Travelers Rest (22 page)

She smiled at him reassuringly. “Yes,” she said. “That was when.” She squeezed his hand. “It didn't work, did it? I'm still here.”

“I talked you into going out there. I was trying to help you leave.”

“Yes,” she said, “but by the time you saw me in the snow, you had already forgotten me, forgotten where we were.”

There was a kind of terror in discovery, in the word itself, something discovered, uncovered, like a beam of light thrown across a darkness in which a creature made for darkness knew nothing at all of light. He was learning, now, that he did not know who he was, really, and this was something he had never thought of in his life except in dreams.

Rose stroked the back of his hand, and the room they sat in, along with the collection of images, faded to a whiteness, a nothingness, a tiny hiss at the edge of his consciousness like the hiss of falling snow. Her voice came to him soothingly, softer and softer, like a lullaby. It was the only thing he knew in the world and it was the only thing he wanted to know.

“There are so many different worlds,” she said. “It's fascinating to think of. They're being created all the time, every second, right here.” She nodded, presumably at the other people, whom he could no longer see or even imagine. “Most of us are only aware of one world, or one ‘presence,' if you want to call it that—that's Alfred's word—but some of us live in more than one, only with limitations. I understand that now. I will always be here, for instance, and I can't change anything—not anything important, anyway. Not by myself, at least. But some others of us”—she gazed out into the vast space of the world that included more than the two of them, and he knew somehow that with a tilt of her head she meant to indicate Julia, his wife—“some other very, very lucky ones get to
choose.
”

H
e must have dozed off, because he dreamed he was at home, having one of his better moments with his wife, and when he came to he was slumped forward on the sofa, holding Rose's hand, which rested loosely on his knee. He wondered how long he had been there like that, and he could see by the look on her face that she was curious about something, and he felt compelled to answer some question that he had unfortunately not heard. He unfolded his hand from hers, trying not to seem startled at himself, but he jerked awkwardly back into the couch, and a trace of disappointment passed over her features. Her eyes fluttered and her fingers fumbled together in her lap.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

She swallowed hard, shook her head firmly, once, and, much to his surprise, reached inside a small purse she had next to her, pulled out a Kleenex, and wiped tears from her eyes. “It's okay,” she said. “It doesn't matter.”

“Really,” he said. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean—”

But she waved the Kleenex at him to be quiet and gestured across the table. He looked over to see Tiffany fast asleep, his head against the chair back and his mouth open, a rhythmic snore escaping slowly from his throat, as if he were being strangled gradually.

He and Rose laughed together quietly. “You know how they always say babies look cute when they're sleeping,” she said.

“Right,” Tonio said. “Babies. Not this guy.” He jerked his thumb toward Tiffany, whose tongue now appeared prominently in his mouth, muffling the snoring to some degree. “Not him.”

“No,” Rose said, and she laughed and wiped her eyes again.

He had not really liked or trusted her up until now, and it was strange to feel close to her for a moment. In fact, he felt almost sorry for her. The prettiness that had bothered him earlier now made her seem delicate and fragile.

“Were we…” he said, and he waved his hand back and forth between the two of them. “Were we in the middle of talking about something?”

She smiled. “We were, but never mind.”

“I'm sorry I fell asleep,” he said. “That was rude.”

She didn't say anything. Instead she sat looking at Tiffany, and he was surprised by what he would have described as a look of hatred on her face. She pursed her lips and squinted her eyes tight and leaned forward, putting her elbows on her knees, her hands held together in midair. “I think he's crazy,” she said, as though talking to herself. “I think he'll try something reckless this time.” She rose from her seat, crept over to Tiffany, put her small hand inside the pocket of his coat, and withdrew a skeleton key. She tiptoed over and sat close to Tonio on the couch. “This is what you saw him take from me when you passed by the room earlier,” she whispered.

It was another of these strange things that kept happening. He hadn't seen her earlier in a room, had he? Had he seen her with Tiffany? They had been here in the lobby all afternoon…but he
did
recall something like that…Tiffany and Rose facing each other, angry, Tiffany squeezing her hand, Rose looking up and seeing him in a doorway. “I can't—” He sighed and took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I don't know. I don't remember.”

She waved away his words. “I forgot,” she said. “Of course you didn't see me.” Then she grabbed his wrist, turned his hand over, placed the key in his open palm, and shut his fingers tight over it. “You'll want this,” she said.

So she knew, then, that he planned to make an escape. Had he told her this? Before he fell asleep? Had they drunk that much brandy? There were three empty glasses on the table, but the bottle was more than half full. “What's it for?” he asked her.

“It's the master key,” she told him. “It opens everything.”

