Always (49 page)

I blocked his access to the bed after that, and eventually he went away. It turned out that he was the brother of a city councillor, and that day was the start of my troubles with the department. But I didn’t know that then. He left and I sat on the floor, and watched as she settled down again and gave the kittens her teats, and tried to understand. It made no sense. It wasn’t logical. She must have known that if she tried to defend those tiny things against something human-sized, she’d die. And she did it anyway. Why?

I didn’t understand until last year, when I met Julia. And suddenly it was clear. I would protect her with my body against an army—I would drink fire to keep her safe.

And now there was Luz.

“. . . know all the commonsense stuff,” Kim was saying. “What about the other stuff, that no one talks about?” I blinked. “Like what do you do when some . . . some creep tries to use your kids against you? What if they try to snatch your kid while you’re there? What if they try to grab you both? What do we do?”

They were looking at me.

“It depends.” I forced myself to be here, now. “Give me an example.”

“I’m walking with my youngest, Carlotta, across the parking lot. Two guys come at us.”

“How old is Carlotta?”

“Five.”

I thought of the terror of trying to protect a five-year-old, the terror of the five-year-old; words wouldn’t be much use at that age. “In an open, unprotected space get into that instinctive, favorite position, the one that works for you.” She assumed it now: left leg back, right leg forward. “Get Carlotta to wrap both arms tight around your back leg, your left leg. That way you know where she is at all times, and she’s behind you, and no one can snatch her without your noticing, and, as a bonus, she’s helping to anchor you. Children like to help.”

I hadn’t known that until late last year when, as I sat in the Carpenters’ Arkansas bathroom, bruised and uncertain, Luz had offered to kiss it all better.

“For grown children, or another adult, you hold hands. Try it now. Hold hands.” Sandra was reluctant to take Therese’s, but did. “Christie and Suze, swap sides. You want to keep your strong hand free.” Christie, left-handed, on the left, Suze on the right. “If you’re touching, you always know where your partner is. You can’t get separated. You can do the fire technique, just charge, or you can stand your ground.”

I held my hand out to an imaginary partner.

“If I need to kick on uneven ground, she can act as a counterbalance.” I mimed leaning. “And vice versa. You protect her as she helps you. You help each other.”

“I tried to reschedule Bingley, but he’s out sick.”

“All right.”

“Except, well, he’s not.”

“Oh?” I pulled over. The car threw a long shadow before me. I considered running the air-conditioning. It was very hot.

“Not that his assistant exactly said that. It was more a tone.”

“A tone?”

“You know. The assistant tone. The one you use when your boss is blowing chunks in the can and you say her conference call isn’t winding up on schedule.”

Blowing chunks. “Then call Turtledove. Have Bingley tracked down and questioned. Turtledove will know what to ask.”

“Would you like those other appointments moved to the afternoon also?”

Other appointments. Banks, attorneys. “Yes. Thank you.”

THERE WASN’T
a single parking space on Kick’s street. I parked in the lot at Tully’s and walked the three blocks south.

The sky was as red as a forge; the sun seemed to compact the air as it sank. The heat had gone to Wallingford’s head: the neighborhood was a seething sea of urban humanity. People paused as they swung open the pub door, white teeth flashing and muscles sliding with unconscious animal health under elastic, sun-browned skin; many of the women seemed to be wearing flowing white muslin trousers and brief halter tops in intense colors. I could have been in Persepolis or Babylon or King Herod’s palace. Only the occasional Birken-stocked foot reassured me this was Seattle.

My pulse was as heavy as a mallet as I walked down Myrtle. The sky deepened from orange and cherry to hints of wine, and edged into dusk; the air glimmered around the edges. The voices of two adolescent boys sharing a cigarette as they walked up the other side of the road seemed gilded, hemmed with dream. Their smoke smelled of incense.

Kick’s front door was open and the screen door unlatched. Music, bone-hard rock, a woman’s voice, poured into the street, stopped abruptly. Then new music, a male voice: sharp cymbal work, insistent bass.

“Hello?” I rapped on the doorjamb. Nothing. “Hello?” Come in, the open door implied. I eased the screen open. “Hello?”

