Stay

by Nicola Griffith

  “There’s no reason for it not to go through if all other conditions have been met. Especially if the adoptive parent had also left a will specifying legal guardianship for the child in the interim.”

  “Mr. Poorway, will you take me as a client?”

  Another of those long pauses. “I’m assuming we’re now speaking to the issue of client-attorney privilege?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give me your number, please, and I’ll call you back in a few minutes.” I agreed, gave him the number, and folded the phone. It wasn’t hard to guess who he’d be calling now.

  Tammy wandered through wrapped in a towel, drying her hair. “Done already?”

  “Waiting for him to call back.”

  “How about waiting somewhere else?” She gestured at her near-nakedness.

  I hauled myself up the two steps to my bed. I’d lost count of the times I’d seen Tammy naked, both live and on tape. I wasn’t the only one pretending the last few days had never happened.

  The phone rang. “Yes, I’ll take you as a client,” Solomon Poorway said. Bette Fleishman must have persuaded him I wasn’t a mass murderer. I smiled bleakly. “Ms. Torvingen?”

  “Aud,” I said.

  “Very well, Aud.” No offer to be called Chuck. “Our conversation is now privileged. However, I would prefer that you not test my ethics too severely.”

  “Thank you for your candor. Here’s another hypothetical question. If the INS should receive a packet dated before the adoptive father died, a signed and dated application for permanent residence, and if there was an addendum to his will giving, say, me guardianship, then I would be her legal guardian until she became a legal resident, yes? Then once she got her green card, I could get her a social security number, and apply for citizenship on her behalf?”

  “Yes.” He didn’t sound happy about it.

  “And it wouldn’t be necessary for the child to live with the legal guardian.” I would send checks. I didn’t particularly want to meet her, but I could at least make sure she had warm clothes, enough to eat, and someone to look after the basics.

  “No.”

  I wanted to ask what kind of wording would be necessary on the addendum about guardianship, but no doubt that would be pushing his ethics too far, so I thanked him and hung up. Tammy was now dressed. I limped back down to the table and reopened the folder.

  “You want breakfast?” Tammy asked.

  “Um.”

  “Well, don’t jump up and down with gratitude or anything.”

  I looked up. Not pretending quite everything away, then. “Jumping up and down would be a bit tricky at the moment.”

  “Is that a joke, Aud Torvingen?”

  The old Tammy had not been pleasant, but this new one was unfathomable. I turned back to the folder and riffled through its contents, thinking. I spread out the information on the Carpenters, including the black-and-white photograph of a house, surrounded by farmland; it looked fairly isolated. I picked up the fact sheet again, read it more carefully. Church of Christ. New Testament literalists. Not technophobic, exactly, but disapproving of frivolity; a phone would be fine, and a car, but definitely no music—apart from the human voice in praise to His glory; modern medicine would be acceptable, as long as it was absolutely necessary—no antidepressants, no Valium, no sleeping pills. Nothing about dancing, one way or the other. Jud Carpenter was a deacon of the Plaume City Church of Christ congregation. I found an atlas, and paper and pencil, and took notes.

  Tammy made toast and eggs and tea. I ate the eggs, crunched my way through the half-burnt bread, sipped at the overbrewed tea, still thinking. It might work, but I’d have to check a few details. No carelessness this time. I touched my neck.

  “Hurt?”

  “Um? No.”

  “Good. So, you decided how to handle it?”

  I had never talked to anyone about my methods before. Julia had never had the chance to see me work.

  “They live in an isolated house in the middle of Nowhere, Arkansas,” I said. “Which is good, in the sense that I should be able to snoop about unseen because there’ll be hardly anyone around. But it’s bad because if there is anyone about, I’ll stick out like a sore thumb. But the best thing is, they’re big-time churchgoers.”

  “Sunday,” she said, nodding. “The whole family.” Smarter than she looked. “All day. All that preaching and singing. Hours and hours to get into their house and take a look around.” She grinned at me, then remembered and turned away.

