Always

THIRTEEN

BELLEVUE WAS MORE OF A GENERIC SUBURB THAN A CITY. THE SAME MIDSIZED office buildings of white concrete and green glass; the smooth six-lane blacktop; the uncrusted, still wet-looking red brick of libraries and schools. Bland, moneyed, characterless. Ideal for Corning, the kind of woman who thought running away made the problem vanish.

In my mind’s eye I saw Kick’s brilliant white smile, the white in the crook of her elbow, her white knuckles as she said, Lesions. Christ. God.

I checked my phone again. 8:08. No messages.

At almost every stop light, I imagined the fall of her oak hair, her delight as she expounded her theory of everything, her laugh like sun shimmering on water. I began to cut in and out of morning traffic.

Amateur, she said in my head.

The hotel was efficient and faceless and could have been in Atlanta. I walked through the lobby. No quiet corners. I went back to the car, retrieved Mackie’s cell phone. Texted a message to Corning’s phone: need money now, meet me in parking garage, by elevator, level P2.

Underground parking garages, like the interior of submarines, are malevolent in their ugliness and lack of human comfort, in their machine-oil smell, their lack of natural light, their sense of confinement. I parked on the lowest tier, and walked to the elevator.

I waited twenty minutes. Then the elevator light dinged, and Corning stepped out.

“Good morning,” I said.

She dropped her purse and backed up against the cinder-block wall. I picked it up, weighed it, remembering another woman and another bag, opened it, looked inside, checked to make sure there were no obvious weapons in hidden compartments, and gave it back.

She hadn’t been sleeping well, clearly. And possibly someone had cut out her tongue.

I pondered that. You would need to hold the tongue with gauze, otherwise it would slip from your grip. I tried to remember if there was any bone at the base of the soft tissue. The tendons might prove difficult, if one were to use a small blade.

But I needed her willing and able to talk.

“You have an appointment with a reporter at the Seattle Times. Her name is Mindy Leptke. You will tell her everything about your land scheme, and she will quote you as an anonymous source.” She stared at me, mute. “Do you understand?”

She held her purse in front of her stomach with both hands.

“Do you understand?” Nod. “I won’t prosecute on three conditions: One, cooperate fully. Two, agree to pay one hundred thousand dollars to Hippoworks. Three, allow your real estate license to lapse in the state of Washington.”

Run, I thought, squeal. Give me an excuse.

“But it must be full cooperation: every name, every meeting. Your statement will be recorded. Leptke will keep one copy, I’ll have the other.”

She blinked like a semaphore.

“You will pay your hotel bill, and return with me to Seattle. You will arrange for a certified check for one hundred thousand dollars as soon as the banks open. We will go to the Times offices.”

She kneaded her bag. It had a blackish smear across the left side where it had fallen on the tire-striped concrete. “I don’t have a hundred thousand dollars.”

That was true. But her condo was worth many times that.

“Sell your condo.”

“But it takes time, it—”

“You know a lot of people in the real estate business. Someone will be happy, as a personal favor to you, to give you fifty cents on the dollar in exchange for expediency.”

“I don’t understand why you’re doing this to me.”

“Because it’s more polite than tearing you limb from limb in a parking lot. But I could do it that way if you’d prefer.”

9:42. I SAT with Corning in the Times reception area. Every time I moved slightly, the cashier’s check rustled in my breast pocket.

I PULLED INTO the warehouse parking lot. My phone said 10:58. I turned the ring volume up.

Dornan was sitting on one of the old couches by the craft-services table, leaning forward and talking to Peg and Joel. His hair was sticking up in a tuft and he wore a white T-shirt with a cartoon palm tree on the front.

He stood as soon as he saw me.

“Why aren’t you with her?”

“She wouldn’t let me,” I said.

I expected him to demand how, exactly, she’d stopped me when I outweighed her by thirty pounds and topped her by five inches, but his arms half lifted, twitched as he began to hold them out to me, then thought better of it, and returned to his side. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This must be… You must be having all sorts of bad memories.”

I nodded.

“But this is—She’s not dying, Aud. Remember that.”

So fragile, like that thin sheet of canvas in the gallery daubed with pigment, and something was hacking holes in it. Lesions. Christ.

“She is not,” he said again. “It’ll be nothing. Well, not nothing, but you’ll see.”

I looked at my phone. 11:06. I wanted to shake it to make sure it was still working.

“You’ll see,” he said again.

I stared at him. “You think you know what this is, don’t you?”

“I… No, no. I don’t want to say. It’s just speculation, and we’ll know soon enough.”

He ran his hand through his hair, and tugged on it. “What time is it?” “Eleven-oh-eight.” He nodded. Perhaps he was imagining, like me, Kick sitting alone in a cold waiting room. “Do you know what doctor she’s seeing?”

He shook his head, ran his hand through his hair again, tugged.

Standing here wouldn’t get anything done. “If she calls”—if she calls you first, if she doesn’t call me at all—“I’ll be with Rusen and Finkel.” He nodded vaguely, raised his hand to his hair. “And, Dornan, try not to snatch yourself bald.”

He dredged up a smile.

11:10. No reply to my knock at the editing trailer. 11:11. My knock on the other trailer was answered promptly.

The trailer was very neat, which meant Rusen was being obsessive again. Their office chairs were next to each other, in front of a screen full of spreadsheets. A lot of the figures were in red. Finkel folded his glasses and put them in his top pocket. His eyes, too, were rimmed in red.

