Travelers Rest (20 page)

It was too dark to search for clues, but he walked over to the window and looked out, and when he turned back something flashed under the bed. He got down on his hands and knees and wiggled his way under the bed frame and after coughing twice from all the dust he emerged with the object in his hand. By the time he reached the thin light from the window, he already knew that it was the snow globe he'd seen his mother holding when he'd watched her from the street. He shook it and lifted it now in the light from the streetlamp, the way he'd seen his mother do.

It didn't surprise him that the snow inside the globe fell on what appeared to be a miniature version of the hotel—he'd seen the gumball machine, after all, and there was the crazy television. But there
was
a surprise. Dewey held the snow globe up closer to the light and watched the tiny pieces of fake snow settle to the bottom and, behind them, the real snow pass down as if through the glass, and his breath came in short, heavy bursts, as if he were trying to breathe from inside the globe itself, but he kept turning it in the light. Right there—fingerprints. He'd seen what he thought was a mirage of his mother holding this snow globe in the window, but she was real, she had been here, she had held this globe in her hands. He had found his mother's fingerprints.

It seemed strange that this discovery should be accompanied by a thumping noise, but there it was, an arrhythmic series of faint
thump-thump-thumps
that he took to be the blood rushing in his brain until he was startled by something smashing against the window with a loud
whup!
He lurched back, hit his foot against the bedpost, and fell backward over the corner of the bed. The snow globe got loose from his outstretched hand, and he heard it shatter on the floor. He was being attacked from somewhere.
Whup!—
there it came again, against the window. Dewey crouched down and scooted behind the bed. He peeked around the bedpost to check out the windowpane, trying hard to quiet his breathing.
Whup!
This time he saw clearly what it was.

“Dewey!” a voice shouted.

He rarely cursed, but on this occasion Dewey tried out a few choice words under his breath, and then he crawled to the wall and relaxed against it, and he listened, while his heartbeat returned to normal, to Hugh calling his name and throwing snowballs against the window.

No way would Dewey answer him. He had no intention of leaving this hotel now until he found his mother and father. If the snow globe had real fingerprints on it, then his mother was somewhere in this hotel. In the darkness he could barely make out the broken pieces of the snow globe on the floor. There would be no way to put it back together, but it didn't matter—he knew what he'd seen. Something had been set in motion, things were happening now, and in the same way that the snow globe was gone for good, so were the times when he would sit lazily around the hotel room doing nothing or playing jacks, the hours when he would hang out at the diner stuffing his face with pie and falling under the spell of Hugh and Lorraine. He sat quietly next to the bed and listened until Hugh quit calling his name and the snowballs stopped thumping against the window, and then he got to his feet and began, in earnest, his search.

About a half hour later, he was tiptoeing around the far back end of the fourth floor, an area he hadn't explored up to now, when he passed an open doorway and thought he saw something move. He stopped in the hall and stood very still. There was almost no light except up ahead where snowflakes twirled down past a large rectangular window above a stairway landing. The air was colder here than it was on the floors below, and he started to shiver. Ahead of him were the stairs—he could run down to the lobby and escape if he needed to. But then he might never know what the thing was, the thing that moved. What would it feel like to be grabbed from behind, he wondered, in the dark, by someone you didn't know? The instant the hand touched your neck, the moment you knew there was no escaping—that would have to be the scariest moment ever. He didn't want anything behind him, so he turned and walked the few steps back to the doorway as quickly and bravely as possible, faced squarely into the room, and was met with a burst of light.

“Who's there?” a voice said.

It was someone with a flashlight, that much Dewey could figure out, and once he'd gotten his back against the wall of the corridor and a hand up to shade his eyes, he saw that the figure behind the light was nowhere near the size of the hotel owner. Then the flashlight beam lurched up and illuminated the face of a boy about Dewey's age with a sharp nose and a thick head of jet-black hair. This was a surprising development, but a welcome one, at least from Dewey's perspective.

“Are you real?” Dewey said.

The boy pointed the flashlight at the floor. He pulled his head back sort of like a chicken. “Why wouldn't I be?” he asked. Then he put the light back on Dewey. “Are you?”

