The Safekeep

by Yael van der Wouden

She could feel a flush rising. There was no reply she could give that wouldn’t confirm the awful way he saw her: sometimes she went for tea at the Van den Bergs. Sometimes called with Hendrik. Small moments, too small for someone who lived with others; who went to work, who went to bars, who had girlfriends who decorated his apartment for him. Hung up gauzes for him.

Her habits seemed to Isabel a natural extension of her personality: she was loud in the night, talked in her sleep and then slept in, ate in small bites throughout the day, never in one meal, often didn’t finish her plate. She left her things carelessly behind and then forgot where she’d put them, would stomp through the house trying to find them. Sometimes she’d disappear for a while. Sometimes she’d be everywhere all at once. Her perfume bullied itself around the house.

In the car, on the way back, the moment Louis said goodbye to Eva it stuck to Isabel’s memory, like a feather to a honeyed finger:

There was no way of eating it in silence—the sounds it made, the wet. Isabel ate through the whole thing: the flesh and stick and pits and core and all. She made sure nothing was left of it, as though it had never been given in the first place.

“Does nothing bring you joy, Isabel?” “What kind of question is that?” “A simple one,” said Eva. She sounded resigned.

What was the worth of happiness that left behind a crater thrice the size of its impact. What did people who spoke of joy know of what it meant, to sleep and dream only of the whistle of planes and knocks at the door and on windows and to wake with a hand at one’s throat—one’s own hand,

at one’s own throat.

That night, she woke up with the dredges of a dream still hot in her mouth: a pooling heat in her belly, the drag of a hand, the puff of breath on her neck. She thought someone had been in her room, but there was no one. There was only she.

Once he was a child and she would hold him through his night terrors. Now he had grown and cried over the touch of a man and let him kiss him under trees, on the ground. And in his eyes she was her mother’s daughter, uncomplicated and stupid in all matters of the heart and the same at seventeen as she was at nine years old, at thirteen. Unchanged.

You were where you wanted to be. I was where I needed to be.

Go where you want to go. Meet whoever. Love.”

Like any man looks like any man.

it: Not even honey could sweeten that vinegar.

“It’s a house.” She said, “There’s always a lot to do in a house.”