The Safekeep(24)

Behind her, Eva whispered: “Yes.”

Isabel left, and Eva followed: a sober procession through the house, up the stairs. Isabel still felt Eva’s presence like a bruise. Isabel’s hand on the stair rail was clammy. Neither of them turned on the light, and so the hall remained dark, eyes slow to adjust. Up on the landing, Isabel passed a hand along her door, looking for the handle. Behind her Eva wasn’t moving, wasn’t making a sound. And when she did, it was very quiet, barely a breath: “Isabel.”

Isabel found the door handle. She held it in her grip. She felt sick, shaking. Don’t let her come a step closer, she thought, and Eva took a step closer. “Isabel.” A touch, a reaching thing: two fingers to the dip of her spine, barely there.

Don’t let—, Isabel thought, and turned, and Eva was there, right there: a hot shape in the dark. Isabel either pulled or was pulled—a rushed and clumsy embrace. The kiss happened without her knowledge, without her understanding the steps it took: how they swayed in the middle of the hallway the one moment and found wall the next; how Isabel came to hold the curve of Eva’s jaw, thumb to the bony joint when Eva opened her mouth for her, did so with a stutter of a sound for her; when Eva came to fist a hand under the heat of Isabel’s hair, when she came to move against her, puff against her. Isabel pushed in closer. She wanted to push Eva through the wall, wanted to push herself into Eva, too. The slide of Eva’s tongue made a pendulum swing low in her belly, made something pitch like a whistle. Eva would not be quiet, would not be still, would grab at her and say, “Mm, ah—” Sounds from the back of her throat and restless hands pulling, hot mouth wide, putting her teeth to Isabel’s lip. The jolt of the bite made Isabel reach, pinch Eva hard at the waist and Eva gasped and—

Isabel stumbled back. She was out of breath. Her mind had gone a white-noise hush. She couldn’t see Eva well in the dark: only the glint of her eyes. Eva swallowed and her throat made a click of a sound. Isabel touched her own mouth again: swollen. It felt bruised.

Her heart gave a single terrified thump. She moved away, found her door—opened it, closed it quick behind her. Stood there for a moment, forehead against the wood. The terror was as wide as the want: a boulder moved from the gaping mouth of a cave.

She had left the sash open earlier that evening, before her date with Johan. Before—

A breeze whispered in and cooled the sweat on the back of her neck. She waited. Eventually, she heard Eva’s door opening, closing. And then: silence. The creak of bedsprings. Isabel’s blood rushing in her ears, her breath against the wood. Isabel licked her lips, and they were sore. She did it again, and again.

Sleep, when it came, offered no relief.





PART II





6


HENDRIK TOOK PIANO LESSONS AS a child and Isabel did not. She had tried several times on her mother’s insistence but was not very good at it and so was only angered by it. Music, when she heard it, did not sound to her like the sum of parts—it was a finished whole, a unit of cacophony. At the piano, she would put her fingers to the keys and they each rang out like a start and did not come together at all. She disliked it. Hendrik took to it. Mother would make him play jingles when guests came for dinner, which he did, quietly and with a sulk. Louis would then excuse himself from the table and stomp up the stairs, with his heavy teenage body and his heavy teenage legs.

When they were young the piano teacher would come by once a week and Hendrik practiced downstairs. The teacher was a woman in her seventies, with big dentures and hair dyed a shock of black. She never played the piano herself, only told Hendrik how to do it. She always smelled like she’d been in the sun too long—warm and dry. Then, when Hendrik was in his teens, she retired and Hendrik said he wouldn’t play again but then Mother found a tutor in Zwolle who used to teach at the conservatory. The man came by their house one afternoon for tea, for introductions. Isabel didn’t think much of him. He was tall in the same way all men were tall, had his floppy hair cut in the same way all men had their hair cut. He spoke with a lot of air in his words, like he was about to run out of breath, crossed and recrossed his legs often.

Hendrik had sat at the table and hadn’t spoken and when the piano tutor asked him to say something about his favorite piece to play, Hendrik had blushed violently and said that he didn’t know. That he had never thought of it. Which was a lie, Isabel knew, and could not understand, and disliked the man and the conversation and had left the room to make more tea.

Hendrik would continue his lessons. He was sixteen, Isabel seventeen, and school was just a thing they had to bear for a little while longer and then they would be done. Louis had moved out the year prior, and Hendrik practiced the piano whenever he could, long, rambling hours on the thing and the music would echo up and through the house—a rushed medley of Beethoven on repeat. He would play it fast and loud, like something was chasing him down the lines of the sheet music. Isabel would do her homework and scrub her knuckles at her ears and eyes and ears again as though that could lessen the volume.

The tutor came by on Thursday afternoons. Hendrik would wait for him, sit at the window, at times a full half hour before he was due. Isabel would say, “Hendrik, come away from the window, please,” and Hendrik would only answer by saying things like, “Did you know he’s played for the national orchestra? And he’s only twenty-seven. Isn’t that young? He’s met the Queen once, have you ever met anyone who’s met the Queen? He’s married but only just last year, and he hasn’t mentioned his wife much, I don’t think they’ve known each other very long, don’t you think it’s strange how sometimes people marry just because they think they—”