The Blue Place

fifteen

She stayed alive until the ambulance arrived. I had to help the EMTs keep her still so they could get shunts in both arms. When one suggested I ride in the second ambulance that was pulling up, spilling red light over Hjørdis’s street—red the exact colour of the bunad—I took him by the throat and shook him a little.

She stayed alive until we got to the hospital. She was still alive as they wheeled her into surgery.

“She’s strong,” I told the three nurses and one doctor in surgical greens who stood with me by the swinging doors. One of the nurses held a hypodermic. “Shouldn’t you be in there, helping her?”

“We’re here to help you.”

“Oh, no,” I said gently. “I’m fine,” and I plucked the needle from the nurse’s hand and squirted the drug onto the floor, but then something bit through my pants and three of them were nodding in satisfaction as the fourth stepped out from behind me and capped her own syringe.

“We need to take a look at you,” one of them said. I backed up against the wall.

“Julia.”

“There’s nothing you can do to help her now.”

The wall was cool and solid against my skin. It also seemed to be moving upwards. All I could see were four pairs of green-clad legs and white scrub shoes.

“Go get a gurney.”

One of the pairs of green trousers walked away down the corridor, then all I could see was the floor.

The room smelled of clean sheets and the lemons Hjørdis had left.

“The police are accepting the story that those two American men were fighting over a woman and you got hit in the cross-fire,” said Sampo.

“Not easily.”

“No. But what other explanation is there? Especially as your prints were on neither weapon and you are such a respectable citizen. The wound helps, of course.”

“Yes.”

We measured each other. If it wasn’t for my letter insurance, I would never have woken from that sedative.

“What’s your real name?”

“Harald.”

“Like the king.”

“Just like the king.”

We didn’t shake hands before he left.

A nurse came in with a tray full of needles and scissors and bandages. She worked quickly, with that lack of tenderness endemic to the profession. “You have another visitor waiting to see you. I told her you had already talked to too many people today.”

“Who is it?”

“I didn’t get her name. She’s American.”

“Tell her she can come in when you’ve finished.”

It was Annie. No longer laughing, eyes circled with jet lag and worry. She took a chair by the bed but did not seem to know what to say.

“When did you get here?”

“Two hours ago.”

“Are her brother and sister coming?”

I thought for a moment she didn’t understand me. “Oh. No. Drew…well, Drew can’t come. And Carmel is at the U.S. Research Station in McMurdo Sound. In the Antarctic. I haven’t been able to get through to her.” She sat there helplessly.

“You’ve talked to the doctors?”

“Yes. They tell me she’s critical but stable. A lot of internal damage. Her liver—” She stopped abruptly. “I was going to say it’s shot to pieces. A figure of speech. But it really is. It really is shot to pieces. They had to take out four inches of colon, too. And one of her kidneys. It was the bullet, they said. A special bullet that bounced around inside.”

“The only irreparable damage is to her liver.”

“She…she’s strong, isn’t she?”

“Very strong.”

“And a liver transplant would make her as good as new again, wouldn’t it?”

“Almost.”

“Why won’t she wake up? She just lies there and there’s no sound but that beep beep beep of the machines.”

“It’s her body’s way of focusing its attention on what’s necessary. She’s fighting to stay alive the best way she knows how. When she regains strength, she’ll wake up.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely. You know Julia, she can’t bear to miss anything that’s going on.”

She started to smile, but the stretch turned into a quiver. “I can’t do this.”

“You’re tired. I bet you didn’t sleep on the plane. Julia doesn’t sleep on the plane, either. A few hours’ rest will work wonders.”

“But I have to see to her things. Insurance. Her clothes. Make arrangements.”

“Hjørdis, my aunt, is already dealing with getting our things from the seter—the farm where we’ve been staying. Everything is being taken care of. And Julia is safe now. She’s in good hands. Get some sleep, Mrs. Miclasz.”

“Annie.” A ghost of the former roguish smile, gone in a moment. “You saved her life.” I should never have let her go. “You love her, don’t you?”

My hawk with broken wings and matted feathers. “Yes.”

“So do I. If we join forces, she’ll have to live.”

“She’ll live.” She had to.

“The doctors tell me you were hurt, too.”

Cracked scapula, chipped elbow, nerve damage. Infections had meant they had snipped away bits of skin and muscle; I had had a blood transfusion; and there were enough stitches to make my arm look like that of a child’s clumsily sewn-up teddy bear.

