The List

by Karin Tanabe

  “Well, I still feel very out of place here most of the time,” I replied unsympathetically.

  “Mom said you hate your job,” said Payton, her face still expressionless. “She said you detest it, and that you have to start at five and write something every hour, and that you want to drink motor oil at lunch and just off yourself, but that she won’t help you because you got yourself into this mess in the first place because you wanted a job with more substance.”

  My mother thought I wanted to off myself? Yet didn’t have plans to intervene? She clearly needed to consult that Spock guide to parenting for a little refresher course.

  “It’s not that bad,” I said, dragging my boots through the grass. “Just all-consuming. The hours are so hard. I don’t have any time for life. And the pressure can be intense. I always feel like if I get one fact wrong, one tiny thing, my career will be over. And when you’re going so fast and resting so little, the odds of slipping are high. But there are good things, too. The access. Working with smart people. And just proving to yourself that you can do it. Plus, I think people are starting to like me more there. The important people.”

  “Yeah, well, I could probably eat a live snake if I had to, but you don’t see me brunching on a cobra, do you. Some things aren’t worth proving.”

  Ignoring her words, I looked out into the distance of the Blue Ridge Mountains and saw lights flashing in the field.

  “Look! Lightning bugs. They’re one of my favorite things about summer,” I announced.

  “I’m aware of your childish affection for the luminescent pests,” said Payton, deadpan. She sped up to untack her horse and headed into the house to steam off her grit.

  Later that night, lounging in our rambling childhood home, I made us iced teas and Payton tried to give me an outsider’s perspective on the latest details I had unearthed at George Mason.

  “Well, there’s no way that girl is getting in Senator Porno’s pants all for the cause of immigration reform,” Payton concluded.

  Our parents had gone into D.C. to catch the Bolshoi Ballet’s much-heralded version of Spartacus, and we had taken over their room like ten-year-olds, eating takeout on their bed while All About Eve played on the TV in front of us.

  “And I don’t understand why Sandro told you all that stuff about his past, about being from Mexico and marrying Olivia while still in school. If he was in cahoots with her to change that old man’s votes, he wouldn’t be talking about his below-the-border pedigree. He would be lying. And I don’t think he knows his wife is having an affair, either. He wouldn’t be serving as her henchman, delivering threats to you in the front seat of your car if he knew about Stanton.”

  “Yeah, I agree. I realized after I kissed him that there was no way he knew about Stanton. I don’t think he would’ve pushed me off like that if he did.”

  Payton smiled and called me a mouth rapist before turning up the volume on the TV with our parents’ space station remote control. “You can’t get all soft and lovestruck and think about Sandro’s reaction,” she added, handing me a box of General Tso’s chicken. “What matters is that Stanton and Olivia got together, period. Your only story is the affair. And it’s a big one.”

  “Yeah,” I confirmed, shoving a broccoli floret down my throat, causing me to start choking. Payton did not move to help me. She just sat there in her head-to-toe Lululemon athletic wear, looking like a yoga advertisement.

  After I flung my body over hers to reach the water and save my own life, I clarified, “And I do have photos. Pretty incredible photos.”

  “Show me,” demanded Payton. “I can’t believe I haven’t asked until now.”

  I made her leave our parents’ comfortable room and follow me out of the house, through the wet grass to the barn, where we flopped on my bed and I flicked on my computer. After entering my password, which was typed in three languages, I showed her what I had. Photo after photo of skin and compromising positions. I had them date and time stamped; I had raw files, huge, duplicable files.

  “How have you not run this story already?” asked Payton when she was done scrolling through the images. “You should have already gone to print with this. There could be other people on to her. Who cares about the theories. Print the pictures and say it’s just an affair.”

  “But it’s not just an affair!” I said, pulling up the picture of Olivia and Stanton holding each other by the window. “Look at this! There’s something behind this.”

  “You don’t have time to figure it out,” said Payton. “You’re getting fired in twenty-five days.”

