The List

by Anne Calhoun

  “What time is it?”

  “Gone seven,” he replied.

  She shuffled past him, into the bathroom, where her body went on autopilot. The trifold mirror covering the medicine cabinet reflected back a woman she did not recognize. For a moment she stared into the mirror, unable to process the swollen eyes, the reddened nose, the lines carved on either side of her mouth.

  Without blinking, she opened the mirror, withdrew the painkillers, shook three into her palm, and swallowed them dry. Back in the main room she looked around, and saw pictures tucked behind lamps, between African violets on the end table, the albums spread over the coffee table.

  “Where’s Mum?”

  Daniel got up and ran a glass of water, then held it out to Tilda. “She’s gone back to Oxford.”

  Tilda stared at him. “What?”

  “Drink this,” Daniel said, and waited until she had taken the glass in front of him and swallowed half of it before answering. “She had two tutorials tomorrow. And a committee meeting she was chairing. She said she’d be in touch.”

  Tilda gripped the back of a chair, pulled it out from the table, and eased into it. Sitting seemed like enough, until she put her head in her hand. Colin and the deal belonged to another lifetime. “Is that what I’m supposed to do? Work? Because I don’t know if I can do that. I called Colin right after I called you. I don’t remember what I said to him other than Nan had died and I wasn’t going to be able to meet them for dinner. It’s entirely possible I hung up on him midsentence.” She paused. “The deal feels like it was happening to another person in another life, and Mum went right back to work.”

  Daniel didn’t say anything for a long moment. “People react differently to grief,” he said finally. “Some people take comfort in work. When was the last time you ate?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, and tried to remember, because he was here, taking care of her, and it meant so much to her. It meant everything, and she should answer his questions. “Um. Not today. Not yesterday. Um. Maybe yesterday. I didn’t eat on the flight, or at the airport. I can’t remember. I’m sorry. I can’t remember.”

  He reached across the table and covered her hand with his own. “I’m going to make you something to eat,” he said. “Toast and eggs.”

  He might as well have been asking her to hoist Nan’s coffin out of the grave. “I don’t think I can eat.”

  “Just try,” he said, and got up.

  For a while she just sat there while he got out the ancient cast iron pan and oiled it, cracked eggs and scrambled them, sliced bread for toast. The scent of the bread toasting made her stomach growl. When the food was ready he slid a plate of eggs and toast spread with currant jam in front of her, and added a cup of tea. She stared at the eggs, the steam rising from them, then at him.

  “Just one bite,” he said.

  But her body betrayed her, because after one bite it wanted more. Ravenous thing. Rapacious thing. She finished the eggs, ate the toast down to the crust, and felt better. She looked at Daniel, who had cleared his plate, and saw better in his eyes.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Most of the village was there. I can’t imagine anyone was in the shops. I saw Rupert in the crowd,” she said, slowly. “A few of Mum’s other friends. Not Andrew.”

  Daniel said nothing.

  “He didn’t come to the funeral. But you did. You came. This is what you do. You go to the funeral.” It suddenly seemed the most meaningful thing anyone had ever done for her.

  He nodded gravely, then cleared the table, tipping her crusts into the bin, running water in the sink to do the washing up. “I should do that,” she said.

  “You should go back to bed,” he said without turning around. “You’re dead on your feet.”

  She did. She undressed into the pajamas in the drawer, scented with ancient lavender sachets, and slid back into the bed, surrounded by the scent of Nan overlaid with the medicinal odors of wound care. She lay there long enough to watch the moon rise over the house, listening to Daniel get ready to leave. He’d gotten a room at the inn, she deduced. Maybe he’d already signed the papers. Her throat closed and tears prickled behind her eyes, but she didn’t cry.

  Grief left her defenseless. Ruined. In wreckage she found a single, pure need.

  She got up and opened her bedroom door. “Daniel,” she said. “Don’t go.”

