The Safekeep

by Yael van der Wouden

It had been years since her passing and the plates were still kept behind the closed doors, unused. On the rare occasion when Isabel’s brothers visited, Isabel would set the table using everyday plates and Hendrik would try to pry open the vitrine and say, “Isa, Isa, come now, what’s the point of having good things if you can’t touch them?” And Isabel would answer: “They are not for touching. They are for keeping.”

But he was right somehow. An odd angle of a thought that hadn’t struck her before—they’d moved into a finished house, a full house. Nearly everything laid out: the sheets, the pots, the vases in the windowsills.

“Who is she, Louis? Who is she, where did she come from, do you even know her, how long have you known her, who’s to say she is who she says she is, that she’s not trying to—” “Keep your voice down!” Then: “Trying to what?” He looked at her, bewildered. She didn’t know how to finish that thought, now that it had been cut off. She breathed high in her chest, and he just looked at her. The silence stretched. Then he said, “You’ve been alone for too long. You’ve not been around people for too long.” “I’m not alone.”

bed-and-breakfast near town. He had brought a man who lingered outside the cemetery, waiting for Hendrik, umbrella in hand. Isabel had never known loneliness like that, one that arrived without the promise of leaving. There was no one now, no one to walk through the door unannounced, no one to open and close a drawer in the other room. Outside, meadows. Outside, land and more land. Isabel sat by the window with a cup of tea and was overcome. Terror rose up slow and thunderous: Mother had died so quickly, so easily, and Isabel had had no say in it. Her uncle might die, too, just as suddenly. The deed will go to Louis, and Louis might decide to marry, and Louis might decide he wanted her out—anything could happen at any given moment and she had no say in it, not in any of it. She belonged to the house in the sense that she had nothing else, no other life than the

house, but the house, by itself, did not belong to her.

But then Uncle Karel came by for dinner one bleak winter day, and he sat at the big table in his dandruff-speckled jumper, leaned in, and said: “You will understand, Isabel, now that your mother is gone, that you must be your own guardian. You must make your own connections.” He wiped at his lips with a napkin. “Don’t be a burden to your brothers, they will have their own lives. You can’t ask too much. And I won’t be here, I’ll have my own business, you understand. I’m not saying this to be harsh. I am saying it because it’s how these things go, and there is no one else who will tell you.”

And then he left, and again it was only she and the walls. The doors, the windows. She went around the house and closed everything, locked everything, the shutters and the curtains and everything that could be pulled over herself like a cloak. For a moment, for a brief and raging moment, she thought: Let him. Let him try to drag me out of here. She saw herself clawing into the walls, taking root.

Relief set in by increments. They never spoke of it, of her never leaving, of her living in the old house, but she wondered at times. Wondered whether it was a purposeful silence on his part—that perhaps he wanted her to have it, keep it. A year passed, two. Three. The house was still Isabel’s. The house would continue to be Isabel’s.

3

EVA TOOK UP SPACE WITH a loud restlessness, a bee stuck in a room with all the windows shut. She touched things, talked about the things she touched, asked questions about them—Is this painting supposed to be the Veluwe? Was this your mother’s vase?—took to circling the gardens with a cigarette in hand, put her fingers to the petals of shrubs, the trunks of trees. Isabel avoided her. Isabel watched her from an upstairs window. Isabel dug her nails into her wrists and breathed steadily through her nose.

It was a water-heavy fruit, full-ripe. The first bite spilled on Isabel’s skirt. It wouldn’t show: the fabric was brown, checkered. 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.

One silver candle holder went missing. There were two of them, an unappealing set, stumpy and old. Her mother’s. Kept in the back of the cupboard, taken out only for occasional polishing. One was gone. It was evening when Isabel found out. She rummaged through the kitchen, dining room, thinking—This will prove me right, this will— She found it under a cabinet: as though it had been placed on the table and had then fallen and rolled out of sight. Who would do that, Isabel wondered, and felt that she knew already.

