Stay

by Nicola Griffith

  “I need to empty her out, hose her down. If you’d point me in the right direction I’d be grateful.”

  “Empty her out, is it?” Eee-yut. He cocked his head at the RV bay. “Just had everything topped up Thursday.” Thur-us-day. “Should suit. Need some help?”

  Tammy slid a bit further down in her seat.

  “Just about got it covered.”

  “You sing out now if you change your mind.”

  I parked, got out, and chocked the wheels, just in case. Then I showed Tammy how to hook the power cable up to the converter so the batteries could start charging. “There should be two pairs of rubber gloves in the undercarriage storage bay. Get them.”

  We drained with the red hose and rinsed with the green, opened and closed, connected and disconnected for a while, then washed the whole place down—including the truck and trailer—before rinsing and filling the freshwater tanks a final time. It was tedious, messy, and foul-smelling, but once all the hoses were stowed and all the valves, cocks, and caps firmly closed, I felt the usual satisfaction of an unpleasant job well done. I told her to check the tires while I squeegeed the windows. She finished first. When I’d dried the windscreen wipers and snapped them back in place, I walked slowly past the glistening tires. They looked fine and fat and all the dust caps were in place.

  “You’re dying to check, aren’t you?” Julia said, sitting cross-legged on the roof of the truck.

  I was.

  “Don’t do it.”

  “Aud?”

  I hadn’t heard Tammy approach.

  “Aud?” A curious glance at the truck, then at me. “Are we done?”

  “Yes. We’ll fill up on gas and pay on the way out.” I remembered her reaction to the men. “Or I can walk over and pay while you stay here.”

  She steeled herself. “On the way out works.”

  She sat stiff as a ramrod as I chatted to Bowlegs and he scratched his chin and wrote a few smudged figures on an invoice while his young assistant filled the gas tanks and money changed hands. She didn’t say anything as I pulled out, or as we drove back up Highway 25.

  “New York,” I said, and her head made a slow, unwilling turn. “You don’t have to talk to me about it if you don’t want to, but if you do, I don’t have to tell Dornan.”

  She said nothing for a while and I thought she was going to go back to that unnatural, unreachable place, but then she breathed in and out, fast, twice, the way you do before you dive through a doorway not knowing who or what is on the other side, and said, “It’s not a pretty story.”

  “No.”

  “I mean, it doesn’t make me look good.”

  We didn’t say any more for five miles, but she began to fiddle with her window button, then her air vent, then the seam of her pants. She tucked her hair behind one ear, then the other, then pulled it forward again.

  “I want to tell someone.”

  “Yes.”

  “It—I just can’t.”

  “Okay.”

  “Stop being so fucking agreeable!” Her face worked as she tried not to cry, paling at the creases like a stretched and twisted pencil eraser.

  “Tissues in the glove box,” I said.

  After she had finished, and had wiped her swollen face clean of mucus, she stared out of the window. “This is the road back to the cabin,” she said suddenly.

  “Just about there,” I agreed.

  “Maybe we should get everything set up and back in place, first.”

  “If you like.”

  We worked for two hours putting everything back together, and when that was done it was time for a late lunch. In the clearing, Tammy talked brightly of the food, of the road, of the rig, and her eyes shone like spinning coins. When she stopped talking, the clearing was silent but for the wind hissing in the treetops. A blood red maple leaf spiraled down from a branch and landed tip first in the grass.

  “Aud?”

  “Mmm?”

  “What was it like, being here on your own, with everything so quiet?”

  “Peaceful.”

  “You didn’t get … nervous?”

  “No.”

  “This morning, when I was making the fire, I felt jumpy, exposed.”

  Exposed. Second time she’d used that word. “But you don’t feel that way now.”

  “No. Because you’re here. And there’s the trailer, somewhere I can go.”

  I looked at the massive tulip tree, the trillium growing at its base, at the maple leaf. This made no sense whatsoever to me. “But it doesn’t worry you if I’m here?”

  “No.”

