The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D Read Online Free PDF Page A

1976
    Dear Diary
,
    Dr. Trinker says I should start keeping a diary to write my thoughts, and do it like I’m writing letters to my best friend or to myself, and that it will help me “process” and “move on.” For the record I think this is a stupid idea, writing to make yourself feel better. But when I rode my bike today past the sub sandwich place where I took Anna for her birthday in February, I couldn’t breathe and actually had to get off and put my head between my knees like an asthma attack. So I will give it a try. She was so proud of turning eight and really psyched to be biking into town, and I thought she’d explode when we went to the pet store and I told her I was getting her a fish for her present. She made me get one too so it would have a friend in the tank to keep it company. Hers died last week. Figures
.
    When you write a letter to your diary are you supposed to sign it?
    Yours truly
,
    Lizzie Drogan
    Kate stopped reading at a sound, a rustling in the trees behind the car. The wooded fringe was a wall of shadows. She held her breath but there was only stillness, then the trembling ground of a truck beyond the trees. Her car’s rear hatch was still raised, and she realized she was fully backlit and visible to anyone coming off the interstate, anyone roaming at 2 a.m. near the rear entry of a motel.
    Kate closed the car door, then pressed the lock button on her keychain, and the alarm chirped. Something darted from under the car by her feet. She gasped and jumped back, dropping the notebook. Low and dark, a small animal loped away toward the Dumpsters, its striped tail bobbing like the flag on a girl’s bike.

    The motel room was dark and quiet when Kate let herself back in. She settled into the armchair and switched the table lamp back on, then sat considering the sticker-covered notebook in her hands. Kate had never seen a photograph of Elizabeth as a child, and the disaffected tone of the journal entry did little to evoke her spirit. Kate tried to imagine her biking into town at twelve, April spattering the back of her pants. Walking through the aisles of a stationery store, muttering
Stupid
under her breath, then riding home with her selection and later pressing kittens onto the cover in a small spasm of preteen cheer. In this way, under duress, she’d begun the journal-writing habit that would last her entire life.
    April 15, 1976
    Dear Diary,
    Another day of no one talking to me on the bus. I stared out the window and tried to think of something else when we passed Taylor Streetand the little cross on the side of the road. I’ve never felt lonelier in my whole life. Everyone is so freaked out around me that for the last month it’s been like I’m poison. It’s like having a sister get killed is contagious and I’m glowing with it. I wish I could move away
.
    Yours truly
,
    Lizzie D
    A sister. Kate felt the chair sink and the floor become unsteady under her feet. How was it possible Elizabeth could have had a sister and not told Kate? Not about the loss, or ever having had one at all. She’d mentioned being an only child, but had spoken so little about it that Kate assumed it had come about in the usual way: parents ambivalent about the demands of children found that one was quite enough, or perhaps were unable to have another, creating an emptiness that had fueled Elizabeth’s decision to have three of her own.
Maybe more
, she used to say.
    Kate exhaled. She thought of how Piper curled into James as they slept in the car, head to head, their high symmetrical eyebrows like two parenthetical statements to Kate’s fulfillment as a professional, and then a wife. She thought of her own sister, Rachel. A sister was a companion and competitor, the person who best understood the crucible in which you were formed. One of the few capable of completing you, and if lost, of cleaving you cleanly in half.
    But in the wash of sympathy, there was a sting that she hadn’t been told.
    April 27,