Burning chunks of wood came down. A spark caught the edge of the blanket, and it went up with a soft whump. Then I could hear again. Lights flashed. Men in turnout coats. Someone threw a blanket over my shoulders. Kick’s hand was still in mine.
After a jump cut I found myself outside, coughing, some fool shining a light in my eyes. I pushed the penlight away.
“I’m fine.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, and shone the light in my other eye.
“I’m fine.”
“She’s better than fine,” Kick said.
“Is everyone all right? Dornan?”
“He’s fine, everyone’s fine.” Her hand was in mine again.
“How come you’re not wearing a blanket?”
“I don’t have one eyebrow burnt off and a displaced rib.”
“It doesn’t hurt.”
“It will.” She was smiling, an otter playing in a smoky waterfall. My face ached. It seemed I was smiling, too.
Then there was a confusion of lights as another fire truck pulled into the lot and burly figures in coats jumped down. More lights, different. Cameras.
I pushed the blanket off. It was hot. Smoke reached a hundred yards into the bright blue sky. That wasn’t going to look good on EPA paperwork.
Kick was there again. “Can you walk?”
“Yes.”
“We have to move back, the whole place is going up. If you don’t walk, they’ll stuff you in an ambulance.”
“Right.”
I stood up. I felt remarkably steady. The ground was perfectly still and solid under my feet.
Six cameras were rolling. Three were network teams, three were ours. Rusen coughed, shouted something at me, flames leaping in miniature in his glasses, coughed again.
“Better than a bit of propane,” Kick said. “You’re insured, right?”
I laughed. She was right, it did hurt.
LESSON 16
THE AIR-CONDITIONING UNIT APPEARED TO BE BROKEN. THE AIR IN THE BASEMENT felt too big and humid for such a small space but I doubted we’d be doing much physical work today.
Sandra’s hand was in a cast, her forehead hidden behind gauze. I was surprised she was there at all. She sat by herself at the end of the bench.
Violence very often acts as a social flocculant. When added to a community—individuals suspended in a liquid of custom and mores—it separates out the individuals. The common mix, the community, is threatened. The class had watched the splashy, television light, the microphone thrust in Sandra’s face, the way she had stared impassively at the body bag on the gurney as it was wheeled into the ambulance without the lights, and the class had separated her out to protect their world, the one where violence happened to other people.
Therese stood with the others. She smiled and touched people on the arm as she talked, working hard to be one of them. Her connection with Sandra would not survive.
I studied them. They studied me back while pretending they were not, except Sandra, who stared openly. She had killed a man: why should she worry about minor infractions of the social code? I stared back.
I would never know exactly the extent of her premeditation. It didn’t matter. It had been my decision to help her frame a guilty man. We are the sum of our decisions.
She looked away, and in profile, without blood covering the lines, I saw the difference: the plumpness, the softness, the change of skin texture around the eyes.
I turned my gaze to the others. Perhaps the sum of my decisions stared out at them. They dropped their eyes immediately. I nodded. To them I was like Sandra. They didn’t want to meet my gaze in case something leapt from my eye to theirs and invaded their brain.
“Not looking at something never, in the history of the world, made it go away,” I said. “So look at this.”
Southern women can’t stand silence. Eventually, Jennifer said, “How do you mean?”
“I mean face it. Engage. Ask questions. Think. Talk. Don’t wish it away.”
Uncomfortable silence again. “I still don’t understand,” Jennifer said.
“How do you all feel? You, Nina. You, Katherine. What do you think? Tonya, Suze, Pauletta. Anyone?”
It was like one of the early classes. I don’t think you know what you’re getting yourself into. If I had known, would I have done it?
“All right. Do you feel proud?”
“Proud?” Jennifer said.
“Proud: feeling pleasurable satisfaction over an act, possession, quality, or relationship by which one measures one’s stature or self-worth. Feeling or showing justifiable self-respect.”
