Stay (3 page)

I drove through the toylike downtown to carefully streetscaped Wall Street, with its new old-fashioned lights and neatly ordered trees. Everything was very clean, very open. Healthy-looking people smiled. It was like moving through the set of a 1960s TV show of the Utopian future. There was a parking space in front of the Heads Up Salon. Someone had even left time on the meter.

A young woman was cutting a man’s hair in the brightly lit interior. “Be right with you,” she called, looking up from her work, beginning to smile. The smile went out and she stepped forward a pace. “Ma’am? Are you all right?”

“Yes. Fine, thank you.”

“You just sit right down and let me bring you some water.”

She was the first stranger I had seen without metal and glass between us in months. I experimented with a smile. “No, really. I just… It was a little warm out there.”

“Well then, if you’re sure? I’ll just finish up here. Won’t take but five minutes.”

I feigned an overwhelming interest in the rows of hair care products lining the shelves above the large plants near the cash register, and she went back to work. After a minute or two, I could breathe normally. I didn’t want to flinch every time the hairdresser or her customer laughed at something the other said. I tried to remember how small talk worked. The weather. The news. I didn’t know any news. What a lovely town this is… ? Yes, and What a nice little salon… I could do this.

The customer admired his cut in two mirrors, stood, paid, left.

“Your turn,” the woman announced. I sat in the swiveling chair. We looked at ourselves in the mirror. She ran her fingers casually through my hair. I made myself sit still. “It looks as though it’s been a while.”

“Yes.”

She fingered a few inches thoughtfully. “You’d look great in one of those new, sleek cuts that you just wash and go. But they’re very short.” She cupped both hands around my face, looked at me in the mirror, got suddenly enthusiastic. “I think we should do it! With your eyes and height you could carry it off!”

“I’m game,” I said, and tried a grin, and just like that I went from stranger to conspirator. It was easier than I remembered. A chameleon, Julia had called me
Don’t you ever get lost, pretending to be so many people
? I hadn’t understood, then.

“I’m Aud,” I said abruptly. “This is my first trip into Asheville.”

“Oh.” She blinked. “Well, I’m Dree. I’ve lived here since I was two.”

“Dree isn’t a name I’ve heard before,” I said as she led me over to the sinks.

“It’s from India or Pakistan or something. My mom wasn’t sure. Maybe it’s short for something. I tried looking it up once, but couldn’t find it. Lean forward.” She wrapped a thick, soft towel around my shoulders. “My mom was one of those old feminists, you know, who came out here to live on the land in a women’s community.” Slush of water from the tap. Squirt of liquid. “This is chamomile mint ” She held her hand under my nose. It smelled light and young, like Dree. “Lean back.”

The water was warm, the shampoo cold. For some reason it wasn’t as hard to have her touch me, now that she knew my name. Her fingers were very strong and brisk. I wondered who she went home to, whether she washed their hair for them in the shower or bath, if she knew how easy it would be to hit me across the larynx with a shampoo bottle and watch me choke to death. I almost sat up.

“I’m going to use an intensifying conditioner Like all our products, it’s made from all-natural extracts and not chemicals.”

“Everything is made with chemicals,” I said at random. “Water is a chemical molecule: made of hydrogen and oxygen. The air we breathe, even the food we eat: carbon, nitrogen—”

Her hands had stilled, so I made myself stop, but then I felt her shrug and she laughed. “Okay. So it’s made with naturally occurring stuff, from plants, not things made with a giant chemistry set. Better?”

“Better.”

She finished rinsing my hair, wrapped it efficiently in the towel. “Come over to my station.”

I sat in the chair before the mirror and she combed my hair through and picked up her scissors. “Last chance to say no.”

“Go ahead.”

She pulled wet hair up between her index and middle fingers, like a ribbon, and cut. “Will you be in town for a while?”

“I’ve inherited some property a few miles from here. I’m renovating it. ”

Pull, snip. Pull, snip. “To live, or just a vacation home?”

“I haven’t decided.”

“It used to be that you couldn’t get a job around here unless it was as a forest ranger in the park service, or working at Biltmore. At least not year-round. Summer jobs, waiting tables, selling crafts, during tourist season. But then people started to live here.”