Rusen, tie knotted more tightly than usual, fussed with finding me a chair. Finkel chatted about the wonderful weather, his jovial voice at odds with his haggard face.

“That medical-insurance issue you raised is dealt with,” Rusen said. “Effective midnight yesterday.”

“Thank you. How are preparations coming along for the final scenes?”

“Wonderful,” Finkel said.

“A little tricky,” Rusen said.

I waited.

“We’re in trouble. We need more film stock, the film processor wants us to cover our expenses so far, the equipment rental place says we owe them a premium for the overage on camera and rolling stock lease, the city just sent the electricity bill, which is twice what we’d budgeted, mainly because of the air-conditioning, and now we have a lawsuit on our hands.”

“A lawsuit.” Petty problems. 11:18. How long did doctor’s appointments usually take?

“One of the grips had a flashback at home and acted crazy enough to scare his wife. She’s suing us for the resulting emotional distress.”

Flashback. “Did he hurt her?”

“Hurt her?” He seemed surprised. “No. According to the papers filed, he and his wife were having a barbecue for friends, and his wife was opening a can of beans when he starts saying, God’s brains are spilled. Anyhoo, their barbecue was ruined.”

“It’s a pure nuisance suit,” Finkel said. “We’d sue her right back, but we couldn’t cover the attorneys’ fees.”

I took Corning’s check from my pocket and slid it across the table to Finkel. “This will help.”

He opened it, studied it judiciously for a moment, then took out his glasses, fitted them to his nose, and looked again. He turned the check over, and back, then passed it with a frown to Rusen.

Rusen looked at the check, looked at me, looked at the check again. “Is it real?”

I nodded. “Payment from the person behind all your troubles in the last month or so. Appeasement. I said we wouldn’t sue her.”

“You’ve got no right to make that decision for this company,” Finkel said.

I looked at him for a moment. “I do. As of ten-thirty last night, when I signed the papers. Here’s my investment.” I slid another check to Rusen. This one was much bigger. “If you disagree, tear up the check.”

Rusen covered it protectively with his hands.

In addition to the frown, Finkel’s chin now jutted forward two or three inches. It would be very easy to break it. Rusen beamed at him determinedly. “Boy howdy, this is like a miracle.”

“Yes,” Finkel said, unwillingly.

“It’ll make all the difference,” Rusen said. “I’d been storyboarding, but then, with the money troubles, I shelved those plans, and was trying to come up with a less expensive way to do things, you know, maybe some smoke, and a big noise off camera, then pan back to people lying on the ground, that kind of thing. And I was worrying about insurance for that, too, since our stunt coordinator left, and Kick hasn’t signed on officially yet, and even the use of firecrackers requires permission from the fire department. But, cripes, this changes everything.”

11:23. This changes everything.

DORNAN AND I sat on a bench in the little park overlooking the Duwamish. My phone was between us. 12:14.

“Well, now,” Dornan said. “This is lovely.”

The air was bright and lively, friendly, and it was possible to fool yourself into believing the world was a harmless place.

“She should be done by now,” I said. “Shouldn’t she?”

“I really don’t know, Torvingen.”

I closed my eyes, and let a purplish afterimage of the river twist behind my lids. When it faded, I opened my eyes again. 12:17. “I’m going to drive to her house. You want to come?”

“I do not. She said she’d call when she had news. She’ll call when she’s ready. It might be hard for her to talk about.”

“That’s assuming it’s bad news.”

But we both knew it would be bad, just not what kind of bad: brutal and clear as an executioner’s axe, or the death of a thousand cuts. How do you tell someone that kind of news?

“Oh,” I said, and flipped open my phone and dialed the Fairmont. Yes, the front desk told me, I did indeed have a voice-mail message. Would I like to access my voice mail now?

I would.

It was Kick. She sounded breezy and offhand. “It’s me. It’s MS. They’re pretty sure. So there you have it.” Click. “To repeat the message, press one. To erase the message, press two.”

I pressed one.

“It’s me. It’s MS. They’re pretty sure. So there you have it.” Click. “It’s me. It’s MS. They’re pretty sure. So there you have it.” Click. “It’s me. It’s MS. They’re—” 12:22. I closed the phone. The river kept flowing, the sun kept shining. The bench was warm under my thighs.

Dornan was watching me, terribly alert.

“She left me a message,” I said. A message. “They think it’s MS.”

He sighed, the way a zip-lock bag does when you squeeze out the excess air. His shoulders lifted, then sagged. “Where are the lesions?”

“What?”

“Are the lesions on her brain as well as spine?”

“Lesions? How on earth do I know? It was a bloody message.”

A bumblebee droned stupidly over a spill of yellow flowers sprouting at the base of the bench supports. A message.

His hands lay still in his lap, no longer tugging at his hair.

“You guessed, didn’t you?”

He sighed again. “There was this man who used to come into the Little Five Points coffee shop. We talked about it sometimes. He didn’t like the heat. That’s what I noticed first. And his crutches. I always used to turn the AC up a notch when he sat down with his coffee.”

“Used to come in. What happened to him?”

“John. He joked about it once, how you could never predict what was going to happen to someone with MS. ‘It gets worse,’ he said. ‘You can’t tell how someone’s doing, really. They fight, and they seem okay and full of hope, and then one day, they just don’t show up anymore and you know they’ve lost the battle, that they’re stuck in a motorized bed somewhere, surrounded by strangers.’ One day he didn’t show up anymore.”

