The deadbolt clicked behind him when he pulled the door shut, and he stood on the cracked sidewalk with his bare chest in the cold and his keys gone and his shirt gone and his phone dead in his pocket, and the Corolla sat twenty feet away under the one working streetlight with a ticket fluttering under the wiper.
He crossed the lot with his arms folded against the wind. The ticket was for overnight parking, thirty dollars, issued at 4:12 AM by a meter maid who had walked right past the front window of Cut-Rate Dental and never looked in. Tyler folded the ticket into his wallet and got in the car and sat with his hands on the wheel.
The engine caught on the third turn. The heater blew cold for a minute, then warm. He pulled the door shut and the lot went quiet around him, the clinic's dark windows behind him in the mirror, the fish tank glow faint in the front office like a nightlight left on for a child.
He put it in drive. He coasted to the edge of the lot, past the dumpster, past the chain-link fence with the plastic bag caught in it, and then his foot came off the gas and the car rolled to a stop at the mouth of the driveway with the highway empty in front of him and nothing behind him but the building.
He sat there.
The charger cable was still plugged into the dead phone on the passenger seat. He'd bought it at a gas station two weeks ago and never used it because the port was full of pocket lint and he hadn't bothered to dig it out. He dug it out now with a pen cap, blew into the port, and plugged the phone in. The screen stayed black for a long minute and then blinked on with the little lightning bolt in the corner and the time in big white numbers.
Wednesday. 6:52 AM.
He stared at it. Two days. Not one. He'd thought maybe he'd slept through a day in there, the way the light had come up wrong through the blinds, the way his body felt like it had been somewhere for longer than a night. But it was Wednesday. He'd come in Tuesday morning with the tooth and he was leaving Wednesday morning without it and the two days between had happened to somebody and he was pretty sure it had been him.
His thumb started tapping the wheel. Tap. Tap. Tap. He caught it and pressed the thumb flat and held it there.
The heater was blowing hot now and he still had the door open a crack because the car smelled like something, and he couldn't tell if the smell was the car or him. His shirt was gone. The shirt was a faded band tee he'd had since high school, the one with the crack in the print across the chest, and it was somewhere in that building or not in that building, and either way it wasn't on him. The air on his bare arms was cold and the air in the car was hot and he sat in the seam between them with his hands on the wheel.
He should drive.
He should drive.
The wheel was under his hands and the highway was right there, empty in both directions, and the Corolla was running warm with the heater on and the tank half full because he'd filled it in the city before he came out here and he had enough to get home and then some. He should drive.
His foot stayed on the brake.
He looked at the phone on the passenger seat. Wednesday, 6:53. The charger cable snaked up over the console and the little bolt sat in the corner of the screen and the time kept ticking forward like it was counting something he owed.
He put the car in park. He killed the engine.
The quiet came in on him all at once, the way it does when you've been hearing a thing so long you forgot it was there — the heater whine gone, the road hum gone, just the tick of the engine cooling and somewhere out past the fence a dog barking at nothing. His breath fogged in front of his face. He hadn't realized how cold it had gotten in the car without the heat blowing.
He got out.
The wind came across the lot and hit his bare chest like a hand, flat and cold, and he folded his arms and stood there with the door open behind him and the dome light making a yellow box on the asphalt. He looked at the building. The front window had the fish-tank glow in it, blue-green and steady, the same glow that had been there when he pulled in Tuesday morning and the same glow that had been there when he sat in the waiting room staring at the deadbolt. The nightlight. Left on for a child.
He shut the car door. The dome light went out and the lot went dark and he stood in the dark with his arms crossed over his chest.
The ticket was in his wallet. Thirty dollars. A meter maid had walked right past this window at 4:12 in the morning and never looked in, and Tyler had been in there somewhere, on a chair, with his shirt gone and his keys gone, and she had written a ticket and walked on. He didn't know why that was the thing that stuck. It was. He could see her, some woman in a reflective vest with a ticket printer on her hip, walking the row of cars under the streetlight, and the window right there, and she'd never looked in.
He started walking.
Not to the front door. He didn't know why he didn't go to the front door — the deadbolt had been unlocked when he left, he'd pulled it himself, he could walk up and push the door and be inside. But his feet took him along the side of the building instead, past the corner where the stucco was peeling, and there was the dumpster he'd coasted past, green and dented with the lid propped up on a broken caster, and past that the chain-link fence with the plastic bag caught in the wire, snapping in the wind like something trying to get loose.
And there was the side door.
He'd noticed it on the way in Tuesday, the way you notice a thing and don't think about it — a plain steel door with a push bar, painted the same beige as the wall so it nearly disappeared, with a concrete step poured under it and a cigarette butt crushed on the step. He stood in front of it now with his arms folded and his teeth starting to chatter and he looked at the push bar and the push bar looked back at him.
He knocked.
Three times with the side of his fist. The sound went flat into the steel and died there.
He waited. The wind came around the corner of the building and he turned his back to it and hunched his shoulders and waited. The plastic bag snapped in the fence. Somewhere inside, nothing. The fish-tank glow was around the front, out of sight from here, and this side of the building was dark and blank and cold.
He knocked again. Harder this time, palm flat on the door, three slow heavy hits that he felt go up his arm into his shoulder.
Nothing.
