The Ice Machine at the Starlite

Marnie Kowalczyk worked nights at the Starlite Motor Inn, off I-94, outside Fergus Falls, Minnesota. Eleven to seven. Thirty-one rooms. One ice machine. No pool, though the building smelled like it had one once and missed it.

She liked nights. Nights didn’t ask much. A trucker wanted a receipt. A couple wanted towels and didn’t want eye contact. The coffee in the lobby pot turned to tar by two, and she drank it anyway, because it was hot and it was there, and those were her standards for most things.

She kept a Post-it on the side of the monitor. Tally marks. Four rows of five, then a few loose ones, like stragglers at the end of a parade.

Each mark was a thought.

Not a nice thought.

Push him. That was the classic. Somebody leaning on the second-floor railing, smoking, and her brain would offer it up the way a waiter offers pepper. Just a suggestion. No pressure. Push him.

Put your hand on the burner. Drive into the bridge abutment. Tell the old woman in 22 that her husband isn’t coming back from the vending machine, and watch her face. (Her husband always came back from the vending machine. He just took a while. He was choosy about chips.)

The therapist in Moorhead called them intrusive thoughts. She said everybody had them. She said the French had a phrase for the one about high places, l’appel du vide, the call of the void, and she said it so warmly, as if the void were a cousin who phoned on birthdays.

“The thought isn’t you,” the therapist said. “You notice it. You let it pass. Like a car on the highway.”

“What if I’m the highway,” Marnie said.

The therapist wrote something down. Marnie never found out what. She stopped going in October, when the insurance stopped and the roads started icing over. Now she just counted.

Twenty-three marks since Christmas. It was January ninth.

** *

The bulb in the ice-machine alcove went out at 2:47 a.m.

She knew the time because she was looking at the clock. She was always looking at the clock. Time at the Starlite moved like a dog that didn’t want to go for a walk.

The alcove was at the end of the ground-floor hall, past 114, a cinder-block nook painted a color the can had probably called Sand. The ice machine lived there. It hummed. Every eleven minutes it dropped a load of cubes, a clatter like somebody falling down a short flight of stairs. Then it hummed again.

Now the hum came out of a dark so complete it looked solid. The hallway light reached the edge and stopped, polite, as if it had been told not to come in.

She stood at the edge with a replacement bulb in one hand and a flashlight in the other. The flashlight worked. She clicked it on. The beam went in about a foot and then quit.

She clicked it off. Clicked it on. Same.

“Huh,” she said.

The machine dropped a load. The cubes rattled into the bin. Cold air rolled out over her ankles, colder than ice-machine cold. Lake cold. February-lake-at-dawn cold. The kind that gets into the hinge of your jaw and stays.

“Hi, Marnie,” said the dark.

It had her voice. That was the first thing. Not an echo. Her voice, but relaxed. Her voice after two beers and a good cry. Her voice if she’d ever once in her life been sure of something.

She did not drop the bulb. She was proud of that later. She held it so hard the glass squeaked against her palm.

Okay, she thought. Okay. This is new.

“You can put the bulb down,” the dark said. “It won’t take. I’m not a wiring problem.”

“What are you.”

“Don’t do the question thing. You know what I am. I’m the guy at the railing. I’m the burner. I’m the bridge abutment.” A pause. The machine hummed. “I’m twenty-three tally marks. Twenty-four, if you count the one you just had about throwing that flashlight at my head.”

She had had that one. She hadn’t counted it yet.

Her heart was going hard and stupid, a moth against a porch light. Her palms were wet. The heater vent above the door ticked as it cooled. Somewhere out on 94 a semi downshifted, a long groan, like the whole night clearing its throat.

“I’m going to go back to the desk,” she said.

“Sure.”

“And I’m going to call somebody.”

“Who?”

She thought about it. Her mom was in Detroit Lakes and went to bed at eight with the TV on. Her manager, Doug, had a voicemail greeting that was mostly the sound of him chewing. The therapist didn’t answer after five, and anyway, what would she say? The void called. It has my number. It sounds like me.

“That’s what I thought,” the dark said. Not mean. Almost kind. That was the worst part.

She went back to the desk. She didn’t run. She walked at the exact speed of a woman who is not running. She sat. She set the bulb on the counter next to the bowl of mints nobody took. She picked up a pen and made a tally mark on the Post-it.

Then she made another one, for the dark itself. That seemed fair.

** *

At 3:20 Gary came down.

