The Safekeep

by Yael van der Wouden

She thought that might have been joy, or something like it. Something that feels sad as much as it feels like love.

The terror was as wide as the want: a boulder moved from the gaping mouth of a cave.

Isabel wondered, briefly and horribly, what Louis had done to earn his first kiss from Eva. How he had touched her, and whether she’d let him, as she’d let Isabel. Whether she’d touched him in return, whether she’d taken him to her room, whether they’d not waited at all before they—

“Girlfriend,” Eva finished then. A glance, quick as anything. Isabel looked away from it. She felt sick. Shame rose up like tar—slow, thick. Louis’s girlfriend.

Eva was someone else now: distracted from her, not caring for her. Looking away from her, worried about other people.

Isabel swayed back into her. In the crook of Eva’s neck, she found a heartbeat to put her lips to.

“I’m not letting her anything.” She said it and felt the words churn on themselves. A lie, of course. She let Eva. She had let her a lot.

He said, “It’s just that I’ve never known you to allow anything you didn’t want in the first place.” He added, “She’s good for you, I think.”

They looked like a couple on a honeymoon. “Ah,” Hendrik said. “A pretty deception.”

She walked Hendrik back home, and he shook, cold and miserable, and Mother kept her hand on his shoulder the whole time. When people looked at them, two drowned miseries, Mother would shake Hendrik and say, Nose ahead. She meant: Don’t mind others. Only look ahead.

“What,” Isabel asked. “What happened to it?” Eva gave her a sidelong look. “They released it,” she said. “After a few days. They couldn’t keep it.” She put a nail to the groove of the wood—a chip in the varnish—poked at it. “It’s not a thing to keep.”

Two days since Eva first took her mouth in a kiss. Two days and they’ve been running in short sprints at each other, starting, stopping, toward and away. Catching slatted-fenced glimpses of each other.

She pulled Eva in. She said “Shh” when Eva sobbed, she said: “It’s me, it’s me.” And Eva said, “Isabel. Isabel,” and said her name like that: a statement, a reminder.

Isabel had never known an embrace like this. Had never been so close in the night. She put her forehead to Eva’s—damp sweat, hot skin. Their noses brushed. Her hand was on the sash of Eva’s robe, tightening. It wasn’t a kiss, it was only a nearness. Isabel could feel the heat of her lips. It wasn’t a kiss.

Across the path, Eva remained, eyes down. Isabel waited. Mouth dry, throat dry. Eventually, Eva picked up the basket, made her way over, too. She took her time, rearranged the weight, from this arm to that arm, back and forth. At the door, several steps away, she stopped. Said, “I can help you cook, you know.”

She was not wanted. That was the long and the short of it: she had learned want, briefly and hungrily. A span of a day, two days. She had learned the shape of it, the quick taste of it. She had reached out, foolishly, and she was not wanted in return. She was not Louis. She was not Hendrik.

The look Eva gave her was wide and dark. Her mouth set as though in anger. It wasn’t anger. Isabel recognized it this time. Found it echoed in herself, a shiver. It wasn’t anger at all.

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

Eva’s hands were on her knees, an unnatural position. She had been waiting for Isabel. She knew Isabel would come for her.

Then Eva said, “You let him kiss you.” The doorjamb dug into Isabel’s back. She leaned away from it. She said, “You let him take me away.”

She didn’t know what she wanted; she knew what she wanted. She didn’t know and knew at once, a blurry shape turning sometimes sharp, a loud Klaxon of yes; and answering the question Where? with: Anywhere. Anywhere.

Eva’s thigh was still between her legs, where she was heaviest; where she was swollen and soaked and would die if Eva touched her there. She was sure she would die if Eva touched her there.

She could not keep quiet. She could not. The sounds pulled from her, loud under the room’s slanted ceiling; loud in the night, loud in how empty the house was.

She opened a window. A ray of light cut across the bed, across Eva’s arm; across her bare breast and a map of marks, red and smarting. She wondered whether Louis had ever done as much, given her as much. Saw her and was undone by her as much.

Isabel’s world narrowed down to a small patch of skin on Eva’s shoulder. She didn’t look at anything else, didn’t lift her eyes.

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.

Isabel told her: “There isn’t a version of me that could’ve looked away from you.”

Little baby Jesus everywhere. They have no problem letting Jews into their homes as long as they’re carved from wood, do they.

She wanted me to come have tea at a café at the corner. I thought, Oh, she has someone waiting there who will get me and send me to the Germans. That’s what I thought! And then I thought: that can’t happen anymore. 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.

Have taken diary with me, have decided I am not worried: Louis does not notice me much or the things I have or the things I do. He wants me! Obviously. He does not notice me.

That’s what happens when people die. They take themselves with them and you never ever find out anything new about them ever.

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.

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 said to the lampshade covered in gauze: “You see, when you spend a very long time being—being quite invisible, really, and quiet, then… You see—” A halted word. “I thought you saw me. For a second there.”

The canals had frozen over. Isabel tested one with her foot and found it solid, and then stood on it in wonder: a miracle, she thought, to stand so solidly on what could also engulf you.

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.