sick of the suburbs. I needed some fresh air, some general aerating of my life. Malcolm would be so proud, such apt use of golf terminology. If he weren’t so mad about my going to work for the competition, smack on Madison Avenue.
April 20, 1989
They’re calling her the Central Park Jogger, a name that fits any one of the thousands of us who loop the reservoir at night with the secret fear something like this will happen. I was in that exact place maybe twenty minutes before. If I’d stretched out a little longer or had answered the phone before I walked out the door, I would have been right there.
How many things in life are like this, near misses? Every day consists of these tiny choices with 57,000 trickle-down effects. You catch a different subway and brush against a stranger with meningitis, or make eye contact with someone you fall in love with, or buy a lotto ticket in this bodega instead of that one and totally cash in, or miss the train that ends up derailing. Everything is so fucking arbitrary. Every move you make and a million ones you don’t all have ramifications that mean life or death or love or bankruptcy or whatever. It could paralyze you if you let it. But you have to live your life. What’s the alternative?
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.
ELEVEN
THE 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 happie
st 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.
Children joined in from neighboring towels, and Chris was relieved of his duties. He lowered himself into a folding chair beside Kate and picked up the bottle of sunscreen, smoothing it across his nose and cheeks in an inverted V.
Sitting. Incredibly, they were sitting. “I’d take out a book, but something tells me they’d notice and it’d break the spell,” she said. “I think this is the first time we’ve both sat down at the beach since having kids.”
Out of habit, he looked to the children, now closer to the waterline. “Well, there was the Cape.”
“But they weren’t with us.”
“God, no.” He reached over and stroked her shin.
That anniversary year Kate and Chris had rented a house in the dunes for a long weekend away, and Rachel had offered to come stay with the children. When their mother had offered to come as well, Kate was not sure which of them was more relieved, Rachel or herself.
The overcast weekend had driven away most beachgoers. Kate and Chris had sat in the sheltered dunes below their deck, temperatures pleasant enough, reading and dozing, and playing Scrabble pulled from the shelves of the rental home. In the evening they’d brought their dinner and wine into the beach grass at sunset. She was reclining with her eyes closed when he went inside for another bottle of wine, and didn’t notice until he sat casually beside her that he’d strolled out without a shred of clothing. Her braying laugh had drawn the attention of an elderly couple walking below. Back home, they’d said they were lucky not to have left with a summons, or with the beginnings of a child who’d have to be named Sandy.
Piper continued her hopeless relay. Finally, she laid herself full-length in the moat to try to stop its absorption of water, and became distracted by the sensation of wet sand, rolling and basting herself. Kate tried to remember the point at which she’d stopped enjoying covering herself in sand, at what age there was dawning awareness, This feels itchy or This is messy or even So-and-so looks nicer than I do in her bathing suit. She was in no rush for her daughter to be there.
“I found out last night that Elizabeth’s mother died of breast cancer,” she told Chris, burrowing her toes in the warm sand. “She’d been studying art in Florence and came home to take care of her. Just packed up and quit school to come home and be her caretaker.”
“I can see her doing that,” he said. “Man, cancer. That must have been brutal.”
“It sounds awful, the slow deterioration. That’s got to be one of the most horrible ways to die.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Lou Gehrig’s disease isn’t a walk in the park. A shark attack would be pretty horrific. Or slow dehydration on a desert island.”
“Don’t joke, Chris. Cancer is so common, it’s scary.” Kate put on her sunglasses and squirmed her chair down lower into the sand. “I’m so glad you quit smoking.”
He made an agreeable sound. She studied him for a moment out of the corner of her sunglasses, looked for a coloring, a clench of the jaw. He stared ahead, expressionless. If she said anything further it would bring them back to that old place of undermined trust, and change the tenor of their vacation.
Five kids now worked with James and Piper by the water’s edge, laboring with their own pails and shovels to create a second tier for the castle walls. Chris called out to them. “It looks good, guys, but make sure the new sand isn’t too wet. If it’s too heavy it’ll collapse your walls.” He pulled his water bottle from the sand and took a long drink. “What did Dave have to say this morning? Are they gonna come out for a visit?”
