The Blue Place

eleven

The boat was old—Hjørdis had said she remembered the same carved prow from when she was a girl—and with the oars shipped it floated motionless in the middle of the glassy waters of Lustrafjord. Julia slept in the bow; I held a fishing line, utterly relaxed, mind as still as the water. There was no traffic, no machinery, just the occasional warble of the little dumpapers nesting on the far bank, and the creak of sun-warmed oak. It could have been another millennium.

The family seter was not quite that old, but Hjørdis thought its basic design dated from the fourteenth century. It and the loft were all that were left of a rambling farm, and our family had owned all the land I could see on the east bank of the fjord. We still owned a great deal, but the working farm had moved north and a little downslope, and instead of sheep it was now cows and pigs and, in the summer, berries. Old Reidun and her daughter Gudrun, and Gudrun’s husband, ran the place. They also owned half of it. Once or twice a year when Hjørdis called, they would make sure there was fresh linen and firewood at the old seter, that the power was turned on, and the cupboards bulged with staples. We had driven to the seter, unloaded our bags, and found a note from Gudrun asking us to go down to the farm for middag. I thought it was more likely that Old Reidun wanted to meet Julia, but we went.

We were greeted by Gudrun and her husband, Per, who were about forty. “Velkommen til Norge,” they had said to Julia, and we had been ushered into the huge farm kitchen, where Reidun was supervising. We all shook hands, then she told us to go get a home-cured ham from the stabbur. “It’s her way of saying we’re family, not her landlord,” I explained to Julia on the way to the curing house.

“But you own half the farm and don’t put in any labour.”

“We also don’t take out any profit, which in some years is considerable. This farm is one of the prime spots for molte cultivation. But our side of the family, who owned the farm originally, moved to the city more than a hundred years ago. In return for half ownership and all the profits, Old Reidun’s father agreed to work the farm and keep up the seter for our use.”

Even after so long, it worked well. The two sets of honorary cousins regarded each other warmly but with a shake of the head that said: They’re not like us.

Middag eight days ago had passed pleasantly with fiery homemade redberry wine, trout, the ham, rømme, new potatoes and salad. We had left loaded down with fresh milk, cream, butter, eggs, bacon and bread. Gudrun promised to resupply us every three or four days.

Julia, since we had been here, had eaten an astonishing amount. “It’s just so good,” she always said when she served herself seconds. We had walked, and napped, and eaten, and talked, and walked more, and now we bobbed about on the fjord because she hoped we could catch some perch.

She slept on. I cast again, watched the lazy ripples. If I squinted, I could just make out the flowers growing in the sod roof of the old loft half a kilometer away on the east bank. The seter itself was hidden by an outcropping of the fjell that plunged straight into the fjord and formed its eastern bank. Beyond the fjell was Jostedalsbreen, the largest glacier in Europe. When the wind was right you could smell the almost chemical bite of the ice but today all that filled the air was the scent of Julia’s skin, like dusty, sun-warmed violets, and, even two kilometers beyond the bank, the pagan smell of the earth’s skin: millions of hectares of birch breaking into leaf at the same time. There was nothing like it; it woke parts of me that usually slept.

“You look pleased with yourself.” Julia was awake and watching me, her eyes a startling, sheened blue against the green lake.

“I’m breathing air like wine, I have money and good health, and I’m in a boat on green water with a beautiful woman. There’s nothing I can’t do.”

She gave me a lopsided affectionate look. “Except catch fish.”

I twitched at my line. Nothing.

“Let me have a go.”

We traded places carefully. She cast expertly.

“Where did you learn how to do that?”

“Massachusetts. Guy taught me.” Her mouth stretched in old grief and her eyes glittered. A bird sang from the woods far away on the west bank. Its call was heartbreakingly pure.

I held out my arms and, careful of the rocking boat, she came to me.

It never ceased to amaze me how she could feel as wild as a living hurricane one minute, and delicate, almost bird-boned, the next. I cradled her to me, felt her heart beating through her ribs. So fragile. I stroked her hair, over and over, and hummed a lullaby. Eventually she sat up and wiped her eyes.