“Why?” Nina said. “It wasn’t us that did anything.”
“Sandra couldn’t have done what she did without this class. You worked together for nearly three months. You hyperventilated in fear together, you threw and let yourselves be thrown, you trusted each other enough to let yourselves be choked. You all learned together.”
They cut glances at Sandra. I knew they were wondering: then was this our fault?
“The thing is, we can’t judge another’s actions. We can never, any of us, know the struggles someone else goes through. We might think we know, but we don’t.”
“I’m here,” Sandra said. “Why not just ask?”
“Okay,” Suze said.
Silence.
“I’m pregnant,” Sandra said. “He’d hurt me before. I knew he’d do it again. My kids had seen me beaten over and over. When I found out I was having a baby, I thought, I just can’t let him do that anymore. I couldn’t, could I?”
“No,” said Christie.
“I had to protect my baby.”
“That’s right,” said Kim.
Their shoulders dropped a fraction, they turned slightly to face Sandra. The muscles around their eyes relaxed. I could have closed my eyes and known, just by the sound of their breath and the subtle change in their scent, that the group was re-forming, that Sandra was being conditionally reabsorbed. Protect the children, the old clarion call. I wasn’t sure whom I disliked the most: Sandra for manipulating them, them for allowing it, or me for sitting witness.
“How far along are you?” Nina said. “Only I was wondering if that’s why you signed up.”
Sandra looked wary, but Nina plowed on, unaware of what she’d asked.
“I signed up because of what happened to my sister’s youngest. Made me think. I went into a coffee shop in Smyrna, Borealis—anyone know it?”
“No way!” Pauletta said. “I saw the flyer in Borealis, too, only in Decatur.”
“So why’d you sign up?” Nina said.
“Because some yahoo neighbor who’d been drinking thumped on my windshield one night and I thought he wanted to jack the car. Turned out he was just staggering around. Scared the crap out of me, though.”
“I saw a flyer at college,” Christie said.
“Which one?”
“Agnes Scott.”
I wondered how it got there.
“Coffee shop,” Tonya said.
“Me, too.” “And me.”
“E-mail,” Suze said, “a friend. That’s why I was late that first day. She was supposed to come along. She chickened out.”
“I nearly chickened out,” Katherine said. “That first day.” I remembered the footsteps in the dust on the stairwell: down and then up and then down again. “I was so nervous.”
“Yeah. I thought I’d get mashed in the face first thing,” Tonya said.
“No, that was later,” Katherine said, and everyone smiled.
“I think we were all afraid,” Therese said to me. “But you taught us a lot.”
All past tense.
Then they were all standing together, even Sandra—Suze helped her to her feet—facing me, smiling.
“Thank you,” Therese said. She was holding something towards me.
They were happy, relieved, ready to reminisce: they were no longer scared because they were done. They’d finished their sixteen-week course and beaten up a padded man
and frightened a bookstore clerk and looked a killer in the face, and now they were safe.
“It’s a small token of our appreciation.”
An envelope. I took it.
“It’s a gift card.”
A picture of azaleas. Bright and impersonal as a southern smile.
“We didn’t know what you’d want, but then we thought, Well, everyone likes coffee.”
“Or tea,” Nina said.
“Right.” They sounded anxious.
I forced a smile and opened it. A Starbucks gift card. The kind of gift one corporation might give another. Steel Magnolias, Inc., to Aliens from the North, LLC. But they had all signed it:
You taught me so much, Jennifer.
Now I will kick ass! Katherine.
My children are safe, Kim.
Aud, you rock! Suze.
Whether you know it or not, I think you’ve changed our lives a little, Therese.
Please, will you let me know if you give an advanced class? Tonya.
I want more, Christie.
With sincerest thanks, Sandra.
You scare the crap outta me, you really do, but in a good way, Pauletta.
I’ll never know, but I hope she finds someone like you to learn from, Nina.
