Travelers Rest (18 page)

“Why would I get angry, Robbie?”

He shook his head innocently to say he didn't know.

“Because I'm unstable? Because I'm psycho?” She said this in a relaxed voice that had, he noted, no hint of anger in it. “Do you feel the need to be
careful
with me now that I've told you my story?” She laughed and stared at the ceiling.

“I just thought it would be good if we didn't get angry with each other.”

“This is nothing,” she said, and she waved her hand out to indicate everything in the room—him, his beer, this morning, the constant snow falling outside the window. “
Nothing.
You have no idea what I've been through.”

“Okay,” he said. “Still—”

“What makes you so funny,” she went on, still speaking pleasantly, as if she was making sure to take Robbie up on his suggestion, “is that you actually think
you're
the one in control here, that
you're
in charge of everything. That's hilarious.” She creased her eyebrows and made a little movement with her shoulders that had a military air to it. “Robbie Addison. So hard, so cold, so distant. Bulletproof. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.” She sipped her coffee and put down the cup and stared at him and shook her head, like she was seeing something sad.

So this was how it was going to be. Things were going to end badly, and there didn't seem to be a good way to avert the outcome, and he really
wanted
to avert the outcome suddenly—whether that was because he honestly liked Stephanie or because he was currently in a precarious situation, more vulnerable than usual, he couldn't say. “Thanks,” he said quietly, and put both hands around his beer bottle.

“You're a sweet guy at heart,” she said, with some genuine feeling, and she leaned in and put one hand on top of his. “You may not even think that yourself, but you are.” She rubbed her thumb on the knuckle of his index finger, and a crazy thing happened—the pressure of her hand on his aroused no thoughts of sex, but made him feel grateful and slightly melancholy instead. It was a day of marvels, no doubt. “I could fall for you in two seconds if I let myself.” Then she pulled back her hand and took up the strand of unruly hair again, holding it out in front of her eyes as if she were chastising it. “But you're in way over your head here. You have
no idea.
” She laughed lightly in the back of her throat. Then she did something surprising, which was to get up and rummage in a drawer until she found a cigarette pack, from which she pulled a cigarette, which she then lit right there in the house, in the kitchen, which was completely against the rules as they'd been laid out to him. She smoked with her back against the sink, turning around occasionally to tap her ash over the drain.

“There are some things I'm confused about, for sure,” he said after a couple of minutes. “Maybe that means I'm in over my head, I don't know. I'm fairly good at getting myself out of bad situations.”

“Not this time,” she said.

“Okay, whatever,” he said. “But tell me, seriously—you seem certain that my brother and his family are still here, but where?” She started to say something but he cut her off. “Because I…
dreamed,
I guess, last night, that I saw my sister-in-law at the hotel, but no one else was there.”

“You dreamed it,” she said. “Yeah, I know those dreams.” She turned on the tap and doused her cigarette in the running water and shut the water off and leaned over the counter to put the butt in the trash. Her left breast hung out of the robe invitingly, but she straightened up and pulled the sides of the robe closer together at the neck and tightened the belt at her waist.

Then she told him in what sounded like a reasonable voice (as long as you didn't actually listen to what she was saying) that she was pretty sure the rest of his family was still “here.” Being here, she said, meant being in a kind of limbo, or not really in a kind of limbo but more of a multiple set of “presences” that made each particular presence difficult to navigate—witness, for example, Robbie's insistence that he had been in the hotel last night when he had really been with her the whole time (on hearing this assessment of the situation, that sense of relief threaded with regret again). As a veteran of this sort of thing, she herself had learned to deal with it pretty well, even to the point that she could go into the hotel itself without suffering any additional damage, at least that anyone could see. “But it's with me all the time,” she said, “inside me. Sometimes it's personal, like it's related to me. I can see my mother sometimes inside my head. Sometimes if I wander around the hotel late at night I can see her for real, like right there in front of me, but I can't be sure that that's not just inside my head, too. Sometimes I even find things.” She walked over by the refrigerator and slid open a drawer and took something out and brought it to him. “I found this that night when I went to get your clothes out of your room. This was in the bottom of the drawer where your socks were.” She handed him a photograph. It was of a little girl with blonde hair and a boy a couple of years older, both seated on an old sofa, smiling somewhat reluctantly at the camera. Robbie looked back and forth from the girl in the photo to Stephanie, who glanced away from him.