“Nothing that won’t mend.”

She stood. “When I come back tomorrow I’ll bring some vitamins. I want you to get well quickly. Julia is going to need us both.”

A nurse brought in a phone. It was my mother.

“Hjørdis has told me what you told her happened.” A diplomat’s nicety of language. “I take it your trip to England will be postponed?”

“Yes. I’ve chartered an air ambulance and will accompany Julia and her mother to Atlanta tomorrow. They’ve found a donor they can keep alive until we get there.”

“Will she survive the operation?”

“The odds are about even.”

“Keep me informed. And if you need anything, anything at all, call.”

I held Julia’s hand all the way across the North Sea, across the Irish Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, even though this was one flight during which she would not be afraid. When I had to release a hand to let the nurse be about his business, I rested my palm against her thigh. Somewhere deep down in her crocodile brain I wanted to register the fact that she was not alone, that she never would be.

Annie sat on the other side of the bed. Sometimes she held her hand, too; mostly, she just looked.

Over the Irish Sea, the plane lurched a little.

“I hate turbulence,” she said.

“It must be genetic.”

“You should be resting that shoulder.”

“I’m fine.”

The plane droned through the arid reaches of the afternoon sky.

“She’s lovely, isn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“She’s too young, too beautiful to die.”

“I won’t let her die.”

“I saw it from the beginning, you know.”

“Saw what?”

“That you two were right for each other. She was so upset about Jim’s death, all to pieces. It was quite unlike her. I haven’t seen her like that before, well, not since…”

“She told me about her brother.”

“Oh. Well, I couldn’t understand it, why she fell apart like that. Almost as if she was blaming herself. And then you came along, out of the blue, and suddenly she wasn’t in pieces anymore.” She smiled. “Did she ever tell you she thought you’d done it at first?”

“The police told me.”

“She went to the police about you?” She shot Julia a startled glance.

“It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. He was her friend. I was there when it happened. But the police didn’t take her seriously.”

“Well, I’m glad she didn’t get you into any trouble.”

Any trouble. Any trouble. I wanted to laugh, but did not know if it would escape as a howl.

Annie said softly, “But what am I saying? I’m not a fool. The Norwegian police don’t really believe your story about two men attacking each other and Julia getting shot by mistake.”

“Do you?”

The engine note climbed as the pilot tried to find his way out of the turbulence.

“I’ll believe that rather than believe Julia might have been at fault somehow.” Her face was set and so pale that the blusher seemed almost garish, the kind of work mortuary beauticians do.

“Julia was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. No, not just in Oslo. It started in Atlanta.”

“When Jim died.”

“Before then.” I told her what I knew, up to breaking into Honeycutt’s house and taking information to Denneny. She didn’t need to know about that, or my deal with the cartels. But as she had said, she was not a fool.

“So you killed them. No, don’t say anything. I’m glad. If I thought asking you to kill a hundred times would keep Julia safe, I’d ask you to do it.”

And I would. A hundred times. A thousand times.

“But we don’t need to worry about that now, do we? The Atlanta police will take it from here. They called, you know, while you were away. They have some new evidence. They wanted to talk to Julia again. I told them she was in Oslo, consulting with Olsen Glass.”

“What did they say?”

“They wanted the name of the person she would be seeing. I gave them Edvard’s number. He came to the hospital, you know.”

I nodded. He had visited me, too.

“He was so young, and he seemed to take Julia’s injury personally—kept apologizing on behalf of his country. I didn’t know what to say, so I just hugged him until he shut up. He cried. I had to mop up his tears. At least it gave me something to do, something that made a difference.”

We both looked at Julia lying still and silent and beyond our care. The engines resumed their steady hum. We were above the turbulence.

“That sculpture garden he and Julia were planning, are planning, sounds lovely. All those story characters and settings for the children. The adult version sounded challenging and exciting, too, but I think it was the children’s garden he really wanted. Wants. Oh, god, Aud, I’m talking about her and the garden in past tense.”

We landed just before six in the evening, Atlanta time. The air was thick and hot and flavoured with diesel fumes. The ambulance drove to Piedmont Hospital along streets crowded with convertibles full of tanned people in shorts and pastel polo shirts, eyes blank and anonymous behind shades. The trees were heavy and green with full summer foliage, the sky an impersonal, bland blue. I insisted that the EMTs give Julia a second blanket; the air-conditioning was fierce. By seven, she was being prepped for surgery.

