Always (58 page)

"Invite them.”

I looked at him.

“The regulatory bigwigs. Everyone loves the movies. They’ll be putty in your hands.”

“That’s . . .”

“An excellent idea. I do have them sometimes. Yes. Now go.”

Outside, I was surprised to find it was raining.

ED THOMAS HARDY
’
S
office looked just the same, though this time the window was sheathed in fine silver droplets.

His shirtsleeves were rolled up and his tie loose, a pen in his hand. The epitome of a man of the people.

“As of half an hour ago, I have contracts for both of the private land parcels adjacent to mine,” I said. “The third, the federal land, might take a little longer.”

He nodded. “What do you know about federal, regional, and local tax incentives?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, I know a lot. And as well as owing you for your, ah, discretion, I know of several ways you could make a lot of people rich.”

“Profit isn’t my motive.”

“You’ve said that before. What do you want the land for, then?”

I imagined my land along the Duwamish, the river dimpled with rain. I saw a woman, sitting on a bench.

“What does the city need?”

“The city?” He gestured at the window. “Which city? The business city, the working people’s city, the city of coyotes and eagles and sword ferns?”

The woman had a fading black eye.

“Profit might not be your motive, but let’s pretend it is. Otherwise the people who can help or hinder you in this won’t trust you. So, what do you want to do with this land?”

The woman with the black eyes sat on the bench, watching a heron, and seeing the bird pluck its shining dinner from the river and take off into the grey sky hardened the amorphous hope under her breastbone to a burning point.

In Atlanta, I had taught ten women. Only one had been Sandra. I could do better next time.

“A foundation,” I said. “Classes. A park, a library.”

“Maybe some low-cost housing?”

“Explain.”

“Form a corporation—”

“I am a corporation.”

“Make a new one. Call it something attractive and well meaning, something stolid and impressive, that sounds semiofficial, like CharterMae Trust or Foundry House or—”

“You’ve thought about this before.”

He nodded. “I’ve thought about this a lot. There’s an ocean of money out there, washing from pocket to pocket. I’d like to see some of it get used. But to get it, you have to give something. Tax credits.” He looked pleased with himself.

“I’m none the wiser.”

“Private developers build affordable rental housing if they get tax breaks. The federal government alone hands out more than five billion dollars a year in credits to anyone who will keep rents low for fifteen to forty years, and rent to tenants who earn no more than sixty percent of the city’s median income. The state administers those credits. I know all the people down in Olympia.”

I waited.

“So what you do is build the housing, then sell the tax credits to syndicators, who bundle them and sell them to investors looking to offset their own taxes. Then you take that money from the sale, and use it to maintain your building. You mix luxury and affordable on an eighty-twenty ratio and you can sell tax-exempt bonds. You’ll make lots of money.”

“I don’t need to make lots of money.”

“The more you make, the more you’ll have to spread around to other people. And the ones you’ll be making the money off of are the rich people.”

“It sounds too good to be true. Why haven’t you already done this?”

“You need a lot of money to start with.”

“And you’d be willing to help shepherd this through the local regulatory process?”

“For a say in some of the community benefit.”

“It sounds . . . tangled.”

“That’s the price, sometimes.”

It would be Bette and Laurence who would work out the details. ETH would handle the work. I thought of those herons.

I need to do this myself,
Kick had said. Not all women could. “My lawyer will call you.” I would also have to donate to his campaign. He couldn’t help me if he was no longer in office.

KICK CALLED
just as I stepped into the rain.

“I’m back,” she said. “What’s left of my tree fell down.”

“Ah.” I stood very still while pedestrians parted grumpily around me and rain ran down the back of my neck.

“I’m wet, I hate my mother, and the tree . . . The goddamn tree. Probably the rain. It’s tipped right over and lying all over my yard. And El Jefe . . . Stupid cat.”

“Are you all right?”

“Of course I’m all right. I wasn’t here.”

“Is the cat all right?”

“He’s hurt.”

“Is it bad?”

