Always (16 page)

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 car.”

“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?

She walked into the kitchen, carefully, as though she were not sure of her step. An injury? Might explain why she didn’t do stunts anymore. Water ran in the sink, then a kettle. A cupboard opened and shut. Half an hour. How many more stupid things could I say in half an hour?

I woke to find her draping me with a blanket. I struggled upright. She stepped back and pulled her robe tighter, and I got another waft of that soft, naked smell.

“I woke you,” I said. “Before. Earlier.” The smell had unmoored me. “It’s late. I’m sorry.”

She sat at the other end of the sofa, and tucked her legs up again. Her toes poked out beneath the robe. Small, like her hands. I imagined them soft between my palms.

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

She nodded tiredly. “I don’t need this. The police already kept me for hours. Did I have a grudge? Why? And when they got past that, it was, Did I know who did have a grudge? Did I know against whom? Did I know why? Had I seen any strangers on the set?”

“What did you say?”

“That you were the most suspicious character I’d seen all day.” She glanced at her wrist, realized it was naked. She got up again and tucked my blanket in around my shoulder. “Sorry. But it’s true. Besides, you know the police won’t come after you. Lift your hand.” She tucked my arm in. “Whoever you are, you’re off limits. To the reporters, too. My face was splashed all over the papers—and Sîan Branwell’s, of course. You? Nowhere to be found. But me, all anyone will think of now when they see the name Film Food is poison.” Her voice sounded distant, almost dispassionate. “The mad poisoner of Seattle. I worked so hard.”

I didn’t say, Don’t blame me. I didn’t say, It’s not my fault. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t her fault, either, but people were still blaming her. She had still lost her reputation. “Did you? See any strangers on the set?”

It seemed an effort for her to come back from her bleak internal landscape. “No.”

“Then I’ll get it all back. Your reputation.”

“Why would you care?” she said wearily.

Because your feet are turning blotchy red with the cold and I don’t want to think about why I want to warm them with my hands, why I want to make you tea, bring it to you, right here, and stroke that heavy hair— which gleams like soft metal that’s been cut with a knife—back from your cheek and tell you not to worry about the stain on your white coat, not to worry about anything.

“I’ll find them.”

She nodded, but she wasn’t really listening. She was too tired to care.

I carefully folded back the blanket and levered myself to my feet. The least I could do was let her get back to bed. “I’ll wait outside.”

She also stood, but this time with a slight smile. “No, you won’t.”

“I won’t?” I said, stupid in the face of my own horrible, insidious tenderness.

“No. Because I hear your ride.”

All I could hear was the uneven lumping of my heart. I concentrated. Outside, a car door thunked and a diesel engine rattled as the cab pulled away. She opened the door before he could knock.

He looked at me, then her. No one spoke. Then she stood to one side. “Can you walk?” Dornan said to me, and I nodded. “Keys?” I touched my jacket pocket, nodded again, and stepped forward. My knees held. “Tomorrow?” he said to Kick, who also nodded. She looked ill and tired and walking once again in her bleak world.

“I’ll find them,” I said.

Dornan walked by me down wooden steps, then concrete. I didn’t hear her shut the door behind us, but I couldn’t afford to split my concentration to turn and see if she was watching. I leaned both hands on the car roof while he opened the passenger door. He stood close while I eased myself into the seat, made sure my fingers were out of the way before he slammed the door. Then I looked. Kick’s door was closed.

Dornan fussed with the seat and seat belt and then the mirrors, the way people who rarely drive do.

“Do you know the way?”

“Mostly. I think.” He started the engine, released the brake, and we rolled down the street. There was absolutely nothing on the road, but at the traffic circle he checked his mirror twice, indicated, and drove counterclockwise all the way around to the left before turning.

We reached the interstate without incident.

“What happened?” he said.

I shrugged tiredly. I didn’t really know. He nodded as though I’d answered, and drove some more.

"Sîan Branwell,” I said.

He spared me a quick sideways glance.

“The name of the star of
Feral:
Sîan Branwell.”

“Yes. I found out yesterday.”

That wasn’t the only name he’d found out. “Why did she tell you her name and not me?”

“Maybe because I asked her nicely.”

And then the freeway was passing beneath what looked like the hanging gardens of Babylon. I blinked and tried to refocus, but the vision remained, and it was real: a park built over the interstate. It wasn’t hard to imagine the city overtaken by forest, fifty years after the apocalypse. For a moment I thought I smelled the rank breath of an unseen predator, big and lithe, pacing the car, hidden by trees.

THIS WEEK THERE WAS STILL LIGHT IN THE SKY WHEN I PARKED, AND UNDER THE
greasy hydrocarbon fumes of drive-time traffic, a hint of life scented. Twigs were swollen at their tips.

The white board was gone, but magazines were stacked under the pegboard. I tried to imagine how this space was used when I wasn’t here. Some kind of low-rent group-counseling space? A beggars-can’t-be-choosers law clinic? Sandra was absent. I wondered if she would come back. No matter. My guess was she already knew the most important things I would be teaching today.

We would begin, though, with action. Make them all feel big and strong. “The larynx,” I said. “To fracture it, you use the edge of your hand, like this.” I showed them how to make a knife-hand. “The tension is in the fingers, the thumb is bent. It’s easier and faster to strike outwards, palm down. Practice with both hands. If your attacker is on his back, you can come straight down, like a hatchet. If he’s on his stomach, you’d be better off with an axe kick to the spine.”

They spent a minute or two slashing the air, then I ran them through a few attacks on the prone bag. After that I hung the bag back on its frame, and we did some side strikes.

“The knife-hand will work very well, though obviously you’d have more reach with a pipe, even a length of hose. No,” I said, as Nina opened her mouth, “not panty hose. Garden hose.” Suze punched Nina on the upper arm and grinned. “Any other household objects that might work?”

“Wrench,” Suze said.

“Hammer,” said Katherine, after a moment’s thought.