IT WAS SUMMER’S END. GRAY-BOTTOMED clouds and a three-day drizzle. Isabel lay on her back under the secretary desk and put her fingers to the etched initials: EDH.
Eva had been born in this room. Her small hand was the hand that held a knife that carved this wood.
Isabel tried to tend to the garden because autumn was on its way. The dirt clung to her hands. She didn’t dare dig into the earth, kept thinking she felt pinpricks from below—but there were none. No shards, no remains, no new secrets to rise from the ground.
Knowledge came at her in flashes only, truth glimpsed from between a lattice, there and then gone: a hare let loose at a party, a box of toys in the attic, a child’s crayon drawing of a horse on a wall behind a wardrobe. The rhubarb. The trees. Every day she woke up and every day the house unfolded around her like a dark hand. She leaned into rooms and the rooms leaned away. Eva had looked at her face and had written of it: Not even honey could sweeten that vinegar. Isabel would not look at herself now, could not bear to see what Eva had seen. She tried to stand tall and found it too heavy a thing; her posture worsened. She took the piece of broken china from the mantelpiece and hid it: in the drawer, the cupboard, in a box, in with the vegetables in the pantry. And every time she regretted it quickly, went back for it with a fast-beating heart that did not slow until the thing was back where she had first placed it: elevated, watching.
She could not look at it. She woke up from her nightmares—pricking needles and bombs and the thumping on the door and—She was shivering and tangled in her sheets, wrestling, crying out—
“Are you,” she started, stopped. It was midday, and Neelke was putting on the kettle. Isabel was at the kitchen table in her nightgown. In her house robe. She was addressing the window, not the girl. She said, “Are you much like your mother?”
Neelke said, “Sorry?” And Isabel did not repeat herself. Neelke had heard. She answered eventually, while pouring out the tea. “No,” she said. They had their tea. There was no conversation after that.
Isabel wanted to know what Eva had looked like as a child. Short, she imagined. Cheeks like balls of dough.
There had once been a Jewish tailor in town. He had a shop with big windows and he’d sit by those big windows with his sewing machine and people could look in, see him at work, bent over. Isabel and her brothers liked looking in when they passed the tailor, and their mother would not allow it—would rush them past and say, Don’t, don’t look inside, children, come now. Isabel wondered now at how she could’ve known that the man was Jewish, and in the moment of wondering she immediately knew, recalled it all at once: a time when Mother took one of her skirts to the tailor for adjustments, and then had returned with the skirt and had found a spot of dirt on the hem; the story of her returning to the tailor, driving all the way back, demanding he cover the costs of cleaning. The story of how he refused to, how he insisted she must’ve dirtied the thing herself when getting into the car. The end of that story, the way it was delivered: “That Jew.”
On the morning of the anniversary of her mother’s passing, Isabel did as she’s always done: she took one plate of good china from the vitrine, off which to eat her breakfast. It was early, and dark outside. Under the dim overhead light, Isabel touched the blues, the whites. The outline of a hare’s leg, a tail, an ear.
Eva had watched her hold these things, her own mother’s things, had watched Isabel handle them, clean them, call them hers and Eva had said—she had said: You do that with such care.
Isabel could not eat her breakfast. The plate was on the table, empty. Isabel laid her head in the cradle of her arms. The feeling, when it came, was not new—had been worn familiar in the weeks since Eva had left: the sudden wanting to do away with herself. The thought—too heavy, it’s too heavy—a desire for someone to take it away from her. The plates, the walls, the weight of her hair, her own damned hands—to let someone else have them. Be done with it.
And then, as always, this emotion was followed quickly by a shudder, a tightening: sit up straight. A voice, perhaps her mother’s, perhaps her own: dramatics. The worst of verdicts, the worst behaviors—dramatics.
She went hungry that day. Tried to right her posture. She left the plate on the table, where it stayed, untouched, for the rest of the week.
