She Shouldn't Have Stayed

The Driftwood sat at the end of a lane that smelled like diesel and salt. I'd been driving since Yarmouth, and my shoulders were barking. Twelve years riding an ambulance in the city, you'd think I'd take my own advice about breaks. I don't.

Inside, the place was exactly what the outside promised. Worn linoleum. A long oak counter gone soft at the edges from decades of elbows. A dartboard nobody was using. There were maybe nine people in the joint and half of them looked like they'd been poured into their stools around noon.

A woman sat alone near the middle of the bar, reading a book. Not a phone. An actual book, thick one, spine cracked. I clocked the cover on my way past. Crane maintenance. Hydraulic systems, something or other.

Well. That's one way to spend a Tuesday night.

I took the stool two down from her and ordered a beer from the guy behind the bar. He was broad, gray at the temples, had the look of a man who owned the place because nobody else would want the paperwork.

"You eat yet?" he asked.

"No. What's good?"

"The chowder doesn't come out of a can, if that's what you're asking. Everything else, lower your standards."

"Chowder it is."

He went off to get it and I pulled my phone out. Two bars of signal. I tried booking a room anyway, out of habit. The nearest hotel's site loaded slow and then told me, in cheerful font, that they had nothing. I called the second one. Nothing. The third one didn't pick up.

The bartender came back with the chowder and a basket of rolls that had given up on life. "You looking for a room," he said. Not a question.

"How'd you know?"

"You got the face. Road face. Plus you checked your phone three times since you sat down and made the noise people make when a booking site disappoints them."

"I made a noise?"

"A little exhale. Very distinctive." He wiped the counter in front of me, which was already clean. "Bad news. There's a fishing fleet convention, or a funeral, or something, I don't keep track. Every room in town's spoken for except one at the Anchor Inn, and that one's got a busted heater, so the owner won't rent it unless somebody begs."

"Great."

"It is what it is. Half-mile walk back to your car in the fog, that's your worst problem. Could be worse. Could be up at the cabin room."

"The what?"

He waved a hand. "Nothing. Ignore me. Long day."

The woman two stools down closed her book around her finger and turned.

"I don't mean to listen in," she said, "but I'm in the exact same boat."

She looked about thirty-nine, but I'm a bad guesser. Hard hands, forearms like she actually used them, a work jacket with a port logo on the chest. Short dark hair going gray at the sides and not pretending otherwise. She had the kind of face that made you want to keep talking to her, which I usually only feel about people who owe me money.

"Crane crew?" I asked, nodding at the book.

"Crane operator. Fay." She put the book down. "We're doing a retrofit on the pier loaders up the road, three-week job. Company booked us into the harborside hotel and the harborside hotel booked us into nowhere. Double-booked the whole block. Some convention."

"That's what he said. The convention."

"Two hundred fishermen or one wedding party. Nobody knows." She smiled a little. "So, the Anchor Inn. One room left?"

"That's what the man says."

"And you were heading there."

"Was planning on it. Now I'm planning on sleeping in my car, apparently."

She turned on her stool so she faced me square. "Here's a thought, and you can tell me to get lost. Split the room. It's got two beds, I checked this afternoon when I thought there might be options. I can pay the whole thing, honestly, I'd just rather have a human being in the room next to mine than a stranger down the hall in a hotel that's over its fire code."

The bartender set down a fresh beer in front of her without being asked. "She's good for it," he said. "Been in here three nights. Tips like a sailor, drinks like a librarian."

"One beer a night," Fay said. "I'm on heavy machinery on the afternoon shift"

"And I'm driving an ambulance," I said. Then, because that's how my brain works, "Off shift. Off duty. Different province. Nobody's saving anybody tonight."

"Paramedic." She said it like she was tasting it. "That explains the posture. You sit like you're about to jump out and start compressions."

"Twelve years of it. It soaks in." I looked at her a second longer than I meant to. She looked right back, easy, no hurry. There was something about that. Most people flinch when you look at them. She just waited. "Alana."

"Nice to meet you, Alana." She picked up her beer. "So. Half of a busted-heater room and my company card. Worst case, you snore and I put the pillow over my own face. Deal?"

"Deal," I said. "And I don't snore."

"Everybody says that."