“Seems like a nice town.”

She shrugged without missing a beat in her cutting rhythm. “I suppose. People are moving here all the time from Atlanta and other big cities.” Snip, pull, snip. “Tilt your head sideways for me, please. Ken—that’s my brother—works for McCann construction, and he’s never been so busy. They’re building houses as fast as they can nail together two planks. Not just itty-bitty things, either, but monsters with pools and party decks, the whole nine yards.” Snip, pull, snip. “Oh, this is going to look good. Such lovely hair. Bet you’ve never wanted to color it.”

“Can’t say I have.”

“And there’s a bunch of— Hold on while I just lower you a bit. How tall are you, anyway? —bunch of businesses that moved close to town a while ago that just keep getting bigger and bigger. There’s Sonopress, ITT, BASF, all those high-tech places. They’re even going to expand the airport.”

“I didn’t know Asheville had an airport.”

“It’s about as big as my left toe. But like I said, that’s going to change. My mom’s always moaning about how fast everything’s growing.”

Her mother’s opinions carried us until she exchanged the scissors for a hair dryer, which roared to life like an old Norton Commando and effectively put a stop to all conversation.

“There.” She turned it off, spun my chair this way and that, nodding to herself. “Take a look.” She turned me back to face the mirror.

“It looks great.”

“I think it works,” she said complacently, and hummed to herself as she pulled off my towel and brushed a few stray hairs from my collar.

She went behind the cash register. “Would you like some product—some of that conditioner? Then that’ll be just thirty-five dollars.”

She zipped my card through the magnetic reader and the receipt churned silently from its machine. I added in a good tip and signed.

“That cut should be trimmed every six to eight weeks, so I’ll expect you back before too long.”

“I’ll be here.” And then I was outside, with the sun warm on my newly exposed neck, and feeling hungry. I started walking.

The heart of downtown Asheville looks as though some mad city planner scooped up half the art deco buildings in Miami, dumped them at random points around a small town square, then stuck in a fountain for pretty, along with a few postmodern structures whose only apparent aesthetic purpose was to reflect in their green glass the older, more substantial buildings. Everything was achingly clean.

As I moved more or less east through the streets, the character of the passersby gradually changed from individual people striding purposefully on everyday errands to that amble, stop, gawk-while-we-hold-hands-and-block-the-street pattern of the tourist.

I turned around and marched down a street called Biltmore Avenue, looking for a place real people might belong.

I found two pubs, practically side by side. I avoided the one with the aggressively shiny brew kegs, wine list, and perky logo, and chose the one that boasted Forty Beers on Tap!

It was like stepping back in time to being a teenager in England; the place smelled of smoke and beer and felt utterly peaceful. Patrons talked in low murmurs, minding their own business over tall glasses half filled with dark, murky brew and streaked with white foam. Smoke curled bluely through the occasional slant of sunlight; dark wood gleamed. I found a table in a corner, facing the door, and ordered pizza and a pint of Greenman ale, which turned out to be more like a bitter than anything else and slipped down beautifully. The pizza, when it came, had everything on it. The sausage was chewy and tough and I savored every bite. I ordered another beer, and half drowsed in the snug warmth, until I felt the light touch of Julia’s hand on my hair, and her whisper,
My anti-Samson
. The room fractured and shimmered.

She sat next to me in the truck all the way back, her hand resting on my thigh.

“Something’s changed,” she said. We drove west. The sun, low on the horizon, shone straight into the cab. She wore the same coat as on the night we’d met. A raincoat. Today it was dry.

“I still love you.”

“Bed linens, bread, orange juice…”

In the rearview mirror, my face was gold in the sunlight. Hers wasn’t, and when she turned to look at me, she didn’t squint against the glare.

“… beer, milk, fruit and vegetables and fish. And a newspaper.”

“Dornan will need a decent place to sleep tomorrow night, and breakfast. And I want something for dinner that’s not rice.” I couldn’t explain the newspaper.

The raincoat had disappeared. Now she wore jeans and a white, low-cut button T that exposed her tight belly. When had she worn those?

