The Safekeep(15)

Isabel went to the secretary, crouched, tried to open it: locked. The drawer too—locked. The key was gone. Isabel upturned some things to see whether she could find it and came up empty. She did glance over a letter, sent by Louis earlier that year, apparently written soon after they’d first met. He was an awkward writer, tried to expound on Eva’s beauty but seemed unable to come up with any word other than heerlijk to describe any part of her. Delightful. Her delightful face. Her delightful voice. The delightful way her delightful bosom pressed against—

Isabel put the letter down. On the nightstand, stuck into the edge of her mother’s picture frame, Eva had wedged a different photograph. It was a woman. Dark hair and a broad smile, looking up from a book. She, too, was lounging in a garden. In a chair, in a white dress; one shoe was dangling off her foot, held only by a big toe. The picture was taken hastily—a little blurry, a little out of focus. There was no name, no date. She looked like a harsher version of Eva: eyes more deep-set, cheeks more pronounced. Pretty, still. Family.

It seemed obvious, but Isabel hadn’t considered it: Eva had to have come from somewhere. Had once been a child, toothless and wobbling. Isabel plucked the picture from its hold. She fingered the scalloped edge, trying to imagine, and then abruptly stopped. The mud was caked under her nails and her knees were stained from the earth: she had dragged the garden into the house. Isabel tossed the yellowing thing back at the table and left. She tried to find calm in the quiet of the empty house. A bug bumped its body against the glass, once, twice. Three times. She had spent the week since Eva’s arrival wanting that emptiness back, longing for it with a hollow belly of desire. She wanted Eva gone, at times so badly she thought she’d just snap, grab Eva by the back of the neck, and drag her out—lock the doors behind her.

But she was restless now. Eva wasn’t gone, she’d only just stepped out. She’d be back any moment. Isabel washed her hands and changed her clothes. She unfolded her inventory and walked through it, room to room, and made sure everything was accounted for. A pencil box was missing. Neelke had dusted in the study yesterday. Isabel made note of it. She stood in the dining room, paper flat on the table, and thought. The grandfather clock clicked its tongue at her. On the wall opposite, a painting of a landscape. A purpling dune, a horizon of windblown pines. It was, as Eva had guessed, the Veluwe.

Isabel took the car to the city, parked behind the church. She walked with her chin slightly up toward the Nieuwe Markt, the post office. At home she’d scribbled a quick postcard to a cousin in Brussels. She had meant to send word for weeks.

It was a slow day, the building nearly empty. Quiet conversations echoed under the high ceiling. A man was pushing a cart full of post across the hall. Isabel asked for the right postage, asked the woman in the booth—as an afterthought—whether she’d seen a young woman earlier. Bleached hair, short.

The woman, watery-eyed, thought about this a moment. “Maybe,” she said. “Froukje? By the name Froukje?”

“No. Thank you,” Isabel said, cleared her throat and left.

Back at the house, Hendrik’s old bike was parked out by the gravel, on the edge of the grass bed. Eva was inside: in the kitchen, at the table, writing in her black notebook. Eating a pear. The juice ran down the back of her hand. When she noticed Isabel she turned the notebook over, put it down face-first. She wiped her hand on a kitchen towel. Her lipstick had rubbed off.

“You were gone,” she said, and said it in such a way that for a second Isabel thought Eva had seen Isabel in her car, had seen Isabel scurry in and out of the post office. Had stood around a corner, perhaps, smirking to herself, knowing, about to make fun of Isabel for—

Isabel touched the back of a chair, took her hand away again. She said, “Yes.”

There was another pear, left in the middle of the table, propped like a statue. Eva said, “I got one for you, too.”

Just the one. Not a bag of pears, or several for the fruit basket. Just the two: one for her, one for Isabel. I don’t want it, Isabel wanted to say. She said, “Thank you.” She took the pear. Put it in her pocket.

Eva looked amused. “You won’t eat it?”

“Later,” Isabel said, and then, with a few aborted movements, fled upstairs. In her bedroom, Isabel—sitting on the edge of her bed—held the pear in the cup of her hands. If she’d eat it now, she’d have to go downstairs to throw away the pits, the core. If she ate it later, Eva might walk by, see her eat it. She did not want Eva to see her eat it. She could throw the whole thing away. She could open the window and throw it away.

It was a water-heavy fruit, full-ripe. The first bite spilled on Isabel’s skirt. It wouldn’t show: the fabric was brown, checkered. There was no way of eating it in silence—the sounds it made, the wet. Isabel ate through the whole thing: the flesh and stick and pits and core and all. She made sure nothing was left of it, as though it had never been given in the first place.

Her arms were dripping. Wet all around her mouth. She had to wash her face in the basin afterward.

The spot on her skirt where the fruit had stained remained throughout the day, a cloying brush to the back of her hand.



* * *



One silver candle holder went missing. There were two of them, an unappealing set, stumpy and old. Her mother’s. Kept in the back of the cupboard, taken out only for occasional polishing. One was gone. It was evening when Isabel found out. She rummaged through the kitchen, dining room, thinking—This will prove me right, this will—