Travelers Rest (17 page)

He tried to get himself together by taking a deep breath and sitting up ramrod straight on the bed, raising his arms above his head as if he were suddenly overcome with a violent need to stretch. “I'm sure it's no big deal,” he said. “I'm sure they're long gone by now.”

“No,” she said, and laughed in a quiet, incredulous way that meant there was nothing funny. “I guarantee you they haven't gone anywhere.”

He tried to bite his tongue but he wasn't good at it. “How the fuck would you know that?” he said. “You don't know anything about my family. You don't even know much about me, but I can tell you one thing—I don't like to be criticized.”

This time she laughed a little louder and sat up and pulled the covers away and got up and put on her robe. “And I don't like to be threatened,” she said. She had a hard gleam in her eye that he hadn't expected. Things might get interesting here in a minute. She said very coolly, “You should probably stop speaking to me in that tone of voice.”

This was the kind of thing that made him boil, and he hated her right at the moment, whoever she was or thought she was or thought she should or could be, but this was the side that his bread was being buttered on currently, and there was no practical alternative he could see other than to head back to the hotel, which he wasn't going to do. It was the hour of compromise, which he also hated. The morning wasn't going the way he'd hoped it would. He flashed her a grim little smile. “You're right,” he said. “Probably.”

Then she told him a story. In the story, a little girl named Stephanie, only seven years old at the time, was in the car with her mother and her older brother, driving to Spokane. As the little girl remembered it, they were simply going to shop at the stores downtown, which were the best and most numerous this side of Seattle. The older brother remembered it differently. He thought there was something more complicated and sinister, something that had to do with a man their mother knew—maybe their father, who had been mysteriously absent all their lives, never seen, never spoken of. The boy and the girl agreed, though, that the stated reason for the mother turning off the interstate into the small town of Good Night was that she wanted to take pictures of the old buildings and the mountains surrounding town. The weather was hot, unusually hot for North Idaho even in the middle of the summer, a dry heat that almost puckered your skin, as if you were being browned slowly in an oven. The afternoon had gotten longer and the sunshine had turned hard and long shadows stretched from the buildings across the silent street. The mother decided to stay overnight, and while she checked them into the hotel, the little girl and her brother waited in the car, not saying anything, and in the little girl's memory everything was absolutely still. Two men walked across the street and into a tavern. A girl rode a bicycle down the sidewalk. An empty logging truck rattled its way home. There was cottonwood in the air, floating lazily through the harsh sunshine.

The mother came out and got the boy and the girl and they went inside. The girl remembered that they didn't have any bags. The hotel was old and empty and their room felt like it belonged to a different century. While the light was still good, the mother used her Nikon to take pictures of the old furniture, the steam radiators, the bathroom fixtures. Then she positioned the boy and the girl on the antique sofa and took a picture. The girl remembered that. The TV in the room didn't work, so that night they played cards. The girl was too young to play games like poker and spades so they humored her by playing Old Maid and Go Fish. In the night, the girl heard a noise. Her brother was on the other side of the bed from her, but the mother's bed was empty. The girl turned to the door in time to see her mother moving toward it, dressed in nothing but a long T-shirt. She remembered that her mother looked very pretty that way, with her sturdy tan legs and her long blonde hair loose on her shoulders. The mother's attention, the girl could tell, was being called to something outside the room. She seemed to be listening to something far away. Quickly then she stepped outside the room, and, at the last moment, she turned back toward the girl, smiled, and put one finger to her lips. To this day, the daughter didn't know whether the mother was saying to be quiet or blowing a kiss. Then the mother heard the faraway noise, and walked away down the corridor. The girl watched the open doorway for a few minutes and then fell back asleep. When she awoke in the morning, the door to the room was still open and the mother's bed still empty.

She and her brother spent the morning wandering around the deserted hotel and waiting for their mother to return. There were no people in the hotel and the people on the street didn't pay any attention to them. The boy unlocked the car and the two of them sat in there for a while. The boy honked the horn. They went back up to the room and waited some more. The mother still didn't come back. Her clothes were there, her purse was there, just not her. Finally the sun dropped level with the windows and it was evening again. The sunlight poured onto the old dusty furniture and the boy, not the girl, started to cry. Something about the hotel scared him and it scared the girl too but for some reason she wouldn't say so. The boy said he wouldn't spend another night in the hotel and when the girl wouldn't agree to leave with him he left by himself and, like the mother, didn't return. She was seven years old and she stayed there alone in the dark hotel. There was nothing to eat but she didn't feel like eating anyway. She was thirsty, though, so she finally took a pencil out of her mother's purse and wrote a note on a piece of paper saying that she had gone to get a glass of water and then she took a piece of gum from her mother's purse and chewed it for a minute and used the gum to stick the note to the mirror on the armoire. She was sure her mother would see it there because her mother had a curious habit of never passing a mirror without inspecting her face in it, even though she never seemed to like what she saw.

At the diner across the street a woman gave the girl a glass of water but she glared at the girl as if she hated her and wanted her to leave, so the girl left as soon as she finished the water.

That night the girl saw her mother walking down the hall and somehow it made her scream, and the mother paused in the corridor but then she went on, and when the girl got to the doorway her mother was gone again. The girl spent all night searching the hotel for the mother and she found a lot of interesting things but not what she was looking for.

She was still sleeping the next day when she heard someone calling her name out in the street. It was her brother. He had brought her a sandwich and a Sunkist orange soda but he refused to come inside the hotel. She went out to him and they sat on the curb and ate their lunch and talked while the people on the street tried to pretend they weren't there, the two of them, just two small kids sitting there eating by themselves. The girl said all these years later that no matter how long she lived in the town she would never forget the way those people had ignored her.

