Always

ELEVEN

THE NOISE OF THE CHAINSAWS RIPPING THROUGH THE BRANCHES ON THE CHERRY tree made my head ache. Wherever Kick was, her headache would be worse. The tree surgeon, Guttersen, and his son, Ben, lopped off the first few smaller branches of the limb overhanging Kick’s dining room extension. They fell onto the concrete with a dry rustle. And then the rustling turned to thumps as the small branches gave way to medium-sized ones.

“Yo!” Guttersen let his saw stutter into silence and Ben followed suit, and Guttersen waved at the man in the truck standing by the huge winch. With an industrial beeping, the arm and canvas sling swung ponderously over the garage to the tree. Guttersen and Ben strapped and wrapped the right-hand limb. Guttersen checked his work, nodded me and Ben back, then yanked his saw to life. The teeth tore through most of the foot and a half in two minutes. He signaled the winch operator. The engine note changed up a gear and the cable tightened. Guttersen cut through the last few inches. With a creak, the sling sagged slightly, and then the limb rose majestically and was swung over the garage and into the bed of the truck.

Guttersen put his hands on his hips and grinned. He looked at me. “Sweet work.”

I nodded.

“Just in time, though, eh?” He pointed with his saw. Where the limb had been sheared away, the wood was dark inside, rotten to the core. “Could have come down anytime. Bye, bye, garage, maybe even the side of the house. The whole tree needs to come down. Could fall on the neighbor’s house. On the neighbor. Big liability.”

I pondered. “How long would it take?”

“Another thirty, forty minutes.”

I didn’t know where Kick was. My head hurt. I looked at the lopsided tree. Rotten to the core. Dangerous. Big liability.

“Go ahead.” As soon as I said it, my stomach rolled. I would have said it was a hangover, but last night I hadn’t had even two beers.

Guttersen started on the left-hand limb. Ben took his chainsaw into the bed of the truck and carved the severed right-hand limb as though it were a roll of butter.

I wandered down to the bottom of the garden. On the other side of the fence, the fluffy cat hunched under a raspberry bush, ears flat. “No rats,” I told her.

I sat on the grass. It was dry and prickly. Up close, I could see how much moss there was in the turf; although summer had barely begun, it was already greener than the grass. I had always thought Seattle was like Ireland, eternally soft and damp and green.

The sky was mostly blue, with a few aggressively cheerful little white clouds. A breeze came from the south, gentle, but strong enough to keep the smell of furious engines downwind. I turned my face to the sun and closed my eyes, and breathed in the scents of sun-dried earth and burgeoning berries.

The chainsaws stopped. I opened my eyes.

“Ma’am?” Guttersen said. I stood, but he wasn’t talking to me.

“I said, what the fuck are you doing to my tree?”

Kick was wearing a plain white T-shirt that fit at the shoulders but was tight around the breasts. A man’s. Dornan’s. Last night’s cut-off T was probably in the grocery bag she clutched in her left hand. Twined among the diesel smell was that of old smoke and stale beer.

She saw me as I crossed the lawn.

“Is this your doing?” She was very pale.

“Ma’am?” Guttersen said again.

“Well?” Kick said.

“It’s rotten,” I said.

She was even paler around the eyes. “You can’t do this.”

“It’s rotten,” I said again, but my stomach rolled again. “It’s dangerous. Tell her,” I said to Guttersen.

“This isn’t your tree?” he said to me.

“You’re fucking dangerous,” Kick said. “How dare you do this to my tree? Look at it.”

We all looked at it. There was nothing left but six feet of trunk.

The truck rumbled to silence. Ben jumped down from the back. “Dad?”

“Secure what’s in the truck,” Guttersen said. Ben turned to obey. Guttersen put down his chainsaw, took off his gloves and tucked them in his belt, and wiped both palms down his jeans. “Now,” he said to Kick, “it looks like there’s been some miscommunication here. Are you the owner?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like me to take the rest of this tree down?”

“No.”

