Best Intentions by Emily Listfield

From the Publisher

A domestic suspense novel about four college friends who reunite when they are 39, and resurrect old desires and grievances with fatal results.

Publishers Weekly

Financial troubles and more test the marriage of a downtown Manhattan career mom and her business journalist husband in this writerly page-turner from Listfield (Waiting to Surface). Sam and Lisa Barkley, who were college sweethearts, can just afford to send their two daughters to an Upper East Side private girls' school, though Lisa, whose family "struggled into the middle class," wonders if a public school "gifted" program would've been a better choice. Meanwhile, Sam's late-night phone calls and odd absences from his office lead her to accuse him of having an affair. Lisa confides her fears to her best friend from college, Deirdre Cushing, whose mysterious death heightens the tension and mistrust between Lisa and Sam. While the author's penchant for punch lines and cliffhangers can come across as a stylistic tic, deft pacing keeps the action moving and the reader guessing. Listfield ensures no character is above suspicion, and in the end, no one is without blame. (May)

Kirkus Reviews

Listfield (Waiting to Surface, 2007, etc.) combines domestic melodrama with murder mystery in this tale of a Manhattan couple whose secrets almost cause their downfall. PR executive Lisa and financial journalist Sam have been happily married since college. Narrating their story, Lisa is at pains to describe the family as virtuous Upper East Siders: Although she sends her two daughters to a private school for a superior education, she is uncomfortable with the snobbish Upper East Side mothers. Life starts to unravel when she hears a suspicious message on Sam's cell phone and overhears a more suspicious conversation. She begins to suspect that Sam, who claims he is working on a big story to cement his shaky career, might be having an affair. Her own job security becomes uncertain when her boss sells to a large out-of-town firm that brings in a consultant who appears determined to undermine Lisa's authority. Lisa confides all to Deirdre, a boutique owner who's been her best friend since college. Then Lisa, Sam and Deirdre have dinner with Deirdre's old flame Jack, now a lawyer in Boston, who's in town to interview at a Manhattan firm. Romantic sparks fly between the former lovers, and Jack, claiming his marriage has failed, enlists Lisa's help to renew his relationship with Deirdre, who is currently confused about her long affair with an untrustworthy, globetrotting photographer. Listfield does a nice job showing delicate marital tensions between Sam and Lisa, and she also creates a compelling, vaguely mysterious counterpoint character in Deirdre. But Deirdre's murder sucks all the energy and believability out of the novel. It's obvious who's guilty, so Lisa's semi-sleuthing makes her seemat best dense, at worst self-absorbed and meddlesome. The too-neatly wrapped-up ending, in which Sam's journalistic coup reaps him a book deal for big bucks, may be the least believable aspect of all. Lively insights give way to predictable made-for-TV-movie fare.

Product Details

• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt
• Read a Sample Chapter

Reading Group Guide

This reading group guide includes discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Emily Listfield. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

Questions for Discussion

1. Reflect on the epigraph from writer Georges Bernanos, "The worst, the most corrupting lies are problems poorly stated." How do these words resonate throughout Best Intentions? What role does misunderstanding and poor communication play in this novel?

2. Early in the story, Lisa spies on her husband, Sam, by checking a voicemail on his cell phone. Is this an acceptable thing for someone in a relationship to do? Should there be complete openness, transparency, and trust in a marriage, or are people in relationships still entitled to some degree of privacy?

3. Discuss the nature of Lisa and Deirdre's friendship. What are some of the cornerstones and some of the pitfalls? Do you think Deirdre sees the friendship in the same way Lisa does?

4. Review David and Lisa's conversation on page 69 about mosaic theory. How, in this novel, do small bits of information prove to be dangerous? David mentions mosaic theory as applied to terrorism suspects. Can you think of any other examples of when this theory might be used? Is this method ever valuable?

5. In the opening paragraph of chapter 7 (page 73), Listfield offers two richly descriptive metaphors comparing the physical effects of a suspicion and a lie. Have you ever experienced similar sensations? Are Listfield's descriptionsaccurate? Try writing your own metaphors about the physical effects of other feelings — worry, hope, love, envy, etc.

6. Do Sam and Lisa have a healthy marriage? Are their problems typical of couples in a rut, or is there something more deeply dysfunctional taking root? Do you agree with Lisa's thoughts on page 102 that "[i]t is so hard to tell when it comes to love if you are being blindly delusional or are simply accepting the flaws and compromises, the disappointments and prosaic compensations necessary to stay together"?

7. What do you make of Lisa's relationship with her client, David Forrester? What are her motivations in wanting to befriend him?

8. Is Lisa a reliable narrator or do her perceptions and feelings shape the telling of the story? Is she a likable protagonist? Is she sympathetic? Does she make good decisions for herself? Does she make good decisions as a wife, mother, and friend?

9. Nearly every character in the book becomes tangled in some form of deception. Discuss the motives for these deceptions; do these characters act out of fear, spite, greed, jealousy? Or are they motivated by a quest for truth and love, or a desire to protect or support those around them?

10. As the saying goes, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." How does the title Best Intentions relate to this proverb and to how the events of the novel unfold? Do any of the characters have truly good intentions?

11. David Forrester explains his digging into Lisa's personal life by claiming he wanted to help her. His ignorance caused suffering in his own relationships, and he states on page 287 that "information is power." Do you agree? Are there some instances where this is not the case, and other things are more important than knowledge?

Enhance your Book Club

1. Print out a map of Manhattan (http://www.onlynyc.com/new-york-maps) and label the places mentioned in the book (the Upper East Side, where Lisa's kids attend school, Grand Central Terminal, across from where Deirdre and Lisa have breakfast, etc.). Try to determine which places in the book are fictional and which are real.

2. Encourage book club members to bring something to auction off, and donate the proceeds to a good cause. It can be a junk auction — it doesn't have to be a vacation in Mustique!

3. The events of Best Intentions are set in motion by the reunion that takes place. Have each member of the group share a reunion story, or state who in their past they'd most (or least) like to reconnect with.

