The List

by Anne Calhoun

  “We haven’t talked about having children,” she said.

  Add that to the list of things they hadn’t discussed before eloping. He ran his hands over his hair, then braced his elbows on his knees. “No,” he said.

  “I don’t think now is the right time to have that conversation.”

  “Because we need to be on a train in an hour, or because we’re both working the equivalent of two full-time jobs?”

  “Either. I’m fairly sure we’re not supposed to mix fights. Stick to one argument at a time.”

  In other words, kids were off the table. “It’s important to Jessie that you be there. You told her you would be.”

  “She has games scheduled every weekend for the next three months. I’ll go to another one. Tell her I’m sorry, and I’ll bring her back a present from England.”

  He just looked at her. “Tilda, sweetheart, I know you don’t know my family very well, but the only way you’re going to get to know them is to spend time with them.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t have a choice. These aren’t people I put on hold to wait for me. Colin is going to Dubai later in the week, and the CFO leaves for his holiday in Spain after our meetings. They’re being quite kind to fit this in.”

  The shower door closed with a snick. Daniel cleaned himself up, brushed his teeth, then joined Tilda in the shower. She gave him a quick, apologetic kiss, then ducked out, leaving him alone under the spray.

  He found her in her office, dressed in her at-home clothes, black yoga pants and a cashmere hoodie, her hair drying in dramatic swoops and curls around her face. The electric kettle was near to boiling on the metal tray that held her teas and cups. Arms folded, she stood looking at the spreadsheet in her hand. The lotus blossom paperweight rested on the leather box holding the requests received. Her list, organized differently from his ongoing thoughts and tasks kept in notebooks, but a list nonetheless. He lifted the paperweight, admiring the vivid pink blossom opening at the tips of the green stem, the way it seemed suspended in the glass, timeless and beautiful. In January a couple of minutes of research into Baccarat hallmarks told him he was holding several thousand dollars’ worth of glass in his palm. Thoughtfully, he tilted the glass and watched the lotus flower catch the summer sunlight before replacing the paperweight back on her desk, and asked the question uppermost in his mind.

  “Did you give me a blow job to preemptively apologize for missing Jessie’s game?”

  “Would you be mad at me if I did?” she asked without looking up from the spreadsheet.

  He thrust his arms into his pullover and tugged it over his head. “Yeah. I would. Sex is sex. Apologies are apologies,” he said. One hand on his hip, he cupped his other hand at the back of his head, trying to figure out what would lead her to do something like that. It was very uncharacteristic of Tilda, who was forthright almost to a fault. “Fights don’t mean the end of the world, or the end of us. Angie and I fought all the time growing up. We’ve always forgiven each other. I trust that the fight is the fight, that it’s not about something else.”

  “We would have had sex anyway,” she pointed out.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  The kettle clicked off, and the rolling boil eased. Tilda set the spreadsheet on her desk, then went not to the tray to make tea but to stand in front of him. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly.

  He looked down into her eyes, trying to put a name to the way she looked. Contrite, and worried, although he had no idea why she would be worried. People fought when they were in relationships. It was as unavoidable as death and taxes, and wasn’t the end of the world. In this light her irises were so pale as to be nearly gray, her lashes and eyebrows and hair dark smudges around her eyes and temples. Her lips were still swollen from sex, a flushed red that drew his gaze, and made him bend forward to kiss her.

  He stopped himself. Faced an uncomfortable truth. He was head over heels, balls to the wall in love with Tilda Davies. He could power square miles of the city with the way he burned for her, and while she said she loved him, what showed was respect. Admiration. Affection. Yes, she was English. Yes, they didn’t talk about their feelings, stiff upper lip, keep calm and carry on. But if sex became transactional, they were in trouble. If sex didn’t connect them, what did?

  There was no way they could have that conversation now. “Let’s talk about it later. Just . . . don’t do it again.”

  She didn’t flinch. “I won’t.”

  —

  On the train to Huntington, he pulled his Moleskine from his jacket pocket and flipped to a clean page.

  Things Tilda Has Used Sex to Replace

  Emotions

  Apologies

  Emotions

  He stared out the window. The suburbs were blooming, green at the tips of branches, adding color to yards brown from winter. He’d never looked through the boxes, but he’d bet there was no letter from herself, listing qualities or characteristics she lacked in her life, and wanted fulfilled. She could give something to other people, some need that wasn’t being met, their deepest desire, that she couldn’t give herself. What was it his great-aunt used to say? The shoemaker’s children are never shod? He sorted through his mental list of Tilda’s qualities, her drive, her struggles with things he took for granted, like love and acceptance and continuity in relationships, and realized he’d missed a very vital point. Connected Tilda Davies, who knew someone who knew someone in every nook and cranny of the city, couldn’t make connections for herself. Or, perhaps, she didn’t make connections for herself because she didn’t know how to handle them once they were made. She got people through what they considered to be the difficult part, the finding, the connecting, the beginning. The start was usually the most difficult portion for people. But what if that was the easy thing for Tilda, and what came after was the thing she didn’t know how to do?

