Travelers Rest (16 page)

“Sure,” Hugh said. “Let's go back.” But he stood there gazing at something down the other side of the hill, and Dewey all of a sudden sensed, once again, what Hugh was thinking—he was thinking about his mother. He nodded toward something in the near distance that Dewey couldn't see. “That's where I saw my mother,” he said, and pointed. “The creek is right through those trees.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wool hat and put it back on his head. “Let's go,” he said. Dewey took one last look at the heavy gate that hid the opening. Then they went back to the steps and down the hill.

When they reached the edge of town, Hugh stopped under the first streetlight and pointed toward the hotel, which was still a ways away, a lot farther than Dewey wanted it to be.

“You see your mother in the window, right? You
see
her there.”

Dewey nodded glumly.

“And you see your father. But when you go to them, they're not there.”

Dewey nodded again.

“The way I feel about it, that means they have to be here somewhere,” Hugh said. “They have to be.” He started walking again, kind of agitated, it seemed, and Dewey followed a step or two behind. “I've always thought that, no matter what anyone says,” Hugh said, as if he were arguing with someone who wasn't there. They got to the next streetlight and Hugh stopped again. Dewey wished he would quit doing that. “Have you ever sat in the bathtub and checked out your feet underwater?” Hugh said.

Dewey sighed, somewhat inaudibly, he hoped. Of course he had looked at his feet underwater in the bathtub. Hugh wanted to tell him something about perception. “I take showers,” Dewey said.

“All right,” Hugh said. “But you know what I mean.”

“Your feet look bigger or they look smaller or they look like they're bent in the middle. Yeah.” Dewey started to walk again, just to hurry Hugh along. “It depends on the angle of perception.”

“Yes,”
Hugh said,
“perception.”
He sounded like he'd made an extraordinary scientific discovery, like when Dewey's dad used to go
“Eureka,”
only it was a joke, because he would have discovered something like, for instance, that Dewey had remembered to put down the toilet seat. “So which perception is real, then?” Hugh persisted. “The one where you see your mom right there in front of you? The one where she disappears? The one where you try to follow your dad but he can't hear you all of a sudden? Or what about the perceptions
they
have when you can't see them but you know they're still there?”

Dewey took a deep breath. “That would be, like,
anyone
when you weren't with them. They wouldn't have to be vanished to go on having perceptions when you're not there.”

Hugh didn't say anything for a while. They passed beneath two streetlights before he stopped again. They were about halfway between the end of town and the hotel. The snow was blowing down in huge sheets now, the wind whipping down the street about twice as hard as when they left the diner, like the blizzard was
gaining
in intensity instead of slowing down. Dewey couldn't feel anything below his knees. “Can we
please
just go inside?” he asked.

“Sorry, sorry,” Hugh said, and started walking again, pushing through the snow briskly this time.

The diner came into sight up ahead across the street from the hotel. Dewey took his hands out of his coat pockets and blew on them and put them back in his pockets.

“Here,” Hugh said, “take these.” He took off his gloves and tried to hand them to Dewey.

Dewey glanced up the street. The diner was about half a block away. They'd be there in two minutes. They'd left over an hour ago. “No, thanks,” he said.

Hugh shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said. “I'd think you'd be cold by now.”

They walked the rest of the way in silence, but right when they got outside the door, right when Dewey could almost
feel
the heat coming from inside the building, something made him stop. “I still don't get it, though,” he said. “
Who
gets drawn here?” He could see Lorraine serving a plate of roast beef and mashed potatoes to an old guy wearing suspenders. She'd be upset they were gone so long. The teenager who cooked with Hugh in the kitchen wasn't all that great, even when they hardly had any orders to fill. “We didn't even know about this place. We just ended up here on accident.”

Hugh was fixated on the window, his eyes not moving, and Dewey knew he was thinking about his mother again. “I'm not exactly sure,” Hugh said, “but I think it's people who are trying to remember something, or maybe they want to change something they regret.”

Dewey wondered if this was what he looked like when he had one of his episodes. Hugh was like a blind man who was also drunk and standing there with his eyes open. He wobbled back and forth like he was going to fall asleep. Then he raised his eyebrows slightly, just the tiniest amount. “Or maybe there's just a certain type of person who's more susceptible,” he said, and he breathed quietly in and out, so that the words seemed to go up into the air like the thinnest trail of smoke. “My mother was always dreamy.”