I took off my shoes. I don’t know why. The oak floor was smooth and hard under my feet, not quite cool. I didn’t recognize the music, but I liked it. My pulse rate began to edge up, but not from anxiety. From something else, as a child’s does when she is playing an enormously exciting game. Hide and seek.

The singer sang of dancing beneath a cherry tree.

“Hello,” I said again, and walked into the kitchen.

Kick was at the stove, a cutting board piled with stir-fry vegetables in perfect heaps by her hand. Orange carrots, enamel red peppers, spring onions greener than pine leaves. Garlic and ginger hissed and sizzled in hot oil. She was throwing the frying vegetables in a perfect arc from her wok, catching them neatly, throwing them again, in time to the music. Her hips moved, side to side, then a figure-eight weave, and her feet stepped this way and that, just a shade behind the beat, deliberate and sure. Salomé in the kitchen.

She looked dense with life. Full and secret.

“Kick,” I said, from six feet away, and she turned, and I saw her as though through a crystal-lensed scope, every grain and pore of her skin, every eyelash follicle at full magnification. I made some sound, low and hoarse, that neither of us heard, and reached out to brush a strand of oak hair from her forehead, but she moved, too, and my thumb plumped against the furrow between her brows, and the world split neatly into two, as lakes do, one layer warm and bright and light, moving easily over the older, denser, colder depths.

Kick spoke to me in two different languages. Her words, her lack of words, said, I don’t know if I forgive you, I don’t know why you’re here, I don’t know if I want to talk to you. But the rest of her body, her smell, her full lips and open hips, the music she’d chosen, was saying something altogether different, and saying it very clearly. I hung, poised, between two worlds, knowing I had to choose and that one kind of mistake would cost more than the other.

Pheromones are scentless. Their molecules slide past our conscious notice and snick home on the waiting receptor sites in the nasal epithelium, triggering a cascade of information. The body knows.

When an ovulating woman offers herself to you, she’s the choicest morsel on the planet. Her nipples are already sharp, her labia already swollen, her spine already undulating. Her skin is damp and she pants. If you touch the center of her forehead with your thumb she isn’t thinking about her head—she isn’t thinking at all, she’s imagining, believing, willing your hand to lift and turn and curve, cup the back of her head. She’s living in a reality where the hand will have no choice but to slide down that soft, flexing muscle valley of the spine to the flare of strong hips, where the other hand joins the first to hold both hip bones, immobilize them against the side of the counter, so that you can touch the base of her throat gently with your lips and she will whimper and writhe and let the muscles in her legs go, but she won’t fall, because you have her.

She’ll be feeling this as though it’s already happening, knowing absolutely that it will, because every cell is alive and crying out, Fill me, love me, cherish me, be tender, but, oh God, be sure. She wants you to want her. And when her pupils expand like that, as though you have dropped black ink into a saucer of cool blue water, and her head tips just a little, as though she’s gone blind or has had a terrible shock or maybe just too much to drink, to her she is crying in a great voice, Fuck me, right here, right now against the kitchen counter, because I want you wrist-deep inside me. I hunger, I burn, I need.

It doesn’t matter if you are tired, or unsure, if your stomach is hard with dread at not being forgiven. If you allow yourself one moment’s distraction— a microsecond’s break in eye contact, a slight shift in weight—she knows, and that knowledge is a punch in the gut. She will back up a step and search your face, and you’ll try to recover but she’ll know, and she’ll feel embarrassed—a fool or a whore—at offering so blatantly what you’re not interested in, and her fine sense of being queen of the world will shiver and break like a glass shield hit by a mace, and fall around her in dust. Oh, it will still sparkle, because sex is magic, but she will be standing there naked, and you will be a monster, and the next time she feels her womb quiver and clench she’ll hesitate, which will confuse you, even on a day when there is no dread, no uncertainty, and that singing sureness between you will dissolve and very slowly begin to sicken and die.

