The List

by Anne Calhoun

  “Yes,” she said. The list of names reminded her that she should have had her LOVE bracelet on. Colin spoke that language, the language of money and sophistication on a global scale. He had the right schools, the right accent, the right connections, and he’d been her advocate through this deal, less impartial than he should have been.

  “Again with the unreadable,” he said. “This is a very good thing. You’re what? Thirty?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “Twenty-eight, and on the verge of becoming a global household name.”

  It was unfathomable, really. No one could ignore her now. “I know,” she said, but even as she spoke she felt the slow stomach loop of a wanting not resolved, transformed into a vibrating tension. She was in her favorite place, on the edge of something, divorce, global launch, getting what she’d always wanted and never been able to articulate. She should feel far more excited than she did.

  “Right,” Colin said. “I’m going to go home and pack. I’ll see you at the departures terminal?”

  “Yes, of course.” Colin gave her a lingering cheek kiss before she slid out of the car. She trotted up the steps to the town house, and put her key in the lock.

  The still air told her Daniel wasn’t home. She stifled her disappointment. The catastrophic appointment this morning only proved she’d made the correct choice. She committed the cardinal sin of a woman entering marriage. She’d expected change, not in Daniel, but in herself, a fundamental reordering of the bedrock of her character.

  This was too much to expect.

  She paused by the dining room and looked at the papers on the table, underneath Andrew’s expensive paperweight. She’d been foolish to think Daniel would sign them and be gone. He couldn’t be rushed, very rarely got his feathers ruffled, did things in his own time, in his own way.

  She climbed the stairs to the third floor, refusing to glance into the open doors on Daniel’s level. In her bedroom she changed into her travel clothes, jeans, a T-shirt, a cardigan for warmth. Her flight to London left just before midnight. Twilight was falling by the time she finished packing, the indigo sky glowing outside her bedroom windows. She’d packed lightly, as it was unlikely she would see her mother on this trip, but she would make the drive to see Nan, check that her foot was healing and she had everything she needed.

  Her suitcase packed, she found her phone and called Daniel. The call went straight to voice mail, which could mean he was working and unavailable, or could mean he didn’t want to talk to her and had shut off his phone. A kernel of fear burrowed deep inside Tilda’s chest. Daniel didn’t avoid problems; he was likely working late. But she couldn’t shake the sudden certainty that if she got on the plane and left, things would never be the same, that somehow taking flight would result in a more permanent devastation than asking for divorce.

  Her mind was frantic, her nerves jittery, as if she’d begun something and already regretted the choice. To calm herself, she made a cup of tea, and settled at her desk, then withdrew from her leather tote her personal and business mail. There was a single letter to Lady Matilda, the once-steady flow drying up over the last few months as she focused more on business and less on her alter ego. With her sterling silver letter opener, she slit the side of the envelope and pulled out the letter.

  Dear Lady Matilda—

  I’ve never asked for anything like this before in my life, never mentioned it to another soul.

  This was exactly the kind of person she maintained her list for, someone who yearned for connection, but had yet to find the right match. She was good at this, although sometimes she wondered if it wasn’t a primary example of God’s cruelty to give her the gift to connect others, so that every day she had to face her own cowardice. Daniel was the first person to ask what she would ask for if she put her name on her own list. She knew, of course, had always known what she longed for and did not have the courage to take for herself. No direct matches in mind, but there would be. There was always a connection, a match for those who dared to ask for what they wanted.

  That’s what she had to do. She had to ask Daniel for what she wanted, the divorce, the same way she expected people seeking introductions to write down their desires, their unmet needs. She had to put it on paper.

  That was the last thing she wanted to do.

  Pacing between her bedroom and her office, she tried Daniel’s number again, with the same result. She was cold, her stomach churning, which was better than the flip-flops she felt when she looked at her suitcase packed and ready to carry down the stairs, load in a cab, and take to the airport. She wrapped her arms around her waist and bit her lip as she looked at her recent calls list. Her thumb brushed over the screen, sliding back and forth between Daniel’s mobile and Colin’s mobile, then settling on Colin’s.