“And you really never saw her again?”

“I saw her the same way you've been seeing your mother. Does that count?” Hugh nodded in little tiny jerks and chewed on his bottom lip. Dewey realized something kind of scary, which was that Hugh was about to cry himself, a big guy like that.

“I
hope
it does,” Dewey said.

“Right,” Hugh said. “Hope it does. That's good.” Dewey made a move to go inside but Hugh held him back gently by the shoulder and looked at him real hard. Dewey could feel the cold all over him for a second, rushing from his head down into his legs, and he started to shake. Hugh took hold of both his shoulders. “Listen to me now, Dewey.” Dewey shook so hard he thought he would shake right out of his clothes, but he did his best to pay attention. “You've been a really big boy about this, a real tough little guy. But this is going to get hard. If there's a way to find your mother and your father and your uncle, we've got to do it fast. Because it usually only takes a day or two before people disappear for good. It's been four days already.”

“Good!” Dewey said. He was crying now. It was hopeless to try to hide it. His nose was running all over the place. “Whatever happens, let's just go ahead and get it over with. I don't want to be in this creepy town. I don't want to be a stupid ‘souvenir.'”

“Don't say that,” Hugh said. “Don't say that.”

“Why?” Dewey said. “What difference does it make?”

“It's not always just the grown-ups,” Hugh said, and he pulled Dewey close to him. Dewey could feel Hugh shaking inside his coat and hear his voice tremble. “Sometimes the little kids disappear.”

W
hen he woke from a deep sleep the first thing he thought was,
I'm lying in bed with my brother's wife.
His eyes were still closed as his consciousness crept forward, and he steeled himself for the slap of this new wave against the fortress of his well-being. The shitty things he'd done in his life had a way of coming at him wave by wave, and he beat them back relentlessly, but this was a big one, tsunami-size—this one would hit the shore hard and keep pushing its way in. What he dreaded most at the moment was opening his eyes to see Julia, at which point he would have to think of that first thing to say, which would be the hardest part, at least until he had to say the second thing.

But when he did open his eyes he was greeted by the sort of dull, leaden pain he associated with a long bout of hard drinking, and he was adjusting to what felt like the new and somewhat squashed shape of his head when he realized that the wall he faced looked very much like the wall he'd woken up to the past few mornings, and when he had taken that impression far enough to make him curious, he turned to find that the woman he lay next to was that very same Stephanie he'd woken up next to the past few mornings as well.

She was awake, with her head propped against a pillow, reading a book as she usually was. Her preference seemed to be either crime fiction or bulky European novels of the nineteenth century, which she read alternately, sometimes switching back and forth several times within an hour. Just to make sure of her and of himself, he reached over and touched the birthmark on her arm, and she lifted her eyes from the page and smiled at him briefly. It was Stephanie all right. Relief shot through him, with just a twinge of regret.

“Do we have any of those cigarettes left?” he asked her.

She grimaced at him as if to say,
Really, right now, you just woke up,
but she nodded to her coat hanging off the back of a chair, and he got a cigarette and a lighter and pulled on a pair of sweats and a T-shirt and made his way downstairs and out onto the covered porch, where he lit up and managed to puff away for a few seconds without thinking much of anything, his head still soft and damaged, one eye open to the view of his breath clouding out and the snow continuing to fall. It seemed impossible both that the snow could still be falling and that it could ever stop.

