Always

FIFTEEN

ON SET KICK WAS ENTIRELY PROFESSIONAL AND IMPERSONAL. "THE FIRST STEP is to visually inspect the air bag, both before and after inflation.” I wondered if I hid my feelings so well when I was teaching.

She lifted this piece and that of the deflated bag, talking about the sensitivity of the plastic to temperature change and how it must always, always be checked. “One stunter died a few years back when they flew his air bag out to Portugal in an unpressurized cargo bay. The cold, high altitude changed the physical properties of the material and the vents didn’t hold. Dead as a stone.”

Then the compressor thudded for fifteen minutes and we walked solemnly around the Model Seventy once again. She moved smoothly.

“Now we test it from the tower. It’ll test the camera orientation, too.”

Again, there were three cameras. One to the side, one on top, one directly behind the bag to focus on the falling object as it fell. Once they were set up to Rusen’s satisfaction, she borrowed one of the props manager’s clothing dummies, carried it to the top of the tower. Then she came back down, handed me a very heavy grocery bag, and said, “Follow me.” Climbing the scaffolding steps with the bag made me aware of the pull of humerus from shoulder socket, the compression of cartilage in my knee and ankle joints, the smooth lubrication of synovial fluid around my hips. We are such delicate machines.

It was surprisingly crowded at the top with the two camera operators. Everyone but me was wearing a headset. I nodded. They nodded back.

Kick took several sets of ankle and wrist weights from the bags and wrapped them around the dummy’s limbs and waist. Some of them had been carefully sewn together to be long enough. Then she cinched me into a harness, standing close to check the fit—the impersonal touch was disorienting—clipped a line to the D-ring at my waist, jerked it to be sure, then did the same for herself. I eased one strap, tightened another.

We picked up the dummy, carried it to the edge of the platform.

“Clear,” she said conversationally, then, for the benefit of people on the set without earphones, she shouted, “Stand clear below.” Then she turned to me. “Follow my swing. Let go at the top, don’t try to push it.” She waited for my nod, and we began to swing. “On three. One”—swing—“two”— swing—“three”—release, and the dummy sailed up and out in a rapidly climbing curve, seemed to pause, then plummeted in an almost straight line to the bag, which hissed and sagged and caught the dummy safely in the center of its sweet spot. Whistles and general applause from below—I saw the flash of Dornan’s grin.

“Of course a body, a person, falls differently,” she said, and unhooked her safety line. “With an active leap and flailing arms it’s more of an overhand, egglike curve. It takes a little longer, and it’s easier for the camera operators to follow.”

“Do they know that?” They seemed barely out of film school. We unbuckled our harnesses. I resisted the urge to help her.

“They will when Buddy gets here.”

We climbed down, a lot easier without the weights, and started the compressors pumping the bag full again.

“Sandwiches?” Dornan called from the craft-services table. He gave the impression of wearing an apron, though he wasn’t.

“Later,” Kick said.

We sat cross-legged on the floor while we waited. She looked around, at the quietly humming set. “We’re pretty much set. Buddy’ll want to test the bag himself, but essentially we’re good to go.”

“I thought you said most serious stunters had their own bags and own air-bag people.”

“I used to be Buddy’s air-bag woman. He coordinated on Tantalus. He trusts my bag work. He’ll walk in here, we’ll get it in one take. Two at most, then I’m free for a couple of days. I can take care of… things.” Maureen. Her brothers.

The air compressor clicked off, and on, and off again.

At eye level, the bag looked huge. She reached out and patted it. It shivered like a big square jellyfish.

“Buddy’s not here,” I said.

“He will be.”

“Yes,” I said. We admired the bag some more. “Is it calling to you?”

“Yes.”

“Insurance aside, would you be up to it?”

She snorted. “It’s only forty-two feet.”

“It occurs to me that you don’t need insurance to jump if it’s just for fun.”

She looked at the bag some more.

“And the cameras could probably do with the practice. Save Buddy having to do two takes.” She didn’t say anything. “How long’s it been?”

“Long time.”

“You—”

“Hush,” she said. “Stop there. Stop. Give me a minute.” She uncrossed her legs and leaned back on her hands, tipping her head to take the measure of the fake office building. She folded over her legs, chest touching knees, stretching out her hamstrings, breathing easily. She straightened, looked at the tower again, began to fold back, then jumped to her feet so fast I didn’t see the transition. She seemed different, burlier. “Roland!” One of the cameramen poked his head cautiously over the lip of the tower. “Live rehearsal!”

There was a moment’s silence, in which several crew stopped mid-hammer or mid-yammer, then Roland said, “You want us to load?”

“Film for three cameras? You and whose fucking checkbook? Rehearsal, I said.”

Einstein once called quantum entanglement—when the quantum states of two objects have to be described in reference to each other even though the individual objects are spatially separated—“spooky action at a distance. ” He believed that it was impossible to use this entanglement to transmit information. Einstein had never been on a film set. I didn’t see anyone leave the building to go get Finkel or Rusen, I didn’t see anyone pick up a phone, but by the time Kick got to the top of the tower, they were both there, watching.

I stood twenty feet from the bag, two feet behind the camera dolly, in direct line-of-sight to the tower. She would look as though she were falling right at me. Dornan stood a little to my left. He looked worried.

She came to the lip of the platform, in safety harness and headset, stood wide-legged for a moment, then sat, feet dangling. She adjusted her headset, appeared to be saying something. The camera operator squinted and made some adjustment. Rusen came over, they conferred. Rusen took the operator’s headset a moment, looked up at the figure on the tower, said something, listened, nodded, said something else, grinned, and gave the headset back.

“Okey dokey,” he said loudly. “Everybody, keep still. Try not to make any sudden moves or loud noises.”

You can’t distract her now, I thought. She sees nothing, hears nothing but what is to come.

And she did that trick again, stood so fast I didn’t see her get up, and her headset was gone, and she was unbuckling her harness, and it was like watching a quarter horse, stripped of its tack, roll in the dust and stand and remember what it meant to be alive. She stood motionless, and I knew her nostrils would be flared, her heart thumping like a kettle drum, that she would be testing the air for unexpected currents, rocking imperceptibly on her feet, feeling the delicate articulations of the talus, the anklebone: the ends of the tibia and fibula, the heel bone, the rays of the metatarsals. So much work for one bone, sliding back and forward on its springy ligament. Less delicate, in comparison, than a horse’s paten.

She was already going to that place, the heart-stopping moment when the world pauses, then resumes as a crystal dream. She was like the horse running, running around the corral, getting up speed before heading towards the fence, gathering itself, listening to its own rhythm, nothing but the heart, nothing but the blood, nothing but the breath. Bit and bridle forgotten, iron shoes now weightless, ribs working like bellows and arteries wide open.

She stepped back, and all I could see was the top of her head, and it moved slightly, as though she had nodded to herself, and then she ran, and leapt, up and out, and—

“Oh!” everyone moaned, as she faltered, then crumpled as though shot, and fell like a dead thing.

