Stay

by Nicola Griffith

  “A little grandiose, even for you.”

  I sat up and smacked my face into an unseen branch. “Julia?”

  “Who else. Is that more tears, or are you bleeding again?”

  The stuff running down my cheek was too warm and thick to be tears. I scrubbed it away impatiently and looked around, but it was so dark I could see nothing, not even the branch. “Where have you been?”

  She ignored that. “Where are your clothes?” Judging from her voice, she was sitting on the ground by my knees.

  I touched my throat. “I don’t remember.”

  “Naked in the woods, at night, in late October. Do you remember how to get back?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Oh, Aud.” She sounded sad. “Don’t do this to yourself. Karp was a monster. You said so yourself.”

  “He didn’t deserve to die.”

  “Does anybody? Besides, you don’t know for sure that he is dead. And even if he is, he wouldn’t be the first.”

  “This is different.”

  “How?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Let me ask you something else, then. Think about Geordie Karp for a moment: smart, well-connected, cold, and manipulative. Forget the borderline thing for a moment. Who did he remind you of? And Aud”—she moved closer, until her voice was a caress—“please, get yourself back to the trailer and get warm.” And she was gone.

  Forget the borderline thing? I didn’t understand. I did understand the last part: get yourself back to the trailer and get warm. And she’d said please. I sighed.

  I tried to get to my hands and knees but my left knee wouldn’t work. I felt it; there was no obvious cut. Bruised, maybe. Hard to tell because my hands were so cold. What time was it? I couldn’t remember how long I’d been here, which direction I’d come from. No point trying to find the clothes now. No point trying to walk back to the clearing in total darkness. More blood ran down my chin and smeared stickily under my hand. I felt about me, patting. Not enough leaves. I rolled onto my belly, pulled myself forward a yard or so, and waved my hands to and fro, feeling for the branch. In woods this thick, a branch should not be so low to the ground.

  Who did he remind you of?

  I dragged myself another yard. There. Thick and sturdy, and growing upwards, from a point somewhere ahead of me. A fallen tree, with a small drift of dry leaves. I rolled onto my side, swept the leaves up around me. They’d keep me warm enough until dawn.

  Who did he remind you of?

  My knee began to ache. I must have twisted it somehow, earlier. I couldn’t remember. Too stubborn to go mad, Dornan had said. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been wrong. My feet hurt, too, but I didn’t want to reach through the leaves to feel them and disturb the warming air pockets.

  Then there was nothing to do but wait for dawn, nothing to do but sit still before Julia’s question.

  It took two hours to cover what should have taken fifteen minutes, and well after the sun had risen I limped into the clearing, leaning heavily on a broken branch, sick, tired, and empty. I hobbled to the fire pit and lowered myself slowly onto the log. There was no sign of Tammy, and I didn’t have the energy to call out. The rental Neon glowed zealous green in the early morning light.

  “Aud!”

  I was too tired to look up.

  “Aud?” Somehow she was in front of me, kneeling on the grass, the way Julia had when Dornan was here, not that long ago, but oh, in what seemed like another lifetime … She was saying something else, about my clothes, but I didn’t pay attention, until she put her hand on my calf, gently, and I flinched.

  “I said, is this your blood?”

  It was spattered on my chest, smeared on my stomach and thighs and neck, on my hands and feet. How had it got on my feet?

  “Aud? Is it your blood?”

  “This time.”

  “Can you walk to the car?”

  I finally lifted my head and stared at her.

  “I’ll drive you into Asheville. You need to see a doctor.”

  I started to shake my head and the world slipped sideways.

  “Whoa!” Strong arm around my shoulders. Her fingers brushed my bare breast and shifted instantly.

  I looked at the grass until it stopped moving. “It’s nothing. Cuts and bruises. I can do it, clean it up.”

  A long pause, then: “Can you stand?”

  My knee was about twice its usual size and I’d lost some blood, but I’d been hurt much worse than this in the past and still managed. Today, for some reason, I just couldn’t seem to move.