  “Colin, I can’t leave tonight,” she said when he answered. “I need to talk to Daniel about something before I go to London.”

  “Having second thoughts?” he asked, his voice suddenly wary.

  “No, not at all,” she said hastily. “What I need to discuss with Daniel has nothing to do with the deal. But I can’t leave without having this conversation. I’ll take the eight a.m. flight tomorrow and be in London in time for a late dinner with the leadership team.” So she wouldn’t get any sleep before the meeting. She was beginning to feel like she’d never sleep again.

  “I understand,” he said, even though he couldn’t possibly understand what she barely understood herself. In order to make this clear to Daniel, to give him the explanation that he deserved, she would have to write down in explicit detail a series of events that she had described to no other person, not even Nan.

  “Thank you.”

  She sat down at her desk and withdrew her personal stationery from the desk’s top drawer. The first sheet was engraved with her name, Matilda Davies, blank pages following, blank until she covered them with her handwriting and told the story known only to two other souls, previously inked only on her skin. She felt like she was moving on autopilot, carrying through actions begun not just a few days ago when she asked Daniel for a divorce, not even a year ago when she met Daniel sitting on a ledge, but long before that in a luxury hotel, in a foreign city. The consequences of her actions ten years ago had finally caught up with her, but she’d been run to ground and now there was nothing to do but face them. Writing it out would make it real in a way it hadn’t been before. But it was already real, just as Daniel said the results of the pregnancy test were real, just not known. All she was doing was confessing to a sin already committed.

  With one ear pricked to hear Daniel’s key in the lock, or his footsteps on the stairs, she wrote. But by the time she had finished the letter hours later, it was clear Daniel wasn’t coming home. Yes, the case that he’d been working on was moving along at a frenetic pace, but he’d never been called on to work until the wee hours of the morning. According to his best guess they wouldn’t be able to get an indictment until the end of the summer.

  She left the letter for him to find when he did come home. She left it on the kitchen counter in the spot where he habitually left his wallet, keys, mobile, gun, cuffs, badge, and the notebook where he kept his own lists, and went to bed.

  Shortly after three a.m. her phone vibrated to indicate an incoming text. She snatched it up, but rather than Daniel’s name, a text from her friend Louise flashed on the screen.

  Hey got up for a wee Daniel’s still out on our terrace. Is something wrong?

  Air evaporated from her lungs. Daniel hadn’t come home because he’d gone back to where it all began, Louise’s rooftop terrace, to the ledge she’d coaxed him onto a year ago. The least she could do was meet him there now, and give him the letter that explained why he was there in the first place. Her hands shook as she thumbed a response to Louise.

  Yes. I hate to ask but can I come over? I’m leaving for London in five hours and I need to see him befor
e I go.

  Louise’s reply came as Tilda scuffed her feet into her ballet slippers and reach for her bag.

  Of course will tell Pepo to let you up and leave the door unlocked xx

  Tilda hurried down Perry Street toward Greenwich Avenue and hailed a cab. The ride to Park Avenue South took only a few minutes at this hour of the night, the streets eerily silent and empty. Pepo yawned as he buzzed her into the building. The elevator ride up twenty-two stories felt much the same as the cab ride—enclosed, isolated from the outside world. The silence rang in her ears, an odd, discordant humming that vanished when she stepped out into the hallway and saw Louise’s door cracked ever so slightly. Tilda stepped inside onto the polished marble floors, then closed and locked the door behind her. The hallway leading to Louise’s bedroom and bathroom was dark, so she tiptoed through the living room to the sliding glass doors that opened onto the terrace, and stepped through them.