Rains came quick, a mouth opening and closing. It had rained on the drive over, and the streets smelled of wet stone. Uncle Karel lived in a canal-facing town house, a tall building with a triangle of a staircase leading up from both ends. He had a garden out the back with a narrow strip of land and a plum tree with half a head: the branches that had grown over the neighbor’s fence had been cut back to their border line.
Karel insisted they sit outside. It would stay dry, he said, and the afternoon was so nice and cool—a gift, he said, after the summer they just had. Isabel agreed with a hum and kept on touching her bare neck, as if to pull down the line of her hair—as if uneasy about the hem of a skirt. Uncle hadn’t commented on it yet. When he opened the door he’d taken her in and had paused a moment, then said, “So!” and nothing else.
The tea was steaming on the garden table. Uncle had taken out the biscuit tin and had put two single biscuits on a small plate—one for her, one for him—and closed the tin again, put the tin away. When he sat down, he did so directly opposite her. He put his elbows on the armrests. He laced his hands over his belly and gave a few smacking mouth sounds to indicate: I’m waiting. Talk.
Isabel had requested this meeting. She called him, she demanded he make time. She had refused to say why. And when he asked that she give him an idea of what was the matter at hand—of how worried he should be—it was Isabel who went quiet on the line, a quiver of a breath. Hand gripping the phone.
The tea was bitter, steeped too long. The leaves were reused from this morning. Isabel scalded her tongue drinking too quickly.
Karel said, “Your hair.”
Isabel touched it again. She had cut it off in a fit in the night. A hairdresser had later made of it what she could, but there had not been much to work with—it was choppy and uneven. Now it sat in a thick bob under her ears, at the hinge of her jaw. She caught sight of herself in mirrors these days and would quickly look away.
She said, “My hair. Yes.” She wondered whether her uncle saw anything else, other than the hair. She felt he must. She felt she was not who she once was. She felt that this should be visible from a great distance.
“Is this what you wanted to see me about?” he asked. “A new haircut?”
Isabel stopped touching her hair. She held the cup and asked him how he was. He said he was well, and then named several items that were considerably more expensive now than they were last year this time, and then went quiet.
Birds in the plum tree. Isabel held a nail to a chip in the rim of the cup and said, “The house…”
“Something has broken,” he concluded. “You have come to ask for—support. Of course, Isabel. Come now, what kind of family is this, what do you think—”
“No,” she said. “Nothing is broken.”
He looked at her a moment.
She said, “You bought the house.”
“What house?”
“Our house. During the war.”
“I did,” he said. It was slow. He considered a moment, added: “For you. You and your brothers. Your mother.”
“Was it…” She smoothed her hands over her skirt, over her knees. “It was empty,” she said it like it wasn’t a question, which it was.
Karel reached for his biscuit. “What an odd thing to say, Isabel. What are you wanting to know? What an odd thing to ask. It was a house, the four of you moved in, of course it was empty. Wouldn’t you have noticed if someone else was living there? What a question.” He ate as he spoke and crumbs collected in the weave of his sweater-vest.
“Were there things in the house?” she asked. “Furniture, I mean. Plates.” A beat. “Spoons and—and the like.”
He seemed to notice her now. A slowing of movement, a slowing of his gaze. He finished his biscuit in a purposeful way, thoughtful. He said, “You mean to ask if I came by the house in a dishonest way.”
Isabel didn’t answer. She sat up somewhat straighter. She fought the urge to swallow.
“Have you read something in the news, Isabel? Is that it? Has someone told you a fantastical story of robbers and thieves and the war? What nonsense. You, of all people, to believe these—”
“No one told me anything. I—” She swallowed. Cleared her throat, said, “I had a memory. I remembered—when we moved in, the house, how it was… full of things.”
