Linda S. Gunther is the author of six suspense novels: Ten Steps From The Hotel Inglaterra, Endangered Witness, Lost In The Wake, Finding Sandy Stonemeyer, Dream Beach and Death Is A Great Disguiser. Her essays and short stories have also been featured in a variety of literary publications. Linda’s author website includes an overviews of each of her suspense novels as well as published short story links to magazines and a weekly blog titled WRITE-BYTES with tips and tools for developing writers.  www.lindasgunther.com

BABY, I WAS WRONG

I collect things. I’m guilty. My house is full of great stuff but when I think about moving out someday or even dying, I get anxious about what an effort that would take either for me or for those I leave behind to sort through it all.

That’s what led me to start small a few weeks ago, pledging to go through each part of my house, room by room, closet by closet, bookcase by bookcase, drawer by drawer to get rid of things I haven’t touched for years or clothes and shoes I don’t wear anymore. With the drought and horrific fires in Northern California over the last 24 months, I knew that Goodwill could use all donations possible, and it was a lot better choice than me adding more to our already loaded landfills.  So, two days ago, my clean-up focus went to the master bedroom, the side cabinets by our king-size bed, the antique wardrobe, the dresser, and the walk-in closet, which I anticipated to be the most difficult challenge. I’d have to try things on and decide what to keep, what to toss, and that would definitely be depressing.

My husband, Bob, was downstairs working in the home office, his headphones on, readied for a nine a.m. Zoom meeting. I had just brought him coffee and his favorite mini bear claws, satisfying his craving for “something sweet” in the morning.

My dog Toffee followed me into the kitchen. I gave her a peanut butter treat, took a few sips of coffee and promised myself to start with organizing the side table cabinets by the bed. Coffee mug in hand, I dragged myself into the master bedroom and opened the top drawer on my husband’s side, where he slept. Damn, jammed drawer. It was where I kept all the old greeting cards exchanged between us over the last 20 years of marriage: Valentine’s Day, wedding anniversaries, Christmases, birthdays; every single one of them I kept. I put my coffee mug down on the dresser and tried pulling the side table drawer open again. After three or four tugs I succeeded. Dozens of cards sat in a crowded disarray in the drawer. I started pulling them out and as I did, I read each one. It was fun, heart-warming, a rush of our history together. Such personal messages between us, especially from my husband. Very sweet, loving, several promising even more of a shining future together. As I read them, I stacked the cards on the bed, threw away any that were from friends or other relatives. I didn’t need to hold onto those but I definitely didn’t want to discard any of the cards between me and Bob. I’m sentimental. A hopeless romantic!

I placed the neat pile of saved cards back into the drawer and pushed it shut. BUT the drawer wouldn’t go all the way back. There was something stuck behind it. I hate when that happens.  It took several tugs to get the drawer out of its slot. It was an awkward size to handle, to get my arms around. I struggled to place it down on the bed. Bending down, I reached inside the piece of furniture and pulled out a few crumpled up greeting cards and a single sheet of yellowed paper with writing on it. It was a handwritten letter signed by John. But which John? I thought. My ex-husband, John? Or my ex-boyfriend, John? I couldn’t tell from the handwriting. It had to be from over 21 years ago before I met Bob. I sat down on the bed, next to the wood drawer, and read the letter. I immediately realized that I had never seen this letter before. NEVER.

I got up from the bed, paced the room, holding the letter, my hand trembling. Damn it, which John wrote this? Why does it matter?

My ex-husband John could have left it in the bedroom when he came to get his things, after I broke up with him on the phone, telling him not to come back. We had purchased the house together, had slept in the same spot I was sitting in reading a letter left for me over 21 years ago. A letter I never saw.

I was so in love with John. When we started dating in 1996 and he showed up at the tail end of my business trip in the middle of the night in New Delhi, India, wearing an Indiana Jones hat to surprise me, I instantly fell for him.

I remember waking up to the knock, going to the door wary of who would be there at 3 o’clock in the morning.

“Who is it?” I said.

“The man who loves you,” he said. That voice made my knees weak.

I opened the door.

He tapped his hat. “Hey baby, how many rupees to spend the night here?” he said, his voice raspy.