Isabel thought, Something is wrong, and it took a moment for the thought to catch up with her sight: Eva was shaking. Her shoulders, her arms. Visibly so—terribly so. Then she bent over and held herself, and went down to a crouch, and Isabel got out of her chair, went to the window, and held the curtain further aside and— She was laughing. Eva was laughing. A hand to the ground to steady herself. It did not stop. Isabel stepped back. It felt like a déjà vu, like she had seen this before, and had been here before. But she hadn’t. There was nothing for Eva to laugh at. Nothing but Isabel, should she want to laugh at Isabel.

Isabel occasionally took her dinners with Eva in the dining room. Eva had been excited for her company at first—spent an evening peppering Isabel with questions, a child asking, What does that mean, what does that mean! What did Hendrik do for a living, and what did that mean, and what did her father do, and what did that mean, and when did they move, and what was Isabel’s favorite subject in school, and did she have good friends in the city, and did she have a boyfriend, a liefje, would she ever want to—

That first dinner ended in a long stretch of silence. Eva said once, “Don’t you have anything you want to know about me?” To which Isabel said, “No.”

Tonight was even quieter. Eva pulled apart her meat, ate half, pushed the rest around her plate. Isabel watched her at it. “That’s disrespectful.” Eva put down her fork. She seemed to be considering a thought. Then said, “Does nothing bring you joy, Isabel?” “What kind of question is that?” “A simple one,” said Eva. She sounded resigned. Isabel took a halted breath. An answer was at the back of her throat—she would speak it, she knew. If she did not stop it now she would speak it. She ate her potato and swallowed and still, words came. Unbidden, they still came: “What does it matter, what brings me joy. What a question, what brings me joy. And who are you, to think I have no—To assume I—” “Oh, then tell me.” Eva leaned forward, toward Isabel. Something about her lit up, a moment: like Isabel had given her an inch there, and she wanted more. “If I have it wrong, then tell me, really, tell me what—”

She thought that might have been joy, or something like it. Something that feels sad as much as it feels like love. When Isabel was twenty-two, the year after her mother’s passing, she got a dog, Haasje. Little hare. The animal wasn’t very clever—chased everything into the water, even the things that meant danger. She made Isabel laugh when so few other things ever did. Haasje died, too, barely a few years old. Too young for a dog.

What was joy, anyway. 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. What did they know of not speaking for days, of not having known the touch of another, never having known, of want and of not having felt the press of skin to one’s own, and what did they know of a house that only ever emptied out.

A thimble from her sewing kit. Isabel could not find it. It was such a small thing, could’ve gone anywhere—could’ve rolled under the bed, could’ve ended up in a pocket, and then in the drain after a cleaning. It did not prove anything. It was only a thimble. It did not prove—

“You worry too much. You shouldn’t worry so much. What danger am I, hmm? Small as I am?” A soft smile now, and she reached out: in the scuffle a strand of hair had come loose from Isabel’s bun—fell over her brow, eye. Eva brushed it aside, tucked it behind Isabel’s ear. Her fingers were colder than the room, nails cut short. “Sweet Isabel. What could I do to you?” Isabel jerked away. The words felt as if they had been shouted across rather than hushed in the small stretch between them. She knows, Isabel thought, wildly, and then—what? Knows what? She had no answer.

She knows, Isabel thought, and flushed from the inside out—mortified, a shuddering shame at something she couldn’t name. She pushed her head out the window into the chilling evening, hoping the air would take it away from her. 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.

5

AND THEN, OVER THE COURSE of several days: an engraved cake knife, missing. A decorative tile, a letter opener. A napkin ring. Isabel sat through a long Sunday morning in the church’s pews. Around her the congregation mumbled along to a song and Isabel stared ahead, unseeing, at the blurry space between the piano and the pulpit. Before her: a big wooden cross. All around: the inlaid windows. Dust caught in motion. Two more weeks to Louis’s return.

Isabel was wiping gently over the ear of a milk jug. Eva said, “You do that with such care.” It came out quietly. Isabel held the jug in the dip of her palm. The night had made the space between them odd, hushed. Isabel met Eva’s gaze and said, “A house is a precious thing.”

