Always

TWELVE

ON THE DRIVE FROM LAKE UNION TO WALLINGFORD, GARY CALLED ME BACK.

“I tried to reschedule Bingley, but he’s out sick.”

“All right.”

“Except, well, he’s not.”

“Oh?” I pulled over. The car threw a long shadow before me. I considered running the air-conditioning. It was very hot.

“Not that his assistant exactly said that. It was more a tone.”

“A tone?”

“You know. The assistant tone. The one you use when your boss is blowing chunks in the can and you say her conference call isn’t winding up on schedule.”

Blowing chunks. “Then call Turtledove. Have Bingley tracked down and questioned. Turtledove will know what to ask.”

“Would you like those other appointments moved to the afternoon also?”

Other appointments. Banks, attorneys. “Yes. Thank you.”

THERE WASN’T a single parking space on Kick’s street. I parked in the lot at Tully’s and walked the three blocks south.

The sky was as red as a forge; the sun seemed to compact the air as it sank. The heat had gone to Wallingford’s head: the neighborhood was a seething sea of urban humanity. People paused as they swung open the pub door, white teeth flashing and muscles sliding with unconscious animal health under elastic, sun-browned skin; many of the women seemed to be wearing flowing white muslin trousers and brief halter tops in intense colors. I could have been in Persepolis or Babylon or King Herod’s palace. Only the occasional Birken-stocked foot reassured me this was Seattle.

My pulse was as heavy as a mallet as I walked down Myrtle. The sky deepened from orange and cherry to hints of wine, and edged into dusk; the air glimmered around the edges. The voices of two adolescent boys sharing a cigarette as they walked up the other side of the road seemed gilded, hemmed with dream. Their smoke smelled of incense.

Kick’s front door was open and the screen door unlatched. Music, bone-hard rock, a woman’s voice, poured into the street, stopped abruptly. Then new music, a male voice: sharp cymbal work, insistent bass.

“Hello?” I rapped on the doorjamb. Nothing. “Hello?” Come in, the open door implied. I eased the screen open. “Hello?”

I took off my shoes. I don’t know why. The oak floor was smooth and hard under my feet, not quite cool. I didn’t recognize the music, but I liked it. My pulse rate began to edge up, but not from anxiety. From something else, as a child’s does when she is playing an enormously exciting game. Hide and seek.

The singer sang of dancing beneath a cherry tree.

“Hello,” I said again, and walked into the kitchen.

Kick was at the stove, a cutting board piled with stir-fry vegetables in perfect heaps by her hand. Orange carrots, enamel red peppers, spring onions greener than pine leaves. Garlic and ginger hissed and sizzled in hot oil. She was throwing the frying vegetables in a perfect arc from her wok, catching them neatly, throwing them again, in time to the music. Her hips moved, side to side, then a figure-eight weave, and her feet stepped this way and that, just a shade behind the beat, deliberate and sure. Salomé in the kitchen.

She looked dense with life. Full and secret.

“Kick,” I said, from six feet away, and she turned, and I saw her as though through a crystal-lensed scope, every grain and pore of her skin, every eyelash follicle at full magnification. I made some sound, low and hoarse, that neither of us heard, and reached out to brush a strand of oak hair from her forehead, but she moved, too, and my thumb plumped against the furrow between her brows, and the world split neatly into two, as lakes do, one layer warm and bright and light, moving easily over the older, denser, colder depths.

Kick spoke to me in two different languages. Her words, her lack of words, said, I don’t know if I forgive you, I don’t know why you’re here, I don’t know if I want to talk to you. But the rest of her body, her smell, her full lips and open hips, the music she’d chosen, was saying something altogether different, and saying it very clearly. I hung, poised, between two worlds, knowing I had to choose and that one kind of mistake would cost more than the other.

Pheromones are scentless. Their molecules slide past our conscious notice and snick home on the waiting receptor sites in the nasal epithelium, triggering a cascade of information. The body knows.

When an ovulating woman offers herself to you, she’s the choicest morsel on the planet. Her nipples are already sharp, her labia already swollen, her spine already undulating. Her skin is damp and she pants. If you touch the center of her forehead with your thumb she isn’t thinking about her head—she isn’t thinking at all, she’s imagining, believing, willing your hand to lift and turn and curve, cup the back of her head. She’s living in a reality where the hand will have no choice but to slide down that soft, flexing muscle valley of the spine to the flare of strong hips, where the other hand joins the first to hold both hip bones, immobilize them against the side of the counter, so that you can touch the base of her throat gently with your lips and she will whimper and writhe and let the muscles in her legs go, but she won’t fall, because you have her.

She’ll be feeling this as though it’s already happening, knowing absolutely that it will, because every cell is alive and crying out, Fill me, love me, cherish me, be tender, but, oh God, be sure. She wants you to want her. And when her pupils expand like that, as though you have dropped black ink into a saucer of cool blue water, and her head tips just a little, as though she’s gone blind or has had a terrible shock or maybe just too much to drink, to her she is crying in a great voice, Fuck me, right here, right now against the kitchen counter, because I want you wrist-deep inside me. I hunger, I burn, I need.

It doesn’t matter if you are tired, or unsure, if your stomach is hard with dread at not being forgiven. If you allow yourself one moment’s distraction— a microsecond’s break in eye contact, a slight shift in weight—she knows, and that knowledge is a punch in the gut. She will back up a step and search your face, and you’ll try to recover but she’ll know, and she’ll feel embarrassed—a fool or a whore—at offering so blatantly what you’re not interested in, and her fine sense of being queen of the world will shiver and break like a glass shield hit by a mace, and fall around her in dust. Oh, it will still sparkle, because sex is magic, but she will be standing there naked, and you will be a monster, and the next time she feels her womb quiver and clench she’ll hesitate, which will confuse you, even on a day when there is no dread, no uncertainty, and that singing sureness between you will dissolve and very slowly begin to sicken and die.

The body knows. I listened to the deep message—but carefully, because at some point the deep message also must be a conscious message. Active, not just passive, agreement. I took her hand and guided the wok back down to the gas burner. Yes, her body still said, yes. I turned off the gas, but slowly, and now she reached for me. I pushed the chopping board to one side, lifted her onto the counter, and slid my hand beneath her waistband.

She was hot and swollen and I held her close, her face against my neck and she groaned. The singer pleaded to his baby to not sing yet, but before the track was over she kissed me in triumph, slid off the counter, pulled her trousers the rest of the way off, planted her feet on the floor and her palms on the top of the stove, laughed that shimmery glad laugh, and said, “More.”

After a while, I remembered that the door was open, but I didn’t care.

And a while after that, when I was lying on the floor smiling at the ceiling, she finished cooking the stirfry, and we ate it, properly clothed, at the dining room table. The windows were open but there was no breeze.

“That song you were playing when I got here—”

“Salomé.”

“Interesting words.”

She looked puzzled, then stared up at the ceiling as people do when they rerun lyrics or conversations in their head, and laughed. “All that stuff about dancing beneath the cherry tree. Poor Aud. Did you think I’d chosen it especially?”

“The subconscious can play interesting games.” I put my fork down, took a breath. “I am sorry about your tree. It was wrong of me.”

“It pissed me off so much, that beautiful tree. Baobab the Bold.”

