Stay

by Nicola Griffith

  We walked on. Luz began to lag. I slowed even more. She hung on to the case with grim determination. I had no idea what nine-year-olds talked about.

  “What’s in there, then? Gold and jewels?”

  “Stuff.”

  “We can buy you more stuff. More clothes.”

  “Not just clothes.”

  Of course. Books. “You know what one of my favorite books used to be? The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Have you read that?”

  On an adult, her expression would have meant, Don’t tell me you love me if you don’t mean it. I plowed on, glad I didn’t have to lie. “I’ve read all of them.”

  “There are seven!”

  “Yes. I’ve read them all. But I think The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is my favorite. Or maybe Prince Caspian.” A bloody thirty-two-year-old Norwegian discussing 1950s English novels with a nine-year-old Mexican girl in backwoods Arkansas.

  The absurdity of the situation didn’t seem to bother her. “I like it best when they have supper with Mr. and Mrs. Beaver,” she said. Safety, warmth, food. Tenderness. Every child should have them. “And I like it when Edmund is in the sleigh in the snow with the White Witch eating Turkish delight.” She swang the suitcase to one hand, then changed her mind and tried the other.

  “You want me to carry that for a bit?”

  “Okay. Just for a bit.”

  All her worldly possessions. It weighed about eight pounds. Not much, but eight pounds more than I wanted to carry.

  “I like it too that Edmund was good in the end and that his sisters and brother were nice to him.” She frowned. “But I don’t know what Turkish delight is. Aba doesn’t know, either. She said maybe it’s kind of like chocolate.”

  “Real Turkish delight is soft and squashy and sweet. It comes in round boxes. The pieces are pale yellow or pink cubes, and all dusted with powdered sugar.”

  “Is it nice?”

  Being in the rig, being out of sight, and getting my ribs taped would be nice. “It’s a bit perfumey, like eating roses. Sickly. I’ll buy you some if you like, then you can tell me.”

  “Aba doesn’t like me to eat sweet things.” A slitted, sideways glance.

  Aud Torvingen, White Witch. “Did you know that they made a film based on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?”

  She gave me that look that said I was speaking Urdu again, and I remembered she didn’t go to school, where children are exposed to other children talking about cartoons and movies and gross-out videos.

  “So what books do you have in here?” She shook her head and flushed, which I hadn’t seen her do before. “Must be a heavy one.”

  She actually hung her head. I imagined her poring over a book of knowledge in tiny type with black-and-white illustrations that was forty years out of date and smelled of mildew, imagined her agony of indecision when it came time to pack her things: she would have wanted it so, but known it was stealing.

  “I could buy you encyclopedias, too. New ones.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re better.” But that wasn’t what she meant. She stumbled, but pulled away when I tried to help her.

  “How far is it?”

  “Another two miles.”

  She nodded wearily.

  “I could carry you, if you like.” Even if she didn’t like. We were already conspicuous; I wanted to be back at the trailer before dark.

  “Like a baby!” Enough energy for scorn.

  “Aslan carried Lucy.”

  “You’re not a lion.”

  “No, but I can talk, not like a horse or a car.”

  She considered that. “Okay. But piggyback.”

  “Of course.” I shifted the Glock to the front of my waistband and squatted. My knee was visibly swollen. She climbed onto my back. “Wrap your legs tightly because I need one hand for—No!” I pulled her legs down a little. “No,” I said again, more softly, “not there.”

  We set off again, her arms around my neck tightly enough to choke. If Mike’s weight hadn’t reopened the wound, hers probably wouldn’t. After a while she relaxed. A little while after that, the pain in my knee notched up from burning to searing.

  Now that she wasn’t walking, Luz was more talkative. She talked about Button a lot.

  “He’s okay. Not as smart as me but he’s good, I mean he’s good when he can be. When Aba tells him, Don’t leave the yard, he doesn’t leave the yard on purpose, he just forgets. So it’s my job to remind him.”

  “But he has tantrums.” I was getting very thirsty.