“Sure,” Dewey said.

“You don't look so good,” the boy said.

Dewey glanced up and down the corridor, wondering if all the noise might attract the attention of the owner. He lowered his voice a little. “What are you doing here?”

The kid started to take a step toward Dewey but then seemed to think better of it and stayed where he was. “What do you mean?” he said.

“I don't know,” Dewey said. “I was just asking.” The conversation wasn't off to a very promising start.

“My name's Hector Jones,” the boy said. “I'm half Nez Perce Indian.”

“I'm Dewey,” Dewey said.

“Cool,” Hector Jones said. He seemed to want to talk to Dewey the way he would talk to someone in a lower grade, but he was actually smaller than Dewey. “My dad's full-blood Nez Perce,” Hector Jones said. “My mom's not anything.”

Dewey looked back up the hall again and Hector pointed the flashlight up that way out of curiosity, but there was nothing there. “Well,” Dewey said, “technically, she has to be
something.
”

“She's not anything,” Hector said.

“Oh,” said Dewey. He tried to think of what he knew about the Native American tribe of the Nez Perce. If his father were here, he could and almost certainly would tell Dewey in his monotonous professor voice the history of the Nez Perce and where they were located and which tribes they were allied with or opposed to and what their mode of living was and what they were mostly doing nowadays. As it was, he remembered only one thing. “Chief Joseph,” he said.

“Yeah, so?” Hector said. “
Everyone
knows
that.
”

“Not where I come from,” Dewey said.

“Where's that?”

“South Carolina.”

Hector pointed his index finger at Dewey's chest. “You started the Civil War,” he said.

Dewey acknowledged that his home state had, unfortunately, played a major role in the outbreak of hostilities but denied any personal involvement in the matter. “Anyway, that was a long time ago,” he said.

“Nothing is a long time ago to a Nez Perce,” Hector said. “To answer your question,” he continued, walking back into his room and plopping down on the only bed, “we had to stop here 'cause my dad ran his truck in the ditch.”

“When was that?” Dewey asked.

“Last night.”

“And where's your dad now?”

“He went to see if he could find someone to pull us out.” Hector narrowed his eyes and cocked his head as if he suspected that Dewey might have some information.

Dewey swallowed hard. His mouth was really dry. He could use a Coke over at the diner about now. “How long ago did he leave?” he asked.

Hector turned off the flashlight and dropped it on the bed and walked over to the window and looked outside. “It was a pretty long time ago,” he said.

It was extra dark in the room now with the flashlight off, so Dewey didn't so much see as simply understand that Hector was trying to get control of himself, to keep from crying.

“That's a pretty good flashlight,” Dewey said.

“It's my dad's,” Hector said. “He's a builder, so he only uses good tools.”

“It's warmer down in my room,” Dewey said.

“My dad told me to wait here,” Hector said.

Dewey was so glad that he'd found Hector Jones, another smart kid, someone who knew something about history and was a Nez Perce Indian, someone who could be his friend. He didn't want to scare Hector any more than necessary or make him feel sad. But Hugh was probably right about one thing—there was no time to waste. A short while ago, he had been wishing that someone had been honest with him sooner, and now he had his own chance. “Yeah,” Dewey told Hector. “That's what my dad said, too.”

Hector turned from the window, silhouetted against the snow clouds. “Is your dad missing?” he asked, and he sounded a lot younger all of a sudden, as if Dewey had a younger brother, which he'd always wished he had.

“My mom and my dad,” Dewey said. “And my uncle, too, sort of.”

Hector just kind of stood at the window. “Oh,” he said.

Dewey grabbed the flashlight off the bed and figured out how to turn it on and shined the light out into the hall. It didn't seem nearly as scary now that he'd found Hector, but he knew the dangers were just as real. “Come on,” he said.

Hector fell in behind him as they left the room and moved toward the stairs. “What are we doing?” he asked.

Dewey thought hard about the snow globe, tried to see, in his mind, his mother's fingerprints. “We're going to make a plan to find everybody,” he said. He turned around and looked at Hector. His eyes were dark and shining in the glow of the flashlight. He held his hand out to Dewey, fist closed. Dewey gave him a fist bump.

