So he knew how she’d felt about work. Kate put her head back against the lounger and wondered how much else he knew. Maybe Elizabeth’s journals wouldn’t be as surprising to him as she’d thought; maybe it wasn’t so much a matter of her keeping secrets as it was of calculated presentation, day after day. What to tell, how to do it and when; what to downplay or not tell at all. Not so different from what Kate had been doing herself.
“A trust issue, sure,” Kate said. “But mostly, it’s kind of a lack of trust in herself.”
“That’s an interesting spin.”
“Well, that’s what’s going on when a person doesn’t show what they’re all about, isn’t it? They’re not trusting that people will approve of the decisions they make, or like them as they are. And maybe they don’t so much either.”
He made a derisive pffft and looked off into the yard. It was a different kind of hurt, being on the short end of trust. Knowing that your partner doubted whether your love was broad enough to accommodate the reality of her and, even if fleetingly, whether you might not stay. He shook his head.
“Well,” Kate said, “at least you know she wasn’t involved with someone else.”
He looked at her blankly. She knew then that he did not know. All he knew was that Michael was a man who’d drawn his wife away. No matter what he’d said at the bungalow about expecting her to share what she knew, his face told her that he never wanted to have this conversation, to learn about his wife from someone else.
“Was it in the journals?”
“Not spelled out.”
“Tell me.”
The neighborhood children had gone inside by the time she finished. She wanted to belittle the Aura Institute. Small word choices or a lift of the eyebrow would do it, put her and Dave in the same camp, a cynical response to the place Elizabeth had chosen over both of them. But as she explained, she resisted.
He didn’t respond immediately. There was the chittering of insects and the murmuring of neighbors, content on their patio, but little other sound.
“You’re telling me she was going to California to some crazy-ass healing retreat.”
“I guess so. I talked to him myself, and he actually didn’t sound all that crazy. He knew all about her, and about your family—”
“He doesn’t know a damn thing about my family.”
She could have agreed with him. But if she had, there would have been no one to lay out the case for the truth about Joshua Tree. That was the fact of it. Elizabeth had paid money, had withdrawn funds slowly from the ATM, and intended to go.
Dave took a long drink from his beer. The light was growing dim and the only thing visible through the brush was the twinkle of a candle. From next door came a light feminine laugh. He tapped the bottle twice on the table, rocked it from side to side on its base, then got up and walked inside.
Two minutes passed, then five. It grew darker. A small animal rustled in the ruins of the rosebushes neglected below the porch. Kate began to wonder uncomfortably what she would do if Dave didn’t come back outside. Should she go in to him? They had both loved her, after all. Or should she respect his privacy, collect her bag, and let herself out the front door? The neighbors blew out the candle and went indoors, and the yard fell silent.
If after ten minutes he hadn’t returned, she’d call herself a cab. She would close the door quietly behind her, head back to Chris and the children and the city bearing an invisible bull’s-eye with which she would make her peace, and the last she’d see of the Martins would be the trunk in the hall.
These thoughts had become a contingency plan when Dave walked back outside holding two fresh beer bottles. He sat in the lounge chair and rested his on his thigh, cupped in his hand.
“Her mother went someplace like that when Elizabeth was in high school, some New Agey thing in the desert.” His voice was thick, and he cleared his throat. “Liz never knew exactly what it was and she made considerable fun of it, but I think she gives it credit for getting her mother on the wagon.”
Kate noted his use of the past and the present tense both, and realized that’s just how love was, something that would always exist between the tenses.
In the distance a siren rose and a dog bayed, then went quiet. The crickets started up, tremulous above the mundane insects that had failed to camouflage their awkward silence earlier, and to Kate at that moment it was the most peaceful sound in the world. It was partly having the indecision and responsibility of the trunk lifted, and partly the relief of being able to talk about its contents. Probably partly the beer, too. A sandal dropped from one of her feet and she let the other drop as well, then flexed her ankles.
She saw Dave look over at her feet. Presentable, nothing manicured but not too neglected, an island of chipped polish in the middle of each nail. They were the feet of a mother who kept herself up passingly well, the feet a Southbrook man would see daily on his wife padding around the house, if he had a wife.
“So how much did you hate me for having the journals?” She said it lightly, but there was discomfort in the question, even if the question was about a different kind of resentment. Sidekick. Babysitting service. Things blurted out under those circumstances were always the truth.
“Nah, maybe just a little in the beginning. And then at the end.” His tone was light with teasing, hints of the old charm. She glanced up to see if his expression had softened but his face was still haggard, cheekbones sharper and hollowed beneath. She wondered if this was just the way he would look now, if grief and disillusionment could change the geometry of a face.
“This isn’t something I wanted, you know. It was making me sick all summer.”
“You just got a little carried away.”
She bristled, but knew it was partly true. “I’m sorry I accused you of taking a notebook.”
He looked over and frowned. “So you did lose it.”
“No. I’m pretty sure she had it with her on the plane.”