  “When he’s upset. Because he doesn’t always understand things.”

  “Does he ever hit you?”

  “On purpose? No! But once when I was little he was wiggling about and I tried to hold his hands and he knocked one of my teeth out. But it was just a baby tooth so it was okay. It was falling out already.”

  “Does anyone else ever hit you?”

  “Like who?”

  “Like anyone. Like Aba, or Mr. Carpenter.”

  “Why would they hit me?”

  “Sometimes adults hit children when they’re not good.”

  “I’m always good.”

  “Always?”

  She squirmed. “Mostly.”

  “And what do they do when they find out you haven’t been good?”

  She squirmed again. “Make me say more prayers.”

  “Prayers are boring,” I said.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Always.”

  “No, sometimes they’re nice. They make me feel …” Her arms tightened a bit while she thought about it. “Like someone’s looking after me the same way I look after Button.”

  “Don’t Aba and Mr. Carpenter look after you?”

  “Aba does. Mr. Carpenter …” I felt her shrug. “He does things like drive the truck and cut the wood and do the farm stuff, and he takes us swimming sometimes, and Aba leans on his arm when we go to church. But …”

  She didn’t have the vocabulary, in Spanish or English, to talk about the inability to deal with the outside world, with strangers and hard moral choices. Jud Carpenter seemed like a good man who belonged in a simpler time. “But he didn’t stop that woman from taking you away.”

  “He wanted to. Aba stopped him. But I’m going back, aren’t I, so I guess Brother Jerry was right. God works in mysterious ways.” Brother Jerry? “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. It’s not far now.”

  My neck hurt, my ribs hurt, I was beginning to imagine I could hear the bones in my knee grinding together, but more than that I didn’t want to see her face when we got in the rig and I drove her away. I walked on, right foot left foot.

  “Aud.” That perfect pronunciation. “Aud? There is something wrong, isn’t there? Am I too heavy? We could leave my stuff here and get Mr. Carpenter to come back for it in the truck, later.”

  “Luz, would you like to live somewhere else? I mean, live in a big city where you could have everything you wanted, watch TV and read books and talk Spanish and play with other girls?” Would I have left the care of my mother, such as it was, if a stranger had asked?

  “Could Button and Aba come, too?”

  “Luz, do you remember your life before Aba, when you lived in another country?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t remember a big church with pretty-colored glass, or your mother and brother and sister? Where everyone talked Spanish?”

  “No.” Her voice had an edge to it.

  “You were telling Button about it.”

  “That was just a story.” Loudly now.

  “But if the story were real, about a real place and a real time, would you like to go back there?”

  “No! It was a story! I want to go home. I don’t want Turkish delight or cyclopedias, I want to go home to Aba and Button and Mr. Carpenter!”

  I gritted my teeth and kept walking. How do you persuade the beaten dog it would be better off with someone else? Perhaps you couldn’t. Perhaps it wouldn’t.<
br />
  It was about six o’clock by the time we saw the truck and trailer. “I can walk now,” Luz said. I didn’t say anything. “Let me down, Aud.”

  Stay in the world, Julia had said, but there were so many different worlds. There was one where I put Luz in my truck and we drove off to Little Rock, where I placed her with social services. There was one where I took her to Atlanta and she lived with me. There was one where we stopped by the truck and I got in and she kept walking, back to Jud and Adeline.

  I set Luz down. “You can walk to the truck.”

  “I don’t want to get in the truck. I want to go home.”

  “I’m very tired, and I don’t want to leave the truck out here. If you get in, I’ll turn it round and take you home.”

  “Swear on the Holy Bible?”

  “I don’t have a Bible.” I switched to Spanish. “But I swear on my own name that if you get in this truck, I will drive you home to Aba.” Aud rhymes with vowed. Another promise hanging around my neck.

  “Today?” English. The language of mistrust.

  “Right now.”

  “And you won’t lock the doors?”

  I should never have offered to buy her Turkish delight. “No. No one is going to lock a door on you ever again.”