  Her eyes were already adjusted to the darkness, so she could easily see Daniel’s back, narrow and straight, sitting on the ledge. What she hadn’t expected was the glow of a cigarette’s tip, the crackle of the paper and tobacco as he inhaled. The soles of her shoes scritched against the slate. He turned and looked over his shoulder, and his eyes widened ever so slightly when he saw her. He stubbed out the cigarette on the ledge and exhaled the last of the smoke into the still, warm air. Shame seared along the surface of her skin. It was a familiar feeling, but the remorse she felt for driving Daniel back to cigarettes was brand-new.

  “Are you going to join me?” His baritone voice still sent shivers down her spine, reminding her that he might look insubstantial compared to heavily muscled street cops or gym rats, but inside, he was honed steel. The light from Louise’s living room lamp picked out glints of silver in his tousled blond hair. His father went silver at a young age, and Daniel was as well. Thirty-two. He’d wear it well; Tilda felt a sharp pang when she realized she wouldn’t be around to see it.

  “If you’d like,” she said. She walked up to the ledge, planted her bum on the inside, and then eased her legs over to dangle twenty-two stories above the street.

  “This isn’t where I thought you’d be,” she said. She looked down at the envelope in her hand. “I should’ve guessed, though.”

  “I want to know where we went wrong. I came back here to try to puzzle it out.”

  Of course he did. Daniel solved puzzles for a living. She’d thought, when she married him, that it wouldn’t matter, keeping this secret. It did. Her secret brought ruin with her from the past into the present she’d hoped not to taint.

  Perhaps this was the price she had to pay to end what she never should have begun, this long walk down memory lane with the man who slid under her defenses with no intention other than loving her. Her blood heated even as her stomach turned flip-flops. “How are you getting on?”

  “Not very well. But for some reason sitting up here makes it easier to bear. It’s as if, up here, the last year never happened. I could go back to the beginning and start all over again, the way I should have started when I first saw you.”

  He looked as serious as he’d ever looked, even more serious than he had when he found her sitting on a ledge twenty-two stories above the Manhattan streets, as desperate as a junkie for some kind of adrenaline rush.

  “There’s nothing you could have done differently, Daniel, nothing you should have done differently. What’s wrong with us is actually wrong with me, and it started long before we met.”

  She held out the letter to him. He took it, both of them holding on to the envelope a little longer than was necessary for the handoff. Nothing bad would have happened if they dropped it, just a slow gentle drift to the streets, but for one crazy second she thought that both of them would go over the edge after it. She because it held the only part of her life she had never told another living soul, he because he had to know.

  He took it from her and turned it over, looking at both the back and the front where she’d written his name in black ink. “This is your good stuff,” he said.

  She almost laughed. He meant the paper, not what was written on the sheets. That was beyond dangerous. That would end in total ruin. He now held in his hands the truth. He would know all her secrets, all her flaws.

  “Read it,” she said quietly. “I don’t know that it will answer all your questions, but it should go a long way toward explaining why I asked you for a divorce.”

  She shifted her weight to swing her legs back over the ledge onto the safety of the terrace, but Daniel’s grip on her wrist stopped her. “No,” he said. “Stay here. We do this together.”

  – TWENTY-TWO –

  Solstice

  Inside an unfamiliar place the exhaustion seemed to drown her. On the street she could identify landmarks, follow Daniel’s lead and use the sun and moon and stars to determine night or day. But so far off the ground, Manhattan’s eerie, predawn silence rang in her ears. She’d known this was coming from the moment their story began. It might even be easy, because she was so tired, out of time, out of space. Numb. Dislocated, in the worse sense of the word.

  Daniel read the first few lines, then looked at her. His gaze hit her like a searchlight, flashing over her from head to toe, white-hot and exposing. Shocking. She’d not seen him since the morning; she wore nothing provocative, a simple pair of dark jeans, a white T-shirt, a cardigan, her black leather tote on the terrace behind her. She had no defenses left. A strange floating sensation tilted the ledge a little; for a moment she felt she could simply float away like an untethered bunch of balloons.

