The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D

by Nichole Bernier

  The phone rang three times before she was connected to an answering machine.

  “Namaste. It’s a beautiful day in Joshua Tree. Thank you for calling the Aura Institute.” The woman’s voice had an unplaceable accent, mellifluous as a chant. “We are very interested in your inner strength and well-being, but are unable to take your call at the moment. Please leave a message and we will call you back as soon as possible to begin your journey of healing.”

  Kate clicked her phone shut abruptly and slipped it into her pocket. It was just shy of nine o’clock, too early for a receptionist to be picking up calls on the West Coast. Then again, the toll-free number didn’t have to be operated in Joshua Tree. It could be ringing anywhere: a glassy headquarters office in Manhattan, a strip mall in New Jersey, a call center in Bangalore. Michael himself could be sitting in front of a rotary phone in a trailer park, playing solitaire and buffing his head. He might be nothing more than a cheap freelance actor who spent off-hours slinging eggs in a diner between tryouts for summer stock.

  Kate clicked on one of the television morning programs as she changed into fishing clothes, choosing cargo shorts with pockets large enough for a few of Piper’s dolls.

  How her choices had changed. In her twenties, maintaining professionalism—right down to the uniform and accessories—had seemed so critical; self-esteem was tied to building on her achievements and the respect she’d worked so hard to earn, and brought true joy. Each imperfect plating felt like an indictment of the best that she could do, and anything that got in the way of her work seemed irresponsible, a misplaced priority. Now those words had new meaning—responsibility and priority, esteem and joy—and their significance was all the deeper because she appreciated them from both sides of the work-family divide. Hopefully, that was how Elizabeth had come to feel too by the time she’d made bushes grow on the banister.

  The morning show went to its top-of-the-hour news roundup. Kate hadn’t watched much television news for weeks, but paused in front of the screen now. The world was a mess. There was footage of burning streets in Kabul, and desert sand hills steaming from missile strikes. Airport security lines were stretched out the doors, and municipal water facilities couldn’t conduct contamination tests fast enough to keep up with the threats. U.S. cities were spinning their terror-alert status so frequently, yellow to orange to red and back, that it seemed television stations should spin color wheels. This morning’s news anchor appeared grave as she delivered an update on the vial of nerve gas missing from a government facility out west; an unsubstantiated report claimed it had been found in one of Washington’s Metro stations.

  The Metro, which Kate rode almost daily with the kids. To Chris’s office, to the museums. Which she’d take to reach Anthony’s new restaurant, if she accepted the job. She turned off the television.

  Kate went to her laptop sitting open on the kitchen counter and typed in a brief search. There were things she could do to protect her family. The stash of food in the spare-tire well and the fire extinguisher weren’t enough anymore. Web sites sold protective air hoods for civilian use, protection that could be kept under the bed, even portable ones designed to fit in a purse. And the drinking water; there was a water-cooler delivery service she’d meant to call before they’d left on vacation. What a relief to have fresh bottled water from some remote mountain spring, someplace safe, flowing right into her kitchen. That would help. Every bit would help, until they could leave the District.

  She’d suspected it would come to this. It was idiotic, living right in the capital of the country. It was as if there were a giant bull’s-eye over Washington; she sensed it, actually felt at times the crawling of her scalp, as if she were being watched through crosshairs. Maybe Chris’s company would agree to let him work somewhere other than the headquarters. Vermont, Maine. Maybe they could even live here on the island, year-round. Kate sat on the edge of the couch, laptop balanced on her knees, and scratched absently at the spot growing warm on her neck.

  How would Elizabeth have responded to how crazed the world had become? A mother today had to have her antennae going in all directions, always. The people with whom your children came in contact; the people to whom you opened the door. The pesticides and growth hormones, the contaminated-food recalls, the chemicals and toxins in everyday objects. Kate did not believe in fate, though she often wished she did. How much easier to give a karmic shrug and believe an outcome was meant to be, trust that what we clung to or resisted so desperately was the edge of some grand unknowable plan. The constant vigilance was exhausting. Think about it too much, and it could paralyze you.

  Paralyze you. She’d heard that phrase somewhere before.

  Kate put the laptop aside and went up to the loft. She skimmed the notebooks containing Elizabeth’s years in Florence, then the time she spent caring for her mother. She found the passage in the Manhattan years, the night after the attack on the Central Park Jogger.

  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?

  Elizabeth had been more resilient than she. That, at its core, was the truth. Here was Kate, unhinged by vague threats—bombs that may or may not menace her city, disease spreading among cattle an ocean away—while Elizabeth had moved beyond setbacks and fear with methodical attention to what was required of her. Kate might be the brassy one on the outside, but Elizabeth was tougher. Whatever happened, somehow she’d moved forward.

  Back in the kitchen, Kate closed the laptop on the photos of parents and children in escape hoods and picked up her cell phone. On the second ring, a receptionist answered.

  “Aura Institute. It’s a beautiful day in Joshua Tree. How may we help you?”

  Kate hesitated, surprised to hear a live person. She was silent a moment wondering how, exactly, she did expect them to help.

