Always

by Nicola Griffith

  Silence. “I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I—”

  “Don’t say it. Just listen for a minute. I’m going back to Atlanta tomorrow. There are some things I have to sort out there. Some papers to sign. But it should all be done by the end of September or October. The movie season will be slowing down here, and it will be cooler by then, and I’m hoping you’ll come out, just for a visit, just for a weekend. You could see how I live and work, the people I know, see my life. As it was. No, please, don’t say anything yet.”

  I began to strip the label from my beer.

  “You probably think I live in a giant house with servants. My house is about the same size as yours.”

  She looked skeptical.

  “Maybe a little bigger. But not much. And I rebuilt it myself. With these hands. The point is, I’d like you to see. One weekend. And then I’ll come back. I have some tables to build for you. And I’m setting up a foundation.”

  She watched me pick at the white underlayer left by the label. “What kind of foundation?”

  “I don’t know. For people who don’t know how to fight back. Sometimes that will be street people, people who’ve given up hope, but sometimes it will be people who have been hopelessly civilized, to the point where they’re powerless to fight back against convention. I’ve bought the land. It’ll be a series of small buildings, set in peaceful grounds along the Duwamish. There’ll be classrooms and offices, some low-cost housing. Offices. General admin for the foundation, of course. My offices—I can see that there would be a good business here in film security—and your offices. For your catering business, maybe, or your stunt work. Maybe even rehearsal space, and studio space, and teaching space for would-be stunters. And a garden, where we could grow things, things to attract wildlife, or things to cook in the cooking classes. I don’t know. Something that makes people feel good while they’re doing it. Maybe skills workshops, like carpentry. Opportunities for people to interact with their physical world. We spend so much time in our heads. And there would be classes on the basics of survival—not just self-defense but cooking, how to balance a checkbook, basic legal rights. Maybe we’ll even have some law offices for idealistic young lawyers who want to help the community.”

  “That’s all?” I wasn’t sure, but I thought she was smiling.

  “I have a lot of money. I want to use it. Money shouldn’t frighten people. It’s a tool. A very versatile one. Take, for example, your stunt work.”

  “Ex-stunt work.”

  “No.” I started working on the label around the collar of the bottle. “We talked about that. I can form an insurance company whose primary client will be you and whichever production company you’re working with. Maybe others, too. I’ve looked into it. Underwriters make a lot of money.” All the more to feed back into the foundation.

  She was silent; so still that her sea-colored dress didn’t move. I couldn’t even see her breathing.

  “You’d accept money if you won the lottery, wouldn’t you?”

  “You bet.”

  “Even if it was me who gave you the winning ticket?”

  “Well, yeah. I think. Sure.”

  “I could do that, you know, if that’s the only way you’d accept my help. I could buy every single ticket for the Washington State Lottery, and give them to you. But it would be easier to just put ten million dollars in an account under your name. Yours forever, no matter what. It’s just a tool. Don’t be afraid of it. Of me. It would be yours, not mine. You could play with it, or spend it, or hoard it, or set it on fire. Whatever it would take for you to not be frightened of it, or me, anymore.” I put down the bottle, collected all the strips of paper in a ball. “Or you could just earn what you earn and we could figure it out. That what’s people who love each other do.”

  She reached for my beer.

  “I do love you.”

  She drank. “You haven’t forgotten that I’m ill.”

  “I haven’t forgotten. You have MS. But you’re fit now, as long as you stay cool, and maybe you’ll be able to do stunt work for years. You also leap to conclusions without thinking, you give everything, even trees, their own name, you get weird and don’t talk when you should.” I looked at the oddly bald bottle in her hand. “And you steal my beer.”

  “What? You can spare me ten million but not half your beer?”

  “Half wouldn’t be a problem. You drank it all.”

  She looked at the bottle in surprise. “Huh.” She put it down. “How do you know I wouldn’t take all your money, too?”

  “Because my lawyer, who looks like a lizard in pearls, would eat you for lunch. Besides, I trust you. I trust you with my life.”

  “You already did that.”

  “Yes.” My blistered face hurt. I was smiling again. “And you saved me.”

  “You let me.”

  “Yes. I let you help. That’s what people who love each other do. I helped Dornan last year. He just helped me.”

  She looked around.

  “Upstairs. Over a game of pool.”

  “He plays pool?”

  “After a fashion.”

  “I could probably beat you at pool.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her golden ear.

  “No, you couldn’t.”

  “I beat you at darts.”

  “We’re getting off the subject.”

  “You just hate being beaten.”

  “Call it one of my imperfections.”

  She laid her hand on mine. Small on large.