  “I know,” I said, feeling time start to crunch in around me. “At first I waited because part of me still felt like it was none of my business. It’s just an affair, like any other affair. They weren’t jeopardizing national security or anything like that.”

  “And now you’ve stomped all over your pathetic ideals?”

  “No,” I said. “I just think there’s a bigger story here, even if Sandro’s not involved. Before I knew that Olivia was married, I thought she might be risking her career for lust, or even love. But now I think she has to be trying to sway him on something. Immigration is his big issue, but since Sandro doesn’t seem to know anything about it, it could be something with Stanton’s family’s company.”

  “But you haven’t confirmed that the young Olivia in Arizona is Olivia Campo,” Payton reminded me.

  “I know. I even looked up the name Olivia online, and out of twenty-five thousand baby names, it’s ranked as the fourth most popular for girls. That’s pretty damn high. Adrienne was six hundred and ninety-six.”

  Payton rolled her ice-blue eyes at me, stretched down on my bed like a cat, and collapsed into child’s pose. With her head smushed into my duvet, she said, “You have to go to print soon. You could lose all your work if you don’t. There are curious reporters all over this town. You just have to be the one to press ‘go’ first.”

  She turned onto her back and put her head on my needlepoint pillow, letting her hair tumble around her like a halo. “Besides, you know how these things work, Addy. Once the story gets published, sources will creep out. People will be jumping to talk to you and then all the dirty details will follow. But the reporter who broke the story will forever be associated with it, even if they’re not publishing all the intimate details. Think about Watergate. Or the Abu Ghraib scandal. That’s how it works.”

  It was true that someone at Goodstone could be on to them. Or even Stanton’s wife. But political spouses turned a blind eye all the time, and I did still believe I was the only reporter who knew.

  “Hand me the landline. I have to call Buck. He doesn’t know where I am,” said Payton, folding herself back into a yoga posture.

  “What do you mean he doesn’t know where you are,” I said, reaching for her head. I should have known better: she successfully bit my hand. She was like a lion cub. They look so cute, but really they want to suck out your eyeballs.

  “I told him I was going north for a couple days, but I think he interpreted that as Uruguay, not Virginia. Hand me the phone, will you, Fatty Addy?”

  “Here,” I said, throwing the phone at her back. I fluffed up the European sham under my head and propped myself onto my left side. I listened as she called Buck, purring into the receiver like an expat Eva Perón. She should give global lessons on how to keep your man in check.

  “Buck says hi,” said Payton when she hung up. “He told me to be nice to you.”

  “Sage advice.”

  “Oh shut up. I’m nicer to you than anyone else in my life. I never see you, so it’s pretty easy.”

  I looked at the clock on my bedside table. It was already past eleven, and I had to turn out a solid performance on Monday just in case Olivia had already told Upton to fire me for my sluttish behavior. Sandro was right when he said that they would pick her over me. They would pick her over almost anyone else at the List.

  “Payton, I have to go to sleep,” I declared, motioning for her and
her fat-free body to leave my bed.

  She stood up slowly and looked at the computer screen. The photo of Olivia with the senator’s arms around her at the window was still enlarged in Photoshop.

  “We should spend the weekend in Arizona,” said Payton as I saved the image for the millionth time and closed the screen. “The article you found is probably nothing, but it could be something. I bet the men quoted in that article about Joanne Reader seeking damages are still alive. We could try to find them. If they knew Drew so well, they might know his daughter. They might be able to confirm that it’s the same Olivia.”

  “You want to go to Arizona?”

  “No, you should want to go to Arizona. I’m just willing to go with you and pay for it.”

  “We can’t go there,” I responded immediately.

  “Why not?”

  “For starters, I work on Sundays. It’s a six-days-a-week job I’ve been blessed with. And secondly, that town where the girl in question is from is tiny. I looked it up; it’s minuscule. You think if we show up there, and it is the right Olivia, that it won’t get back to her? I’ll be screwed.”

