After (50 page)

She could hear him shuck off his pack, root around inside. The flare of a match lit his fingers and his face as he touched the flame to a wick. Handing her the lit candle, he said, “You have a bad habit, don't you? Sacrificing yourself to let others get away. Just how many lives do you think you have?”

He lit a second candle and made a survey of the ground floor. More dust and spiders than furniture. But the doors were solid, the windows intact. Best of all, he told her, even from the road, the little row of buildings was almost impossible to discern among the overgrowth of trees and shrubs. He climbed past her to check out the upstairs, and returned saying it was all clear.

“I should take a look at your leg.”

“It's sprained. I should lie down. Elevate it.”

“Let me get you upstairs. To a bed.”

“It's better if I stay down here. Better chance of getting out, if they come.”

“Alright. I'll bring a mattress down for you.”

When he'd made up a bed, Nix let him carry her over and lay her down. Her way of testing herself. Like holding her hand too close to a candle's flame.

“We should get this off,” he said, touching her boot. “Alright?”

When she'd unlaced, she let him pry the boot from her foot, holding her calf stable so her knee was hardly strained. A stack of pillows served to elevate the swollen leg.

“I'll see about a compress,” he said.

In the dark, she could hear his steps reverberating through the empty building, see the yellow light from his candle flutter over ceiling and walls, raising and banishing hordes of shadows, stretching up walls and windows, shrinking away into dark corners.

A door opened and closed, and his boots clomped around the perimeter, back to the door.

“Found a tub almost full of rain water out there.”

A clatter of metal in the kitchen. The door. The clomping. The door.

Artel appeared at her bedside, a fancy silver bowl filled with water, a sheet, and scissors.

“One thing we're not lacking is linen. The stuff in the closet isn't even that dusty.”

He snipped the edge twice, then tore two strips off the sheet, and submerged them in the water. Then he went still.

After a long pause he said, “You should take your pants off. So they don't get wet.

I'll go upstairs and get you a sheet to cover up with.”

She laughed, anger, hate coiling around and around in her belly. “Why? Do you think I'm shy?”

“I don't know.”

Swallowing her futile rage, she said in an even voice, “Get my other boot off.”

This time she let him unlace it. He pulled the second off as gently as if that knee were sprained, too. She unbuttoned, unzipped. Then looked at him, and lifted her hips from the mattress, careful not to put any pressure on the injured knee or wrist. Artel leaned in and slid her pants off her hips, down her thighs. Then, raising the unhurt leg first, then the injured one, he worked her pants the rest of the way off. He kept his eyes fixed on her swollen knee, mottled gray and green in the candle's light, avoiding the sight of her bare thighs and the thin gray fabric covering her sex. She fought the urge to laugh at his embarrassment. Then another surge of bitter anger flooded through her.

With the ruined sheet folded under her leg to absorb the excess water, he wrapped her knee in the soaked bandage while she watched. Then he did her wrist.

“I'm sorry about the gun,” he said, his rough voice at its softest.

“It gave you the advantage. They're all dead. And we're here.”

“Yeah.”

“So. Thank you.”

“You're welcome.”

“Artel. Gareth.”

He fixed his gray eyes on her.

“There are women, resistance women, even virgins like the ones we freed today, who would offer themselves to you now. As payment. Or just from gratitude. But I won't.”

“Alright.”

She smiled, and even she didn't know if it was because she was relieved, or mocking him.

“That's not why I did that, today. That's not what I'm here for,” he said.

“What are you here for?”

“What else would I do with this life?”

It angered her, somehow, his answer. It was her answer.

“And,” he said, “I'll risk sounding naïve, risk another one of your amused smiles, and tell you: I don't even want that. You fucking me, for payment, for gratitude.”

“No?”

“That's no different than the rest. Is it? If I want someone to fuck me because they owe me, I can get that at the sex hotel.”

She couldn't help it. Her mouth curved. One of her amused smiles.

“Am I the only one?” he asked. “I was right, before. You had men with you, today.