Gravity seemed to triple for a moment, then adrenaline burned through my system and kicked me into hyperdrive. Kick fell in slow motion. Sound fell away. I started to draw breath before leaping—to do what, I don’t know—when my automatic processing of images caught up with my brain and I realized she was smiling. And then she thumped neatly into the exact center of the bag, and swung herself to the ground like a pro. Her grin was big enough to split the world.

Noise swelled around me: applause. She bowed, laughed.

Dornan was there, patting her on the back, saying, “Jesus, God in heaven,” and Rusen pumped her hand like a maniac. I stayed where I was. My muscles trembled with unspent power.

Then she was standing in front of me.

“Well?”

Her skin looked perfectly elastic, blooming and alive. I touched her cheek. "You were good,” I said. "I believed it. I thought you were going to die.”

“Yep,” she said. “Pretty much perfect.”

“And you used to do that every day?”

“Only higher.” She grinned. “Still want to learn? When Buddy’s done the jump I’ll pack away the Model Seventy and we’ll get out that old Forty and give it a try. Hey,” she said, as Dornan ambled over with two cups. He gave one to her, held another out to me.

“I remembered no cream,” he said. “But I put sugar in it. You looked as though you could do with it.”

I accepted the cup.

“I can also recommend the sandwiches,” he said. “Tuna or jerk chicken.”

Kick sipped at her paper cup. It smelled strange. She saw my look. “Red tea. Don’t need caffeine after that. But I could eat. Aud?” I shook my head. She nodded, then gave me a one-armed hug. She squeezed hard, then kissed me. “I’m glad you were here.”

She headed back to the air bag, swaggering slightly. Dornan said, “She’s different, isn’t she, when she jumps.”

“Yes.” Hearty and careless, unfragile, unneeding. “I think I’ll take my coffee outside. Join me?”

We sat outside on the hood of my car and watched clouds sweep in two different directions, as though the sky were being torn apart.

IF KICK was a quarter horse, Buddy was an old steer, sinewy and raw-boned, grazed on arid land all his life. His skin was leathery and tightly stretched, and when he shook hands with the crew, I saw a scar twisting up his left forearm like a brand. He walked around the air bag with Kick and listened attentively as she talked about the testing and her own fall. His limbs were lanky, and next to Kick he seemed uncoordinated, but there was a kinship, a live-free-or-die lift of the head, a risk-calculating twist of the mouth. I looked at him, nodding and listening, unbuttoning the cheap flannel shirt, looking over the harness Kick handed him, and understood they shared a world I couldn’t. I wondered if her stunt rigger brother looked like that.

I left them talking to Rusen and the camera operators.

Finkel was in his trailer. “That was some jump of Kuiper’s,” he said. “We should’ve been rolling for that, saved the cost of this Buddy guy.”

“Mmmn,” I said. Had Kick not told anyone about her diagnosis apart from me and Dornan? I sat down. “We need to talk about OSHA and EPA. And Sîan Branwell’s PR value. Let me see her contract.”

We were both on the phone an hour later when Rusen came in, glowing. “We got it!” he said. “In one—Oh, sorry.” He made a production out of putting his finger to his lips and sitting with conspicuous quietness in a chair in the corner while Finkel and I wound up our calls.

We finished at about the same time. I nodded to Finkel and he crossed two more names off an already heavily striped list.

“What’s that?” Rusen said.

Finkel handed him the list. “We’re inviting everyone and his goddamn dog to the set on Tuesday to hang with Sîan Branwell. Well, not with her, exactly, just around her. See her from a distance. Watch a real movie being made.”

“Dornan’s idea,” I said. “The regional manager from OSHA is bringing her two children. The woman from EPA might come with her mother. Apparently her mother is a big fan.”

“Are we allowed to do that?” Rusen said to Finkel, who nodded to me.

“We all agreed that this in no way affects the official business of their respective offices,” I said. "That the public good must be considered, we must be shown no undue favoritism, and so on. What it will do is ease the pressure these higher-ups might have brought to bear on the case officers handling our paperwork because of the newspaper article. Now we’ll go back to waiting our turn in the queue; it will take time to get to us. And time is all we need.” And without Corning paying Mackie to call in every single violation, we would be in only one queue. “Also, the fire department has agreed to expedite the pyrotechnic permit, and the reporter who wrote that Times piece will show up with a photographer.”

“What do we have in the way of publicity stills?” Finkel said.

Rusen looked blank.

“Maybe we could strike a side deal with the photographer,” Finkel said. “So, Stan, I’m sorry, you had some news?”

“We got the shot. The fall. Perfect. All three cameras the first time. They’re already packing away that huge bag thing. We’re in good shape. Great shape. I was thinking it might be good to give folks a break.”

“It is a holiday weekend,” I said. “And we could cut some checks.”

“Bad idea,” said Finkel. “You give these people a couple days off and who knows if they’ll come back, ’specially if they have money burning a hole in their pockets. You know what these creative types are like.”

I wondered how Rusen and Finkel had met and started working together; they seemed to be from different continuums.

“What is there still to do?” I asked Rusen.

“On set? Not a lot. Rigging the pyrotechnics, which Kick says is eight hours’ work, max, even including testing. The rest has to wait for Sîan on Tuesday. We could give them Saturday and Sunday, get everyone back first thing Monday, and still have a pretty good margin for error.”

“And off set?”

“Editing.”

“Lining up product placement,” Finkel said.

“But you don’t need the crew for that,” I said. “And they’ve been working hard, and you’ve some money in the bank.”

“We sure do. Boy, Anton, I really think we should do it.”

THE CLOUDS had slowed from scudding to drifting. One layer, moving from the southwest, looked like an indigo veil. Kick’s van was gone. I’d helped her and Buddy wrestle the Model Seventy into the back. She and Buddy would drive it back to the storage unit.

“And then we’ll maybe go out for a beer…”

I imagined them at a rickety table in a smoky bar, with beer and shooters, pausing in their conversation for a moment to watch some pretty woman walk by before going back to agreeing that all directors were ass-holes who didn’t know nothing about nothing.

“…and then I have to spend a couple of days breaking the news to the rest of the family.” On her own.

"AUD, ” Eric said in surprise when he answered the phone. "Your mother was just about to call you. We were hoping you could have dinner with us tonight.”

“Yes. Yes, that would be fine.”

Pause. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“No more… episodes?”

“I’m fine.”

“Taste?”

“About the same. Perhaps a little better.”

“Good. That’s good. I spoke to my colleague the other day and he admits that they’re no nearer to determining a couple of the mystery ingredients. His guess is that it came from some illegal basement lab. It’s astonishing just how—Hold on one moment.” Muffled conversation. “Your mother would like a word. We’ll see you tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Aud, are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“You called Eric’s phone. Did you have a medical question?”

“I did. I wanted his opinion on MS research. But it can wait until we have dinner. He didn’t say where.”

“Rover’s. Eight o’clock. A special occasion. My negotiations are over. One last dinner together, and then we leave tomorrow.”

ROVER’S WAS the kind of place that provoked conversations about love and art and philosophy, so while it was clear from my mother’s particularly erect spine that she wanted to talk about something specific, we kept to small talk over the first of our eight-course grand menu dégustation: an egg, lightly scrambled with lime crème fraîche, returned to its shell and topped with white sturgeon caviar. The tiny beads were dark olive and tasted nutty, perfect over the creamy egg.