  What if she’d been playing to her strengths until she met him, doing the thing everyone else admired and envied, but he’d forced her out of her comfort zone and into the unknown?

  He ran down suspects, cases, promotions, marathons. Ultramarathons. Once he decided he wanted her, Tilda Davies hadn’t stood a chance. People forgot about his tenacity. He didn’t mind, frequently encouraged it. Being underestimated in situations worked to his advantage. But his intention was never to tame her, or to own her. It was never about conquering; it was about possessing and being possessed in return.

  She meant it when she said she wouldn’t use sex as a preemptive apology again. He knew she meant it, but also knew he’d just boxed her in. It wasn’t a cage, or a prison cell, but the strain in her eyes, the stark line of her jaw, told him he’d pushed her a little bit further out onto the ledge, the one he suspected they’d never really found their way off.

  – NINETEEN –

  May

  Tilda flowed with the crowd exiting the subway car, along the platform, and through the turnstile to the station. Fifth Avenue was quieter than the subway, the grand shops not yet open, professionals in suits striding down the street, carrying cups of coffee, staring at phones. Phones were the easiest way to avoid eye contact and connection, but the previous night, on the flight home from Tokyo, she’d had to force herself to add a few lines to her letter to Nan. The habit started at boarding school, when she was so desperately lonely the only thing that kept her from crying was knowing she could write to Nan at the end of the day. She composed the lines as the day passed, storing them up for the few minutes she had to write before lights-out.

  But lately, nothing she wrote felt real, true. Describing spring in Tokyo to Nan reminded her of another spring there, one she’d not written down and mailed to Cornwall. Her relationship with Daniel left her equally wordless, forcing her to acknowledge another truth, that she lacked the language to describe something as deep and complicated as a marriage. She remembered the last time she couldn’t make h
er experience real by converting life into ink on expensive paper. It was happening again, this time with a man she could not bear to lose, and the feeling of inevitability frightened her.

  At least sex still told the truth about them; not even her unconscious attempt to sabotage the best-functioning part of their relationship worked. After Daniel left for Jessie’s soccer game several weeks ago, she’d shoved the emotions aside by throwing herself into work. The momentum of avoidance carried her through a trip to London, then to Tokyo, the demanding immediacy of business keeping them in a state of suspended animation. Daniel was no less busy than she, working long hours, uncommunicative about the case, training for the ultramarathon when he wasn’t working. Lately she felt like they circled each other, in constant motion, their orbits never quite intersecting.

  They’d intersected the night before, when she walked through the front door of the town house and found Daniel uncharacteristically at home, and utterly wrecked. Officer Deshawn Richards, one of the rookie officers Daniel trained while with the NYPD, had been stabbed in the throat during a traffic stop. That’s all Daniel had been able to say. The rest of the night had been silent, the tension of what weighed on them broken only by the sound of a whiskey bottle clinking against a tumbler. Feeling utterly inadequate compared to the depth of his grief, she’d nonetheless sat beside him until he was too drunk to do anything but sleep. She’d not slept at all herself, working through the night, into the next day, then crashing, only vaguely aware of Daniel’s coming and going.

  Today was the funeral. Her aversion was gut-deep and more than jet lag, exhaustion, and stress combined, but she refused to bow to weakness, or tell Daniel anything less than the truth. The truth was, she had no calls today, no pressing appointments at West Village Stationery, no reason at all to skip this funeral. Remembering his response to her semi-playful blow job to apologize for missing Jessie’s game, she wouldn’t pull the sex card. Shame washed through her, memory triggered by the conversation. She’d not done it on purpose, but that was worse. It meant that the defects in her character were coming out again, and as much as she tried to tell herself she’d known this would happen, the memory of Daniel catching her at it, then calling her on it in his calm, measured way, burned to the bone.

  She would brazen it out, dressed in black, holding a cappuccino to keep her awake. The imposing facade of St. Patrick’s Cathedral loomed across the avenue as she crossed Fifty-second Street. Rain threatened but so far had held off, and the weather couldn’t decide on spring or winter. The street was blocked, the hearse parked in front. Uniformed police officers from departments around the region lined the street on either side, an honor guard of men and women. Her phone in her hand, she slowed her pace.

  “Excuse me,” she said to the nearest NYPD officer. “I’m looking for Agent Daniel Logan.”

  “No one’s allowed through,” he said brusquely.

  “I’m his wife.”

  That got his attention. “You have ID?”

  “Yes, but not in his name,” she said as she dug through her purse. She handed over her New York State ID card, then pulled out her phone and called Daniel.

  “Hey, sweetheart. Where are you?” His voice was rough.

  “I’m on the other side of the street with Officer Liu,” she said, and handed the phone to the cop, who listened for a moment, then nodded and gave Tilda her phone back.

  “Go on through, ma’am,” he said. He waved to get the attention of the officer across the street from her, pointed at Tilda, then gave a white-gloved thumbs-up. The officer nodded. “She’ll let you through.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and loped across Fifth Avenue, her purse bumping from the crook of her arm. It was odd not to monitor the steady flow of cars and buses, but the size of the crowd and the solemn occasion had rerouted traffic. The crowd of uniformed police officers spilled out of the church and down the steps leading to the sidewalk. The sheer number of people clad in black or dark navy blue muted the city’s normal spring sprays of white blossoms, pink cherry trees, and yellow daffodils.

