Nicola Griffith - Stay

“I’ll be back in an hour,” I said. “Be ready to leave. Assuming you still want to come with me.” It took most of that hour to get a copy of the elevator key made, to find and buy an envelope, to persuade the desk clerk to run it through their stamp machine, for a fee. I put the original key in the envelope, addressed it to Geordie Karp at his loft address, and dropped it in the mailbox. The duplicate went back in my pocket; you never knew.

When I got back I walked around the parking lot for the remaining minutes, saw license plates from sixteen different states, almost all on American cars, and wondered what the percentage of foreign to American vehicles would be at a hotel as opposed to a motel. Probably some ethnologist has done a study.

Tammy was washed, brushed, and standing by the bed like a cadet in a military academy when I got back. So she could at least make sense of what I was saying.

“Hungry?” I asked. She waited a fraction to see if I’d give her a hint about what I’d prefer her answer to be, and when I gave her no clue, she shrugged very slightly. Apart from that single “What?” when she woke in the truck, she hadn’t said a word since we’d left New York. “I need to eat before I drive.” She picked up her purse. She was connecting at least some of the dots. I drove us through a quiet, gray morning and, when I could find nothing else, to the violence of light and plastic and noise that is Denny’s.

Our server’s eyes were overbright, as though he were in the middle of a speed jag, but it could just have been the light. “What’ll you have?”

I ordered pancakes and eggs and bacon, with coffee. Tammy refused to look up from the menu. I smiled blandly at the server, offering no help at all. He shifted from foot to foot.

“Regular breakfast is pretty good,” he said finally. Tammy nodded. “With coffee?” She nodded again.

We ate in silence. When the bill came, I stood up. “I’m going to the bathroom. I’ll see you outside.” She made a panicked, abortive movement, but no sound. “Your wallet should be in your purse.”

“She’s not ready to do things for herself,” Julia said from behind me as I washed my hands.

“I think she is.” I pulled a paper towel from the dispenser, lifted my gaze to her reflection in the mirror, and the floor seemed to drop six inches: Julia’s indigo eyes had darkened to chocolate brown, like Tammy’s.

“Imagine if it were me out there,” she said.

The bathroom door swang back and forth behind me as I walked rapidly back to the restaurant.

Tammy, pale-cheeked, was still at the table, but she had her credit card out, sitting on top of the bill.

“You—we should probably take that up front.”

After a moment’s hesitation, she picked up the bill and card and followed me to the cash register. She handed it over to the server without a word. He handed her a slip and a pen. She looked at me with those empty brown eyes.

“Sign,” I said. She wrote slowly. “And add five dollars, for a tip.” The faster she came back to the real world, the faster I’d be rid of her.

In the parking lot, I went to the driver’s side, unlocked it, then climbed in the passenger seat. Tammy looked at me, looked back over her shoulder at Denny’s, then up at the sky when a solitary raindrop hit her shoulder.

“Better get in before you get wet.”

She got in. I handed her the keys.

“I’ve done too much driving lately, I’m tired. Wake me in a couple of hours.” I curled up and closed my eyes. We sat there for nearly thirty minutes before she put the keys in and turned the ignition. I kept my eyes shut while the engine idled.

“I can’t,” she said at last. I waited some more. “I don’t know where we’re going.”

“No,” I agreed.

Another long, long wait.

“Where are we going?”

“North Carolina, near Asheville.” I sat up and turned to face her. “Unless you’d rather go somewhere else. I’ll travel with you wherever you want, get you settled somewhere.”

“Not Atlanta,” she said.

“All right.”

“North Carolina?” I nodded. She nodded back and steered us carefully out of the parking lot, onto I-81 South. Her driving was bad at first, but improved rapidly. She stayed slightly under the speed limit. I was starting to go to sleep for real when she spoke again. “What’s in North Carolina?”

“Woods, birds, a house. There’s room enough for two, for a little while.” Until Dornan can come and get you. She didn’t say anything but the engine hit a higher note.

I didn’t sleep but drifted in a theta-wave state for a while until she began to brake too hard and make abrupt lane changes.

“Take the next exit,” I said. “I’ll take over.”

When she sat in the passenger seat it was obvious that returning to the world had taken its toll; her shoulders were hunched around her ears, and she picked endlessly at her thigh where the corduroy had worn thin. A person who is new in the world—a child, or an adult in a foreign country or just out of hospital—needs safety, first of all, but then they need to know that they matter, that their opinions are considered, that there are choices. The trick is not to offer too many options at once.

I turned on the radio and skimmed through channels: the blandly perfect smile of fusion jazz, a huge-voiced country music diva belting out about how her dawg done left her, an apoplectic talk show host ranting about tax reform, a commercial for wireless phone service that degenerated into the low-toned gabble of federally regulated footnotes. I kept trying, and eventually plumped for some college station that sounded as though it was broadcasting from the bottom of a disused well. “Not exactly to my taste. Feel free to change the station.” The thigh-picking slowed, but we listened to well-bottom music until the weak signal started to fade. “Find something else, will you?”

She found something that called itself adult contemporary and sounded as though its artists, mostly women with little-girl voices, lived on Prozac. Still, it was a decision.

“Maybe we should stop at the next town and buy some CDs.” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d shopped for something unnecessary.

I drove for another hour. Tammy napped. When the adult contemporary signal faded, she sat up and changed the station without prompting. Mommy’s little helper.

At Wytheville, just north of the North Carolina border, I left the interstate and took us onto the Blue Ridge Parkway: more than two hundred miles without a single traffic light or fast food franchise. With a speed limit of forty-five miles per hour—less on some of the hairpin bends—leaving the interstate meant adding at least two hours to our journey, but it was an essential buffer zone between where Tammy had been and where she was going. I turned off the radio and opened both windows.

“Breathe,” I said. Valleys ran long and deep to either side, and cows grazed in pastures framed by split-log fences. The air was rich and cool and edged with life.

“It’s cold.”

“Put your sweatshirt on. We’re two thousand feet up a mountain.”

“You live up a mountain?”

“A valley halfway up a mountain, but we’ve a couple of hundred miles to go.” Somehow, in four or five hours, I had to show her how much there was here to appreciate. She had to know before she got there how special this place was. It had to become special to her, too, otherwise she would trample all over the fragile peace of my refuge. She squirmed into her sweatshirt and we drove for a while in silence.

“These are the Blue Ridge Mountains.”

She nodded, but didn’t say anything.

“Part of the Appalachians, one of the oldest mountain ranges on earth. They’re so old that they appeared before most animal and plant life existed.”