“Were the negotiations satisfactory?”

“They were very useful. However, it became clear that the needs of the software company and the Norwegian government were very different, and would remain so, so I concluded the talks.”

“You don’t seem too dismayed,” I said.

“In any circumstances, it would be hard to be dismayed while drinking this marvelous Pauillac.”

I sipped the 1990 Haut-Batailley. It bloomed in my mouth like an origami rose, structured, geometric, and precise. “Your attitude to negotiations wasn’t always so relaxed. Was it?”

She sat up straighter. “When I was young it was all about winning, about making the other do what I wanted. But sometime in the last ten years… Well, I changed.” She didn’t look at Eric, but I got the impression their feet were touching under the table. “Now instead of charging at people, sword drawn, I find it much more enjoyable and productive to run alongside them, learn their stride and rhythm, whether or not we could run together in the long term. In the course of my discussions with the software company, I found that our basic philosophies were radically different, and although I could have found a way to negotiate an agreement, it would have been temporary and unsatisfactory to everyone. The government would have ended up wasting years of various departments’ time trying to enforce an openness that the company simply wasn’t capable of offering. My recommendation will be that all contracts be terminated and the state move to adoption of open source code. In the long term, it will save time and money.”

After the egg came oxtail soup, which reminded me of the lentil-and-chicken -liver soup I’d eaten with Dornan.

“In the long term, one needs true partnership for a relationship to endure. Common interests, common goals, common expectations.”

It was clearly a prepared statement, a preamble to her main point.

“Your little girl, Luz. You would risk a great deal on her behalf.”

“I would.”

“You might even risk sacrificing her goodwill in the short term in order to discuss the prospects for her long-term happiness.”

“I’m prepared, Mor. Just speak.”

“This is very difficult.”

Eric leaned forward. “Your friend has recently been diagnosed—”

“Her name is Kick.”

“Kick has recently been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.”

“Yes.”

“It is a very unpredictable disease.”

“Yes, it is.”

“What do you know of it?”

I put my spoon down and looked directly at my mother. “Perhaps you should tell me what it is you think I should know.”

“Like any mother, I am only concerned for my daughter’s happiness.”

“I am happy.”

“Yes, but for how long?”

“How long will you and Eric be happy?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and now I was certain they were touching feet beneath the table. “But neither of us has an incurable disease. I… please, Aud, I feel the need to speak.”

I could take one last sip of the lovely wine, remove my napkin, drop it on the table, say good-bye, and walk away. But there were tears in my mother’s eyes. She was not managing me, not negotiating. She was pleading.

“…know that you’ve heard my concerns. And after that, no matter what you choose, you are my daughter, and I love you. I will respect your choices.”

“Good. Because they’re my choices. And MS might be incurable, but it’s treatable.” Silence. “Wouldn’t you agree? Eric?”

Eric looked troubled. “The efficacy of most treatments is as variable as the disease course.”

“There’s a lot of research. You should know that. You’ve been working with those biotech companies.”

“Research is… well, I wouldn’t say this to anyone that wasn’t family but, frankly, there are a lot of lies.”

“I’ve read the studies. Someone at Kick’s stage can be helped.”

“The most optimistic information we have is that thirty or forty percent of people with the very early stages of MS can achieve a thirty or forty percent reduction in the deterioration of their disease.”

After a long pause, I said, “That’s not what I understood from my reading.”

“That’s not what the drug companies want you to understand. The drug companies want you to hope. Forty percent sounds wonderful—it sounds as though everyone who injects themselves with these rather far-ranging immunomodulators will get forty percent better, which is worth all the money, and the side effects, and the pain, and the inconvenience. But I wouldn’t play those odds at a craps table.”

“I didn’t know you played craps.”

My mother made a rare gesture of impatience. “Dice games are not the issue.”

“Fine. What is the issue?”

“Money,” Eric said. “Money and the lies and false hope it breeds. The pharmaceutical companies cast a rosy tint over their research pipeline and their products and their clinical trials. Consider this. All of the current recommended treatments for MS were developed under the orphan disease umbrella. It means there are tax advantages, government grants, and non-competition clauses. An orphan disease, strictly speaking, is one which fewer than two hundred thousand Americans suffer from. Most medical authorities would acknowledge that there are closer to half a million people in this country with MS. There is some evidence to support the opinion that there are very many more than that. Yet the drug companies have found their way around legislation. Preying on the hopes of ill people and their loved ones is easy in comparison.”

“You have obviously spent a lot of time researching this. I appreciate your concern.” I picked up my spoon.

“Aud, Kick’s life may be measurably shorter than yours. She will need a lot of… help as the years progress.”

“Not necessarily. There are people who, ten years after diagnosis, are absolutely no worse than they were before.”

“And those people are unlikely to get worse. Yes,” Eric said. “All true, but—”

“But are you prepared to wait ten years to see?” my mother said. “Aud, she is ill. You will always be the strong one, the healthy one. Partnerships should be equal. You can protect her, yes, but shouldn’t she also be able to protect you?”

Kick, protect me?

“It is more than likely that you will come to resent her because of that, and she you for being healthy.”

I skimmed a spoonful of liquid from the surface of my soup. My hand was trembling. Interesting. I breathed gently. The trembling stilled. “It’s already been pointed out to me that illness is not pretty, it’s not romantic, it’s not easy.” My spoon jerked, and dumped congealing soup back in the bowl with an audible plop. The spoon slid under the warm liquid and one perfect globule shone on the white tablecloth. The same reddish brown as drying blood. “I understand what I’m doing.”

“Do you? Illness can crush hope. It can crush intention…”

A server appeared with a fresh spoon, but I shook my head and gestured for him to take the bowl away.

“…times when illness can be bigger and stronger than we are.”

I focused on that perfect brown-red hemisphere on the white tablecloth. It was slowly sinking into the linen, spreading, losing its shape and focus.

“Aud?”

“There’s always something,” I said. “Unless we brick ourselves up in a box. There is no perfect security. You plan to the best of your ability, and then you improvise. Sooner or later there’s always someone or something bigger or faster or stronger than you. You just do the best you can, and when you run into trouble, you get help.”

My mother was studying me. In the subtle lighting, she seemed older than she was, and more powerful. “Is that what happened with your throat?” she said.

A fish knife lay by my right hand. I picked it up and turned it in my fingers, heavy and cool. It was silver, burnished with the tiny cuts of a thousand dishwashings. “I got my throat cut because I was tired, and careless, and afraid. Because I didn’t understand that when you run into trouble, you get help. You ask your friends, and family, for their support.”

Her eyes were aquamarine and fathomless.

“You are adult,” she said. “We will leave the matter there. I trust your judgment. I ask only that you do judge and don’t jump blindly. When you choose, you will have my absolute support.” She didn’t have to make extravagant vows. If I chose Kick, she would accept us without reservation and never remind me of this conversation by word or deed; she would close over it like the ocean over a swimmer’s head. I remembered Julia on the fjord, saying,… a land that doesn’t know compromise… black or white, yes or no, on or off. My mother’s soul was still Norwegian, in a way that mine was not.