I ached for them. Most of them would not be able to cling to their bubble world; one day someone, something, would burst it. I wished it could be different.
“Thank you,” I said. “Be safe.”
SEVENTEEN
THERE WAS A RED DOT BY THE PAINTING. “WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?” I SAID TO the sales associate. But I knew.
“It’s sold,” she said.
“Sold.”
“Yes. I’m sorry. You must be very disappointed. But there are several of his other pictures available.”
“I want this one.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s no longer available.”
HIPPOWORKS RENTED The Last Supper Club and invited all the cast and crew and dozens of industry insiders, local celebrities and hangers-on, and corporate sponsors.
The party had been going for three hours with some serious drinking, including bartender stunts involving flaming shots and leaping balls of flame that were probably illegal. I stayed in a corner. My eyebrow stung and my ribs ached and I didn’t want anything to do with fire for a very long time.
“Hey,” said someone with a bright red face and messy black hair. John. Wardrobe. “Hey, there’s a rumor going round that you strangled that kid.”
“Why would I do that?”
He looked puzzled. “I don’t know,” he said, and wandered off. Kick and Rusen and Finkel were surrounded by admirers at the other end of the club.
I took my beer upstairs, where I found a pool table. There was no one else around so I racked the balls and began potting them in order. The color and motion and geometry were soothing, and it was good to keep my muscles moving, work the stiffness out.
“Here’s where you’re hiding,” Dornan said.
“I’m not hiding.”
“No, of course not.” He watched for a while as I stroked the balls into their pockets. He coughed once or twice. We’d all been doing that, particularly the ones who had left the warehouse last. “All packed for tomorrow? Oh, you should have had that one. No doubt it’s your bandaged rib.”
“No doubt.”
“Would you find an actual game more interesting?”
“I might.” I banged the eight ball in. “Help me set up.”
He dug the balls obligingly from the top pockets and rolled them towards me. I racked them. He broke. For Dornan, it was a brilliant stroke: the cue ball actually hit the clustered balls at the other end of the table. It wasn’t a legal break, because only one ball touched a cushion, but Dornan and I had long ago found that making him play strictly by the rules led to a great deal of frustration. He leaned on his cue. “Try not to pot all yours in one go.”
I cracked in the two and the six. He sighed loudly.
“We should give you a handicap.”
Handicap. I wondered how much longer we’d able to use that word in casual conversation.
“Kick’s looking very pretty tonight.”
“Yes,” I said, squinting down the cue at the four, which was hiding behind the eight ball. I could do it if I banked off the left-hand cushion.
“Oh, nice shot. So why is she down there and you’re hiding up here?”
I chalked my cue, walked around the table, leaned, measured, stroked in the five. “I’m not hiding,” I said, lining up the next shot. “I’m waiting. I asked her a question. She hasn’t answered me yet.”
“Aud Torvingen, you are deeply stupid.”
I missed my stroke, barely clipping the cue ball and sending it spinning in slow majesty into the corner pocket. He fished it out, polished it on his jeans, whistling, and put it three inches behind the eleven, in a direct line with the same corner pocket.
“Not a good idea,” I said.
“And why is that?”
“Just look at it.” He would pot the eleven ball, then without the skill to spin and bend the cue ball, would be trapped behind the eight ball and two of mine.
“It looks to be a perfectly reasonable position,” he said, and potted his ball, and was sadly puzzled as to how to hit anything else. He walked around the table twice. “I see,” he said. “I see now. You could have explained. ”
“It was obvious.”
“Maybe to you.” He pursed his lips. Walked around the table again. “So. Kick. You asked her to go to Atlanta, where the heat will make her ill and she knows nobody and there’s no work for her. Why?”
“Because it’s where I live.”
“Is it?”
“Don’t be gnomic. I didn’t understand you the first time you said that and I don’t understand you this time. I want her to come and see where I live. I’ve seen where she lives. One weekend, that’s all I ask. It’s not like it’s forever.”
