The List

Emory

At three in the morning on Thursday, he went down into the tunnel with a lantern and the twelfth notebook under his arm, to think.

He did his thinking in the oil room. It was the one place in the world that was entirely his: a squat stone vault at the base of the tower, twelve feet by fourteen, with a floor of packed earth and a roof of iron girders and a single slit window, long since bricked up, through which in the old days a keeper’s boy had fed lamp oil to the burners. He had cleaned it out the winter before. He had laid down a rug and a cot and a plank desk. He had lined the walls with shelves of pine, and on the shelves, in order, spine out, stood eleven black notebooks with elastic straps and rounded corners, and each of them was numbered on the spine in white paint.

He set the twelfth on the desk and lit the green-shaded lamp.

It was very quiet. Above him the tower rose a hundred and four feet into the dark, and he could hear, faintly, far up in the lantern room, the slow turning of the lens, whisper, whisper, whisper, on its bed of mercury. Water dripped somewhere in the tunnel behind the iron door. It was cold. He put on his father’s old Navy peacoat, which hung from a nail, and sat down in the creaking chair, and uncapped the pencil, and looked at the blank page.

He wrote, at the top, in his small clear capitals:

WHAT WENT WRONG.

He underlined it.

He was a methodical man. It had always seemed to him the one real virtue he had: the willingness to sit down in front of a failure and take it apart, piece by piece, the way he would take apart a rotted plank, to find where the damp had got in. His father had been the same. Don’t curse the wood, Em. The wood’s just telling you something. He turned the pencil in his fingers. He began to write.

1. SHE SAID RULE SIX.

2. I AGREED TO RULE SIX.

He stopped.

He looked at the two lines for a long time. They sat on the page like a pair of nails in a board. He could see, quite clearly, the exact moment in the kitchen at Fennimore House, on the morning of the first of June, when she had slid the gas bill across the table and handed him the pencil. He could see her face. He had known, even then, in the shadow of that bright morning, with the French toast cooling and the sea in the window, that he was being asked to sign something his body could not honor. He had watched the words go onto the paper in her small round hand, the other person lets go, and he had felt his heart check, like a horse at a fence.

You agreed, he told himself coolly. You said “I agree.” You signed with your own name. You kissed the paper.

I did. He pressed the pencil to the page. I kissed it so she would believe me.

He wrote:

3. A RULE MADE BY A FRIGHTENED PERSON IS NOT A RULE. IT IS A SYMPTOM.

He considered this. He liked it. It had a clean edge. He underlined the second sentence, and nodded, and felt the first loosening of the knot in his chest.

That was the thing she did not understand. She was frightened. She had been frightened since last Thursday, since the bathroom floor, since the moment the world had turned over and given her back the thing she’d wanted most and a man’s face looking down. He had seen it. He had seen it in the way she went white at the sound of the kettle, and sat very still when he came into a room, and looked at him sideways, across the dinner table, as if he were a stranger she’d been warned about. She was pregnant. She was frightened. She was alone with a body that had already betrayed her four times. And in that state, in that sick, shaking, hormonal terror, she had reached out and grabbed the first thing within reach: a rule on the back of a gas bill.

It was not her fault. He wanted that on the record. He wrote it, in a box.

IT IS NOT HER FAULT.

* * *

The funeral came back to him then, as it did on nights like this, uninvited, in a clean bright wash of light.

He was fifteen. He stood by the coat rack in the church basement, in a suit that was a size too small, with a paper plate in his hands. Everyone in the room was talking in the soft ugly voices of the bereaved. They came at him one after another: red-faced men, pearl-necklaced women, an elderly deacon who smelled of peppermint. You’re the man of the house now. You have to be strong. Your mother’s going to need you. He counted them. He counted the number of times they patted his shoulder. It was a thing to do. It was something to hold on to, a rope across a river.

Twelve.

