I showered, changed, unpacked, and dumped the dirty clothes on the floor by the washing machine. I knelt to sort them. Hjørdis had packed; Julia’s clothes were jumbled in with my own. I held a soft blue shirt to my cheek, remembered Julia’s sly smile as I had unbuttoned it at the seter one afternoon, remembered her laugh and wave as she drove off down the track, beautiful in her blue dress. I couldn’t bear to wash away her scent. I left the laundry on the floor.
I drove with the windows down, and the humid, sinewy heat fisted down my throat and fattened the ugly thing that pulsed under my sternum like a feeding leech.
The Bridgetown Grill was hotter still, flaring with the spit and sizzle of Jamaican cooking in the open kitchen that ran the length of the narrow gallery painted with palm trees and crowded by fast-talking dental hygienists whose glasses kept steaming up, and by white rastas whose dreads drabbled through their blackened fish and hot sauce unnoticed. Benny, skinny as a rail, was already eating, Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like the red bauble on a blood pressure monitor.
“Jamaican jerk chicken,” he said by way of greeting.
I beckoned the waiter and ordered the first thing I saw on the menu. “Tell me about Honeycutt.”
“Gee, and how are you, too, Torvingen? I gut NCIC in fifty minutes flat and get out here in fifteen more and all the thanks I get is—”
“Honeycutt.”
“Shot clean as a whistle in the back of the head in the men’s bathroom at Kennedy with a .38 at about three-thirty p.m. on May eighth. No one saw anything, no one heard anything. Best for last: he hadn’t even cleared customs and immigration.”
“Someone with access knew his schedule.” Someone with access to privileged information; who could get inside international airport security.
My food arrived just as Benny finished his. He looked from his empty plate to my full one. I pushed it at him. “Help yourself.”
“Not hungry?” He was already cutting the fish into bite-sized pieces, the better to shovel it down in record speed. “By the way, that coke from the Inman Park arson that you were interested in? It’s gone. Um, that’s good.”
I felt as though someone were squeezing my head. “When?”
“Not sure. Oh, this fish is delicious!”
“Then when did the department find out?”
“Well, they haven’t, yet. But I like to check on things that interest me. Sort of look at them, like trophies. Well, not look at them exactly, just sort of test them. Every now and again. So I went to check on the coke—and it’s gone. Well, not gone. Changed. The bags are the same, and the seals, but it’s not the same coke. It’s not coke at all, anymore.”
“But it was before?”
“It was what the lab report said: ninety-nine percent pure Colombian coke. It’s not now, though.”
“How do you know?”
“I just, well, you know, tested it.”
“Before and after?”
“I just took a bit. Really. Just a bit, to see. It’s not like it’s a habit or anything.”
“Never mind that. You’re sure, absolutely sure that what came in was pure, but that what is there now is not?”
“Yes.”
He’d never swear to it in court—why should he lose his job and risk prosecution?—but I didn’t need a court. The leech under my sternum swelled. I stood.
My phone rang. “Torvingen.”
“Aud?” It was Annie. “Aud, you’d better get here. She’s rejecting.”
Annie was waiting for me outside ICU. “The doctor says she isn’t rejecting. They say she has to have another operation. No one will explain.” Her once-round cheeks sagged, and she looked like a sad caricature of the Annie Miclasz I had met just a few weeks ago.
“Is she in the theatre now?”
“No, they’re about to prep her.”
“If she’s not rejecting, why are they going to operate?”
“The liver’s stopped working, and her kidney. And she’s got an infection. But I thought she was getting better. I don’t understand it. She woke up, and—”
“She woke up?” I went utterly still.
“Just for a minute. I’m sure.”
“I have to see her.” Before they prepped her and she ran away again into coma.
“I’ll go get coffee and be back in fifteen minutes.”
“If you see the doctor, send him to me.”
In ICU everything—the walls, floors, bed linen, even Julia’s bedspread—was white, against which crystal red and green lights blinked on and off, slowly, like lizards’ eyes. The air was full of the hiss and suck of oxygen, the peristaltic pulse of IV units squeezing god knows what into her veins, the hum of a dozen machines.
Julia’s hand in mine was mustard yellow, like her arm, like her face. I lifted it to my face. It smelled strange, of drugs and pain. The scent of one who has met that cheating Viking with the great ham hands. One who has played and lost.
“Your nails need trimming,” I told her.
Hiss, suck, blink.
“They must have grown a quarter of an inch in the last few days.” I sounded like a fool. “Julia, I want you to listen to me. You’re ill, but you mustn’t give up. I want you to start thinking about what you want to do when you get out of here. Have I told you about Whitby Abbey, on the Yorkshire coast? There’s a ruin there that dates from the twelfth century, very haunting, very gothic, but the first abbey there was founded in the seventh century by Hilda. There’s a power there. You wouldn’t think to look at it from the outside. But then you cross the track and walk over some turf, and…ah, Julia, it’s suddenly there before you, and it’s as though the breath of the earth drives up through the soles of your shoes and into your bones. I want to hold your hand, this hand, and watch your face when you step onto the turf at Whitby Abbey.”
Hiss, suck, blink.
“Or we could take a boat to the Lofoten Islands in late June when even at two in the morning the sea is silver, like ghost water, and you can read the newspaper without a light. Or if you’d rather go in autumn, we could make troll cream from whortleberries.”
I told her about crushing the berries, about whipping up egg whites, folding the one into the other; how it would feel in her mouth.
Hiss, suck, blink.
“But it might take a while before you can travel far, so before we sail to Lofoten, before you see Whitby, I’ll show you Northwoods Lake Court. As I promised.”
I had also promised I would keep her safe. I touched her cheek, very gently, with my fingertips. Dry now, but still soft. Her eyelids flickered.
“Fuck,” she whispered.
“Julia?” I touched her cheek again. “Julia?”
“Fuck. It hurts.”
“I’m here. I’m right here,” I said, squeezing her hand with both mine, then stroking her hair from her forehead.
Her eyes opened. The whites were pink, but her irises were brilliant as a clear evening sky. She blinked quickly, like a camera shutter. “I’m here,” I said again.
“I’m dying, aren’t I?” Her voice was light and dry, an insect running over a newspaper.
“You’ve had a liver transplant. It’s not going too well. They’re going to operate again this afternoon.”
“Promise me you…”
She shut her eyes.
“Julia?”
She tried to lift her hand. I lifted it for her, put it against my cheek. “When we met,” she whispered, “you were frozen inside. Empty. Now you’re not. Don’t go back. Even if I die. Stay in the world.”
I could not imagine a world without Julia. “You will not die.”
She opened her eyes. This time she didn’t blink. “My mother…she’s not always brave. I hate machines. Don’t let machines keep me alive. Don’t let them.”