26

Liddy

One morning, there’s a white envelope in the hallway outside Liddy’s door. She guesses it’s from Rose, and she’s filled with self-reproach because Rose felt she had to resort to leaving a note. Liddy promises herself she’ll go down for a cup of tea this afternoon.

But the note isn’t from Rose. It’s from Marta. I would very much like to speak with you, it reads. May I come by at ten o’clock tomorrow morning? If this is not something you would like to do, please leave me a message at #503 and I will honor that wish.

Liddy doesn’t leave a message, but she does drive herself into a frenzy. It’s been two weeks since the morning Rose introduced them, so if Marta had feelings for her, wouldn’t she have reached out sooner? What does she want to talk about? Rose? Their shared situation? Fears about the building? Or maybe, just maybe, could she have been hit by that thunderbolt too?

The next morning, Liddy wakes early, although she isn’t sure she actually slept. She has her usual breakfast of toast with cottage cheese and two cups of tea, heads downstairs to wash up. Then she goes to #454. She sits down at Robin’s desk, touches her books and soccer trophies, switches to Scott’s and picks up a notebook full of pencil drawings of little men climbing into and out of fantastical and complicated structures in both two and three dimensions. She pushes her nose into a drawer full of Robin’s pajamas, imagines she can still catch her daughter’s scent.

Liddy has been using Rose’s phone to call the twins, but they’re always in a hurry to get off and do whatever it is they’re doing, which is a good thing. Sometimes Robin asks how her writing is going, but most of the time Liddy can almost see their eyes roll when she tries to prolong the conversations. Neither of them mentions Garrett, but she can tell it weighs on them.

When she leaves #454, she tries to work on Leaving and is unsurprised when the effort goes nowhere. Seven thirty. It occurs to her that she could just go up to #503 now, but that would be rude. Marta initiated this encounter, and it needs to progress on her terms. So Liddy putters around, shuffles the papers on her desk, thinks about which scarf to wear. Eight fifteen.

There’s a knock on the door, stronger than Liddy would have expected, and she jumps from the chair where she’s been pretending to read. She pushes the heavy door open and smiles at Marta, motions for her to enter. She doesn’t look at Marta directly, doesn’t trust her voice not to tremble. “Please, please,” she finally says, her voice steady, if an octave lower than usual. “Please come in. Sit down. Please make yourself comfortable,” she adds, like some robotic servant programed to be polite.

Marta takes in the room. “It is as if I am standing in an apartment in a magazine. I cannot believe you were able to make it look like this.”

“I had a lot of decorating experience in my previous life,” Liddy says dryly.

“You are an interior designer?”

Liddy laughs. “No, nothing like that, but please, please come join me on the couch.” She groans inwardly. Again, robotic. And idiotic.

“Thank you.” Marta sits but keeps looking around. “I am sorry if I am staring, but I am finding this so extraordinary, and I do not know how to stop myself. It is as if I have been transported to another world.”

The praise makes Liddy uneasy, as does Marta’s close proximity. “Can I get you something to drink? Coffee, tea, water?”

“I would love some tea, thank you,” Marta says, and their eyes lock.

Liddy forgets about the tea, drops to the couch, and lightly places her hand on Marta’s arm. “Do we know each other from somewhere? You seem so, so . . . so familiar.”

“I sense this also, but I do not think we know each other from Boston. And I doubt we met in Venezuela.”

“So where is this coming from?”

Marta’s smile is full, lighting every plane of her face. “Perhaps it is coming from the future.”

Over the next month, they become lovers. Although Liddy wants this desperately, she’s also nervous, having never been with a woman. She’s fantasized about it, sure, watched that lesbian soft porn, but actually making love to a woman is a whole other being. Marta is gentle, and knowledgeable, waits to make sure Liddy wants what she has to offer, and Liddy’s apprehensions are quickly erased.

Marta’s body is soft and full, her runner’s tautness stretching just beneath her incredibly smooth mocha skin. Far different from Garrett, from any man—more welcoming, more exciting, exquisite. Then there’s Marta’s tongue, finding places no man has ever found, turning her inside out with pleasure. And there’s Liddy’s own tongue, searching Marta’s body and learning to bring her the same.

Marta is older than Liddy thought, but there are still twelve years between them, and at first this troubled her. But Marta brushed her concern aside, claiming that their connection is far more powerful than time. “I have a sense about such things,” Marta told her. “This is how we are supposed to be.”

They tell each other their secrets, both striving to evade those who stalk them, both hoping to someday walk free. The speed at which they’ve come together amazes Liddy, but Marta just smiled when she mentioned it. “I have found this is often the way with women,” Marta said. “We do not have the same fear of commitment as some men do.”

They laugh uproariously when they discover they have both hidden bundles of cash in their respective units, and encourage each other to move forward in pursuit of her dreams. During the day they write in their own spaces, but at night they come together in Liddy’s.

“Maybe you should think about telling that lawyer you want to keep going,” Liddy suggests to Marta one evening. “You shouldn’t stop because you’re afraid the worst will happen. What if it doesn’t and there’s a way to make it all go away?”

“Maybe you should think about meeting with him also,” Marta suggests to Liddy. “Jason Franklin is a good man, and perhaps he will have ideas about how you can get away from Garrett for good.”

One night as they lay coiled together in Liddy’s bed, Liddy says, “I don’t think our initial connection came from the future at all. I think it was more straightforward than that: pure, unadulterated chemistry. It struck us, and we knew there was no choice but to be together.”

Marta doesn’t disagree, but she doesn’t abandon her original position. “When I do not try to make you think like me,” she says, “and you do not try to make me think like you, we can enjoy each other’s thinking, and we will be stronger separately and together because of it.”

After all those years of Garrett orchestrating her performance as the perfect wife, directing her to listen to this music, buy this dress, befriend that woman, suck up to this man at that dinner party, now she’s with someone who just wants her to be herself. Accepts her as she is. No instructions necessary.