The Safekeep(47)

“Harder,” she said later. In bed, on her front, hips tilted up. Isabel was behind her, over her, straddling the back of her thigh. They were rocking slow. Eva said, “More.” Isabel said, “What?” blurry with heat, with skin, and Eva repeated it again and again, more more more, until Isabel held her down. Until Isabel put her teeth to the back of her neck.

Again, terrors woke Eva up in the night. She choked into the pillow and Isabel had to shake her awake, then hold her and Eva sobbed into her, into the flat bone between her breasts. “What,” she asked. “What are these dreams, what is it, what is it?”

Eva didn’t answer. She tired herself out, she fell asleep. Isabel kissed the line of her hair, kissed her closed eyes. Isabel tried to breathe through the misery of holding someone else’s hurt within oneself and stayed awake like a guard dog—like there was something to keep out. Like there was someone trying to get in.



* * *



Then, on the first of July, a letter from Louis, sent with high urgency:

Unexpected delays will send note within a week. Apologies hope you’ll make it without me for just a little while longer will let you know as soon as I arrive much love Louis



Isabel read it first, heart pounding. Eva was upstairs. Isabel waited for her to come down, an impatient and unmoving rod at the dining table. And when Eva did come down, calling hello before entering, Isabel took the letter and held it out to her, gaze down. Eva, too, read it with something akin to terror.

“All right,” she said.

“Eva,” Isabel said. “We—”

“All right,” Eva said again. Her shoulders were straight, her face shuttered. “A few more days. Okay. A few more days.”

Isabel looked at her. Eva handed the letter back. “Let’s not talk about it. He’ll come when he’ll come. I’m—I’m going to the city, I want—We don’t have leeks, I thought to make something with leeks, have you seen the linen bag, I swear I left it in the kitchen last—”

Isabel folded the letter five times until it was only a very small square. She put it in the paper drawer, a stack of letters from Rian and some administration. Neelke wanted to make dinner but said she couldn’t find the small blue oven dish. Isabel thought, Small blue oven dish—as if scanning a list, searching—and then shook it off. Shook it off and told Neelke she didn’t have to make dinner. Eva had gone into the city for groceries—she didn’t have to make dinner. Neelke nodded and didn’t know where to go next, walked from one end of the room to the other, unsure.

“The curtains need dusting,” Isabel told her, and stepped aside to let Neelke pass.

Eva came back later than she said she would. She had several leeks sticking out of her linen bag, biking up the gravel path. Isabel was outside, waiting for her. Itchy and feeling silly for it. Eva had only been gone an hour. Isabel had spent a lifetime alone. She had spent a whole life without this woman, without her in this house, and now an hour. And now her heart raced at the sound of tires on gravel, the sight of her: first a dot, then a person, then a known shape, coming closer.

She walked back into the house before Eva would notice her waiting. Isabel saw herself for a brief second from the outside in: restless and demanding, and somehow—needy. A word she had never ascribed to herself, she had never needed anything that could not be easily given. The thought embarrassed her, the glimpse of herself in the mirror embarrassed her, and so she turned away from it all with a firm twist.

Eva cooked: soups and sauces, and she put lentils in the rice, fried the onions to a crisp. She made bread, bread that rose and baked with a smell that pushed through the wall, hot yeast, soft dough. She made enough to last them for two days, all the way through sundown Saturday. Sunday came and Louis had not yet called and Isabel did not go to church. Sunday came and instead Isabel spent the morning convincing herself she didn’t want to kiss Eva, then doing little else but kissing Eva into the shadowed wall in the hallway. She put her hand over Eva’s breast, a hot flush of shock at her own daring, and Eva pushed into her hand, made a long noise into her mouth. It was like they were hiding here, out of sight of the sun-drenched remainder of the house. It was like they were sneaking around, only it was Sunday, and the house was empty. Isabel said, “Eva,” and, “Eva.” And Eva said, “What?” She put her hand over Isabel’s, squeezed harder, said: “What, darling? Go on. Go on.”

Then Johan called the house on the phone and Isabel thought it would be Louis, and it wasn’t, and she was so giddy with relief she laughed and happily told Johan he better not come by, that she would be gone to visit family for a while. Eva watched her do it, lingering in the study doorway.

“Will you not let him know?” she asked when Isabel hung up.

Isabel looked at her, caught in a movement. “Let him know?” She said it like a question, like: finish this sentence.

“That you’re not interested,” Eva said. She leaned back against the wood. She had a tilt to her jaw as if she was expecting Isabel to say, Who’s to say I’m not interested? which made Isabel’s stomach twist fast.

“I’ve not,” she started, stopped. Eased her hands down the side of her skirt. “I don’t know how.”

“Don’t you?” Eva asked.

Isabel looked at her. She took a step, hesitated. Said, “Would you like me to?”