Page 5 of Sublimate
“No, and I wouldn’t have told anyone if you had admitted to keeping a big stash, either. I was thinking that I could drive you and when we got there, you could pay me…oh, no.” I had just gotten a text. Then I got another one.
“What’s wrong?”
Kolter. “My boyfriend woke up,” I said. “He woke up and wants to know why I’m at Roy’s Tavern right now.”
“You can explain what happened,” Nolan suggested.
“That I picked up a stranger on the side of the road, drove him to a bar, and now we’re drinking together?” That didn’t seem like a good plan at all. “I better leave,” I said, standing up quickly. “Are you going to be all right?”
“Why do you care?”
It was a good question. I guzzled my soda like he had done with his whiskey, because it was a shame to waste it. “Thank you for this, Nolan. Bye.”
He was staring at his empty glass and I wasn’t sure that he’d heard me, but I had to go. I ran to my car but it was too little, too late. I had been thinking those things about the Constitution, but what did some olden-times parchment matter when my present-day boyfriend was at home with the potential to wake up and look for me? Which he had done!
And when I got back there, things with Kolter went as badly as I had expected. I apologized but I also put myself in his shoes and knew that I would have been very upset if he’d gone out withanother woman, although I wouldn’t have reacted in the same way.
This situation wouldn’t happen to him, though, because he never would have stopped to help someone like I had done. It wasn’t something that I was ever going to do again. First, it wasn’t likely that I would encounter another half-frozen man walking along a lonely country road, and if I did….well, now I had proof of my boyfriend’s reaction to the situation. He wasn’t able to accept that I was telling the truth and I had no way of convincing him. I thought that maybe, if I’d known Nolan’s last name, I might have tried to find him to ask him to back me up, to make assurances that nothing sexy had happened. It had been the farthest thing from our minds!
Except I had noticed that he was very good-looking. He had carried that off despite the snow melt on his thick hair, and despite how his blue-grey eyes were very bloodshot. But those thoughts about his appearance had been secondary to the other stuff that was going on, like how he’d been lost and maybe dying.
And I didn’t know his last name because I really didn’t know anything about him, besides that he’d been engaged, wore a nice suit, and wasn’t careful with his belongings. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. Kolter wasn’t interested in hearing an explanation, and it did sound so dumb when I tried to say that I had only gone to a bar because of inalienable rights and the pursuit of happiness. Those things might not have been the Constitution anyway. I hadn’t learned about sublimation and I didn’t remember the important historical documents very well, either. I hadn’t actually done very much in my years at school.
Weeks later, things had blown over (as they usually did). I had mostly forgotten that Nolan guy, although I did sometimes think about him and wonder if he’d made it home all right. After I got my phone back, I looked for news reports to see if someone with his name had been found frozen in the woods. I also searched around local sites for information about an unidentified dead man and I didn’t find anything, but maybe he didn’t have dental records either? Also, this area did remind me of where I’d grown up, in that there was a lot of land with no one on it. Back home, we didn’t have all the forests that were around here, but you could get the same feeling of being the last person on Earth. You could disappear just as easily, and no one would ever notice.
When I thought back about him, though, I realized that he didn’t seem like the type who might disappear without someone sitting up and asking what had happened. A person with his haircut was keeping it up. His stylist might wonder, “Where has Nolan gone? He’s usually in here at least every three weeks.” And a person who got his hair cut so often probably had other routines, like picking up suits from the dry cleaner’s or getting groceries delivered. He probably went to the dentist on a regular basis, too.
I wondered if he had a family. Were there people besides the ex-fiancée, people he loved and who would have been sad if he had frozen in the woods? Were there people he texted with and updated on his life? Did they know that he was doing things like drinking so much that he passed out in a car in the actual middle of nowhere, with no way to get back home? But he had said that even if he’d had his phone, he had no one to call.
I also looked at the house at the address he’d given me. It was so pretty in the pictures, pretty and very large, and the estimates about how much it was worth made my eyes widen and I may even have whistled. Someone sitting on all that money should have had plenty of people to keep track of him. But if I hadn’t driven past him that night, he could have lain down in the snow and that would have been the end of the story.
It was the end of my story with him, anyway. Nnnn-ooo-lll-aaa-nnn No-Name was a strange little flash, interesting and different but quickly disappearing. Kind of like a shooting star.
Meanwhile, I was here on the ground. But I did look up sometimes.
Chapter 2
“What the hell is this?”
“It’s a Christmas tree,” I said, and Kolter turned to me, furious.
“I know goddamn well what it is! Why did you put it in my living room? We’re going to my mom’s house for the holiday.”
“I thought we could have our own little celebration here, too,” I said. “I cut that tree down. It didn’t cost anything.” It was just a small, gangly one that had been growing in the shade of enough bigger siblings that it wasn’t ever going to get tall itself.
“But you bought the stand, didn’t you?” He picked up the tree by one of its top branches and shook it, and water sloshed onto the floor. “You bought those ornaments.”
“I made some,” I told him. Now most of them had fallen off and broken.
“It’s a waste. It takes up too much room. Get it out of here,” he ordered. He left and I heard his car start. Well, first it madea few angry noises, but then the engine finally did turn over. I got a towel and wiped up the water, and I also picked up the ornaments. I rehung the ones that weren’t broken and gathered the pieces of the ones that were, because maybe I could fix them. I was very skilled with glue and I’d used it on furniture, shoes, my bumper...it was so versatile.
I carefully carried the tree and put it into the hall closet, where I kept my clothes. I could bring it out later when Kolter was in a better mood and not so inclined to arguing. He’d gotten in trouble today at his job, over what, I wasn’t sure. But I thought that he might like the tree when he was feeling happier in general.
He’d come home in a terrible temper, ranting about his boss, and everything I’d done had made him angrier. Was he hungry? Not for a damn sandwich! How about a beer? Didn’t I know that was the last can he had? I offered a shoulder massage, but he didn’t want me to touch him, and I said I could—
“Will you shut up, Vivi? You yap like a damn dog! Shut up and leave me alone,” he’d told me, so I had. But then he’d spotted the tree, which I hadn’t hidden or anything. It was sitting in the living room and that wasn’t large, but he’d overlooked it until he’d thrown himself down on the couch. And it had made him madder than anything else! It was because he was always looking out for signs of disrespect toward his mother, and he had thought that me getting a tree was one of those. He’d probably believed that I was sending a message that I could do things better, which was what he thought his coworkers did, too.
I actually did have a problem with his mother but I never, ever showed her an ounce of disrespect (I knew better than to do something like that). I didn’t care if she ignored me and spoke only to her son, and I didn’t even care that she made remarks about me in my hearing (rude remarks). My problem was how she treated Kolter, which was like he was some kind of royalty. Because she put him on a pedestal, he carried around the expectation that everyone else in the world needed to behave the same way. She let him do whatever he wanted with her house, her truck, and her bank account, and he—