“Baobab?”

“Better than Fred.”

It was a tree. But this time I kept my mouth shut.

“She was beautiful. Oh, I knew she was going to have to come down, but she was my tree. My tree, my decision.”

“I was trying to help. I really am sorry.”

“You weren’t yesterday. You stood there like you were glad you were cutting down something pretty in my garden, like you wished it was me they were cutting up with a saw. I thought maybe you were trying to hurt me because I’d, well, because of my behavior the night before.”

“The subconscious can play interesting games,” I said again.

“Yes. And I’m sorry for mine, too.”

We nodded at each other, and held hands, and let our palms talk to each other. They seemed to be better at it than our brains. Her hand was cool. I lifted it, kissed her fingertips. The garlic and ginger made the mucous membrane of my inner lips tingle pleasantly.

“I’m glad you hadn’t been cutting chilis.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“I don’t… Are you blushing?”

“No. It’s hot in here. I’m flushing. It’s different.”

“If you say so,” but she was grinning, and I didn’t care, because I wanted to make her grin every day. So unlike last night’s twisted, self-hating smile. My hand faltered in its conversation.

She felt it, and understood, and her breathing ratcheted up as the tension between us rose. It was like stepping into a static electricity field. The hairs on my forearms lifted. My scalp tightened.

“Kick.” I cradled her hand between both of mine. “Help me understand what happened last night.”

“Oh, I drank too much.” I waited. She sighed. “You talked about perfection. It—I didn’t like that.”

“No.”

“I’m not perfect.”

“No one is.” She didn’t say anything. I stroked the soft, thin skin over the tendons on the back of her hand.

“I’m like the tree.” Now I was thoroughly confused. She pulled her hand free. “Don’t you get it?”

“No.”

“I’m sick.”

When I was fifteen I had gone running along the beach in Whitby. It had been a sunny March day after more than two weeks of rain and fog, and I was warm and happy. In a moment of sheer joy I’d stripped off my jeans and dived headfirst into a breaker—and thought I had dived into a wall. The near-freezing water paralyzed my chest muscles and cut off my oxygen as effectively as a sheet of glass sliding through my neck. I thrashed in the churning breakers, but no one noticed. Last year, I had been shot and had to dive into a glacier lake to escape the gunman. I had understood, this time, about freezing water, thought I had been prepared, but the cold still stopped my breath.

“Are you dying?”

“What? No, of course not.”

When that first flood of air hits your lungs again, nothing matters but the rush of oxygen. It doesn’t matter if the air is smutty with smoke, or stinging with rain; it only matters that you’ll live. I stared at my plate, at the jewel-like vegetables, and savored the tangy aftertaste of lime, the bite of garlic, the hiss of ginger on my tongue. Dead people couldn’t do that. I looked at her. “Good. Don’t die. I need you.”

Her eyes filmed. One tear spilled down her right cheek. I ran the back of my finger up her skin and caught it.

“Is it cancer?”

She shook her head.

“Then what?”

She scrubbed at her cheeks with the back of her free hand. “Something. I don’t know. I had an appointment.” I nodded. “An MRI, but the pictures weren’t very clear, my doctor says. But it’s something.”

“When will they know?”

“He’s getting another doctor to read it tomorrow. Or the day after.”

“You should get it done now.”

“I don’t think there’s a rush.”

“But you don’t know. You said yourself. You should get it done today. He ought to—” I shut up. Her hand had gone passive in mine and she was studying it impersonally, as though already separating herself from her body, from life, from our conversation. “If it’s a question of money...” She drifted farther away. “What kind of doctor?”

“Neurologist.”

“And they’re sure it’s not your hip? Those pins?”

“They took the pins out more than a year ago.” She smiled gently. “Couldn’t have had an MRI otherwise.”

A neurologist. None of it made sense. She looked so good, so alive. Her skin was firm, her muscles dense, her eyes bright. “You’re so strong.”

“Most of the time.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“What do you know about my accident?”

“That it was a miracle you survived.”

“I didn’t make any mistakes.”

“No.”

“I didn’t make any mistakes,” she said again. She lifted her hand, studied it, flexed it, held it out, palm up, a few inches from the table, as though it were the top of a cliff a hundred feet from the sea. “Everything was perfect: setup, departure point, landing area, wind, temperature, light, cameras. I felt good. The rehearsal had been clean and easy. It was going to be beautiful. I knew it. I felt it. I jumped. I ran and bent, and my muscles compressed like a spring before it flies loose, and I leapt, and the muscles in my right leg just… The spring just broke. There was nothing there.” Her hand rose and turned and fell slowly, inevitably to the table, palm down. “Nothing there.”

I picked it up. “You are here. Your hand is here. Right here. I’m here.”

“Yes,” she said. “But for how long?” She stood, and patted my cheek, as she would a child’s, and filled the kettle.

BY SEVEN O’CLOCK the temperature in the house had climbed to eighty degrees. Kick turned pale, and when she talked, she slurred very slightly, and I said, What’s the matter? and she said, I’m hot.

I ran a cool bath and laved her with water until her skin began to pebble and her waxy pallor warmed back to gold.

A neurologist. Heat reduced conductivity, and the central nervous system was one electrical system. Increase heat, reduce signal.

“Kick, why don’t you have air-conditioning?”

“Because people in Seattle don’t. Why spend ten thousand dollars for a system you’d only use ten times a year?”

“It’s just money.”

“Just money I don’t have.”

“I do.”

“I know.”

I couldn’t find a fan, so she stayed in the bath while I opened all the windows. I checked the weather forecast for tomorrow: cooler in the morning, hot again from the late afternoon.

By nine o’clock cool air was moving in blocks through the house. I lay awake a long time, coming up with cooling strategies if she couldn’t move, or couldn’t breathe.

IT WAS eight o’clock when I woke. She was sitting on the side of the bed, stroking my head with cool hands, staring into the middle distance, lovely and strong and fine as a Chinese chair.

I wasn’t conscious of moving, but her hands must have felt some message from my body, and she blinked and looked at me, and smiled.

She smoothed the hair back from my forehead. “When you’re a bit more awake I want to ask you a favor.”

“I’m awake.”

“What are you doing this afternoon?”

“Nothing I can’t postpone or bring forward to this morning.”

“My five-year-old nephew is coming over around two o’clock. His mom is supposed to be picking him up again around four, but she’s not always great with timekeeping, and I have a message that they want me to go in for another scan at four-thirty.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No. It’s nothing. Just an hour or so. And Maureen should be here to pick him up before I leave. But I want you to be here to watch him for me in case she’s late. Will you do that?”

“A five-year-old? Couldn’t you just tell Maureen you have a—” Of course. She hadn’t told Maureen anything about this. “Yes,” I said. “I’d be happy to.”

I CALLED Turtledove from the car before I set off and left a message. He called me back when I was on the bridge over Lake Union. I couldn’t pull over. “Make it fast.” Traffic was light, but anyone who thought it was possible to talk and pay attention to the road at the same time was a fool.

“Bingley’s in Oaxaca.”

“He ran?”

“For a while. It’s a last-minute package deal. He’s back in six days.”

Six days. I’d be on my way back to Atlanta by then.

“If you want to spend the money we could bring him back.”

“No. Leave it.”

