“Nine is a good age,” I said. By then I had realized that although my mother behaved as if she loved me, and maybe even wished that she did, she didn’t. My father had been in Chicago that summer.
Tammy was studying me.
“What?”
“You used to scare me. You always scared me, even when Dornan was there. Always judging, and usually not in other people’s favor. Not in mine, anyhow. But since you got back from—Since you got back, you’ve been different. That night, when—” She squirmed and glanced away. “It was a pretty sad seduction attempt, I know, totally embarrassing, but the way you reacted… I thought you were going to strangle me. You looked crazy. Not the kind of person you could ever imagine being nine years old. You seem more human now. And now I’ve embarrassed myself again. Jesus, it’s hot in here.” She put her glass down and pulled off her sweater. When she picked up her glass again, the wine was a rich red against the cream of her bodysuit—which, like the sweater and the wine, she had bought that morning in Asheville. It was strange, seeing her in clothes I had not bought or lent her, drinking wine she had selected without my advice, without needing me there.
“You’re different, too.”
“Yep. Since I—Well, I’ve learned plenty. The world can be big, and stink, and it hurts if you fall off, but hey, it’s worth trying, mostly, and what doesn’t kill you… Well, it doesn’t kill you.” She lifted her glass. “To learning experiences, even though they suck.”
“To not being nine years old and at the mercy of the world.” Like Luz.
She got up, came back with the second skillet. “Time to fry that bacon.”
The bacon hissed and shrank and turned translucent, and when it browned we filled our plates with it, and corn and squash and onion, and the doughy-looking things that were the ash cakes. I tried one. It tasted of cinders. “It’s good,” I said. It’s easy to lie to people you’re leaving.
I ate deliberately: onion sweet and smoky and soft, corn bursting rich and yellow under my teeth, and the bacon melting in places but chewy in others. And then the plate was clean.
It didn’t matter about Luz. She was nothing to do with me. Sending money was as much as I needed to do. More. I hadn’t put her with the foster parents in Arkansas. I didn’t have to help her, or any of the others—because, oh, suddenly it was so clear that there were others. Many, many others.
I stood up. “Wait there,” I told Tammy.
Outside it was raining harder than ever, thick drops the size of raisins, but cold and hard, and it was quite dark. On the way back, I stuck the file in my shirt to keep it dry.
“You’re dripping,” she said when I returned.
I sat closer to the fire and pulled out the folder. She recognized it, but made no comment.
I opened it. “They’ve been very careful.”
“Who?”
“The agency who handled all this.” I fanned the sheaf of papers on the floor. “Not one mention of the agency name, not a single letter or fax or printed e-mail with a person’s signature.”
“Then how do you know there’s an agency involved?”
“The bar code. The brochure. They’re professionals. Someone is doing this a lot.”
“They could be, you know, just a regular adoption agency.”
“Adoption agencies don’t usually farm out the adopted to foster parents.”
“Jesus.” She stared at the documents. “How many kids do you suppose there are?”
“I don’t know.” Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands?
I looked at the photograph. Only nine, learning that there was no love in the world. By now the agency might have heard about Karp. It’s likely they would hand the girl over to some other pervert, for more money. That or leave her with the foster parents, who would dump her on social services once the regular checks dried up. All about money.
Tammy poured us both more wine. “So what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
The wine was warm now from being by the fire, its taste as rounded and familiar as the roof of my mouth. It would be very easy to just finish this bottle, then start another, sleep soundly, and get up in the morning and go about my business, rebuilding this cabin, pretending to turn it into a home. Why had I hurt Karp? Why wouldn’t he just die? I laughed. I couldn’t even make up my mind about that.
“I don’t think it’s funny,” she said.
I didn’t really care what she thought. I drained my glass and filled it with what was left in the bottle, ignoring her glass. I looked around at the cabin: the fire without its stove, the unconnected toilet, the dry kitchen. “We have to speed up the work here. I’ll be taking the truck and trailer. If you want to stay out here, you’ll need this place to be livable.”
“What are you going to do? You don’t have to rush. You can’t. What about your knee?”
“My knee will be fine.” I shoved the poker in the fire, stirred it about. Put the poker down. Picked it up again.
“I don’t want to be here alone. I want you to stay.”
“People don’t stay just because you want them to.” They never stayed.
“And why are you in such a rush anyhow? You could wait until spring. Why do you want to do it now?”
“I don’t want to do it at all.” I stood up, paced restlessly to the sink, the fireplace, back to the sink. “She’s just some nine-year-old. Why should I care?” Back and forth. Back and forth. I stopped, standing over her. “Why the fuck should I care?”
She flinched, then glared at me. “So if you don’t care, why are you shouting? Why don’t you just run off in your trailer someplace and live happily ever after?”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
Because running would mean closing up seamlessly, leaving everything behind, again. It would mean breaking my promise, acting as though Julia had never existed. I sat down hard, scrubbed my forehead with the heel of my hand.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have shouted.”
“You keep saying you’re sorry and you keep shouting at me.”
I stared into the fire. Stay in the world, she had said, and this was the world I had made.
“Aud?” She touched my hand to make me look up. “I’m sorry I got you into all this.”
“You didn’t,” I said tiredly. “Dornan did. Or Julia did, by dying. Or maybe I did, by loving her. It’s all connected.” Irony is rarely amusing. “Just one big happy human ecosystem, like the woods, with some trees trying to grow too fast and smother the rest.”
“And you’re the axe,” she said.
The fire popped. An axe, cold and unlovely. “Is that really how you see me?”
The old Tammy would have smiled and said, No, of course not! and tried to reassure me, soothe my ruffled feathers, but though a fleeting regret showed in her sigh, she nodded. “You can use an axe to bang in nails, but that doesn’t make it a hammer. It’s still an axe. Cutting is still what it’s made for.”
The rain washed down the windows in an undulating sheet.
“Remember when you asked me why I didn’t hit Geordie? It was because I don’t know how. That little girl in Arkansas doesn’t, either. You do. I know that. But do you have to go yourself? Or if there’s no one else to send, do you have to go now? You could wait until I—”
She wrestled the old Tammy to silence. “I guess you want to leave as soon as you can.”
Tammy had just gone into the bathroom to brush her teeth and I was already in bed when my phone rang.
“Congratulations,” Eddie said. “Your boy’s case has made it to the front page. Give me your number and I’ll fax it.”
“Just read it out.”
“Very well. It’s the usual tabloid banner—”
“Tabloid?”