Travelers Rest (23 page)

The fourth floor produced nothing of any particular value, and it was colder than the rest of the hotel, and Hector worried that bats might fly in through the holes in the roof, and even though Dewey pointed out that such a thing was unlikely to occur during a snowstorm, they agreed that the fourth floor was not a good place to be. They went back down to the third floor, which Dewey said he had already investigated recently, so they went to the second floor, which of course was Dewey's own floor and for that reason pretty familiar, so they were headed down the stairs to the lobby when Dewey shined the flashlight beam toward the old fireplace at the far end of the room and there stood a large man with long black hair, his back turned to Dewey and Hector.

Dewey came to a dead stop, gripping the banister hard with his free hand, still directing the flashlight steadily at the man, who paid no attention to the flashlight beam, or to Dewey and Hector. Hector stumbled against Dewey and let out a yelp and both of them fell, the flashlight beam careening around the walls until Dewey got hold of the banister again and steadied himself, Hector now on the stairs just below him.

The man, who was now walking slowly across the room toward the long desk where Dewey's father had talked to the owner, wore a dull-looking brown coat, old jeans rolled up at the cuffs, and a pair of heavy boots that made no sound as he moved across the floor. His long black hair spilled out from beneath a wide-brimmed hat with a leather band around the middle. He held, Dewey saw now, a long pistol in his right hand. This should have been terrifying, Dewey realized, but he felt that he had seen it before—the man's total unawareness of any outside presence, his quiet, ghostly movements, the way all his energy seemed to be directed toward something inside his own head—it was the same way his mother looked when he saw her in room 306. Grimly determined, composed and slow and calm, the man advanced a few more steps toward the desk, the muscles along his jaw twitching, and raised the pistol as if he were pointing the barrel straight at someone's head—but there was no one there. Dewey tensed, preparing for the blast.

“That's my dad,” Hector said, seemingly out of nowhere. Dewey had forgotten Hector was even there with him on the stairs. “Dad!” Hector shouted, his voice loud and hoarse in the whispery quiet of the lobby, the strange eerie scene playing out in the flashlight, and before Dewey could grab hold of his arm, Hector was bounding down the stairs toward his father, who still held the gun outstretched in his hand, the tip of the barrel waving back and forth, like the menacing head of a snake about to strike.

Later, Dewey would have a hard time piecing together exactly what happened next, because it happened very fast. Hector's father stepped backward suddenly, his head and shoulders drooping, and lowered the gun to his side. He swiveled and walked toward the front entrance, and just as he did so, with Dewey shouting at him to stop, Hector barreled across the room toward his father, who, of course, paid no attention. Then, right when Hector seemed about to intercept his father at the door, all the lights of the lobby—the huge old chandelier and the lamps along the walls—erupted in a blinding whiteness all at once, like a giant sunburst, so that Dewey became dizzy there on the stairs, his eyes open but not seeing anything, and there was a rush of air as if someone had thrown open all the doors and windows to the blizzard outside, and then Dewey found himself sitting on the stairs in the pitch dark, a dark so intense and full that at first he couldn't even find the switch on the flashlight with his shaking hand.

When he did, and the switch flicked and the beam flashed, what he saw in the pool of light was Hector curled up on the dusty floor in the space where his father had been, lying completely still. He wasn't dead. Dewey knew that. But when he knelt to help Hector up and placed his hand under his arm, the word that crossed Dewey's mind was “corpse-like.”

But Hector was fine. He was all right. He sat up and put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. “What happened?” he moaned.

Dewey shined the flashlight around the room, searching for any sign of Hector's father. Everything looked the same as it usually did in the lobby, or the way it had ever since his mother and father disappeared—the dilapidated furniture, the peeling walls, the sagging ceiling.

“I'm not sure,” Dewey said. There was no sign that anything had happened except for a faint smell of smoke in the air.

“I don't feel real good,” Hector said.

Dewey picked up the pellet gun and helped Hector to his feet and they stumbled up the stairs. They returned to Dewey's room and he was straightening up Uncle Robbie's bed for his friend when Hector brought up the subject Dewey had been dreading.

“Where's my dad?” he asked.

And Dewey had to explain to Hector all over again, because, just as Dewey had suspected, he hadn't been listening before, that his dad probably hadn't really been there at all, which made Hector start to cry. Hector thanked him for making up the bed, and then he got under the blankets with his pellet gun, and Dewey went to his bed in the other room and lay there trying to go to sleep but he couldn't because he could hear Hector crying. And then after a while he heard Hector's footsteps and he looked up and saw him shivering there in the glow from the streetlight.

“I'm really cold,” Hector said.