Karel brushed the crumbs from his chest. He took his time doing so. “You were very young,” he told her. It was a judgment. “These things are not as they seem when you’re a child, Isabel. And now you are no longer a child. Yes, a family lived there. But they left. They did not pay their mortgage, they did not pay their taxes. This happens, it happens every day, people make gambles they cannot keep, people pack up and leave and they don’t take their—their plates and their spoons. Goodness! Do you understand? It happens every day. There is nothing untoward here, Isabel. It’s the law.”
Isabel had a curling thing in the lowest part of her belly. It rose to her lungs, took her by her throat: an argument. She was going to have to form words soon. She was sweating under the cool midday sun, half in the shade of town house roofs.
Karel said, “We bought the house, Isabel. It is our property. We did not cheat our way into it. There is a deed, there is—” He slowed himself. He took a loud slurp of his tea, continued: “The house was empty. What do you think happens to empty houses? In times of hunger, of war? Who wants to see empty houses when there’s people on the streets? Would you rather I not have given you a home? Would you rather you stayed in Amsterdam, starved, bombed, God knows what—” He cut himself off again. He looked off to the side for a while. He had a mole in the middle of his cheek, same as Mother had had. His hair was thin and combed over, skin soft over his jaw. He had always seemed old to Isabel, long before he was truly old.
“What does it matter,” he said, still looking to the side, “that someone has lived there before? They’re gone. They did not come back for it. Every house has a history. What house doesn’t have a history?”
“How do you know?” Isabel asked.
“Hm?”
“That—they’re gone. That they didn’t come back.”
“How do you know someone has returned, do you think?”
Isabel looked at him. Under the table, she held the skin on the back of her hand in a tight pinch.
Her uncle said, “They knock.”
Something must have shown on Isabel’s face. Karel made an exasperated sound, gave her a quick smile, said, “Isabel, what is this game? Would they won’t they, meisje: reasonable people would contact the council, it wouldn’t be an unsurpassable hurdle. You call, you send a letter, you—act. And besides.” He reached for a biscuit—realized in movement that he’d already eaten his share. Leaned back again. “There were outstanding payments. The bank took it back. Parate execution—a standard procedure. You know what I think, meisje?”
He called her meisje in moments like this. In moments where he wanted her to remember who he was, who she was. Little girl. Darling girl.
She said: “What?”
“If they wanted the house, they would’ve come back for it. If they cared about it, they would’ve come back for it. No. They’re gone. They’re gone or they don’t care. So many are gone. You don’t know, Isabel. You were so young.”
An image came to Isabel: Eva, a child. Cheeks like dough. Alone in a field, alone in an attic. Mothers with numbers on their arms. Young, he said.
“I want the house,” she said.
Karel said, “Pardon?”
“I want the house. I want the house to be mine. I live there. I care about it, I keep it in order, I want—” It got caught in her throat. She licked her lips. “I want to grow old there.” She said, “Give it to me.”
“Sweetheart.” The word was said expansively—too slow. Uncle Karel gave her concern with a frown. “The house is promised to Louis.”
Isabel let go of the back of her hand. She flexed her fingers, put both her hands on the tabletop. She kept them there, said, “I know. But what if Louis doesn’t want it? He has no use for it.” She tried not to move, to look strong, to look determined: “What if Louis wants me to have it?”
“Isabel…”
“Can you change that? If we all agree on it?” She licked her lips again. “Can it go to me?”
“Have you and Louis had a falling-out?” Karel asked. “Is that—Isabel. Is that what’s the matter?”
“Not at all.”
“I know the two of you haven’t been—as close as you once were. I know that you and Hendrik—”
“No,” she said. “Louis and I are well. We—” She took a tight breath: “We’ve actually grown closer recently. I really…”
Birds in the plum tree. A thin weave of clouds over the sun, and everything went a muted shade, a bright and muted shade. “I was wrong about him,” Isabel said.
Karel’s frown changed in nature. “Were you?”
“Hm,” she said. “Perhaps we should both visit you soon. Perhaps that would be nice.” She pushed the plate with the one biscuit a little end toward him. “You can have mine,” she said.
