The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (42 page)

“I was thinking of bringing the kids down to D.C. this fall,” he said. “Doing sort of a museumy thing. The zoo, the Mall, and stuff.”

“They’d love it. So would James and Piper.” She stepped through the door. “It stays warm into November. You should come.”

“Well, maybe we will.” The door flapped closed as he let go. He leaned against the interior frame, arms crossed.

She walked across the lawn toward the cab feeling his eyes still on her, and climbed into the back. The vinyl seat was cracked and sharp under her legs, and she readjusted her position closer to the door, where it was smoother. She looked up and saw the Martins’ front door closing, and then the light on the porch, where she’d
saddled Elizabeth with her old plants and fish, blink out. But as the taxi pulled from the curb, in the long hall window the shadow of a man remained, a figure above a broken box filled with the nearest thing he had to his wife’s remains.

The train glided through New Jersey. Dim industrial forms dominated the landscape, skeletal power plants and construction equipment rendered hazy and less unattractive by dark and distance. The engine decelerated over a railroad trestle, and the staccato of its passage reverberated in the vast untenable space between water and sky. The cry was mournful, but a lull for those unafraid of what they cannot control, or on their way to becoming so.

T
HE CAB LEFT
K
ATE
at the curb and she stood for a moment in her driveway. The house was dark except for a dim light in the family room. She reached in her tote bag for keys. Wallet. Phone. Pen. Then a piece of paper, unfamiliar. She pulled it out and held it under the streetlight. It was a white slip, a sheet from a prescription pad with Elizabeth’s name on the patient line. It must have fallen from the last journal, which Kate had read again in the car, then replaced in the trunk outside the Martins’ house. The scrip called for some unreadable milligrams of something starting with a
P
and with an
x
near the middle, prescribed by some doctor whose first name began with an
N
. Natalie … Nadine … Nadia.

It might have been a prescription for anything. Something related to her illness. Something to help her sleep. Or it might be a rabbit hole into somewhere else entirely. Kate held it, considering the places Elizabeth had and had not gone to speak openly. Then she crumpled it in her fist and dropped it back in the bag.

She entered the house quietly and put down her tote, then walked down the hall to the family room to find Chris, likely asleep over his laptop. But the room was empty. She slipped off her shoes and climbed the stairs to check on the children, walking first into
Piper’s room. The girl was curled horizontally across the top of the pillow, catlike, and her purr of a snore quieted as Kate pivoted her back under the covers. Then Kate walked into James’s room. His arm was crooked as if to be filled, and she retrieved the stuffed dinosaur from the floor and tucked it inside his elbow. He didn’t stir. His slack cheeks and lips were as full as a toddler’s, though his skinny legs, scissored on top of the sheets and covered with vacation scrapes, were startlingly long.

Kate went into the master bedroom before even locking up downstairs or getting undressed, intending to lie down beside Chris. She would curl against his back and tuck her chin in the space between his neck and shoulder, and if he woke up she would tell him she loved him. You could not take a single day or night for granted. Within every hour, every plane ride, or every routine doctor’s appointment was the spark of possibility, the thing that would become your undoing. And how you left things just before the final moment—that was how they would remain. She hoped he would wake so she could say at least, I love you. That would be enough until tomorrow.

But Chris wasn’t in the bedroom. The quilt was still smooth, the pillows plumped in their shams. She walked back downstairs, curious, and then concerned. The lights were off in the den, but she looked into the small room expecting to see him asleep upright in the leather chair, eerie as a stranger in the dark of his thoughts. But that room was empty too.

The kitchen hallway near the garage door was piled with suitcases and linens he’d unpacked from the car. Beside them was the box of food and emergency supplies she’d kept hidden in the car’s spare-tire well. It was just as well that it had been unloaded. It all needed to come out.

At the end of the hallway the heavy back door was open. She stood inside the screen door and glanced across the yard, past the flagstone patio and grill not used often enough, beyond the soccer
nets and the shed. At the end of the yard near the tall arborvitae there was a glowing pinprick of orange. It rose and descended as slowly as an aged firefly.

She opened the screen and walked outside. In the back of the yard Chris was sitting on their stone bench. He was bent over forward, elbows and forearms on his thighs, a cigarette dangling from his fingers. He watched as she approached, but didn’t move. It was as if he had been sitting there motionless for years, waiting for her to come back and discover him.

She pushed both hands into her front pockets. Fireflies blinked above the laurel bushes by the house, and night sounds took the place of what would have been an enormity of silence. An evening animal scratched under the evergreens. The mechanical rattle of an automatic door opener came from a neighboring house, followed by the scraping of a barrel over asphalt. They looked for a long time at one another and there was nothing awkward in the look, nothing combative or self-protective. It was a naked look and it was all right there: the waiting and the worry, the dwindling communication and the secrecy and the deception, if it could be called deception, of understatement and omission. The anxiety, and the longing for guarantees—against calamity, against misunderstanding—when there were none to be had. The slow drift that becomes otherness after enough time has passed. They were two people who had begun to wander apart, whose paths had forked, and each had stepped off and found the route absorbing, and then had become a bit too accustomed to going it alone.