“Let's do it,” Hector Jones said.

S
he dreamed that she had a dream about something she should remember. In the dream that she was dreaming she had, she was opening the door to a room, and something important was happening on the other side of the door. She could feel herself leaning into the truth concealed by the door, but she couldn't fit the key into the lock fast enough before the dream she dreamed she was having ended because she dreamed of waking up, outside in the snow, standing in front of a window reading the letter about the key. This dream made her impatient, because after all she'd already read the letter in a different dream, or what she had thought was a dream before she seemed, at times, to be in possession of an actual key which actually did open the door to room 306. But in this dream, anyway, she was impatient to get back inside the hotel. She hurried through the falling snow as best she could, taking small steps in an unwieldy pair of shoes, ankle boots, really, which she didn't recognize as her own but liked immensely just the same, holding up her long skirt in the snow, a skirt she didn't recognize either.

And then she suddenly found herself standing outside the door to her own room, and she pressed her ear close to the wood, listening for noises. It was in her very own room that the important thing was happening, the thing that had been in the other dream. She was spying on someone, she realized, but she didn't know if it was herself or someone else. What did she think was going on behind there? She heard a man's voice, and then the low, muffled voice of a woman and recognized in a hot wave of embarrassment that she was listening to two people having intercourse, but she didn't know if it was herself she was listening to. She was mostly curious to know who the man was, so she began very quietly to fit the key to the lock, and it was the fear of finding out something about herself, something she didn't want to know, that woke her from the dream of turning the key in her own door to watch the couple, whoever they were, and when she jerked awake in bed, sitting straight upright, naked, she quickly looked down to find out if she was with anyone, if she could still catch herself in the dream.

No one was there. There was the impression of a head on the other pillow. The sheets were tangled on that side of the bed. When she put her hand to the mattress, on the other side from where she slept, it was warm to the touch.

But she was confused about who might have been there. She was alone in the room, and everything was white. All she could see was snow, everywhere she looked, as if she were flying through a whole world of snow where nothing was solid, where she was weightless and suspended. She knew she hadn't eaten in a long time and she felt so light in both her body and her mind that it was as if she didn't exist at all. She had been dreaming, hadn't she? Of what? She couldn't remember. But she was awake now, or she thought she was awake, if that word meant anything anymore. She rose and stood naked in front of the mirror. Julia. Julia was the woman in the mirror. And as had been the case lately, when she stood in front of the mirror, there were other Julias—each just a little fainter, each just a little further removed—reflected behind the first Julia, but there was no mirror behind her to create the reflections. And as always, when she stepped away, the women in the mirror followed her, one by one, each just a fraction of a second behind the one before her.

Slipping on her nightgown, she found that the key was in her hand, and she moved to the door and used the key and passed into the hallway. She was hungry, that was all she knew, and not necessarily for food, though food would do. She floated down corridors and through rooms and up and down stairways and narrow passages, cold and light, like a faraway star. She did not find what she was looking for. She never did. She had been in this corridor for years.

Once, as she was moving weightlessly, almost invisibly (was there anyone to see her?), she felt something clutching at her, pulling her, and she turned around to see a black upright telephone on a small gilt table. The telephone emitted a faint crackling, or possibly she felt it under her skin.

She picked up the phone by its stem and held the mouthpiece in front of her. Staring into the air of the hallway, focusing on nothing but the empty space there, she raised the receiver to her ear. She could hear someone breathing, and she could hear herself breathing, too, into the mouthpiece.

“Is it you?” a voice finally said.

It was the voice of a child. Or it was the voice of a man with a child's voice contained inside it. Again she felt something pulling her, as if she were being held back from a place or a time that she was going toward. For a moment she was confused, and her breath came up tight in her throat, and she held her hand over her mouth. She was listening to the breathing, which seemed to come from somewhere deep inside herself.

“Is it you?” the voice said again.

She could not remember how she knew the voice, but it tugged at her, it stole her breath, it carried her heart away, and she knew, somehow, the answer to the question. “Yes,” she said. “It's me.”