Nicola Griffith - Stay

The cut was about three inches long, not deep, but wide. When I turned my head this way and that, it gaped and seeped at the center. I set about the grim business of cleaning it.

“Are you going to leave it unwrapped like that?”

“I’m letting the skin around it dry so I can put some Band-Aids on.” Steri-Strips would have been better, but I didn’t have any. I picked up the scissors and cut chunks out of two sides of a Band-Aid so that what was left looked a bit like a very short dumbbell. I peeled away the sterile backing and put it over the slash in my neck so that the edges of the cut were pulled together. Instant butterfly suture. I did it all twice more. It shouldn’t scar too badly. Then I smeared antibiotic ointment over the seam and dabbed some on my face, and the backs of my hands.

“I don’t see why you don’t just go to the doctor.”

“Hospitals are… they have bad associations for me.”

She gave me a jaded look. “Like they don’t for everyone else?”

After a moment I said, “I didn’t take that last antibiotic you were trying to give me, did I?”

“No.” She brought the glass of water back and pulled the bottle out of her pocket again. “How did you get all this stuff, anyway?”

“I asked my doctor.”

“You said, ‘Hey, doc, I kill people for a living and sometimes they fight back, so can I have pills and stuff, in case?’ ”

“I don’t, and he didn’t. Fight back.”

“Then—”

“It was later. I got careless.” Which wouldn’t happen when I went to Arkansas for the girl. That trip would be planned down to the last detail, no more mistakes. No one would ever know I’d been there, until the girl went missing. I wrapped my neck again.

“So? How did you get her to give you the drugs?”

“Him.”

“Whatever.”

“I travel all over, sometimes to remote areas. If you’re somewhere like Kamchatka and get a compound fracture, you can’t just phone a pharmacy. There might not be a doctor for several hundred miles. He gives me prescriptions so I’ll always have antibiotics, and morphine, and a few other things.”

“You’ve got morphine in there?”

“I used it up, in Norway.”

“Norway again.”

I blinked. Pain might chew away at your defenses until you said whatever came into your head, but obviously the narcotic-based Vicodin had been worse. “Pass the heating pad, please.” She did.

“Doesn’t look like it’s helping much.”

It wasn’t.

“Changed your mind about the Vicodin?”

I started to shake my head, hissed as my neck pulled and the throbbing in my scalp started up again.

“Right, what was I thinking? Of course it’s better to grind your teeth and make the veins in your forehead stick out in pain than to take a couple of pills. Great. Fantastic. Especially the part where you start to get mean and shout at me again. Can’t wait.”

I didn’t want to babble my head off again about Julia. Julia was mine. Had been mine. Julia?

Tammy stood up. “I’ll make us something to eat.”

Julia?

Tammy banged and clattered resentfully in the kitchen. The pain in my knee slid like a superficial warm layer over the terrible ache deep in a part of me I couldn’t reach, couldn’t even name.

“Listen,” I said.

Bang, clatter.

“Tammy—”

She turned, snapped “I’m doing soup,” and went back to stirring.

“Listen. I need you to listen. We met in Atlanta. They were trying to kill her but I said I’d keep her safe. She was paying me to help her find out who killed her friend. But that wasn’t why I was doing it, although I didn’t know that. Well, I did, but I’d never loved anyone before. We went to Norway—”

Tammy looked up from her soup. “Norway?”

“—I thought it would be safer there.” Home was supposed to be safe. “She had business in Oslo, but when we went to Lustrafjord, it wasn’t business anymore.”

Tammy left her soup and sat on the foot of the bed.

I tried to explain how I’d shown Julia who I was by taking her to the seter , the farm where I’d spent my childhood summers, but it came out sounding like a bad romance: boats on the fjord, sun on the water, flowers on the fjell . “She went back to Oslo for a meeting. One of the killers came for me by the glacier lake. He shot me.”

I rolled up the left sleeve of my T-shirt. The bullet had hit my shoulder blade, bounced a bit, and traveled down the underside of my arm. The scar was pink and puckered, no longer an ugly purple red.

She looked at it. “You could have that fixed.”

“He shot me, so I broke his legs and left him to die. There was no choice because I couldn’t call the police to help him, or to help Julia, because if they found him they’d detain me, stop me from helping her.” I’ll protect you, I’d said. “So I did it, left him without a second thought.”

But I didn’t help her. I went to the blue place, forgot that it wasn’t just me against them. Forgot that Julia was in the middle.

“I killed the ones in Oslo, too. They weren’t real people. No one is. Was. So I killed them, but not before they—Anyway, she died. And I haven’t thought about them, the killers that I killed, not really.” I ran my fingers down the bullet track. Physical pain was easy to deal with. “The people I’ve killed were just objects, things to be removed. They only mattered as far as how they affected me. Everything, everyone used to be like that. Not anymore. Do you understand?”

She shook her head.

“She opened me, and now it’s all different. I feel different. I do things differently, like with Karp.”

“You still haven’t told me about that.”

“I don’t understand why I did it. I don’t understand it at all. Rage. I’ve never felt it before, not really.”

She looked skeptical.

“Mostly I would feel a kind of disgust, and irritation. I would look at them and think, You’re in my way, and I’d move them aside. Like moving a chair.” I thought about it. “Or like twisting the barrel of a rifle, breaking it so it can’t be used against you. I felt some annoyance, maybe. Not rage. People weren’t worth getting angry about.”

Neither of us said anything for a minute. It should have been getting warmer by now.

“You’re not wearing your watch,” I said.

She glanced at the pale band around her wrist. “No.” Silence. “So I still don’t know what happened with Karp.”

“It was Julia. A woman who looked like her. Except she didn’t, not really. It just—I was thinking about her, then I came out of his loft, and there they were. She ran. I hit him so he couldn’t breathe, took all the fight from him, then dragged him into the elevator and hit him again. Beat him. Hands, elbows, knees, feet.” My bones began to fill with lead again. I felt heavy enough to sink through the bed, through the floor of the trailer, into the dirt.

After a moment she said, “Did it hurt him?”

“Yes.” My knee hurt so much I couldn’t think. “Something’s burning.”

She jumped up, ran into the kitchen. “Shit.” She turned off the stove and came and sat down again. “That’s it for the soup.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Knee?”

“Yes.”

“There’s always the Vicodin.”

I was talking anyway. I nodded tiredly. The bed shifted as she leaned, handed me pills and glass.

The water was cold, and ached all the way down my gullet. “She loved me. She wouldn’t now, not like this.”

“Like what?”

“Like this .” I thumped the mattress. “If she were here she’d say he was a monster who would have just kept hurting people, and that he deserved what he got. She’d probably even try to believe it, but—” If I wanted, I could remember every creak and pop and spatter.