The List (25 page)

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 tomorrow. 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.

T
ilda 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.

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.