  As soon as we pulled up outside the farmhouse, she tore into the house and slammed the door behind her. I switched off the headlights and the engine, turned on the dome light. It seemed very bright. I pulled the Glock from my waistband and put it in the glove compartment. After a while I opened the glove compartment again and took out a folder and my phone. I looked at the phone. There was no one to call. The engine ticked.

  The front door opened again. Adeline Carpenter. She took one step out and stopped. I turned the light off, put the phone back, picked up the folder, and climbed down. The pain was constant now. I could hang on perhaps another hour.

  “Luz says … well, I can’t make head nor tail of it, but she’s here, and you’re here …” She waved vaguely with her left hand, and her eyes were brilliant and glassy. “And your face …” She pulled an inhaler from her apron pocket and sucked hard. I thought for a moment she might pass out.

  “Mrs. Carpenter, may I come in? We have a lot to talk about.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  We sat at the kitchen table, on our third cup of coffee. The same stew still simmered by the stove but the room looked flatter and harsher in electric light. Luz was with Button, watching Jud work on the truck. Adeline had watched while I cleaned the grit and blood from my face and smeared the graze with antibiotic ointment. She gave me ibuprofen for the pain. Her breathing improved as I washed away the evidence of violence. I hadn’t mentioned my knee or ribs.

  I had given Adeline an edited version of what had happened, up to the point where Luz and I walked back from the woods, and her confusion was mounting.

  “So Miz Goulay’s in a car in the woods?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she’s not coming back?”

  “When she wakes up, she’ll untie Mike, and they’ll both spend a fair amount of time searching for the car keys, which they won’t find, after which they’ll have to walk out. They might walk the wrong way, but it shouldn’t be cold enough tonight to do them any harm.”

  “But she won’t …” She took a moment to breathe. “She won’t be coming back after Luz?”

  “No.”

  “And …” She used her inhaler again. Breathed. Another snort. The color came back to her face. “She won’t go to the police?”

  “No. If the police were called, she would have a lot of explaining to do.” The list of charges a good lawyer could level at Goulay would be long, beginning with kidnap of a minor, trafficking in illegal immigrants, carrying a concealed weapon without a permit… “Jean Goulay will never bother you again. Luz will stay here, with you and your husband and Button. If that’s what you want.”

  “Yes! And her … Mr. Karp?”

  “He’s in a persistent vegetative state, the kind of coma from which you never wake. He’ll get weaker and weaker and then die.”

  “She told the truth about that, then.”

  I opened the folder, spread out Luz’s birth and adoption certificates, her passport and medical reports. “The only people on this earth now responsible for Luz are you and your husband. And me.”

  She frowned. “Where did you get those?”

  “From George Karp’s apartment.”

  She reached out and touched the birth certificate with a fingertip. “In New York. Miz Goulay said he was beaten half to death, but she didn’t say who by.”

  “George Karp was not a good man.”

  She nodded, but I wasn’t sure if she was agreeing or simply acknowledging what I’d said. “You weren’t here on vacation, were you?” she said.

  “No.”

  “And it wasn’t just chance that you came by when we ran out of gas.” She was breathing fast, but this time it wasn’t asthma. “You told a pack of lies to get into my house.”

  “I had good reason.”

  “You lied, just like that Goulay woman. You even lied about having cancer.”

  “I never said I had cancer.”

  “Don’t you get clever with me! You know what you meant for me to think.”

  “Listen to—”

  “No, Miz Aud Thomas or whoever the heck you are, I’ve had my fill today of being bullied and lied to. You’re sitting in my kitchen. I don’t have to listen to one word you say.” She folded her arms and leaned back in her chair. Adeline discovers strength through righteous anger. Shame she hadn’t been able to break free of the Kind Christian Lady persona a little earlier.

  The stew simmered peacefully for a while. The dishes on display were a willow pattern; one had a carefully mended crack. Under the table, my knee was swelling.

  Eventually she couldn’t stand it. “Just what is it you want with us?”