  The young female officer caught her eye. “Go around the side. He’s in the vestry,” she said.

  But Tilda could already see Daniel’s gold-and-silver head in the sea of dark blue caps. He pulled her in and took a deep, shuddering inhale. Uncertain where to put her hands, she patted his shoulder and upper arm, then his jaw. He was ruthlessly shaved, cut, and polished, his hair trimmed, his jaw silky smooth, but his eyes were red-rimmed, and under the smooth skin his jaw was tight.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” she said, then added helplessly, “Daniel, I’m so sorry—”

  He shook his head, then bent it. By the time he lifted his head he’d pulled himself back together. His face was set in an emotionless mask she’d never seen before. “Let’s go,” he said. “They’re almost ready to start.”

  In one smooth motion he turned and put his hand at the small of her back, guiding her up the steps and into the cathedral’s cool, dim interior, the ceiling lifted by air and sunlight illuminating the stained glass windows. Candles flickered in the niches. Daniel walked down the center aisle and guided her into a row of chairs. Tilda felt like she was adrift in a sea of black and blue.

  “He left a wife, Michele, and four kids,” Daniel said under his breath as they walked up the side aisle. They squeezed into two seats three rows behind the widow just as six white-gloved, uniformed men and two in suits bore the coffin to its place in front of the altar. Surreptitiously Tilda withdrew her phone from her pocket. She’d left the shop in Penny’s capable hands, but a shipment from France was three days late. She swiped her thumb over the screen, then while the wheel spun glanced at the widow. She turned to the child seated next to her, her black veil swaying forward to expose a pale cheek. The little girl looked up at her mother, tears slipping along the tracks laid by an earlier bout of crying.

  Tilda’s breath came short. The girl wept silently, tears falling down her cheeks to dampen the Peter Pan collar of her black dress. Her mother bent forward and kissed her forehead, then swiped at her tears with her thumb before turning to the boy on her left. A woman Tilda assumed was a grandmother sat at the end of the row, holding the fourth child’s hand.

  Unable to connect to server.

  She slipped her phone back in her pocket and fixed her gaze on the priest. His unhurried movements seemed appropriate to the situation, the religious equivalent of good black ink flowing onto time’s white paper. She stood when Daniel stood, sat when he sat, reciting prayers and liturgical responses, stumbling through the unfamiliar prayers. They stood as the widow and her children filed out behind the flag-draped casket, followed by the rest of the family.

  “Are you going to the cemetery?” she asked in an undertone.

  “No,” Daniel said. “It’s a private internment, for family only. I’m going out with a bunch of the guys from the two-seven. I’ll be home later.”

  “All right,” she said, then went on tiptoe to kiss his cheek, wondering why she’d been there at all.

  —

  The door lock snicked, waking Tilda up. She rolled over and looked at the clock. Twenty past two. They’d closed down the bar, then. She lay where she was and listened to his slow progress up the stairs. Shuffling, and a couple of thuds where his shoes bumped into the step rather than clearing the riser. The light from the hall blinded her when he opened the door. His jacket was rumpled, his tie askew, the top buttons of his white shirt unfastened.

  “Come here,” she said.

  He slumped on the edge of the bed. She slid to her knees on the floor in front of him and went to work on his shoelaces.

  “I’m drunk,” Daniel said matter-of-factly.

  “It smells like very good whiskey,” she said, and tugged off his left shoe.

  “I haven’t been this drunk in a very long time,” he said, the words enunciated with the careful attention of the
utterly legless.

  “You don’t have to explain,” she said. She got his socks off, then started on the single remaining button on his jacket. He nominally helped her get it off his shoulders.

  “Woke you up,” he slurred.

  “I haven’t been asleep long,” she said.

  “Call?”

  “Yes.” Colin called her at seven London time, while he was still in his pajamas, eating porridge and fruit and toast.

  “Sometimes I think you’re on another continent,” Daniel said.

  She looked up at him, but his eyes were closed, so she went to work on his shirt buttons, then his belt and zipper. “Right now I’m right here,” she said softly, and stripped him down to his T-shirt and boxers.

  He sprawled on the covers. Eventually she shifted him until he was partially covered, then gave up and crawled over him, to her side of the bed.

  “He was twenty-eight,” Daniel said. “I trained him. Did you know that?”

  “I did,” she said. “You told me in London. Remember?”

  “He could read people like nobody’s business, knew what a suspect would do before he knew. The suspect. Not Deshawn. I’m not making sense.”

  “I understand,” she said.

  “This never should have happened to him. Other guys, sure, but not him. Do you think he felt it? The knife?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Perhaps.”

  “We train for guns, but knives kill you just as dead. Married at twenty-one, four kids by twenty-seven. He wanted a better life for his kids. Better than his. He didn’t know his dad. Was this better?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He thought so.”

  He was asleep, that quickly, that deeply. When she woke up the next morning, he lay limp and heavy next to her. She showered and dressed and went to work, texting him as she walked.