“You didn’t mention the other things,” I said. The tarps, the cash, the liquid propane gas, the double tanks full of diesel fuel. She didn’t seem to hear. After a while, I realized why: they were going-away things.

T
he Isuzu bumped into the clearing
just after midday, and Dornan poked his head through the open window. His face had more lines, or maybe it was the light. He climbed out and stretched. “Mountain roads…” He looked around, looked at me. “Something’s different.”

“Yes.”

“Ah. Well, I brought everything you asked for, plus a few extras.” He went round to the back of the Isuzu, opened the rear door, and pulled out a cooler. “There’s steak, and beer, and potatoes. Some decent coffee. And just in case you get the power on…”—he balanced the cooler against the rim of the trunk, reached in, and pulled out an espresso machine—“this.”

“Good,” I said, then ran out of polite conversation. “Bring the records, and my clothes.” I lifted the cooler from him and carried it into the trailer. He followed with my hanging bag.

“Where should I put it?”

I jerked my chin forward, towards the bedroom, “On the bed,” and started transferring the cooler contents to the fridge.

By the time he came back with the two cardboard file boxes, the food was in the fridge and I was wiping down the inside of the cooler. “On the table. I’ve almost finished.”

He leaned against the table for a moment, considering. “The power is on,” he said, “and you’ve had your hair cut.” It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t respond. “I’ll make coffee.”

He hummed to himself while he ground and measured, but he moved more slowly than usual, and there was more shadow than there had been around the bones of his wrists and nose.

“You’ve lost weight.”

He didn’t turn around, but said after a moment, “So have you.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and now he did turn around, but I wasn’t sure how to explain what I meant: that I knew I’d been selfish; that I hadn’t cared about his worry, about Tammy; that there just wasn’t much room inside me for anything but my grief.

“I just want you to find her for me, and bring her back,” he said.

“I’ll find her.”

“And bring… Oh, god. You think she’s dead.”

“No.” The espresso machine hissed and spat. “Make the coffee and come and sit.”

He made the coffee mechanically and brought it to the table.

“I’m going to find Tammy,” I said. “I’ll talk to her. If she wants to come back, I’ll bring her. If.”

“You’ll tell me where she is?”

“If she wants me to.”

He could have said a lot of things then, but he didn’t. He forced himself to smile. “You’ll let me know she’s safe at least?”

“Yes.” If she was.

He sipped at his coffee for a while, as though I weren’t there. “It’s a nice afternoon,” he said at last. “I think I’ll take a walk.”

“There’s a trailhead on the west side of the clearing. If you follow that, it’ll bring you to the creek. If you’re not back by four, I’ll come find you.”

I sat for five minutes after he’d gone, then took the lid off both boxes. One held a collection of opened and unopened mail—junk and bills mainly—going back at least three months, plus the other information I’d asked for: insurance documents, 401 (k) and bank statements, birth certificate, apartment lease. The other was Dornan’s private shrine to Tammy. He had saved everything, in no particular order: printouts of e-mails were bundled with birthday cards and Post-it notes; snapshots poked out from cassette cases; there were plane tickets and hotel bills and dinner receipts. On top lay a shopping list.
Slim-Fast
, it said forlornly,
toothpaste, water, dishwasher soap
. I imagined Tammy loading a dishwasher, and the only picture I could get was her playing to an audience: stretching so that her pants pulled tight across thigh and buttock. But her handwriting was not what I’d expected: no circles over the
i
, no fat loops; it was strong and clear and angular, and she had preferred black ink.

I didn’t want to know what Tammy had said to Dornan via e-mail, what she had whispered late at night to his phone machine; I doubted I’d need to.

I started with the mail, sorting it quickly into bills, junk, and personal. The junk I put back in the box, the personal—all unopened—I set aside, and the bills I sorted further by date and type, discarding anything before the first of the year. Tammy had not canceled the lease on her apartment, so there was ten months’ worth. All had been paid by Dornan; his notation of check number and date and amount was scrawled in the upper right corner of each. The Visa card pile was significantly smaller than the others; it contained nothing since August. Her other credit card, an American Express, was there in full, though the last three months showed no spending activity. I pulled an example from each pile. The AmEx listed plane tickets, hotel bills, out-of-town restaurant meals. Business expenses. Probably referred immediately to the company she worked—used to work—for. The Visa was billed from a variety of Atlanta restaurants, two different hair salons, Macy’s, Saks, auto repair, pharmacy: purely personal. The conclusions were obvious.