  Daniel’s gaze sharpened, a blue scythe, the only brilliant color in the darkness. “Promise me you won’t bolt,” he said.

  She nodded, although the response was more automatic than answer; he was using his cop voice, the one he performed like a party trick. She’d been up all night writing the letter. Her circadian rhythms and brain chemistry were completely disconnected from night and day, past and present.

  She watched him for a length of time that was measured in seconds but felt like a lifetime, let herself drink in the sight of him, the compact strength, veins and dusting of blond hair on the backs of his hands, the deft way he handled the paper. Then she blinked, sandpaper lids rough enough to call moisture. Closing them felt so good. She could shut out Daniel’s eyes while he read.

  Daniel—

  I wanted him.

  Let me say first, let me make perfectly clear, that I not only consented to what happened, but I initiated everything.

  I wanted him.

  You wanted to take us back to the beginning, but we didn’t begin here. None of us comes to a relationship as blank as a sheet of paper, and I am no exception. When I was seventeen, I lost my virginity in a room indistinguishable from the one you took me to on my birthday. That fall I was a rather unwilling companion for my mother during her first speaking tour. We traveled to twenty-three cities on three continents in six weeks, my mother, myself, and her research assistant, Andrew.

  You remember Andrew.

  It started out innocuously enough. Looks, mostly. A smile just a bit more knowing. I didn’t seek him out, but I didn’t avoid him, either. I didn’t like him. He was everything I was supposed to want to be, but he subtly mocked what he was. He’d look at me. Wink. Roll his eyes. Bring me drinks, or sit next to me for a few minutes at one of the horrid receptions in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, while I bored him with the current city’s tourist report. I think Mum had read something in the Guardian about preparing your child to leave the nest, and decided I needed a shove from the mother bird. I wanted to spend my gap year in Cornwall with Nan, so I resented being dragged all over the world on the twenty-first century version of the Grand Tour, sent off to see the sights to “foster independence” then sitting through the same lecture given over and over, the same jokes, attending obligatory cocktail parties, dinners, receptions. I watc
hed Mum drop names and show off a little, for Andrew. Perhaps he saw what she was doing. Perhaps not.

  I did. While Mum worked at forming alliances to strengthen her future, I worked at drawing Andrew from her side. Mum found power in her way, and I found it in mine.

  I won’t insult you by asking if you’ve ever engaged in an illicit love affair. We never talked about that kind of first, the firsts that shame us, where we learn how deeply we can desire, how badly we can hurt. You won’t know how those stolen, secret moments are electrified with passion and the fear of discovery. I kissed Andrew for the first time behind a closed door separating us from a reporter for the LA Times who was interviewing Mum. I went on tiptoe and pressed my mouth to his, felt his tongue touch mine for a second, perhaps two, before he pulled away. It’s such a heady sound, the total silence when two people aren’t breathing for fear of discovery.

  He said we couldn’t do it again.

  I told him to stay away, if he could.

  He couldn’t.

  The next day he drew me into the empty chapel at the Los Angeles Airport and kissed me. I can still remember the way his fingers felt along my jaw as he held my mouth for his, that sweet electric shock of his tongue against mine, my heart racing, the heat and weight of his body against mine.

  He kissed me without desperation, as if we were getting acquainted, soft pressure, a nuzzle with his nose that changed the angle, caressing me with lip and breath and the shadow of his scruff until my mouth opened. His hand was heavy on my hip, holding me against the wall, inciting me to arch against him. He behaved as if this were completely normal, our right, even, and so I did, too.

  I’ve not thought of this for years, but now I remember the strangest details, the contrast between his hair under my index finger while the collar of his shirt and blazer were stiff under my ring and pinky, the way tendrils of pleasure unfurled, climbing around my bones, spiraling through muscle, seeking the heat and light dancing along the surface of my skin. We flew to Tokyo from Los Angeles, to the city of lotus flowers and neon lights.