The next course was Dungeness crab with beets, two ingredients—like the lentils and cherry compote—I would never have dreamt of putting together, but that worked perfectly.

She and Eric were not looking at each other but I could tell that, in the way of some couples, they were intensely aware of each other’s body language and were exchanging a private communication. I drank the last of my wine.

“In honor of our last night,” Eric said, “I believe we should have something special from the wine list.”

He consulted the sommelier, and between them they decided on a 1983 Château Margaux, which was brought up from the cellar with great ceremony. Eric gestured for me to taste.

I held the glass to the light. The wine was the color of an ancient garnet, something set long ago in a barbaric Anglo-Saxon brooch, acquiring depth and gravity through the ages. It unfurled in my mouth like a cloud.

“I think she likes it,” Eric said, and the sommelier poured. “It will be hard to find wine like this in Oslo,” he said sadly.

Servers, moving as soundlessly as though they were on oiled wheels, brought us a cèpes and game confit tartlet, topped with foie gras, which dissolved on my tongue. We ate with concentration, and sipped the Margaux, for several minutes.

“How is the wine?” our server asked.

“Lovely,” my mother said.

I picked my last toasted hazelnut from the plate with my fingers and ate it. They were waiting to see where I’d take the conversation. “I’ve been contemplating buying an oil painting. I wonder what a Norwegian would think of it.”

My mother raised her eyebrows, and her thought was as clear as sunlight. “I know,” I said, “but I haven’t lived there for a very long time.” They waited attentively. “It’s a big painting, of a woman. She’s… not fully clothed, exactly, but covered. But it’s clearly from a particular tradition. It reeks of high art, the artist as savant, dedicated only to improving upon his talent at the expense of all else. No concession to the group. No acknowledgment of the Jante law.” The almost fanatical Norwegian obsession with social and cultural equality.

A different server refilled our glasses. “How are you enjoying it?”

“Delicious,” Eric said, and the server gave us all an approving nod before gliding away.

“It sounds fascinating,” my mother said.

Our tartlet crumbs were replaced by lobster with white asparagus and perigord truffle, and yet another server took the opportunity to drift over and ask if we were enjoying the wine.

We drank in tiny sips. It lasted us through the lobster, the guinea fowl mousseline, the palate-cleansing spice-infused pinot sorbet, and finally the squab with chanterelles and caramelized turnip. It was beautiful food. I found myself longing for rough bread and homemade hummus, with cole slaw falling off all over the table and Kick smiling in satisfaction, knowing just what would please me. In my imagination I smiled back at her, then found I was smiling down at her, because she was in a wheelchair.

THE NEXT DAY, I didn’t call Kick, I didn’t call Dornan, I didn’t call Rusen and Finkel. I left my phone at the hotel and walked to the gallery.

I CONTEMPLATED Antique Dressing Table. The woman was a study in contradiction. Clothed only in a thin silk robe and open to the gaze of the viewer, she remained inaccessible, enigmatic, hidden. Her expression was secretive. It conveyed a sense of someone leading a supremely autonomous inner life, yet—and I couldn’t work out how the painter had made this so clear—she was vulnerable. Perhaps it was the eyes, focused far beyond the viewer, or the fact that there were no lines in her face. An innocent, or perhaps a victim past caring. It could have been her hands, one lying on top of the other in perfect repose, or complete resignation.

So flimsy, just daubs of oil on thin canvas.

This thing is inside me like a stain.

“Beautiful, isn’t she,” said the sales associate who had nodded earlier. “Would you like me to arrange a private viewing? I find that a few moments alone with the lighting just right can help a person make up her mind.”

I WENT TO the dojo, where I worked until I sweated. I found myself working with Chuck, who flinched every time I laid hands on him.

I’m here. Yes, but for how long… those odds at a craps table…

If Chuck didn’t relax, he might fall wrong, break his back or his neck. I began to feel horribly responsible.

… times when illness can be bigger and stronger than we are…

I threw Chuck too hard. I apologized. He shied at my voice.

I took a shower, and was just getting dressed when people started to arrive for another class.

There is no perfect security. There’s always something. Always.

I put one of the communal gis on and went back out to the mat.

I WALKED TO Pioneer Square, consulted the piece of paper Bernard had given me the other night, the address of the woodworkers’ collective.

In the square, I found myself staring at a twisted metal column.

“Pergola,” said a homeless man with muddy green eyes and bright blue Gore-Tex jacket. “Fell down in the earthquake.” He looked about forty, though he could have been a lot younger. “Spare a dollar?” But then his pupils dilated and he stepped back. “I know you. You’re crazy. Stay away from me. You stay away.”

A pioneer, one who hadn’t wanted to dance.

“No, no, you keep your money.”

There was a handwritten card on the door of the woodworkers’ collective. Back in an hour. It was neatly printed, and hung exactly in the center of the glass, but it didn’t say when the hour had begun or would end.

I could see a sideboard and a carved screen, and a dining table. I put my hands against the glass like blinkers, and squinted. Fine work. Better than anything I could do. But I could learn. It was a collective. I could talk to the artisans. I could buy the furniture and learn from them.

From one moment to the next, I couldn’t breathe. My lungs just wouldn’t work. The ground wasn’t shaking, the air wasn’t shimmering, there were no drugs in my system, but I couldn’t breathe.

I bent at the waist, forced myself to count out five seconds as I breathed in, two as I paused, five as I breathed out, two as I paused. And again.

THE NEXT day was cool and rainy. I felt every minute of the work I had done in aikido. My muscles were sluggish with fatigue acids. I walked in the rain. I walked to a pier and watched the water. Kuroshio, the black current. I walked to the set. It was deserted, the door locked. I tried to remember what day it was. Sunday?

I’m here. Yes, but for how long?

THE SUITE was as cold and impersonal as a flatiron. I turned the AC off and sat on the bed. My joints and feet and head ached.

I started the shower, and the rush of water made me realize I was thirsty. I filled the tooth mug under the cold tap. I drank, filled, drank.

The shower was hot. I stood under it a long time. The water smelled of chlorine. I had not noticed that in Seattle before. Perhaps someone had added something to a reservoir. Perhaps my sense of smell was coming back.

I sat on the bed and dried myself carefully. Buckets rattled outside as the housekeeper cleaned something.

Something behind me kicked a bucket. No, a can. The can rattled and bounced down a cobbled alley. I’m here, it said, right behind you. And then all sound died, everything, even the sound of my heartbeat.

I woke on my back. The room was brilliant with sunshine. It had stopped raining. A housekeeper was banging and clanging in the hall. I felt as though I had a hangover.

I had another shower.

DORNAN ANSWERED on the third ring. "What did you mean,” I said. "The other day. When you said you didn’t live in Seattle?”

“Well, as you know, Torvingen, I live in Atlanta.” Silence. “Are you quite well?”

“What did you mean?”

“Why do you ask, why now particularly?”

“I’ve been thinking. About things.”

“Things, is it?” I didn’t say anything. “And have you reached any conclusions? ”

Yes. But for how long?

“I don’t know,” I said, and hung up.