  I turned on my laptop and while it warmed up Tammy pulled on a sweatshirt and went outside. I hooked up my cell phone, got online and started searching the web. After a few minutes, I heard the chunk-and-scatter of wood being chopped into kindling. For the next hour, I clicked my way through web pages, and Tammy got a real rhythm going with the hatchet; she had peeled down to her T-shirt and the wood was piling up. We didn’t need it. I watched for a while, then picked up the phone book and turned to electronics suppliers.

  Tammy came back in just as I finished organizing my notes. The exercise had done her good; she looked bigger, stronger, more relaxed.

  “Tea?”

  “Thank you,” she said, and smiled tentatively. “It’s great out there, real fresh and clean-smelling.” I smiled back, then got up to fill the kettle. Tammy looked at my neat pile of notes. “You look all set.”

  “I’ve worked out a beginning. But there’s nothing I can do for a while.” In New York both knees had been whole, and I’d still had my throat slit by a scarecrow with a razor.

  A house is more likely to be inhabitable in the long term if you approach it as a spaceship. Think of the walls and roof and windows as hull integrity; electrical, heating, and sewage systems as life support; floors and interior walls as decorated bulkheads. I had walls and a roof but would need to get the windows glazed before there was perfect hull integrity. I’d dug and installed the septic system months ago, but still needed to install toilet, bath, sinks, and shower. The electrical system could wait. Heating couldn’t. I needed glass, I needed a wood-burning stove, and I needed to check and repoint the chimney and flue. We would have to go to town for the glass and the stove, which for now left the chimney and flue.

  The cabin smelled of cold stone and raw wood, and my breath steamed. I stood in the middle of the unfinished floor and studied the massive fieldstone fireplace.

  “How are you with heights?” I asked Tammy.

  “Depends,” she said warily. “What did you have in mind?”

  It seemed that Tammy could climb a ladder up to the roof and the chimney, but not let go of it once she was there, which made the whole exercise rather pointless. I would have to wait a few days before I could get up a ladder and do the chimney repairs myself. Meanwhile, I took a look at the flue and inside stonework. Apart from a few minor repairs, the flue looked solid and well designed, and we didn’t need ladders for the first stage of interior pointwork.

  Under my direction, Tammy carried the bags of cement and buckets of water and mixed the two in the right proportions until I was satisfied. Then I showed her how to slap the mortar between the stone with an upward stroke, slice the excess off with the downstroke, and shape what was left with a fast right-to-left horizontal swipe.

  “The trick is to not get mortar all over the face of the stone because then you have to chip it off bit by bit when it’s dry, which is tedious and time-consuming.”

  Slap, chop, scrape. Slap, chop, scrape. Stretch, bend, sigh. Mindless rhythm of stone and mortar and steel, dusty scent of mortar and wet mixing board. It was probably not much over fifty degrees outside, and a breeze blew through the open door, but Tammy’s face grew lightly sheened with sweat, and my knee ached.

  I woke in the early hours. I took the phone outside and called Eddie’s number at the Journal-Constitution. I had to leave a message.

  “It’s me. I need follow-up on that George Karp story, whatever comes over the wires: new leads, witness statements, police activity, Karp’
s condition. I’m particularly interested in what evidence the police think they have. You’ve got my number.”

  The first two days, we worked only until lunch because I was still too tired to do a full day. When my knee got strong enough to lighten the strapping, and limber enough to climb cautiously up the ladder to repoint the chimney, I spent an hour every afternoon in the woods. There wouldn’t be many of these days left, and it gave me time to think about Karp and what might happen if he woke up and gave the police a good description; what might happen if the police took that description to the local cafés, talked to the waitress in the second café, where I’d left the book. I tried to think about moving money to a Swiss account and how I could build a new identity, but each time found myself wondering instead how I could make sure nothing went wrong in Arkansas, or contemplating what still had to be done at the cabin.