A Conversation with Emily Listfield

1. What set this story in motion and got you thinking about this central question of how well we can really know the people we love?

I began with a kernel of an idea: What are the effects of miscommunication on relationships? What happens when you think you know what someone else wants — whether it is a spouse, friend, or lover — and you are totally wrong? This is something we all have experienced. Often, because we don't want to hurt someone's feelings, or because we think we know them better than we do, we don't ask the right questions and instead proceed to act in ways we think will make them happy. But without honest communication the results can be disastrous.

2. Though many characters' stories are intertwined in this novel, we experience it all from a single character's perspective, through the voice of Lisa. Why did you choose to make Lisa the sole narrator? Did you experiment with writing from the voice of any of the other characters or was this Lisa's story from the outset?

I wasn't sure how to tell this story at first. I tried writing from the four main characters' points of view in alternating voices, but it gave the reader too much information. The point I wanted to drive home is that we don't really know what someone else is thinking. Telling the story solely through Lisa's eyes lets us learn and experience and form conclusions, right or wrong, at the same time she does.

3. Do you feel a kind of kinship with Lisa? Does any part of her story overlap with your own?

I have certainly stolen some of my experiences raising a daughter — much to my daughter's chagrin! My female friendships have always also been deeply important to me as a source of humor, comfort, fun, and connection. Though there is no single "Deirdre" in my life, the spirit of my friendships informed the writing. Lisa's observations, too, about the schoolyard chemistry among mothers, working and not, comes largely from my own experiences.

4. Your novels are praised for their emotional depth and honesty. How do you so accurately imagine situations, characters, and internal conflict that might be outside your own experience?

It's like method acting, I suppose. You just have to imagine you are that other person. Also, you take bits and pieces of past emotions and experiences of your own and recast them.

5. Like many of the female characters in your novels, you have enjoyed a successful career in media. You're also a mother. How do you balance your writing career with the rest of your life?

It changes from day to day. I think all working mothers find that being flexible is the key to making it work — or at least not losing your mind. My daughter is very supportive, and because she is a bit older now, quite independent. It's sometimes complicated, of course, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

6. In this book you offer up a pretty scathing picture of life among the urban glamorous and elite. Lisa longs for acceptance into these circles but shuns them at the same time, becoming a sort of rogue mommy. Is this something you've experienced and struggled with in your time in New York City?

Yes and no. I am a downtown mom with a daughter in an uptown private school. There are times when I feel our lives are different in various ways, including financially, but it is not a world I crave to belong to. Would I like some of their freedom and perks? Sure, at times. But I am happy with the choices I have made and with the type of life I've chosen. I like being able to move within different worlds.

7. You also write rather lovingly about some places in New York City. What do you most enjoy about life there?

I love the energy, the way the city makes room for so many different types of people; I love how you can move between groups and identities, how you do not have to be cast and held to one thing. And I love that you can get almost anything at almost any time!

8. You've written seven novels now. How do you think you've matured and grown as a writer? What things have gotten easier and what things are still challenging for you?

The beginning of a new book is always a challenge: finding the voice, discovering the characters, figuring out pacing. As with anything, I think you get better at it the longer you do it — or at least you know some of the pitfalls to avoid. Coming to terms with the ups and downs, the doubts and the pleasures, gets a little easier only because you know that writing entails all of them. It doesn't make it any less real at the moment, though.

9. Do you have a muse? What inspires you to sit down and spin these tales? I don't have a muse.

For me, writing is a way of making sense of experience and emotion, a way of putting some order to it. Like most writers, I think at heart I am an observer, storing away tidbits that will come out in later writing, imagining what it is like to be inside other people's heads, and wanting to share what is in yours.

10. Do you plan to continue writing novels, or is there another genre you'd like to try someday? What are you working on now?

I love writing novels and can't imagine ever stopping. Right now I am working on a new book about the intersection of politics and family secrets. Does how people behave in their personal lives affect their public acts? How do you balance the right to privacy versus the public right to know? And what is the effect of discovering and keeping secrets on family members? There are topics of great relevance today.

Read an Excerpt

One

I lie in bed watching the numbers on the digital alarm click in slow motion to 6:00 a.m., 6:01. My right hand, curled tightly beneath my head, is cramping, but I don't want to risk moving it. I lie perfectly still, listening to the birds chirping noisily outside, a high-pitched chorus wafting rebelliously through the harsh geometry of Manhattan. Nervous I would oversleep, I had tossed fitfully until dawn. Now, as with most missed opportunities, the only thing I long for is another chance at the night.

The lightness of the chirping fills me with a yearning I can't quite place, for unabridged land, for air, for my own childhood forty miles north of here, though I wanted desperately to escape the precisely gridded suburbs with their overriding promise of safety. Still, it's hard not to feel nostalgia for a time when I thought predictability was the worst fate imaginable.

I shut my eyes, willing the thought away.

It is a morning for fresh starts, after all.

Sam grunts softly in his sleep and rearranges his long legs, his left thigh brushing against mine under the sheets. I flinch unconsciously at the brief interlude of skin on skin and hold my breath, trying not to disturb him — he has been up most of the night. He settles into his new position, letting out an aborted sigh from somewhere deep within his dream, and I exhale, secretly disappointed that he hasn't woken, turned to me. I look down, studying his face in the pale sunlight. Always handsome, he is more defined now, his edges sharper, as if everything soft and extraneous has been carved away, leaving his most essential self exposed. I run my fingertips gently through his matted dark-blondhair — I've always loved him best this way, disheveled, unguarded.

His skin is warm, almost moist.

I try to remember the last time we made love in this fragile sliver of time before the girls wake up. I try to remember when we stopped trying.

I reach over and shut off the alarm so it won't wake him. All through the night I felt his agitation roiling his attempts at sleep, infiltrating my own. I'd turned to him once around two a.m. and asked what was bothering him.