  “If you were downtown on your own in”—I nearly said New York—“some big city, at this time in the afternoon, would that worry you?”

  “Jesus, look, I know cities. I know how they work, what the rules are. This outdoors stuff, it’s … It just doesn’t feel safe.”

  Nothing was ever safe, not the way she meant it. But she had said exposed, and I knew that word. Exposed meant going back to live in Norway when you were ten years old, speaking English with more facility than Norwegian, and already being two inches taller than your classmates. Exposed meant conspicuous, different, not fitting in, not feeling at home, at least not until you learn that your self is your home and no one can take it away—until you fall in love and are led partway down a path that disappears as abruptly as your lover and leaves you stranded, lost in the mist.

  Tammy’s eyes were bright again, and her mouth twisted at one corner. “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

  “Why don’t you tell me.”

  After a pause she said, “I grew up in Connecticut.”

  Either she’d get to the point or she wouldn’t.

  “I grew up knowing the woods weren’t a place I should go. No one ever said anything straight out, but the woods were where little girls got raped and trees got hacked down and Bambi got shot. You read about it in the papers.” She shredded a blade of grass with great concentration. “It was like someone stuck big labels on everything: the woods, all the outdoors, was theirs, and if we went there, we’d end up like the deer or the trees. So, before, when you were still in bed and I was building the fire, it was like there were people in the woods watching, or animals, or whatever. They knew I was out here on my own. But it wasn’t so bad because I knew I could run into the trailer. And you being out here, now, makes it safe. Or something. And the trailer’s safe because I slept there.”

  Forest can be dangerous if you don’t treat it with respect, but it’s just trees and birds and bears and beetles. I tried to think of a way to explain that. “A forest is just like a city. It can be dangerous, but if you learn what to expect and how to deal with it, you’re fine. Once you know how to read traffic signals and use a crosswalk, you’re pretty safe crossing a road. It’s the same with the woods.”

  “Right.”

  “You just have to get to know it, neighborhood by neighborhood, except you have streams instead of avenues. The places a stream runs through can feel like different worlds, the way, say, Park Avenue runs through both the Upper East Side and Harlem. I can show you one little neighborhood, if you like.”

  A week ago, this part of the river, where trees on each side of the bank touch and merge overhead to form a living tunnel, had been a green-and-black oil painting of dark water and moss-backed boulders. Now it was as though some vandal had hurled cheap emulsion at the canvas: the arterial red leaves of a low-lying maple branch streaked violently from one bank to another, and on the far side, little poplar leaves the exact color of twenty-four carat gold lay strewn over the boulders like pirate treasure. Autumn, like grief, changes everything.

  The air smelled the same, though, rich and slow and secret.

  “The best times of day to see wildlife are dusk and dawn.” The sun would go down in half an hour or so. “Sit quietly, and keep still. Even blinking can be enough to scare a bird off. Watch the falling leaves—they all fall at the same speed. When something moves at a differ
ent speed, you’ll notice. Use your peripheral vision.” It was like adjusting to the rhythms of an urban beat: learn the patterns, tune them out, and the unusual is instantly apparent.

  We sat still and quiet, and gradually the ever-present rush of water faded into the background and I could hear Tammy’s breath. Ten yards south, a jumble of boulders and two fallen trees helped form a quiet backwater where the black, gleaming surface barely moved.

  A bright chur-wee cut through the wood, and a little bird with powder blue wings flashed out then back into the trees. Tammy jumped.

  “There’ll be more. Wait.”

  Then it seemed the woods were full of bluebirds with their chur-wee and tur-a-wee and rusty-colored breasts. Two females flew at each other like kamikaze pilots playing chicken and Tammy smiled, but the battle was in earnest. Everywhere at this time of year, female bluebirds fought female, and males fought male, defending territory with the snuggest nesting hollows. When winter came, the winners would survive; the losers might not. The battle gradually retreated back into the trees and the calls faded.