“Oh!” He wanted to reach, hesitated, said, “If you’re sure?”
Isabel said, “Yes. It’s yours.”
“Thank you,” he said, and ate the biscuit.
“I’ll ask Louis,” Isabel said. “About visiting you.”
Karel gave her a look but did not push. There were crumbs on his sweater-vest again. He brushed them off again. In another garden, fenced off, some children screamed out something in joy. The birds startled out of the plum tree. Isabel and Karel turned to watch them in unison: their flurry of wings, their turn about the sky, the search for a new place to settle down.
Napkin rings. Picture frames, the small ones, from mother’s bedroom. The big blue oven dish. A vase of marble. Five plates, good china. The ones with the hares. Six soup bowls. A salad bowl. The sugar pot, the milk jug, the menorah. Isabel found that one in the wine cellar: wrapped in a cloth, within a cloth, within a suitcase. The silver had gone gray, brown.
She polished it. It took hours.
Four bookends: a ballerina on each end, leaning in.
Haasje. The stuffed animal had a worn belly. Isabel placed it in the dip of a bowl, and the bowl held it like a bed. The beads-for-eyes stared up, blank, until Isabel turned off the kitchen lights. She left the room and closed each door between her and the kitchen—as if the thing might get up and return to her in the night.
Nothing ever changed about Tante Rian’s home. Isabel hadn’t been in a while and nothing had changed: not the dust on the shelves, not the placement of the vases, not the dredge of old coffee in the coffee maker—brown filter paper curling at the edges.
Rian had a lot to say about Isabel’s hair. She tutted and called her foolish and reassured herself that it’d grow back and then had a lot to say about how Isabel hasn’t been by for some months. She also had a lot to say about how no one else has come to see her in a while, how she was being forgotten, and how different it used to be when Isabel’s mother was still alive. When Isabel was young. “You used to adore me,” she said, half to herself, wobbling over to the kitchen. The house smelled like boxed air. “You and your brothers all! Tante Rian this, Tante Rian that. You brought me drawings you made. I still have them, you know. All of them I kept. Do you believe me? Do you want to see?”
“I remember,” Isabel said.
Then Rian had a lot to say about the oven dish, the one she had or hadn’t been gifted before the war. She had run into the old neighbor at the market earlier that week. The woman had brought up the dish, and Rian had ignored it, just “pretended I didn’t hear her, just as if I didn’t hear her at all, I just bought my cheese. That’s what I did. Thank you, sir, I said to the cheese man. And when I got home I said to myself, Rian, well done. Well done. You didn’t let her get the better of you, well done.”
Isabel joined her in the kitchen. It was narrow, barely fit two people. It was built into the side of the house some ten years ago. The old kitchen, the maids’ kitchen, had been remade into a downstairs bedroom: Rian couldn’t go up the stairs anymore. She hadn’t been up to the second floor since the forties.
Isabel watched Rian reach up for two cups. Her fingers were swollen at the knuckles. Isabel started, “So she—” Then stopped. Then asked, “She gave you that dish, you said?”
“Yes, yes,” Rian said. She poured out the coffee.
“Gave it in what—in what capacity?”
Rian didn’t seem to understand the question. “What?” she said. “Gave, gave it, she gave it to me to keep.”
“To keep.” Isabel accepted the coffee. It was lukewarm. The pot had been made before she’d arrived. “Where did she go that you had to keep it?”
Rian looked at her now. Looked up with watery eyes. They were small and the color of rust. She had put makeup on, as she always did when Isabel visited: rouge, a faded lip. It made her reaction look startled, flushed. Her cup made a sound on its saucer. “Go?” she said. “Where did anyone go, Isabel. It was war, it was hunger. We were starving, we were living on rations. Do you know how much we had to eat each day? Two slices of bread, one glass of milk, no meat—barely! People came to the door to beg and I had nothing to give. No one had anything to give. What time did I have to pay attention to anyone else? People left, people came, people ran away or hid away, I don’t know. I did not keep track of where people went. But I kept that dish for her, you know. Because she was a friend. She wasn’t here and I kept it for her.”
