The Safekeep(35)

There was a bar at the back of the establishment and they were not the only wet guests to have sought refuge. Something like humor hung about the place—a commiseration over a sunny day lost, an amusement over shared misery. There was a tall fireplace against the wall, and someone was lighting a fire. People cheered when the flame caught. A few kids went to stand by it, hands outstretched, and the room grew damp and humid.

The four of them settled into a booth. Sebastian went to order their drinks and came back pulled tighter than when he’d left—tense, jaw clenched. He remained standing and Hendrik said, “What? What happened?” and Sebastian said, “Nothing, could you pass me my wallet?”

Hendrik reached for him. Sebastian moved away from it, irritated, said, “No. Just—give me the damned wallet, please, if you want your drink.”

Hendrik gave him his wallet, then stood—made to walk with him to the bar. Sebastian said, “No, sit down,” and Hendrik said, “I can’t come with you? Is that not allowed?” to which Sebastian said, “No scene.” It was a command. Hendrik, when he replied, replied to something else altogether: “Look, you can’t carry everything back by yourself.”

Sebastian relented silently. Isabel kept her eyes on the table. Dark varnish, chipped in places. Under the varnish the glimpse of wood was lighter, much lighter. It was only she and Eva at the table now. Eva was still breathing like she was recovering from the run.

“They wouldn’t serve him,” Eva said, out of nowhere and into nothing: generally and vaguely at the space between them. She said, “They wouldn’t serve him unless he paid beforehand.”

Like she was telling Isabel. Like she was making sure Isabel knew, understood what happened. It wasn’t the first thing she had said to her since the night before, but it felt like it.

“I know,” Isabel said. It came out harsher than she meant it. She swallowed, and then on that wave of emotion: “I’m not as clueless as you think.”

The back of the room was an open conservatory. The rain blurred the view, and the outside was just a shapeless green, the splatter of water on ground. The ceilings were high, the echo bad. Eva put her elbows on the table. Her hair was still dark with the wet, her eyes stern. She said, “All right. So what is it that you are?”

Isabel was reminded—a bathroom of a restaurant, something from another life. Isabel had told her Louis would tire of her. Eva had answered, in that same tone as now: Hm. We’ll see.

“I—” Isabel started, and was cut off: Sebastian and Hendrik’s return, hands full of drinks. Eva turned to them, smiling, expression cleared, not a trace of what had just passed. She tried to ask Sebastian something quietly, and he only said, “Let’s just drink our drinks, please, thank you.”

Eva was pushed further into the booth, and now they were seated in twos: Hendrik and Sebastian a pair, Eva and Isabel—a pair. Isabel shifted, kept her distance. Her mouth was dry, and she drank too quickly, felt it rise fast. She was tired from a day in the sun, from the water, from a sleepless night preceded by a sleepless night preceded by Eva’s presence in the hall across—constant and pressing on her brain like a thumb. Pressing, pressing.

A conversation was taking place. Eva had asked Sebastian about his childhood, and Sebastian answered with compact phrases at first, short bites of information. He was still locked up in discomfort, still ill at ease, and replied to Eva’s questions as such: he was born in Algiers. No, he remembered none of it. No, he was four when they moved to Paris.

Eva hummed and didn’t push. Isabel had heard parts of the story before, flashes of it, and knew that Sebastian never spoke of any of it: not of the move or what had been left behind or of the news that occasionally lifted out of the radio and into living rooms, disembodied and distant: civil war, independence. None of that. He only ever mentioned his mother, not his father. Daughter of a French politician, a family of very important people. She had not been allowed to marry whom she wanted to marry. She raised him alone. They lived with her sister’s family. C’est comme ?a, is what he’d say of it when he tired of questions. It is what it is.

He didn’t say that now. He loosened unexpectedly. The drink, the melancholy heat. The slow way Eva eased the conversation out of him. He spoke of his mother: how beautiful she had been in her youth, movie-star beauty. How she had been too young to have him when she had him, and heartsick, still, and how she tried her best. To raise him, to have the family accept him, the brown child they desperately tried to pass off as white.

Isabel knew what she’d thought when she first met Sebastian. Foreign had been the word. She hadn’t wanted him in her house. She hadn’t wanted him touching her things. She knew, too, what she thought of Eva when she first saw her.

She knew what that made her, what kind of person that meant she was. She ran hot with it now, indignant and embarrassed all at once, and then Eva said, “Hmm. I had an aunt in Algiers.”

Sebastian went quiet. He said, “Had?”

Eva nodded and drank to the bottom of her beer.

Hendrik asked, “Where’s your family nowadays, Eva?”

“Oh,” she said. “Nowhere.” And then looked around as if waiting impatiently for the next round of drinks. “Or some of them are somewhere, who knows. Ah! More drinks?”

“All of them?” Isabel asked. “All of them gone?”