"Nothing, just the story I'm working on. The pieces don't jibe, a source won't call me back," he said, curving away from me, though whether it was to avoid disturbing me further or a desire to be left alone, I wasn't sure. I've seen him like this many times before at the beginning of an assignment, waiting for a clear narrative to form in his head. He is a man who likes order and grows steeped in anxiety until he can impose it. Perhaps that's all it is.

For months, though, all through the summer, Sam has seemed restive for reasons I can't quite place. It has grown contagious, a malaise that has metastasized between us into a desultory low-level dissatisfaction, nothing I can touch, nothing worthy of accusation or argument, and yet. I hope the cooler season will wipe the slate clean, bring a new semester for our marriage.

I miss him.

There are moments, unexpected, unpredictable, when there is a sudden flash, a brief illumination in a look or touch, and we are us again, connected. They are hard to manufacture, though, no matter how hard I try. Sometimes I can feel him trying, too, missing me, too.

I slide carefully out of bed and pad barefoot down the hallway, bending over to pick up a crumpled gum wrapper, poorly hidden evidence of Claire's latest habit, the cloying sweet smell of imitation strawberry, grape, watermelon, vanilla emanating from her like cheap perfume, the noisy snapping and chewing deeply annoying, even more so because it is surely interfering with the six thousand dollars' worth of braces that encase her teeth, correcting a supposed crookedness that only an Upper East Side orthodontist can discern. Seizing the parental high road, I've taken to hiding my own gum-chewing habit, one of the pretenses I've recently felt it necessary to assume. I open the front door carefully, hoping its creak won't wake the children, take the papers into the kitchen and make a pot of coffee.

I can feel their breath, Sam's, the girls', in their separate corners of the apartment, surrounding me, grounding me even as they sleep. I have twenty minutes before I have to wake them and make breakfast, which, as per first day of school tradition, will involve pots and pans rarely seen on weekday mornings, scrambled eggs with chives snipped from the shriveling strands of the window herb plant, toast slathered with strawberry rhubarb preserves from the farmers' market, hot chocolate made from unsweetened cocoa and sugar rather than packets, ballast for whatever schoolyard intrigues, new teachers' quirks, algebraic conundrums, vertiginous swings in popularity lie ahead. I turn on the radio and listen to the weather report, which predicts a humid Indian summer day, the temperature threatening to hit the high eighties.

I dip my finger in the jam and lick it absentmindedly. Long ago, when the girls were still young enough to need supervision at the breakfast table, Sam and I developed a tag-team approach. I would get them up, put the food on the table and then dress while he ate with them. Though Phoebe is eleven and Claire thirteen, the habit remains, one of the unexamined rituals of family life that you realize only later are its very glue.

I take one last sip of coffee and walk into Phoebe's room first, stepping carefully over the huge shopping bag of new school supplies from Staples that have spilled across the floor, a kaleidoscope of colorful binders, highlighters in seven colors, six of which are totally unnecessary as far as I'm concerned, a new hole punch, index cards for book reports, neon-pink Post-its in the shape of hearts and arrows. Phoebe possesses a unique blend of laserlike focus and forgetfulness — she can concentrate on an assignment for hours but will leave it on the bus. It is one of the things — not just the forgetfulness, but her lack of concern about it — that she has promised, albeit halfheartedly, to work on this year, though when I suggested buying a memo pad for to-do lists, she refused. "I'm eleven," she reminded me indignantly, as if lists were one more odious thing waiting for her in adulthood, along with mortgages, insurance claims, cholesterol readings. "Writing things on the back of my hand works just fine."

I lean over to kiss her cheek and she rolls sleepily into me, burying her face in the crook of my neck, her eyes fluttering open and then closing again.

"You have to get up, sweetie," I whisper as I run my fingers underthe blanket and tickle her, her body at least nominally still mine. Thesoftness of her neck, her arms makes the walls of my heart constrict.No one really tells you how much it is like falling in love over andover, how physical and encompassing it will be. Or that you willnever feel completely safe and relaxed again.

"Not yet." Her breath is heated, musty but sweet.

Since they got home from camp, the girls have grown used to lounging in bed till noon, especially in the last few weeks, when, like a final indulgent binge before a diet, we all lost the will for discipline of any sort.

"I hate school," Phoebe groans.

"It's too soon to hate school."

"It's never too soon to hate school."

I smile, knowing the words are hollow. Phoebe is by nature an easygoing child who, despite her carelessness, is generally anxious to please her teachers and popular with her friends. "Get up, my little misanthrope."

She looks at me suspiciously and is about to ask what the word means when she thinks better of it, knowing I will tell her to look it up, something she has absolutely no intention of doing. "It's not too soon for me to get a cell phone, either," she calls after me.

I leave without answering. I have decreed, repeatedly, that twelve is the age of consent for that particular piece of technology, my desire for being in constant touch, for being able to place her, outweighed by my certainty that Phoebe will lose at least a dozen phones within the first month. I make my way to Claire's room, where every available surface is lined with ornate boxes, jewelry cases, embroidered journals, the artifacts of her life stashed in tiny drawers, a Chinese puzzle of secrets and mementos. There is no one on earth quite as sentimental as a thirteen-year-old girl. In the rare moments when I am alone in the house I sometimes go through her drawers, scan her Internet history, her notebooks, looking not for evidence of crimes but for clues to who she is becoming. When I lean down to wake her, Claire shrugs away, curling deeper beneath the stained pale blue quilt she refuses to part with. It takes three increasingly strenuous shakes to get her to at least raise her head temporarily, her face hidden by a tangle of thick brunette hair almost the exact color as mine. If Phoebe is Sam's daughter, lighter in coloring and temperament, Claire, with her olive skin, her broodier nature, is mine. Claire's chosen outfit for the day — a loosely knit pale-pink cable sweater, denim mini and leggings — is carefully laid out on her desk chair. She spent a few days last week in East Hampton with a school friend shunning the beach to shop on Main Street and Newtown Lane, Claire suddenly one of those tanned, long-legged girls of indeterminate age still so alien to me with their giddy sense of entitlement apparent in every avid stride. I wonder if strangers, seeing Claire, assumed she was one of them, with an enormous shingled house and a credit card of her own.

