She turns back to Caleb, a question in her eyes. He nods. “My brother Elijah and I live up there.”
Sarah looks up at the house again. It’s now completely dark. The tension in her abdomen spasms, releasing a nervous titter. “You don’t have a dead mother in the basement, do you?” She regrets the joke as soon as it slips out of her mouth.
Caleb scratches his head. “Well, a boy’s best friendishis mother.”
He chuckles at her startled expression. “I’m joking! She’s buried in the Sweet family plot on the other side of town. She passed away from cancer when I was a kid.”
Thank goodness Sarah’s mask hides her burning face. “Oh my God. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right; it was a long time ago. Come on.”
He picks another key from the cluster hanging from the carabiner and unlocks the door to the darkened motel office. Sarah hangs back in the doorway while Caleb flicks on a light and slips behind the reception desk. The office looks like it closed decades ago, instead of earlier this year. Wood paneling lines the walls, and a brown leather loveseat slouches below a Robert Bateman print of a wolf. The only modern touch is a painting hanging on the wall behind the desk. Black conifers crowd the large canvas, the brushstrokes unsettling in their violence.
“How about lucky number seven?” Caleb grabs a key hanging on a pegboard, an actual metal key with a red diamond-shaped tag. “All our units have a mini-fridge and a kettle. I can pick up groceries for you tomorrow if you want to make a list. You okay for tonight, though? I can bring you a sandwich.”
It’s a nice thing to do. Sarah shrinks back as he comes out from behind the desk.Nicecan be taken away at the drop of a hat.Nicemakes it more devastating when they turn on you, teeth bared.Niceis how they control you.
Sarah’s stomach is hollow, though not from hunger. “I’m good, thanks.”
Caleb leads her to a unit in the middle of the building. He unlocks and then holds the door open, and she sucks in her breath to make herself smaller as she squeezes past. He’s a big man, taller than Ben and wider in the shoulders. All the more reason for her to not appear threatening.
The room smells faintly of bleach and the burned musk of an electric baseboard heater. Caleb flips a switch by the door, and a floor lamp flickers to life. They could be in any two-star motel in the country. Two double beds in matching salmon-and-jade bedspreads. Cream-colored lampshades on brass fixtures. Simple wooden furniture, all of which are stained the same shade of amber. The anonymous familiarity is comforting.
Like the office, the only modern touch other than the flatscreen TV is the paintings hanging above each bed. The canvases are only a couple feet square, but the painted pines seem to burst out of the edges. In the lamplight, the paint appears almost sculptural, as if the trees are made of thick black tongues. The brutal energy of the brushstrokes is dizzying. Sarah feels that if she were to touch the surface of the canvas, the trees would drag her into their depths.
“Think about what you might need for two weeks and let me know.” Caleb reaches into his jacket and pulls out a business card. He hands it to her, along with the room key.SWEETSIDE MOTEL, the card says.YOUR NORTHERN GETAWAY. “The number will reroute to the house. Feel free to call anytime. One of us is always up.”
“Thank you,” Sarah says, laying a hand over her heart. If she appears sufficiently grateful, he’ll leave, and she can take off her coat and wash the blood-stiff fleece scratching her breastbone.
He takes his weight off the door. Sarah instinctively holds it open and watches him walk to the truck. Her body remembers doing the same whenever guests left her home. It’s funny, the things the body remembers even though friends haven’t visited for years, not since she met Ben.
As soon as Caleb is a safe distance away, he unhooks his mask and turns to face her. He’s in his mid-thirties, a little older than Sarah, with a straight nose, square jaw, and wide cheekbones roughened with dark stubble. In the dusk, his blue eyes are so drained of color they’re almost clear.
In short, he looks like the kind of man who rescues stranded women. Sarah tenses against the open door, the business card creasing in her cold fingers.
“Have a good night, Sarah,” he says. She was right about how white and straight his teeth are.
The polite thing to do would be to reveal her own face and thank him again. But she’s not ready to take the mask off. She wordlessly closes the door and slides the chain lock in place.
CHAPTER THREE
When the truck drives away, Sarah screams.
She tugs the blackout curtains closed, strips off her mask, and collapses face-down on the nearest bed. She screams and pounds her fists and feet, feeling the satisfying ricochet off the boxspring mattress. Her voice scrapes her windpipe until she realizes she’s laughing. Laughing and crying.
She’s finally alone.
When the squall of elation subsides, she wobbles to the bathroom. She washes her mask in the sink first, then takes the hoodie into the shower with her. The little paper-wrapped motel soap is harsh, and she scrubs herself and the hoodie raw. The blood spatter won’t completely come out of the pink cotton fleece, but it fades enough that she can claim she’d splashed coffee on herself while driving.
After the shower, she puts on pajamas and checks her phone. No calls or messages, but no one has this number. The battery’s at 2%. She digs through her backpack for the charging cable and comes up empty. Her stomach sinks. The last place she saw it was in her car’s glove compartment, where she’d shoved it after plugging in the phone at the rest stop to check the news.
The bedside table holds a notepad and ballpoint pen with the motel’s address printed on them. Graham’s number is the only one in her contacts, and she scrawls it on the pad before the phone gives up the ghost. It’s a piece of crap, but what can you expect from a cheap burner bought from the grocery store? She tears off the page and stuffs it and the dead phone into her backpack. First thing tomorrow morning, she’ll call Graham, and hopefully roads will have been cleared and he can drive down. She doesn’t care about Officer Isaac’s threats or Caleb’s kind promises. She has to keep moving. She has to disappear.
Caleb had said there was no wifi, so her laptop is also useless. It’s a good thing she told her clients she was taking time off. When she’d gone freelance, she thought she would miss going into an office. It’s turned out to be a blessing, and not just because of lockdown. There’s no one to keep track of her. Not even Ben.
Not anymore.
She switches on the TV and finds a local CBC affiliate. The six o’clock news is on, but it’s all stories about the pandemic. Businesses struggling, cases rising, vaccines not available in Canada for months yet. No one’s looking for an Asian woman who fled Toronto earlier that day.
