Stay (25 page)

It was about six o’clock by the time we saw the truck and trailer. “I can walk now,” Luz said. I didn’t say anything. “Let me down, Aud.”

Stay in the world, Julia had said, but there were so many different worlds. There was one where I put Luz in my truck and we drove off to Little Rock, where I placed her with social services. There was one where I took her to Atlanta and she lived with me. There was one where we stopped by the truck and I got in and she kept walking, back to Jud and Adeline.

I set Luz down. “You can walk to the truck.”

“I don’t want to get in the truck. I want to go home.”

“I’m very tired, and I don’t want to leave the truck out here. If you get in, I’ll turn it round and take you home.”

“Swear on the Holy Bible?”

“I don't have a Bible.” I switched to Spanish. “But I swear on my own name that if you get in this truck, I will drive you home to Aba.” Aud rhymes with vowed. Another promise hanging around my neck.

“Today?” English. The language of mistrust.

“Right now.”

“And you won’t lock the doors?”

I should never have offered to buy her Turkish delight. “No. No one is going to lock a door on you ever again.”

As soon as we pulled up outside the farmhouse, she tore into the house and slammed the door behind her. I switched off the headlights and the engine, turned on the dome light. It seemed very bright. I pulled the Glock from my waistband and put it in the glove compartment. After a while I opened the glove compartment again and took out a folder and my phone. I looked at the phone. There was no one to call. The engine ticked.

The front door opened again. Adeline Carpenter. She took one step out and stopped. I turned the light off, put the phone back, picked up the folder, and climbed down. The pain was constant now. I could hang on perhaps another hour.

“Luz says… well, I can’t make head nor tail of it, but she’s here, and you’re here…” She waved vaguely with her left hand, and her eyes were brilliant and glassy. “And your face…” She pulled an inhaler from her apron pocket and sucked hard. I thought for a moment she might pass out.

“Mrs. Carpenter, may I come in? We have a lot to talk about.”

W
e sat at the kitchen table,
on our third cup of coffee. The same stew still simmered by the stove but the room looked flatter and harsher in electric light. Luz was with Button, watching Jud work on the truck. Adeline had watched while I cleaned the grit and blood from my face and smeared the graze with antibiotic ointment. She gave me ibuprofen for the pain. Her breathing improved as I washed away the evidence of violence. I hadn’t mentioned my knee or ribs.

I had given Adeline an edited version of what had happened, up to the point where Luz and I walked back from the woods, and her confusion was mounting.

“So Miz Goulay’s in a car in the woods?”

“Yes.”

“And she’s not coming back?”

“When she wakes up, she’ll untie Mike, and they’ll both spend a fair amount of time searching for the car keys, which they won’t find, after which they’ll have to walk out. They might walk the wrong way, but it shouldn’t be cold enough tonight to do them any harm.”

“But she won’t…” She took a moment to breathe. “She won’t be coming back after Luz?”

“No.”

“And…” She used her inhaler again. Breathed. Another snort. The color came back to her face. “She won’t go to the police?”

“No. If the police were called, she would have a lot of explaining to do.” The list of charges a good lawyer could level at Goulay would be long, beginning with kidnap of a minor, trafficking in illegal immigrants, carrying a concealed weapon without a permit… “Jean Goulay will never bother you again. Luz will stay here, with you and your husband and Button. If that’s what you want.”

“Yes! And her… Mr. Karp?”

“He’s in a persistent vegetative state, the kind of coma from which you never wake. He’ll get weaker and weaker and then die.”

“She told the truth about that, then.”

I opened the folder, spread out Luz’s birth and adoption certificates, her passport and medical reports. “The only people on this earth now responsible for Luz are you and your husband. And me.”

She frowned. “Where did you get those?”

“From George Karp’s apartment.”

She reached out and touched the birth certificate with a fingertip. “In New York. Miz Goulay said he was beaten half to death, but she didn’t say who by.”

“George Karp was not a good man.”

She nodded, but I wasn’t sure if she was agreeing or simply acknowledging what I’d said. “You weren’t here on vacation, were you?” she said.

“No.”

“And it wasn’t just chance that you came by when we ran out of gas.” She was breathing fast, but this time it wasn’t asthma. “You told a pack of lies to get into my house.”

“I had good reason.”

“You lied, just like that Goulay woman. You even lied about having cancer.”

“I never said I had cancer.”

“Don’t you get clever with me! You know what you meant for me to think.”

“Listen to—”

“No, Miz Aud Thomas or whoever the heck you are, I’ve had my fill today of being bullied and lied to. You’re sitting in my kitchen. I don’t have to listen to one word you say.” She folded her arms and leaned back in her chair. Adeline discovers strength through righteous anger. Shame she hadn’t been able to break free of the Kind Christian Lady persona a little earlier.