  “Kick, I want to be able to send you flowers without you threatening to kill me. I want to oil the hinge on your gate and build you better railings. I want to sit with you in our park and watch herons catch their dinner, to ride with you in a limousine to the premiere of Feral. I want to find out who would win at pool. So stay here and sort through all your job offers, and pick a couple, and do the work, and maybe see your doctors, and understand the shape of things to come, and then come see me—just for the weekend, if you like—and see my life. See where I’ve been. The weather will be lovely. But come.”

  "Yes,” she said. "Yes.”

  ALL THE way back to Atlanta I stared out of the window at the clouds.

  “When will she come?” Dornan said.

  “September.”

  “Did you buy the painting?”

  “No.”

  Another hundred miles of cloud went by.

  “So what will you be doing with yourself when we get back?”

  “Flying to Arkansas to talk to Luz and the Carpenters about adoption.”

  “You’ve signed?”

  “I’ve signed. Then I’ll be organizing my foundation. You’ll be helping.”

  “Me?”

  “I need people I trust on the board. And people who know how to make money. I don’t want it to be one of those institutions that just sucks money into a black hole. You’ll have to fly back and forth, Seattle to Atlanta, but I’ll pay for first class, of course.”

  “Of course,” he said faintly, then rang for the cabin attendant. “I don’t suppose you know how to make a kamikaze?” She didn’t; they agreed on a nice glass of cabernet sauvignon.

  “And you?” I said.

  “Ah, well, I expect Jonie will greet me with the accounts all nicely balanced and the perfect cup of Americano. No one makes Americano like Jonie.”

  Maybe when I come home at night I want comfort and the smell of coffee and to feel safe. For the first time, I understood something about Dornan before he did.

  “What?” he said.

  I smiled.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  First, this is a novel. I’ve taken a few minor liberties with Seattle and its institutions, icons, and landmarks for the sake of convenience.

  Second, this is a novel. While I taught women’s self-defense for five years in the U.K., and while all the statistics used in this book (from the 1985 Women Against Rape study, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Journal of the American Medical Association) are real, Aud
is a fictional character. The way she teaches self-defense is particular and peculiar to her.

  Third, this is a novel. My MS is not Kick’s MS—MS, too, is particular and peculiar. However, Eric Loedessoel’s opinion of immunomodulatory drugs is very similar to my own. I’d like to emphasize that this is merely an opinion; I’m not an M.D. and I don’t pretend to be an authority on these things.

  A note on self-defense: If you’re looking for good, relatively current (written in the 1990s) nonfiction resources, an excellent place to begin is Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear (Dell). When I started out, in the 1980s, it was with two books: Ask Any Woman: A London Inquiry into Rape and Sexual Assault, by Ruth E. Hall (Falling Wall Press; visit womenagainstrape. net for more), and Stand Your Ground: Self-Defence Guide for Women, by Khaleghl Quinn (Pandora Press). Though the 1985 WAR study is more than twenty years old, the statistics have held up remarkably (and depressingly). I haven’t read the Quinn book for a while; I remember it being a little touchy-feely in places, but it beats most of what I’ve seen in the last few years.

  When it comes to recommending a self-defense class, I can speak only to Seattle. If you live here, check out Home Alive (homealive.org) or the Feminist Karate Union (feministkarateunion.org). If you live elsewhere, and know of a good class or instructor, drop me a line via my website (nicola-griffith. com) and I’ll add the link to my Community Resources page.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A handful of people made this a better book. Sean McDonald, my editor, was implacable. Shawna McCarthy, my agent, dealt cheerfully with the highs and lows. Therese Littleton (nothing like the Therese in the book) and Cindy Ward offered insights on an early draft. Kelley Eskridge, my partner, helped most of all; she always does.

  A variety of written sources proved invaluable in terms of pointing out things I didn’t know or clarifying things I did (or thought I did). For mirror neurons, I owe a great deal to Sharon Begley’s Wall Street Journal science column; I applied her explanations rather literally. Much of the neat (or diabolical, depending) real estate tax info also came from The Wall Street Journal (Ray A. Smith’s Property Report, June 1, 2006). A House & Garden article from about ten years ago, “Dealer’s Choice: The King of Ming,” by Amy Page, alerted me to Chinese furniture. Lawrence Weschler’s intriguing New Yorker profile of Ed Weinberger was the basis for Aud’s examination of the fictional Wiram exhibit in Atlanta. Some of Kick’s theories about falling and story come from Garrett Soden’s excellent Falling (Norton).

  Mostly, though, I just made stuff up.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  NICOLA GRIFFITH, the author of Stay, The Blue Place, Slow River, and Ammonite, has won the Nebula Award, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and multiple Lambda literary awards. She is also the coeditor of the Bending the Landscape anthology series. She was a women’s self-defense instructor for many years, until she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1993. Born in England, Griffith now lives in Seattle with her partner, the writer Kelley Eskridge.