THE SCENTS of sweat and mold and deodorant in the dojo’s changing room were briefly overlain by that of fabric softener as I stripped the freshly laundered gis from their rain-wet bags and hung them on the rail. The next newcomer wouldn’t have to wear clothes that stank of anyone else’s sweat. I laid my new gi and hakama, the black-bloused trousers that yudansha are entitled to wear, on the bench.

I took off my clothes and folded them. I taped my left knee. I pulled on the gi, then the hakama, pulling ties tight, twisting this way then that, loosening, retying. They were stiff and harsh with newness, but despite this, and despite the fact that it had been a long time since I’d experienced the odd combination of tight belt, loose arms, and the swing of cloth around my calves, it felt deeply familiar.

When I went out onto the small mat in my hakama to warm up, Mike smiled, but nobody seemed surprised, and this time, when the bell rang, and we assumed seiza along the edge of the mat, I took the far left position, and after we bowed and sensei stood, it was me he gestured into the center to be uke.

“Kokyu-dosa.”

I stood opposite him, and took his left wrist in my right. It was a big wrist, flat and hard on top and bottom, with tiny dark brown hairs like wire sickles springing from around the wrist bone. As I gripped, he opened his fingers and I felt the massive tendons on each side expand and stretch my own fingers, opening them.

Kokyu-dosa, the blending exercise, is the most basic building block of aikido. It is gentle and fluid, and the nage does not have to worry about making sure that the uke falls well or protects his or her shoulder or wrist or elbow or hip; the uke doesn’t fall at all. The best practitioners simply breathe, and step and turn and lift both hands before them as though carrying a lightly balanced tray of tea, and the uke, if she keeps hold of the nage’s wrist, is twisted to one side and bent forward from the waist, forehead almost to the ground.

But there is beauty in even the simplest movements.

Sensei, Petra had told me, had been practicing aikido for twenty-five years, many hours a day. He was very, very good, but as I matched myself exactly to his strength and force, skin to skin, fascia to fascia, vein on vein, as I felt his wrist joint turn smoothly and his muscles relaxed and open, I understood that he was not great. He had never been hurt, never had his confidence taken away and had to refind it, never, since young adulthood, met anyone bigger, stronger, faster or better trained.

He couldn’t teach me how to be the Aud who had never been drugged, who still had her sense of taste, who had never thought of letting someone else do the protecting: but, just as my mother was a woman who had lived twenty-five years longer than I, just as Dornan was a man with blue eyes who understood what friendship meant, he knew more aikido than I did; and I could learn.

It seemed to last for hours, but at some point it must have changed, because now he was the one wrapping his massive fingers around my wrist, heavy as a manacle, and I was the one imagining a pinpoint between my radius and ulna, leaving that point in exactly the same locus of three-dimensional space and pivoting everything else around it: keeping the same distance between that point and my center of gravity, two finger-widths beneath my navel, yet stepping forward, and turning and breathing out, and extending the imaginary tea tray. He was the one who bent down and to the side like a tin soldier slumping under a blowtorch. We changed hands, changed roles again, uke to nage, nage to uke, and soon my joints moved like frictionless electromagnetic bearings and my autonomic nervous system hummed like a transformer reaching capacity.

NINE O’CLOCK. The night was clear and I drove down the viaduct with the windows down, cool air sliding over my arms, tires hissing and splashing through standing puddles. In Atlanta the temperature would be about seventy-five degrees, and the air scented with jasmine and honeysuckle and laced with the creak and chir of crickets and tree frogs. There would be less atmospheric pollution, and the stars would be brighter and sharper. There would be less traffic.

Half the parking lot’s sodium lamps were dead, and what remained painted the dark with brass. The right-hand side of the lot was crowded. The two Hippoworks trailers were lined up neatly, side by side, Kick’s van next to them. The left-hand side of the lot was cordoned off and Janski stood in front of the cones, hyperalert, head swiveling this way and that, weight forward on his toes. I got out of the car. I could smell the metallic tang of adrenaline and testosterone.

“What happened?”

“Probably nothing, ma’am.” He scanned the shadows.

“When?”

“An hour ago. I thought I saw someone approaching one of these gas lines.”

“Gas.”

“Propane, ma’am. For the stunt tomorrow.”

My heart began to pump smoothly, powerfully.

“Just one person?”

“Hard to tell. They ran off when I challenged them.”

“And you’ve searched the area?”

“Ma’am, Mr. Turtledove’s inside, perhaps you’d like to speak to him about it.”

I listened, sniffed. Nothing. I nodded to Janski and went in through the side door. Everything seemed to glow, as though specially lit. The lock looked different: newer, bigger.

Rusen, Finkel, Deverell, and Philippa were huddled in a knot about ten feet to the left of the door. They straightened when they saw me. “You’ve heard about our intruder,” Finkel said.

I looked at Deverell. “Prowler,” he said. “I tried to call. Janski thought he saw someone near the pipeline in the lot. He gave chase. He called me. He and I searched the immediate vicinity while Philippa and the stunt coordinator, Kuiper, checked the lines. Nothing damaged. No sign of the prowler.”

“We used one of the production’s portable arc lights to check the lines,” Philippa said. “As far as is humanly possible, I can guarantee they haven’t been disturbed.”

There were no guarantees. Beware, my body said, but there was nothing.

“And the search?”

“Very close on the property itself,” Deverell said. “Foot canvassing on a slightly wider perimeter, visual and audio beyond that.”

Translation, they’d checked every window and door, turned over every garbage can and grate on my property, walked up and down the closer streets, and looked and listened. But ware! my back brain was shouting. Ware!

“I told them we should leave that light out there,” Finkel said. “As a deterrent. ”

“No, sir,” Philippa said. “Not unless you’ll authorize more personnel. Remaining near the light renders night vision useless. We’d need more people to cover the perimeter.”

“There’s no budget for that.”

I looked from Finkel to Rusen. “I was here yesterday. The place was deserted. ”

The conflicting messages—everything is safe, and beware—were making me jumpy.

“That’s my fault,” Rusen said, embarrassed. “I’d given everyone else the weekend off and it seemed wrong to make Jan stay. I told him to go home.”

“Mr. Rusen suggested to Janski that he leave, so he did but, sensibly, he called me. I got here as soon as I could.”

“How long?”

“No coverage for four hours. No signs of attempted ingress.”

“The locks?”

He shook his head. “Not changed until this morning.”

Four hours. Turtledove seemed about to say more, but I shook my head slightly, trying to think. “Stan, Anton, we’ll need to talk later. The trailer? Thank you. Deverell, Philippa, walk with me.”

When Finkel and Rusen were out of earshot, I said, “Where is Mackie— Eddard?”

“I don’t know,” Deverell said. “Nor do the police. The younger one, though, Finkel’s son, has been back in New Jersey for two days.”

“Find Mackie. Hire whoever you have to. Start now.” Was that it? Something else? “I’m going to check with Kick about that gas line.”

Behind the food counter, Kick had her hands on her hips and Dornan was looking mulish. “…asked me to run things tonight, so that’s what I’m doing. You should rest while you can.”

