The Safekeep(26)

And Hendrik, his words now clear as a bell: “Forbid what? Say it, Mother, please say it, what is it you think you forbid me to do? You can’t say it, you can’t even think it, of course you can’t, how can you even conceive of such a thing, what life have you lived and now all alone in this house with your maids and your—curtains that need cleaning and the tea at twelve and God the boring fucking—”

The slap rang out crisply. There was nothing else that sound could have been, nothing but the rush of a hand to a cheek. Then Mother’s gasp, followed by a single startled cry.

Later, in her room, Isabel went to her knees at his feet. She crouched near and pressed a damp towel to his bleeding lip. Dawn was paling behind the curtains. Mother’s ring had caught on his mouth, chipped a tooth, broke skin. Hendrik sat obediently on the edge of the bed and let Isabel clean his face.

“He doesn’t love me,” he told her. He was crying. “He lied, he doesn’t love me.”

Isabel wanted to not hear the words in the same way she could sometimes blur her eyes when looking at something—decide not to see it in full focus, decide to disengage. She swallowed and lowered the cloth from his face. All of her recoiled from the word love. She couldn’t keep the rush of sickness that came over her. She recalled: Hendrik, on the damp mossy ground, Edwin writhing over him.

“It’s better like this,” she said. “It was wrong. It is better that it’s over.”

“Wrong?” He asked it quietly. Isabel did not answer. He continued, that same small voice. “Have you ever wanted anyone, Isa? You have never. You can’t even—Oh. You’re just like her, aren’t you?”

Isabel wanted to say, I’m not. She wasn’t sure this was true, only that Hendrik had meant it as an insult. She said, “Perhaps I am, if it means I know right from wrong. And I know it is wrong for a man to force a—”

He knocked her hand away from his lap. “Edwin didn’t force me. I wanted him. I—” The rest was choked off with a sound. He pushed her away and got up.

Isabel said, “Hendrik,” and he said, “No,” and left.

He slept through the next day, and the day after that. And then he, too, like Louis before him, was suddenly gone. At first Isabel thought he’d return: he ran away in the night, left a note saying he could not bear the house—could not bear the thought of the countryside any longer, and the people in it. He said, I am not made for this place.

Mother did not discuss the letter with Isabel. She locked it away in her drawer. And then, a week or two onward, Hendrik sent a message saying he was out of money and had nowhere to stay. But he would not come back home, and Mother would not part with money unless he returned, if only for a while. In the end, it was Uncle Karel who mediated a solution: found Hendrik a small apartment in Scheveningen, would check in on him at intervals and report back to Mother. Isabel never did find out what Hendrik’s life had looked like during those years. He would go on to finish school, eventually. He would study, eventually. She missed him with a nauseated fear, a gut-deep thing. He had been half her life for so long, and then all at once he was gone. Once he was a child and she would hold him through his night terrors. Now he had grown and cried over the touch of a man and let him kiss him under trees, on the ground. And in his eyes she was her mother’s daughter, uncomplicated and stupid in all matters of the heart and the same at seventeen as she was at nine years old, at thirteen. Unchanged.

The day Uncle Karel sent news that Hendrik was set up in his apartment, a good month after the whole affair began, Mother said, “Well, that’s that, then. Just you and me now, Isabel.” It was noon. They were having tea. Mother said, “Good. Nice and quiet.”

Mother got sick when Isabel was twenty-one. First it went slow, and then it went fast. Isabel called Hendrik and Louis back home. Louis came for a day and then left. Hendrik came with a man, tall and handsome and graying at the temples. It was raining and the droplets rolled off the shoulders of his coat—Hendrik held the umbrella.

Isabel said the man could not stay at the house. Hendrik was wild-eyed and pale and he took Isabel aside and barely breathed as he said, “Isabel. Please, Isabel,” and Isabel said, “She is sick. Are you here to make it worse, or are you here to help?” They were whispering in the study. The man still stood outside, under the front-door awning. Hendrik turned from her to wipe at his face and then went and had a murmured conversation with his friend, whom he then took back to the station.

Hendrik would not speak with Isabel that week. He sat at Mother’s side and held her hand and ignored Isabel. Once, the first year when Hendrik did not show for Christmas, Mother had said: “I suppose we all have our priorities.” Isabel had held him as a child. He now loved others more than he loved her. His mother was on her deathbed and he cried over a man. Such were things, and Isabel lifted her chin at it, ground her teeth at it, made herself bigger.

Mother passed on a Friday evening. She had done suddenly better the previous day, had sat up in bed and for a second had recognized Hendrik but not Isabel. And so the next morning Hendrik said he would go to Scheveningen for the day. He didn’t say why or for whom, but Isabel could guess. He gave her a phone number to call in case Mother worsened, and Isabel said she would, but she did not. She was holding her mother’s hand, she could not leave, she could not go to the phone.