  Something plopped in the backwater. “Turtle,” I murmured, though I hadn’t seen it. Nothing else made quite the same sound, like a dinner plate falling flat into a full sink. The light began to change, thinning from rich afternoon mead to a more sophisticated predusk Chablis which slanted in through the trees and picked up the wings of insects dancing over the surface. Far fewer than there had been two weeks ago. Seasons are like economic change: cycles of plenty and dearth.

  A flash of blue and white feathers and yellow feet caught my eye for a split second, then a kingfisher was rising up out of the water with a silvery fish in its beak. It alighted upstream on the blood red maple branch over the water and looked this way and that before maneuvering the fish so that it could swallow it headfirst. Then it was off again, sturdy body and mohawk haircut disappearing as it followed its river road to wherever.

  We sat for a while, until the light began to drain away in earnest. “Time to go.” When you are visiting any strange place for the first time, short visits are best.

  It was darker under the trees, and I walked behind Tammy so that she could see ahead instead of looking at my back, and so that she wouldn’t have to worry about an unnameable something creeping up behind her in the glimmering dusk.

  It rained on and off for two days. Tammy didn’t seem inclined to talk and it was impossible to sit for hour after hour in the trailer with rain drumming on the roof, so I took her into the cabin and showed her how to use a drawknife and a saw. We started on the interior wall. Most of the studs were up; it just needed pine board hung, and pine is an easy wood to work with. That first morning Tammy, although she tried hard, was a real hindrance; she had no idea how to hold anything, how to steady a board on a sawhorse, how to plane smoothly with a drawing knife. I demonstrated, over and over. We were both glad to break for lunch. After lunch, I gave her the task of cutting the boards to size and nailing them to the studs.

  “Don’t worry about making mistakes,” I said. “That’s how you learn. If you saw something short, we put it aside and cut another. If you nail a board in the wrong place, we pull the nails and do it again. The worst thing you could do is mash your fingers flat with that hammer.” Or slice open your femoral artery if the saw skids. A sudden image of me kneeling before her, arterial blood gouting over the unfinished floor while I ran my hands up her smooth thigh and into her crotch, seeking the pressure point, made me turn away abruptly.

  I worked in my corner on a piece of walnut that would become part of the stair rail, and pretended not to watch as she tucked her hair behind her ears, took a deep breath, measured once, measured twice, then cut.

  She went to bed at eight o’clock that night and slept like the dead for twelve hours. I didn’t. The noises she made while she dreamt kept me awake. Her face was drawn when she woke.

  “Okay?” I asked over coffee.

  “My muscles ache.”

  I let it pass. “Ibuprofen’s in the bathroom. And a hot shower will help.”

  The drip and runnel of rain ran counterpoint all day to the rasp of steel on wood. I worked steadily, but she kept stopping and staring off into the distance, then looking at her saw as though it had appeared in her hand as unexpectedly as a dinosaur bone.

  The next day was beautiful, hotter than it had been for a while, and Tammy, whose sawhorse stood in the sunlight streaming through the door, sweated while she worked. Her scent—earthy and light, like the smell of crisp baby carrots when you first pull them from the ground—mixed with that of sawdust and leaf mold. She pulled a handkerchief from her pocket, wiped her face, and bent once again to the board she was recutting. Muscle flexed in her thigh as she steadied the wood against the sharp rip of the saw. The shorts were mine and fit snugly. I turned away and drank some water, then contemplated the walnut I’d been working.

  Walnut is a hardwood that cuts and splits almost as easily as pine, but its real value is its beauty. The grain of the three pieces I had cut and polished for the handrail up to the loft could have been painted by a long-ago Chinese artist. Imagine porous paper stretched tight under a silkscreen, healthy dollops of gold and saffron ink, smaller ones of chestnut, tiny, tiny pinpricks of some color paler than the winter sun, the sudden back-and-forth of the wedge, and while the wavy lines bleed into each other, the artist dips his fine brush in umber ink and paints on careful rosettes which spread like the ripples in a pond. Then, while the ink still glistens, he sprays everything with lacquer and the surface is liquid-looking but hard, and complex as a natural fractal.

