“You think my hair’s like wood?”
“I love wood.” I rolled onto my stomach and stroked her hair, over and over, rounding over the back of her head, feeling the sleekness, like the oak finial of a three-hundred-year-old baluster that has been polished by twelve generations of hands. Figured oak. That was it, exactly.
She rolled onto her stomach, too, so that we were lying next to each other like eight-year-olds looking over the edge of a cliff. “So you know a lot about wood, and about herons and oysters. You didn’t learn that in the police.”
“I wasn’t always in the police.” And I told her of growing up in Yorkshire and on the fjord, in London and in Oslo, while my mother worked her way up the political and diplomatic ladder. Of my travels in the wild parts of the world, working on my cabin in North Carolina: the trees, the birds, the wood.
“It sounds beautiful,” she said. “My parents had a cabin in the North Cascades. It was hot and dusty—dust everywhere. Jesus. It’s basically a desert out there. But that’s where I learnt to ride. Do you ride?”
“I do.”
“English saddle, though, I bet.”
“That’s how I learnt. But I can ride western.”
“I can ride anything. With or without a saddle.”
I can cook anything. I can ride anything. Simple statements of fact. “Even bulls and broncos?” I stroked the small of her back, very gently, running my palms over the tiny hairs there.
“Anything. When I was a kid, I did stunt riding of things like ostriches and goats and llamas. I’ve ridden elephants and alligators and, once, even a very large dog.”
Her backbone was entirely sheathed in smooth muscle. I ran my fingertips down the soft skin. The slanting light threw fillets of muscle into sharp relief. What Kick was saying suddenly registered, and I paused. “When you were a child?”
“It’s a family thing. My mother did stunts. My uncles do stunts. One of my brothers is a stunt rigger. My sister did makeup. My father, in case you’re wondering, is in trucking. How old were you when you learned to ride?”
“Eight. Or maybe nine.”
Downstairs her phone began to ring.
“Pony or horse?” The machine beeped, and someone with a deep voice started leaving a message.
I thought about it. “Pony, I suppose.”
“You suppose? What was his, or her, name?”
“I haven’t a clue.” The voice stopped and the phone machine beeped again.
“You must remember. That moment when… You really don’t remember? ”
“I don’t really remember learning things.” I cast my mind back to being a girl, nine, on a pony on the moors; twelve, my mother and the WAR study; a year or so later in Yorkshire’s West Riding, a horse. “Judy,” I said. “One of my horses was called Judy. When I was twelve or thirteen. She was a hunter. Fifteen hands. Her mane was very pale. A bit like yours.” I ran my hands through her hair. “Yours feels better.” I pushed it away from the back of her neck, which I kissed, then some more, and swung my leg over her so that now I sat in the small of her back, like a soft saddle.
“Um,” she said. I reached around and took a plump breast in each hand. She groaned and began to move.
LATER, she said, “Let’s eat pizza.”
When she went downstairs to find the number, I wrapped myself in a sheet and stood by the window. Eastwards, the radio towers on Queen Anne Hill blinked with red navigation lights. I heard her taped voice in the background, then the beep and deep voice of the replayed message. The sun was setting on the other side of the house, drenching the western slope. The stairs creaked as she came back up.
“You’re doing that noble statue thing again,” she said. She wrapped her arms around me from behind, rested her head between my shoulder blades. “What’s so interesting?”
I nodded at the hill, at the sunset reflecting from the windows on Queen Anne in the growing dusk. “They look like campfires. Like an army camped in the hills above Troy.”
Her arms were tight. We stood there a long time. I wondered who had left the message.
Eventually, she stirred. “Get dressed,” she said. “It turns out I have an early appointment tomorrow, so I’m going to kick you out after we’ve had pizza.” She smiled, but it was brief and distracted. “We’ll do something tomorrow. ”
“Good.”
“But I don’t know my schedule. I’ll call you.”
APRIL. OUTSIDE, NUTHATCHES SANG AND AZALEAS BLAZED ON EVERY LAWN. INSIDE, we all sat on the scratchy blue carpet that smelled less new now, and ten women stared at their copy of the list of general pointers, specific dos and don’ts and miscellaneous hints I’d given them the week before Lake Lanier.
I knew the list. I looked at the women. We’d had a week of solid sunshine since I’d seen them in their bathing suits. A few—Suze, Therese, Nina—were showing the first hint of the gilding common to middle-class Atlanta white women in summer. Many were in short sleeves. Sandra wore short sleeves for the first time, too; things must be going through one of those periodic honeymoon periods at home. She felt me looking at her— she had the sensitivity of a prey animal—and looked back. Her eyes did that brilliant shining thing, trying to share some message that couldn’t be put into words, and I made a mental note to visit Diane at the Domestic Abuse Alliance sometime in the next couple of weeks and chat. From my early days in uniform I knew that simply asking Sandra would send her scuttering back into her burrow, but whatever she was trying to tell me was getting more urgent.
“I’d like to say a word about appropriate clothing. This carpet will take the skin off your knees and elbows when you fall. Soon we’ll be trying out some moves where you will be making contact with the floor. From now on I’d advise long sleeves and long pants. Also, from next week, I’d like us all to be working in bare feet.”
Those who worried about their feet would now have a week to take care of them before exposing them to the world. “Before we set the papers aside, are there any questions?” Shuffling of papers. Silence. Two months ago I would have said the list was entirely self-explanatory, but I had learnt that silence was a bad sign. “Page one, then. The first principle: See them before they see you. Remember the gunfighter metaphor. The Kroger exercise. ”
“Don’t stand and blink in the light,” Jennifer said, fast and loud, in a star pupil voice.
“Yes,” I said. “Don’t draw attention until you know what’s going on. It’s one of the most important maxims on the list. It’s connected to many of the simple dos and don’ts on page two.” Flip, flip of pages. “Take the corner wide. Never get in your car without looking. Don’t walk by large shrubberies—”
“Don’t walk under an overpass!” Jennifer said.
“Yeah, jeez,” Pauletta said, momentarily forgetting her list. “There’s this overpass right by my mother’s that I park near and walk under every day. And these big-ass bushes along the sidewalk. But then I read this thing and got to thinking.”
I nodded. “In England in the early eighties, the Yorkshire Ripper used to stand against a corner wall—or on an overpass—and when women walked past, he’d bash them on the head with a paving stone.” It was something I’d never been able to drill into my rookies those years Denneny had asked me to supplement their academy training: when you blow into a building expecting trouble, gun out, don’t forget to look up. “Always look,” I said. "Not looking never saved anyone. Don’t look at the ground while you walk.”
“And in a public place sit with your back to a wall and facing the door.” Tonya.
“Or facing the majority of the room,” I said. "It depends. For example, if it’s a place where people come and go and tend not to stay long—a coffee shop, a laundromat—you would face the door. If it’s a restaurant or bar or club where people may be for several hours, you would face the majority of the room.”