The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (38 page)

She steamed the clams in a broth of wine and shallots, and halved fingerling potatoes into aluminum bags to roast with oil and sea salt. He boiled lobster on a burner attachment to the grill. Then they sat at the patio table alone together facing the yard, the water, the orange-tinged sky.

She took a breath. “I found out something about Elizabeth today.”

He looked across the lawn an extra moment, then turned with a smile of endurance.
Can’t we just have one nice, final night?
  “Oh?”

He didn’t ask what she’d learned or how, when she couldn’t locate the only journal she hadn’t read. He picked up his fork and started eating.

She watched his nonchalance and tried not to let him see how it
bothered her. She needed to find a way to make him care; if not to help her make sense of it, at least enough to support what she wanted to do. She recounted the late-night television, the jewelry and juicers and the business card in the trunk.

He was quiet a moment longer than she would have been under the circumstances, then took another bite of food. “So Elizabeth was flying to Joshua Tree to buy a juicer?”

Her mouth fell open stupidly. He was rarely caustic, and never with her. She felt herself receding from the table like a camera trick, a fast panning-out shot pulling away.

She would keep the conversation short and businesslike. He would not be subjected to more talk of Elizabeth, which would also signal that she wasn’t going to confide in him. That’s what marriage could be after nine years: such a subtly tuned tool that the simple act of declining to discuss something could be both a gift and a jab.

“I think she had cancer and didn’t tell anyone,” she said.

He visibly startled. Ordinarily, this would have launched a conversation not just on Elizabeth but on honesty and deception as a whole—the aspects of ourselves that we show one another in marriage and friendship, and what we conceal. Even as she said it so bluntly, she knew it was all wrong. But she couldn’t stand the thought of warbling in earnest while he sat beside her this way.

“Cancer. Well.” He took a large bite of corn, then added more butter. “What makes you think so?”

She watched as he continued to eat. “I found the number for the treatment place she was going. It was on a business card. The guy there knew her. He offered condolences, knew things about the family.”

This gave him pause. “When?”

“When did he know her?”

“No, when did you call?”

“I left him a message this morning. He returned my call while you were out picking up dinner with the kids.”

He paused, holding his fork. She saw him register that this had
happened last night and she’d spoken to Michael that afternoon, and that she hadn’t mentioned it all day. Normally she’d have shared those things immediately. This was the greater issue. He toyed with his hold on the fork, then continued eating.

She had misjudged. By not bringing it up earlier, she had drawn more attention to it than if she’d just mentioned it in passing. He might have been dismissive, even testy, but at least he would have been included. She forced herself to cut a small bite of lobster tail and dip it in butter.

“So what are you going to do now?” he asked.

“I’d like to stop at the Martins’ on the way home and give him the trunk, talk to him a little while.”

He nodded. He wouldn’t have relished a whole conversation about whether or not she would, but it chafed, hearing she’d made the decision without mentioning it. It helped that she’d said
I’d like to
, rather than made a declaration. But not much.

“On a Sunday, in the summer?” he said. “We’d get home insanely late.”

“Well, I thought maybe you’d head home with the kids, and I would take the train home from there a little later. I don’t want to talk about it in fragments around all the kids.”

This was not what he’d expected. It wasn’t just the inconvenience—the Martins were an easy stop off the highway—though there was a small inconvenience. He would have to make pleasantries for a few moments and then either let the kids play briefly, or break the news to them that they would not be staying to play. Then he would have to continue home, unload at least the basics from the car, get them to bed. Solo parenting—it was nothing she hadn’t done a million times while he was traveling. But it was more than that. She’d be spending the evening alone with Dave Martin. All this crossed his face.

“Well then, I guess that’s that,” he said, and stood to take his plate into the kitchen.

She sat at the table alone, watching the cloud of gnats beyond
the citronella candle as her steamer broth cooled and her lobster grew rubbery. He came back out of the house and stepped off the porch into the dark and insects, and headed to the beach.

Eventually she’d washed the dishes and gone to bed. By the time she fell asleep, pushing back thoughts of Elizabeth handling cancer treatments alone, Chris still had not returned.

Chris pulled off the highway, and the change in momentum woke Piper and James.

“Are we home?” Piper asked.

“This isn’t our home,” James said, looking around. “It’s the old home. Hey, this is the way to the Martins’.”

Chris didn’t say anything. Kate took his silence as a cue that he would not take responsibility for telling the kids that they would not be staying to play.

“We’re stopping off at the Martins’ house because I have to give them something,” she said. “I’m going to stay and talk to Mr. Martin. But you guys are going on home with Daddy, and I’m going to take a train a little while behind you.”

“Can I stay and take the train?” asked James.

“I want to take the train too!” said Piper.

“No one else is taking the train,” Chris said. “Mom’s going to be getting home too late.”

They turned the corner onto the Martins’ street. Dave was in the front yard, mowing the lawn. Jonah and Anna played in the driveway drawing with chalk and Emily was set up beside them in a playpen. This was his system for juggling three children and yard work.

In the beginning there’d been a rush to charity, everyone wanting to take the kids, a thinly veiled assumption that it was too much for a father to care for his three children alone. He’d told Kate that if he was seen in the grocery store struggling through shopping with the kids, there would be babysitting offers and lasagna on his
doorstep by dusk. No matter that Elizabeth had done this, all the time. Once, a few months after Elizabeth’s death, Brittain had called Kate in Washington to say that she’d seen Dave doing yard work with the kids in the driveway, and that maybe the playgroup could pull together a fund-raiser for a contract with a landscaping service? It had been offered and declined, offered and declined, until he finally asked Kate to tell them no thanks,
really
. What they would never understand was that all he wanted was to mow his own damn lawn with no one watching, or offering to do it for him, or bringing a meal over afterward as a condolence for his having to mow a lawn without a wife to watch the kids.