  “A bargain. You don’t want Luz to go, and Luz doesn’t want to go, but you can’t afford to keep her. I can help.”

  “Why would you want to do that? What’s Luz to you?”

  “My motives have no bearing on the matter.”

  “They do for me.”

  If I sat here another hour, I wouldn’t be able to drive. “Did you know that the legal age for marriage is fourteen in Georgia, and just twelve in Delaware?” She kept her arms folded, but now she looked uncomfortable. “Wasn’t too hard to put two and two together, was it? Don’t get righteous with me. You have no moral leg to stand on.”

  Another pause. “What do you mean, help?”

  “Luz stays here. I pay you and untangle the immigration situation. When she’s eighteen she gets to choose her own life.”

  She half unfolded her arms, bewildered now. “But why?”

  I ignored that. “We’ll come to an agreement, write a contract, a covenant. For the money I send I’ll expect certain things.”

  “Why should I trust you? I don’t know you. I don’t even like you.” Heady stuff, freedom. But her timing was inconvenient.

  “You don’t have to like me. I don’t have to like you. We simply have to abide by an agreement. For example, one of my conditions would be that she goes to school. A good school.”

  A long, cautious pause. “She’s got to attend church.”

  “Fine. On the condition that when I set up health and other insurance, you take her in for regular checkups—physical, dental, optical—to medical professionals we agree on beforehand.” She did not say yes or no to that. “If you break the terms of the agreement, I come and take Luz away. If I break them, I give you the documents.” It would be easy enough to take them back again. “All we have to do is make the agreement, and all communication between us will thereafter be through my lawyer, who will hold the documents until Luz is eighteen. Agreed?”

  “If you tell me who you are, and why you’re doing this.”

  “No.”

  “Then we’re done talking.”

  “You don’t
need my name.”

  “I might not be Miss College Mouth Audrey Thomas or whoever the hell you are, but I know a woman who’s hiding something pretty big when I see her. Checks and insurance and doctors. We aren’t talking pin money here. So I want to know who you are and what Luz is to you.”

  The key to negotiation lies in ensuring the other party needs to reach an agreement more than you do, my mother told me once when I was twelve. If you’re willing to walk away, you will win. When I asked her what to do if it was something you really, really wanted, she said, If you have a personal stake, get someone else to negotiate on your behalf. That only works if you have someone else.

  If you’re willing to walk away … But, Choose, Julia had said, and she had loved me. “I won’t tell you my name.”

  “Then—”

  “But I will tell you this. I used to be something like that man, like Geordie Karp, but I’ve changed. I’ve—I’ve seen the error of my ways.” I remembered the sampler. “Now I want to do unto others as I would be done by. I want to atone for the past. Helping Luz, helping you all—Luz and you and your husband, and Button—is the only way I know to make it even partway right.”

  Long silence. “I met that man but once,” Adeline said meditatively, “and I didn’t like him. Not one bit. He wasn’t the kind to give anyone anything—especially not something like this.” She leaned forward and tapped Luz’s documents. “So I reckon you took them, or maybe made him give you them. So I’m thinking that maybe it’s not a coincidence that he’s in the hospital mostly dead and you’re sitting here talking to me about his daughter. No, close your mouth, I haven’t finished. You had something to do with his hurt. It might be that you hired some roughnecks to settle his hash. It might be that you had good reason. But I don’t much care. He was a bad man. A very bad man. You say you used to be like him. Now, you don’t seem that way to me, except for all your lying, but how can I tell for sure? The way it looks to me, Miss Walk-in-Here-with-a-Big-Checkbook, is that I could be getting myself into just the same mess I got myself into before. There’s a lot I don’t understand and don’t know, and that means maybe one day someone, maybe you, could show up at my door and take Luz, take my child away. And she is mine. She may not have come from my loins in blood and sweat and tears like Button did, but she’s in here.” She thumped her breastbone. “And I need something—some kind of guarantee that’s more than a lawyer’s paper—and I reckon that’s your name.”