“He can’t sit down. And he’s complaining. But he’s eating and he lets me stroke him. It’s probably not even broken.”

“So it’s . . . his leg?” I didn’t know why we were talking about a cat that wasn’t even hers. I started walking along the sidewalk.

“His tail. It’s sort of bent. Hold on.” A strange ripping sound rasped in my ear. “That was him purring into the phone.”

“Oh.”

“So, anyway, I thought that I’d take him to the vet, and while I was gone you could finish what you started with the tree.”

“You want me to . . . Kick, have you seen the paper?”

“Yeah. So are you coming, or what?”

“Yes.”

“Great. Gotta get to the vet.” Click.

I folded my phone and waited in bemusement for a light. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the traffic pole flash magenta and turquoise, or burst into a chorus of “Louie, Louie.” The rain began to ease. By the time I’d crossed the road, it had stopped.

SHE OPENED
the cardboard carrier and the old black cat stalked off, looking rumpled and annoyed, but fit. She straightened, closed the door of her van.

“Subluxation of the tail,” she said. “Good as new in two days. Whose is the truck?”

“A rental. Like the chainsaw. I bought the gloves.” I shut up before I said anything else foolish.

She looked at the sawn chunks of trunk stacked by the gate and then at the growing patch of blue sky above the dining room extension. “If it had come down a week ago it would have crushed half the house.” She stepped closer. Damp earth, sawn wood, the rich, sharp scent of Kick. I took off the gloves, dropped them on a stump, and held out my arms.

Later, in her bed, she eased herself into the curve of my arm. I stroked her hair and her back, and wondered under which knob of vertebra, exactly, the lesion lay. The skin and muscle felt the same.

“How did it go with your parents?”

“I hate my mother.” Perhaps she was aiming for a light tone, but the attempt was ruined by a deep undertow of hurt and puzzlement. “I told them. My mother . . . my mother’s a drama queen who thinks she’s Lady Pragmatism. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Well, the family will have to organize twenty-four-hour care.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ She looked at me kindly, like I was a three-year-old, and said, very slowly, ‘For when you’re paralyzed, honey. Who else is going to help you?’ ”

I thought of my mother’s reaction, and she’d never even met Kick.

“It was like she
wanted
me to be helpless so she could feel important. It was all about her. I know it was probably a shock but, Christ, paralyzed. So I looked at Pop, hoping for a bit of reason, and you know what he said?”

I shook my head.

“He said that, hell, he was sure it was all some big mistake. His little girl couldn’t have a disease like that. I should just see. I should just wait. Everything would be A-okay. I didn’t know whether to puke, scream, or bury an axe in his head.”

“So what did you do?”

“I laughed, and said I wanted a glass of water, and Mom jumped up and said she’d get it, and I had to practically arm-wrestle her to the sofa. I’m not a fucking cripple yet, I said. Except I didn’t say ‘fucking.’ And then I went into the kitchen and cried. And then I came back and told them I was just fine, and that for their information I’d just accepted a job as stunt coordinator on a series pilot, and thanks very much for their pity and denial, but I didn’t need an ounce of help from them. And now I have to find a way to tell Maureen and my brothers.”

My brain jumped to three different places at once. She’d accepted the job.

“I don’t think I can face telling them right now. Ted’s in the Seychelles, anyhow.”

“The stunt rigger?”

“No. That’s John. He’s in Arizona. Ted’s an accountant. But Maureen’s right here.”

“Yes.” Maureen, who would look blank, then say something kind and caring, such as, “I really need to get my nails done soon.” I took Kick’s hand—the nail beds were pink, the nail white—and kissed her fingers, one by one.

“So, like I said, I hate my family.” Rain pattered on the skylight. “This weather,” she said.

She had taken the job. I thought of her jumping, face peach with dawn. “So. You saw the paper.”

"Yep.”

“What did you think?”

“Always hated that picture.”

“Seriously, what—”

“
Shush.
I’m trying to tell you. Seriously. The way my parents treated me, more Crip than Kick, I saw I’ve been doing that to myself. Cutting myself down to size before anyone else could do it.”