“It’s been nine years. I used to weep for him every day. It’s less often now, and sometimes there are days, even weeks, when I don’t think about him at all. Then I’ll think of my other brother, Drew, or Carmel, my sister, and I remember I’m the eldest now, and I feel…They live so far away now, but I feel so responsible for them. And then I miss him. Missing him is like a hole inside me, a gaping wound, wider than the hands of anyone who would try staunch the bleeding. A hole so big it could swallow the world.”

“I have big hands.”

“I know.” She tried a smile, and it worked pretty well. She took a deep breath and I could almost see her step aside from her grief and thrust it behind her. “There don’t seem to be any perch biting in this part of the lake.”

“Then I’d better row you to another part.”

It was good to bend my back to the oars, to watch the boat scooting over the fjord and see Julia laugh in delight at the miniature bow wave I managed to throw up.

At some arbitrary spot that seemed no different from the one we’d left, she told me to stop. I shipped oars and watched her cast, and cast again. I lay back in the thwarts and listened to the sing and plop of the line.

The sky teemed like the Serengeti: herds of cloud antelope, springbok, even rhino with cloud horns, racing in the same direction; with a bit of imagination I could make out a warthog and a line of anteaters trundling nose to tail. Farther down, a cautious tortoise couldn’t decide whether to creep north or south, and right at the horizon, three pearly gray porpoises seemed to leap from the water.

“I don’t miss the Atlanta sky,” I said.

“No?”

“No. You get up in the morning and the sky is blue. Later in the day you glance up and it’s blue. While you eat dinner, you look out of the window and it’s…blue. There are occasional days when you get up and it’s blue, you eat lunch and it’s blue, but when you have dinner there’s a thunderstorm, and, admittedly, those skies are something, cloud as pink as an alligator’s mouth, that gorgeous violet around sunset if the storm is on its way, the occasional green flash of a transformer going out—taking the power with it, of course—and it’s nice to have the road freshly washed, but when you get up in the morning, it’s blue again. You can’t lie on your back and watch another world form and dissolve and dance minuets over your head. Unless you count contrails.”

“Do you?”

The cloud tortoise was slowly being ripped apart by its own indecision, or maybe some haematovirus of the African plains…. “Um?”

“Do you count contrails?”

“If they have had the time to evolve. Sometimes I think of planes as seeding the skies with new life….” We contemplated the clouds for a while.

“It’s odd,” Julia said at last. “You talk about life so much, yet you’ve been around a lot of death. I asked you before why you did this, and you said it was because you’re Norwegian. So now I’ve seen Norway. It’s a land that doesn’t know compromise. It’s snow, ice and darkness in the winter; and endless midnight sun, bright meadow flower and sweet green grass for two months in the summer. Black or white. On or off. Yes or no. It explains some of the way you react to what life throws at you, the pragmatic immediacy, the readiness—you never forget that there are trolls in the hills. But it doesn’t explain why. Why you keep throwing yourself into the path of the pain in the world.”

“No.”

She waited.

“The pain of the world doesn’t follow paths. It blunders all over the place. It ran smack into my bedroom, carrying a gun, when I was eighteen years old.” She waited again. “It’s a long story.”

The antelope still galloped overhead, the dumpapers warbled, Julia seemed perfectly happy to sit there with that rod, waiting, until the Ice Age came again and we travelled around the world on a tongue of green ice. I sighed, and started at the beginning.

“I was born in England, where my mother was a consular officer, and didn’t see Norway until I was two. The bit of English I spoke was a strange cross between the Chicago accent of my father and the south London of my nanny. We split our time between Oslo and Bergen until I was six, when we went back to the U.K. My mother was now an attaché. My father was busy with his business, flying back and forth between London and Chicago. I was either at school or up in Yorkshire, spending vacations with Lord Horley’s children. I hardly ever saw my mother but I learnt not to miss her. I learnt to expect her to be a long way off, a presence who always came on the important occasions—birthdays, Christmas, school sports days—but who moved to a holy schedule arranged long in advance and never to be interrupted.” The boat creaked as I leaned forward. “My mother is one of those people who always knows how to act, how to dress, even how to do her hair. She never, ever looks out of place. She could be at a bonfire night party in an ancient Berber jacket, cutting up parkin and treacle toffee for my friends, pulling charred potatoes out of the fire embers with hair all tousled and nose just the right shade of red from the cold November air one day, and the next she would be in cashmere and pearls, hair in a chignon, taking tea with Lady Horley. Everyone thought she was a perfect mother. But we were strangers to each other. Perfectly polite, perfectly willing to try to be a model mother and daughter, but unsure how. I think it upset my father.”