  Tammy and I didn’t speak much during the day, but at night, over food and coffee, we talked of this and that. I told her about Dree, the hairdresser, about Asheville, what I could remember of the history of the place. She told me of her undergraduate years at the University of Georgia, the friends she had lost touch with. We didn’t drink. We didn’t read. We would climb into our respective beds and sleep like stones, or at least Tammy did. I woke up suddenly, at all hours, thinking of Karp—I should have killed him, should have made sure; I shouldn’t have hurt him in the first place—wondering what was wrong with me, why I wasn’t already running, and where a nine-year-old girl might go to hide, if she could.

  One morning I woke before dawn. The air was still and cool and humid, the way it gets in an airtight metal box, no matter how nicely you disguise the interior with leather upholstery and good carpets, and I wanted to walk. I dressed quietly and crept out into the clearing. My breath bloomed before me like the thought balloon of an empty-headed cartoon character. There were no tracks in the hoarfrost. The predawn sky was like lead, with barely enough light to see. I was glad of my thick jacket.

  Amid the trees, leaves fell, gray and silent, like something filmed in the early days of cinema. The air was crisp enough to slice at the warm mucus membranes of my nose and throat, and smelled of iron. Autumn. This is where new life begins, with the seed falling on hard ground, being buried by dead leaves. The old life had to die first.

  Tammy was dressed and on what looked like her third cup of coffee by the time I got back. The bright interior of the trailer seemed garish after the cold clarity of the woods.

  “I was trying not to get worried,” she said.

  “I woke up this morning and it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen or heard a groundhog in days, that they’ve begun to hibernate, and I went out into the woods and saw the first gouged tree of the season—from deer, rubbing the velvet off their new antlers—and I realized it’s November.”

  “Okay. Let’s pretend I don’t understand what you’re talking about and need a few hints.”

  “Today is the second of November. My birthday.”

  “Your birth—”

  “And I was thinking, there are a few things we need, and I should return that Neon.”

  “Wait. Back up. How old are you?”

  “Thirty-two. And you were saying only yesterday that your hair needs cutting. We could go into Asheville. Maybe have something to eat, something to drink.”

  She blinked. Maybe it was her first cup of coffee after all. Then she smiled. “When do you want to leave, birthday girl?”

  We dropped the Neon off first, then I drove the truck to the salon, where there were already two people waiting; I stayed long enough to say hello to Dree and tell Tammy that if I wasn’t back by the time she was done I’d meet her in the café next door.

  On Church Street, I hesitated, engine running, outside the Asheville Savings Bank, while I thought, I can’t, I’m not ready, but had no idea what I meant. Eventually I parked.

  The manager’s office, white shelves holding books and plants surrounding her door, light wood desk, medium window, was as relaxed as she was. At my suggestion, she called Lawrence, my banker in Atlanta, and decided as a result that she would be very happy to attend to my every need as far as local business dealings were concerned. She came round to my side of the desk, shook hands, and prepared to escort me back into the public space and the care of a trusted teller.

  By the door, I noticed the bonsai tree. A perfect oak, ancient and stately, and only six inches high.

  “Eighty years old,” she said. “It was an anniversary present from my husband. Beautiful, isn’t it? It came with a book—”

  When I had tried to talk to her about setting up a Swiss account, my mouth had dried up, and I imagined a nine-year-old in a foreign country, with no love, no one to rely on. I don’t care, I told myself, I’ve never even met her—and what use would I be to her in jail? But I still hadn’t opened my mouth.

  “—torture it: prune the roots, clip out new limb growth, and wire the branches to achieve the desired shape. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I just let it grow.”

  The manager shook herself from contemplation of the tree and asked if, apart from facilitating an immediate account, there was anything else she could do to help.

  She gave me directions to Architectural Glass, two different hardware stores, and a place called Bathed in Light.

  Bathed in Light had exactly what I needed. I arranged to go back later that afternoon to pick up the bathtub, sinks, and other fixtures I had picked out. Thoughts of Karp and fingerprints got muddled up with stainless steel faucets and brass-accented showerheads.