The surgeon came to talk to us in the visitors’ suite before he scrubbed. “The operation will take several hours, and you won’t be allowed to see her for hours after that, but I don’t suppose there’s any point telling you to go home and get some sleep? No. Well, I’ll call in again after the operation and let you know how it went.”

I pulled two armchairs together for Annie, and two for myself, and found us both blankets. We curled up. When I woke at two in the morning, Annie was staring at the ceiling.

“Would you like some coffee?”

“May as well,” she said.

Hospitals at night are strange places. The floors gleam in the dark and the air is too dry and hot. In a few hours, gurneys trundled by hospital porters spiriting away those who had died in the night would squeak down these corridors, past doors behind which frightened people lay awake, listening. I passed a vending machine on the way to the nurse’s station, but ignored it.

Annie sat up when I came back with fresh coffee. “Where on earth did you find this?”

“I told the nurse that if she let me into the nurses’ break room to make some fresh, I’d not only make a generous donation to the hospital children’s fund, I’d bring her a cup, served any way she liked. You’ll be pleased to know that she takes cream and sugar. And she likes cookies.” I passed her the plate.

The coffee was long gone and we were playing backgammon when the surgeon returned. He was one of those men who needed to shave three times a day. He was wearing slacks and sports jacket. On his way home.

He was frowning when he came in, but smiled when we stood up.

“Let’s all sit down again, shall we?” Always we with doctors. “You’ll be pleased to know that the operation went smoothly and the patient is stable. But as you know, recovery can be a slow process.” He couldn’t remember her name.

“When can we see her?” Annie asked.

“She’s not conscious yet.”

“When?”

“In the morning? Yes, in the morning. A quick peep around ten o’clock. But very briefly. Yes, I think that would be best.” The man was so tired he was talking more to himself than to us. He started to get up.

“But someone will let us know how she’s doing?”

“The nurses’ station just down the hall will have all that information. Just ask. As I’ve said, the operation went very smoothly.”

Annie just nodded. He left. I got up. “I’m going to get some more coffee.”

I caught up with him at the nurses’ station, where he was commenting on some blunder on a TV hospital show the night before. They both laughed.

“Doctor.”

“Ah?”

“Another question, about Julia Lyons-Bennet, the woman you just gave a new liver. When will we know if she will reject the liver or not?”

“At least twelve hours. Tomorrow afternoon. Perhaps even later.” He just wanted to go home.

“It must have been a complicated operation.”

He made a vast effort and dredged up a smile. “Well, yes, she’d been shot and there were one or two things that we don’t normally encounter but, given that, everything went very well. Very smoothly. As I said.”

“But she’s still not conscious. What were the one or two things?”

He let his smile fade. “We had to resection her colon, and there are indications that her remaining kidney is under strain. But I can’t stress enough that she is currently stable and doing very well under the circumstances. It was a good organ match. We have high hopes.”

“How high?”

“High,” he said firmly. He was lying.

When I got back to the visitors’ suite with more coffee, Annie was crying. “She’s going to be all right, Aud. She’s going to be all right. I know it. Oh, please god she’s going to be all right.” She wiped at her eyes and sipped her coffee. I had put extra sugar in it. “He was very thoughtful, changing out of his bloody clothes before he came to see us, don’t you think?”

More likely he had needed the time to think of the phrases that would reassure without actually lying.

“Ah.” She put her cup down. “I think I can sleep now.”

I stayed awake, thinking. Julia, facing me that first time in the street in the rain. Julia, telling Dornan about penis piercing. Julia, in my arms at the fjord. Julia, Julia, Julia. So many mistakes.

After I had seen Julia, I took a cab back to the house. The flowers were all dead from lack of water and the house smelled of air-conditioning. The chair sat empty in the centre of my workroom. I called Benny. “I hope you don’t have any arrangements for lunch because I need some information, and I need it now. Anything you can find on the death of Michael Honeycutt in New York. The Bridgetown Grill at twelve.”

I showered, changed, unpacked, and dumped the dirty clothes on the floor by the washing machine. I knelt to sort them. Hjørdis had packed; Julia’s clothes were jumbled in with my own. I held a soft blue shirt to my cheek, remembered Julia’s sly smile as I had unbuttoned it at the seter one afternoon, remembered her laugh and wave as she drove off down the track, beautiful in her blue dress. I couldn’t bear to wash away her scent. I left the laundry on the floor.

