by Anne Calhoun
It held neat stacks of letters tied with ribbon. Bewildered, her heart pounding, Tilda lifted them. They were her letters.
Nan, who said she didn’t have time for foolish sentiment, had kept her letters. Judging by the ribbon-tied stacks, all of them, from . . . yes, the handwriting on the envelopes scrolled in reverse from her precise, angular script to the careful, rounded letters of the eight-year-old girl she’d been when she went to boarding school. Cradled in unsteady piles on her lap were all the letters she’d sent Nan, her entire history.
Her throat closed. Tears spilled down her cheeks as she smoothed her palm over the stacks. She was here, right here, in pen and ink. Despite sending away her past, it was right here, waiting for her to come back and claim it. The good and the bad, the funny and the sad, the mundane and the remarkable, it was all here, stored with Nan’s treasures. In the other compartment lay her wedding day picture, taken by the judge’s clerk who witnessed the ceremony.
Tilda studied the picture for quite a while. She didn’t look like a bride, not in a garnet dress the light in the chamber dulled to near black. She carried no flowers. Daniel also wore a dark suit and a subdued tie. The background wasn’t flowers or a gazebo or a lake, but rather law books and framed certificates and diplomas. She touched a smudge on the picture and realized Nan had sat there with the album, studying Tilda’s face. The picture caught the moment she stood in front of the windows with Daniel, her head bowed, her hands clasped in his, the moment when he whispered her into the wedding.
Are you sure? Tilda, are you sure? We don’t have to do this.
She stared at the picture for a very long time, taking in Daniel’s concerned, loving expression. Her own face was so much more difficult to read, seemingly carved from alabaster marble, her lips parted, the line of her nape and jaw and forehead backlit by the light coming through the window. The pose was protective and possessive, surrender in her bowed neck, charged with the dark current of lust that characterized their early relationship. No wonder the judge and the clerk were looking elsewhere when they broke that little bubble of intimacy and turned back to the room.
Troubled, she set aside the framed picture and picked up the old-fashioned ones, made of leather, the snapshots tucked into little clips. There was just enough room left in the cedar chest to hold the pictures now displayed on end tables and the mantel, the old-fashioned albums she remembered collecting the day when she sorted through the living room. Nan always said she didn’t have room for such silly things, that she remembered well enough what her only granddaughter looked like. Tilda was puzzled, until the light dawned.
When she came to visit, Nan put the pictures and albums away not because they made her uncomfortable, but because she knew they made Tilda uncomfortable. She’d been protecting Tilda to the last. Loving her as best she knew how, to the very end.
There was one album at the bottom of the chest, one Tilda hadn’t seen before, made of dark blue leather that held a sheen of time and handling. She lifted it out and opened it to find pictures of her. A baby picture from the hospital, wearing the cap all newborns wore to keep them warm. Swaddled in a gorgeous hand-knit white lace shawl for her christening. Napping on her mother’s chest while her mother napped, her head lolling back against the back of the sofa. In a pram, her mother pushing her self-consciously through the village.
These must be the pictures taken before she left for Oxford. The pictures displayed on the next few pages were relatively unremarkable, snapshots taken when Tilda and Mum came to visit Nan, carefully posed by the stone wall lining the path to the sea, or picking flowers in the field. Eating an ice cream after a visit to the shops, her eyes brimming with delight at the treat.
When she turned the next page, she stopped breathing. She was about eight, wearing a short ruffled dress and sandals, her hair a mop of black curls around her face, her eyes wide, unblinking. Haunted. Seen like this, the girl she was before she was sent to live with Nan, and the girl she was after that, her brokenness shone from the page like a searchlight over the sea. She remembered crying herself to sleep, night after night, until she stopped crying because no one was coming for her.