"Honey, I think you may need to rethink your outfit," I say gently. "It's going to be too hot today."

Claire shakes her head at the ridiculousness of the notion. The outfit can't be rethought — the skirt is too short for the school's restriction that hems be within four inches of the knee to wear without leggings and the sweater is, well, perfect. Any dolt can see that.

"I'll be fine," Claire insists. Under the best of circumstances, she has a certain rigidity that, though frustrating at times, I nevertheless hope will serve her well later in life when self-doubt, frankly self-reflection of any kind, has a tendency to impede progress, if not happiness. I have come to see the benefits of having blinders on. Anyway, when it comes to clothes Claire is particularly ironclad. It's useless to fight, though that doesn't always stop me from trying. It's a hard habit to break — thinking you can control your own children.

The girls are dressed, Phoebe in capris and an Urban Outfitters T-shirt she pulled out of her dresser at the last minute, Claire in precisely the outfit she had planned, and at the table, pushing their eggs around with the tines of their forks when Sam stumbles out. He looks momentarily surprised at the presence of actual cooked food before recognition dawns on him. "Ah," he says, smiling, "the first day. The anticipation, the dread, the scramble for good seats." He bends over and kisses the top of the girls' heads. He has an informal, easygoing manner with the kids, who accept the undertone of irony as part of his makeup, like one's particular scent or way of walking. It is the same relaxed, loping charm I fell in love with nineteen years ago when we sat next to each other in the back row of a class on Hawthorne and James during our junior year in college: the smile that even then creased the sides of his cheeks, the tatty burgundy wool scarf draped casually around his neck in a way that only prep-school boys can ever truly pull off, his sly running commentary about professors, his baritone that entered my pores and stayed there like smoke. Sam seemed to have an innate sense of belonging and yet not take it seriously — a lethal combination to someone like me. My own family had struggled into the middle class, there was nothing effortless about it, every move, every emotion was splayed out, picked over, vociferously debated. The very notion of privacy was alien, suspect. Sam's cool distance was as deeply attractive to me as my lack of it was to him. Then, anyway.

I watch Sam, yawning as he takes his first sip of coffee, breaks offa piece of Claire's toast and gets his hand slapped, a shopworn routinethat nevertheless tangles me up with comfort and affection.

This is what we have created, this family.

Sam flips through the stack of newspapers in front of him, quickly scanning the front pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post before turning to the business sections. There is an unmistakable testosterone-induced anxiety — has anyone gotten a juicy story he has somehow missed? — and poorly concealed relief that there is only the usual stock market pabulum and speculative opinion. An observer by nature, he has a talent for intuiting shifts in mood and influence, the way power movesaround the city. It's what makes him a good business journalist. Still, two weeks ago, Sam's latest competitor at the magazine, Peter Borofsky, a reporter six years younger and ten times as hungry, broke a story about how the board of a Fortune 500 company spied on its own president, bugging his phone, getting his financial records. The report made it onto the evening news and Sam can't help but grit his teeth every time he hears it mentioned. This morning, at least, he is safe. So far. I know that the moment I leave he will race to his laptop to check an ever-expanding list of Web sites and blogs. There are so many more ways to be bested now.

"What kind of day do you have?" he asks, glancing up from the paper.

"Some forms to fill out at school..."

"What forms?" Claire demands, suspicious.

"Nothing, just the class trip consent things."

"Didn't you do that? They were due weeks ago."

"I thought I had, but apparently not. I got an e-mail from the school on Friday."

Claire looks at me disdainfully.

I shrug. There are so many forms, a new batch every day, and newsletters and invitations and updates and e-mails, as if the school is worried parents won't feel they are getting their money's worth if their mailboxes aren't constantly overflowing. "It'll be fine," I insist. I turn back to Sam. "Then I'm having breakfast with Deirdre."

Sam nods and as he flips the page of his newspaper the corner dips into his coffee and threatens to fall off into soggy little islands of print. The three of us went to college together on an upstate campus so snowy that ropes stretched like cat's cradle yarn across it for students to pull their way to classes. In recent years, though, my friendship with Deirdre has come to exist largely outside of a broader social context, a skein that binds us from our early days in Manhattan, when we shared a loft in the East Village. For fifteen years we have been meeting once a week, or close to it, though what had oncebeen late-night drinks in cheap dive bars has morphed into early-morning breakfasts. "This is the most long-term relationship I've ever had," Deirdre often jokes. I have Sam, of course, but I know just what she means.

"You'll see her at Jack's dinner tomorrow night," I remind him.

"How could I forget? The big birthday celebration."

"Who's Jack?" Claire asks.

"Someone we went to college with."

"How come I've never met him?" Any pre-child life is suspect and murky by default; neither of the girls truly believe in its existence.

"He lives in Boston."

"You're going to Boston?" Phoebe asks, perplexed.

"No. He has a job interview in New York and asked us all out to dinner," I explain. "We haven't seen each other in years."

Jack Handel was Deirdre's college boyfriend, a scholarship kid from northern California. From the start, he and I shared a special empathy; we were both outsiders on that hilly, privileged campus, though our reactions were quite different. If I wanted — a little too desperately — to fit in, Jack wore his interloper status defiantly. It's not that he had a chip on his shoulder, but his sense of direction set him apart; he was sharper, faster, more strategic, while the rest of us were still a little soft, unformed, blurry around the edges. I still remember one Christmas vacation, when the four of us met up in the city almost every night. For Deirdre and Sam, who both grew up here, Manhattan was already a checkerboard of memories: There was Trader Vic's at the Plaza, where Deirdre swore they let her drink at sixteen — we got plastered on Scorpions, with their sickeningly sweet floating gardenias and two-foot-long straws, Deirdre and I in our thrift-shop fifties cocktail dresses wobbling out into the cold night; we went to Sam's favorite jazz club downtown and were scolded for talking during the sets; we ended up at three a.m. at Brasserie, where Deirdre's father had a running tab and we could charge enormous breakfasts, though I asked repeatedly to the point of annoyance if she was sure it was okay. I was barely able to afford a diner on my own and couldn't imagine anyone being that cavalier about money. And there were the places that they avoided. Deirdre wouldn't go to Serendipity because it was where her father used to take her to drown her parents' divorce in Frozen Hot Chocolates; she centered her life downtown as much as possible. Sam had written off all of Park Avenue on principle. The city was a game of Twister to them, and if I would never catch up I would also never risk falling into one of their valleys. That winter break, though, Jack and I were along for the ride, giddy, exuberant, lucky to be chosen. For that brief moment, opportunity, the future itself, felt boundless.