“Protecting yourself.”

“Making myself small.”

“So you told Rusen you’d accept his offer.”

“Yep. I knocked on his door and went in and announced importantly that, ‘Hey, I’ll coordinate your stunt,’ and he nodded and said, ‘Boy howdy, that’s great, can you deal with the fire department permit situation today?’ I felt crushed—drums should have rolled or lightning cracked or something equally portentous: Kick steps up to herself.” She sighed, and the long, soughing breath had a crack in it, and the crack widened and wobbled and grew and became, to my surprise, soft laughter, which, in its turn, grew sturdy and bright.

She laughed until she was as red in the face as a newborn, and as helpless, and kicked her feet. I held her tight enough to snap someone whose muscles weren’t as dense and resilient as rubber bands, and she squeezed back and swung me onto my back and pinned my hands to the mattress, and I laughed and flipped her over in turn, and she tried to turn me back the other way, and then we were on our sides, matched muscle to muscle and bone to bone, strong and fine and taut, mouth to mouth, belly to belly, eye to eye. We breathed each other’s breath, sucking the warm expelled air deep into alveoli and bronchiole; oxygen that had been in her blood dissolved in mine, fed my cells, moved the hand that curved over her bottom and between her legs, pulled her against me, gentle, inevitable, as slow as the turning of the world.

Later, she lay with her head on my thigh and her back against my ribs. I laid a hand on her rib cage and felt it rise and fall, rise and fall.

“Is it really this simple?” Her cage of bone and cartilage buzzed slightly under my palm as she talked. “Believe in yourself?”

“It’s like self-defense. You have to refuse to be trespassed against. You have to refuse to believe what people want you to believe. It helps if someone shows you a few simple things, but mainly you have to be willing to simply do it.”

“But what if some giant grabs some little old lady—”

“It doesn’t matter how small you are or how big they are. I can teach any reasonably able woman to render an attacker unconscious inside twelve seconds, if she’s willing. If she’s not willing, nothing will make a difference. ”

“Twelve seconds. How long would it take you to teach someone like me how to do that?”

“You’re more than reasonably able. And you’re smart. Five or six hours, total.”

She rolled onto her back. “Kick Kuiper, killing machine.” She smiled. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“You can teach me. But you have to let me teach you something in return. ”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Whatever you like. How to fall.”

“I know how to fall.”

“When someone throws you, maybe, when there’s no choice. But what about willingly, deliberately letting go?” She reached for her clothes. “Your truck has a tow bar, right? You want to go for a drive?”

I DROVE.
She directed me north, along wet surface streets. Traffic was light and the air as sweet as the steam that comes off a cake just pulled from the oven. I kept to a sedate pace.

She approved. “I get so tired of people trying to impress me by weaving in and out of traffic as though they were riding a motorcycle.”

There was a motorcycle at the triple-sized storage unit. There were two. “This one,” she said, slapping a Suzuki’s metallic green tank, “is my off-road machine. Custom shocks. This one here is for high-speed freeway chases. But what we’ve come for today is my Model Seventy air bag, some crash pads, couple mini-tramps, and the air ram. The trailer’s in the next unit.”

THE LOT
was quiet. Lights showed in the editing trailer, but the second one was dark. The warehouse door was closed. A young, alert-looking man in a rust-colored jacket nodded at us pleasantly, bid us a fine evening, and asked to see ID. A small name badge on his left lapel said he was Janski, of Turtledove Security. We obliged. He clearly recognized both our names, but nonetheless checked his list before smiling and stepping aside.

“How have things been?” I asked him while Kick held her card against the lock.

“Quiet.”

The door thunked and clicked open. It was cold. My skin tightened and my stomach tensed, but there was nothing obviously wrong. I considered, then made a mental note to talk to Turtledove about changing the locks, or the access code, whichever was best. We went in.

The standby lighting, pale and cool, made the set alien and vast. The islands of light had a greenish cast and seemed to ripple. The unseen roof loomed. Kick and I stood there, listening to the quiet.