The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D

by Nichole Bernier

  So I did the cop-out: I told him the dysplasia is mild and not a big deal, which I knew would free up his paralysis and make it easier for him. He’s not a strong man, but every fiber of his being needs to believe that he’s a good one. I did this pretty much knowing he’ll come around, though now I’ll never know whether he would have come back on his own if I’d been really sick. But I don’t have that luxury. I don’t want to do this by myself.

  The future’s like a superhighway through a big bland desert. Marriage, kids, mortgage, suburbs, little hands getting into my paint. I will not give in to the sentimentality of wondering about the other options, partners, lifestyles, the whole Road Not Taken thing. I already did that, and it brought me here. This is where I am, and he is where I am. It will be okay. But the price I’ll pay for not having to do this alone will be never having the certainty that I can count on him.

  SIXTEEN

  KATE STOOD AT THE kitchen counter staring into her beach bag in disbelief. She rifled through its contents—water bottle, key chain, sunscreen, book. But no wallet. She turned the bag upside down on the kitchen table in a waterfall of pens, receipts, and snack bars. Spare change clattered onto the counter, but no trunk key, which was not a surprise. That had been zippered away, night after night. And now it was gone, stolen with the wallet at the beach.

  Driver’s license and credit cards, replaceable. Cash, negligible. But she was fairly sure that this was the only copy of the trunk key. She poured herself a glass of water and sat down at the kitchen table. There might be another copy somewhere at the Martins’ house—it was hard to believe Elizabeth would have given her only key to the law firm. But to ask Dave would be to raise all kinds of unpleasant issues, chief among them his belief, she was sure, that his wife’s journals should not have left his house.

  She could call the police to see if a wallet had been found; she would check the beach, and call some island locksmiths. But for now, since no one would see, she sat at the table with her face in her hands.

  She was alone. The kids were next door at the Callums’ so she could work at Flour for a few hours, and Chris was en route to Cambodia. An exclusive Angkor Wat hotel was rumored to be ripe for purchase; it had been empty and in a state of disrepair for some time, and its owner, a Saudi prince, let slip that he’d just as soon sell. When the president of Chris’s firm heard, it was as if he’d been given the coordinates of the Holy Grail. Finding a property of this quality so close to the famous temples was unheard of. Chris got on the next flight to Siem Reap to check it out and, if it was promising, begin negotiations. He’d likely be gone a week, ten days. When he returned, they’d have a week left of their vacation.

  Kate had felt a jolt at his first mention of Southeast Asia. He’d been many times, but not in the past year. She knew what had been happening in the region lately. Anyone who followed current events did. All over the news, cities were reduced to pinpoints glowing red on maps, more terror cells and training camps discovered every day. When she’d mentioned her concern to Chris—breezily, like a parody of spousal worry—he’d assured her that those things weren’t happening where he was going.

  It was normal to have concerns. But she also knew she had lost perspective in the past year on the way an ordinary person might reasonably feel under certain circumstances. She saw Chris in town squares and markets, places that were targets for desperate hate-filled men and hateful acts. If he was in the wrong place at the wrong time there would be smoke, cries, and prayers; his wallet would be found, blown to the curb, his passport in pieces, photos of their children loose in the street with charred edges.

  Kate got up from the kitchen table and went to the loft to examine the trunk. It sat in the middle of the floor like a squat rebuke to her carelessness. Why had she kept the key in her wallet? She crouched to scrutinize the lock, some sort of metal weathered to dull brown. A classic vintage keyhole, a small round opening above with a tiny notch at bottom.

  Kate went back downstairs for anything that might be made into a tool—Piper’s barrette, a paper clip, a pair of nail clippers with a fold-out file. She wriggled each in the lock without luck. All of them caught on the notch, too thick to slide the rest of the way in. She remembered the little key for their car’s rooftop storage unit, and retrieved it from a dish of loose change on Chris’s dresser. Just looking at it she could see it was too thick. Next to the dish Kate noticed the photograph of herself laughing over a dropped soufflé in the studio, the one he always brought with him when he traveled. She hesitated, wondering what, if anything, it meant that he had not taken it this time.