“So was it a gift?” Isabel asked. “Or were you keeping it?”
Rian turned away from her. She walked back to the living room, said, “You’re playing with words now. What does it matter, gifting, keeping? She gave it to me. It was a terrible time. She was gone for years. Oh!” It came out an exclamation. “Oh, I don’t want to talk about it!”
Isabel, half in and out of the kitchen, wanted to say: You bring it up every time I’m here. She didn’t. She still had the saucer in hand, the cup by its ear. Her breakfast sat sour and high in her stomach. Rian had her back to Isabel. She was arranging a plant on the windowsill, turning it—turning the faded leaves to the light. Isabel had upset her.
After a while, Isabel said, “I’ll warm the pastries.” She had brought pastries.
“Yes,” Rian agreed, and continued to fiddle with the plant.
The pastries smelled fresh, sat prettily in their paper bags, had egg-washed coats of shine. Isabel stood there a moment. It was a bright day, sunny, but the light no longer felt like summer. She wore her hat. She had a jacket on in the car. A shiver ran through her now, so sudden and so strong her teeth chattered.
She held herself. Outside: a pear tree, arms wide, a circle of rotting fruit on the ground. Isabel opened a cupboard and considered Rian’s oven dishes. She had five: two of clear glass, two of decorated white glass, one ceramic. She could not guess which one was the kept dish. Rian did not cook for herself. She had a woman who came and cooked, meals that were kept in the icebox and heated, reheated.
They ate their pastries in silence. When Rian spoke again, it was to say: “A nice cup.” She meant her coffee. She drank the last of it.
Isabel said, “Yes.” She said, “Yes, lovely.” She didn’t say much else of it for the rest of her visit. She went home and avoided making eye contact with the door or with the hearth or with the box of things. She opened the cutlery drawer and it rattled. She wrapped half of everything in a cloth and made a package out of it. She took all that was fragile and rolled old newspapers around each item. She knocked her palm on a nail sticking out of the side of the box and bled onto the inky paper, and only later—when she washed her hands—did she notice the wound: a red line, irritated.
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.”
When she left, she wished them both a safe trip—wished it tersely, wanted to mean it more than she did. Wanted to be softer than she was. Hendrik was quick with his hug, still sore over their falling-out, but said: “You can come visit. You should. I’ve told you.”
“Hm,” she said, and her throat was tight, and the hallway blurry. She went down the stairs. Sebastian came after her then, quickly, and stopped her right as she was out the door—a hand to her arm. He seemed to want to say something. He opened his mouth, closed it. He was in his socks.
“What?” she said.
“You resent him. For coming with me.”
“No.”
“You don’t approve.”
“I—” He was still holding on to her. She was tired. She didn’t want to cry in front of Sebastian. “You’re lucky to have him, that’s all. You should know that. That it’s lucky, to have someone with you. Please let me go.”
He let her go. She knew there was something about that word, and how she said it—lucky. He stood on the bottom rung of the stairs, a little taller like this. They were both in the shadow, in the dark. “You seem to think you have so little in the world.” She could see the twist of his mouth. “But you have so much. Much more than most of us.”
She took a breath to argue and found that nothing came out: that her throat had closed up, that only a sound like a sob would leave her. She’d not heard him like this before—harsh. Almost reprimanding.
“He has regrets, you know,” Sebastian added. “You could be kinder with him.”
“He left,” Isabel said. The word was wet.
“I know. But he regrets it. So do you, I imagine. It is what it is. It’s done. Tomorrow we leave, what can you do. I am scared, what can I do.”
