The List

by Karin Tanabe

  I paced across my bedroom, nervously flicking a pen between my fingers. I had so much to say to him, so many unanswered questions. My mind was racing with apologies and declarations and confusion. I still felt something for Sandro. A lot of something. But as I walked through the room perfumed and covered in fake tanning spray, I admitted to myself that it wasn’t the same feeling I’d had before I left for Arizona and wrote the article. Sandro had been such a part of breaking Olivia’s story that he now felt less like a part of mine.

  I walked to my dresser and strapped on the gold Cartier watch I got for college graduation and looked at the mother of pearl dial. I only had eight minutes until Sandro was scheduled to pull up and I was still pacing in my underwear. Flinging open my closet, I reached for the yellow dress I wore the day I met Victoria Zajac. It had brought me luck then, made me calm and confident when I needed it the most. I prayed the magical sundress would bring it all home again now.

  I was ready—insanely nervous, but clothed. Should I go to the window and watch him drive in? Or was that too voyeuristic? Maybe he would see me and change his mind. No, I would do this properly. I would just let him walk up the stairs to my apartment, pray he wasn’t allergic to horses, and open the door.

  A quiet little voice in my head was whispering that the whole scenario could go in the opposite direction and that Sandro could walk in with guns blazing and curse the day that I was born, but I chose not to listen to that little voice.

  Sandro was five minutes late. Then seven. He wasn’t going to come. He’d had a change of heart. I would have to subscribe to Spinster magazine and learn how to kill bugs on my own. As I was about to cry off my three coats of mascara, I saw my parents’ gate slowly open and a black SUV drive through. It pulled up next to my father’s truck and I ran away from the window and stood exactly five paces from the door.

  I heard his car door shut and faint footsteps on the wooden stairs. When he finally knocked, I sprinted forward and opened the door, trying to stay calm. I was going to keep my cool; I was not going to jump into his arms or burst into tears.

  But the person standing on my stoop with a phone in one hand and keys in another wasn’t Sandro. It was Olivia Campo.

  I quickly looked past Olivia to see if Sandro was behind her but she put her arm out to stop me and I almost fell against her. She shoved me against the door with her pale hands and my right leg hit the side of it.

  “Olivia!” I screamed both at the sight of her and because she had just pushed me, hard, away from her.

  She didn’t respond, she didn’t smile, and she didn’t lift her hand up to slap me across the jaw. She just stood there silently. If I looked exhausted, she looked worse. She was even paler than before. The confidence she always radiated had evaporated. All that was left was a worn-out girl with a husband who clearly loved her, not me, and very little else.

  Brushing past me, her bony shoulder stabbing my arm, Olivia walked into my living room.

  “I came here to tell you you’re a selfish bitch,” she said with her back to me. She stood in silence as I felt my heart rate speed up. She finally turned around after observing the curated contents of my apartment.

  “You look ridiculous, by the way. Is that all for my husband?” she said, gesturing toward my unnatural cleavage.

  Before I could answer, she raised her voice and said, “I thought it would be a nice idea to catch you off guard. Give you a tiny taste of how I felt when I answered Upton’s call last week. I was in a restaurant with the president in Jakarta, but I doubt he told you that part.”

  I opened my mouth to confirm that Upton hadn’t given me the details of their chat, but she shook her head to silence me.

  “You are a selfish, heartless bitch. Just like me.” She looked at my made-up face, my straight hair and bright dress, and moved toward me. “That’s what you think of me, isn’t it?”

  I stood there, unable to respond.

  “And you didn’t get this so-called story about me and Hoyt because you’re a good reporter,” she added. “You got lucky. You happen to live here. Period.”

  “Olivia!” I said again. I was still in shock. I didn’t know what to say besides her name. I had been waiting for Sandro, I had just spent the past hour thinking about what I would say to him, and now his wife—the woman I had spent months trying to psychoanalyze—was here in my living room.

  Olivia’s red hair was brushed back and her thin arms were locked by her side. She stared at me expectantly, and when I said nothing, she marched in her flat sandals back outside, stopping on the small wooden landing at the top of the stairs. I followed after her.

  “Look at you,” she said finally, smiling sarcastically at me. “Adrienne Brown. Style section reporter extraordinaire. No one ever paid much attention to you—any attention to you—in the newsroom so you figured that the way to get some recognition was not through actual work, but by ruining my life.”

  “That’s not what I intended to do!” I said quietly. “I was just—”

  She cut me off.

  “You threw yourself at my husband, you spied on me in the middle of the night, you photographed me having sex! Then you flew to Arizona and asked everyone in my hometown all about me! Then—and this is probably my favorite part—you talked to the very woman the government trusted to protect me when I was eight years old. The rest of your dear readers might not know who your ‘anonymous source’ was but I certainly do. I lived with Victoria. That woman used to bathe me because I couldn’t stand in a shower until I was fifteen years old. Did you know that? Because that’s where I found my mother, collapsed in a pool of her own blood. Are you aware of how sick it is, to pry into that world?”

  I bit the inside of my lip as she screamed. I had asked Victoria for details, but she hadn’t told me that.

