Stay

by Nicola Griffith

  “What time is it?”

  I glanced at the bedside clock. “Two fifty-three. In the afternoon.”

  She followed my glance to the clock, wouldn’t take her eyes off it.

  “Here.” I moved it so it was closer, and facing her. She looked at me, back at the clock, at the curtains.

  “Open the curtains.”

  “You’ll sleep better if they’re—” Her eyes started to go dead again. “Okay. Hold on.”

  I opened them. She looked at the concrete building, the blue sky, back at the clock. “Afternoon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Two fifty-three?”

  “Two fifty-four, now.”

  She nodded slightly to herself and fell asleep as though someone had pulled the plug.

  I settled myself in the armchair near the window. Taxis honked; sirens grew, dopplered, faded. On the TV, an orange kitten chased floating dandelion seeds through the sunlight of a summer garden. I did not know what to make of Tammy’s behavior. Fear might explain some of it, but fear of what? She had had a key, she could have left anytime, or if she was scared of something outside the apartment, she could just have picked up the phone. Except, of course, there hadn’t been a phone.

  The kittens were replaced by some woman with a Canadian accent demonstrating the art of stenciling in home decor.

  Tammy woke after an hour. She didn’t sit up or say anything, just gasped, and her respiration rate went up. Then she started turning her head very, very slowly towards the clock, as though her life depended on me not knowing she was awake.

  “I’m here,” I said. She froze. After a moment she turned her head to look at me. “Are you hungry yet? The sandwiches are still here. The drinks have gone cold, though, so if you want tea or coffee, we’d have to order more.”

  “Where are we?”

  “The Hilton.”

  She looked at the clock. It seemed to reassure her.

  “The tuna salad sandwiches aren’t bad.” I put one on a small plate, added a napkin and the saltshaker, and brought it over to the bed. She looked at it as though it were a snake. I put it down near the clock. “Food is almost always a good idea.” She reached for it without sitting up, careful not to let the covers slide off her shoulders. Well, well. “I’ll bring you a robe.” I put it on the bed and withdrew to the bathroom for a couple of minutes, where I folded her corduroys and cashmere, and when I came back she had taken a bite and was chewing. I poured her some water and brought that over, too. She was still chewing the same bite. “Swallowing comes next.”

  She swallowed obediently. I sighed, and she flinched and dropped the sandwich, which made me sigh harder with irritation, and she shrank back against the headboard.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I don’t know what you want,” she said in a small voice.

  I stared at her. The Tammy I had first met nearly two years ago would have walked naked down Peachtree Street before it occurred to her to wonder what anyone but herself wanted. She studied her sandwich fixedly. “I want you to eat that sandwich, if you can, and drink some water. Then I want you to sleep again. I want you to know you’re safe. And then tonight we’ll decide what to do.”

  She looked at the clock again, and picked up the sandwich.

  As I’d thought, the carbohydrates combined with whatever shock she’d had sent her off to sleep again within a few minutes. I got up and turned the heat down, then went back to alternately looking out of the window and watching the television. The Canadian woman was now demonstrating color glazing. Every time the camera pulled back, the word “cheap” hovered brassily in the corners of the small, flimsy set; the wall wobbled as she leaned on it. To the English, cheap is not a pejorative word, simply descriptive, and usually delivered with an air of triumph: “I got these jeans cheap at the market!” In the United States, of course, cheap means shoddy, tacky, gimcrack; I didn’t know a single American who would boast of buying something cheaply. Where were the Canadians on the cheap scale? Perhaps they followed the same cultural and geographic axis as the country in general: more European in Quebec, more American in Vancouver.

  The chattering Canadian came to an abrupt end, and was replaced by an earnest magazine program dealing with health care for the mentally disabled. A while later I began learning more than anyone needed to know of the reproductive cycle of emperor penguins.

  Sandy Hair and his coworkers had just begun to pack up to leave when I realized Tammy was awake and watching me. When I looked at her, she lowered her gaze in the universal primate gesture of submission. I should have noticed her wake, but, like a prey animal, she had learned to move quietly. Interesting. She seemed to have her wits about her, now.

  “Good evening. It’s pretty dark outside. You’re not wearing much and this room is lit up like a stage. I’m going to close the curtains.”

  No protest this time. She sat up, touched her bare shoulder with her left hand. “You undressed me.”

  “Yes.”

  Silence, then: “Have you told Dornan anything?”

  “No.”

  Another silence. “I want to leave.”

  “The door’s right there. You have money in your purse.”

  “No. I mean, I want us to leave New York.”

  “Us?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Is someone looking for you?”

  “I have to leave now,” she said.

  “I’ll be driving back south, but—”

  “I don’t want to go to Atlanta!”

  “I’m not going to Atlanta, and I’m not leaving until tomorrow—unless you want to talk to me, tell me why you need to leave right now.”

  “Where are my glasses?”

  “Right there next to the water.”

  She found the case, put on the steel-rims. I expected the gaze she turned on me to be sharper, but it was as blank as before. “Why can’t we leave now?”

