Always (38 page)

“As do I.”

“So you do.” He could sound very much like my mother sometimes when he used that
I know things you don’t
tone. “But, Aud, the pattern is very nearly right, very nearly. She means a lot to me. Don’t toy with her.”

Silence. “So. Is she in there?”

“No. But—”

“Do you have her cell phone number?”

“She doesn’t carry one—” He knew so much more about her than I did.
Because I asked nicely.
“. . . me finish, she’s not on the set, but she is here.”

“Where?”

He nodded at the second Hippoworks trailer, just as the door banged open and she jumped down. She wore jeans and work boots and a salmon tank top. The arms of a cardigan were tied around her waist. Her skin was golden. From here you couldn’t see the freckles on her shoulders. She said to Dornan, “Floozy and the Winkle aren’t—” And then saw me. “Aud.”

Her hair was down. I wanted to plunge my hands in it, pull her to me.

“Well,” said Dornan. “I should be getting back in to help with that scaffolding. ”

Kick and I just looked at each other.

“It’s still hot in there,” he said to her. “Maybe you should stay out here for a bit.”

She nodded.

“Pass your cup, then,” he said to me. I bent and retrieved it, handed it over obediently. He sighed, shook his head, and went inside.

“It’ll be hot in there for a while,” I said.

“Okay.”

“We could go for a walk.”

“What, in traffic?”

“Not exactly.”

THE POCKET
park was on the other side of a deserted side road and hidden by a row of straggling hawthorn. If I hadn’t known it was there, I would never have found it.

There was a patch of grass and two benches overlooking the Duwamish, connected by a short path to a grassy clearing. We held hands and sat on a bench, watching the river slide by below, as brown as overbrewed tea. I felt my lack of sleep the night before, and if the wind hadn’t been so strong, I might have dozed. Every now and again the water glinted, like a powdered old lady throwing a roguish smile.

The rocky shore was green-slimed and smelled of rot. Northward, in the direction of Harbor Island, four Canada geese stood splay-footed on the pebbles and honked. Beyond them arced the concrete spans of a massive bridge.

“What’s the bridge?” I asked Kick, stroking the back of her hand idly with my thumb.

“The West Seattle Bridge. And, funnily enough, what it’s connecting to is West Seattle. Typical of this city.”

“Dornan finds all the names in this city amusing.”

“Um.” She sounded relaxed, or maybe she was just sleepy.

“I hear you two were up late last night, talking on the beach.” She was staring out over the water. “So. What was so interesting that it kept you up until two in the morning?”

She turned to look at me, and searched my face the way my mother had done just a week ago. “Oh, this and that.” And she laughed, and kissed my cheek. I put my arm around her.

Gulls wheeling over the old, crumbling pilings that poked like broken teeth from the low water on the shore of Kellogg Island squabbled over something I couldn’t see. Power lines ran here and there, and steam, white as the smoke in a movie magic spell, coiled up from a plant on Harbor Island. The clouds in the west looked like yellowed Styrofoam.

“There’s nothing like this in Norway,” I said.

“Um.” She settled tighter against me. In this light, her hair was like twisted gold wire. I would have been happy never to move again.

A tug plowed by, heading south, upriver, tight and rolling and muscular, cocky as a rooster. Its engine throbbed but the stink of diesel was whipped away by the breeze. Silver flashed in its wake. Salmon.

In the other direction, downriver, near the geese, more movement made me turn.

“Look,” I said, and she lifted her head.

A green-backed heron came in to land, like an inexpertly piloted Cessna. She sat up. “If a stunter dived that badly she’d be fired.”

“Not as graceful as you,” I agreed. “I watched
Tantalus.
”

“That old thing?” But she sounded pleased.

“You dive like a cormorant.”

She smiled but didn’t say anything. The wind began to pick up. Another heron slipped and slid through the air and splashed tail- and feetfirst into the shallows right in front of me. It plunged its ugly, ancient-looking beak into the opaque water but missed whatever it had been after. Disgusted, it took off again, flapped heroically for a moment, and finally hauled itself into the air, legs dangling.

“I had no idea they were so clumsy. And small. It was a heron, right? I always thought they were bigger.”

“Great blue herons are big.”

