The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (22 page)

“Okay, so your wallet was stolen,” Max said, puzzled by her emotion. “You’ll get a new license with a better picture, and you’ll have to memorize a new credit card number for your online shopping. It’s just a wallet.”

“It’s not just a wallet.” Kate sprinkled a fistful of flour across the island for a kneading surface. As she told him about the journals and the lost key, she trailed her fingertips across the counter, creating long wavy lines through the flour.

“And the rest of the journals are locked inside?”

“A few. The last one or two.”

Max turned the dough onto the floured island and rolled it in her direction. “Maybe the husband has another key somewhere.”

Kate palmed the ball, letting the heat from her hands soften it, streaking the butter through the dough to make it flaky. Then she pushed it against the countertop. This was not something she wanted to ask Dave. “There could be another key somewhere at his house,” she said, working the dough in short tight strokes. “But it’s awkward. How do you think he feels about my reading these books in the first place? I don’t know how he’d take hearing that my key is gone.”

She could easily see Dave’s response, matter-of-fact with a chilly edge. But there could also be an explosion, all that anger at the world’s injustice finally let out of its box.

“So dodge the whole thing,” Max said. “Stuff the trunk in your basement, and if he ever asks, just tell him it’s a lot of girly angst and that his wife would have wanted them thrown away.”

That might have been possible at the beginning of the summer, but now Dave wanted to be involved, and expected a resolution. Perhaps he’d always had more backbone than she’d credited him with. Or maybe the past year was still rolling out its effects, like the way Dave perceived his marriage and privacy: what had been hers, what had been his, and what of hers was now his.

She told Max about what Dave had already read of the last journal, about Elizabeth traveling to meet someone named Michael. At the suggestion of infidelity Max’s expression hardened. “I don’t know why this matters so much to you,” he said. “Protecting her.”

“I’m just trying to do this thing that she asked, Max. I’m just trying to figure out the right thing to do with these books.”

His hands continued to move fluidly as he flattened another ball of dough into a disc, but he said nothing.

“If someone you cared about died and trusted you with something like this, wouldn’t you take it seriously?”

He contemplated it, but didn’t answer directly. “Well, losing the key isn’t the biggest deal in the world. It’s not as if you lost the books themselves. You can always smash the damn thing open. Surely it’s not made of titanium.”

Kate set the cream cheese mixture in the refrigerator. “I will if I have to. But it would be a shame to ruin it. The trunk is a family heirloom.”

“Well, her family isn’t seeing that trunk again anyway unless you make peace with the fact that you can’t control the way she is going to be remembered. What she did is what she did.”

He pushed a large bowl of kiwi toward her. She took one and began to peel, digging out the core on each end. She thought of all the marital hopscotching she’d seen in New York, the indiscretions of people she had never thought capable of cheating.
Maybe loyalty is for swans and bird-minded people
. Not a sentiment she would have thought could come from Elizabeth.

This wasn’t something she was going to be able to leave unfinished, or discover quietly and put aside. Dave would call again, and again. Elizabeth was not an unintelligent person, but this—leaving the journals to someone else, without specifying what should be done with them—had been a careless way of safeguarding them.

If it had been Kate, and she’d had secrets she’d wanted kept private, she would have done things differently. She would have stipulated that the books be destroyed.

K
ATE SAT IN THE
loft and listened to the murmuring downstairs. The children had quieted their bedtime silliness once the lights went out, and would be asleep soon.

The remaining half of the pastel-striped journal was thicker than the other notebooks. Elizabeth had supplemented its pages with sheets torn from notepads, backs of flyers, scraps of thought scrawled on the edges of train schedules. She wrote wherever she happened to be, on whatever she happened to have.

Dave had called Elizabeth right after he received her voice mail about the baby, as she’d expected. They reconciled. His apology and remorse seemed sincere to Kate, and moving, but Elizabeth held herself at a remove.
I marched through the necessary gymnastics of it with him. The tears and apologies, the self-recrimination and gnashing of teeth, then the parade of kindness. It had to be that way, or he wouldn’t be who he is
. Gradually the analytical tone disappeared, and when she wrote about the return of passion, it was without irony or reservation.

One hot night Elizabeth and Dave sweated through failed air-conditioning in his building. The fan rotated in the dark just inches from the bed, making sheets clammy then hot again wherever they
lay. He got up for ice cream and walked naked to the kitchen, and Elizabeth watched the streetlights cross his body like a toga. He returned with two small granny-glass sundaes, a ring in hers where the cherry would be.

Kate read this with the odd sensation of wanting to turn to someone, like two friends watching a movie, and say,
How can she just forgive him and move on?
and
What is it with men and engagement rings in food, anyway?
But the person she wanted to turn to, she realized, was Elizabeth.

With her friends in Washington, the other mothers she’d met through her children’s schools, conversations tended to skate on the surface of things. With her parents, there was the fear of saying anything that would not live up to intellectual standards, that would forfeit ground on the respect she’d earned as an adult with ambitions of her own. With Rachel … they were closer when Kate was working. After she’d quit that last job, when Piper was a baby, she hadn’t been able to explain her choice in a way that Rachel could understand or respect. At the next Christmas gathering, Rachel’s confusion and disappointment, and the gulf that had opened between them, were palpable.

And with Chris—well. But reading Elizabeth’s notebooks was one unedited mind to another, and also entirely inimitable in real life. The person in the world most likely to understand her now was a dead woman, and she felt more alone than she’d felt at the summer’s beginning.

Elizabeth and Dave’s wedding was a small gathering at an estate home in Georgia. Dave’s brother-in-law Zack read a poem by Pablo Neruda, and Zack’s children were flower girl and ring bearer. Elizabeth was fifteen weeks pregnant. Dave became choked up during the vows; Elizabeth was surprised by her own sadness that her mother
could not be there.
It doesn’t matter what kind of relationship we had. Losing your mother before you’re married and have kids just messes with the order of things, a domino effect through the milestones of your life
.

Kate could not imagine what it would have been like if her mother had died before James and Piper were born. She had flown in just before each of their births, and sharing the raw, carnal days of early mothering had brought them together in a way that had been lacking. They finally had something in common, she and her cerebral mother who could count on one hand the number of times she’d baked anything, who could become so distracted by the latest psychology journal that the water would boil over and the pasta grow rubbery. Babies were an inexact science. There were no sure fixes to sleeplessness and colic in rigorous study or circular debate, nothing academic about them. Only trial and error, and intuitive touch. In this, Kate and her mother were part of the same tribe, after all.