Page 11 of Sublimate
“That’s fine. You know, the public library downtown has a nice place to sit,” she mentioned. “They won’t bother you until closing time, if you’re looking for somewhere to go.”
“Thank you,” I said. I was, actually, looking for somewhere to sit for a while. January had gotten even colder than the month before, and the place where I lived had gotten colder, too.
“I’ll get it fixed!” Kolter had shouted at me. “Stop complaining!” But he hadn’t made any move to repair his furnace, which was limping along and keeping the house at about forty degrees.The water pipes hadn’t frozen but it wasn’t pleasant to be inside there for any length of time, and I had time on my hands. I was trying to grow my cleaning business and I had also been applying for other jobs, but neither of those things was going great and our dryer was still out of commission. Kolter had been complaining to me about how stiff his jeans were (due to the sublimation, I supposed) but there was nothing I could do about it…besides paying for repairs out of my hidden stash of money. That meant admitting to him that I had a hidden stash of money, which I also couldn’t do.
I had suggested that maybe he could use his mom’s machines for his laundry. I had snooped while we were at her house for Christmas and I had seen that she definitely had them, but he hadn’t liked my idea.
“Me? What the hell are you good for?” he had wanted to know. He’d been very touchy for a while now, mostly because he had been fired from his last job. He’d gotten back at the boss who had disrespected him by disrespecting her right back—in a very disgusting way. He had gone into her car and peed all over the front seat, and then he’d bragged about it to his coworkers. To his shock, the company had let him go. I thought that he’d been lucky that no one had called the police but I knew better than to say that. I wished I’d known better than to propose using his mom’s washer and dryer and I never should have suggested borrowing money from her…he hadn’t liked that, either.
Anyway, I had time on my hands but taking up a table at a busy restaurant was not the way to spend it. I got up, apologized again, and asked her for the location of the library. It wasn’ttoo far—much too far to walk, though, so I would have to drive and I was doing my best not to waste a drop of gas. But I did go there next and the lady at the hamburger restaurant had been right. This was a nice place to sit, with big chairs (no tape holding them together) and even a fireplace burning real logs. I had thought about trying to use Kolter’s charcoal grill inside the house to create some warmth like this but luckily, I’d looked that up before I’d gone ahead and lit it. Bad idea. I would have been breathing a whole lot of carbon monoxide, which was something else I didn’t remember from middle school science. In fact, I didn’t remember anything from middle school science.
This Whitaker Reading Room was very nice, very plush and cozy, and I felt like I had a little connection here. After Nolan had talked about his last name, I did seem to spot it wherever I went. There was a statue of an olden-times guy that I’d driven by several times on my way to a cleaning job, and just yesterday I had noticed that the marker under it identified him as “Alden Whitaker.” I had also driven on Whitaker Avenue as I’d passed the Willa Whitaker Botanical Gardens.
Seeing the name above the door here gave me the idea to read about the family, so I asked for help and got onto one of the free computers. It seemed like the Whitakers had made a bunch of money a long time ago but they had quit that business and moved onto a lot of other things. There were Whitakers doing real estate, biotech…what was that, exactly? I detoured from my original search to find out. Whitaker Investments, Whitaker Logistics, Whitaker everything. There really were a lot of them and they seemed so successful!
It could have been that they were hiding the bad ones, though. In one of the houses I cleaned, the front facing rooms where they entertained were perfect, but the bedrooms upstairs reminded me more of my current situation with Kolter. They hadn’t taped together the furniture, but they didn’t really have much furniture at all. Unlike my other clients, they only owned one set of sheets so I had to wash and dry them in order to change the bed. And those had holes, too.
But downstairs? They had the fanciest guest towels that I had ever seen! That couple was hiding the bad parts just like how grocery stores turned the apples so you couldn’t see the bruises. It wasn’t only the ratty sheets, either—those people were keeping a lot from their neighbors and friends. But cleaners found out everything.
There also could have been some bruised or holey Whitakers. I looked specifically for Nolan and the first thing I came across was a picture of him with his grandparents in front of their beautiful home, the one at the address he had given me the night we’d met. He was standing in the background, younger and maybe a little ganglier, like he’d gotten broader and stronger as he’d aged. I thought that he was still very thin for his height, though. Kolter was at least a couple inches shorter but he must have weighed—
Oh! I had been focused on the picture and hadn’t noticed that the article itself was about the grandparents’ deaths in a boating accident. I slowly read and it didn’t get too detailed, but what it did report was very sad. They had gone out together on their sailboat and a few days later, it was found drifting. The theorywas that one of them had fallen overboard and the other had followed to help. Their life jackets were still in the “hold,” and I’d had to stop and look up that word (it just meant a storage space). The reporter reminded everyone to wear flotation devices, not just have them available to use.
