Always

by Nicola Griffith

  "Perhaps when next I speak to the police liaison he will be able to tell us something.”

  The coffee urn. Had to be. Kuiper? No, she had been surprised when I’d said, when I said those things. Somebody had made me say and do things that . . . Somebody had rendered me helpless, somebody . . . "Uh,” I said as my heart skipped a beat and then slammed against my rib cage in the wrong place.

  “Aud?” She was leaning over me. “Aud?” I didn’t have the breath to speak.

  Suzanne ran in from the other room, brushed my mother aside, thrust her stethoscope through a gap in the pajama top.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “Shssh,” she said, and frowned—the skin between her eyes rolled in a plump sausage—and moved the stethoscope slightly.

  Whatever it was seemed to be over. My heart pulsed neatly, in the right place.

  Suzanne straightened and slung the stethoscope around her neck. “Mild arrhythmia,” she said. “Not too worrying, but a doctor might be a good idea.”

  “I’ll see to it,” my mother said.

  Suzanne hesitated, then nodded, and went back into the sitting room. No one had asked my opinion. I struggled to sit up.

  “Please, Aud, try to rest. I don’t think you realize just how serious this could have been.” She smoothed her eyebrows again. “I consulted with your friend about your accommodations and we agreed to install you in a two-roomed suite so that Suzanne can remain here as long as you feel she can be helpful. Your friend also has been very helpful.” Oh, yes, very. “The police have promised an extensive inquiry, and I’ll keep you updated with any developments. All your belongings have been brought over from your hotel. If there is anything else you need, ask Suzanne or call me. Now I will speak to your friend, and to Eric. He should be here within the hour.”

  Her back was very straight as she walked away, despite the fact that, on top of jet lag, she must have been up all night taking charge of my life.

  It took a long time and a lot of effort but I eventually dragged the room service menu from the bedside table to the bed, and dialed the right numbers. I knew exactly what I wanted, but found I kept ordering random words from the menu (“delicious,” or “sales tax”). After a few tries I found that if I kept my sentences to two words or less—scrambled eggs, two please, tea, English breakfast—I could manage. I concentrated on the fact that I could manage, not the fact that I had to.

  Breakfast arrived ten minutes before Dornan. The food tasted like something forced from a crack in the earth.

  “Well,” he said, looking at the tray on the bed, “it doesn’t look as though that was a success.”

  “Taste those eggs.”

  “Thank you, but I’ve already—”

  “Taste them, Dornan, or at least get the tray out of my sight. They taste vile, and they smell even worse.” Or at least that’s what I tried to say, but it came out as a river of muddled syllables. I stopped. Tried again. Stopped. His eyes glistened. “Bad,” I said. “Bad food.”

  “The eggs are bad?”

  “And the butter is rancid and the milk for the tea curdled.” Cremble degg. Runny kid. I took a deep breath. “Butter. Milk. Ranky—rancid.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you? My taste. They’ve done something. The drugs. Everything tastes of sulfur.” I stopped, this time in surprise, because I had made sense, and was shocked to see Dornan half close his eyes in relief. Brain damage. My mother hadn’t mentioned that possibility. He hopped up, lifted the tray, carried it to the dressing table, grinned as he popped a strawberry in his mouth. “Shame,” he said, sitting down again. “They’re delicious.”

  “The fruit was all rall—right,” I said.

  “You want me to bring that back, then?”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know. Forget the food. Why did you let my mother take over?” Mumbly ho-taker. But most of it had come out all right.

  “All her suggestions seemed like sensible ones.”

  I said carefully, “Why her hotel?”

  “Better than being in hospital under restraint.”

  “Wasn’t that bad.” I should have signed those papers, made sure he had power-of-attorney for health care.

  “You weren’t making any sense whatsoever. And you were seriously alarming the natives. One of the police officers who was brought in had to be treated for a bruised shoulder and seemed pretty cross about something. They had to Taser you, Torvingen. Twice. I’m guessing that if it weren’t for your mother you’d have a few bruises of your own and be facing charges.”

  “You were at the hospital?”

