Always (54 page)

“Good morning,” I said.

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

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

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

But I needed her willing and able to talk.

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

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

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

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

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

She blinked like a semaphore.

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

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

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

“Sell your condo.”

“But it takes time, it—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

He stood as soon as he saw me.

“Why aren’t you with her?”

“She wouldn’t let me,” I said.

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

I nodded.

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

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

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

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

“You’ll see,” he said again.

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

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

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

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

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

He dredged up a smile.

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

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

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

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

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

“Wonderful,” Finkel said.

“A little tricky,” Rusen said.

I waited.

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

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

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

Flashback. “Did he hurt her?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rusen covered it protectively with his hands.

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

“Yes,” Finkel said, unwillingly.

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

11:23. This changes everything.

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

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

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

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

“I really don’t know, Torvingen.”

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

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

“That’s assuming it’s bad news.”

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

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

I would.

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

I pressed one.

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

Dornan was watching me, terribly alert.

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

“You guessed, didn’t you?”

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

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

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

“Did he have good medical care?”

“I imagine so.”

“Was he on any of the experimental drugs?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hello?” She sounded wary but curious.

“Hey,” I said. “How are you?”

“Well, you know, I have MS.”

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

“So what’s this about seaplanes?”

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

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

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

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