“Did he have good medical care?”

“I imagine so.”

“Was he on any of the experimental drugs?”

“He was a customer. He came in one day with crutches. A year later he was in a scooter. Two years later he didn’t come in anymore. All right? That’s all I know.”

The bee came back. I listened to its deep, round soothing sound, and wondered what had happened to that fly in Kick’s house.

I DROVE TOWARDS Kick’s house but as I crossed the Fremont Bridge a seaplane flew low, west to east, and suddenly I had to know where it was going.

I swung off the bridge and along 36th, driving faster than I should. I still lost it. But I followed another plane. I dropped down to 34th, swung right along the water.

Over Lake Union, a seaplane overhead dipped one wing and turned sharply, then evened into a shallow approach and came in to land. Water planed up and out from its fat pontoons the way it would under the webbed feet of a landing duck.

Hope. Maybe it was like falling. If you felt the physiological effects, and called it exhilaration, not terror, then it was exhilaration. What did hope feel like?

I pulled over and called Kick. After four rings, the machine clicked on. “It’s me. I got your message. Thank you. I’m standing by Lake Union, wondering if you’ve ever taken one of those tourist seaplane rides. It looks as though there are three different-sized planes, one is—”

“Hello?” She sounded wary but curious.

“Hey,” I said. “How are you?”

“Well, you know, I have MS.”

“Yes,” I said, matching her light tone. “I heard that.” Silence.

“So what’s this about seaplanes?”

SHE MET me at the terminal on Westlake. She jumped from her van as lithe and strong as an acrobat. Vitality sang under her skin, shone in her breeze-whipped hair, flowed like a poem with the pump of muscle as she slid her door shut. Beautiful. She even looked as though she’d slept well, better than I had. The only sign of shock was a barely perceptible pause between my conversation and hers, as though the signal were being routed through some intergalactic wormhole for processing. She seemed to have walled up the whole diagnosis, encysted it somewhere deep inside, to be dealt with later. She smiled cheerfully as she swung herself up into the plane.

The smell of fuel was overwhelming to begin with. The noise was overwhelming for the entire flight; we wore earplugs, and I still felt crushed by the din. Once we were two hundred feet up, I didn’t care.

We were the only passengers on a seven-seater Beaver. We held hands across the aisle, to begin with, but as soon as I realized that meant we would be looking at different things through our separate, tiny portholes, I unbuckled and took the seat behind her. There were no headrests, so I could put my chin on the back of her seat and lay my cheek against hers as we gazed at the water.

The plane stayed almost entirely over water: north over Lake Union to Gas Works Park, then east across two bridges—one was up; toylike cars formed a shiny tail to north and south—to another bay, the university to the north, the green swath of arboretum to the south. East some more, and the water abruptly paled to an almost royal blue, and we were in a steep turn south, flying low over a floating bridge. Down, along beautiful coast-line; west, directly over the city—the Space Needle seemed close enough to touch; a jag south again, down the Duwamish—I tapped Kick’s shoulder and pointed to Kellogg Island and the tiny patch of park. She nodded, and reached up and back. I kissed her hand.

West over West Seattle, then a great curving arc around Alki, and the deep, deep blue of Elliott Bay. From above, the orange cranes looked nothing like brontosaurus.

From up here, everything seemed very clean and tidy and contained, easy to deal with, easy to understand. Beautiful, delicate, precious. The messy details were hidden, the power and angular geometry of humanity’s controlling stamp clear. If we could bend the landscape, surely we could find a way to defeat some autoimmune molecule gone awry?

We flew over the familiar four-chimney building of one of Seattle’s bigger biotech companies. Kick’s head turned to watch it diminish behind us.

Clouds were streaming up from the southwest. The plane bumped a little as it cut over Queen Anne Hill—no fires over Troy in the early afternoon— over Fremont and its troll, Wallingford and Kick’s house, and turned sharply to come south over the northeastern horn of Lake Union.

The pilot turned slightly and made an up-and-down hand shape: bumpy landing ahead. We both nodded and smiled: risk, the spice of life. I left my cheek by hers—soft and dry as a well-handled cotton sheet—all the way down.

The pilot taxied to the dock and turned off the rotor. The silence was shattering. “So,” she said, “want to come back to my place and look at MRIs?”

WE SPREAD them out on the dining room table and I held them up one by one to the light while Kick commented.

“That’s my favorite,” she said. “My eyes look just like pickled eggs.” They did: enormous, bulging white orbs starting from a delicate grey skull. I could see the folds of her brain, the bone of nose and cheek, even a line of ligament.

“The lesion—or plaque, as Dr. Whittle insisted on calling it—is that tiny little fleck of greyish white there. No, there. See?”

I peered at the stiff, plastic film. “No.”

“Give it to me. There. I think. Or maybe there. Hmmn. Do you know where the parietal lobe is?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s where Whittle said it was. The left parietal lobe. If it was a lesion—sorry—plaque at all. He said he wasn’t really sure, it was so small.”

“All right.”

“The parietal is where you store your nouns: chair, hat, cat, mat. So if I forget your name, you know why. Just kidding. Now this one”—she sorted through the slippery pile, pulled one from the bottom—“this one’s where the real action is.”