He breathed in the dark of the hallway. Then she left, almost left, turned—reached out. His hand met hers halfway, a quick squeeze. His palm was warm. The house smelled like the two of them—Hendrik and Sebastian, the soap they used, the cologne they used, and Hendrik’s habit of always opening one window and also a note of something else. Something that happens between bodies, close together, four walls and a roof.
Isabel took the train back home. She was rocked on the tracks. Her belly was hollow. There was a light on in the kitchen as she approached the house. A warm orange, and someone moving inside: the blur of a silhouette; shoulders, hair up in a tail. Isabel was arrested by it—stopped, heart tripping, a dull headache turning sharp. Her body had decided what was happening before the rest of her caught up. She walked, then ran, then pushed through the kitchen door. It overlapped, the scene of it: smell memory of something cooked, of the evening, of the fire in the hearth, the radio on, and a woman’s body leaning over the table—a cloth in hand, cleaning the surface.
Neelke startled. Recovered, said hello. She seemed unsure of what to do next. Isabel had come in midbreath, midrun. Her pulse was in her teeth still. Neelke looked lovely in the low light, looked young and flushed and tired. Isabel recalled the evening she had come home and found Eva and Neelke here, here exactly, a bottle of wine and Eva laughing and touching Neelke’s hair. They were having a conversation about how Neelke might cut it. Isabel had got so angry. She had sent Neelke away. Eva had called her a tyrant. Isabel had grabbed her, had grabbed her arm—had been reluctant to let go.
“I didn’t—” Neelke started, stopped. She held the cloth in two hands before her. “I meant—to be done. I ran late.”
Isabel didn’t reply. She went to her. It was a dazed moment. Neelke shifted, stood differently—stood to attention. Stiff. Her blouse was red, tiny purple flowers, and was missing one little button: between her chest and her navel. She was wearing a white shirt underneath. Isabel, close and blurry-eyed and dizzy, held Neelke’s face in her hands. It was such a small face. Her skin was soft, and warm. Eva would tilt up open-mouthed when held like this.
The fire crackled. Neelke breathed fast and audible. Isabel looked at her, and looked at her. She let her go. She sat down at the table and ran a hand over her face and dug her nails into her cheekbones.
Neelke said nothing. She moved quietly and washed the cloth. Wrung it out, hung it over the oven door. She made to leave. She was in her coat, at the door, when Isabel spoke up.
“Neelke—” she said. It came out like gravel. Neelke had been so quiet the week Isabel had fallen ill. She had occasionally sat by the bed as Isabel slowly ate her soup. She had asked about Eva once and had received no answer, and had not asked again. “Do you—” Isabel cleared her throat. “Are you alone? Do you have someone?”
Neelke didn’t seem to catch the question at first. She worked a breath, confused, then said: “A boyfriend?” Her voice was so small.
Isabel looked at her. “A boyfriend.”
Neelke blushed quickly. Her jacket was a dark green. “I do,” she said.
“You do.”
“Bas. Bas van der Laan.” His full name, as if making sure he was real.
“Is he nice to you?”
“He—Yes.”
Isabel took a breath. “You will not be here forever,” she said.
Neelke looked out of her depth. Isabel said, “I’m not firing you. I’m only saying. You will go one day.”
“I don’t,” Neelke said. “I don’t know what—”
“It’s all right. Go.”
Neelke stood, hesitant, one hand on the door handle. She had made the kitchen a lovely place. Isabel could cry at it: at how a room could be made, and left behind, and turn terrible by way of absence. How a space could miss a person. How a person could stop—
“Good night,” Isabel said.
Neelke waited several seconds, then left. Isabel listened to the new silence: the fire, the hum of the pipes. In the dining room, the vitrine was empty. A dark sheet of glass, and behind it—nothing. A shard, a single piece, and nothing.
