Just For The Heat

My car died in stages, which I appreciated.

First the warning light, which I ignored, because it had been coming on for six weeks and going off again like a hypochondriac with good insurance. Then a noise under the hood like a drawer of cutlery going through a woodchipper. Then a smell. Then nothing, which is the part that actually kills you.

I coasted onto the gravel with the last of the momentum and let the whole thing roll to a stop on the shoulder of a highway with no shoulder to speak of, and sat there while the engine ticked itself cool.

“Okay,” I said. “All right. Talk to me.”

It did not talk to me. That’s the trouble with cars. Give me a person and I can get an answer out of them in about a minute even if they’re unconscious, but a Corolla just sits there being smug.

I got out. Popped the hood. Coughed at what came up out of it and waved it off with my hand, which achieved nothing except making me look like a woman flirting with a house fire.

Steam, not smoke. Coolant, from the smell of it, sweet and hot and faintly chemical. Something in the cooling system had given up and taken the temperature gauge hostage on its way out, and the gauge had been lying to me for who knows how long, because it was that kind of car and I was that kind of owner.

So. Not a fixable problem. A towable one.

I stepped back and did the thing I do at work when a case has gone somewhere I can’t follow, which is to stop touching it and look at the whole patient.

Highway: empty. Dusk: arriving, fast, in that flat orange way that makes everything look like a photograph of itself. Last town: forty miles behind me. Next town: fifty-something ahead, if the sign three miles back could be trusted, and it had been shot twice, so probably not.

Phone: two bars—two more than I’d had for the last hour.

I got back in the car, locked the doors because I’m not an idiot, and called my brother.

He picked up in one ring. He always picks up in one ring. He has done it since he was eighteen years old and it is the single most exhausting fact about him.

“Where are you.”

“Hello to you too.”

“Tate. Where are you.”

“I’m fine.”

“That’s not a location.”

“It’s a status. You should be more excited about the status.”

I heard him move. I heard a door, and then the kind of quiet that means he’d stepped outside so his mate couldn’t hear him get upset.

“Tatum.”

“About forty miles past Dunmore, on Route 12. My car’s dead.”

“Dead how?”

“Dead like it needs a tow and possibly a funeral.”

“Are you off the road?”

“I’m on the shoulder.”

“Is there a shoulder?”

“There’s a philosophical interpretation of a shoulder.”

“Jesus Christ.” A scrape of gravel. He was pacing. I could see him doing it, out the front of that house, one hand on the back of his neck. “Okay. Stay in the car. Doors locked. I’m six hours out but I’ll—”

“No.”

“—I’ll take the truck, I can be there by—”

“Jesse.”

“—one, if I leave now, and we’ll sort the car in the morning—”

“Jesse. Your mate is twenty-eight weeks pregnant with blood pressure her doctor doesn’t like.”

Silence.

“I am her doctor’s second opinion,” I said. “I’ve read the numbers. You were sent home from that appointment with a piece of paper that said, and I’m paraphrasing here, do not leave this woman alone, and if you get in that truck tonight I will drive to you, and when I get there I will remove your testicles with a pair of nail scissors, and I will not use anesthetic, because I won’t have any, because my medical kit is in a moving van somewhere near the state line.”

More silence. Longer.

“You can’t just say things like that.”

“I’m a doctor. I can say whatever I want about testicles, it’s in the oath.”

“It’s really not.”

“You’ve never read it.”

That was when the truck slowed down.

I heard it before I saw it, that drop in pitch when someone comes off the accelerator, and my hand was already moving to the ignition before I remembered the ignition was a decorative feature now.

Headlights swung wide across my side mirror. A pickup, dark color, pulling in about fifty feet behind me on the gravel and sitting there with the engine running.

“Tate?”

“Hang on.”

“Tate.”

“I said hang on.”

I got out of the car. That was a decision, and I made it on purpose, because the inside of a car is not a fortress, it’s a box with windows, and I’d rather be on my feet with the road behind me than sitting down waiting to be leaned over.

The driver’s door opened. A man got down—big, forties, flannel shirt, a face that had probably been described as friendly by people who’d never needed to check.

Alpha. I got it off him at thirty feet, the same way you get the smell of a hospital before you’re through the doors.

“Car trouble?” he called.

“Yep.”

“Want a hand?”

“Nope. Tow’s coming.”

He kept walking.

