The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D

by Nichole Bernier

  Or maybe it was simpler than all that. Maybe Elizabeth had just needed the peace of mind after her diagnosis of knowing her journals would be safe. And even simpler still. Kate had been the best she had.

  Chris stood in front of her, rolling the keys in his palm. “Call me when you know the train.” He looked at her directly, which he’d hardly done at all since dinner the night before.

  She had tried moving through the past year mechanically, acting as if she were as resilient as she believed she should be. But in hindsight her system hadn’t worked well. This would not be irreparable, but it would take time, and a good deal more vulnerability than she was comfortable with. She would have to lay it all out there, naked talk about danger and fear, the arbitrariness of loss, and her shaky sense that nothing could be counted upon to last. He would see a needier person than the one he’d married, possibly someone unstable, and she’d lose the validity of her opinions. Then she would see the extent of his dedication toward a partner who made things, as he’d see it, more complicated than they had to be. He would feel that he needed kid gloves.

  She felt a nausea as if she’d eaten bad food. But there wasn’t any other choice. Elizabeth had been wrong about one thing: keeping your own confidence does not protect you. It only makes you sicker.

  “Thanks again,” she said. “You’re a good sport.” Whether or not she felt this to be true, she felt she had to say it.

  Chris shook his head, a small incredulous gesture that said he didn’t believe she thought he was a good sport, and that she had some nerve chalking it up to sportsmanship. He got in the car. The children craned their necks backward waving to her, but Chris did not look back.

  As Kate watched them drive off it occurred to her that her whole world was pulling away, all the very best of it, everything she was that was nonnegotiable, and she knew in a maudlin moment that if anything happened to them she’d wish it had happened to her as well. She stood at the curb until the car turned the corner and, window by window, wheel to bumper, disappeared behind the fence.

  In the middle of the yard Dave idled the mower, watching her. Then he gave a push and started walking, arms outstretched and braced against the work ahead.

  The Martin children grew bored in the driveway and jumped on their sidewalk chalk, reducing it to colored ash. They wanted to go inside to play.

  She glanced at Dave to see if he’d give her any guidance—how long he planned to mow, what he’d like her to do with the kids, when he wanted to have dinner. But he did not look up.

  She went up the walkway with Emily on one hip, and Jonah and Anna followed. And Dave maintained his pace to keep up the home front, one row at a time.

  THIRTY-ONE

  KATE PUT EMILY down on the floor and stood in the middle of the kitchen. It always took her a moment to adjust to the room as it looked now, counters piled with mail, cookbook shelves cluttered with poorly stacked Tupperware. The pictures held with magnets to the refrigerator door were unchanged from last summer.

  Jonah and Anna looked at her expectantly, then sat at the kitchen table littered with the remnants of painting projects. She could start dinner, but she was a guest here now. To act the way she’d always acted, opening cabinets and searching the refrigerator, felt presumptuous. She thought of ducking her head out the door, trying to catch his eye. Would you like me to … No. He had mentioned spaghetti.

  Kate opened a cabinet, then two, looking for cans of stewed tomatoes. Jonah and Anna asked for cups of water for their brushes and to finish their watercolor swirls. Emily looked up at her from her seated position on the floor, blue eyes large over her spouted cup. She held it tightly in two hands, ten Cheerios peeping around the green plastic handles.

  As Kate heated olive oil with crushed garlic in a saucepan, her stomach clenched at the smell. Her appetite rarely reacted to stress; she’d cooked under nearly every kind of circumstance, working beside abusive chefs and hovering brides and, once, a co-worker who’d cleaved a finger neatly off, lying like another carrot stick on the chopping board. But it had been a long time since she had been this at odds with Chris. The thought of what he might be thinking at this moment, and the conversation awaiting her at home, cramped her abdomen.

  She put a pot of water on to boil and heard the lawn mower engine cut off, then the sound of dragging metal as Dave returned the mower to the garage. A moment later, he walked into the kitchen and saw the sauce half made and a salad in the works. The hair over his forehead dripped sweat, and mechanical grease smeared his shins.