Gary was 114. Gary was a regional sales rep for a company that made agricultural drainage tile, which he had explained to her at check-in, at length, while she ran his card twice because the first time it declined. Gary had a lanyard. Gary had a laugh that started before the joke and kept going after it. Gary had called her “sweetheart” four times and “hon” twice and once, when the card declined, “chief.”

Now Gary was in boxers, a Vikings sweatshirt, and black socks. He was holding the plastic ice bucket from his room. He smelled like Busch Light and microwave burrito and the particular sweat of a man who had just been on the phone with his ex-wife.

“Ice machine,” he said. “Where is it.”

She looked at him. She looked down the hall toward the alcove. The dark sat at the end of it like a held breath.

“It’s broken,” she said.

“It’s humming. I can hear it humming.”

“It hums. It’s broken. It hums broken.”

Gary squinted at her. “You people,” he said, which was not a sentence, but he said it like a whole paragraph. “I’m paying sixty-nine bucks a night. I want ice.”

“I can get you some from the back.”

“I can get it myself, sweetheart. I’ve got legs.” He turned. He started down the hall. His socks whispered on the carpet.

And here was the thing. Here was the whole thing, folded up small.

She could let him.

That was all. Not push. Not burn. Not swerve. Just sit. Just keep her hands on the counter and her mouth shut and let Gary from 114 walk his black socks down the hall into whatever was waiting there, humming, in her voice.

Nobody would know. Nobody would even ask. Gary was the kind of man people only missed in the abstract. His company would send a different Gary. The drainage tile would still drain.

Let him, said the thought. It didn’t come from the alcove. It came from right behind her breastbone, where it had always lived.

She wanted to. God, she wanted to. The wanting was warm. It was a bath. It was the first warm thing she’d felt since October.

Gary was halfway down the hall.

She was out from behind the counter before she decided anything. Her hip caught the corner of the desk and sent the mint bowl spinning. Her shoes slapped the carpet. She reached him three steps from the edge of the dark and grabbed his arm, his sweatshirt sleeve bunched in her fist, and the cold came off the alcove so hard her eyes watered.

“Whoa,” Gary said. “Hey. Whoa. Hands.”

“It’s broken,” she said. Her voice came out strange and high. “I’m sorry. It’s broken. Please. I’ll get you ice. Please.”

He looked at her hand on his arm. He looked at her face. Something in it made him stop, the way an animal stops at a smell. For a second he wasn’t Gary. He was just a tired man in socks, in a hallway, at three in the morning, a long way from anybody who loved him.

“Okay,” he said. “Jeez. Okay.”

She walked him back. She went into the back room and opened the staff freezer, which held a bag of ice, two Hot Pockets, and a foil pan of tater tot hotdish from Doug’s wife: ground beef and cream-of-mushroom soup under rows of frozen tater tots, lined up like a tiny potato army. She filled his bucket. Her hands shook so badly that cubes skittered across the linoleum and under the shelves.

Gary watched from the doorway.

“You okay, chief?”

“Yeah.”

“You look like hell.”

“It’s the lighting,” she said.

He took the bucket. He paused like he might say something else, something human. Then he didn’t. He shuffled off to 114. The door clicked. The deadbolt slid.

She sat down on the floor of the back room, right there on the cold linoleum, between the mop bucket and the shelf of tiny shampoos. She put her forehead on her knees. The freezer door hung open and breathed on the back of her neck. She let it.

She was crying. She noticed it the way you notice rain from inside a parked car: a little late, already wet.

You stopped, she thought. You stopped. You stopped.

It didn’t feel like winning. It felt like setting down something heavy and finding out your arms were still shaped like you were carrying it.

** *

At 4:10 she went back to the alcove. She brought a folding chair.

She set it at the edge of the light, facing the dark, and sat with her coffee. The tar had gone cold. She drank it anyway.

“That was close,” the dark said.

“Shut up.”

“I’m just saying. You were going to.”

“I didn’t.”

“No.” It sounded almost proud. “No, you didn’t.”

The machine dropped a load. Clatter. Hum. Her breath fogged a little in front of her face. Indoors. Fine. Sure.

“What would you have done to him?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t.”

“I mean it. Nothing. I don’t do things, Marnie. I’m not a hand. I’m a door.” The voice shifted and settled, the way her own voice did when she was explaining something to her mom for the third time. “People walk up to me and I open, and they look in, and they see what they’d do if nobody stopped them. That’s all I am. Gary would’ve walked in and gotten his ice and walked out. Maybe had a bad dream. Maybe called his ex-wife and said something unforgivable. That’s on Gary.”