  “Is Michael in, please?”

  “May I ask who is calling?”

  “My name is Kate Spenser. Michael knew a friend of mine, Elizabeth Martin, who was supposed to have come to Joshua Tree last year. I have to talk to him about her.”

  There was no harm in assuming. If she was wrong, the worst they could do was not return her call.

  “I see. I’m sorry, but we have a policy of not discussing clients.”

  “Actually, she was … she is deceased, and I’m working with the family”—here Kate paused, having no idea where to go with this line of inquiry—“to settle her affairs.”

  “I do see and I do appreciate that. And I am sorry for your loss,” the woman said again. Kate could imagine the employee mantra. Acknowledge the situation. Hear the conflict. Affirm the sadness. “But he is not available. May I have one of our spiritual coaches return your call?”

  Kate left her name and number, knowing she wouldn’t hear from anyone. Cult freaks, she thought, and hung up the phone.

  Rarely were beach conditions just right at the height of the season. Crowds were usually too heavy or the music was too loud, too many greenhead flies were biting or conversations were too close, someone was too vocal about how a screenplay had been optioned. But on this last day fishing conditions were ideal, and there was solitude on the peninsula. Chris had chosen this location for surf casting, hoping for striped bass, bonito, false albacore. They drove out past the sunbathers and ballplayers to the tip of the peninsula, the car prepared with an oversand permit and half-deflated tires, where they had almost complete privacy.

  After the first half hour the kids became bored with their rods, and a
fter an hour of clamming in the low tidal pools their rakes and trowels had been lost, broken, or abandoned. But the dunes were empty and the wind was mild. The car had already been packed with necessities for the day, so they set camp, convincing Piper that this was as fine a place to swim as her favorite beach.

  Chris had pored over tidal charts for the various parts of the island, and when conditions were optimal, he stood and waited with the determination of Ahab. The waterline inched upward; beach plums appeared to grow full and ripen in the hours that passed. Still there were no bites. He offered examples of past successes, the time he’d caught a forty-pound striper in just this spot by casting with live eel, same as he was today. Still nothing, right up until their departure. But Chris being Chris, he shrugged it off.

  “I thought I’d get one today,” he said lightly as he steered the car off the sand where it reached the turnoff from the peninsula. “I felt the fishing karma.”

  “Fishing karma rarely comes to those who are accompanied by loud six- and four-year-olds,” she said. Bayberry bushes and wind-twisted juniper lined the access road, and she inhaled the scents of summer as the car brushed by.

  “You never believed I’d get one anyway.” He said it as if he were wounded. He was sunburned and crusted in salt, and his left elbow hung out the window casually. He smiled, sad and flirtatious. “No faith.”

  Kate grinned. “You, my dear, are the one who suggested lobster and steamers. You’re the one with no faith I’d come along unless you bribed me with a clambake.” She thrummed her fingers on the sill of the car door, sun warm on her arm.

  Life on the island was incompatible with concern over nerve-gas vials and water contamination. As she thought this, she came close to believing it. There was no contrary voice whispering imagined warnings—sinking ferries, toxic rabbits, tainted clouds wafting from Boston. That was the fallout of an overactive mind, a mind accustomed to being in control. And—here was the surprise, an unexpected gift of logic—perhaps life back in Washington, or anywhere, could be incompatible with such fears as well.

  Chris reached the end of the long sandy access road and waited to merge into traffic. At the corner was a farmstand, a wooden lean-to with a few tables of produce and flowers. As Chris idled, Kate watched the woman at the farmstand, knitting. A small boy beside her drove toy cars around cardboard pints of mixed berries.

  “So how did Max’s place appraise? Is he really going to sell that house?” Chris asked.

  “I haven’t heard from him yet. But it sounds like he is.”

  For sale among the woman’s vegetables lay handmade children’s sweaters and hats, and even from the car ten yards away Kate could appreciate the skill. Baby blankets spread across the table showed elaborate basket-weave patterns. A cabled cardigan was draped around the larger vegetables, an armhole slung over summer squash in a chummy embrace.

  “You know, I was thinking about coming back out here in the fall, helping Max get ready to move,” Kate said. She could be of help packing boxes, running the bakery. He might appreciate the company, someone to talk to, or even just to keep a companionable silence. “Would you mind staying with the kids some weekend so I could come back out?”

  Chris shrugged. “Sure, as long as I’m not traveling.”

  The boy knocked over a cardboard pint and the woman put down her knitting to right it, fat blackberries and raspberries, small blueberries rolling every which way.

  Kate needed to call Anthony. He deserved to know that she would not be putting her name in for the job. It had been tempting to imagine herself made whole by the things that used to provide such satisfaction, and to hope she might be capable of compartmentalizing now in a way she hadn’t then. It might well have been managed. That had been her automatic retort to Chris, though he really hadn’t offered provocation. Mostly she had been arguing with herself.

