Always (48 page)

“Fine,” I said. “But I don’t want to see either of them on my property again.”

“But Bri is just a boy. I’m sure he wouldn’t—”

“He already has. Several misdemeanors and at least one felony. He would be tried as an adult. He might well go to prison.” It didn’t really matter. Turtledove would keep them off the set if I said so, and I’d be gone in a week, back to Atlanta, after which I wouldn’t care.

I went out to the parking lot to call Kick. She didn’t answer. I waited for the beep. “It was Bri and Mackie who drugged the coffee. I have verbal confessions. They’ve been banned from the set. Finkel and Rusen don’t want to prosecute, but there’s nothing stopping you from doing so.” Though there wouldn’t be much point bringing suit against Mackie, because he had no money, and if she sued Bri, his father would make sure she never worked in the industry again. I hesitated, wondering if I should remind her to drink lots of water, wishing I could take back the morning and do it again, unsure what I’d do differently. The tree was rotten. It had had to come down. “I wanted you to know.”

The interior of the Audi was hot, aromatic with the new-car volatiles drawn out by the sun. I tossed Mackie’s phone into the glove compartment, then was tempted to curl up in the backseat and drowse like a cat, reset my day, but my phone rang.

“Aud?” My mother sounded tentative. “I have just had a most interesting conversation with Eric, who had just spoken to your friend, Hugh.”

“Hugh?”

“Matthew. Matthew Dornan.” I opened the car door and got out, leaned against the Audi’s hood. “Aud? Are you there?”

“I’m here.” Hugh? I couldn’t remember anyone ever calling him that before.

“It seems you have upset your friend. Your other friend.”

“It seems you always blame me when things go wrong.”

Silence. “So,” she said. “Your friend. She is upset with you?”

“Yes.”

“And was it something you did?”

I sighed. “Yes.”

“Are you are sorry for it?”

“Yes.”

“But she didn’t accept your apology?”

Silence.

“Aud.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Then say nothing while I talk. Your last friend died. I didn’t meet her. This friend—”

“She’s not my friend. I’m not even sure we like each other.”

“No?” I said nothing. “Tell me what happened.”

“I did her a favor.”

“What kind of favor?”

“One she didn’t want.”

“Eric is very keen on a paperback writer called Heinlein, whose books almost all have spaceships on the cover. He is dead now, I believe. But Eric is fond of a quote from one of these books: ‘In an argument with your spouse, if you discover you are right, apologize immediately.’ ”

“I don’t know if I am right.”

“All the more reason.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Good. And when you have apologized, I’d like you to bring her to dinner. We’re leaving very soon.”

“I know.”

“Well, then,” she said in her it’s-all-settled voice, the one she used with recalcitrant parties in a negotiation, then rang off before I could muster an argument—which was another favorite trick.

I was still staring at my phone when Dornan arrived in a taxi. He paid the driver, got out—a little more slowly than usual—ran his hand through his hair, and saw me. He turned his head slightly, like someone approaching an unpleasant task.

We stood silently for a moment. He looked sweaty. It could have been a hangover. It could have been because it was hot.

“So, Hugh. You called my mother.”

“Someone had to do something.”

“Someone could simply tell me what is going on.”

“No,” he said. “No. You can’t ask me. I can’t—She made me promise.”

“So you do know what it is.”

“No. Or, yes, I knew she was going to find out yesterday what the—” He blinked, shook his head. “You have to ask her.”

“I did.”

“Ask again.”

A gull flew overhead. “I dreamt of Luz last night. And Kick’s tree.”

“She loved that tree.”

"Yes.” I watched the gull, wheeling round and round. “I shouldn’t have done it, should I?”

“What do you think?”

I tried not to think about how my stomach had rolled when she came home, clutching her carrier bag.

“Aud . . .” He wiped his upper lip. “Try to figure it out.” He headed for the warehouse door.

It was definitely hot.

I sweated lightly as I dialed. “Kick? It’s Aud. I was wrong. I’m sorry. I’m coming to your house to tell you in person. I’m sorry.”

