The Lavender List

by Meg Harrington

  “I was very fond of her.”

  Michel looks sympathetic. “She still thinks you’re…”

  She nods. “A necessity.”

  They can’t discuss it further. Amelia is like Michel’s brother. A topic better danced around. Besides, their nanny is walking in with the twins in tow, and she thinks Laura’s a dilettante homemaker.

  Laura snaps the newspaper into a fold and hands it back. She kisses her children good-bye, gives her husband a peck on the cheek and makes her way to the bus stop.

  Wife of a diplomat, and she has to take two buses to get to work. Wouldn’t do to use her husband’s driver, or her own car. No Laura Wright has to be a very different woman down in Foggy Bottom.

  Quiet.

  Polite.

  She has to be fond of beige suits and peering at maps and fetching coffee and files. And waiting for the under-the-table assignments that only she and Frank Wisner know about. “That’s your cover,” he told her with a grin. “If you’re the meek little analyst and coffee girl, then no one will blink when I send you to Guatemala or Greece.”

  It works marvelously, but the majority of her day tends toward excruciatingly boring.

  For half of this particular day, she stares out the window at the fog resting lightly on the Potomac. She taps the tip of her pen against her chin and tries not to think about Amelia Maldonado.

  Normally, that isn’t so hard. She has children she cares a great deal for, a job that often consumes her, and a husband who…Well, she’s fond of him.

  “How about friends?” he asked when she confessed that she’d had enough great loves in her life and wasn’t about to add him to the list. “Friends who make a life together?”

  Sometimes, she pities her husband. It must be hard living in the shadow of a dead man and sharing a home with a woman who is very much in love with another woman.

  One she hasn’t spoken to since 1946.

  They’ve a new president now. And Laura’s an agent again. And Amelia has an Oscar.

  And a Tony.

  And fans. Whole legions of them.

  She certainly doesn’t need one more.

  In her section’s office, there’s a whole slew of televisions on one wall. They play broadcasts from all over the country. Piping them in and displaying them in fuzzy black and white. It’s a costly investment. One the general balked at, but his second, Dulles, was all too eager to indulge for his favorite employee, Frank Wisner.

  “I’ve seen a few of his skeletons,” Wisner said when Laura once pressed him about it. Then he gulped his beer like a cowboy in Colorado. “The trick is to know all their secrets and make sure you have none of your own.”

  A swath of grayscale passes along one screen, and Laura has to stand and move closer. Sometimes, from her desk, it’s too hard to make out who’s on screen.

  She looms over the TV sets, hands wrapped around her middle, fingers digging into her side.

  Because there’s Amelia again. This time, it’s a movie. That dreadful domestic drama that won her an Academy Award.

  “Hey Wright, you getting paid to watch flicks,” someone asks.

  Someone else chuckles. Makes some comment about the flightiness of her “sex.”

  “Shove it,” she barks, eyes still on the screen.

  Amelia looks radiant—if fuzzy. She’s just light hitting electrons. A ghost of physics scattered against the glass.

  Not the real thing. A woman who was warm against Laura’s lips, pliant beneath her fingers as she sighed into Laura’s hair and came against her hand.

  A woman who took on the mob to save her and laughed at Laura’s bad jokes and… cared.

  A woman who loved her.

  A woman Laura abandoned for a job she only gets to do half the time.

  She rounds on the other analysts in the room—the clever women just doing their jobs and the idiot men always angling to tease.

  The “good-natured” ribbing stops.

  Her heels are loud on the brown tiles as she stalks back to her desk and snatches up her purse.

  She feels the need to have a secret. And damn Frank Wisner to hell if he protests.

  On occasion, by people who Laura has only a passing fondness for, she’s been called “impulsive.”

  Her father’s said it more than once. Usually after she beat the snot out of a bully in an effort to protect the bullied. “Just because it’s right,” he’d say with a sigh, “doesn’t mean you ought to run off and do it.”

  Standing in a bathroom at Radio City Music Hall, decked out in an evening gown and far from the family she made a go at forging, she can hear father’s admonishment in her head.

  She’s not wrong in this instance.

  Staring at a flesh and blood Amelia poised over a sink, trying to collect herself, Laura knows, beyond the shadow of a doubt, she’s being impulsive.

  But she speaks up anyways.

  Amelia seems to be crying and apologizing for it, as if she’s done something wrong. “Sorry. I just had a…”

  “Successful film premiere by the looks of it.” Laura’s impulsive, but she’s also very suave. She once broke a soldier’s mind with nothing more than a smile and a nice dress.

  Amelia looks confused.

  That’s a natural response. Particularly for a girl who was once drugged and abandoned by a woman who then faked her own death.

  So, Laura decides to fill in the blanks. She approaches Amelia carefully and tells her how wonderful her career appears to be. How she’s so proud. How she’s so madly in l—

  The crack of Amelia’s palm against Laura’s face is so loud, she’s surprised cops don’t burst in with guns blazing.

  “You fake your death and disappear for six years, and now you want to end the world with me?”

  Now that Amelia’s spitting her words back at her incredulously, Laura has to admit they sound… silly.