  “I was. I have to say you seemed to be happier when you were stoned. You might have been talking gibberish, but your smile was radiant.”

  Poison had made the world so beautiful. But I wouldn’t be able to say that. “Strawberries,” I said. “Bring me them.”

  He brought me a napkin, a fork, and the dish of fruit and put them by me on the bed.

  I ate one. “Still at the Edgewater?”

  He nodded. “I’ve kept your room there, too, just in case. But I thought you might like to stay here, perhaps, for some privacy.” He said that with a slight question, but I had no idea what he meant by it. When I didn’t respond, he said, “Your mother wanted me to stay with you. She isn’t easy to refuse.”

  “No.” We sat in silence for a moment. “So. You met her. Tell me.”

  DORNAN FOR GOT to take the tray with him when he left and I was too tired to call out to Suzanne.

  When Eric Loedessoel arrived five minutes later, his eyes strayed to its contents while he explained why he was there.

  “I have an M.D. but am not a practicing physician. I can’t treat you or formally advise you in a medical capacity, but I have consulted with colleagues at Harborview Medical Center, and believe I can help you with any questions you might have, on a stopgap basis. But I want to make it clear that in my opinion tomorrow you should consult a fully qualified and licensed physician.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “For your help so far.”

  He looked at the tray again. “I see you didn’t eat much,” he said. “Was it the taste? But you can still smell?”

  I nodded.

  “Many of the other victims are displaying similar symptoms.”

  Victims.

  “Those that are conscious, that is. One of the as yet unidentified compounds has a tendency to depress the autonomic nervous system. Two of the victims are being assisted with their breathing. There was a third, but he is already managing to breathe nicely on his own again. The reasonable conclusion is that the effects are probably temporary.”

  I had never been a victim before.

  “. . . worry about, as long as you avoid over-exertion. I’d like to look at your notes, if I may?”

  I nodded.

  He left and came back with the clipboard. This time I noticed his faint scent of cologne, and knew whose pajamas I was wearing.

  “. . . few days, probably an unnecessary precaution.” He was looking at me.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Suzanne noted an arrhythmia. It’s probably nothing to worry about, a result of toxic stress, but I’d suggest avoiding taxing your heart in the next few . . .”

  I lost track again of what he was saying. All these favors mounting up. Reduced to relying on the kindness of strangers. I had to get back to my own hotel.

  “. . . emotional lability . . .”

  It was all that caterer’s fault. Kuiper. She should watch her coffee more carefully. Dancing in Pioneer Square.

  “. . . hallucination flashbacks . . .”

  I woke midafternoon. My breathing was a lot better. When I sat up, the walls shimmered but didn’t dance.

  My clothes on the chair were carefully chosen: Eileen Fisher trousers in black linen, with pockets; a layering T-shirt, white; a V-necked silk sweater; underwear; cashmere socks; low-heeled boots. They would do for any occasion and temperature. I knew as surely as though I’d seen my mother d
o it that she had chosen them. I looked around the rest of the room: my laptop on the dressing table, not where it belonged, but where I would see it when I was well enough to sit up for any length of time; my jacket laid casually over the back of an armchair; my luggage stowed beneath the window, again, not where it belonged, but where I would see it and infer that the rest of my belongings were in the closet. My wallet, I knew, would be in the pocket of the jacket; my toiletries would be in the bathroom.

  After five minutes of sitting and turning my head this way and that without dizziness, I felt confident enough to drag myself to the bathroom.

  I sat on the toilet, and thought about beauty and poison, and the fact that my mother knew me so well she could use my own belongings to send the kind of message that would get through the drug fog: I was able to leave anytime I needed to. I stared at the silk pajama bottoms pooled at my feet and kicked them off, then unbuttoned the top and dropped it on the floor. My skin still smelled of cologne, but faintly.

  I came to with a start, cold, and hauled myself to my feet, and flushed the toilet. Suzanne came into the room just as I got to the bed. The left side of her hair was flat; she must have been taking a nap, too.

  “Need some help?” She reached out, but hesitantly, unwilling to touch naked skin without permission. Or maybe she had just never seen healed knife and bullet wounds.