  “What you did is vile!” Olivia continued. “You should be the one getting slammed by the press, not me.”

  She hit her little balled-up fist against the wall, took a deep breath, and tried to lower her voice. It quickly rose again.

  “And after you finished snooping around like my fucking biographer, you tied it all up in a bow, handed it to Upton, and sat around celebrating while he fired me even though you knew I was halfway around the world with no friends or family. When I got home, jobless, with my name smeared beyond recognition, I got to watch you talk about it on national television every chance you got. You sure soaked that up. It was just radiating from your hopeful face. ‘Look at me! Someone finally gives a shit about me.’ But guess what? They didn’t and they don’t. They just wanted to hear you talk about the senator. About me.”

  “He’s no longer a senator,” I murmured, but she didn’t hear me.

  She lifted her head up higher and looked at my tense face, my grinding teeth. “All you are is a messenger. You’re not a reporter. And why you’re not crying and groveling for my forgiveness right now, I’m not quite sure. You did hang your own peer without a second thought.”

  “I don’t think you have ever regarded me as your peer, Olivia.” My body was tingling. I felt guilt—of course I felt guilt—but then in Arizona, and now on TV, I was just doing my job. She of all people should understand that.

  And she would have done the exact same thing.

  Olivia was tense and silent, looking off to her left at my parents’ big white and green house bathed in late afternoon sun. Now that she wasn’t screaming, you could hear the cicadas chirping.

  “How long did you know about it?” she said finally. “About us.”

  “Since March.”

  Olivia looked up at a small white moth flying near her hair and swatted it away.

  “Well, it went on for much longer than that. It had been over a year.” She looked at me, standing stiffly, waiting for me to react. “Do you want to take out a notepad or something?” she asked. “I’m sure you’ll immediately want to file that tidbit off to your pal Upton.”

  Over a year? Had they really been coming to Middleburg for that long? It
was amazing I was the first to catch them in the act.

  “I don’t want to write anything down,” I said finally.

  She put her hands in the pockets of her loose black shorts and gave me a once-over. “Your biggest problem is that you don’t understand this town,” she declared. “You Style girls just sit back there complaining about how hard you work, but there are thousands of people lining up to take your jobs—as trivial as they are. And hundreds of thousands want mine. If you think Christine Lewis is the only person working a seventy-hour week to get the word senior next to her title, you’re very naïve. Everyone wants to cover the White House. But very few—”

  “You never even wanted to cover the White House!” I countered. “All you wanted was to destroy Stanton.”

  Olivia’s face turned whiter than usual and her tired eyes looked straight through me. “Destroy?” she repeated quietly. “I didn’t want to destroy him.”

  I rolled my eyes and moved toward the railing. I knew better. From the moment she learned the name Hoyt Stanton she was ready to rip it out of the history books.

  “You didn’t think he killed your father?” I retorted. “That he was responsible for his death?”

  Olivia put her hand on the wooden railing and sighed, looking disparagingly at me. “Obviously I did, for years. I hated him, the whole family, for decades.” She tilted her head back proudly, her freckled face creasing around her eyes as the sun moved lower in the sky.

  “I needed somebody to blame, so I did my research. It was all I thought about, all I did. My parents in Texas tried to put the past behind me and I tried to make them happy. But as soon as I got to college, it turned into an obsession.”

  No wonder she wasn’t writing for the Battalion. She was too busy with her own investigative reporting.

  “But there’s nothing,” she said firmly. “Trust me,” she said, lowering her eyelids. “If there was anything to find on Hoyt and his family, I would have found it. This is my life we’re dealing with, not yours. I’m sure you were betting on finally doing some hard-hitting story now, but please don’t insult my intelligence by saying you’ll wrap the whole thing up by morning.”

  I knew it would take me a little more than twelve hours, but I still planned on squeezing something important out of the past. Or maybe Olivia was just going to hand it to me. She had already told me an intimate detail about her mother’s death. She seemed ready to talk—or yell—about her relationship with Stanton. Maybe because it was already public knowledge and she was out at the List and now Stanton was out of a job, too.

  “I already wrote a hard-hitting article,” I pointed out. “Maybe you read it?”

  Every muscle in her face scowled at me.

  “You probably think your article is the best thing to ever get slapped on the front page of the List,” she said, scratching her nails into the wooden railing next to her. “You’re probably having the damn thing framed.”

  Actually, my mother had already had the front page of the paper framed. It was sitting in my bedroom closet waiting to be hung up somewhere. Upton said that besides the president’s election, it was the largest type they had used for a headline in the four years they’d been operating. When I told that to my mother, she’d screamed and driven straight to the overpriced framing shop in Middleburg and had the thing mounted like it was a Gustav Klimt.

  “I knew it,” said Olivia when I didn’t reply right away. “Well, I hope you’re enjoying this—really soaking it in—because this is the high point of your career. It’s not going to get better than this.”

  “At least I still have a career,” I shot back. “And the paper is printing just fine without you.”

  Olivia dropped her hand from the railing. “I’m not quite done yet,” she replied under her breath.

  I wondered if I’d misheard her. Not quite done yet? What the hell was she going to do next?