* * *

The Anchor Inn was a two-story thing with a sign that buzzed. The room was clean enough and the heater made a sound like a dying accordion, but the owner was a tiny old woman who charged us half and apologized twice, so nobody was going to complain.

We put our bags down and neither of us turned on a TV. That's how it started, I guess. We just kept talking.

She told me about the cranes. I didn't think I'd care and then I cared. The way she described working the cab, two hundred feet up, moving a forty-ton container across the pier in a crosswind, her hands so light on the controls. "You don't fight it," she said. "You're not strong enough to fight it. You just suggest. The machine agrees or it doesn't."

"So it's like a horse."

"It's like a horse the size of a building that hates you personally." She was sitting cross-legged on her bed, still in the work jacket, one boot off. "How's the ambulance compare?"

"Oh, mine's all horses and none of them are the size of a building. Mostly it's old men who don't want to go to the hospital and young people who took too much of something and my job is to be calm at both of them for twenty minutes."

"You're good at calm."

"How do you know?"

"You've been calm since you walked in. Even when the booking site was disappointing you." She shrugged. "It's in the shoulders."

I laughed, and it came out easier than laughs usually do for me. We ordered pizza from a place the bartender had written on a napkin, and ate it off the dresser, and she told me about the time she'd dropped a load of frozen fish and it burst like a piñata across the pier, and I told her about the guy who called 911 because his GPS insulted him, which is a true story and she didn't believe me, which is fair.

Somewhere around midnight I noticed I'd stopped being tired. That hasn't happened in years. My whole life is tired. I'm single by choice, been that way since my twenties, and I like it that way, most days, and the days I don't like it I've handled with short flings and no complications. But this was different. This was just easy. Sitting cross-legged on a hotel bed across from a stranger, talking about work like it mattered, and it did matter, and I didn't want to sleep because sleeping would end it.

"You've got a look," Fay said.

"What look?"

"Like you're deciding something."

"I'm deciding whether to sleep or keep talking."

"And which is winning?"

"Tragically, sleep. I've got four hours of driving tomorrow."

"Where to?"

"Cape Chu. Then home. It's a loop. I do it every couple years to reset my head."

She nodded like that made perfect sense, because to her it probably did. "Well. Lights out, then." She snapped her lamp off on her side and the room went half dark, just the parking lot glow through the thin curtains.

I lay there listening to the heater wheeze. The bed was lumpy. The ceiling had a water stain that resembled Portugal.

Then I heard her say, quiet, from her side of the room, "Alana?"

"Yeah?"

"Good day. For a bad one."

"Yeah," I said. "It was."

I closed my eyes. And that's when I felt it, the first time. A cold spot near my neck, like someone had opened a fridge behind my head. Just for a second. Then gone.

Fog off the harbor, I told myself. Old window. Bad seal.

I told myself that three more times before I slept.

I woke up again sometime deep in the night. The parking lot glow was gone, replaced by nothing, thick dark. Fay was asleep in the other bed, breathing slow, out cold.

At the foot of the bed, someone was standing.

I didn't scream. Twelve years on an ambulance will do things to your startle reflex. I just lay there, heart loud, looking at it. A shape. Tall-ish, wrong in a way I can't explain except that it was too still. People are never that still, even asleep, even dead. It stood at the foot of my bed and it did not move and I did not move and I could not see a face, just the darker-than-dark of it against the curtain.

I blinked.

Gone. Foot of the bed empty. Heater wheezing again like nothing happened. Fay breathing slow across the room, dead asleep, she'd slept through all of it.

I lay there until my heart slowed down and told myself I'd dreamt it. Hallucinated it. Woke up mid-sleep-paralysis, that's a thing, that's documented, I've read about it, I've had patients describe it. That was the story. That was the only story available, so I took it, and I slept, eventually, like you do after you lie to yourself good enough.

I woke up to gray light and the sound of the heater giving up. Fay was already awake, sitting on the edge of her bed, boots on, drinking coffee from the machine in the corner.

"There's coffee," she said. "It's bad."

"Perfect. That's how I like it."

I sat up. My neck was stiff from the lumpy mattress, and I had a crick that said I was thirty-seven, not twenty-five. Fay watched me stretch and didn't pretend she wasn't watching.

"So," she said. "Here's my situation. I've got three more weeks of this job. You've got four hours of driving. I don't want to make it weird."