I rang off. Then I was off the bridge. I pulled over and called Gary. “This afternoon’s appointments with the banks and Finkel and Rusen’s attorney—see if you can bring them forward to this morning. I have to be done by one-thirty.” To babysit.

“On it,” he said.

He called back as I was giving my keys to the Fairmont valet. “Ten-thirty, Nguyen the banker. Eleven-fifteen, a preliminary meeting with Brooks-Page, the representative of Contalmis, the company that owns one of those Duwamish lots you want. Twelve noon, Clinch, another banker. No response as yet from the attorneys or their principals.” He sounded pleased and terrified.

“Keep trying.”

“Okay. I’ve e-mailed your schedule, and a packet of relevant information is being faxed to your hotel as we speak.”

I could get used to having an assistant.

The fax was waiting when I got to my room, along with one from Bette, together with a cover note in her huge scrawl. Here’s the revised Hippoworks contract. What were they thinking?? They got money, you got bubkes. Thanks to me, you now have some control. Buy me mojitos when you return. I sighed. I didn’t want control. I just wanted to help Kick.

I showered and changed. Checked my e-mail. My schedule, as Gary had promised, and an e-mail from Laurence. Money’s there, everything you asked for, but I hope you know what the hell you’re doing.

I had a few minutes to search the Web for neurological signs and symptoms. A seemingly endless list, from acid maltase deficiency to Zellweger syndrome. I tried again. Leg weakness and MRI. A much smaller list. Brain or spine tumor—but she’d said it wasn’t cancer. Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis. Guillain-Barré and Huntington’s disease. Brown-Sequard and ALS. Still too many, and all of them frightening.

While I changed my clothes and tried to think about something else, my brain, in orderly fashion, began to construct a hierarchy of disease. The best diagnosis would be a discrete, benign, operable spine tumor. Two hours under the knife and everything fixed. The worst would be ALS, or maybe Huntington’s—a complete dismantling of self not unlike Alzheimer’s. Guillain-Barré was a mixed choice; it generally killed you within nine months or went away on its own.

I had known her only two weeks. I had known Julia six weeks before she died. With Julia, I’d had no warning. And no choice.

THE NEPHEW’S name was David. "Not Dave,” he said through his tiny milk teeth, “David.” It reminded me of meeting Luz for the first time, though she had been nine, and she hadn’t been clutching a moose backpack stuffed with a Nerf gun—he called it his Pop Shotz Pistol—and three G-rated DVDs.

“Jesus,” Kick said after we’d settled him down in front of the TV with the first one and were making a late lunch in the kitchen, “what is it with these movies? Why does the parent fish or lion or deer always get brutalized in the first few minutes while the fishlet or cub or fawn watches? Jesus. And why does his mother think I need audiovisual aids to keep my nephew entertained for a couple of hours?” I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t the films she was tense about. “Look, can you watch him while I finish this?”

I left her to it and settled down with David in front of the TV, which was showing brightly colored fish.

I looked at David’s gun. It looked as though it worked by squeezing the butt and forcing the Nerf missiles, which were spongy quarrels with suction-cup tips, out of the muzzle with air pressure.

I swapped the gun to my other hand. It was nicely designed, one quarrel already in the barrel and three slotted into a kind of cartridge underneath. It fit my palm well. There was even a sight midway down.

“Do you want to play with it?” he said.

“I don’t want to disturb your film.” He looked blank. “The movie.”

“I’ve seen it before,” he said in that world-weary way children have. “Three times yesterday. Go on, shoot it.”

I pointed at the fireplace and squeezed. The arrow shot out with a satisfying phhtt and stuck briefly to the painted brick. I slotted another arrow and squeezed. Again, it clung for a microsecond before dropping to the hearth.

“Does it help if you lick the ends?”

“No,” he said, “but if you shoot at a window or something, it sometimes sticks.”

I got up and went to the other side of the room, and shot at the window. The arrow stuck on the glass.

“Yes!” he said, and we grinned at each other. The arrow fell off. “Try that big booger. You have to stick it on the outside, not the inside.”

The big booger was a torpedo-sized missile slung beneath the arrows. It had a hole in its tail that fitted over the muzzle, rather than into the barrel.

“You gotta aim it up,” he said. “It flies different.”

A child who appreciated ballistics. It had never occurred to me to wonder if Luz would. I aimed the length of the room and it went sailing majestically into the coat tree, a good yard to the left of where I’d aimed. He jumped up and scrambled to get it. “My turn.”

I gave him the gun.

“Okay,” he said. “Come and watch this.”

Gun in his right hand and remote in his left, he squinted carefully down the barrel and squeezed the butt and pressed PAUSE at the same time. The arrow stuck, right on the frozen fish’s tail fin. “Huh,” he said. “A flesh wound. Tails don’t count, only a tap in the hat.”

A tap in the hat. Where did a five-year-old pick up the language of hired killers? School? What was Luz learning that I didn’t know about?

“Now watch me off the TV with this big booger.” He carefully fitted the torpedo. He missed on his first try, but not by much. “Oh, yeah. You can laugh, but I’ll get you. You better start squealing for mercy, ’cause I’m gonna get you.”

This time he knelt and aimed with both hands.

“Die, sucker!” The missile bounced cleanly off the center of the screen. “Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It’s dead. Never coming back.”

Kick walked in with a tray. “Time for soup,” she said.

While David watched the rest of the fish film, Kick and I cleared away the dishes. “I’ll try to be as quick as I can,” she said. “If he gets cranky, there’s ice cream, and don’t forget he has those other two movies.”

“Right.”

She smiled, but it was distracted, harried. “Just don’t try to parent him, okay? He hasn’t had any of that from his mom and dad. It’ll just confuse him. I have to go. Are you sure you’ll be all right?”

"Absolutely,” I said. I held her, palm against her spine. I imagined a neat, rubbery little tumor, like a latex robin’s egg, that would just pop out when you opened the skin.

I WAS LYING on the floor and David was asleep on the sofa when she got home. Gauze and medical tape flashed white in the crook of her left arm.

“Christ,” she said, crossing immediately to the sofa. “Is he dead? What did you do to him?”

I sat up. “Nothing. He’s asleep.” She looked down at David dubiously. He had his thumb in his mouth. I put my arm around her waist. She leaned into me and her muscles softened little by little. She felt warm.

I stroked the side of her arm. “Blood draw?”

“IV for the MRI. Some kind of contrast thing.”

“Big Band-Aid.”

“They had to try twice.”

A blue Mini screeched to a halt outside the house—on the side of the street where no one was supposed to park—and the driver honked and left the motor running. Like a dog who recognizes the sound of his master’s footsteps, David stirred.

Kick picked him up. “Mom’s here,” she said, but he was still floppy, asleep with his eyes open. She turned to me. “Where’s his stuff?”

I picked up his backpack and held it out.

The horn honked again. “Bring it. You can meet the family.”

But all I saw of Maureen was an artificially bouncy river of strawberry blond hair and bangles flashing on her right wrist as she leaned over and shoved open the passenger door. All I heard was a “Yeah, hi,” to Kick’s introductions, and “Just put him in his seat, Kick, for Chrissakes. I’m late.” It was Kick who snapped the seat belt buckles and kissed David on the cheek, and Maureen was revving the engine even before Kick slammed the door.