  She went back up to the loft and the trunk. If an island locksmith was not helpful, she might try tracking down a trunk company that still made tiny locks and keys. But even as the thought crossed her mind, she knew she wouldn’t have the time or patience. In the end she would pry it open any way she could.

  She sat back on her heels and looked out the loft window. Propped on the inside of the windowsill was the notebook with Elizabeth smiling into the sun. On the chaise lay the pastel-striped notebook. Two notebooks still outside the trunk.

  The screen door slammed shut behind her with a hollow bang. “I’m here,” she called toward the kitchen, and put her bag behind the counter.

  “It’s about time.” Max’s voice came from behind the curtain. “Do you know how many tarts we have to make for that dinner party?” Kate poured herself a cup of coffee and stood at the window that opened onto the side patio. At the largest table three men sat with coffee and doughnuts, their golf shoes piled on a nearby bench.

  “Hollywood people,” Max muttered from the kitchen. “They order two kinds of tarts in double the number they actually need, so they won’t run out of either kind. Then they have the nerve to ask if they can return the extras.”

  One of the golfers’ cell phones began to ring. He looked down, grimaced, and pressed a button to silence it without answering. “Ahhh, no, I don’t think so,” he said. “Not right now.”

  Kate watched as he pushed the phone away and leaned back in his chair. His friend laughed. She fought an urge to go out and tell him to answer his damned phone, that you never knew why someone might be calling. She turned away from the window and walked through the curtains to the kitchen.

  “Sorry I’m late. I had to get a sitter for the kids. Chris went to Cambodia.” She picked up an apron from the pile folded on the shelf.

  “Cambodia? What’s he doing there?”

  “Checking out another exotic hotel.”

  “Exotic hotels. Ah, yes,” he said bitterly.

  She looked up, eyes narrowed. He stood half inside the refrigerator, removing ingredients. But his jaded comment, she reminded herself, was not about Chris.

  “Have you heard from William?” she asked, tying the apron strings behind her back. “Anything at all? Or about him?”

  He moved around the butcher-block island collecting utensils, and for a moment she thought he had not heard her.

  “No,” he said finally. “And I don’t expect I will.”

  “Well there has to be something you can do. Go after him legally?”

  He handed her a whisk and a rubber spatula. “It would be very hard to do.” He tapped the spatula against the counter lightly, as if he’d thought it over but decided against it. “I’m not going to go that route.”

  She wanted to say that she’d never liked William much anyway, but that sort of proclamation was never useful after the fact. It hadn’t stopped her from saying it the spring day Max called with the news. But the courageous thing would have been for her to have said something years ago, when she’d felt a chill from William, possessive of Max and unwelcoming to his old friends. Or certainly to have said something last summer, that night out to dinner. She’d gotten up from the table to go to the ladies’ room, and as she turned the corner she’d seen William in the doorway to the kitchen talking to their waiter with too much familiarity. It was all wrong, his posture and expression. And even if she’d
felt he was not right for Max long before, she’d known it with certainty that night, the way he’d turned away from the waiter with that sensual languor, a twist of hips first, head last. He even saw that she’d seen him, and brushed past her with heavy-lidded eyes like a pissed-off cat. Still, she hadn’t mentioned it to Max. It was awkward. It was private. And she might be wrong.

  Max handed her the cream cheese as he laid out the ingredients for the tart crust. Then he cleared his throat. “I decided to sell the house.”

  She looked up quickly. All those years designing, then building. The walls of bookshelves, and water views if you stood just so. “Oh, no.”

  He shook his head. “It’s just a house.”

  That wasn’t what he meant, though. What he meant was The bakery means more.

  She stood looking at him, but he didn’t meet her eye. She scratched at his hand with her index finger. “I’m sorry,” she said. “When?”

  “I’m putting it on in a few weeks. Catch the summer people while they’re here.”

