The Safekeep

by Yael van der Wouden

How quickly did the belly of despair turn itself over into hope, the give of the skin of overripe fruit.

She clutched at Eva, the give of fat over bones, over hips. She wanted to hold all of her at once and couldn’t. Wanted to have bigger hands, wanted to envelop, wanted to cover her, contain her—scooping water out of a sinking boat.

Isabel, too full to be teased, came to stand behind her. Wrapped her arms around her, pressed her face to Eva’s neck and stayed there. Eva’s laughter went quiet. She let herself be held a moment. She stroked Isabel’s arms. She said, quiet, “Who are you?” She said, “Have you always been like this? Have you just been waiting to happen?”

Isabel tried to breathe through the misery of holding someone else’s hurt within oneself and stayed awake like a guard dog—like there was something to keep out. Like there was someone trying to get in.

Eva came back later than she said she would. She had several leeks sticking out of her linen bag, biking up the gravel path. Isabel was outside, waiting for her. Itchy and feeling silly for it. Eva had only been gone an hour. Isabel had spent a lifetime alone. She had spent a whole life without this woman, without her in this house, and now an hour. And now her heart raced at the sound of tires on gravel, the sight of her: first a dot, then a person, then a known shape, coming closer. She walked back into the house before Eva would notice her waiting. Isabel saw herself for a brief second from the outside in: restless and demanding, and somehow—needy. A word she had never ascribed to herself, she had never needed anything that could not be easily given. The thought embarrassed her, the glimpse of herself in the mirror embarrassed her, and so she turned away from it all with a firm twist.

She had held a pear in her hand and she had eaten it skin and all. She had eaten the stem and she had eaten its seeds and she had eaten its core, and the hunger still sat in her like an open maw. She thought: I can hold you and find that I still miss your body. She thought: I can listen to you speak and still miss the sound of your voice.

Isn’t that strange, how that works? You can think something that used to be true but isn’t true anymore but still believe it in your bones.

That’s what happens when people die. They take themselves with them and you never ever find out anything new about them ever. I think that big love is like that but no one’s dead or dying. And then I think: it’s much better to just like a person a lot. Who makes good decisions when they’re in love? I know no one.