We thought it would always be that way.

Sam turns another page of his newspaper. "Who is Jack interviewing with?"

"He wouldn't tell me. He signed a confidentiality agreement."

"I can't see him moving to New York."

"Why not?"

"It's easier to be a big deal in Boston. Is Alice coming?"

"I don't think so. He'll only be here overnight. His actual birthday is next weekend, so I guess they'll do their own thing up there."

Jack is the first among us to hit forty. Deirdre's birthday is in seven weeks, Sam has six more months, I have eight.

"You'd think Deirdre would be the last person he'd want to spend his birthday with."

"It was all so long ago," I remind him.

Claire listens intently. She worships Deirdre, scavenging for clues to a life so much more captivating than anything we could possibly offer.

Sam shrugs without looking up and runs his hands lazily down his flat stomach — he still runs three miles most mornings, though his knees have lately begun creaking with alarming regularity. At thirty-nine he considers this a decidedly premature development that he plans on ignoring for as long as possible. Like most men he is determined to deny the physical signs of aging to the same degree that women obsess about them. "By the way, I may be late tonight."

"Late as in don't hold dinner?" For years, Sam and I ate after the girls, but reading numerous dire magazine articles has convinced me they will be hooked on heroin by the age of fourteen if we don't change our evil ways. Lately I've been making a concerted, if erratic, effort for all of us to eat approximately the same thing at approximately the same time. There have been spurts of upstart rebellions from various involved parties ever since.

"I'm not sure. I'll call you as soon as I know. I'm hoping to meet with someone about the Wells profile. I'm waiting to hear back from him."

I study Sam, weighing my options. It would never occur to me that being late on the first night of school is even a choice. Still, I don't want to fight this morning. And I know how much he needs this profile.

Sam has recently been assigned to write a cover story on Eliot Wells, the founder of Leximark. An early innovator in Web functionality, he is supposedly about to introduce some breakthrough cross-platform first-step artificial intelligence something or other — I don't quite get it, though I pretend I do rather than suffer through one more excruciating explanation. All I know is that the most controversial thing that has been written about Wells in recent years, aside from allusions to his cataclysmic temper, is that he has a proclivity to skip showers — though it seems to me this is said about any number of Internet gurus, as if a lack of personal hygiene is in and of itself a sign of genius. Sam is hoping to uncover something grittier and has convinced himself — though not, as yet, his editor, Simon — that there is dirt lurking in Wells's background. Of course, the great inverse law of journalism is that the further you bring someone down, the higher you raise your own profile.

"All right, let me know." I get up to dress.

"Lisa?"

I turn partially around. "Yes?"

"There's something I want to talk to you about." His face, still hatch-marked with indentations from his pillow, is earnest, almost nervous.

I look at him quizzically.

He glances over at the girls. "Later. Tonight."

"All right."

As I pass, he reaches over and grazes my forearm with his fingertips.

I will feel it there for the rest of the day, he can still do that to me.

I leave the three of them in the kitchen and go to shower, letting the hot water pour down my face, thinking of the day ahead, what to wear, my schedule at work, wondering, too, what Sam might want to talk to me about and why he thinks he needs to reserve my time. I mean, where else would I be?

When I get out I notice that his cell phone, charging on the night table, is flashing with a message.

I wrap the towel tighter about my chest, shake out my shoulder-length hair, the thick, dark waves not yet expanding from the heat into the total unruliness that had me wearing a ponytail most of the summer. I open the top drawer of my dresser, consider three different versions of a white V-neck top that to the naked eye look identical but which are in fact each completely necessary for varying levels of bloat. I can hear Sam and the girls clearing their plates. I glance at the door, still closed.

I don't know why I pick up the phone. I have never done anything like this before. It would be easy to say it is intuition, but we always claim that in retrospect.

With it still charging, I push "voice mail" and listen to his message.

It is a woman's voice, she does not leave a name, she does not have to, judging by the intimacy lacing through her tone. "I'm going to be a little late tonight," she says, the words slightly muffled by the whoosh of traffic in the background. "Can we make it six thirty? Same place."

I press the button to save the message as new and sit down on the edge of the bed, a cool sweat beading along the back of my neck and trickling slowly down my spine.

Copyright © 2009 by Emily Listfield

Read a Sample Chapter

I lie in bed watching the numbers on the digital alarm click in slow motion to 6:00 a.m., 6:01. My right hand, curled tightly beneath my head, is cramping, but I don't want to risk moving it. I lie perfectly still, listening to the birds chirping noisily outside, a high-pitched chorus wafting rebelliously through the harsh geometry of Manhattan. Nervous I would oversleep, I had tossed fitfully until dawn. Now, as with most missed opportunities, the only thing I long for is another chance at the night.

The lightness of the chirping fills me with a yearning I can't quite place, for unabridged land, for air, for my own childhood forty miles north of here, though I wanted desperately to escape the precisely gridded suburbs with their overriding promise of safety. Still, it's hard not to feel nostalgia for a time when I thought predictability was the worst fate imaginable.

I shut my eyes, willing the thought away.

It is a morning for fresh starts, after all.