  She opened the cream cheese. “Am I allowed to say I’m glad you’re keeping the bakery? It’s so you. It’s irreplaceable.”

  He paused, then dumped flour into the mixing bowl. A small cloud rose from the pile. She glanced at him sideways, and saw his eyes glistening.

  “Do you have a realtor for the house yet?” she asked softly. “Need help fixing it up?”

  He smiled, and coughed away the emotion. She’d amused him.

  “What?” she said, feigning offense. “I’ve sold houses. I have an eye for style.”

  He dropped his eyes to her baggy T-shirt and cargo shorts. “Sure you do, honey,” he said, drawing out his words patiently, as if he were speaking to a child. “You surely do.”

  She flicked a piece of cream cheese at him, and he lifted it off his collar with a fingernail and rubbed at the place, smiling.

  On opposite sides of the wooden island in the center they moved through the automatic gestures; flour, salt, and sugar blended, shortening and butter cut into pebbles, drops of ice water scattered like seeds. As he worked the dough he looked over at her, then looked again, as if he hadn’t noticed before.

  “What’s up with your eyes? They’re all red.”

  “Allergies.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “What are you allergic to? Butter?”

  She exhaled. “I’m fine. I just lost my wallet, and got bent out of shape about it this morning. I think it was stolen yesterday on the beach.” She dropped the block of cream cheese into another bowl and jabbed at it with a spoon.

  In the scope of things, the loss of the key was not tremendous. Still, it delayed things, and reading the journals was becoming too consuming. While she was playing with the kids, she found herself wondering what had drawn Elizabeth to stay with Dave, and what had finally pulled her away. The other night after they turned off the light, as Chris’s hand brushed the flat of her stomach above the waistband of her briefs, she’d had a jarring memory of Elizabeth’s thong, her art-teacher boyfriend, and her rant against loyalty. Even without having finished reading the journals, Kate wondered how she would be able to look Dave in the eye.

  “Okay, so your wallet was stolen,” Max said, puzzled by her emotion. “You’ll get a new license with a better picture, and you’ll have to memorize a new credit card number for your online shopping. It’s just a wallet.”

  “It’s not just a wallet.” Kate sprinkled a fistful of flour across the island for a kneading surface. As she told him about the journals and the lost key, she trailed her fingertips across the counter, creating long wavy lines through the flour.

  “And the rest of the journals are locked inside?”

  “A few. The last one or two.”

  Max turned the dough onto the floured island and rolled it in her direction. “Maybe the husband has another key somewhere.”

  Kate palmed the ball, letting the heat from her hands soften it, streaking the butter through the dough to make it flaky. Then she pushed it against the countertop. This was not something she wanted to ask Dave. “There could be another key somewhere at his house,” she said, working the dough in short tight strokes. “But it’s awkward. How do you think he feels about my reading these books in the first place? I don’t know how he’d take hearing that my key is gone.”

  She could easily see Dave’s response, matter-of-fact with a chilly edge. But there could also be an explosion, all that anger at the world’s injustice finally let out of its box.

  “So dodge the whole thing,” Max said. “Stuff the trunk in your basement, and if he ever asks, just tell him it’s a lot of girly angst and that his wife would have wanted them thrown away.”

  That might have been possible at the beginning of the summer, but now Dave wanted to be involved, and expected a resolution. Perhaps he’d always had more backbone than she’d credited him with. Or maybe the past year was still rolling out its effects, like the way Dave perceived his marriage and privacy: what had been hers, what had been his, and what of hers was now his.

  She told Max about what Dave had already read of the last journal, about Elizabeth traveling to meet someone named Michael. At the suggestion of infidelity Max’s expression hardened. “I don’t know why this matters so much to you,” he said. “Protecting her.”

  “I’m just trying to do this thing that she asked, Max. I’m just trying to figure out the right thing to do with these books.”

  His hands continued to move fluidly as he flattened another ball of dough into a disc, but he said nothing.