Looking at her spinal MRI was like looking at something left hanging from a tree after the vultures have been at it: bones, stripped bare, hanging in a knobby, gristly curve in the middle of nothing. I was suddenly, viscerally glad they didn’t do these things in color.

“This, apparently, is the thoracic spine. And there, that big white splotch, on the left side of the spinal cord, is what’s causing the trouble.”

“You sound as though there’s no doubt.”

“Multiple sclerosis means, basically, many scleroses, or plaques, scar tissue, on the fatty myelin sheath of brain and spinal cord. Identification of two definite plaques are required to fulfill the multiple part of the criterion. ” Her voice was impersonal but her eyes began to dart back and forth.

“Kick.”

“There’s no such diagnosis as mono sclerosis. Whittle will only swear to one plaque, that one on my thoracic spine. Which of course is the main trunk line of the power cable system in the body.”

“Kick—”

“No. Let me say it. Think of the spinal cord as a power cable. Imagine the myelin sheathing as insulation. Imagine the plaque as this place where something has stripped away the insulation. Signal can’t get through as strongly. It leaks off. There’s a basic neural deficit. You send a signal and it doesn’t get through, or it gets through scrambled and you get paresthesia, dyesthesia, weakness. Sometimes plaques heal themselves. Sometimes they get worse, and the underlying axons die. Then you are, to put it technically, fucked. Permanent paralysis. No one knows what causes it.”

She paused, and if it weren’t for her eyes, back and forth, back and forth, I could have imagined her at a spotlit lectern, with overheads.

“Mostly it’s believed to be an autoimmune disease, the immune system in overdrive and attacking itself. Some, of course, think just the opposite, that it’s an insufficiency. Everyone agrees that the course of the disease is variable. Sometimes very mild, sometimes leading to premature death. The neural deficit can appear in cognitive thinking, in the autonomic nervous system—which means breathing and heart regulation, digestion, and other basic functions—or it could mean not seeing so well sometimes, or being dizzy, or getting weird tingles down your spine.”

Stop it, I wanted to say, just stop it.

“So there you have it. MS in a nutshell. That’s what I’ve got: some disease that no one knows the cause of, and that they don’t know how to fix. One that might not affect me much at all, or might kill me, or reduce me to a drooling idiot. Though Whittle was kind enough to tell me he thought I had the kind that, quote, wouldn’t make me stupid, unquote. Would you like a cup of tea?”

Tea? It took me a moment to change gears. “Yes. Please.” I didn’t, but she clearly needed something to do with her hands. “So what happens now?”

“We wait and see what develops.”

Develop: grow, change, increase in size. While she filled the kettle and got out tea bags, I stacked the MRIs, and wondered if she’d discussed drugs. We could get to that later. First I wanted to talk to Eric about his contacts in the biotech industry. There might be treatments her neurologist didn’t know about. I concentrated on aligning the slippery plastic sheets.

“So,” she said cheerily, “how was your day?”

“My day.” I found I could remember nothing except bright numerals on my phone. 12:22.

She rinsed cups. “You look tired.”

“Not much sleep.” Maybe she thought I’d been out carousing till all hours, untroubled by the upcoming diagnosis of a woman I’d known barely two weeks. “I spoke to Corning. The woman behind all the set trouble. ”

“Corning?” She paused, one hand on the fridge door, one holding milk. “Right. Why didn’t you say?”

Hi, honey, I have MS. Do you really, how interesting, I had an interesting day, too, I found some woman you don’t even know.

She was staring vaguely at the milk in her hand. “What’ll happen to her?”

“She’s spilling her guts to the district attorney.”

I wasn’t sure she’d heard. She seemed utterly focused on pouring milk into her cup.

“I also went to the set. They have money now, but I think Rusen is getting anxious about this stunt finale.”

She turned the cups so that both handles faced out at the same angle.

“He told me he’d offered you the coordinator job.”

She poured tea with great concentration.

“Have you talked to him?”

“Um? Oh. No.”

“They’ll be able to afford to pay you now.”

“Yes. If I decide it’s what I want.”

“But it’s what you do.”

She put the pot down carefully, and turned. “I’m a cook.”

“Yes, and a very good one.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“I’m not patronizing. You’re very good. You know that.”

“But? Being a really good cook just isn’t good enough for you?” What? “I don’t understand. You’re a stunt—”

“Was. Was a stunt performer. Past tense. I’m not anymore. It doesn’t matter what I used to do. What I do now is cook. It’s who I am. Face it. Look at me. Face it. I have. I’m just a crippled diseased has-been who can’t even make a career out of cooking things. And now… And now…”

I stood.

“Don’t touch me.”

I put my arms at my side.

“You put him up to offering it to me, didn’t you?”

“No. I didn’t need to.” If she would just let me touch her arm, her hand, her hair, I could think, put the words together in a way that made sense. “It’s going to be all right.”

“No, it’s not.” She was very pale. “This thing is inside me like a stain. It’s all different now.”

I took a deep breath, in and out. I sat down again, because if I didn’t she would bolt. “It’s not different.” I held out my hand, unthreatening, like a rancher squatting, hand out, sugar cubes on his palm. “Give me your hand.” She took a reluctant step forward. “Please.”

She slid her warm, small hand into mine. I felt that familiar electric flood, saw the answering looseness in her shoulders, the way she nearly tipped back her head.