Sam grunts softly in his sleep and rearranges his long legs, his left thigh brushing against mine under the sheets. I flinch unconsciously at the brief interlude of skin on skin and hold my breath, trying not to disturb him -- he has been up most of the night. He settles into his new position, letting out an aborted sigh from somewhere deep within his dream, and I exhale,secretly disappointed that he hasn't woken, turned to me. I look down, studying his face in the pale sunlight. Always handsome, he is more defined now, his edges sharper, as if everything soft and extraneous has been carved away, leaving his most essential self exposed. I run my fingertips gently through his matted dark-blond hair -- I've always loved him best this way, disheveled, unguarded.

His skin is warm, almost moist.

I try to remember the last time we made love in this fragile sliver of time before the girls wake up. I try to remember when we stopped trying.

I reach over and shut off the alarm so it won't wake him. All through the night I felt his agitation roiling his attempts at sleep, infiltrating my own. I'd turned to him once around two a.m. and asked what was bothering him.

"Nothing, just the story I'm working on. The pieces don't jibe, a source won't call me back," he said, curving away from me, though whether it was to avoid disturbing me further or a desire to be left alone, I wasn't sure. I've seen him like this many times before at the beginning of an assignment, waiting for a clear narrative to form in his head. He is a man who likes order and grows steeped in anxiety until he can impose it. Perhaps that's all it is.

For months, though, all through the summer, Sam has seemed restive for reasons I can't quite place. It has grown contagious, a malaise that has metastasized between us into a desultory low-level dissatisfaction, nothing I can touch, nothing worthy of accusation or argument, and yet. I hope the cooler season will wipe the slate clean, bring a new semester for our marriage.

I miss him.

There are moments, unexpected, unpredictable, when there is a sudden flash, a brief illumination in a look or touch, and we are us again, connected. They are hard to manufacture, though, no matter how hard I try. Sometimes I can feel him trying, too, missing me, too.

I slide carefully out of bed and pad barefoot down the hallway, bending over to pick up a crumpled gum wrapper, poorly hidden evidence of Claire's latest habit, the cloying sweet smell of imitation strawberry, grape, watermelon, vanilla emanating from her like cheap perfume, the noisy snapping and chewing deeply annoying, even more so because it is surely interfering with the six thousand dollars' worth of braces that encase her teeth, correcting a supposed crookedness that only an Upper East Side orthodontist can discern. Seizing the parental high road, I've taken to hiding my own gum-chewing habit, one of the pretenses I've recently felt it necessary to assume. I open the front door carefully, hoping its creak won't wake the children, take the papers into the kitchen and make a pot of coffee.

I can feel their breath, Sam's, the girls', in their separate corners of the apartment, surrounding me, grounding me even as they sleep. I have twenty minutes before I have to wake them and make breakfast, which, as per first day of school tradition, will involve pots and pans rarely seen on weekday mornings, scrambled eggs with chives snipped from the shriveling strands of the window herb plant, toast slathered with strawberry rhubarb preserves from the farmers' market, hot chocolate made from unsweetened cocoa and sugar rather than packets, ballast for whatever schoolyard intrigues, new teachers' quirks, algebraic conundrums, vertiginous swings in popularity lie ahead. I turn on the radio and listen to the weather report, which predicts a humid Indian summer day, the temperature threatening to hit the high eighties.

I dip my finger in the jam and lick it absentmindedly. Long ago, when the girls were still young enough to need supervision at the breakfast table, Sam and I developed a tag-team approach. I would get them up, put the food on the table and then dress while he ate with them. Though Phoebe is eleven and Claire thirteen, the habit remains, one of the unexamined rituals of family life that you realize only later are its very glue.

I take one last sip of coffee and walk into Phoebe's room first, stepping carefully over the huge shopping bag of new school supplies from Staples that have spilled across the floor, a kaleidoscope of colorful binders, highlighters in seven colors, six of which are totally unnecessary as far as I'm concerned, a new hole punch, index cards for book reports, neon-pink Post-its in the shape of hearts and arrows. Phoebe possesses a unique blend of laserlike focus and forgetfulness -- she can concentrate on an assignment for hours but will leave it on the bus. It is one of the things -- not just the forgetfulness, but her lack of concern about it -- that she has promised, albeit halfheartedly, to work on this year, though when I suggested buying a memo pad for to-do lists, she refused. "I'm eleven," she reminded me indignantly, as if lists were one more odious thing waiting for her in adulthood, along with mortgages, insurance claims, cholesterol readings. "Writing things on the back of my hand works just fine."

I lean over to kiss her cheek and she rolls sleepily into me, burying her face in the crook of my neck, her eyes fluttering open and then closing again.

"You have to get up, sweetie," I whisper as I run my fingers underthe blanket and tickle her, her body at least nominally still mine. Thesoftness of her neck, her arms makes the walls of my heart constrict.No one really tells you how much it is like falling in love over andover, how physical and encompassing it will be. Or that you willnever feel completely safe and relaxed again.

"Not yet." Her breath is heated, musty but sweet.

Since they got home from camp, the girls have grown used to lounging in bed till noon, especially in the last few weeks, when, like a final indulgent binge before a diet, we all lost the will for discipline of any sort.

"I hate school," Phoebe groans.

"It's too soon to hate school."

"It's never too soon to hate school."

I smile, knowing the words are hollow. Phoebe is by nature an easygoing child who, despite her carelessness, is generally anxious to please her teachers and popular with her friends. "Get up, my little misanthrope."

She looks at me suspiciously and is about to ask what the word means when she thinks better of it, knowing I will tell her to look it up, something she has absolutely no intention of doing. "It's not too soon for me to get a cell phone, either," she calls after me.

