Always (68 page)

“Why?” Nina said. “It wasn’t us that did anything.”

“Sandra couldn’t have done what she did without this class. You worked together for nearly three months. You hyperventilated in fear together, you threw and let yourselves be thrown, you trusted each other enough to let yourselves be choked. You all learned together.”

They cut glances at Sandra. I knew they were wondering: then was this our fault?

“The thing is, we can’t judge another’s actions. We can never, any of us, know the struggles someone else goes through. We might think we know, but we don’t.”

“I’m here,” Sandra said. “Why not just ask?”

“Okay,” Suze said.

Silence.

“I’m pregnant,” Sandra said. “He’d hurt me before. I knew he’d do it again. My kids had seen me beaten over and over. When I found out I was having a baby, I thought, I just can’t let him do that anymore. I couldn’t, could I?”

“No,” said Christie.

“I had to protect my baby.”

“That’s right,” said Kim.

Their shoulders dropped a fraction, they turned slightly to face Sandra. The muscles around their eyes relaxed. I could have closed my eyes and known, just by the sound of their breath and the subtle change in their scent, that the group was re-forming, that Sandra was being conditionally reabsorbed. Protect the children, the old clarion call. I wasn’t sure whom I disliked the most: Sandra for manipulating them, them for allowing it, or me for sitting witness.

“How far along are you?” Nina said. “Only I was wondering if that’s why you signed up.”

Sandra looked wary, but Nina plowed on, unaware of what she’d asked.

“I signed up because of what happened to my sister’s youngest. Made me think. I went into a coffee shop in Smyrna, Borealis—anyone know it?”

“No way!” Pauletta said. “I saw the flyer in Borealis, too, only in Decatur.”

“So why’d you sign up?” Nina said.

“Because some yahoo neighbor who’d been drinking thumped on my windshield one night and I thought he wanted to jack the car. Turned out he was just staggering around. Scared the crap out of me, though.”

“I saw a flyer at college,” Christie said.

“Which one?”

“Agnes Scott.”

I wondered how it got there.

“Coffee shop,” Tonya said.

“Me, too.” “And me.”

“E-mail,” Suze said, “a friend. That’s why I was late that first day. She was supposed to come along. She chickened out.”

“I nearly chickened out,” Katherine said. “That first day.” I remembered the footsteps in the dust on the stairwell: down and then up and then down again. “I was so nervous.”

“Yeah. I thought I’d get mashed in the face first thing,” Tonya said.

“No, that was later,” Katherine said, and everyone smiled.

“I think we were all afraid,” Therese said to me. “But you taught us a lot.”

All past tense.

Then they were all standing together, even Sandra—Suze helped her to her feet—facing me, smiling.

“Thank you,” Therese said. She was holding something towards me.

They were happy, relieved, ready to reminisce: they were no longer scared because they were done. They’d finished their sixteen-week course and beaten up a padded man and frightened a bookstore clerk and looked a killer in the face, and now they were safe.

“It’s a small token of our appreciation.”

An envelope. I took it.

“It’s a gift card.”

A picture of azaleas. Bright and impersonal as a southern smile.

“We didn’t know what you’d want, but then we thought, Well, everyone likes coffee.”

“Or tea,” Nina said.

“Right.” They sounded anxious.

I forced a smile and opened it. A Starbucks gift card. The kind of gift one corporation might give another. Steel Magnolias, Inc., to Aliens from the North, LLC. But they had all signed it:

I ached for them. Most of them would not be able to cling to their bubble world; one day someone, something, would burst it. I wished it could be different.

“Thank you,” I said. “Be safe.”

THERE WAS A RED DOT BY THE PAINTING. “WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?” I SAID TO
the sales associate. But I knew.

“It’s sold,” she said.

“Sold.”

“Yes. I’m sorry. You must be very disappointed. But there are several of his other pictures available.”

“I want this one.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s no longer available.”

HIPPOWORKS RENTED
The Last Supper Club and invited all the cast and crew and dozens of industry insiders, local celebrities and hangers-on, and corporate sponsors.

The party had been going for three hours with some serious drinking, including bartender stunts involving flaming shots and leaping balls of flame that were probably illegal. I stayed in a corner. My eyebrow stung and my ribs ached and I didn’t want anything to do with fire for a very long time.

“Hey,” said someone with a bright red face and messy black hair. John. Wardrobe. “Hey, there’s a rumor going round that you strangled that kid.”

“Why would I do that?”

He looked puzzled. “I don’t know,” he said, and wandered off. Kick and Rusen and Finkel were surrounded by admirers at the other end of the club.

I took my beer upstairs, where I found a pool table. There was no one else around so I racked the balls and began potting them in order. The color and motion and geometry were soothing, and it was good to keep my muscles moving, work the stiffness out.

“Here’s where you’re hiding,” Dornan said.

“I’m not hiding.”

“No, of course not.” He watched for a while as I stroked the balls into their pockets. He coughed once or twice. We’d all been doing that, particularly the ones who had left the warehouse last. “All packed for tomorrow? Oh, you should have had that one. No doubt it’s your bandaged rib.”

“No doubt.”

“Would you find an actual game more interesting?”

“I might.” I banged the eight ball in. “Help me set up.”

He dug the balls obligingly from the top pockets and rolled them towards me. I racked them. He broke. For Dornan, it was a brilliant stroke: the cue ball actually hit the clustered balls at the other end of the table. It wasn’t a legal break, because only one ball touched a cushion, but Dornan and I had long ago found that making him play strictly by the rules led to a great deal of frustration. He leaned on his cue. “Try not to pot all yours in one go.”

I cracked in the two and the six. He sighed loudly.

“We should give you a handicap.”

Handicap. I wondered how much longer we’d able to use that word in casual conversation.

“Kick’s looking very pretty tonight.”