  “Well, all right then,” he said, with just a hint of a twang. “I’m gonna go shower.”

  She wondered what his system was for a shower after mowing. Television, maybe, with the play yard moved to the bedroom. Or maybe he would have just motored on through dinner without one, leaving sweat droplets on the dish towel and grass clippings on the floor, and taken a long hot shower after the children were asleep.

  “I’ll wait to put the pasta in until I hear the shower turn off,” she said. “It’ll be ready ten minutes after that.”

  He nodded and, seeing the kids were content in their activities, went upstairs. Kate turned back to the stove and stirred the sauce, breaking up the larger pieces of stewed tomato with the wooden spoon. She scanned the paintings hanging on the kitchen walls. There was the same portrait of a young girl eating ice cream that had always hung there, an inexperienced work with asymmetrical eyes but certainly good for a teenager, and, now, recognizable as the same girl in the photograph in the trunk. The painting that may or may not have sent Amelia Drogan over the edge that Christmas Day, and driven her to attend the retreat that would recalibrate her ability to deal with alcohol, with single parenthood, grief. The painting had sprung from emotions Elizabeth was too young to understand—the desire to bring some semblance of wholeness back to their home, a yearning to right things—following a loss for which she would never stop blaming herself. Beneath the portrait, Anna sat contentedly under her namesake painting rainbows.

  Above the chair where Jonah sat was the oil painting of two Manhattan brownstones. One brightly lit window depicted a mother combing out her daughter’s long hair, the pair bathed in nostalgic lighting, while in the adjacent window a party was in full tilt. In the festive window a dark-haired woman threw back her head in strong laughter. Her glass of wine was ready to spill, and the crimson at the rim matched her lips and the gems at her neck. On the other side of the kitchen was a painting that hadn’t been there before. In a rainy dog park, a mutt stood amid a pack of silken golden retrievers, bow-legged in a Burberry jacket and radiating mange. His face was so expressive Kate could caption it. Wanna make something of it? So this is what you made of it, Kate thought. Good for you.

  Beside it was another new painting; Dave must have decided to hang more of Elizabeth’s work. Kate imagined the stack Elizabeth had flipped through that evening she’d stood above the margarita party continuing without her. This painting depicted a pile of tricycles parked in a heap. But as Kate stared at the indistinct wash of spokes and bars, features emerged like shapes from clouds. The front wheels became children’s faces; the handlebars, long harelike ears. The compact arc of each frame ended in tiny tires curled like feet, and the effect was mystical, small bodies curled in sleep.

  She looked down at the sauce. To not recognize in someone close to you the things that make her who she is, even if you did not understand such things, was a kind of negation; Kate knew what it meant to be thought of as less than what you are. There had been small signs, but she’d chosen not to see them. It had been easier to accept the simple, useful version of Elizabeth. But there was also this: Elizabeth had gone to great lengths to create that version. At the end of the day, a person had to take responsibility for what she showed the world and what she didn’t.

  “Nooo! I’m using the red! You can’t have it!” Anna screeched from the table.

  “But you’re mushing it all up and ruining it with the white!”

  Jonah leaned
across the table and snatched the tainted red canister, spilling his cup of dirty paint water. Brown spread across the table and both of their pictures, then trickled over the edge onto the floor. As her picture went muddy, Anna began to cry.

  “Okay, okay, it’s all right,” Kate said, walking over with a roll of paper towels, trying to dab the excess water off their pictures. She mopped up the paint water from the table and tried to reestablish calm before Dave came down. They’d have dinner, she supposed, then talk after the kids went to bed. She had no idea how to begin. I don’t think Elizabeth was having … You were right that Elizabeth was not going. Elizabeth was not well. Everything was too declarative, as if the facts of her belonged to Kate. Nothing belonged to her. The proprietary anger that had made her reach for the phone and accuse him of taking the journal was now an embarrassment.

  Emily toddled over and raked her cup through the brown paint water on the floor, spout side down.

  “Oh yuck, Em, not your cup. Why don’t you play over here.” Kate moved her to play on the floor with cooking utensils. When she took away the cup to clean it, Emily started to wail.

