The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (18 page)
Read The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D Online
Authors: Nichole Bernier
Others on the sidewalk were passing by as if nothing were amiss, barely glancing at the sky. Someone asked her if she was all right, and a second person stopped to help her retrieve her cell phone, wallet, and keys scattered on the ground.
She gathered her things with murmured thanks, then watched as the small plane flew on toward the airstrip in the middle of the island, growing smaller until its fading roar was indiscernible from the airhorn of an incoming ferry.
The house was silent, door unlocked. A note on the counter read,
Went to get manicotti from the pizza place. Back soon
.
Kate stood in the family room taking in the scattered objects her family left behind. Splayed books, a menagerie of plastic animals. A spill of Legos. Chris’s open laptop, battery dying. She used to enjoy
the quiet of an empty house, but now it unsteadied her. This was the way the room would look if its inhabitants were suddenly gone, the fossil of a family.
She went to the refrigerator and took out a beer, then brought it out to the patio with Elizabeth’s notebook. The sun was low on the bay. In the sky, the simple black shell of a plane moved through the clouds like a cardboard cutout in a diorama.
September 15, 1992
Dave was a toned-down version of his golf-tournament self at dinner, not too jovial or overly familiar, both of which I was afraid would get old fast. Greeted me inside the restaurant with a light touch on the back, ushering toward the table, polite. Very traditional.
Things I noticed: Freckles across his nose and cheeks make him look like an overgrown six-year-old. Very strong jaw and chin, big shoulders and chest. He’d gotten a haircut but it was still all over the place. He does have one head of gorgeous dark hair. Right after we sat down and were pulling out our napkins he smiled wide and said, Thanks for coming. His smile goes all the way to his eyes, just about the warmest brown I’ve ever seen. I got a tightness in my throat. Be nice, Elizabeth, I thought. Smile more.
I asked him about golf, about the tour, how much he plays, and where he calls home (an apartment just outside NYC, though he’s there so rarely a neighbor is in effect a co-owner of his dog). He worked in pro shops after graduating from Georgia Tech and played on some mini tours until he got his tour card, and has been scrabbling—his word—year after year to qualify. I’d remembered him as glib and chipper, but one-on-one he’s more serious. He chooses his words as if each one matters and it’s very important that he say exactly what he means.
He asked about my family, and I kept it simple—Vermont, Connecticut, divorced, deceased. When I said cancer, something slid shut behind his eyes. Yup, I know a thing or two about that, he said. His sister, last year. We were both quiet for a minute, and just when I started racking my mind for something else to talk about, he said,
That’s just not something a body should have to go through, and not something that anybody should have to watch. Neither of us wanted to say any more about it, so we didn’t.
After dinner he cabbed with me to my building, and before I could ask if he wanted to come up, gave me a soft peck on the cheek and strolled off. I watched him walk away toward the corner with a rolling gait that bounces on the balls of his feet, solid and heavy like a draft horse, but light like a very contented one. He looks as if he could carry you a thousand miles if he had to.
K
ATE PULLED UP TO
the fence of a small farm on the northwest part of the island. Several Holsteins lifted their heads. Piper and James unbuckled their seat belts and hopped out, eager to get to the barn.
“Heyyyy … aren’t you forgetting something? Like, good-bye?” Kate called.
They returned to the car with caught-me smiles and leaned in the window. Kate cupped James by the chin and planted a kiss on his cheek, then Piper’s. “Have fun. See you at one.” Freed, they sped toward their fellow campers.
Kate sat in the car and watched her children slide in easily with their peers. She could barely remember the days when they’d clung to her, toddlers with “separation anxiety,” as the books called it. In a way the earliest months were easier to remember, the exhausted nights that bled into one another with a disbelief that it would ever again be otherwise.
There they were, grown campers with peers. Animated, confident, independent.
January 1, 1993
I don’t think I’ve ever rung in the New Year with a significant kiss at the stroke of midnight before. It isn’t the cliché I always thought it would be, like roses on Valentine’s Day or standing under the mistletoe. It’s like there’s an embedded promise of agreeing to share the year to come.
When Dave turned to clink glasses with me last night at the party he didn’t say a word, just gave me that slow mysterious smile, the one that says he’s really happy because he’s always one-quarter sad so he knows full well what happy feels like. And he slipped his arm around my waist and pulled me in tight. His kiss is slow, like he’s still asking permission. When we wake up in the morning he grins like he’s grateful and not taking anything for granted
.
February 27, 1993
Watched the Nissan Open. He didn’t make the cut. After the first and second rounds he was four and five strokes over; a ball in the water here, a putt blowing by the cup there, it adds up. Watching is nerve-racking. He rarely makes it anywhere near the top half of the leaderboard. Still staking out the hinterlands, he says with only the barest hint of disappointment. But I’ve never heard him say a word about anything else he’d want to do, career-wise, or how low he’d go before throwing in the towel. I think he honestly feels lucky to do what he loves to do and be able to pay the rent. More or less
.
March 15, 1993
Bertha’s gone. So sad. Poor girl’s legs gave out completely. Dave said she hasn’t been able to walk herself outside for days, so we took her to the vet. He told us that she’s had a long life for a dog, let alone a Newfoundland, but enough is enough and it’s time to let her go. He gave us the choice of doing it now or bringing her home for one more night, and Dave said No, we need to do this. We shouldn’t prolong it.