And then, out of the crowd, a woman had come toward him, a thin pale woman in a good wool coat with her hair coming down, and had not said a word. She had looked at him. She had looked at him the way you would look at a thing you knew to be real. And then she had knelt, in her good coat, on the filthy linoleum, with the whole room watching, and said in a quiet voice, You don’t have to be okay. Not today.

It was the first true sentence anyone had said to him in a week.

He had not fallen in love with her. He wanted that understood. Whatever the school counselor would later say, whatever the mild, kind, concerned woman with the clipboard would write in a file, whatever his mother’s face did when she looked at him across the table, it had not been that. He had been fifteen years old and his father was dead and a stranger had told him the truth. That was all it had been. A thing he was grateful for. A thing he could not stop holding, turning over, as a boy holds a stone he’s found on the beach, because it was smooth, and warm, and he knew he would not find another.

The glove had been in his pocket the next morning. He had not asked for it. He had put his hand in his coat and found it, gray, soft, with its crooked leaf. I’ll want it back at some point, she had said, smiling, and he understood that she meant it as a joke, and that he did not have to return it, and that he would, anyway, someday, when it was time.

He turned the page.

THINGS CORINNE LIKES, said the heading, in the neat capitals of a boy of fifteen. Below it, in a different ink, and a different year, in the older, harder hand of a young man, ran the list. He didn’t have to read it. He knew it by heart. It was in the first notebook, and the second, and the third; it spilled on through all the rest. It had grown over eight years into something vast and quiet and orderly, like a library:

1. Chamomile tea with honey, 2 spoons (one big, one small).
2. People who tell the truth.
3. Kneeling down to look at people.
4. Fixing things by hand.
5. She says “okay” like a question and then waits for the answer.

...

417. Chet Baker, esp. the version of the song with the wrong second verse.
418. Skau.
419. The word vemod.
420. The smell of rain on warm stone.

1,203. Her left hand under her cheek.
1,204. Four breaths, then a big one.

He had not been a stalker. He had known the word. He had looked it up, at seventeen, in a bathroom with the door locked, with the hot fierce shame of a boy who has been caught out in a thing he doesn’t have the vocabulary for. And he had understood it. He had understood, then, that there was a version of himself, a mistaken, clumsy, unlucky version, who had once left notes in a girl’s locker and walked six blocks behind her in the rain.

That was a failure of method, he told himself. Not of feeling.

Tessa Brandt had not understood what he was offering. That was all. He had wanted to give her a kindness, and she had taken it for a threat, and he had paid for it with a year. But he had learned. He had learned the one lesson that mattered, in that long gray winter in the psychologist’s office, with the clipboard and the box of tissues. He had learned it so thoroughly that he had written it, in the front of the fourth notebook, in his own square hand:

DO NOT ASK FOR WHAT YOU WANT. ARRANGE FOR IT TO ARRIVE.

* * *

He had been very patient.

That was what no one would believe, if they ever came to read these pages. They would see a man who’d watched, and followed, and waited; they would see eight years. But it had not felt like patience. It had felt like a long slow tide coming in. He had gone on with his life. He had done his schoolwork, and built a boat, and learned to cook, and trained as an EMT, and taken his mother’s hand across the table every Sunday night; and all the while the other thing had sat at the center of him, quiet and bright, like a lamp in a window.

He had followed her work.

He did not apologize for that. It was public. It was in the world, on shelves, with her name on the title page in small gray capitals: Translated from the Norwegian by Corinne Aldermere. He had found her first book at sixteen, in the Portland library, by accident, between a cookbook and a field guide to the birds of Maine. He had read it on the bus. He had read the second the following week. By the time he turned twenty he had read thirty-one of them: Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, one Icelandic saga in a spiral-bound edition from a small press, and every one of them had her in it. Her breath. Her commas. The way a sentence would run on and on, in a long careful clause, and then stop on a hard little verb, like a hand closing. He could have picked her out of a thousand.