“Oh God,” I laughed. “What?”
He picked me up off my feet, kicked the door shut and carried me to the bed.

The beginning of an unforgettable week. We did the road to Agra, saw the Taj Mahal the next day and spent a few more days roaming New Delhi’s temples, amusement parks, restaurants and museums. He escorted me to a wedding I had been invited to attend by one of my colleagues where I wore a royal blue sari and a long white chiffon scarf. We threw red tulips at the groom who sat atop an elegant white stallion surrounded by musicians, all the wedding guests and family headed to the celebration in a grand hotel at the end of the avenue.

John was a high-tech company executive and while we dated, we arranged our business trips to Asia at the same time. Although we worked for different companies, we’d rendezvous in exotic places like Bangkok, Seoul Korea, Hsin Chu Taiwan, Shanghai and my favorite place, Hong Kong. We were the perfect match – always up for high adventure. He had magnetic charisma with people, even those he just met, possessed the deepest, sexiest voice I’ve ever heard, and could have been a movie double for Harrison Ford.

Did you ever feel like you were so connected to someone whether physically touching each other or not? We’d glance at each other from afar, sneak a smile even when deeply engaged in conversation with someone else. That’s how it was between us.

We married within fourteen months of our first date. But after a year of marriage, two miscarriages behind us, John had accrued two DUI’s, one where he was put in jail for a weekend (volunteered, instead of doing community service) and another where his license was revoked for three months upon which I realized that he was an alcoholic. He busied himself at night making red wine in the garage and arranging wine maker dinners with his treasured wine club compadres. He was a flirt on occasion, said provocative things in public settings but on the other hand seemed physically faithful. I loved that he was a gourmet chef and could craft a delicious three-course seafood meal at a firepit on a Maui beach with a minimum of ingredients. He was a generous lover, had a talent for debate on both social and political issues, was a rising leader in his high-profile tech company and probably had the top IQ of any man I’ve ever dated or married. I’m addicted to intelligent, creative, romantic men. You may have guessed that. But he was dangerous. Lived on the edge. Had bets with business colleagues that he could be the last one to board an airplane closest to take-off and get away with it. They’d hold the plane for him. I liked these qualities and I hated them at the same time.

I finally called it quits with John just a day after an incident where he was likely inebriated from his homemade wine and had stepped out of the way while holding a hand-written check, a check for $10,000, money he owed me from the house down payment, his hand raised high in the air above his 6-foot-2-inch frame so I couldn’t reach it.

“Here,” he said. “Take it. It’s yours,” he teased.  

All 5-foot 2 inches of me jumped up to grasp the check, which was stupid of me. Down the steep flight of stairs I went, tumbling from our upstairs living room down to the hardwood floor landing by the front door. No, John hadn’t pushed me but he could have prevented what happened which is what I realized after being told I had two fractured ribs. I was still deeply in love with John but I knew I didn’t want a child with him, knew he had a sizeable drinking problem and knew that a future with him would be a slow slide into a deep chasm of heartbreak.

Was the mysterious letter from John, my ex-husband? I stopped pacing and sat back down on the bed. Or was the letter left in the bedroom a year later by John, my ex-boyfriend, the man who mended my broken heart after I let my husband go?

Complicated, I know. This tale may be hard to follow. But keep in mind, what I just explained is only a small slice of the discombobulated life I’ve led.

So, how does John the ex-boyfriend enter into my life? And why would I think maybe the letter was instead from him?

Devastated from my break-up with my husband, I plunged myself into my work as Director of Learning and Organizational Development at a prestigious fast-paced global Silicon Valley company.  I was also an actor, performing part-time in many community productions and hosting a bi-weekly cable TV show called Creative Encounters. I busied myself. For months I didn’t socialize, didn’t go out other than to work, rehearsals or TV production. I managed to convince John to let me buy him out of the house which we had bought together just a year before. It was a tough negotiation but he finally accepted $40,000 in cash, saying I would never be able to do the commute alone from the beach over the mountain every day without him driving, that it was a bad decision on my part; one that would end dismally for me within a few months. Of course, that only made me determined to prove him wrong.

