Stay by Nicola Griffith Page A

an apoplectic talk show host ranting about tax reform, a commercial for wireless phone service that degenerated into the low-toned gabble of federally regulated footnotes. I kept trying, and eventually plumped for some college station that sounded as though it was broadcasting from the bottom of a disused well. “Not exactly to my taste. Feel free to change the station.” The thigh-picking slowed, but we listened to well-bottom music until the weak signal started to fade. “Find something else, will you?”
    She found something that called itself adult contemporary and sounded as though its artists, mostly women with little-girl voices, lived on Prozac. Still, it was a decision.
    “Maybe we should stop at the next town and buy some CDs.” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d shopped for something unnecessary.
    I drove for another hour. Tammy napped. When the adult contemporary signal faded, she sat up and changed the station without prompting. Mommy’s little helper.
    At Wytheville, just north of the North Carolina border, I left the interstate and took us onto the Blue Ridge Parkway: more than two hundred miles without a single traffic light or fast food franchise. With a speed limit of forty-five miles per hour—less on some of the hairpin bends—leaving the interstate meant adding at least two hours to our journey, but it was an essential buffer zone between where Tammy had been and where she was going. I turned off the radio and opened both windows.
    “Breathe,” I said. Valleys ran long and deep to either side, and cows grazed in pastures framed by split-log fences. The air was rich and cool and edged with life.
    “It’s cold.”
    “Put your sweatshirt on. We’re two thousand feet up a mountain.”
    “You live up a mountain?”
    “A valley halfway up a mountain, but we’ve a couple of hundred miles to go.” Somehow, in four or five hours, I had to show her how much there was here to appreciate. She had to know before she got there how special this place was. It had to become special to her, too, otherwise she would trample all over the fragile peace of my refuge. She squirmed into her sweatshirt and we drove for a while in silence.
    “These are the Blue Ridge Mountains.”
    She nodded, but didn’t say anything.
    “Part of the Appalachians, one of the oldest mountain ranges on earth. They’re so old that they appeared before most animal and plant life existed.”
    “No fossils,” she said after a moment.
    “Right. Lots of gemstones, though.” Smarter than she looks, Dornan had said. “Some of the rivers are even older than the mountains.”
    She didn’t seem interested in the apparent paradox. Mountains form in geological time, in slow motion. A river that exists before the mountain forms will cut through the new, soft rock to get to the sea. Most of those seas were long gone, but the rivers remain. We passed a sign for Blowing Rock, the head of the New River. Stupid name for the oldest river on the continent.
    “It’s about time for lunch. We could stop and eat and take a look at the river.”
    She nodded, though I’m not sure whether it was the food or the river that appealed.
    Blowing Rock is a small town with a lot of money whose inhabitants had managed to keep the ugly face of tourism from their doors. We ate fettucini in a café under a bright awning, surrounded by window boxes spilling flowers; sun warmed those wood and fieldstone houses not sheltered by maple and poplar.
    Tammy spent more time watching relaxed, clean, happy people walk past the window than eating.
    “Is this real?” she asked eventually.
    I nodded, and for a moment I thought she would burst into tears, but she just shook her head.
    When we got back in the car, she watched the scenery more intently, and once pointed to a speck hanging high over the canopy. “What’s that?”
    “Hawk,” I said. “I can’t tell what kind.”
    She was silent the rest of the drive, and I left her to her thoughts, because now