Dave stood on the threshold of the vet’s office door, rocking on the balls of his feet and looking down at the ground. I wanted to give him
his peace, so I walked over to poor Bertha sedated a little on the table and put my hand on her massive head. The fleshy red parts of her lower lids were even puffier and runnier than usual, overworked it seemed from the effort of staying awake. Her breathing quickened a bit as she rolled her eyes toward the doorway and stared, then looked up at me. I turned back to the doorway, and Dave was gone.
I thought he must have stepped out to the bathroom, or maybe even to his car. Maybe he needed a minute alone. I stroked Bertha’s head, ran my thumb down her long, wide nose. Fifteen minutes later he still hadn’t come back.
The vet came in and asked if we should proceed. When I suggested we wait for Dave, he explained that Dave had already left a credit card and signature at the front desk. His long silence then, full of something besides awkwardness. Disappointment. Sympathy, maybe. You can either stay or not stay, as you wish, the vet said.
I looked back down at big old Bertha, rubbed her wide black forehead, working her silky ears between the thumb and forefinger like I’ve seen Dave do. She continued to look toward the doorway, though whether she was watching for him or if that was just the path of least resistance for her eyes, I couldn’t say. I stayed until the injection was finished and her breathing slowed to nothing. Her eyes stayed on the doorway until they lost their shine.
I went back to his apartment but he wasn’t there. I waited awhile, then left, and then called later, but got no answer. When I called the next day he didn’t even explain himself—why he’d left, where he’d gone.
Are you okay? I finally asked. That was such a strange way to leave.
He was quiet for a minute until I wondered if he wasn’t going to talk about it at all. Then he said, I just couldn’t, Liz. I don’t do sickness very well.
I didn’t say what I wanted to, which was, Well, hon, we’re not often given the luxury to choose to “do” sickness or death. It just happens. I
also didn’t say the other thing that was on my mind, which was, What if I wasn’t there? Would you have just left her there on the table, alone?
But instead the New Softer Liz said, I know it’s hard. But we did the humane thing. Come over tonight. But he said he wanted to be alone, he’d catch up with me tomorrow before he left for Florida.
I know this should be telling me something important, something I should be noting carefully. My mother’s voice is echoing in my head with something about community versus isolation and the importance of pulling strength from others when you are lacking. And my own inner voice behind that: It’s about responsibility, it’s about what you owe to someone you love who is in a bad way, a pact that you make when you enter into a relationship—yes, with a pet, too—to see her out of this world as she saw you through it. But the poor guy lost his dog, and it’s not for me to tell him how he should have done it better. Even if it seems as if he did choke in the clutch
.
The next morning Kate woke early. Pale light filtered through the filmy curtains, and the birds had already recognized the start of the day. She crawled from bed, picked up the journal she’d been reading, and carried it out to the family room.
In June 1993, Elizabeth turned thirty. Dave surprised her with a flight to Maui to join him in an off-tour pro-am tournament. One of her clients was among the sponsors, so her boss told her to bring her laptop, make a show of double-checking promotional literature, and call it a work trip.
I love this job
, she wrote.
They will need to pry me away from this place with a crowbar
.
Each time Elizabeth described her work, Kate felt as if she were reading about another person entirely. She’d written about designing logos and advertisements with the obsessiveness that Kate and her culinary school friends shared for rare ingredients; the journal was filled with details like the shape of a recurring geometric motif, the selection of fonts, choices of colors. But she’d never said such things aloud.
Although Dave had been to Maui any number of times, he behaved like a tourist with Elizabeth. They bodysurfed in Lahaina and watched the sun rise from the top of Kilauea volcano, a moonscape of brick-colored rocks backlit in orange. They trespassed in a sugarcane field and tasted some just to say they had, gnawing on stalks stringy and sweet, like a candied asparagus. Her fears of traveling together—that she’d be claustrophobic amid so much togetherness, or be lost in an orgy of golf—proved unfounded. She had time to herself. He respected her privacy. And though he was absorbed in the tournament, he was not consumed by it.
On the night of her birthday he brought her to a restaurant in a converted general store set in the middle of an old pineapple plantation. As they sipped passion-fruit margaritas, he slipped a small velvet box across the table. Her heart seized.
My first thought was Oh no, then had a parade of images—mortgage bills, poopy diapers, boredom. But when I flipped up the lid it was the most beautiful pair of diamond earrings, small perfect octagons with starry refractions from the candles and water glass. In the card he wrote, You’re my rock
.
Kate heard a step behind her, then felt a hand on her shoulder. “Hey.” Chris walked past the couch to the kitchen. “You’re up early.”
Kate rested the notebook in her lap. “The birds woke me up. They were like something out of Hitchcock.”
He rubbed his head and reached for the cabinet where the cups were kept. “You make coffee yet?”
She glanced at the table beside her where a mug would be. “No.” Once she’d opened the notebook and begun to read, it hadn’t crossed her mind.
Chris filled the water chamber on the coffeemaker and emptied old grounds from the filter basket. Outside, the sun glowed pale on the long lawn.
“What got you up?” she asked.
“I have to write something up on Southeast Asia,” he said, rubbing his face. “There’s a hotel there that might be going on the market.”
He opened the refrigerator and took out a cup of yogurt, and added a handful of fresh blueberries from their cardboard pint. Then he leaned against the counter lost in thought, the container brimming with berries held before him like a gift.
When Chris had asked her to marry him, it had been a surprise to her. They had been together just under a year. Kate had been working in the restaurant that night—she worked most nights—when the maître d’ strode into the kitchen with one of her crème brûlées, apparently sent back by an unsatisfied customer. “Just look at this mess!” he said, gesturing disgustedly at the broken crust. She took it in her hands, brows tight. Sticking out of the middle was a diamond ring, gleaming in the caramelized sugar.