“Did it upset you?”

“No. Not really. It’s just the way my world was.”

“But you want to see her when we go back through London. What changed?”

My whole life. “I’m curious. I think she is, too. And I think we’re both ready to treat each other as real people, not some personification of a role. We went back to Oslo when I was eleven, then back to London, then back to Oslo. That is, my mother and I went back. My father left and went to Chicago when I was thirteen. I went back and forth between England and Norway until I felt that both were my home, and neither. I hardly ever saw my mother. I finished school when I was seventeen. That summer my father wrote and asked me to visit him in Chicago. I didn’t want to spend summer in Chicago, but his invitation set me thinking. I was an American citizen who had never set foot in that country. And I thought: I could go to university there. So I applied to all kinds of schools, and I chose Georgia Tech.”

“You’re smart and well connected. You could have gone anywhere: Yale, Harvard, Smith. Anywhere. So why Georgia?”

“Because they said yes first. And because it’s warm. So I made a few phone calls, flew to London, told my mother where I was going, and caught the plane to Atlanta the next morning.”

“The next morning, just like that?” Her hair shimmered as she shook her head, then cast again. Hiss, plop.

“I flew economy on Delta, landed at five in the afternoon, local time, and got into a broken-down taxi whose driver had no idea where he was going.”

“None of them ever do,” she said, one eye on her float. “Should have rented a car.”

“I was used to English and Norwegian airport taxis.”

“Rude surprise.”

“Yes. Anyway, the only map I had was the one faxed to me in Norway by the manager of the apartment complex in Duluth where I had decided to rent—”

“Duluth? That’s a forty-minute drive from Georgia Tech.”

“I know that now. All I knew then was that…You’ve got a bite.”

She began to reel in. “It’s a big one.”

She landed a glistening perch, and while it flopped, cast again—and immediately got another bite. “Fish convention. Here we go. And another.”

“I’ll smoke them over an alderwood fire,” I said, and my mouth flooded with saliva.

“Do it now,” she said, and I rowed us back.

We built the fire near the back door and sat on the stoop to eat them out of the pan, hot and oily. We wiped the oil up with bread. Julia stood, pan dangling from her hand. She smiled, and the line of her back, the crumb of bread at the corner of her mouth, struck deep. I caught her free hand and pulled her back down, kissed that slippery mouth, felt her breathing quicken under my hands. We were the only people for miles. I slid her shirt over her head and her pants down around her ankles, and when she came she tore out a handful of daisies with the grass and her cry was fierce as a hawk’s.

She lay in my arms and smiled her slow, creamy smile. “More. But this time in bed.”

This time it was slow, slow as the fall of night in northern latitudes, as the unfurling of a leaf in spring. My north, my springtime.

We drowsed for a while, sun streaming through the southern windows onto the rugs below the sleeping gallery. I stroked her long, tanned fingers. She pulled the quilt up around her shoulders. “I can’t get used to the fact that seeing sunshine doesn’t necessarily mean it’s hot. Does it ever get hot here?”

“It gets warm in July and August, but not hot, and not humid.”

“Not like Atlanta.” She settled more comfortably against my shoulder. “You were telling me how it was when you arrived in the U.S. Duluth.”