What do they get for their troubles?”

“Today wasn't my plan. I just went to help out. I don't know those men.”

“But you trusted them enough to put those girls in their care.”

“No. I trust—“ She'd almost said a name. “Someone else that much.”

His voice quiet again, the challenge gone he asked her, “Have you ever known, ever met even one good man?”

She took her time. Honestly thought about it.

“No.”

* * * *

Every half hour, all through the night, he came back to her, first to remove the compresses, let her skin breathe, then to wrap her knee and wrist again in the cold, water-soaked bandages. By morning, her wrist was almost back to its normal size. The knee, though, was still swollen and mottled purple, yellow, red and green, and so stiff she could barely bend it even an inch or two. She felt caged, knowing she was stuck there, probably for a week, maybe longer if she didn't want to wreck her knee forever. A sick, nervous feeling crept through her, like always, when she thought about what it would be like when she couldn't run, couldn't ride, couldn't fight anymore.

In the morning, he came to her with a roll of toilet paper—another article of which there was a welcomed abundance at that long-deserted outpost—and she let him pick her up and carry her outside. He set her on her good leg by a big tree a good hundred yards from the building, and wandered off to give her privacy.

When he'd carried her back inside and helped her to get settled in an upholstered armchair he'd taken outside, earlier, and swept clean of years of dust, she said, “You've risked a lot, helping me.”

He looked up from the strip of soaked cloth he was winding around her knee and gave her a small smile.

“You know what they'll do to you, if they catch you with me like this?”

“I think so.”

“You know what to tell them, so it goes easier for you.”

“I don't care about that.”

“You fucking will care when they're raping you half to death. Or cutting your balls off. You tell them you found me here like this. That you thought you'd have a little fun with me, before taking me in. They'll forgive that. That's just part of being in the club.”

“I can't do that.”

“You can.”

“Really? When I say that, what happens?”

“You know what happens.”

“Tell me. So I know I understand.”

“You host a little party.”

“No.”

“It's not a big deal. I'll live.”

“Well. You're tougher than me.”

“I've been through worse.”

“I know you have.” He went quiet for a long time, avoiding her gaze while he finished the bandaging. Then he locked his gray eyes on hers.

Not soft. A harsh quiet, that voice. Rough air. “I know why they were so cruel, that day, before they brought you to me.”

While a sickening shudder went through her, she fought to keep herself blank and still. She willed him to go, to leave her alone. He looked away, and went.

The hot pulsing of her knee under the cold bandage was something to focus on.

The pain. She swiveled her hand, aggravating her wrist. Too practical to risk the knee.

Even now, with that memory chewing at her, there was no urge to cry. Just a horrible dryness, like she'd been eviscerated and filled up with sand. Too much sand, so the dryness overfilled and stretched her. Pulled her skin tight.

* * * *

Carrying a beautiful, strangely-shaped object, Artel clomped down the stairs looking as odd as the thing he was holding. His smile, the way he bore the thing, like a treasure he wanted to hold near, the way he seemed strangely conscious of her noticing him and his prize, made Nix think of a child taking possession of a man's body.

She waited for him to bring her the treasure and explain his perplexing exuberance, but he just grinned at her as he dashed by, and darted out the door.

Through the window she could see him striding off, among the trees, out of sight.

Ten or fifteen minutes later he emerged from the screen of trees. When he came inside and pulled a wooden chair up beside her, she saw that its surface, the part that reminded her vaguely of the shape of a woman's body, was glossy, a warm, tawny yellow. There was a long, straight handle with wires running down its length; that part was dark brown.

“What is it?”

Artel laughed. A different-sounding laugh than she'd heard from him before.

“Are you serious? You've never seen one?”

“No.”

Smiling again like a child masked and costumed in the face and body of a man, he said, “It's a guitar.”

He arranged the fingers of one hand on top of the wires near the end of the handle, then brushed the fingers of his other hand across the strings above the hole in the tawny, glossy wood, and sound, humming, vibrating sound poured out of that shadowy aperture.