  The room was dim, moonlight bathing the worn wood floors in silver. He stood in the door, turned toward her, his shoulders broad against the starry sky. “Don’t ask me to do that, Tilda. I know you’re hurting, but I can’t be that for you tonight.”

  “I don’t want . . . I just . . .” She took a shuddering breath, and when she spoke again, her voice was very small. “I don’t want sex. I just want to be close to you.”

  He looked at her, and for the first time in their short, whirlwind relationship, she let him see her exactly as she was. He locked the door again, then crossed the floor and met her by the bedroom door. She crawled back into bed, listening to him removing his suit, shirt, and tie. Then he lay down beside her. She let her eyes close and his warmth seep into her, right down to the bones.

  —

  She awoke the next morning to sunlight, birds, and Daniel lacing up his trainers. “Go back to sleep,” he said without looking up. “I’m going for a run.”

  When the door closed behind him, she lay in Nan’s bed, for the first time in months anchored by scent and light and sound in time and space. She thought about Daniel, setting off along the narrow road. Processing grief and hurt and uncertainty through intense physical exercise. The hills and cliffs would give him a challenge. Perhaps she should take it up, learn to leave it all behind on the pavement, rather than in hotel rooms.

  Her entire body ached from the tension of the past few days, something she hadn’t realized until she let go. Keeping it all together was so much work, so difficult. Picking up her former life was impossible.

  Daniel would be gone for a couple of hours. All she could do right now was sleep.

  —

  She awoke again when the front door opened, bringing with it the scent of sea and grass, Daniel, and warm scones. When he appeared in the door to the bedroom his hair and T-shirt were damp with sweat. He had a bag from the tea shop in the village. “Breakfast,” he said.

  Lacking any clear direction for how to behave with him, she nodded, then got up. Her mouth tasted foul, and she wanted a shower, but he was sweaty and had brought back breakfast. “Can I just . . . if you don’t mind?”

  “Go ahead,” he said, and took the newspaper into the garden.

  Daniel was too much of a cop to not meet her eyes, but the muscles around them were tight, wary. She brushed her teeth, showered, and dressed in an ancient pair of jeans and a jumper. While he showered, she made tea, and coffee for him, then took Nan’s tea tray to the garden. The Cornish coast on a June morning was a beautiful thing, blue sky to the horizon, gulls swooping over the cliffs, the scent of the fruit bushes blooming. But this year, no one would make jams and jellies and send Tilda a batch.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said again. It meant everything to her to have him there, beside her, for even a little longer, but words were utterly inadequate. Maybe that’s why relationships were built on trust and a life together, because in the matters of birth and death and love, words were not only inadequate, but somehow wrong.

  But with so few shared experiences to draw on, words were all she had.

  “I’m glad to be here,” he said, and slid her a glance. He meant it, the sincerity in his blue eyes real and potent. For a moment, connection hummed between them.

  “When are you going back to New York?” she said when he joined her at the table.

  Daniel broke a scone into smaller pieces. “My return ticket is booked for to
morrow. The informant’s counting on a wild summer to get the information we need. I walked out of a planning meeting to catch a plane.”

  He’d walked out on the biggest case of his career to be with her. She nodded. “I know. Thank you.” The tea scalded the roof of her mouth. She set the cup on the saucer and lay back on the chaise. She couldn’t bring herself to ask him where he would be when she returned home.

  They sat there while the sun climbed behind them, paused overhead, then descended into the sea. Daniel seemed as content as she was to simply watch clouds scud across the sky, the wind shift and crease the ocean, the tide rise and fall in the cove at the base of the village. At the end of the day he left, brought back more food. They ate while the moon rose, casting a mysterious and ethereal westward trail on the sea. They spoke of nothing, simply lay in the present and let the sun and moon and stars whirl around them, observed the call-and-response of the tides.