Isabel had known Johan would show up eventually and then he did. Isabel would not let him in. He stood outside by his car parked on the gravel, his hands in his pockets and talking loudly at the house. There was a waver to his stance, and Isabel could imagine it: he’d been drinking with his friends in the city—then passed by Isabel’s on his way back to his mother’s. Isabel stood in the doorway, half inside, the door open just enough to answer him through it. If he came closer she would shut it.
“So you’re not coming outside,” he said. He sounded angry about it, or maybe he was being sarcastic, or was hurt. “You’re afraid of me now?”
“It’s not a good time, Johan,” she said.
“I haven’t seen you in a while,” was his answer. “Your kitchen girl said you were sick.”
Isabel tightened her hold on the door handle. “I was.”
He made a sound. “You look fine to me now.”
“I’m better. Yes.”
He laughed. It wasn’t a nice laugh. He leaned back against his car. He wasn’t leaving quickly, not easily. He looked up from under the fall of his hair. “I thought we had a nice time,” he said. “Didn’t we have a nice time, Isabel?”
“You should leave,” Isabel said, and Johan said, “Wait wait wait—” and made as though to go up to the door, and Isabel made to close the door—and he stopped. One foot up the step. The door was now only open a crack. Johan scoffed, took a step back, said louder than before:
“This hair doesn’t suit you at all. Very unflattering.”
“Why are you here?”
“Why am I—” He cut himself off with another laugh. He was moving, pacing. He had the energy of a poked animal—something that looked like annoyance but felt like danger. “Do you think you have options, Isabel?” he said, louder than before. “Do you think they’re lining up? At your age? With your—” He sucked his teeth. “Tread carefully. I might leave. I might not come back.”
“Yes,” Isabel said, heart beating fast.
“Yes? Yes what?”
“Don’t come back.” She wanted to say it more clearly. It came out soft, and she didn’t know whether he heard it at first, but he did: turning to the door with a sharpness, a wide-pupil eye. She saw only a sliver of him, was peering at him through the door crack.
He was silent. Then, “You wasted my time. You played with me.”
“Please leave.”
“Is that so?” He came to the door. She could smell the alcohol. “I don’t think I will,” he said, and Isabel closed the door quickly and he was there in a few strides—was banging on the wood. His shape was blurry through the glass panel. Isabel locked the door with fumbling hands and the sound of the key seemed to anger him more: rattling the handle, shouting to be let in. He called her arrogant, and a bitch, and asked her to come out, and said he only wanted to talk, and then put on a sweet voice again. Then—quiet.
Isabel was rooted to the spot for a moment. She couldn’t see him anymore. She thought he was going to the car at first, and then realized—and ran. To the kitchen. She got there just in time, just as he was rounding the house and coming up to the back door. She locked the door and yelped, startled, when he tried to rattle that door, too. She stepped away.
“Why don’t you send out that girlfriend of yours instead?” he called through the window, his hand an oily stain on the glass. He looked a terror like this, hair mussed, face red. He said, “She was much nicer than you. Nicer to look at, too. Send her out, I want to say something to her. Send her out. Send her—”
Isabel went to the living room and closed all the curtains and stood in the middle of the room. Johan stood outside for a while. He shouted some more terrible things. Isabel turned on the radio as loud as it went, and then covered her ears, shut her eyes tightly.
It was a long time before she opened her eyes, uncovered her ears. The noise had stopped. On the radio, a song: it was a bop, a lyric that went, I’d bounce to you, I’d bounce bounce bounce!
Isabel pushed aside the curtains to peek. It had passed the dark turn of evening, and the pale twilight was only a very far strip. Johan’s car was gone. Johan was gone.
That night, Isabel did not fall asleep in her own bed. She did not change out of her clothes. She lay herself down in her mother’s bed and did not think of it as Mother’s bed. She got under the sheets and held the pillow tightly to her face.