  Dave appeared in a clean T-shirt and shorts. “What happened to our kumbaya? It was so quiet a minute ago.”

  He filled the doorway like the prototype of a man from a soap commercial, scrubbed clean and scented of pine. She never remembered him as such a presence back in the days when she lived around the corner, or even the times she’d seen him in the past year. When Elizabeth was alive, he’d been a cardboard cutout of a father slipping in and out of the room, tossing a one-liner as he went, or working the grill in the background. Now when he entered a room, the room knew it.

  He took the sippy cup from Kate and wiped the dirtied spout on his shirt. In his casualness she felt the possibility of normalcy, and the ball of her stomach began to loosen. She shook the box of penne into the pot of boiling water with a scratchy tumble.

  Just before seven o’clock, Dave went up to bathe the kids while she washed the dishes. On his way out of the kitchen, Emily on one hip and the other two clambering up the stairs, he opened the telephone drawer and tossed her the train schedule. She knew she should call Chris, but was not looking forward to the terse conversation or to his voice as it would sound, curt. She wiped the counters and straightened stacks of Tupperware. When there was nothing left to clean in the kitchen, she dug her cell phone out of her bag and dialed.

  There was no answer. She told his voice mail that she would be on the 8:56, and home shortly after one. She spoke to the receiver with as much warmth as she could, tried to infuse the words with optimism.

  Kate walked into the living room, stood in the doorway absorbing the difference between the way it had been and how it was now. Elizabeth had always kept it distinct from the playroom, with small adult knickknacks and better lamps. Dave had no such distinctions, and the living room and kitchen were now scattered with puzzles, games, and books left wherever they had been used last. Kate collected a handful of dolls and carried them to the bin in the next room where they’d always been stored. Back in the family room she dealt with the miscegenation of puzzle pieces, reconstructing wooden boards of farm animals, dinosaurs, house pets.

  She glanced up at the bookshelves, crammed with paperback novels and hardcover art volumes. Framed photos of the kids were scattered in front of the books, overlapping images so dense that Kate had always noticed something new each time she’d looked. Then, at the far right end of the top shelf was an unfamiliar framed sketch—pencil or charcoal, something dark and smudged. There were vague sweeping lines outward and down. A waterfall, a weeping willow. Whatever it was, it was unfinished, the rough strokes of a work in progress. As she looked closer she saw it take the shape of a woman’s face, a subtle profile that gave her a shiver of recognition. A negligible nose, a curve of a chin above a slim neck, and straight-cut bangs. A swing of dark hair that curved bluntly under the chin, as it did only when properly cut and cared for, which was not often enough. And below the tilted head, the whorled tendrils drawn on an infant’s head in nursing position. Piper’s head.

  She heard Dave enter the kitchen and open the refrigerator, and then he walked into the family room. He hesitated with a beer in his hand as he saw her nearly done straightening his children’s toys. His look was like a shrug, and he walked on through the room and pulled open the sliding doors to the patio, then lowered himself into a lounge chair with an exhale. The message was the same as it had been to her on the front lawn: Come or not, as you’d like. She took her time finishing, slid the completed wooden puzzles back in the racks like sleeping berths. Then she went into the kitchen and took a beer as well.

  The yard was dim with what little was left of the daylight, and the empty lawn and swingset had the deserted feel of a schoolyard in summer. Through the thin woods behind the Martins’ came the sound of children not yet ushered in to bed, and in the yard to the right, Kate could hear the neighbors talking on their porch. Murmured conversation came through the trees, tired parents catching up at the end of a long day. To anyone else’s eyes, she and Dave might appear the same way. Their bottles rested close on the small side table between them.

  He leaned toward her, reaching for the baby monitor under the table. As he adjusted its volume, the warbling voice of Emily joined them on the porch, rhythmic syllables strung together like notes. Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma ma, up and down her own tuneless scale. Both of Kate’s own kids had said Mama before Dada too, and she wondered whether all babies had that word among their first, an ingrained verbal progression whether or not they had a mama in the house.

