I changed the search to KICK KUIPER, and this time got several thousand hits. IMDb had a list—a long list—of her films. Stunt! had a cover interview with “Top Diving and Driving Artist ‘Kick’ Kuiper” from four years ago. The picture was of a woman in a red harness suit smiling brilliantly, bright with that reckless shine that comes only from riding a wave of adrenaline to survival. The caption read “Kuiper on the set of Tantalus.” I remembered that film. The action hero had been too old for the actress. The action scene with the actress had been good—Kick’s scene, I now realized.
There was also a smaller piece, about a year later, another interview, with Kick saying, “Hell yes, I’ll be back. The docs say the pins will be out in a month. Two months after that I’ll be as good as ever.” She sounded like a character from a fifties western, not like Kick at all. I backtracked, and found the news item—reported in Variety and Hollywood Reporter, even a one-liner in EW—about the fall that went wrong. I paid the subscription fee for the first two and read the articles.
“It’s pretty much a miracle she survived at all,” Benton “Buddy” Nels told us. “You fall from a hundred feet and you have to land right, you have to hit that sweet spot. You miss it and the bag flings you sideways at a wall or the sidewalk, hard, and real fast. Like shooting an egg from a catapult. You just break.”
And break Kuiper did, cracking two vertebrae and several ribs, and shattering her pelvis and right hip. Fortunately she landed on dirt that had just been dug over and fluffed for a horse-fall scene minutes earlier.
“They’re saying it was the dirt that saved her, and I understand that, but that’s not the whole story. Beyond that, there’s her superb physical condition. And beyond that, hell, I can’t explain it. There must’ve been some angel looking out for her that day.”
The word miracle cropped up three times, along with unbelievable and inexplicable.
Something caught my eye: a report a year before her accident from BusinessWeek, about product liability and various industry insurance rates. There was a thumbnail photo of Kick, noted stuntwoman Victoria “Kick” Kuiper, and a quote from her about why she wasn’t planning to sue the makers of her harness. “Stunts are dangerous,” she said. “***t happens.” I followed the link and found that that time it had been a broken scapula.
All that work, all that risk, and now she cut fruit for a living. Maybe she was good at it, but did it ever make her smile like the sun?
I looked up. Suzanne, eyes tired and cynical, held out the check. “You forgot to date it.”
I took it. “So I did. Do you have—” She handed me a lime green plastic pen. “And what is today’s date?”
“May seventeenth. Holy shi—I mean, are you okay?”
“Absolutely. Yes, fine.”
I watched as though from the wrong end of a telescope while she picked up the piece of splintered pen that had skittered across the glass-topped table. Where I had snapped it, the lime green plastic had turned milky pale, like the sepals that protect new tree blossom in spring.
“My apologies for that,” I said. “I will of course reimburse you for the damage.”
“It’s a pen,” she said, and bent to pick up the rest of it from the carpet. I got another from the laptop case, took off the cap, tested it on the back of the check. Blue. I turned the check over, aligned it carefully with the edge of the table, and wrote in the date. My hand didn’t shake. I capped the pen, returned it to the bag, refused to look at the photo of the woman who still smiled because she hadn’t lost anything.
“Excuse me,” I said, and stood. “Please see yourself out.”
I stood with my back against the bedroom wall until she left, thinking nothing.
I WALKED TO the waterfront. Waves slapped and seagulls squabbled, as at any other beach, but traffic fumes wafted over the grass. It was crowded with smiling people wearing sandals and shorts, even though it was only in the mid-sixties, and they seemed unreal, though I couldn’t put my finger on why. I walked north, to the Seattle Aquarium, but I remembered pictures from the guidebook and couldn’t bear the idea of being trapped beneath the surface with marine otters swimming ceaselessly from one side of their tiny concrete tank to another. I kept going north, the water to my left. Past the Edgewater— I wondered what Dornan was doing today; I should call him and invite him to move to the Fairmont—past the Pacific Science Center, which on another day would be interesting, and on through Seattle Center, the theater district. At some point I found another park with fewer people. Instead of gulls, this one was full of crows. One strutted along the path in front of me. In the sunshine its feathers shone with a dull, oily sheen, as though carved from slate.
I watched the water and the sky, where cumulonimbus massed on the eastern horizon, zinc and pewter.
After a while, I headed back south and then east, down more of a gradient. For the first time that day I found myself panting slightly. A few days, Loedessoel had said. I slowed, and breathed more easily.
South again, Boren Avenue, Howell Street, where the city began to look like any inner urban wasteland: empty blocks, patched pavement. In Atlanta the air would have felt heavy and tired; here it was light and capricious, as contradictory as the waterfront park.
It was as I was walking past a low, industrial-looking building with the unlikely name of Re-Bar that I realized I was being followed: a white man sixty or seventy yards back. About forty, my height, casual dress, not an athlete but moving easily enough. Usually I was the one doing the following. I stopped, and pretended intense interest in the sign that said, Open at Eight. The man slowed, took out a phone. I shook my head at the sign in mock regret, and started back south, but slowly, hoping he would close the gap. He didn’t.
A professional, which made it unlikely I had been picked at random. Which raised a very interesting question. Was he connected to the people who were steering the warehouse mess, the people who were systematically reducing its value? Time to start getting answers.
I turned, as though going back to something I’d just seen. Once again, he slowed. I kept walking. He stopped. He put his phone away.
I ran at him.
After a split second, he ran, too. He ran with concentration, no backward glances, no tension in his shoulders, but I began to cut the distance. Fifty yards. Forty. My lips skinned back in a grin. Thirty. Soon we’d find out what was going on. Twenty. Then we hit a hill. In five seconds I was breathless and in fifteen he was gone.
It took me half an hour to get back to the hotel. No one followed me. I wasn’t sure what I would do if they had. I thought of the laptop as I’d left it: Kick’s smile as brilliant as burning magnesium. I’ll get it back for you, I’d said. No one could ever give her that back.
THE CONCIERGE, whose name was Benjamin, was African-American, which surprised me, and I realized what had seemed so unreal about the crowds by the waterfront, and nearly everyone I had seen in Seattle so far: they had been ninety-five percent white, with a handful of Asians and a sprinkling of Hispanics and Native Americans. Nothing like Atlanta, where more than half the population was black.