17. Wilson
— ? —
Wilson
I can’t get the words right.
Two hours at this desk and the wastebasket is already half full of crumpled pages, and every sentence I put down sounds like an excuse.
Or a lie. Or both.
A knock at the door makes me jump.
I check my watch. Past eleven.
The inn doesn’t do room service, and the owner went to bed hours ago muttering about the mainland weather report being wrong again.
I open the door and my heart forgets how to work.
Izzy stands in the hallway holding her grandmother’s jewelry box, the cherry wood one with the brass latch, the one she told me about at Il Faro when I asked what the trick to it was.
She’s wearing the old cardigan over a faded T-shirt, jeans with a hole in one knee. Her hair is still damp from the shower, curling at the ends the way it does when she doesn’t blow-dry it.
“You told me to correct the letters.” She lifts the box slightly, evidence for the court. “So I’m here to correct them.”
I step back and hold the door open without saying anything, because I don’t trust my voice right now.
She walks past me and stops in the middle of the small room, taking it in.
The narrow bed under the quilt that’s older than I am.
The desk drowning in crumpled paper and cold coffee.
One lamp, and the slanted ceiling she has to duck under at the window.
“You’ve never been in here,” I finally manage.
“I’ve never wanted to be in here.” She sets the jewelry box on the bed and sits down next to it, tucking one leg under her the way she always does when she’s settling in for a hard conversation.
“But you said I could take the letters apart line by line, and I couldn’t sleep, and I kept thinking about all the things you got wrong. ”
I pull the desk chair over and sit across from her, keeping a few feet of distance between us because I don’t trust myself any closer than that. “Where do you want to start?”
She opens the box and pulls out the stack of letters. My handwriting on every page, some of it smudged from rain, some of it barely legible because my hands were shaking when I wrote it.
She’s kept them in order, I realize, and numbered them in pencil in the corners.
“This one.” She pulls out the third letter and smooths it flat on the quilt between us. “You wrote that the conference I drove up to surprise you at was in Boston.”
“It was.” I’m certain of this one. I remember the hotel, the view of the harbor.
“It wasn’t.” She looks up at me, and there’s no anger in her face, just a bone-deep exhaustion that makes her look older than she is.
“It was Providence, Wilson. You’d been gone two weeks, and I drove up on a Friday without telling you, and we ate terrible seafood at that place on the water where the waiter spilled wine on my dress. ”
I remember the conference. I remember her showing up unannounced and how happy I was to see her. I don’t remember the city at all.
“Providence,” I repeat, reaching for the pen on the desk. I write it in the margin next to the crossed-out Boston. “What else did I get wrong?”
She watches me make the correction without arguing, without defending myself, and her face changes in a way I can’t quite read.
“The robe.” She flips to another letter, her fingers finding it without looking, the way you find a light switch in your own house. “Linda’s letter. You wrote that I never wore it.”
“You didn’t. It was still in the tissue paper in the villa.”
“That was the second one. Linda bought me two.” Her voice stays level but her hands don’t, and I can see the tremor in her fingers as they press against the page. “I wore the first one once. The night you called from Singapore and said you’d try to get on an earlier flight.”
I don’t remember that call. I remember a hundred calls like it.
“I put it on and sat on the end of our bed until two in the morning.” She smooths the page flat again. “Then I took it off and put it in the back of the closet, and I never told you, because you never asked why I was so tired the next day.”
“Izzy, you don’t have to…”
“Write it down.” She taps the page with one finger. “You remembered it wrong. Fix it.”
I write it down. The words come out crooked, but I get them on the page where she can see them.
She pulls out another letter and scans it, and then she stops. Her eyebrows go up.
“Okay, hang on.” She turns the page toward me. “You wrote that you carried me up the stairs on our wedding night.”
“I did carry you up the stairs.”
“Wilson, you tripped on the second step and almost took us both out.” She’s fighting a smile now. “I had to grab the railing, and then I carried the champagne the rest of the way because you clearly couldn’t be trusted with it.”
I remember the stairs. I remember her laughing. The tripping part is news to me.
“Can I keep that one though?” I rub the back of my neck. “It sounds better my way.”
“Absolutely not.” She pushes the pen toward me across the quilt. “Write it down. You tripped. I saved the champagne. That’s how it actually happened.”
“You’re really going to make me put that in writing?”
