More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Isabel felt distantly dizzy: it wasn’t her own head spinning, but somewhere nearby something was spinning, and it was dragging her in. Eva’s gaze, heavy in the dark.
“Who are you?” She said, “Have you always been like this? Have you just been waiting to happen?”
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.
Sunday came and Louis had not yet called and Isabel did not go to church. Sunday came and instead Isabel spent the morning convincing herself she didn’t want to kiss Eva, then doing little else but kissing Eva into the shadowed wall in the hallway.
“Would you like me to?” She knew what she wanted to hear, hated how obvious it was: wanting to be told she was wanted.
Isabel had never wanted before. And now any day Louis could knock on the door and then what Isabel wanted would no longer matter.
“I will have to go with Louis. You understand that, don’t you, Isabel?” “No,” said Isabel. “Darling,” Eva said. “You can’t.” “Isn’t it better than nothing?” Eva said. “Isn’t it enough?” Isabel took a breath to answer and found that she had no answer to give. Found that she did not know the precise meaning of the word enough, the way Eva used it—not what it meant in relation to another, in relation to her.
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.
“There isn’t a version of me that could’ve looked away from you.”
Isabel stood in the hallway with a head full of cotton. She had kissed Eva against that wall. She had kissed Eva in that doorway.
That’s what happens when people die. They take themselves with them and you never ever find out anything new about them ever.
June 15, 1961 God help me. I can still feel her mouth.
God help me she looks at me. God help me I don’t want her to look away.
She wakes up before I do and gets breakfast ready so I can have it when I am awake and it makes me want to cry. People have done this before, it is not special, and still I want to cry.
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.
Isabel tried to consider Eva, tried to consider her face and her health and found she couldn’t, found she had to look away. Found that love was a sickly thing that punished you for each step you took in its direction.
“I want to die at the thought of anything hurting you.”
“And what if that’s you?” she said. “The thing that hurts? What if—it’s who you are? What if it’s where you come from and—” Isabel turned her face down: to be closer. To feel the words with the heat of her mouth. Eva whispered, “What will you do then?”
She gave Eva the wine and found that her heart had not grown any lighter over the months, had not grown any lighter at the sight of Eva. She loved her. She might always.
“If you are mine then I am yours. Do you understand?
“Let me,” she said. “Let me. My love. Let me try.”
She knew Eva was there, knew she had approached. She would never not know. She would never leave a room again and not leave half of her behind.
