The Safekeep(18)

Isabel jerked away. The words felt as if they had been shouted across rather than hushed in the small stretch between them. She knows, Isabel thought, wildly, and then—what? Knows what? She had no answer.

Up in her room Isabel sat at her dresser. There was a cloud of bugs by the open window, catching the setting sun, dancing up, down. In the mirror Isabel tried to see what Eva had seen. She pulled the strand from behind her ear, arranged it over her eye again. Pushed it back, hand slow, smoothing it back. She touched her cheek, the corner of her wide mouth. Her fingers to her lips: she pushed two inside, over her tongue, the ridge of her teeth, and then a door slammed shut downstairs and Isabel got up and dried her fingers off on her skirts and swallowed three times. She could still taste her own skin. She rearranged herself, looked from the window to the wall to the bed.

She knows, Isabel thought, and flushed from the inside out—mortified, a shuddering shame at something she couldn’t name. She pushed her head out the window into the chilling evening, hoping the air would take it away from her.

That night, she woke up with the dredges of a dream still hot in her mouth: a pooling heat in her belly, the drag of a hand, the puff of breath on her neck. She thought someone had been in her room, but there was no one. There was only she.





5


AND THEN, OVER THE COURSE of several days: an engraved cake knife, missing. A decorative tile, a letter opener. A napkin ring.

Isabel sat through a long Sunday morning in the church’s pews. Around her the congregation mumbled along to a song and Isabel stared ahead, unseeing, at the blurry space between the piano and the pulpit. Before her: a big wooden cross. All around: the inlaid windows. Dust caught in motion. Two more weeks to Louis’s return. Yesterday, Isabel, in a fit of worry, had taken out all the good china from the vitrine and laid it out on the table. She filled a bowl with soapy water and took each dish in hand, wiped a wet cloth over the surface, collected the dust. The hares went around and around in a circle and Eva came and stood nearby and watched. She had come to the kitchen for something else, and seemed to have got distracted by Isabel and her cloth. Isabel did not address her. Eva did not seem to mind. After a while, she said, “Ah.”

Isabel was wiping gently over the ear of a milk jug.

Eva said, “You do that with such care.” It came out quietly.

Isabel held the jug in the dip of her palm. The night had made the space between them odd, hushed. Isabel met Eva’s gaze and said, “A house is a precious thing.”

Eva didn’t answer at first. She was looking at how Isabel was holding the little item—in a cloth, in her hand. There was something hazy about her eyes. Her mouth was slightly open, her tongue pushed behind her teeth. Isabel could see it, did not want to see it.

“Yes,” Eva said at length, on an intake of air. “Yes.”

The pastor was speaking of St. Augustine and his pears. Something about youth in a pear grove, something about stealing for stealing’s sake, something about the seduction of disobedience. The faint taste of pear rose in the back of Isabel’s throat. The pastor was quoting, looking down at notes from the pulpit: “It was foul, St. Augustine wrote of his childish actions. It was foul and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. And so in considering our own—”

A grip caught on Isabel’s lungs. She had to shuffle out of her pew, making people stand. Excuse me, she said, and thought she would faint. She did not faint. She stood outside, hands pushed to the wall, and tried to slow her breath.



* * *



Eva took to spending the afternoons tanning in the garden. She preferred a spot by the hedge, where the firs didn’t cast shade, and dragged her chair there: laid out in her two-piece, sunglasses on. She was turning a freckled brown, her hands the darkest. It made the beds of her nails stand out in pink. Isabel noticed it when she reached for something across the table, when she held a pen to write scribbled notes.

Neelke swore she didn’t take anything. She gave Isabel a teary speech: Why would I take anything? Why would I take, we have everything at home? And Isabel said: To sell, to pawn off, I don’t know why a thief would steal, you tell me. And Neelke said, No no no no! And cried, sobbed, at which point Eva came in smelling of suntan lotion. She looked bewildered by the scene, asked, “What—” And to Isabel, immediately: “What did you say to her, Isabel?”

“None of your business,” Isabel said, and Eva turned to Neelke with a “Sweetheart, what—”

“I have to go,” Neelke said, even though she was only halfway through her tasks for the day. Isabel and Eva watched her leave, watched through the window as she ran off with her bike in hand: still teary-eyed, still wiping at her face.

“Be nicer to her,” Eva told her, nostrils flared, and Isabel thought, Why? And said as much to Hendrik over coffee at a small Utrecht café, their midway point between their two homes—her driving down from the east, him driving up from the west. Hendrik was slow-limbed and happy looking that day—no jittering legs, no murmured conversations with himself. He was having a good week. He hadn’t yet mentioned Sebastian’s mother, or her health.

“Neelke is not stealing from you,” he said. He held his coffee by the rim, a cage of fingers over the mouth of the cup. “And Eva is just some girl Louis picked up somewhere. This is not a mystery.”

“But—the spoon. The—”