I drove with the windows down, and the humid, sinewy heat fisted down my throat and fattened the ugly thing that pulsed under my sternum like a feeding leech.

The Bridgetown Grill was hotter still, flaring with the spit and sizzle of Jamaican cooking in the open kitchen that ran the length of the narrow gallery painted with palm trees and crowded by fast-talking dental hygienists whose glasses kept steaming up, and by white rastas whose dreads drabbled through their blackened fish and hot sauce unnoticed. Benny, skinny as a rail, was already eating, Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like the red bauble on a blood pressure monitor.

“Jamaican jerk chicken,” he said by way of greeting.

I beckoned the waiter and ordered the first thing I saw on the menu. “Tell me about Honeycutt.”

“Gee, and how are you, too, Torvingen? I gut NCIC in fifty minutes flat and get out here in fifteen more and all the thanks I get is—”

“Honeycutt.”

“Shot clean as a whistle in the back of the head in the men’s bathroom at Kennedy with a .38 at about three-thirty p.m. on May eighth. No one saw anything, no one heard anything. Best for last: he hadn’t even cleared customs and immigration.”

“Someone with access knew his schedule.” Someone with access to privileged information; who could get inside international airport security.

My food arrived just as Benny finished his. He looked from his empty plate to my full one. I pushed it at him. “Help yourself.”

“Not hungry?” He was already cutting the fish into bite-sized pieces, the better to shovel it down in record speed. “By the way, that coke from the Inman Park arson that you were interested in? It’s gone. Um, that’s good.”

I felt as though someone were squeezing my head. “When?”

“Not sure. Oh, this fish is delicious!”

“Then when did the department find out?”

“Well, they haven’t, yet. But I like to check on things that interest me. Sort of look at them, like trophies. Well, not look at them exactly, just sort of test them. Every now and again. So I went to check on the coke—and it’s gone. Well, not gone. Changed. The bags are the same, and the seals, but it’s not the same coke. It’s not coke at all, anymore.”

“But it was before?”

“It was what the lab report said: ninety-nine percent pure Colombian coke. It’s not now, though.”

“How do you know?”

“I just, well, you know, tested it.”

“Before and after?”

“I just took a bit. Really. Just a bit, to see. It’s not like it’s a habit or anything.”

“Never mind that. You’re sure, absolutely sure that what came in was pure, but that what is there now is not?”

“Yes.”

He’d never swear to it in court—why should he lose his job and risk prosecution?—but I didn’t need a court. The leech under my sternum swelled. I stood.

My phone rang. “Torvingen.”

“Aud?” It was Annie. “Aud, you’d better get here. She’s rejecting.”

Annie was waiting for me outside ICU. “The doctor says she isn’t rejecting. They say she has to have another operation. No one will explain.” Her once-round cheeks sagged, and she looked like a sad caricature of the Annie Miclasz I had met just a few weeks ago.

“Is she in the theatre now?”

“No, they’re about to prep her.”

“If she’s not rejecting, why are they going to operate?”

“The liver’s stopped working, and her kidney. And she’s got an infection. But I thought she was getting better. I don’t understand it. She woke up, and—”

“She woke up?” I went utterly still.

“Just for a minute. I’m sure.”

“I have to see her.” Before they prepped her and she ran away again into coma.

“I’ll go get coffee and be back in fifteen minutes.”

“If you see the doctor, send him to me.”

In ICU everything—the walls, floors, bed linen, even Julia’s bedspread—was white, against which crystal red and green lights blinked on and off, slowly, like lizards’ eyes. The air was full of the hiss and suck of oxygen, the peristaltic pulse of IV units squeezing god knows what into her veins, the hum of a dozen machines.

Julia’s hand in mine was mustard yellow, like her arm, like her face. I lifted it to my face. It smelled strange, of drugs and pain. The scent of one who has met that cheating Viking with the great ham hands. One who has played and lost.

“Your nails need trimming,” I told her.

Hiss, suck, blink.

“They must have grown a quarter of an inch in the last few days.” I sounded like a fool. “Julia, I want you to listen to me. You’re ill, but you mustn’t give up. I want you to start thinking about what you want to do when you get out of here. Have I told you about Whitby Abbey, on the Yorkshire coast? There’s a ruin there that dates from the twelfth century, very haunting, very gothic, but the first abbey there was founded in the seventh century by Hilda. There’s a power there. You wouldn’t think to look at it from the outside. But then you cross the track and walk over some turf, and…ah, Julia, it’s suddenly there before you, and it’s as though the breath of the earth drives up through the soles of your shoes and into your bones. I want to hold your hand, this hand, and watch your face when you step onto the turf at Whitby Abbey.”