  “You got fired!” I reminded her loudly. “And what self-respecting publication would hire you now?”

  Olivia shrugged her thin shoulders and brushed a few stray hairs off the back of her neck. “Yes. I got fired. You got me fired. But I’ve got something that hasn’t gone out yet.”

  My mind began racing. What was she working on? Something with the White House? Dirt on the administration? White House scandals definitely trumped Senate scandals and I had heard Upton trying to reassign one of Olivia’s stories on the White House counterterrorism team to Christine. A scandal involving them would be big if Olivia still had her hands in it.

  “The Foster Care Empowerment Act,” she said softly, smiling at my confused expression. “That was mine. I wrote it.”

  That fluff piece? I was aware that she had written it. How exactly was she going to save her career with that?

  Registering my expression, Olivia repeated herself.

  “The act. The Empowerment Act. I wrote it.”

  I leaned back against the wall, needing something to steady me. The Foster Care Empowerment Act. That was Stanton’s bill. How could Olivia write it?

  “But that was his cause!” I stuttered. “That was what changed your mind about him.”

  “You really think he cared about all of that?” said Olivia, wringing her hands in frustration. “About orphaned and abandoned kids? His wife adopted those kids so she would have something to do while he was in Washington. If you believe that self-important, anti-immigration, gun-loving man ran for Senate to pass bills on foster care, you’re exceptionally stupid.”

  “But you don’t think that!” I exclaimed, regaining my voice. “I saw your face when you thought nobody was looking. I know your relationship was—”

  “Was what, Adrienne?” she said angrily, cutting me off.

  I suddenly wished we weren’t standing on the small landing. I wanted to be in the city where society forced us to be quiet, civilized. Here in the country, we just screamed.

  “Please tell me about the nature of my relationship with Hoyt,” she asked bitterly. “I’d love to get some insight from you.”

  It was strange, off-putting even, to hear Olivia call Stanton by his first name. I took a deep breath. “You came to D.C. because you wanted to get close to him,” I replied, trying to sound confident. I was not going to let Olivia notice that standing so close to her was making me suffocate. This, all this, was her fault.

  “And then when you did, you fell in love with him. You didn’t mean to, but you did.”

  We heard the faint boom of what sounded like thunder and we both looked up at the sky.

  “You’re wrong,” she said, seeming startled from the sudden noise. “I didn’t want to get close to him. I needed to.”

  I let her words sink in as I watched the early evening clouds move faster and faster above us.

  “Like I said, I was fixated on him for years,” she continued as I lowered my eyes to meet hers. “You understand that, I believe. Obsession?” I thought back to all the nights I watched my White House Correspondents’ Dinner footage of Sandro, pausing it on his handsome face as he smiled politely at Isabelle. And the way I pressed my body against his in Olivia’s kitchen. How I had gone to his house when I knew Olivia was away, and had kissed him, put my arms around him. Yes, I did understand obsession. And somehow, in these surprising moments, I was starting to understand Olivia, too.

  “I hate him,” she said. “Real hate. A person like you will never understand that kind of disgust. But that was part of the problem—that level of emotion can turn—and it did. It became something else, something less like loathing and more like . . . ”

  Her voice trailed off and she looked toward the open door of the apartment, at the furniture inside, the window over the gingham bench and the view of the horse fields.

  “What I wanted more than anything was for him to become fixated on me. Obsessed with me. He had controlled my entire life—my childhood, college, even this move. He had this inescapable hold over me and I knew the only way I could finally shake it was if I could turn it around. It was my turn
.”

  I stood in silence listening to her. This, then, was how she justified it. Not because he had won her over with his passion for foster care, not even because she had fallen in love. The first time she had seen Stanton, talked to him and finally slept with him, these were the thoughts going through her angry, frustrated mind.

  “It worked,” she said firmly. “That look on my face—the one you described so inarticulately in your article—wasn’t love. That was peace.”

  “You know I could write a story about this,” I said, breaking her out of her so-called peace. “Especially about the fact that you wrote legislation while you were a Capitolist employee and having sex with a senator.”

  “But you won’t,” said Olivia. She smiled at me presumptuously. “You’re nothing like me. You printed the first story because you wanted the List to acknowledge your presence. And now you’ve made your little splash. But you can’t handle a beat like this one. You can’t smear people’s lives and not have it eat away at you. That’s why you work for the Style section. It’s not because you love writing about celebrities or politicians’ wives. It’s because you’re too scared to do anything else.”

  Too scared? I had followed her in the middle of the night and photographed her naked with a U.S. senator. If she needed evidence of my backbone, she just needed to turn to page one of every newspaper in the country. She and Stanton had graced them all.

  Olivia moved closer to me, her eyes flashing.

  “You wanted attention and you found it by bringing me down. But I’ve already lost everything—my job, Hoyt, my reputation, even my family isn’t speaking to me. If you write about the bill—the fact that I birthed it and made Hoyt push it to Pennsylvania Avenue the way I wanted it—you won’t hurt me. But you will keep thousands of kids from having better lives. And I know your type. You don’t want that on your conscience.”