Nicola Griffith - Stay

No matter how many lights you turn on, hotel rooms are always too dark and always too small, and when you press your face up against the glass, all the people so many stories below always seem to have more freedom than you do. Even the people in the building opposite, harshly lit by fluorescents in their office cubicles, seemed to have fuller lives. One man wearing a shirt and suspenders kept scratching at his sandy-haired head with a pencil. He held a phone in his right hand and the pencil in his left, talk talk scratch scratch, then he swapped hands, scratch scratch talk talk. If the pencil was sharp, he would have tiny rips all over his scalp.

Stationary cabs lined up like golden beetles down the center of Fifth, glittering in the strange New York sunshine. In any other city on earth the drivers would have been standing by their cars, arms folded, leaning against hoods and gossiping.

No noise from the bathroom. To the left of the office building, a huge sign spelled out ESSEX HOUSE backwards. Sandy Hair put down his pencil and scratched fiercely at his temple with his fingernails, exactly the way a squirrel would, only much more slowly. Cabs opened their doors, closed them, and drove off with fares. Other cabs took their place.

Someone rapped on the door and announced that they were room service. When I opened the door, a rotund woman, crisp as a freshly baked dinner roll in her white jacket, pushed the cart briskly into the room. I stepped in front of her before she could go any further. “I’ll take it.” I signed the tab and herded her out.

Sandy Hair was still scratching his scalp. I set the table up so one chair faced the corner and the other the door. “Room service is here,” I called to Tammy. I lifted plate rings, poured tea, divided sandwiches. I ate one. Tuna salad. No sound from the bathroom. I sipped tea. Not made with boiling water. Tammy was probably sitting in the bath with her mouth hanging open. She hardly knew me, yet here she was, depending on my goodwill, like a child. Selfish, like a child. What gave her the right to assume I’d just take care of everything? There was no way to know what to do with her. It was obvious she didn’t want to see or be seen by Dornan, but I couldn’t leave her on her own in this state; I didn’t trust her to look after herself. I didn’t trust her, full stop. If I got her in my truck and drove to Atlanta, or anywhere else for that matter, I wouldn’t put it past her to cry kidnap when she recovered her wits.

“Tammy. Food,” I called again. Nothing. The bathwater was probably getting cold. Maybe that would prompt some movement.

I will find her, I had told Dornan, but all I’d found was a shell. I had no idea how to go about finding the rest.

I poured myself more tea and took it over to the bed nearest the door where Tammy’s bag lay on its side next to the pillows. Cup in one hand, I opened the bag with the other and tipped it upside down, stirred the spilled contents with one finger. The two plastic bottles both held the same thing, Ambien, a prescription sleeping pill. I put them on the bedside table, along with the ring, the contact lens case and its solutions, and the glasses. I stuffed everything else back in except for the underwear, which I put in the drawer next to the one that held mine. No clues.

I put my empty cup back on the room service trolley. That bathwater would be really uncomfortable by now.

“Tammy?” I knocked on the door, listened. Nothing. “Tammy?”

Memory of my dream about the woman dead in the bath made my knees sag as though I were in a high-speed elevator braking to a halt. I hammered on the door. “Tammy!” I turned the handle and slammed into the door, forgetting it wasn’t locked.

Tammy wasn’t sitting in her own blood, her eyes weren’t rolled up, she wasn’t floating facedown. She was hunched, knees under her chin, at one end of the bath, weeping silently, great fat tears falling like fruit onto her thighs. The ends of her hair were wet. Eight hundred miles for this.

“Get up,” I said. She was alive, and she didn’t care, didn’t understand how precious that was. “Get up!” Her face was quite still and calm. If it were not for the body language and the tears, I might have thought she was meditating. She was removed, no longer caring; life wasn’t worth living but there wasn’t enough of her left for her to bother killing herself. Maybe she wanted me to do it for her.

“Let’s get you out of there. Come on now, Tammy, come on.” I took one of the towels from the rack and held it out encouragingly. “It’s lovely and soft and warm. Come along now.” She blinked slowly. I slung the towel around my neck and leaned down. “I’m going to put my hands under your arms, that’s it, just like that, and lift you out, that’s it, move your legs, that’s right. And now you have to step over the rim, onto the mat.” Her skin felt firm and cold, meat waiting to be cut. “Put this towel around you. Yes, yes, come on now.” She made no move to pull the towel closed about her. I left it draped over her shoulders and got another one. “A good, brisk rub and you’ll be fine. And when you’re dry, I’ll put you to bed. There’s tea, and food if you want it. And perhaps a bit of television. The door’s locked, no one can come in or out. You can sleep. You’re safe.” I opened the bathroom door, put my right arm around her waist, and took her left hand in mine to lead her forward. “Here we go. Here. This bed. You sit right there. I’ll turn on the television.” She sat obediently, unconscious of her seminakedness, while I flipped through channels until I found a soothing natural history program about domestic cats. “Stand up just a minute while I pull back the covers. There we go. Sit down. Now swing your legs up.” Flash of skin, smooth now, warmer. She smelled of towel. “Lie down, that’s right. Here, let me take the towel. What you need right now is some sleep.” The food could wait. I tucked the bedclothes around her shoulders and under her chin. She closed her eyes obediently. I sat next to her on the bed. “You’re safe. I’ll be sitting near the window, right here. You sleep.” Maybe I should give her a sleeping pill. Her breathing deepened. Just as I eased off the bed her eyes flicked open, and they were frightened.

“What time is it?”

I glanced at the bedside clock. “Two fifty-three. In the afternoon.”

She followed my glance to the clock, wouldn’t take her eyes off it.

“Here.” I moved it so it was closer, and facing her. She looked at me, back at the clock, at the curtains.

“Open the curtains.”

“You’ll sleep better if they’re—” Her eyes started to go dead again. “Okay. Hold on.”

I opened them. She looked at the concrete building, the blue sky, back at the clock. “Afternoon?”

“Yes.”

“Two fifty-three?”

“Two fifty-four, now.”

She nodded slightly to herself and fell asleep as though someone had pulled the plug.

I settled myself in the armchair near the window. Taxis honked; sirens grew, dopplered, faded. On the TV, an orange kitten chased floating dandelion seeds through the sunlight of a summer garden. I did not know what to make of Tammy’s behavior. Fear might explain some of it, but fear of what? She had had a key, she could have left anytime, or if she was scared of something outside the apartment, she could just have picked up the phone. Except, of course, there hadn’t been a phone.

The kittens were replaced by some woman with a Canadian accent demonstrating the art of stenciling in home decor.

Tammy woke after an hour. She didn’t sit up or say anything, just gasped, and her respiration rate went up. Then she started turning her head very, very slowly towards the clock, as though her life depended on me not knowing she was awake.