The Safekeep(2)

“What do you mean, before?”

“Before we moved in. Someone else might’ve broken a plate. There were always only five of them, no? What happened to the sixth?”

“Those are—Hendrik. Those are Mother’s plates.”

“No, no. The house came with the…” He gestured vaguely. “Crockery. Chairs.”

She had been eleven when they moved to the east of the country, and Louis—the oldest—thirteen. Hendrik was small for his age at ten, a hollow-cheeked and melancholy boy. Isabel hadn’t thought he remembered much of those early days in the house. They mostly spoke of what came before: their childhood in Amsterdam, Father before he got sick, the smell of the city in December, a toy train that went round and round.

But he was right somehow. An odd angle of a thought that hadn’t struck her before—they’d moved into a finished house, a full house. Nearly everything laid out: the sheets, the pots, the vases in the windowsills.

“But it was Mother’s…” Isabel trailed off. Their mother had loved the hare’s pattern. The house was full of it: hare figurines on sills, hares on the tiled back of the hearth.

Hendrik said, “We used to have—Oh, you remember, in Amsterdam, we had the plates with the bluebells. No, I think it belonged to—that woman Uncle Karel was married to back then, no? Didn’t she get the house ready for us?”

“Uncle Karel was never married,” Isabel said.

“Oh, briefly. Tall. Birthmark on her cheek. Would say hello with a yodel.”

“No.”

“She was with us for a while, before Mother joined. You really don’t remember?”

She didn’t remember a woman. She didn’t remember the day of their arrival, or anyone showing them around, telling them where to go, where to sleep, why the beds were already made, already—

“Don’t obsess over this,” Hendrik said. “Isa? Don’t do that.”

She was pinching the skin on the back of her hand. She stopped. Cleared her throat, touched her hat a third time. “Well, maybe Louis knows.”

“Right,” Hendrik said, like the thought of Louis knowing anything was entertaining. “He’s bringing a girl, did he tell you?”

Louis usually brought girls to their dinners. The last time they’d had a meal with just the three of them had been accidental: Louis’s date stood him up. Isabel had thought, Good riddance, and then found that Louis—when not in the company of relative strangers—in fact had little to say to his siblings. It was a long and stilted evening. Hendrik got very drunk, first loud and then very quiet. She and Louis had had to deliver him home: Hendrik lolling in the back of Louis’s car, throwing up in the gutter outside his building. Sebastian had leaned out the window in a dressing gown and called down, Jesus, what have you two done to him?

“I reserved for three,” she told Hendrik. It was the principle of the thing, the fact that Louis yet again hadn’t told her he’d be bringing a girl. Hadn’t called her. He never called her.

“I know you did.”

“It’s bad manners.”

“Hmm,” Hendrik agreed.

“Is it the same one as last time? I didn’t like her. Her neck was too wide.”

Hendrik laughed at this. Isa hadn’t meant it as a joke. He told her, “No. He’s bringing a new one,” and Isabel tsk’d and Hendrik smiled, closed-mouthed. “The love of his life this time, I’m told.”

“Really.”

“Really.” The cigarette was finished. People were coming in and out of the restaurant, guided by a server in a buttoned suit. Hendrik said, “Shall we?”

“He’s not inside yet.”

“I know.” Hendrik rolled up the window. “But shall we?”

They went. It still took another half hour before Louis showed up, during which Hendrik smoked three more cigarettes, drank two beers, chattered idly, and then started up again about whether or not he should join Sebastian on his trip to Paris, to see the ill mother. It would be an indefinite stay. The doctors weren’t overly confident. He said this and kept eyeing Isabel in a way that felt like he knew she didn’t want to hear it and still he wanted her to tell him: to either go or not go, to give him some sort of blessing. Isabel could not. Isabel said, “You must do what you want to do.” She had a glass of water. She drank from it.

Hendrik said, “Would you be all right? If I were gone for a while?”

“Is that how you think I live? Breathlessly awaiting your next visit?”

“Isabel.”

“You’re gone now, too. You don’t live at home, might as well be in Paris, really. Might as well—” Isabel wanted to say more but stopped herself. She had never been to Paris. She knew it was far. She knew that when their mother was sick, all Hendrik had had to do was take a single train home, and that he rarely did.

Hendrik touched her arm. “Never mind,” he said. Then he picked up a new thread, a cheerful “So never mind that for now, anyway tell me something new, something exciting. Tell me how’s your man, Isa, tell me about that.”

It brought her up short. “My—what?”

“Oh, you know. Old neighbor Johan.”

A terrible kick of a feeling—as though she’d been caught in embarrassment: showing too much skin, speaking out of turn. She ignored the heat at the base of her neck and answered with a “Johan is certainly not my…”