The body knows. I listened to the deep message—but carefully, because at some point the deep message also must be a conscious message. Active, not just passive, agreement. I took her hand and guided the wok back down to the gas burner. Yes, her body still said, yes. I turned off the gas, but slowly, and now she reached for me. I pushed the chopping board to one side, lifted her onto the counter, and slid my hand beneath her waistband.

She was hot and swollen and I held her close, her face against my neck and she groaned. The singer pleaded to his baby to not sing yet, but before the track was over she kissed me in triumph, slid off the counter, pulled her trousers the rest of the way off, planted her feet on the floor and her palms on the top of the stove, laughed that shimmery glad laugh, and said, “More.”

After a while, I remembered that the door was open, but I didn’t care.

And a while after that, when I was lying on the floor smiling at the ceiling, she finished cooking the stirfry, and we ate it, properly clothed, at the dining room table. The windows were open but there was no breeze.

“That song you were playing when I got here—”

“Salomé.”

“Interesting words.”

She looked puzzled, then stared up at the ceiling as people do when they rerun lyrics or conversations in their head, and laughed. “All that stuff about dancing beneath the cherry tree. Poor Aud. Did you think I’d chosen it especially?”

“The subconscious can play interesting games.” I put my fork down, took a breath. “I am sorry about your tree. It was wrong of me.”

“It pissed me off so much, that beautiful tree. Baobab the Bold.”

“Baobab?”

“Better than Fred.”

It was a tree. But this time I kept my mouth shut.

“She was beautiful. Oh, I knew she was going to have to come down, but she was my tree. My tree, my decision.”

“I was trying to help. I really am sorry.”

“You weren’t yesterday. You stood there like you were glad you were cutting down something pretty in my garden, like you wished it was me they were cutting up with a saw. I thought maybe you were trying to hurt me because I’d, well, because of my behavior the night before.”

“The subconscious can play interesting games,” I said again.

“Yes. And I’m sorry for mine, too.”

We nodded at each other, and held hands, and let our palms talk to each other. They seemed to be better at it than our brains. Her hand was cool. I lifted it, kissed her fingertips. The garlic and ginger made the mucous membrane of my inner lips tingle pleasantly.

“I’m glad you hadn’t been cutting chilis.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“I don’t . . . Are you blushing?”

“No. It’s hot in here. I’m flushing. It’s different.”

“If you say so,” but she was grinning, and I didn’t care, because I wanted to make her grin every day. So unlike last night’s twisted, self-hating smile. My hand faltered in its conversation.

She felt it, and understood, and her breathing ratcheted up as the tension between us rose. It was like stepping into a static electricity field. The hairs on my forearms lifted. My scalp tightened.

“Kick.” I cradled her hand between both of mine. “Help me understand what happened last night.”

“Oh, I drank too much.” I waited. She sighed. “You talked about perfection. It—I didn’t like that.”

“No.”

“I’m not perfect.”

“No one is.” She didn’t say anything. I stroked the soft, thin skin over the tendons on the back of her hand.

“I’m like the tree.” Now I was thoroughly confused. She pulled her hand free. “Don’t you get it?”

“No.”

“I’m sick.”

When I was fifteen I had gone running along the beach in Whitby. It had been a sunny March day after more than two weeks of rain and fog, and I was warm and happy. In a moment of sheer joy I’d stripped off my jeans and dived headfirst into a breaker—and thought I had dived into a wall. The near-freezing water paralyzed my chest muscles and cut off my oxygen as effectively as a sheet of glass sliding through my neck. I thrashed in the churning breakers, but no one noticed. Last year, I had been shot and had to dive into a glacier lake to escape the gunman. I had understood, this time, about freezing water, thought I had been prepared, but the cold still stopped my breath.

“Are you dying?”

“What? No, of course not.”

When that first flood of air hits your lungs again, nothing matters but the rush of oxygen. It doesn’t matter if the air is smutty with smoke, or stinging with rain; it only matters that you’ll live. I stared at my plate, at the jewel-like vegetables, and savored the tangy aftertaste of lime, the bite of garlic, the hiss of ginger on my tongue. Dead people couldn’t do that. I looked at her. “Good. Don’t die. I need you.”