  “Okay.” Her grip around my shoulders shifted to my waist. “I’m going to haul and you can lean on your stick, branch, whatever. On the count of three. One, two, three.”

  I tried, then, but it was as though someone had stolen the marrow from my bones and filled them with lead, heavy and soft, and I managed only an inch or two before I sank back on the log. How odd to be so helpless.

  “Fuck,” Tammy said under her breath. Then, more loudly, “I guess we’ll just try again.” She got behind me this time, put both arms round my waist, face pressed against my bare back. Her hair tickled. “Okay. And this time you’re going to make it. On three. One, two, three.”

  I rose slowly on one leg and hovered for a moment, knee bent, precarious as a kite deciding whether to catch the wind, then I was up, clutching my branch with one hand, the other arm over Tammy’s bowed shoulders.

  “All right! Right leg first, okay, good. Now the left leg, I’ll take your weight.” Her voice was muffled: her cheek was crushed under my left breast. “Left leg, no, left leg. Good, good. Right leg. Okay. Let’s just stand here for a second and catch our breath. No, Jesus, Aud, don’t you give up. You have to help me. I’m—It’s not far. You have to help.”

  She bullied, she panicked, she wheedled, and one step at a time I crept closer to the trailer, and after about five days I was there, swaying in front of the three metal steps.

  “Fuck,” she said.

  “I can do it,” I said, because she sounded near to tears.

  “Yeah, right. Look, you sit on the edge of this step—”

  “No.”

  “Jesus, Aud, you have—”

  “Won’t get up again.”

  “Oh. Okay. Well, how about if you lean here for a minute—can you do that?—and I’ll get inside first and try to drag you up the steps from behind.”

  “Move the steps.”

  “Move …? Right.” It took her a couple of shoves because she had to keep one arm around my waist, but they folded away underneath the rig eventually. She squeezed past me, climbed into the rig, and maneuvered me until my bottom rested against the cold sill. Then she squatted, put her arms under mine, and clasped them beneath my breasts.

  “Now, when I say, you push off with your good leg and I’ll pull. You can do this, okay? Ready? On three. One, two, three!”

  I hopped and she hauled and we shot backwards into the trailer alongside the recliners, heads pointing at her bed, me lying on top, faceup, her hands on my breasts. She levered me away from her and scrambled up. I just lay there, looking up at her upside-down face.

  “My bed’s closest. You’re almost done.”

  A confusion of trying to stand, pushing and being pulled, prodded, shouted at, until I found myself lying on her pullout and she was sitting next to me, water steaming in a bowl by her side. Where had that come from?

  “Your throat’s stopped bleeding. I wrapped it. It was already crusting up.” I touched what felt like a towel around my neck. “Don’t mess with it. You’ve lost enough blood. And you’ve got a scrape across your forehead and nose that I still have to clean. I already did your feet.” They were wrapped bulkily in white bandage. When did she do that? “Full of dirt, but you didn’t seem to feel me scrubbing away.” She lifted the bottle of hydrogen peroxide. “This’ll sting. Might have been better if you’d stayed passed out—”

  Peroxide. Bleach. Pierced people with bleached hair
and writhing tattoos. At night Tompkins Square Park was full of them. They hung out by the fountain that has been dry for years, on the side opposite the gay boys with their squat, muscular little dogs wearing bandannas. I didn’t want those dogs getting a scent of blood-drenched clothes.

  I stepped off the path. It felt wrong walking on grass in Karp’s shoes. Light and sound faded until there was nothing but my breath and the rustle of plastic bags. I stopped, listened. Silence. And under the scent of green growing things, the smell of urine-stained clothes and unwashed hair.

  I dumped one bag—the underwear, the shoes, the jacket—behind a tree. Someone would find it within half an hour, someone who wasn’t particular about bloodstains, and who wouldn’t talk to the police. I walked on a little.