“All right, then.” He pulled a card, bent at one corner, from his back pocket. “There’s my phone and e-mail. If you change your mind, let me know. If you don’t, well, I understand how you might be pissed, seeing as I didn’t check that this lady was the owner, and didn’t get any paperwork, and I apologize, I just…” He couldn’t find a way to end his sentence. “I apologize,” he said again, and held out his hand. Kick shook it. Such small hands.

“It’s not you I blame,” she said, and Guttersen was wise enough to simply pick up his saw and leave. Thirty seconds later, the truck ground its gears and eased out of the drive. She turned to me. “I don’t want to hear anything you have to say. Not a thing. Not one word. I want you to leave. And if you send me flowers I will kill you. Do you even know what you’ve done?”

I paused, one hand on the gate, not sure if I was supposed to answer that or not. Not, I decided, and left her there, still holding her grocery bag.

TURTLEDOVE CALLED me just as the Fairmont parking valet drove off with my car.

“Mackie’s real name is Jim Eddard. He has a string of juvenile arrests, everything from vandalism to petty dealing and minor assault. The last arresting officer thinks he was also involved in an arson eighteen months ago, but there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m on the set. He’s not here.”

“Do you have an address?”

“We have two possibles.”

“Is Finkel Junior there?”

“Who?”

“Bri. Mackie’s young friend.” I’d hung tags on both of them.

“One moment.” After a twenty-second pause he said, “He’s here.”

“Then stay there. Keep your eye on him. If Mackie comes in, watch him. If you have to choose, go with Mackie. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Less than twenty minutes. Meanwhile, start going through all the employee records.”

“Philippa started on that as soon as we saw Eddard’s sheet.”

“If you need to use staff for the record scrutiny, hire a couple of people.”

“We should be okay.”

“Good.” I shivered. It was cool in the shadow of the hotel. “For now, let’s not bother Finkel and Rusen or anyone else on set with this.”

“Of course.”

I folded the phone and waited for the car valet to come back.

"HELLO, BRI,” I said.

He straightened from the box of metal scaffolding connectors. “Hi?” He had a spray of pimples on one side of his mouth.

“I can’t find Mackie.” Or Peg, or Joel, or Dornan. “Do you know when he’ll be in?”

“He said he’d be here before lunch?” He twitched, as though he really wanted to get back to his box but knew it wasn’t polite.

It was close to noon now. “What time’s lunch, do you think?”

“About now. Or twelve-thirty?”

I nodded. Turtledove was watching from the door. I held up my wrist, made a half-dial motion, waited until he nodded he understood, then turned back to Bri, who smiled uncertainly. “Do you know who I am?”

His nod was jerky, too.

“Then you know I was one of the people you poisoned.”

He smiled wider and he locked eyes with me. Like a puppy that thumps its tail and cringes at the same time. “I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did. You and Mackie.”

“No.”

“Yes. You were at the coffee urn just before I drank. Mackie was laughing. ” I was certain now. Adolescents love to hero-worship.

Something of my certainty must have penetrated his adolescent dimness. Like a lot of teens, he was unpracticed in the subtleties of lying. He couldn’t equivocate. He flipped, suddenly eager to please.

“It was supposed to be a joke! Mackie said it would be funny.”

“Was it?”

He didn’t know whether he was supposed to nod or shake his head.

Mackie could be here any minute. I needed to shortcut this process. “Are you hungry, Bri, or thirsty? No? Because I am. Let’s go sit down out of the way, have a little chat.” He followed me, sneakers squeaking on the concrete floor, to the craft-services table, where dozens of plastic-wrapped bottles of water were lined up with military precision, along with packets of crisps and pretzels. Rusen, or Joel. Kick wouldn’t organize things that way, nor would Dornan. I put them from my mind.

I pulled a bottle from its plastic and sat on the other side of the table, gestured for Bri to join me. He twisted his head to and fro.

“Mackie’s not here. Your father isn’t here. Even if he were, he couldn’t save you. Maybe he wouldn’t want to. You’re sixteen, Bri, not twelve. You know what Mackie’s like.”

“No.” But he did.

“Sit.” He sat. He didn’t know what else to do. “You know that it’s not smart to put drugs in anyone’s food or coffee. What did you think would happen?”