So that was that, then. They would pretend about the smoking. She tried to remember which year they’d gone to Cape Cod, which anniversary that had been. Three years ago? It felt like much more.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I invited them again. But he had his polite voice on that says he’ll never really take me up on it.”
Chris nodded. “Dave’s holding things together well, but there’s a lot of politeness going on with him. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him irritated. I get the feeling he lets you see exactly what he wants you to see.”
She palmed a dollop of sunscreen and worked it in circles across her chest and neck. “This morning he asked me how far I’d gotten in the journals. I feel like he’s torn between wanting to find out the truth about her and not really wanting to know.”
Chris shook his head. “To have that loss, and then get that kind of information about the person you thought you knew? That’s as big as it gets.” He watched James straddling the castle, wanting to make himself king. “I guess you never really know people. She’s the last person I would have suspected of fooling around.”
“We shouldn’t jump to conclusions, Chris. I mean, she was all about her family. Everything she did was for them.”
Two women in bikinis strolled by at the waterline just below where the kids were repairing the castles. When the sand flying from James’s shovel neared their shins, they jumped back with mincing steps, as if they’d been burned. Both had long, full hair, carefully turned with blow dryers and brushes. As they walked, their breasts bobbed in their bikini tops like buoys in the water.
Chris’s eyes followed them as they passed. Kate looked at him until he noticed her watching him, and then both looked back at the kids at the sand castles.
“Just because Elizabeth was a perfect mom doesn’t mean she couldn’t have an affair. But if that’s what it was, are you going to tell Dave? Or give him the books, or what?”
Fair and sensitive. Kate watched the women move down the shoreline. “I’ll have to see what feels right. I don’t know what would be more cruel—to hand Dave proof, or leave him wondering what she was doing. I guess it depends on whether the truth seems like it would benefit him in any way, or just hurt him.”
Chris frowned. “Well that’s a little controlling, don’t you think? Deciding what kind of truth he can handle.”
“I’m not ‘deciding’ anything. I just don’t know how much is appropriate to share. Dave and the kids have their memories of her a certain way, and all that could be shot to hell. That’s not what she would have wanted.”
“Well maybe she should have thought of that before she started screwing around and put it in her diary. Don’t you think Dave deserves to know whether his life was a sham?”
“A sham? Come on, Chris. Everyone keeps little things from their spouse. Something they think, something they do. Or a bad habit.” She tried to keep her voice from becoming too pointed on the last two words, and she stared straight ahead at the water. “But even if she did have secrets, she’s still entitled to her privacy. A person’s wishes don’t stop being real just because she’s gone.” Kate sat back in her chair, surprised by her own vehemence.
Chris turned to her, eyes unreadable behind dark lenses. “Dave is the one who’s still here, and his life counts too, Kate.” He reached for the water bottle, found it empty, and tossed it into the sand. “No offense, but maybe this project has become a little too much about you, and this idea of yourself as her protector.”
She opened her mouth and leaned forward in her chair, but was interrupted by chaos at the castle. Six kids were now within what was left of its walls, including Piper, jumping up and down on the remnants of towers and turrets and screeching with destructive glee. James stood to the side, near tears.
“Don’t! Don’t!” he yelled at them. “I’M THE KING! THIS IS MY CASTLE! DON’T WRECK IT!” But it was too late. The walls had already crumbled.
TWELVE
THEIR THIRD WEEK of vacation had been earmarked for the children to attend farm camp, an island of structured time on the open calendar. Kate had loosely envisioned the new things she’d try solo while the kids were occupied, kayak tours and birding excursions. But each morning, after she pulled out of the driveway with the kids and their backpacks and Chris sat down to his work, there were two things she wanted to do. First, she’d swim in the ocean, rediscovering the fluidity of movement that used to come naturally. Then she would pull on a cotton tank dress over her swimsuit and go to the café to read.
The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D Page 10