Then I found “Nolan L. Whitaker” listed as a fraternity member at a college in Florida, and I also found where it said he had graduated. With honors! That was no bruised-apple behavior.
But there wasn’t much else about him. I couldn’t find any mention of a job, for example, and I couldn’t find his social media, which was strange. I had come across the accounts of some Whitaker relatives but they had everything set to private. I wondered which were his favorite cousins, since he didn’t have any siblings to be friends with. I myself had a sister, but I wouldn’t have called her a friend. I wouldn’t have called her, period, and she felt the same way towards me.
Right now, no one was calling. That was because I had run out of minutes on my phone and I didn’t have a way to get more until I had my next cleaning job. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of coming to a library to hang out and use their free internet—but really, the reason was obvious. I hadn’t ever been a book person, not reading for fun or reading the ones required for school, either. I had certainly not graduated with honors, and in fact, I hadn’t graduated.
That was a problem when you were looking for jobs. A lot of them wanted things like a high school diploma or an equivalent, and also official stuff like a driver’s license and other paperwork that I didn’t have anymore (if I’d ever had it).
I rubbed my temples and looked at the wood burning in the fireplace, wondering what to do about money, about the heating problems in the house, and about everything else. I started to feel kind of jumpy and desperate. The last time I’d gotten like this was the month before when Kolter had broken the ornaments on the Christmas tree. I’d been upset and then I’d had that sense of “holy bells, what am I doing?”
I’d tried to describe it to Nolan when we’d talked later that day. This kind of mood often led to me doing crazy things, like purposely leaving my phone on the couch, concocting a web of stories as a cover, and going to eat two cheeseburgers with a guy I had picked up on the side of the road in a snowstorm. It had worked out for me that time because no one had noticed and no one had gotten mad, but there wasn’t any guarantee about my safety in the future. I had to be more careful.
Careful, I reminded myself. Don’t give in to these feelings…I stood and went to the desk where the librarian sat. She had shown me how to log into the computer when I hadn’t understood, and now she smiled and asked if I had another question.
“Yeah, I was wondering how to find someone’s address. Not for creepy reasons,” I assured her. “It’s a long story if you want to hear it.”
She glanced at her screen and then nodded. “I have some time,” she told me.
I gave her a version of what had happened with Nolan, except I didn’t include the bread-making part (the reason that I’d hadto leave my house) and I didn’t include the part about him swallowing whiskey in one gulp (and my belief that his drinking was habitual). I only said that I’d encountered a guy walking down a road out in the boonies on his way to some unknown destination. I explained that afterwards, he had come to say thank you but I didn’t add that he wanted to get the details about what had gone on because he couldn’t remember that night very well.
“He was really nice to me,” I told her. “I wanted to look up where he lives, just to—I guess to check and make sure he has somewhere. I don’t think he’s living rough or anything, but just to check.” I couldn’t describe it better.
I hadn’t ever mentioned his name, but the librarian was nodding a little, like she knew this story. How could she have known this story?
“I went to school with a guy like that,” she said. We were in a library so we hadn’t been talking loudly, but she had dropped her voice even further. “He was a really smart kid but he had problems...” Now she glanced toward the main room and started whispering. “He started at our local high school as a sophomore because he had gotten kicked out of his boarding school. You have to renew a contract with them every year and they didn’t give him a new one, so he was disenrolled.” She picked up one of her long, dark curls and wound it around her finger, then let it drop before winding it again. “He would never tell anyone why he had transferred and I only found out because my neighbor is an admin in one of the elementary schools. Anita knows everything.”
“It’s too bad that he had to switch,” I said. As much as I liked to talk, I was also interested in hearing other people’s stories, so I had questions. “What happened to him?”
“Academically, he was way ahead of us. He had taken things that we had never heard of, like college-level classes in the ninth grade.” She nodded as if she was still impressed and she twirled her hair faster. “But he didn’t do any homework, he never studied, and he never paid attention to the teachers. He didn’t put in any effort but it was very obvious that he was capable. He would ace tests but he didn’t get good grades because he never handed anything in. He ended up graduating anyway and went to college. I bet that he did really well there since he was so smart.”
“Like, he would have been on the honor roll?”
“Exactly,” she agreed. “Your story made me think of him because he had a thing about disappearing. He would end up on the other side of the state or sometimes out of the state, just doing wild stuff. He would drive to Chicago or the UP in the middle of the night, for example. I think he still travels all the time. He has his own plane.”
“He’s a pilot?” I asked.
