Nicola Griffith - Stay

“Halfway up a bloody mountain, half mad, no food, but you remembered to bring these—What are they called, anyway?”

“No idea.” The corn was the best thing I’d tasted in months.

“Come to think of it, there are a hundred things I don’t know the name of, usually fiddly little things. These, for one. And those things they use to nail cable and wire to the baseboard in your house—you know, those double-spiked U-shaped thumbtack things—for another. And where do they all come from, who thinks them up?”

“Um,” I said, around my corn.

“Rubber bands. Toothpaste caps.” He touched the ruby stud in his left ear. “Those little metal things that go on the back of earrings. I’ve had this since I was twenty, never lost the stone, but I’ve probably sent the sons and daughters of the devil who makes earring backs to college.”

That was something Julia might have said. I felt my mouth twist. Dornan tilted his head and waited.

“Julia…” I tried to swallow past a closed throat.

He understood. He went back to eating his corn. After a moment he said, “I liked what I saw of her, that once, in the café.”

I set my corn aside. “Tell me what she looked like to you.” I was hungry for another viewpoint, to see Julia again for the first time.

“Tall, taller than she really was, anyway, because of the way she held herself, like a ballet dancer. When I saw her come in that night with you, I said to myself, Now there’s a handful, because I thought she’d be snooty, you see. It was the way she carried her head. But she wasn’t.” He picked up his steak plate and knife and fork. “Until Tammy came in. Though I don’t blame her for it—I expect she took her cue from you.” He looked up. “Your face is a study.”

I just stared.

“You think Tammy’s body blinds me to her faults?” He shrugged comfortably, then started cutting his steak. “Bit more well done than I like. No, I think I see her very clearly. You, now, you were the one who was blinded. You couldn’t see her good points for her bad. Ah, now your face is closing up. I haven’t seen that face for a while. No doubt you’re thinking, He doesn’t know the half of it and I’m not going to ruin his image of his fiancée by telling him. Tell me, did she try to seduce you? Yes, I thought so. She tried it with all my other friends who didn’t like her.”

“I—”

“Oh, I know, you turned her down.” He speared a piece of steak, put it in his mouth, chewed, swallowed. “So, you turned her down, not your type, but the point is, Torvingen, the point is, she is my type. She might use sex like subway tokens but I trust her in my own way.” He forked up more steak. “Eat, eat, while it’s still hot.”

I did. My teeth sank into the juicy muscle. Everyone is different. “Different people want different things.”

“Yes. And Tammy was the one for me.”

“I’ll find her.”

“No doubt.” He looked at his steak sadly. I reached out and touched his arm.

“I’ll find her,” I said again. We ate for a while without saying anything. I drank my beer.

“She pretends she’s tough,” he said, “but she’s not. She’s smart, and pretty as a picture, and she knows her way around the world, but sometimes I’d look at her and just want to hold her, protect her from everything. She wouldn’t let me.”

“No,” I said. I hadn’t been able to protect Julia. I hadn’t been able to protect myself from her. Dornan got up, disappeared into the trailer, came back with a box of tissues.

“Every luxury,” he said with a crooked grin that showed the blue tooth. “Even halfway up a mountain.”

I wiped my face. The tears kept welling, I kept wiping. “I can’t bear it.”

“You will, eventually.”

“Tell me about it, Dornan, about grief.”

“It never goes away. After a while, though, after a long, long while, life starts to sand it down and take the sharp edges off. Over the years it gets smaller, until you don’t notice it so much. Sometimes some jagged bit will catch you off guard, but that happens less and less.”

I thought of Julia weeping on the boat in Norway, so many years after her brother died. “I don’t think I can live for years feeling like this.”

“You don’t have much of a choice.”

“There are always choices.”

“Oh, you won’t kill yourself, you’re too self-centered, and you’re too stubborn to go mad. So that means you’ll have to cope.”

Cope. A small word for a terrible task.

“Building this house is one way of doing it, of course.” He put his plate down and twisted to look past me at the cabin. “It looks almost finished.”

“The outside, maybe. The inside needs a lot of work. That interior wall needs finishing, some of the floor pulling and relaying. The handrails up to the loft have to come out. I have some lovely walnut I want to put up there, really fine grain. I also want to turn the board gable into one of half logs, so it matches everything else.”

He stood, dusted off his jeans. “Show me.”

I did. I showed him each joint, discussed every decision on materials and design, and explained how I’d cut the walnut for the railings myself, from the sixty acres of mature black walnut plantation that was part of the reason my great-grandfather had bought this land in the first place. As the evening wound on, I took the flashlight down from the nail near the door and kept talking. He listened patiently for hours, as friends do.

Outside, it was almost dark.

“Espresso, I think,” Dornan said, and went into the trailer. I sat on the log, stoked the fire back to life.

He brought two cups and a carafe outside, sat next to me on the log, and poured for us both. We stared at the fire. Far away, wild turkeys gobbled.

“I’ve told you what happened my first night in this country,” I said.

He nodded. “The man who broke into your apartment. That you killed.”

“Yes.” Fourteen years ago. “I never told you how it felt.” A hot night in a new country. I’d fallen asleep naked and woken with a gun in my face. “It was like a dream—how could it be real to wake up with someone pointing a gun at you?—but I knew it wasn’t. Under my pillow I had my father’s flashlight.” Old. Heavy. Polished steel. “I hit him with it. It was easy. I just stood up and hit him with it, and his neck broke. I didn’t have to think, because the adrenaline took me to a place where—” I couldn’t tell him, after all. “It took me to a place where you don’t think. And that’s what happened in Oslo. I didn’t think.”

Julia walking down the street to my Aunt Hjordis’s house, oblivious to the two men right behind her, lifting their guns. Me leaping from the car, smiling, almost floating, getting one before he could shoot—crushing his spine where it met the skull—but reaching the other a split second too late. If I had been five seconds earlier, if I had not forgotten I had a gun…

“I could have saved her.”

“Drink your coffee,” he said eventually. We sipped for a while. “That night you brought her to the café, you and she hadn’t, you weren’t yet—”

“No.”

“But I knew you would. It was as plain as day.”

I remembered. Julia had excused herself at one point, and when she walked to the bathroom we both watched, and Dornan said Very nice, Torvingen , and I said—I believed —It’s all business, Dornan , because I hadn’t understood. Not then.

“Just six months ago,” he said. “All four of us under one roof.” He shook his head.

“How tired are you?” I asked.

“It depends what you have in mind.”

“Before I leave, this cabin has to be weatherproof. That means getting tarps up at the windows. I could do it tomorrow, but if we both worked tonight for an hour or two, I could leave early in the morning.”