“Ah.” He nodded smugly to himself.
“What does that mean? Explain it to me. Stop. Stop walking around that table. Look, I understand the pool table. It’s orderly. There are clear rules. It’s obvious. But I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me. Clearly there are rules about things that are just as obvious to you that I’m missing. About Kick.”
“Not about Kick,” he said gently. “About you. As you would say, it’s perfectly obvious. You’ve been intending to come and live in Seattle since the first day you met her.”
I stared at him. “I have?”
“Of course you have. It’s as clear as day. It is to you, too, you simply haven’t yet put it into words. I was hoping you’d figure it out for yourself, it’s better that way, but, well, all right, here it is: Atlanta isn’t your home. I’m not sure it ever was.”
I heard the words, but they made no sense. “It’s where I live. Where I used to work. People I know.” You. “A whole system.”
“Which is exactly what you’ve been building in Seattle, only better.”
He was insane.
“You stopped talking about selling the warehouse almost as soon as you saw it. Ooh, you said, they need my help.”
“Not anymore. It’s all gone, nothing left but burnt timber,” but even as I said it, at a deeper level I felt the words rolling magisterially towards their pockets, dropping one by one, making sense. For a moment my ribs seemed as though clamped in a vise. I couldn’t breathe, but it was just a memory of standing outside the woodworkers’ collective, thinking, I’ll get to know these people.
“And you do know people. You know electricians and carpenters, movie producers and actors, private detectives and reporters, politicians and local government agencies, bankers and real estate agents, even a criminal or two, not to mention two police officers who won’t forget your face in a hurry. You’ve found a dojo. Discovered parks and restaurants and pubs.”
He coughed.
“Can I have a bit of that?” He borrowed my beer. “Ah, that’s better. No, ther
e’s no question. You’ve made more of a life here in three weeks than you’ve done in five years in Atlanta. I only wonder that you’ve managed to hide from the obvious for so long. This place is ideal for a Norwegian who isn’t really Norwegian anymore. It positively reeks of Scandinavia, all clean and shiny and Americanized, full of rules that people obey with a smile when it pleases them and break with a smile when it doesn’t. Ideal for you.”
I thought of the Jante law, and the painting. Of Gas Works Park, the little pocket park by the Duwamish, the land I’d bought. What hope felt like burning beneath the breastbone.
“For God’s sake, there’s even your own personal troll under the bridge. Do you understand now? Good. Now, return the favor, please, and show me how to beat you at this bloody game.”
BACK DOWNSTAIRS I reclaimed my corner seat and settled in with a fresh beer. At the next table, Finkel was entertaining an industry journalist. “. . . stroke of luck. The warehouse and its contents—the sets, the props, the costumes—were a total write-off, but we’d more or less finished shooting anyhow. The beauty of it is we get reimbursed for all that stuff we had no more use for. The negatives were stored off-site and we had the foresight to back up the EDL twice a day. Not a frame was lost. And no one was hurt.”
“What are you, chopped liver?” Kick slid into the chair next to me. “How’s the face? I can hardly see any blisters.”
She wore a cool, summery dress the color of the Caribbean, a necklace of green turquoise tubes, doubled casually into a choker, and her hair loose. Her bare shoulders gleamed.
“. . . product placement for post-production has tripled,” Finkel continued expansively, “and I have two studio meetings next week.”
“The man’s glee is unholy,” she said. “But in a way this has worked out well. We’re almost certain of some kind of deal now. It wouldn’t surprise me to find he’s cooking up a side deal for a Hallmark movie of the week about the Great Seattle Movie Drama.”
“Not if I have anything to do with it. What’s EDL?”
“Edit decision line.”
Which left me none the wiser.
“Anyhow, I won’t have any difficulty getting work for a while, coordinating or catering.”
“So you’ll be busy. You won’t want to come to Atlanta. I fly back tomorrow. ”
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