The pastor was speaking of St. Augustine and his pears. Something about youth in a pear grove, something about stealing for stealing’s sake, something about the seduction of disobedience. The faint taste of pear rose in the back of Isabel’s throat. The pastor was quoting, looking down at notes from the pulpit: “It was foul, St. Augustine wrote of his childish actions. It was foul and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. And so in considering our own—”

Neelke swore she didn’t take anything. She gave Isabel a teary speech: Why would I take anything? Why would I take, we have everything at home? And Isabel said: To sell, to pawn off, I don’t know why a thief would steal, you tell me. And Neelke said, No no no no! And cried, sobbed, at which point Eva came in smelling of suntan lotion. She looked bewildered by the scene, asked, “What—” And to Isabel, immediately: “What did you say to her, Isabel?” “None of your business,” Isabel said, and Eva turned to Neelke with a “Sweetheart, what—” “I have to go,” Neelke said, even though she was only halfway through her tasks for the day. Isabel and Eva watched her leave, watched through the window as she ran off with her bike in hand: still teary-eyed, still wiping at her face.

“Neelke is not stealing from you,” he said. He held his coffee by the rim, a cage of fingers over the mouth of the cup. “And Eva is just some girl Louis picked up somewhere. This is not a mystery.” “But—the spoon. The—” “Things get misplaced. Things get misplaced all the time when you live with other people. God, what do you think half my arguments with Sebastian are about?” He had to pull in his long legs when someone wanted to pass, then unfolded them again—sprawled into space. “Stop that,” he said, and pulled Isabel’s pinching fingers from the back of her hand.

“I don’t live with other people,” she said. The implication was: unlike you. Unlike Hendrik and Sebastian. It had been seven years and she avoided saying it out loud as such, admitting it as such—Hendrik and the person he was living with. The person he was— “I know. But for now you do. For now.”

The inside of Eva’s mouth was stained wine-purple. She was wearing Neelke’s cardigan. She said something, and then they both laughed loudly, and Isabel’s harsh tumble of a heart shoved her forward: down the two steps into the room. She could feel the angry heat in her face, saying, “What’s this? Why is Neelke still here? What are you two—what…”

“Why don’t you join us, Isabel? Sit down. Join. There’s wine, there’s—” “I know there’s wine. That’s my wine.” Her breath was coming fast and uneven through her nose. “This is my kitchen. This is my—” “House, yes, we know,” Eva said. “We know. This is your house.” She was defiant—jaw cocked, looking up at Isabel. She’d winged her eyelids today, had painted her lashes. She was still holding on to Neelke. “Let her go.” “I’ll go,” Neelke said. “You stay,” Eva said.

The door bounced off its frame: Neelke let it fall shut behind her as she rushed out, not too steady on her feet. Then Eva got out of her chair—a harsh scrape on the floor—and Isabel took a step farther, ready, and both of them spoke at the same time, Isabel with a “—getting the maid drunk under my roof while—” and Eva with a “—like a tyrant, as if no one is allowed to breathe when you’re—” They fell silent.

An indignant sound rose from Isabel. Not listening, Eva said, as if Isabel could, as if the sound of Eva’s voice was a choice for Isabel to make. Every day, she had to listen to Eva. Every moment spent in the house and everything about her was too big to avoid: the glare of the sun off her hair, the ring of her laughter, the way her words went high when she put on that act, her night terrors—huffing and restless in the dark, so loud that Isabel could hear her through two closed doors. Isabel couldn’t help but listen, wished she could, wished she— “This is my life,” she ground out. “Do you understand? This is my—” “And what a life it is! You must be bored. Isabel, I am bored beyond measure and I’ve only been here for a minute. Oh, if you’d just let me—just let me in, let’s—We could talk, we could take walks, wouldn’t that be fun? Wouldn’t that be so much better?” The apples of Eva’s cheeks looked tight and blotchy. She walked around the table as she spoke, walked toward Isabel. She was in a skirt, a loose blouse. The fabric slipped, and there: the pinched elastic of her bra dug into her flesh. It was pink. “I can’t,” Isabel said, “think of anything worse.” Eva came to a standstill. She breathed a few quick times, chest rising. “Why are you so determined to dislike me?”