“See?” I held her hand very gently. “Not everything has changed. There is still this.”

She folded onto the floor and began to cry.

I held her with one arm, and stroked her hair, her shoulder blades, her arms, her hair again, kissed the top of her head, kissed her ear. Held her, held her, held her.

After a minute, she lifted her face. “Do you really want tea?”

“No.”

“Good.” She rested her cheek against my chest. After another minute I slid down to be next to her on the floor.

“Tell me what you need.”

“I need to do this by myself.”

“All right.”

“I mean it. Don’t meddle. Don’t push me. On anything.”

“What will you do first?”

“I have to tell my parents.”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

“Will you want to talk afterwards?” Surely it was all right to say that?

“I don’t know. They’re in Anacortes. I might stay over. I’ll call you tomorrow. Or you’ll see me.”

IT WAS after six o’clock and the park by Elliott Bay was empty of tourists. The air was salty enough to lick. My mother and I walked over the undulating grass and I told her about the grass that grew in the pocket park near my warehouse, about how I’d told Kick I was sorry, about going up in a plane, about taking Corning to see Leptke and how easy it had been to get Corning to talk.

“Once she started, she fell in love with the story of her own cleverness. I left them cooking up a way for Leptke to be able to name her as a source. They’re going to go talk to the DA about immunity from prosecution in exchange for full cooperation on council staff corruption.” Eight hours ago. It seemed like a decade, something dimly remembered and unimportant. But it was important. She had ruined Kick’s new career before it got properly started.

We walked on a path for a while.

“And did your—did Kick talk to the reporter?”

“I don’t think it’s top of her list at the moment.” Plus, she didn’t know about it.

In the distance, out of sight, someone began playing a flamenco guitar. “You don’t sound very happy.”

“Corning will lose her condo, and her license, yes, and you might argue that her hundred thousand is already making a difference to the people she hurt most, that it will help them pay their bills, help them keep their jobs, allow for the possibility of success, but, Mor, it’s just money.”

“And money isn’t justice.”

“No.” Dancing and vomiting in Pioneer Square. Bellowing about earthquakes in Nordstrom. The graphite sheen under Kick’s eyes and the molecules chewing at her spine. Stress was the worst thing for MS. Corning had contributed directly to that.

We walked on. The guitar player came into view: an elderly woman. I dropped ten dollars in her guitar case.

“You seem to have stopped losing weight, at least.”

“Yes. I’ve found—Kick showed me some things I could eat.”

“Kick. Will she have dinner with us?”

“It’s not her top priority at the moment.”

“I see.”

I doubted it. “She’s sick.”

“We can postpone, until…” Her step faltered, as though she had tripped over an invisible crack in the pavement. “Ah, I see. Is it very bad?”

“It’s multiple sclerosis.”

“I’m so very sorry.”

“She hasn’t died.”

“No.”

“And she won’t die. No, Mor, listen. Please. MS isn’t like that.” And I poured out the conflicting opinions and research I’d read on the Web, and what Kick’s doctor had said. She listened without comment.

When I’d finished, she said, “And she is well currently?”

“She gets a little tired. And when it’s hot she sometimes limps a little, but not always. But she looks… You can’t tell. She’s strong.” Very strong. “She only found out today. She is…” I wasn’t sure how to describe her offhand cheeriness, followed by her weeping. “She’s in shock, I think. As you can imagine.”

“Yes.”

“I wanted to be with her tonight but she’s with her family. Telling them.” Right now. Explaining, probably, how she wasn’t going to die. Or probably wasn’t.

“What will you do?”

“I don’t know.”

We followed the path to the water’s concrete-bound edge. “The light is extraordinary, don’t you think?” she said.

It was. To the west, the view could have been one from a north European coast, all heather tones: a deep blue sound with hints of slate in the shadows between waves, lacy whitecaps, low islands in the distance, their outlines softened by the low clouds, which were layered, moving in two distinct directions, the way I imagined two armies might, streaming past each other, heedless, in an effort to regroup. I was reminded of the Western Roman emperors: blank-eyed, massive, calm, carved to inhuman size from white marble. The view east from Kick’s window would be more like that of the exotic Eastern Empire: crimson, rose gold, molten brass, the air twinkling with dust rising from the drying dirt, burning to umber. The clouds, too, would be different, gauzy and light, like a bundle of harem silks sliced through with a cheese wire and draped over Queen Anne where the windows would be glinting like the gilded dome and minarets of Hagia Sophia.

Hadrian had built his wall at the westernmost tip of his empire, and turned his face inward, and the Roman Empire had begun to die. In the east, Justinian, at Theodora’s urging, had faced his enemies, kept expanding. The Roman Empire of the west had merged imperceptibly into the barbarism of the Germanic tribes in the fifth century. Byzantium had continued until the Turks crushed it in the fifteenth.

“…glad,” my mother was saying. “Atlanta must be very beautiful for you to want to leave this place.”

THEY ALL STARED SILENTLY AT THE MATTRESS PROPPED AGAINST THE FAR WALL. It was a brand-new double which I planned to donate to Arkady House when the classes were over.