There was a noise from the armchair. Tiffany rolled his head from one side to the other, and his eyes opened momentarily, but they didn't focus on anything. Tonio and Rose kept still. The snoring didn't start again, but Tiffany seemed to be asleep.

“He always wanted me to have it,” Rose whispered. “He said it was safer with me.” She patted Tonio's arm. “But he sensed something this time. He was afraid I was going to give it to you, so he wanted it back.”

“He was right,” Tonio said.

Rose turned for a moment to the pale light sifting through the windows. “It's almost dark,” she said. “That will make it harder. You'd better go now if you're going to.”

His head throbbed at the thought of venturing out into the snow again, the misery of it, the bone-chilling cold, the scary descent into the white space that pulled him and brought him back, always somehow less than himself, into this room again. He hadn't tried it for days. He'd been conditioned not to. “Should I?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said. “I think you have to.”

“But isn't the idea that the two of you want to keep me here forever? Isn't that what this has been all about?”

“That's not something we really have any control over.” She studied Tiffany anxiously, as if to tell Tonio to hurry.

“Of course you do. We all do.”

Rose offered him a grave stare. “I'm afraid something will happen to Dewey,” she said. Her eyes were a cold cobalt blue, and their color heightened the icy feeling that came over him at the mention of some potential harm to his son.

“What could happen to Dewey?”

“I don't know.”

Tonio was up from his seat now, stumbling over a chair leg. “Where do I go?” he said a little too loudly. He was on the verge of waking Tiffany, he knew, but the thought of Dewey pressed him down, smothered him—some unknown thing in a dark place.

“When you were outside, did you feel like something was leading you?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Then go there.”

Which was exactly what he had planned to do. He hurried toward the entrance.

“Anthony?” she said. He looked back at her. She stood there primly dressed, still wearing the same little silver shoes. “Let me say this. You can make mistakes. There are blunders. There are moments of stupidity. We all know that.” She folded her arms across her waist and pressed her lips together, the way Julia always did when she applied lipstick.

“I've got to go,” he said. “What is it?”

“But you can't screw up the one or two really big things,” she said. “That's what matters, isn't it?”

“I don't know,” he answered. So why did he feel, as he opened the door and narrowed his eyes at the sky filled with snow and winter light, that he'd ruined something already?

H
ector Jones came armed with a variety of useful tools. In addition to the flashlight, he had a Swiss Army knife that featured a bottle opener and scissors, and, best of all, a pellet gun that his father had allowed him to bring into the hotel if he promised not to shoot it. At first the pellet gun had seemed too good to be true, one of the kind of wild stories that other kids his age often made up, even though, Dewey had noticed, they seldom held up to even the most preliminary rounds of questioning.
Our Yorkshire terrier killed a python. My dad beat Kobe Bryant at one on one when he was in high school. Ashley Bostic told Kaneesha Green that when we got to ninth grade she would have sex with me.

Dewey had become proficient at defusing these stories gently, like time bombs in the movies, snipping each wire very carefully one at a time so that there was no explosion, so that the tellers of the stories weren't embarrassed by them or too disappointed to find out they weren't true (it was interesting to Dewey that, most of the time, they actually seemed to believe them). In this case, when Hector claimed to be in possession of a, quote, “Winchester Model 1028 break-barrel pellet rifle with mounted scope that shoots the distance of three football fields,” unquote, Dewey had suggested to him that it probably wasn't a
real
pellet gun but more likely an airsoft rifle, which his friend Hunter had and which his own parents had refused to buy him this very Christmas—at which point Hector, without a word, picked up the flashlight and, with Dewey in tow, marched back down the hall and up the stairs to the room on the fourth floor and produced the gun proudly from where he'd stashed it under the bed. “If I would've heard you coming at first, I would've shot you with this,” Hector told Dewey impressively.

Back in Dewey's room, Dewey convinced Hector, by pointing out to him that his father had told him only that he shouldn't shoot the gun
inside
the hotel, to take some target practice out the window. This produced an exhilarating five minutes of fun and forgetfulness until Dewey shot the metal No Parking sign outside the diner and it clanked loud enough to bring Lorraine out the door and into the street, where she looked left and right and then up to the second-floor window, which fortunately was dark because Hector had been smart enough to turn off the flashlight. Seeing Lorraine had the unfortunate effect, though, of bringing Dewey back to reality, and there were a depressing few minutes in which he and Hector sat on the floor under the window and thought, without speaking, about their missing parents, if Hector was thinking the same thing, which Dewey guessed he might be.