And so, I sat on the king-sized bed next to the wooden drawer, over 21 plus years later, in the same house I shared with my ex-husband, reading the hand-written letter more than three times while my husband Bob was downstairs working in the home office, finishing up his morning coffee.

I threw the letter down on the bed, picked up the cumbersome drawer and pushed it back into the open slot of the bedside table. I looked at the letter again, examining the signature. Love always, John. The way John was written seemed unique, I thought; how the “o” looped with the “h” in his name. I rushed over to the bedside table on my side and opened the top drawer. Didn’t I have a postcard from my ex-boyfriend, John who had moved back to the U.K., to live in his mum’s house after she passed away?  I was sure he must have signed the postcard. He was good at staying in touch. I could compare his recent signature with the one on the hand-written letter. All I found was my passport, several room cardkeys from hotels I’ve loved around the world, a plastic bag full of metal keys, old medications, a damaged mini tape recorder, and some crumpled artwork from my granddaughters. A potpourri of stuff in the drawer but no postcard from John in the U.K.

I sat down on the bed staring at the letter and thought back to how I met John the Englishman in 1999, four or five months after the break-up with my ex-husband.  I had just landed a new job as Vice President of Human Resources and was duly stressed, reporting to a CEO who wanted me to help him take the company public after eighteen years of being privately held. It was a Friday night and I had just arrived home after a long drive back from the Valley.

My good friend Steve who had actually officiated our wedding phoned me. His new girlfriend, Laury, was singing jazz at the local bistro in Capitola.

“Get your ass out of your house.” he said on the phone. “You’re becoming a hermit. I’m not hanging up until you agree to come out.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll be there,” I said.

“Hooray!  Look for me in the bar,” he said, and disconnected.

It was dark and drizzly when I parked the car on the street outside the bistro, pinpricks of rain hitting the dashboard window. I looked over at the bar entrance and through the glass saw a petite woman with long dark hair holding a microphone, singing, and a man wearing a fedora at the piano behind her. I felt lonely, depressed, put my head down on the steering wheel. When I looked up, tears started to stream down my face. I wanted to escape, crawl into bed, not go sit in a bar and fake it.  Still traumatized from the break-up with John, our divorce in its final stage, and feeling the unrelenting pressure from work, I sat in the car for at least fifteen minutes fighting with myself until I mustered up the courage and went inside. As I entered, I waved at Steve who sat in the back at the bar.

He placed a glass of red wine in my hand, and asked, “What do you think of my girlfriend’s singing?”

“Fabulous.” She was in the midst of crooning Unforgettable, a smooth jazz tune, one of my favorites. That’s when I noticed the man sitting directly across from me, on the other side of the  horseshoe-shaped bar. Long black straight hair down to his shoulders, a slender build, dark friendly eyes, and kind of a crooked nose. He wore a wine-colored kerchief tied around his neck that was tucked inside his black shirt. He smiled at me, then looked away, and responded to the stout man who sat next to him. I could hear his voice. It was a working-class English accent, out of place in this California beach town. I had lived seven years in London in my twenties. The sound sent a warm feeling rippling through my body, settling in my chest near my heart. At a break in the music, my friend Steve left the bar to talk to his new girlfriend. The Englishman got up and came around the bar towards me.
“Hello,” he said. “I’m John. I don’t mean to be forward but can we maybe chat for a few minutes?” He seemed low key, calm, kind of shy. But his name was John.

“I saw you outside,” he said, “in your car. I was worried about you, luv. Looked like you were sad.” He touched my sleeve. “Nothing here to sob about on a Friday night in paradise.”  He grinned.

I felt embarrassed but laughed. “You’re absolutely right. Nothing here to sob about.”

That was the start of our time together as lovers. It lasted over 18 months. John was a gifted artist, water colors and sketches, a cartoonist, a Raymond Carver fan and quite honestly a talented writer of mainly ‘slice of life’ short stories. He lived in a small cabin on a creek in Corralitos, just a few miles from my house at the beach. He was a man of the earth, no bank account, crafted beautiful gardens, painted houses for cash, made a living outside the system, and a decent income. We fell in love. He had lived for five years in Africa, before coming to America, was actually an extra in the movie Out of Africa and had spent months with a research team of animal behaviorists on the Savannah where he got paid to draw baboon butts each day from sunrise to sunset. We were an unlikely couple. John knew about love and did tiny little things to help me out every day we were together. He encouraged me to write fiction. How did he know that I’d be any good at it? I’m not sure.

