Nicola Griffith - Stay

I watched myself lift half the hinge and put it against the logs at shoulder height and measure with the eyes, move it up slightly, hold it with the left hand, and with the right lay the spirit level along its top. Hinge a little low on the left. Move it slightly. Nod at Dornan, at the hammer in his hand, swap left hand for right and step to one side to watch while he puts in the big nail, don’t flinch even slightly as he swings, don’t move as what should be three swift blows for each of the three nails becomes a dozen swings, fourteen, then a pause, and on to the other hinge, at knee level this time. Bang bang bang, bang bang bang, bang bang bang. See Dornan’s pleasure: he can do this. Nod. Lift other hinge pieces, position, drop in steel spindle, move assembled hinge back and forth, remove. Measure door. Nail on upper hinge. Pause. Let Dornan nail on second. Pointing. Lifting the door. Holding, maneuvering, dropping in spindles. Done.

And with a snap I smell my own sweat, feel utterly weary, realize Dornan is watching me carefully.

“We hung a door,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, for the second time that day. He waited. “Going off like that. You must have—It’s…” I had never bled on someone before. I didn’t know how to apologize for it.

He didn’t seem to know what to say, either. He pushed the door gently, watched me and the door both as it swung smoothly backwards. “It works.”

“It’s not quite finished.” All I wanted to do was walk into the woods and stop thinking, but if I left the job half done it would drive me mad. “The top of the pintle needs securing, nailing down.”

He bent and picked up his beer, deliberately casual. “You’d have to show me how.”

“No.”

“Many hands make light work.”

“No.”

“Why not?” he asked softly.

I didn’t know.

“You’re helping me with Tammy. I’d like to help you.”

The sun shone warmly, the birds sang, and my cabin was more whole than it had been. I began to pant again, felt my heart accelerating, and this time it wasn’t a smooth machine, a turbine beginning to whine as it reached redline, it was a panicking, soft muscle. Accepting help would be like levering open my rib cage with a crowbar and giving him a knife.

Dornan’s face was tired, but the harsh lines bracketing his mouth had gentled. I don’t know what my face must have looked like, but he nodded as though I’d said something. “I’m your friend. I have been for a long time, even if sometimes I wonder if you know what that means.”

I was the one who helped, the competent one, armored and invulnerable. Aud rhymes with proud.

“You saved my life once, and I know you’ll find Tammy for me, but I know that none of that really means anything to you. You’re helping me the way you’d help a hurt dog. Which doesn’t exactly make me feel good. I’m a person, not a dog. But you don’t know that because you won’t let anyone in. I’ve been banging on that particular door for eight years. Mostly it’s been a waste of time. Even just six months ago, if I’d said all this you would have smiled and ignored me because you’d have had no idea what I meant.”

But now I knew, because Julia had turned me inside out like a sock, and there was no going back.

“So, will you show me? About the hinges?”

Children in the schoolyard ask, Will you be my friend? and they mean it, but this was the adult version, loaded with traps and consequences.

“And then you can show me the other stuff. The cabin. All the things you’ve done on the inside.”

“You’re not really interested.”

“I admit I don’t know a piece of pine from a piña colada, but I want to hear all about what you’ve done with the place, because it was you who did it.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re friends. That’s how it works.”

That’s how it works. He seemed so sure.

So I showed him how to take a picture nail, hammer it part of the way into the doorframe just below the handle of the pintle’s candy cane, then use the hammer to tap it into a U-shape arching up over the pintle and back into the frame so the pintle couldn’t fall out. He did the second. Two small picture nails. Two friends. We stood and looked at our handiwork for a while.

“Now we can look inside, and you can tell me every single thing there is to know about how to make a log cabin from scratch.”

“Everything?”

“Everything. Though if there’s a lot to say—and I can’t imagine it being otherwise—then perhaps we should wait until we’ve eaten. There’s steak. What would you like with it?”

“You’re the cook. I’ll sit out here and think.” Not think. “About finding Tammy.” About being in the world.

“And you’ll be wanting another beer brought out to you, I suppose?”

“I’ll be down there.” I pointed to a boulder fifteen yards down the heath bald.

He headed back to the trailer and I walked sideways down the slope. From the boulder, blackberries, azalea, and rhododendron stretched all the way down to maple and cherry and other successional trees. Julia appeared about ten feet away, her back towards me. She said nothing for a moment, and when she turned round she was frowning. “You’re blaming me for this?”

“You made me make that promise.”

“You could have said no.”

“Not to you.”

She laughed then, that rich, fuming laugh, like Armagnac, and knelt next to me. “It was your choice, Aud. You were ready. I just came along at the right time.”

“Beer,” Dornan said from behind me, and handed me a frosted bottle. “Does that miniature stove work the same way as a real one?”

I turned back to look at Julia, but she was gone.

“Aud? The stove?”

“Yes. It takes a bit longer, that’s all.”

“Dinner in half an hour, then.” He turned to head back up the slope.

“Dornan?”

“Yeah?”

“Nothing.”

He shrugged and climbed back up, those long wiry muscles working under his jeans. He rarely wore anything but jeans, even though he made a lot of money from Borealis, his string of cafés. The closet in his midtown home was full of good clothes; he had shown me them years ago, complaining that his girlfriends always bought him suits, as if he couldn’t afford them for himself, if he’d wanted. I knew what clothes he had, what films he enjoyed, what books he read; his favorite color, his hopes and fears and dreams. I knew that his front tooth was blue not as the result of a barroom brawl, as he liked to pretend, but because he had hit the metal bar with his mouth when trying to beat the Trinity College, Dublin, pole vault record. I knew that his first wife had died of leukemia six months after they had both graduated, before he and I had met.

In the time I’d known him I had driven him home when he was drunk, held his head while he puked, put him to bed. I listened on the nights his pre-Tammy girlfriends had left him. He had been to my house once, the night he drove me home from Borealis, the day he thought I’d been in a car accident, the day Julia died. I had not even let him through the door. And now he was here, and I had let him help.

The steak smelled good, rich and red and strong. Muscle. Cooked muscle. I flexed my left hand, the one holding the beer, and watched the muscles in my forearm swell, then relax. What had Dornan’s muscle felt like when he swang that hammer? Everyone’s muscle attaches differently, to a bone that’s thicker or thinner, under skin that is sensitive or not.

Everyone is different, I thought. Everyone is different. I stood. “Dornan, I’m hungry.”

“Then get up here and eat. It’s more or less done.”

We ate outside. The steak was so big there was barely room on the plate for the red potatoes tossed in butter and marjoram. We had to eat the corn first. It was succulent and buttery and very hot. Dornan admired the wood-and-steel prongs jammed into each end of his corn.