Soon he started to shiver in his T-shirt and his bare feet grew numb on the thin ice of the porch step. He was an infrequent smoker, generally used cigarettes just as a way to shake things up with a high or change the rhythm of what was going on, or, like now, as a way to help him slow down for a minute and think, and what he had come outside to think about was what he had done last night, or what he thought he had done, which was go back to the hotel, possibly feeling contrite, possibly to issue an apology (although he couldn't imagine why he suddenly would have felt like apologizing), where he had found Julia alone (why? Where was everyone else?) and, as he thought he remembered it, wound up in bed with her. Of course it was a possibility he had thought about before, sometimes for weeks on end, subtly shifting the fantasies around in his head as if they were a rare and expensive drug he intended to savor, erotic bouts that would be followed by something nearly resembling a hangover. But this was not at all the same. He had
been there with her.
He had been lost again, in one of the never-ending twists and turns of the stairways and hallways, and a door had opened and a hand had taken his, Julia's hand, he had seen her face, she was smiling at him in what he would have described as a weary way, as if she were dealing with a stubborn child, and he had been led into a room. There was an unusual smell in the air, like incense, almost, but more like he imagined it would smell if you actually burned flowers, and the air was hazy and thick, and whatever light there'd been when he stood in the doorway disappeared. Julia moved to him, close enough that he could feel her warmth…but now he couldn't see her face. Then there were the familiar motions of two bodies coming together, although the process was complicated by all sorts of strange clothing that he couldn't make out in the darkness—a dress that seemed to go on for miles, bulky undergarments like petticoats or corsets or who knew what it all was. He could remember the feel of her long hair, which he'd had to unpin, sifting through his fingers as he lay down on the bed. None of it felt even remotely like a dream—here on the porch step he could still smell that strange burning sweetness that had been in the air, and he remembered in some detail how, even while it was happening, he had run the whole gallery of Robbie personas through his head for inspection and censure—Robbie the sleazebag, Robbie the traitor, the asshole, the ingrate, the fool. He had even managed to feel bad about Stephanie for a minute or two. He felt more certain, all in all, about what had happened than he usually did in the morning.

On the other hand. Even aside from the obvious, that he'd woken up next to Stephanie instead of Julia, there were problems with the whole thing. He and Julia hadn't ever spoken, not once. That made no sense, because there were a lot of things to talk about. He hadn't asked her, and she hadn't told him, where Tonio was or where Dewey was or what they had all been doing in town for the last few days while he cavorted with the local female citizenry. And he didn't remember going to the hotel, which was something he'd sworn he would never do again for any reason, although neither of those facts eliminated the possibility that he had indeed gone there. But he also didn't remember anything he'd been doing that would cause him to black out or to go back on such a staunch resolution. But again, on the
other
hand, he now had in his head what distinctly seemed like a memory and not a product of his imagination—that when Julia first led him through the doorway, she had pulled him toward her quickly and impulsively kissed his forehead, just above his left eyebrow. Which made it really difficult to explain or understand why, the next thing he knew, he was waking up in bed with Stephanie, and also why he would remember the kiss on the forehead but have no recollection, or not much, of the more intimate details.

Overall, it seemed to Robbie like one of those sad and sordid tales from a long evening that got told to him bit by bit over a period of days and weeks as he ran one by one into the various spectators and participants, and that usually ended with another trip to detox. But maybe he only thought that because the other possibility—that he was beginning to understand what Stephanie meant when she said he had no idea what he was getting into with this town—was even more disturbing. He could see, for instance, that he had seriously underestimated this place's capacity to mess up a person in a big and frightening way over a very short period of time. It was, very likely, the most fucked-up place in the world. Why, he wondered, tilting his head up toward the mountains and the snowy pines, were the prettiest places always the most horrible?

His cigarette was down to the last drag and he tossed it out into the snow, where its flight ended in a little hiss. Everything was so quiet that you could literally hear not just the cigarette but the
snowflakes
landing. A row of giant icicles hung from the porch awning and he broke one off with both hands and smashed it on the porch steps just to hear some noise, then he went inside and back upstairs. Stephanie was right where he'd left her, wearing her black reading glasses, the detective novel propped on her knees. He could tell she was about to get in the shower because the digital clock on the end table was turned to face her. When she was trying to sleep, the blue light of the display bothered her, and she turned the clock to face out into the room. In the morning, when she started to think about getting up, she turned the clock toward her to check the time. It was amazing how fast you could learn people's habits. He'd probably learned a hundred different habits of a few dozen different women in exactly the same way and forgotten them all just as quickly. Right now, this was the only one he could recall, this one of Stephanie's.

“So, if I were going to quiz you on the subject,” he said to her, standing in the middle of the bedroom. She glanced up from her book but made sure not to lose her place. “What would you say we did last night?”

She laid the book down flat in her lap and gave him a look. “You don't know what we did last night,” she said.

He shrugged apologetically. “I mean, at one point I
thought
I knew what we were doing.”

She stared at him as if to say go on.

“I thought we drank beer and smoked a bowl and played rummy. But then when I woke up, I thought maybe something else had happened.”

“Like what?”

Honestly he had no idea how to explain about Julia, so he just shook his head and raised one hand in a helpless gesture.