We took trips when I could get away from my demanding job, off to Costa Rica for two weeks in a jeep, traversing the country, drinking English tea he made in his portable teapot in the jungle where we used his binoculars to look for parrots, sloths and iguanas. Another time, we took a trip to U.K., drove all the way down to Wales and took a car ferry to Southern Ireland, kissed the Blarney Stone, drove the Ring of Kerry, and ended up back in Yorkshire visiting his mum in her gingerbread house in a little village called Skipton. We wrote stories together on our trips, and made up little one-act plays. On another adventure, we spent a couple of weeks in Cornwall and slept in a glass encased Crow’s Nest room at the top of an old pub in a seaside town called Mousehole where we drank Drambuie, feasted on fish and chips wrapped in newsprint, and made love. We kept a shared journal accented with illustrated cartoons on every trip we did together, each of us adding to it day by day. I still have that journal.

But usually, I was swimming with the sharks in Silicon Valley, under great pressure. I worked hard and late, and commuted home from the Valley to John who had the fire going and dinner in the oven.  He cut his shoulder-length long hair for me, a complete surprise, without me ever asking. He said he wanted to look presentable when he escorted me to my occasional business events. One time he even rented a tux for my company holiday party and pretended to be James Bond. Only I knew that. He looked amazing.

It was a quiet life at home with John. And then it blew up. I had come home from work on a Thursday night so excited that I had the following Monday off. It was a holiday.  President’s Day. I was chattering away, going over my day. As he made me dinner, I made suggestions about what we could do on the Monday off. He looked over at me as he poured the wine.

“Luv, so sorry but I’ve got a painting job this weekend and it will go through the end of the day on Monday. I’m already committed to the customer.”

“What?” I said, devastated. “But we arranged it. Discussed it. Damn it! You knew I had Monday day off. You said we’d do something special.”

“But I can’t. Sorry luv!”

Incensed, I completely lost it and threw him out. Yes, I did. “Leave now,” I said. “That’s it. I can’t deal with this.”

He looked hurt, but with a stiff upper lip, he nodded, picked up his cloth shoulder bag and started to leave the house. He turned to me before he went down the stairs to the front door. “Baby, can we talk about this? I don’t want to leave.”

I folded my arms across my chest, pressed my lips together firmly and shook my head a few times. Thinking back, I was too dramatic, too self-centered.

He nodded and said, “Okay luv, but that’s a bloody bad decision you’re making.”  He said he’d pick up his stuff the next day while I was at work, and would leave the key under the mat.

He could have written the letter the next day, left it by the bed or on the side table for me to read. But I never saw it. NEVER. And how the hell did it get stuck behind the drawer?

We didn’t talk for a few weeks, then ran into each other accidentally one morning at a coffee shop in Capitola. I forgave John but didn’t take him back as a boyfriend. Inside, I had considered our lifestyle differences. I can’t deny that I was conflicted, not really seeing a long-term future between us. So, instead, our platonic friendship formed; coffee together at least a couple of times a month, sometimes a movie, an occasional dinner out. This re-formed relationship lasted through me meeting my current husband, Bob.

John even house-sat for us and took care of my dog when Bob and I went on our honeymoon and on other trips after that. He painted my house while we were gone. Bob got to know him, trust him, although they never became close or even friends. But anytime I needed handyman work, house painting or gardening, John Stone was happy to help out up until his mum died about five years ago and he was gone back to Yorkshire. He never came back to California but has written me postcards at least twice a year. Nobody else writes postcards any more.