All her adult life she’d dragged this little girl from student housing to a series of apartments, then to the town house, and finally all over the world, repeating behaviors that looked wildly successful and cosmopolitan on the surface but were doomed to fail to give her what she wanted. Needed. Longed for. She remembered reading about indigenous tribes that, when on long journeys, would stop and wait for hours, or days, or weeks, for their souls to catch up with them. She’d lost her soul somewhere in her rootless, unfettered childhood. She wasn’t sure where she’d left hers, perhaps in Tokyo, perhaps in Cornwall. Perhaps it had been waiting for her at the unclaimed baggage room in Heathrow all along.
At the bottom of the trunk lay a photograph of Granddad in an old-fashioned suit and tie, Nan’s wedding photograph, Granddad in the same suit, Nan in a smart dark green dress that set off her hair and eyes. Pictures Nan had long since stowed away.
Tilda held them in her hands, trailed her fingertip over Nan’s face. The motion left a slight smudge similar to the one left on her photograph by Nan’s finger. Inspired, Tilda rummaged through Nan’s tiny closet and came up with a vintage suitcase. Without so much as untying a ribbon she transferred the stacks to the musty suitcase, letters, albums, all of Nan’s treasures.
It was time to go home. For the first time in her life, the name at the top of her list was her own.
—
She packed her suitcase once again, and took the train to Heathrow, cleared customs and immigration, then boarded the flight to JFK. Unwilling to check either of her bags, she staked out more than her share of allotted luggage space in the bins. The plane flew through a perpetual dusk, and distant gray sprawl of ocean beneath her, its textures and shifts smoothed to glass, the vast, empty dusk around her, lulled her to sleep. She awoke when the flight attendants began preparing the cabin for arrival. Out the window she sought the familiar landmarks lit up in the night sky: the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Freedom Tower at the tip of the island, Central Park’s rectangular green swath. The setting sun gilded the Manhattan skyline. Tilda stared out the window, and felt it pierce her.
Standing in the taxi queue was far less beautiful, the wait hot and long. The cab smelled of onions and coffee. The cabbie dropped her and her two bags at the black door of Fifteen Perry Street. After he left, she wrestled the bags through the doors, and then stopped in the foyer.
Home.
The divorce agreement still lay on the dining room table, although based on a fainter circle of dust Daniel had picked up the paperweight, then set it down again. Heart in the back of her throat, she flipped through to the last page.
He hadn’t signed them. He’d thought about it, or at least looked at the paperweight. She hefted it, looked at the pink lotus flower suspended in the glass, then at the front windows. Still intact. A faint, involuntary smile crossed her face. How very, very like Daniel to think about hurling five grand of paperweight through the windows, but not do it.
She was so exhausted she couldn’t make a list of all the things she needed to do, but was equally unable to sleep. So she left her new suitcase filled with the contents of Nan’s cedar chest at the bottom of the stairs, and hauled the larger bag containing her clothes and toiletries up two flights to her bedroom. She paused on the second floor to peer into the guest room and bath. The bed was unmade, and Daniel’s electric toothbrush and razor sat haphazardly on the counter, their charging lights blinking out of sync.
He hadn’t signed the papers, and he was still here.
Unpacking took all of ten minutes. Dirty laundry, dry cleaning, toiletries neatly put away. She showered, changed into a pair of yoga pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt, then went back downstairs, ran a glass of water and went into the dining room.
She op
ened the vintage suitcase and took out the stacks of letters, neatly bundled and wrapped in faded ribbons, then sat down at the foot of the dining room table, facing the divorce papers. The knots in the ribbons gave way easily. She fanned them out along the length of the table, but ran out of room when she came to the head, where the divorce papers, paperweight, and pen still sat.
Very aware of what she was doing, she picked up the paperweight and stuffed it in a drawer on the hutch, but laid the papers on a chair, still near the rows of letters but no longer blocking their flow. The pen she capped and pushed behind her ear, then resumed laying out the story of her life. She studied the letters as if she were studying a note from one of the people asking for an introduction. Most of the postmarks were from school, a few with international postage from the book tour, then New York.
