Page 32 of Her Ice Queen

"Thank you, Joski."

"Don't thank me," he said, tired, an old joke with the joke removed. "Just drive safe."

The 110 north was twenty-four minutes at that hour. She did it in twenty-one, past the arena glow and the taco trucks and out of the districts where the buildings knew Carla's name, and the whole drive she kept both hands on the wheel and conducted, in her head, in Maria's voice because her own had stopped being reliable, the reasonable briefing: she is sitting alone at a counter. She is drinking one drink among strangers. You will sit down next to her, and it will be the conversation twelve days overdue, and it will be hard, and it will be fine, because the woman read you a price list at a window and paid every line of it in public, and people who pay like that don't.

She didn't let herself finish the sentence, superstitiously, and drove the last mile with the windows down, the night smelling of cut grass and exhaust and somebody's late carne asada, ordinary Los Angeles going about its ten o'clock while her whole life narrowed to a pink sign up ahead on the right.

The bar had the neon Joski promised, pink, buzzing, the second vowel dark. Two motorcycles and a Caltrans truck out front, and a black German sedan parked half a block down at an angle no valet would have forgiven, and the sight of the familiar plate did a strange double thing in Indra's chest, relief and dread arriving together through the same door.

She crossed the street. Pulled the handle. Stepped into warm beer-smelling dark, jukebox playing an old song, pool balls clicking somewhere back, and looked left along the counter to its dead end, where a woman with dark hair loose around her shoulders sat with her back to the wall.

Found her. The relief got one full second of life.

Then the rest of the frame arrived.

There was a second woman. Standing close, inside the distance strangers keep, hip against the counter's end, one hand up and cupping Carla's jaw, and their mouths together. Kissing her. Being kissed. From the door, in the pink light, at a range of thirty feet, Indra watched the kiss exist, watched it continue existing, whole seconds of it, and watched Carla's hands stay on the bar on either side of her glass, not touching the woman, not pulling her in, and not, for one second, two, three, pushing her away.

Then Carla's palm came up between them and she turned her face aside and said a word Indra couldn't hear, and it didn't matter at all, because the arithmetic was done. However this kiss had started, it had been allowed to run three seconds past the version where Carla Denver stopped things she didn't want. Indra had watched this woman end a phone call with a national outlet in one syllable. She had watched her freeze a boardroom by lowering a pen. Speed was her native language. And she'd sat still inside a stranger's hands with a face Indra knew from the inside, and let it happen at the exact hour she'd texted something's come up, in the one room in Los Angeles she'd hidden from everyone who loved her.

Her hands went cold. Sound arrived from a distance, the jukebox, a laugh at the pool table, and Indra's body ran its old cold protocol, the one from another apartment and another life: the stillness, the sensation of stepping three feet back from her own eyes, the hands going quiet at her sides. She did not throw anything. She did not cry. She would examine both facts later.

Carla turned. Aiming for the room in general, maybe, or the door, or air. And found Indra standing in it.

Indra watched it hit. Watched the whole system fail at once, the color leaving, the lips parting on a breath that went nowhere, the eyes going from confusion to recognition to a horror so total and so instant it would have moved her, an hour ago. It was the most naked she'd ever seen Carla's face, more naked than the club, more naked than the candle and the couch and the story about the Tuesday. Complete transparency, arriving exactly one kiss too late.

The stranger had stepped back, hands lifting, reading the room's new physics, saying words at both of them that neither of them heard. Carla came off the stool. "Indra." One word, cracked down the middle, and a step forward, hand rising.

Indra didn't move, and the not-moving stopped Carla harder than a wall.

The strange thing, she'd think later, was how quiet everything got inside. Twelve days of static and dread, gone; the questions, gone; even the pain standing off to one side, respectful, waiting to be processed at a decent hour. What remained was clarity, cold and flat and perfectly lit, and when she spoke, her voice came out cool and level, and it did not shake at all.