THE PUB was air-conditioned. The darts were the kind they always keep behind the bar: cheap aluminium barrels coated with a faux brass finish, plastic shafts, plastic flights. I threw a one, a five, and then, finally, a twenty. I pulled them out, chalked up my sad score, and handed the darts to Kick.

“Inferior darts,” I said.

She just smiled and walloped in a twenty, a triple twenty, and triple nineteen. It wasn’t a fluke. She’d already beaten me soundly in our first game. “One hundred and thirty-seven,” she said in a sweet voice. “Mark it up.” I did. It left her with thirty-two, the perfect closing position.

I threw again, and managed a respectable score of sixty-one.

She took two darts to finish: a sixteen and double eight. “Should have done it with one,” she said, “but, like you said, they’re inferior darts.”

We took our beer to a table.

“So,” she said, “you survived trial by nephew.”

I nodded.

“Sorry I was so late. But Christ, when I came in and saw him lying so still on the couch… He’s never slept at my house before. How did you do that?”

“I took him into the garden for some good, clean, healthy fun in the fresh air and sunshine.” She gave me a look. “All right: we shot at each other with the Nerf gun. Moving targets.” We’d also shot at squirrels, but she didn’t need to know that. We’d missed, anyway.

We sipped the rich, nutty beer. Fuller’s Extra Special Bitter, served in imperial pints.

“Was it a problem with the scan that made you late?”

“Just the IV. I have pathetic veins.” She shrugged. “Hopefully it’ll be worth it. They said the gadolinium will… They said…” She stared into space. The tips of her fingers, where they wrapped around her glass, were pale. “They said the gadolinium would make the lesions show up more clearly. Lesions. Christ.”

Two tables away, three women and a man burst out laughing at the end of some joke. “Drink some beer,” I said. She did. I did. “They think you have lesions?”

“Brown-Sequard syndrome.”

Which was a set of symptoms, not a diagnosis: weakness or paralysis on one side of the body, numbness on the other, caused by a spinal lesion. But the spinal lesion could be the result of a tumor, or MS, or trauma, or infection with something like TB. Had she had a cough recently? Or smelled oranges in the middle of the night, or newly mown grass, or heard music? Did her arm ever get weak? How was her vision? I opened my mouth, then shut it, and tried to imagine how she felt. “Do you want to talk about this?”

“No.”

I nodded. “All right. Just tell me when you’re due to get your results.”

“Tomorrow. I have to go back to Northwest. Eleven o’clock.”

The patient was always the last to know. By now, half a dozen people would already have seen the results. Some radiologist would have shoved the film up under the steel clip at the top of the light panel and given it a preliminary read, would have looked at the pictures of the delicate sheathing on her spine, the thin image-slices of her brain, and would be sitting at home eating a Reuben sandwich and saying to their sweetie, Saw a sad case today, hon. She’s only twenty-eight… They would have sent the information to her doctors, where it would be printed and read by nurses, then handed off to receptionists and neatly filed.

“All right,” I said.

“I just… Today I want to talk about ordinary things, and drink beer, and pretend there’s nothing wrong. Because after tomorrow I’ll know, and there won’t be any more pretend.”

“Tomorrow, then.” If I knew who her doctor was, I could break in, read the results for myself. Or rip it from the Northwest Hospital’s servers.

Four men came in and sat at the table between us and the joke-telling group. Business clothes, or at least shirt and ties. Their voices were very loud. I looked at my watch. “How’s the food here?”

“Pub food. Burger and fries. Club sandwich. It’s okay.”

We ordered. She had the garden burger and cole slaw. I had fish and chips. Ordinary things.

“So, the scaffolding’s about done,” she said.

“Good.” The chips were almost English: fried in lard, and soft. They tasted good when doused with vinegar. “How big is it?”

“Forty-two feet.”

“And I imagine someone’s going to have to jump from that.”

“Bernard.”

“Is he up to it?”

She sighed. “No. He doesn’t understand the camera. He can’t act. He’s afraid, which is dangerous for everybody, and he can’t fall. Pass the salt, please.”

She applied salt and rearranged her burger for a minute, obviously working up to something.

“Falling isn’t like any other kind of stunt work. To fall, you have to understand the ground. You have to embrace not being on your feet.” She pushed her fries around. “Listen to me. I’m probably not even making sense.”

“You’re making perfect sense.”

She hesitated, and then went on in a rush, “It’s about letting go. It might sound crazy, but it’s a kind of acceptance. A being right there and a not being there. Christ, no, that’s not right, that makes it sound like a fortune cookie. Wait a minute. Let me think.”

This time it was the pepper shaker, followed by ketchup. Her eyebrows went up and down, the muscles to either side of her mouth tensed and relaxed, tensed and relaxed, as they moved in tandem with her interior monologue. “It’s much more than the possibility of being hurt. It might have started out that way, when our ancestors were swinging from trees, but it’s become this whole moral metaphor. A fall from grace. Pride before a fall. Feeling good means you’re up, bad means you’re down.”

“Lucifer’s fall.”

“Exactly. It’s the most basic prohibition of all: Do not fall. It’s drummed into us. We’re not as scared of the landing as we are the falling. Think about it. A fall from thirty feet can kill you just as dead as one from a hundred feet, but fewer stunters will do a hundred feet because it just feels more scary—and that’s because it takes longer to fall.”

She dipped a fry in her tartare sauce. Munched it. Dipped another.

“When you’re preparing for one of those falls you have to know the physics and the math, the geometry and architecture of the thing. And you have to think all the way down, but in a way you have to not think.”

“It sounds a bit like martial arts.”

“Does it? Well, anyhow, before, I planned and I calculated and I imagined forces and angles and safeties and redundancies, but I never really thought I’d ever get into trouble. I was as confident of landing well and walking away as I was of walking to the fridge for a beer without tripping. You need that confidence. You can’t afford to lose it.”

I nodded.

“There are two kinds of people, those who thrive in acute-stress, high-input situations, and those who don’t. Bernard doesn’t. When I jump, when I step out of the plane or dive off the cliff, there’s this kind of internal flash, and I can feel my heart slow for a second or two. It slows down, and I focus like a machine. No, that’s not right. Like a laser, maybe, except I feel so alive. And I don’t make mistakes. The more stress I feel, the more my concentration improves.”

Her gaze was unfocused, her food forgotten.

“I don’t know anything like it. It’s like being God for a few seconds, except it can feel like hours. Everything looks and sounds, I don’t know, different, like it’s outlined in crystal.”

“Like being washed clean.”

Her eyes focused on me. “Yes. How do you know?”

“It’s happened to me.” Now it was my turn to hesitate. I wasn’t used to talking about this. “It’s like dancing, like being a hummingbird among elephants, like having all your joints lubricated and everything suddenly tuned to perfect pitch. Even the light changes. I call it the blue place.”

We stared at each other.

“It’s the limbic system,” I said. “It changes the way our neurons work.”

She was nodding. “It changes everything. It changes the whole brain network.”

All of us see the world in images. We tell a kind of instant story about every moment. But when fear triggers the amygdala, it releases neurotransmitters; the hypothalamus dumps adrenaline. They change the rate at which we form and process those images: we form them faster and then we connect them together more richly and widely. Meanwhile, all that adrenaline is opening the arteries and speeding the heart rate, changing the physical machine up to top gear. We don’t just feel smarter, stronger, and faster; we are.

