After the funeral, they sat around Dan’s kitchen table with three boxes of her notebooks.
Not diaries. She’d always been clear about that. Research notebooks. Field observations. Thirty years of them, numbered spines, the handwriting changing from one end of the shelf to the other.
“She’d want the early ones destroyed,” said Ellen, who’d known her in graduate school.
“She wouldn’t,” said Marcus, her colleague for the last decade. “She kept everything. She was meticulous.”
“That’s not the same as wanting it read.”
Dan had no opinion. He’d married her twelve years ago and never opened them. That had been the rule: they’re not private, they’re just not interesting to you. Which was probably true. He was an electrician. Her notebooks were full of soil cores and pollen counts and diagrams he couldn’t read.
They divided them into decades. Ellen took the eighties. Marcus took the two-thousands. Dan took the nineties because nobody else wanted them — the in-between years, after the PhD and before the lab appointment, when she’d been adjunct-teaching and applying for everything.
For three weeks they read. They took notes. They met again.
“She was angry,” Ellen said. “I’d forgotten how angry. The early notebooks — she’s arguing with everyone. Her advisors, the literature, herself. There are pages where she’s crossed out her own conclusions and started over. Four, five times.”
“That’s not what I found,” Marcus said. “The later notebooks are calm. Systematic. She’d arrive at a site, measure, record, move on. The anger’s gone.”
“Or she learned to hide it.”
“That’s a theory about a person you’re constructing from text, Ellen.”
Dan looked at his stack. The nineties were different from both. She wasn’t angry or calm. She was scared. Not of the work — of the gaps in the work. Pages where she’d written the same measurement twice, three times, with question marks. Margins full of: check this. check this again. can’t verify until spring.
She’d been afraid of being wrong. Not in the way that makes you careful. In the way that makes you measure the same thing until the instrument wears out.
He’d known this about her. Not from the notebooks — from living with her. The way she’d check the lock three times. The way she’d re-read emails before sending. He’d thought it was personality. The notebooks said it was load-bearing. The whole structure of her precision was built on a foundation of not trusting the first reading.
“I think we’re describing three different people,” he said.
“We’re describing the same person at different times,” Marcus said.
“No.” Dan closed the notebook in front of him. “We’re each describing the person these notebooks make when we read them. The angry one, the calm one, the scared one. They’re all real. None of them are her.”
“Then who was she?”
Dan looked at the window. It was the same window she’d looked through for twelve years, and he didn’t know what she saw.
“Someone we’d have to ask.”
Ellen pushed her stack toward the center of the table. “She said something once — I’ve been trying to remember it exactly. In the first year of the program. She said the field observations were never the field. They were a negotiation between the field and the observer. The notebook was the treaty.”
“That sounds like her.”
“It sounds like all of us.”
They sat with the notebooks between them, three agreements about a person who wasn’t there to disagree.