The Safekeep(68)

The water ran pink. She pulled at the skin around it. It didn’t hurt. Hendrik asked about it when she came by to visit two days later. Their suitcases were packed in the hallway: they were set to leave for Paris by morning. They sat on Hendrik’s balcony and the day smelled like brine. Hendrik insisted they sit outside because he and Sebastian hadn’t made use of the balcony all season and now they must make up for it, even if it was too cold. Sebastian was quiet and withdrawn, not quite there. Isabel did not know what the latest news was about his mother’s health. She couldn’t imagine it was positive.

Hendrik took her hand and said, “Oh, what did you do? That looks bad, it looks quite inflamed,” and Isabel said, “It’s nothing, it doesn’t hurt,” and Hendrik looked at her, and looked at her, and said, “You know, I just can’t get used to the hair.”

Isabel said, “Then don’t look at it.”

He laughed. He lit up a smoke, offered her one. She rarely smoked, only ever at Hendrik’s insistence. She disliked the smell, the tacky film of taste it left behind. She accepted the cigarette now. Hendrik said, “You know you never did tell me what ended up happening with Louis and Eva and everything. Were you there for it?”

Isabel lit her own cigarette. “There for what?”

“Him breaking it off? Did he do it at the house immediately? Or did he pick her up and—”

“She left,” she said. Her eyes were dry. “He called in advance and… she left.”

Hendrik made a sound: a scoff, a laugh, in between. Sebastian looked up briefly. He looked at Hendrik, and at Isabel, and seemed to see something—infer something. Isabel turned from it, smoked deeply. She closed her eyes as though against the bright sky.

Hendrik said, “Well, at least you have your home back. That must be nice.”

Isabel said nothing. They were having a glass of port, and Isabel’s stomach was empty, and the heat of it spread quickly: to her head, to her limbs. Her hands remained cold. She kept them under the quilt. The wind had picked up.

Then Hendrik reached out and pulled at a strand of her hair. Her head bobbed toward the tug. He said, quietly, “So will you tell me what this was about, then?”

She batted him away. “Leave it,” she said.

“Very unlike you.”

“What’s like me,” she said, and patted her hair down. Touched her neck. It was cold. “There’s no such thing. Like me. Surely if I do it then it’s like me.” The cigarette had made her nauseous. She put it in the ashtray, still red-tipped.

Hendrik looked at her. Sebastian went inside. He touched Hendrik’s shoulder on passing.

“What,” she said.

“You’re acting strange.”

She didn’t want to be observed by him and instead considered the roof of the building opposite. “So Paris, tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

“So dutiful.”

“Isabel.”

“You know,” she said. “You know you used to have night terrors, as a child. All the time. You were so scared. Every night,” she told him. “I held you. You cried and I held you.”

He tried to laugh at this and couldn’t. Instead, he put the knuckle of his thumb to his eyebrow and smoked, and almost spoke and didn’t, and so it was up to Isabel to say the next thing.

“You left us,” she said. The port was rising in her blood. “Mum and me. But mostly me. You left me—on my own.”

It was his turn now to look away from her—look at the roofs. “You had Mother.”

“I wanted you.”

“Oh, Isabel, you know I couldn’t—I couldn’t be there. I couldn’t…”

Isabel took a long sip. They’d never spoken of this. She was not who she once was, and she couldn’t imagine it was for the better. Her edges were jagged and her chest cracked open and she said, “I know.” She said, “I know Mother was… unyielding. She worried.”

Hendrik huffed. “I don’t think she worried.”

“I lived with her after you left. I saw her every day. She’d wait for your letters like—like you were a soldier at war. She’d write to Uncle Karel nearly every day asking about you. She’d—”

“Don’t you hear it as you say it? Soldier at war! What war? The war wasn’t mine, it was hers. I hadn’t died, there were no battles. I was here, I was always here, she could’ve come to me, spoken to me, she—” He stopped himself. Took a moment and said, a grain to his voice: “It’s easier for you. To see her affection. She never had any reason to hold it back from you. God.” He breathed a laugh. “You’re so much like her.”

Isabel nodded. “You think I’m soulless,” she said. “That I don’t know—”

“Of course I don’t think you’re—”

“I do know. I do know what it means to want. To—to only want—” She’d raised her voice and was sorry for it now. It started raining. Hendrik looked at her, startled, and she wanted to tell him—wanted to be done with it, make it someone else’s burden. No one knew of her heart and no one knew of her grief and it was torture.

She closed her mouth and the rain came louder. They went inside, and Sebastian, who was reading at the kitchen table, pretended not to have heard everything. He said, “All right?” and Hendrik said, “No, no, it’s raining, damn it.”