It was getting more crowded. I signaled a passing server for another round. After it came, we sipped for a minute. I moved my glass around on the beer mat, sometimes centering it on the Fuller’s logo, sometimes fitting it to the corner. “It’s funny how the mind can interpret the same signals in different ways. That adrenaline arousal—elevated heart rate, breathing, galvanic skin response—can be felt as fear, or sex, or excitement. It’s all in the mind.”

“I tried to tell that to Bernard: just grin like Rusen and tell yourself, boy howdy, this is fun! and eventually you’ll believe it. But he doesn’t get it.”

“No.”

We shook our heads, like two old soldiers drinking at the veterans’ hall and despairing of the youth of today. “But let’s get back to arousal,” she said, and grinned. “My flash, your blue place. I did some reading. Psychology books call it flow. They talk about losing awareness of your surroundings, about being swept up in the tide—not exactly surrender, but a kind of letting go.”

“When you can do nothing, what can you do?”

She frowned.

“A Zen thing,” I said.

“But it’s not doing nothing. Is it?”

“Not for me.” And when, two years ago, your muscles failed you on the drop, what did you do about that? Why have you waited so long?

“Right. What was I talking about? Oh. Those books. Flow. So, anyhow, flow leads to the gestalt thing, and physical fabulousness, but also disinhibition.” She drank more beer and grinned again, but it wasn’t the twisty grin I’d seen two nights ago. This was the otter, diving in and out of the water for pure joy. “In other words, there’s a reason those po-faced puritans of every stripe hate it when people take risks or have fun. You jump off a bridge with a bungee cord around your ankles, or go dancing, or surf that rip, and the next thing you know your body is not only giving you the arousal message, it’s telling you there’s no reason not to have sex.”

“Bodies are smart.”

“Yeah.” She clinked my glass with hers. “You know that fall metaphor? I sometimes wonder if the Adam and Eve thing, getting kicked out of the garden of Eden, is a species memory of coming down from the safety of the trees, of losing paradise in order to walk upright and grub about on the forest floor.”

There wasn’t a single bone in her neck and shoulders that was too big or too small, not a single muscle that should have been more or less developed. She was perfectly proportioned, slight and exceptionally strong and beautiful. “I don’t want any more to drink,” I said. “Come back with me. Have coffee in my suite.”

“Your air-conditioned suite.”

“Stay the night.”

The night was hot and airless but intensely alive. In un-air-conditioned Seattle people sat on their porches, by windows. On the two-block walk to my car we passed through miniature seas of music, laughter, wafts of marijuana smoke.

Kick talked about falling. The difference between a controlled, green-screen studio shot, with backgrounds inserted digitally later, and a live shot. “You can fall a hundred twenty feet from a specially built platform that’s perfectly dry and level, and even the airflow is controlled. Falling off a real building from sixty feet is three times as dangerous. There’s always the risk of a distraction—a traffic accident on the next block, a sudden rainstorm or gust of wind—and then there’s all the bits of building that stick out that you have to compensate for, flagpoles and ledges and pipes, and the way wind moves over a solid surface.”

She talked hard and fast, waving her arms for emphasis. “And, oh, I just had a thought. About safety and risk, and falling and beginnings. About stunts and film and human story. A grand theory of everything, or at least a reason you could make a case for film being the ultimate narrative medium… the most basic thrill narrative of all. The ultimate high-stakes story. We care about what happens. It has a beginning, middle, and end, and it’s all or nothing. The stumble, the fall, the landing. You either walk away or you don’t. Success or failure.” She talked faster but walked even more slowly. “It’s turning the clock back to a million years ago, when Junior fell out of the tree and the whole troop watched, banana half-chewed, to see if she caught herself in time or broke her back in the dirt.”

The closer we came to her house and my car, the slower she walked, until we stood at the bottom of her steps and she was still talking, and her eyes shone a strange electric blue under the sodium street lamp, and I realized she was trying to give me it all, tell me everything she knew about falling, because maybe this time tomorrow it would no longer be true, or at least no longer her truth.

For a moment she seemed to bend and glimmer. I said, “You’re not coming back to the hotel, are you?”

Her arms sank to her sides. “No.”

I knew the answer to my next question, too. “Would you like me to stay at your house?” Halos sprang out around the street lamps. “I could come with you to the doctor’s tomorrow.”

“No. Thank you, but no. It’s—This is mine.”

The halos fractured. “Will you call me?”

“Yes.” She reached out and touched my cheek with the back of her hand and when she lifted it, her skin gleamed.

“I mean, will you please call me as soon as you know anything? And call me if you change your mind. Call me for anything, anytime.”

“Yes.”

“And stay cool, remember the bathtub. And that fan Dornan bought for you. If you can’t find it—”

“Aud.”

“—I could probably find a twenty-four-hour—”

“Aud.” Again she reached out and brushed my cheek, then the other. “It’s all right.”

I caught her wet hand and kissed it. “It’s not.” How could it be.

I enfolded her, cradled her head against my collarbone, felt her hips sharp against mine and her ribs, sheathed in taut muscle, bending like bone bows in and out, in and out, and I wanted to howl and hurl myself against the world, to lay my body down to keep her safe. I breathed the Kick-skin, fennel-shampoo, and beer scent of her, then squeezed and let her go.

I WALKED DOWNHILL. It wasn’t the way to my car but it was easier. After about a mile, I was at Gas Works Park, but I didn’t want the comfort of night-breathing greenery and the confusion of natural and industrial. I turned right. In another half a mile, I was walking along the ship canal in Fremont. I turned right again where the Highway 99 bridge ran over the water, walking under its blank shadow, seeking the place where its soaring impossibility met the dirt.

On 36th Street I tracked the trail of used condoms and dirty syringes, of empty potato chip bags and, oddly, a child’s wooly winter cap, to the armpit of Fremont.

Hunched in the concrete crease was a troll, holding a VW Beetle in its left hand.

I stopped. Breathed. It was still there.

I approached cautiously. The VW was real. Life-size. The troll was made of concrete. It had long hair and wild eyes. There was a sign, saying something about a sculpture competition, but it was so defaced with graffiti that I couldn’t read it.

The troll always wins, I’d said to Julia in Norway, and I had been right. There was always someone, something, bigger and faster and stronger. Always.

MY SUITE was silent and cool, as still as a burial chamber undisturbed for a hundred years.

I dialed Rusen.

“Yes?” He sounded distracted and grown-up. The Avid’s hard drive was chattering in the background.

“It’s Aud Torvingen. Before I sign the agreement, I have some questions about crew insurance and employee status.”

“Boy, okay.”

“Kick Kuiper.” Silence. “Rusen?”

“Um?”

“Rusen, turn your chair around so you’re facing away from the screens. Turn your chair around.”

A long, floaty sigh and chair creak. “That thing sure is hard to resist.”

“Yes. Kick Kuiper. What’s her employee status specifically as it relates to health insurance?”

“Hold on one second.” Tap, tap, tap. “Okey-doke. Well, it looks like she was hired as a contractor, so no insurance. At least—”

“Change it.”

“That’s not legal. But—”

“Change it.”