At the mention of the plane, he turned his face in the other direction. He didn’t want to take the conversation this way. Frankly, neither did she.
“When did you start to want to know?” she asked.
“Hmmm?”
“When did you start to want the books? At the beginning of the summer it seemed like you didn’t even want them. You could have read them when you had the chance before you gave them to me. There had to be a spare key somewhere, or you could have bashed the trunk open.”
He paused to take a drink, and put his head back against the lounger while he swallowed. “Some mornings I wake up, and I think she’s in the shower or waking the kids. It takes me a few minutes to remember she’s not here. When someone is still so real it feels downright evil to do something you know they wouldn’t want you to do. But honestly, I didn’t really want to know, either.” Small Emily sounds came through the monitor and he turned it up a notch. Soft groans threatened to become cries, but then faded. “After I read enough to know something else was going on and then gave them to you, something changed. Of course they’re hers, but she’s gone, and at some point it stopped being about keeping everything frozen. I might sound like a cold sonofabitch and don’t get me wrong, I miss her like anything. She was the soul of this house.”
She noted that his language had switched to past tense. Back and forth, closer and further from his wife.
“But she had her own agenda and a lot of the time it didn’t have a hell of a lot to do with me,” he said. “Nothing’s any good until I figure out where all that came from, because I don’t want to have that kind of happy horseshit going on with my kids. I want them to feel like they can really talk to me.”
“You mean being up front about what they’re thinking.”
Of course there was irony in this, but she hadn’t intended it. He looked at her sharply. “You don’t know the all of it, Kate.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. I’m agreeing with you. It’s important to be able to talk openly with your kids. You never kn
ow what they’re picking up on but just feel like they shouldn’t say.” Kate picked at the fiber of the chair. “That was definitely true about Elizabeth as a kid.”
She thought of Elizabeth’s last journal. I don’t want any chance of this affecting the kids. It’s worked so far and warped as this sounds, it’s one of my proudest accomplishments. Well, maybe. You never really knew what effect you had, what version of yourself they saw and were left with. At what age, she wondered, do kids develop a barometer for truth and lies, and for that murky area where grown-ups act one way while feeling entirely another? Probably a lot earlier than most adults think they do.
Dave stretched out his legs, and put his hands up behind his head. Then he let out a long sigh. “She always did like talking to you, Kate. She saw a realness in you that she didn’t get from a lot of people around here. That’s what she said when you guys came back from your beach walk last summer. ‘Kate gets it.’ ”
Kate turned her head to the side so he couldn’t see how it affected her. She swallowed and reached up to push at her bangs, wiping at her cheek as part of the gesture.
“You know, I think she would have told us both if she’d had more time,” he said. Kate was surprised by how calm he sounded. “But in the end it’s all just speculation, none of it makes a difference. It all came down to the wrong, wrong time to get on an airplane.”
At the word time she looked at her watch. It was 8:47. Her train would leave Stamford in nine minutes, too tight even if she were already in a cab.
“Oh no,” she said. “I missed it. The train.”
Dave looked over without lifting his head from his chair. He didn’t glance at his own watch or appear too concerned about when and if there was another train, about how her husband would be putting the kids to bed, then waiting, and wondering.
“You could stay here. I could take you to the first train in the morning on my way to work.” He was watching her with eyes tired and simple, not realizing or not caring that anything might be complicated or misconstrued. He was a man for whom things were no longer complicated and who didn’t especially care if they were misconstrued. If he knew this might create awkwardness with Chris, it didn’t trouble him. This was no longer the Dave that Elizabeth had known, a man who avoided things that might be awkward or cause pain or worried about his actions and their repercussions, because he’d already been through the worst and survived. Nothing else mattered much. Things simply were what they were at the moment, and at the moment they were fine. “Stay, hang out,” he said. “Have another beer.”
Part of her did want to delay what awaited her at home. She and Dave would sit as the sky darkened from dusky purple to deep night, and they would talk about what it meant for a person to conceal her illness. Whether it was possible Elizabeth honestly thought she was protecting her family and whether it was the bravest thing to do, allowing them to continue with the impression that their daily lives were untouched by anything that could spoil their world, muddied water across all they’d made. Perhaps she’d believed she could handle it alone, get herself well quietly and not have to see the worry on their faces each time she returned from treatments. And maybe her deception hadn’t been about distrust, and she knew that his track record of dealing poorly with illness was something he had outgrown with years of marriage and caretaking. Dave and Kate would listen to the crickets and talk like old friends about the difference between what was noble and what was selfish: whether the act of making the decision for someone else, and not letting him have the chance to help you and, if necessary, even prepare to say good-bye, was the most or least generous thing a person could do. And when the bats darted out of the trees, one of them would notice the time and say, We should probably call it a night. They would head upstairs, her fingers trailing along a banister that had once grown bushes, and she would turn toward the guest room, adjacent to his. After undressing quietly so as not to awaken the kids, she would lie down and through the wall hear the bedsprings and breathing of yet another of his solitary nights. And in the morning, when the nanny arrived and found Kate clearing cereal bowls with hair and clothes that had already seen a full day, she might wonder the same things Kate had wondered about her, and wonder about the extent of a man’s loneliness.