As they pulled up alongside the curb, Dave killed the motor of the mower and turned to their car, squinting. Kate stepped out and kept her hand on the car door handle. He didn’t call out or walk down to greet her with his arms outstretched. He just stood as she walked across the lawn, his arms spattered with bits of grass, waiting.

She stood just out of hug range to spare them both the awkwardness, though it didn’t make a difference. “I have something for you. Can I come over for a while?”

He glanced at the car, took in the fact that Chris and the kids were still sitting inside, and looked back at her.

“Well, I was gonna finish the grass and take a shower. We’re having spaghetti.”

It wasn’t much of an answer. It merely showed that they had no particular plans and that she could join in or not, but that she was neither a special guest nor an especially welcome one. Chris opened the car door and got out. As he walked toward the curb, Jonah and Anna realized their friends had come. They dropped their chalk and ran over to the Spensers’ car to hang on the half-open windows.

“Hey, man,” Chris said as he reached Kate and Dave, and the men shook hands.

“Tail end of the trip,” Dave said.

Chris was a quick study, attuned to the subtleties of international
investors with whom nonverbal cues were telling. Kate watched him size up the factors. He took in the lack of pleasantries and Dave’s cool tone, his wife’s discomfort. The contents of the trunk might be physically leaving their world today, but nothing in the dynamics on the lawn suggested they’d be truly gone.

“Vacation’s all over. Can’t stay on island time forever,” he said. “But we had a good go of it, so I can’t complain.”

The kids squealed from the car; the Martin kids opened the door just as James and Piper were freeing themselves from their booster seats.

“Let’s go play in the backyard!” Piper yelled, and the four streaked away from the car like cartoon characters in a dust cloud. Emily, realizing she’d been left behind, began to cry.

Kate watched the kids run. Piper’s toes hung over the front of her sandals, and James’s shorts were a bit high on the thigh. They’d grown, incredibly, in just two months. That’s how change went; time moved suddenly when you took your eyes off the action, and sometimes appeared to happen all at once, the clock moving past an outgrown moment with a visible click.

“Hey, kids, I’m afraid we can’t stay. We’re just dropping off Mom,” said Chris, moving to intercept the children before they reached the gate to the backyard. He put a hand on the shoulders of his two, turning them back toward the car. He called to Kate over his shoulder. “What train do you think you’ll be taking?”

“I’m not sure.” She glanced at Dave. He hadn’t yet acknowledged that she was welcome to stay. Chris noted the way she looked at Dave, her small deferral, and he continued toward the car.

“I have a train schedule in the kitchen,” Dave said. “Amtrak goes through Stamford pretty regularly.”

Kate walked back to Chris and helped direct the grumbling children into the car. “I’ll call you after I have a look at the timetable. Will you help me get the trunk out?”

Dave stood nearby looking at the ground. If hearing this was his first realization that Kate had come to give him back his wife’s
journals, he didn’t show it. He kept his eyes on the grass. Then he restarted the mower’s engine.

Chris lifted the car’s rear hatch while Kate put the kids back in their car seats. Once they were buckled she joined him behind the car, and they shimmied the trunk from where it was wedged. Then she pulled one last journal out of her tote bag. When she’d gone back into the island house that morning for a final walk-through, the photo-covered journal had still been on the loft’s window ledge, nearly forgotten. She’d thought briefly of bringing it home and keeping it. Whenever she opened her top drawer there it would be, along with the note from the woman critical of Kate on the television show: Elizabeth smiling into the sun, overexposed and underestimated.

Chris looked at her, waiting. Kate lifted the lid and placed this book in the trunk with the rest. Then he pulled the trunk out of the car.

“Thank you for doing this,” she said.

“Doing what?”

“Taking the kids the rest of the way home. Letting me finish this.”

He stood with the trunk in both hands in front of him, leaning backward a bit to compensate for its weight. “So finish it, then,” he said, and walked past her toward the house.

As she leaned through the back window to say good-bye to the children, she watched Chris open the Martins’ front door and put the trunk inside the hall. He placed it on the floor in front of the sidelights, and through the small vertical panes she saw him remain crouched. His head was bowed, and after a moment he rested his hand on the trunk like a mourner at a wake, then stood. Watching him, her chest clenched for both of them, and she had to turn and face the car to regain her breath.

She heard the front door open and close again, and Chris descended the steps slowly and walked toward Dave. There was no backslapping, no see-ya-soon pleasantries often traded by the playgroup husbands. Just a few words, vague good wishes for the rest of
the summer. Chris looked away, and Kate saw both the sympathy and resentment.

Maybe there would be no seeing ya soon. Maybe that would be the way it would end, the two families going their separate ways. And maybe that was what Elizabeth had foreseen when she left the journals to Kate, choosing a reader who was empathetic and close but who could disappear from Dave’s life regardless of what she had chosen to do with the books. Maybe Elizabeth had even foreseen the tension it would cause in several different ways—between Kate and Dave, between Kate and Chris—and decided that that too was not such a bad thing, the empathy of being misunderstood, a small dose of alone.

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.