“Here is a handout covering some of the topics we’ve talked about in the last couple of weeks, and one or two other things that might prove useful.” It was a retread of my previous list, grouped into related headings: information you should never hand out to a stranger, ways to protect yourself at home, and so on. At the top, in big, bold font were phone numbers of Bette’s new associate, who would be eager to represent any of them in an emergency, Arkady House, the Georgia Domestic Violence Coalition, emergency hotline numbers, and the phone numbers of three hospital emergency rooms. Perhaps these numbers would displace mine in their minds and speed-dials. I’d also copied from a website a checklist of items one should assemble before leaving a violent domestic partner: passport, birth certificate, checkbook, medical records, children’s records, etc.

Most of them flipped through the sheaf with one eye on the mattress. Sandra ignored the mattress completely and examined the checklist one item at a time. I studied her. She seemed to have gained weight.

“Put the lists away now.” They all turned to their various bags and back-packs and Tonya flinched as Suze swung her bag quickly from the bench about a foot from Tonya’s head.

The nose looked fine to me, but clearly she was gun-shy. They all were. Time to discuss the elephant in the living room.

“Tonya, how’s your nose?”

“Okay. I guess.”

“It looks good, no swelling. Does it hurt?”

“Not especially.”

“Any problems with breathing? Odd nerve sensation?”

“No. It’s cool.”

“Good.” I let them consider that for a moment. “So how did it feel, to get hurt?”

“Painful.” She made a careful face and everyone smiled in sympathy.

“Do you feel more vulnerable?”

“I guess. More jumpy anyhow.”

“More scared, deep down, or less?”

“I don’t know.” She thought about it. “Both, maybe. I mean, I sure wouldn’t want anyone to hit my nose again anytime soon. But the notion of being hit somewhere else is less scary than it was. Kind of. I mean, it hurt, but it, like you said, it gets better. It’s just a… a… It’s not the end of the world.”

“Or your good looks,” Nina said.

The smiles were rueful, and I understood that Nina’s remark wasn’t entirely a joke. For them looks mattered as much as permanent disability.

“But what’s it like?” Jennifer said. “To get whomped like that?”

“And, Katherine,” I said, “what was it like to do the, ah, whomping, even though it was accidental?”

“Awful,” she said. “I felt sick.”

“So did I,” Tonya said.

I let them sit with it. It was an inescapable fact: getting hurt hurts. Several of them stared desperately at the floor. Perhaps I would donate a large sum to Crystal Gaze so that future classes could at least stare at a nicer carpet.

“Omelets,” I said.

“Oh, no,” Pauletta said. “Please tell me you’re not going to give us that crap about breaking eggs.”

“Crap. I see.” Cliché, possibly—but I didn’t know how else to describe it. Which annoyed me. “Tell me, then, how you make an omelet.”

Silence. Nina cleared her throat. “Egg beaters?”

Despite my irritation I almost smiled. “Someone broke those eggs.”

“Yes, but not me.”

“Those eggs get broken. Yes or no?” I looked around the group. “Yes or no?”

Reluctant nods.

“To learn to walk, you have to fall down. To make an omelet you break eggs. To defend yourself from physical attack, someone gets hurt. Yes or no?”

More nods, one or two Yeses.

“Nothing is free. Nothing is magic. You get out what you put in. Risk and reward. Suze, help me move the mattress to the other wall.” We lifted it away and there lay ten gourd-sized piñatas. I picked up the nearest, crimson painted with gold donkeys and stars, and shook it in their direction. “That rattle is a single poker chip. On it is a number that corresponds to an item on this list.” I pulled a piece of paper from my pocket. “On this list are ten items. A day at Gleam, the day spa. Dinner for two at the Horseradish Grill. Hundred-and-fifty-dollar gift certificates from places like Saks and Tiffany’s and Teuscher. Mostly luxuries, but not all.” I’d included certificates from Chevron and Kroger. “You give me the chip, I give you the corresponding gift certificate. The only rule is that you have to use a naked body weapon to break the piñata open.”

“Won’t that hurt?”

“It might,” I said. “You won’t know until you try.”

“And they’re just piñatas, right?” Pauletta said.

“Plain old papier-mâché. I broke one myself yesterday.” And that had been so satisfying I’d broken another two and had to buy more.

“Did it hurt?” Jennifer asked again.

“Only one way to find out. Would you like to go first?” I tossed her the piñata ball. She dropped it. It didn’t break.

She picked it up tentatively and shook it. “Don’t people usually break these things with sticks?”

“Usually. There again, they’re usually blindfolded, too.”

“It should hang from something.”

“If you like.” I pulled a piece of string from my other pocket, glad I’d spent the time combing the city for the kind of piñata with two little holes at the top for string instead of the cheap kind with the hook.

“Well, how else do I hit it?”

“Entirely up to you.”

She cradled it in her arm and patted it as though it were a puppy that might have rabies. “It’s hard.”

I nodded.

“It will hurt if I hit it.”

In reply I pinned the list to the door with the thumbtack already pushed into the wood. “Take a look and see if you think it’s worth it.”

Nina was already looking at the list, with Christie standing by her shoulder. “Jimmy Choo!” she said. “If you don’t break that ball, I will.”

But Jennifer was hugging it possessively.

“Think of all your body weapons,” I said.

“Give me that,” Nina said.

“No,” Jennifer said. “But you could hold it for me, so I can hit it.” She gave it to Nina.

“If you hold mine for me next.”

“Think of—”

“Not like that,” Jennifer said, completely ignoring me. “In front of you.”

“—the room. Think of—”

“Like this?” Nina said, holding it against her stomach.

“Okay.”