“I have too much to do.” She wore jeans and a sleeveless, heathery-grey mock turtleneck. It must have been sunny in Anacortes; her skin was golden, her teeth and sclera very white.

“Then why are you pestering me? Look”—he held up his gloved hands—“I’m all hygienic.” He picked up Kick’s triangular knife. “The worst thing I can do is cut the sandwiches a bit crooked. Go. Take a break, for pity’s sake. I’ve got things—Aud.”

Kick swung round. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Here and there.” Trying to decide.

“Why didn’t you answer your phone?”

“I haven’t been carrying it. Taking a leaf from your book.”

Beneath the tan, there was a hint of the old graphite sheen under her eyes. Talking to the family had not gone well.

“My apologies for interrupting,” I said to Dornan, “but I need to talk to Kick a moment about the prowler, and gas line safety.”

“I’ve been over that,” she said. “They’re fine.”

“Humor me.”

“I would have humored you this weekend, if you’d bothered to answer your phone. Right now I’m pretty busy.”

“I got the impression that Dornan has things covered. Dornan?”

“Yes,” he said.

She had the grace to blush. “Oh, fine. We’ll take a walk.”

Outside, she paused in the dark and breathed the scent of damp earth and looked at the stars. “It stopped raining.”

“Yes.”

“Where did you go?”

“Nowhere. The lines. Are they truly safe?”

“Look, they aren’t even connected to anything. It’s just piping. The propane is safely under lock and key inside. I ran compressed air through the setup, twice, and there was no leakage. There’s nothing wrong. Nothing happened. I’ll run the same tests tomorrow, to be sure, as I would have done even without a prowler, but I’m telling you now, no one touched that pipe. And as part of my usual safety precautions there’ll be a double cordon around the area, and the camera operators closest to the flames will wear Nomex. Even if the whole damn thing blew up, we’d be okay. We don’t need much gas, and in the open air there won’t be atmospheric buildup. I called you from Anacortes. I was going to suggest we go to Rainier for the weekend. Just you and me. Nowhere, you say. Why didn’t you carry your phone?”

“I had some thinking to do.”

“And what did you think about?”

Paintings. Odds at a craps table. Love as a bear trap. Doing the best you could, then improvising.

The world shimmered. No, I thought, not now.

“Aud?”

“It’s nothing.” Do you see that silver cloud? Do you hear the silence? Do you feel the distinctness of every molecule, all at once? No. It was another brain chemistry cascade. It wasn’t real.

I shook my head. Neither of us moved to go back inside. Traffic sounds had drained away, sliding off into a bubble of silence. Even the trees were still. I could hear her breath.

“Is that real?” I said.

“Is…” She saw that I was listening, and tilted her head. “Wow. That silence. It’s like a magical moment out of time and space. Wait.” She listened some more. “Is that the river in our park? Let’s go see.”

“It’s not safe.”

She looked at me. “Listen. There’s nothing. No one’s out here. Are you all right?”

“I’m… not sure.”

She touched my arm. “Come with me, then. We’ll sit by the river.”

It was too dark to cut through the line of trees so we walked up to Diagonal Way. It was half past nine on a holiday evening in an industrial zone. Perfectly natural for everything to be quiet and deserted, to look and feel like something from a post-apocalyptic film.

“Cue zombies,” she said.

“You really want to go to the river?”

“Smell it,” she said. “On a night like this it will be beautiful.”

I nodded. “There’s an old rail track we could follow once we’re across the side street. I don’t know what the light will be like but the footing will be level.”

On the other side of the road, the Federal Center was silent and dark. The buildings appeared derelict. The wire fencing was torn here and there.

I crossed the side road. After a moment’s hesitation, so did she; I realized that on her own she would have walked to the light and waited for it to change. We found the track. The night smelled of trees and river. My land, I thought, and, just like that, I felt good. Something inside me had settled. I wasn’t sure what, yet, but something.

I smiled. “In some ways, you’re more—”

The only warning was the skittering of a can the taller one kicked as they attacked. Everything slowed down. Two of them. I noted Kick’s face, still and quiet, her relaxed shoulders. I saw the glint of something moving at my head, felt the wave front of air as a heavy body came at me.

This was a dream. Wasn’t it?

I stood, irresolute, stupid, while one of the shapes threw Kick to the ground.

Kick opened her mouth, but I didn’t hear a scream.

Would she do that if this was a dream? I couldn’t breathe. Something knocked me down. The dirt under my cheek felt real. I could hear my breath, now, and feel it. I breathed, long and deep. Something thudded on my thigh. I felt that. The body always knows.

“You asshole,” Kick shrieked. “Leave her alone!”

Would you let her protect you?

Is that what was happening?

I kipped up. Something wasn’t quite right with my left leg, but I ignored it. It was working well enough. Pain is just a message.

Two of them. One coming at me again, swinging something. Kick, I thought, and turned, and as easily as unscrewing a cap from a bottle I drew in the arm, twisted, and threw the attacker away. He and his crowbar landed on the concrete at the same time. They made different sounds.

Kick was half up, half down, shouting something, and this time the sound stretched and slowed, like whale song, and I stepped lightly to her side, and put my hands around that little waist and lifted her away, and laughed, and now the second attacker was behind me, and I pivoted and unfurled a back-fist strike, more to get the range, and then I was close enough for my favorite, which I gave him: a perfect elbow, driven hard and flat as a boar spear into his floating ribs. They broke like twigs. He went down with a querulous oof?

Scraping sound, hoarse breathing; the first attacker hauled himself like a zombie from the concrete, one arm swinging limp. His eyes were like pools of tar.

I dived into a roll and brought my trailing leg in a great arc, heel into his breastbone, and he went down.

Some drugs make their users impervious to pain—able to ignore the message. I picked up his crowbar. It was rough and pitted.

“You really should take better care of your tools,” I said, and smashed his right kneecap. If you take out a support, the building can’t stand. He started trying to sit up. I considered. Even a hopping zombie could do harm. I smashed the other knee.

I walked over to the second man.

“Kick,” I said.

“Asshole!” she said, and kicked him again. “You asshole!” Her voice was shockingly loud.

“His ribs are broken. If you really want to hurt him, kick him there.” That made her pause. “Step aside a moment.”

It was Mackie. His eyes, too, were dark with drugs. “You,” he said.

“Me.”

“I knew you’d have to come. I knew they’d send for you.”

He was lithe and capable, ambidextrous, and chemically removed from pain.

“There’s some bits of broken wire over by the fence,” I said to Kick. “Bring them, please.” I turned back to Mackie. “The easiest thing, the most sensible, would be for me to break your spine, or crush your larynx, or smash your knees. Like his.” I nodded back at his friend. “But she wouldn’t like that. So your other choice is to lie still and be tied up.”

Kick came back with a few bits of wire. I selected the two longest, un-rusted pieces. “Turn on your stomach.”

“I can’t, my ribs.” His lips were dark.

“Turn on your stomach.”

The ribs crackled as he turned, and he groaned, but I doubted he could feel much. I sat on the back of his knees, facing his feet, and wired his ankles together. Then I sat on his thighs and wired his wrists. His breathing began to sound labored. “I wouldn’t struggle too much when we’re gone,” I said. “Something’s pierced your lung. Wait quietly for the police.”