  Dave pulled something out of his pocket and placed it next to her on the table, a photograph. She put down her beer and pinched her fingers on her shirt to dry the condensation, then picked it up. It was a picture of Elizabeth reading a story to Anna in the playroom. Elizabeth looked pale and tired beside her tanned, smiling daughter. “When was this taken?”

  “Last August, a few days before she left for her trip. She looks bad, doesn’t she.”

  Kate held the photo but didn’t say anything. Elizabeth’s face was puffy, her hair was limp, and there were dark circles under her eyes. In truth, she didn’t look all that much different than she had in the months after Anna was born, but then Kate had misread her appearance. Even so, it was disconcerting to see how much Elizabeth had changed in the month since Kate had visited while passing through town last summer. They’d spoken on the phone several times in July and August—discussing preschools, kindergarten, and, as Kate recalled, her own rattling-on irritation over a new pediatrician. On and on, minutiae. Of course she’d had no idea. She looked away from the photo.

  “She was sick,” he said. “That’s what you came over to tell me.” He wasn’t challenging her, or looking for confirmation. He already knew, and wanted her to know that he knew.

  “I think so.”

  He seemed surprised. “So she didn’t tell you, either.”

  “No.”

  He nodded, and turned back to the swingset. He stared at it as if he were waiting for it to do something, and she turned toward it too, just for something to look at other than him. She half expected the swings to start swaying from the force of their combined silent attention.

  “I thought for sure you knew all along. I thought that was why she left you the books.”

  “No.” Though it occurred to Kate that it might have been easier for him to think it: that Elizabeth was reluctant to show the truth about one thing in particular, rather than everything in general.

  “How long have you known?” she asked. She was almost certain he hadn’t taken the missing journal, but she had to ask.

  He stared into the yard. “Once I started paying attention, it wasn’t hard to find. She handled the bills and insurance paperwork, so that was all filed away. She put the oncologist stuff with the OB bills.”

  The word oncologist didn’t seem to trip him up as it did her, the specificity of the title evoking appointments and treatment
s, and making real the notion that a person might handle that by herself. It was the very best of a person, or the very worst.

  Dave was still fixed on the swingset as if it were holding him in place. Kate drew up her knees to her chest. “I can’t imagine keeping that kind of secret. The energy it would take.”

  “Who could? Who would want to?” He took a drink, and put the bottle down on the table too forcefully. Suds rose up the neck and threatened to overflow. “I’ve known—I knew—” Dave worked to find the right tense. “Elizabeth and I were together a long time. I have an idea why she did it. But she should have known better after all these years.”

  It hung there, the suggestion that Elizabeth should have forgiven him for mistakes made so many years ago. He wanted her to agree, and Kate knew she should say something like, Yes, you would think. But maybe in a situation like that it wouldn’t matter how many years had passed. It was no small thing to walk away from someone when she was sick, to convey to her, No thanks, I didn’t sign on for that. Maybe that was, in fact, the sort of thing someone could never get over.

  “Well,” Kate said, “she just seemed not to want to talk about things. I think the privacy piece kind of outweighed everything.” It was a noncommittal observation, but she didn’t know whether he wanted her insights. Don’t you dare talk to me about what my wife wanted. “It seems like a habit with her, being so private. She had this way of presenting herself, a particular way she wanted to appear. I don’t think her secrecy was necessarily a reflection on how much she trusted the other person.”

  This wasn’t altogether true. If Kate had been honest she would have said, She only gives you one chance to let her down. But she didn’t want to remind him of ways he’d lost his wife’s trust early on. He had the trunk now. He’d see for himself soon enough.

  “Secrecy, well, that’s a strong way of putting it,” he said. “There was a lot of stuff she downplayed, I knew that. Like acting as if she didn’t care much about her work. If she wanted to play Mommy Pollyanna because it made her feel like a better person, that’s fine. I just wanted her to be happy. But keeping actual secrets? I don’t know about that. Not until this.” He gestured with his beer toward the photo. “This is a whole different ball game. No trust.”