He stared at the floor. It was tempting to force him to respond, but I didn’t know how long we had.

“But it was all Mackie’s idea, right?”

He muttered something.

“I can’t hear you.”

“Yes.”

“All right. Tell me what else was his idea.”

“What do you mean?” He looked up at me from behind his flopping hair. I had lost count of the number of adolescent suspects who had given me that look, thinking maybe that now they’d admitted something, maybe they could skate a little.

“Let’s just do this, Brian. Tell me about the film, and the lights, and the lab, and the drugs. Let’s start at the beginning.”

“My dad won’t let you do anything to me. Mackie says I’m too young to be prosecuted.”

“Maybe not.” He was of an age to be legally responsible for his actions, but knowing that would only discourage him from admitting guilt. “But I could tell Mackie you told me everything, because I know a lot of the details, even though I don’t have proof, and he won’t care about the fine print. He’ll just beat you into the dirt.” I flexed my hands: If he doesn’t, I will. “And he’ll turn on you in a second. So here’s your chance to tell your story and score some points. Tell me. From the beginning.”

He was sixteen, and not bright. I would give him a minute or so to work out where his best interests lay.

He took forty seconds. “The film stock? He said he’d buy me a beer if I swapped it out for some other film? And, y’know, it wasn’t like it would hurt anyone or anything. I mean, it’s just film. Right?” I nodded. “Right. And it’s not like my dad is broke or anything. So I said okay.”

“How did you do it without anyone seeing?”

“Oh, man, it was so easy. I didn’t have to swap the film, Mackie doesn’t know anything. I just changed the exposures. Like, thirty seconds’ work.”

“Pretty good, wasting thirty thousand dollars in half a minute. What does that work out to an hour?” He was getting uncertain again, which would just waste time. I gave him my best smile. “So you’re pretty smart. Smarter than Mackie, I’ll bet. The drugs were your idea?”

“Nah, they were his. He was like, We can get them so totally fucked up! and I’m like, Okay, all right, so he goes, I’ll get the stuff and we’ll, like, do it right now. So I said okay.”

“So he had the drugs with him, even before you discussed it.”

He thought about it. “I guess.”

“So when did you do it?”

“You were there. That night. We just dumped the baggie in the pot. You were macking on the craft-services girl, and she was, like, ignoring you so hard she wouldn’t have noticed if I took a dump in the food. So I held up the lid and Mackie shook out the baggie into the coffee, and then stirred it with a wrench.”

“A wrench?”

“We didn’t have a spoon. Anyhow, someone would have noticed if one of us had been carrying a spoon, he said.”

Mackie wasn’t nearly as dumb as Brian. I looked at my watch. “So what do you think I should do with you?”

“Do?”

Perhaps there was no such thing as consequences in the world of almost-Hollywood high school parties. But it wasn’t my job to teach him morals. “I’ll just let your father deal with it.”

Now he panicked. “My father?”

“He’ll decide about the police. But you won’t be working here anymore.”

“But I don’t go back to school for three months.”

“Not my problem.” I waited until I caught Turtledove’s eye, and gestured him over. “Do as you’re told for the next few minutes.”

I stood, and he tried to stand, too, but I pressed him back into the seat without effort. His face went slack; he still didn’t really grasp what was happening. It was tempting to punch him until he understood; I was grateful when Turtledove came up.

“Watch him. I have to talk to Rusen. If Mackie comes in, don’t let him leave.”

I drank my water, threw the bottle in the trash on the way out to the trailer. I knocked and went in. Rusen and Finkel looked up. “Rusen? A word?” and didn’t give him time to consider, but stepped outside again.

He joined me.

“Bri Junior and Mackie are the ones who have been sabotaging things.”

“Bri? Mackie? Are you sure?”

“Yes. The drugs, the film stock, everything. Bri has admitted as much. Mackie, real name Eddard, was the leader, of course. I haven’t talked to him yet.”

“But Bri’s just—”

I needed him to pay attention. “Do you still want me to invest?”

“Well, sure.”

