Cold (14 page)

“They were true.”

“Maybe but they pissed me off.
 
I thought, what happened happened and there’s no changing it.
 
You can’t go back and pretend it turned out all different.”

“That’s not what you said.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“What you said in your letter—“

“My
letter?”
 
She seemed frightened for a moment.
 
“I sent it to you?”

He nodded.
 
“One letter.”

“Oh, God, I don’t remember—I mean, I wasn’t sure if I actually mailed it.”

“I understand.”

“You do?
 
What did it say?”
 
She leaned toward him slightly.
 
“Did it make sense?”

“Sort of,” he said.
 
He put his hand in his back pocket, then withdrew it quickly.
 
“Shit,” he whispered.

“What?”

“These aren’t my pants—and I left your letter in them.”
 
She put her head back against the wall and closed her eyes, relieved.
 
Her throat looked strong, two thick cords beneath her skin, with a deep hollow between them.
 
He couldn’t stare at it any longer.
 
“But I read that letter so many times I know it by heart,” he said.
 
There were small white circles in the blue carpet pattern and he put his forefinger on one.
 
“It was unreal, how you were saying the things I’d been thinking.”
 
He knew she’d opened her eyes but he continued to trace the white circle with his finger.
 
“Inside, time becomes something else.
 
You start to wonder why you can’t just move back and forth somehow.
 
I mean I know what happened happened.”
 
He put his middle finger in another circle and walked his two fingers on the carpet, always touching white circles.

“But you wonder why you can’t just go back to a specific point in time.”

“Yes, that’s what you said too.
 
In your letter.”

He raised his head and watched her put a hand over her mouth.
 
“I was
so
whacked
out,”
she said, almost pleading, “that I wasn’t even sure I really
wrote
that, and I had no idea I actually sent it to you, with an address and a stamp and all.”

“I got it.”
 
Suddenly he put his hands in the front pockets of his corduroys.

“I kept your letters,” she said.

“Thank you.”
 
After a moment he added, “I think I came just to hear that.”

“I wrote you a lot.”
 
Her hair was flattened on the side where she’d been leaning against the wall.
 
“I didn’t send them except for that one, I guess.
 
I began writing them last summer, when things with Warren were getting very strange.
 
And I was here at work and I just started writing to you.
 
I hadn’t heard from you in several months and I didn’t know what that meant.”

“It meant I was coming, I guess,” he said.
 
“It meant I was going to do like you said.”

“What did I say?”

“In your letter—you said that somehow we would be able to go back to a specific point in time.
 
You really believe that?”

“Well, yeah,” she said.
 
“Not physically.
 
Not like in some time machine.”

“No, but just you yourself.
 
The way you think and feel about things.”

“I guess I do, though it’s been hard lately.
 
Since Lorraine—and, well, since your brother moved out.”
 
She looked up at the clock on the wall.
 
It was nearly midnight.
 
“You hungry?”

He nodded.

“There’s only one place in town now that stays open this late.
 
Joey’s Pizzeria has a new owner and they deliver.
 
Sometimes I call them and the kid comes over on the way home and gives me a deal on whatever’s leftover.”
 
She stood up; her jeans were tight around her thighs.
 
“Let me call before he closes up.”

“He sweet on you?”

“Yeah, sure.
 
They’re all sweet on me.
 
That’s been the problem all along.”

•

Warren opened his eyes.
 
He had dozed off and now he could see Noel behind the counter talking on the telephone.
 
Leah’s head was heavy on his right thigh and she was snoring softly.
 
He still had his hand inside her panties where she was warm and wet.
 
Noel hung up the phone and turned to her left.
 
She seemed to be talking, though no one else was in the office.
 
It was difficult to tell from this distance.
 
Warren drank the last of the schnapps, put his head back against the seat and closed his eyes again.

•

“Jimmy was just closing up,” Noel said.
 
“He’ll be over in two minutes—you should get in the back office.”
 
Norman started to get to his feet.
 
“No, I’d stay down,” she said.
 
“Be just your luck that somebody would drive by and recognize you.”

Norman got on his hands and knees and crawled into the back office.
 
When he was beyond the desk he sat on the cot next to the computer station.
 
“The cops,” he said.
 
“They ever come in here at night?”

She leaned against the doorjamb and folded her arms.
 
“Not unless I call them.
 
Sometimes we get a party in one of the rooms and they come and check it out.
 
Happens a lot in the summer.
 
During the fall it’s hunters on the weekend mostly.
 
And now packs of snowmobiles are starting to invade every weekend.
 
A few times I’ve had to call the police because someone was—”
 
She felt her face flush.
 
“Someone was getting out of hand.”

“You mean some guy’s beating up on his wife or girlfriend.”

“I haven’t seen it the other way around yet.”

“I suppose not,” Norman said.
 
“I just came from a place full of guys like that.”

•

Warren was awakened by the sound of an engine.
 
Across the street he watched Jimmy’s delivery truck pull up in front of the motel office.
 
Fucking Jimmy wasn’t twenty; wore those real baggy jeans that look so stupid.
 
Ball cap backwards.
 
Just a happy guy delivering pizza.
 
A million kids like that get sucked into the Navy.
 