“The really hard part for me,” she said, “is you take on other people's memories, other people who've been there. You're remembering what other people remember or remembered—sometimes good, sometimes bad. They're like memories of things that never happened, not to you. They get stuck in your head.”

He had been sitting there nodding in an intent but puzzled way for quite a while now, and he wasn't sure how long he could keep on doing it. He kept wanting something, he didn't know what, or not really wanting something but being aware of the absence of something, and he figured it out now, with Stephanie talking about memories of things that never happened. When he was little, not as old as Dewey even, he would imagine what his older brother—his mysterious, almost supernatural older brother, out there in the world pursuing a special kind of knowledge, a knowledge of the past and people of the past, lost civilizations—might be up to, and he would store up these imagined events almost as if they'd really happened. He was missing Tonio right now. For one of the few times in his adult life, he really wished Tonio were here. He would like to know what Tonio thought about
this
whole thing.

Of course he didn't believe any of it, not really, but he believed that Stephanie believed it, and he had experienced enough of the disconcerting effects of the place to know there was something unusual going on, something that at least needed explaining. There had to be (as some character always insisted in movies of the supernatural, he realized, usually the first one to die as a result of not believing in the phenomenon) a logical explanation. It was only because the town's collective IQ fell somewhat short of triple digits that no one had figured it out yet. But he
trusted
Stephanie—she was no idiot, by any means.

He drank the last of his beer. Stephanie got another one and handed it to him and sat down on the chair next to him again. He'd been sitting in the same position too long and his knee hurt, the old basketball injury. Basketball—the only thing he'd ever been any good at, which he quit in eleventh grade because he wanted to drink beer and smoke pot instead of practice. If he had it to do over again, he'd make the same decision. Who was he kidding here.

He put his hand on Stephanie's knee, as if he were trying to be gentle in acknowledging the difficult things she was telling him, but really he just wanted to feel her leg. The smooth skin of her knee, slightly red from where she'd had her legs crossed before, was infinitely soothing to him at the moment, in a way that only serious narcotics usually made him feel. “Once,” he said, “when we were on vacation, my dad decided it would be fun to take me to this haunted house. We were in the Black Hills, South Dakota, billboards for this place all along the side of the road, obviously a tourist trap.” She was only halfway paying attention, but talking about it made him feel better, so he went ahead. “Freaked me out at the time. A bunch of weird shit, chairs balancing on one leg, rubber balls that rolled uphill. There was a totally level place on the floor where if you stood two people side by side, one would be taller, but if they switched places the other one suddenly would be. It scared the crap out of me. My dad thought it was funny.”

She sighed—a long sigh that seemed to go on forever, as if she were in the process of sighing her entire body inside out.

“Not the same thing?” he volunteered.

She didn't even bother to answer. She got up and went to the fridge and grabbed the last beer and sat back down. “I'll finish this one off,” she said. “Then no more today. We've got stuff to do.”

This was, naturally, exactly what he didn't want to hear, never liked to hear, exactly what he'd hoped to avoid when he snuck out that first night from the hotel room. It was one of the only things someone could say that got him right in the gut: There's stuff you have to do. It's all your fault. Be patient. That's enough. Stop. Don't. No.

“Let me ask you something,” Stephanie said, “and then I'm going to finish getting ready.”

“What?” he said.

“Who was it that insisted on pulling off the interstate? Who was adamant about it?”

Adamant. Huh. “No one, really,” he said. “My sister-in-law got interested in the town.”

“What about at the hotel? Did anyone act like they really
liked
the place? Like, found it fascinating?”

“Julia. Definitely.”

“What about your brother?”

“What about him?”

“What was he doing?”

“I don't know. Being a dick.”

She sighed that long sigh again. “It's your sister-in-law, then,” she said. “She's the one it's happening to. The rest of you are just stuck here with her.” And with that she went off up the stairs.

He didn't want to think about Julia, but he couldn't help it. He didn't want to admit that some part of him wished he were in that hotel room right now. He wished, above all, that he could have seen her face.