Dewey told him to get the blankets from the other room and they could pile all of them up together and both sleep in the same bed.

“I'm really, really cold,” Hector said again when he lay down on the other side of the bed and started pulling the blankets around him.

Dewey remembered the corpse-like feel of that arm, which was not like anything he had felt before. “It'll be okay,” he said, which was something his mother used to tell him a lot.

They lay there for a long time and Dewey watched the snow fly by out the window and the bed shook just slightly from Hector's shivering. Earlier, it had looked like the storm might be ending, but now it didn't look that way at all.

It seemed like a long time later when Hector said, “Do you think so?”

Dewey was almost asleep. “Yes,” he said, and he reached over and patted the blanket where it was pulled up over Hector's shoulder. He could feel him shivering under there.

“Okay,” Hector said.

Then Dewey listened in the dark for a while, and Hector's breathing grew quiet and he wasn't crying anymore, and Dewey knew that he was asleep.

And he fell asleep himself. He dreamed that he and Hector Jones were walking along the highway. It was out in the huge open area of South Dakota or Montana, one of the long, empty stretches he and his parents had passed through on the way west, Dewey sitting in the backseat with his head against the window, amazed at the distance he could see, the earth stretching out so far you could almost imagine its curvature, how it dipped slightly out there on the horizon, turning over into tomorrow, traveling through cold, lifeless space, the stars like little pricks of fire too far away to warm anything. Hector carried his pellet gun as they walked, and Dewey's shoes scuffed through the rocks, and the wind blew, and it wasn't snowing but it was going to snow. He and Hector didn't say anything to each other but it was okay, they knew what they were walking toward. And then a car slowed down on the highway and the window rolled down and Dewey's mother was sitting in the passenger seat and staring hard out the window, searching for something, and his father, who was driving the car, asked his mother urgently what she saw. But she didn't see anything. Dewey waved and waved, he shouted till he couldn't shout anymore, and Hector shouted, too, their voices rang like bells in the air, but his mother didn't hear, and as the car passed slowly, slowly, slowly, she rolled up the window and the car went on. Dewey and Hector walked along the highway and the day was growing dark, and up ahead there was a cold, purple sky above the mountains.

When he woke in the morning, Dewey peeked out from under the covers to see the ice on the window and the snow flying down. He was in the usual place. When he turned over to see how Hector was doing, Hector wasn't there.

M
rs. Addison had never been drunk before. Even when she accepted Miss Blanchard's invitation to run off to the pantry with a bottle of brandy, she had not really believed that this would be the outcome. But this must be what it was like—for a long time she had felt pleasantly warm inside, but now the pantry was growing stifling, and when she looked down, the floor had begun to turn slowly, in a counterclockwise direction.

Miss Blanchard had talked about so many things that Mrs. Addison could no longer remember them all. She had retained, however, two prevailing impressions: first, that Rose Blanchard, for all her fame and her stable of male and even female admirers, was a lonely person, perhaps the loneliest that Mrs. Addison had ever met, and second, that she had a very high regard for Mr. Addison.

This latter being, her husband, had never seemed so immaterial and far away as he did now. To think that he was out there somewhere, that he sat on a stuffed chair surrounded by other men, talking and smoking cigars, and that he had some right to claim influence over her behavior, that he would, for instance, be entitled to sit in judgment of her present occupation, seemed as unlikely and foreign to her as the idea of men on the moon. Who was this man Rose Blanchard praised so eagerly and incessantly? Usually, he was a somewhat suffocating presence in her life, but for the moment she felt herself free of him entirely and could summon him to the mind's eye in a way that took no account of the control he had exerted over her from the time she agreed to marry him. She could see the way he stood, his long loose frame, the rather large head with the smallish eyes that looked as if they were constantly peering into something, weighing things and measuring, his large hands always in motion. He was not a graceful man, but she could see that he had a kind of smooth, loping energy that other women might admire. If she compared him to an animal, she thought, it would be a giraffe. On a trip to Philadelphia with her family, before she came out West, she had seen a giraffe at the zoo, and now she pictured it standing there squarely on its long legs, its head up in the sky, but with her husband's face on it, nibbling leaves. This made her laugh in the middle of something her companion was saying, and Rose Blanchard pressed her lips together and waited impatiently.

“I'm sorry,” Mrs. Addison said, and fanned at herself with one hand, her face feeling flushed. “Please go on.”

Rose raised the brandy bottle to her lips and took another sip and offered it to Mrs. Addison, who declined. “I was only reminding you of how fortunate you are,” Rose said, as if in conclusion to something, though Mrs. Addison had long since lost track of what. It was becoming positively overheated in the pantry.