  “No. Thank you.” I climbed onto the bed, trying to look as though it cost less effort than it did, wondering, even as I did so, why I bothered. Suzanne wasn’t a predator waiting to pounce at the first sign of weakness; she was a nurse.

  “Actually, yes. You could help. My laptop. It’s on the dresser.” Four-word sentences were now easy.

  She brought me the laptop, set it up—it didn’t take long; the signal here must have been better than at the Edgewater—and refilled my water glass. “Make sure you drink it,” she said, and left.

  I had two e-mails. One was from Luz, one from Rusen: the information I’d requested. While it was downloading, I fell asleep.

  When I woke up, it was dark again. After midnight. I was viciously hungry, but couldn’t face the idea of fruit. Rusen’s document blinked at me. I scrolled through it. The text bulged and shrank on the screen like a squeezed accordion. I found I was stabbing the keys so hard the casing creaked. I drank the water. The fact that I had to annoyed me. The nasty nylon laptop case, the fact that my laptop was there—that I was in bed in this room—that my clothes were laid out neatly on the chair, that some strange woman was sleeping in the room next door and that I had had no say in any of it made me want to hurl the glass at the wall. I wasn’t even sure if I could. I didn’t even know if the room was registered in my name. Was I being treated like a dependent, like a child? I was wearing Loedessoel’s pajamas. Even my skin smelled of him, the man who had married my mother. My mother, who had crooked her finger and said, Come, and I’d climbed obediently onto a plane.

  I put the glass down. My heart squeezed and released, squeezed and released as my adrenal gland pumped hormones into my bloodstream and arteries widened and surface capillaries shut down. The muscles in my jaw pulled my teeth together, my thighs twitched, I was too hot. And somebody had done this to me. They had dumped a cup of powder in a coffee urn and turned my life inside out, like a sock.

  They wouldn’t have been able to if that bloody woman, Kuiper, had been paying attention. And why did she think I was out to hurt her precious Rusen, anyway? No doubt she was laughing, laughing right now, telling a friend all the stupid things I’d said.

  And then I was hunting for her information, and found it: Film Food, Kuiper, Victoria K. prop., 4222 Myrtle Avenue, in Wallingford, just four blocks from the Jitterbug, according to MapQuest. And it made perfect sense to get out of bed and put on those carefully selected clothes, collect the draped-just-so jacket, complete with wallet and car keys, and leave.

  MURPHY’S, THE pub on the corner, was shut. Restaurants, bars, and movie theaters were dark. Lights changed at an empty intersection. It was so quiet I could hear the new leaves of the maple tree under which I’d parked hiss and shiver. The moon was small and bright. Wallingford slept. Well, Kuiper wasn’t going to.

  Number 4222 was a small, wooden bungalow, original pre-World War I cedar shakes painted sage green, woodwork bright white. No light on the porch. No light on most of the porches; obviously a low-crime area. Sodium streetlights pooled like pale brass on sidewalks, whose concrete had been wrenched out of true decades ago by the growth of tree roots. Here and there it gleamed more palely, where the concrete had been replaced. Still silent, no tree frogs, no crickets—just the river of interstate traffic about a mile away. The scent of spring flowers, delicate as lace, there and gone again. Utterly unlike Atlanta.

  From the path, three concrete steps—dark, with moss growing on the uprights—led to eight wooden steps, painted a darker green than the cedar shingles, to a wooden porch. The door had glass insets, and a brass lock plate that hadn’t been replaced for forty years.

  Both sets of steps had rails, but added recently, sometime in the last five years, though not very competently; the right-hand rail wobbled. Cheap, gimcrack thing; aluminum painted black to look like cast iron. Out of place.

  There was no knocker on the door, no doorbell. I banged on the white gloss-painted panel between the glass. The house boomed. The sound rolled up and down the silent street. I banged again, thumping the door panel with the meaty part of my fist, five times, putting some weight behind it.

  “I know you’re here,” I shouted cheerily. Her van was in the driveway. Bang. Bang, bang. Not a single neighbor’s light flicked on. Polite, circumspect, incurious. Very Scandinavian.