  We. The I-can’t-cope-by-myself ploy was something I had seen her use before, but not like this. This time there was no glint in her eye, no upthrust breast or canted hip, just a frightening brokenness.

  I didn’t want to stay in this hotel, in this city, another night anyway. “I’ll pack while you dress.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Midnight, and a black autumn wind was trying to push the truck this way and that as we crossed the southern edge of Maryland. Tammy slept in the passenger seat, right hand curled around her left wrist and the cheap watch we’d bought her at the airport. All she’d done since I’d taken her from that apartment this morning was sleep.

  “It’s a shock reaction,” Julia said. She sat sideways on Tammy’s lap, facing me. “A way to hide. You hide in the woods, Tammy hides in her dreams.” She stroked Tammy’s face gently, moving the back of one finger up her cheek, as if catching a tear. The muscles in my legs tensed and the truck jumped forward. “Where’s the fire?” she said.

  “I want to be in West Virginia before we stop.”

  She studied Tammy, whose eyes were darting from side to side beneath closed lids. “Did you take away those sleeping pills?”

  “No.”

  “Might be an idea. At some point she’s going to crawl far enough out of her pit to get her self-will back. That’s when she’s liable to do something stupid.”

  Tammy umphed and turned in her seat, moving Julia, who said, “Bony hips. I think she’s lost weight,” and I suddenly couldn’t stand the idea of Julia touching another woman, not touching me, never touching me again.

  “Please,” I said.

  Julia raised her eyebrows.

  “This—I can’t—” I braked and started to pull over.

  “What?” Tammy sat up.

  Julia vanished. I yanked on the parking brake before we quite stopped moving and Tammy jerked forward against her seat belt. The engine rumbled. The wind howled. Her gaze slid this way and that but she kept her head down.

  “Get out.”

  She put her hand on the door l
ock and prepared to get out, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, without even looking at me. It was as though she had expected all along to be abandoned, as though she accepted it, even deserved it.

  Shame raised prickles on my skin from knees to neck. “I mean get in the backseat. There’s more room, you can stretch out.”

  She climbed out and into the back without another word.

  “Are you warm enough?” She nodded, eyes huge. “Good, that’s good.” The truck started up again smoothly and I pressed the accelerator down and down until it wouldn’t go any further. Lane marker studs streamed under my wheels. The engine began to whine. Annoying.

  “It’s all right,” I said, to myself, to Tammy, to Julia, wherever she was, and eased my foot off the gas. The stream flowed more sedately. “We’ll take the next exit and stop for the night.”

  The Days Inn was plain and comfortable; spending the night with Tammy was neither. She didn’t take off her underwear or her watch and lay rigid on her tautly made bed like a knife from the wrong set of silverware set out on its napkin by mistake. She didn’t talk, she barely breathed, and her eyes glimmered slightly: wide open and empty even of fright.

  I woke at six the next morning, and opened my eyes just in time to see Tammy’s flick open and watch me. Back to square one. I got up, ignored her, and went and had my shower. There was no packing or unpacking to do.

  “I’ll be back in an hour,” I said. “Be ready to leave. Assuming you still want to come with me.” It took most of that hour to get a copy of the elevator key made, to find and buy an envelope, to persuade the desk clerk to run it through their stamp machine, for a fee. I put the original key in the envelope, addressed it to Geordie Karp at his loft address, and dropped it in the mailbox. The duplicate went back in my pocket; you never knew.

  When I got back I walked around the parking lot for the remaining minutes, saw license plates from sixteen different states, almost all on American cars, and wondered what the percentage of foreign to American vehicles would be at a hotel as opposed to a motel. Probably some ethnologist has done a study.

  Tammy was washed, brushed, and standing by the bed like a cadet in a military academy when I got back. So she could at least make sense of what I was saying.

  “Hungry?” I asked. She waited a fraction to see if I’d give her a hint about what I’d prefer her answer to be, and when I gave her no clue, she shrugged very slightly. Apart from that single “What?” when she woke in the truck, she hadn’t said a word since we’d left New York. “I need to eat before I drive.” She picked up her purse. She was connecting at least some of the dots. I drove us through a quiet, gray morning and, when I could find nothing else, to the violence of light and plastic and noise that is Denny’s.

  Our server’s eyes were overbright, as though he were in the middle of a speed jag, but it could just have been the light. “What’ll you have?”

  I ordered pancakes and eggs and bacon, with coffee. Tammy refused to look up from the menu. I smiled blandly at the server, offering no help at all. He shifted from foot to foot.

  “Regular breakfast is pretty good,” he said finally. Tammy nodded. “With coffee?” She nodded again.

  We ate in silence. When the bill came, I stood up. “I’m going to the bathroom. I’ll see you outside.” She made a panicked, abortive movement, but no sound. “Your wallet should be in your purse.”

  “She’s not ready to do things for herself,” Julia said from behind me as I washed my hands.

  “I think she is.” I pulled a paper towel from the dispenser, lifted my gaze to her reflection in the mirror, and the floor seemed to drop six inches: Julia’s indigo eyes had darkened to chocolate brown, like Tammy’s.

  “Imagine if it were me out there,” she said.