“There’s no determination there,” Isabel said. “I dislike you—quite effortlessly.” Eva’s reaction was a punched-out sound. It could have been amusement—it could have been frustration. It rolled through her once, twice. “Right,” she said, and then looked up at the ceiling, the empty game rack. She blinked rapidly, throat working. “Right,” she said, and walked by Isabel, making to leave. Isabel caught her by her elbow—it happened without her intention. They both looked down at Isabel’s hand, the dig of her fingers. She was holding on tightly. “Let go,” Eva said. Her voice was rough now. Isabel let go.

“No, no I—” She moved. She was near. “I’ve been kissed by boys I didn’t want to kiss, in the past. That’s all, that’s all I wanted…” She trailed off. “How,” Isabel started, “how can you know?” “Know?” “If you want. Or if you, if you’re…” “Well… Well, sometimes you just know, of course, and sometimes you have to try, and then you know.” Isabel turned her face away. She was sure it was flaming. Isabel did not know what that meant at all: what it was to know, of course. “You should just let him,” Eva said. “Next time he tries. Find out.”

Eva said, “You worry about it too much. It’s nothing, really, a kiss. It’s such a small thing, you wouldn’t believe.” Isabel looked at her now, quick and scathing, meaning to say something about not being stupid, about having kissed before, though she hadn’t, but Eva was waiting for her there: a puff of a laugh and then she darted in, pecked Isabel on the lips. “See! The smallest thing, isn’t it? Nothing at all.” Isabel stared. Her mouth felt branded: lemon to a wound, salt. She could not take a full breath.

She was so short this close. So warm. She had made Isabel so angry and Isabel’s face felt heavy, and a foreign thing pulled at her from behind her navel. Pulled. She turned to Eva—a fraction of a movement. Eva swayed, leaned first away and then, all at once, toward—tiptoes. She kissed her again. It was a press of a mouth this time: Isabel’s sharp inhale, Eva’s top lip between hers. Heat, the quickest bloom: the pressure of Eva’s fingers to her shoulder, her chest to Eva’s, her kiss. Their lips clung when Eva pulled back with a raindrop of a sound. “Oh,” Eva said. “You resemble him so much.”

Don’t let—, Isabel thought, and turned, and Eva was there, right there: a hot shape in the dark. Isabel either pulled or was pulled—a rushed and clumsy embrace. The kiss happened without her knowledge, without her understanding the steps it took: how they swayed in the middle of the hallway the one moment and found wall the next; how Isabel came to hold the curve of Eva’s jaw, thumb to the bony joint when Eva opened her mouth for her, did so with a stutter of a sound for her; when Eva came to fist a hand under the heat of Isabel’s hair, when she came to move against her, puff against her. Isabel pushed in closer. She wanted to push Eva through the wall, wanted to push herself into Eva, too. The slide of Eva’s tongue made a pendulum swing low in her belly, made something pitch like a whistle. Eva would not be quiet, would not be still, would grab at her and say, “Mm, ah—” Sounds from the back of her throat and restless hands pulling, hot mouth wide, putting her teeth to Isabel’s lip. The jolt of the bite made Isabel reach, pinch Eva hard at the waist and Eva gasped and—

Her heart gave a single terrified thump. She moved away, found her door—opened it, closed it quick behind her. Stood there for a moment, forehead against the wood. The terror was as wide as the want: a boulder moved from the gaping mouth of a cave.

6

Mother’s voice rose: “I forbid it, Hendrik. I forbid it.”

And Hendrik, his words now clear as a bell: “Forbid what? Say it, Mother, please say it, what is it you think you forbid me to do? You can’t say it, you can’t even think it, of course you can’t, how can you even conceive of such a thing, what life have you lived and now all alone in this house with your maids and your—curtains that need cleaning and the tea at twelve and God the boring fucking—” The slap rang out crisply. There was nothing else that sound could have been, nothing but the rush of a hand to a cheek. Then Mother’s gasp, followed by a single startled cry.

“He doesn’t love me,” he told her. He was crying. “He lied, he doesn’t love me.” Isabel wanted to not hear the words in the same way she could sometimes blur her eyes when looking at something—decide not to see it in full focus, decide to disengage. She swallowed and lowered the cloth from his face. All of her recoiled from the word love. She couldn’t keep the rush of sickness that came over her. She recalled: Hendrik, on the damp mossy ground, Edwin writhing over him. “It’s better like this,” she said. “It was wrong. It is better that it’s over.”

