Nicola Griffith - Stay

I got out the gun and pointed it at her. “Someone who is getting more irritated every second.” There was no one here to stop me. Aud rhymes with allowed. I used the key remote and her door lock thunked open. I nodded at the car. “Your purse.”

Luz suddenly wriggled out of her seat belt and lunged to the front of the car, reaching for the horn. She managed to hit it once, just enough for a light pap that no one would hear, before I got the door open and yanked her out with one arm.

I stood her up on the pavement. “Don’t.” I switched to Spanish. “Estoy salvando te de esta mujer. En unos minutos, te devolvere a… a Aba.” And in the middle of explaining to her I was rescuing her, that I would take her back to Adeline, she gave me that bird-eyed look again, and I understood, then, why I recognized it. I had looked at my own mother the same way all those times she had said, Yes, Aud, this time I will be there for the school sports day, or, Of course I don’t have to work on your birthday.

The woman was edging towards the car. I pointed the gun again until she stopped, then turned back to Luz. “I will explain very soon, but I need you to be very quiet and very still, just for five minutes. No one will hurt you. Do you understand?” She nodded, amenable but uncommitted. “Get back in the car.”

She shook her head.

There was no time to argue. “Then stand right here, next to me, and don’t move.”

She crept to my side.

I turned back to the woman. “Su bolso.”

“Ella no comprende,” Luz said.

“Your purse,” I said again, in English.

“I could get it,” Luz said. If you please Mummy, she might do as she promised. And I wanted to pistol-whip this smug woman, this panderer of children, until her blood seeped into the Arkansas dirt.

Luz climbed into the backseat, felt around the floor, and emerged with the purse. “It’s heavy,” she said, and held it out to me.

I made myself breathe. In and out. “Find her wallet,” I said. I locked the car again and put the key in my pocket.

Luz rooted around and came up with a slim, calfskin billfold.

“Open it. I want her driver’s license and insurance card. Read them to me.”

Luz did. Jean Goulay, an address in upstate New York.

“Any business cards in there?”

“What’s a business card?”

I didn’t take my eyes off Goulay. Any minute now she was going to realize she was in even deeper trouble than she thought. People don’t avoid leaving their fingerprints if they mean you well. “Tip the purse out onto the road.” Luz did, and looked at me nervously. I forced what I hoped was an encouraging smile. “There, those pieces of cardboard with phone numbers and e-mail addresses.” Maybe she didn’t know what an e-mail address was, either. “Lift one up so I can read it.” I read it aloud. “Goulay Adoption Agency: specializing in difficult cases. Discreet. Established in 1987.” Nineteen eighty-seven. Fifteen years of processing children like imported grain. Some of them would be old enough to already be married.

“This will stop,” I said to Goulay. Terrible heat was building in my bones and it was hard to get the words out; the hinges of my jaw felt dry and swollen. I put the gun back in my waistband.

“Nothing I’ve done is illegal.” Perhaps it was seeing me put the gun away, but Goulay had relaxed again, on surer ground. She looked almost smug.

My stomach squeezed. I took a step towards her. She would break so easily under my hands. “ ‘Illegal’ doesn’t interest me. If you import one more child, I will hurt you.”

“What is it to you? They’re better off here. They’re well fed and well taken care of. Over there this girl would be a prostitute, like her mother. She’d probably be dead by now; her sister is. Her brother already has AIDS.”

Well fed. Well taken care of. It wasn’t enough. I took half a step towards her.

“You can’t touch me. You think I run a business like this without the best lawyers money can buy?”

My arm came up, and as she realized her lawyers couldn’t stop me smashing my fist into her well-bred face her mouth fell open and her pupils dilated, and it reminded me of Karp’s fear; I remembered the animal noises I had made, and the vomit, and I didn’t want to do that, didn’t want to be that anymore. I lowered my hand, and the way the color rushed back into her face and the sweat started at her hairline made me think of one of those dolls that cry or wet their underwear when you press a button, and I laughed. My laughter made her change color again, which was even funnier.

Eventually I sobered. “As of today, you are out of business.” I nodded at her purse. “I have your name and social security number. I know your face and where you live. You, on the other hand, know nothing about me. Not my name, not where I’m from, not even how I found out about you. If you do this again, even once, I’ll find out, and I’ll come for you, and you will spend the rest of your life in pain. Now put your belongings back in your purse and get back in the car.”

And that’s when everything went wrong, when Goulay smiled instead of looking scared, and bent to pick up her purse.

It’s heavy…

I understood why at the same moment I understood that I could not move in two directions at once, and that, here, Luz was the point, just as in Norway Julia had been the point, only I had forgotten.

When Goulay straightened with the purse in one hand—gaping as though disemboweled where the previously concealed compartment now lay open—and a nickel-plated Ruger .38 five-shot in the other, I was standing in front of the child. Luz inhaled sharply. The hand holding the Ruger didn’t waver.

All the heat had burned from my bones, leaving them light and strong. A fly hummed a few feet from Luz’s head. I felt dense and supple and utterly relaxed. “Luz.” I reached behind me, put a hand on her shoulder. “Está bien.”

She had been so brave all this time, but now I felt the tremble deep in her little bones.

“It’s all right,” I said again.

“Child, get the car keys and bring them to me.”

“They’re in my right-hand pocket,” I told Luz, not taking my eyes off Goulay. The child was the point. This time I would not forget.

Luz groped in my pocket for a moment and came out with the keys. The Glock hung in my waistband, but there would be no time to use it.

“Bring them here.” Goulay held out her left hand, the gun in her right still trained on my stomach. The gun’s vanity plating meant it was probably the cheap model Ruger had taken off the market a few years ago, because there wasn’t much demand for a pretty weapon with a stiff trigger. And it wasn’t cocked.

My head filled with humming. It wasn’t the fly. I breathed in, deep and slow, until the world took on a dreamy blue edge. All the time in the world. Luz moved in slow motion towards Goulay with the small unsteady steps of a terrified nine-year-old. One step. Two. On three her hand lifted and dropped the keys into Goulay’s palm.

The human body is densely studded with nerve endings which constantly send information to both our conscious and subconscious minds. Generally the brain does a superb job of traffic control, and training can improve this, but an untrained person cannot focus on two important and unfamiliar things at once. When those keys touched the sensitive skin of Goulay’s hand, for a split second her attention was divided: her right arm still pointed at me, her index finger still rested on the trigger, but for that moment, just a hitch in time—the space between a breath, the time it takes for an electrical impulse to leap a nerve synapse—her body knew more about her left hand than her right. And it takes more pressure than the untrained realize to pull the trigger of an uncocked gun.