Nothing from Tokyo, but she now had the letter she’d written Daniel about Tokyo. She went upstairs, got the letter from Daniel’s nightstand, and tucked it in its proper place in the rows.
That was the first step, to reread the letters, starting with the most recent, and working her way back, excavating her self from these letters like artifacts on an archaeological dig.
Daniel’s key turned the lock on the front door. It swung open, hit the suitcase on the floor, which scraped over the tile. “Tilda?”
“In here,” she said, trusting him to navigate to the sound of her voice.
He appeared in the doorway in his suit and tie, his keys still in his hand. “Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” she said.
He braced his shoulder against the doorframe, tipped his head so it rested on the white wood. “Good flight?”
“Yes,” she said. “It brought me home.”
His gaze sharpened, then he nodded at the rows of envelopes on the dining room table. “What’s this?”
“Every letter I ever sent Nan.”
“Ah.”
He looked at her, and she’d never felt more raw or vulnerable under his gaze. “Daniel, I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything,” he said not unkindly. “I’m going for a run. I’ll be back later.”
“All right,” she said.
He came back downstairs wearing running shorts and a T-shirt. Before he left he handed her another glass of water.
She opened the last letter she’d sent to Nan, and read it. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t cry anymore, that she knew what she needed to do and would work at it until it was done, but in hindsight the letter was so superficial and stupid and false, all the lies of omission she was telling herself, walls made of words and paper fibers and ink. She neatly folded the letter, inserted it back into its envelope, the only one on the table not handled by Nan, and went upstairs to sleep.
—
She awoke to Daniel sitting on the edge of the bed. “Tilda,” he said.
In that moment she knew that she wanted to wake up every day for the rest of her life to Daniel’s voice murmuring her name. His gaze, so troubled and caring, searched her face. “I love you. Daniel, believe me when I say that. I know I haven’t given you any reason to but please, please believe me. I love you.”
“I love you, too,” he said. He smoothed her hair back from her face and smiled at her, so sweet and wistful and wary. What she’d done to him shamed her almost as much as what she’d done to Andrew.
“We need to talk,” she started, then sat up straighter. “Why are you in a suit? Are you going back to work?”
His hand rested on her hip, warm, anchoring. “It’s morning, Tilda. You’ve been asleep for thirteen hours.”
“I need to go into work,” she said, and started to lift the covers.
His hand tightened, not much, but enough. She felt the weight of it, weight she could have powered through a lifetime ago, before everything fell apart. “I called Penny and told her you were taking a couple more days off.”
The weight of his hand mirrored the weight of her soul, unfamiliar but pleasantly heavy and warm. Carrying that weight would take some getting used to. “I’ve already asked her to do too much.”
“She said you’d say that. She says to tell you not to short-circuit the process.”
The instinct to avoid this through work was strong, but she ignored it. “We need to talk,” she said again.
He smiled, somewhat involuntarily. “See? That wasn’t so hard,” he said before he grew serious again. “We do. But not today. Tonight.”
“Shall we meet in the kitchen?”
“It’s a date,” he said, and squeezed her hip before leaving.
Getting out of bed was a breeze because her mouth tasted foul and her hair felt lank. She showered, brushed her teeth, dressed in loose-knit pajama pants and a T-shirt, went downstairs for breakfast, popped bread in the toaster, opened the door, and pulled out the currant jam.
Then she fell apart.
Half an hour later she pulled herself off the kitchen floor, put the jam away, and had a pear and a bowl of instant oatmeal for breakfast. She sat at the table on the patio and read her email, both work and personal, called a supplier, called several personal appointments she’d missed. Slate cleared, she went inside and looked at the letters stretched out on the dining room table. Her life, in neat rows. Craving sunshine and the summer breeze, she scooped up the divorce papers and the column of most recent letters from the table, and took them into the back yard with a cup of tea.