She wished she could hand him a journal, a guide to the person she’d become in the past year that would make it all clear, just place it beside him on the bench and walk away. When morning arrived he would have laid on her nightstand a book of his own, and when they came together again there would be clarity. No fear of saying something incorrectly or leaving something out, of being stopped short by a furrowed brow or an interruption at the wrong moment that makes one swallow whatever confidence had begun.

It was all so exhausting, trying to be understood. She’d once read a quote—from some high school required reading? or the lyric of a song?—that had stuck with her:
If you knew all there was to know about a man, you could forgive him anything
. There was something reflexive in the forgiveness,
but of course
, once you knew what made a person into a collection of oddities and defenses. The work to reach the knowing was exhausting, not the forgiving. That seemed to happen on its own.

Kate sighed and sat down on the bench slowly, like an older person giving rest to weary joints. She sat so close to Chris that her leg touched his along the length of their thighs, the curve of his jeans warm and familiar in the cool of night, tangible as a conversation that did not have to end. They sat looking at the back of their home touching casually but not accidentally, like newlyweds wanting the constant comfort of physical togetherness, the reassurance that they shared the same view of an unbroken future stretching across the chasm, at least as much of it as they could control.

Two extraordinary women were in my mind as I wrote this book, neither of whom lived to see their children grow to adulthood. No words are adequate for such loss, but this fictional account of a lost mother was my catharsis, and tribute.

Writing a book is a solitary endeavor, but every other part of bringing it to fruition requires a community. I am endlessly thankful to have landed in the care of my wise agent, Julie Barer, whose extensive knowledge and keen judgment direct my decisions. I have much admiration for my brilliant editors at Crown, Kate Kennedy—who first believed in the book and helped shape it—and then Lindsay Sagnette, who deftly led it, and me, through the labyrinth to publication. My deep appreciation to all those at Random House who supported it along the way. And to Tom Wallace and Rick Levine, whose early support at Condé Nast led to much growth and opportunity.

Early readers offered me valuable feedback, and I am honored by the reading time and insights of Chris Abouzeid, Juliette Fay, Henriette Power, Javed Jahangir, Dan D’Allaird, Elena Rover Strothenke, and Ann Allen Hall, as well as Wayland Stallard and others at The Writing Center in Bethesda, Maryland, where this novel was born. After moving to Boston I found in Grub Street a wonderful community of writers, and I credit this organization with
connecting me to the talented people who would become my friends and colleagues at the literary blog
Beyond the Margins
.

For sharing their knowledge and areas of expertise my thanks to Susan Reed, Annie B. Copps, Killian Higgins, and Lisa Bonchek Adams; to the Professional Golf Association for its elaborate archives; and to Shergul Arshad for his improvements on my Italian phrases. To M. A. Tarver Gallerani and Tracy Birkhahn Spicer for making it logistically possible for me to slip away when I needed a bit of intensive revision time, and to Priscila Moraes for her loving care of my children while I wrote. To Ken and Patricia Berkov for use of the island cottage that was the inspiration for the one in the book (you might consider adding that loft?). The novel’s bakery pays homage to the original Humphreys Bakery in the woods of West Tisbury, Martha’s Vineyard, and its name, Flour, is a salute to the great bakeries of Joanne Chang in Boston. It is worth noting that the flight on which Elizabeth Martin perished bears resemblance to the crash of American Airlines Flight 587, but that accident occurred three months later; likewise, the fictitious Summer Bali explosion is similar to the event of October 2002.

A toast to Carolyn Casey, Lauren Chacon, and Jackie Hendrix, whose critical listening over a long dinner helped me put heart in my reading voice. I am always mindful of the friendship of my first parenting playgroup (Alyson Hussey, Denise St. Mary, Cheryl Pinarchick, Betsy Casey, and Catherine Raynes), whose members continue to teach me the enduring fellowship of women who come of age as mothers together.

I cannot imagine the writing life without the companionship of fellow authors, and I am indebted to Jenna Blum, Amy MacKinnon, Robin Black, and Susan Coll for pushing me up the learning curve with sage advice at key moments. My endless gratitude to Kathy Crowley and Randy Susan Meyers; every writer needs a home team to offer support, direction, and tough love, and they are mine.

To my parents, Ron and Sandra Bernier, for teaching me that we never really know what is happening in the lives and hearts of
others; this compassion leads to imagination and empathy, which are both critical in writing fiction. To my siblings, Carrie, Suzanne, and Matt, and to the Ahern clan, all of whose enthusiasm buoyed me through the years of writing, including my beloved mother-in-law, Maureen, who did not live to see the book in print but did hear some of it on her last night.

To my children, two of whom were born during the writing of this novel. They teach me daily the breathtaking complex love that is motherhood. But above all, deep gratitude and love to my husband, Tom Ahern, whose unwavering support—including the gift of time to pursue a dream—is testament to his kindness, and understanding.