Nicola Griffith - Stay

That, she said, was when their sex play went from make-believe bondage to using silk scarves, which became rope, and then chains. One time he chained her up and teased her sexually for hours until she was crying out, screaming, begging him to give her an orgasm, and he just goaded her into saying more and more humiliating things, explicit things, until he finally let her come and come again. “And I liked it,” she said, half defiant, half ashamed.

I kept my expression vaguely concerned.

“What I didn’t know was that he had the whole thing on tape. He played it for me one day—it could have been morning, it could have been the middle of the night—when we were eating breakfast. Have you ever watched yourself having sex? It’s…” She closed her eyes for a moment. Her head was almost wholly in shadow, black against the stained sky. Uncertain firelight, a softer orange, made the shadows dance and sway, so that her face looked hollowed and old. She opened her eyes. “You don’t look like a person, you look like a thing, a wiggling white thing, dripping with sweat, drooling, face all swollen. The audio makes it worse. I looked at that video and hated myself. And Geordie smiled, and said something like, Imagine if your family and friends got their hands on this! And then he went back to eating his scrambled eggs and asked me to pour him some more tomato juice. And I did.”

After that, things got worse. He acted as though they were still partners, equals. She didn’t know up from down. He even began to seem sort of fatherly. “That’s when he told me about the girl in Arkansas. He called her his wife-in-training.”

She played with the cheap watch we’d bought in New Jersey, the one she never took off. My bottle was empty, hers barely touched. It would only delay her, and my dinner, if I asked if I could have it, so I lay down again on the grass and breathed its scent, green and vital and unspoilt. The fire burned cleanly now, bright in the gathering dusk, and the wind in the trees whispered back and forth. The whispering grew, and was suddenly shot through with myriad tweets and twitters. I sat up.

“Oh,” Tammy said, as a thousand red-breasted grosbeaks settled like feathery locusts in the trees surrounding the clearing. The air shivered with their flutter and preen, and their calls sounded like the metallic squeaks of a thousand rusty water pump handles. After a while the noise died to an occasional squeak or flutter as they settled for the night.

“Where did they come from?”

“The north. They’re migrating. Tomorrow they’ll be on their way again, after they eat all the high-lipid berries and unwary insects in sight.” Asset strippers. But she wasn’t interested in the birds, just in avoiding talking. “So,” I said.

She pretended to be busy watching the trees.

“You were talking about his wife-in-training. That’s an odd phrase.”

She muttered something.

“What?”

“I said, he meant it literally. Her name is Luz. She’s nine years old.”

I knew I didn’t want to hear this.

“He bought her in Mexico City two years ago. She was seven. Her mother was a prostitute, and her brother and sister. Or maybe they were dead. Geordie said she’d still be on the street if he hadn’t… if he hadn’t rescued her. He said they flock like birds, the kids there. Gangs of them, running around wild on the streets. He adopted her but she’s being fostered by someone else. That was the hardest part, he said, finding just the right family. He seemed so proud of it, the way people talk about the dream house they’re having built. You know: they tell you when they first got the idea for something, what sparked it, even where they were; they go on and on about how they picked the architect and the builder, how they found the land and beat all the obstacles, the building permits, getting the utilities connected, what they did when they found out that what they’d figured was bedrock wasn’t. Jesus, I hate people like that. Anyhow, he found a couple in the Bible Belt, an hour’s drive from Little Rock, and he paid them a lot of money—a lot in their terms, he said—to school her at home in traditional values, to teach her to cook and sew and obey her future husband, to keep her away from the influence of TV and video and the web, even books. She had enough English now, he said, to read from the Bible. He pays the couple to keep their mouths shut. She’s nine now. Very pretty, very sweet, he said; he’s been to see her twice. Real healthy, and smart. When she gets to be fourteen—a well-trained, brainwashed fourteen—he’ll take her to Georgia or someplace and marry her. And she’ll belong to him totally. She’s already trained to think he can do what he wants with her, he said. If she even squeaks, all he has to do is divorce her and she’ll be kicked back to Mexico, still a teenager. No family, no money, no job, nothing. She’d probably be dead in a few years. And you know what? It’s true, pretty much. He can do all that. It’s legal. He liked telling me that part. He didn’t apply for citizenship, and because she’s a minor she wouldn’t even really be a legal resident. If he divorced her at fifteen, she’d be shipped off and no one would care.”

No one cared now.

I stared up and back at the trees behind me. Here was a smart, good-looking woman who had grown up in the last quarter of the twentieth century, yet she had been reduced to nothing more than a shell in just three months. She had allowed herself to be raped, and beaten, and humiliated. She had let him convince her she was crazy. Three months. And even after learning what this man was doing to a child, she had stayed. She had had a key, and money, and Dornan, who loved her, and she had stayed. I didn’t understand at all.

“Why did you leave with me? What made things different? Karp still has that tape.”

Tammy laughed, and it was one of the saddest sounds I had ever heard. “You have no idea what you’re like, do you? There I was, floating in this loft like… like a goddamn orange bobbing in space, tethered to nothing, no up, no down, no idea how I got there, no air to breathe, no way home, everything so unreal I wondered if I even existed, and you walked through the door. You’re like concrete. Completely real. Even just standing there, before you said anything, you made everything else real: the walls, the floors, what he’d done to me.”

Me, real. It was my turn to laugh, but it didn’t sound sad, and now that I’d started I couldn’t seem to stop.

You’re frightening her , Julia observed.

“I know,” I said. “Dornan was wrong. I think maybe I’ll go mad after all.”

Tammy sat back on her heels, and I suddenly saw her as she must have looked when she was thirteen, with new breasts, and the realization that she was never going to be allowed to do things boys did, never just be herself, and I was filled with a horrible, insidious tenderness. She was fighting hard. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t have any of the tools.

“What do you mean about Dornan?” she said.

“What? Oh. He told me I wouldn’t go mad with grief, that I’m too stubborn.”

“Grief?”

I stared at her. How could she not know? “Julia,” I said carefully.

She took the kind of short breath people do when they remember something they know they shouldn’t have forgotten. But it had been back in May, and I had only been her fiancé’s friend who didn’t like her, and then I’d just disappeared, and so much had happened to her since then that it wasn’t surprising. Except, of course, it was.

“Don’t.” I held up my hand. “Don’t apologize.”

She didn’t. She just studied my face for a while, then rocked back on her heels and up onto her feet, and walked into the trailer. She came back with a fresh beer for me.