"Don't worry. I know exactly what this is." She looked at the stool, the glass, the stranger already dissolving toward the pool tables, the whole sad diorama of it. "I spent two years being the person someone runs to when they're scared of how much they want me. Two years being the safe room somebody else panicked in. I told myself never again, and I meant it, and then you read me a price list at a window and I thought, this one pays." She took one breath, the only one that cost her. "I'm not doing it again. Not even for you."

"Indra, please, it isn't⁠—"

"It is, though," Indra said, gently, which was the worst part, she'd understand later, gentleness deployed at execution range. "It's exactly. You knew where the door was, Carla. You've never once needed me to tell you where a door is."

And she walked out. Through the door, into the warm night, past the pink neon spelling its broken word, and behind her she heard the stool legs scrape and her own name once more in that cracked-open voice, and she kept walking, because the alternative was stopping, and stopping was the person she used to be.

She sat in the car because her hands weren't drivable yet.

Through the bar's front window, framed in pink like a photograph she would never be able to delete, she could see the counter's dead end. The stranger was gone, all the way gone, vanished into whatever story she'd tell about tonight. Carla hadn't followed Indra out. That fact sat where it sat. She had made it three steps from the stool, by the geometry, and stopped, and now she stood in the middle of the room facing the door, not moving, while the bartender said what bartenders say and got nothing back. Just standing, in the pink dark among strangers, staring at the door as though the door were the last thing that had happened to her.

Indra watched for one minute. Gave herself exactly that, sixty seconds, timed, a professional to the end. There had been a time, twenty minutes ago, when the sight of Carla Denver standing wrecked in a dive bar would have been an emergency her whole body answered. The body still wanted to. That was the vicious part; the wanting didn't care about the arithmetic, the wanting would have her back inside in eight seconds flat, holding what was left, being the safe room again, being the place another terrified woman went to put down what she couldn't carry, and being put down herself in due course, as she had been before, two years, item by item, until she'd fit in a carry-on.

Never again. She'd sworn it in a parking lot in another summer. The oath was old but it started on the first crank.

At sixty-one seconds, Indra started the car.

She drove back down the 110 under the lit interchanges, both hands on the wheel, ten and two, and she didn't cry on the freeway because the freeway deserved her full attention, and she didn't cry in the parking garage because garages echo, and she made it up her own stairs and through her own door and got the deadbolt turned, and stood in her small dark apartment that no one had run a bath in, and the quiet finally came off its leash.

She slid down the door until she was sitting on her own floor, and let it.

It came out of her in the order grief keeps: the body first, shaking she watched from a cold distance with detached interest, hands, then shoulders, then the breath going ragged in the dark. Then the pictures, unsorted, in whatever sequence the projectionist chose. The stranger's hand on the jaw she had held on a terrace. The pins coming out of dark hair one by one onto a nightstand, click, click, click. You'd be choosing me, knowing exactly who I am. The pink neon spelling its broken word. Her own name cracking down the middle in a voice she knew under forty headings and never once under this one.

And then, last, because her mind saved its cruelties for the end of the reel: the bath. Some anonymous brutal Thursday in another lifetime, three weeks ago, Carla reading her shoulders across a kitchen and running the water without one question, and Indra lying in it thinking no one had ever managed her before, thinking she'd finally found the country where wanting things was legal. She'd stood in her own bathroom that week, toothbrush in hand, and recognized herself. A woman repossessed by her own life. Two months, that version had lasted. She sat on the floor of her small dark apartment and could not decide which was worse, that it had been taken back, or that some flat cold voice at the bottom of her, the one with Renata's fingerprints still on it, was saying told you, told you, they always come for the wanting eventually, you knew the invoice was coming, and here it is, itemized.

"No," Indra said out loud, to the voice, to the dark apartment, to nobody. Her own voice arrived wrecked but recognizable. "I got to want it. That part was real. She doesn't get to have been fake. She only gets to have run."