  —

  Daniel left the next day in time to catch an early evening flight to Kennedy; he’d go to sleep around midnight in his own bed after a seven-hour flight. No wonder Tilda was so lost. He’d often wondered what it took to bring Tilda Davies to a complete halt. He now had his answer. Death had flattened her down to the very ground.

  She was asleep on the chaise when he came out to say good-bye, the quilt draped loosely over her body. He stood beside her, then sat on his heels and used the very tips of his fingers to stroke her hair back from her face. She was pale, bruised under her puffy eyes, no color in her cheeks and almost none in her lips. Her hair had dried without any guidance, so it curled in tufts and wisps around her ears. He brushed it back, whispered her name. Tilda. She continued breathing, dreaming without him. Faced with an impossible loss, impossible decisions, her mind tricked her body by demanding sleep.

  She had no experience with grief. Her rootless childhood had ravaged her in more ways than one. She’d never lived in one place long enough to lose people who mattered to her, to feel the loss of a chunk of her soul like a physical ache. While home was a physical place, it was people, too. She had only the most tenuous connection to either, and that disappeared when a blood clot drifted from Nan’s ankle to her lungs.

  He ached for her, right down to his bones. He wanted to pull her into his arms and rock her like he’d rock a child; he wanted to strip her bare and show her how much life was still left; he wanted to rage at her; he wanted to go to his knees and worship her. But wanting her wasn’t enough. She had to want him, and more than that, she had to want a life together.

  The curl above her ear twisted loose. He tucked it away again. “Tilda,” he whispered. “I’m not here because it’s the right thing to do. I’m here because I love you.”

  Her breathing didn’t change. Her eyelashes didn’t flicker. She slept on. He kissed her cheek, then went to get a cab to the train station.

  – TWENTY-SIX –

  Tilda awoke in the late afternoon to an empty house and a sun headache. She ran herself a glass of water, and poked listlessly through the tiny house while she drank it. Opening cupboard doors. Closing them. She lifted the lid on the trunk at the foot of Nan’s bed. An old linen sheet covered the contents, and Tilda closed it without disturbing them. At twilight she walked down to the sea, then to the pub for a quick supper. Talk quieted when she opened the door, but when she ordered a pint and a ploughman’s platter to stay, a steady stream of residents kept her company during her meal, telling stories about Nan. She smiled through the inevitable tears, a paradox of emotion she couldn’t explain or ignore, but simply felt.

  Daniel sent a text while she was asleep. I’m home. She stroked the screen with her thumb, and wondered if he meant he’d arrived, or he was back at the town house. She would find out when she went home herself. In the meantime, she sat in Nan’s house and tried to figure out what to do next. The answer, when framed in the context of what would Daniel do, seemed simple. She went to sit outside in the sun.

  —

  The next day she was drowsing on the chaise when a car door slammed, awakening her. She walked around the house to see who’d come to call and found the local solicitor and her mother on the slanted steps. “Hello, darling,” her mother said, and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek.

  Tilda accepted the kiss, but wrapped her arms protectively around her waist. “Hello, Mum.”

  “Hello, Ms. Davies,” he said. “I’d like to speak to both you and Dr. Davies for a moment. May I come in?”

  She let him in and made tea while he withdrew papers from his briefcase and settled himself at the table. After a polite sip, he cleared his throat. “I’m the executor of Mrs. Davies’s estate. The short version of her will is this: your grandmother left the house and contents to you, Ms. Davies.”

  “To me?” Tilda said. She looked at her mother, who showed no signs of surprise at this turn of events. “Not to Mum?”

  “No. I understand you live in America with no plans to return to England on a permanent basis. I’d be happy to recommend an agent, when you decide to sell.”

  “I’m not selling,” she said. Her lips were numb. She cleared her throat, and repeated herself. “I’m not selling. Can you recommend someone reliable who might want to run the place?”

  The attorney’s brow furrowed for a moment. “There’s a young lad in the village looking to try his hand with organic farming,” he said. “I’ll leave his name and number. I’m sure you can work out a suitable arrangement with him or with someone he recommends.”