Mrs. Addison's thoughts drifted lazily while she looked at a flour sack propped in a corner of the room, its letters blurring so that she had trouble keeping the name straight—Delaporte Flour. She was remembering an expression she had seen on her husband's face earlier…when Mr. Tiffany was showing her the room, and her husband had tapped on the window and looked out into the street. He said he had seen a boy out there, and then it was as if she too had seen this boy, though she was nowhere near the window—he was wearing a bright sweater and funny boots. She had seen her husband's expression, how his eyebrows pinched together, how his lips twitched as if he wanted to smile. And then he turned to her from the window—it was as if they knew something they weren't saying. Now she had the strange sensation that she had known her husband for years. But that of course wasn't true. Most of the time she felt that she didn't know him at all. Maybe it was hearing Rose talk about him now. Why did she talk about him so much? In what way was he so remarkable as to draw her attention? How did she seem to know him so well? She wanted to ask Rose this question, but then it was too late, because she was being asked something herself.

“Do you have any idea what it feels like to be an orphan?” Rose said.

She examined this woman sitting next to her, the legs drawn up in front with the skirts pushed around behind, holding a bottle of brandy in her lap. The white throat, the flushed cheeks, the manner in which she held her head back so proudly, the blonde hair woven up on her head. She was famous across America. In every city and every town, in every out-of-the-way place where there was a newspaper, a dance hall, a saloon, her name was known and passed around. How was it that this woman seemed so intimately connected to her own life? Why did it feel as if the two of them had been sitting and talking in the pantry almost eternally?

She giggled under her breath, grabbed the bottle of brandy from between Rose's legs, and took another sip. She immediately wished she hadn't, and handed the bottle back.

Rose fixed her with an icy stare. “I asked if you knew what it was like to be an orphan,” she said. “It is a serious question. I ask you in all seriousness. I was under the impression that you were a serious person, not a giggling fool.”

Maybe because she had not expected to be spoken to in that manner, Miss Blanchard having been solicitous of her attention in only a friendly way up to that point, this statement made the floor stop spinning briefly, and Mrs. Addison attended to the question, which was not a thing she had ever considered. What did it matter that Miss Blanchard was an orphan? What
could
it matter, now that she was celebrated universally for her talent and her beauty? Why should it concern Miss Blanchard that she had been—long ago in her infancy, a time she could not even remember—abandoned by her mother, or that her childhood had been spent in the coldness of the institutions for the poor, that she had had to invent herself from her own dreams of glory, finding her name in the colorful flowers that grew outside the dormitory windows? She was Rose Blanchard now, and there she sat with those icy eyes that seemed to absorb everything, pull everything in, her blonde hair gloriously piled on her head, her head tilted back so that everything she drew to herself, all the attention she commanded, seemed to be balanced there on her chin. Surely being an orphan meant nothing to Rose Blanchard.

And yet to satisfy Rose's desire that she be a serious person, for it seemed impossible not to give Rose what she asked, Mrs. Addison tried to think of the question seriously, and was surprised to find how strongly affected she was by the sudden memory of her mother and father, by a picture she conjured of them seated near the hearth at home in Virginia on a rainy winter day, her father busy with the morning newspaper while her mother stared out the window into the gray world thinking of her daughter far away. She could not be having a “vision,” as it were, because, first, she did not believe in such nonsense, and also because it would be past midnight in Virginia, and her mother and father would certainly have long since retired for the evening. No, it was just that for a moment her imagination afflicted her strongly, but there was also something more, a strange feeling like an internal echo, a memory being created like a tiny sound inside her, and she listened to its hollow, mournful progress, and found that it brought tears to her eyes. She tried hard to straighten herself, to bring her swirling vision and her thoughts into stern focus, so that she could answer properly for what she was feeling. “I would expect that to be an orphan means that one experiences a terrible longing,” she finally said.

Rose, who was leaning forward, gripping the bottle of brandy in her smooth white hands as if poised to attack, softened her expression, her clenched pose receding so that she seemed to be melting into herself, becoming rounder and less angled. “There is nothing worse,” she said, apparently satisfied, and tipped back the brandy, taking a long drink. A man's voice sounded sharply from the kitchen. It was the first voice other than Miss Blanchard's that she had heard in some time, Mrs. Addison realized. It had apparently gotten very late, and the kitchen had been cleaned and vacated, leaving only the two of them. The man's voice rang out once more, from farther away, and then a door swung to. She felt a sudden rushing in her head, and she tried to steady her gaze on a box of dried apricots residing somewhere above Rose's head. It occurred to her that she needed to find her husband. He would know what to do about this, how to get rid of this awful fuzziness. The bottle of brandy was placed in her hand, and without thinking she drank from it again, but it only made her mouth drier.