  “If someone you cared about died and trusted you with something like this, wouldn’t you take it seriously?”

  He contemplated it, but didn’t answer directly. “Well, losing the key isn’t the biggest deal in the world. It’s not as if you lost the books themselves. You can always smash the damn thing open. Surely it’s not made of titanium.”

  Kate set the cream cheese mixture in the refrigerator. “I will if I have to. But it would be a shame to ruin it. The trunk is a family heirloom.”

  “Well, her family isn’t seeing that trunk again anyway unless you make peace with the fact that you can’t control the way she is going to be remembered. What she did is what she did.”

  He pushed a large bowl of kiwi toward her. She took one and began to peel, digging out the core on each end. She thought of all the marital hopscotching she’d seen in New York, the indiscretions of people she had never thought capable of cheating. Maybe loyalty is for swans and bird-minded people. Not a sentiment she would have thought could come from Elizabeth.

  This wasn’t something she was going to be able to leave unfinished, or discover quietly and put aside. Dave would call again, and again. Elizabeth was not an unintelligent person, but this—leaving the journals to someone else, without specifying what should be done with them—had been a careless way of safeguarding them.

  If it had been Kate, and she’d had secrets she’d wanted kept private, she would have done things differently. She would have stipulated that the books be destroyed.

  SEVENTEEN

  KATE SAT IN THE loft and listened to the murmuring downstairs. The children had quieted their bedtime silliness once the lights went out, and would be asleep soon.

  The remaining half of the pastel-striped journal was thicker than the other notebooks. Elizabeth had supplemented its pages with sheets torn from notepads, backs of flyers, scraps of thought scrawled on the edges of train schedules. She wrote wherever she happened to be, on whatever she happened to have.

  Dave had called Elizabeth right after he received her voice mail about the baby, as she’d expected. They reconciled. His apology and remorse seemed sincere to Kate, and moving, but Elizabeth held herself at a remove. I marched through the necessary gymnastics of it with him. The tears and apologies, the self-recrimination and gnashing of teeth, then the parade of kindness. It had to be that way, or he wouldn’t be who he is. Gradually the analytical tone disappeared, and when she wrote about the return
of passion, it was without irony or reservation.

  One hot night Elizabeth and Dave sweated through failed air-conditioning in his building. The fan rotated in the dark just inches from the bed, making sheets clammy then hot again wherever they lay. He got up for ice cream and walked naked to the kitchen, and Elizabeth watched the streetlights cross his body like a toga. He returned with two small granny-glass sundaes, a ring in hers where the cherry would be.

  Kate read this with the odd sensation of wanting to turn to someone, like two friends watching a movie, and say, How can she just forgive him and move on? and What is it with men and engagement rings in food, anyway? But the person she wanted to turn to, she realized, was Elizabeth.

  With her friends in Washington, the other mothers she’d met through her children’s schools, conversations tended to skate on the surface of things. With her parents, there was the fear of saying anything that would not live up to intellectual standards, that would forfeit ground on the respect she’d earned as an adult with ambitions of her own. With Rachel … they were closer when Kate was working. After she’d quit that last job, when Piper was a baby, she hadn’t been able to explain her choice in a way that Rachel could understand or respect. At the next Christmas gathering, Rachel’s confusion and disappointment, and the gulf that had opened between them, were palpable.

  And with Chris—well. But reading Elizabeth’s notebooks was one unedited mind to another, and also entirely inimitable in real life. The person in the world most likely to understand her now was a dead woman, and she felt more alone than she’d felt at the summer’s beginning.

  Elizabeth and Dave’s wedding was a small gathering at an estate home in Georgia. Dave’s brother-in-law Zack read a poem by Pablo Neruda, and Zack’s children were flower girl and ring bearer. Elizabeth was fifteen weeks pregnant. Dave became choked up during the vows; Elizabeth was surprised by her own sadness that her mother could not be there. It doesn’t matter what kind of relationship we had. Losing your mother before you’re married and have kids just messes with the order of things, a domino effect through the milestones of your life.