They weren’t listening. I shrugged. They couldn’t do themselves too much damage. There were no corners, no rough edges, no dangerous metal hooks to tear skin.

They’d formed a circle with Nina and Jennifer at the center, just like children at a birthday party. Nina snugged the piñata more firmly against her belly and set her back foot to prepare for the punch. Ready to take one for Jimmy Choo. Jennifer began to breathe and bounce around on her toes like a boxer.

“Hurt it,” Suze said.

“Kill it.” Kim.

I wished I’d thought of bribery weeks ago.

And with a thin, gull-like cry, Jennifer hit the piñata with her fist. Nothing happened.

“Love tap,” Pauletta said. “Get closer. Kill it.”

Jennifer set her chin and hit again, harder. “Ow!” She shook her hand. “Think Jimmy,” said Nina.

“Ow,” Jennifer said again, but absently, and stepped in close and hit it again, and it buckled. “Ha!” Whack. “Ow!” This time she scowled.

“Oooh, now she’s pissed,” said Pauletta, and Jennifer was.

“Ow!” This time it was more accusation than complaint, and she threw a series of unscientific, uncoordinated, but totally committed punches, and she screeched like a herring gull fighting with a crow. The piñata crumpled and she seized it from Nina and shook it until the chip fell out. She snatched up the glittery disk. “Four!”

“Number four,” Christie said from the list on the door. “That’s wine .com.”

“Champagne!” Jennifer said, then looked at her reddened knuckles.

“Worth it?” I asked.

“Totally!”

Nina picked up a green-and-blue piñata and tossed it to Jennifer. “My turn.”

The rest of the class closed around them, like punters at a cockfight. Three minutes and scraped knuckles later she had the caviar. “I’ll trade with whoever gets the shoes,” she said with a satisfied smile.

“No way,” said Kim, “those shoes are mine. Me next.”

“What about your nails?” Tonya said.

“Shoot.” Kim stared at them a minute. “Anyone got any clippers?”

“Wait,” I said. “Think. What other body weapons do you have?”

“Elbow,” said Christie.

For the inexperienced, elbows were difficult to use accurately, and even a beginner could generate enough power to break a nose or a cheekbone.

“We’ll hang this one,” I said, and produced the string again. Soon the piñata was hanging from the bag frame, swinging gently.

“Kick it,” Suze said suddenly.

“Knee-high or lower,” I said.

“No, seriously. Give me one of those.”

“Which?” Christie said.

Christie tossed her the orange piñata. Suze caught it, and without pause threw it in the air, and on the way down, just before it hit the floor, she kicked it as though going for a forty-yard goal. It burst in a spectacular shower and a yellow chip tumbled slowly, inevitably to lie faceup on the carpet. Number six. Jimmy Choo.

“Give me one,” Therese said. Christie obliged, and Therese put it against the baseboard, and with one kick, broke it to smithereens. “Number one,” she called to Christie, who said, “Chevron,” and Therese shook her head, and Kim yanked her ball from the string, put it against the wall, and kicked it to pieces. Number eight: Barnes and Noble.

Katherine grabbed a blue-and-yellow ball and put it on the floor. “Hey, Fred,” she said. “Die, you son of a bitch.” In the startled silence she said, “Axe kick to the head,” with the air of a pool shark naming her pocket, and delivered an executioner’s blow.

Sandra named someone called George and knelt by it and destroyed it with successive hammer blows with the meaty parts of her fists. Tonya called it Ma’am Yes Ma’am, and had Christie hold it against the wall at chest height, where she burst its spleen with her elbow. Pauletta yelled, “Watch this,” and put hers on the carpet in the middle of the circle. When everyone was watching, she sat on it violently, crushing it. She jumped up, face dark and eyes flashing. “How’s that?” she said. “Who’s sitting on whose face now, you fuck?”

I decided not to reinforce the “naked” part of the body weapon rule.

They started to bargain over the chips.

“Anger,” I said, and waited. Gradually they turned to look at me. “What is it? Why is it?” Blank, though this time no one looked at the carpet. “How does it feel?”

“Good,” Pauletta said. “Man, it feels good. Kind of clean.”

Nina nodded. “Naughty but nice.”

Lots of nods, some smiles. “But in the real world it feels wrong,” Therese said. “Losing my temper feels childish, like a two-year-old screaming in the supermarket until it gets what it wants.”

“Is feeling angry the same as losing your temper?”

“Hmmn,” she said.

“Anger, like fear, is an emotion, not an action. It’s a particularly strong emotion and, again, like fear, releases adrenaline. It won’t just go away because we want it to. What makes you angry?”

“Idiots,” said Suze.

“Oh, yep,” Nina said. “And when my husband leaves the cap off the toothpaste. Nearly thirty years he’s been doing it.”

“When people cut in line,” Tonya said. “I really hate that.”

“Little things and big things, then. And they can vary from day to day. What makes a person angry today might just make us shake our heads tomorrow. But if you do get angry you can’t ‘rise above it’ because it’s a hormonal thing. It has to be acknowledged, even if just to ourselves. It’s best, if possible, to alter the situation so that we’re not being made angry anymore, and it’s good to do something with the adrenaline charge if you can, to use it in some way, because it makes you feel better.”

“You mean like telling the person you’re mad at that you’re mad?” Christie said.

“Maybe. It depends. Would you find that hard?”

She nodded.