“Then listen. Turtledove is going to babysit Bri. You keep Finkel in the trailer, away from his son, until I’m finished with Mackie. Do you understand? ”

He understood.

I stood by the scaffolding for a while. It was more than thirty feet high. Carpenters were banging busily nearby. I recognized one of them; he’d been talking to Steve Jursen the day I arrived. Perhaps he didn’t like coffee.

Turtledove and Bri were not in the line-of-sight of anyone walking into the warehouse. There were no obvious weapons lying about, no crew whose stance would scream “Take me hostage!” if things went bad. I went out into the lot and sat in my car.

Mackie’s car turned out to be an unremarkable Toyota, old, but not too shabby or too bright. He got out, slung his leather jacket over his left shoulder, and headed for the warehouse.

I shimmed his door open, released the hood, lifted the distributor cap, removed the rotor, closed it up again. Hummed to myself as I followed him in.

He was admiring the scaffolding, nodding at the carpenters, his wide-spaced eyes clear and friendly: matching the appearance of his prey, a small-predator trick. Either he spent more money on tailoring than I did, or he was unarmed.

He was alert. He turned when I was ten feet from him, one foot carefully positioned in front of the other.

“Don’t run, Jim. I’d have to knock you down.” He dropped his shoulders in an appearance of instant relaxation. I smiled. “Or run if you like. Knocking you down might give me an appetite for lunch.”

“Why should I run?” His voice was as whippy as a steel antenna. He probably thought he was a good actor.

“Why do people usually?” I shrugged. “Come and sit and tell me everything. ”

“Make me.”

“All right.”

“Nah, nah, just kidding.” Rueful smile. The it’s-a-fair-cop routine. Casual glance this way and that to see if there were any uniforms at the exit. “What do you want to know?”

“Oh, I already know. I just need verbal confirmation of when Corning hired you and how much she paid.”

That rattled him: I knew. I smiled, allowed myself the indulgence of imagining how I’d take him down if it came to that.

He made a show of swinging his jacket off his shoulder, fiddling with the zip, slinging it back onto his other shoulder. It hung there as easily as it had on the other side. Ambidextrous. That would make it more fun. I wouldn’t want to leave bruises, though: it would shock Finkel and Rusen and, by extension, Kick.

"And what do I get?”

“What would you suggest?”

“Immunity.”

“No.”

“Then I’ve got nothing to say.”

“Your choice.” I got out my phone, let him watch me dial 411, press TALK. His shoulders relaxed a little more, but the weight moved to his back foot. Clearly he wouldn’t be expecting a foot sweep. “Yes,” I said to the operator, “Seattle police, nonemergency. Yes, please. Thank—” He bolted.

He got to his car before I did, but that was because I wasn’t trying. He leapt into the driver’s seat. He gave me the finger and slid the key home without slamming the door. He turned the ignition. Nothing happened.

I hummed to myself as I pulled him out and kneed him on the sciatic nerve hard enough to collapse the leg.

“Get up.”

“You’ve broken it!”

“No. But I could if you like. Get up. Sit.” He dragged himself into the driver’s seat and rubbed at his leg.

“I can’t feel it.”

“There won’t even be a bruise.” I was really tired of people whining today. “Now, tell me about Corning.”

He wasn’t scared, and if he was angry he didn’t show it, but he knew a no-win situation when he saw it. He talked.

Corning, he said, had given him five thousand dollars, with a promise of double that when he was done. “But if I’d known it’d take so long, I’d have asked for more.”

The five thousand was a lie. She’d given him three installments of two thousand dollars. “What did she ask you to do?”

“If you don’t know, then why are we having this talk?”

“I know what you did. I want to know what she asked you to do.”

“Wasn’t specific. Make them leave, she said. Make them go broke.”

“Why?”

“Don’t know. Don’t care.” Another young man who liked breaking things for no particular reason. Maybe a horrible childhood was to blame, or some genetic glitch. It really didn’t matter; he was twenty-two, and he saw no reason to change a life with which he was perfectly satisfied.

“Did she give you the drugs?”

“Karenna?” He laughed, and it struck me that Corning had a penchant for young men: Gary and Mackie and probably Johnson Bingley. Big Mac.