She sat with that. The heater ticked. Down the hall somebody’s TV was playing an infomercial for knives, a man’s voice promising, over and over, that it cut through anything.

“So it wasn’t him I was saving.”

“Nope.”

“It was me.”

“Now you’re getting it.”

She laughed. It came out wrong, a cough wearing a laugh’s clothes. “Great,” she said. “Great. So I sprinted down a hallway and grabbed a drainage tile salesman to stop myself from letting him get some ice.”

“When you put it like that.”

“How else would you put it?”

“You did the hard thing,” the dark said, “for a reason nobody will ever see. That’s most of what the hard thing is.”

She hated that it was right. She hated that it said it in her voice, so she couldn’t even pretend it came from somewhere wiser.

** *

They sat. A woman and a dark. 4:30. 4:45. The window at the end of the hall stayed black. Snow had started, small and dry, ticking against the glass like someone patient trying to get in.

“Can I ask you something?” she said.

“You can ask.”

“Lake Lida. The summer I was nine.”

She didn’t have to say the rest. It knew. It was made of the rest. The dock with the loose board. The smell of sunscreen and lake weed and her dad’s Marlboros drifting down from the cabin porch. Danny, six, out of the orange life jacket he’d taken off because it itched. Her standing behind him. Then the water, flat and bright, and nobody on the dock but her.

Everybody said he slipped. The sheriff said it. Her mom said it at the funeral, and at Christmas, and once, drunk, on the phone at two in the morning, she said it like a question.

Marnie didn’t remember. That was the thing. She had the before and the after, and in the middle a white space the exact size of her hands.

“You know,” she said. “Don’t you. You were there.”

“I’m always there.”

“Did I?”

The machine hummed. The snow ticked. The knife man down the hall said, through anything, folks, anything.

“Do you want me to tell you?” the dark said.

She opened her mouth.

This was the other door. She saw it now. Not Gary. This. The dark would open, and she would look in, and she would finally, finally know. And either way she would have to live there. Either way it would be true forever.

Don’t, she thought. Don’t look.

The not-knowing was terrible. It was also the only room in her she could still stand in.

She closed her mouth.

“No,” she said. “No, thanks.”

“Okay.” Gentle. “That’s allowed.”

She put her hand over her eyes. Her fingers were cold and smelled like coffee. She stayed like that a long time. Her shoulders shook, and then they didn’t, and then they did a little more, and the dark didn’t say anything, and that was the kindest thing anyone had done for her in a year.

** *

At 6:15 the sky went from black to the color of dishwater. Gary checked out at 6:40. He dropped his key card on the counter. He didn’t look at her.

Then he did.

“Hey,” he said. “Last night. You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“’Cause you seemed.” He waved a hand in a circle in front of his own face, meaning all of it.

“Long shift.”

He nodded. He took a mint from the bowl, which nobody ever did, and unwrapped it, and put it in his mouth. “My ex says I don’t notice things,” he said around it. “I noticed that.”

“Okay, Gary.”

“Okay.” He knocked twice on the counter, like it was a door. Then he went out into the snow, and his truck coughed and caught, and he was gone. Somewhere another Gary was already waking up.

She replaced the bulb in the alcove at 6:55.

She didn’t expect it to work. She stood on the folding chair and unscrewed the dead one by feel, the glass cold, a little crust of dust on it. She screwed in the new one. She stepped down.

Light.

Just an ice machine. Just Sand-colored cinder block and a drain in the floor and a sticker that said SCOOP ONLY, DO NOT USE BUCKET. The machine dropped a load. Clatter. Hum.

She stood there a while.

Gone, she thought, and felt something she didn’t want to name, because it was too close to grief, and it was embarrassing to grieve an ice machine.

Then she looked down.

Her shadow lay on the floor in front of her, long in the new light, stretching into the alcove. She lifted her hand. Her shadow lifted its hand.

A little late.

Not much. Half a second. The length of a decision.

“Same time tomorrow?” it said.

Marnie folded the chair and tucked it under her arm. She went back to the desk and peeled the Post-it off the monitor, all twenty-five marks, and looked at it for a long moment. She uncapped the pen and added one more, for the wanting. Then she stuck it back on. There was still room at the bottom.

“Yeah,” she said. “Where else would I go.”