Chris looked at her, wide-eyed. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
Kate walked a few steps down the patio trying to slow her breath and pulse, all out of sync, then leaned back hard against a railing post. “Dave took one of Elizabeth’s notebooks while he was here, the one that explains why she was flying to L.A. He just went in and took it right out of our loft.”
Chris put his hand behind his neck, and looked down at the floorboards in a Lord-give-me-strength way. When he looked back up at her it was with wonder.
“It was his wife’s journal, for Christ’s sake. If I were you I’d say good riddance and let him deal with where his wife was going. It’s been making you crazy all summer.”
“Don’t you get it? It was up to me to figure out what to do with them.” She stomped her bare foot on the floorboards. “She trusted me—this is all she wanted. And I didn’t do it.” Emotion clenched her throat and she didn’t trust herself to speak. She looked at him as if he were missing a most basic point of logic.
“Why do you care so much about protecting them from each other?” He craned forward for eye contact, and she looked away, eyes filling. He stepped closer and took her gently by the shoulders. “Give him the rest of the notebooks and be done with it. Why are you so fixated on making this your problem?”
Of course it was her problem. How could he not see that it was? Elizabeth had asked this of her and she owed her at least that, to make amends.
Amends.
Kate stopped thumping her heel and went still with the surprise of having her motivations so unexpectedly clear. The air was suffocating, even outdoors, and pressed in on her like a cloud of gnats. She leaned forward from the railing and began to walk down the porch. The lawn stretched toward the ocean in dark relief.
“I’m going to walk for a while.”
“Kate,” he said. “Come on. Let it go. Enough already.”
The grass under her bare feet was thick and damp as seaweed. She waited until she passed beyond the range of the porch lights and walked faster.
“Kate!”
Once she was past the pool of porch light she began to run. Darkness closed in as she put behind her Dave’s words—cutout, sidekick—and the trunk that in the end told her nothing except that Elizabeth was not as placid as she’d seemed, but might have acted that way because Kate had treated her as if she were. The soft cold grass grew coarse near the beach, but she didn’t slow as she hit the sand. She turned and kept running along the water, even as the stones dug at her insteps and dried eelgrass scraped her ankles.
The side of her foot struck a rock, stopping her short. The stabbing sensation shot from her little toe up her ankle. She inhaled sharply and doubled over, crouched with hands on her knees until the sparks of pain dulled. The water was a few yards away, dark as blanketing earth. She stayed bent until her breath returned. Sidekick. Then she pulled her sweatshirt over her head, stepped out of her pants, and walked step by step into the sea. The cold water numbed her toe and she went in without flinching. Gooseflesh rose above the place where the water met her shins, then her knees, then thighs. The hair stood along her legs and arms and across her scalp, electrifying. Stronger than the emptiness, more tangible than anxiety.
Kate dove in and when she surfaced fell into the rhythm of the swimmer she hadn’t been for years. She swam straight out from shore, turning for air every fourth stroke, toe throbbing with each kick until she ceased to notice. She swam with her eyes open but the stinging wash of salt did not flush the vision of Elizabeth’s face with its most common expression, one of bland inscrutable goodwill, watching and listening but offering little of herself. In the look there had been an unnerving collage of admiration, envy, and resentment, but underneath it all, need. Stay, it had said. Let me have more of you.
She swam with no sense of time, thinking only briefly of the harmful things that might be under and around her—rusted debris, infectious bacteria, sharks. There were few sounds. Wind over water. The clang of a ship’s rigging. Then music and laughter. She paused, lifting her head from the water, suspended.
The party boat she’d heard earlier was up ahead, close enough to hear the music clearly and to see the people standing on deck with their drinks. A woman in a black halter dress, a man whose shirt was open to his navel. She touched his arm in response to something he’d said, and threw back her head in showy laughter.
The scene felt a million miles from shore, from Kate’s bungalow and children and the daily grind to keep them happy and grounded and safe, and another million from where Dave was likely pacing his yard and cursing her. Kate thought then of the painting in the Martins’ kitchen, the two brownstones. A woman drinking wine with her head thrown back in manic laughter, while next door, a woman combed her daughter’s long wet hair.
Kate continued to tread water, imagining what Dave was doing at this moment. Swinging his driver in the darkness of his yard, or sitting in his Spider and drinking a beer with the radio on. Or he might be at this moment reading Elizabeth’s second-to-last journal, learning about her fascination with a man whose ability to accept her for who she was had roused her from a domestic coma. As Dave read her impressions of this man and her decision to travel with him, he might look up and across the garage beyond his car to the far wall, where her easel was folded and gathering dust. He might put a hand through his hair, thick but for the spot Elizabeth had pretended not to see, and wonder where things had gone wrong, what had happened to bring them from a ring on an ice-cream sundae to Three days until I leave. Never anticipated anything so much or expected this much.