  He neatly penned the name Joe Gloyne and a local phone number on the pad of paper by Nan’s rotary phone, then left. Tilda escorted the solicitor to the front door, then turned to look through the house’s single room at her mother, standing on the flagstone terrace, staring out at the sea. Her back was straight, her shoulders rigid, a solitary, lonely figure. With a sudden, shocking clarity, Tilda realized she might never cross the gaping void between herself and her mother, not from her own mistakes or for lack of trying, but because her mother simply didn’t want to be reached.

  But life was far too short and far too precious for Tilda to deny herself the chance to love and be loved. As a child she’d asked for what she wanted, again and again, and been denied. She’d spent the last ten years staggering under a burden of shame and guilt without once asking for atonement. As an adult all she could do was let her mother, and herself, off the hook of anger and heartache.

  “I’m sorry, Mum,” she said in the silence hanging over the room after the door closed.

  “Don’t be, darling,” her mother said, staring fixedly at the currant bushes running in tangles to the sea. “I didn’t want the place, and your Nan knew that.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” she said quietly.

  Her mother transferred her clear, analytical gaze from the tangled brambles to Tilda’s face.

  “I’m sorry for what happened with Andrew,” Tilda said.

  “The time for an apology was ten years ago,” her mother said.

  “Nonetheless, I am sorry, Mum.”

  “As am I,” her mother said, and looked away again.

  Tilda’s heart was pounding, her underarms prickling from a nervous sweat, her stomach churning, but she had begun and she meant to go on. “But you should have protected me. A fatherless girl, left to her own devices in boarding schools and summer enrichment camps? You should have protected me,” she said.

  Her mother looked at her, her gray eyes as sharp and slicing as daggers. “I gave you the best of everything. The education and opportunities I never had, connections you spurned. As for protecting you . . . from Andrew? Andrew was hardly a threat to you. Lacking clear direction and a guiding hand, he has the initiative one would expect from someone who’d never had to do a proper day’s work in his life, and his career has foundered for it. That was all you, my girl. How could I possibly protect you from yourself?”

  “It would have been
easy, Mum,” Tilda said. She heard Daniel in her voice, even, sure, bedrock in her soul. “All you had to do was pay attention to me. That’s all I wanted.”

  Her mother returned her attention to the sea. “I gave you everything, and you ask for more. Too much. From the very beginning, you asked too much of me.”

  She didn’t clarify, or elaborate. The tide was flowing back out, ebbing from the harbor walls. Tilda watched and let the tide of grief carve away the rocks of anger and resentment and pain, revealing something else inside her. Pity, laced with forgiveness. She’d asked for it from her mother, and given it to her mother. It could be a gift to both of them, but only if her mother was willing to receive forgiveness as well as give it.

  All she could do was offer it. She could do no more.

  —

  Claiming no interest in anything left in the cottage, her mother left at midafternoon.

  Tilda cleaned out the fridge, sorted through Nan’s knickknacks, the pictures on the mantel, and the albums tucked under the end table, then slept on sheets that smelled of Nan, and faintly of Daniel. The next day a man from the village brought his truck and loaded all of Nan’s possessions but for the rocking chair and cedar chest into the back of it. Shipping them, and Nan’s Mason Cash mixing bowl and the hand beater she used to scramble eggs or mix the milk into flour for tea biscuits, to New York would cost a fortune, but Tilda wanted them. When she’d finished, she opened all the windows and let the cool evening breeze blow through. She was booked on the evening flight to Kennedy, but before she hurled herself into the air again, there was one thing left to do.

  She dragged the rocking chair through the door to the garden, and then positioned the cedar chest beside it. In the day’s fading light she opened the lid, then shook out the sheet that had protected the most precious relics of Nan’s life. She draped it over the rocking chair’s polished arm, and turned back to see what the chest held.