  After Elizabeth died, the sound bites about her went like this: great mother, great wife, great friend. The moment a person is gone it becomes critical to define her, making a life into a thing memorialized. The complex and contradictory person she had been was slowly being reduced to its essence: she was dedicated, naturally maternal; she was all heart, the true center of her home; a devoted member of the community of moms, a galvanizer, a workhorse. To what extent these things were true was beside the point. In a reduction some attributes are exaggerated, and some evaporate.

  As far as Kate knew, no one had ever said, Elizabeth was a very creative person, a painter who produced interesting work that was sold here and there, even though a few of her paintings might yet be hanging in someone’s home, picked up cheaply years ago in a little gallery on Avenue A, or in that island gallery, if that connection ever materialized. It was never said of her, Her graphics appeared in this or that magazine advertisement, or She worked hard to carve out a fulfilling working life in the late-night hours on the side of raising her family. These weren’t her sound bites and were never to be her legacy. Maybe Elizabeth hadn’t trusted that others would understand the nuances of what she loved. Perhaps she thought that eventually she’d miss work and painting less. Or maybe it was simply that she had come to believe that at the end of the day, what matters is who you are, not what you do.

  But sometimes, Kate thought, what you do is integral to who you are. And what Elizabeth might not have appreciated was that there were ways of putting elements of your life together wherever they fit, patiently, at different points in time—ways short of giving them up or denying they exist. She might have come to appreciate it if she’d had more time. Maybe she’d begun to.

  Chris dropped her off at the house for a shower and went on with the kids to the fish market. She walked inside the bungalow, unlocked always, as was the island way, and thought how odd it would be to be back in the District in their alarmed, double-bolted house. And yet it wouldn’t. She knew they would slip back into their lifestyle as easily as they’d shrugged it off, as matter-of-factly as the child wore his gas-mask hood. People were resilient, people adjusted to all kinds of things. What was the alternative?

  Kate turned on the shower and had pulled her tank top over her head when her cell phone rang in the kitchen. It would be Chris, asking if she wanted littlenecks or cherrystones, chicken lobsters or larger ones. She reached it just before the fourth ring.

  “Hey,” she said, untying her bikini top. She could taste the clams already, small and meaty, slicked in butter. Littlenecks or small steamers, if they had them. That should be the last night’s send-off.

  “Is this Kate Spenser?” A man’s voice, unfamiliar.

  “Yes. And this is?”

  “This is Michael from the Aura Institute.”

  Kate stood rooted in the kitchen as her bikini loosed and fell. “Yes. Hello.”

  “I understand you were inquiring after Elizabeth Martin.” His voice was so close and so personal, she wanted to draw back the phone and keep him at arm’s length. She wrapped her arms across her chest as she walked to the bathroom for a towel and turned off the shower.

  “Yes. She was my friend.”

  He sighed. “Normally we don’t discuss our guests, but I wanted to let you know I am sorry for your loss. That was a terrible shock. We knew she was on that plane. I hope the family received our condolences.”

  Ordinarily, his professional sympathy would have made her roll her eyes, the soothing voice slipped on like Mr. Rogers’s sweater to deal with such circumstances. Grieving friend. But her humor, her cynicism, her wariness, all stalled after he said “our guests.” He’d known Elizabeth. This was Michael.

  He cleared his throat to draw her back into conversation. “We sent flowers to the house following the memorial,” he said. “I hadn’t wanted to bother the family with a phone call. But we were so shocked and sad. I had been looking forward to working with Elizabeth.”

  Working with. Kate digested the phrase. “Yes. Everyone was shocked.”

  “I imagine it has been a very difficult year for them.”

  “It
has been,” she said vaguely, buying herself time while she tried to make sense of what she was hearing. “But Elizabeth’s husband is holding things together.”

  There was a pause while each waited to hear the other’s agenda.

  “I understand you’re working with her estate,” he prompted. “As I said, normally we don’t talk about our guests. I hope you understand, but it’s part of our confidentiality charter. I wish I could be of help in some way.”

  “Yes. I do see, and I do appreciate that,” Kate said, adopting the receptionist’s syntax. She strained to think of a line of conversation to keep him talking, making an effort not to say, for once, the most direct thing. So why was she coming out to visit you people? “It has been a tough time, and there have been many details …” She paused, grasping for nouns that might be appropriate to the situation. “Debts and credits, accounting sorts of things that the family should not have to deal with alone. I’m serving as a trustee.” This wasn’t untrue. Here she found her foothold. “And there were certain sums paid in advance.”

  “Ah,” he said. “And your interest is in the fact that she paid in full even though she never participated in her stay.”

  His cautious diction reminded her of Dave, or at least the way he’d begun to sound this summer. But the telegenic warmth was still there, and Michael’s intimate tone that spoke knowledge, as if he knew her mind, and understood.

  That’s what he does, she reminded herself. He wins confidence, eases minds.

  “Yes. I am looking into these kinds of matters on the family’s behalf.”

  “Well, Ms.… Spenser? At the risk of sounding businesslike and lacking in empathy, I have to remind you of her contract. I’m sure you’re aware from the paperwork she left behind that her visit is considered nonrefundable. Arrangements are made in advance, rooms reserved, and she did receive our pretrip counseling.”