He sat in the chair finishing what Stephanie promised would be his last beer of the day, and after a while someone knocked on the back door, where he'd gone outside to smoke earlier. It surprised him to find that there was another human being in the world. He went to the door and opened it and there stood a guy in a stocking cap flicking a guitar pick against his teeth. “You must be Uncle Robbie,” the guy said.

W
hy she felt compelled to follow Miss Blanchard back through the kitchen in the aftermath of Tiffany's lavish feast she couldn't have said. Miss Blanchard was a famous actress. She had visited with the president and she had taken the stage in all the major cities, and yet here she was, through some old association of Mr. Tiffany's, sleeping under the same roof, in the same hotel, as herself, Julia Addison. Mrs. Anthony Addison. Especially in this new role, this new garment, almost, that she felt she wore night and day, she didn't want to be so easily swayed by the attentions of someone like Miss Blanchard, but there the fact was—she found herself leaving her husband in the lobby with the other gentlemen and following Rose Blanchard, who carried two unlit cigars and a bottle of Armagnac in her left hand, back through the kitchen to the pantry.

She had at first resisted being impressed by Miss Blanchard. As predicted, she had arrived on the back of the Harrington boy, all loose and aflutter, laughing and chattering, her skirts above her knees as she was whisked in through the hotel doors. Her blonde hair was piled on her head and fastened with a stunning diamond brooch and on her feet were sparkling silver slippers. She was a pretty woman, certainly, if not a beautiful one, her features perhaps a bit too perfect and regular (the smoothly arching eyebrows over the pale blue eyes, the almost perfectly straight and average-size nose, the thin lips that opened smiling to reveal the small, even teeth, the high cheekbones set in the perfectly oval face, the complete absence of freckles or pockmarks or scars of any kind, the skin as smooth as the surface of a mask) to achieve the uniqueness of beauty, unless it could be said that perfect regularity itself was a form of beauty. Privately, in her own heart, which she had kept closed off to others (including her new husband, whom she often felt she barely knew) since she left her mother and father and sisters in Virginia, Mrs. Addison felt that she was at least Miss Blanchard's equal in terms of looks. And indeed it was a little disconcerting to find herself, so used to being fussed over by men, particularly in this new place, Good Night, Idaho, which seemed like an outpost at the edge of the world, connected like a bead on a long, loose string to the other outposts of “progress”—Helena, Boise, Salt Lake, Spokane Falls, she had learned all the names—so thoroughly ignored in the excitement of Miss Blanchard's arrival.

There was nothing much to be impressed with in Miss Blanchard's background, which Mrs. Addison had learned from the newspapers. In some sense, her story had the same slight flaw as her pretty face, in that it was the perfect story in a very usual way: orphaned at birth, parentage unknown, raised in the charity ward of a Lutheran church in Saint Paul, Minnesota, a bright, eager child who excelled in her studies and had very early shown signs of great imagination, as well as a penchant for attracting the attention of visitors to the orphanage, who inevitably chose her from among all the children to single out for praise. Even her stage name had the quality of perfect artifice—the last name, Blanchard, had been adopted in appreciation of the director of the home, Miss Greta Blanchard, who reported that Rose had been “the most darling of so many, many darling girls,” while the first name had been chosen to remind its bearer of the flowers that erupted in a blaze of color each spring below the orphanage's dormitory windows.

Mrs. Addison's own maiden name was Joseph, and her father, Samuel, was a successful shipping agent in Richmond. She had no reason to feel either charitable or condescending toward Miss Blanchard based on her life's story—while the Josephs were not snobbish in their views of class, they were also not overly swayed by the popular sympathies. Mrs. Addison had been taught, above all, to maintain a high regard for propriety and reserve. In light of this regard, she found Miss Blanchard more than a bit disappointing when she caroused with the hotel staff and teased Mr. Tiffany. It came as a surprise that Miss Blanchard treated even her own husband, Anthony, with signs of affection and familiarity. Miss Blanchard had gone so far as to ask that Anthony introduce the two of them, as if she knew him already. Mrs. Addison had half expected an explanation, had imagined for a moment that Anthony would say, apologies, he had neglected to tell her about his old and dear friend Miss Blanchard, whom he had known for so many years. But Anthony had registered surprise at the request, and had in fact introduced himself along with his wife, which seemed to amuse Miss Blanchard.