  “Ya think?” It’s all South Brooklyn that comes dripping off Amelia’s tongue.

  “Oh! Your accent. I thought you lost it.”

  She’s so formal and breathy in her pictures.

  Amelia slaps her again. This time with the other hand.

  Laura rounds on her and suspects she looks upset. “Are you quite finished?”

  “I don’t know, Laura. I still haven’t socked you in the mouth.” She balls her small fist up for emphasis.

  “I’ll take the slap thanks.”

  “I just—I can’t believe you! The gall. And the chutzpah. And the gall.” She lightly punches Laura now. But in the shoulder. “Showing up looking like that. Smiling! At my premiere?”

  “I had hoped…” She sighs. “I had hoped it would be romantic?”

  Amelia gives her the stink eye—something she hasn’t experienced in years. Spies tend to not give one another the stink eye. It’s gauche.

  She’s immediately grateful this meeting is private, because otherwise she might be a smidge embarrassed.

  “Tell me something, Laura, if some gorgeous dame had gone and wooed you in a spectacular fashion, genuinely connected with you on an emotional level, and then drugged you, locked you up in a mansion ‘for your own good,’ and faked her death, how would you feel?”

  She’d have punched her into the next decade.

  “Right. So how do you think I feel? Particularly when I can’t help but notice that set of rings gleaming on your finger.”

  She glances down. Shit. “I’d… meant to remove those.”

  Amelia crosses her arms. “Not helping.”

  “Amelia,” Laura says, distracted when Amelia sighs. She’s quickly getting fed up with Laura. So Laura has to forge ahead. “Have you ever felt just—just an all consuming need to see someone. To be with someone?”

  A
melia swallows as she stares.

  Perhaps it’s working? Laura comes closer. “You… you’re who I need.”

  She’s close enough now, she could kiss Amelia if she didn’t think she’d get punched for the attempt.

  Amelia glares up at her, lower lip stuck out. She looks more like herself than all the glamour and sophistication that she’s become as Amelia Wright.

  “Then maybe you shouldn’t have left me and gone and gotten married.”

  Well. That will knock the wind out of anyone’s sails.

  She pushes past Laura, their shoulders touching as she does. It’s supposed to be a brush off. A good-bye. Sayonara. Do svidanyia.

  But they both gasp at the contact, as if there’s something electric there.

  And Amelia stops. They’re shoulder to shoulder. Facing opposite directions. Her hand, wrapped in a satin glove, is centimeters from Laura’s own.

  Laura just has to curl her fingers, and they’re around Amelia’s hand.

  She doesn’t look at her. It’s as if one of them is Veronica Lake, casting a spell in that ridiculous witch movie. Looking at one another will break the spell and usher in the wretched feelings that rightfully consume Amelia and have deftly dodged Laura.

  Amelia’s sharp intake of breath at the contact, though, that sorely tempts Laura. Her whole body thrums with potent need.

  “I’m sorry.” And she is. She’s so, so sorry.

  Amelia’s fingers, ever so delicately, brush against Laura’s. She can hear the scrape of satin sliding over her skin. Then Amelia sighs, and her hand falls away, leaving Laura impossibly cold. “You’re married and I’m—”

  “Engaged?”

  She laughs. This gorgeous, sultry laugh. Much throatier than anything she’d do in one of her pictures.

  “Whatever you’re looking for in New York isn’t here, Laura. So how about you go back to your happy life and just think of me as that twit up on the screen.”

  “We both know that’s impossible.”

  “Maybe. But it’s a necessity too. Isn’t it?”

  There’s a whisper of cloth, and Amelia is standing in front of her again, so close she might feel the heat of her. She presses her satin-clad hand against Laura’s cheek. “We’re a disaster remember?” The corner of her mouth crooks up. “So how about we avoid the apocalypse?”

  She reaches up to wrap her hand around Amelia’s and takes another step toward her. Amelia doesn’t back down. She’s not the sort. So, they’re impossibly, irritatingly, close to one another. “I told you, I’d much rather end the world with you.”

  That earns her a genuine smile. The kind Amelia used to dole out like the government gives milk for children. “Anyone ever tell you, you talk too much?”

  Amelia speaks softly. Intimately. And Laura feels obliged to do the same. She doesn’t bother to hide the small smile growing. “Not in quite some time.”

  She very much wants to cross that small distance and press her lips to Amelia’s. It would be simple, and it feels right, and Laura is even doing it—her eyes drifting closed.

  But she’s stopped by Amelia, who suddenly darts forward and kisses the corner of her mouth. “See ya, Laura.”

  Then she’s out of the room in a quick flurry of satin and silk and exorbitantly priced perfume.

  CHAPTER 16

  Laura wasn’t raised in a military setting. Her father served, yes, but he was more a lawyer than a soldier, and her mother was as stalwart a pacifist as ever lived. All the rigid routine and necessity for rigorous planning wasn’t a natural impulse for Laura or some chief component of her upbringing.

  This is made obvious by her idiot move of driving to New York City to confess her love in the middle of a movie premiere.

  But Laura has to admit, sometimes there is merit to the military’s love for planning.

  Case in point, the Amelia Maldonado affair.