“I’m really going to make you put that in writing.” She’s smiling for real now, the first time all night, and I can breathe easier for it. “Go on.”
I write it down. Tripped on second step. Izzy saved the champagne.
When I look up, her face has gone softer.
“You do this thing,” she says, quieter now. “Where you remember stuff wrong in your favor. I always wondered if you knew you were doing it.”
“I’m starting to realize I do it a lot.”
“The Vermont weekend.” Another letter, another page smoothed flat. “You wrote that you canceled two hours before we were supposed to leave.”
“I did.”
“You canceled twenty minutes before. I was in the car.” She’s not crying, but her eyes are furious about it. “The bags were in the trunk and the engine was running and I was in the driveway waiting for you to come down. Then Isaac called, and you came down without a coat and knocked on my window.”
I open my mouth. Nothing useful is in it.
“You didn’t even open the door, Wilson. You said it through the glass.”
I have no memory of the glass. I have a memory of a deal that closed that Monday, and I couldn’t tell you now what it was for.
I write it in the margin. Twenty minutes. The window.
She watches me do it with an expression I’m starting to recognize. She’s waiting for me to defend myself. She’s braced for the argument, the counteroffer, the version where my memory is just as valid as hers.
I don’t give her one.
“There’s one missing.” She counts the pages again, frowning. “You’ve sent me fourteen letters. There are only thirteen in here.”
I don’t say anything, but my face must give me away.
“Wilson.” She looks up at me with those eyes that have always been able to see straight through every wall I’ve ever built. “Where’s the fourteenth letter?”
“I didn’t send it.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because I couldn’t figure out how to finish it.” I gesture toward the wastebasket without looking directly at it. “It’s in there somewhere. Buried under tonight’s disasters.”
She’s off the bed before I can stop her, crossing the small room in three steps and crouching down next to the wastebasket.
She pulls out crumpled pages one by one, smoothing each against her thigh, discarding the false starts until she finds the one that’s different. More than a few sentences on it. The one I’ve been trying to rewrite for three days.
“Don’t read that,” I say, but it comes out weak and desperate, and she’s already unfolding it.
“I woke up under the heavy quilt and I knew you’d been there.” She reads it out loud, her voice flat and careful. “I knew you’d come downstairs in the dark and covered me while I slept, because the cedar chest was still open by the wall and the thin blanket was on the floor where I’d kicked it.”
She swallows and keeps going.
“I lay there for an hour trying to figure out what it meant that you’d done that. That you’d chosen to keep me warm when you had every right to let me freeze.”
She stops reading. Her hands are shaking so badly now that the paper rattles.
“You knew.” She looks up at me from where she’s crouched by the wastebasket, and she’s blinking hard. “You knew I came downstairs and put the quilt on you.”
“Yes. I knew.”
“You never said anything about it.”
“I didn’t know how to.” I grip the arms of the chair to keep myself from crossing the room to her. “I didn’t know what it meant, Izzy. I didn’t know if it meant anything at all, or if you were just being decent to a man sleeping on your grandmother’s couch, or if…”
“It meant I couldn’t stop myself.” Her voice cracks wide open. “It meant I couldn’t stop caring about you even when I wanted to more than anything. It meant I hated myself for covering you up, because it felt like giving in to a thing I was trying to kill.”
“Izzy, listen…”
She crosses the room and kisses me before I can finish saying her name.
I freeze for half a second, too shocked to respond, and then my hands are in her hair and I’m kissing her back with months of wanting behind it. She tastes of mint toothpaste and the salt of tears she’s trying not to cry, and my whole body aches with the relief of finally touching her again.
She climbs into my lap without breaking the kiss, her knees on either side of my hips in the desk chair, and I let her lead because I will follow her anywhere she wants to take this.
Her hands push my shirt open. A button pings off the hardwood somewhere. Then her palms are flat against my bare chest and I can feel her trembling everywhere we touch.
Her mouth moves to my jaw, my throat. Her fingers find my belt.
“Izzy.” I pull back just enough to look at her face. “Izzy, wait a second.”
“Don’t.” She kisses me again, harder. “Don’t you dare tell me to stop.”
“I’m not telling you to stop.” I catch her wrists gently, holding her hands still against my chest. “I’m asking if you’re okay.”
Her eyes are closed. Her breathing is ragged and uneven. And I watch it happen, the second she goes somewhere else, somewhere inside herself that I can’t follow, the place she goes when things get too real too fast.