“There is nothing worse,” she heard Rose say, “than to know—every day, every hour of every day—as a child, that you are an unwanted person, that the most simple, basic impulse guiding the continuance of the species, that of a mother's love for a child, is somehow absent in your case. And to be surrounded, every day, by other wretched children, who know the same thing about themselves.”

The room was now spinning hard, and Mrs. Addison was overcome with a desire to lie down, if only for a moment, and, as if she understood this perfectly, Rose set aside the brandy and motioned for Mrs. Addison to rest her head in her lap. The room then tilted to the side, and her cheek met the cool satin of Rose's dress.

“Don't close your eyes,” Rose said from somewhere above and outside her, and fingers brushed lightly through her hair. It was an effort to keep her eyes open, but she did as she was told. “This is the sort of game we would play at the orphanage,” Rose said. “Soothe each other, comfort one another—each of us taking turns being the child and then the mother.” The light touch of the fingers continued in her hair, and she began to feel as if she were somewhere else, no longer in the pantry at all, no longer in this place a whole continent away from her home. “You can't imagine the loneliness,” Rose said. “It never leaves you. It's there in every part of your being, it's there in every breath.” The fingers running through her hair, everything so soft and still, even the light in the pantry fading. “I suppose my compensation is that I developed an unusual strength, that I had to develop it or perish. But even such strength is a poor substitute for the love a child receives from its mother and father. Without that love, I don't think a child can ever learn how to truly love anything.” The fingers went motionless in her hair, everything was completely quiet. Her eyes were closed, and the room was turning again. “There's not a thing I love in this world.” She could feel Rose's breathing, how her heartbeat quickened. “So as I say, you're fortunate. You have enjoyed the love of a caring mother and father, and now, as a mother yourself, you have the experience of loving your own child.”

With her head pressed against Rose's stomach, she could feel the emptiness and the loneliness, as if it were coming from inside Rose, and she could feel too the opposite of that inside herself, a warmth, a fullness…then she knew. Rose Blanchard had just called her a mother. How Rose knew was a mystery, as was so much else about her, but Mrs. Addison felt the truth of it inside her: she was carrying a child. She was pregnant with Mr. Addison's child.

She gasped and sat up. Everything was dark, and Rose appeared as a shadow in the thin light seeping through the tall windows. “I'm having a son,” she said.

“Yes.”

And then everything began to spin around her and she felt her stomach churn. “I'm afraid I'm ill,” she said. “Help me. Please, I need air.”

Rose lifted her to her feet and guided her by the arm out of the pantry and down some steps and into a long corridor that seemed to lead toward the back of the hotel. There were no windows, and it grew darker and darker as they moved farther down the passageway, and soon she had been swallowed by a smooth black space that was like nothing on earth, and she felt that she would suffocate if she could not get outside. Up ahead, a dim rectangle of light materialized around the borders of a doorway that seemed to float in midair. She could see absolutely nothing between herself and the light, and she had to trust completely in Rose, who moved along the passageway as easily and swiftly as a cat.

The only thing she wanted now was to find her husband. He was the only one she trusted. This would have been a shocking thing to realize if not for the fact that, in the near-total blackness, as she struggled to breathe, she could now picture her husband perfectly, but he was not the same as she knew him. She could see him as if they were in a different time and place, he was transformed into someone wholly different and new and yet he was the same, his face with no sideburns or mustache, a pair of spectacles on the bridge of his nose, looking out a window. She was nearing the light from the doorway but she came to an abrupt halt and felt with her hands to brace herself against the wall. Her husband was looking out the window—she knew now, she
knew
—at the same boy he had seen earlier from the hotel room. She could see the boy herself as if through her husband's eyes, she could see him there herself, had seen him hundreds, thousands of times—he was her own
son,
he was Dewey. She had lost him she didn't know where and she hadn't remembered him because something had happened to her but now she
knew,
and yet she also knew that she carried a child inside her, a child that belonged to her and her husband, who was the same as but different from Dewey's father. Where was Dewey? She was being rushed along by Rose Blanchard, who now pulled her toward the door, tugging on her rather than guiding her, and then the door was thrown open into cloud light and night air and she stumbled outside into the snow and fell to her knees.

“Wait,” she said. “Wait, I have to find my son and my husband.”

There was no answer. She looked up to see Rose framed in the doorway. She could just make out her features in the white light of the falling snow and the clouds overhead, and it was the same face she'd seen in the pantry—the cold, refined beauty of someone horribly alone.

“I'm sorry,” Rose Blanchard said, and she stepped back inside and closed the door.