The Safekeep(52)

“You think you love him?”

“Good God.” Eva turned—padded the collar of her blouse to her face, her sweat. She said, “What kind of question is that.”

“A simple one.”

Eva flashed her a look: dangerous. She held her ground for a moment. Held Isabel’s eye, nostrils flared, and then she was gone—walking in a non-direction, taking a step and stopping, taking another and stopping. “I need—” she said. “I need to pack. I need—”

“He doesn’t care about you,” Isabel told her.

“Oh, what do you know, Isabel.”

Eva wasn’t looking at her. Isabel told her, “He met someone else. That’s why he called me. He met someone else. He wants you gone.”

“I’m sure he did,” Eva said. “I’m sure he does.” She didn’t seem surprised by it, or offended. She looked distracted, saying quickly, “And Louis will meet another girl after that, and another after that, oh, what does it matter? They will come and they will go and isn’t it—And I will be there, I’ll be true now, he’ll see, I’ll stay, I won’t—I can’t—”

“You think you’re the first girl he’s brought home?” Isabel said. “You think you’re the first girl he’s promised to marry?”

“So what!” Eva laughed, a thin and sad laugh. “So he doesn’t love me! Who cares about that? Who cares about—”

“I care,” Isabel said. Her voice broke on the syllable.

Eva’s face was a grimace around a smile. Her chin was dimpled, trembling. “What use,” she said, “is that to me? So you care. I have nothing, Isabel. I have not a thing in this life. Do you understand what that means, to someone like me, to get to—to have the promise of a—”

“So it was about money,” Isabel cut in. “You wanted his money.”

Eva stopped short. A flicker—something, as if Isabel had snapped her fingers between her eyes, brought her back. She laughed again, that same hollow sound. “Sure,” she said, and nodded. “Yeah, it’s about money, why not.”

“I have money,” Isabel said. “I could—You could, you could stay, we could—”

“We could what? God, Isabel. You have an allowance. What do you think, that you’d keep me? Keep me here? How? As what? Your maid? Your—” She swallowed, twice in a row, and Isabel tried to reply with quick-heated words and Eva cut her off with a louder “And then in a week, month, year, when you’re bored and done with me—then what? What am I to do then? You’ll kick me out? You’ll leave me to—”

“I won’t. I won’t be done with you.”

“Oh, you won’t? How nice.” Eva was sharp now, sharp and fast: “Are you listening? I’m telling you: your word is nothing, it’s—it’s—air. What certainty in life do you have? What certainty can you give me? What home?”

“This home,” she said. “My home.”

Eva shook her head. “No, you can’t,” she said. “It’s not yours to give.”

Isabel opened her mouth, closed it. The argument ran around her in circles, and she wasn’t sure where it had started, and where it had ended; what she said or hadn’t said or might still say. All she wanted was to make a sound—just a sound, a miserable groan—and have it arrive at Eva’s feet as an explanation, fully formed and coherent: Don’t go. Stay.

“God,” Eva said, and wiped her eyes on her sleeves. She had painted her lashes and the fabric came away stained. She said it twice more, “God, oh God,” and then marched out of the room. Isabel made to follow immediately, and Eva stopped her with a quick hand into the wide distance between them:

“No,” she said. “Leave me be.”

Isabel stopped. The ground held her: two hands risen up from the floorboards, a grip on her ankles. She couldn’t move if she wanted to.

Eva’s footsteps were quick clacks across the dining room, across the kitchen floor. A door that opened, a door that closed.

And Isabel, stranded in the empty space between a couch and a wall. A home that wasn’t hers to give.



* * *



It was a dark dipping moment of night when Eva returned. Isabel was up in her room, listening: the rummaging, the slow steps up the stairs. She could not imagine where Eva had been and could imagine all too well where Eva had been: the neighbors, the town, a bar, someone’s car, someone’s bed. Louis, perhaps—somehow she could’ve found Louis, and she had cried in his arms and he could’ve decided he loved her again, more than this other girl, and he could’ve taken her home or to a hotel and she could’ve said, Oh, I’ve missed you! and he could buy her things like clothes and shoes and pretty rings to put in her ears and a roof should he want to and—

Isabel lay in bed in her clothes over the sheets and let herself believe this was true, that Eva had done all of it, had done the worst of it in the span of a few hours. The picture of Eva’s mother was still in Eva’s room. Eva would not leave without it, she thought. She would come back for that picture, if nothing else.

I have not a thing in this life, she’d said. She had said it before. Isabel had thought she meant—that she had meant family. That she had meant loved ones. Isabel had thought she was saying: I am like you.