Hendrik would not speak with Isabel that week. He sat at Mother’s side and held her hand and ignored Isabel. Once, the first year when Hendrik did not show for Christmas, Mother had said: “I suppose we all have our priorities.” Isabel had held him as a child. He now loved others more than he loved her. His mother was on her deathbed and he cried over a man. Such were things, and Isabel lifted her chin at it, ground her teeth at it, made herself bigger.

“What do you mean, she knew?” “I don’t know, she just knew! She asked me something about Sebastian earlier and—oh, I can’t recall, she just understood, we didn’t speak it out loud. It’s not so outrageous, Isabel. She’s a modern girl and there are other people like us in the world and perhaps we’re not the first ones Eva’s met or—” “I know there’s—” She stopped herself, lowered her voice. Eva and Sebastian were inside, clearing up breakfast. The window was open, and sound carried easily here. She said, “Never mind.” Hendrik came to stand next to her. He lit a cigarette, said, “You’re letting her sleep in Mother’s room, though.” “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. She added, quickly, “Louis told her she could stay there.”

He added, “She’s good for you, I think.” “Good?” A heavy thud in her chest as she said this. Images from last night, quick and terrible and overlit. “What do you mean, good?” Hendrik was amused by her anger, said, “She’s loosened you. It’s nice.” Isabel could only look at him. Could only widen her eyes, a baffled breath, and Hendrik continued, “You danced last night, now you’re coming for a swim. Who would’ve thought!”

Arousal, when it came, was an inconvenience—a wrench in the routine and a distraction. It was a heavy blanket weighing her down in the night, it was the drag of honey into lungs. It was never bound to anyone. Not a face, not a body, not the promise of a touch—never the promise of a touch. It rose and fell with the same unpredictability of a fever caught outside the house, the same disembodied mystery—who had it been? Who was it that coughed, passed this on?

He didn’t say that now. He loosened unexpectedly. The drink, the melancholy heat. The slow way Eva eased the conversation out of him. He spoke of his mother: how beautiful she had been in her youth, movie-star beauty. How she had been too young to have him when she had him, and heartsick, still, and how she tried her best. To raise him, to have the family accept him, the brown child they desperately tried to pass off as white.

“It’s,” Eva started. She wiped her hands along her ribs. It was a nervous gesture, and Isabel had seen it on her before. “It’s been an odd few days.” “Odd,” Isabel repeated, flat. “We’ve just been—” She turned to face Isabel, and she was all nerves now, eyes restless and a trembling smile. “Oh, we’ve been a bit stupid, haven’t we? Just—so silly, with—But it’s, it’s just, we shouldn’t think about it too much, right, Isabel? It happens, kisses are just—things, and they happen, and… Perhaps best if we—just. How about we don’t speak of it at all? Wouldn’t that be best? And Louis will be back within a week or so, of course, and we’ll—we’ll be like sisters, and… So it’s best if we…” “It was a game to you,” Isabel concluded for her. “You meant to make—fun of me.”

Isabel closed her eyes in the back seat and did not open them until they were already driving. All the windows were down. The wind pushed through, a hot breath, a bright warm palm of sky to her face. Sebastian quietly asked her, once, “Are you all right?” And Isabel said, “Of course,” sternly. The storm had left its marks on the landscape: trees felled, branches tumbled down dikes. In reply, nature screeched into the day: insects rubbing noise out of wings, blackbirds running and cawing, flying and cawing.

“What will you do?” Isabel asked. She had intended to command, and instead it was only a question. “When he arrives?” “Oh, I’ll—Don’t worry about me.” “I don’t,” Isabel said. Eva smiled at that, unhappy. She had done a lovely job of the garden table: a cloth, two candles. A bowl over a plate. The good glasses, the etched crystal. Isabel weathered the sudden and rattling rush that demanded she go to Eva, that she put her hands on her—but Isabel remained where she was, a tree upright in a storm.