The stew simmered peacefully for a while. The dishes on display were a willow pattern; one had a carefully mended crack. Under the table, my knee was swelling.

Eventually she couldn’t stand it. “Just what is it you want with us?”

“A bargain. You don’t want Luz to go, and Luz doesn’t want to go, but you can’t afford to keep her. I can help.”

“Why would you want to do that? What’s Luz to you?”

“My motives have no bearing on the matter.”

“They do for me.”

If I sat here another hour, I wouldn’t be able to drive. “Did you know that the legal age for marriage is fourteen in Georgia, and just twelve in Delaware?” She kept her arms folded, but now she looked uncomfortable. “Wasn’t too hard to put two and two together, was it? Don’t get righteous with me. You have no moral leg to stand on.”

Another pause. “What do you mean, help?”

“Luz stays here. I pay you and untangle the immigration situation. When she’s eighteen she gets to choose her own life.”

She half unfolded her arms, bewildered now. “But why?”

I ignored that. “We’ll come to an agreement, write a contract, a covenant. For the money I send I’ll expect certain things.”

“Why should I trust you? I don’t know you. I don’t even like you.” Heady stuff, freedom. But her timing was inconvenient.

“You don’t have to like me. I don’t have to like you. We simply have to abide by an agreement. For example, one of my conditions would be that she goes to school. A good school.”

A long, cautious pause. “She’s got to attend church.”

“Fine. On the condition that when I set up health and other insurance, you take her in for regular checkups—physical, dental, optical—to medical professionals we agree on beforehand.” She did not say yes or no to that. “If you break the terms of the agreement, I come and take Luz away. If I break them, I give you the documents.” It would be easy enough to take them back again. “All we have to do is make the agreement, and all communication between us will thereafter be through my lawyer, who will hold the documents until Luz is eighteen. Agreed?”

“If you tell me who you are, and why you’re doing this.”

“No.”

“Then we’re done talking.”

“You don’t need my name.”

“I might not be Miss College Mouth Audrey Thomas or whoever the hell you are, but I know a woman who’s hiding something pretty big when I see her. Checks and insurance and doctors. We aren’t talking pin money here. So I want to know who you are and what Luz is to you.”

The key to negotiation lies in ensuring the other party needs to reach an agreement more than you do
, my mother told me once when I was twelve.
If you’re willing to walk away, you will win
. When I asked her what to do if it was something you really, really wanted, she said,
If you have a personal stake, get someone else to negotiate on your behalf
. That only works if you have someone else.

If you’re willing to walk away… But, Choose, Julia had said, and she had loved me. “I won’t tell you my name.”

“Then—”

“But I will tell you this. I used to be something like that man, like Geordie Karp, but I’ve changed. I’ve— I’ve seen the error of my ways.” I remembered the sampler. “Now I want to do unto others as I would be done by. I want to atone for the past. Helping Luz, helping you all—Luz and you and your husband, and Button—is the only way I know to make it even partway right.”

Long silence. “I met that man but once,” Adeline said meditatively, “and I didn’t like him. Not one bit. He wasn’t the kind to give anyone anything—especially not something like this.” She leaned forward and tapped Luz’s documents. “So I reckon you took them, or maybe made him give you them. So I’m thinking that maybe it’s not a coincidence that he’s in the hospital mostly dead and you’re sitting here talking to me about his daughter. No, close your mouth, I haven’t finished. You had something to do with his hurt. It might be that you hired some roughnecks to settle his hash. It might be that you had good reason. But I don’t much care. He was a bad man. A very bad man. You say you used to be like him. Now, you don’t seem that way to me, except for all your lying, but how can I tell for sure? The way it looks to me, Miss Walk-in-Here-with-a-Big-Checkbook, is that I could be getting myself into just the same mess I got myself into before. There’s a lot I don’t understand and don’t know, and that means maybe one day someone, maybe you, could show up at my door and take Luz, take my child away. And she is mine. She may not have come from my loins in blood and sweat and tears like Button did, but she’s in here.” She thumped her breastbone. “And I need something—some kind of guarantee that’s more than a lawyer’s paper—and I reckon that’s your name.”

I was sipping air carefully, trying to protect my ribs. “What will you give me in return?”

“The time of day.” She folded her arms again.

I stared past her for almost a minute, then reached into my pocket for my wallet. Moving, even my right arm, was getting harder. I pulled out my license and stared at it. The face in the picture seemed naked and defenseless.

“I’ll show you this license on two conditions. One, that you never write my name down anywhere, ever. Two, that you tell no one what it is, not even Jud.” And that you treat her like a daughter. That you love her, because she’s only nine years old.

She considered, nodded, and held out her hand. I gave her the license.

“Aud Torvingen. What kind of name is that?”