“Wait up, just hold on now. What I’m trying to tell you is that I might not have to.” I waited. “I offered her the job of stunt coordinator earlier today.”

“Stunt coordinator.”

“She’s more than qualified. Tell you the truth, I have no clue why she’s working in craft services to begin—”

“Did she accept?”

“Well, now, she hasn’t exactly accepted yet, no.”

“What did she say?”

“Here’s the thing. She’s been out a couple days. I had to leave a message on her machine this evening…” When we were in the pub, talking about the blue place and falling, about flow and otherness, about being larger than life, brilliant with it, on top of the world. “…in particular?”

“I’m sorry?”

“I said, is there any reason in particular this is coming up now?”

“Just sign her up as stunt coordinator from the time you left her the message. I want her on the company’s insurance.”

“I guess I could stretch a point that far. For Kick. It’s not really wrong, when you think about it, I mean, I have offered her—”

“Thank you. Please see to the paperwork before you get lost in editing again.”

“Boy, that’s a good thought. That thing sure is—”

“Rusen. Good night.”

The phone felt big and bulky in my hands but I didn’t want to put it down. I imagined dialing Dornan, waking him up, his creased voice saying, What on earth is it that won’t keep until tomorrow, Torvingen? And what would I say?

I called Leptke and left a message. “Be available tomorrow. Tell your counsel. I’ll have your proof before midday.”

Then I e-mailed Laurence instructions and the information necessary to wire funds to my Seattle bank. I also asked him to make sure someone at that bank had a cashier’s check waiting for me so that I could finalize the Hippoworks deal.

I called room service for some tea. Tomorrow I would deal with Corning. I saw myself tracking Corning to her hotel, backing her into a corner, flexing my hands perhaps, so that she bolted and I chased her, and brought her down like a lion with a young impala. I would take her throat, just hard enough to suffocate her slowly, and as her eyes rolled back, I’d rip out her soft insides. Her right leg would kick once. If I closed my eyes I could feel her skin under my hands, feel her pulse flutter and still, taste her fear. She would never be able to hurt Kick or anybody else again.

It wouldn’t make any difference. At eleven o’clock tomorrow, it, whatever it was, was coming to get Kick and I wouldn’t be there.

THEY HAD MY PHONE NUMBER, A LITTLE PIECE OF MY LIFE, AND STILL THEY UNDERSTOOD almost nothing of what I knew of the world. They were peering at it through a keyhole: I wanted them to open the door.

“The important thing to remember,” I said as they obediently lowered themselves to the floor and rolled onto their stomachs, looking scared, “is that there’s a kind of joy to all this.”

“Joy?” Pauletta said, sitting up again. “Excuse me, but are you insane? You get off on imagining someone’s about to pin you face-first in the dirt?”

“The mat’s quite clean,” I said. “Perhaps that’s not what you meant. Except it is, in a way. Lie down again. All of you, lie down. Facedown, arms at your sides.” I sat cross-legged so that I wouldn’t loom over them. “Those of you on the mats, can you smell that sharp scent? It’s vinegar. I wipe the mats down with it after every lesson. It’s a natural disinfectant. Feel the mat, how it pushes back at your hips, how you have to turn your head to one side to breathe comfortably, how that pulls at the muscles that attach to your jaw, that run down your neck, that connect to your arms. Feel it. Feel yourself, your body, your bone and muscle, the blood singing in your veins. Breathe deep. Feel your lungs expand, how your spine lifts another inch from the floor. Imagine your rib cage, what it holds and protects: your lungs, your heart, your spleen, all those blood vessels. It’s a fortress—very, very strong. Feel your knees, delicate and strong and indispensable. It’s all yours, every inch. Even when it feels bad, if you get a bruise, a graze, a cut, a break, a puncture, a sprain, it feels good because it’s yours. You are it, and it is you. Enjoy it at all times. Enjoy using it. Enjoy defending it.”

Someone had forgotten to wear underarm deodorant today. I tasted it, the tang of fatty apocrine sweat, full of much larger, more complicated molecules than the simple C₂H₄O₂ of vinegar. It was faint, and it was healthy, clean sweat on a clean body wearing clean clothes, but unusual in Atlanta, where almost everyone equated any kind of body odor with filth and wrongness, where people liked to pretend the body didn’t exist.

“This is your body. Yours. No one but you has the responsibility to keep it, to keep yourself, whole. If someone pins you to the ground, what will you do?”

The underarm scent grew, perhaps, slightly stronger.

“So you’re facedown. The first thing you do is protect your throat, and neck, and your breathing. Turn your face forward again. Stretch the crown of your head towards the wall in front of you. That will stop your neck bending the wrong way, it will pull your chin down.”

“It puts my nose on the floor,” said Tonya.

“Bring your arms under your body. That will make it harder for an attacker to grab hold of them. But keep them bent, elbows down by your ribs, hands up between your breasts. If you can, while keeping your upper arms close to your body, bring your hands up, like this.” I made the international sign for vulva: palms out, tips of index fingers and of thumbs touching. “Keep your elbows in. Put your hands in front of your face. Put your face in the gap. If your attacker starts banging your head on the ground, it will afford you some protection.”

This time the strengthened body odor was definite.

“Everyone, sit up.” They did. I looked from set face to pale face to lightly sweating face. Katherine had carpet fluff stuck to her lip gloss. “Pick a partner. ” Katherine turned to Tonya, Pauletta to Nina, Christie to Suze; Sandra didn’t look at Therese, but Therese understood it was her job to be Sandra’s partner, and sat a little closer; Kim looked at Jennifer and sighed—though, to her credit, silently. “You’re going to learn this together. You’re helping each other learn. When you play the attacker, remember that your partner is a grown woman and needs to know the truth; she needs to know that you won’t let go immediately to make her feel better. She needs to know that in a real situation the techniques she learnt here will work. When you play the one being attacked, try not to panic. This is a controlled situation; you’re safe. We’ll begin with lying facedown and your attacker on top of you because that’s the worst position to be caught in. You’ll learn how to get away from that and then you’ll know you can do anything. A volunteer.”

No one.

“Therese.” She had been the most confident tumbler last week. “Come here and pin me. Everyone, move back a little.” I stretched out, facedown, put my face in its protected gap. “Sit on my back. Pin my wrists to the floor.” She sat on me, but carefully. I doubted she weighed less than 120 pounds, but she was keeping about half that on her feet, taking the strain on her quads. “No. Sit on me. The point is to pin me so I can’t move.” She did. “Now pin my wrists. Hard.” She leaned into it. Her hands were cold and slightly damp. “Think you can roll out all right if I throw you over my head?” I felt movement. “Are you nodding or shaking your head?”

“Yes, I can roll.” She sounded grim.

“All right. Like a Band-Aid. One rip and you’re off. Ready?” And I breathed out with a whoosh, shot my hands forward, and bucked her off. There was no crash, and she stood about the same time I did, so I assumed she’d landed well.

“Whoa,” said Suze.

“Ready to go again?” I asked Therese, and she nodded, though she wasn’t grinning, which surprised me. The first time I’d been thrown and had landed well enough not to get hurt, my exhilaration had been fierce, burning brightly enough that I could have thrown back my head, opened my mouth, and lit the sky. I would never understand these women.

