The Cooling

The windows were fogged. The cabin smelled of sweat and rain and wet wool. Sarah Lahey's cheek was still against the side of Karl Jenkins's neck, and her breath was slowing, and the small warm place between them was the only thing in the car that had not yet started to cool.

The cold gear turned in Karl without permission. He felt it go the way a man feels a bone click back into place — a small mechanical adjustment that was neither painful nor pleasant and that, once it had happened, could not be undone. The thing in his chest that had been open a minute ago closed. Not slowly. Simply closed.

Sarah felt the change before he moved. She did not know what the change was. She knew only that the man whose heartbeat had been under her ear a few seconds earlier was no longer entirely the same man, and that the small warm place between them had started to cool from his side first. She sat up. She did not want to. She did it because her body had been reading other people's bodies for as long as she had been alive, and it would not lie to her now even if she wanted it to.

She gave him a smile that was smaller than the one she had been preparing, and she offered him the word still in the form of a tease about Gladys, and she understood as she was saying it that the tease was the last small offering she was going to have the courage to make.

Behind Karl's closed eyes the name arrived whole. It rose from the same place the silver hair in the cubicle had come from that afternoon — a knowing without a source, a certainty his profession had no name for and his conscious mind had not summoned. Beatrix. He did not know a Beatrix. He knew a Beatrix. The thing in his chest that had just closed took hold of it the way a drowning man takes hold of a piece of wood.

When he opened his eyes he did not look at Sarah. He said no. He said he thought it was time to pay Beatrix a visit. The name Beatrix landed in the passenger seat beside him with a weight Karl did not see Sarah absorb, because he did not turn his head to see it.

He reached behind his seat for the duffel bag.

Sarah watched him do it. She had not known the bag was there. The bag had not been there in the world she had been living in an hour earlier, because the world an hour earlier had been a world that did not contain a duffel bag. It contained one now. Karl pulled from it a fresh grey t-shirt, clean and dry and folded, and Sarah understood in the moment she saw it that Karl Jenkins had left the house that morning packing a change of clothes against the possibility of a day he would need one — and that the t-shirt had been behind his seat at Myrtle Forest, and at the Berriedale house the morning before, and every other time his hand had touched her in any capacity that was not the job. The t-shirt was the small domestic proof that wherever Karl Jenkins was at any given moment, he had already prepared to leave.

He pulled the ruined shirt off and the fresh one on. The fabric covered the marks her nails had left on his chest. He told her he needed to go alone.

Then he reached across her.

His arm brushed the front of her chest as he extended it, and his hand found the handle of the passenger door, and he pushed it open. The gesture inverted the one his hand had made at the end of Myrtle Forest Road, when he had closed it around her arm to keep her from walking into the trees. That hand had been holding her back. This one was letting her out.

Sarah understood the sentence completely.

She gathered her clothes from the footwell with hands that were steadier than her face. She said the only thing her voice would give her — that he could be such a prick sometimes — and she got out of the car and slammed the door behind her with enough force that the carpark gave her the echo back off the far wall of the Entertainment Centre. Karl did not look at her. He put the key in the ignition. The engine started on the first try.

She watched his taillights grow smaller. She watched them reach the exit and turn onto the highway and join the small red stream of other cars and disappear.

Then she was alone in the vast empty carpark with her shirt still open at the front and her zip refusing her fingers and the bruises on her hips beginning to come up. She finished dressing because there was no one left to help her. She yelled something into the dark that she would not remember the words of afterwards, and the carpark took the words and gave her nothing back, and then the tears came in earnest, and she started walking in the general direction of her own house — which was less than ten minutes away on foot, which was the small mercy of geography.

A kilometre away on the highway running north, Karl Jenkins was driving toward an address he could not explain how he had come to know, with the name of a woman in his head he had met before, and a coldness in his chest where a minute earlier something else had been.