The Safekeep(53)

She had meant: money. Now she could hear from Eva’s tread in the hallway that she was trying to be quiet, trying not to creak the floorboard. Eva was moving like a whisper in the other room. The drag of a quiet something on the floor, the scrape of a chair, the whining hinges of the wardrobe doors. The light in her room was on and it filtered into the hallway like a crack, cast the faintest orange into Isabel’s room.

Isabel got out of bed, went to Eva’s room. Not Eva’s room—Mother’s. Eva was on her knees on the ground, packing her suitcase. She was doing a bad job of it. She was making the motions of folding without actually folding, and then throwing in the clothes in heaps. Everything that was on the table was now on the floor: her perfume bottles, her powders, her mother’s picture, her diary.

She looked up and her face was—blotchy, rubbed at, puffed. Isabel remembered the voice she’d used with Louis on the phone, high-pitched and syrupy. She remembered noting the bulging seam of Eva’s skirt that first night, at the restaurant; remembered the repulsion, the shrill annoyance, the humidity in the bathroom.

Eva continued packing and Isabel said, “Eva.” Eva did not reply, did not look at her anymore, and so Isabel went to her knees by her side and tried to still her hands—grabbed at her arms, which would not stay still, pulling away. “Eva,” she said again, and, “Please, please, don’t—”

Eva pushed her away with a sobbing breath and Isabel took her by the shoulders and turned her, made Eva face her, and Eva slumped. She wept for a few moments, forehead to Isabel’s chest; then she came up and said, “We’ve been so stupid,” and Isabel held her close and Eva continued: “We should have never, I should have never, what a catastrophe, what a—”

“No,” Isabel said. Eva had stopped weeping. She let Isabel bear her full weight, on her knees on the hard floor. Isabel told her: “There isn’t a version of me that could’ve looked away from you.”

Eva calmed down at that. “Don’t say that.” She spoke into the collar of Isabel’s dress: “Please stop saying things like that.”

They took to bed. It was confused and closed-eyed. Eva said, “Turn off the light, turn it off,” and Isabel, half out of her dress already, had to go turn off the light; bumped into things on the floor, kicked something, the clatter of a bottle. Eva’s hands shook the whole time. Isabel buried herself between Eva’s legs, held her by her heavy thighs, her ass. She was swollen, breathless. Isabel ate her, the loud suck of a full-ripe fruit; she ate the flesh and the seeds and the core and all.

Afterward, Eva fell asleep with an away slant, the line of her spine turned to Isabel. Their feet were still tangled. Isabel swallowed the taste of Eva; swallowed again, and again. Her throat felt dry. She stumbled on her way to the bathroom. She drank with her mouth under the tap; her face was a sharp shadow in the mirror, puffy-mouthed and wide-eyed in the dark. The water dripped down her throat. She looked a nightmare.

They slept almost together, a finger’s width of space between them. Isabel floated on near dreams, never really resting in full. She gave up with the early dawn, that midsummer’s peak, and sat up against the pillows and waited. The day would come and Eva would leave. The day would come and the suitcase would close, and would be taken down, and then the house would be empty.

She put her feet to the ground and found an odd surface, and bent down to see: the diary. It peeked out from under the bed. She had kicked it last night. She picked it up. The cover was soft, leather, a well-made thing. The first light of morning cast the shadows of the tall firs against the curtains, drooping shapes, heavy branches. Eva breathed a deep sleeping sigh.

Isabel turned the book over in her hands. She opened on the first page, just to see—see the penmanship, see what words Eva wrote in what way, see if it was Louis’s name in a rounded swirl of O and U. The word apple with a childlike, open-bottomed P.

It wasn’t a diary entry on that first page. It was a list. A good handful of items had been crossed off. At the top: teaspoons. Eva had written the number between brackets: twelve. The next item crossed off: bread knife (wood handle). Then: tiles (decorative, hares). The letter opener, napkin rings, the engraved cake knife. And on and on the list went, two columns on one page, and into the next—an inventory of a house.

Isabel stared at the list. She held the little book so long and so tightly that her thumb left a print on the page: damp, sticky. The shadows shifted against the curtains. A bird flew off a branch.

Isabel rummaged in the wardrobe, put on her robe, and went downstairs. She made coffee. She counted the spoons: five. There were five left. She hadn’t been counting recently, and now there were five left. Isabel reached for a cup for her coffee and accidentally dropped it and it bounced around on the kitchen floor; the ear broke off, a chip off its lip. Isabel threw it in the bin and got herself a new cup.

It didn’t take long for Eva to come down, haphazardly dressed, sleep crusted at the corners of her eyes. She called for Isabel before she found her: “Isabel?” into the living room, and, “Isabel? Have you seen—” into the dining room, and then at the top stair to the kitchen: came to a halt.

“Good morning,” Isabel said. She was sitting at the table, hands folded in her lap. The coffee was steaming on the table. Eva’s diary was open, and next to it Isabel’s own pages of inventory, the ones she had made in a fit of worry, a fit of paranoia, all those weeks ago.