I found the 800 number on the bill and, while it rang, assembled a few things from the box. A bored, beaten voice answered. “ParkBanc this is Cindy how may I be of service.”

“Yes, hello. I’m calling about my Visa bill.”

“Name please.”

“Tammy Foster.”

“Account number please.”

I read off the number. I heard her fingernails ticking on the keyboard even on the cellular phone. “Tammy J. Foster,” she read back to me like a robot. “Last four numbers of your social security number for security purposes.”

I read them from the bank statement. More plastic ticking. As my partner, Frank King, had said when I was a uniformed rookie in Atlanta,
Finding people’s not rocket science, Torvingen. They got a social security number, it’s easy
—

“Address please ma’am.”

“Yes, well that’s why I’m calling. I haven’t had a bill since July, so you probably still have my old Atlanta address.”

“No ma’am we have a New York City address.”

“Well, it’s probably the wrong one because, like I said, I haven’t seen a bill since July.”

“Your account is current ma’am.”

“Well, that can’t be right. Like I said, you haven’t sent me a bill for months. What address do you have there?”

“One moment.”

—
It’s your illegals that are hard to track. Otherwise, hell, just follow the money
. Frank had been right, mostly. The exceptions were dead people, and smart people with no scruples and enough money to pay for both active and passive concealment. Unless Tammy was dead, I could probably do it just from the bits of paper I had here. Dornan could easily have hired a private investigator to do the job for a hundred dollars: all they had to do was run her name through their subscription databases. No doubt he hadn’t gone that route because—

“Your mother’s maiden name please ma’am.”

I read it from the birth certificate. “Acklin.”

“Yes ma’am. We have you listed at Apartment C 95 Seventh Avenue South New York New York 10012.”

Greenwich Village. What was she doing in Greenwich Village? “Well, that’s the right place, all right. But I don’t get it. Why aren’t I getting my bills? It doesn’t make any— Oh, shoot,” I said, doing my best to sound embarrassed. “I think I’m calling about the wrong account here. I was looking at my American Express and my Visa at the same time and I guess I just mixed them up and called the wrong one. It says here I paid the last few bills, so I guess I got them ”

“Yes ma’am. Your account shows your last payment of $354.89 paid September 29th. That was billed to the New York address.”

“God, I’m sorry.”

“Yes ma’am,” she said, still bored. “Have a good day.” She disconnected with a click.

New York. Blaring horns, shrieking sirens, the sour stink of ten million people, all streaming by at a thousand frames per second. New York. And I would have to go there. That’s why Dornan had asked me to find her, not some faceless agency, so that I would go to her on his behalf and ask her to come home.

I put each item back in the box one at a time, carefully squaring envelopes and aligning stamps, concentrating on arranging the bills in chronological order, deliberately not thinking, because if I thought about all the basic groundwork I should do, the phone calls I ought to make, I would walk away, walk into the woods and not come back, and I had promised.

I heard Dornan emerge from the trees just before four, but he didn’t come in. I got two Coronas from the fridge, opened them, and took them outside. He stood at the southern edge, looking down and out over the heath bald. I let the bottles clink as I walked, and held his out when he turned.

He nodded and drank. “Nice woods you’ve got here.”

“About two hundred acres.”

He nodded some more. “So why do you have that strip of AstroTurf in front of the trailer when there’s all this natural stuff?”

“It doesn’t get muddy. Works as a doormat.”

“Ah.” He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“I didn’t look at the private papers. I didn’t need to.”

Now he looked at me. “You know where she is?”

“Yes.” Her, or someone pretending to be her. “I’ll be ready to leave tomorrow. It might take a few days.” He rubbed his eyes with his free hand. It shook slightly. “I haven’t shown you what I’m doing with the cabin. Bring your beer. Then we’ll cook that steak.”

His smile told me he knew I was doing it to help him, but he followed me to the cabin anyway.