But Hector Jones was more of a doer than a thinker, it turned out, or, maybe more accurately, a
planner
instead of a
worrier,
so that it wasn't long until he had laid out, with a great deal of energy, several ideas for finding their parents and/or getting help. The first of these was a highly proactive proposal that involved going door-to-door in the town and using the pellet gun to threaten homeowners into revealing the whereabouts of Hector's father and Dewey's mom and dad. Dewey was skeptical of this plan because (a) the pellet gun didn't look enough like a real rifle to scare anyone all that much (an argument that Hector disputed vigorously, insisting that the stock and the barrel were made of, respectively, “real hardwood” and “real gunmetal”) and (b) the people in the town were very weird, distrustful of and downright hostile toward outsiders, children, even, much less children who showed up at their doors brandishing imitation firearms. Dewey predicted that this proposed course of action would only get them killed.

The second plan was much simpler, and under normal circumstances would probably have been quite effective. It involved using a cell phone to make a video of themselves stranded in the hotel and posting it to YouTube, but under questioning from Dewey, Hector had to admit he lacked the cell phone required to conduct the procedure.

The last of Hector's plans was to snowshoe back to his dad's truck at the interstate, use a large rock to bust open the storage box in the truck bed, take out the flares his dad kept there, then come back to the hotel and fire them from the roof. Certain parts of this plan made sense to Dewey and certain parts did not. He began by questioning the part about the snowshoes, which he figured would be hard to obtain, but Hector swore that he could make them out of sticks and shoelaces, and that this was a common skill possessed by Nez Perce Indians. And while Dewey did not doubt Hector's ability to “bust the box lid open with a big ass rock,” he did have some questions about the flares.

Actually, Dewey was surprised and a little bit ashamed of himself that he hadn't thought on his own about walking back to the interstate. That seemed like a pretty smart plan. The problem would be getting through the snow, which by now was so deep that it had made even the comparatively short hike to the mine entrance almost impossible without Hugh's help. How far was it to the interstate? The best that Dewey could remember, it was maybe three miles, but Hector insisted that he and his father had walked at least ten. This seemed unlikely to the Dooze Man. But it was no doubt a long way, and the snow was very high, and it was only getting higher, and it would be pretty tough, he supposed, if you were relying on snowshoes made out of sticks and shoelaces. And if you got stuck out there, you could freeze to death. Still, of all Hector's plans, this one struck him as the most viable, especially when you considered that if you actually did get the flares from the locked box in the pickup bed, you wouldn't necessarily have to bring them back to the hotel to fire from the roof (even though it would definitely be pretty awesome, you could agree with Hector on that much)—you could just fire them off right there by the interstate. And if you made it all the way to the interstate, wouldn't there be signs of life anyway? Wouldn't there be cars? Or was this blizzard so massive that it had wiped out the entire American transportation system? It was hard to say, although Hector did report the presence of other vehicles as of the previous evening. It was all pretty exhausting to think about, so they decided to table the discussion till tomorrow.

There were two things that Hector was absolutely adamant about; one was that they should not go ask Hugh and Lorraine for help, and the other was that they needed to search the entire hotel right away in an attempt to rescue the prisoners. The fact that Hector kept talking about the situation in those terms gave Dewey the uneasy sense that his new friend still wasn't taking the whole thing seriously, that he hadn't reached the point at which he really believed his father was no longer around.

That had been a difficult thing for Dewey as well, but he felt he had, in a way his mom and dad would be proud of, grown up some in the past few days. Definitely he would rather not have had to go about it this particular way. Definitely he would be happy to go back to being a regular ten-year-old at any point his mom and dad decided to show up. But even though, as it turned out, Hector Jones was twelve years old and in middle school, Dewey could see that it was going to be up to him, at least for the first couple of days, to keep Hector thinking clearly. This business of searching the hotel at night was kind of scary, but now that someone was with him it wouldn't be as hard or as nerve-racking. He did like the fact that he now had in his possession, or at least in the possession of his companion, a Winchester Model 1028 break-barrel pellet rifle with mounted scope that shot the distance of three football fields, but he wondered if the gun would impress the creepy hotel owner much if it was pointed at him. And even though he too had just a couple of hours ago been thinking of his mother and father as prisoners and the hotel owner as the one who was keeping them captive, he felt that he and Hector were understanding these words on two entirely different levels. This wasn't a game of capture the flag. It wasn't a mission on Call of Duty where you got to start over when your dude got killed. Hector still thought his father was going to come walking in the door any minute, and that this would all end up being an adventure. Dewey felt sorry for him for that reason.

