Page 2 of Sublimate
I showed him my phone and he squinted at the screen.
“I can’t see anything,” he told me.
It wasn’t like he had a vision problem or the cold had affected his eyes. It was hard to see things because the glass had a lot of cracks, but I had gotten used to them. “It says that your house is two hours from here,” I said and he seemed very surprised.
“How did I get so far away?” he asked, but that was a mystery to me as well.
He came up with another destination, a bar that I didn’t know but when I typed in the name, it was a reasonable distance. It was also behind us, which made it better. I had probably killed enough time so that it was safe to go home now.
So I made a U-turn and headed back the other way. “I’m Vivienne. My mom wanted something that sounded classy so she tried another language. It’s French,” I explained. “She thought that our last name was French, too, but I don’t think that’s right. I’m Vivienne O’Keeffe.”
“I speak French.”
“Really?” That was what my mom had said, too, but I’d never heard proof. “She started with ‘Vivian’ but one of the nurses at the hospital where I was born told her the other way to spell itand I like it. If she hadn’t picked Vivienne, she was going to use ‘Crudités.’”
“You mean that you were almost named after vegetables. Raw vegetables.”
Maybe he was out of it, but he had retained some knowledge of a foreign language. “It was lucky for me that the nurse was there and suggested Vivienne instead. But people mostly call me Vivi, just the first four letters. The first four letters of the other name spell ‘Crud,’ so it really worked out for the best.”
Nolan, Nnnn-ooo-lll-aaa-nnn, was staring out the window and I couldn’t tell whether he agreed or not.
“My middle name was going to be even crazier but now it’s ‘Claire’ because that was the nurse’s name.” Thank you, Claire, I thought. I owed her. “Were you going home tonight?” I asked out loud. “Because I know it’s hard to see on my screen, but it looks like you were heading in the wrong direction. You were walking east and your house is north. Right?”
“I have no idea where I am,” he told me. “None.” He leaned his head against the window with a little thump, and I heard him sigh, too.
“Soon enough you’ll be at a bar,” I soothed. That seemed like a bad plan to me, though. Problems usually got worse when you stirred in some alcohol. “Do you have your phone? You could start calling around and trying to find your wallet. Or you could call a friend and ask for help, too.”
“I don’t know who I would call.”
“Are you new to the area? So am I,” I said. “I moved here from Nevada. I’m from a small town about two hours north of Las Vegas. It reminds me a little bit of northern Michigan, except it was the desert. But we did get some snow because it’s what you call the high desert. It was usually very dry, though. I never saw it snow like this.”
He didn’t answer and I glanced over, wondering if I was talking too much. It was a habit I had, one I had been trying to break. “I’ll stop,” I told him. “My boyfriend says that I yap like a little dog. He doesn’t like dogs.”
“That’s a rude thing to tell you.”
“Yeah, but he’s right. I do talk a lot but I think it’s because I’m by myself so much for my job, and when I get around another human…” I used my hand to mimic an eruption from my mouth. “He’s not very patient so that makes it harder for him to deal with me.”
“Why aren’t you around people? What’s your job?”
“I clean houses. Sometimes my clients are there, but they don’t want to have conversations and they stay in other rooms. Anyway, I’m supposed to work, not chat. I’m trying to build up my business so if you know anyone…” I glanced over again, but he shook his head. “I also take in laundry. Well, I used to, but that’s on a break because the clothes dryer isn’t working. I’d never lived in a place that had its own washer and dryer and I loved it, and it was also a good way to make money. But people don’t like how their stuff can get hard and scratchy if I put it out on the line. And sometimes you get bird poop or bugs, andof course, now there’s the bad weather. Stuff freezes but it does dry.”
“Sublimation.”
“What?” I asked.
“The water sublimates when the solid ice turns directly into gas. It skips melting back into a liquid,” Nolan explained.
“I’ve never heard of that but it sounds like magic.Wouldn’t it be great if things could just change that way?”
“Water does, according to my middle school science class,” he said. He sighed again.
“I don’t remember it,” I told him, but the truth was that I had probably never learned it in the first place. “The problem with sublimation is that the clothes turn very stiff, which people don’t like, but the place where I live is too small to hang lines or put up racks inside. So, that’s why I’m taking a break from my side business.”
I was talking too much again, but he wasn’t objecting. Maybe he was afraid I would put him out on the side of the road if he did, or maybe my warning about the knife had scared him. Anyway, I managed to keep my mouth closed for several miles, up until we approached a small building set close to the road.
“That’s my house,” I announced, although it wasn’t really mine. There was a light up on a pole in the yard and that was still turned on, but I couldn’t see any other illumination in the actual building. Good, because it meant that Kolter was asleep, andmaybe he was enjoying pleasant dreams that would soothe him out of his bad mood.
“There?” Suddenly, Nolan seemed fully awake. “You live there?”