He had said so. That was the strange part. He had said it, at her desk, in June, with the sun on the floor, and she had laughed. You’d know it anywhere, she had said, and he had said I would, and she’d thought it was a lover’s joke.

It was true.

Then the day of the envelope.

He was twenty-two years old. It was a cold bright Tuesday in November, and he’d driven down to Cumberland with a thermos and a camera to look at her house. Only to look. He had told himself that for a year. A gray colonial with a green door, set back on an acre of trimmed grass in a street of identical houses. He parked at the end of the block, as he had a dozen times before, and sat with the engine off and the heater ticking, and watched the front door, and at ten past noon a car had pulled into the drive.

It was a silver Lexus. A man had got out. And then a girl.

She was perhaps twenty-six. She wore a camel coat and tall boots, and her hair was bright and straight and long. She laughed up at the man as they went up the path. He put his hand on the small of her back, and the girl turned her face up and kissed him on the mouth, openly, at noon, on the doorstep of the house where Corinne slept. Then they had gone in.

Emory had sat very still in the truck.

He had not felt rage. He had expected rage. He had braced himself for it, as one braces for a blow. Instead he had felt a profound, cold, clear sense of arrival, as of a man who finds, at the bottom of a long staircase in the dark, that there is a floor.

She doesn’t know.

She doesn’t know, and she’s alone, and she’s going to find out in the worst possible way.

He had picked up the camera.

He had taken three hundred and eleven photographs, over nineteen days. He’d stood in alleys and hotel parking lots. He’d sat in a Starbucks across from a restaurant for four hours with a book open on his knee. He had been scrupulous. He had chosen twelve, only twelve, the clearest, the plainest, the least cruel, and had printed them on good paper and put them in a plain brown envelope, with her name on the front in block capitals, and not a word inside. He had stood on the step of the gray colonial in the January dusk, with the porch light off, and bent and laid the envelope on the doormat with two fingers. And he had walked away without looking back, shaking, light-headed, as if he’d lifted a stone from a river and seen the water run clear.

It was the kindest thing he had ever done.

He believed that still.

* * *

He wrote on, in the cold light of the lamp. His handwriting steadied. The page filled.

4. SHE WAS GOING TO PORTLAND ALONE.

5. SHE WOULD HAVE BEEN IN A BUILDING I COULD NOT ENTER. WITH STRANGERS. AT A RISK OF ONE IN FIVE.

6. SHE LIED TO ME ABOUT THE DENTIST. SHE DELETED THE TEXT. SHE SAID “I’M SAFE” A HALF-BEAT LATE.

7. THEREFORE SHE DOES NOT TRUST ME. THEREFORE SHE WILL NOT TELL ME WHEN SHE IS IN DANGER. THEREFORE I MUST KEEP HER WHERE I CAN SEE.

He read it over. It was airtight. He felt the calm come down on him, the old clean calm, like a lid sliding home on a box.

It was the logic of the lifeboat. He had been taught it in his first training, in the cold classroom at the rescue squad: when the vessel sinks, the first duty is to the survivors. You don’t ask their permission. You don’t wait for them to agree. You get them into the boat. He had been given a laminated card with a diagram. He had loved the card. It was the first thing, after his father, that had told him plainly what a person was for.

I did not choose this, he thought. The situation chose it.

He closed the notebook on the pencil, and leaned back, and looked at the ceiling of the oil room, the dark iron girders furred with cobweb.

She’s carrying my child.

The sentence was so large that it would not fit in the room. He had to say it again, slowly, mouthing it in the lamplight, to feel its weight. My child. Four losses, a scar the length of his hand, a surgeon with a gray mustache saying you will not carry. And he, he, Emory Wolcott, son of Desmond, boatwright, had done what four doctors could not. He had put a child in a woman who could not have one. It was a miracle. It was a sign.

It was, he thought, with a sort of vast tender dizziness, meant.