What finally impressed her about Miss Blanchard was something happening below the surface of the evening, in some place beneath the stylish table settings that Tiffany had purchased and the ostentatious swell of the dining room and the aromas wafting from the hotel's kitchen and the lilting melodies of the chamber orchestra Tiffany had hired—beneath all these things, which Miss Blanchard responded to with the appropriate degree of surprise and pleasure and gratitude, as if she were made to play the part of famous actress to perfection, something flashed out from her eyes from time to time and shaped an underlying impression. In short, Miss Blanchard knew what she was about. While she did not fail to attend to her admirers or to heap praise on the establishment, she seemed to be living inwardly on some plane of investigation that had nothing to do with any of these externalities, as if her body and her voice were unconnected to her thoughts in the usual way.

Mrs. Addison often thought of herself in this same fashion, as a person who negotiated the shallow waters effortlessly, moving through life's evident and visible social dimensions in a way that always left her better off than before—more comfortable, more secure, with increasingly better prospects—while at the same time attempting to plunge beneath the surface without attracting attention.

And so after the dinner was over and after the dancing was done and after everyone had congratulated Tiffany on his fine hotel and his great success, on how he had brought a new and very necessary air of civilization, a harbinger of progress, to the mining town, and after all the dignitaries, all the finest of the fine people to be found for hundreds of miles around, had shuffled happily off to the lobby or the drawing room or in some cases off to bed, when Miss Blanchard tugged lightly on her sleeve and, with a mischievous smile and a nod of her head and that look in her eye that Mrs. Addison had found attractive and somewhat conspiratorial earlier in the evening, invited her away from the others, Mrs. Addison followed. There was a moment in which the light touch of Rose Blanchard's hand on her sleeve, the slight but insistent pull, made her feel as though she was leaving something behind or moving on to something, that when she came back into this room perhaps no more than a quarter of an hour from now there would be some real difference. The gas lamps cast a dull yellow light across the space of the lobby, making her feel as she walked away that she was suspended in the warm stillness of a summer dusk, as if she moved through space while time stood still and dust motes hung forever in midair. At the door she paused to take in the lobby with its fine carpets and its fine chandelier and its graceful ebony furniture, the height of the new Aestheticism, an assertion on the part of its proud owner that here, too, in the barely tamed wilderness of the western territories, one could find the evidence of refined natures and sensibilities.

“Hurry,” Rose Blanchard said to her, laughing softly. “Before they cut off our means of escape.” And then they were darting through the kitchen while the staff looked on with surprise and vague good humor, Rose guiding her past crates of live hens and towering piles of gleaming fruit and the greasy mess of discarded napkins and silverware, the detritus of the feast. In the rear of the immense space, she came upon a latched door and threw it open to expose shelves and shelves of various foodstuffs, bins of rice and beans, sacks of flour and meal.

Rose shut the door partway, leaving just a shaft of light to see by, and plopped down on a sack of flour, pulling Mrs. Addison with her. “Perfect,” she said. She slipped a box of matches from the sleeve of her dress and lit one of the cigars, then handed over the other.

Mrs. Addison was not unfamiliar with cigars. Her father, a devoted smoker, had delighted in allowing his daughters to have a puff on an imported cigar in the presence of their mother, who objected to the practice strenuously. Liquor, on the other hand, was new to her. After only a few sips of the brandy, things became loose in her head, objects drifting from side to side, possible outcomes of this evening spreading out in her thoughts like waves.

“Christ almighty,” Rose Blanchard said, “I could see after five minutes that you were the only person here worth speaking to.”

Mrs. Addison, somewhat taken aback, said nothing.

“You and your husband,” Rose said. “Your husband is an interesting and capable man. And handsome.” She leaned forward, patted Mrs. Addison's leg, and winked.

“Thank you,” Mrs. Addison said, not knowing what else to say. She wondered if Rose Blanchard had confused her husband with someone else.