Then his fingers starting moving, the ones up the handle lifting and pressing and sliding up and down along its slender length, the others flicking over the wires in a blur, and a thousand notes swelled around her, twining around and around each other, filling the room with music.

When his hands stilled and the vibration of the untouched strings ceased, the music faded to silence. She remembered that feeling. A feeling from childhood. Joy.

“I took it outside to tune it, so it would be pretty when you first heard it. It still doesn't sound right. The strings are too old.”

“How do you know how to do that?”

“My dad taught me. You've never heard it before?”

“Where I was raised, the orphanage, we had a piano.”

“You played?”

“Sort of. Not like that. That was...” She laughed for some reason. “Will you play it again?”

He smiled, touched the wires, and different music came from under his fingertips.

Slower, sadder music.

“My fingers aren't used to playing, anymore,” he said, setting the guitar aside and rubbing his hands together. “It hurts; the strings dig into your skin, until you get calluses.”

Her eyes traced over the gleaming surface, the intricate pattern of yellows and browns decorating the edge of that hole, the different thicknesses of the wires, the six spindles at the end of the handle, where those wires wound round and round.

“Here,” he said, holding it out to her, “want to try?”

It was so light. It had looked heavier. The thickest wires were rough when she ran her fingers up and down their length. But the tawny surface felt as smooth as it looked.

When she tweaked one wire with her thumb, a note thrummed out and vibrated through the air while the wire blurred between its neighbors.

“If you want, when your wrist is better I can teach you a song.”

Later that night, and three or four times the next day he played for her. And every time, that smile widened and curved his mouth while his left hand squeezed the strings down on the neck and the fingers of his right hand plucked and strummed the strings.

While he played, his right toe went up and down in a steady rhythm, noiseless when his boots were off, slow or fast, in rhythm with the song.

“You really love music, I guess,” she said when he'd put the guitar back in its brown leather case.

“Yeah. Well, I guess it reminds me of being a kid.”

They were both quiet for a while.

“I don't usually think about it,” he said after a few minutes. “I guess I was happy, then.”

“With your dad.”

“Yeah. It felt like such a small world. The two of us. We traveled around a lot, I remember, when I was little. But it still was just us most of the time, on the road, in whatever house or building, where we stayed the night or the week. It's strange to think back to those years. Things must have been like they are now. But my little world felt so...quiet. Safe, I guess.”

* * * *

It wasn't hard, learning the patterns, which strings to hold down over which fret, and which to strum. The hard part was turning her wrist and angling her fingers so she only held down the strings she wanted, while leaving the other strings untouched. But soon she had a whole, short song down pat. Over and over she played it, until there were no long gaps between the notes while she got her fingers into place, and all the notes flowed out, strong and even.

“Does the song have a name?” For some reason, she hadn't thought to ask, before then.

“Ode to Joy.”

* * * *

Her wrist was a hundred percent. The knee was taking longer, but at least she could get around the room. Get off her ass for a few minutes at a time. Off her back.

Still, she forced herself to wait three more days before venturing outside for even a brief, cautious walk. However close the walls seemed to shrink in on her, how caged she felt, trapped in that dim series of adjoining rooms, how strange it was, spending every hour, day after day, in Artel's sight, she wouldn't risk delaying the return of her strength. Or worse, only healing halfway. Walking away from that place slower, weaker.

Only when she could walk without a twinge of pain nipping at her knee did she make a tentative foray out. Even then, she forced herself to ask Artel to come, too, so that if she'd misjudged, he could carry her back, and she could avoid doing herself another injury.

The first time, they just circled the old hotel, and she breathed in the fresh air and remembered how it felt to walk on ground that wasn't perfectly smooth and level, and to be surrounded by light. Later that day they circumnavigated the whole row of buildings, keeping behind the screen of foliage partitioning their hideaway from the road, even though they'd have heard horses coming in plenty of time.