The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (8 page)

“Well, you can’t do it all. Sometimes”—Chris wiped his mouth and glanced at Kate—“you have to make a choice.”

Driving up-island at night was like traveling in space. There were no streetlights and few visible houses on Harvest Road, under its canopy of trees. Scrub oak and pitch pine were like dark walls along the sides, opening sporadically onto llama pastures like deep empty rooms.

When they turned onto their dirt driveway, rabbits scattered in the headlights. That rabbits had been the culprit behind a tularemia outbreak a few years back still amazed her. Two landscapers had died of the bacterial infection, and it had pitched the island into a frenzy. Although tularemia was rarely lethal, East Coast newspapers ran snarling rodent caricatures (“Bugs Bunnies!”) and vacationers canceled their rentals. When Kate and Chris had decided to come anyway—the hype seemed silly, the odds of infection remote—they
thought about splurging for a better rental because rates were so low. But in the end they’d come back to the bungalow. They really didn’t need anything larger, the location was ideal, and the nostalgia outweighed the advantages of a more luxurious space.

Bunnies, benign as fairy-tale characters. Their dried droppings caused infection when they blew into the air and were inhaled, innocent as dust. She eyed the vanishing rabbits, and rubbed the side of her neck, tingling with a prickly heat.

If tularemia had broken out this year, the hype would not seem nearly as silly to her, nor the odds as remote. Odds didn’t mean a thing.

K
ATE RARELY READ THE
newspaper anymore. It lay where Chris had left it on the patio table, headlines half obscured by breakfast dishes. Phrases of alarm stood out among the empty cereal bowls and plates of jammy crust. terrorism fears prompt civilian cipro stashes. And down the page, environmental toxins linked to illness. She looked over the paper and to the yard. The children were playing croquet, jumping over wickets with their faces to the sun. attacks in suburbs.

Against her better judgment, she pushed a plate aside to see the rest of the article.

Officials Say Suicide-Bomb Attacks in Suburbs Would Be Impossible to Deter

She put the plate back on the center of the paper and leaned back from the table, watching the children with her coffee held under her chin.

Each day it was something new, some danger unthinkable just the day before. In the beginning it had seemed anything was possible, that the television might break in with an emergency broadcast announcing a reservoir in California had been poisoned with anthrax, that mad cow disease had been found in U.S. livestock, Ebola was airborne at JFK Airport. The news no longer surprised her, which was not to say she was desensitized. It was more of an amazement that yet another way had been found to make her feel as if she stood in an Escher landscape, the most basic things gone demented.

She’d always followed common precautions. A fire extinguisher in the kitchen, a burglar alarm on the house. But the nature of danger had changed in the past year. A few months ago, there’d been a scare that someone had tampered with the D.C. water supply, and not long after, a bomb threat had forced the evacuation of the Metro while she’d waited for a train. For thirty minutes she’d moved slowly upward and out through the tunnels, the pack of frightened commuters craning their necks for the scent of information.

What little could be done, she had done. If things became untenable in Washington, a friend’s cabin in rural Maryland would be their retreat, and the car was stocked with bottled water and canned goods. She and Chris had decided together on the cabin—most people they knew in the District had a designated place—but she’d loaded the car supplies herself, tucking the heavy cardboard box in the corner of the trunk. When he’d seen it, he’d rolled his eyes.
You’ve got to be kidding me. This is Washington, D.C., Kate, not Chernobyl
. She’d laughed along, and removed it. So far, he hadn’t noticed the supply in the spare-tire well.

She pushed the newspaper aside and drank the last of her coffee,
which was also the last of the coffee at the house. Kate picked up her pen and began jotting a grocery list, beginning with breakfast ingredients and ending with staples for their favorite dinners.
Rice wine vinegar, ginger, chicken breasts
. In the yard the kids had moved from playing croquet to playing dirt shower, a wash of grass and soil over each other’s heads.
Laundry detergent
, she added.
Shampoo
.

But tonight she would not be cooking, at least not beyond something easy for the children. They had arranged for a sitter from a list of college students on the island, and were celebrating their anniversary at their favorite restaurant. Phlox had opened five years before as an eclectic café in the woods, and had developed a cult following for fresh seafood and its organic produce grown in back. Soon the newspapers and magazines took note, and it had expanded with a lounge, which had drawn the kind of patrons seeking the new hot thing. Reservations became harder to get, even if the quality was lost on much of the clientele, who would have eaten sea bass from tanks slicked with algae if it were printed on the menu in a trendy font.

She should have been looking forward to dinner, great food prepared and cleared by someone else. She would style her hair and put on her pink sundress, the one too feminine for her taste but that Chris liked. They would have a glass of wine and comment upon the bar crowd, and have uninterrupted conversation that was broad and worldly, like the old days. Her edgy humor would return and he’d smile at her in the loose way that showed pleasure unrelated to his work, and when they returned to the bungalow, the sitter would be hastily paid and there would be no flossing before bed.