  The park bench was made of concrete, still almost whole, and in the dark you couldn’t see the graffiti. I went down on one knee to shove the second bag—the trousers and tunic—beneath it and was about to stand when the razor touched my throat.

  “My bench, bitch. What you doing to my bench?”

  The concrete smelled of mold and cold stone. My knee, to which I had transferred all my weight as I was about to get up, hurt. The arm around my throat, the one holding the straight razor, was thin and scabbed.

  “Gonna cut you good.” A young voice, very young.

  With a straight razor held firmly against your carotid, there’s very little you can do. If you kick out backwards, the person holding it goes backwards, dragging their arm and the blade with it. You wouldn’t feel much but you’d be unconscious in thirty seconds and dead in two minutes. If you turn to your left, it pulls across your trachea. You wouldn’t bleed too much, but you’d be getting no oxygen. Turn to the right and the blade slices into your jugular as well as the carotid. Move downward and it takes the artery where it eases past your jawbone. Try to pull the blade down and it opens the blood vessels where they dive under the collarbone.

  Neither of us moved. I couldn’t think of a single thing to do or say that would save my life.

  “What you say, bitch? Fucking with my bench.”

  This is how it would end, then, killed by a barely teenage junkie in a squalid little park in a city I hated.

  The arm under my chin tightened. A thin trickle of blood ran down the neck of my borrowed shirt. Dying in someone else’s clothes, with a pornographic tape in my pocket, dying as the kind of person who could disassemble a man with her bare hands for no particular reason and who hadn’t even thought to check whether he was still alive.

  “You think I’m shitting you? You think I won’t do it?”

  What did it matter? “Actually, I’m thinking of an afternoon a year or two ago, in my garden in Atlanta.” I closed my eyes, remembering. “It was sunny and warm. I have a lot of trees: oak and pecan and beech—”

  The arm jerked. “Shut up.” This time the blood flowed smoothly, no little trickle.

  “—and jays, a lot of blue jays. Noisy birds. But smart. They band together when there’s danger. So one day I was outside—”

  “Shut the fuck up!” The hand was trembling.

  “—and these jays were all screeching around the big oak tree, then diving at it. There’s this peregrine falcon perched on the end of a branch, about twenty feet up. It’s ignoring the jays and watching this hole halfway up the trunk of the beech tree where chickadees liked to nest. Then I noticed that all the little birds, the finches and sparrows and tits, had gone.”

  The trembling against my throat grew worse and the razor shifted slightly as the wielder moved restlessly. In my peripheral vision I saw red sneakers. Small red sneakers. Razorboy was wired, needing a hit so badly that probably none of my words made sense. But the story wasn’t for him.

  “The falcon was so sure there was nothing in the garden to hurt it that it didn’t see what I saw. A cat, skinning up the trunk of that oak, quiet as a snake. The jays were screeching even more: now there were two predators on their turf. The cat inched belly down along the branch until it was about three feet away. Its tail lashed back and forth, and it gathered its back feet, but just as it jumped, the hawk dived. It nearly hit the ground but just managed to swoop back up. It was so—”

  The arm spasmed and the razor jerked, hard, and one of the red sneakers kicked out involuntarily, and the razor fell and clattered cheaply against the concrete bench. I stared at it. Blinked. Stood up.

  He, or perhaps it was a she, it was too dark and he was too thin and too young for me to be sure, backed up a step. I picked up the razor, hefted it, looked at his oversize turtleneck and flapping khakis. He was shaking so badly he wouldn’t get more than two steps before I’d be on him. He knew that, too.

  I moved the razor back and forth, thinking, and took a step towards him. “—the hawk was so flustered the jays managed to drive it off. But do you know what the best part was? The cat. It was a long branch that the hawk had been on, and where the cat was now it was so narrow that it couldn’t turn around. It was stuck. And that’s when all the little birds, the finches and sparrows and tits, came out to play. They flew to the twigs and branches nearby and sang at the cat, and flicked their tails at it. The cat couldn’t do a thing. Take off your sweater.”

