The Safekeep(10)

They kept Uncle Karel’s house after the war and never went back to Amsterdam. It was better for them, Mother insisted: The green, the land. The space. Louis never forgave Mother for that, mourning all the friends he left behind in the city, and Hendrik didn’t seem to care much either way. He was an unhappy child, no matter where. Cried often, hid a lot. Isabel didn’t mind it, the move to the east. She hadn’t any friends in the city, and hadn’t any friends in the country, either. It wasn’t as bad as everyone made it out to be, all worried about her, fussing over her being alone in her room. But it was fine: she read, she took walks, she and Hendrik made up stories about the people who drove by in cars. And then Louis moved out and life got quieter, and then Hendrik ran away and life got quieter still. Rooms turned cavernous. Mother got sick. Mother passed away. Isabel, freshly in her twenties, directed several maids about the house: the sheets needed changing, the windows needed cleaning. Dinner would need to be served by six.

The day after the funeral was a bleary-bright one: mist over the meadows, weeds looking purple. There was a plate of leftover sandwiches on the table in the dining room, covered by a kitchen towel. Flies hovered over it. The house was empty, except for Isabel. Louis had driven back the previous night and Hendrik would not come into the house, had booked a bed-and-breakfast near town. He had brought a man who lingered outside the cemetery, waiting for Hendrik, umbrella in hand.

Isabel had never known loneliness like that, one that arrived without the promise of leaving. There was no one now, no one to walk through the door unannounced, no one to open and close a drawer in the other room. Outside, meadows. Outside, land and more land. Isabel sat by the window with a cup of tea and was overcome. Terror rose up slow and thunderous: Mother had died so quickly, so easily, and Isabel had had no say in it. Her uncle might die, too, just as suddenly. The deed will go to Louis, and Louis might decide to marry, and Louis might decide he wanted her out—anything could happen at any given moment and she had no say in it, not in any of it. She belonged to the house in the sense that she had nothing else, no other life than the house, but the house, by itself, did not belong to her.

The tea cooled. She had decided, right then, to put the issue forward to Uncle Karel—the issue of what might become of her and the house. The issue of could she perhaps have some hold on the deed, something, a promise, a certainty of being kept in safety. But then Uncle Karel came by for dinner one bleak winter day, and he sat at the big table in his dandruff-speckled jumper, leaned in, and said: “You will understand, Isabel, now that your mother is gone, that you must be your own guardian. You must make your own connections.” He wiped at his lips with a napkin. “Don’t be a burden to your brothers, they will have their own lives. You can’t ask too much. And I won’t be here, I’ll have my own business, you understand. I’m not saying this to be harsh. I am saying it because it’s how these things go, and there is no one else who will tell you.” He was nodding so that she might nod along; she did not. She watched him, unmoving. He said, “Yes?”

She stared at him until his nodding stopped.

“Yes,” she said, and swallowed, and went to take away the dishes so he wouldn’t notice how fast she was breathing, or the trembling of her hands.

And then he left, and again it was only she and the walls. The doors, the windows. She went around the house and closed everything, locked everything, the shutters and the curtains and everything that could be pulled over herself like a cloak. For a moment, for a brief and raging moment, she thought: Let him. Let him try to drag me out of here. She saw herself clawing into the walls, taking root.

She was ready for it that first year. Every time Louis met a girl, every time he came by to visit, she waited for it: for him to look around the house and say, I actually think I might have it now. But he never did. He never seemed to notice it, even: he sat in rooms as though they might be any space, looked out windows as though they might be any windows. The house, it seemed, was a blur to him—walls in the way any place might have walls, roof like any building might need a roof.

Relief set in by increments. They never spoke of it, of her never leaving, of her living in the old house, but she wondered at times. Wondered whether it was a purposeful silence on his part—that perhaps he wanted her to have it, keep it. A year passed, two. Three. The house was still Isabel’s. The house would continue to be Isabel’s.

Once a year, on the day of her mother’s passing, Isabel would breakfast off one of Mother’s plates, a rarity. Two slices of bread with aged cheese. The hares would appear in fragments from under her meal: a tail, a foot, an ear. When she’d finish she’d wash the plate and dry it and put it away where it belonged, in the vitrine, with the doors locked.





3


EVA TOOK UP SPACE WITH a loud restlessness, a bee stuck in a room with all the windows shut. She touched things, talked about the things she touched, asked questions about them—Is this painting supposed to be the Veluwe? Was this your mother’s vase?—took to circling the gardens with a cigarette in hand, put her fingers to the petals of shrubs, the trunks of trees. Isabel avoided her. Isabel watched her from an upstairs window. Isabel dug her nails into her wrists and breathed steadily through her nose.

Neelke, the maid, came by first thing on Monday. Isabel hurried her inside with a list of things that needed to be done. First it was a relief to do so, to have another person in the house, a more familiar one, distraction from the annoyance that was Eva. And then Neelke went to fill a bucket with soap and water and Isabel’s relief turned sour. Now there were two people in the house. Now Isabel had to keep her mind on two people in her house, anxious all the more about the potential third—Johan, on his day off, coming up the driveway, hands in his pockets, his slow walk, his dripping way of leaning in and saying, Missed me?