I turned to the rest of the class. “This time it’ll be slow motion, so you can see for yourselves how easy it is.”

Therese perched back on top of me.

“What would an attacker be expecting from me in this position?”

“Panic,” and “Struggle like crazy,” Nina and Tonya said at the same time.

“And what would you do in a panic?”

“Curl up like a bug,” said Nina.

“Why?”

“Because I’d be panicking,” she said with obvious patience.

“And why would you, Tonya, struggle? What’s the ultimate point?”

“To get him as far from me as I could. Protect myself,” she said.

“Nina?”

She nodded. “Get him off of me.”

“Pin me,” I said to Therese. She did. Her hands were less cold and damp. Perhaps relief and lessening of stress were her version of exaltation. “Now look at her balance. Where’s her weight?”

“On your wrists,” Jennifer said.

“Yes. She’s leaning forward, thinking that what I’ll do is pull in like a bug, to protect myself. Or thrash about, to get her off me, away from me, somehow. The last thing an attacker will be anticipating is any kind of move that pulls them towards us, or that appears to spread us flatter to the ground and therefore make us more vulnerable. So that’s exactly what we do. It also happens to work to pull them further off balance. Watch.”

Instead of the untrained, instinctive move to pull my hands down to protect my belly or breasts and groin, I exhaled and slid them smoothly forward along the mat, wrists first: Spider-Man shooting web at the wall. Therese started to topple forward.

“Now if that’s all I did, she’d just fall on me.” I turned my face slightly and said to Therese, “Get off for a moment, please.” She did. I got back into my initial position. “What I do is tighten my abdominal muscles and jerk my knees up underneath me”—I showed them in slow motion, pulling into a tight mushroom, then down again, then bunching again—“and I shoot my hands forward at the same time as bucking.” I showed them. “Now watch while I do it at full speed.” I nodded to Therese.

Even though she was expecting it, she went over. This time she smiled as she came up, a small smile but definite.

I smiled back. “You want to throw me this time?”

“You weigh a lot more than I do.”

“True. But it will work.” Using exactly this technique, on a gravel road in Arkansas last year, I’d thrown a man weighing close to two hundred fifty pounds.

“All right.”

She lay down like a woman going to her execution. I sat on her sacrum. “Remember to protect your face.” She did. I pinned her wrists firmly. I could see her pulse thumping madly in her carotid arteries and felt her rib cage swell and shrink, swell and shrink. Then she stilled, and with a cry of despair and rage, she threw me off. She threw me far harder than necessary and I flew seven or eight feet.

The class clapped and Pauletta whistled and stamped. As I rolled to my feet, Therese sat up, looking pleased.

“Man, you practically sent her into orbit,” Pauletta said to her.

“You can’t do that from a mattress,” Sandra said.

“You can,” I said. “It’s more difficult, yes, but possible.”

“Well, I couldn’t.”

“Perhaps you haven’t, yet, but you could.”

“I can’t. I’m speaking from experience.”

“Yes,” I said. “But that was before you had me to teach you.”

She glared at me. “And an attacker wouldn’t pin you like that, anyway.”

“All attackers are different,” I said. “But I’ll be happy to show you a way around any pin. What would you like to try?”

“I want you to tell me what to do when they break down your bedroom door and grab you from behind around the throat with their forearm and pin your arms to your body with their other arm and then push you facedown into the bed so you’re suffocating and while your hands are trapped by your own body they pin you down with one hand on the back of your neck and you can’t breathe, can’t think, and then they have their whole body weight and they have a hand free. Can you picture that?”

“It’s very clear.”

“Tell me how to get out of it.”

“Think of first principles.”

They all stared at me. First principles when in their heads they were all about to be anally raped in their own beds?

“First principle: make sure you can breathe. You have time to think, you can keep your head clear enough to think, if you can breathe. Christie”— she seemed to be the least inherently frightened person in the class, perhaps it was a generational thing, “lie facedown on the mat, please.” She did. I sat on top of her. She started to push her hands into the face-protection position. I’d taught her that. She’d absorbed it as naturally as limestone does water. “Very good,” I said, “but let’s pretend for a minute that your arms are trapped down underneath you. Good. Thank you.” I brushed her hair gently out of the way so that I wouldn’t trap it and put my hand on the back of her neck. So small. I felt the sixth vertebra under the web between my thumb and index finger. I knew three different ways to displace it, to sever her spinal cord, to snuff her life between one breath and the next. “If I started to press here, her face would go into the mattress.” I looked at Sandra. “Yes?”

She nodded.

“And your attacker would probably be expecting you to try and lift your head to breathe, yes?”

Again I waited until she nodded.

“So you would do the unexpected. The opposite of lift. What would that be?”

“Tuck,” Nina said. “Chin down, try get your forehead to the matt, mattress, and make an air pocket.”

“Good. Do that, Christie.” And my bright swelling of pride at Christie’s bravery was tinged now with streaks of anger at Sandra. “Now, Sandra, tell me what you’re afraid of in this situation.”

She shrugged.

“Are you afraid your attacker will strangle you to death? Tickle you until you’re crazy? Sing Barry Manilow? No? Then what?”

“What do you think?” Now she was angry, too.

“I have several guesses, but tell me exactly, specifically.”

“Rape,” she said, and something in her voice, some solidity in tone, reminded me of con artists I had met who looked you in the eye and spoke firmly, and I knew she was lying, or at least not telling the whole truth. She was less afraid of rape, something that had probably happened to her dozens of times, than of… what? I found I didn’t care enough to force the issue.

Rape was what everyone else was frightened of, so that’s what I would address.

“All right. So if you’re tucking and bending your spine to protect your breathing, it means you’re also reaching down with your hands. Christie, try that please—just bend and reach down. Reaching down means two things. You’ll have extra leverage—you can use your arms as well as your legs to push against the mattress—and you can reach down far enough to protect your anus and vagina. Christie, can you reach down as far as between your legs?”

“Yes,” she said, surprised.

“But he’ll just push the hand away,” Sandra said.

“All right.” I leaned back and reached down. “But see how that shifts my weight? You could find some leverage now.”

“Not if he’s breaking your fingers. You won’t be thinking about leverage if you’re in pain.”

I knew then, as surely as though I’d just watched video, how it would be for her when her spouse started to beat her. She would probably never think of leverage; she would probably not think at all. Maybe she had the first dozen times it happened but now, as with so many people who are habitually abused, she would simply relax when it began because at that instant she could stop waiting, she could stop worrying what form it would take, this time; it would begin, and she would know. It would be a strange kind of relief.

Most of the class were not habitually abused and I addressed them. “For most people, being in this kind of situation usually leads to a huge gush of adrenaline. We’ve talked about this before. You’ll either panic or your automatic pilot takes over. Either way, it’s unlikely you’ll be thinking or feeling much at this point. You’ll be doing, probably unconsciously. You’ll be focused, as both Tonya and Nina have said, on making your attacker stop, get off, get away from you any way you can. Once you commit to that, once you begin, you’ll do almost anything to see it through. He might break one or more of your fingers, yes, but you’ll feel his weight move. You’ll be on that like lightning—”

“Well, you might,” Sandra said.

“Yes,” I said. “I would. Christie, I’m leaning back now, to get at your hands, so what can you do?”