  He was so far gone, arms and legs jerking so badly, that it took him almost a minute to get it over his head.

  “Throw it to me.” He tried, but it dropped at his feet. I advanced. He backed away. I bent, picked it up. Black, thick, filthy. “There are clothes in the bag under the bench.” I lifted the razor and took another step towards him. He watched, dead-eyed. I folded the blade.

  “So the cat had to jump.” I threw him the razor and walked away.

  The world jerked, like a badly edited film, and I was lying down with something taped to my face. I blinked. Tammy rose from one of the recliners.

  “Hey,” she said.

  My knee seemed to be clamped between two blocks. I tried to move the cover to look, but Tammy leaned forward and lifted it for me.

  “I iced it, then bandaged it and stuck a bag of ice on each side. I gave you some Vicodin for the pain, but you should really take ibuprofen or something too. Shouldn’t you?”

  I reached up and touched my face. Gauze.

  “I cleaned it.”

  “Peroxide,” I said, remembering. I hoped she hadn’t used it on my neck. “Ice. Move the ice. And put some—”

  The airport felt larger than it should but perhaps it was just because it was so late and there were fewer people. The black turtleneck was sodden with blood but it hid my throat. My scheduled flight was long gone. There was one more plane flying to North Carolina, to Charlotte, just before midnight.

  “They’ll be starting preboarding about now,” the counter clerk said, trying not to be obvious about glancing from side to side to see if there was anyone within calling distance.

  I started to walk. Nothing sounded right. I kept clutching for bags that weren’t there. The concourse was hard hard hard beneath my feet. I was alive. I was alive because the damaged child who had wanted to kill me hadn’t had the physical strength to hold a blade at my throat for three minutes. My pulse fluttered fast and light and sweat filmed my forehead.

  I barely made it to the bathroom.

  I vomited several times, resting in between with my head against the steel pedestal. It was warm against my skin and I longed for porcelain, white and cold. The whole airport was too warm; my feet sweltered in two pairs of socks. I retched again, and blood trickled over my collarbone.

  • • •

  Another bad edit, and Tammy stood in front of me, holding out pills and water. My arms would hardly move. She sighed, put the glass down, helped me sit up, and with one arm still around my shoulders handed me the pills, then held the water to my mouth. I spilled half of it down my front, which was more or less clean.

  “Yeah, I sponged you down. Mud and blood. How come you were naked? What did you do with his—with the clothes?”

  “She wanted to know that, too.”

/>   “Who did?”

  But I was remembering the blood pouring down the drain of Karp’s shower.

  “Aud? Are you going to puke again? Aud? Jesus, I’ve just about fucking had it—” She was crying.

  “Down.”

  She lowered me back down. “Don’t fucking puke, just don’t you dare.”

  If you button the jacket so all they see of the filthy sweater is an inch of turtleneck beneath obviously high-quality clothes, if your haircut is expensive and your teeth white and even, if you keep your voice pleasant, and if they find your money to be good and your ID valid, they will doubt the evidence of their senses. Smell is hard to document: impossible to photograph, difficult to describe. Move with assurance, act as though there is absolutely nothing wrong and—if the plane is half empty and you’re flying first class—they will make no comment about your smell as they take your ticket; they will process your car rental in Charlotte without demur. Act as though there is nothing wrong and you can make it true, for a while.

  Late afternoon. I hurt all over. The blocks were gone from around my knee. Tammy was reading at the table. I managed to sit up, but it left me panting. Tammy looked up; her eyes were red. “You look a little better.”

  “Yes.”

  “You scared the shit out of me.”

  I touched the bandage around my neck.

  “You should see a doctor.”

  “I’ll be fine.” My mouth felt as though it belonged to someone else. “What pills?”

  “Vicodin—”

  Vicodin. Funny word. After a moment I realized she was still talking, repeating something. “What?”