The Safekeep(27)

It happened like this: Mother was a shriveled heap in bed. Her hands were soft fists like babies have soft fists. She took a quiet breath, and then not the next. Hendrik came home that evening and she told him. He wanted to go up to see Mother and his knees gave out halfway up the stairs. There he was stuck, could not move for a while. His crying sounded more like long inhales. Isabel did not go with him into Mother’s room.

Later, in the kitchen, he said, “Why. Why didn’t you call.” His voice was rough, eyes tired.

Isabel did not answer. She had poured herself a glass of jenever. She drank it and thought, You were where you wanted to be. I was where I needed to be.

She thought, And now you will leave again.

And he did. She would barely hear from him in the year that followed. Then came a summer, and Isabel found old letters they’d written to Mother as children and sent Hendrik one of his, and he wrote back immediately, thanking her. She wrote back with an update on the house and the estate in general. He wrote back describing his new apartment, saying she should come by, perhaps. She said he was welcome to visit her, too: the roses had come up nicely this year.

They sat in the garden, on the bench under the firs. Hendrik looked well. He was kind to her, and listened in a soft way, and often looked out to the sky and took a deep breath, as though that, too, was joy. Into a lull in the conversation he said: “I’ve met someone.”

Hendrik, sixteen and waiting at the window. Hendrik on the mossy ground, writhing. Hendrik on her bed’s edge with his bleeding lip and—

“We live together now,” he said. “An apartment, it’s not much, but—he is very good. I would like for you to meet him, Isabel.”

Isabel did not want to meet anyone. She just wanted this: the two of them, summer. Mother’s bench. He read her silence for what it was and then turned to her and took her hand in his and said: “You don’t have to be her, Isabel.” He meant their mother. She knew he meant their mother. He said, “You can be whoever you want to be now. Do you know that? You have all the freedom. She’s gone. You’re not taking care of her, you’re not bound to this house. Go where you want to go. Meet whoever. Love.”

Bound to this house, he said. As if it was a tether and not a shelter. And not her own love, too.

She did meet Sebastian, however. Hendrik came one afternoon and stayed for dinner. When Sebastian got out of the car Isabel held her breath. He was short and striking and dark like some of the farm boys were dark—like the men who came from the south and worked in the greenhouses. But he was not a farmer, or a greenhouse worker. He wore an expensive-looking suit. He sounded French but looked different in a way she didn’t think was French. Her first thought was, foreign. Her second thought was a jumble of words, things she’d heard said in connection to the word foreign—never good things, never safe things—and a nervous coil tightened within her. Hendrik’s hand was on Sebastian’s elbow, guiding him toward her. Hendrik could barely look away from him. This stranger would come into her house and she had the urge to rush back in and cover everything, hide it all from him: the things, the walls, the paintings. The pictures.

Hendrik didn’t kiss her hello. Once he’d been a child and she had held him through his night terrors. She thought, I am the only one who remembers that. She thought—He has forgotten and there’s no one left who remembers that.

Sebastian was quiet in the kitchen. Hendrik encouraged him to ask Isabel specific questions: “Oh, ask her this!” Which he then did, verbatim, which Isabel then answered shortly and didn’t ask him anything in return. Hendrik allowed this for several minutes before he had enough and said, “Oh, what a boring conversation this is, come see the house!” And then pulled Sebastian from his seat and herded him into rooms. Isabel stayed behind and listened to them walk through the house, Hendrik saying: “So here’s where I banged my forehead against the mantelpiece, which is how I got this scar.” And, “This is Great-Aunt Cora in her headdress, a real heartbreaker.” And, “This is the rug, it is simply a rug, and this is a vase of flowers Isabel cut from the garden, are you enjoying this tour very much? You should, I’m doing an excellent job.”

There had been a moment, after dinner that day, a short and uneasy moment, when Hendrik had left the room for a while and it was just the two of them, Isabel and Sebastian. She remained seated. He walked slowly about the room, a hand in his pocket. The back of his head was neatly shaven. He had a mole right above his lip. He had dressed up to come see her. Isabel knew that Hendrik must have told him all about her: that she was lonely and bitter and took after her mother too much.

That’s how this man would think about her, too, now.

He paused by a framed picture left on the side table. He picked it up. Isabel tensed. She knew which one it was: Haasje, the dog. Black-and-white. It had been taken in the garden, the young pup lounging under one of the firs, in the shade.

“There was a dog?” he asked. He was trying hard to work away the French inflection to his Dutch.

“Yes,” Isabel said. “Was.”

“I had a dog.” He put the picture back. “Well, my cousin did. But the dog liked me best. Mother and I moved in with my aunt the same week they got the dog. My cousin wanted to call the dog Sebastian. Some sort of joke, I think. Mother forbade it.”

“What did he—call it, then?”