“Norwegian.”

She nodded again, mouthed the name to herself a couple of times, and handed it back.

Now she had my name. And a woman in New York had seen my face. One chance phone call could put them together.

“Aud? Miz Torvingen?”

I wrenched my attention back to the table. “Yes.”

“Your color isn’t so good.” Kind Christian Lady returns, magnanimous in victory.

“I’m fine.”

“Yes, well.” She picked up her coffee mug. “Get you a refill?”

I shook my head, paid scant attention as she got up and poured for herself. What was it like to care so fiercely for a scrap of humanity you could carry as easily as a small sack of potatoes? What was it like to be the one so cared for? “Why does Luz call you Aba?”

She cleared her throat and made a production of adding sugar and cream. She cleared her throat again. “She called me that from the beginning. Two years now. It’s from Abuela, Spanish for grandmother. I looked it up,“ she added defiantly.

“That’s not all you taught her that you weren’t supposed to, is it?”

“No.”

“I’d like to hear about it, about Luz. Will you tell me?”

She turned and sat. “She was such a sad little thing, always weeping and talking in Spanish. Wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t talk English, wouldn’t take any comfort. I didn’t know what to do, until one day I took Jud’s truck to the library and borrowed a cassette and a book. Had to buy a cassette player too. Had to hide it from Jud. But, oh, you should have seen her sweet face when I put that tape on!” She wiped absently at her eyes. “A flood of words! What with the book and everything, I learned to say Hello and Eat this, and after an hour or two, she was eating pretty as you please and calling me Aba.”

“And you two talk Spanish to each other.”

“God gave her her own language and I don’t see anything wrong in having it spoken in this house.”

“Mrs.— Adeline, I’m not criticizing. Just the opposite. But there’s more, isn’t there?”

She twisted her wedding ring. “Math. She could add and subtract if she did it in Spanish, so I didn’t see the harm of showing her how in English. And you can’t get much done in the house if you don’t know how to multiply and divide. And then… Well, you’ve talked to her, she’s a curious little thing. Once she had the bit between her teeth she had to know more. So I bought some encyclopedias at a yard sale and I taught her, and after a while I started sneaking to the library for extra books when Jud had them both off swimming or suchlike. He doesn’t know. I thought it best.”

“How much of an obstacle is he likely to be?”

“Mostly I worried, before, about following the agreement we had with Miz Goulay. Jud’s stubborn about such things. A man’s word is his bond.” She gave me a complicit woman-to-woman smile that congealed suddenly: no doubt remembering I was nothing like a good Christian wife and mother.

“Perhaps it would be best for you to speak to him privately.”

“I can speak of it some,” she said slowly. “You’ll have to do the money talk.”

“Yes. But perhaps you could give me an idea of what he might think was fair.” I gathered the documents. “How much did Karp send you a month?”

“Five hundred dollars.”

According to his records, it had been four hundred. “And do you think that’s fair? Take a moment to think it through.”

“Six hundred?” she hazarded.

“Let’s begin with seven-fifty, and review the situation after three months.” By my estimate, they would need at least fifteen hundred a month to give Luz what I thought she needed, but for the Carpenters, especially Jud, that might be an immoral sum, easily confused with a temptation of Mammon.

“We could manage with that.” She got a determined look on her face. “There’s her food, and clothes, and things for her room, not to mention all the extra trouble of teaching her good English. It won’t be long before she’s a teen, eating us out of house and home, growing out of all her clothes. Then there’s the books…”

She was rehearsing her argument for Jud. I felt around under the table until I found the transmitter. It peeled off easily and dropped into my hand.

“… thousand and one other things a man doesn’t pay any attention to…”

Once they were used to the arrangement, I would buy items such as a television and computer and music system. I’d provide the money for private tuition so Luz could catch up on those subjects Adeline might not have covered. I’d pay to send her to interesting places on vacation, make—

All money and no love. The way my mother had been with me.

No. It wasn’t the same. It wasn’t. I wasn’t Luz’s mother— she already had one, or at least someone who loved her.

I stood carefully. “You’ll talk to Jud tonight? Then I’ll take my leave. I’ll talk to my lawyer and get a preliminary agreement drafted. I’ll come back tomorrow. Afternoon.” I was sweating; the bug cut into my palm.

There was still the booster unit in the tub of flowers by the door, which would be easy enough to retrieve on my way out, and the transmitters upstairs.

“If I may, I’ll go up and use your facilities before I leave.”

I used both hands on the stair rail, and counted backwards from two thousand in sevens as I climbed. Pain is just a message.

In the Carpenters’ room, the back window was open. Faint voices—Button chattering, Jud answering, one short phrase from Luz, an acknowledgment from Jud—drifted up on the night air. The bug was exactly where I’d left it.