Calamity

CHAPTER 3

There was a difference between the view of the city at night and seeing it through the window of an expensive car. Rose never had a specific attraction to that, how wealth transformed the character of a window, how the same streets that seemed cold-blooded in the walk would be almost beautiful when you were in a warm state and were going slowly along in them. The lights blurred softly. The noise stayed outside.

Sitting on her part of the car and looking out, she said nothing, as nothing was needed. Williams sat on his side holding his phone in one hand and her ivory muffler still around the other and he scrolled through something she was not supposed to see and said nothing.

That was fine. She was now accustomed to his silence. Within three weeks she had learned to read the various sorts of it; the attentive silence when he was thinking, the contemptuous silence when he had lost interest and this one, which was neither of the two and had no name.

The weather was colder out in the world. She had not even carried a coat as she had never thought the night would go so far, and the thinner stuff of her dress, the one Anna had already stained once this evening was not doing much good in the way of keeping out the cold that was stealing in through the window seal. She tried not to shiver. She did not entirely succeed.

She nearly missed the movement which was so slight. She could feel that burden pressing on her shoulders and she only then felt the warmth of it, the slight scent of cedar and something clean and she turned and discovered his jacket hanging round her like it were the bluest eye in the world.

Williams was already gazing backward at his phone. He had not asked. He had not announced it. He had just crossed the distance separating them and done it, like an individual does something that they have resolved not to make an issue of. His shirt-sleeves were now turned up at the wrist, his limbs were exposed to cold like that which she herself had just been insulated against, and he nowhere hinted that this was by no means a mere transference of cloth.

Rose opened her mouth. Closed it.

Peered into the jacket on her lap, and felt something pinching in the middle of her chest, which she strongly refused to investigate.

"Thank you," she said quietly.

He did not answer.

The rest of the way they rode silently. As the car pulled up before her apartment she got out into the night and turned to give back the jacket.

"keep it," he said,

The vehicle drove off before she could protest. She stood in the pavement with his jacket on her shoulders and watched the tail lights vanish and said to herself that he was just a man, he ran hot and not cold like other people. That it meant nothing. That she had to go up the stairs, remove her shoes and call Tobias and sleep.

She went upstairs.

she got inside, already reaching to her phone which remained in her purse, she did not realize that she had left it in the car.

of course.

She sat up on the rim of her bed in the silence of the little room and experienced the specific fatigue of a man who has been acting composure four hours in a row and has just been allowed to relax. Her feet ached. The champagne had set hard on the front of her dress.

It had been in the meticulous bookkeeping of events an evening a calamity masquerading as an event in good light. She lay back across the bed. She thought about her Grandma.

She wondered whether the nine o'clock medication had been remembered by Tobias. She thought, or even thought, against her own wish, how Williams had gone so still when she wrapped his hand.

She could not hear the feet in the passageway. She did not hear the door. Before she could say jack, she was hit hard on the head and fell unconscious.

At the time when the car was six minutes away to his apartment, Williams saw the purse on the back seat. He looked at it for a moment. Small, brown, somewhat battered on the fastening; the sort of a bag which a person carries when he is overworked and can afford no better.

Her phone would be in it. Her keys, possibly. Her everything, most likely. In the morning he could get the driver to give it back. That was the sensible thing. The straightforward thing. The thing that needed nothing of him, and brought nothing to the cost of anybody.

He gazed another minute on the bag.

"Turn around," he said.

Usually, when Norman was busy not reacting, he ride very quiet, and this is what he did this time, except that he was riding up front.

"Sir?" "She left her bag. Turn around." Norman turned around.

He never uttered anything whatever and that was somehow more than anything. Williams gazed at the window and did not invite a dialogue on it.

The house was a small five storey on a back street, the type of house that was good and well maintained even though it was not new, the type of house that one goes to when they are thrifty and yet still have enough pride to be concerned about the environment around them.

He was holding her floor and flat number in staff file. He had not checked it up to-night. The thing is that he remembered, as he remembered most things, without making his decision. He took the stairs. On the left side of the third floor, the second door.

He knocked. Nothing. He knocked again, louder. The corridor was quiet.

The next door door was dripping, low television sound. He checked his watch. It was not half an hour yet until she got home. She was not stupor-slumbering.

"Rose." Silence.

He felt something queer happened in his chest. Minor and ambiguous in the beginning; an anomaly, an incorrectness in the condition of the silence. He flattened his palm to the door and touched nothing, heard nothing, and the little object in his chest grew to something very much larger.

The door was unlocked. He pushed it open.

She was on the floor next to the bed. Crumpled. Still.

One of her hands extended toward the nightstand in an attempt to gain something before she descended and had failed. In three steps Williams was beside her, on his knees, before he had determined to move. He touched her two fingers to the throat; pulse, yes there, but irregular and turned her face against him.

She was breathing. Sights artificial, painless, yet breathing.

Her lips were of a wrong, faint color. She was clammy-skinned with nothing to do with cold. This was not sleep. This was not fatigue.

There were a lot of things in his life that Williams Orchid had witnessed. He had seen men fall and forsake and vanish. He had been taught at a very young age how the world could snatch something away, and twenty years had elapsed since then in which he had felt no emotion over it.

What passed through him now, lying on the floor, in a little rented room, with her hand in his was not nothing. He picked up his phone with hands which, as he had not used in a very long time, were not completely steady.

Someone had done this.

And they had done it tonight.