  “You look like you’ve seen god,” Tammy said from right beside me.

  I smoothed the wood with my palm, then looked at her. She was grinning.

  “I’m done,” she said, and stepped aside so I could see the interior wall. It was finished, or one side of it was, at least. I stepped up to take a look, trying not to think about the hammer handle shoved down the front of her shorts. It was suddenly obvious that she wasn’t wearing underwear.

  “Looks good,” I said. “Now help me with this stair rail.”

  Two hours later, still sweating, muscles aching pleasantly, we stood admiring the finished railing and one-sided wall.

  “It’s starting to look like a house,” Tammy said.

  “Long way to go.”

  “Jesus. Would it do any harm to pat yourself on the back, just kick back and drink a few beers?”

  Julia had said the same sort of thing, more than once. “A few beers it is, then.”

  We built a fire in the pit while we drank our first, and opened a second while we waited for the coals to get hot. It was about six o’clock, and the sky glowed like stained glass.

  “It’ll cool fast tonight,” I said. “I’m going to put on some warmer clothes.”

  In the trailer I changed into old corduroys and sweater, and tried to remember what clothes she had bought in Asheville. I took fresh beers outside.

  “I laid some spare sweats on the bed, in case you needed them.” She took the empties back in with her.

  Icy beer, hot fire, fading sun and total quiet. Lovely. I lay on the turf and stretched. When Tammy reemerged I propped myself on one elbow and pointed to where I’d put her beer on the log, away from the heat. She took a swallow, then squatted down opposite me to examine the fire.

  I shouldn’t have lent her the sweats. She still wasn’t wearing any underwear, and the cloth was old and thin and contour-hugging. I could see, clearly, the swell of her vulva, the bone of her hip, the curve where inner thigh becomes groin. When I looked up at her face, she was watching me watch her. She bent to poke the logs, then sat, and the moment passed.

  “You did a good job today. You learn fast.”

  “Oh, I learn fast all right.” It sounded bitter.

  I didn’t understand that. “Dornan helped me, too, when he was here. Though I think he hit more fingers than nails.” She didn’t smile. “You should call him.”

  She shoo
k her head. “I can’t. I just can’t.” Without looking at me she said, “Anyhow, I’d have thought you’d be happy to keep me away from him. You never liked me when we were together.”

  There was no point denying it.

  “So why’d you come find me? How’d he get you to do that?”

  Because we’re friends. That’s how it works. “He knew you were in trouble—he just didn’t know what kind.”

  “Neither did I,” she said. “Not at first.” Now she looked at me. “You know what my job is, right?”

  “Business development.”

  “And you probably think it’s a nothing job that any zero brain can do as long as she’s pretty and smiles and flirts.” I don’t like being told what I think, but this was her therapy session, not mine. “It was kind of true, at least it used to be. But then I went down to Florida, to that mall development in Naples, and met Geordie Karp.

  “Geordie was … he was like a dream, you know? Famous, kind of, and good-looking and rich and great at his job. He’s probably, I don’t know, in his late forties, but he looked a lot younger. And he singled me out, and told me I had lots of talent, people talent. Then he offered to mentor me.”

  I nodded.

  “It was like he’d looked inside me and seen exactly what I wanted; he understood. He saw me, the real me, not the southern party girl who was fun to have around at the business meetings so you sometimes threw her a bone.”

  A time-honored southern strategy.

  “He was going to help me, give me the tools to be professional, he said. Then I could get what I wanted without having to flirt and smile. He’d been looking for someone like me, he said, someone worth his time. And I believed him. But it was more than that. Geordie was … Look, just don’t judge me, okay? Geordie was gorgeous. Tall, maybe two inches taller than you, and fit, sort of whippy, with curly golden hair and a red-brown beard. Soft, not like most men’s facial hair. And he knew all the best restaurants, and the people there always knew him, and he was generous, and funny, and well dressed.”