I buried my face in her hair. Cloudberries and frying fish. “Well, for one thing, before I came to Atlanta, I didn’t know what humidity was. I’d read about it, and Christie Horley told me how awful it had been in New Orleans when she’d been there the year before, but verbal information isn’t the same as somatic. You have to feel it on your skin, touch it, smell it, run your fingers lightly through the sweat that never evaporates to understand.” I felt her nod against my shoulder. “So I got to Atlanta and took a cab for Duluth in August. The cab had no air-conditioning and the air was thick and sweet, like peach juice. I knew I wasn’t in Norway anymore. I was alone in an exotic foreign country at the start of a fine adventure. Anyway, the cab driver couldn’t seem to understand what I was saying half the time. Even though I’d told him I was Norwegian, he insisted that I was German—then wanted to know if I knew his son, Dan, who was in the army in Germany, in Mew-nick. I told him I was very sorry but that I didn’t know his son, and would he please head north on I-85 here, instead of south? His driving worried me.”

Eighty miles an hour without seat belts, windows open to scoop up the viscous air, him steering with one finger and leaning back to talk to me about his son in Munich, careless of the fact that the other drivers hurtling along the interstate seemed as oblivious as he of the rules designed to keep people alive on the road.

“The apartment complex was called Northwoods Lake Court. It was brand-new, frame units built around a lake. I don’t know how many buildings because they were all hidden by trees, but according to the manager there was only me, at the northeast end, and one family due to move in the next day at the extreme south end. The rest wouldn’t fill up for a month or so. The lake had fountains. The only luggage I had was two suitcases. I’d intended to take another cab into Duluth and buy necessities—bedding, kitchen things, lamps, because it was one of those apartments with no overheads—but the place was so beautiful I just wandered around until it was dark.”

I couldn’t begin to describe to Julia the wonder of that place: swamp oak and bluebirds, swallows and bullfrogs, white oak and birch, my own private playground for a month.

“My apartment was built on a slope so that although the front door was at ground level, the only possible access to any of the windows would be via ladder. And the apartment complex was empty. Besides, this wasn’t real life. This was the start of a grand adventure, like sleeping on the beach in Mauritius. All I had in my two suitcases were clothes, an old flashlight my father had had as a boy and had given me when I was seven, and a few books. That night I slept naked on the bedroom carpet, flashlight by my head and screened windows open to the sound of the fountains below and the chirring of tree frogs.” I had felt perfectly safe, cradled by air so soft it was tangible.

“I fell asleep early; it must have been about ten o’clock but it seemed a lot later because of my six-hour jet lag. I don’t know what time it was when I woke but all of a sudden I was lying there, staring at this strange ceiling, lit by sodium light slatted by the window blinds, listening to the fountain. I was absolutely still, rigid, and I knew something was wrong. My heart ratcheted like an asymmetric crank. I listened hard, but all I could hear was the creaking chorus of tree frogs, the scratch of crickets across the velvet night, and the endless fountain. But I knew I had to keep still, there was this little voice in my primitive hindbrain whispering, Don’t move, don’t move, so I tried to look around the bedroom without turning my head but all I could see was shadow the colour of lead and those strips of yellow light. I was sweating, slick with it, and my heart felt like a vast, runaway engine, but I tried to think.”

I could still remember the faintest metal touch of the flashlight against the middle finger of my right hand, the sudden itching of the carpet as I sweated, the way a car changed gear in the distance, the voice in my crocodile brain saying, Don’t move, don’t move, and the restless red turbine in my chest beginning to whine and overheat.

“And then a man’s voice said, ‘Don’t move, I have a gun.’”

“Jesus!” She sat up.

“It was an unremarkable sort of voice, very quiet and steady, but I couldn’t see him. The voice was so ordinary and the whole thing so surreal I thought that maybe he wasn’t there at all, that maybe it was a dream, but then there was a faint, oiled clicking from the shadow, and I knew it wasn’t a dream, my breath started to come in great gusts, and the muscles in my arms and legs coiled so tight and ready my bones hurt. Then he stepped forward, and suddenly in the slatted light there was a gun, ugly, clumsy looking. He kept coming forward and the light inched along a bare forearm, a white-shirted shoulder, up a lightly muscled neck to a reddish gold moustache.” I closed my eyes. “I can see it now, like a series of photographs. And that’s when it happened. It was as though this veneer fell away, as though I stepped aside from a mask, and it felt as though my heart slipped its bearings and hurtled loose. I came off the carpet without thinking, without even blinking, holding the flashlight—and it must have weighed three pounds—like a piece of kindling. It was so light in my hands. I surged off that carpet, muscles whipping like hawsers, swinging that flashlight up and out, and I was so sure. It was so easy. I swung up and out, unstoppable. He started to blink—that’s how fast everything was moving for me, I even noticed that the whites around his eyes looked bluish in the light—he started to blink but then three pounds of bright steel travelling at brutal speed caught him under the chin. His head snapped back and he fell. His body made a sort of lolloping thump on the carpet, like a big sack of potatoes.”