I leave without answering. I have decreed, repeatedly, that twelve is the age of consent for that particular piece of technology, my desire for being in constant touch, for being able to place her, outweighed by my certainty that Phoebe will lose at least a dozen phones within the first month. I make my way to Claire's room, where every available surface is lined with ornate boxes, jewelry cases, embroidered journals, the artifacts of her life stashed in tiny drawers, a Chinese puzzle of secrets and mementos. There is no one on earth quite as sentimental as a thirteen-year-old girl. In the rare moments when I am alone in the house I sometimes go through her drawers, scan her Internet history, her notebooks, looking not for evidence of crimes but for clues to who she is becoming. When I lean down to wake her, Claire shrugs away, curling deeper beneath the stained pale blue quilt she refuses to part with. It takes three increasingly strenuous shakes to get her to at least raise her head temporarily, her face hidden by a tangle of thick brunette hair almost the exact color as mine. If Phoebe is Sam's daughter, lighter in coloring and temperament, Claire, with her olive skin, her broodier nature, is mine. Claire's chosen outfit for the day -- a loosely knit pale-pink cable sweater, denim mini and leggings -- is carefully laid out on her desk chair. She spent a few days last week in East Hampton with a school friend shunning the beach to shop on Main Street and Newtown Lane, Claire suddenly one of those tanned, long-legged girls of indeterminate age still so alien to me with their giddy sense of entitlement apparent in every avid stride. I wonder if strangers, seeing Claire, assumed she was one of them, with an enormous shingled house and a credit card of her own.

"Honey, I think you may need to rethink your outfit," I say gently. "It's going to be too hot today."

Claire shakes her head at the ridiculousness of the notion. The outfit can't be rethought -- the skirt is too short for the school's restriction that hems be within four inches of the knee to wear without leggings and the sweater is, well, perfect. Any dolt can see that.

"I'll be fine," Claire insists. Under the best of circumstances, she has a certain rigidity that, though frustrating at times, I nevertheless hope will serve her well later in life when self-doubt, frankly self-reflection of any kind, has a tendency to impede progress, if not happiness. I have come to see the benefits of having blinders on. Anyway, when it comes to clothes Claire is particularly ironclad. It's useless to fight, though that doesn't always stop me from trying. It's a hard habit to break -- thinking you can control your own children.

The girls are dressed, Phoebe in capris and an Urban Outfitters T-shirt she pulled out of her dresser at the last minute, Claire in precisely the outfit she had planned, and at the table, pushing their eggs around with the tines of their forks when Sam stumbles out. He looks momentarily surprised at the presence of actual cooked food before recognition dawns on him. "Ah," he says, smiling, "the first day. The anticipation, the dread, the scramble for good seats." He bends over and kisses the top of the girls' heads. He has an informal, easygoing manner with the kids, who accept the undertone of irony as part of his makeup, like one's particular scent or way of walking. It is the same relaxed, loping charm I fell in love with nineteen years ago when we sat next to each other in the back row of a class on Hawthorne and James during our junior year in college: the smile that even then creased the sides of his cheeks, the tatty burgundy wool scarf draped casually around his neck in a way that only prep-school boys can ever truly pull off, his sly running commentary about professors, his baritone that entered my pores and stayed there like smoke. Sam seemed to have an innate sense of belonging and yet not take it seriously -- a lethal combination to someone like me. My own family had struggled into the middle class, there was nothing effortless about it, every move, every emotion was splayed out, picked over, vociferously debated. The very notion of privacy was alien, suspect. Sam's cool distance was as deeply attractive to me as my lack of it was to him. Then, anyway.

I watch Sam, yawning as he takes his first sip of coffee, breaks offa piece of Claire's toast and gets his hand slapped, a shopworn routinethat nevertheless tangles me up with comfort and affection.

This is what we have created, this family.

Sam flips through the stack of newspapers in front of him, quickly scanning the front pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post before turning to the business sections. There is an unmistakable testosterone-induced anxiety -- has anyone gotten a juicy story he has somehow missed? -- and poorly concealed relief that there is only the usual stock market pabulum and speculative opinion. An observer by nature, he has a talent for intuiting shifts in mood and influence, the way power movesaround the city. It's what makes him a good business journalist. Still, two weeks ago, Sam's latest competitor at the magazine, Peter Borofsky, a reporter six years younger and ten times as hungry, broke a story about how the board of a Fortune 500 company spied on its own president, bugging his phone, getting his financial records. The report made it onto the evening news and Sam can't help but grit his teeth every time he hears it mentioned. This morning, at least, he is safe. So far. I know that the moment I leave he will race to his laptop to check an ever-expanding list of Web sites and blogs. There are so many more ways to be bested now.

"What kind of day do you have?" he asks, glancing up from the paper.

"Some forms to fill out at school..."

"What forms?" Claire demands, suspicious.

"Nothing, just the class trip consent things."

"Didn't you do that? They were due weeks ago."

"I thought I had, but apparently not. I got an e-mail from the school on Friday."

Claire looks at me disdainfully.

I shrug. There are so many forms, a new batch every day, and newsletters and invitations and updates and e-mails, as if the school is worried parents won't feel they are getting their money's worth if their mailboxes aren't constantly overflowing. "It'll be fine," I insist. I turn back to Sam. "Then I'm having breakfast with Deirdre."

Sam nods and as he flips the page of his newspaper the corner dips into his coffee and threatens to fall off into soggy little islands of print. The three of us went to college together on an upstate campus so snowy that ropes stretched like cat's cradle yarn across it for students to pull their way to classes. In recent years, though, my friendship with Deirdre has come to exist largely outside of a broader social context, a skein that binds us from our early days in Manhattan, when we shared a loft in the East Village. For fifteen years we have been meeting once a week, or close to it, though what had oncebeen late-night drinks in cheap dive bars has morphed into early-morning breakfasts. "This is the most long-term relationship I've ever had," Deirdre often jokes. I have Sam, of course, but I know just what she means.

"You'll see her at Jack's dinner tomorrow night," I remind him.

"How could I forget? The big birthday celebration."

"Who's Jack?" Claire asks.

"Someone we went to college with."

"How come I've never met him?" Any pre-child life is suspect and murky by default; neither of the girls truly believe in its existence.

"He lives in Boston."

"You're going to Boston?" Phoebe asks, perplexed.

"No. He has a job interview in New York and asked us all out to dinner," I explain. "We haven't seen each other in years."