  The bathroom door swang back and forth behind me as I walked rapidly back to the restaurant.

  Tammy, pale-cheeked, was still at the table, but she had her credit card out, sitting on top of the bill.

  “You—we should probably take that up front.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, she picked up the bill and card and followed me to the cash register. She handed it over to the server without a word. He handed her a slip and a pen. She looked at me with those empty brown eyes.

  “Sign,” I said. She wrote slowly. “And add five dollars, for a tip.” The faster she came back to the real world, the faster I’d be rid of her.

  In the parking lot, I went to the driver’s side, unlocked it, then climbed in the passenger seat. Tammy looked at me, looked back over her shoulder at Denny’s, then up at the sky when a solitary raindrop hit her shoulder.

  “Better get in before you get wet.”

  She got in. I handed her the keys.

  “I’ve done too much driving lately, I’m tired. Wake me in a couple of hours.” I curled up and closed my eyes. We sat there for nearly thirty minutes before she put the keys in and turned the ignition. I kept my eyes shut while the engine idled.

  “I can’t,” she said at last. I waited some more. “I don’t know where we’re going.”

  “No,” I agreed.

  Another long, long wait.

  “Where are we going?”

  “North Carolina, near Asheville.” I sat up and turned to face her. “Unless you’d rather go somewhere else. I’ll travel with you wherever you want, get you settled somewhere.”

  “Not Atlanta,” she said.

  “All right.”

  “North Carolina?” I nodded. She nodded back and steered us carefully out of the parking lot, onto I-81 South. Her driving was bad at first, but improved rapidly. She stayed slightly under the speed limit. I was starting to go to sleep for real when she spoke again. “What’s in North Carolina?”

  “Woods, birds, a house. There’s room enough for two, for a little while.” Until Dornan can come and get you. She didn’t say anything but the engine hit a higher note.

  I didn’t sleep but drifted in a theta-wave state for a while until she began to brake too hard and make abrupt lane changes.

  “Take the next exit,” I said. “I’ll take over.”

  When she sat in the passenger seat it was obvious that returning to the world had taken its toll; her shoulders were hunched around her ears, and she picked endlessly at her thigh where the corduroy had worn thin. A person who is new in the world—a child, or an adult in a foreign country or just out of hospital—needs safety, first of all, but then they need to know that they matter, that their opinions are considered, that there are choices. The trick is not to offer too many options at once.

  I turned on the radio and skimmed through channels: the blandly perfect smile of fusion jazz, a huge-voiced country music diva belting out about how her dawg done left her, an apoplectic talk show host ranting about tax reform, a commercial for wireless phone service that degenerated into the low-toned gabble of federally regulated footnotes. I kept trying, and eventually plumped for some college station that sounded as though it was broadcasting from the bottom of a disused well. “Not exactly to my taste. Feel free to change the station.” The thigh-picking slowed, but we listened to well-bottom music until the weak signal started to fade. “Find something else, will you?”

  She found something that called itself adult contemporary and sounded as though its artists, mostly women with little-girl voices, lived on Prozac. Still, it was a decision.

  “Maybe we should stop at the next town and buy some CDs.” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d shopped for something unnecessary.

  I drove for another hour. Tammy napped. When the adult contemporary signal faded, she sat up and changed the station without prompting. Mommy’s little helper.

  At Wytheville, just north of the North Carolina border, I left the interstate and took us onto the Blue Ridge Parkway: more than two hundred miles without a single traffic light or fast food franchise. With a speed limit of forty-five miles per hour—less on some of the hairpin bends—leaving the interstate meant adding at least two
hours to our journey, but it was an essential buffer zone between where Tammy had been and where she was going. I turned off the radio and opened both windows.

  “Breathe,” I said. Valleys ran long and deep to either side, and cows grazed in pastures framed by split-log fences. The air was rich and cool and edged with life.

  “It’s cold.”

  “Put your sweatshirt on. We’re two thousand feet up a mountain.”

  “You live up a mountain?”

  “A valley halfway up a mountain, but we’ve a couple of hundred miles to go.” Somehow, in four or five hours, I had to show her how much there was here to appreciate. She had to know before she got there how special this place was. It had to become special to her, too, otherwise she would trample all over the fragile peace of my refuge. She squirmed into her sweatshirt and we drove for a while in silence.

  “These are the Blue Ridge Mountains.”

  She nodded, but didn’t say anything.

  “Part of the Appalachians, one of the oldest mountain ranges on earth. They’re so old that they appeared before most animal and plant life existed.”

  “No fossils,” she said after a moment.

  “Right. Lots of gemstones, though.” Smarter than she looks, Dornan had said. “Some of the rivers are even older than the mountains.”

  She didn’t seem interested in the apparent paradox. Mountains form in geological time, in slow motion. A river that exists before the mountain forms will cut through the new, soft rock to get to the sea. Most of those seas were long gone, but the rivers remain. We passed a sign for Blowing Rock, the head of the New River. Stupid name for the oldest river on the continent.

  “It’s about time for lunch. We could stop and eat and take a look at the river.”

  She nodded, though I’m not sure whether it was the food or the river that appealed.