I opened my eyes. It was odd to see the bedroom loft, the seter, the cool sunshine. I could remember the sweat on my skin, the blood roaring in my ears; humming with a sense of power; feeling huge and pure and fierce and filled with a wild, hot joy at being alive.

“I was still holding the flashlight. I flicked it on. It worked. The gun was in his hand, his left hand, but it wouldn’t do him any good. He was staring at the ceiling, head bent sideways—the expression on his face was odd, a kind of gentle amusement. All of a sudden I couldn’t get my breath. There was a dead man in my bedroom. My first night in a strange country and there was a dead man in my bedroom. I’d killed him, and I didn’t even know his name. I remember staring at the flashlight, at the light streaming through my fingers, making them blood red. I turned the flashlight off. He disappeared. I turned it back on again. He reappeared. This time he seemed a long way off. ‘This is my apartment,’ I told him. ‘You had no right.’ The light shining on the carpet began to wobble. I was shaking. My breath came in little pants. There was a strange noise coming from the living room. Ringing. The phone. I walked across the carpet of the bedroom, the tiny hall, the rug in the living room.”

I could still feel the carpet on my feet, the different textures of the two acrylic weaves, and the new smell of rubber carpet pad and harsh, foreign cleaning fluids.

“The phone was on the pass-through counter between the dining room and the kitchen. It felt slippery and big, difficult to hold in my left hand. A voice at the other end said, ‘Is this Aud Torvingen?’ and I said yes, and he went on to say that he was Lieutenant Wills, of the Duluth Police Department.” I closed my eyes again. “‘Please listen carefully,’ he said. ‘We are aware that you are probably speaking under duress. We are in control of the situation. Please remain calm.’ It was a very soothing voice. ‘Now, if you can, ask him to talk to us on the phone.’

“‘He can’t talk to you,’ I said. I felt dizzy. Blinding light filled the apartment. Then there was another voice from outside, with a bullhorn, harder, eager, you could hear the adrenalin in it, shouting that the building was surrounded, that he should pick up the phone. ‘No, you don’t understand,’ I said, but then realized I wasn’t holding the phone anymore. The receiver dangled from its cord, near the floor. I picked it up. ‘You don’t understand. He can’t talk to you because he’s dead.’

“There was silence, then a faint muttered conference on the other end, then, ‘Ms. Torvingen? There have been no reports of gunshots in the last half hour.’

“‘What?’ I said. I had no idea what that had to do with anything.

“‘Ms. Torvingen, if he shot himself we certainly would have heard it.’

“‘He didn’t shoot himself,’ I said.

“‘No,’ said the soothing voice, only now it was full of the there-there syrup of a parent talking to a child. ‘Ms. Torvingen, can you speak English well enough to understand what I’m saying?’ I said yes, then thought: Haven’t I just been speaking English? ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now, are you all right, Ms. Torvingen? Can I call you Aud?’

“‘No,’ I said, and then he got all urgent.

“‘How are you hurt?’

“‘No,’ I explained, ‘you can’t call me Aud because I’m eighteen and you’re treating me like a child and not listening to anything I’m saying. The man is dead. I killed him with my flashlight. He had a gun and I killed him. He’s in my bedroom. He had no right. He still has his gun but he’s dead. I’m fine.’

“This time the silence on the phone was longer and I wondered if I’d been talking in Norwegian after all. ‘Aud, Ms. Torvingen,’ he said, then sort of trailed off. He cleared his throat and started again. ‘You say he’s dead, that you killed him. Are you quite sure?’ At least he didn’t sound patronizing anymore.