“When and how did you meet her?”

He shrugged. But it didn’t really matter. I had the date of the first payment.

“Come with me,” I said, and motioned for him to stand.

“My leg.”

“You’ll just have to limp.”

Inside the warehouse, people glanced at each other as he limped in ahead of me. “You got any duct tape?” I asked an electrician. He passed a roll to the carpenter, who passed it to me without a word.

I walked Mackie to the food-services table, where it looked as though Bri had been crying. Turtledove seemed interested in his nails. “Yo,” Mackie said to Bri. “Fucking pussy.”

I made him kneel and put his hands behind his back. I put his jacket on the table, and taped his hands and feet together, then lifted him onto a chair. I taped him to that. No more hammering. The crew stared openly.

“One more question. When were you going to claim the rest of the money from Corning?”

He shrugged, though not as elegantly now that he was bound. “When the job was done.”

“How were you going to get in touch?”

“Her cell phone.”

I went through his jacket, found his cell phone, slipped it into my pocket.

“Hey!”

He seemed genuinely outraged that I was taking his fifty-dollar phone. I could have taken his sight, or his life. I just looked at him. Something deep in his eyes squirmed like a sea mollusk under pressure. I went through his wallet, but there was nothing interesting. I dropped the jacket on the table.

I said to the listening crew, “This man that you know as Mackie is really Jim Eddard. He and Bri spoiled the footage and drugged the coffee. If that pisses you off, feel free to let them know.” To Turtledove: “Don’t let either of them move.”

NO POLICE, Finkel and Rusen decided.

“That’s not wise,” I said.

“It would be too hard on the boy,” Rusen said. “His brother has just died.”

This wasn’t about how Bri felt. But I hesitated. What did I feel? What did I want? One called the police to ensure protection, punishment, or revenge. I didn’t need protection from a sixteen-year-old boy. Punishment was only useful when it triggered remorse, or acted as a deterrent. Revenge, as George Orwell pointed out, is the product of helplessness. I wasn’t helpless, though I had been for a few days, thanks to Bri and his friend. Perhaps if I’d understood a few months ago how it felt to be helpless, I could have explained to my students that having power meant not needing vengeance. Perhaps things would have turned out differently.

“Fine,” I said. “But I don’t want to see either of them on my property again.”

“But Bri is just a boy. I’m sure he wouldn’t—”

“He already has. Several misdemeanors and at least one felony. He would be tried as an adult. He might well go to prison.” It didn’t really matter. Turtledove would keep them off the set if I said so, and I’d be gone in a week, back to Atlanta, after which I wouldn’t care.

I went out to the parking lot to call Kick. She didn’t answer. I waited for the beep. “It was Bri and Mackie who drugged the coffee. I have verbal confessions. They’ve been banned from the set. Finkel and Rusen don’t want to prosecute, but there’s nothing stopping you from doing so.” Though there wouldn’t be much point bringing suit against Mackie, because he had no money, and if she sued Bri, his father would make sure she never worked in the industry again. I hesitated, wondering if I should remind her to drink lots of water, wishing I could take back the morning and do it again, unsure what I’d do differently. The tree was rotten. It had had to come down. “I wanted you to know.”

The interior of the Audi was hot, aromatic with the new-car volatiles drawn out by the sun. I tossed Mackie’s phone into the glove compartment, then was tempted to curl up in the backseat and drowse like a cat, reset my day, but my phone rang.

“Aud?” My mother sounded tentative. “I have just had a most interesting conversation with Eric, who had just spoken to your friend, Hugh.”

“Hugh?”

“Matthew. Matthew Dornan.” I opened the car door and got out, leaned against the Audi’s hood. “Aud? Are you there?”

“I’m here.” Hugh? I couldn’t remember anyone ever calling him that before.

“It seems you have upset your friend. Your other friend.”

“It seems you always blame me when things go wrong.”

Silence. “So,” she said. “Your friend. She is upset with you?”

“Yes.”

“And was it something you did?”

I sighed. “Yes.”

“Are you are sorry for it?”

“Yes.”