“And what’s that?” She pointed.

“A grebe, I don’t know what kind.” And then I was seeing wildlife everywhere, and naming it for her: a kingfisher, some kind of coot, more fish, a bumblebee humming over the mossy grass, a ladybug snicking its wings in and out as it crawled across the back of the bench. I knew that the shallows would creep with crabs and be bobbled with oysters, that the smell of rot meant that living things grew here and then died. And I knew why people would pay a million dollars for a condo in an industrial district.

Kick slid close again, laid her palm against my cheek. Small, cool hands. I turned. Her eyes were very grey. She leaned in and kissed me. “Sometimes your face looks like something carved a thousand years ago.”

I ran my hands over her shoulders, down her arms, around her waist. The muscles in my thighs and back strained and trembled. She was shaking, too, but although her pupils were big, I realized it was with cold as much as desire. I untied the cardigan knotted around her hips, lifted her with one arm, and pulled the cardigan free with the other. I breathed fast. “Put this on,” I said.

While she pushed her arms into the sleeves and tugged I watched the sky. The clouds had grown denser, firming from Styrofoam to incised stone, subtly colored, chiseled and layered and polished. “It’s beautiful,” I said.

She buttoned with her left hand, laid her right on my thigh. “Isn’t Atlanta like this?”

I shook my head. “In Atlanta, in May, the sky is always blue. Later in summer there are storms in the afternoons, and for an hour or so there are clouds overlaying a sky the color of pink grapefruit, but this . . . it’s like intaglio-cut stone.” I pointed. “There. Mica. And amethyst. Rose quartz. Carnelian, and, look, see that grey? That’s what natural, uncut diamond looks like.”

“Kiss me,” she said.

I did, and I wrapped my hands around her tiny waist, then slid them around the swell of her hips, pulled her to me. Her bottom was warm and luscious. I cradled her cheeks, ran my hands back to her waist, dipped my fingers under her waistband. Our mouths were wide. Another tug hooted.

I looked at the grass, decided there were too many goose droppings, and sighed.

She pulled away, grinning, as though she knew what I was thinking. “Oh, well,” she said, “nice park anyway.”

“Glad you like it.”

“I had no idea it was here. Be nice if it was more private, though.” She laughed to herself as she straightened her clothes.

“There’s a woman called Corning who wants to pave all this over with condos.”

“Will you buy one?”

“No.” She shivered again, and I put my arms around her. “Because I’m not going to let her build them.”

She started kissing me again, then stopped. “What time is it?”

“About four o’clock, I think.”

“Shit. I have a—I have to run.” She kissed me again. “Meet you at the house? Around seven?”

AT AIKIDO,
the sensei wasn’t there. Mike was leading the class. It was informal and boisterous. I made people fly, and flew in my turn.

Afterwards, as we swept and wiped the dojo, Mike and Petra separately invited me to the Asian Art Museum to see a new display of Chinese art— Mike in a
whatever
kind of way, and Petra shyly. I declined but suggested they go together, and managed not to smile at their consternation.

THE HOUSE
cooled and darkened. We lay under her duvet. My face hurt from smiling. She butted my hand, like a cat; I stroked her head. There were no lights on in the house, and in the long, northern dusk her hair gleamed, dark and light, layered, sometimes pale and silvery like bamboo pith, sometimes heavy and dark, like freshly split pine. “Wood,” I said. “That’s what your hair reminds me of.”

“You think my hair’s like wood?”

“I love wood.” I rolled onto my stomach and stroked her hair, over and over, rounding over the back of her head, feeling the sleekness, like the oak finial of a three-hundred-year-old baluster that has been polished by twelve generations of hands. Figured oak. That was it, exactly.

She rolled onto her stomach, too, so that we were lying next to each other like eight-year-olds looking over the edge of a cliff. “So you know a lot about wood, and about herons and oysters. You didn’t learn that in the police.”

“I wasn’t always in the police.” And I told her of growing up in Yorkshire and on the fjord, in London and in Oslo, while my mother worked her way up the political and diplomatic ladder. Of my travels in the wild parts of the world, working on my cabin in North Carolina: the trees, the birds, the wood.