But that apathy was creeping in again, the sense she’d had lately that things didn’t quite live up to their billing, so why bother. It was the same ambivalence and letdown she’d felt a few weeks before, out to dinner with friends. She genuinely liked the women, other mothers from Piper’s preschool, but had had a sense of dislocation all evening. She couldn’t get in sync with the conversation and humor,
and her responses felt a quarter-beat off. Home renovations had never been her forte. But even when they’d talked about their kids’ activities she would fish for a contribution and come up empty. None of it mattered; she was unable to shake the sense that none of it could be counted upon to last.

She had started feeling this way after Elizabeth’s death, but instead of fading as the months passed, it intensified. Sometimes it was a fog, a sense that she had not a single thought in her head worth sharing; sometimes it was a growing panic that at any moment something could go very wrong. She’d always been conscious of her family’s safety, but this was different. Danger was everywhere and nowhere, immediate and elusive, and no one was prepared. It was as if she alone could smell it, subtle as the metallic first moment of rain.

She hadn’t said anything to Chris, unable to imagine it. But she could imagine his response. After he stopped smiling, because surely his first thought would be that she was kidding, his look would change from one of identification to one of sympathy. He would suggest that she should get out more often—join a gym and get back to swimming, perhaps join one of those women chefs networking clubs. He might even take it as evidence that she should accept this new job after all, that staying at home was making her loony. Or worse, think privately that she was too loony to handle working, and that she should find “someone to talk to,” because it was quite a thing, to lose a friend, and well, maybe everything that followed had hit her especially hard too. The fact of his suggesting it would be enormous, because he was an own-bootstraps sort of man and
therapy
was not part of his lexicon. That was her fear: not professional help, which had occurred to her but which she believed wasn’t necessary, but that Chris would look at her and see instability, weakness.

It had been a long time since they’d gone out to dinner together, just the two of them. She could envision a staggered silence, one line of conversation after another failing to catch hold until they finally chatted about the weather expected the next day and
whether to go to the beach. There were many evenings back home when they moved around and past one another, wordless for hours at their own tasks. She was thankful for the few hours of quiet focus, but at moments, she felt the loss of quiet companionship, a like-minded silence. Their daily lives were so different; she could no longer say for sure they were of like mind.

Was it possible, she wondered, to have solitude together? She tried to imagine what he would do if after dinner she went to his study back home with her book or her laptop, and sat on the couch there instead of in the living room, as they had in the early years. He might glance over the top of his computer with a look of surprise and then a smile of welcome.
Hey there
. Or there might be a moment’s hesitation. She’d sit quietly nearby, each of them feeling the weight of the other in the room and a dampening of his or her own thoughts, each looking up expectantly when the other shifted in a chair or looked off into the middle distance. She might offer a snippet of commentary about something she was reading, but it would not be easily understood out of context. After an hour or so she would stand and stretch, murmur that she thought she’d call it a night, and the following night she’d go back to the living room. It was a gift, solitude. But solitude with another person, that was an art.

She’d never thought about Elizabeth and Dave in that way. But if she had, she would have imagined them smoothly companionable. Elizabeth reading a book while Dave sat on the leather couch reviewing promotional materials for some new piece of golf equipment. When he got up for a cup of coffee or a dish of ice cream and asked in his folksy way if she wanted something, she’d smile at his thoughtfulness. Or maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe she had wished he’d be the kind of man to walk back in with two glasses of wine, step in front of the television, and lift the book out of her hands. Maybe in truth there had been a lot of invisible wishing.

For two nights Kate had been reading the journal in the loft long after the last of the boats returned across the dark harbor, running lights trailing like phosphorescent fish. The second night she’d opened the notebook with hesitation. If she’d had to guess what her friend had been like in high school, Kate would have imagined a fresh-scrubbed yearbook editor, an all-American girl who babysat for the neighborhood. This emerging person was significantly less sunny, more independent and creative, but much lonelier. Kate found herself wishing for a photo, wondering whether she had been fashionable once, before she became the kind of mother who wore dangling pumpkin earrings at Halloween.

Last night’s entries followed Elizabeth through her senior year of high school. There was a tremendous amount of writing; Elizabeth recorded details the way others whispered observations to friends. She’d passed the time waiting for college acceptance letters by painting and holding odd jobs. Like her friends, she experimented with alcohol; drinking at weekend parties made her feel indistinct, blurring the line where she ended and others began. She and Michael would sit in his car with the radio on. When he kissed her, he cupped her jaw in one hand and didn’t slip his hand up under her shirt right away, which she saw as a sign of his integrity. She held out hope that soon he’d ask her to sit alone with him during lunch in the cafeteria, as the couples did.