  “But what are you now? You think the George Mason microfiche files are going to solve this for you? You need people on the record. If we don’t find anything in Arizona, then we go to Texas. We go to A&M and start asking questions there. But you have to start flying. Even Friday feels too late.”

  I was not sold. I felt like once I started speaking to people, anyone other than Payton, that my story was leaked.

  “Well, we definitely can’t fly into Phoenix,” I said. “It will be on the aviation record, or whatever it’s called. It will be something that ties us into all this.”

  Payton started laughing in her superior way. “You kissed her husband in her house! You hid in the grass and photographed people having sex, with a ten-thousand-dollar camera that you rented! I don’t think a plane trip to Phoenix is the thing that’s going to blow your cover,” she said. “You fell upon something by accident. Then a few more somethings. You already have a good story, but if the ducks line up for you in Arizona or Texas, you will have a great story. If you want to ignore my advice to publish now, then you have to go the rest of the way. Otherwise your forgone hours of sleep and the beautiful Town & Country clothes you gave up for this job will all be for naught.”

  Not a terrible point.

  “Think about it,” she said. “Something made you stay hot on the trail. Why did you start fussing around with all this anyway? You could have let it go.”

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “It was just the way Olivia was standing next to that car that night. I knew she was hiding something, and I think natural curiosity kicked in.”

  “Like you wondered if she was turning tricks for horse owners by the side of the road?”

  “I felt something was off, but also, it was the fact that it was her. It was strange to see Olivia, who is the essence of a Capitolist reporter, so out of context.”

  “So you started snooping.”

  “Basically.”

  “And that brought you to her exceptional-looking husband.”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “Why unfortunately!” Payton exclaimed. “You never know with those loyal dog types. He might switch on her when he sees those photos. Most men would.”

  “I still wonder if I can do it,” I admitted. “If I can pull the trigger and change the course of someone’s life. Many people’s lives. It scares me. I feel like it will haunt me forever.”

  “Well then, you’re in the wrong racket,” Payton concluded.

  She was probably right. Journalism had become an extreme sport, not for the faint of heart. And I had wanted to be in the thick of it.

  “We’re going to Arizona,” declared Payton. She sounded sure and steady, like a doctor about to perform a liver transplant. “Just switch weekends with someone. Say you’ll work both Saturday and Sunday the following week because you need to tend to your ill sister.”

  It would be very All the President’s Men of me to hunt down a lead far out of state. It was something I had never expected myself to do. I had never been that type of reporter, nor had the Capitolist hired me to be that kind of reporter. But people change.

  “Okay,” I told Payton. “I’ll put the vacation request in. But you have to help me hunt down the men who were in the courtroom that day.”

  Back at my desk on Monday, my cell phone lit up with a text from Payton. I grabbed it, made sure Hardy was not at his desk to chide me for moving, and walked quickly back to the handicap bathroom, the only one in the building with any privacy.

  “I have some terrible news,” Payton said when I called. Her voice was as bright and casual as if she were saying “The soup of the day is clam chowder.”

  “Stanton called you, he’s having me killed?”

  “No,” she replied. “There were five men mentioned in the court article, right? Five witnesses to the accident?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, the first one is dead.” Of course he was. “People in small towns really are in such poor health,” remarked my sister. “He died of heart disease at the age of fifty-one.”

  I didn’t remind her that we hailed from a town with a population of 976. The difference was that our small town was rich.

  “Brilliant. He’s dead. Do me a favor and don’t call me if you find any more dead people. I won’t be able to finish the day, and I still have eight more articles to write.”

  “Is Olivia there?” asked Payton.

  “Thank God, no,” I said. “The president is in full fund-raising mode, so she’s constantly following him.”

  “Darn. I wanted to come by and see her. From how you’ve described her she sounds just hideous. I mean, obviously I’ve seen pictures of her naked, but it’s not the same. I wanted to get that in-person vibe.”

  That would be just fantastic. Payton and Olivia. It would be like having put Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in the ring together without rules.

