Cold by John Smolens

Leah’s head.   Her blond hair was so fine it seemed to float above his lap.   He placed one hand on the back of her skull, and with the other he took a drink of schnapps.   The snow that passed through the light from the motel office was absolutely horizontal, as though there were no such thing as gravity.  

 
    •

 
    It was hot in the office and Norman had worked his coat off.   He was sitting on the floor now, his back against the cabinet door under the counter.
    “I got your letters,” she said.   The color had returned to her face.   Something about her skin was different—it wasn’t as plump and smooth as he remembered, though the way it was now suited him fine—and he suspected it had to do with having a child.   “Why’d you stop sending them?”
    “I don’t know,” he said.   “Guess it seemed pointless after a while.”
    “They made me mad at first,” she said.
    “They were true.”
    “Maybe but they pissed me off.   I thought, what happened happened and there’s no changing it.   You can’t go back and pretend it turned out all different.”
    “That’s not what you said.”
    “What do you mean?” she asked.
    “What you said in your letter—“
    “My letter?”   She seemed frightened for a moment.   “I sent it to you?”
    He nodded.   “One letter.”
    “Oh, God, I don’t remember—I mean, I wasn’t sure if I actually mailed it.”
    “I understand.”
    “You do?   What did it say?”   She leaned toward him slightly.   “Did it make sense?”
    “Sort of,” he said.   He put his hand in his back pocket, then withdrew it quickly.   “Shit,” he whispered.
    “What?”
    “These aren’t my pants—and I left your letter in them.”   She put her head back against the wall and closed her eyes, relieved.   Her throat looked strong, two thick cords beneath her skin, with a deep hollow between them.   He couldn’t stare at it any longer.   “But I read that letter so many times I know it by heart,” he said.   There were small white circles in the blue carpet pattern and he put his forefinger on one.   “It was unreal, how you were saying the things I’d been thinking.”   He knew she’d opened her eyes but he continued to trace the white circle with his finger.   “Inside, time becomes something else.   You start to wonder why you can’t just move back and forth somehow.   I mean I know what happened happened.”   He put his middle finger in another circle and walked his two fingers on the carpet, always touching white circles.
    “But you wonder why you can’t just go back to a specific point in time.”
    “Yes, that’s what you said too.   In your letter.”
    He raised his head and watched her put a hand over her mouth.   “I was so whacked out,” she said, almost pleading, “that I wasn’t even sure I really wrote that, and I had no idea I actually sent it to you, with an address and a stamp and all.”
    “I got it.”   Suddenly he put his hands in the front pockets of his corduroys.
    “I kept your letters,” she said.
    “Thank you.”   After a moment he added, “I think I came just to hear that.”
    “I wrote you a lot.”   Her hair was flattened on the side where she’d been leaning against the wall.   “I didn’t send them except for that one, I guess.   I began writing them last summer, when things with Warren were getting very strange.   And I was here at work and I just started writing to you.   I hadn’t heard from you in several months and I didn’t know what that meant.”
    “It meant I was coming, I guess,” he said.   “It meant I was going to do like you said.”
    “What did I say?”
    “In your letter—you said that somehow we would be able to go back to a specific point in time.   You really believe that?”
    “Well, yeah,” she said.   “Not physically.   Not like in some time machine.”
    “No, but just you yourself.   The way you think and feel about things.”
    “I guess I