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘his eyes are open and his neck’s bent, and he hasn’t moved from my bedroom floor,’ but all of a sudden I thought: What if he isn’t dead? What if this is like one of those horror films and he’s lurching to his feet, covered in blood, and bringing his hand up with that gun, with an evil lopsided grin. I dropped the phone and ran back to the bedroom. He was still there, of course. Still dead.”

Julia’s hand crept across my stomach to find my hand.

“The police arc lights had bleached his face white and a pool of urine and faeces spread under his body. The whole scene was grainy, like an old black and white newsreel. I noticed that his hair was thinning on top but in that light I couldn’t tell the colour of his eyes. It bothered me. Then I thought: the gun, they’ll believe the gun even if they don’t believe me. So I squatted by his gun hand, but the weird thing was I couldn’t make myself let go of the flashlight first. I tried, but my fingers wouldn’t move, so I had to fiddle for a while with just my left hand before I could pull the gun away. I went back to the living room, all bright now with the police lights, put the gun down on the pass-through and picked up the phone. ‘I’ve got his gun,’ I said. ‘I’m going to open the sliding glass doors in the living room, step onto the balcony, and toss the gun down onto the grass.’

“‘Aud, I think—’

“This time I put the phone firmly back in its cradle—I was getting sick of that syrupy voice—and picked up the gun. I walked towards the sliding doors and would have stepped out there naked if I hadn’t seen my reflection in the glass. Oh, I thought, I’ll have to do something about that. The police lights didn’t reach inside the bedroom closet and I tripped over one of my suitcases just inside the closet door. I had to put the gun down on the floor to pull on jeans one-handed. The flashlight wouldn’t fit through sleeves, so I chose a vest. When I was done, I stuck the gun in my back pocket. It felt good. The flashlight felt better.

“The glass doors slid open easily. The balcony was one of the reasons I’d chosen that apartment. Three hours earlier the night had been quiet, soft with fountain spray drifting over the lake. Now the night gleamed with light and metal and well-polished boots. I stood up there and looked at the revolving lights, at the trees and lake beyond them, and thought: This is my new country, new apartment, new life; all stained, like my bedroom carpet. I took the gun out of my pocket and threw it into the crowd below. Then I leant over the rail and vomited on their heads.”

Julia put on a towelling robe and made us blackberry tea. I drank mine in the bath, she sat on the floor and stroked my arm, shoulder to elbow to wrist to fingertips and back again.

“You’ve never told anyone about this before, have you?”

“No one. I suspect my mother was briefed on the situation via the consulate, but we’ve never spoken of it.” I remembered the ambulance ride, being met at the hospital by overly polite administrators, and knowing that someone somewhere had gone beyond the call of duty and found out who I was, or at least who my mother was.

“Take me there.”

“To Northwoods Lake Court?”

“Yes. Take me there when we get back.”

It was such a private thing. No one even knew I had ever lived there, never mind what had happened, or how it looked. Such a beautiful place. “I was only there a few days.”

“Take me anyway.” Her hand came to rest just below my triceps. “Promise me we’ll go when we get back.”

“Very well. I promise.”

Her hand resumed its stroking. “So who was he? How did the police know he was there?”

“The police had had a call from the apartment complex half a mile down the road, an intruder. Apparently they had a car in the area and followed him to Northwoods Lake Court. They did a foot search and saw my front door ajar. His name was Tim Schultz, an out-of-work carpenter. Married, two children, but separated. He was thirty-four years old. No one could tell me why he did it.”

I soaped myself thoughtfully.

“I thought knowing the details was important, but it isn’t really, because the important part wasn’t what happened at the apartment, it was what I realized later, on the way to the hospital. The police and EMTs came bursting into the apartment and bundled me up in a blanket without so much as a by-your-leave and threw me in an ambulance. I was in a daze. I remember the police sergeant and EMT were arguing about the flashlight—the sergeant was saying it was evidence, the EMT said I was in shock, that if holding it made me feel better he wasn’t going to take it away from me. That’s when I realized: the shivering and vomiting had stopped, and the strange detachment I felt wasn’t shock but the dawning realization that this was real, that I had killed someone. I had taken a life. He had had a gun, I had had a flashlight, but I had taken him, and in the moment of doing so I’d felt faster, denser, more alive than ever before. Killing him had burned me down to a pure, uncluttered core, to my essence. It was all real and it felt…Well, you tell me how it felt when you hit that man at Honeycutt’s house.”