  With the help of headphones, caffeine, and candy, I got through the day. I thought about Olivia, Sandro, and Stanton only about five hundred times, Sandro in particular.

  That night in the car while relaying the message about my career ruin, he had said I was gorgeous, with long legs and hair. Actually, that didn’t sound so good when I repeated it. Lots of people had long legs and hair. Conan the Barbarian. Frankenstein. But the gorgeous part made up for it. If he knew the truth about Olivia, he would leave her. I knew he would. No man could forgive such a breach of trust. Could he?

  I turned off the quiet road and pulled into the long driveway, waiting a few seconds as the gate slowly opened. I spotted Payton in the outdoor horse ring with our father riding Gilt, the mare my dad bought in Argentina before I came home. I parked my car next to my dad’s truck, slipped off my work shoes, and grabbed some extra boots from inside the barn.

  “Adrienne! Look at your sister. Can you believe how calm that devil of a horse is?” asked my dad when I walked toward him. He was wearing riding clothes and his tall boots were covered in mud.

  I couldn’t. I didn’t even like feeding Gilt because she was the most moody, horrific horse my father had ever bought. But under Payton, she moved like a Triple Crown winner.

  I moved to the fence and sat next to my dad. We watched Payton canter around the ring effortlessly, the dark brown horse just starting to break a sweat under her.

  “I know your sister is mean as hell,” said my dad, “but she can really ride a horse.”

  “She’s not that bad,” I said.

  “Oh, really? ‘Not that bad’? That may be the nicest thing I’ve ever heard you say about Payton. Twenty-eight years and you finally like your sister. Well I’ll be. In that case, I’ll leave you to it. Don’t let that horse buck her off.”

  We both looked at Payton and saw we had nothing to worry about. She was like Lance Armstrong on a bicycle. My father walked to the barn to put away the lead rope he was holding, and
I watched Payton finish up her ride. When she was done, I let her put Gilt away and waited for her to join me on the fence.

  “Let’s go in the house,” she said. “I’m burning up.”

  Our boots crunched along the gravel driveway, and I slipped my cardigan off and let the heat hit my skin.

  “I thought about Sandro way too much today,” I told her as we walked. “It’s pathetic; don’t think I’m not aware. He wants to get me fired. He thinks it’s a swell idea. But I bet he wouldn’t think so if he knew what Olivia really did on weekends. I bet she tells him she’s out of town. The president of the United States is probably her sex excuse.”

  “You’re obsessed,” said Payton, opening the front door and walking in. The screen door closed in my face and I kicked it open with my boot and followed her to the living room. We left our riding boots in a muddy pile by the fireplace and collapsed on our parents’ white sofa. A few leftover olives and artichokes were in small ceramic bowls on the coffee table and I grabbed them and started shoving them into my mouth with my dirty hands. I was probably going to contract hoof-and-mouth disease, but what did I care? My life wasn’t exactly roses right now anyway.

  “Work was awful today,” I said, leaning back on the couch. “I had to write an article about this speech Jill Biden gave at four P.M. but I had to be done by the time her speech was finished at four twenty-five P.M. Like how is that possible? Time travel? I finished five minutes after and Hardy said I had the journalistic pace of a Galapagos turtle. A turtle.”

  “Fascinating,” said Payton, dissecting an artichoke and only eating the inside. “Tell me again why you chose a career in journalism? A love of premature wrinkles and stress headaches?”

  She took her thin hand and brushed it near my eye while mouthing the words “crow’s-feet.”

  “I don’t know why I chose journalism,” I answered honestly. “Mom seemed to like it.”

  “Mom also paid five thousand dollars to meet Gloria Estefan in Miami. Gloria Estefan. She’s not of sound mind.”

  What was wrong with Gloria Estefan? I pushed Payton’s hand off my face and stood up to walk out to the barn. I was only a few steps away when I felt something ricochet off the back of my head. It was an olive, thrown by the hand of my own sister. I turned around to yell.