She dreamt of dark homes with the lights off and people banging on windows and doors wanting to get in. She was very young and Eva was very young, and she was outside, crying. Someone’s voice was loud and whispered at the same time, and Isabel crawled under a table. Eva called her name. Isabel covered her ears. She startled awake, choked by the top button of her dress. She couldn’t get it to open. She couldn’t get it off. She pulled, and pulled, and the dress tore and she shimmied out of it—gasping, gagging.
Autumn had barely entered, barely taken off its coat, but the air smelled like winter already. Outside the café people bustled by and pulled clouds of breath behind them. Coats and hats and umbrellas held like walking sticks; the streets were slippery with last night’s cold snap, and across the street a vendor blew on his gloveless hands.
Louis was silent for a long time. He’d been late, and then when he arrived he gave Isabel a quick kiss on the head and announced that he would not be able to stay long—had other things to do, had a long list of errands, had his girl waiting back at home—and so Isabel said what she had come to say. He sat down, and she said what she had come to say: what she wanted, and what he must do to give it to her.
“Isabel…” he said now, and Isabel looked back to him. He said her name like an admonishment. “Isabel,” again. “What’s this? Are you—insecure? Uncertain?”
She did not follow. “Insecure?”
“That you will not find a man? Isabel, you will. If you try a little, I’m sure you will. Dress nicely, give a few compliments, it’s really—Look in the paper. There’s always men looking for women in the paper. I’m sure you’ll find someone nice, Isabel, and when you marry your man he won’t want to…” A waiter came by for Louis’s order. He ordered a coffee, sat back in his chair. Wiped the sweat from his upper lip. He’d been rushing and still looked hot from his commute. He said, “What man wants to move into his wife’s home? No, no. He’ll want to start a life for the two of you. He’ll want to buy, build, not—”
“I will not marry,” said Isabel.
“Isabel. Come now, what’s—”
“I will never marry. I’m telling you.”
“Don’t say that,” he said. “You don’t know that.” His coffee arrived. He used pincers to put in the sugar cubes: three. He said, “You just need to get out more. Don’t you have—friends? To take you out? Of course you’re never going to meet anyone cooped up in that depressing—”
“Hendrik,” Isabel said, “will never marry.”
He stopped stirring his coffee. His eyes were sunken, milky gray. They were her eyes, too. He said, “Hendrik… Isabel. Hendrik…”
“I will never marry,” she said.
“That’s not the same. You know that’s not the same. You know why he…” Louis glanced around. He did that when Hendrik’s life came up: as if someone might hear and come to some conclusion, and he would have to explain something. Get in some kind of trouble.
Isabel said it again: “Louis. I will never marry. Hendrik will never marry and I will never marry. Do you understand?” She reached out quickly—unplanned, desperate, placed her hand over Louis’s where it rested on the table. She gripped it, hard. “Do you understand?”
Louis stared. His eyes were restless, back and forth. A flush rose: over his jaw, his neck. He swallowed. He looked at where her hand covered his, then back to her.
She said, “Give me the house.”
He opened his mouth, closed it.
Isabel leaned in. She wanted to bare her teeth. “Please,” she said.
Louis did not respond. Eventually, he pulled his hand from under hers—held it in his own hand as if she’d hurt him. As if she’d squeezed too tightly. Isabel sat back, breathless, hot under her collar, under her arms.
Louis exhaled, slow and long. He looked out the window. A couple walked by: she was short, a fur coat. He was tall, noticeably tall, and had to lean down a little to hear her talk; she pushed herself flush against him. Smiled up at him. Her lipstick was on her teeth.
“Louis,” Isabel said.
Louis put a hand to his forehead, closed his eyes. He had their father’s hair: thick and upright. Mother used to tell a story that Louis, four years old, had cried a full evening because he could not be a dog—could not turn into a dog. He had somehow got it in his head that people could turn into the thing they wanted: dogs, birds, airplanes.
“Louis,” she said again.
“Yes, just—” He took a breath. “A minute. Give me a minute.” The coffee steamed between them. Louis said, “I need just a minute.”