She was still sitting outside when Daniel came home. His footsteps paused for a moment, the fridge opened, closed, then he opened the screen door and walked down onto the flagstones, a beer in hand. He took in the stacks of letters, the plates dotted with crumbs, and said, “Have you been out here all day?”
She looked up. His tie was loosened, the top button undone, and his face was lined. “Most of it,” she said. “Hard day?”
“Just long,” he said, and pulled out a chair to sit next to her. “The next couple of months are going to be hell. Ready to talk?”
“Yes.”
“The day you thought you were pregnant. Why did you call me?” he asked.
It was a good question. Why hadn’t she just taken the test and dealt with the consequences on her own? But the first thing she thought when she realized exactly, precisely, how heart-stoppingly late she was, was Call Daniel. Now.
“I thought you should know,” she said. She huffed out a laugh. Because he was Daniel. Because he was good with women on ledges, as she well knew. Because something told her he’d stand beside her in the bathroom, and afterward. In that moment she’d wanted the sheer animal comfort of someone to sit beside her while she waited for the test to return its answer, and that moment of weakness, as always, was her downfall.
“Why did you say yes?”
“I wanted to marry you,” she said quietly. “Please believe me when I say that. I wanted to marry you. I wanted you. Wanting has never been my problem. My problem is having. Keeping what I want.”
“That’s not your problem, Tilda.”
– TWENTY-SEVEN –
He looked at her, hated how the next few minutes would hurt her, but knowing she had to go through them. “What did your mother say to you after she saw you and Andrew?”
Tilda looked down, away, then slid him a glance, half love, half amusement, all hope.
“You really don’t miss a trick, do you?” she said.
“I miss all kinds of tricks. I just try not to miss the same trick twice.”
“You ruin everything.”
He blinked, then realized she didn’t mean him.
“That’s what she said. You ruin everything.” She took a deep breath. “She looked at me like I was a whore, and said, You ruin everything. Then she walked away.”
Rage throttled him. That’s why Andrew was at the dinner party. His presence was a not-so-subtle reminder to Tilda of her past
mistakes, ensuring they would haunt her for the rest of her life.
“I wasn’t sure if she meant I’d ruined her life, the trip, or her reputation. I’d ruined her chances with Andrew, certainly. Perhaps simply by being born. I have no idea who my father is, but he disappeared like vapor before I was born. I ruined that for her, too. As near as I can tell there were two men in her life she actually wanted, and both times I ruined her chance at happiness.”
He counted to ten. Then counted to ten again. He had to say something, before she interpreted his silence as judgment. “She’s blaming you.”
“Oh, I couldn’t help being born,” she said with a little laugh that sounded as harsh and brittle as his voice. “But I was trouble with Nan. Skipping school. Uncontrollable. That’s why I was sent to boarding school. I’m certainly to blame with Andrew. She wanted him. He needed her, but wanted me. I wanted . . .” She went silent again. Daniel heard nothing but the rush of blood in his ears. “I wanted to make her see me, see who I am, see what I could do.”
Silence. Daniel sat across from her, and waited. Something happened in Cornwall, beginning when she held a handful of Cornish dirt over her grandmother’s coffin and let it trickle through her fingers. “I didn’t want you to know this about me. You’d never do anything like that. You’re a good person, a good man.”
“Just because I wouldn’t do that doesn’t mean I judge you for doing it. You were seventeen, as alone as any child I’ve seen who wasn’t in the foster-care system. Your mother . . . your mother defies description, and Andrew . . .”
Her cheeks bloomed pink. “Still. I’m ashamed of myself,” she said finally.
“Why?” he said gently.
“What kind of horrible person does what I did—”
“A seventeen-year-old, passionate, determined person who knows she deserves better than what she’s had.”
“And what kind of pathetic person asks her husband to take her back because she’s suffered one loss and is afraid of losing someone else? You’ll think I’m here just because I’m scared of losing you and I’m afraid of being . . . without you. I’m not afraid to be alone, but the thought of life without you terrifies me.”