“I think I remember a local train from Stamford to New York, and then a late one to D.C.,” Kate said. “I should check it out. Chris will be worried.”
He nodded, unsmiling. “I’ll call you a cab,” he said, and went inside. If it mattered to him one way or another, it was only momentary. Because he was on to the next moment, and this was fine too.
THIRTY-TWO
STAMFORD’S TRAIN STATION at night was neither the best nor the worst place to be, well lit but without the criminal urgency to warrant constant police patrol. Drunks loitered unsteadily by the concessions. In a corner, a young man and woman were groping, fighting, or a little of both.
Kate bought a newspaper and stood near the departures and arrivals board. She had not read any national newspapers in months, and although she had not missed them on the island, she now pored over the sections like letters from distant friends. Even the news—alarming as it was—was oddly reassuring. A terror cell broken up in Detroit. The source of the anthrax letters, close to being discovered. Canada’s first fatality from mad cow disease had been tracked to Britain, which meant North American stock was not the source of contamination, not yet. There were answers in the air, precautions you could take. Most things were preventable, and if not, someone was working to ensure that they would be.
Kate flipped to the second page of the National section and paused at an article about the science of coincidence—the likelihood, say, that eleven of the world’s leading experts on bioterrorism had died recently, one after the other, simply by chance. Conspiracy theorists had it wrong, the article insisted. Statistically speaking, the suspicious timing of their deaths was within the realm of mere coincidence.
Mere coincidence. Kate had come to hate that phrase. She lowered the newspaper and looked down the hall at the couple, whose affections were becoming agitated. The young woman did not want to go with him, she said, she hated him when he was like this, get off; his arms around her looked more like a wrestler’s pose than an embrace. Kate tensed and glanced around for security.
There was nothing mere about coincidence. Every day millions of people were done in by arbitrary events, random events, and freak occurrences of nature through no fault of their own. Fault was better: bike accident with no helmet, lung cancer in a smoker, some kind of cause-and-effect pattern to hold back the chaos. There was aggressive risk, like walking across the lobby to interrupt that couple, and there was calculated risk, like renting a bungalow during a tularemia outbreak, and perhaps even like her choice to ride this train that would get her home after 2 a.m. And then there was what people called mere coincidence. Elizabeth, who rarely traveled, being on that flight—with bad wind, a faulty rudder, and an inexperienced pilot. A little girl speeding on her bike after her older sister, whose moment of teasing coincided with the arrival of a reckless driver.
The months after Elizabeth died had been a shock to Kate, the realization that the world was a truly unpredictable place, and that life didn’t follow a benign trajectory just because you ate organic fruits and vegetables and flossed daily. She knew her shock was naïve even as it left her alternately terrified and numb, and kept it to herself. At Elizabeth’s memorial service she had been somber like everyone else, and if in the months afterward she became quieter—well, by then, the whole country was reeling. No one noticed that she spent more time alone, and wondering, with growing fixation, which of her kids’ schools she would race toward first if Washington was targeted.
But Kate couldn’t access the shock any longer, and the shock itself now seemed sophomoric. You could become paralyzed with worry about what might happen to your family, or if you hadn’t yet had children you could decide not to, as a sort of proactive damage control. Either way, you would be der
ailing your life voluntarily out of fear that it might become ruined by chance. Or you could pick up and move on. Those were the only choices.
Back in her cable-show days she’d believed most things could be made to happen or not happen by sheer force of will. But she saw that now as vanity. Most things in life, the best and the worst of things, were not controllable. Those who understood that simply marched ahead; that was the thinking of a survivor, someone who resurfaced. The irony was not lost on her that she was beginning to learn this from someone who had not.
The arguing pair were speaking in hushed tones; the girlfriend stood against the wall and he leaned over her, palms against the wall on either side of her head. They were next to the concession window, and Kate walked by casually, as if she were not assessing the woman’s safety. Their voices were now tender; the young man sounded as if he might cry.
“Large coffee,” she said to the clerk.
As he filled her cup from an industrial urn, Kate looked around the counter area. There were coin jars for tips and for various childhood diseases. Taped to one side by the condiments and milk thermoses, a poster advertised an art exhibition at NYU.
She hadn’t known Elizabeth went to NYU until their walk on the beach last summer, or maybe she’d known but hadn’t remembered. When Elizabeth told Kate about the painting trip to Joshua Tree, she’d seen her surprise. I studied art in college, Elizabeth explained.
Kate knew too little about art, and usually hid her ignorance with stock references to Degas ballerinas or Pollock splotches. I never really was liberal arts material, she admitted, poking a stick in the sand. She imagined Elizabeth thinking of the things lacking in her cultural education because she’d gone to culinary school.
The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D Page 29