That’s the tell, by the way. Nobody teaches you that. They teach you about dark parking lots and keys between your knuckles and a hundred other pieces of folklore, and none of it is as useful as this one thing: watch what they do after you say no.

“You sure?” He was twenty-five feet away. Fifteen. “I know these old Corollas. Bet it’s your thermostat.”

“That’s a great guess.”

“So pop the hood, I’ll—”

“It’s already popped. You’d have seen that if you were looking at the car.”

He laughed. He had a nice laugh, and I hated it.

At twelve feet he stopped, and he tipped his head, and he breathed in through his nose.

Every hair on my arms stood up.

“Huh,” he said.

I said nothing.

“You smell sweet for somebody out here on her own.” His eyes went down the length of the highway, both directions, and came back. “Nobody waiting on you?”

There are a lot of things I could have said. I have an entire alternate life in which I said something devastating and he wept.

What I said was: “That’s a strange thing to say to a stranger.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah. Actively. Like an eight out of ten.”

I moved. Not away—that’s the other thing nobody teaches you, that moving away is an invitation, that it tells them the shape of the game. I moved to the trunk, which I’d left open, and I put my hand on the tire iron sitting on top of my two remaining suitcases and I did not pick it up. I just left my hand there, on the metal, where he could see it.

And I lifted my phone with the other hand and turned the screen toward him so he could read the call timer counting up, and the name at the top of it.

“That’s my brother,” I said. “He’s been listening to this whole conversation. He’s six hours away—bad news for me—but he’s also the kind of man who writes down license plates, and he’s already got yours, because I read it out to him while you were getting out of the truck.”

I hadn’t. I read it now, off his plate, slow and clear and loud, and I heard Jesse’s voice come tinny out of the speaker saying what the fuck, what the fuck is happening, Tatum—

The alpha looked at the phone. He looked at the tire iron. He looked at me for a beat longer than he needed to, and I understood, with total clarity, that he was doing math.

Then he smiled and put his hands up like we’d been joking around.

“Just being neighborly.”

“Sure.”

“You have a good night now.”

“Uh huh.”

He walked back to his pickup, got in, and shut the door.

And then he sat there.

He sat there with the engine running, sixty feet up the road, for eight seconds. I counted them, because counting is what I do when I can’t do anything else—it’s how I run a code, it’s how I got through twelve, it’s the only reliable thing I own.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.

Then he pulled out and drove away, and his tail lights got small, and then they were gone, and the highway was just a highway again.

I sat down on my back bumper.

Then I put two fingers against my own carotid, because I am a professional, and also because I could not think of a single other thing to do with my hands.

One hundred and twelve.

Which is fine. That’s a fine number. That’s a completely normal heart rate for a woman who has just experienced nothing whatsoever.

I put the phone back to my ear.

Jesse was still going. He’d been going the whole time, and the volume of it told me everything about the state of him.

“—TATUM. Tatum. Answer me—”

“I’m here.”

“WHAT HAPPENED.”

“Nothing happened.”

“That was not nothing, I heard you reading out a license plate—”

“Some guy stopped to be helpful and I didn’t want him to be. Reception’s terrible out here, you probably got half of it.” I looked at my hands. Steady. Good. “He’s gone.”

The lie came out smooth. It wasn’t to protect him. It was because if I told my brother the truth, then it would be true, and I would have to be a woman who had that happen to her, and I had spent ten years and one entire medical degree becoming a woman who has things happen near her instead.

“Tate—”

“I’m fine. I’m annoyed. Those are different.” I stood up. “The problem is still the car and the problem is still that you’re not coming to get me. Say it back to me.”

“...I’m not coming to get you.”

“Because?”

“Because my mate is twenty-eight weeks pregnant and my sister is a bully.”

“Correct on both counts.”

He blew out a breath. In the background, faintly, I heard Marisol’s voice ask something, and Jesse say nothing, nothing, she’s fine, in a voice that has never fooled his mate.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Give me two minutes. I’ll find someone.”

“Find someone who? We’re six hours from anything.”

“Two minutes, Tate.”

There was a rustle. Fabric, a hand over a microphone, the muffled shape of an argument I couldn’t hear the words of. I stood on the shoulder of Route 12 in the last of the light with a tire iron I’d never picked up, waiting.

The phone changed hands. I heard it happen—the scrape, the shift, the breath of somebody putting a phone to their ear who hadn’t been holding it a second ago.

And then a voice I have known for twelve years said:

“Nice to hear your voice too, Webster.”