“But she didn’t accept your apology?”

Silence.

“Aud.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Then say nothing while I talk. Your last friend died. I didn’t meet her. This friend—”

“She’s not my friend. I’m not even sure we like each other.”

“No?” I said nothing. “Tell me what happened.”

“I did her a favor.”

“What kind of favor?”

“One she didn’t want.”

“Eric is very keen on a paperback writer called Heinlein, whose books almost all have spaceships on the cover. He is dead now, I believe. But Eric is fond of a quote from one of these books: ‘In an argument with your spouse, if you discover you are right, apologize immediately.’ ”

“I don’t know if I am right.”

“All the more reason.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Good. And when you have apologized, I’d like you to bring her to dinner. We’re leaving very soon.”

“I know.”

“Well, then,” she said in her it’s-all-settled voice, the one she used with recalcitrant parties in a negotiation, then rang off before I could muster an argument—which was another favorite trick.

I was still staring at my phone when Dornan arrived in a taxi. He paid the driver, got out—a little more slowly than usual—ran his hand through his hair, and saw me. He turned his head slightly, like someone approaching an unpleasant task.

We stood silently for a moment. He looked sweaty. It could have been a hangover. It could have been because it was hot.

“So, Hugh. You called my mother.”

“Someone had to do something.”

“Someone could simply tell me what is going on.”

“No,” he said. “No. You can’t ask me. I can’t—She made me promise.”

“So you do know what it is.”

“No. Or, yes, I knew she was going to find out yesterday what the—” He blinked, shook his head. “You have to ask her.”

“I did.”

“Ask again.”

A gull flew overhead. “I dreamt of Luz last night. And Kick’s tree.”

“She loved that tree.”

"Yes.” I watched the gull, wheeling round and round. “I shouldn’t have done it, should I?”

“What do you think?”

I tried not to think about how my stomach had rolled when she came home, clutching her carrier bag.

“Aud…” He wiped his upper lip. “Try to figure it out.” He headed for the warehouse door.

It was definitely hot.

I sweated lightly as I dialed. “Kick? It’s Aud. I was wrong. I’m sorry. I’m coming to your house to tell you in person. I’m sorry.”

I called Gary. “Reschedule my appointment with Bingley for tomorrow. Make it afternoon.”

“But he’s already nervous. He might—”

“Just do it.”

THE BASEMENT, WHEN I ARRIVED, HAD SMELLED OF PATCHOULI AND INCENSE AND strange women. I had turned on the sluggish air-conditioning unit and propped open the door, and my students had arrived carrying their own smells, but the room was still heavy with alien scents. I felt displaced. Perhaps it was just strange to be back in Atlanta after a weekend in Arkansas with Luz and the Carpenters. Her tenth birthday. Everything there had smelled of children and red clover and pine needles.

We had warmed up, and practiced falling again, and now they were sitting, waiting.

“Today’s subject is children.” I looked at Suze. “Even if you don’t have kids, you probably have younger siblings, or nephews and nieces. You might have a frail elderly relative. You might be out—or in—one night with a friend or roommate. A lot of what I’ll teach today applies in those situations. Also, of course, you never know when you might end up with children in your care unexpectedly. Children are not like adults. They don’t think the way we do or know what we know.” Sometimes this was good, sometimes bad.

Very briefly, after being pulled off the streets and before the police commissioner had been pressured to remove my badge altogether, I’d been assigned to visit local schools and talk about safety. Some of the things they had been taught astounded me.

“What do you currently teach your children about safety?” I said.

“Don’t talk to strangers.” Kim said. Some nods.

“What’s appropriate in terms of touching,” Therese said. More nods.

“All right. Let’s go back to that first one. What’s a stranger?”

“How do you mean?” Kim said.

“I’ve asked roomsful of children to describe or draw a stranger and they come up with a remarkably similar picture. A man, usually with dark facial hair, wearing dark clothes, and often a hat.”

They came up, in fact, with the classic mugshot caricature of a rapist, whose race varied with both the socioeconomic status and race of the child. Women taught their children to be afraid of what the news had taught them to fear.