He stepped back off the concrete step and looked up the wall. There was a small high window, frosted, dark. There was a vent. There was a gutter running down the corner with a bird's nest jammed in the elbow of it. He stood in the cold looking at the wall of the building like it might tell him something, and it didn't, and his thumb started tapping against his thigh, tap tap tap, and he caught it and pressed it flat and held it.
He walked around to the front.
The window was right there. He stood in front of it with his hands cupped around his eyes and looked in, and there it was — the waiting room, the chairs in a row, the reception counter, the fish tank bubbling on its stand with the blue-green light coming off it and the little orange fish hanging in the water like it had nowhere to be. The deadbolt on the front door, thrown. The whole room lit dim and blue like the bottom of a pool.
Nobody in it.
He knocked on the glass. Two knuckles, quick. The sound was small out here in the open lot and the wind took most of it.
He knocked again, palm flat on the window, and the glass was cold and the cold went through his hand and up his arm and he stood there with his palm on the window and his breath fogging the glass in front of his face, a little circle of fog that shrank and grew and shrank.
He could see his own reflection in the glass, faint over the blue room — a bare-chested kid in worn jeans with his hand up on the window like he was looking into an aquarium, like he was the one on the outside of the tank.
He took his hand off the glass. The fog print of his palm stayed on it for a second and then faded.
He should drive. He had the car. He had the tank half full. He had a ticket in his wallet and a tooth in his head that wasn't his and a rent due in five days now, not six, because he'd lost a day in there, and he could get in the car and put the highway behind him and be home before the sun was all the way up and sleep in his own bed and never come back to this place and let the two thousand four hundred dollars be the price of a lesson and never mind the shirt, never mind the keys, get the spare out of the kitchen drawer and drive the Corolla until the wheels came off.
His feet didn't move.
He stood in front of the window with the blue light on his bare chest and he thought about the receipt in his wallet. Paid in full. See you Friday. The same blue ballpoint that wrote 6:00 AM on the first one. He thought about Renata's mouth on his in the back room, the way she'd said it — Friday — not like a question, not like an invitation, like a fact she was telling him about the weather. He thought about the drill sound from the back of a building he'd walked through and found empty, and how he'd turned the deadbolt and walked toward it instead of out the door.
He'd done that. He'd stood in that office with the door unlocked and his car outside and he'd thrown the bolt and walked toward the sound. He didn't have a good reason. He had a reason, but it wasn't good, and standing out here in the cold he could feel it sitting in him like a swallowed stone, the thing that had turned his feet around.
He knocked on the glass again. Hard. Palm flat, three times, and the third one rattled the frame.
Inside, down the hall past the reception counter, a light came on.
Not the blue of the tank. A warmer light, yellow, from the hallway that led back toward the exam room, and it spilled out across the waiting-room floor and made a long yellow rectangle on the linoleum. Tyler watched it. His hand was still flat on the glass. The rectangle of light held steady and then a shadow moved across it, and then another, and the shadows were the wrong shape for one person — too much of them, moving slow.
The shadow stopped at the edge of the waiting room. Tyler couldn't see who it was from here, only the shape of them at the mouth of the hallway, tall and still, and then the shape turned and the light behind it caught the edge of a coat and a hand, and the hand was holding keys.
The front door opened.
Not the side door. The front, right in front of him, and Renata stood in the frame with the blue tank light on one side of her and the yellow hall light on the other, and she had her coat on, the puffy one she'd worn in the parking lot Tuesday, zipped up to her throat, and her keys were in her hand, and her ponytail was down and her hair was loose around her face like she'd been asleep and gotten up.
She looked at him. She looked at his bare chest and his arms crossed over it and his hand still up where it had been on the glass, and she didn't say anything.
Tyler's teeth were chattering. He couldn't stop them. He stood there with his arms folded and his teeth going and the cold coming off the lot behind him and he looked at her and she looked at him and neither of them said a word.
Then she stepped back.
She stepped back into the waiting room and held the door, and the warm air came out of the building and hit his chest and his face, and it smelled like mint and like the tank and like something else underneath, something sweet and stale, and Tyler stood on the step with the cold at his back and the warm on his front and he didn't move.
Renata tilted her head. Just slightly. Like a question she wasn't going to ask out loud.
He stepped in.
She closed the door behind him and the deadbolt turned and the cold was gone and the room was blue and warm and quiet except for the tank bubbling and his own teeth chattering, and he stood in the middle of the waiting room with his arms crossed over his bare chest and the linoleum cold under his socks because he'd left his boots in the car, and Renata walked past him to the reception counter and set her keys down on it.
They landed with a small bright sound.
Tyler looked at the keys. His keys were not on the ring. He looked at the counter and then at her and she was unzipping her coat, slow, one pull at a time, and under the coat she was wearing a faded band tee with a crack in the print across the chest, and it was too big on her, the sleeves hanging past her wrists and the hem down over her hips, and it was his.
She saw him see it. She didn't say anything about it. She hung the coat on the back of the reception chair and stood there in his shirt with her arms bare and her hair loose and the blue light on her face, and she looked at him the way you look at a dog that's come back to the porch.
Down the hall, past the counter, past the dark room with the sink, the door to the back room stood open and the yellow light was on in it, and from here Tyler could see the edge of the chair — the brackets on the sides of it, the headrest too high, the dark stain near the base that he'd seen Tuesday and hadn't let himself think about. The light was on in there and somebody had turned it on.
Renata followed his eyes down the hall and then looked back at him.
She still hadn't said a word.