Nicola Griffith - Stay

We set off again, her arms around my neck tightly enough to choke. If Mike’s weight hadn’t reopened the wound, hers probably wouldn’t. After a while she relaxed. A little while after that, the pain in my knee notched up from burning to searing.

Now that she wasn’t walking, Luz was more talkative. She talked about Button a lot.

“He’s okay. Not as smart as me but he’s good, I mean he’s good when he can be. When Aba tells him, Don’t leave the yard, he doesn’t leave the yard on purpose, he just forgets. So it’s my job to remind him.”

“But he has tantrums.” I was getting very thirsty.

“When he’s upset. Because he doesn’t always understand things.”

“Does he ever hit you?”

“On purpose? No! But once when I was little he was wiggling about and I tried to hold his hands and he knocked one of my teeth out. But it was just a baby tooth so it was okay. It was falling out already.”

“Does anyone else ever hit you?”

“Like who?”

“Like anyone. Like Aba, or Mr. Carpenter.”

“Why would they hit me?”

“Sometimes adults hit children when they’re not good.”

“I’m always good.”

“Always?”

She squirmed. “Mostly.”

“And what do they do when they find out you haven’t been good?”

She squirmed again. “Make me say more prayers.”

“Prayers are boring,” I said.

“Sometimes.”

“Always.”

“No, sometimes they’re nice. They make me feel…” Her arms tightened a bit while she thought about it. “Like someone’s looking after me the same way I look after Button.”

“Don’t Aba and Mr. Carpenter look after you?”

“Aba does. Mr. Carpenter…” I felt her shrug. “He does things like drive the truck and cut the wood and do the farm stuff, and he takes us swimming sometimes, and Aba leans on his arm when we go to church. But…”

She didn’t have the vocabulary, in Spanish or English, to talk about the inability to deal with the outside world, with strangers and hard moral choices. Jud Carpenter seemed like a good man who belonged in a simpler time. “But he didn’t stop that woman from taking you away.”

“He wanted to. Aba stopped him. But I’m going back, aren’t I, so I guess Brother Jerry was right. God works in mysterious ways.” Brother Jerry? “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. It’s not far now.”

My neck hurt, my ribs hurt, I was beginning to imagine I could hear the bones in my knee grinding together, but more than that I didn’t want to see her face when we got in the rig and I drove her away. I walked on, right foot left foot.

“Aud.” That perfect pronunciation. “Aud? There is something wrong, isn’t there? Am I too heavy? We could leave my stuff here and get Mr. Carpenter to come back for it in the truck, later.”

“Luz, would you like to live somewhere else? I mean, live in a big city where you could have everything you wanted, watch TV and read books and talk Spanish and play with other girls?” Would I have left the care of my mother, such as it was, if a stranger had asked?

“Could Button and Aba come, too?”

“Luz, do you remember your life before Aba, when you lived in another country?”

“No.”

“You don’t remember a big church with pretty-colored glass, or your mother and brother and sister? Where everyone talked Spanish?”

“No.” Her voice had an edge to it.

“You were telling Button about it.”

“That was just a story.” Loudly now.

“But if the story were real, about a real place and a real time, would you like to go back there?”

“No! It was a story! I want to go home. I don’t want Turkish delight or cyclopedias, I want to go home to Aba and Button and Mr. Carpenter!”

I gritted my teeth and kept walking. How do you persuade the beaten dog it would be better off with someone else? Perhaps you couldn’t. Perhaps it wouldn’t.

It was about six o’clock by the time we saw the truck and trailer. “I can walk now,” Luz said. I didn’t say anything. “Let me down, Aud.”

Stay in the world, Julia had said, but there were so many different worlds. There was one where I put Luz in my truck and we drove off to Little Rock, where I placed her with social services. There was one where I took her to Atlanta and she lived with me. There was one where we stopped by the truck and I got in and she kept walking, back to Jud and Adeline.

I set Luz down. “You can walk to the truck.”

“I don’t want to get in the truck. I want to go home.”

“I’m very tired, and I don’t want to leave the truck out here. If you get in, I’ll turn it round and take you home.”

“Swear on the Holy Bible?”

“I don’t have a Bible.” I switched to Spanish. “But I swear on my own name that if you get in this truck, I will drive you home to Aba.” Aud rhymes with vowed. Another promise hanging around my neck.

“Today?” English. The language of mistrust.

“Right now.”

“And you won’t lock the doors?”

I should never have offered to buy her Turkish delight. “No. No one is going to lock a door on you ever again.”

As soon as we pulled up outside the farmhouse, she tore into the house and slammed the door behind her. I switched off the headlights and the engine, turned on the dome light. It seemed very bright. I pulled the Glock from my waistband and put it in the glove compartment. After a while I opened the glove compartment again and took out a folder and my phone. I looked at the phone. There was no one to call. The engine ticked.

The front door opened again. Adeline Carpenter. She took one step out and stopped. I turned the light off, put the phone back, picked up the folder, and climbed down. The pain was constant now. I could hang on perhaps another hour.

“Luz says… well, I can’t make head nor tail of it, but she’s here, and you’re here…” She waved vaguely with her left hand, and her eyes were brilliant and glassy. “And your face…” She pulled an inhaler from her apron pocket and sucked hard. I thought for a moment she might pass out.

“Mrs. Carpenter, may I come in? We have a lot to talk about.”

We sat at the kitchen table, on our third cup of coffee. The same stew still simmered by the stove but the room looked flatter and harsher in electric light. Luz was with Button, watching Jud work on the truck. Adeline had watched while I cleaned the grit and blood from my face and smeared the graze with antibiotic ointment. She gave me ibuprofen for the pain. Her breathing improved as I washed away the evidence of violence. I hadn’t mentioned my knee or ribs.

I had given Adeline an edited version of what had happened, up to the point where Luz and I walked back from the woods, and her confusion was mounting.

“So Miz Goulay’s in a car in the woods?”

“Yes.”

“And she’s not coming back?”

“When she wakes up, she’ll untie Mike, and they’ll both spend a fair amount of time searching for the car keys, which they won’t find, after which they’ll have to walk out. They might walk the wrong way, but it shouldn’t be cold enough tonight to do them any harm.”

“But she won’t…” She took a moment to breathe. “She won’t be coming back after Luz?”

“No.”

“And…” She used her inhaler again. Breathed. Another snort. The color came back to her face. “She won’t go to the police?”

“No. If the police were called, she would have a lot of explaining to do.” The list of charges a good lawyer could level at Goulay would be long, beginning with kidnap of a minor, trafficking in illegal immigrants, carrying a concealed weapon without a permit… “Jean Goulay will never bother you again. Luz will stay here, with you and your husband and Button. If that’s what you want.”