He had bought the house for her in December, a month before the envelope, before she had any reason to need a house like that, because it was the right house: a house with a light, a house with a road that ended, a house with a tunnel, a house that his father had held in his hands. He had been so certain. He had walked through the empty rooms in December with the realtor’s key in his fist and had known, as plainly as a child knows the way home, that this was where she’d be safe. Where the world could not reach. Where nothing would ever be taken from her again.

And he had been right. The proof of it lay asleep, at that moment, in the big white bed upstairs, under a quilt, with a hand on her stomach.

* * *

He went up through the tunnel at four.

He walked slowly in the dripping dark with the lantern held low, past the green iron door, past the scratched names on the wall. He knew it by heart. A hundred and ten feet. He did not count the steps. He passed the place where, in July, she had said I’m with you in the faint gold light, and he felt it in his chest like a bruise.

I’m with you.

She had meant it. He knew she had. She’d meant it for a while.

The cellar was cold. The rack of preserves swung back under his hand. He climbed the stairs in his stocking feet, through the dark kitchen, with its cold stove and the jug of wild asters still on the table, and the two blue plates he had not washed. He had not been able to. He stood a moment looking at them, in the gray window-light, at the smear of butter and the crumbs of haddock, and the white mug on its side, with the amber ring of honey in the bottom.

He washed the plates. He dried them. He put them away.

Then he took the phone out of his pocket.

It was her phone, a small pale thing in a blue case, still warm from the charger. It had been lying on the arm of the study chair, dark and patient, where he had laid it at midnight, after he carried her up. He woke it with his thumb. It lit up. Four texts from Dana Okafor, her lawyer, about an unsigned form. Two from Ingrid, in Oslo, about the thirtieth. One from Callum Reyes, brief and decent and embarrassed: Hope all’s well. Pip says you’re swamped. No pressure. C. And at the bottom, patient, three days old, the one from his mother.

Everything okay up there? Em says you were low. Call me, Cor. xx P.

He read it.

He sat down in her chair at her desk by the window, in the dark, with the sea beginning to pale beyond the glass. He cracked his knuckles. He thought for a moment, with his eyes closed, as a pianist thinks before the first note. He could hear her. He could hear the rhythm of her sentences, the little pauses, the apologetic parenthesis, the fondness for the dash that she thought she’d conquered and hadn’t. He knew where she put her commas. He knew where she hung a clause. He knew that she wrote Love you with no punctuation, and xx in lowercase, and sorry when she meant please.

He opened the thread, and typed:

Pip, sorry; I’m a terrible correspondent. I’ve gone to ground with the Skau, so it’s pages and tea and no internet until the thirtieth. I’m fine, honestly, only tired; I think it’s the first cold week of the year. Tell Callum I’m sorry and I’ll ring when I surface. Love you. xx C.

He read it back.

It was perfect. It was her. He could not have told it from her own, and he knew every one of her own by heart. He felt a quick sharp thrill of craft, the joy of a joiner who sees a seam close without a gap, and under it, a flicker of something else, an uneasy small wince, as at a splinter.

It’s what she’d say, he told himself.

He sent it. He wrote to Ingrid, in a polite brisk professional note, with a semicolon, requesting an extension and asking that all correspondence be directed by post. He wrote to Dana Okafor, three lines. He wrote to Callum, a short grateful reply, with a smiley face.

It took twenty minutes. When he put the phone down, the window had gone from black to gray.

* * *

He called his mother at seven.

He did it at the same hour he always did, on the hour, as he had since he was eleven, from the porch step with his coffee, and she answered on the second ring.

“Em.”

“Hi, Mom.”

“You sound terrible.”

“I haven’t slept. I’ve been at the yard till late. Mr. Tilden’s got a rush job on the Bristol.”

“On a Wednesday night?”

“It’s Thursday, Mom.”

“I know what day it is.” There was a small silence on the line. He could hear a kettle singing behind her, and a radio, and under it the dry steady quality of her attention, like a hand laid flat on a table. “Cor texted me. She says she’s gone to ground.”