“You fucked me up.”

“Yes.” I thought of not being able to move, not being able to see, of doubting my own senses. He’d done that to me. “I’d do it again.”

I threw the crowbar into the bushes and turned to Kick. She was real. “Shall we?”

We walked back to the set. I put my arm around her waist.

“So that’s how you hit people,” she said.

“Pretty much.” For no reason, we both laughed, and then there was traffic again on Highway 99, and the world seemed almost ordinary.

“So, what were you going to say, before? When we’d just crossed the road?”

It seemed like a lifetime ago on a planet far, far away, a place where I wasn’t sure and didn’t know. Her waist under my arm was intensely alive. The body knows; I knew. “When you nearly walked up to the light, even though the road was deserted, I was thinking, in some ways you’re more Scandinavian than I am.” I had no idea whether she knew what I was talking about, but neither of us wanted to talk. She leaned into me as we walked and I adjusted my stride so we moved hip to hip. My left thigh hurt.

I still had my arm around her waist when we got to the warehouse. “Get Turtledove,” I said to Janski. “And Rusen or Finkel.”

“I’m not supposed to—”

“Get them now.”

Kick and I stood forehead to forehead, breathing each other’s scent. Someone cleared their throat. Deverell.

“I found Mackie, or rather he found me. Us.” Rusen stepped out of the warehouse, blinking in the dark. “We hurt them. Two of them. Call the police,” I said to Rusen. “Tell them they’ll need an ambulance.”

“You should tell them.”

“Just tell them. Tell them we’ll be…” I looked at Kick, who nodded.

“We’ll be at Kick’s house if they need us. Persuade them not to need us for a while.”

“What—”

“Just do it, Rusen.”

He got out his phone. He looked at my leg. “You’re hurt.”

I looked at the rust mark on my trousers where the crowbar had thumped into my quadriceps. “It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about anything. It’ll be fine.” It was all going to be fine.

SHE DIDN’T shake me awake, she simply held me tighter. "I’m here,” she said. “It’s a dream.”

“It came up behind me in the alley,” I said. “In the dark.”

“It’s a dream,” she said.

“No,” I said. “It’s still there.”

I STEPPED OUT OF BOREALIS, DORNAN’S COFFEE SHOP A LITTLE AFTER SUNSET. The seventy-degree dusk smelled of blackened fish from the Bridgetown Grill and water, caught in magnolia blossom cups, evaporating after a long day in sunshine.

I had just told Dornan my news: my mother was getting married and wanted to see me. I didn’t want her in Atlanta, in my life, but she was visiting Seattle. If Dornan wanted a working holiday in the land of coffee, I would cover flight and hotel.

I was fairly sure that the offer to pay would clinch the deal.

My phone rang. I recognized the number but couldn’t place it. I answered.

“Hello.”

“Aud?”

“Who is this?”

“Aud, this is Therese. Aud, it’s… Oh, God. She’s…” Shuddering breath. “Look”—suddenly brisker, almost impersonal, as though she had stepped out of the messy, hyperventilating body and become all frontal cortex—“I’m at Sandra’s house. It’s a terrible thing. I didn’t know who to call. You have to come. There’s blood everywhere. It’s… There’s blood.”

IMAGINE A FULL cup of coffee. Imagine tripping over the rug and flinging it across your white wall and new pale green sofa. That’s a lot of liquid—and a coffee mug is usually less than twelve ounces, less than a third of a liter. The average human body contains 5.6 liters of blood, fifteen or twenty times as much as that cup of coffee. And blood is brilliant red.

Sandra’s house was a neat four-bedroom mock Tudor in one of the developments that had gone up fifteen years ago on the edge of Druid Hills, the kind of place where the kitchen should have been white and blond oak, with mediocre can lights in the ceiling, a tidy little breakfast nook, and children’s pictures tacked brightly to the fridge with animal magnets.

Two of the ceiling lights at the far end of the kitchen, over the counter near the stove, had been hit with arterial blood spray. The end of the room dripped and glowed an eerie vampire-cavern red. Blood dripped onto the body below, thickly, silently, the drops absorbed by its clothes. A pool was spreading from its upper arm. Brachial artery. The boning knife was lying next to the gleaming, slow-moving pool. Henckel. Dishwasher safe.

The purple-green glisten of intestines protruded beneath it. Belly, too. Like a pig.

“Thank God, thank God,” Therese said from the column by the dining room entrance. She clamped a hand on my left arm and tried to pull me into the dining room.

“Stop,” I said, “stop. Don’t move, not even an inch.” I was reading the pool of blood on the floor, the smears and spatters, the little lake on the counter, already dripping off the edge, the streak along the kitchen wall to the dining room, sorting story lines, angles of arc, possibilities. “You mustn’t move anymore,” I said absently.

“But Sandra—”

“Can wait thirty seconds. If we’re to save her, I need to think.”

After a moment, I nodded. “Sandra,” I said, “come here.”

“She can’t—”

“Therese, be quiet now. Get Sandra from the dining room, bring her here. Right now, Therese.”

Sandra’s skin was pale, paler than I’d ever seen it, but apart from the blood there were no marks on her face and hands that had not been there at the last class.

“His blood’s still coming out!” Therese said. “He’s alive. He’s—”

“Not really,” I said. No medical facility on earth could save this man: this was simple hydrostatic draining, not the vivid spurt of a pumping heart. His blood levels had already fallen below the crucial forty-percent level. Even without the gaping belly wound, he was dead. “Have you called the police?”

“No,” Therese said. “No, I suppose I should. I just didn’t…” She trailed off and looked at me.

She just didn’t want it to be real.

“Where are the children?”

“I don’t—”

“Sandra, where are the children?”

“Sunday school.” She sounded quite composed.

“When will they be back?”

“At seven-twenty.” It was a little after six now. One less thing to worry about.

“Your husband—”

“That’s not my husband.”

I breathed out slowly, deliberately. “This man on the floor is not your husband?”

“My husband is dead.”

“Yes,” I said. “He’s dead, and we have to do something about that.”

“That’s not my husband,” she said again. “That’s George.”

In. Out. “This man on the floor, with all the blood, is not your husband. He’s someone called George.”

“That’s right.”

“But you killed him.”

“He’s dead?”

“He is.”

“Then, yes, I guess I did.”

Therese was giving me urgent signals. “Sandra, you sit down again in the dining room for just a minute. Don’t touch anything.”

“I don’t have to do what you say. I don’t have to do what anyone says anymore.”

“Just for the next five minutes. Five minutes.”

She nodded and sat. I looked at Therese. “Please tell me you know what’s going on.”

“Her husband’s been dead two years. That’s George, her sister’s husband. ”

“He’s the one who beats her?”

“And more.”

“Her brother-in-law.”

She nodded.

“This is going to make it harder.” I turned back to where Sandra was sitting patiently at the dining room table. Pale wood, ash. Never liked ash. Back to Therese. “She called you?”

Nod. “She said, ‘You better come, I need you to be my friend.’ I knew by the way she said it that it was something terrible, that she, that she meant…”

We both knew what she meant. I’d given them the idea: a good friend’s number on your cell phone, help out the truth a little.