And then there was the deal with Hugh and Lorraine. Dewey had made the mistake of saying he had some doubts about Hugh and Lorraine, which was the wrong thing to say to a twelve-year-old, apparently, because you could see the idea kind of take off like a rocket in the mind of Hector Jones, soaring out into the atmosphere a million miles an hour and bursting into flame. Hugh and Lorraine were evil, they were probably zombies or vampires, he would lie in ambush for them waiting quietly and patiently as only Nez Perce Indians could, and when they appeared he would shoot them between the eyes with his Winchester Model 1028 break-barrel etc., etc., etc. Dewey didn't like to hear Hugh and Lorraine talked about that way, but it was his own fault for bringing it up in the first place. It really did bother him, though—how they'd held hands across the table at the diner and asked each other if they were
committed
to this thing. What the heck sort of question was that? Of
course
they should be committed—Dewey was freaking
ten years old
for crying out loud. Who wasn't committed to helping a ten-year-old whose mother and father were missing? Yet they acted like it was a really big deal, like they needed to be congratulated for making an effort, needed a pat on the back for offering him a place to sleep other than the freezing, piece-of-dog-crap hotel. Again Dewey wanted to ask himself: What was wrong with the people in this town? Where were the police, the investigators, the news teams, that Nancy Grace woman his mom claimed to hate but kept on watching? In the past few days, he had felt tragically uninformed regarding the adult world, but he still felt pretty sure this kind of shit just wasn't supposed to happen.

And he didn't want to say it out loud or even think it to himself…but wasn't Hugh kind of a chicken? Here was this big, presumably pretty strong guy three times as old as Dewey who was totally, absolutely, never under any circumstances in the history of the world going to set even one foot inside this hotel. He, Dewey, had slept in here for
four straight nights.
It gave one pause.

While the Dooze Man was thinking through all this, Hector had been readying for the expedition. “Do we have some rope?” he asked Dewey.

“What for?” Dewey said.

Hector gave him a look that said what kind of idiot doesn't know what you need rope for.

“I don't think so,” Dewey said.

“That sucks,” Hector said. He searched around casually with the flashlight beam. “Can I have your shoelaces?”

“For what?” Dewey said.

Hector sighed elaborately. “Dude,” he said, “you're tripping.”

Dewey offered no response.

“Instead of the
rope,
dude,” Hector said in a tone that suggested he had lost all hope for Dewey both now and in the foreseeable future. “'Cause we don't have no
rope.
”

Dewey thought about this for a second. “I'm not taking out my shoelaces,” he said.

Then there was a rapid-fire series of requests: Did they have extra batteries for the flashlight? No. Backup food supply? No. Not even, like, some potato chips? No. What had Dewey been living on? Food from the diner. From the zombies? Zombie food? Yes. Shit. Cell phone? They didn't work here. Dewey had already told him that. Fuck. Water? You could scrape snow off the windowsill and drink it. What were you supposed to do about flushing the toilets, by the way? Keep using different toilets on each floor or better yet go to the diner. Wow. Crazy. Toothbrush? Why? In case it turned out to be an overnight trip. Oh, yes, and toothpaste, and Dewey didn't mind sharing. How did you rinse your mouth, though? You could scrape snow—yeah, right, off the windowsill.

Hector stood there with the Winchester Model 1028 break-barrel pellet gun in one hand and Dewey's toothbrush and toothpaste in the other, Dewey shining the flashlight on him. “Are you ready?” Hector said.

“Sure.”

They headed up to the fourth floor first, Hector leading the way, Dewey behind him with the light. Ghostly Hector, climbing the creaky stairs in the jerky motion of the flashlight beam, like the doomed character in a horror film. It was spookier than Dewey had thought it would be, and for a minute he wished he were alone again.

They didn't find much. Everything was dark, and it was cold from holes in the roof, and there were cobwebs everywhere, and in the stairwell the dried-up remains of a plant in a swinging pot scared the crap out of them when Dewey accidentally hit it with his head. Only as they were walking down the long fourth-floor corridor did Dewey feel something like a shushing in his blood, a little thrum of particles, and from somewhere in his vision he conjured a dim image of his mother, so lightly imprinted that he couldn't be sure it wasn't a strange shadow from the flashlight or a moment in which he had drifted into dream. A dim outline of her there in the hallway, but then it was like he'd rubbed his eyes and opened them and nothing was there except for a phone, an old black phone of the kind with the separate receiver and mouthpiece. It was the same kind they used in
It's a Wonderful Life.
This was another one of the few things his parents agreed on: they would search the TV listings every Christmas to find out when it was showing. His mother knew practically every line in the entire movie, and his father claimed to watch it mostly to humor her, but once, at the part where George Bailey hugs his son real hard after he thinks they've lost all their money and he won't be able to take care of his family anymore, Dewey saw his father take off his glasses and wipe his eyes with the back of his hand and real quick put the glasses on again. He thought of
It's a Wonderful Life
now, the snowstorm that hits Bedford Falls, and he imagined how easy it would be if you had your own guardian angel to tell you what the hell was going on and what important lessons you were supposed to learn from it. It turned out real life wasn't like a movie.