I called Gary. “Reschedule my appointment with Bingley for tomorrow. Make it afternoon.”

“But he’s already nervous. He might—”

“Just do it.”

THE BASEMENT, WHEN I ARRIVED, HAD SMELLED OF PATCHOULI AND INCENSE AND
strange women. I had turned on the sluggish air-conditioning unit and propped open the door, and my students had arrived carrying their own smells, but the room was still heavy with alien scents. I felt displaced. Perhaps it was just strange to be back in Atlanta after a weekend in Arkansas with Luz and the Carpenters. Her tenth birthday. Everything there had smelled of children and red clover and pine needles.

We had warmed up, and practiced falling again, and now they were sitting, waiting.

“Today’s subject is children.” I looked at Suze. “Even if you don’t have kids, you probably have younger siblings, or nephews and nieces. You might have a frail elderly relative. You might be out—or in—one night with a friend or roommate. A lot of what I’ll teach today applies in those situations. Also, of course, you never know when you might end up with children in your care unexpectedly. Children are not like adults. They don’t think the way we do or know what we know.” Sometimes this was good, sometimes bad.

Very briefly, after being pulled off the streets and before the police commissioner had been pressured to remove my badge altogether, I’d been assigned to visit local schools and talk about safety. Some of the things they had been taught astounded me.

“What do you currently teach your children about safety?” I said.

“Don’t talk to strangers.” Kim said. Some nods.

“What’s appropriate in terms of touching,” Therese said. More nods.

“All right. Let’s go back to that first one. What’s a stranger?”

“How do you mean?” Kim said.

“I’ve asked roomsful of children to describe or draw a stranger and they come up with a remarkably similar picture. A man, usually with dark facial hair, wearing dark clothes, and often a hat.”

They came up, in fact, with the classic mugshot caricature of a rapist, whose race varied with both the socioeconomic status and race of the child. Women taught their children to be afraid of what the news had taught them to fear.

“More children are harmed by people they know—teachers, pastors, club leaders, relatives—than by those they don’t. The same is true for women. According to the
Journal of the American Medical Association,
the leading cause of injury for women aged fifteen to forty-four is domestic violence. It’s not the stranger who poses the danger.”

“You’re a poet and didn’t know it,” Nina said.

“Don’t,” I said. “No more jokes. Not today.” I surveyed them, one by one. “Do I have your attention?”

Nods.

“The best way to protect your children is to protect yourself. In homes where domestic violence occurs, children are abused one hundred and fifty times more often than the national average.”

No one said anything.

“Like your children, you need to know when something is wrong. Like your children, you need to believe you have the right to defend yourself. Self-defense is about self-worth, self-esteem, self-love. Self. We are worth fighting for.”

I watched Sandra, remembering my last conversation, years ago, with Diane, at Arkady House, a women’s shelter. I’d asked her why so many of these women didn’t do the sensible thing and prosecute. She had said, “These women are grown-ups. They know what they need. If a woman comes in here all beat to shit and I say, ‘Honey, you need medical attention, you need to leave that man right now,’ and she says, ‘Well, Diane, what I really need is a pair of shoes for my youngest,’ I give her a pair of shoes. You know why? Because maybe her youngest doesn’t have any shoes, because that’s how her husband controls them. And if the kid can’t walk out, then they can’t leave. So if she says what she needs is shoes, then what she gets is shoes. If she says nothing, then maybe it’s because she needs to, or maybe she’s still lying to herself. Don’t make her talk to you if she doesn’t want to. If she’s lying to herself, she’ll only lie to you. No one can change that woman’s life but her. Don’t try to do it for her. Down that path lies madness and despair.”

Madness and despair. She could have been talking about Sandra.

“. . . want to teach my kids to be scared of everyone,” Kim was saying. “Even their uncles, their daddy. I won’t.”