“It sounds beautiful,” she said. “My parents had a cabin in the North Cascades. It was hot and dusty—dust everywhere. Jesus. It’s basically a desert out there. But that’s where I learnt to ride. Do you ride?”

“I do.”

“English saddle, though, I bet.”

“That’s how I learnt. But I can ride western.”

“I can ride anything. With or without a saddle.”

I can cook anything. I can ride anything.
Simple statements of fact. “Even bulls and broncos?” I stroked the small of her back, very gently, running my palms over the tiny hairs there.

“Anything. When I was a kid, I did stunt riding of things like ostriches and goats and llamas. I’ve ridden elephants and alligators and, once, even a very large dog.”

Her backbone was entirely sheathed in smooth muscle. I ran my fingertips down the soft skin. The slanting light threw fillets of muscle into sharp relief. What Kick was saying suddenly registered, and I paused. “When you were a child?”

“It’s a family thing. My mother did stunts. My uncles do stunts. One of my brothers is a stunt rigger. My sister did makeup. My father, in case you’re wondering, is in trucking. How old were you when you learned to ride?”

“Eight. Or maybe nine.”

Downstairs her phone began to ring.

“Pony or horse?” The machine beeped, and someone with a deep voice started leaving a message.

I thought about it. “Pony, I suppose.”

“You suppose? What was his, or her, name?”

“I haven’t a clue.” The voice stopped and the phone machine beeped again.

“You must remember. That moment when . . . You really don’t remember? ”

“I don’t really remember learning things.” I cast my mind back to being a girl, nine, on a pony on the moors; twelve, my mother and the WAR study; a year or so later in Yorkshire’s West Riding, a horse. “Judy,” I said. “One of my horses was called Judy. When I was twelve or thirteen. She was a hunter. Fifteen hands. Her mane was very pale. A bit like yours.” I ran my hands through her hair. “Yours feels better.” I pushed it away from the back of her neck, which I kissed, then some more, and swung my leg over her so that now I sat in the small of her back, like a soft saddle.

“Um,” she said. I reached around and took a plump breast in each hand. She groaned and began to move.

LATER,
she said, “Let’s eat pizza.”

When she went downstairs to find the number, I wrapped myself in a sheet and stood by the window. Eastwards, the radio towers on Queen Anne Hill blinked with red navigation lights. I heard her taped voice in the background, then the beep and deep voice of the replayed message. The sun was setting on the other side of the house, drenching the western slope. The stairs creaked as she came back up.

“You’re doing that noble statue thing again,” she said. She wrapped her arms around me from behind, rested her head between my shoulder blades. “What’s so interesting?”

I nodded at the hill, at the sunset reflecting from the windows on Queen Anne in the growing dusk. “They look like campfires. Like an army camped in the hills above Troy.”

Her arms were tight. We stood there a long time. I wondered who had left the message.

Eventually, she stirred. “Get dressed,” she said. “It turns out I have an early appointment tomorrow, so I’m going to kick you out after we’ve had pizza.” She smiled, but it was brief and distracted. “We’ll do something tomorrow. ”

“Good.”

“But I don’t know my schedule. I’ll call you.”

APRIL. OUTSIDE, NUTHATCHES SANG AND AZALEAS BLAZED ON EVERY LAWN. IN
SIDE, we all sat on the scratchy blue carpet that smelled less new now, and ten women stared at their copy of the list of general pointers, specific dos and don’ts and miscellaneous hints I’d given them the week before Lake Lanier.

I knew the list. I looked at the women. We’d had a week of solid sunshine since I’d seen them in their bathing suits. A few—Suze, Therese, Nina—were showing the first hint of the gilding common to middle-class Atlanta white women in summer. Many were in short sleeves. Sandra wore short sleeves for the first time, too; things must be going through one of those periodic honeymoon periods at home. She felt me looking at her— she had the sensitivity of a prey animal—and looked back. Her eyes did that brilliant shining thing, trying to share some message that couldn’t be put into words, and I made a mental note to visit Diane at the Domestic Abuse Alliance sometime in the next couple of weeks and chat. From my early days in uniform I knew that simply asking Sandra would send her scuttering back into her burrow, but whatever she was trying to tell me was getting more urgent.