The boy said he'd seen their mother in the park, walking beneath the cottonwood trees. She appeared there in the afternoon, walking slowly in a long dress, bending her head to one side as if she was listening to something. In the sunlight, the brother said, she appeared to be slightly transparent, and if he approached too close she disappeared.

The girl refused to leave the hotel so the boy gave her ten dollars he had taken from the mother's purse and told her to get something to eat. Then he went back to the park to sleep.

But instead of getting something to eat that night, the girl wandered through the strange hotel, going up and down the stairways in the moonlight, peeking into the empty rooms, sitting on the old furniture in the lobby and staring out the window at the street. Finally she fell asleep there, but she was awakened by the uncomfortable feeling of something pulling on her, pulling her up and out of herself, and she woke up startled, out of breath, to find the lights of the lobby blazing and her mother not twenty feet away, her back turned, walking through the lobby as if she were carrying on a conversation with someone, though she never made a sound.

All that night the girl followed her mother around the rooms, barely feeling herself move, afraid that it was just a dream. Her mother sat at a long table moving her lips silently, an endless pantomime that she seemed to perform for no one. Finally she danced alone in a big empty room while a hot breeze from an open window blew around and around. The girl remembered later that if she stayed perfectly still sitting in a corner, she could half hear voices and music. She fell asleep that way, for the second time that night, and she woke up to a cold room with sheets of rain coming in the window. She walked across the street and spent her ten dollars at the diner and she never saw her mother again.

That was it, the girl said. End of story. Then she got out of bed and went into the bathroom and closed the door behind her and turned on the shower. Robbie went downstairs to the kitchen and started to make a pot of coffee but it was too much trouble so he got a beer and sat at the kitchen table drinking it. He didn't think that Stephanie was crazy or delusional, but maybe she was one of those garden-variety spiritual nuts, the kind the Northwest seemed to sprout like toadstools. He had a way of attracting these women: Wiccans, Pentecostals, Sierra Club whack jobs—various self-appointed spiritual advisors and do-gooders from all ends of the spectrum. Sometimes Robbie wished he'd grown up in, say, an old Polish neighborhood in Chicago, someplace that was maybe less scenic but where the people had more common sense. He tilted his head back and closed his eyes. This Stephanie had seemed so normal.

For a minute or two, sitting there with his head tilted back and the inside of his skull filled with the same uniform gray light of the sky, he simply felt himself drifting, the only sensations the soft sound of the shower overhead in the bathroom and the cold bottle against the fingertips of his right hand, but then even these sensations faded and everything was white and cold, like snow, and he was no place at all, everything was gone. Another sound started to establish itself, as if it were hammering its way up out of a great void. Robbie knew the sound, or at least knew that it was familiar, but it took a long time before he could tell himself what it was—it was the sound of the stairs in the hotel. As soon as he realized this he was in fact running up them, up the numberless stairs in the white light of the snow outside, his heart and head pounding. He was running toward something or he was running away from something, he didn't know which, but there was no doubt about the urgency of the situation, it was of the utmost importance that he get up the stairs quickly. He was running from those assholes, who were shouting behind him, intent on doing him harm, or he was running to help Julia, or someone, the shouts were from up ahead now. He pulled himself up as fast as he could by the banister, slivers stinging his hands, and there was a knocking sound, a weird light, an acrid smell, and heat.

He exhaled sharply and lurched up in the kitchen chair and the beer spilled across the table. Before he could make up his mind to do anything about it, Stephanie was there with a towel wiping it up. He watched her as if from a great distance, everything muffled. His hands shook where they rested on his legs and it felt like a heavy belt was tied tightly across his forehead and his chest, making it almost impossible for him to move or breathe. Stephanie had almost finished with the mess.

“I think I might be having a heart attack,” he said to her.

At which she laughed—not in a mean way, actually in a very nice, soothing way, but it was laughing, just the same. It helped him, though, the laughing, to get hold of himself a little bit, and he managed to lean forward and prop his elbows on his knees and place his head in his hands. “What the
hell,
” he said.

Her hand touched his wrist. “You were in the hotel again, right?” she said. He nodded, not looking at anything but a sliver of light between his hands. “Does that mean you're ready to listen now?”

“Okay.”

She took her hand from his wrist and he glanced up to see that she had a coffee cup in front of her. He'd been out of it at least long enough for her to finish her shower, comb her hair, put on the robe she was wearing, and make a pot of coffee. These mundane events were transpiring while he thought he was dying.

“Take a deep breath,” she said, and he did, and he felt better. She got up for a second and then came back and sat down across from him. “Beer for breakfast?” she said, and placed another bottle on the table.

“Thanks,” he managed to say, and he opened the bottle and took a drink and the world began to right itself. Stephanie began to look quite attractive there in her blue robe, for instance, and he imagined immediately several things he'd like to do to her right now if she let him. It was amazing, if he really thought about it, that he didn't disgust himself more. But at least he didn't feel like he was having a heart attack.

“So,”
she said, reaching across to pick at the label on the beer bottle, “what did you think of my story?”

“It was very interesting,” he said. “I enjoyed it immensely.”

She didn't laugh, but almost, which meant he hadn't screwed things up too badly, at least not yet. “Any questions?”

“Yes,” he said. He leaned forward and tried to appear both mature and considerate, the way he'd seen attorneys do when following a delicate line of questioning. “Let's agree on one thing beforehand, though, okay?”

“What?” she said, moving a strand of damp blonde hair behind her ear. What a find, really, in a place like this. He could have done a lot, lot worse.

“Let's not get angry.”

Right away he could tell this request wasn't going over the way he'd hoped it would. Stephanie leaned back in her chair and crossed one leg over the other, a nice little gap opening in the robe, but it was clear she wasn't trying to be seductive. He didn't like the expression on her face.