“No argument,” I said. “Teaching children more fear isn’t useful. They should be taught instead to understand what’s acceptable, and from whom. They should understand who they are: where their sovereignty lies, if you like, just as you’ve started to learn in the last few weeks. They should learn that if someone abuses them, make them stop. They should learn that it’s not smart to hand out information that may make you vulnerable. But what does that mean with regard to a ten-year-old?”

I thought of Luz, the ten-year-old I knew best: her avarice, her covetousness, particularly when it came to good leather and precious metals, her occasionally unfathomable combination of cynicism and naïveté, suspicion and trust. Ten-year-olds, in many ways, were far more capable of looking after themselves than teenage girls because they had not yet fully learnt the social imperative of fitting in, of being submissive.

“Here’s what I would talk to children about. I would tell them to never answer the phone and tell someone they were alone in the house. I would explain that they must never open the door without the chain being fastened, even if they’re expecting Santa or the Tooth Fairy. I would suggest that they never, ever get into a car with someone you hadn’t expressly told them they should go with. It doesn’t matter whether they recognize this person or not. I would tell them that if ever they were frightened to be in a room, any room, even with a relative, it’s okay to run from that room and come and find you. I’d make sure they had a phone with your own phone number on speed-dial.”

“Not cheap,” Katherine said.

“Kroger has those pay-as-you-go kind, three for forty bucks,” Kim said, in a
What planet are you from?
tone. “My kids bust theirs all the time. Carlotta even flushed hers down the john last week. You just give them another. Cheap compared to a kid’s life.”

“About touching,” I said, “you’ll have to work out the wording for yourself. ” No doubt there were as many coy euphemisms as southern women.

“Telling them don’t let anyone touch you where your bathing suit covers works pretty good,” Kim said, and this time the
what planet
tone was meant for me.

All the mothers nodded.

I wondered if Luz knew this. Of course she did. Didn’t she?

“Or if anything creeps them out, they should just yell,” Nina said. “Kids like yelling. Dan did that, my sister’s youngest. He’s eleven. His coach got him in the locker room one day and Dan yelled and another teacher came running, and they called his mom, only they couldn’t get ahold of her, so they called me, and when I had him in the car, taking him home, I asked him what had made him yell, and he said, ‘He was a bony-faced creepazoid! He creeped me out!’ And then he wanted to know if we could go to McDonald’s.”

“And they should run,” Kim said.

“Yes, but where?” Therese said. “You don’t want them running from the frying pan to the fire.”

“Walk the ’hood,” Pauletta said. “I did that with my nephews and nieces when they were staying after that big storm down in the Carolinas. I showed them the routes from home to school, and school to safe places. I introduced them around to the good folks and warned them about the bad.”

I thought of all those times I had moved: Oslo to London to Oslo to Yorkshire to London. I couldn’t remember my mother showing me the safe places. There again, I had assumed everywhere was safe. I had assumed the world would protect me.

I remembered the kittens.

During my first few years in uniform, my partner, Frank, and I got called in to deal with a lot of bodies. More than our fair share. It became a joke in the department: a citizen calls in something suspicious and it was always Frank and I who ended up being closest and discovering the body. One winter, during a cold snap, we answered a call from an old man’s neighbors who had not seen him for two or three days. Newspapers were piling up. We broke down the door. He had died on his bed. He must have been dying slowly for two days, because although the apartment was cold, he was still warm. At some point, his cat had crawled onto the bed and given birth to five kittens. She was a skinny thing, nothing but bone; she probably had not eaten for three or four days. But when we burst in, she stood over those kittens and arched and hissed, ready to take on the world. Frank left, said he’d find a box to carry them all to the cat-rescue place. And while he was gone, the coroner’s deputy arrived and told me to move the cat so he could get at the body. I refused, told him that Frank was going to get a box. I said we would wait: what difference did five minutes make? But the coroner’s deputy thought his time was too valuable to wait, and he reached to pick up the cat. She opened his hand from his wrist bone to the base of his thumb. The blood had been shocking, as were the frantic, blind wiggling of the kittens trying to find the nipples that were gone, and the wide-eyed, pointed-whiskered mother cat who was ready to die.