“Good. It felt good. I felt…bigger.”

“It’s the adrenalin. When everything slows down and my muscles are hot and strong and the blood beats in my veins like champagne I feel this vast delight. Everything is beautiful and precious, and so clear. Light gets this bluish tinge and I feel like a hummingbird among elephants, untouchable.”

She reached out and flicked water against the pink welt that ran over my lower ribs. “But you’re not.”

“I’ve played with adrenalin, almost every dangerous sport you can imagine, but that’s not the same as violence, not the same as coming up against someone who wants you dead, where there’s no room for one misstep, where it’s all or nothing. Feeling that bungee cord whip you up just two seconds from the ground is one thing, looking into the eyes of a man with a knife is another. It’s the ultimate competition—there’s one life between us, and it’s mine. You feel how fine life is. It’s a sort of possessiveness. A bit like sex. Just as you can’t suddenly rip someone’s clothes off in public when you have the urge, you have to train the urge to violence. It’s like always singing sotto voce when all you want to do is take a great breath and let it rip. Violence feels good. It’s so simple and clear. There’s no mistaking the winner. I like it, but I avoid going there, going to the blue place, because I think I could get lost, might not find my way back, I wouldn’t want to find my way back because it’s seductive.” I dabbled my fingers in the warm water. “I said before that I left the police force because I didn’t want to work for anyone else. That’s true, but it was also because the blue place called too strongly. It had become all I wanted, all there was.”

She sat back on her heels and studied me with cool, slatey eyes. “Past tense?”

I thought about the blue place, about my life then, about Julia. “Past tense.”

She kissed me. I unfastened her robe. My cup fell in the water. We ignored it. I wanted to be inside her.

Later, when she was sitting between my legs and I was soaping her back with the washcloth, she put the soap back on its sturdy wooden shelf and said, “So what happened in the ambulance with the flashlight?”

“I hefted it in my hand—”

“Bet they edged away.”

I smiled, remembering the EMT’s undignified scramble to the back of the ambulance. “Yes. I hefted it. It was heavy and smooth and, Oh, I thought, so is the oxygen cylinder by my stretcher, so is the drip stand, the officer’s baton. I was surrounded by objects I could use as weapons. I told the sergeant he could have it. And I’ve never worried about carrying a weapon since. They’re everywhere.”

“Mostly, anyway.”

“Always.” I dipped the washcloth in the water, folded it over and over on itself lengthwise, doubled that in on itself and twisted it, but not hard enough to get rid of most of the water.

“That?”

“Instant blackjack.” With one flick of the wrist I smashed the wooden shelf off the wall.

She grinned. “Now you’ll have to fix it.”

“There’s still soap on your back,” I said, and changed the blackjack back to a washcloth by dipping it in the water.

I woke in the dark with Julia’s hand on my shoulder. “Aud, it’s all right. It’s all right. Wake up. It’s just a dream.”

“I’m awake.” The dream images began to drain away.

Her breath was soft and sleepy on my face. Her hair fell across my throat. I breathed in the scent of cloudberry and violet and warm woman. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

“It’s a recurring dream. About a dead woman in the bath. Her eyes are like unpolished marble and she is still. So very, very still. The water is still, too, and cold. And then I realize I’m not breathing, my heart is not beating. I’m still, and I’m cold, frozen. I’m dead.”

Julia slid on top of me. “Feel. That’s my heart. It’s beating. Yours is beating. Wrap your arms around me. There. Feel my ribs move up and down. I’m breathing. You’re breathing. It was just a dream. We’re alive. Just listen.”

I did. I listened to the fist-sized muscle that beat valiantly in her chest, lub-dub lub-dub, atrium-ventricle atrium-ventricle, pumping thick red blood through her arteries, sucking it back tired and thin, sending it out again refreshed, over and over, like some comfort-station cheerleader at a marathon handing out water and banana chips to exhausted runners and sending them on. Alive.