I glanced at the letter again, got up and hurried into the walk-in closet and reached on a shelf behind my jackets for a cardboard box where I had kept some old photos. Maybe the last postcard from John was in there. And it was! There was an artistic rendition of the Yorkshire Dales on the front of the card and on the back a hand-written note. A simple note about how he was enjoying being back in the UK, in Yorkshire; that he spent most of his time gardening and made a bit of money taking care of other people’s pets. He loved dogs. I held the yellowed paper letter up close to the postcard to compare signatures. Some similarity but no, not really the same “J” or the swoop of the “o” to the “h.” Damn, it was hard to tell. I needed to find something with my ex-husband, John’s signature. Divorce papers maybe. Who the hell knew where those were? I have so much stuff in this house.

“Honey, how about take-away for dinner?” my husband Bob called up the stairs from the office.

“Sure,” I said back. “Sushi?”

“Pizza? He asked.

“Mexican? Cilantro’s, maybe?” I responded.

“Deal!” he said and peeked around the corner at the foot of the staircase.

“Deal,” I said, from the top of the stairs, and grinned at him. His salt and pepper hair was in disarray, his black fleece sweats covered in white dog hair and his face at least 48 hours since his last shave .

“Want the usual?”  he asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“I better order on-line,” he said, and looked at clock on the wall in the hallway. “We can beat the dinner rush, I think.” He shrugged.  “It’ll still be 20 minutes on Highway 1 and another 20 to get back.”

“Okay honey,” I said, and blew him a kiss.

Once he left the house ten minutes later, I rushed down to the office to look for my divorce papers from over 21 years ago. They had to be somewhere in that room. Then I could compare the ex-husband’s signature to the one on the found letter.

Toffee, my dog, followed close behind me. She seemed to think we were playing some sort of game. I muttered, “not now Toff.” I was in a frenzy, annoyed, curious, guilt-ridden, determined to find the papers, compare the signatures and have time to set the dinner table before Bob returned.

I searched the file cabinets first and then in the plastic bins where I kept years of tax returns in the back of the closet under an array of hanging dressy clothes: evening gowns, cocktail dresses, sequin tops, I would likely never wear again. No divorce papers. I shut the closet door, and started to search the tall oak bookcases which were stuffed with my business books and stacks of training binders. I spotted a couple of cardboard shoe boxes on the bottom shelf of one bookcase but found only old photos from past company functions. No divorce documents. Kneeling down, I reached for the large cardboard box under the desk and opened the lid to find old textbooks, term papers and a printed copy of my thesis from the MBA program I completed years ago.

I pushed the box back under the desk, stood up, and eyed every corner and crevice of the room. My dog sat at my feet with a dinosaur toy in her mouth. She pushed the toy against my ankle. “No Toffee, not now,” I said. I bent down, gave her a quick hug, and surveyed the room from a different angle. Was there another box I’m not seeing yet?  Damn, what if I had to show those divorce papers for some big transaction? I had no clue where I had stashed them. Had I inadvertently tossed them during some prior house clean-up attempt?

I ran back upstairs to the master bedroom, glanced at the alarm clock and realized Bob would likely be home in less than ten minutes. I picked up the letter from the bed. It was quiet in the room. All I could hear was the faint tick of the clock. A lump formed in my throat. My neck ached.  I sat on the bed staring again at the signature on the letter.  Would I have made a different decision? Would I? With either John? Would I be living another reality today?

I crumpled up the letter into a ball and threw it down on the floor.  Toffee looked up at me, then sniffed the crumpled ball and nudged it. I reached down, snatched up the letter, placed it on the bed and smoothed out the yellowed paper with a flat hand. I closed my fist and rolled it back and forth until the paper uncurled but still wrinkled. I wanted to keep it. It was a found treasure, written with love; and regret. I had regrets too. I was too dramatic when I was younger, wanted that instant gratification, desired my life to be nothing less than perfect, and sometimes expected too much from a partner, more than could be given.

I wiped my damp eyes and heard the front door open downstairs. Toffee wagged her tail and scampered out of the bedroom to the top of the staircase gazing down at Bob who likely held a stack of brown paper bags full of Mexican food. I could smell the chicken tortilla soup and heard his footsteps coming up the stairs. I pushed the wrinkled letter back inside the drawer, all the way behind the wood, back to where I had found it a few hours earlier. I didn’t want Bob to see it. But I’d know that the letter was still there, in a safe place. A letter I never saw before that day. A letter that could have changed my life.