The Safekeep(14)

She kept a torch next to her bed, always, and let it guide her way down the stairs in a bright circle of light. There was no one standing at the front door, no one standing at the back door. The garden stared back at her, blues and grays, asleep. A breeze pulled at the hem of her nightgown. The arms of the lilac shrub swayed. In the kitchen Isabel lit a small fire against the snapping cold of the night and turned on the radio at its quietest. She had a glass of water. She sat by the window and breathed. A single bird warbled at the first note of dawn.

Isabel took the spoons from the drawer and laid them out in the same order as before: biggest to smallest. They lined up so neatly. She counted them: eleven. She counted them again: eleven.

She breathed hotly. Counted them again: eleven.

One missing. One spoon missing. She took out the drawer and opened the cabinet and looked in all the spaces where a spoon might have fallen. Eleven.

Eleven.

I watched her, Eva had said. She’s just a girl, she’d said.

Harmless.

The next morning, Isabel was waiting for her: laid out a plate for her, a glass, cutlery. When Eva came in, sleep-rubbed, Isabel followed her movements closely—sitting upright in her chair, eyes dry at the edges. When Eva went to the drawer, Isabel said, “No need,” and gestured at the table: everything was ready.

Eva looked about, confused a moment. She said, “Oh.” And, “Thank you,” uncertain. She sat down, taking in the breakfast table. The glass of milk. She said, “Is Neelke coming today?”

“No,” Isabel said.

“Right,” Eva said.

“It’s just us today.”

Eva looked up. “No errands today?”

“No. I’ll be staying home. All day.” She nodded at the food. “Eat,” she added, a command. “It’s for you.”





4


A WEEK HAD PASSED AND Isabel was counting down: three more to go. She sent Louis a quick note tracking the extra costs incurred in the household due to Eva’s stay. She called Johan and told him she would be too busy, this week, for a visit, and he said, Oh, come now, Isabel, as if she was playing a fun game. She insisted that she could not come to him, that she had a guest in the house.

“A guest?” he asked, that same dripping way, words stretched out. “Should I be worried about my Isabel being stolen away from me?”

A roiling, seasick feeling. Nerves, Hendrik said. She hung up and sat at the telephone desk and in a notebook she made an inventory: divided the house into floors, the floors into rooms, and each room had three columns—items, how many, placement. She filled the page and then tore it out, filled the back, too, cramped writing to fit it all. She kept the paper, folded up small, in her pocket. Sometimes she’d reach for it: not to take it out, not to check anything, but just to touch it.

Eva came to find her in the garden and asked whether she could borrow one of the bikes in the shed.

“Why?” Isabel asked. She was on her knees, twisting the rhubarb stems out of the ground, placing them in her basket.

“I thought I’d go to town.”

“What do you have to do in town?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Get an ice cream, send a letter.” Eva tipped a finger to a purple rhododendron bulb. “And it’ll be nice to go somewhere a moment, really, I don’t think I’ve ever been just in one small place for so long—I mean it’s a big house, of course, but what I mean is…” She trailed off. “Would you like to come with me?”

A strand of Isabel’s hair was stuck to her cheek. She could feel it. It was a warm day and she was sweating. She said, “No.” And then, a beat later, “You can take Hendrik’s old bike. But it’ll be too big for you.”

“I don’t mind.”

“You’ll have to roll up your trousers,” Isabel said. “The chain will dirty the hem.”

Eva looked at her blankly. It lasted a moment too long, too silent, and so Isabel said, “You don’t even know the way.”

Whatever thought Eva had sunk into now lifted with a snap and she said, “Oh, I’ll figure it out. You can tell me. I’ll ask someone along the way.”

“The bike wheel wobbles.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said, and stood there a beat longer. She didn’t fidget. She barely seemed to move at all.

A bead of sweat rolled from Isabel’s cheek to her neck. Eva followed its track, eyes slow, and Isabel wiped it away. She cut the leaves off one more stem of rhubarb, then got up to show Eva to the shed. She kept her arms to her body; she didn’t want Eva to see the sweat stains, or where her blouse stuck to her back. Eva wrangled Hendrik’s old bike out of the shed. It had gone unused for years, was so rusted that a puff of dust came off it when Eva clapped the saddle. The bike was indeed too tall for her: it took her a few tries to get on, and when she biked, her toes barely reached the pedals. She waved at Isabel, cycling down the gravel path. “I won’t be long!” she shouted. She had a small linen bag hanging from her shoulder. Her hair was up in a short ponytail. She’d painted her lips that same heart-attack red as the first night they’d met.

Isabel watched her disappear around the stand of trees and then rushed inside, upstairs. Eva kept Mother’s room in a mess—sheets rumpled, clothes piled. Bottles, tubes, cakes of powder. Once, when Isabel was twelve, her mother found a pile of blood-soiled stockings Isabel had kept under her bed, and for the mess Isabel received two strikes over her wrists. It had been her first period, and she thought she was dying—no one had told her about bleeding. No one had told her what to do with the mess. Mother had no patience for mess.