“Was anyone with you when you got the call?”

“No.”

“Good.” Back to Sandra. “Sandra, do you want to go to prison?”

“No.”

“Then you’re going to have to do exactly as I say, even though some of it will be unpleasant. Do you agree?”

“All right.”

That was the closest I was going to come to informed consent. “Come here. Stop when you get to the edge of the carpet. Now, see the knife?” Nod. “I want you to take one step in, one careful step, and pick up the knife, then turn to the sink and rinse the knife.” She moved like a sock puppet. “Good. Now give it to me.”

She held it out. “You’re wearing gloves!”

“Yes. Now where were you when he, when you slashed him?”

“Right here, by the sink, washing the knife.”

Perfect. “Tell me what happened.”

“He came in, said he didn’t have long, that Betts thought he was stuck in traffic on I-20, that what the fuck had I done with the front hedge, he’d told me not to hire a yard boy, they always fuck up, then he pushed me against the sink, here”—she touched her midriff—“so I couldn’t breathe and it was going to be like last week, last week when the children saw some of it, and I don’t know, I’d been practicing, you see, the way you taught us, so I turned around and cut him, on his arm, and he looked all pissed, like he was going to hit me, so I slashed him again. He always made me keep the knives sharp. Nothing ticks a man off more than he should fumble at his meat like a goddamn pussy in front of his family, he used to say, he didn’t keep food on the table and a roof over his wife’s nephews and nieces to be treated…” Her eyes were dry. “Well, that won’t be happening anymore. ”

“No. And then what?”

“And then…” She frowned. “I don’t remember.”

“You called Therese.”

“Yes, yes, I guess I did.”

That was her story, I couldn’t see superficial evidence to contradict it, and there wasn’t time to dig deeper.

“Stand here. Yes. Very good. Did George have any diseases?”

“Diseases?”

“HIV, syphilis, that kind of thing.”

“No.”

I nodded. “You’ll want to make sure you get antibiotic and tetanus shots anyway.” I hefted the knife. The edge glittered like a ruby scalpel under the weird light. Sharp, as she’d said. I laid it against her forehead and traced a thin line. Therese gasped. I ignored her. “You’re right-handed, yes?” I asked Sandra.

“Right-handed. Yes.”

“Put your left hand on the counter.”

Blood was beginning to well from the slit on her forehead. She didn’t seem to feel it. She did as she was told.

I took her little finger, imagined the fifth interpharyngeal joint, made sure I had it firmly, and then jerked. I felt the metacarpal snap cleanly.

She gasped. Blood ran in a thick sheet down her face.

“Therese, call nine-one-one. Tell them two people are badly hurt. That’s all. Hurt. Blood everywhere. They’ll want you to stay on the phone, but just pretend to panic and put the phone down. Go.”

“But her hand, her face.”

“Go.”

Now Sandra’s white skin was tinged with the grey of shock and her breathing was harsh. Exactly what I needed. A woman demonstrably in shock, covered in blood, hand swelling. Documented abuse. Clearly self-defense.

She swayed. “Don’t faint, Sandra. Take this.” I gave her the knife with her blood on it. “Touch it to George’s arm, where you cut it before. You can tread in the blood, it’s all right. Just try not to splash. Touch the blade to the cut in his arm if you can. Now, while you’re bending down, put the knife in his hand. He’s left-handed?” Therese was talking and crying on the phone: blood, hurt, hurry. Her voice shook and it sounded as though her nose was running. Shock was taking her, too. “Wrap his hand around the handle, get his prints on it. Now you take it again and drop it where it was on the floor earlier. No, no, leave it there. It’s close enough. Now step out to the dining room. Yes, don’t worry about the footprints.” The blood was still draining, still spreading. It was going to cover a multitude of sins. “Sit down. No, don’t faint. Don’t faint.”

Snuffling sound as Therese dropped the phone, replaced it on the cradle, wiped her face. Sunday, I thought. Sunday. They’d be here in less than five minutes.

“Therese. Stand here. No, it doesn’t matter about the blood now. Listen. Sandra, here’s what happened. He came in, just like last week, and pressed you against the sink, where you were washing the knife. You struggled because this was just like last week. Just like last week. He reached around, grabbed your hand, broke it, grabbed the knife. You were struggling even more. He cut your face. Dropped the knife. You picked it up, cut his arm, just the way you said, then cut him again. You were panicked, because this was just like last week, but worse. Then you called Therese. That’s all you remember. Don’t mention the self-defense class. Now, tell me what happened.”

“Washing knife. Came in, like last week. Squashed me. Broke my hand getting knife. Cut my face. Like last week but worse, worse. Dropped the knife.” She was beginning to gasp with shock and pain. Her face was a mask of blood. She looked like a woman who had just fought for her life. “Then called Therese. Then… I don’t remember.”

“That’s fine. Therese, Sandra called you. You came straight here. You don’t remember what you did, exactly, but at some point you called me. Later, they’ll ask how you know Sandra, why she called you. Tell them you met at Crystal Gaze. Don’t mention the self-defense class. They’ll ask why you called me.”

“Why did I call you?”

“You probably panicked.”

“I did panic.”

I nodded. “You knew I used to be police, you knew I’d know what to do. You met me at the bookshop, too.”

“At the bookshop. When?”

“Don’t worry about it. You won’t be expected to remember any details in a situation like this.” I studied her. She was sweating; she’d missed a bit of mucus by her mouth. The perfect picture of middle-class shock. “How are you?”

“I think I might vomit.” I nodded. “You broke her hand. You just broke it. And you cut her face, like she was a… a piece of fish.”

Sandra started to slide off the smooth wood of the dining room chair.

“Hold her up, please. I need to make a phone call.”

I called Bette’s new associate, who sounded bright as a new penny, despite the fact that it was both weekend and evening, gave her the address, told her to get here ASAP, and then scanned the room. The body was drained; the blood pool was no longer growing. It was already darkening slightly, congealing. The confused footprints and handprints of Therese and Sandra could be easily explained by the automatic movements of someone in shock.

The officers of APD Zone 5 were not fools. If they looked hard enough they’d see that some of the evidence didn’t add up but at first glance there was enough plausible detail to hang a story on. Everyone knew Sandra was being abused. They themselves had been called out last week. And there was undeniable injury and shock of the victim.

I heard the first sirens in the distance.

I rinsed my gloves under the tap, shook them dry, then carefully stripped them off and put them in my pocket.

The kitchen lights had stopped dripping. Sandra’s breathing was loud but even. Therese was murmuring something, stroking her hair. For one moment, Sandra’s gaze caught mine, and her eyes flashed, and then they dropped.

In the current political climate no Atlanta DA would prosecute Sandra for defending herself, when she could prove she had reason to fear for her life, and when her attacker had clearly meant her harm. Why, it was even his own fault that the knife was so sharp.

The sirens were louder, and now the red kitchen gleamed with a more fiery red and flickers of blue.

She had done it very well: the children conveniently gone, her friend to back her up, me to provide the finishing, undeniable touches. I had shown her how, and I would even provide the lawyer. At least I had made sure it hurt.