Kate began to tire, treading water. Her toe became inured to the cold and began to throb. She turned toward the bungalow, a few windows glowing at the end of the lawn. It was a cool night, good sleeping weather, and she would pull up the hand-knitted afghan that belonged to the homeowners—designed, no doubt, by someone with some story behind why it was made and for whom. Everything had a story. Every word, it seemed, every small gesture, was the result of something that had moved someone, or moved her to pretend as if it hadn’t.
Kate turned away from the boat and began slow strokes toward shore. Chris would be waiting for her back at the house, a little worried but not too much. He wasn’t the worrying type, but he would be on a night he’d seen his wife so unhinged. Maybe they would stay up and talk, and he would be understanding of her guilt and obligation even if he didn’t really understand.
Or maybe she would just return, and that would be good enough, and when he crawled under the covers she would go too. There was no longer anything left for her to stay up and read.
TWENTY-SEVEN
IN THEIR LAST WEEK they went to four of their favorite beaches, built entire cities in the sand. Kate taped up her toe and limped through the agricultural fair, flew down high sackcloth slides and clomped through the barns with 4-H exhibits, and watched enough log-chopping and frying-pan-throwing competitions to occupy a frontier town for a lifetime. They grilled a surf-and-turf dinner for the neighbors, and she made the kids cupcakes with animals piped in bright icing that stained their lips blue. She was the best mother in the world, the very best.
As much as she had sworn to Chris after her swim that she was putting the whole business behind her, she couldn’t. It was there at the beach, there when they played their last rounds of miniature golf, and when they walked around town with oversized waffle cones of ice cream. She hadn’t finished. There was supposed to have been a trajectory; she would read all summer and decide what to do with the books when everything became clear. But it never had.
Kate didn’t doubt that there had been another journal, but she was no longer certain of whether Dave had taken it. She replayed his visit and departure—how long he’d been inside showering, whether he’d been carrying a bag that could have concealed a notebook. Of one thing she was certain: When he’d said good-bye in the driveway, his defeated bearing was gone. He walked away with an ease that seemed to her evidence he’d seized an opportunit
y.
Yet as days passed, her doubt grew. Three days after she’d called him, while she was going through the early tasks of closing up the house, she recalled a passage from the final journal, a phrase she’d breezed over at the beginning of the summer. She’d stopped cleaning the refrigerator and gone up to the loft.
The air was stale with the windows closed, and the notebooks were still scattered on the floor. It was there in the last journal, the one she’d read after leaving the Martins’ house. Now I have to get myself together and say good-bye to the kids and remember to make a fuss over packing the painting supplies they bought, jam them in somehow with all that awful writing. It was possible Elizabeth had taken this missing journal with her on the plane. Kate couldn’t imagine why she’d bring that older one, instead of the new book she’d begun before her trip, but if she had, then the angry exchange with Dave had been unjustified. And even worse, Kate realized with a drop in her stomach, she would never understand what had drawn Elizabeth to Joshua Tree.
Memories of what she’d read were like a hangover that faded and returned. Kate would be cooking dinner and remember an episode from her Southbrook years, then find herself recasting it with this new version of Elizabeth. When the playgroup women had overstayed at her house, evenings they’d been invited for pizza and left the family room in shambles, Elizabeth had always told them not to bother straightening up. She had her own way of organizing things; it would only take a minute for her to do later. Now Kate could imagine Elizabeth sighing with relief when they left, then working on design projects that would keep her up until 2 a.m. because she loved the work even if this was the only way she could manage it. And never telling them, as if the desperation for something of her own would undercut her credentials as a dedicated mother, and set her off from her friends. Kate tried to recall the number of times she’d asked Elizabeth to babysit while she worked intermittently in restaurant consulting. She had always thought she had reciprocated as often as she’d asked. But maybe she’d just wanted to think she had.
Had they taken advantage of Elizabeth? Like most things in life, it was more complicated than that. Elizabeth hadn’t volunteered much, and Kate hadn’t asked. How much could a person be expected to see when someone else showed so little? Elizabeth had felt herself to be alone, but she had also felt herself to be unique, that her experience was both unusual and unshareable, when in truth it was not.
But she had opened herself to Michael.
How did you recognize that potential understanding in a person, Kate wondered; how did you recognize whether it existed in your own spouse, untested? If she could find this Michael, she felt she would know.
There had been three high schools in Elizabeth’s town, each with graduating classes of over a thousand. Three days before they were to leave the island, Kate spent the evening on Internet searches. She clicked through town board-of-education sites and people-finder databases, the alumni sites posted in banner advertisements.
The next day she called school administrators, and though they turned her down, citing alumni privacy, class lists were traced online easily enough. In Elizabeth’s class there had been seven Michaels. But there had been only one Claire. With a few keystrokes she emerged, Elizabeth’s closest high school friend, married and living in New Jersey.
Claire answered on the third ring. After exchanging pleasantries and then sympathy, Kate came to the reason for her call. I’m trying to find the guy she dated in high school, she said. Michael.
There was a confused silence. A small child cried in the background.
Elizabeth never really dated anyone, Claire said as she tried to soothe the agitated child. Then she reconsidered. Well, she could have without telling anyone. Elizabeth was funny that way.