“Anyone else?” Many nods. Suze shook her head. Sandra didn’t commit one way or the other. “In every culture I’ve come across, from Oslo to Yorkshire to Istanbul to New York, women are disapproved of for showing anger; it’s not feminine, not desirable. And women have been trained for so many years to never, ever get angry that they think if they let themselves slip just a little, just once, it will be a crack in the dam, that the dam will break and unleash a torrent of inappropriate, uncontrolled rage. In specific situations, a lot of people think that if they get angry, they’ll provoke a violent response. Women, in short, have been trained to believe that they’re not allowed to be angry.”

“Trained,” Katherine said loudly. “You’re always talking about training, like we’re dogs or something.”

“It’s not polite to raise your voice,” I said, and she immediately hunched and blushed. Suze frowned. “Don’t frown,” I said to her, “you’ll get wrinkles.”

Silence.

“Basically, much of what we women hear about anger implies that showing anger means we’re not ‘real women.’ Or, conversely, because we’re women, our anger isn’t real, it’s not to be taken seriously. Our anger, we’re told from day one, is either laughable or disgusting. Effectively, we’re trained to fear and resent our own anger.”

They looked at each other.

“All of you,” I said. “All trained. Women are not innately good and kind and wise. We’re trained to be that way. It can be a serious obstacle to getting what we want and need. We’re conditioned. An attacker sometimes has to merely invoke that conditioning and it’s as effective as a leash and muzzle.”

“Damn,” Nina said.

“It’s a little like escaping a bad cult. You have to be active in your deprogramming. The first part of what I’d like you to do between now and next week is listen to your body. Learn what makes you angry. Big or small. Don’t judge, for now, whether your anger is reasonable or rational. Anger, for the simple fact that it’s an emotion, is never rational or reasonable. Understandable, yes, but not a rational process. Don’t worry about it. Just learn how you work inside. And then, when you get angry, admit it to yourself, and do something about it.”

“Like what?”

“Depends. The first thing must be to find a way to use the adrenaline created by anger. What do you usually do when you get angry? For example, I like to hit things—such as the punch bag. I also like to break wood for kindling.”

“I kick the soccer ball extra hard,” Suze said. “Or throw the softball.”

“Slam doors.” Christie.

“I walk extra fast.” Tonya. And then they were off: kneading bread, stabbing the dirt with a trowel extra hard, singing “real loud,” strangling a towel, punching a pillow, peeling a lot of vegetables, and, Kim’s, my favorite, “hitting the wall in the garage with an old tennis racket.”

“And how does that make you feel?”

“Better.” “Cleaner and calmer.” “More in control.”

I nodded. “Control comes from having choice, bleeding off the pressure on a regular basis, so you’re not seething all the time. Then, when something makes you angry, you can choose whether or not—and how—to respond. ”

Physically venting also meant they would get used to it, and be able to produce a response more quickly in an emergency. It was all a matter of use.

“It’s good for your breathing and coordination, too. And the next time you’re strangling a towel”—a nod for Sandra—“or punching that pillow”— Pauletta—“I want you to really feel the emotions, the physical sensations— the speeded-up heart, the breathing, the rising strength.”

Some nods.

“I want you to feel it, and remember it. Remember it so clearly that you can recall it in the middle of the night, if necessary, or while you’re brushing your teeth in the morning—and while you’re brushing your teeth one morning, recall very specifically three strikes or joint locks or throws that you think you do well.”

I held up three fingers.

“Three things. That’s all. A kick, a knuckle strike, and a pinkie wrench. Or an elbow strike and two kicks. Or two throws and a punch. It doesn’t matter. Three.”

I motioned Christie over to hold the bag.

“So I might pick a back fist”—I lunged and unfurled a whipping right fist into the right temple of my imaginary opponent—“then an elbow strike”—the back fist had brought me close enough for a flat, hard drive into the solar plexus—“and then a kick to the knee.”

Christie staggered at the last blow. I could feel the energy boiling in my bones.

“Rehearse the anger feelings, the adrenaline, and rehearse the strikes in your head. Rehearse them as you’re driving, as you’re preparing dinner, as you get dressed. Enjoy the sensation. Just three things. Over and over.”

I scanned the faces around me.

“Anger isn’t a bad thing. It’s just a feeling. Learn it. Understand it. Feel it—and then start matching that feeling to your three strikes—your punch, your kick, your hold release, whatever. Then start matching the strikes with possible attacks. Imagine someone pinning you to the wall, or jumping you from behind, or touching you on MARTA. Tie the imagination to the anger to the adrenaline to the strength to the strike. Over and over.”

More nods. Some of them, I could see—a shifting of the feet, an increased pulse at the neck—were imagining as I spoke.

“Yes. That trowel in the dirt is a sword-hand to the neck. The towel is your attacker’s throat. The soccer ball is a knee. The tennis racket is a sword-arm to the groin. Imagine the combination blows—the fist, the kick, the strangle. Or the throw, the kick, the knee. Imagine what you will shout as you strike out or throw. One word is best: no, or blam, or die, or fuck. It doesn’t matter. Pick one, practice it. If you can, practice it as loudly as you can. If you can’t, run through it in your heads. Play with it. Play with the scary thing. But play hard, play clearly, and play a lot. I want you ready by this time next week, because I have a treat for you.”

“Why does the word treat from you make me nervous?” Nina said. “What do we get next week?

I smiled. “A real live boy.”