“She’s working.”

“She’s always working. She sounded strange. Her message was —” Pip stopped. “It was very polite.”

“She’s tired.”

“I called her last night and it went to voicemail. I called Tuesday, too. And Callum says she’s not answering him either.”

“She’s busy, Mom. She’s got the deadline.” He said it easily, with the little rueful laugh. “She’s not going to answer anyone till the thirtieth. You know how she gets.”

“Em.”

“Mm?”

“Is there something you want to tell me?”

The half-beat came.

He felt it come, as he always did, a small cool pause in the machinery, like a stone dropped into water. He had tried for years to train it out of himself. He had practiced in the mirror, in the cab of the truck. He had never been able to close it. It was there, always, between the question and the answer, no longer than the blink of an eye; and he knew that his mother, who had listened to him lie about homework, about girls, about the sound of a window breaking at two in the morning, heard it, every time.

“No,” said Emory.

The line was quiet.

He sat on the porch step in the pale cold sunrise with the phone at his ear and the mug cooling in his fist and the whole shining bay in front of him. The lamp was still burning at the top of the tower, small and white, in the daylight, like a candle in a cathedral. He waited. He did not breathe.

“All right,” said Pip.

Her voice was very level. It had gone smooth and quiet, the way it did at the clinic when somebody on the table had stopped breathing, and she wanted him to know she’d noticed.

“I love you,” she said. “You know that. Whatever it is.”

“I know, Mom.”

“I’ll call tomorrow.”

“I’ll be here.”

She hung up. He sat holding the phone against his ear for a long time after the line went dead, listening to the silence, and the sea.

* * *

At five minutes to six on Friday morning, he climbed the stairs with a tray.

It was the third tray he’d made. He had made one on Thursday morning and another that night, the toast and the ginger tea and the vitamins in their blue bottle, and carried each one up, and stood outside her door, and listened to her sleep, and carried each one down again untouched. He had sat on the landing with his back against the wall for hours, in the dark, with a cold cup on his knee and his head against the panel, listening to her breathe, four breaths and then a big one. He had cried. He had not made a sound.

This morning she had woken before he was ready. He had been in the kitchen with the kettle on when the first sound came down through the ceiling: the creak of the bed, a step, another, a long gasp; a low, ugly, sobbing retch; a tap running; and then, in the silence, a voice, very small and cracked and terrified, saying “No,” and again, “No,” and then her fists on the wood, a terrible dull battering, a woman beating at the inside of a drum. She was screaming his name. She was screaming it, he thought, as you scream the name of a person who has pushed you off a cliff.

He had stood with his hand on the kettle until it stopped. Then he had let her have forty minutes, which seemed to him about right: long enough to understand, not long enough to hurt herself. Then he had made the tray.

Now he stood with the tray against his hip and the key in his fist and pressed his forehead to the cold panel of her door.

It was quiet on the other side. He could hear her breathing, very close and low down, as if she were sitting on the floor with her back against the wood, and no more than the thickness of a panel between her head and his.

He closed his eyes.

It’s all right, he said to the door, to the dark, to the quiet breathing behind the wood, to the boy by the coat rack with the paper plate. It’s all right. It’s only the first day. She’ll understand. She’ll forgive me. She won’t be able to help it, because she’ll see what I’ve given her.

I’ll be so good to her.

He laid his palm against the wood, flat, where her fists had struck, and held it there, as one holds a hand to the flank of a frightened animal.

I promise, he said. I promise I won’t ever hurt you.

I promise I’ll never let anybody hurt you.

I promise I won’t ever let you go.

It sounded, in the dim hall, like three separate vows. But he said them in a single breath, and in his mind, as he stood there with his palm against the door and the tears running down his face, they were one.

He wiped his eyes on his sleeve. He lifted the tray. He unlocked the door, and drew the bolt, and slid back the bar, and put on his gentlest voice, the voice he used for strangers at accidents, and stepped into the room.