“I don’t know. I can’t see which way you’re tilting.”

“Backwards,” Suze said.

“Sshh. Christie, you won’t have anyone to see for you. Feel it, feel where my weight is, which way I’m leaning, feel how easy it would be to tip me one way or another, or to hit me with something.”

“But you’ve got my hands!” she said. I waited. “Oh.” And she kicked up and back with her heels and thumped between my tipping shoulder blades, and as I twisted to grab her ankles, she yanked her hands from between her legs and, weight on her knees and palms, hurled herself backwards and literally sat on me.

“Oh, my God,” she said, leaping up, mortified. “Did I hurt you?”

“You could have. How would you, right now, if you wanted to?”

“Kick,” Katherine said.

“Elbow!” “Knee in the face.” “Stomp her like a snake until she doesn’t move anymore!”

Christie froze.

“Use them all. I’ve fallen back, on my hands, so if you kick at my face or neck, I can’t grab and trap your leg. Pretend to kick. In slow motion.” She did—a tentative mai-geri to the chin. I pretended to topple sideways. “Now another kick—slow, slow, make it slow—to my face, then, while I’m choking on my blood, you prepare and deliver an axe kick: spine, preferably, or rib cage. Then you run, leave the house, and call nine-one-one.”

“And your lawyer,” Pauletta said.

“And your lawyer,” I said. “And don’t clean away any blood on you. Don’t change your clothes, even if they’re torn or soiled. Make sure the first thing you mention is not how you learnt to do this in a self-defense class. Now”—before they could think too hard about any of it—“let’s practice. Find your partner. Try the double-hand pin first. Good. Make sure you’re spread out, that you won’t be throwing your partner into someone else.” I said that particularly to Suze, who tended to forget that others might mind having a body hurled in their direction.

We ran through the double-hand pin, then the one-handed strangle. They were tentative at first, then began to toss each other about as children would.

“With both, remember what should come next. Think of your bedroom: when they’re down, what can you hit them with easily? Where’s your clock? Your potted plant? Your baseball bat? Where’s your phone, so you can take it with you when you run? Good. That’s good, Kim, very good,” as she sank her nails into Jennifer’s hands in slow motion.

This was more like it. Even Sandra was mechanically following the plan. Katherine and Tonya were—

Tonya’s nose blossomed red and she shrieked and clapped both hands to her face.

“Sit up, put your head back.” Wail. The whole room focused. Blood in the room. “Tonya. Sit up. Put your head back.”

“Oh, God,” Katherine said, “oh, God, I’m sorry. I just—”

“Tonya, move your hand.” I spoke slowly and very clearly. “Move your hand. Tonya, please, move your hand so I can see.” The initial spill of blood from her nose was already slowing. Her eyes were wide with pain and panic. Everyone in the room was poised to run, as though blood would make the sharks come.

“I’m so sorry,” Katherine was still saying, “I didn’t—”

I tapped the back of one of Tonya’s wrists, then deliberately put both hands behind my back so she knew I wouldn’t be touching her face, and she moved her hands just enough for me to peer at her nose. “It’s not broken. You’ll be fine. The blood’s already slowing. You’re fine. Nice deep breaths. Katherine, are you hurt? No? Good, then I want you and Therese and Kim to help me. Therese, I want you to get me a hot, caffeinated drink with sugar. Kim, your job is to find ice and a soft cloth. Katherine, bring me something to clean the mat before it stains.” Cleaning. Before it stained. Yes. She nodded, followed Therese and Kim like a zombie through the door. “The rest of you, do some stretching, and when you’ve done that, we’ll take it in turns to hit the bag.”

I waited until they’d started their unwilling stretching, then sat by Tonya.

“At least you’re wearing a black T-shirt,” I said. “When the ice comes, put it on your face.”

“It’ll hurt,” Sandra said matter-of-factly, and squatted down on the mat. “But it’ll keep the swelling down. If you take two ibuprofen every four or five hours for a couple of days, you won’t even be able to tell anyone hit you.”

Therese came back with a double mocha latte.

“I don’t drink coffee,” Tonya said in a shaky voice.

“You do now. Caffeine and sugar will help with the shock. It will make you feel better. Sip, good. And another. And why aren’t you all hitting that bag?” They went back to punching. “Ah, here’s the ice.”

After another minute, her shakes began to subside. I helped her up and moved her to the bench.

“Drink more coffee, keep the ice on your face, and if you’re feeling all right in ten minutes, I’ll drive you home.”

“Let me do it,” Katherine said.

“You can clean the mat,” I said, nodding at the cloth in her hand.

“I’ll sit with her,” Sandra said. I nodded, and moved to supervise the punching of the bag, which wasn’t all it could have been.

After another five minutes, Katherine gathered Tonya’s things and they made their way to the door. Everyone watched them leave.

“All right,” I said when the door closed behind them. “Excitement’s over. Let’s get back to pins. This time on your backs with a one-handed strangle.”

They moved like old women, newly aware that they could be hurt. Even Suze was tentative when she put her hand around Christie’s throat.

I kept my tone brisk. “What did we learn about strangles? Tuck your chin—protect your throat. Breathe, if you can.” Slight movement as the supine women tucked their chins. I pretended not to notice. “Distract. And where there’s a joint, there’s a weakness. Watch.”

I lay down and gestured Therese over. She smiled politely and climbed on top of me and laid her left hand lightly on my throat. I tucked my chin and said, in that deep, exaggerated voice it’s impossible to avoid when stretching one’s vocal folds, “I have so many choices here it’s almost embarrassing. Suggestions?”

“Hey,” Christie said, “it’s like—Get off me a sec,” she said to Suze, who obeyed.

“That was easy,” I said. No one laughed, though Nina smiled. I sighed internally; after the blood, we were back at square one. “Saying, Get off me is always worth trying. You never know. So, Christie, you were saying?” She looked blank. “What is it like?”

“Oh. Like last week, the week before I mean, with the one-handed strangle against the wall. You could twist and bash her elbow, or bring her face into the mat like it was a wall, or, well, shit, anything.”

“Exactly.”

I showed them. How I could put my left foot flat on the mat and use that to leverage the same twist into the slam of forearm on inside elbow. How to pull myself down and yank Therese’s face into the mat as though it were a wall. The swing and whole-arm pin of the opposite twist with my right foot on the mat. And they wouldn’t do any of it. They had seen blood and they were afraid: that swinging elbow might connect to a nose, that moving fingernail might graze a cornea, that wrist or shoulder or knuckle might get dislocated.

"Up,” I said. "Everybody up. Let’s get back to the bag. I want to see combinations: fist, elbow, knee, one after the other.”

The bag couldn’t bruise. The bag couldn’t look at you reproachfully if you slipped a little and banged the wrong place. The bag wouldn’t remind you of thin skin and red blood. Even so, they were tentative. “Shout,” I said. “Blam. Kapow. Whap. This is an attacker who is trying to hurt you. Why should you put up with that? Defend yourselves.”

Not much difference.

“They are coming after your children.” The thumps got meatier. “You are not going to let them hurt you, or your family—not you, not your sister, not your mother, not your children. You. It’s up to you. No one else. Come on. Hit it!”

“It’s just a bag,” Nina said.

And that was the problem.