  “It’s me”—bang—“a victim”—bang—“of your coffee.” Bang, bang. “I don’t”—bang—“even like”—bang—“coffee.” Bang, bang. “Kuiper.” Or whatever she called herself. “Kuiper.” Bang. “Come out.” Bang, bang.

  Between one bang and the next, the hot, tight clarity of adrenaline drained away and I found myself panting. Something in my peripheral vision fluttered. My palm squeaked as it slid down the glossy woodwork. I locked my knees.

  “No,” I said. "You won’t. You will not.” And I hung there, between standing and collapse, smelling the mysterious flowers again, wondering what they were.

  The porch vibrated briefly, and with an effort that made the scar near my jugular tighten, I pushed against my hands and swayed back onto my heels before a deadbolt rattled and the door opened.

  Bare feet on a lovely, ribbon-work inlaid oak floor. They must be cold. White toweling robe to her knees, and hair trapped under the collar where she’d pulled it on in a hurry. Phone in her left hand. Didn’t she know that the time to call the police was before opening the door? I opened my mouth, but the graphite sheen under her eyes, her drawn face, shocked me silent.

  “What—” she began, but the flutter in the corner of my eye turned to flapping, and I lost the lock on my knees. “Fuck,” she said, and grabbed me under the arms before I went down. The phone dug into my armpit. For a moment my face hung near the opening in her robe, and I breathed the soft, buttered-toast scent of sleepy, naked woman. Then she shifted her grip, stepped in close enough to lean my forehead on her collarbone, and stuffed the phone in her pocket. “Fuck,” she said again, and half dragged me across the living room to a three-seater sofa. She dropped me awkwardly, but the old leather was soft. Luz would have liked it.

  She rearranged her robe, then leaned across me and switched on a table lamp. She looked down. The exertion had given her a bit of color. “Tell me why I shouldn’t call the police”—she bent and peered at me more closely— “or maybe an ambulance.”

  “I’ll be all right,” I said, sitting like an abandoned rag doll. I was so very tired of feeling helpless.

  “What are you doing here? No, never mind. Just keep still. I’ll call you a cab.” She straightened and turned this way and that, as though looking for something.

  “No need. I have a ca
r.”

  “You’re not fit to drive.”

  “I drove here.”

  “Right. And that worked out so well for you.” She wasn’t really paying attention, still scanning the room for whatever it was.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Of course you are.”

  The color was fading in her cheeks, and she looked ill again. “Did you take some, too?”

  “What?”

  “Drugs. Did you take any?”

  She looked at me this time. “No.”

  “So why do you look so terrible?”

  She folded her arms. It took me a minute to understand that her strange expression was hurt.

  “No, that’s not . . . I didn’t mean it to sound . . .” I wanted to shrink to the size of an ant and creep into the cracks of the sofa.

  “You do seem to have the gift of tongues. Speaking of which, you’ll have to explain the ‘tongue palace’ reference to me sometime.” She went back to scanning the room. Stilled. Sighed. Fished the phone from her pocket. “Now, a cab.”

  “No cab. I’ll call my friend, Dornan.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Him.”

  I couldn’t interpret her tone and she didn’t offer any hints. “His number’s—”

  “I have his number.” She crossed to an enormous chair, in the same battered-looking leather, at the other end of the living room, consulted a notebook, and dialed. While it rang she pulled her feet up under her, tucked her hair behind her ears, brushed an imaginary fleck from her robe. “Hey,” she said, “it’s Kick.”

  Kick?

  “Oh, don’t worry, I know. Three-thirty. Yep.”

  Her name was Kick?

  “That’s right,” she said, staring up and to the right at nothing, as people did on the phone. “Because I have a friend of yours prostrate in my living room. Uh-huh, the very same. Yes. Well, fairly lucid. Soon? Okay.”

  She put the phone down and wiped her face with her hand. “He might not be able to get here for half an hour. Depends how long it will take him to get a cab.” She stood wearily. “I don’t imagine you want coffee.”

  I shook my head. Three-thirty in the morning. What had I been thinking, banging on her door at this time?