“It faces south and west, and the long side measures thirty-six feet. The logs are oak, hand hewn. They’re a hundred years old and there’s no reason for them not to last another century.” I laid my palm against the solid wood. It was still warm from the sun. New York. “This is a craftsman cabin, built for my greatgrandfather by masters, not one of the more usual settler’s shacks made from whatever came to hand and which have long since rotted away, and good riddance.”

His smile was real this time. “You always have been a snob, Torvingen.”

“I like well-made things.” I squatted and patted the corner of the building. Ten million people. “See how the sill and first end log are quarter-notched? If you could rip up the floor you’d see that the sleepers it rests on are all lap-jointed and middle-notched, and then pegged.”

He nodded seriously. He hadn’t a clue what I was talking about. It was suddenly necessary that he understand.

“Everything here was done by hand. You couldn’t just drive to Home Depot and load up your truck a hundred years ago. They had to cut the tree—and remember they didn’t have chain saws. Then they had to hew the logs: make the round sides flat. Even the chalk they used in their chalk boxes was made from local stuff, like pokeberry juice and lime.”

“What’s a chalk box?”

“What you use to snap out a line, so you know you’re cutting straight. You make the line, then score the log every two or three inches with a poleaxe. Then you use a broadaxe to slice off the chips.”

“Which you could probably use as kindling, to start a fire.”

“What?” My throat felt very tight.

“Don’t look at me like that. I’m doing my best. I only know two things about wood: it grows on trees and you can burn it, and I only learned the second thing two days ago. But go on, I’m listening.”

“This door—”

“There isn’t a door.”

“—doorframe. It’s pine that I split out myself, and it’s pegged with yellow locust.”

“Locust? Strange name for—”

I talked right over him. “Do you know how rare yellow locust is now? Do you know how long it takes to cut it, season it, then slice it into bars, then whittle it? Then you have to auger out the frame holes and get the wood braced properly against the logs. It’s hard to do that on your own, to get it vertical, to get a ninety-degree plane this way, too, and then to hold it there while you hammer in the pegs when you only have two hands and I don’t know how I’m going to hang the door itself, to make it all fit seamlessly so no one can tell I was— You have to never give up, never stop, because then you have to
see
—”

“Aud…”

“You have to see she’s not there, that there’s this great
hole
inside instead, nothing there—”

“Aud…”

My fists were balled and the veins on my wrists and the back of my hands thick blue worms.

“Aud.”

I panted. My face felt cold.

“I’ll help you hang the door.”

“The door?”

“I’ll help you hang it.” He put down his beer. “Right now. Where is it?”

“Inside.”

“Then let’s get it.”

My body belonged to someone else. I led him inside, over the wide, heart-of-pine floors that would be refinished once the door and windows were in, past the hearth I had already rebuilt, right through the wall that would be—between the studs I would cover with pine board one day soon—to the oak door. I had to put my own beer down before I could pick up the far end. He picked up the near. We walked it outside and leaned it on its end to the right of the doorway. He followed me to the hogpen, silently accepted hammer and nails and spirit level while I lifted down the massive wrought-iron hinge pieces and candy-cane-shaped drop pins, then followed me back.

I watched myself lift half the hinge and put it against the logs at shoulder height and measure with the eyes, move it up slightly, hold it with the left hand, and with the right lay the spirit level along its top. Hinge a little low on the left. Move it slightly. Nod at Dornan, at the hammer in his hand, swap left hand for right and step to one side to watch while he puts in the big nail, don’t flinch even slightly as he swings, don’t move as what should be three swift blows for each of the three nails becomes a dozen swings, fourteen, then a pause, and on to the other hinge, at knee level this time. Bang bang bang, bang bang bang, bang bang bang. See Dornan’s pleasure: he can do this. Nod. Lift other hinge pieces, position, drop in steel spindle, move assembled hinge back and forth, remove. Measure door. Nail on upper hinge. Pause. Let Dornan nail on second. Pointing. Lifting the door. Holding, maneuvering, dropping in spindles. Done.

And with a snap I smell my own sweat, feel utterly weary, realize Dornan is watching me carefully.

“We hung a door,” he said.