  Architectural Glass was harder to find and there was nowhere nearby to park—unusual in Asheville. The woman who tried to answer my questions was one of those transplants from the Northeast who believe they are far, far better than anyone who has ever lived in any of the southern states. She smiled patronizingly while I explained what I wanted, then explained to me why that wouldn’t be possible. I asked to see the manager. She told me she hardly thought that would be necessary. I told her she was right, she hardly thought, which was why I wanted to see the manager. Now. It turned out I couldn’t have the glass until the day after tomorrow.

  By the time I got back in the truck, I’d been gone from Dree’s for two and a half hours. The hardware store and Radio Shack would have to wait. I parked outside the café and went in. No Tammy.

  “Aud!” she said from Dree’s station as I pushed open the door of the salon, “we were just wondering where you’d got to! Sorry it’s taking so long but Dree had three people in front of me.” She pointed at three bags lined up in the waiting area. “I even had time to do some shopping.” But then she turned around to the mirror again and she and Dree went back to talking a mile a minute about Dree’s mother, who according to Dree seemed to be getting weird in her old age, I mean like different, and Tammy totally agreed: that seemed to happen to moms at a certain age, they forgot they were old. It amazed me how people could bring out different facets of each other’s personalities. It looked as though they would be a while.

  “I’ll be next door, in the café, if—”

  “Oh, I’ll be through in just a minute,” Dree sang. “Why don’t you wait?”

  So I sighed and stayed and watched as the damp tangle around Tammy’s ears turned into beautifully shaped hair, and they talked about some upcoming party or other. Then they were both standing, swatting chunks of hair off the nylon robe, dusting at Tammy’s neck, admiring Dree’s handiwork in the mirror.

  “Tammy’s been telling me all about your cabin!” Dree said. “You didn’t tell me you were doing the work yourself.”

  “No. It’s—”

  “That’s thirty-five dollars,” she said to Tammy, then back at me, “Your cut’s holding up well, but don’t leave it more than another two weeks before you come in again.”

  “All my cash is gone,” Tammy said. It had been my cash to start with. I handed over two twenties and two ones.

  Dree put them in the till, then said, “Why don’t you
come tonight, too? It’s your birthday after all, right?”

  I stared at Tammy, but she didn’t even look apologetic. “Dree’s mother is having a party tonight. Dree wanted to know if I’d go with her.”

  “Yeah,” Dree said, “everyone else will be fifty.”

  You don’t know us, I wanted to say, What would your mother think? But then I remembered her mother was an ex-hippie woman-on-the-land feminist who had named her daughter after some Hindu earth mother figure, and it seemed clear that Tammy really wanted to go, and it was one way to not think about the New York police gathering clues, or a nine-year-old girl lying in bed alone at night wondering why no one loved her.

  “It’s just outside town,” Tammy said. “Closer to the cabin.”

  “Come about seven,” Dree said.

  “What should we bring?” I asked her.

  “Something to drink?” She didn’t sound too sure.

  “Perhaps if I knew what the party’s for …”

  “Well, you know. To have fun?”

  “It’s something they do every year,” Tammy said. “Dree’s mother and her old friends—about forty. Some bring guests, some don’t. They like meeting new people, right Dree?”

  Dree looked amazed at Tammy’s summary, but I should have trusted Tammy to know everything she needed in order to bring, wear, and talk about the appropriate things.

  “About seven then?” Tammy said to Dree. “And thanks for the cut.”

  She didn’t thank me for paying for it, just picked up two of the bags and left the third for me to carry. It was the heavy one.

  Tammy dropped the high school senior act as soon as we’d stowed the bags and entered the café. “What’s good here?”

  “I have no idea.” But the chili and corn bread looked worth trying. Tammy decided on Caribbean quesadillas with avocado and pineapple.

  I told her about the glass showroom, that we wouldn’t be able to fit the windows for at least two days, and then tried to describe the bathroom fixtures I’d chosen. I found I wasn’t very good at it. In the end, I got up and brought the catalogue from the truck.