“More children are harmed by people they know—teachers, pastors, club leaders, relatives—than by those they don’t. The same is true for women. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, the leading cause of injury for women aged fifteen to forty-four is domestic violence. It’s not the stranger who poses the danger.”

“You’re a poet and didn’t know it,” Nina said.

“Don’t,” I said. “No more jokes. Not today.” I surveyed them, one by one. “Do I have your attention?”

Nods.

“The best way to protect your children is to protect yourself. In homes where domestic violence occurs, children are abused one hundred and fifty times more often than the national average.”

No one said anything.

“Like your children, you need to know when something is wrong. Like your children, you need to believe you have the right to defend yourself. Self-defense is about self-worth, self-esteem, self-love. Self. We are worth fighting for.”

I watched Sandra, remembering my last conversation, years ago, with Diane, at Arkady House, a women’s shelter. I’d asked her why so many of these women didn’t do the sensible thing and prosecute. She had said, “These women are grown-ups. They know what they need. If a woman comes in here all beat to shit and I say, ‘Honey, you need medical attention, you need to leave that man right now,’ and she says, ‘Well, Diane, what I really need is a pair of shoes for my youngest,’ I give her a pair of shoes. You know why? Because maybe her youngest doesn’t have any shoes, because that’s how her husband controls them. And if the kid can’t walk out, then they can’t leave. So if she says what she needs is shoes, then what she gets is shoes. If she says nothing, then maybe it’s because she needs to, or maybe she’s still lying to herself. Don’t make her talk to you if she doesn’t want to. If she’s lying to herself, she’ll only lie to you. No one can change that woman’s life but her. Don’t try to do it for her. Down that path lies madness and despair.”

Madness and despair. She could have been talking about Sandra.

“…want to teach my kids to be scared of everyone,” Kim was saying. “Even their uncles, their daddy. I won’t.”

“No argument,” I said. “Teaching children more fear isn’t useful. They should be taught instead to understand what’s acceptable, and from whom. They should understand who they are: where their sovereignty lies, if you like, just as you’ve started to learn in the last few weeks. They should learn that if someone abuses them, make them stop. They should learn that it’s not smart to hand out information that may make you vulnerable. But what does that mean with regard to a ten-year-old?”

I thought of Luz, the ten-year-old I knew best: her avarice, her covetousness, particularly when it came to good leather and precious metals, her occasionally unfathomable combination of cynicism and naïveté, suspicion and trust. Ten-year-olds, in many ways, were far more capable of looking after themselves than teenage girls because they had not yet fully learnt the social imperative of fitting in, of being submissive.

“Here’s what I would talk to children about. I would tell them to never answer the phone and tell someone they were alone in the house. I would explain that they must never open the door without the chain being fastened, even if they’re expecting Santa or the Tooth Fairy. I would suggest that they never, ever get into a car with someone you hadn’t expressly told them they should go with. It doesn’t matter whether they recognize this person or not. I would tell them that if ever they were frightened to be in a room, any room, even with a relative, it’s okay to run from that room and come and find you. I’d make sure they had a phone with your own phone number on speed-dial.”

“Not cheap,” Katherine said.

“Kroger has those pay-as-you-go kind, three for forty bucks,” Kim said, in a What planet are you from? tone. “My kids bust theirs all the time. Carlotta even flushed hers down the john last week. You just give them another. Cheap compared to a kid’s life.”

“About touching,” I said, “you’ll have to work out the wording for yourself. ” No doubt there were as many coy euphemisms as southern women.

“Telling them don’t let anyone touch you where your bathing suit covers works pretty good,” Kim said, and this time the what planet tone was meant for me.

All the mothers nodded.

I wondered if Luz knew this. Of course she did. Didn’t she?

“Or if anything creeps them out, they should just yell,” Nina said. “Kids like yelling. Dan did that, my sister’s youngest. He’s eleven. His coach got him in the locker room one day and Dan yelled and another teacher came running, and they called his mom, only they couldn’t get ahold of her, so they called me, and when I had him in the car, taking him home, I asked him what had made him yell, and he said, ‘He was a bony-faced creepazoid! He creeped me out!’ And then he wanted to know if we could go to McDonald’s.”