Jack Handel was Deirdre's college boyfriend, a scholarship kid from northern California. From the start, he and I shared a special empathy; we were both outsiders on that hilly, privileged campus, though our reactions were quite different. If I wanted -- a little too desperately -- to fit in, Jack wore his interloper status defiantly. It's not that he had a chip on his shoulder, but his sense of direction set him apart; he was sharper, faster, more strategic, while the rest of us were still a little soft, unformed, blurry around the edges. I still remember one Christmas vacation, when the four of us met up in the city almost every night. For Deirdre and Sam, who both grew up here, Manhattan was already a checkerboard of memories: There was Trader Vic's at the Plaza, where Deirdre swore they let her drink at sixteen -- we got plastered on Scorpions, with their sickeningly sweet floating gardenias and two-foot-long straws, Deirdre and I in our thrift-shop fifties cocktail dresses wobbling out into the cold night; we went to Sam's favorite jazz club downtown and were scolded for talking during the sets; we ended up at three a.m. at Brasserie, where Deirdre's father had a running tab and we could charge enormous breakfasts, though I asked repeatedly to the point of annoyance if she was sure it was okay. I was barely able to afford a diner on my own and couldn't imagine anyone being that cavalier about money. And there were the places that they avoided. Deirdre wouldn't go to Serendipity because it was where her father used to take her to drown her parents' divorce in Frozen Hot Chocolates; she centered her life downtown as much as possible. Sam had written off all of Park Avenue on principle. The city was a game of Twister to them, and if I would never catch up I would also never risk falling into one of their valleys. That winter break, though, Jack and I were along for the ride, giddy, exuberant, lucky to be chosen. For that brief moment, opportunity, the future itself, felt boundless.

We thought it would always be that way.

Sam turns another page of his newspaper. "Who is Jack interviewing with?"

"He wouldn't tell me. He signed a confidentiality agreement."

"I can't see him moving to New York."

"Why not?"

"It's easier to be a big deal in Boston. Is Alice coming?"

"I don't think so. He'll only be here overnight. His actual birthday is next weekend, so I guess they'll do their own thing up there."

Jack is the first among us to hit forty. Deirdre's birthday is in seven weeks, Sam has six more months, I have eight.

"You'd think Deirdre would be the last person he'd want to spend his birthday with."

"It was all so long ago," I remind him.

Claire listens intently. She worships Deirdre, scavenging for clues to a life so much more captivating than anything we could possibly offer.

Sam shrugs without looking up and runs his hands lazily down his flat stomach -- he still runs three miles most mornings, though his knees have lately begun creaking with alarming regularity. At thirty-nine he considers this a decidedly premature development that he plans on ignoring for as long as possible. Like most men he is determined to deny the physical signs of aging to the same degree that women obsess about them. "By the way, I may be late tonight."

"Late as in don't hold dinner?" For years, Sam and I ate after the girls, but reading numerous dire magazine articles has convinced me they will be hooked on heroin by the age of fourteen if we don't change our evil ways. Lately I've been making a concerted, if erratic, effort for all of us to eat approximately the same thing at approximately the same time. There have been spurts of upstart rebellions from various involved parties ever since.

"I'm not sure. I'll call you as soon as I know. I'm hoping to meet with someone about the Wells profile. I'm waiting to hear back from him."

I study Sam, weighing my options. It would never occur to me that being late on the first night of school is even a choice. Still, I don't want to fight this morning. And I know how much he needs this profile.

Sam has recently been assigned to write a cover story on Eliot Wells, the founder of Leximark. An early innovator in Web functionality, he is supposedly about to introduce some breakthrough cross-platform first-step artificial intelligence something or other -- I don't quite get it, though I pretend I do rather than suffer through one more excruciating explanation. All I know is that the most controversial thing that has been written about Wells in recent years, aside from allusions to his cataclysmic temper, is that he has a proclivity to skip showers -- though it seems to me this is said about any number of Internet gurus, as if a lack of personal hygiene is in and of itself a sign of genius. Sam is hoping to uncover something grittier and has convinced himself -- though not, as yet, his editor, Simon -- that there is dirt lurking in Wells's background. Of course, the great inverse law of journalism is that the further you bring someone down, the higher you raise your own profile.

"All right, let me know." I get up to dress.

"Lisa?"

I turn partially around. "Yes?"

"There's something I want to talk to you about." His face, still hatch-marked with indentations from his pillow, is earnest, almost nervous.

I look at him quizzically.

He glances over at the girls. "Later. Tonight."

"All right."

As I pass, he reaches over and grazes my forearm with his fingertips.

I will feel it there for the rest of the day, he can still do that to me.

I leave the three of them in the kitchen and go to shower, letting the hot water pour down my face, thinking of the day ahead, what to wear, my schedule at work, wondering, too, what Sam might want to talk to me about and why he thinks he needs to reserve my time. I mean, where else would I be?

When I get out I notice that his cell phone, charging on the night table, is flashing with a message.

I wrap the towel tighter about my chest, shake out my shoulder-length hair, the thick, dark waves not yet expanding from the heat into the total unruliness that had me wearing a ponytail most of the summer. I open the top drawer of my dresser, consider three different versions of a white V-neck top that to the naked eye look identical but which are in fact each completely necessary for varying levels of bloat. I can hear Sam and the girls clearing their plates. I glance at the door, still closed.

I don't know why I pick up the phone. I have never done anything like this before. It would be easy to say it is intuition, but we always claim that in retrospect.

With it still charging, I push "voice mail" and listen to his message.

It is a woman's voice, she does not leave a name, she does not have to, judging by the intimacy lacing through her tone. "I'm going to be a little late tonight," she says, the words slightly muffled by the whoosh of traffic in the background. "Can we make it six thirty? Same place."

I press the button to save the message as new and sit down on the edge of the bed, a cool sweat beading along the back of my neck and trickling slowly down my spine.

Copyright © 2009 by Emily Listfield

Continues...

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Excerpted from Best Intentions by Emily Listfield Copyright © 2009 by Emily Listfield. Excerpted by permission.
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