Hiss, suck, blink.

“Or we could take a boat to the Lofoten Islands in late June when even at two in the morning the sea is silver, like ghost water, and you can read the newspaper without a light. Or if you’d rather go in autumn, we could make troll cream from whortleberries.”

I told her about crushing the berries, about whipping up egg whites, folding the one into the other; how it would feel in her mouth.

Hiss, suck, blink.

“But it might take a while before you can travel far, so before we sail to Lofoten, before you see Whitby, I’ll show you Northwoods Lake Court. As I promised.”

I had also promised I would keep her safe. I touched her cheek, very gently, with my fingertips. Dry now, but still soft. Her eyelids flickered.

“Fuck,” she whispered.

“Julia?” I touched her cheek again. “Julia?”

“Fuck. It hurts.”

“I’m here. I’m right here,” I said, squeezing her hand with both mine, then stroking her hair from her forehead.

Her eyes opened. The whites were pink, but her irises were brilliant as a clear evening sky. She blinked quickly, like a camera shutter. “I’m here,” I said again.

“I’m dying, aren’t I?” Her voice was light and dry, an insect running over a newspaper.

“You’ve had a liver transplant. It’s not going too well. They’re going to operate again this afternoon.”

“Promise me you…”

She shut her eyes.

“Julia?”

She tried to lift her hand. I lifted it for her, put it against my cheek. “When we met,” she whispered, “you were frozen inside. Empty. Now you’re not. Don’t go back. Even if I die. Stay in the world.”

I could not imagine a world without Julia. “You will not die.”

She opened her eyes. This time she didn’t blink. “My mother…she’s not always brave. I hate machines. Don’t let machines keep me alive. Don’t let them.”

“I won’t.”

“Stay in the world, Aud. Stay alive inside. Promise me. Stay alive.”

I whipped through the night as the ice crept through my veins. I stopped once at a strip mall, where I called Denneny’s office number, disconnecting as soon as he picked up. Then I filled my spare can with gas and bought some gloves. My mouth tasted of copper and blood.

At Cheshire Bridge Road I cruised the sex bars until I found the car I wanted, a dark, late-model Volvo with multiple airbags and antilock brakes. This time I parked in the lot of another bar and walked back. A quick thrust with a shim and I was inside.

I understand Denneny. He works late because he has nothing to go home to and when he looks inside himself, there is nobody there. I parked a block down the road from the precinct house, adjusted my headrest for maximum safety, and waited. I watched the stars. Tonight I didn’t recognize any of them; they were cold and alien. I thought of abbeys on headlands, of Norwegian islands in a sea breeze, of Northwoods Lake Court, where the air would be utterly still but for the creak of tree frogs and the endless patter of fountains. Then for a while I thought of nothing.

He emerged just after eleven p.m. I let his Lexus get a block ahead before I pulled out.

When we first met, he had lived in Candler Park. When he made captain he moved to Morningside, a neighbourhood where all the houses were built of dusty rose brick on winding little streets and fronted by velvety, floodlit lawns. No doubt he had thought he would soon be promoted up to commander and the giddy heights of the Prado mansions.

At an intersection I tightened my seat belt and turned my lights off before following him up a long, empty hill. He had been driving the same route for eight years and took it faster than was really safe in the dark. Half a mile from the top of the hill, the road would take a wide curving left, then a sudden right alongside one of those pretty rose-coloured walls. His speed picked up. Fifty, fifty-five, sixty.

He took the long left curve without slowing down, as I’d known he would. Time for me and the Viking to play one last round. I smiled, shifted, and punched the gas. The nose of the Volvo touched his right rear bumper just as he would have been thinking of feathering the brakes and threading the wheel through his hands to take the car to the right.

Brake lights flared and stained the night red. I eased my foot down a little more. Tires squealed, metal screeched. My heart was an anvil. The Lexus wobbled, then slewed, then seemed to straighten. I hummed to myself as I floored the gas and drove him into the wall at sixty miles an hour.

The noise was huge and seemed to last forever and then the night turned white as airbags bloomed and the cars bounced and my head walloped back into the head restraint. The wound along my shoulder pulled at the stitches. Nothing I hadn’t anticipated. I slashed the airbags and kicked my way out of the Volvo. The night smelled of honeysuckle and gas and hot rubber and seemed to turn very slowly.

