Free The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D by Nichole Bernier

say for sure they were of like mind.
    Was it possible, she wondered, to have solitude together? She tried to imagine what he would do if after dinner she went to his study back home with her book or her laptop, and sat on the couch there instead of in the living room, as they had in the early years. He might glance over the top of his computer with a look of surprise and then a smile of welcome.
Hey there
. Or there might be a moment’s hesitation. She’d sit quietly nearby, each of them feeling the weight of the other in the room and a dampening of his or her own thoughts, each looking up expectantly when the other shifted in a chair or looked off into the middle distance. She might offer a snippet of commentary about something she was reading, but it would not be easily understood out of context. After an hour or so she would stand and stretch, murmur that she thought she’d call it a night, and the following night she’d go back to the living room. It was a gift, solitude. But solitude with another person, that was an art.
    She’d never thought about Elizabeth and Dave in that way. But if she had, she would have imagined them smoothly companionable. Elizabeth reading a book while Dave sat on the leather couch reviewing promotional materials for some new piece of golf equipment. When he got up for a cup of coffee or a dish of ice cream and asked in his folksy way if she wanted something, she’d smile at his thoughtfulness. Or maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe she had wished he’d be the kind of man to walk back in with two glasses of wine, step in front of the television, and lift the book out of her hands. Maybe in truth there had been a lot of invisible wishing.

    For two nights Kate had been reading the journal in the loft long after the last of the boats returned across the dark harbor, running lights trailing like phosphorescent fish. The second night she’d opened the notebook with hesitation. If she’d had to guess what her friend had been like in high school, Kate would have imagined a fresh-scrubbed yearbook editor, an all-American girl who babysat for the neighborhood. This emerging person was significantly less sunny, more independent and creative, but much lonelier. Kate found herself wishing for a photo, wondering whether she had been fashionable once, before she became the kind of mother who wore dangling pumpkin earrings at Halloween.
    Last night’s entries followed Elizabeth through her senior year of high school. There was a tremendous amount of writing; Elizabeth recorded details the way others whispered observations to friends. She’d passed the time waiting for college acceptance letters by painting and holding odd jobs. Like her friends, she experimented with alcohol; drinking at weekend parties made her feel indistinct, blurring the line where she ended and others began. She and Michael would sit in his car with the radio on. When he kissed her, he cupped her jaw in one hand and didn’t slip his hand up under her shirt right away, which she saw as a sign of his integrity. She held out hope that soon he’d ask her to sit alone with him during lunch in the cafeteria, as the couples did.
    Her art teacher recommended her to a gallery that carried the work of new artists, and she wrote giddily of the sale of two pieces for $100 each. She kept her favorite; a sketch of it in her journal showed a Warhol-style canvas of repetitive, overlapping bicycle wheels. Finally a thick envelope arrived from NYU.
    She wrote in the journal all spring and summer, pages filled with longing for closer friends, a more conventional mother, a real relationship with Michael. But as the months passed and her hopes were not met, the tenor of her adolescent wishing cooled. She met Michael more often at night, but stopped dreaming he’d ask her toshare a table in the cafeteria, and stopped hinting that her family used to be larger when he expressed no curiosity or concern.
    The grandfather clock gonged once from the