“And they should run,” Kim said.

“Yes, but where?” Therese said. “You don’t want them running from the frying pan to the fire.”

“Walk the ’hood,” Pauletta said. “I did that with my nephews and nieces when they were staying after that big storm down in the Carolinas. I showed them the routes from home to school, and school to safe places. I introduced them around to the good folks and warned them about the bad.”

I thought of all those times I had moved: Oslo to London to Oslo to Yorkshire to London. I couldn’t remember my mother showing me the safe places. There again, I had assumed everywhere was safe. I had assumed the world would protect me.

I remembered the kittens.

During my first few years in uniform, my partner, Frank, and I got called in to deal with a lot of bodies. More than our fair share. It became a joke in the department: a citizen calls in something suspicious and it was always Frank and I who ended up being closest and discovering the body. One winter, during a cold snap, we answered a call from an old man’s neighbors who had not seen him for two or three days. Newspapers were piling up. We broke down the door. He had died on his bed. He must have been dying slowly for two days, because although the apartment was cold, he was still warm. At some point, his cat had crawled onto the bed and given birth to five kittens. She was a skinny thing, nothing but bone; she probably had not eaten for three or four days. But when we burst in, she stood over those kittens and arched and hissed, ready to take on the world. Frank left, said he’d find a box to carry them all to the cat-rescue place. And while he was gone, the coroner’s deputy arrived and told me to move the cat so he could get at the body. I refused, told him that Frank was going to get a box. I said we would wait: what difference did five minutes make? But the coroner’s deputy thought his time was too valuable to wait, and he reached to pick up the cat. She opened his hand from his wrist bone to the base of his thumb. The blood had been shocking, as were the frantic, blind wiggling of the kittens trying to find the nipples that were gone, and the wide-eyed, pointed-whiskered mother cat who was ready to die.

I blocked his access to the bed after that, and eventually he went away. It turned out that he was the brother of a city councillor, and that day was the start of my troubles with the department. But I didn’t know that then. He left and I sat on the floor, and watched as she settled down again and gave the kittens her teats, and tried to understand. It made no sense. It wasn’t logical. She must have known that if she tried to defend those tiny things against something human-sized, she’d die. And she did it anyway. Why?

I didn’t understand until last year, when I met Julia. And suddenly it was clear. I would protect her with my body against an army—I would drink fire to keep her safe.

And now there was Luz.

“…know all the commonsense stuff,” Kim was saying. “What about the other stuff, that no one talks about?” I blinked. “Like what do you do when some… some creep tries to use your kids against you? What if they try to snatch your kid while you’re there? What if they try to grab you both? What do we do?”

They were looking at me.

“It depends.” I forced myself to be here, now. “Give me an example.”

“I’m walking with my youngest, Carlotta, across the parking lot. Two guys come at us.”

“How old is Carlotta?”

“Five.”

I thought of the terror of trying to protect a five-year-old, the terror of the five-year-old; words wouldn’t be much use at that age. “In an open, unprotected space get into that instinctive, favorite position, the one that works for you.” She assumed it now: left leg back, right leg forward. “Get Carlotta to wrap both arms tight around your back leg, your left leg. That way you know where she is at all times, and she’s behind you, and no one can snatch her without your noticing, and, as a bonus, she’s helping to anchor you. Children like to help.”

I hadn’t known that until late last year when, as I sat in the Carpenters’ Arkansas bathroom, bruised and uncertain, Luz had offered to kiss it all better.

“For grown children, or another adult, you hold hands. Try it now. Hold hands.” Sandra was reluctant to take Therese’s, but did. “Christie and Suze, swap sides. You want to keep your strong hand free.” Christie, left-handed, on the left, Suze on the right. “If you’re touching, you always know where your partner is. You can’t get separated. You can do the fire technique, just charge, or you can stand your ground.”

I held my hand out to an imaginary partner.

“If I need to kick on uneven ground, she can act as a counterbalance.” I mimed leaning. “And vice versa. You protect her as she helps you. You help each other.”