Nicola Griffith - Stay

“I’m here,” I said. She froze. After a moment she turned her head to look at me. “Are you hungry yet? The sandwiches are still here. The drinks have gone cold, though, so if you want tea or coffee, we’d have to order more.”

“Where are we?”

“The Hilton.”

She looked at the clock. It seemed to reassure her.

“The tuna salad sandwiches aren’t bad.” I put one on a small plate, added a napkin and the saltshaker, and brought it over to the bed. She looked at it as though it were a snake. I put it down near the clock. “Food is almost always a good idea.” She reached for it without sitting up, careful not to let the covers slide off her shoulders. Well, well. “I’ll bring you a robe.” I put it on the bed and withdrew to the bathroom for a couple of minutes, where I folded her corduroys and cashmere, and when I came back she had taken a bite and was chewing. I poured her some water and brought that over, too. She was still chewing the same bite. “Swallowing comes next.”

She swallowed obediently. I sighed, and she flinched and dropped the sandwich, which made me sigh harder with irritation, and she shrank back against the headboard.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“I don’t know what you want,” she said in a small voice.

I stared at her. The Tammy I had first met nearly two years ago would have walked naked down Peachtree Street before it occurred to her to wonder what anyone but herself wanted. She studied her sandwich fixedly. “I want you to eat that sandwich, if you can, and drink some water. Then I want you to sleep again. I want you to know you’re safe. And then tonight we’ll decide what to do.”

She looked at the clock again, and picked up the sandwich.

As I’d thought, the carbohydrates combined with whatever shock she’d had sent her off to sleep again within a few minutes. I got up and turned the heat down, then went back to alternately looking out of the window and watching the television. The Canadian woman was now demonstrating color glazing. Every time the camera pulled back, the word “cheap” hovered brassily in the corners of the small, flimsy set; the wall wobbled as she leaned on it. To the English, cheap is not a pejorative word, simply descriptive, and usually delivered with an air of triumph: “I got these jeans cheap at the market!” In the United States, of course, cheap means shoddy, tacky, gimcrack; I didn’t know a single American who would boast of buying something cheaply. Where were the Canadians on the cheap scale? Perhaps they followed the same cultural and geographic axis as the country in general: more European in Quebec, more American in Vancouver.

The chattering Canadian came to an abrupt end, and was replaced by an earnest magazine program dealing with health care for the mentally disabled. A while later I began learning more than anyone needed to know of the reproductive cycle of emperor penguins.

Sandy Hair and his coworkers had just begun to pack up to leave when I realized Tammy was awake and watching me. When I looked at her, she lowered her gaze in the universal primate gesture of submission. I should have noticed her wake, but, like a prey animal, she had learned to move quietly. Interesting. She seemed to have her wits about her, now.

“Good evening. It’s pretty dark outside. You’re not wearing much and this room is lit up like a stage. I’m going to close the curtains.”

No protest this time. She sat up, touched her bare shoulder with her left hand. “You undressed me.”

“Yes.”

Silence, then: “Have you told Dornan anything?”

“No.”

Another silence. “I want to leave.”

“The door’s right there. You have money in your purse.”

“No. I mean, I want us to leave New York.”

“Us?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Is someone looking for you?”

“I have to leave now,” she said.

“I’ll be driving back south, but—”

“I don’t want to go to Atlanta!”

“I’m not going to Atlanta, and I’m not leaving until tomorrow—unless you want to talk to me, tell me why you need to leave right now.”

“Where are my glasses?”

“Right there next to the water.”

She found the case, put on the steel-rims. I expected the gaze she turned on me to be sharper, but it was as blank as before. “Why can’t we leave now?”

We. The I-can’t-cope-by-myself ploy was something I had seen her use before, but not like this. This time there was no glint in her eye, no upthrust breast or canted hip, just a frightening brokenness.

I didn’t want to stay in this hotel, in this city, another night anyway. “I’ll pack while you dress.”

Midnight, and a black autumn wind was trying to push the truck this way and that as we crossed the southern edge of Maryland. Tammy slept in the passenger seat, right hand curled around her left wrist and the cheap watch we’d bought her at the airport. All she’d done since I’d taken her from that apartment this morning was sleep.

“It’s a shock reaction,” Julia said. She sat sideways on Tammy’s lap, facing me. “A way to hide. You hide in the woods, Tammy hides in her dreams.” She stroked Tammy’s face gently, moving the back of one finger up her cheek, as if catching a tear. The muscles in my legs tensed and the truck jumped forward. “Where’s the fire?” she said.

“I want to be in West Virginia before we stop.”

She studied Tammy, whose eyes were darting from side to side beneath closed lids. “Did you take away those sleeping pills?”

“No.”

“Might be an idea. At some point she’s going to crawl far enough out of her pit to get her self-will back. That’s when she’s liable to do something stupid.”

Tammy umphed and turned in her seat, moving Julia, who said, “Bony hips. I think she’s lost weight,” and I suddenly couldn’t stand the idea of Julia touching another woman, not touching me, never touching me again.

“Please,” I said.

Julia raised her eyebrows.

“This—I can’t—” I braked and started to pull over.

“What?” Tammy sat up.

Julia vanished. I yanked on the parking brake before we quite stopped moving and Tammy jerked forward against her seat belt. The engine rumbled. The wind howled. Her gaze slid this way and that but she kept her head down.

“Get out.”

She put her hand on the door lock and prepared to get out, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, without even looking at me. It was as though she had expected all along to be abandoned, as though she accepted it, even deserved it.

Shame raised prickles on my skin from knees to neck. “I mean get in the backseat. There’s more room, you can stretch out.”

She climbed out and into the back without another word.

“Are you warm enough?” She nodded, eyes huge. “Good, that’s good.” The truck started up again smoothly and I pressed the accelerator down and down until it wouldn’t go any further. Lane marker studs streamed under my wheels. The engine began to whine. Annoying.

“It’s all right,” I said, to myself, to Tammy, to Julia, wherever she was, and eased my foot off the gas. The stream flowed more sedately. “We’ll take the next exit and stop for the night.”

The Days Inn was plain and comfortable; spending the night with Tammy was neither. She didn’t take off her underwear or her watch and lay rigid on her tautly made bed like a knife from the wrong set of silverware set out on its napkin by mistake. She didn’t talk, she barely breathed, and her eyes glimmered slightly: wide open and empty even of fright.

I woke at six the next morning, and opened my eyes just in time to see Tammy’s flick open and watch me. Back to square one. I got up, ignored her, and went and had my shower. There was no packing or unpacking to do.