  If Laura had planned it like an op, it might have ended in sighing, kissing, and twelve straight hours of sex in a hotel room.

  So, round two she plans as if it’s an op, only with less scouring of maps and anticipation of fatalities. She really wants Operation Woo Amelia to go off without a few murders.

  Step one of her new op is the simplest one. Laura calls a friend in Truman’s office and asks if one Amelia Wright is on the list to perform at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

  Why no, she is not.

  Oh? Really? Well, if it isn’t too much trouble, you should ask her. She sings wonderfully, and this new western has made her quite popular with your boss’s constituents.

  “Oh, thank you so much for the suggestion, ma’am!”

  If Amelia will accept the offer, she will then have to be in Washington, DC, a considerably smaller town than New York. So if she and Laura “happen” to run into one another, it could be a coincidence. The sort that Laura can smoothly play off as a surprise.

  Which is exactly what she does when she “runs into” Amelia at the White House a week and a half later. Amelia’s just met the President and First Lady and enjoyed a tour of the reconstruction of the White House. She’s wearing a Christian Dior suit and daringly shaped hat, making her easily the most stylish woman in a twelve-block radius.

  Laura is wearing her favorite pinstripe gray suit, and until she saw Amelia, she was sure she was the most stylish woman in a twelve-block radius. Now she’s excited and envious and also on her way to meet with the President’s cabinet on matters of world security.

  They see each other. Laura smiles so widely her cheeks hurt. Amelia looks startled. Glances away.

  Not one to be dissuaded, Laura smoothly steps in front of her. “Miss Wright, I’m a tremendous fan of your work,” she announces enthusiastically. It’s odd saying her own name like that.

  Amelia peers at her for a moment, as if she’s trying to figure out Laura’s game. Something softens around her eyes, and she dryly says, “Thanks.”

  “Were you…Were you looking for the bathroom? I can escort you.” It’s a terrible excuse. So bad, in fact, that she has to take Amelia’s hand and guide her toward a bathroom before her escort, a clean-cut teen in a blue suit and White House tie, can protest or Amelia herself can point out how lousy the excuse is.

  The bathroom is empty. There’s two stalls, and both doors are wide open. Laura leans against the door, and its handle digs into the small of her back. She tries to be as suave as humanly possible. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

  It’s the second time they’ve met in a bathroom in as many weeks.

  It’s very funny.

  Amelia isn’t as amused. In fact, she seems a little more nervous. She tugs at her gloves and then pulls down the bottom of her jacket. “What on earth are you doing here?” She fidgets with her hat.

  “Meeting with the President.”

  She shakes her head. “You’re pulling my leg.”

  “I’m not. In fact I will now be,” she glances at her watch, “two minutes late.” Dulles and Wisner will kill her.

  “Then maybe you better skedaddle?” Amelia is clearly, impossibly, confused. And her hat is off-kilter. It’s endearing.

  “I will. I am.” She takes a step toward Amelia, her sensible heels clacking on the tile, and Amelia steps back, her more sophisticated shoes barely making a sound. “I just wanted to apologize. The other day I made a tit… of us both.”

  Amelia’s so very even. She stares, her sharp brown eyes unblinking and focused on somewhere around Laura’s nose. “Real tit.”

  “I should have been more… delicate.”

  “A little.”

  “And I understand if you’re not keen on—if you’re not keen on me. But I would like to hope we could be friends?”

  She laughs. Did Amelia always have that sort of laugh or was
it something cultivated out west? “Laura, whatever we are, it isn’t friends.”

  Laura sighs.

  “And whatever we may be? It’s not gonna be fair to the fella whose rings you’re wearing.”

  Reflexively, Laura’s thumb brushes across her rings. She really should take them off. “What if I told you we were getting a divorce?” Laura sounds too hopeful about it for polite company.

  Amelia smirks, “I’d say that was some timing.”

  There’s a half dozen other things Laura can say then. Though they’re all likely to go as well as this current exchange. “Well. Then.” She slaps the files in her hand against her thigh. “I’m sorry for wasting your time.” She glances at herself in the mirror, then at Amelia, who stares so hard when she thinks Laura isn’t looking. “I suppose we should go look for your escort now?”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  She holds the door for Amelia and guides her out. Her tour guide is at the other end of the hall looking deeply confused.

  “Hey, Laura,” Amelia says, smile bright and eyes on anything but Laura. “You know a Representative Chalmers?”

  She does. He’s on the Foreign Affairs committee and a frequent guest at the dinner parties Michel hosts.

  He’s insufferable.

  “We met at a party a few months ago, and he’s just been absolutely delighted I’m in town,” Amelia says conversationally. She pushes at her hat again and tries to fix it. Laura probably should have given her time to use the mirror. “Keeps taking me out to dinner.”

  Laura plasters on her biggest and falsest smile. “How lovely.”

  Amelia’s eyes flicker over her, and Laura thinks, that maybe, she kind of smiles. Like she’s being put on. “Apparently, he’s got a big dinner party he’s going to in a couple of days. Would just love for me to join him.”

  It is only through considerable grace and willpower that Laura doesn’t trip. “Are you… attending?”