Sublimate

Chapter 1

What was that?

I squinted through the dark and snowflakes, which were falling faster now. Apparently, November was a little early for this kind of severe weather but it wasn’t unheard of—northern Michigan was used to a lot of snow. I wasn’t personally used to things here, not yet.

But I knew that it wasn’t normal for someone to be walking along the narrow shoulder of a desolate road in the night, not here or anywhere else.

Was that even a person? I took my foot off the gas pedal and stared at the figure.

It was tall and lurching a little, left to right and also back to front.

That meant his forward progress was minimal…

yeah, it was “his.” As I got closer, I could see that this was a human man and not a zombie or revenant.

I tapped my foot on the pedal and the car inched forward until I was alongside him, and then he stopped. So did I. I put on my hazards, reached into my bag for some support, and rolled down the window. “You ok?” I called. “What are you doing out here?”

Because honestly, we were close to the middle of nowhere. I hadn’t seen another car for miles and I hadn’t seen another house since I’d taken off from mine. I did live at the edge of nowhere, after all, and I’d driven a ways so I had to be near the middle of it by now.

“Bud?” I asked. “Are you lost?”

His head turned and he stared at me. “It’s not Bud, it’s Nolan. I’m Nnnn-ooo-lll-aaa-nnn,” he said, drawing out each letter.

“Nolan,” I repeated. It earned me a nod. “Got it. What’s going on?”

He looked up toward the sky and I also glanced that way, but the roof of my car prevented me from seeing too much. Then he swiveled and looked behind us at the empty road. The pine trees grew up close to the shoulder and it was totally dark since the snow-filled clouds covered the moon.

He took a moment to consider the view, though, before he answered. “I’m walking,” he stated.

“You ok?” I asked again.

“I’m fairly cold.”

He was wearing a suit, like a businessman, and the shoulders of his blazer were covered in snow because he wasn’t wearing a coat.

His hair was dusted with it, too, so I couldn’t really see the color.

The good news was, he looked great with white hair so he could cross “going grey” off his list of worries about the future.

My own list of future worries had things that were unrelated to hair color, like, “Having no money.” Another was, “I’m only found after several weeks of missed work and then there is a struggle to identify my remains because real life isn’t a show where someone could just grab my dental records, and it would be difficult to find a relative for a DNA match.

Also, bears have eaten most of me.” But again, those were problems for the future.

A bigger worry for this guy right at this moment was frostbite in his fingers and toes, and the biggest of all was that his whole body would just shut down as he froze to death.

Maybe he was walking so funny because that was already happening.

I looked at the road ahead, long and empty until the lights from my car died into the blackness. I couldn’t let him die out here, too.

“Do you need a ride?” I asked.

He lurched to the window and leaned on the roof. “I do. I can pay you to bring me home.”

“Really? Great,” I said. He rattled the door handle but before I unlocked it, I had something to add. “I have a large knife.” I patted the sheath I had previously removed from my bag. “If you try anything, I’ll use it. I mean it.”

“All right, fair enough,” he told me, so I let him in. I already had the heat on but I turned it up another click. In the glow of the dome light, he’d looked extremely pale.

“How much will you pay me?” I asked.

“Is a thousand enough?”

“A thousand dollars? Holy bells. Yeah, that’s great!” I had been willing to drive him anyway, even without the money, but I would happily take it…except, there was a problem. “I can only do cash.”

“That’s fine.” He patted the left side of his suit jacket, but then he frowned. He patted the front of his pants and then angled his hips so that he could pat the back as well. “I don’t seem to have my wallet.”

I sighed but understood. This was very typical.

My boyfriend regularly “forgot” his wallet and so had my boyfriend before him.

Anyway, I didn’t require this poor stranger’s money in order to help him—but as for that, he didn’t seem to be very poor.

I wasn’t an expert on men’s clothes, but his suit fit him very well and also looked like nice material.

He had a good haircut, which I knew for sure because I’d gone to cosmetology school (at least for a little while).

“Why don’t you just give me the address of your house?

” I suggested. He pronounced it slowly, almost the same way he’d told me his name before, and I typed it into my phone and waited for the map to load.

“Oh, there’s no way,” I told him when I saw the red dot and the long blue lines that led to it.

“This is far! How did you end up out here?”

He looked through my window at the pine trees. “I was in another car, but the driver stopped and made me exit.”

“Why? What did you do?”

“I couldn’t pay him since I don’t have my wallet. As I’ve already explained to you,” he pointed out.

"Right, ok. But I don’t have the money to buy gas for a trip like that.” I had wasted enough driving out here in the dark but this had been necessary.

“How far is it?”

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 it and 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, and of 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.