The screen door opened on resistant hinges and Kate entered the bakery. The front was empty, no customers, no Max. The pastry case was filled with what remained of the morning offerings. From the back there was singing.
“You fill up my se-e-e-nses …”
She looked through the curtains. Max was cleaning pans with his back to her. The music played faintly from the stereo in the corner, but it was his voice, an octave above its natural range, that filled the room.
She set her large cardboard box on the pastry case and stepped through the curtains, crooning back. “Coooome let me looooove you … you adorable maaan-chiiild.”
Max shook a soapy whisk over his shoulder in her direction and continued singing softly.
“John Denver?” she said, brushing suds from her T-shirt. “This is what you sing when you’re alone? You’re a closet John Denver fan?”
“There is not one closeted thing about me and you know it,” he said. “I can only imagine what you sing in the shower. Someone—left the cake out—in the rain …”
“Donna Summer is a very underappreciated artist.”
“Mmm, yes. Years before her time.” He fished a knife too quickly from the sudsy water and winced. “I thought we weren’t meeting the realtor until two,” he said, considering the pad of his thumb.
“I thought I’d come a little early. I wanted to bring you these.” She went back through the curtains to the front of the bakery and carried in the cardboard flat with three potted plants. “Something to help your house show better. Not that it needs it.”
“Well aren’t you sweet.” He touched the wide, flat petals of the white phalaenopsis as gently as one would the cheek of a newborn. “Love orchids. So much better than cut bouquets.”
She took a piece of rugelach from the case. “So this realtor. Is she going to be your buyer’s broker on a new place too?”
“Not sure. I might rent. I’ll get the full picture of what I’m dealing with in the fall.”
His house was not extravagant, but it had been designed to his tastes—heavy on kitchen, dining room, and library, light on space appropriate for large-screen televisions or bulky children’s toys, the types of rooms most sought after in real estate these days. It would not be easily dispensed with, or replaced.
“The full picture of what you’re dealing with from investigators, or from your accountant?”
He waved his hand, a summary gesture that included the all of it. “The fall, the fall,” he repeated, with the rhythm of a poet wrapping up a reading. “Everything will be clearer in the fall.”
She dropped into the worn wooden chair beside the butcher-block island and watched him wash dishes at the sink. So ugly, the whole business. William had been flaky, certainly, but she’d never imagined anything on the scale of this. Max rarely wanted to talk about it, and she was never certain how much to press. She leaned low over her legs, releasing the tension in her hamstrings.
“I won’t mind having fall come, myself. School, fresh starts, and all that.”
He stacked baking pans in the drying rack. “Already? All year long, you’re counting the days to summer.”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“You still reading your friend’s books?”
“More or less.” She dropped a sandal and rested her bare foot on a rung of the stool. “There are a lot of them. I can’t imagine putting yourself out there like that on paper.”
Max pulled a spatula from the water and scrutinized its edge. “It’s not the most uncommon thing in the world. I keep a journal, you know.”
Kate looked up. “You do? I never knew that.”
“For years and years.”
He moved another stack of muffin tins to the sink. She watched as he cleaned one, scraping crust from its edges.
“Why? If you don’t mind my asking,” she said. He paused in his scrubbing. “I mean, are you going to do anything with them? Do you love writing?”
He looked over his shoulder at her. “It’s not a matter of loving writing. It’s something I need to do. It helps me vent and figure things out. I don’t have to think about anyone else’s feelings or judgments. It’s the one place I really get to have my say.”
“Why not just call a friend?”<
br />
He gave her a wry smile that suggested she’d missed the point in some important way. “ ‘The unexamined life’ and all that, m’dear.” They sat in silence while he drained the sink. “Besides. Who wants to hear all that? Really.”
She watched as he picked up the utensils in the drying rack and began to put them away.
It occurred to her that there could be in most relationships two distinct tracks of conversation taking place at any given time: what people actually discussed about their lives, and what people did not discuss but was very much on their minds. In the end I come back to that same feeling I’ve always had about confidences. They rarely give anything back, you rarely leave feeling any better, and you can get more out of just writing to yourself.
Max’s conclusion could have as easily come from Elizabeth. Who wants to hear all that? he’d said.
She was not certain she had ever conveyed that she would be available to him in that way. But never before had it occurred to her that she should; if people wanted to talk, she figured, they’d talk. There was a fine line between expressing concern and violating privacy. But another thought pricked. Perhaps laziness was a point on that spectrum too. She had not extended herself as she ought to have with a friend. She walked over to the sink to help put away the dishes.
“So these journals of your friend’s,” he said. “Explain to me again how you came to have them?”
“She put a line in her will. If anything happened to her she wanted me to decide what should be done with them.”
“So she designated a trustee. Interesting.” He reached to a high cabinet and put away a stack of bowls. “Did you ever break into that trunk?”
“Yes.” She shifted in her chair, pictured the lid hanging brokenly on its hinges.
The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D Page 24