“Yes,” I said, squinting down the cue at the four, which was hiding behind the eight ball. I could do it if I banked off the left-hand cushion.

“Oh, nice shot. So why is she down there and you’re hiding up here?”

I chalked my cue, walked around the table, leaned, measured, stroked in the five. “I’m not hiding,” I said, lining up the next shot. “I’m waiting. I asked her a question. She hasn’t answered me yet.”

“Aud Torvingen, you are deeply stupid.”

I missed my stroke, barely clipping the cue ball and sending it spinning in slow majesty into the corner pocket. He fished it out, polished it on his jeans, whistling, and put it three inches behind the eleven, in a direct line with the same corner pocket.

“Not a good idea,” I said.

“And why is that?”

“Just look at it.” He would pot the eleven ball, then without the skill to spin and bend the cue ball, would be trapped behind the eight ball and two of mine.

“It looks to be a perfectly reasonable position,” he said, and potted his ball, and was sadly puzzled as to how to hit anything else. He walked around the table twice. “I see,” he said. “I see now. You could have explained. ”

“It was obvious.”

“Maybe to you.” He pursed his lips. Walked around the table again. “So. Kick. You asked her to go to Atlanta, where the heat will make her ill and she knows nobody and there’s no work for her. Why?”

“Because it’s where I live.”

“Is it?”

“Don’t be gnomic. I didn’t understand you the first time you said that and I don’t understand you this time. I want her to come and see where I live. I’ve seen where she lives. One weekend, that’s all I ask. It’s not like it’s forever.”

“Ah.” He nodded smugly to himself.

“What does that mean? Explain it to me. Stop. Stop walking around that table. Look, I understand the pool table. It’s orderly. There are clear rules. It’s obvious. But I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me. Clearly there are rules about things that are just as obvious to you that I’m missing. About Kick.”

“Not about Kick,” he said gently. “About you. As you would say, it’s perfectly obvious. You’ve been intending to come and live in Seattle since the first day you met her.”

I stared at him. “I have?”

“Of course you have. It’s as clear as day. It is to you, too, you simply haven’t yet put it into words. I was hoping you’d figure it out for yourself, it’s better that way, but, well, all right, here it is: Atlanta isn’t your home. I’m not sure it ever was.”

I heard the words, but they made no sense. “It’s where I live. Where I used to work. People I know.” You. “A whole system.”

“Which is exactly what you’ve been building in Seattle, only better.”

He was insane.

“You stopped talking about selling the warehouse almost as soon as you saw it. Ooh, you said, they need my help.”

“Not anymore. It’s all gone, nothing left but burnt timber,” but even as I said it, at a deeper level I felt the words rolling magisterially towards their pockets, dropping one by one, making sense. For a moment my ribs seemed as though clamped in a vise. I couldn’t breathe, but it was just a memory of standing outside the woodworkers’ collective, thinking,
I’ll get to know these people.

“And you do know people. You know electricians and carpenters, movie producers and actors, private detectives and reporters, politicians and local government agencies, bankers and real estate agents, even a criminal or two, not to mention two police officers who won’t forget your face in a hurry. You’ve found a dojo. Discovered parks and restaurants and pubs.”

He coughed.

“Can I have a bit of that?” He borrowed my beer. “Ah, that’s better. No, there’s no question. You’ve made more of a life here in three weeks than you’ve done in five years in Atlanta. I only wonder that you’ve managed to hide from the obvious for so long. This place is ideal for a Norwegian who isn’t really Norwegian anymore. It positively reeks of Scandinavia, all clean and shiny and Americanized, full of rules that people obey with a smile when it pleases them and break with a smile when it doesn’t. Ideal for you.”

I thought of the Jante law, and the painting. Of Gas Works Park, the little pocket park by the Duwamish, the land I’d bought. What hope felt like burning beneath the breastbone.

“For God’s sake, there’s even your own personal troll under the bridge. Do you understand now? Good. Now, return the favor, please, and show me how to beat you at this bloody game.”

BACK DOWNSTAIRS
I reclaimed my corner seat and settled in with a fresh beer. At the next table, Finkel was entertaining an industry journalist. “. . . stroke of luck. The warehouse and its contents—the sets, the props, the costumes—were a total write-off, but we’d more or less finished shooting anyhow. The beauty of it is we get reimbursed for all that stuff we had no more use for. The negatives were stored off-site and we had the foresight to back up the EDL twice a day. Not a frame was lost. And no one was hurt.”

“What are you, chopped liver?” Kick slid into the chair next to me. “How’s the face? I can hardly see any blisters.”

She wore a cool, summery dress the color of the Caribbean, a necklace of green turquoise tubes, doubled casually into a choker, and her hair loose. Her bare shoulders gleamed.

“. . . product placement for post-production has tripled,” Finkel continued expansively, “and I have two studio meetings next week.”

“The man’s glee is unholy,” she said. “But in a way this has worked out well. We’re almost certain of some kind of deal now. It wouldn’t surprise me to find he’s cooking up a side deal for a Hallmark movie of the week about the Great Seattle Movie Drama.”

“Not if I have anything to do with it. What’s EDL?”

“Edit decision line.”

Which left me none the wiser.

“Anyhow, I won’t have any difficulty getting work for a while, coordinating or catering.”

“So you’ll be busy. You won’t want to come to Atlanta. I fly back tomorrow. ”

Silence. “I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I—”

“Don’t say it. Just listen for a minute. I’m going back to Atlanta tomorrow. There are some things I have to sort out there. Some papers to sign. But it should all be done by the end of September or October. The movie season will be slowing down here, and it will be cooler by then, and I’m hoping you’ll come out, just for a visit, just for a weekend. You could see how I live and work, the people I know, see my life. As it was. No, please, don’t say anything yet.”