This is the second of two excerpts comprising the first chapter of Nichole’s debut novel.
The following is reprinted from the book The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D. by Nichole Bernier. Copyright © 2012 by Nichole Bernier. Published by The Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
The roadside clutter thinned near the Connecticut line, old tires and abandoned appliances giving way to birches, azaleas, road kill. Trees lined the median like suburban sentries. The sun hadn’t let up and Kate’s sunglasses weren’t doing much to cut the glare, reviving the headache she’d had on and off all day, and yesterday too. A two-day headache. Brain tumor, she thought. Ocular cancer. Aneurysm.
She lowered the window a few inches. A warm wind cleared the recirculated air and the smell of old peanut butter sandwiches.
Several things struck her each time she read Elizabeth’s note, one thing more than the rest. It wasn’t that Elizabeth had kept journals, though there was that, or the wonderment of what such an uncomplicated person could have written. Today I got Jonah and Anna to agree to turkey sandwiches in their lunchboxes. Or the realization that Elizabeth had been so phobic about flying; Kate knew she’d been a bit of a nervous flier, but enough to make a summer addendum to her will before she traveled? And it wasn’t the contradiction that she had been meticulous enough to name a trustee for her journals, but had never followed through with the letter expressing her intentions. What struck Kate most was a single word choice—sensitive. Not a word people used often to describe her. Even with Elizabeth, her most frequent contact in the dailiness of mothering, sensitivity wasn’t something Kate wore on her sleeve. But Elizabeth had seen it. Each time Kate thought of it, she felt the loss of something she hadn’t known she’d had, an unscratched lottery ticket found years too late, a winner.
When Kate first heard about Elizabeth’s trip out west, it was last July. The Spensers stopped for an overnight in Connecticut on their way to the previous summer’s vacation, and the two women had gone walking on the beach, as they did when Kate came back to visit. Elizabeth mentioned her birthday gift from Dave, a long weekend away for a painting workshop. There was an opportunity with a Mexican painter famous for abstract landscapes, she’d said, a workshop guru who almost never left Oaxaca. She spoke in a gush with agitated movements, working a chain of dried seaweed between her fingers like rosary beads.
It had been strange, such fidgeting from a person usually calm as tranquilizers. Elizabeth called the trip a fortieth birthday present two years early, one she’d requested herself from Dave. She’d found a cheap flight from JFK to Los Angeles on August 9; Joshua Tree was about 120 miles east, and she was even looking forward to the drive alone. A getaway to recharge her batteries, she’d said, as the seaweed strand snapped in her hands. At the time Kate had been surprised. Elizabeth hardly ever traveled, rarely expressed an interest in it. Kate knew Elizabeth used to paint before she and Dave were married and still dabbled here and there, but nothing Kate would have thought worth taking a trip across the country without a baby so young.
That was the last time she’d seen Elizabeth. Her plane never made it past Queens. Officials called it a freak accident, a confluence of bad things—bad wind, bad rudder, a bad call by the pilot. Any deeper consideration of the flight, or the arbitrariness of Elizabeth’s having been on it, was quickly overshadowed by all that came in September.
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