“Did you think you were in the hotel?” Stephanie asked him.

That was an easy way to put it. “Yes,” he said. “Yeah. I did.”

She folded the corner of the page she was on and put the book away. “There's a lot you're not telling me about why you're here,” she said.

What he'd told her, as best he could remember, was that Tonio was an asshole and he'd left him at the hotel. He'd been ashamed to say anything about Julia and Dewey because he knew who would look like the asshole then, and afterward, when she pressed him a little further, he changed his story to make it sound like
Tonio
had gone on home without
him.
That seemed like the most convenient way to get what he wanted out of the situation, which was Robbie's rule of thumb in terms of conduct. When you'd done the things he'd done, when you'd gotten into dangerous situations with unstable people as a matter of course, when you'd formed alliances and made enemies on the fly, in very short and very intense bursts of time and energy, when there was always money involved, either way too much or way too little, when things crashed and burned and blew themselves up completely and irrevocably sometimes in a matter of minutes, sometimes with nasty consequences for what seemed like small transgressions and only negligible damage for what seemed like catastrophic personal failures, what Robbie had learned was that ultimately everyone was going to act in his or her own self-interest anyway, and the person who acknowledged that the soonest, behaved the most selfishly from the outset, would usually come out ahead. But the longer he stayed in this town (or was stuck in this town, because it was starting to feel that way), the more it seemed in his best interest to trust Stephanie. He stood there thinking of these things and staring at the snow swirling against the windowpane.

“Where's the closest bus station?” was what he ended up saying.

Stephanie rolled her eyes at him behind her glasses.

“Let me guess,” he said. “Nowhere near.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Hey,” he said, and he went over and sat on the edge of the bed and put his hand on the place where her feet stuck up under the covers. “Look, I'm having fun, I really am, but I
am
starting to get freaked out a little, you know?” He pointed out the window. “I mean, this is a
weird fucking place.
Just for starters—seriously, this is just the tip of the iceberg—where the fuck does it snow like this? Have you seen anything like this before?”

Stephanie didn't answer.

So then he told her the actual story, hiding maybe one or two things, such as stealing Tonio's money and sleeping with his wife. He ended with how he had absolutely thought he was at the hotel the night before.

She took off her glasses and put them on the nightstand. “You probably were,” she said.

“You said I was here the whole time.”

“You were kind of in both places at once,” she said. “It takes some getting used to.”

He was, at this point, almost prepared to accept that explanation. It had the unfortunate quality of feeling true to him. It was as if he had two different memories of the same time, and each was as real as the other. He was not as baffled by this development, the possibility that his brain contained two separate memories of the same evening, as, say, Tonio would have been. In fact, having the ability to be in two different places at one time was something he'd often wished for, especially when it involved two different women, although one of them was Julia, which created a whole lot of complications, and also there was the hotel, which he would never be able to think about with anything approaching pleasure. Really, he'd had a nagging sense of being stuck in that fucking hotel ever since he'd left it, some part of him constantly plodding up the rickety steps, huddled shivering in the cold and airless passageways. It lingered beneath his skin.

Stephanie flopped back onto the pillow. “Wow,” she said. “You really should have told me about this before, Robbie. You
really really
should have told me.”

Here was another occasion on which he was going to have to feel guilty, then. That much seemed clear. He hated these situations, this feeling, and he bristled instinctively, or by long habit, whenever anyone or anything made him feel this way. As far as relationships went, this was, generally, the beginning of the end. It made him so
tired
to be arriving at this point, he'd been here too often, and you'd think by now people would realize that he wasn't going to bend, he wasn't going to act better or do anything different or—especially—apologize. The one person who understood this (well, Tonio
understood
it, but he also hated Robbie for it, for his capacity to get away over and over again with his self-destructive behavior and never accept responsibility, etc.) was Julia, who, whenever Robbie fucked up, simply looked at him in a way that said she understood  his silence was in essence his acknowledgment of guilt and even an expression of remorse, and that his failure to mend his ways or apologize for them was an example of both his weakness and his strength. But now he had gone off and complicated his relationship with Julia, too—or he hadn't. He could go to the hotel and talk to her—or not, because she might not actually be there. The front edge of panic was setting in: the prickling in the skin, the tightness in the chest, the cramping in the fingers—this was what it felt like, finally, to go nuts. It was something he had worried about in the past, and now it was here.