It would be something if he were delivering more than pizza, if he went in there and Noel put her arms around his shoulders, kissed him, then took him into the back office.
 
Warren could see himself driving over there, going into the office, catching her going down on the kid.
 
Snap a photo and give her a ton of shit over custody.
 
Just to make her sweat.

But Noel came around the counter, opened the front door and never let Jimmy out of his truck.
 
She leaned over and talked to him, her arms folded under her breasts because of the cold.
 
Fucking crazy to be out in that.
 
Hair blowing all around.
 
Then Jimmy handed the pizza box out his window.
 
She tried to pay him, but Warren could see that the kid was refusing it.
 
Always looking for an edge.
 
Maybe the kid wasn’t so stupid.
 
He drove off and Noel rushed back inside.
 
She walked through the door to the back office and went out of sight.

•

They ate quickly at first, while the pizza was hot, but after her second slice she stopped.
 
Norman kept going, though he left his crusts in the pizza box now.
 
When he stopped, he looked like he was about to fall asleep.
 
“You look exhausted,” she said.
 
“I could give you a key and you could go down to a room and get some sleep.
 
Maybe clean up.”

“I stink, huh?”

After a moment, she smiled.
 
“Yeah, kinda.”

“All right.”
 
He sat up on the cot.

“Then what, Norman?”

“I don’t know.
 
What you said in the letter really bugs me.”

“There’s nothing you can do about it,” she said.
 
“You got to keep going now.”

“But what you said in the letter, about your father and this guy Woo-San.
 
I wish—”

“You
can’t
stay here, Norman.
 
You
know
that.”

Reluctantly, he nodded his head.
 
He sat forward and rested his forearms on his knees.
 
“Bing, a friend inside, he said if he ever got out he’d go across the border and head out to the Canadian Rockies, maybe British Columbia.”

“Sounds like a good plan,” she said.
 
“Last summer I went across to Soo Canada a couple of times, and customs never did much at all.
 
Same thing every time—where are you from, where are you going, what nationality are you, are you carrying any firearms?
 
Didn’t ask for my license or anything.
 
But they’ll be looking for you, won’t they?”

“I don’t know.
 
I got this van and I just don’t know.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Jesus, you ask a lot of questions.”

“I know.
 
You stole a van?”

He took one arm off his knee and touched his forehead a moment.
 
“I was thinking I could get another car.
 
I don’t want to but maybe I could do that just to get across in something they might not be looking for.”
 
He got up off the cot.
 
“I don’t know.
 
I got to lie down, I think.”

I’ll get you a key, and I’ll call your room in a few hours.”
 
She stood up.
 
“This is
so
strange.”

He was closing the lid to the pizza box, tucking in the side flaps.
 
He wouldn’t look up.
 
There were grease stains on the cardboard and he traced one with his finger.
 
“No, it’s not,” he said finally.
 
“Not really.
 
This is just like I thought it would be, and it’s just like you said in your letter.
 
We’re the same.
 
We haven’t changed.
 
All that stuff that happened didn’t happen.”

She stood there a moment longer, watching his hand.
 
For a moment she thought she would cry, but then he turned to her.

“You really believe that, right?” he asked.

She pressed her lips together and tried to hold on, but the tears were there and she could feel them.
 
Releasing all the air from her lungs, she whispered, “I do.
 
I
really
believe that.”

Seven

Warren became aware of bright light coming from behind him and, opening his eyes, he squinted against headlights reflected in the rearview mirror.

 
Leah was sitting up, brushing the hair out of her face.
 
“The fuck is this, cops?”

“I don’t know.”
 
The lights were right behind his truck.
 
He checked his side view mirror but he all he could see was glare.
 
He looked at the motel office a moment, then put his car in gear and pulled out into the snowy street.
 
The headlights stayed right behind him.
 
He drove slowly through town toward Bobby’s house.
 
After a couple of blocks, he said, “It’s not the cops.”

“Who is it?”
 
She was tucking her blouse into her jeans.

“A couple of kids in a Camaro, I’ll bet.
 
Buck and Pete.”

“Pete, the wrestler?”

“Yeah.”

“That kid, Jesus,” she said.
 
“Last fall he got in a fight with some guy, a hunter from downstate, right in the parking lot behind Sally’s Pub.
 
Took three guys to pull him off.
 
I mean that guy should be on Wrestlemania.”

•

Noel gave him the key to room 12 because the heat was on and it was around back.
 
Norman went outside and drove the van behind the motel, and suddenly the motel office seemed inordinately empty and quiet.
 
The only sound was the ticking noise coming from the baseboard radiators.
 
She sat at the counter and tried to finish the article about the mastodon, but she kept staring up at her reflection in the plate glass window.
 
She wasn’t tired.
 
And she wasn’t wired.
 
She felt absolutely even, and it was so odd.
 
A few minutes ago she’d been fighting back tears, but now it felt like something was moving again.
 
It was not an unpleasant sensation, though it was a bit frightening.
 
She felt on the other side of something, some emotional abyss that was necessary for her to cross.
 
Occasionally a gust of wind would shake the plate glass.
 
All she could see above the counter was her head and shoulders.
 
The sign on the front of the counter was backwards in the glass:
 
!PRAA emocleW