His airbags had inflated, too, and like a good policeman he had been wearing his seat belt, but the impact had been a surprise, and he was still stunned. I pulled open his door, felt around his belt for his cuffs and gun. I shot the bag, then clipped his hands to the wheel.

“I never liked you, Denneny, but I trusted you. You had rules. What happened? Was it the death of your dreams or that of your wife? Nothing to work for, no one to go home to, nothing inside. Nothing except your rules. You should have clung to them, Denneny, they might have saved you.”

Metal ticked. Somewhere an owl screeched.

“You know why I’m here, don’t you?”

He turned his head slowly. Blood trickled from his left nostril. I pulled back the hammer.

“Don’t you.”

He closed his eyes and nodded.

“Good.” And I shot him in the abdomen.

The frame of the Volvo had buckled a little with the impact and it took me a moment to get the trunk open. My head hurt. When I got back with the gas can, he had started to go into shock.

I unscrewed the cap and laid it carefully on the grass verge. I sloshed gas inside the car, over his body. Judging by the way he squealed and thrashed, it stung on that wound.

“I was stupid, Denneny. Who warned me off this case in the first place? Why would someone leave all that coke at the scene of a crime unless they could get it back from the evidence locker whenever they wanted? I should have known, but I trusted you. Trusted your rules. But you broke all those rules, for money. When did you stop caring, Denneny?”

The can was heavy; my shoulder burned.

“Who could have called Lyon Art to get the information about Olsen Glass? Who took his holidays in California, where Michael Honeycutt used to work? Who knew where to find three men who would kill for money?” He choked on the gas. “Who might be expected to find out Honeycutt was laundering cartel drug money? So simple. All I had to do was put it all together, Denneny, but I didn’t. I didn’t ask that last question: who was the only person—the only one, Denneny—that I trusted to help me with this?”

I should have remembered: the Viking never plays by the rules.

“Did you laugh when you pulled the strings? Did you think I was funny, running around like a dumb but faithful dog, bringing you bones? No, because nothing amuses you anymore, does it? And nothing annoys you. Nothing fills you with joy. It’s all gone. You’re dead inside. Empty.”

I stepped back and looked at him. Drenched to his skin. I tore off his shirt and twisted it, then knotted it into something I could throw. My head pounded, and when I bent down for the gas can the grass verge swooped. The cap got cross-threaded when I tried to screw it back on. I had to take it off and start again. I carried it back to the Volvo and returned with matches.

I tossed his gun into the backseat, then pulled a penny from my pocket. It was warm in my hand; bright and sharp. I held it up between finger and thumb. In the headlights it could have been gold. “All for this, Denneny. All for money.” I put it back in my pocket. My fare for the ferryman, not his.

I stepped back and struck a match. It burned electric blue at the centre but its wavering tip was the yellow of every torch ever used to light a pyre, that most human of fires that roars against the night to keep the ice from our hearts. I touched the match to the shirt, which I whirled over my head until it was a great orange wheel. I threw it into the car.

At Little Five Points, the night was full of the noise and laughter of people who don’t know that the trolls always get you in the end, who when they look up at the night do not understand that the beauty of the bright stars turning overhead, though vast, was created by a universe utterly indifferent to their fate. These young, healthy innocents understand only enough to be a little afraid, so they fill themselves with pot and beer and in the light of a myriad cafés listen to inept street players trying to drive back the dark.

I walked into Borealis. The tables seemed to get in my way, and the chairs were not where they should have been. Don’t let machines keep me alive, she had said. Don’t let them. And I had promised.

“Aud! What in the world is the matter?” Over his shoulder, he called, “Two lattés over here, Jonie, please. Sit, Aud. Sit, for the love of god.” He led me to a corner table. “What is that terrible smell? Gas, is it? You’ve been in some accident? No? Well, never mind. You’ll live. How’s Julia?”

Julia, with the indigo eyes and the laugh like Armagnac. Julia, who had thought she was ready. I took the penny from my pocket. Fare for the ferryman. But Stay in the world, she had said. I spun the penny on the table and, while it turned, stared past him, past the innocents with their light and their noise, and out into the night.

“She died.”

She died, but Stay in the world, Aud, she’d said. Stay alive inside. Promise me. I closed my fist around the spinning penny. Just a coin. The world fractured; meltwater ran down my face.